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June 25, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:31:05

Daily Wire Backstage: Defending America… From Itself

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	Hey, Michael Knowles here.
	The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage defending America from itself is right around the corner.
	This episode will be terrific, entertaining, wonderful, handsome, swarthy.
	It will leave you speechless, controlling words, controlling minds.
	Available now, wherever books are sold.
	Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, and the God King, Jeremy Boring, as we discuss everything from my new book to transgender athletes competing in the Olympics.
	And if it's good that Juneteenth is now a national holiday.
	Spoiler alert, it's not.
	Take a listen.
	I don't do him anymore?
	I don't do him anymore.
	Fair.
	Welcome to Daily Wire Backstage, defending America from itself.
	I'm Jeremy Boring, known around these parts as the God King, lowercase g, lowercase k, and we're glad you have tuned in.
	Is President Biden planning to just hand the presidency over to Kamala and claim the gold medal in recognizing my white privilege Olympics?
	That'd be a good move for him.
	Will the left's push to abolish the American flag be enough to wake people up to the poison that is critical race theory?
	Did Michael Knowles really write a book with actual words in it that is a diagnosis of the losing strategy conservatives have taken to combat the left's assault on liberty, virtue, decency, the Republic of the Founders, Western civilization, and this show?
	Frankly, I'm speechless.
	That was you.
	That wasn't me.
	That was you this time.
	I feel so dirty.
	You should, yeah.
	This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Don't like big tech and the government spying on you?
	Visit expressvpn.com slash backstage.
	Joining me, the Ben Shapiro, the Andrew Klavan, the Michael Knowles.
	We're very glad you're here.
	We're very glad that Matt Walsh isn't.
	He's been showing us up lately, so we decided to do the show without him.
	Plus, he's on vacation.
	Plus, he's very expensive.
	From pronouns to microaggressions, there's no question that political correctness has been rapidly seeping into every corner of American society.
	And that's why Michael Knowles wrote Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
	And it's available everywhere the books are sold right now.
	So go to your local bookstore or grab one off Amazon today.
	If you're a fan of Michael Knowles, then you should be a Daily Wire member and help keep him employed.
	Believe me, it is literally the only way you can help keep him employed.
	Go join at dailywire.com/subscribe.
	You'll get 20% off of your membership with code JUSTICE in honor of our newest content offering, Created Equal, Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, a terrific documentary about Supreme Court Justice Thomas' Battle to the highest court in the land.
	If you'll remember, this particular documentary was mysteriously removed from Amazon, but it absolutely was not canceled.
	Again, that's dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	Sign up and snag that 20% off membership with code JUSTICE. If you're a current Daily Wire member, well, you can get your questions into the chat box right now for our Q&A later on tonight.
	These intros just get longer and longer, and I don't feel like...
	We're done, right?
	Thank you for tuning in.
	Less work for us.
	So, what's going on in the world?
	There is a whole lot.
	I'm actually very lucky because...
	Do you know why I wrote the book, Speechless?
	For the money.
	I wrote it purely for the money.
	This is great, man.
	You can buy a lot with 50 bucks.
	No, I wrote the book, Speechless, in part because I thought it would be funny if...
	There's the ding.
	I thought it would be funny if you start with a book that doesn't have any words to follow that up by writing a book that is entirely about words.
	I just got a kick out of that idea.
	But I wasn't convinced that this would be the issue.
	You know, I signed this book contract almost two years ago.
	I didn't know that would be...
	I mean, you're almost Barack Obama.
	Like, you almost blew through, had to repay, got another book deal.
	Exactly.
	That has become sort of the issue at the very moment.
	Big tech crossed the Rubicon, obviously, when they kicked Trump off of all of the platforms.
	But it's not just that kind of censorship.
	You're seeing it now.
	The radical transgenderism is going to the Olympics and nobody's allowed to say boo about it.
	You're seeing it, obviously, with what we're allowed to discuss in the public health apparatus and everything in between right now.
	There's even a tie-in with Clarence Thomas.
	I write about the Thomas Confirmation at length in the book because that was a big shift, I think, for a lot of people maybe who weren't totally conservative to realize, wow, this political correctness thing is a big problem.
	Our friend Andrew Breitbart.
	That was the defining moment of his political transition.
	Well, I mean, first of all, congratulations on a book that has words in it.
	I did endorse this one not facetiously.
	And it actually is quite an impressive accomplishment.
	It opens with Lewis Carroll, and then it gets more pretentious from there.
	I was really...
	I felt Lewis Carroll that was too pedestrian to really, you know, you had to go much further.
	You know, I was impressed because, you know, Ben and I have sort of talked about, you know, made fun of you for writing a book with no words in it.
	But now, having read this, I feel like all your books should have no words in it.
	I'm going back to my original.
	I'm just in it for the cigars.
	If you guys can see, we're smoking speechless Michael Knowles cigars on the show tonight.
	And they're good.
	They are very good.
	This is something that I got a real genuine kick out of.
	Drew, you've written about 5,000 books in your life.
	Ben, you write about, what, seven or eight books a year?
	I think.
	And kind of turn them out.
	And we don't even notice.
	We don't even pay attention.
	And then I publish one book ever.
	We were popping champagne in the back.
	We were pre-gaming the back stage.
	It's like when your kid says his first word, like anybody else could do it, but this is, you know, a kid.
	Yeah.
	We actually have a few questions from dailywire.com subscribers about the book.
	So this one, Michael, for you.
	Congrats on the book, Michael.
	What triggered you into writing this book?
	How long did it take for you to write it?
	The thing that got me to write it is I actually...
	I mean, I felt that my first book was my magnum opus.
	And I felt it was extremely true in a Thucydidean sort of contribution to Western civilization.
	But I did want to write a real book because...
	One, I had a few things to say.
	But moreover, I wanted to write a real book with an argument and not just a kind of light book because I don't think I want to do it again.
	I don't know why you people do it.
	It is agonizing, especially if you put some research into it.
	It takes months and months of research.
	I don't know about you.
	I'm so obsessive about every little comma.
	It's just...
	No, not you.
	You've already finished another book by the time they're doing the first edit on the book.
	My book comes out July 27th, and I'm halfway through writing a novel right now.
	I'm just in my spare time.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	We all have different writing styles, and I know Drew is more of a craftsman.
	I know that you read over your work, and you really spend time with it.
	For me, it's like Mozart.
	It just comes to me in full paragraphs.
	I really never go back, and there are no errors, as they say.
	So pretty much I don't have to edit.
	It's just like thousands of words at a time, no mistakes.
	It's beautifully flowing.
	St.
	Michael prays over every word.
	I do.
	You know, Thomas Aquinas was known for dictating multiple books at a time to his various secretaries.
	So that's something to aspire to.
	This next question is for the whole group.
	Group.
	What are the books?
	They changed the question.
	Wait a sec.
	Literally, the next question in the teleprompter said, group.
	So then I think, well, I got time.
	Smoke me a cigar.
	Maybe try to get this thing going.
	Then I'll look up and read the question.
	They change out the question.
	You know what the producers did?
	Hoodwinked.
	You know what the producers did?
	They were controlling words and thereby controlling minds.
	I'm speechless.
	Yes, you are.
	Yes.
	No, there's no ding.
	It's a production team.
	Michael, what are your book's pronouns?
	My book's pronouns are whatever the opposite of the New Zealand weightlifters' pronouns.
	Whatever that is, I don't want any part of it.
	Well, that's a great thing for us to talk about.
	I mean, it's been an unbelievable week in sports.
	Where apparently every single person going to the Olympics now is transgendered and wants to burn our flag.
	So, Drew, walk me through these various stories.
	It's terrible.
	I mean, I'm sorry.
	I do not understand.
	You know, I saw a guy, a newscaster in, I think it was Australia, saying, I cannot understand why anyone would object to this.
	I cannot.
	But I thought, wait, you literally cannot understand why a man lifting weights on the girls team because he calls himself a girl is not as good.
	And you're a journalist?
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, honestly, the whole thing is so ridiculous.
	A quick shout-out to my friend Leon, because my friend Leon has a story.
	His wife just gave birth to their seventh child, so they've been very productive.
	Wow.
	And so this happened this week, and apparently when the child came out of the mother, the doctor then turned to him and said,"'Do you want me to announce your child's gender?' We're good to go.
	For like six years?
	And only been weightlifting as a woman for six years?
	And he immediately becomes the oldest female weightlifter in Olympic history?
	Yeah.
	I mean, men are unbelievable at this stuff.
	It's just, it's incredible.
	Like, men are great at being men, and they're unbelievably good at being women.
	As I have now been saying for many years in the future, all the best women will be men.
	This is my whole theory, though.
	There's a lot of people who say that men are under attack, and I don't actually believe that's the case.
	No, women are under attack.
	Femininity is under attack, and what people are saying to women is you only have value if you are men, and therefore men have to be less manly so that women can be manly and compete with them.
	That's the problem.
	The problem is women, and the problem is women because women add a certain...
	Non-materialistic, non-Marxist, non-spiritual idea to human life.
	No woman will ever be able to win any sporting competition again if this thing really takes root, right?
	It won't just be that the New Zealand guy is the best weightlifter.
	It'll be that also the guy from Australia is the second best weightlifter.
	Here's the problem.
	Today, it came out just today, actually, that there was another person who's qualified in the NCAA, transgender woman, biological man, who is qualified to run in the NCAA races, but violates the Olympics rules on how much the estrogen versus testosterone levels are or something like that.
	And so this person has now been barred from running in competition at the Olympics.
	So I really, really look forward to the International Olympic Committee explaining why one of these transgender women is actually a woman, but one of these transgender women is not actually a woman.
	It's ironic because we're told that your body has nothing to do with whether you're a man or a woman.
	But we're also told that the actual essence of our sex now is just the amount of testosterone in us.
	It's the most reductive thing possible.
	The aspect of this, though, that I find really troubling...
	I think it goes back a ways.
	For a moment, I thought that this transgender craze was totally new and it's taking everything by storm.
	It might actually upset feminism or it might upset same-sex marriage, which is argued against it in some ways.
	Born this way is very different than I can change my entire sex.
	Fluidity.
	Yeah, the fluidity.
	But I think I'd like to blame all of this on the feminists.
	And the reason I would like to do that is...
	The essential argument of transgenderism, if one can even say there is an argument, it's a little out there, is men and women are exactly the same.
	Men can become women, women can become men.
	So it's expressed differently, but really one is the same.
	This was the same argument for same-sex marriage that...
	The union of two men and the union of a man and a woman is exactly the same.
	It's the exact same category.
	And it's the same argument of second wave feminism.
	That women are exactly the same.
	They can do every single thing just like the men.
	A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
	It seems like this goes...
	But it's also the opposite argument.
	Because it's saying that I'm a woman because I want to keep house and I want to bake cookies and that makes me a woman.
	So actually it's saying that the essence of women It's lipstick and stiletto.
	Yeah, exactly.
	By the way, look, I look great in it.
	This is a game that you see from the left all the time, is to hold two completely mutually exclusive premises.
	Yes.
	And therefore, if you argue with one, then they hit you with the other.
	And this happens in the realm of critical race theory as well.
	Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, who are two of the...
	They hold that there are essentially four tenets to critical race theory.
	The first tenet to critical race theory is that white supremacy is in the air around you.
	It pervades everything.
	It's like the force.
	It pervades the air around you.
	It unifies all living things.
	The second principle is that white people are incapable of understanding their own racism.
	That white people are basically unable, but they benefit from it.
	They all benefit from it.
	Then there are two completely mutually exclusive tendencies inside critical race theory.
	One is that race is a social construct.
	And the other is that we can define you purely by your race.
	Race is a social construct, and it's been constructed by the powerful over time in order to subjugate other people.
	But also, because you are part of this social construct, either white or black, you are unable, if you're white, to identify racism or understand it.
	And if you're black, you're totally able to understand and identify racism in a way you can't even explain to white people.
	Well, the problem is, the minute you argue with one of those premises, they immediately hit you with the other premise.
	So if you say, well, that sounds like racial essentialism to me.
	I'll say, well, no.
	I say that race is a social construct.
	And it's the same thing when it comes to transgenderism.
	There are a thousand mutually exclusive arguments inside the arguments regarding transgenderism.
	One is that gender is completely fluid, but also...
	That stereotypes are apparently so rooted in your innate gender biology that if you abide by a stereotype that is a stereotype, it's essential.
	It's a stereotype that's constructed, but it's also not constructed.
	It's also essential.
	If they play this game long enough, what you realize, and I think this is the premise of your book, really, is that when you school around with language this much, when you make words this valueless and contentless, what it really is about is what they have always accused the institutions of being about which is power.
	This is what Foucault says.
	Foucault always says that everything in the end, language, everything is about power.
	That is all projection.
	For Foucault, everything is about power because he wishes to use language as a tool of power in order to accomplish what he wishes to accomplish.
	I almost never make predictions because I feel like the future is unknown.
	My one prediction is that 1984 is going to be cancelled, that pretty soon they're going to start to say that Orwell, we shouldn't be reading Orwell, because it is Orwell.
	I mean, it is every single thing that they do is predicted in that book.
	The rewriting of history, the use of words, all of this, everything that you're saying is all in that book.
	It's all outlined in 1984, so eventually they're going to have to say, no, we shouldn't be selling it.
	When they cancel 1984 and when they cancel Huxley, people can still read about it in Speechless.
	But actually, to your point, Ben, your point is this excellent one, which is the left argues from these contradictory premises.
	But my argument in Speechless is that political correctness is this purely negative campaign.
	When we talk about critical race theory, which is a derivation of critical theory broadly, comes from Marx's statement that we need the ruthless criticism of all that exists.
	It's just trying to knock stuff down, deconstruct, debunk, and just bring it all to rubble.
	So we have this idea of human nature in the West, which is that we're body and soul.
	It's basically a simple idea.
	It's called hylomorphism, to use the technical term of Aristotle.
	And the left has these two completely opposite ideas of human nature.
	One, we're just material.
	We're just meat puppets.
	All of our hopes and dreams are just, you know, synapses in our brain firing off.
	The other one, that we're pure spirit.
	You know, I look like a dude.
	I've got an Adam Zapp.
	I've got a low voice.
	But no, if I say I'm a woman, I'm really a woman.
	They'll go back and forth, sometimes in the same sentence, but the object is always to destroy the true and traditional understanding.
	But nothing is...
	I'm sorry.
	That's all the time we have.
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	Is that today?
	Today, yeah, one year ago today.
	Wow, happy birthday.
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	You have been rebuked by life itself.
	Your mortality is now on boldness.
	You're not allowed to die.
	And so you start thinking, like, I have responsibilities.
	And to quote Ben Shapiro, unless you're a total horrible human being, you have to do something about this responsibility.
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	Policy Genius advertises on each of your shows.
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	I'm speechless.
	There we go.
	My God, are you falling asleep in there?
	I mean, we were bad.
	You work for us.
	We pay you.
	Drew, I actually want to get back to the point that you were about to make.
	One of the things I've observed by way of segue...
	There's all this talk about how the sexes are interchangeable, but the net result in almost every measurable area seems to be that when men transition into women, they dominate all women.
	When women transition into men, they are unable to dominate all men.
	I'm talking about in sport, I'm talking about in physical areas.
	Doesn't that vary discrepancy?
	Prove that the whole thing is nonsense.
	It's the end of the question.
	No one has objected to a woman, a trans man, playing in men's sports because they'd come in number 50 of 50.
	You know, that's why.
	So it's not actually a problem.
	And that's why I feel it is...
	Because there is a difference.
	Yes, mammalian species are sexually dimorphic.
	Also, I feel like we are sort of species-centric here in the West.
	I've noticed that there are other mammalian species, and all of them have this peculiar tendency toward sexual dimorphism, in which there are two sexes that reproduce with one another, one called the female.
	And one called the man.
	But I think we should ask ourselves what it is about women that these guys want to extinguish.
	Because that is the thing about feminism.
	Simone de Beauvoir said women should not be allowed to choose to be homemakers because too many of them will do it.
	And you think, well, what is the problem with that?
	What is the problem with making a home?
	Well, she says...
	She gives the answer.
	And she was arguing with Betty Friedan, a subject I actually discuss in Speechless.
	And Betty Friedan was a radical...
	Did you read a book?
	I don't know.
	We'll get it on the next episode.
	They'll ding it.
	Betty Friedan, a radical feminist in her own right, said, Hold on.
	Whoa.
	Hold on a second, Simone.
	I think that women should be able to choose if they want to go to work or they want to stay home.
	That's fine.
	And Simone de Beauvoir said, No, that is not conducive to liberation.
	And we need to force women out of their false consciousness...
	Well, see, this is what I wanted to say before when you said that political correctness is negative.
	It's only negative.
	Really, nothing is only negative.
	Nothing that human beings do because human beings act in their own interest.
	So when they're tearing something down, they're tearing something down for a purpose.
	And this is why I keep going back to the idea that this is a move for power.
	I mean, it's got to be.
	It's the essential materialist essence and motive.
	I think there's something more than that, and this goes to a sort of, again, back to critical race theory.
	There's a lot of intertwining here because these are all sort of springing from the same root.
	And that root is this fundamental belief that human beings are replaceable widgets who are, in essence, exactly the same, and therefore any inequality of outcome can be chalked up to the evils of the system.
	And so when you look at the inequalities between the sexes, Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And then men have their compensatory power is that they have great upper body strength, right?
	Like these things don't match up in terms of human importance, by the way.
	You'll notice that the thing women do preserves the human species at an extraordinary rate, while men picking up heavy objects very often also drop those heavy objects on each other or themselves.
	But we win medals.
	That's why they give you medals.
	It's useless.
	Exactly.
	But if you need a mover, you don't call a woman.
	If you need a baby born, you're probably not going to call a man.
	Just as a general rule.
	So what the left has decided is basically, if you can remove the most obvious differences between men and women, And these are the two most obvious differences between men and women, just to the outward eye.
	Then you can treat everybody as though they are innately exactly the same.
	And if they are innately exactly the same, then you actually have a plausible argument that any system that ends in inequality at the end is inequity.
	Right?
	And this is the same argument that you see being made with regard to race in the United States.
	Anytime there's an unequal outcome by race, it must be that the system itself is racist.
	This is explicitly Ibram X. Kennedy's argument, right?
	Any inequality of outcome must be inequity in the system.
	Because otherwise, you're suggesting that some people are inferior at things, and other people are superior at things, and that's racist.
	Yeah.
	Or, alternatively, maybe some people are making bad decisions, and other people are not making bad decisions, and that's always going to fall disproportionately, no matter which group you pick, if you split it halfway down the line.
	What's fascinating to me about this is, Thomas Sowell has written about this extensively, and I can't remember the exact term he uses, but it's something like...
	The quest for cosmic justice.
	No, he calls it the unbeatable fallacy, the fallacy that simply will not die in the face of the facts.
	He wrote a book that's maybe about 30 pages, a tiny little book called Discrimination and Discrepancy.
	That's terrific.
	Discrimination and disparities.
	Disparities.
	And it's just a brilliant, brilliant book that absolutely destroys...
	He is our greatest living...
	Well, this is the thing.
	This is what I want to say.
	Our greatest living public intellectual is a black man.
	Ibrahim Kendi is not an intelligent man.
	He's not an intellectual.
	He's just not.
	I'm sorry.
	The things that come out of his mouth are not the sorts of things that people who read say.
	And Thomas Sowell is this...
	I mean...
	Come on, this is a majority white country in which the greatest public intellectual alive is a black man.
	Probably second grade, too.
	Clarence Thomas.
	And Clarence Thomas.
	But nobody celebrates him.
	Nobody celebrates him.
	They put up instead statues to George Floyd, this thug, basically, and they let this guy go inside.
	By the way, I did predict this.
	I said that in the future, I told Jeremy this like six months ago.
	I said in the future, the only statues that will ever be built in the United States are people who are purportedly victims of the system.
	There will never be a statue of a hero again in the United States because heroism is not permanent.
	And every human being is flawed.
	So the minute you put up a statue to a hero, immediately you're going to get people saying, yes, but he also did X, Y, and Z.
	Whereas victimhood is permanent and infallible.
	If you were a victim of something, it doesn't matter what you did the rest of your life.
	If you are George Washington and you were the father of the country, but in a time when a huge percentage of the population held slaves, and most civilizations did, you held slaves.
	We cannot have a statue up to you.
	If you're George Floyd and you spent literally the entirety of your adult life participating in criminal behavior, but you died at the hands of a police officer, then we can make a statue of you because, again, your victimhood is irreplaceable, but heroism is always shaded by the fact that human beings are...
	You know, on 9-11, the 20th anniversary of 9-11 is coming up, which is the defining political event of my lifetime.
	Yeah.
	How we've forgotten that, by the way.
	Unbelievable.
	Antietam was the defining political event of his lifetime.
	Oh, what a battle that was.
	And we, at that time, I remember being really offended by this idea.
	People would say, you know, 3,000 heroes died in the Twin Towers.
	And I would think, no, that is not what a hero is.
	Many heroes died in the towers.
	The firefighters.
	The firefighters.
	Undoubtedly, there were heroes among other people who were in the towers as well.
	Cowards died in the towers.
	Child molesters probably died in the towers.
	And crooks died in the towers.
	And they were all victims.
	From the point of view of justice against the actual crime that was committed against them by Al-Qaeda, every one of them deserves to be avenged by a just system.
	But being a victim does not make you a hero.
	Yes.
	You can't interchange those two terms.
	But now, the two terms are completely synonymous.
	And you'll notice in the case of Clarence Thomas, an heroic figure, I think, and a really terrific figure.
	Yeah.
	He never even got the statue to be taken down when they built the Black History Museum.
	By the way, I object to the Black History Museum, one, because the building is hideous, and two, because it suggests that black people shouldn't be in the American History Museum.
	It's a totally separate thing.
	But when they built it, They utterly marginalized Clarence Thomason.
	They gave Anita Hill better seating than they gave to this great conservative legalist.
	I think part of this has to do with the very structure of narrative in a world in which heroism generally requires that you are defending something worthwhile.
	That's what heroism generally requires.
	But because we've removed values from our system and we don't believe that there are that many things that are worth defending anymore, now what heroism has been reduced to is overcoming an obstacle.
	The pathway to heroism is there's an obstacle and you have to overcome it.
	So victimhood is inherently part of that process, right?
	If there's no obstacle for you to overcome, you're not a hero in this particular vision.
	Now, the way that we used to define heroism typically is, like, for example, if you ask me who my heroes are, I would say my parents.
	The obstacles they had to overcome, pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.
	They lived in the freest country in the history of the world.
	They lived in a household where they loved each other.
	They were middle income and then over time grew to be upper middle income.
	And the obstacles they had to overcome were sort of everyday obstacles.
	They were my heroes because what they were defending was hearth and home and family and they were raising children in a traditional way.
	But that's not heroism that makes movies.
	The heroism that makes movies is something bad happened to X. And what we've so become addicted to victimhood that we now prize victimhood above everyday heroism to the extent that if you make a victim of yourself through your own choices, you're considered more heroic than the person who actually acts responsibly.
	So, for example, my parents, again, married, and this is true for literally hundreds of millions of people across the United States, black, white, and green, The people who are championed in the movies and on TV are single.
	You will never see two parent families championed as a heroic story.
	You'll see a single mother championed as a heroic story because single mothers are overcoming an obstacle.
	Now, in many of those cases, the obstacle was self-made.
	Yeah.
	But it's still overcoming an obstacle.
	And so victimhood is so tied into our narrative structure, it's hard to overcome.
	You're making a wonderful point about victimhood because so much of this, as we constantly are saying, is a perversion of Christianity.
	And one of the things that built Christianity was martyrdom.
	And the idea of martyrdom was that you were willing, that you had something beyond life itself, that was more valuable than life itself, And we're willing to actually stand there and be eaten by a lion, which sounds incredibly disgusting and painful to me, because you were defending an idea.
	Now that is a beautiful thing.
	People who die for ideas.
	I mean, I'm Martin Luther King who says, look, they're going to kill me, but I've done an important thing.
	This does move you.
	But when you take the values out of it, what are you?
	But this is exactly, so the George Floyd situation is a perfect example of this, right?
	I mean, Rosa Parks is a person who made a sacrifice, a planned sacrifice, which, by the way, I don't think makes her sacrifice any lesser.
	In fact, I think it makes it smarter, right?
	They actually planned it out in advance, and it was an actual smart thing they did.
	She actually made a sacrifice.
	Martin Luther King made sacrifices, right?
	There are many people over the course of the civil rights movement who have made actual sacrifices in pursuit of a higher ideal.
	George Floyd did not willingly make a sacrifice in pursuit of a higher ideal.
	George Floyd did not die for an idea.
	Correct.
	He died almost undoubtedly, at least in part by accident, even though Chauvin was convicted of first-degree murder.
	But the reality is that even if he was convicted of first degree, even if it was a murder, he didn't die because he willingly went to his death in order to achieve acts, right?
	And again, this is not a rip on George Floyd.
	It's a rip on Nancy Pelosi, who literally declared that he was a martyr in the same way that people have martyred themselves.
	To be a martyr means to stand for a higher ideal and then die for that higher ideal, not to die, and then be retroactively considered a martyr because the ideal that you can now propagate off the death of that person is of benefit to you.
	But isn't this just evidence that, as the great political philosopher Bob Dylan points out, everybody's got to serve somebody?
	And we now pretend that we're an irreligious, totally secular country, total separation of church and state.
	We have a very rigid liturgical calendar.
	We're in the holy month of pride right now.
	We've got new liturgical feast days added all the time.
	We just had a new one added.
	And it's just, I'm not even really knocking it in as much as man has religious longings.
	We obviously long for something beyond this By the way, you're totally right about that.
	One of the things that's driven me up a wall, and people refuse to acknowledge this, is there's this move that is now being made all the time.
	Rhonda Santos will sign a bill saying that women can have their own leagues and men don't compete in those leagues.
	And people will go, during Pride Month.
	During Pride Month.
	Or how dare you sign a bill against critical race theory during Black History Month on Juneteenth?
	You saw Eric Adams did this.
	Eric Adams is like, did you even see that Catherine Garcia and Andrew Yang were campaigning against me together on Juneteenth?
	I was like, I wasn't aware that Juneteenth was established specifically to prevent people from campaigning against you because you're black.
	That's weird.
	But that is treated in the same way that Jews treat, like, I can't believe that they started a war on Yom Kippur, you know, like the holiest day in the Jewish calendar in 1973.
	Right?
	It's like, Those aren't the same thing.
	If you're going to have a Pride Month because you want to demonstrate that you're out and you're proud, fine, whatever.
	Although I think that the country declaring Pride Months of any sort, like literally any sort, divisive and silly, but it's a gluttony month.
	Humility month.
	Putting that aside, the notion that we can now use this as a cudgel to beat you and claim that you're a bigot because you're doing enduring Pride Month.
	It obviously is religious treatment of a rather irreligious subject.
	So, I want to talk about our friends over at Stamps, and the reason I want to talk about it is because I'm not the kind of guy who likes to go anywhere or do anything.
	And Stamps.com makes it possible for me to still be productive and quite successful, even with that predisposition.
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	We do it here at The Daily Wire, and we've been doing it for a long time, mostly because my staff has to work around all of my laziness and bad attitude and agoraphobia, I think it's fair to say, agoraphobia.
	But also because time is money, because getting in your car, driving across town, especially today.
	Listen, Stamps.com is my favorite kind of company, all joking aside, because they have made our lives more productive, more efficient, and that gives us time to be better at the things that we need to be doing, better at running our businesses, better at living our lives.
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	Never go to the post office again.
	I won't.
	I'd like to bring the conversation back to Knowles' book.
	And I'd like to mention the title of the book, but it keeps spinning around so I can't...
	Oh, it's speechless.
	It's speechless there.
	Sorry, I've only got the back cover.
	But, you know, it seems to me one of the greatest acts of censorship that the left has performed, and maybe the essential, central act of censorship, was under the guise of this made-up idea of the separation of church and state, was banning the discussion of religion and the teaching of religion from the public square.
	And we accepted this.
	I think the right accepted this.
	And we thought, that's fair.
	Why should one religion be put over another?
	But in fact, in doing that, we gave up the entire argument for our country.
	We gave up the essential argument for our country and can no longer actually make the argument for the rights enumerated, you know, for the ideas enumerated in the Constitution and also for the spirit expressed in the Declaration, all of which are dependent upon the idea that our rights are God-given.
	Well, if we had a true separation of church and state, which is a preposterous idea, by the way, and I debunk it in this book.
	What's the book?
	It's called Speechless Controlling.
	But you might not have heard of it.
	Even I'm tuning out at this point.
	But if you really had a firm separation of church and state and religion really had to be banned from the public square entirely, one could not read the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July or any other day.
	assumptions that were made by the founders in their time, they assumed, because they say that they held particular truths to be self-evident, that the waters in which they were swimming philosophically were common and well understood.
	And so if you read the Declaration, you read the And if you read the Founders' language, they're constantly citing the Bible.
	It's the number one most cited document in any of the Founders' writing.
	I mean, they've gone through all their writing.
	And they cite Locke sometimes, and they cite a lot of Blackstone, and they cite various people.
	But the number one document, by far, it's not close, is the Bible.
	And that's because that was the sort of error that they actually were breathing all the time.
	And because that was implicit to them, but was not made explicit...
	There was a move to separate off what was explicit from what was implicit.
	And we lost what was implicit.
	And when you have only the explicit, but you lose the entire fundamental basis, the entire thing collapsed.
	In the same way that when you look at Picasso's early work, it's just paintings, right?
	When you listen to jazz, they're not playing the wrong notes.
	In order to deconstruct something, in order to critique something, I'm a critic of a lot of American evangelical theology.
	Because I teach the Bible.
	You have to actually know something before you can criticize something, before you can deconstruct something.
	There's a lot of value in critical thinking.
	There's a lot of value.
	The founders, if you take, you know, Adams famously said to Thomas Jefferson, if the two of us were to behold the Shekinah glory, we still would be skeptical.
	They weren't religious in the way that we think of We're good to go.
	A common frame of reference.
	We have a common frame of reference and of faith.
	So if we get in an argument and I can cite a Bible verse, you have to respond with a Bible verse.
	You cannot just say, take that book away.
	And I think that that's the position they've put us in, basically, is they've taken the book away.
	And not just the Bible, although the Bible fundamentally, that's the fundamental document they've taken away.
	But in taking away all of our understanding of our own history, They've given us just the criticisms, but what they think they're doing is criticizing.
	What they're really doing is playing wrong notes.
	They didn't bother to learn.
	To learn how to do it, yeah.
	Even if you want to read criticism...
	I like reading criticism, right?
	What the left has done is this little trick where they pretend that critical theory is critical thinking, and they've actually made this...
	It's not.
	It's its own horrific academic, pseudo-academic movement.
	But in order to criticize something or to read criticism and commentary...
	As you say, you need to know what you're talking about.
	Even if you don't believe a single word of the Bible, you consider yourself the staunchest atheist or the most tuned out agnostic.
	You simply cannot understand any work of literature or history for that matter, for the most part, if you haven't read the Bible.
	And what is the one book that you're just not allowed to read in the public schools?
	It's the Bible, the foundation of the civilization.
	There is a great line in G.K. Chesterton that This is one of my favorite lines because it concisely says what I'm always trying to say, where he says, break the conventions, obey the commandments.
	And in other words, there's plenty of room for originality.
	There's plenty of room for criticism.
	There's plenty of room for progress.
	But all of it should be in keeping with the traditions that brought us here for the simple reason is that's what gave us our values.
	The problem with the left is you're always arguing.
	They're arguing for our values.
	Yeah.
	But they don't want any of the conventions or the commandments that bring us those.
	So here's a question from a DailyWire.com subscriber.
	You could become one right now and get 20% off if you head to DailyWire.com and use promo code JUSTICE. For the whole group, our tax money goes to pay for abortions, goes to pay for schools, to brainwash our children, to bail out states that have crappy governance, among many other issues we find stupid, evil, or both.
	My question is, is there a line in the sand where we conservatives decide to stop paying taxes?
	Well, you put it that way.
	Sign me up.
	Sounds great.
	I mean, so the reality is that the only reason that people pay taxes in the end is because there's a giant gun attached to the other end of you not paying a tax.
	I mean, the government has the power of compulsion.
	The real question you're asking is, why would you obey the edicts of the federal government, and when does the federal government lose legitimacy?
	That's really the underlying question to paying taxes, because let's face it, no one wants to pay taxes.
	No one likes paying taxes.
	I moved from California to Florida in part to avoid paying certain taxes.
	So the the answer to that is at the point where you do not have any other options except to fight back.
	And I don't think we're at that point yet, number one, because this country is so closely divided.
	Number two, I think a lot of people just do not understand the arguments at all.
	And our mission and in part is to inform people and allow people to to awaken to arguments they've never heard before, because all these institutions are so unbelievably dominated by the left.
	And number three, I'm putting a lot of faith these days in states.
	I just think that states are going to end up providing the only bulwark in the end against the predations of the federal government, which is why it's wonderful that our company is located in a state where Governor Lee is presiding.
	It's wonderful that I live in a state where Governor DeSantis presides.
	Drew, unfortunately, lives in a state where...
	Where the governor either dressed in blackface or in a KKK outfit, and there's no third choice.
	Which is worse.
	Hey, we have the only black governor in America.
	Wow, man.
	But I think the bottom line is, and I hear this argument about abortion also, you know, people will be like, well, at one point you stand up and you do violence, and the answer is when all other options are exhausted.
	Read the Declaration of Independence, right?
	The founders were, the entire reason behind the declaration was because they say that dissolving the bonds that tie one people to another is such a significant, consequential act, cannot be taken lightly.
	And so they have to make a robust defense of what they're about to do.
	It's not just like, oh, we don't like it.
	We don't like the cut of your jib.
	We're kind of tired of this.
	We don't like that you do some things that are...
	No, no, no.
	It has to be, as you say, you have...
	It's like just war theory, right?
	You...
	There are no other options.
	The other options must have been exhausted.
	And the other thing I want to point out to the people who suggest we need a national divorce.
	First of all, there's no such thing as a peaceful national divorce.
	That just doesn't happen.
	So if you're actually saying you're willing to take up a gun and start shooting your relatives, I don't think we're there yet.
	I don't want to do that.
	I think we should not be as flippant about it.
	But also, they're making the same mistake that has caused us to lose every single aspect of the country.
	Namely, they're saying, let's disengage.
	Let's just give up.
	That's right.
	How about we just do what these parents are doing at the local school boards and go in and say, no, you don't have the right to completely pervert my country.
	Oh, my gosh.
	We've got video of one of these fathers speaking out against critical race theory.
	If you guys didn't see them, you probably talked about it on your shows.
	This is so good, though.
	Can we play that?
	The only race it is is the human race.
	I never raised my sons to see anybody as a color.
	The color was never even discussed in my house at all.
	All we know is that as children grow, they just see other kids and they'll just immediately start playing.
	There is no child sees them and like, why is his skin color like that of mine?
	We never discussed that.
	When it all comes down to it, people are just people.
	My sons never had a talk about white people, about Asian people.
	All they know is that they were people.
	They were their friends.
	They played with them.
	They never once came home and said, This is happening all across the country.
	Parents standing up at school board meetings and objecting for the first time.
	And Michael, you bring up this idea.
	That disengagement is a conservative predisposition, and it's the reason that we lose.
	And I've been talking for a long time, I think that one of the major problems in American conservatism is that American conservatism is largely comprised of American Christians.
	And American evangelicals have a multi-hundred-year tradition or longer of being obsessed with eschatology.
	Being obsessed with the idea that the world is going to end right away.
	Christ is going to come back and justice is going to be wrought on the earth.
	And listen, I have no problem with eschatology.
	I have a problem with a fixation on eschatology to the point that it causes you to remove yourself from reality.
	So we're very good at winning elections.
	There are more Democrats than there are Republicans in the country.
	And yet we disproportionately win presidential elections.
	Why?
	Why?
	Well, because every election is the most important election of our lifetime, and the next election doesn't matter at all, because Jesus is going to come back, because I have a big supply of my patriot food buried in the backyard, and I have 10,000 rounds of.223 ammunition.
	We're doomsdayers.
	These are all good.
	You're now convincing me of the other side.
	We're doomsdayers, and we're not optimistic.
	My rebuke of the American evangelical tradition of eschatology is that God commands optimism from the very beginning of Genesis.
	Be fruitful and multiply as a commandment that predates sin entering the world.
	Hope is a theological virtue.
	Lift up now thine eyes is one of the most recurring terms in the book of Genesis, meaning from the very beginning God is saying...
	Have optimism.
	Look toward a future.
	And it's one of the great ironies that the left is more optimistic about the future than conservatives.
	We disengage.
	They plant seeds for generations.
	They plant, they sow a harvest that they will not reap for 40 years.
	We disengage and then we're surprised when they win.
	This is exactly right.
	But I think it's inherent in conservatism to a certain degree.
	There's a wonderful Gilbert and Sullivan line, every child that's born alive is either born a little liberal or a little conservative.
	And I think that there's something to that because one of the things that a conservative can see is that if you pull the string, the suit might fall apart.
	That any little thing that you do might cause the destruction of everything we have.
	And so they've kind of got a negative point of view, not to mention any names.
	Uh-huh.
	I'm so much more pessimistic.
	It's true.
	Jeremy and I, this is the nature of our friendship.
	Basically, we get on the phone and we're going to have a nice uplifting conversation.
	How bad do you think it's going to go?
	It's going to be so much worse than that.
	It's true.
	They compete.
	And I think that that leads to people.
	I hear this from conservatives all the time.
	It's over.
	Forget it.
	You want to fight?
	Forget it.
	It's over.
	When we sink into the mud, the last thing you're going to see Although, what's ironic about that is that actually of the people on this particular show, the two who kept arguing that there will be future elections are actually the supposed two pessimists in the room.
	But when it comes to the sort of argument over what we can do at the local level, I mean, I'm so heartened by the anti-CRT movement I'm seeing.
	It's the most heartened I've been, more heartened actually, I think.
	Then the Tea Party movement.
	The Tea Party movement was a quote-unquote small government movement.
	It disbanded basically upon Republicans winning back office in 2010.
	And the Republicans took the heart right out of it because they kept spending.
	And so there was no fight back.
	And maybe there was never going to be any fight back or any way to fight back against that because when you're in Congress, your job is to quote-unquote get things done as opposed to having a mandate to not get things done, which is really what the mandate was in 2010.
	But what we are seeing right now on the local level with people saying this cannot go any further.
	Is a wonderful and fruitful pushback that we are seeing from all sides of the political aisle.
	And I will say, I am really optimistic about 2022.
	I'm optimistic about 2024.
	I'm optimistic that the American people are starting to have enough of this crap.
	Because if you look at the polls on things like CRT, they're devastating for the Democrats.
	There's a reason why, in the last week alone, the Democrats have decided that suddenly voter ID, which was Jim Crow...
	Until the last 27 seconds is now okay with them.
	Stacey Abrams is like, I'm just never against voter ID. Assuming, of course, that we are like guppies and have short-term memory loss.
	And Raphael Warnock doing the same thing in Georgia.
	When the Democrats are starting to back off of their defund the police nonsense, and because Eric Adams, of course, is probably going to win the mayoralty in New York running on the basis that we need stronger law enforcement, weaker law enforcement, and you're starting to see Democrats go out there like Maisie Hirono, who's a nut.
	Saying, we're not the party of defund the police and Jen Psaki getting up and saying, no, it's the Republicans who are really...
	She said this.
	I'm not kidding.
	She said it's the Republicans who are probably the party of defund the police.
	They're starting to reverse on their own key principles because it turns out that once again, because American politics is so reactive, Democrats didn't understand their mandate.
	When Trump lost in 2020, the mandate was, don't be that guy.
	But it was not, get rid of all of his policies.
	Americans broadly liked his policies.
	They just had problems with him personally.
	And Biden gets in, he's like, well, it seems like my mandate is to...
	You know, and also, and cream wheat, and come on, and nuke America.
	And everybody's like, whoa, dude, that's not what you were elected for.
	Could he please not nuke us?
	By the way, that was the most insane thing.
	I'm so confused.
	So it was a huge controversy when apparently Donald Trump at one point allegedly suggested nuking a hurricane.
	He didn't suggest nuking every gun owner in America.
	Hands up, don't nuke.
	That's what we're all saying now.
	The President of the United States literally said yesterday that you shouldn't own guns or care about owning guns because, after all, if you got in a shooting war with us, we will send our F-15s and nuke you.
	I've never wanted a gun more than this, by the way.
	And the Taliban laughed.
	I've got to stop you right there before we say too many mean things about Joe Biden because, you know, look, my first book, my blank book, was endorsed by the then President of the United States, Donald Trump, who, Reasons to Vote for Young, that's a great book for your reading enjoyment.
	My new book, Speechless, Actually did receive an endorsement from the sitting president of the United States, Joe Biden.
	Take a listen.
	Mike Knows wrote a book called Speechless Control.
	Word Control.
	Thank you, thank you, thank you.
	For sharing the powerful story and for helping the country understand what's happening here.
	And in case you were wondering...
	He's a great and gifted writer.
	I really mean it.
	The honesty with which he stepped forward...
	And talked about the problem and the hope that it gave me hope reading it.
	Thank you, Mr.
	President, and you're welcome.
	That is amazing.
	And also, I'm a little miffed that our editing team spent so much time on that.
	Pretty obvious.
	No, that was kind of worth it, actually.
	Now, the amazing thing about that is that you could have just gone directly to Biden and asked him to say that.
	Oh, yeah.
	And he would have just said it.
	Some version of it.
	And then he would not have understood that he said it.
	I mean, as I'm constantly saying, Joe Biden, it must be like a wonderful thing to be Joe Biden, right?
	You wake up every morning and somebody tells you you're president.
	That's just unbelievable.
	I am.
	I always wanted to be president.
	I always wanted to be president.
	Here's a question for the group from our dailywire.com subscribers.
	Do you think conservatives have a blind spot in video games and gaming culture the same way that we did in education and Hollywood?
	Absolutely.
	Tell us video game old fans.
	I am a video gamer and I love them and I think that they have been attacked by the woke and they're trying to force them into wokeness and have succeeded to a certain degree, but they succeed in all these things because conservatives aren't paying attention.
	Video games are more popular than Hollywood.
	They have been more popular than Hollywood for maybe 10 years.
	They make more money than Hollywood.
	They engage the imagination in a unique and original way.
	They take people into what are usually acts of heroism against evil.
	So they're inherently conservative.
	They're inherently religious in some certain sense.
	They're a wonderful tool and they bring young men into experiences, I think, that train them to the heroic mind.
	And they're fun.
	And they're fun and they're artistic when they're done really well.
	When I was in Afghanistan, a sentence I always like to say because I feel like Dr.
	Watson.
	But I would see the soldiers go out and literally get shot at and then come back and play video games where they got shot at.
	And I think that they were actually, you know, a way of training themselves to the heroic mindset.
	And yeah, they can be an art form.
	They have once or twice elevated themselves to an art form.
	And I think that they bring...
	People, young men especially, into an imaginative world that can be very, very fruitful.
	Obviously, they can be overplayed and overdone, but we don't pay attention to any of this stuff, and it just drives me nuts.
	So I want to talk about privacy because you are on the internet.
	That's how you engage with us.
	And when you're on the internet, your privacy is at risk.
	We all take risks every day when we go online, whether we think about it or whether we don't.
	We think our connection probably won't be interrupted by hackers.
	We think our data probably won't be used against us.
	But if you're using the internet without ExpressVPN, it's like you're driving a car with no insurance.
	Why would you take that risk?
	Every time you connect to an unencrypted network, At cafes, at hotels, at airports, any hacker on the same network can gain access to your private data, whether it's your passwords, your financial details, Michael Knowles' cell phone number, any of it.
	Which we'll just give out.
	ExpressVPN acts as an online insurance.
	It creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet so that hackers can't steal your personal data.
	It'd take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption.
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	That's expressvpn.com slash backstage, and you can get an extra three months for free.
	And as my little brother told me at a very young age, free is a very good price.
	Expressvpn.com slash backstage.
	Don't drive without a seatbelt.
	Don't drive without insurance.
	Don't use the internet without ExpressVPN.
	Michael, I used up all my energy.
	What do you want to talk about?
	I'm glad that we focused on a little bit of hope because I do feel, you know, as you point out, this line, my priest, Father George Rutler, has this line.
	He says, difference between a Scottish optimist and a Scottish pessimist.
	Scottish optimist says, Scottish pessimist rather says things can't get any worse.
	Scottish optimist says, oh yes, they can.
	And we do it all the time.
	And I think there actually is great cause for hope.
	One of my fears for 2022 and 2024 is I think we could easily retake the House, and I think that we could do well in 2024 if the elections are fair.
	And I know we're not allowed to make any comments out of the big tech to shut us down.
	But I'm just pointing out, there's always fraud in elections.
	Both sides are always trying to game the system.
	And Democrats took a huge advantage by pushing widespread mail-in voting, in some places in contravention of state constitutions, by pushing ballot harvesting, by pushing motor voter laws.
	They've been doing this for decades, right?
	This is nothing really new.
	And I was really pleased to see that the Republicans on Capitol Hill have shut down the biggest election power grab that we have seen from Democrats possibly ever.
	S1 and HR won the Corrupt Politicians Act.
	But they had to.
	I'm very down on the Republican Party and our elected officials.
	You know, during the first two years of the Trump administration, we controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress.
	Republicans have controlled the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature in Texas for 19 years uninterrupted.
	And what do we do when we have power?
	Virtually nothing.
	And everyone will always tell you why.
	Well, there was this mitigating circumstance.
	You know, we needed one more vote or we needed one more this, we needed one more that.
	At a certain point, though, you have to just realize, oh no, they do exactly what they want to do.
	They don't want to do anything that changes the fundamental argument in the country.
	So, for example, the most unifying issue among Republicans is the abortion issue.
	It's the most important social issue, certainly, of the last half century.
	If our politicians actually act decisively against abortion, then there's no reason to vote for them anymore.
	I honestly think they think this way.
	So of course they stood up and did the right thing where the Corrupt Politicians Act is concerned because they personally have something to lose.
	If they let the Democrats completely remake elections in the country, they might lose their power.
	To tell us they're going to do a bunch of things that they'll never, ever, ever do.
	By the way, notice this issue that you're talking about, abortion.
	This is the one issue that basically all the conservatives can agree on.
	Notice, we've actually made some progress on abortion.
	We've at least held the line.
	Notice that that is basically the one issue that conservatives argue from the standpoint of justice.
	So many other issues we argue from this kind of utilitarian or argument from efficiency.
	Well, you go work around the edges and you increase efficiency.
	But abortion is just, no, this is wrong and we're going to stand against it.
	And I'm noticing, especially those parents who are not up to the school boards, they're making arguments.
	This is wrong, this is right, and we're going to stand for what's right.
	Because they're humans.
	They're not politicians.
	They're not pundits.
	They're actual people who want their children to be taught moral things.
	And you're absolutely right about this.
	And the other thing that I will say, because what you just said, I... I could not agree with more, except that I do believe we are asking Republicans to do something that goes against the nature of politicians.
	We're asking them to have less power.
	And that means that they're paddling upstream while the left is riding the rapid right downstream.
	And I think that is a more difficult job.
	So here's a great question from a DailyWire.com subscriber.
	At what point do we stop pointing out the left's hypocrisy?
	They couldn't care less, and the sheep will never acknowledge the hypocrisy anyway.
	Are we doing the wrong thing to point out that they're hypocrites?
	I think it's important because there are a group of people in the middle who are under the fundamental assumption that the left is moral and the right is immoral, because that's the line that the left is consistently pushing.
	So when you point out their hypocrisy, you're basically saying, no, you don't hold any sort of moral high ground, particularly on these principles that you yourself do not hold.
	But the general critique, which is that the right needs to stop whining about the left being hypocritical and instead needs to just fight the left on its own terms, I think that there is certainly some truth to that.
	I think that can go too far, and I'm a little afraid of that, because I think that there is a push on the right right now to subvert our own fundamental principles with regard to, for example, liberalism on things like free speech in order to, quote-unquote, fight the left.
	And that does not mean that there aren't things that we can do.
	There are 100% things that we can do.
	But I think that very often...
	On the positive side, the critique of hypocrisy suggests that you shouldn't try to shame people who can't be shamed, which I agree with.
	On the other side, it seems to me that very often people who want to critique the right for pointing out hypocrisy really wants to subvert the fundamental principle, which is that there should be an evenly held standard across both right and left.
	Instead, what they say is, okay, well, if the left is going to be hypocrites about things, then we should do.
	We might as well just club them in the face using equally deplorable tactics.
	Did you notice that I have some problems with?
	The problem with the hypocrisy argument, though, is it too often accepts the values Yes, that's for sure.
	So if the left says, you know, we have strong women and we say, well, Hillary just married into power and our women are stronger, we think, well, maybe the answer is that strength is not the only virtue.
	Maybe strength is a male virtue and there are other virtues.
	We tell this to Caitlyn Jenner a lot, right?
	Yeah.
	Where they would be using the argument, they're constantly saying, well, you know, when you critique anybody who's transgender, it's because you're transphobic.
	And then they would critique Caitlyn Jenner and be like, well, now who's the transphobe?
	You're the real transphobe.
	You're the real transphobe.
	Did you see the argument when the Supreme Court cases came out and Amy Coney Barrett voted to not take this case on Obamacare?
	The third attempt to overturn Obamacare and the court didn't want to take it.
	And there were some conservatives who came out and said, ha ha, oh, the left is going to be so embarrassed because they said that ACB was going to be the vote against Obamacare.
	Ha, we showed them take that libs.
	Well, if we keep owning the libs by upholding Obamacare, we're not going to have any conservative movement left.
	However, I will say that Senator Whitehouse represents many, not many, but several liberals who I know belongs to an all-white club.
	The guy's a thug to begin with.
	He's been committing thuggery against the Supreme Court, trying to intimidate them into giving leftist views.
	And now we find out he belongs to an all-white club.
	And he says, well, it's a tradition.
	Yeah, you know, it is.
	And my feeling about that is you should have the right, you should definitely have the right to belong to an all-white club or a club that doesn't let Jews in or a club that doesn't let anyone you want.
	But it means you're a schmuck.
	But here's the thing about this.
	Okay, so this whole story is bizarre to me.
	The reason this whole story is bizarre to me is because it is illegal to have an all-white club in the United States.
	Okay, it is patently illegal.
	It is illegal under the Civil Rights Act.
	You cannot have a club in the United States that bars black people explicitly.
	That is not allowed.
	So the reason it is an all-white club, it does not have explicit rules barring black members.
	Okay, because that would be illegal under both state and federal discrimination laws.
	Instead...
	Are you sure about that?
	Yes.
	A private club?
	Yes.
	I know a couple of private clubs that actually do have that.
	That explicitly bar black people?
	Yes.
	Well, they make it impossible.
	Okay, that's a different thing.
	So this club apparently had rules for admission that they said they've had black members in the past, they don't have black members now.
	So what Sheldon Whitehouse could have said, were he an honest human being, is our club have standards.
	Sometimes there are black people who meet those standards.
	Sometimes there are black people who don't meet those standards.
	But the problem is, he can't make that defense.
	Because this is the point that everybody seems to be missing.
	He couldn't make that defense because on a principled level, he cannot argue for standards based on merit because if he makes an argument on standards based on merit, he undercuts his entire agenda.
	That's right.
	So this is how a club that is not officially all-white transforms into a quote-unquote all-white club, even though all-white clubs are illegal in the United States.
	So I agree.
	I don't think all-white clubs should be illegal in the United States, but they are.
	I think the Civil Rights Act actually has...
	I agree with you also.
	I've been a long-time proponent of freedom of association, which was ended in the private sphere by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
	And I think that that's a problem, but I want to know who the a**holes are.
	I want you to go to an all-white club so that I can go, oh great, there's an a**hole.
	I don't want to have to deal with this human.
	But this is such a club against the right.
	Do you remember they did this to Rand Paul?
	And they do it often to people who make arguments for free association, often on libertarian grounds.
	You just make it on plain constitutional grounds, but on libertarian grounds.
	And so you get perfectly amiable libertarian like Rand Paul.
	And During his first rise to the Senate, you remember they said, well, Senator Paul, we're going to ignore what you're talking about right now on Obamacare or anything else.
	Would you have voted for the Civil Rights Act?
	And, you know, if you say no or if you say I have certain problems with this, your career is dead politically.
	And yet, the arguments that Goldwater made at the time that kept him out of the presidency were quite right.
	Yeah, I mean, you can see that there's certainly...
	Almost everything we're dealing with can really be traced back in some way to the civil rights.
	I mean, this is the case that Christopher Caldwell makes in The Age of Entitlement, right?
	And he's exactly right about it.
	I mean, the fact is that you could say in 1964, on balance, it is so important to get rid of state-sponsored discrimination.
	that is a temporary measure.
	I will vote to curtail freedom of association.
	And in fact, many of the proponents of the Civil Rights Bill suggested that this was going to be temporary.
	In fact, Hubert Humphrey, one of the great proponents of the Civil Rights Bill, suggested that it was never going to go as far as it has been taken in terms of legal precedent.
	But to even point out that there are flaws in the Civil Rights Bill now is to suggest that you are indeed, this is the game the left likes to play right now, is that if you are in favor of a right and the right can be misused, This means you're in favor of the misuse of the right.
	That's right.
	Right, which is just the greatest form of nonsense sophistry ever.
	So as long as we're in the part of the show that's going to be clipped up by Media Matters and shipped out to make us all more famous, here's the question.
	If Juneteenth is a national holiday, why isn't Election Day a national holiday?
	And wouldn't it allow us to finally say that we have ended voter suppression if it were?
	Well, Juneteenth is a national holiday not because of the merits of Juneteenth.
	I think people pointed out in Galveston, Texas, they said, we've known about Juneteenth a long time.
	That's true.
	It was a local tradition in very small parts of the United States.
	The reason that Juneteenth is a holiday is because it is being portrayed as a new National Independence Day.
	The title of the bill was the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, and it's being promoted by people who are fans of critical race theory, who are fans of the 1619 Project.
	It is a holiday that is being used to push resentment.
	That's why the emoji on Twitter for Juneteenth was the red fist, right?
	It was the symbol of communism, of black nationalism, and some other associations.
	It's a pretty good trick, because first of all, Trump supported making Juneteenth a national holiday.
	And it is, you know, it's a good holiday.
	It's just galling that it should be put forward by the people who haven't let black children go to school for a year and a half, and the people who have essentially destroyed the black family through their programs.
	Well, I suppose this is the problem.
	People say, well, in theory, Juneteenth could be a good holiday.
	And I say, sure, I guess if it were a holiday to acknowledge the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment.
	But it just simply, in practice, is not that.
	It's part of this broader leftist question.
	Well, you actually can't have a holiday to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment, because that would acknowledge that at some point in the history, white people in America did something.
	As the sole person on the panel who probably would have voted for Juneteenth, I mean, I thought Juneteenth is a fine national holiday.
	I have no problem with it.
	I really have no problem at all with Juneteenth.
	In fact, I like the idea of a national holiday celebrating the greatness of a country that ended slavery through the death of hundreds of thousands of citizens.
	I mean, I think we all agree with that idea.
	The fact that it was immediate, the left was, they had such buyer's remorse over Juneteenth.
	If you watch the media, They got angry that the Republicans had voted for Juneteenth.
	They were mad about it.
	They were like, well, yes, but there's so much more to do.
	And Juneteenth is just a reminder of how much more there is to do.
	Because you won't teach CRT. Right, and it's like, well, no.
	Juneteenth is a reminder of how amazing America is that we sacrifice several hundred thousand of our own people to end an evil institution.
	But I will say that to Michael's point, That is what a good Juneteenth holiday would have been.
	That's not actually what they have.
	We had these same arguments over MLK Day.
	Back in the 80s, we had these same arguments over MLK Day.
	They didn't call it the MLK New National Independence Day.
	How many people have actually read the bill?
	No one is going to call it the New National Independence Day, except for people who are wild radicals.
	Everybody else is just going to say, it's Juneteenth, I have the day off.
	But don't you think...
	In the same way that...
	And now, what you're going to get is the same battle that the left has been losing over MLK for a while here, right?
	Where they try to retcon MLK, right?
	Where they say, well, this is their new thing.
	MLK is going to be canceled, I think.
	That's my prediction.
	I agree with that because they've decided that the original iteration of Malcolm X was actually correct and that MLK is wrong.
	But the original arguments over MLK Day were it's going to promote radicalism, it's all about...
	And then what did it become?
	It just became a simple tribute to the basic proposition in the I Have a Dream speech.
	I mean, that's really what it became.
	And that's what schoolchildren learned.
	And you know what?
	It's a pretty damn good thing that schoolchildren learned that since that is now the chief weapon being used against critical race theory.
	So I think that Juneteenth is going to come out the same way.
	I think what's going to end up happening is I think we're going to win this critical race theory fight, which is a revision of what Juneteenth actually is.
	Juneteenth is a sign of American progress.
	It is the Frederick Douglass fulfillment of the Independence Day pledge.
	Frederick Douglass said Independence Day doesn't apply to black people.
	He said this before the Civil War because it didn't apply to black people.
	Because they were not independent, they were slaves.
	And then he said, but I trust that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States wrote a promissory note that's going to be cashed, and Juneteenth is the cashing of the promissory note.
	So, that's wonderful.
	Now we can also...
	So now we actually have...
	Honestly, I like Juneteenth in the sense that now...
	We can, I think with fairness, say to the left, we're celebrating Juneteenth because we celebrate July 4th, so why won't you stand for the damned flag now?
	Why are you kneeling for the flag?
	You've got to pick one.
	If you like Juneteenth or you hate the flag, you cannot do both.
	I think you're much more optimistic, Ben, than people give you credit for on this issue.
	Because the other aspect is, they say, well, we need a holiday to celebrate the conclusion of the Civil War and what that gave us.
	We already have that holiday.
	That's actually what Memorial Day is.
	It became more than that, but it was established after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
	And I hope you're right, Ben.
	I mean, I truly, that would be terrific.
	But I do fear that there is this broad project that Hannah Nicole Jones put out in the 1619 Project, not so much to pervert facts, though she obviously did that in the thesis, but as she said, the point of this is to Reframe American history to put slavery at the center of it.
	And Obama said last year, he said Juneteenth, and maybe he'll lose this fight, but he said Juneteenth is not about a victory.
	Juneteenth is only about the work that is done.
	Here's the thing, he lost the fight.
	He lost the fight.
	The fight's over.
	When a thing becomes a holiday, nobody except the Jews celebrates holidays where you lose.
	Right?
	Seriously, this is not a thing.
	There's no holiday that America celebrates where we celebrate a bad thing about America.
	Here's the day when we're going to celebrate all the crappy things about America.
	So what people are going to take away from Juneteenth is, this is the day America...
	But what it will end up being for most children in the United States, I predict, and I don't think this is being too optimistic, I think it's pretty realistic, It will be, hey look, I have a day off.
	Why do I have a day off?
	Because this is the day America ended slavery.
	That's how people think.
	That's as much deep as they go into politics.
	And all these people who are like, and it's a reminder of the next hundred years of Reconstruction.
	People are going to be like, well, then why are we celebrating it?
	See, this is the problem with the left's constant move.
	They're constantly engaging in this self-defeating move.
	And it's kind of funny to watch.
	They just did it this week with Carl Nassib, the linebacker for the Oakland Raiders, or Las Vegas Raiders.
	He came out as gay.
	It's a historic moment.
	He's this NFL player, active NFL player, comes out as gay.
	Now, I thought to myself, well, first of all, there was this big hubbub over Michael Sam, you remember, back in 2013.
	So I'm not sure what the deal was there.
	But is it historic or is it not historic?
	Because if it's historic, then you kind of have to say, hey, look how much more tolerance America has become Of gay people in the United States that you have professional NFL players who are being celebrated for being gay in the United States in 2021.
	Every time the left declares it's a historic moment, they immediately have to buy it back and go, it's not historic because America just sucks even more.
	I agree with Ben on this.
	I think that there is something galling.
	Now we really need that ding.
	Yeah, hold on a second here.
	No, I think there is something galling about the Democrats using Juneteenth the way they are using it, but there is a kind of time bomb in there that's going to blow up in their face.
	I mean, they celebrate so often, for instance, the Tuskegee Airmen, who were heroes of mine, because when I was flying planes, I just loved all the different stories about fighter pilots, because when you fly a plane, you suddenly realize fighter pilots are out of their minds.
	You know, the bravest people who ever lived.
	And the only, seriously, the only person on Earth, on Earth, and I've met like every famous movie star there is, the only person on Earth who ever overawed me was one of the Tuskegee Airmen who came on my show.
	I think Harry Stewart was his name.
	Yeah, unbelievable.
	I was reduced to the level of like a stammering, you know, fanboy, basically.
	Because here was a guy who flew up into the air and fought Nazi pilots, some of the greatest fighter pilots ever, and fought them in a country that, He wouldn't let him be who he was.
	He had to fight just to become the pilot.
	And he believed in that idea so much.
	He believed in the country so much.
	And he just said, I said to him, how could you go up and risk your life like that?
	He said, I kept my eyes on the prize.
	I kept my eyes on the prize.
	Because he knew the country was going to fulfill itself.
	Just like Martin Luther King knew the country and demanded the country fulfill itself.
	And that blows up in the left's face again and again over time.
	It's why they need Biden so badly.
	Honestly, Kamala Harris does not speak this language.
	She does not speak this language.
	Joe Biden, because he's an old-school Democrat, when he speaks about how he still is kind of patriotic about America, I actually think that that is truer to kind of old Biden.
	And I think that the hypercritical, critical race theory woke Biden that we're seeing right now, it's weird to watch him.
	It's like he's speaking a second language.
	He's uncomfortable.
	Whereas for Kamala Harris, that is first language, right?
	When she's speaking about how America's great, that is second language to her.
	When she's speaking about how America sucks, that's kind of first language to her.
	And it is a generational difference.
	I mean, Joe Biden was born in the 1940s.
	So if you're born in the 1940s and you grew up in the United States in the 1950s and 60s, No matter how far left you are, unless you're like full Howard's in, you still have sort of a baseline appreciation for the United States.
	Whereas if you grew up in the 60s and 70s, then you kind of have the opposite.
	The first language you speak if you're on the left is how much America sucks.
	This is a strange historical circumstance, by the way, that we've just had three boomer presidents...
	Who were all born the same year?
	Who were all born the same year.
	And then we went back to a pre-Boomer president.
	That does actually worry me.
	People don't really talk about this too much.
	It does worry me a little bit about the future of the country.
	I think there's a reason for that.
	And I think it's because I think that Americans think we can't take care of ourselves.
	I think we are looking for parental figures.
	And those parental figures are old.
	Because America is an older country now.
	So they're looking to old people to lead us and parent us.
	Because Finally, they're realizing, to a certain extent, that the old people might know better than they do.
	If they'd only realized that in the 60s, it would be a hell of a lot better off.
	I want to correct myself.
	I want to look at the numbers.
	Obama might not be a boomer, right?
	Obama's Gen X. It's actually stranger than what you outlined.
	You had Bill Clinton, who I believe the year is 1942.
	Clinton, born in 1942, boomer.
	George W. Bush, born in 1942, boomer.
	Barack Obama, post-boomer.
	Yes.
	Donald Trump, born in 1942, the same age as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
	Boomer.
	So we went forward a generation, we went back to the boomers, and now we've gone back even further to a pre-boomer.
	So Joe Biden's older than Bill Clinton.
	We've got to find out like the last Civil War veteran in a way.
	The last widow of a Civil War veteran just died.
	Before she could be elected president.
	But think about that.
	It makes a certain amount of sense because we're fighting all the old battles of the 60s still.
	And we never got past that.
	And so there's basically an empty generation of politicians between the age of about 68 and 30.
	There's this entire empty generation of politicians who were either sort of just kind of emptily following in the footsteps of the boomers, but there was no harsh rejection of that so much.
	And so there really has been a dearth in American life, right?
	I mean, it's symptomatic of a culture that has serious decline issues.
	Absolutely.
	So here's the question for the whole group.
	Besides your own, which book from the other Daily Wire hosts is your favorite?
	Goodness, I hate to answer that because I'd have to say speechless because he's selling his book.
	I kind of like, you know, what's his name?
	Right Side of History.
	That was pretty good, too.
	Right Side of History is good.
	Mickey?
	I have to say, you know, I really, I hate to give a sincere compliment of the gentleman on the stage here, but I really have enjoyed all of your writing.
	And Jeremy, you haven't published a book, but I have enjoyed your writing as well.
	Aww.
	No, because even when I vigorously disagree with your outrageous heresy, it's very interesting to engage with, and I learn something.
	But I think my favorite one, beyond all the theological stuff that I love in Great Good Thing, I love...
	Werewolf Cop.
	I was going to say Werewolf Cop.
	It's a great book.
	I love the title.
	The title killed you and you probably sold a tenth of the copies.
	There's the title that really killed me.
	You guys make fun of my titles.
	That's the title that really killed me.
	Werewolf Cop is a far better title than The Great Good Thing.
	Or your upcoming The Greater Gooder Thing.
	I'm sitting around stewing over this.
	The Truth and Beauty is about Christ and poetry.
	It's about the truth and beauty.
	It's a great title.
	I don't think you understand what a title is.
	Do you understand the titles are supposed to convey information?
	Right?
	Like, this is what the book's about.
	If I were to pick up a book called The Truth and Beauty...
	It's about Jesus and Poetry.
	Well, how could I not see that?
	Because it's not called Jesus and Poetry, Drew.
	If you'd called it Jesus and Poetry, I'd be like, oh, this is probably a book about Jesus and Poetry.
	I think that the fundamental problem is that Drew is an old-school writer who thinks that a title is part of the art.
	I am a rich internet entrepreneur who understands that titles are headlines meant to elicit action from the audience.
	Ten things you need to know about William Wordsworth.
	Number eight will shock you by Andrew Clayton.
	By Andrew Clayton, thank you.
	By the way, a hundred percent.
	I would publish that today.
	Actually, the book that I like is also one of Drew's novels.
	And as you did with me, the name completely escapes me.
	But it is the newspaper man who's racing to stop.
	True crime.
	Yeah, true crime is great.
	And the characterizations, particularly, are spectacular.
	The characterizations at the beginning of Werewolf Cop are fantastic.
	What Drew writes better than any American writer today.
	Is the inner monologue of a man.
	This is right.
	The thoughts of a man, you are the king of the craft.
	I want Drew to write Dostoevsky, and Drew wants to write Mickey Spillane.
	You should read Identity Man, which is, somebody described it as Dostoevsky meets Raymond Chandler, and I think that's probably...
	Okay, but see, the thing is, I wanted to divorce you from Raymond.
	Like, I also love Raymond Chandler, and I also love Mickey Spillane, but the stuff that you do the best is the Dostoevsky stuff, which is why The Great Good Thing is a really good memoir, right?
	Because it really effectively is that thing.
	Yeah, it's the inside of your mind.
	This is too much nice stuff about Drew.
	I don't know, I don't know.
	I was just going to say that.
	Here's a question for Jeremy.
	Where's Jasper?
	Here's the thing.
	One year ago, I mentioned I was gazing into the face of my brand new beautiful baby daughter.
	And one of my thoughts, as I told Ben, was...
	I should commemorate this beautiful moment by buying a watch that I really, really want.
	And I didn't.
	Like, I put the well-being of my daughter first, and I've regretted it for 365 days.
	Like, I really want that watch.
	The other thing that I thought as I gazed into the eyes of my daughter was, what is my dog going to do?
	He doesn't like children.
	My dog famously, his worst quality, does not like children.
	Or Jews.
	Yeah, it's true.
	I was talking about his worst quality.
	But he agrees with the dog.
	The bad quality.
	Actually, Dennis Prager always puts a little kippah on Jasper's.
	Yeah, but Dennis is too big to be a Jew.
	He's like, who is this albino giant?
	So, I was very nervous about how Jasper would react to my daughter.
	And then we got home from the hospital with this little adopted baby and put her in the crib.
	And Jasper was whining and didn't know what to make of it.
	And then he never went to work with me again.
	He will not leave her side.
	He's her little shadow.
	That is adorable.
	If you put her down for a nap and then you leave the room, he won't leave the room until she's asleep.
	He'll stay up there until she's firmly asleep.
	Then he'll come down and find her.
	It's the sweetest thing.
	It is.
	A question for the group.
	Has Matt Walsh been using his vacation time to search for the real Abuela?
	You're his employers.
	I mean, I want the insight.
	What's going on?
	Tune in next month for Backstage.
	First of all, if he did, that'd be unbelievable.
	My favorite moment of the entire situation, not exposing AOC's hypocrisy and apparent lies, actually, about poor little Abuela, but it was Matt Walsh's follow-up to it.
	Where he just tweeted out very simply, I'm sorry, Abuela.
	I tried.
	For the group, from a DailyWire.com subscriber, Matt named his fans the Sweet Baby Gang.
	What do you guys call your fans?
	I call them recent customers with receipts or speechless.
	Controlling words, controlling minds.
	That's the proof, baby.
	That's what I want to see.
	I call all of my fans Laurel.
	I've got one fan.
	True.
	I just call my fans and ask them for money.
	And I don't really call my fans anything.
	I mean, so much of America loves me.
	Frankly, it would be hard to, I think, box them in.
	It's just too great.
	Just call them America.
	Exactly.
	It's just too great a panoply of humanity for me to really...
	Big of you.
	You know.
	As I would have expected.
	So, a thought that's been on my mind, and we hit on it a little bit the last time we were together, but I think...
	I didn't drive on Parkways.
	Yeah, you know...
	I think it merits a little consideration.
	And we live in a remarkable time wherein we are almost a different species than all of the people who have come before us.
	In the 20th century, I've said before, after the Second War, we in the West essentially defeated war, disease, poverty, and death.
	We essentially arrived at a place where the common tragedies We're good to go.
	Well, the reason that that great fear about a disease that had a fairly low mortality rate could exist is because of how successfully we have defeated disease.
	If you go back 100 years, everyone died from some disease all the time.
	Same with war.
	One of the reasons so many of our soldiers returned home and have horrible bouts of depression and even suicidality is because...
	in war makes them so utterly unique.
	There's no one with whom they can relate.
	Whereas, if you go back a couple hundred years, there was a fighting season in which all fighting age men went and fought.
	And you would fight until it was time to go get the crops out of the ground.
	And then all the fighting was over for the year.
	And so, you experienced horrors.
	Terrible things would happen.
	But you had every other man, every other person in your country with whom you shared that So you weren't unique by the tragedy of Bethel.
	I have a very dear friend who lost her son a little over a year ago.
	And that event has become very defining in her life.
	That tragedy has become very defining in her life.
	But if you went back in time 100 years, every single parent lost at least a child.
	Oh, so many.
	Or multiple children.
	Every single child who came of age probably had lost their mother and lost siblings.
	Death was such a constant companion that it didn't make you unique and therefore didn't define you.
	War didn't make you unique, didn't define you.
	Disease didn't make you unique, didn't define you.
	And everyone lived in subsistent poverty, really, until the Industrial Revolution.
	For that reason...
	We almost cannot relate to any humans who've ever gone before us.
	And because we can't relate to them, we can only assume that they were somehow evil.
	It's almost impossible to place yourself in a time and in a place and in a reality, a circumstance that you've never experienced.
	And so...
	I was thinking about this.
	It's funny to say this, but I was thinking about it in relation to the UFO conversation that we had the last time we were together, that even the fact that we see something mysterious in the air and we think our first thought is extraterrestrials is because we live in a time and a place where we have so much fiction around us.
	If you had seen that exact same phenomenon 200 years ago, It could have landed and E.T. could have walked off and you wouldn't have thought extraterrestrial even then.
	You would have thought demon or you would have thought ghost or you would have...
	Because in the reality in which you lived, you had a completely different framework with which to understand the world.
	And so what I want to touch on here for conversation for the group before we close is how does one overcome all the bias of now?
	For lack of a better term, the fact that we can only think in the very narrow parameters of our own experience.
	How can you understand your place in history?
	How can you understand your place in the cosmos?
	How can you understand your relationship with God?
	How can you understand your relationship with the people on the earth today who don't live in Western luxury?
	How can you understand your fellow man if you cannot step out of your experience?
	Did you see the headline that ran a couple of weeks ago?
	It's, I forget which paper.
	They said, shocking new study from researchers concludes that the aging process cannot be stopped.
	And I looked at that.
	I said, oh, I'm scratching my head.
	What does it...
	Oh, that all the expert geniuses at all the top schools just discovered death.
	They just discovered mortality.
	We've totally lost a sense of that.
	We've lost...
	You see this in the religious sphere.
	We're no longer preparing to die.
	We just don't see death happen.
	We talk about forever wars because we've been in a country now for 20 years.
	20 years!
	That's the blink of an eye.
	The Brits used to judge their wars in not just decades, but centuries.
	A hundred years war.
	And even in America, I think, forget just us moderns where we think everything that is older than five minutes ago is somehow crazy and illegitimate.
	Even in America, we really only judge history on the scale of 200 years.
	But people that came before us, they were people.
	They were real people.
	They actually thought about things.
	The ideas that we're all discovering for the first time have been discussed for millennia, actually.
	But I think this goes actually to why the left goes after the education system.
	Because if we recognize that people have been grappling with these problems for a very long time, some problems that we consider fixable political problems are just eternal difficulties that we're going to have to grapple with, that would give us a lot more grace for one another and to let us think more seriously about politics.
	This is the great delusion of technology is that things improve.
	And you read this, if you read Steven Pinker's book, he He says things are so much better now.
	Things are not better now at all except technologically and medicinally.
	And it's wonderful.
	Science is a wonderful human advance.
	But it hasn't changed the human heart one little bit.
	It hasn't changed people.
	Right.
	And one of the things that is both dangerous and also hopeful is that the generation younger than everybody in this room will accept this stuff It'll just be the air they breathe.
	When Spencer, my son, was growing up, he and I played video games together.
	Till about the age of 12, I was teaching him how to play video games.
	But at a certain moment, he understood what it meant to sit with a controller and control the images on screen in a way I never could.
	You know, he could see a scene and understand it and see the mission that he was given before I could ever understand it.
	Because he just grew up with this thing that was, to me, an actual miracle.
	And so as these children start to learn, you know, this world that we...
	We can't possibly grasp the change that has taken place that you are outlining exactly.
	The change is so huge that those of us who were born really even within 20 years ago cannot quite grasp what has happened to us.
	They will be able to grasp it.
	And the danger, of course, is that they'll walk into an evolutionary trap that they won't be able to get out of.
	They will advance rapidly.
	Beyond femininity.
	They'll advance beyond childbirth.
	They'll have their children in little toasters in the kitchen and will not know what they have lost, the humanity that they've lost.
	That's the danger.
	But the hopeful thing is that they'll rediscover what you're talking about.
	Even seeing, because all these machines will simply be part of their lives, they'll start to understand, oh, one still dies.
	The eternal questions are still there.
	Freedom versus authoritarianism will still be there, whether we...
	I care for the few or the many.
	Still, those are always going to be tensions in human life.
	And once those tensions come back into play, possibly they'll get more realistic.
	And that's the hope.
	Because they will understand.
	I'm telling you, the people who are younger than anybody, you know, 19, 18, 17, they will understand this technology in immediate, instinctive ways that we just never will.
	So I think that the reality is that we absolutely can understand people of the past, which is why we read documents of the past.
	It's why we bother to read history.
	It's why we bother to read the Bible.
	It's why we see ourselves in David or in Moses or in Jesus or why we see ourselves in characters from fiction from 300 years ago.
	It's why we watch movies that are rooted in those same exact archetypes, as Jordan Peterson would say.
	But I think that this is why there's a fundamental war on human nature happening right now, is that as we defeated all of these forces that had been so present and ever-present and heavy in life, as we defeated war and death and as we defeated poverty and as the world became richer and more connected and informational deficits could be remedied with a piece of technology that you carry around in your pocket, as we did all of that, and as it turned out that the problems of human nature We're in some cases exacerbated, made worse.
	People have become crueler in many ways in Western society than they were even when I was growing up, like far crueler online than they are in real life.
	People have become far more nasty toward one another.
	People become far more tribal and you're seeing it happening in real time.
	The answer to that from people who are at war with the basic religious concept, which is that there is a fundamental and universal human nature, people who are at war with that have decided that the problem isn't our failure to recognize human nature and to adapt to human nature.
	Our real problem is in acknowledging that human nature even exists.
	So if we can just obliterate human nature utterly and completely, and we can do that with linguistic tricks, we can pretend that human nature is all a social construct as opposed to biologically ingrained.
	We can pretend, I mean, it is called human nature for a reason.
	They can pretend that it has nothing to do with reality and that reality itself is an obstacle to your utter fulfillment.
	This is why when people ask me to steal man Marxism, for example, what I always say is that Marxism is a terrible economic theory, but it's actually a spiritual theory.
	It's a spiritual theory that's been around a lot longer than Marx.
	And that spiritual theory is, if you restructure the systems in which you live, a new man will be generated.
	A better man will be generated.
	A new sort of human will be generated.
	And that new sort of human won't be susceptible to any of the things that actually make war and poverty happen.
	Because war and poverty don't happen in a vacuum.
	War and poverty happen because human beings are innately sinful, as every religious person knows.
	One of the stupidest things I've ever seen said was said by Nelson Mandela, quoted online.
	And it was that the natural state of humanity is prosperity and poverty is artificial.
	It is, of course, precisely the opposite.
	The natural state of humanity is poverty and prosperity is artificial.
	And it is only because we recognize our own human nature and then built institutions to militate against that human nature that we were able to rise above any of that.
	And once we rose above that, and it turned out that happiness was not the consequence, it turned out that we still couldn't fill that hole in the heart that God typically fills, then we went to war with human nature itself.
	And so if we wish to reconnect with history, if we wish to connect to other people, like even have conversations with other people, we're going to have to understand that the person sitting across the table from me is not racially essentialist or even sexually essentialist.
	At the bottom line, yes, there are essential characteristics about all of us because we are embodied humans, because as Aristotle would suggest, we are in fact soul and body and we are combined in one.
	But by the same token, We share that exact thing, and we share all the same flaws.
	And once we understand that, we're going to be a lot more understanding toward one another.
	We can actually have conversations, and then maybe we can talk about actually solving some problems.
	But white boys can't jump.
	That's something absolutely clear.
	White men can't jump.
	That's all the time that we have tonight.
	Appreciate you hanging out with us, and we look forward to seeing you again here in about a month.
	As always, thank you especially to our DailyWire.com subscribers.
	If you want to get in on the action, head over to DailyWire.com slash subscribe right now.
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	And please go pick up, I hate myself for this, please go pick up a copy of Michael Knowles' new book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
	You'll be glad you did.
	I'll be glad you did.
	Not because it's good for Michael, but because it makes it look like we still have some clout out there.
	We'll see you guys next time.
	Daily Wire Backstage is a Daily Wire production.

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