All Episodes
Previous Next
May 27, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
01:38:28
Daily Wire Backstage: The Mask Is Off
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey, Michael Knowles here.
The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage, The Mask Is Off, is around the corner.
Seems like every time you check your news feed, it looks more and more like science fiction.
We will unpack all of it.
Be sure to join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, and God King Jeremy Boring, as we discuss everything from John Cena groveling to the Chinese Communist Party, to all the freaky alien videos the government keeps releasing.
Do not miss it.
Welcome to the Daily Wire backstage.
The mask is off.
I'm Jeremy Boring, known as the God King, lowercase g, lowercase k, and we are glad you've tuned in.
Can Biden's daily regimen of Gatorade, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and Flintstone vitamins really keep him in the tip-top cognitive shape we've come to expect?
Is there a certain number of rockets fired by Hamas at Israeli citizens that would actually convince the left that they're on the, quote, wrong side of history because clearly 3,500 isn't the number?
And when the UFOs playing peekaboo with our military do finally land, will John Cena apologize to our alien overlords for Hollywood's shame that is The Last Jedi, Battlefield Earth, and Howard the Duck?
Let's hope he does the right thing in whatever language we all end up speaking.
Roll intro graphic.
Is there anything more shameful than that John Cena video apologizing in Mandarin for calling the country Taiwan a good person?
Wait, wait, wait.
I want to say something about this.
You know, I want to say something about this.
Everybody, it's fun to blame him, but it's universal.
It's Universal Studios.
No, I blame him.
No, you blame Universal Studios.
He's not doing that on his own.
And Universal Studios is insisting on that because they made more money off this new Fast and Furious thing in China than they're going to make here.
That's his fault for going along with it, though.
That's right.
Universal can tell him to do that.
He did it.
But he's just a big face, you know, and he's fun to make fun of.
And I'm not saying he's not to blame.
I'm not saying we shouldn't make fun of him.
I'm just saying that we should understand that this is...
When those Hollywood people get up and they make speeches about how evil we are for voting for Donald Trump, when they do all this stuff, they cut scenes of gay love out of movies for different countries.
You heard it here.
Andrew Klavan does not think John Cena did the wrong thing.
The Daily Wire Backstage is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
For peace of mind whenever you go online, visit expressvpn.com slash backstage.
Joining me with all the correct opinions, Andrew, Ben Shapiro, Andy Klavan, Matt Walsh, and Michael Knowles.
We are so glad that you're joining us tonight, and we want to take just a quick moment to say, if you want to get your question in, head on over to thedailywire.com and become a member.
We take questions from our audience, particularly from our members when we do this show, because they are the reason we are able to do the show in the first place to get access to the box where you can submit your questions.
Go become a member, dailywire.com slash subscribe.
You can even get 20% off your membership and get automatically entered to win a trip to our studio to meet Candace Owens.
And the rest of us.
All you have to do is use the code VIP. This is the last week you can enter to win, so hurry up before the opportunity slips sliding away.
Dailywire.com slash subscribe.
This thing's still going.
I'm done.
That's the entire promo.
You heard it here.
You heard it here first.
Code VIP and Andrew Klavan thinks that John Cena is basically the whole show.
Does he have a deal with China, too?
Does he have a deal that we sell out?
You know, this is Hollywood.
It's the whole industry.
Of course.
Wait, Hollywood are whores?
What's that?
Hollywood are whores.
Wow.
You're talking about Hollywood who took the actual remake of Red Dawn, and instead of it being the Chinese, a global superpower.
Took the Taiwan patch off Tom Cruise.
I mean, come on.
And it is unbelievable.
It's unbelievable that they're making speeches to us while supporting these communist jackbooted oppressors.
I'll do one better.
I'll do one better.
It is the fault of Hollywood that they've decided...
There are two things.
One is doing business with China.
The second is overtly kowtowing to China.
They're not the same thing, right?
Doing business with China but saying that China's an authoritarian garbage state, which it is, I really don't see a huge problem.
Well, we all do business with China because we live in a world like a lot of people like to complain sometimes that our leftist here stumblers are made in China.
And I always think, are you writing this hateful comment to me on your iPhone?
Or on your laptop, which was made in China?
Or on your desktop computer, which was made in China?
So my broader point is that if you really want to get to the root of the problem here, The root of the problem is that the West made the fundamental miscalculation that if it could get China to engage in market transactions, this would moderate China.
And instead, it just made itself dependent on China via market transactions.
And what should happen right now and what should have always happened is the West should be economically isolating China.
And that has to be an act of collective action because you can't have American products saying, OK, American manufacturers can't make in China, but we'll still import products from other manufacturers who are making in China and then undercutting them by 20 percent on the price.
That's not going to work.
There has to be an actual move by the government to prevent people from doing business in China if you actually want to hamstring the Chinese government.
In fairness, I don't think that it was a bad experiment.
I don't think it was a bad notion that opening up China economically could have led to liberalization.
It just didn't work out.
It just didn't work out.
You know, Joe Biden, so we're probably not going to get much of this anytime soon, because Joe Biden very famously, I think it was only about five years ago, said, a rising China is good for everybody, and a rising China will lead to prosperity.
And it just didn't happen.
That was the argument for letting him into the world trade.
I know.
He waited for the check to clear before that happened.
But that was the argument for letting China into the World Trade Organization.
And what did China do?
Immediately, they start cheating.
They start undercutting us.
And they obviously don't change the government.
But it's also the argument Obama used in Iran.
It's always the wrong argument that if we let these people into the community of nations, they will act as if they're part of the community of nations.
As if they're not grown-ups with a philosophy of their own.
They have a philosophy.
That philosophy is what we're fighting.
We're not fighting Chinese people.
We're fighting the philosophy.
I guess what I would say, though, is that sometimes when I think about FDR, just for example, and obviously I disagree with almost every piece of FDR's domestic, in particular, domestic policy as precedent, but I have a little bit of sympathy.
I have a little bit of sympathy for, like, very early 20th century communists.
Me too.
So do I. They didn't know.
That's right.
I have absolutely no sympathy for modern day communists because you have a hundred years of oppression and mass murder that you can look immediately to.
So we know that a lot of those ideas are bad.
I'm not sure at the time that Nixon or Kissinger were opening up.
I mean, part of the argument was that opening China would make China more moderate, but the other part of it was take China off the table so they're not an ally to Russia, right?
That was really the real policy concern involved in the opening of China.
But the issue now is how do we shut down China?
Because China is indeed an aggressive, authoritarian enemy of the United States that is pursuing global power, threatening Taiwan.
They just subjected the free state of Hong Kong and nobody cared to complete tyranny over the course of two years.
Unbelievable.
So quickly.
It's the first reversal, total reversal.
For a free country since the end of the Cold War.
It's an amazing, amazing thing.
The world just did not give any craps at all.
That's not fair.
The NBA cared.
And so the real problem I see right now is now...
What's amazing right now is that now you have a unique opportunity for the West to mobilize in opposition to China.
Why?
Well, because we now have fairly good information that this Wuhan virus probably started in the lab in Wuhan, right?
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
I want to know...
Yeah, start speaking Mandarin to apologize for all of this.
But the reality that, you know, this story was cudgeled to death for a year, right?
If you said this in social media, they would literally take you off of Twitter and off of Facebook because it was a conspiracy theory.
It was fact-checked false by PolitiFact.
And they just had to reverse the fact-check because PolitiFact, of course, is a garbage partisan organization designed only to shut down conservative outlets.
Yeah, like all fact checkers.
Pretty much.
But, like, this is such an opportunity for the United States and for the rest of the world to say, okay, so China did two things, both of which are unbelievably egregious and led to the deaths of millions of people.
Number one, this thing, in all likelihood, began through a gain-of-function research failure at a Chinese laboratory, and it was allowed to escape the lab in November 2019, which brings you to the much bigger thing, because mistakes get made.
The much bigger thing is that they then hid this all the way until the end of January.
So, to be fair, once the DNA sequencing on COVID-19 was released, within one weekend, the scientific community had created the vaccine.
One weekend, by the end of the weekend, the mRNA vaccine sequencing was done.
Literally, they released it at the beginning of the weekend.
By the following Sunday, everybody had sequenced the mRNA vaccine.
And then it took all the way until November to get it ready for market.
Okay, although if you'd cut out all the middlemen and you really accelerated, maybe you're ready by September, October.
And if there hadn't been a presidential election, for sure by October, 100%.
But if this is started in November, say you use the exact same timeline and they release the DNA sequencing on COVID-19 in November or December, and you push the entire timeline up by two months, how many lives get saved?
That last wave happened in September, October, November.
It killed like 200,000 people.
I also have a question of this gain-of-function research that they claim makes it easier to study these viruses, but it also essentially weaponizes the virus.
I mean, do we know that the Wuhan lab is not sitting around making viruses for germ warfare?
I think we probably can suspect that that's what they're doing.
Right.
We in the United States have known for decades.
Except for Anthony Fauci.
But I had a mask on and I was facing violence.
And now when Fauci is being caught, you know, Rand Paul is now accusing him of perjuring himself because Anthony Fauci said the United States has not in any way funded gain-of-function research that was done in Wuhan.
And Anthony Fauci very cleverly denied and he said, we did not send any money to Wuhan for gain-of-function research.
But we did fund gain-of-function research that was done in cooperation with One thing I'm wondering through all this is, first of all, what is gain-of-function research?
But secondly, when you look at the fact that for a year we weren't allowed to talk about the lab in Wuhan and now all of a sudden we can.
I think the assumption among a lot of conservatives is that whilst the media was covering for China, I think that's part of it.
But I also think We're good to go.
Hold on a second.
Wait for us to tell you you're allowed to draw that conclusion, and then you can.
So now, yeah, you're allowed to talk about it, but just because they don't want regular people to go off on their own thinking about things.
And the Washington Post, as much as said, we denied it because Trump said it.
Right.
Margaret Haberman, Maggie Haberman, she said that on national TV. She said, well, because Trump was talking about it, obviously we couldn't take it seriously.
Well, actually, that would mean that you should take some of those New York Times reporters and maybe go research this sort of thing.
You don't have to take the president at face value.
You could go change.
But the thing that's truly amazing is that why isn't the Biden administration taking this opportunity?
I mean, literally half a million people died in the United States of COVID-19.
Like, why isn't he taking the opportunity to say, OK, now is the time for us to crack down on China?
By the way, there's wide bipartisan approval for this.
If you look in the polling on whether Democrats and Republicans are kind of...
There's like the only thing we agree on is that China is an actual threat and that China screwed the pooch on COVID.
And the fact that Biden instead is saying, well, you know, let's let the WHO do their investigation.
And we don't need an independent investigation.
We don't need to put any pressure.
Like this is the we were told if you remember what Michael said, because Biden believes that a rising China is right.
He still holds his view.
They're not bad people, folks.
They're not bad people.
It's not even just that Biden's not taking this seriously.
He's impeding the investigation.
Yes, there was a State Department investigation launched under the Trump administration.
And Blinken, the new secretary of state, shut it down when he got into office.
Well, this is a hallmark of their entire foreign policy, right, which is never let the facts get in the way of your ideology.
But it's also also the racial stuff just makes it impossible, I think, for modern day Democrats.
That's why we didn't we've heard some people in the media saying they deleted some of the tweets, but saying, of course, it's racist.
They were saying that for a year, but some are still saying it's racist.
New York Times today.
Right.
So the fact that Chinese people are not white is a big political problem for Joe Biden and the Democrats.
I think in some ways it's as simple as that.
This came from a place where these are not white people.
This is getting very offensive.
I was in Washington's D.C.'s Chinatown the other day, and there's a big lit poster, electric poster telling us not to hate Asian people.
I'm beginning to be offended by these signs telling me not to hate people.
You know, it's like, first of all, screw you.
Who the hell are you to tell me?
I'll hate whoever I want.
No, but I will hate whoever I want.
And what makes them think this country that has been so welcoming to everybody, that has been so welcoming to everybody, needs a lecture from corporate toadies who are doing business with the Chinese.
And doing business to the point where they won't criticize them.
Why are they lecturing me?
Anybody who can afford that sign shouldn't be lecturing me.
Put a sign about how we shouldn't hate Asian people up at the Harvard admittance.
Right, right.
Here's a question from a dailywire.com subscriber for the group.
If the Wuhan virus was man-made, how should the U.S. respond?
Not how will they, which is not at all.
How should they respond?
Well, I mean, the big question isn't whether it was man-made.
It was whether the leak was the responsibility of the lab and whether they then covered that up for months, right?
Because without the cover-up, even there you would understand, okay, this is the stand, right?
Something escapes a military facility.
It's not the first time this sort of thing has happened before, actually.
But once it starts getting covered up, that's the real moral responsibility.
Because they knew for months, for sure, 100%.
And this thing was transmitting human to human.
They were lying about their casualty statistics.
They knew 30,000 people probably died in Wuhan.
They said 3,000 people died in Wuhan.
What should the punishment be?
The punishment should be massive economic sanctions against any company that is based in China.
I mean, that should be like take on the entire economic regime of the Chinese.
What's amazing to me is that the Biden administration is willing to sacrifice the American economy so that we can blow out the dollar by borrowing money from China, essentially.
But if you are actually going to make economic sacrifices, you should do so for perhaps the higher purpose of getting rid of the authoritarian regime in China, which is threatening all of its neighbors and threatening the freedom of the United States eventually.
Because we can lose this thing by default.
That's the part that I'm afraid of.
This is why I don't think it's the worst idea in the world for there to be a union of democracies.
You know, instead of a United Nations, which I think we should walk out of tomorrow, if not yesterday, I think this should be a union of actual free peoples that can stand together against threats like this.
You know, one of the things I thought Trump did that was reckless was when he got rid of that Asian, you know, the United-Pacific Partnership thing.
Because we do need to act together against a threat like China.
TPP had problems with it, but this was a big mistake.
TPP was specifically denied.
No, he had legitimate problems, too.
I agree.
There are certainly problems with the TPP. It gave too much power to international institutions, but it should have been corrected in the same way that Trump tried to correct NAFTA, right?
I do not think it would be a terrible thing to have an international union of democracies.
I think this is the thing.
We keep talking about globalism as if it's somehow going to go away.
It's a global world.
I can take the phone out of my pocket and call Afghanistan and get put directly through.
It's a global world.
We need to unite the people who actually believe that the people should rule.
But is the issue here that we want instant regime change in China, or is the issue that we want to contain China and stop them from aggressing on Taiwan, aggressing in Hong Kong, aggressing on our interests in the South China Sea, aggressing on us economically?
We have to cut off their leverage.
Right now, they have way too much leverage over America's ability to operate, whether it is through the number of American treasuries they hold, or whether it is over the number of American businesses who are doing serious business.
And the property they steal.
And yes, I do want a regime change in China.
But if you're asking me if I want Some sort of military regime change or some sort of instantaneous regime change.
No, but I think that if you love the idea of human freedom, then your long-term objective would be to see China liberated from this mess that they've made.
As long as it's not going to cost me $5 more for my iPhone.
Forget the whole thing.
And the thing is that we have the model of this, right?
The United States did not engage in large-scale trade with the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War.
The United States basically cut them off at the knees economically, and then we out-competed them because their system was not capable of functioning.
I do want to push back on that, though, because I think what you just said reinforces a bad idea out there that people have, even on the right, about how economics work.
Your iPhone is not $5 cheaper because it's manufactured in China.
Your iPhone exists at all because it's manufactured in China.
Yeah, that's true, but that shouldn't be true.
I agree that it shouldn't be true, but it is true.
Because it isn't just that it's cheaper in China.
It's that in America, you cannot manufacture.
Manufacture at the rate of innovation.
Because of things like environmental regulations, because of all of the rules that impede trade.
The precious minerals that they use to make this stuff, we have those available and you can't get out of here.
But this is something that needs to be addressed.
That actually, when you're saving the environment, which is not in any trouble...
It's not a crisis at all.
You are enslaving people, and you're making it easier to enslave people.
We've outsourced all of our pollution at the world countries.
I was in the car recently with my son.
He was peppering me with all these questions about how different things are made.
And of course, as a parent, you realize how stupid you are.
I can't answer most of them.
At one point, he asked me, how long did it take to build the Empire State Building?
Which was built 90 years ago or so.
And so I thought, you know, okay, maybe 10 years or something?
Like six days, yeah.
And I looked it up.
So I said, okay, let's look it up.
And it was built in a year.
And of course, you try to build the Empire State Building today.
I mean, look at the building that replaced the World Trade Center.
It took them 15 years to even get started.
They've been doing the big thing in Boston since...
Ted Kennedy was wandering around leaving women in rivers.
Right.
And that's back when you wanted to build a building.
You just built the building.
But now it would take five years to even get the permits to even start.
Exactly right.
What you need to do while you're trying to figure out, well, if everything is going terribly, what should I do?
What can I do, Jeremy?
You can go to Policy Genius.
And you need to go to Policy Genius.
We laugh.
I like to have fun with the ad reads.
But you have a responsibility to the people in your life.
What will happen if you are gone and unable to care for them?
The answer is you need a life insurance policy.
Like all other kinds of insurance, you need to be a responsible adult and make sure that you are insured against the worst possible outcomes.
PolicyGenius makes it easy to compare quotes from over a dozen top insurers all in one place.
Why compare?
Because comparing lets you save.
You can save 50% or more on life insurance by comparing quotes at PolicyGenius.
The licensed experts at Policy Genius work for you, not the insurance companies, so you can trust them to help navigate every step of the shopping and buying process.
That kind of service has earned Policy Genius a five-star rating across thousands of reviews on Trustpilot and on Google.
And from me, I've told you guys before, I've gotten three life insurance policies on PolicyGenius.com, one for myself to provide for my wife and for my child in the event of my, I shouldn't say the unlikely event, it's the very likely event of my untimely demise, one on my wife because, you know, one on my wife because, you know, she also has responsibilities to our child, and the most important one is the one that I carry on Ben Shapiro.
Head to PolicyGenius.com.
Get started right now.
PolicyGenius, when it comes to insurance, it's nice to get it right.
It's even more nice to do the right thing.
PolicyGenius.com.
You forgot the one you took out on Knowles because of the murder plot.
Wait.
Hold on a second.
That can be evidence.
The problem with getting a life insurance policy that would give me the kind of confidence it would take to murder Knowles is that he would have to have a medical exam first.
And there's not...
Even policygenius.com could never deal with all of this.
It's too healthy.
China, bad.
Another thing going on in the world that's been bad since the last time we were together is this horrible conflict going on in the Middle East.
Hamas deciding to fire 3,500 rockets.
Yeah, 4,500.
Yep.
Indiscriminately into Israel and Israel responding the way that any first world power would, which is with very expensive, very technological, very directed, but very lethal force.
And to see the reaction both in the news media and in the left politics in this country has just been unbelievable.
I would say that.
I want to talk about it for a little bit.
Someone this week, our very own Candace Owens, made this great point.
She said there are people on the left who are sending me pictures of dead Palestinians, children even, saying if you don't speak out against this, then you don't deserve to have your platform.
And there are people on the right who are saying if you don't stand up for Israel, you don't deserve to have a platform.
And Candace rightly said...
We can't all be experts on everything all the time.
She said, I'm reading books about this.
I'm trying to get educated.
She has a history of doing this on other issues in the past where she doesn't want to speak out until she really knows.
I appreciate that.
At the same time, I don't think that one has to be an expert to understand the immorality of firing rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas.
It seems to me that what the left has been saying during this conflict is essentially because Israel is better at war, Then the Palestinians, Israel is evil.
Which, A, makes me understand why we do so badly in wars in this country.
50% of Americans actually think that the purpose of war is equal destruction.
No, we need equity.
It's equity in warfare.
Equitable outcome in warfare.
But essentially they're saying Israel would be a lot better if more Jews died in these convicts.
Well, Israel is also the West, and they seriously hate the West.
It is amazing to me.
I read on the air Hamas's charter, which is just a series of...
Anti-Jewish filth.
They blame them for the French Revolution.
I'm not making this up.
I wish I were making this up.
They blame Jews for the French Revolution.
They blame Jews for World War I. They blame Jews for World War II, their clever plan to exterminate themselves in order to take over the world.
I don't know what that was about.
But, you know, this is the kind of stuff...
They quote the Hadiths about Jews hiding behind rocks and trees and Muslims being called to kill them.
It is everything, everything, but the blood libel is in it, but I'm sure they would believe in the blood libel too.
Surely, surely, if somebody tells you You know, my philosophy is that I believe Jews should be exterminated because of this.
We should believe them.
We should believe that this is a genocidal terrorist movement that was elected, was duly elected by the Palestinian people.
somewhere along the line that has to be addressed, and somewhere along the line has to be addressed that the Jewish state is the freest, most multicultural, most successful state in the Middle East and should be imitated.
The thing that drives me about this, and it goes back to what you were saying, it goes back to what you were saying about no policy result is going to change their philosophy.
The Iranian deal by Obama, one of the great disasters of his administration, was overturned by Donald Trump, and he instituted the first actual advance in Middle East peace that I have seen in my lifetime, which now goes back to 1776, right?
So this is the first time I ever saw anybody do anything, just a little bit of a change in the strategy of going into the Middle East.
They have gone directly back to the Iranian deal.
I mean, when you bring this terrorist state, Iran is a terrorist state.
When you bring it back into the center of power in the Middle East, you encourage all the bad actors to climb on board.
They're the ones who are funding Hamas.
They're the ones who are sending them the missiles.
It's just incredible to me that no fact can penetrate their ideology.
To give a two-minute synopsis for people who don't know the modern origins of this particular conflict.
Do not go back to the exodus.
I definitely don't.
I have a video coming out that's like a full hour going all the way back to the exodus.
But, no joke.
But what Drew says about Hamas is not only correct.
The fact is that what just happened over the past few months, what actually drove this, what started this, is that in late April, Mahmoud Abbas is the head of the Palestinian Authority.
He's currently in the 16th year of a four-year elected term.
Because the last election in the Palestinian Authority was held in 2005.
So he's now, you know, 85 years old.
Kind of like 15 days to slow the spread.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So he was elected.
So he won in the West Bank in very contentious circumstances.
Then Hamas won the next year in the Gaza Strip.
So he called another election because the Biden administration said, we would love to see you guys do an election.
So he called an election and then he looked at the polling and he realized he was going to lose to Hamas because Hamas right now rules the Gaza Strip.
And they're at war, literal war, like people killing each other with the Palestinian authority and Islamic Jihad.
So he called these elections and then he canceled the elections in late April.
You know what?
Bad idea.
No more elections.
And so in order to distract Palestinians from the fact that he had just canceled an election that would have allowed him to be replaced in power, he decided to launch essentially a terror campaign against Israel.
He started posting videos on Fatah TV about how it was good to stab Jews.
He started encouraging Fatah members to go up to the Temple Mount and fling rocks and projectiles at Israeli police to start a conflagration on the Temple Mount that could then be treated as though it was a mutual conflict on the Temple Mount.
And he started propagandizing about what was happening in Sheikh Jarrah, which is a suburb of Jerusalem.
There's a literally 50-year legal case that has been winding its way through the courts about, I kid you not, four houses.
These four houses were basically owned by Jews before 1948.
Jordan won this territory between 48 and 67.
They handed deeds over to a bunch of Arabs in that area.
Israel respected the deeds that were handed over, but there were four houses where Jordan hadn't handed over the deeds.
So the Jews came back in 67 after they won.
And they said, okay, well now these houses, we have the title, it's our house.
The courts came up with the solution.
You guys pay rent and you get to stay.
The Palestinians didn't pay rent for 50 years.
And so finally, the Jews were like, well, you didn't pay rent, so we're evicting you.
That was the eviction crisis.
Four houses in Sheikh Jarrah.
OK, there are 1.9 million Israeli Arabs living in the state of Israel.
So when people talk about ethnic cleansing or moving people out, there are 1.9 million Arabs living in Israel.
There are zero Jews living in Gaza.
There are zero Jews living under the Palestinian Authority.
There's only one apartheid regime in this particular conflict.
And it is not Israel by any stretch of the imagination.
Hamas had to get in on the business.
Once Fatah started the conflict in order to generate more publicity for themselves, Hamas couldn't be left out.
Now it's a party.
So they start firing rockets at Israel in order to not be left out and to outflank Fatah, And you can see, by the way, all of this play out after the ceasefire was signed.
There's this big riots on the Temple Mount have continued.
In Al-Aqsa Mosque, you have thousands of Muslims who have gathered.
And they actually shouted out the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who's a Fatah member, a member of Mahmoud Abbas's party.
They shouted him out shouting, we are Mohammed Daif's men, meaning Mohammed Daif is the spiritual leader of Hamas.
We are with Hamas.
So all of this is basically just an internal Palestinian conflict that was then projected outward at the Israelis.
And the Israelis were like, okay, listen, thank God for Iron Dome.
We can prevent 90% of these projectiles from hitting Israelis.
But we're going to have to take out a bunch of your stuff.
When we say that any state did what Israel would have done, that's not true.
Any state that was hit with 4,500 rockets in the middle of, for example, its capital city or Tel Aviv or Washington, D.C. or New York, let me put this, of 1,000 rockets at San Diego, which is not a top 10 American city in terms of population, the American flag would be flying in Mexico City by tomorrow morning.
And we all know this.
I also wonder from just the perspective of the American interest, I think there are plenty of good moral arguments to be made about the problem itself in Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, but just from the American interest, I'm confused as to how it would serve the American interest to back Hamas or to back the national pretensions I'm confused as to how it would serve the American interest to back Hamas or to back When people say, Hamas doesn't represent the Palestinians, Hamas does, in fact, represent the Palestinians.
Hamas won an election, they're about to win another.
So I just don't understand.
I suppose the argument would be that Israel, a relatively young nation, that's the big problem, and so we've got to give more power to the Palestinian Arabs, who are calling for, by the way, From the river to the sea, Palestine to be free.
So they're calling for the eradication of Israel.
Does anyone believe that that is a tenable...
Taking the moral arguments aside, that that's a tenable thing, you're going to wipe out a nuclear power, that the world would tolerate that?
That doesn't seem like such a good idea.
So now we're going to back Hamas?
What?
It's heartbreaking about this.
When I was a kid, we were really not that far from the Holocaust.
And I used to call us, I actually wrote this, that we were holiday Jews.
We were taking a holiday from a history, a relentless history of anti-Semitism.
I mean, the nonstop hatred of the Jewish people that has really been going on before the year dot, as they say in England.
It's been going on forever.
We have this holiday, and the holiday's over.
And it's heartbreaking.
It is heartbreaking to see Jewish, ordinary Jewish people attacked on the street and no one said...
As with all racism in America, we all lived in this beautiful period where it wasn't happening and now it's back.
I do want to pick up though briefly on what Michael is bringing up because there are a lot of voices on the right today that call into question our relationship with Israel.
Some very ugly voices.
I think it's important to say that when we...
I'm very critical of the America First movement.
There are two distinct America First movements.
Yeah, there's Lindbergh's.
There's Trump who uses America First to mean that America must put America's interest ahead of other interests.
And then there's the America First movement, which is...
Online, jolly, right-wing trolls who actually are racist and actually do despise the state of Israel and actually do want an American, a white ethnostate in this country.
It's unfortunate, because they're sophisticated online trolls, that they've used the language of Donald Trump's, hey, wouldn't it just be nice if we put America's interest ahead of other interests?
But they have.
And so when I'm critical of America first, I'm not being critical of Donald Trump.
I'm First of all, Donald Trump was the most pro-Israel president of America.
But you do have this America First movement, this Internet America First movement, very hostile to Israel.
And they say a lot of things.
They're angry about the bombing of the USS Liberty in 1967.
I used to get people to ask me that question.
They're like, really?
Yeah.
They apparently haven't heard that England burned the actual White House during the War of 1812.
Why can't Israel be?
Allies don't ever get mad at each other.
But I sort of think, you're right, there's this distinction.
As with all these terms, they're used in lots of different ways.
But let's take it totally seriously for a second.
Let's say, just from the American interest point of view...
This is where I'm going.
Right.
The claim, I guess, is that it is in the American interest to ditch Israel, that we've got a sort of Israel-first foreign policy.
And, you know, like so many of these online movements, first of all, you've got to remember, a lot of these guys are very, very young.
A lot of them are pushed to the fringes.
A lot of them are told, you're evil because you're a white person or you're a man or whatever.
So, like, I was young once.
once.
I remember the sort of crazy, extreme things 18-year-olds say.
But what does that mean?
I mean, just because you're reacting, it's like, you know, when we're told that men are evil, take Israel out of a prison, we're told men are evil.
One way that men react when they're 18 years old and they're just so sick and tired of this is they become sort of performatively sexist or That's not the answer, right?
That's just sort of the flip side of the coin.
So I think, sure, if these guys are saying, we've been told our whole lives that Israel is the greatest ally of the United States ever in the history of the world, and now we found out it's only like a fine ally, but it's not like the greatest one ever.
I think, well, okay, so your answer is to back Hamas?
What are you talking about?
I think...
Just to take up a little bit for them.
Not really.
But I think, obviously, from a moral standpoint, morally it's clear.
And all you have to do is apply the just war theory to this.
And, you know, one thing in waging a just war is, first of all, there has to be a chance of success.
And when you have Hamas just firing rockets randomly at the civilian centers, nothing's going to happen from that except that you kill a bunch of civilians, maybe, and then get destroyed yourself.
Right.
But at the same time, I think one thing, the people that you're talking about, One thing that annoys them is when they see...
I don't remember who tweeted.
Someone tweeted something like, if you're an American patriot, it means you're pro-Israel or something like that.
This idea that it is your patriotic duty to have this particular feeling about another country.
No matter what the other country is.
I don't care what country it is.
So that goes too far on that side of it.
And I think they're kind of reacting...
That's kind of what you're saying.
They're reacting to that...
I do think that there is something patriotic about supporting our allies because we form alliances because it's in our national interest to form alliances.
And having formed those alliances, and if we're all operating in a kind of good faith where those alliances are concerned, then there is a kind of patriotic...
Yeah, but you don't have a patriotic...
You do not have a patriotic duty to support any country that is not your own.
I will say that I think that what that statement is missing is the phrase at the end right now.
Okay, so I don't think that you have a patriotic duty to eternally support any other country because circumstances change.
The country, I mean, how many times have we seen alliances change and people end up on the other side of those alliances?
But the idea that in a conflict between a democratic ally and an actual terror group, That it doesn't connect to any sort of...
We're not talking about nationalism now, which is just attachment to country.
We're talking about patriotism, which goes to underlying principle.
That you have no duty at all to support a fellow democracy that is an ally in its own battle for survival.
That seems to me to raise some patriotism principles in the same way that it would raise patriotism principles to say that if Hitler were about to overrun Britain, people who are saying, well, you know what, it doesn't implicate the United States at all or patriotism at all to watch Hitler overrun Britain.
And it seems like it kind of implicates patriotism to watch Hitler overrun Britain.
But you know, the other side of this is that no matter who does this, it helps the left, whether the right does it or whether the left does it.
It's the same thing with blacks.
If the left so encourages black violence in cities that some white people start to say, Well, those blacks are being violent.
That all helps the left.
They want us fighting with each other.
They want us fighting with our fellow citizens.
They want us to hate people who are different than us.
And they don't care.
They don't care if they inspire blacks to have hostility against white people.
But if that then inspires white people to have hostilities against blacks, they don't care because we're fighting with each other instead of fighting with the people who are usurping power from the people.
And that is all happening at the top.
That's always happening at the top.
I sort of am, even kind of of your opinion, Matt, to give the critics here even more of the benefit of the doubt, just to make the...
Realpolitik argument, which is, you know, during Trump we were told that we had to back the Kurds.
The Kurds are our greatest ally.
The Kurds are the most wonderful people in the world.
And Turkey was aggressing against the Kurds.
But this creates a problem.
Because Turkey has been a NATO ally for how many decades at this point?
So now do we reflexively back our ally Turkey in this battle with the Kurds?
I don't know.
That raised a lot of problems on the right.
So I understand there are nuances here.
But we should have...
We are no longer allies of Turkey.
And the fact that we are unprepared to move with haste to address the changing realities that Ben refers to...
And this context is completely different in the sense that we were never allies of Hamas.
There's no world in which we are allied with Hamas.
This is sort of my point.
I just mean, you know, granting that people are just rebelling in this very, I think, emotional and reactionary way against...
These sort of extreme statements that we, you know, it's your patriotic duty to be an ally of Israel or something, to just say, look, in this case, we just should back Israel.
Israel's the better.
I can understand the principled argument.
I'll give people this.
I can understand the principled argument that the United States should just be hands off completely in terms of foreign policy.
I think it's wrong.
But I can understand the complete isolationist argument.
Why are we involved anywhere in the world?
I think that it's an ignorant argument that's based on a failure to understand the realities of the world, which is that vacuums exist and that bad states fill them if we leave those vacuums open, which is the lesson of the last century and a half.
But I can at least understand that argument.
What I cannot understand is the situational application of that argument.
Yeah.
Right.
Which is, OK, well, we should be involved here and we should be involved there.
But this particular one should definitely not be involved in.
And I have real objections when these Jews firing firing, you know, at Hamas batteries that are located in civilian areas to protect themselves.
I've heard people this week say, you know, if Israel, Israel might be our ally, but why are we giving them military aid?
We you know, England is our ally and we don't give them military aid.
It's like, well, no, the last time England was in a war.
Not only did we give them military aid, we gave them a significant percentage of our GDP. And then when things got bad enough, we gave them hundreds of thousands of our sons.
And then when it was over, we gave them the Marshall Plan and rebuilt their entire continent.
It's important, I think, with a conversation like this to get really specific.
Right, I agree.
But there are other things that get caught up in this.
Like, for example, evangelical conservatives tend to also believe that it's our religious duty.
We're biblically called to support Israel.
And that brings in a whole other aspect of the conversation.
And then you have people that kind of react against that and are saying, well, no, we don't.
I think it's a misinterpretation of Christian doctrine.
So I think you have to be really specific in this conversation.
Here's one place where I think that we should all be able to agree.
And frankly, I think that people of any level of good heart should be able to agree.
In a conflict between a thriving, diverse democracy that upholds humanitarian values and an actual honest to God genocidal terror group, that's not a moral choice.
Whatever you think are the practical applications as to whether the United States should be involved or should provide aid or any of that sort of stuff, on a moral level, the New York Times is specifically saying that Israel is in the wrong, that Israel should not be defending itself.
You have them literally printing op-eds from people who are activists for Hamas, downplaying the evils of Hamas.
You have the entire Democratic Party right now.
By the way, that's how I know that it's It's morally right.
You have the entire Democratic Party right now basically covering for the open anti-Semitism of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar who spread blood libel.
When they say that Israel is targeting Palestinian children, that is just an abject lie.
Israel has been participating in the most pinpointed attacks of any military I have ever seen, including the United States military.
They're dropping knock bombs on the...
Rashida Tlaib is saying this fight is not just in Israel.
It is the fight for all minorities everywhere.
Which, by the way, is why you're seeing Palestinian activists go to Jewish areas in the United States and protest there.
If you thought this was a foreign policy problem, why are the protests not happening in Washington, D.C.? Why aren't they happening next to the congressional office?
They're not.
They're going down to a restaurant a quarter mile away.
They're going down to Brooklyn and they're beating Jews in the streets.
Or they're going down to areas in Miami where there are lots of Jews who live there.
They're driving through in trucks with Palestinian flags on the back.
Are those the policy makers?
No, these are not...
I'm sorry, that's the Nazis marching through Skokie.
But you know, Jeremy makes a great point here.
I can't believe I said that.
I need to wash my mouth out with soap.
Jeremy makes a great point, which is, if you are not an expert on the past, I don't know, what, 3,000, 4,000 years of this conflict in the Middle East, there is a rule of thumb.
I know we're not supposed to appeal to authority, but when I see AOC and Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and Bernie Sanders...
And the New York Times.
And the New York Times and CNN, and just all of them lined up on one side of the issue...
I'm going to have to go in on the other side.
And maybe my opinion will change as I learn more, but I think it's a good rule of thumb.
That's a very reasonable judgment.
Especially Rashida Tlaib.
These people are really vile, evil.
I don't think we can emphasize that enough.
It's not a political disagreement.
The New York Times is too, by the way.
The New York Times was supported Castro, which supported Che, which supported Stalin.
Yes, these are bad people.
And when they're all uniformly agreeing...
Don't wear your mask.
The New York Times printed a graphic today that was such an abject lie.
It was a graphic depicting the state of Israel, but it said Palestine across, and then it showed how Palestine was shrinking.
This graphic is so bad.
In 2015, when MSNBC ran it, they had to issue an overt apology saying that this was an anti-factual map.
The New York Times ran it today.
I mean, the media are so all in on us.
It's insane.
But other than the moral and other than the political, I also do want to address this sort of idea on the right That America first means that we're somehow completely disengaged in the world.
And it doesn't.
We have alliances.
We give aid.
Because we believe, maybe sometimes inaccurately, but because we believe it is in our interest to do so.
We have to...
We want to contain openly hostile powers like Iran and North Korea.
We want to constrain rival powers like Russia and China.
We want to incent economic activity around the globe, which is in America's interest.
Those are the reasons.
Now, you may disagree with specific examples of us doing this.
I disagree with specific examples of us doing this, but the idea that we're just a piggy bank charity out there giving people money because it's great.
When you hear people say, we're not the world's policemen, they're usually denying that there's any American interest that exists outside of our own borders.
I think that that's a complete mistake.
That's never been true.
We have interests, and you have to pursue your national interest in a very messy world with shifting alliances, with shifting realities on the ground.
Again, I'm not saying that any individual conversation is out of line.
A nation that I am very fond of has its own national interests.
And Israel's national interests will not always...
Sometimes it's in conflict with America.
That's right.
Align with America's interests.
Being allies doesn't mean that we're in some sort of perfectly symbiotic relationship.
Isn't there a problem with the foreign aid thing?
I agree situationally we have allies and we should support them in situations.
My issue with foreign aid as a concept, no matter what country we're talking about, is that This is American taxpayer money you're taking from American families.
Yeah.
And you're giving it to a foreign government.
And those American families have absolutely no say over what happens with the money.
They do not directly benefit from it anyway.
And they also don't know what happens.
The American family sitting around their dinner table, that money comes from them, it goes to the foreign government.
That you don't get a direct say on what happens with the money, and you don't really know what happens with most of it.
I don't agree that you don't get a direct benefit from some foreign aid.
You don't get a direct benefit from some domestic spending.
There's a lot of domestic spending that they take your tax money and you get no direct benefit.
Some of it's in contravention of your interest.
But there is an interest...
In spreading America's influence around the world.
So one thing that has given us the wonders of the American century, the 20th century, is that America essentially controls the waterways of the entire Earth.
And that's a remarkable thing that exists and has allowed us to have...
Huge advances in technology, huge economic advances.
You have that in part because of an expression of America's military might and in part an expression of America's economic might and in part because America has crowded out rivals who would break parts of that off and keep us from being able to access it if they could.
And a lot of Americans, listen, sometimes you just give charity.
There's an earthquake in some country and we decide we want to help them out.
A lot of our aid, though, the majority of our aid, is about keeping influence in strategic places around the country, where if we don't, China will.
And of course that's true.
I mean, the notion in the United States seems to be that foreign aid is a form of charity.
That is certainly not the notion in China.
That's right.
China does not give a crap about charity.
This is not a charitable democracy.
This is a country that has used its Belt and Road program as a way to bootstrap itself into influence in a variety of countries around the world.
Russia's doing the same thing.
So, again, you can make the argument that you don't care.
That's okay.
You can make that argument that you don't care if China expands its sphere of influence or you didn't care if the Russians do it or you didn't care even back when it was the USSR and the USSR was expanding its sphere of influence.
But that begs a further question, which is what do you think America's role in foreign policy ought to be?
If you think that America's role in foreign policy is that we stay within our own borders and only when somebody knocks over a tower in New York, Do we respond and militarize?
Well, that is one view of foreign policy.
I think that it's a very short-sighted view of foreign policy, and I think that it leads to a much more difficult world for the United States to navigate with a lot fewer allies available for us to fight back against some of the worst people on Earth.
But what exactly do people think is the fundamental role of American foreign policy?
I guess with foreign aid, I would say, I think, again, going back to American families, this money is coming from people, from us.
Sure.
I think you should be able to give a really specific answer.
Like, we're going to take this money, we're going to give it to this government for a specific reason.
I think the families who are taking the money from have a right to know specifically what is this money going to.
And I'm not saying there could never be a good reason, but you should be able to give a specific reason.
And I think when you are giving billions and billions every single year to countries across the world, and the answer is American influence, That's just not quite specific enough.
But I would only argue that foreign aid is a very small part of the budget and that most of what we steal people's monies for and do in contravention of their interests actually happens domestically.
And what bothers me about this sort of America first argument is that quite often they say, we don't need to be giving our money overseas.
We need to be taking care of our own right here at home.
And I go, no, for God's sake.
Give all the money overseas rather than continuing to prop up huge socialist spending programs at home that actually do take away my freedom far more than just not only take away my money but also constrain my freedom.
We'll talk a little bit more about this.
First, I want to talk about our friends over at ExpressVPN.
You don't need me to tell you that big tech is clamping down on freedom of speech everywhere that isn't apparently governed by Ron DeSantis.
Those are the only places where big tech isn't clamping down on free speech.
You should have the right to express yourself freely online, but unfortunately, Big Tech has a monopoly on what you can say, and they've opted for silencing tactics and censorship.
To fight back on Big Tech's control of the internet, I use ExpressVPN.
When you use ExpressVPN, the app on your computer or your phone, you anonymize much of your online presence by hiding your IP address.
That makes your activity a whole lot more difficult to trace, and it makes selling your information to advertisers even more difficult still.
What's more, ExpressVPN encrypts 100% of your network data to protect you from eavesdroppers and from cyber criminals.
You have an obligation to yourself, you have an obligation to your family to protect your data.
We live in a digital age.
You have absolutely no idea the power that you're giving to these companies when you loosely let them have access unnecessarily to your data.
Revoke big tech's right to your data.
Secure your internet with a VPN that I trust for online protection.
Visit expressvpn.com slash backstage.
That's expressvpn.com slash backstage.
You'll get three extra months free with this exclusive link.
Go to expressvpn.com slash backstage right now to learn more.
Expressvpn.com slash backstage.
That's right.
We got our own promo code backstage.
You know what strikes me about this?
At the heart of kind of this disagreement over projecting American strength abroad, and I don't just mean a disagreement among us, I mean among the American people and among the right too.
I understand one argument, one sort of more novel argument against projecting American strength abroad, which is some years ago, there was broad consensus on what it meant to project American strength abroad.
The American, truth, justice, and the American way, the American cultural exportation around the world, right?
There was, we were broadly in agreement and in support of that, but that largely Christian, you know, unique, but American kind of version of that has fallen away into this broad global liberal empire.
And so I think there are a lot of people who say, I'm all for projecting American influence abroad, but I don't want to promote transgenderism in Namibia.
That's not where I want my tax dollars going.
But I also don't want to find Black Lives Matter flags at American embassies.
Exactly.
None of us think we shouldn't have embassies.
Right, but that is the influence that's being pushed.
The fact that our government is out of control, that it's unconstrained, that it is in no way limited, that it believes that what it needs to be promulgating around the globe and at home is socialism and leftism and critical race theory and this incredibly anti-Christian modernist worldview.
I agree that all of that needs to be fought.
And to the extent that you say that we need more transparency in how the government spends our money, I agree with that.
But there's an attitude on the right that's what I'm kind of pushing back again.
Well, the question is to, you know, you mentioned when we say that what we're getting in return is American influence.
That's been true of all American foreign interventions ever.
Yes.
Including wars.
What were the American interests that were threatened when the Soviets threatened to take over Berlin?
And we participated in the Berlin Airlift, which was an act of foreign aid.
We actually flew supplies into Berlin to maintain Berlin as a free city.
Why exactly did we bother doing that?
The Soviets could have just taken Berlin.
We didn't rule it.
It didn't have anything to do with us.
It was very far away across the water.
And that's been true of literally all projections of American power ever.
So the answer was always that American influence is important because we understand that the opposite of American influence is not a vacuum.
The opposite of American influence is very bad people increasing their own sphere of influence and then using that sphere of influence in order to threaten true American interests.
So to take an example in the Middle East, for example, if Israel were to disappear tomorrow, what that would mean is that authoritarian states would take – probably would threaten control of the Suez Canal.
We saw the Suez Canal blocked recently.
By a giant shipping container, right?
And that giant ship basically cut off all world trade for a significant period of time.
There are gas lines in the United States.
Right.
If the Straits of Hormuz are cut off, oil supplies falter.
If the South China Sea falls to complete Chinese domination, then the shipping of products ends.
But these are specific...
You're giving specific cases of this is what America needs to do in this particular situation for this reason, which is great.
I'm sure I could pull up on my phone a list of all the countries we're giving aid to, how much money we're giving, and I suspect that if I were to do that...
I'm going to find dozens that equals billions of dollars where there's not going to be necessarily that really specific answer.
The question is whether you're in disagreement with the general concept.
That's why I said what I'm pushing back again is an attitude, not specifics.
If you're suggesting that government should be more efficient, that we should be more strategic with what we do and don't do, of course I agree with that.
The idea of our government in perpetuity having all these other governments on the dole That's what I'm pushing back against.
Well, I mean, Japan's been on the dole for, what, some 80 years with American military presence in Japan?
And thank God for that.
Yeah, some of them need to be on the dole for a long time.
You know, I'm kind of amazed.
I say something controversial because I only come to the show to try and give Ben a heart attack before I have one.
But I'm kind of amazed we could have this entire conversation about Israel without really talking about the Jews, without actually talking about the fact that the Jews are special.
This is the thing that anti-Semites get right.
They think the Jews are special because they're evil.
That's crap.
But But the Jews are special.
They're special in our history.
They're special in our religion.
Matt was talking about the evangelicals.
I think the evangelicals have a point.
These are the people with the Athenian Greeks who basically inform everything we think and believe.
And there are no Athenian Greeks.
The Athenian Greeks are gone.
But the Jews aren't.
And that's a really important fact.
When one of the things the left is really objecting to is that this is a Jewish state and that offends them because it is racially specific.
But the world has proved that it can't tolerate Jews unless they have a state.
If Jews don't have a state, they'll be killed and chased from pillar to post.
And so it seems important to me that someone stands up and says, you know...
These people are important because they're us.
They're some way the source of who we are, and we need to defend them and their values.
One of the amazing things that happens when you're in Israel, and you've been in Israel a lot more than I have, but...
I've only been three times, actually.
Okay, well, I was there, and I opened the newspaper and read the editorials, and...
The fineness of the ethical and moral conversation that was going on in their newspapers made me embarrassed for our newspapers.
I mean, we have a good op-ed section in the Wall Street Journal that James Toronto should win the Pulitzer Prize.
There's nothing like the ordinary editorials that are going on in an Israeli newspaper because they're Jews.
And they say it in the things, well, wait, you know, other countries could do that, but we can't because...
I mean, what they did in this war is something that Israel has long-term, which means purity of arms.
They literally write it into the military code, this attempt to prevent civilian casualties.
Again, I point out the fact that everybody's saying, look at that wild disproportion between the number of people who died in Gaza and the number of people who died in Israel.
Yes, Israel fired massive ordnance into Gaza and only killed 200-odd people after experiencing 4,500 rockets fired at it.
But there's something else.
There is an underlying idea, and this has taken root mostly on the left, but a little bit on the right.
And that is the idea that the world would be a more peaceful place if Israel ceased to exist.
And you can see this in the way that so many people on the radical left actually talk about the state of Israel.
The idea is that, because first it was, Israel has to have a two-state solution, because if there's no two-state solution, we can't solve all the problems in the Middle East.
Now you're starting to see people openly say, well, maybe there shouldn't be a two-state solution, maybe there should be a one-state solution in which the Israeli-Jewish demographic majority just disappears, and it just becomes a complete one-state, which of course means that the Jewish state ends.
Well, The notion that seems to be out there is that anti-Semitism, and this is being really pushed by the media right now, anti-Semitism, right, and this headline right here is it, right, from Michelle Goldberg, attacks on Jews over Israel are a gift to the right.
The basic idea here is that when it comes to Anti-Semitism, that anti-Semitism is an outgrowth of anti-Zionism, or rather of Zionism.
If it were not for the state of Israel, anti-Semitism would just disappear, which ignores all of human history between 136 CE and 1948.
There's a lot of intervening history right there.
The same people who are beating Jews on the streets with poles in Brooklyn are shouting at them that they're only beating them because of Israel.
And it's like a random Jew in Brooklyn.
I have a feeling that's not true.
I have a feeling that if Israel didn't exist, there would be a lot more Jews who are getting beat.
When Jesus said, you are the salt of the earth, you're the light of the world, he was talking to the Jews.
He was talking specifically to the Jews.
God doesn't break those covenants.
That's still in place.
And when we look at these people, we're seeing where our ethics come from, where our ideas come from.
One of the great evidences, by the way, for the truth of the Bible, to me, for the truth of the New Testament.
Sorry, Ben.
You're complimenting my folks, so continue.
The New Testament posits that in the future there will be an Israel.
And Christians believe that.
They believe that the Bible is true.
It's very hard for us.
I'm fascinated by this notion that it's almost impossible for us to ever separate ourselves from this moment.
And that connection to this moment really blinds us to the experiences of almost all humans across all time.
Maybe we'll talk about it on this or a future episode more generally.
but specific to the topic at hand, it's easy for us to imagine being Christians and thinking that in the future, there's Israel because there's Israel.
But for almost 2,000 years, every single Christian who ever lived, like the vast majority of time that there has been Christianity, Christians had to believe in that future and there was no Israel.
You talk about the Athenian Greeks, the reemergence of Israel in the land that God gave to the Jews is a quirk of human history that has absolutely no corollary.
Almost 1800 years later, no people has ever been scattered from their home, continued to exist, and then come back into possession of that home across 1800 years.
Odd, what?
Yeah.
Another strange thing about the Jews, if I may, is, you know, one of the criticisms is...
That they control the weather.
That they control the weather, for goodness sake.
Top three weird things about the Jews.
Space losers.
Space losers.
Very peculiar.
But, you know, one of the arguments against the United States support of Israel is, you know, I don't think it's particularly...
I hate to call it an argument, but one of the impulses is to say, that's just Jews who are in positions of power in the government, and there are plenty of Jews in positions of power in the government, and they're really behind this whole thing.
But then I couldn't help but notice, Ben, when you were reading that headline, it was by, what was that name?
Michelle Goldberg.
It's not an Italian name.
It's not an Irish name.
It's in the New York Times.
Bernie is wildly anti-Israeli.
Bernie.
So, you know, it's a bit strange, isn't it, that so many American Jews seem very anti-Israel.
I will say, you bring up the evangelical support of Israel, and I'm...
Drew and I are the two potentially evangelicals.
I don't think either one of us is truly in the category of evangelical, but the closest evangelicals on the panel.
I don't support Israel because of a belief that the Bible commands me to support Israel.
That's not part of my...
I have a kinship with the people of the Bible, with the Jews.
I think that we share common history.
We share common ethics.
Not the exact same ethics.
The Judeo-Christian worldview, that term makes people mad because Christians and Jews believe very different things in places.
Yes, of course.
Saying Judeo-Christian doesn't mean I believe Jews and Christians believe the same things.
It means I believe that there's a foundational framework that we share Book one, we share, that takes on distinct characteristics.
But all of that to say, the existence of the state of Israel today actually convinces me that it's not up to my support.
God doesn't need me to support Israel.
If he decides there's going to be an Israel, there's going to be an Israel.
And as an American, what I'm more concerned with is...
Who should I support?
with whom do I share values?
God doesn't need much from me.
He's God.
He's the uppercase GK.
I am but a lowly lowercase GK.
And so my support of Israel is premised completely on that shared set of values, completely on a shared set of interests, I believe national interests, and I believe ideological interests.
That really is the limit of my So you don't feel biblically compelled?
I do.
I feel biblically compelled both through commands from the Bible and through the values that I've derived from the Bible or the beliefs that I've derived from the Bible to support...
To support in a broad sense the Jewish people.
But that doesn't mean if the Jewish people are wrong that God wants me to say that they're right.
So as an example, if Israel had gone into the Gaza Strip and started rounding up people like the Germans did in the 30s and putting them into ghettos or rounding them up like they did in the 40s and putting them onto boxcars, I would tell you that this was wrong.
I wouldn't feel like, I don't know, yeah, they're indiscriminately killing Palestinians, but God does say be nice to the Jews.
Of course I wouldn't take that position.
But nobody ever said that Germany should cease to exist.
I mean, this is the thing.
The only country on earth, literally the only country on earth that has to argue for its right to exist is the Jewish state.
And that is biblical.
It's also worth noting here that when we talk about foreign aid to Israel, particularly in this context, a lot of that foreign aid is going for the Iron Dome.
If you are a believer that Palestinians should not be mistreated, you should thank God every single day for the Iron Dome.
Because if it were not for the Iron Dome, Israel would have eviscerated the place.
And everybody understands this.
The fact that 90% of the rockets being shot from the Gaza Strip were shot down by this miraculous technology that is located in all of the population centers of Israel.
The simple statement that 4,500 rockets were fired at civilian areas and 12 people died is a demonstration of just how effective the system is.
If those rockets had all hit in civilian areas and killed hundreds or thousands of Jews, There would be no Hamas.
Hamas would not exist anymore.
And also, the idea that, well, if you get rid of Israel, then the Middle East is a peaceful place is, of course, absurd.
Because, first of all, these Islamic groups are killing each other anyway.
They're going to continue to do it.
I think with the biblical thing, it doesn't bother me.
Evangelicals that feel spiritually inclined to take this position doesn't bother me at all.
I do think my theological difference with them, which doesn't sound like this is your position, but...
The idea that our salvation is still somehow tied to a particular geographic place, or even worse, to a government.
No, I completely agree with you.
That, to me, is a problem.
I agree with you.
Yeah, we know that now that's the whole idea.
It's universal.
Go preach to all nations.
Again, salvation has existed from a Christian point of view for the past 2,000 years.
And for 1,800 of those, there was no state of Israel, and there was no particular government.
I almost reject any theological notion That requires you to live in a specific time and a specific place in order for it to be true.
And so, tying salvation to support of Israel, I would just see as another one of those.
But you know, I do wonder too if some of the recent uptick against Israel, or let's rephrase it, in defense of say the Palestinian Arabs, is actually caused by radical leftism.
Because for much of my young life, certainly since 9-11, there has been this sense on the right that the Muslims are out to get us.
And there have been Muslim incursions on Western Christendom for roughly, oh, 14 centuries now.
So obviously there's historical precedent for this.
But I think a lot of people are looking now and they're saying, well, you know, I don't think I exactly want to live under Sharia.
You know, look, I don't want to live under Hamas or anything like that.
But there is a sense among not these insane radical extremist Muslims, but among...
Muslims more broadly, that at least we can talk about God, right?
We talk about how Judaism, you know, sort of writes the first book, and then you get Christianity, and from that there is this derivation.
Let's not forget, Islam is the product of an encounter between Muhammad and a heretical Christian monk.
And this is not even disputed by Muslims.
And so there is obviously a lot of commonality there.
And when you look at the radical left, which says, God doesn't exist, boys can really become girls, we need to kill the babies, we need to do this all for freedom or something.
And then you look over at the Muslim world, which has different answers than we do, but they still recognize that God exists, that there is a moral order, these sorts of things.
I think that might explain a little bit of the rapprochement you've seen in the last four, five years.
I completely agree with that.
I think there's more connection between the transgender mania and the hatred of Jews than anything else.
Absolutely.
There's no question about it.
Today...
Today.
It's sort of like, you know, Jesus says, I've told you this before, that Jesus says they'll hate you for my namesake.
And anytime I meet some Christian and people are mad at him, they always say, well, you know, the Bible told us that they'd hate us for his namesake.
And I said, no, no, no.
They hate you because you're an asshole.
They would hate you for his namesake if it ever came down to it.
And it's the same with the Jews today.
But yes, today they hate the Jews because of leftism.
I agree with that.
But they've always hated them for something.
I honestly think that the most important point was actually the one that Jeremy made at the very beginning, which is that most of the conversation around this has not circulated around what Hamas believes.
Because if you had that conversation, then this moral conversation would be over, right?
Hamas is a terrorist group that believes in genocide.
So, end of story.
What it has circulated instead around is a particular leftist point of view, which is that power is inherently evil and corrupt, and that the powerless are inherently victimized.
Yes.
And so you see BLM tweeting out.
I mean, and they said this in the BLM manifesto that they were they were in favor of Palestine.
You thought to yourself, what in the world do these two things have to do with each other?
But you see Rashida Tlaib saying it's the same conflict that black people are having with police in the United States and Palestinians are having with Jews in the Middle East.
And it's just a matter of power imbalances.
What this really is about for the left and the reason why they are covering for anti-Semitism at this point is because they share a lot of the basic principles of anti-Semitism.
A lot of the basic principles of anti-Semitism are A lot of the left's point of view, the hard left's point of view, is a conspiracy theory about how power works.
The intersectional hierarchy, all the systems of power are geared toward the most powerful, and so therefore, if you are powerful, it is because you sit at the top of the hierarchy.
In order to achieve equity, these hierarchies must be torn down.
Now you look to the Middle East and you say, okay, look, here's this very powerful, small, tiny Jewish state.
And then you see these Palestinians and they're living in privation and horror.
And you don't look to, okay, maybe they're doing that because terrorist groups run them.
Instead, it becomes, well, the people who are really doing well over there, they must be the ones who are responsible for all of this.
And then you obfuscate in order to conceal basically what's going on.
They'll say things like, well, it really is a color thing.
First of all, that demonstrates such unbelievable ignorance of what Jews are that it's almost beyond the pale.
Number one, Jews are not white.
Number two, the Jews in Israel are super not white.
Like if you've ever been to Israel, over 50% of the population is from Arabic countries.
Like my wife's family, they're entirely from Morocco.
All of their ethnic derivation.
They participate in whiteness.
Yeah, exactly.
Whatever that means, that's what you're doing.
They participate in whiteness.
And what the left means by they participate in whiteness is they are successful under the current system, and the current system needs to fall.
And so this is why you see...
I don't know, Ben.
I wish it was as rational as this.
If all they were trying to do is attack power centers, I'd almost have some sympathy for them.
But I think they have overturned the moral order.
They're just going up the line to anybody who has morals.
Yeah.
So...
We've talked about China.
We've talked about Israel.
You may be wondering, when are we going to talk about America around here?
We're not.
But we're going to go even further afield and talk about the final frontier.
But before that, I want to tell you about all the time you could save by not going to the post office.
As aforementioned, and but a lowly lowercase god king, I am not omniscient.
I'm not omnipotent.
I can't be in all places at once, and I did not spend time itself into existence with my spoken word.
As a result, I am an impatient son of a god.
You've been lying to us all this time.
Yeah.
There's a lot of false advertising in the title I'm going to grant you.
If you're still going to the post office, you are wasting your time.
I was wasting my time for many years because I did not know about our friends at Stamps.com.
Don't pay full price for postage.
Go to Stamps.com and you don't have to do either of them anymore.
You can mail and ship anytime, anywhere, right from your computer.
Send letters, ship packages, pay less, a lot faster.
Stamps.com saves businesses like ours thousands of hours and tons of money every year.
Here at Daily Wire, we've used Stamps.com since 2017.
No more wasting our time.
And back in 2017, there were very few of us, so it was quite often my time.
Now, if we had to go to the post office, it wouldn't so much be my problem, but it still saves us a ton of money.
Simply use your computer to print official U.S. postage 24-7 for any letter, any package, any class of mail, anywhere you want to send.
Once your mail is ready, just schedule a pickup or drop it off.
It's that simple.
With Stamps.com...
You get discounts up to 40% off post office rates and up to 66% off UPS shipping rates.
Not to mention, Stamps.com is a fraction of the cost of those expensive postage meters.
Stamps.com is a no-brainer.
It saves you time.
It saves you money.
You want to go because you owe yourself your time.
You owe your business your time.
You owe your family your time.
You owe me a little bit of your money.
Go over it.
Stop wasting your time by going to the post office and instead go to Stamps.com.
No risk.
With promo code BACKSTAGE, you get a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and a digital skill.
No long-term commitments.
No contracts.
Stamps.com.
Click on the little microphone at the top of the homepage.
Type in BACKSTAGE at Stamps.com.
Promo code BACKSTAGE. Never go to the post office again.
Because where we're going to go, my friends, out there somewhere.
Obviously, earth-shaking news coming out of the Pentagon on 60 Minutes this last week.
Matt's been covering the story since long before 60 Minutes got in on the action.
There are...
Unidentified aerial phenomena being observed by United States military aircraft.
Apparently it's happening with some frequency.
Our former Senate Majority Leader, the Right Honorable Harry Reid, and that's how you know it's true.
The Right Honorable Harry Reid became very concerned about this, and because of him and others in the government, a task force was formed within the Pentagon to track these unidentified aerial phenomena, or as you may know them, unidentified flying...
Objects?
Objects.
And now we're starting to see a lot of gun cam footage, a lot of sensor footage, a lot of radar footage coming from military aircraft, primarily F-18s, things that are flying over the water.
And the question I have for the panel is...
Look at that.
Come on.
Are we alone or are geese just getting super fast?
Dining like this.
Fast.
Can I just open this up?
I believe I'm the only alien-believing American on the panel tonight.
Well, you haven't committed yet, but I am the representative of our people and culture.
And I do feel marginalized and, frankly, unsafe sometimes in this workspace.
But I think there are two things here.
Okay, first of all.
Obviously, we don't know exactly what that is or what those things are.
And in order to come up with any kind of probability that it's aliens, we need some background information that we don't have.
Like, for example...
We need to know, are there aliens in the universe?
And how many such civilizations are there?
And where are they?
And what sort of technology do they have?
We don't know any of that.
But what that tells us, first of all, is that you can't just rule out, you can't basically rule out as a possibility, or even as a plausible possibility, that those are aliens.
Because for all we know, now, if we're the only intelligent civilization, even just in the galaxy, then that's definitely not an alien.
But if there's intelligent civilizations in all of our surrounding solar systems, let's just say, or in some of the nearest ones, then the probability goes up.
So we don't know that at all.
So we kind of have to put that to the side.
And then we just look at that.
And now we have to say to ourselves, what the hell is that?
Yeah, but we've been hearing these UFO reports for a long time, for decades, really.
And I think the objection that a lot of people had, including myself, is that we said, well, if there were actual UFOs, like alien spaceships in the sky, then we should get better evidence Why is it always a farmer in Kansas that sees them?
It's kind of like Bigfoot.
The only person that sees Bigfoot is someone who has a camera that the battlefield reporter at Antietam had.
So why is that always the case with aliens?
And that was always my objection until, in the last few years, we're getting trained observers up close.
There were four Navy pilots who observed one of these things.
Up close, four of them.
For five minutes they watched it.
And corroborating their testimony, we have radar data and video of that one thing, this tic-tac-shaped thing that was flying around, breaking the speed of sound and doing things that seem physically impossible.
So that's exactly the kind of evidence that for decades we said, well, if they were really UFOs, we should have that evidence.
Now it's here, and so I feel like that should at least get us to reassess our original evidence.
I hate to pour water on this, okay?
I've got a couple other theories beyond the Martians.
One is that this is foreign technology.
Now you say, we've never seen technology like this.
Right, I said it's foreign technology.
Now...
There's another possibility.
Maybe it's our own technology.
But Michael, you say, the government says that it's not.
I know the government would never lie to you.
I know the government's always totally above board.
But maybe it is our technology.
Maybe this whole PR campaign is a bit of a fake out to our adversaries.
But let's say it's not.
Let's say we have no clue what that is up in the sky.
Do aliens exist on other planets?
Is there intelligent life?
I'll go even further.
Is there life at all on other planets?
The one argument that drives me the craziest is this one.
They say, Michael, it's just probable.
It's just probability.
The universe is a gazillion light years across.
It's so big.
So it's just probable that there is life somewhere else.
And I say, you know, to ascertain a probability, you need to know literally anything about the subject that you're talking about.
When it comes to the origins of life, there are actually six or seven main hypotheses.
There's the Miller-Uray hypothesis of the primordial soup.
This was in the 50s, but the experiment didn't work out that well because they didn't have the right chemicals.
Then there was the clay hypothesis, that there are actually these crystal structures within clay that could form the basis of sort of organizing genetic information, but there's really no way to describe how it goes from that to nucleotides, right?
So that kind of fell apart.
Then there's the idea that it was actually formed in the sub-oceanic vents.
Then there's an idea that it was actually the opposite.
It was formed underneath frozen oceans.
Then there's this idea that it came here from Martians, you know, from outer space, which only pushes the question off and says, well, how the hell did life form there?
My point is, in modernity, we're told we're not Look, there's probably a zillion other of us.
And my only point is, maybe that's true, but we have no evidence.
We have no reason to believe that we're not special.
My whole approach to this is, you know, the philosopher Wittgenstein, who may have been an alien...
Of that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.
And the philosopher Clavin says, that which we don't know, we don't know.
And this is the thing.
You know, the arguments against the aliens always take the form of, well, would aliens do this?
Would aliens do that?
How the hell do we know?
First of all, if anybody who has the technology to send actual objects across the galaxy to us is in another sphere than we are, the things that they do may seem illogical to us and may be logical, but even more so, they may be stupid.
They may be incredibly technological proficient and stupid.
We can build phones.
So like teenagers.
We can build phones where we can talk across the planet.
And we still elected AOC to Congress.
You can do incredibly stupid things.
So they may be coming down here with these Tic Tacs from outer space and building little rock statues.
And you say, well, would they do that?
How the hell do we know?
So all I would say is we now have information which I, this is where I agree with Walsh.
We now have information which we said nobody had and all the people who were, conspiracy theories and it was zone whatever it was, 50, what is it?
Two in Nevada?
Zone, no, area 51.
Area 51.
You know, we now have these pictures of things that are really interesting, really different, worth stopping for a minute and saying, gee, what is that?
And the point you make is actually really important.
We don't know how life began.
We don't know whether we are, in fact, the special thing that happened on this one planet or if this is something that would happen on any planet near, you know, equally distant from a star.
I read your piece that you wrote, which I found incredibly offensive and hateful, where you said there's no reason to believe that aliens exist, right?
Yeah, that's the headline.
But you could easily flip that around and say there's absolutely no reason to believe they don't exist.
When you live in a universe with trillions and trillions and trillions of planets, and we have visited none of them, and we've sent probes to a few, but we've actually visited none of them, to sit here and...
It seems to me, it is a probability thing.
Well, this is my problem.
Hold on a second.
It's like walking in, to me, it's like walking into a 50-bedroom mansion, and you get to the foyer, and you don't see anybody there, and you say, well, I guess the place is empty.
It doesn't make any sense.
Somebody had to build the mansion, and that person who built the mansion would be a person, right?
And we have some idea of how the person got there, he probably took a car, I don't know, you look for the car.
We have no clue how life...
We don't have any idea.
There are going to be a lot of people in the comments.
But we do know.
How?
You and I, we all know how life started.
We don't know the exact...
Man formed Adam out of clay?
Right.
We know God created it.
I mean, that might seem like a shortcut, but we all know that.
So, I actually think...
When you introduce God into the equation, which, of course, you can't take him out...
A lot of believers think that this is a challenge to their faith and it just doesn't make any sense.
How can you have intelligent civilizations?
Well, I actually think that when you factor in God, which again you must, it makes the probability higher because then there's a purpose.
There's a purpose element.
Are aliens fallen?
Well, I don't know that.
But there's a purpose.
Mustn't they not be fallen for Christianity?
I don't know the answer to that, but all I know is that there's a purpose for all these billions of galaxies.
Well, here's why.
Because the Christian idea is that there's a Godhead, it's Trinity, Father, Son, and the bond of love between the Father and Son, which is the Holy Spirit.
The Son saves mankind by taking on human nature and dies on the cross and is resurrected three days later, right?
Ascends up into heaven, seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.
Is he like...
So he's fully human and fully God and also fully Martian?
We don't even know whether Martians are exactly like us or not.
Are they human?
I really want to...
We don't know any of this.
I'm trying to filibuster Ben because I know he has a good argument.
I don't want him to jump in.
It's not that great.
Go ahead.
Okay, so here's my not that great argument.
So I agree with...
What you are saying, and it's a burden of proof question, obviously.
Is the burden of proof on the people who are trying to provide the idea that aliens exist, or is the burden of proof on the people who are saying that aliens don't exist?
But that doesn't change the balance of the evidence, which is that we have no idea, right?
And so we're all saying the same thing.
We have no idea.
Do aliens exist or do aliens not exist?
What I think is that the likelihood that aliens not only exist but have been floating around the planet in what seem to be bizarrely bird-like shapes...
And also, our behaving in ways that seem to conflate with optical illusions that we have seen before suggests to me that, because human beings have a very long time of describing a...
When have you ever seen a Tic-Tac bird?
Tell me that.
Where did that come from, then, I asked.
I mean, it could be very far away.
That doesn't look like amazing pixelation.
It's not, like, right up on it.
Like, I don't know, but it doesn't seem to me the most plausible explanation for that.
Four people saw the tic-tac.
But this reminds me...
And from far away, it might look like a tic-tac.
I mean, like, just because things refract off surfaces of clouds differently.
Like, David Blaine also isn't cutting coins out of his arm.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
It's illusion, Michael.
Here's my position on it.
The burden of proof is on people who want to say that there are aliens, not on people who say that there aren't.
The burden of proof is never on a person who is maintaining the status quo or is maintaining what we know.
The idea of aliens is...
A novel concept rooted in fiction.
The fact that this is even in our minds is a possibility.
When we see something moving across that screen, the only reason we even ask ourselves, is that extraterrestrial life?
200 years ago, you could have seen it in the sky, and your thought wouldn't have been, is that extraterrestrial life?
Because that idea had not been broadly introduced into the American psyche.
We have a frame of reference now, largely programmed in us by fiction, That causes us to see certain things and judge them according to that frame of reference.
What is the tic-tac?
I don't know.
What I know is that our government is testing technology decades before we know about that technology.
The first time we ever saw an F-117 stealth fighter, it was almost 20 years old before Americans even knew that that existed.
It had been not only in existence, it had been flying around our country.
Yeah.
Non-stop.
There's a reason that the pilots you're referring to keep seeing these things in restricted airspace.
Why in restricted airspace?
Why is that airspace restricted?
Because that's where we test things.
That's where our government goes to test things.
Also, we keep trying to figure out what is the thing, but there are so many examples of...
You can't paint with a broad brush.
Some of it may not even exist.
You may be looking at something on one of these cameras, and that something is nothing.
It's not a goose.
It's not a tic-tac bird that do exist.
It's not a weather balloon.
It's literally a nothing because these airplanes, their sensory mechanisms are programmatic.
They're so software-driven now, and we're constantly updating and refining that software.
It could literally be tracking something that doesn't even exist because of an update that happened to the firmware.
It could be foreign governments hacking our systems to show us things that aren't there.
It could be foreign governments testing technology.
I think that's actually unlikely.
I think it's far more likely there to be us testing technology.
It could be hackers in some basement in Tuscaloosa hacking our equipment.
But of all those theories, the least likely is that it is something from another planet.
The reason I don't agree with this...
Because we know all those other things exist that you just said.
This is like ghosts, you know.
Whenever I have more than 10 people in a room, I always ask anybody who's seen a ghost.
Always, always, never fails.
Somebody has seen a ghost.
Some sane, rational person has had her experiences inexplicable.
First of all, it's a weird dinner question.
It's not.
But you do get a yes answer.
Because it's been true through history.
It's been true through history.
The reason we don't believe in ghosts is because we don't believe in ghosts.
That doesn't mean that the burden of proof is on somebody who does believe in ghosts.
I mean, more people have seen ghosts through history than have seen Brazil.
I mean, there's plenty of reason to believe in ghosts.
And I think the same thing is true here.
The fiction that you're talking about is extrapolative fiction.
It's people extrapolating from life on Earth to life on other planets.
That's not illogical.
Do you believe in ghosts?
What?
Do you believe in ghosts?
I'm actually unsure what I believe.
But let's hold on.
As long as we're going here, we're going to go full of our bell here.
I don't want to get off on ghosts.
You can't say that what I just said, which is that the least likely of all of those options is that it's extraterrestrial life.
You can't say that I'm wrong about that.
Of course the least likely explanation is that it's extraterrestrial life.
Definitionally, not just by a little, it's not 5% less likely that it's a software glitch than that it's extraterrestrial life.
It's not even 100% less likely that it's a software glitch than extraterrestrial life.
Definitionally, what I'm saying is true.
Because what Noah's is saying about probability is only a half-truth, right?
It's true.
I only do that.
That's all I do.
Based on what you're saying right now, it could be a time machine.
It's at least equally, I would say it's even more likely that it's a time machine.
No, no, I don't agree with that.
But it's at least as likely that it's a time machine that it's an alien and far more likely that it's a sunspot.
The thing that Knowles is saying about probability is right in the sense that we have no idea.
We have no idea how to calculate the probability.
And that's why we need to know.
You can't talk about probability.
No, this is not true.
There is a theory under which this is not true.
The probability of seeing something and not understanding what it is, every human has that happen all the time.
The theory that a software glitch happens in military hardware that's being updated happens all the time.
It is far more likely, and I'm saying you can't paint with a broad brush about this.
I'm not even saying there aren't aliens.
I'm not saying we didn't see an alien.
If we saw an alien, it's one single instance of these things.
This is another thing.
When we talk about, are they aliens?
Every one of them is different.
If we had 50 pilots all the time and they were all seeing something that looked exactly the same...
Can I just say one thing?
I'm not saying the alien is the most likely explanation.
For example, there could be civilizations under the ocean.
But hold on a second.
The alien is not the most likely.
I also don't think it's not necessarily the least likely.
Like you said, we have to look at each individual case.
So the Tic Tac, for example.
I would say that the alien is more likely than the seagull, okay?
Because I have never seen a seagull that can go to the speed of sound and that doesn't have wings.
Never been to Atlantic City.
I would put it above some other options.
I do think it's not the most likely, but it's a plausible...
Here's what I would say.
It's a plausible explanation, and it's more plausible...
It should be judged more plausible today...
I don't believe there's any reason to say that it's a plausible explanation.
It is certainly, because definitionally it is true, that it is possible.
It is a thing that could be.
But Occam's razor tells us that the vast majority, the most likely...
It is far more likely that it is something known than that it is something unknown.
The thing about not knowing is that you really don't know.
Just to go back to Knowles' point about probability.
It is genuinely true that we don't know how life began and we don't know how special it is on Earth.
So we have no way of calculating the probability.
But if you start with a theory that things happen physically basically the same way, then it's very probable that there's life on other planets.
It's also probable that some of it is more advanced than ours.
And it could be.
Because we don't know, we literally don't know.
We don't know how probable...
Well, hold on.
But what is the probability?
We don't know how probable...
When you say it's not probable...
That's how you could tell.
Yes, because we've all had software malfunctions and we haven't all interacted with aliens.
Correct.
What is the probability that birds exist?
100%.
What is the probability that software exists?
I think they were all replaced by drones.
I mean, there are some people who don't believe that birds exist.
Right.
Let's use a less controversial one.
What is the probability that chemtrails and lizard people exist?
That's 100%.
This is the thing.
Is it possible that there are aliens?
I doubt.
I think it is possible.
I think it is incredibly unlikely.
I base this on the fact that we've picked up no radio signals from space.
I base this on the possibility that we don't have anything.
The best thing that anybody can come up with to tell me that aliens did, aliens with so much sophistication that they were able to traverse interstellar spaces that they came here a long time ago and stacked rocks on top of rocks in the Sahara.
That's crazy.
If we had opened Pharaoh's tomb and it had been air-conditioned, I would have gone, you know, there's a real possibility that somebody else built this besides slaves in Egypt a thousand years ago.
The very fact that we don't commonly encounter aliens, and we do commonly encounter myriad other things that this could be, means that the most likely answer to every one of these individual things is that it has...
So you're saying there's a chance.
That's my whole argument, really.
I'm also saying, Drew, that it's far more likely that you'll die of a heart attack than that you'll be killed by an alien.
You can't say that's not true.
It's far more common that I will have a heart attack.
But the thing is, if I'm killed by an alien, then that's a thing, right?
All I'm saying is we have no way of calculating the probability.
No, but you do.
It's the same question as ghosts.
There's no hard evidence that ghosts exist.
Okay, so if suddenly you're a creep and a door shut in your house, what does that even mean?
Isn't the probability tied to the number of alien civilizations in the universe?
Don't you need to know that?
No, you don't.
Because if there's zero, then...
If it's zero, then that would be an answer, but we'll never know if it's zero.
Any number above zero actually doesn't factor into our equation at all.
It actually doesn't factor into our equation.
Because when you're in a 747 and you look out the window and you see a 737 going by, is it an alien spacecraft?
I mean, it damn well could be.
I once thought it was.
They could have technology that makes them mimic the look of our technology.
But of course, while that is possible, it is the least likely of all the possible...
It's more likely that you didn't see anything than that the 737 that you probably saw is an alien spacecraft.
But when you say there's no hard evidence that ghosts exist, all those people, the sane, rational people who have had really convincing experiences, why isn't that evidence?
Because lots of people have experiences of things that don't happen all the time.
That's true.
I don't think aliens and ghosts are related.
I'm not talking about aliens and ghosts being related.
I'm talking about the probability of things being true and what you need to calculate those probabilities.
But you're not asking what the probability that aliens exist is.
You're asking me what the probability that things being observed on gun cameras by American pilots are aliens.
That's a different question.
That requires you to answer a bunch of probabilistic questions, by the way.
No, it isn't, because even if there were to be alien civilizations, you then have to multiply that by the probability that those alien civilizations are sophisticated enough to build technological spacecraft.
Multiply by the probability that millions of years ago, literally millions of years ago, they launched these spacecraft to reach...
Not necessarily.
I mean, we don't know what...
Well, if you believe that the laws of physics hold, they're not traveling faster than the speed of light.
They could have a wormhole.
These are only the laws of physics we know.
They could have a wormhole.
That's a thing.
Have you guys never seen ancient aliens?
I also watched Interstellar, okay?
It was cool.
But, like, the probability that things are traveling through wormholes to the United States...
Well, I know.
But to Drew's point here, there is a far greater likely...
Unbelievable.
It's how Trump got elected, guys.
There is a far greater likelihood that the ghost of Donald Trump will run in 2024.
No, there is a far greater likelihood that ghosts exist because we know people exist.
We know we're fairly certain that souls exist.
We're fairly certain, at least I am, that angels and demons exist.
So we can sort of extrapolate from our own understanding of these things.
But I don't know that E.T. exists, goodness gracious.
And we're not talking about the probability of whether or not life exists.
You are a little bit, and I like your argument.
But I'm not actually talking about the probability that aliens exist.
I'm talking about the probability that when we see something on radar in an F-18...
Yeah.
...that it is more likely...
Ask a question.
When a pilot says, I saw this thing happen and it moved up in a way that I've never seen before, and he's obviously not crazy.
Maybe he is crazy, but we don't know that.
I mean, and it came up in front of me and then it vanished.
I don't know.
Maybe he's seen an illusion, but...
The other day I played three Carbante with a guy and the dude totally made me believe.
Let me ask you a serious question.
So, would you agree that we would all agree if we know that there's no aliens out there in the universe then the probability is zero for any of these?
Yes.
Okay.
If we knew that, let's say, there was one intelligent civilization per galaxy, that still makes 100 billion civilizations, but the chances of crossing a galaxy is very slow, very slim.
But if we knew, for example, that there was an intelligent civilization in 20 of the 30 nearest stars to us, would you say that that makes the probability more likely that one of these unexplained situations is alien and ordinary?
Yes, but by so fine a margin that it's like saying that buying two lottery tickets makes you more likely to win the lottery than buying one.
It is true, as an absolute statement of fact, that you have twice as much of a chance of winning the lottery if you buy two tickets.
But it is not true by any statistical actual reckoning.
You are still...
Overwhelmingly not going to win the lottery.
Doesn't mean you won't.
Overwhelmingly not going to win the lottery.
Your odds have changed only by the most minute of margin.
If I knew for a fact that there were aliens, if we had even heard radio transmissions from aliens, even Elon Musk says there's something wrong that the universe is so quiet.
He obviously believes in aliens.
He says he thinks that there's something that happens that actually destroys civilizations before they can become Fermi's Paradox, I think it's cool.
Before they can become interstellar travelers, or we would have been aware of them long before we saw them on a gun cam, because we're listening, we're looking, we observe, we watch the sky.
Obviously, the things aren't invisible if our pilots are seeing them.
In fact, in a funny way, we're capable of making...
Aircraft that can't be seen by these same sensors that apparently the aliens who can travel in interstellar space aren't capable of.
But how do you explain?
It's more likely that America, and I don't think this is what it is either, but it's more likely that we're testing some sort of drone vehicle that can actually become invisible, that can refract light and cloak itself.
I know that's more possible because it's possible and there are humans and we're making things all the time.
Can we just use, I just want to go back to the TikTok.
Not TikTok.
I want to go to TikTok.
The aliens might be on TikTok for sure.
Let's use the Tic Tac example because we have their four eyewitnesses up close.
They observed it for five minutes.
Plus we have radar data.
Plus we have video of all the same thing.
That's really compelling evidence that at least so we know.
Something was observed.
Right.
It was not a glitch or anything.
There was a real thing that was there that they saw.
That is likely, although still not completely.
What are your theories on what that thing was?
I wouldn't begin to know what it was.
As I said, they could have seen...
It's literally called an unidentified flying object.
There are unidentified flying objects.
This is where we agree.
I agree with you completely about this.
I have no idea what it was.
But there are far more likely scenarios than that it is extraterrestrial life, which we don't even know exists.
far more likely that these pilots observe some man-made, because we know there are men and they make things, craft operating in restricted zones where we know we test those kinds of crafts.
Hypersonic missiles that move at speeds we've never seen.
Drones that are capable of breaking Gs that would have killed humans.
Unpiloted vehicles can do things that piloted vehicles never could because piloted vehicles kill people if they make certain hygiene maneuvers.
Testing with speed, testing with shapes, testing with automated control, maybe even testing with electronic hacking where once we are observed we're able to send false data to the radar of our enemy to tell them what we're observing.
I'm saying that any of those things Are possible and more likely than what was observed was a flying tic-tac full of aliens.
Although I will grant you that like winning the lottery, there is a numeric possibility that they observed.
But I will also say that it is no more likely that what they observed is an alien than that one of us is an alien.
It's no more likely that what they observed is an alien than that there are invisible aliens standing over our shoulders documenting this conversation to figure out how much we know Or whether they can subscribe.
Most importantly, we keep forgetting the communications element of this.
We've been talking now for our entire lives about how Messaging is not accidental, generally speaking.
There are strategies to communication, especially when it's coming from the government.
Does no one think it's a little bit weird that the government and the mainstream media, which is in cahoots with the federal government, is just all pushing this one story right now?
So what you're saying is it like a distraction?
Yeah, very possibly enough.
I don't know if that's true, but it's more likely than that it's...
I find it very unlikely the government would all of a sudden decide to use UFOs as a psyop.
You know what?
The only reason I mention it right now is because I realize we've come to, you know, almost the end of the show, and I haven't yet once plugged my book, which is about, like, it's called Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
There we go.
There's the bell.
Okay, I just wanted to make sure we got at least one in during the, you know.
But I also think it's possibly true.
I also think that, you know, we're just like, the government does this, and they can pull the message.
Usually when anything happens, there is very quickly a bunch of confirmation that the thing has happened.
So say, for example, that you're a Native American living, you know, in America before the settlers arrive, and suddenly you see a boat on the water.
You've never seen a boat on the water before, right?
This is a crazy thing.
What is this thing?
So you go and you tell all your friends, and your friends are like, that's crazy.
That doesn't exist.
Nobody's ever had anything like that.
Okay, and then the next day the boat arrives on the shore, and a bunch of settlers get off, and they're like, hey, now you've had some more confirmation.
Okay, if the boat just went away...
Sure, it could have been a boat.
But, like, usually that's not how things go.
Usually within a fairly short period of time.
And we've been talking about, as you say, these UFOs for, like, what, 50 years, 60 years at this point?
Yeah, they didn't go away.
They're here, Ben.
Where is the cascade of information that confirms your belief that they are here?
We're getting the cascade of information right now.
You just ruined your own argument.
No, what is the cascade?
You're like the Native Americans going, there's no ship out there.
No, because eventually the ships get off and then proceed to destroy the planet.
What's the worst thing to do?
I'll agree with this.
If in ten minutes they get off the pill and get pregnant and if in ten minutes they get off the pill and they start lecturing to us about Communo-anarchism.
And I will fully admit that the...
You guys are going to be in trouble when they come.
Just solving this is anybody.
I mean, listen, the Jews are in trouble with everyone.
I may as well get early on the bandwagon.
Everyone hates us anyway.
May as well get on board with our civilizations, you know.
I, for one, welcome our new Tic Tac.
Thank you for tuning in.
As always, we're very happy to have you join us, and we'd like to invite you to become a member to enjoy the full Daily Wire experience.
Head over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Use promo code VIP for 20% off and the chance to get a free trip to come meet Candice herself and whichever of the rest of us happens to be here on that day.
Don't miss out.
This is the last week to enter the sweepstakes.
Thanks for joining us tonight.
We will see you next time, assuming that we haven't been probed.
Daily Wire Backstage is a Daily Wire production.
▲
Export Selection