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July 29, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:42:49

Daily Wire Backstage: The Commies Are At It Again

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	Hey, Michael Knowles here.
	The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage, The Commies Are At It Again, is right around the corner.
	Don't miss me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, and the God King, Jeremy Boring, as we discuss everything from Ben's new book and Simone Biles' walk of shame to the dread Delta variant, the Delta Phi Beta Lambda Gamma Kappa Sig Chi.
	Take a listen.
	Welcome to the Daily Wire backstage.
	The commies are at it again.
	I'm Jeremy Boring, known round here.
	Nobody actually knows me as the God King, but I say it every time with persistence.
	We're glad you turned in.
	Will protesters in Cuba have to burn the American flag rather than march with it if they want to get any mainstream media coverage?
	Will Joe Biden continue to snap at female reporters until they let him sniff their hair?
	Does the White House teaming up with Facebook on a censorship campaign against misinformation make anyone else feel like we're living in the authoritarian moment?
	You know, guys, I'm just not feeling it.
	What are you talking about?
	I mean, physically I feel fine, but emotionally I'm just...
	It's not fun for me anymore, you know, and I'm just not in the right headspace, and so I think I'm just gonna...
	I gotta take some time for me.
	Keep your seat, buddy.
	You have an obligation to your team.
	You have an obligation to your country.
	But I am still a winner in my own heart, right?
	Ugh.
	Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Stand up for your digital rights.
	Take action at ExpressVPN.com slash backstage.
	Yes, they actually pay us to do this show.
	Joining me to discuss all the news and more is the Ben Shapiro, the Candace Owens, the Matt Walsh, the Michael Knowles, and Andrew Klavan, also guest starring.
	Mask mandates are back on the table as the COVID Delta variant rears its ugly head and the CDC reissues new guidance.
	While some state leaders are holding their ground, others are forcing their citizens to adhere to government authority at the expense of personal freedom.
	Ben Shapiro, of course, predicted all of this in his latest book, The Authoritarian Moment, which hit bookshelves yesterday and is already trending third under Amazon's list of bestsellers.
	Get your copy now anywhere books are sold, or you can pick up a signed copy for just $30 at dailywired.com slash Ben.
	On tonight's Backstage, Ben's going to...
	This is longer than any ad I've ever read for any paying customer.
	But it's because we love Ben.
	I love him.
	Just because I love him.
	Keep reading it.
	Yeah.
	Ben's going to offer...
	Ben's going to offer us some insight into this very unique moment in American history and detail some of the examples he writes about in the authoritarian moment.
	As usual, you can watch this live on social media or on our website, but we want to announce that you can now enter to win the ultimate backstage experience where you and a friend can come lounge with us here at Daily Wire HQ, have some good conversation.
	You can even spark up a cigar.
	Michael's feeling generous.
	And get signed copies of Ben's newest book.
	How?
	You go to dailywire.com slash backstage.
	Use code BACKSTAGE. You'll get 25% off your new membership.
	When you do, you'll automatically be entered to win our VIP experience, which includes two tickets, plus travel, to see an episode of Backstage Live, a meet and greet with me and the other backstage hosts, signed copies of Ben's book, and a tour of Daily Wire Studios and offices right here in Nashville.
	Current Daily Wire members, you can get your questions into the chat box right now for our Q&A later on tonight.
	Wow.
	Was that the whole show?
	Are we done?
	Yeah.
	The title, God King, is just an honorific they give you if you make it through all the copy on the teleprompter.
	Really, anyone can be a God King.
	Michael, I have to say, that was one of the bravest things I've ever seen in my life.
	Thank you very much for recognizing my courage and that I need to take care of myself.
	It's just the heroism, the authenticity.
	Yes.
	I was blown away by it.
	Kinzo levels of authenticity.
	Yeah.
	Thank you.
	Of course, we should talk about this story of Simone Biles, actually one of the great American athletes, one of the great gymnasts of all time, perhaps the greatest gymnast of all time, walking off of her team challenge at the Olympics because she had the sads.
	And what do we make of a culture in which such a thing is possible, Matt?
	I think it's important for everyone to understand here.
	And I think I could speak for most people in the room.
	At least myself.
	I wouldn't care.
	I'll just speak for myself.
	If she just walked off and quit and then apologized afterwards and said, hey, you know, I really just felt like I couldn't do it.
	And then everyone reacted with appropriate disappointment and we all said, oh, that's too bad.
	I wouldn't be talking about it at all.
	I wouldn't care.
	I would just say, well, yeah, people quit.
	I understand why people quit.
	It's relatable.
	It's understandable.
	We all quit things when they're hard.
	The problem is when the media tells us that we have to celebrate this thing, when now we take cowardice, and I'm not saying that she's nothing but a coward, but this was a cowardly act.
	Hmm.
	It was a difficult thing she didn't want to do, and she decided not to do it.
	That's something we've all done that before.
	I almost didn't come on the show tonight.
	When you tell us that that is now, I think the New York Times called that radical courage, that's when it becomes absurd.
	And there's also a double standard here, too, because we know, you know, you cannot imagine Tom Brady in the middle of the playoffs, third quarter, they're down by a couple scores.
	And he walks off the field, goes to the sideline and says, hey, coach, you know, I'm just not in the right space right now.
	I need to sit and collect my thoughts.
	It would never happen.
	And if it did happen, I don't think there'd be anyone celebrating his courage for doing it.
	Did you see what her teammate said?
	So she came out and because one of the arguments was, well, Simone Biles, a woman who I had never heard of until last night, by the way, that's how little I care about the Olympics.
	I wouldn't be talking about it except for this reaction.
	And they said, well, Simone Biles let her teammates down.
	And then the teammate came out and said, this is wonderful.
	We support her.
	We don't owe you a gold medal.
	This is just about us.
	And so it's true that the athletes don't owe us a gold medal.
	But they do owe us trying.
	They do owe us competing because it's not actually about Simone Biles.
	I mean, I take it to be she's a wonderful athlete.
	It is somewhat about the team, but it's really about the country.
	We sent them to go represent us and go try to win some medals.
	And so there is a sense of duty, I think, or there used to be.
	I think that the big question, there's a sort of preliminary question and there's the secondary question.
	The preliminary question is why she actually walked off.
	So if she actually walked off, Because she was suffering from what they're now calling aerial disorientation, which apparently is a thing, where you get up in the air and you don't know where you are, and it can be really dangerous.
	Like, if you see what she does, I mean, if you actually see her performance, it's unbelievable.
	Michael hasn't, but I think everyone else on Earth literally has.
	It's just, I mean, it's incredible what the woman's capable of doing, and she's been the best gymnast on Earth for the last eight years.
	If she was actually in a place where mentally she had lost her ability to orient her body, and so she could really hurt herself, and so she said, I'm not going to do this, that is understandable, but it's still not heroic.
	And this is the part that gets to the secondary question.
	So putting aside whether she's wrong or cowardly, that depends on the reason why she actually walked off.
	They worked their way to this aerial disorientation argument.
	That's not what was being said at the time.
	It's not what she said.
	Right.
	She explained why she walked off.
	We're all trying to interpret what was the real reason.
	She actually said it.
	She said she wasn't having fun.
	She said she was under a lot of pressure.
	She wanted to do it for herself, not anybody else.
	Those are the reasons she gave.
	That's fair enough.
	The real bigger question is the one that you're asking, which is why as a culture, because I care less about her as an individual and why she did what she did, why as a culture, there are multiple op-eds, one in the Times, one in the Washington Post, talking about how we have to redefine victory To include not participating.
	And what makes the hero the hero of any story is overcoming the obstacle, not sitting down.
	Michael Jordan played famously a game in the playoffs where he had the flu.
	He plays this unbelievable game, he scores over 40 points, and this is known as the flu game.
	It was one of Michael Jordan's kind of storied moments in his career.
	If he had sat down and said, listen, I have the flu tonight, I can't play.
	Nobody would have been like, wow, that's terrible.
	What a terrible person.
	He didn't play through the flu.
	But what made him the hero is that he played through the flu, right?
	Is that he played while he was sick.
	And the move from I did what I was supposed to do for my teammates despite the obstacle is the heroism to I've honored my own authentic feelings of what I ought to do.
	That is a society-wide problem, right?
	And that's not relegated to sports.
	We have decided as a culture that we care more about you honoring your own authenticity than we care about you fulfilling your obligations to others.
	It's the purpose of what these people do.
	After all, all they're doing is like flipping through the air.
	And the reason you do that is to demonstrate excellence.
	And to demonstrate excellence, you have to overcome the obstacles.
	And I don't want to pick on her.
	I'm with you on this.
	I don't want to pick on her.
	Maybe she felt she was in danger.
	Maybe she felt she couldn't pull it off.
	There's no...
	It's not exactly a shame to say I cannot do this.
	It is a shame to hold that up to people as heroism.
	In the same way to send out a soccer team that kneels...
	That's the American soccer team that kneels...
	Well, honestly, I was happy that they lost it this week.
	Well, me too.
	I felt like a good bunch of Swedish blondes beat these purple-headed...
	Donald Trump's never said anything truer than America is glad that they lost.
	Of course we're glad that they lost because...
	Because they don't represent us.
	Why would I be happy that they win when they are choosing not to represent me?
	There's a reason they're there.
	There's a reason to honor America.
	The entire argument that we can have people at the Olympics who kneel or don't pay attention to the anthem, it's the equivalent of the Yankees signing somebody for $100 million and they go out on the field and like, you know what, I hate the Yankees.
	I'm just going to rip these stripes right off my shoulder.
	Who in their right mind...
	The owner wouldn't allow that to happen.
	I'm so confused as to why we as a country who sponsored these athletes to go to the Olympics are supposed to be okay and celebratory.
	I also find this is kind of almost circular.
	We started at, I guess, the women's movement being like, we really just need to have women into these spaces.
	Men have sports.
	We need to have a women's sports team.
	Men have a gymnast team.
	We need to have a women's gymnastics team.
	We can do what men can do.
	And then it just seems to be over and over again, it's the women that are throwing down the towel and saying, this is too much pressure, I can't do this.
	You've got Naomi Osaka, you've got Simone Biles walking away.
	I just haven't seen a guy do this and say, I just can't do this because I'm under emotional pressure.
	So, you know, this might be an argument for trans women in the Olympics.
	I don't know.
	Well, did you see, actually, on that point, and it kind of ties in with the excellence point that you made, Drew, the head of the Olympics Broadcasting Agency said, this year, unlike years in the past, we are not going to focus the camera angles on the women's bodies, because that's wrong.
	We shouldn't be looking at the women's bodies.
	And I thought, you know...
	These are the most beautiful, exquisitely sculpted people, the men and the women for that matter, like on Earth.
	We send them all there.
	Like 0% body fat?
	0% body fat.
	This goes back to ancient Greece.
	These people are physical specimens, and we're not allowed to marvel at that anymore.
	Actually, that level of excellence...
	I actually want to pick up on this idea of marveling, because I think that the entire...
	The Victoria's Secret models when they removed the angels from the catalog and everyone was like, well, this is good because these incredibly physically fit, genetically unbelievable specimens of humanity shouldn't be models.
	And I thought, well, no, that's what a model is.
	A model...
	When we call someone a model, it's not the same...
	The word doesn't mean the same thing as when we say that you have a model train.
	A model train is a miniature replica of something much larger.
	When we use the word model for someone who is a fashion model, we're actually saying that they are the ideal form.
	It's aspirational.
	It's aspirational.
	And athletes are aspirational.
	We watch athletes because we want...
	Not because...
	I can't do what they do.
	People on Twitter are like, how dare you say that she did the wrong thing?
	You could never do half of what she does.
	Of course I can't do half of what she does.
	The reason that we send people up to do these things and to represent our country by doing them is because we aspire to.
	It's not that I want to be Tom Brady.
	I don't care about football enough to be Tom Brady.
	I don't have any of the innate capabilities of Tom Brady.
	I don't have the discipline of Tom Brady.
	But in some way, when I engage with the sport, Tom Brady represents an idealized form of what humans can achieve.
	And that is part that's part of his job.
	They do what they do so that we can.
	And that kind of connects with what Ben is saying.
	So saying it's actually a larger discussion about what we're doing in society right now.
	Right.
	So now they're trying to edit everybody and say, actually, we shouldn't aspire towards victory.
	We should aspire towards walking away and just throwing the towel in.
	That's now something that we should be, you know, should be aspirational in society.
	And then you take a look at what's going on at the same time in the school system.
	You know, I talked about it on my show, but, you know, Bill Gates is funding an initiative called Equitable Math, right?
	Because they determined that getting the right answer in math is racist, right?
	I'm not kidding.
	It's a form of white supremacy to ask kids to get the right answer in math.
	I was never racist in math class in that class.
	I was never racist in math class either.
	But, you know, so they said instead what we need to do in the classroom is we need to have children that get the correct amount of points even though their answer is wrong because they tried.
	And this is really the same thing that's happening here.
	You're literally just saying it's no longer enough to be good or to be great, doing things absolutely wrong, walking away, that's now.
	You don't even have to try.
	Yeah, you don't have to try.
	There's something so self-serving about this.
	Because, yeah, if we criticize Simone Biles, suddenly we're the bad guys.
	But really, and we're being selfish or something because we want her to put her body at risk.
	No, as you say, this is aspirational.
	These are great...
	And we want to see them do great things.
	For them to quit in the middle is disappointing, but the people who say, oh no, quitting is actually courageous because you're living your truth, and as long as you're maintaining your own psychological health, it's actually a courageous thing to do.
	That's just another way of them saying, well, I'm courageous also, because anyone can do that.
	I mean, anybody...
	Anyone cannot participate.
	Right, exactly.
	It's bravery is rare.
	That's why we look up to it.
	When something is, it is very, very difficult to be an Olympic gymnast.
	I fully understand that.
	And the pressure that Simone Biles is under as the greatest, and everyone is expecting greatness from you all the time.
	To even try to live up to that is incredibly difficult, and most people can't do it.
	That's why we admire it.
	But saying, this is difficult, I don't want to do it.
	Anyone can do that, and so if that's courageous, if I'm saying that's courageous, what I'm saying is, well, I get to be courageous too.
	It's also the misapplication of compassion, which I feel is a really damaging thing for society as a whole.
	Of course I feel compassion for her.
	I feel compassion for a guy who feels like he's a woman inside.
	I'm compassionate for the suffering that they feel, but that doesn't make him a woman, and it doesn't mean that this is a heroic act.
	You can actually feel somebody else's pain without...
	I actually do object to our friend Charlie Kirk, and listen, obviously we all admire and are friendly with Charlie.
	I think that he went overboard when he said something along the lines of that she's a sociopath for what she did.
	She's not a sociopath for what she did.
	She's narcissistic, though, not for what she did, but because of her Justification for it, yeah.
	Of what she did.
	That is a narcissistic act.
	Well, yeah, and I want to get to talking about narcissism because it's funny because they started to sort of thread Naomi Osaka, at the same time they were trending, Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles, is that correct?
	Yes.
	And Meghan Markle.
	And they said, this year, black women are saying they've had enough.
	And again, talking about the irony here, the same argument with the feminist, right?
	So it's like, you have the black...
	Group of black people that believe we're just not allowed into these spaces, right?
	There's just institutional racism everywhere.
	And then when you get into these spaces, you say, I quit, right?
	So it's just like, I just don't understand where this goalpost is going, right?
	So Meghan Markle, they've been historically racist.
	She married to the family.
	I quit, right?
	Simone Biles, oh, it's historical racism.
	There's no black people.
	I quit.
	It's like, so what is the actual goal?
	I don't know where we're going.
	And maybe that is the point.
	It's just chaos.
	Well, it's this radical kind of subjectivism, right?
	Because this is actually what ties in the math and the physical bodies and everything.
	It's this full-on assault on standards where when the friend who's on the Olympic team says, well, we're winners in our hearts, I think, well, that's great, but we want you to be winners in reality, actually.
	My TV preferred.
	You know, if you now say that there is a standard of physical excellence or right or wrong or true or false or good or bad, Then math is racist and Victoria's Secret is racist.
	Now you're seeing just this total inversion where that which is sort of false and wrong and ugly, that's exalted as the highest good.
	Is that an actual quote?
	Winners in our heart?
	Did someone say that?
	Yeah, this member of the Olympic team.
	She tweeted it out.
	Earlier this week on my podcast, I was talking about how We have an empathy crisis in this country, but the crisis isn't lack of empathy.
	It's that we have two very different versions of what empathy constitutes.
	On the one hand, you have people generally on the right who believe that what empathy is is understanding that other people are individual human beings with the capacity to reason and come to conclusions.
	And so if they come to a conclusion that is different from your own, you still have to respect the fact they came to a conclusion different from your own.
	But...
	whether that conclusion is right or wrong, and you can hold them to particular standards.
	So you understand that the other person is a person, but they're still held to that particular standard.
	It's not unempathetic to hold that person to the standard.
	It's actually more empathetic because you expect them to be a rational human being.
	And then there's the standard of the left, which is that empathy means that whatever is the subjective feeling that somebody has inside, all of society is supposed to conform to that.
	All of policy is supposed to conform to that.
	And that creates a really asymmetrical politics.
	Because if you're on the left and you conflate policy with empathy, then what this means is that if you oppose my policy, you are non-empathetic by definition.
	You're a bad person by definition.
	Whereas people on the right, we understand that policy is completely not connected with empathy.
	It has nothing to do with empathy in the sense that the left is talking about it.
	And so you could disagree with me on policy and still be an empathetic person.
	The left just doesn't accept that.
	I think that this goes to something.
	You're saying it in a sort of glib, funny way, but there is a feminine component to this, that we live in a society now that has taken everything feminine, good and bad, and elevated it to virtue and everything that's masculine, good and bad, and denigrated it to sin.
	And so, The effect of this is that you have negative femininity being treated good and positive masculinity being treated as bad.
	I'm not saying that a woman's rights should be limited in any way.
	I'm saying something descriptive here, not proscriptive to borrow from Ben.
	It is a simple fact that for the vast majority of human history...
	Women have been primarily concerned with building the home.
	And building the home requires huge amounts of empathy because you're working with the most flawed people, children, and you're helping to rear them and make adults out of them.
	Men, historically, have been not...
	Primarily concerned with building the home.
	They've been concerned with building the home for the home, which is the society.
	And for that reason, in societies we see the best and worst of masculine virtue.
	Horrible masculinity at its worst is very barbarian.
	You see this in pre-civilizational societies.
	You see it in certain third world societies or Middle Eastern societies.
	But there are positive aspects of masculinity, which were cultivated largely in Western society, imperfectly but over time, where you have concepts like justice, not social justice, but justice.
	Justice is not empathetic.
	You don't want to raise your kids, justice doesn't.
	You have to raise your kids empathy first, but you have to order your society justice first.
	And we're at this place now where instead of having a natural tension between those two things, we've just completely eliminated one of them as evil.
	And so it is women primarily.
	It's an acknowledgement of our biological predispositions, and that's the irony, and that's why I laugh at this stuff, because every time you see it, it's a woman.
	It is Naomi Osaka.
	It is Simone Biles.
	And you look at them, and you just go, you are acknowledging that women are not the same under pressure as men.
	And it's funny, but it's...
	It is what it is.
	I laugh at it and I say, okay, you know, I'm happy.
	You want to go home?
	I don't mind.
	I'm with you.
	I think it's totally fine, acceptable.
	They are under a lot of pressure.
	There's no requirement for them to have to perform.
	But I do have, I think it's very annoying when afterwards they come to us and it's like, well, this person is a hero anyways.
	I won in our, we won in our hearts, said no male team ever.
	You know, this also goes back to what Michael was saying about these bodies.
	I would actually go further than what you're saying, because I think the female body is at the center of all human relationship.
	I mean, the attraction to the female body.
	Like everybody, I only watch women's sports for the skimpy outfits.
	I believe...
	I mean, like everyone on Earth, right?
	Of course.
	I believe they should be able to choose not to wear those skimpy outfits while they're doing the thing that I won't be watching.
	But still...
	The truth is the truth.
	And this attraction that we feel to women's bodies is part of our humanity.
	We're embodied creatures.
	We're here to reproduce.
	I actually said this on Twitter this week.
	Someone was angry about some man objectifying some woman.
	And I said, you know, the fact that men find women attractive...
	It's not bad.
	It's not a thing.
	The promulgation of our entire species depends on men finding women attractive.
	To your point, that is baked in to who we are biologically.
	I'm not suggesting that we are only the sum of our biology.
	I'm not suggesting that every masculine trait is positive, nor am I suggesting every feminine trait is negative.
	But I am saying that unless we can have a conversation about how you balance those things in a modern world, you're only going to end up with the worst things.
	You can never override biology.
	Ultimately, it's going to be negative masculinity that prevails because as good men are weakened, bad men are going to fill that vacuum.
	I watch the WNBA because I want to see if one of them can dunk for the first time.
	That's enough.
	That's enough.
	I have to do an ad and there's no way to segue to an ad.
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	Matt, you never get to go before I go into an ad read ever again.
	So I want to talk a little bit about the craziness happening in the country right now around COVID. You know, one of the things I've tried to discipline myself about lately is not to blame We're good to go.
	Not saying there's not a pandemic.
	I'm not saying that the pandemic hasn't been deadly.
	I'm not saying that no action should have taken place in regard to the pandemic.
	I'm saying the greatest act of mass hysteria and overreach by governments on a global scale in human history is what we've just lived through.
	And now, as we're coming out the other side...
	As the vaccines have been widely dispersed, certainly dispersed enough such that everyone in this country who wants a vaccine has had the opportunity to have the vaccine.
	At this very moment, our federal government and certain state and local governments are considering forcing you to mask again so that you can protect people who choose not to get the vaccine, which is their God-given right.
	So some of them are requiring you now to get vaccinated.
	The Veterans Affairs Office today announced that they're going to require vaccinations from federal workers, which, you know, if it were happening in reverse, you would say that it was a backhanded attempt to drive the opposition party out of what few positions they have left in the federal government.
	And we're supposed to take all of that lying down.
	In fact, social media has an entire basically list of things that we can and cannot say on this show if we don't want to lose our ability to speak on social media in the future.
	And you may say, well, just say it anyway, but we can't sacrifice our voice on this and other important issues just to be reckless and cavalier about the things that we say.
	But you should know, we can't raise any question as to whether or not vaccines, the efficacy of vaccines, you can't raise any questions about the efficacy of masks.
	You can't raise any questions about the danger, the threat of COVID to small children unless you are incredibly precise and say that COVID does not appear to have a high fatality rate among children under 12.
	By even that, they're probably going to flag us and then decide it was okay.
	Well, he was very technically correct.
	And all of this goes to the central question, is it the right of governments to combat misinformation simply because they have determined that that misinformation is creating some sort of nuisance to public safety or public health?
	I think you're being way too kind that that's why they're doing it.
	The Biden administration has made it Very clear that the people they blame for misinformation are conservatives and Fox News.
	And the thing is, that's literally untrue.
	The reason conservatives are not listening to the government and listening to the media about the vaccinations is because the media has lied about them for the past 10 years.
	It has told them Donald Trump was a Russian spy.
	It's told them Brett Kavanaugh was a racist.
	And then, oh, by the way, you should do this.
	And people think like...
	Why should we trust them?
	I just want to add on...
	Even that is a lie, because the least people that are likely to get the vaccines are black Americans.
	So even the lie that it's the conservatives aren't getting the vaccines...
	But it's black Americans in red states.
	And also, blue Americans in blue cities.
	40% of all New York City teachers are not vaccinated.
	The CDC! L.A. County...
	L.A. County...
	Last I checked, LA County, a minority of the residents of LA County are vaccinated at this point.
	There are like five Trump voters left in LA County since I took my family and my company out of LA County, right?
	We all left.
	We were all the Republican voters in LA County.
	The stats, the move that is just mind-boggling to me, beyond the VA, mandating vaccines, and I think, to be honest, I think that there's a case that if you work in a hospital and you're working with uniquely vulnerable people who can't get the vaccine, The notion that if you work in a nursing home, for example, for a living, that you have to get a vaccine to work in a nursing home, that's a different story.
	There's no question that certain career choices that you make come with certain...
	Right.
	But if you're working for MTA or something in New York, the notion that they can fire you if you don't get a vaccine is absurd.
	And the one that's utterly mind-boggling, astonishing to me, as the pro-vax guy on the right, right?
	I love the vaccines.
	I think the vaccines are great.
	I got the vaccine.
	My wife got the vaccine.
	My parents got the vaccine.
	We got it literally the first day that we could.
	I think they're...
	I think they're a miracle.
	I think that if you look at the disconnect between the case rate and the death rate in countries that have wide levels of vaccination, it is unbelievable how they've been disconnected.
	I mean, like, we are averaging in this country a seven-day average, 290 deaths a day.
	We are up at three, four thousand deaths a day back in the early part of the year.
	That is largely because of the vaccinations and as well as the natural immunity that's been produced by widespread of the actual COVID. As the pro-vax guy, the notion that we, the vaccinated, are supposed to mask up is so unrooted in anything remotely approaching the science that it's insane.
	It makes me want to punch a wall.
	It is beyond crazy.
	I don't know why the pro-vax people thought that getting the vaccine was going to give you a freedom back.
	That was the part that I was just going like...
	LOL. Like, I was like, everyone really thinks, like, two weeks or so.
	I mean, just like, how far are we going to go?
	No, but the difference is, okay, so for me and for my parents, so let me say my parents.
	My parents are 65.
	I didn't want them walking around unprotected with COVID.
	Once they got the vaccine, then forget about everything else.
	Now I said to them, it is much safer for you to walk around unmasked, which it is.
	It's much safer for them to walk around unmasked because even if they were to be exposed to COVID, their chances of actually being hospitalized from COVID are vanishingly small.
	I read the same CDC that's saying the vaccinated need to mask up now reports.
	There have been 161 million Americans who have been vaccinated.
	Totally vaccinated.
	Which, by the way, is an unbelievable thing.
	We vaccinated half the country with a non-FDA approved vaccine.
	We're still operating under FDA. This is also mind-boggling.
	We're operating under FDA. It shows the FDA is a pile of garbage.
	FDA emergency authorization, but you are mandated to get the vaccine before full authorization of the vaccine.
	So what are you going to do?
	Suck it back out of my arm if you don't get the full authorization?
	But put that aside.
	161 million people in the United States have been fully vaccinated.
	There have been a grand total, according to the CDC, of less than 6,000 hospitalizations among the vaccinated in the United States, which means that your chances of being hospitalized after being vaccinated in the United States are 1 in 27,223.
	But Ben, the statistics literally don't matter.
	Why did you think that if you did everything the government said you were going to get your freedoms back?
	That's my question.
	Well, I'll say this.
	But here's the thing.
	It's the government.
	But there came a point, and this is the thing that's happening.
	I didn't think that the left was going to ever give the freedoms back.
	But I did think that more Americans were going to take their freedoms back.
	And this has been fun.
	Jeremy and I have had this kind of conversation many times since the beginning of the pandemic.
	Jeremy was very anti-everything at the very beginning.
	But he also thought that everybody was going to be very robust in their defense of their individual freedoms.
	I was much more like, let's hold off.
	Let's see how this thing goes.
	I was much more cautious with regard to the pandemic.
	But I also thought that a lot more people were going to be like me.
	Like, they're going to be more cautious.
	But even I am just...
	I'm bewildered and befuddled by the fact that so many Americans are going along with this absolute, utter, unbelievable bullshit.
	It's unbelievable to me.
	I'll say to toot my own horn, because with a name like God King...
	It was Liz Wheeler and I from day one.
	It was pretty close.
	A couple of weeks after me, maybe like two months after me, I was day freaking one on my Twitter feed.
	Like, come on, guys.
	Oh, I was too.
	Come on.
	I mean, it's just...
	And my entire point was, what the government takes, it is loathe to ever give back.
	Of course.
	But I will say, where I was wrong, I think I was right about the nature of government, I was wrong about the nature of the citizenry.
	I genuinely thought, You know, people will take this for weeks.
	And then as the weeks turned into months, I thought, well, people are really afraid.
	Maybe another month or two people are going to put up with this.
	But Americans, we're a feisty bunch.
	We're a rebellious bunch.
	We're a self-determining bunch.
	I'm shocked at the level of people.
	We're 18 months into this thing or something.
	But do you know what we're missing?
	The thing that is missing from this conversation is we're thinking of it, okay, there's a big government pushing this on one hand, and the citizens either going along with it or fighting back on the other.
	But it's not just big government.
	We've said it ourselves tonight.
	It's the media.
	It's not just the media.
	It's the media.
	It's big tech.
	It's the universities.
	It's the corporations.
	It's the blob.
	It's the liberal establishment working in concert, by the way.
	You've got now the Biden administration admitting...
	For all intents and purposes, that big tech is acting as a proxy, an enforcement wing for the government.
	So it's, you know, just to focus all of our ire on the government, obviously I'm extremely irritated at them, but it's the NGOs.
	It's just every...
	It's also, it's not just...
	I think your point is correct.
	We can talk about government.
	We can talk about media.
	We can talk about all these big institutions.
	But there's also something deeply sick within the American population.
	And that is a frightening thing to confront.
	It's very depressing.
	And there's no quick answer to it.
	But I think part of it, at a deep level, I think part of what's happened here and why people haven't been robust in the defense of their liberties is that for a lot of Americans, this was a confrontation with mortality.
	That they've just never...
	I think a lot of Americans had lived...
	Because we live very comfortable lives.
	More comfortable lives than anyone had ever lived in the history of mankind.
	Like an unprecedented level of comfort and luxury and freedom up until now.
	And this was this moment where for the first time, lots of people had to confront the fact that they're going to die and that death is lurking around the corner.
	And I actually think that there are millions of people who had never actually reflected on that fact, and now they can't handle...
	The reality.
	Any level of risk, they cannot handle it.
	It's a very peculiar thing, and I've said this on the show before, that essentially after the Second World War, the West defeated war, disease, poverty, and death.
	We live these lives where it's not that there is no poverty.
	It's not that there is no disease.
	It's not that there is no war or that there is no death.
	It's that the vast majority of us very rarely, if ever, encounter those things.
	And the result of that is that for the first time in history, if you happen to be one of the people who did encounter one of those things, it becomes very defining for you because it's isolating.
	Because there's no one with whom you can share that experience.
	And so, you know, I mean, we talk about how the forever war, neocons just won a forever war in Afghanistan 20 years.
	I mean, you know the British had a war called the 100 Years War.
	Like, war was forever until the middle of the 20th century.
	There were fighting seasons, and every fighting season, every fighting-age man, that's where these words come from, fighting season, fighting-age man, every fighting-age man during the fighting season would go off to war.
	When that happened, you saw horrible atrocities.
	You saw terrible things, just like modern combat.
	But when you came home and you were haunted by those things, You hadn't been unique out of the common human experience.
	Your neighbor had gone through those things.
	Your father had gone through those things.
	Your grandfather had gone through those things.
	And so you had some context to understand your experience.
	Similarly, if you lose a child in this day and age, obviously, I can't fathom anything harder than losing a child.
	It's almost unimaginable.
	And yet, if you lived before the 20th century, every single person lost a child.
	Every one of them.
	And so, if you lost a child, you weren't unique out of the human experience.
	Your mother had lost a child, and your neighbor had lost a child.
	So, all these things that we experience now, confronting our mortality, PTSD, loss of...
	We see, and so disease is the other one.
	Most of us have not really encountered disease.
	And when we do, we put ribbons on our door and we're basically made heroes because we're the one in anybody who's actually faced, especially if you're below a certain age, the one of anybody who ever faces a disease.
	You have no context to put that in.
	Now comes a disease, not in the scheme of things, all that fatal a disease, although obviously compared to the Compared to the bubonic plague, it's not particularly fatal.
	Along comes this disease, and it does suddenly affect all of us for the first time again, and none of us are prepared for it.
	We're not prepared for it experientially.
	We're not prepared for it as a community.
	We're not...
	Prepared for it spiritually, which is, I think, a big part of what you're driving it here.
	We have absolutely no way to contextualize the thing that we're experiencing.
	And, you know, when you say disease, it's not just disease, it's pandemics.
	Just like there was a fighting season, pandemics swept through all the time.
	And you're absolutely right.
	It was cholera season.
	The cholera season and the plague.
	I mean, you forget that, like, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet during the plague.
	There were always plagues.
	And the plagues, some of those plagues wiped out like a third of the world.
	And it was just...
	What happened to people?
	And that has stopped.
	It's a miracle.
	It's a wonderful, wonderful thing.
	But of course it has the side effect of making people afraid.
	I also think, to go back to the media for one second, the media are such damned liars about this.
	It is unbelievable.
	And they lie with stats and people have no familiarity with how statistics work.
	And so they'll say things like, wow, the number of deaths is up like 40%.
	Oh, you mean it went from like 2 to 2.8?
	Right?
	There was a clip the other night of Allison Camerata and Victor Blackwell trying to browbeat a mayor outside of St.
	Louis.
	And they were saying to him, you're not forcing your citizens to mask up.
	You should be forcing your citizens to mask up because people are dying in St.
	Louis County.
	So I had the temerity to actually look how many people are dying in St.
	Louis County.
	St.
	Louis County is a county of about 996,000 people.
	Their daily rolling average of deaths from COVID is one.
	Yeah.
	We're still missing also some of the political aspect here, which is, yeah, the media probably at the lead of it.
	But when we say it's an overreaction by the ruling class, it's an overreaction from the perspective of our way of life and our rights.
	It's not an overreaction from them because what this lockdown has resulted in is a massive historic transfer of wealth and power from especially the middle class, but lower classes too, to a very small handful of extremely wealthy people.
	Billionaire oligarchs in Silicon Valley.
	Who own newspapers.
	Amazon and obviously to the government.
	I thought it was so ironic and frustrating when Jeff Bezos goes into space Which is a different topic.
	I thought that was great, but I think it's great that billionaires going into space.
	If they're going to build stuff, rather than building a mansion for their poodle or whatever, why not build spaceships?
	But anyway, Jeff Bezos goes into space.
	You've got all these leftists that are complaining about this rich guy, and he's so evil, and Amazon is evil.
	Well, not only do they all use Amazon, of course, and almost every adult in the country is an Amazon Prime member, literally, but Amazon was enriched by these lockdown policies to an extreme degree, and a lot of these same people supported those policies, which, as you say, is this thing that transferred wealth over to these corporations.
	These corporations are the first one to really hit hard on that fear mechanism.
	They want to keep you fearful.
	You go into Whole Foods, Jeff Bezos owns that.
	You go onto Amazon.com, we're all in this together.
	All this messaging, we're all in this together.
	When you look at the corporations that are controlling that messaging, who want to keep this pandemic going on forever, they're the ones that are simultaneously lining their pockets.
	And people don't need to think through that.
	So I always follow money, you know, because to me there's always going to be a financial incentive.
	And, you know, you see Bill Gates popping up everywhere.
	I mean, just recently, before it was announced a couple of days ago about the PCR test, CDC issued some—I'm sure you saw the updated guidance about the PCR test and saying they're no longer, you know, efficient.
	They pulled back.
	They're not efficient in terms of determining the differences between— COVID and other viruses, which the conspiracy theorists said for a very long time, but surprise, surprise, it took them this long.
	But prior to them making that announcement, we see that Bill Gates is invested in a new technology to determine COVID. So it's just like, how much do they know?
	When are they knowing this stuff?
	When are we getting this information?
	It seems like we're getting the information sort of at the end of everything.
	And I don't trust the government, but I do want to say in defense of the American people, because I actually don't think the reason that you don't see these uprisings as much, because you look overseas, obviously in Europe, you've got the uprisings happening every day in France.
	We have the uprising happening in England, happening in Greece, and these people have had enough of lockdowns.
	But it's also the structure of our government that this allows that, for better or for worse.
	What I mean by that is state rights, right?
	There's no reason people in Florida, no reason people in Tennessee to get up and start, because we're not living how people are living in New York.
	And those people that are living in New York are the neurotic types that are okay with these lockdowns.
	So that's part of the reason that you're not seeing the upriding, because people that are most likely to say, hey, I want my freedom back, are actually living in free states.
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	True.
	Can I just speak into something that Knowles was talking about, which is this frightening conglomeration.
	Although this is the second time that you've affirmed something that Knowles is talking about.
	This is way too many.
	I'm going to try and make it intelligent.
	The conglomeration of powers that is now, you know, the corporations, the government, the media, the academy.
	Imagine for a moment if the churches had stood up against the lockdowns.
	If they had said what John MacArthur at Grace Church in California said, he said, I'm not here to protect people from the flu.
	I'm here to protect people from eternal damnation.
	Because of what you're talking about, because of the way that death and the four horsemen of the apocalypse have sort of been pushed back into the background, we have lost that sense of immediacy that used to be represented by the Magdalene with her skull that your sins are about to be answered for soon.
	And you're not in the distant future, but soon.
	And so the churches have lost their faith.
	I believe the churches have lost their faith actually in the supernatural, in the thing that they're supposed to be preaching.
	So there used to be a state And the church.
	That used to be the two people who argued over who had the power.
	Now the church is basically folded.
	I mean, there's very, very few churches, incredibly few churches, that said, you don't have the right to shut down churches.
	Constitutionally, you do not have the right.
	And because they didn't do that, there's an essentially...
	Why should we rebel?
	What side are we on if we rebel?
	I do want to ask a question, and I'll ask it to anybody, but maybe Ben, I actually want to hear.
	What is your opinion on people who are naturally immune, who naturally have the antibodies?
	Where is that in the discussion?
	It is, again, an insane failure of the public health establishment not to even talk about this.
	Right.
	There are some good studies out of Israel that suggest that not only is natural immunity a result of infection, but also that natural immunity may be more durable.
	That's what the studies from Israel are suggesting.
	Common sense suggests that too.
	When you make these herd immunity arguments over what percentage of the population is vaccinated, it would be remiss not to actually say how many people I mean, how do we not even have that stat?
	How do we not even have the stat as to how many people who are not vaccinated already got COVID and were diagnosed with COVID? What happened to the ticker on CNN that was counting up infections?
	Basically, by now, everybody should have had COVID, and yet they're telling us that doesn't matter.
	Everyone has to get the vaccine.
	And it's also an easy way for the media to elide one reason why a lot of people are not getting the vaccine.
	If you talk to people who are not getting the vaccine, there are a bunch of reasons why people aren't getting the vaccine.
	Some range from the completely unreasonable to the somewhat reasonable.
	And the somewhat reasonable is, I had COVID three months ago, and I was diagnosed with COVID, and I have a natural immunity now, so I don't need the vaccine.
	I have not heard any scientists really speak to, does the vaccine make things stronger?
	I had chickenpox when I was a kid.
	I wouldn't just go get the chickenpox vaccine for no reason.
	You used to have chickenpox parties when people were kids, right?
	That's what we had, chickenpox parties.
	But I think you're missing an important aspect of this, which is that the vaccine mandates are not about public health.
	At this point, the vaccine mandate is about making you bend the knee.
	It's the imposition.
	Yes.
	You must acknowledge the power of the ruling class.
	You must acknowledge the authority of the media.
	This is why they're talking about expanding testing into small children for whether we should use the vaccine or not.
	To date, Again, I will quote the CDC statistics because we can't get blacklisted for quoting the CDC, apparently, the all-knowing, all-powerful CDC. So I'm only going to quote CDC stats tonight.
	Okay, according to the CDC, grand total number of children under the age of 18 who have died of COVID is 337.
	A huge number of those kids have pre-existing conditions.
	Right, had real comorbidities.
	Leukemia.
	Right.
	The number of people in the United States, according to the Census Bureau, under the age of 18 is somewhere between 73 and 75 million people.
	Okay, the number of people who have died in the same period.
	In the same age group, from pneumonia, is 810, according to the CDC. So this idea that we have to vaccinate every single three-year-old, or that all the three-year-olds have to mask up to protect their teachers, right?
	If the teacher wants to get the vaccine, get the vaccine.
	Get the vaccine.
	40% of New York City teachers are not vaccinated.
	The reason they're not vaccinated is because a lot of them don't want to go back to the classroom, frankly.
	And I think also there's the gaslighting because we've expanded the definition of what it means to be anti-vax.
	It used to mean that you just don't believe in vaccines and don't want to touch vaccines.
	You think they're all bad, right?
	And now it's included people who have gotten the vaccine, had a bad reaction, spoke about it.
	Eric Clapton is now in the anti-vaccine category going, okay, that's weird.
	It also includes people that are just being honest with you about what's going on.
	And there's been this tremendous gaslighting.
	This is where I really have a problem.
	And I agree with you that this is not actually about public health.
	People have listened to exactly what the government told them to do.
	They have locked down their businesses.
	They have stayed at home.
	They got in line.
	They got the vaccine.
	And there are people that have talked about the reactions afterwards.
	Myocarditis obviously is now listed.
	But that was after we knew about the myocarditis.
	We were just listening to people telling their stories who were getting banned and censored.
	moms who did the right thing took their kids to the doctor and said since then my kid has had heart inflammation i knew four months before the cdc decided to acknowledge it so that is what's making people makes people even more uncomfortable with what's going on it's that you are purposefully you know censoring some people to be quiet and hushing them up rather than having an honest discussion if they were honest and said like we are with everything by the way no matter we could put tylenol on this table somebody could have a bad reaction tylenol is generally a good drug you know There's a list of warnings at the end of every drug commercial.
	Every drug, right?
	There's going to be a few people who are not going to have a good reaction to Tylenol, people who are allergic to everything you take.
	If you need an apple, people are going to be allergic to it, right?
	Apples are good to eat.
	I'm not going to say don't eat an apple.
	But they're pretending that this vaccine, it is impossible.
	You are crazy.
	And this mass gaslighting is actually turning people who are traditionally very pro-vax into believing that there is some evil conspiracy here.
	The idea that you have to This whole idea that you have to have one opinion about, what's your opinion on vaccines?
	Are you pro or anti?
	I've always found that to be absurd, even before COVID, when people would ask you, are you pro or anti-vaccine?
	I mean, it depends on the vaccine.
	It depends on the situation.
	It depends on who we're talking about.
	It depends on a lot of things.
	It should be the same thing with the COVID vaccine.
	And, you know, Rand Paul is one who I believe didn't get the vaccine because he had prior infection.
	And that seems like you don't have to have any ideological, philosophical opinion about vaccines to just make that reasonable judgment.
	This is just one of the, to your point, one of the several things about COVID that we just don't talk about.
	It all flows from this crazy term, settled science.
	Well, this is the...
	Nonsense.
	Which doesn't exist.
	In my book, The Authoritarian Moment, I talk about the conflation of the science, TM trademark, you know, the science as an institution, with the actual scientific process.
	And one of the things that you'll notice, and this is really driving me up a wall, if you, like me, would like to see more people who are in vulnerable positions get vaccinated, right?
	I say this all the time.
	I'd like to see.
	There's a guy I was talking with today, 63 years old, didn't get the vaccine.
	I said to him, you probably should.
	He said, well, I'm waiting a year to see what happens.
	I said, do you have a rationale for that?
	You really should, at the very least, go talk to your doctor about getting the vaccine and then get the vaccine.
	You're in the vulnerable category.
	The way that you convince people, if you actually want to take them seriously, is you say, okay, here are the statistics that we know about adverse reactions to the vaccine.
	Here are the statistics we know about adverse reactions to COVID. Your chances of getting an adverse reaction from COVID are this percentage higher than your chances of getting an adverse reaction from the vaccines.
	That is the way that you would convince somebody.
	But no one in the media wants to do that.
	And the reason they don't want to do that is because they don't actually care whether you get vaccinated.
	They care about yelling at you.
	You do it like Tucker.
	You then get thrown and castigated and called a conspiracy theorist anti-vax and you read actual VAERS data.
	And spied on.
	And they're making the frogs gay.
	By the way, he was right about that.
	You know, the historical component of this, too, is something that I think is probably the most scary aspect of it.
	Because...
	What we're talking about is big data, big science, big information.
	And in the 19th century, we had the Industrial Revolution.
	In the 20th century, we had the Managerial Revolution.
	And in the 21st century, what if we had the Information Revolution?
	Everything is becoming smart.
	Your refrigerator is smart.
	Everyone's spying on you.
	You just read an ad about how everyone's spying on you.
	There's a great new book out, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, I'm not sure if you guys have read it yet, by Shoshana Zuboff.
	Really good book about how these big data companies often working with the government are gaining a huge amount of power and a huge amount of influence.
	So while we're talking about the blob and the Fauci's and all of these people taking a lot of political control and money during this, there's a major historical shift in the way that the economy works.
	And so I think we're going to continue to idolize Science and data.
	And the people who have benefited most from this lockdown in terms of power and money are the people who are monetizing.
	Listen, I think that we all have a great...
	Science remains, by pulling data, the one institution in American life that people trust.
	Why?
	Well, because science has produced unbelievable goods for the human race over the course of the last couple of centuries.
	Undeniable.
	Undeniable.
	Right?
	Uncontroversial human goods.
	But because it is such a powerful institution, because it has so much trust, the left has now infused these institutions with its own politics and skewed away from the science.
	They've decided that science is actually just a tool to be wielded like everything else in American society.
	And therefore, if we have to ignore the stats, and if we won't, we won't even tell you the stats, even if it makes the case for what we're talking about.
	Because it's more important that we stake a position here, a moral position, and it's important that you not take that moral position.
	In fact, we will avoid making a convincing case to you.
	Instead, we will say that you are an idiot denier who's only doing this because you watch Tucker Carlson.
	And ignorant because you don't have the data that they have.
	Did you see Jen Psaki yesterday being asked about the data to support the mask mandate on the vaccinated?
	She was asked about it.
	She didn't cite a single stat.
	She didn't cite a single fact.
	She just said, the scientific institutions tell us that this is what's important.
	Well, I'm sorry.
	I wasn't aware that there was a person called the scientific institutions who was touched by the hand of God.
	But this is exactly how Fauci talks, too.
	If you question Fauci, you're questioning the science.
	Well, then, was I questioning the science when Fauci was pro or anti-mask?
	Was I questioning the science when Fauci was pro or anti-schooled This is my problem with science, and of course science, unbelievable, created the modernity and all the miracles that we have, were created utilizing the scientific method.
	My problem with people putting trust in science, I don't like young earth creationism.
	That's a thing in, particularly in evangelical Christianity, is where you look for scientific evidence that the earth is precisely this age or that age.
	6,000 or 5,000 or 18,000.
	There's a few different numbers.
	They'll measure the pressure from oil wells.
	They're always coming to you and saying, now we've got proof of something that we believed going in.
	I always say, here's the problem with doing that.
	The problem with doing that is the science will change.
	And so if you have built your justification for what you believe in faith on something that you believe has been proven by science, what's going to happen to your faith when the science changes?
	It will change.
	The one thing that will absolutely happen every single time is the science will change.
	That's not a flaw in science.
	That's the good thing about science.
	That's the honest part of science.
	There should always be a debate.
	And if there was more of a debate and people talking about what's going on, different reactions that they're having, then I would be much more inclined to say, you know what, okay, at least I know the discussion is honest and I'm more inclined to go and trust this vaccine with the knowledge that I have.
	But there is no debate.
	And again, in my personal opinion, I think that What we are going to see because of the dishonesty, because of the changing, because of the censorship, censoring doctors off of YouTube who are talking about what they're seeing in the emergency room, saying only doctor that can speak is Dr.
	Fauci.
	I think it's actually going to create an underbelly of people that are explicitly anti-vax because they're going to now correlate...
	This experience with every vaccine under the sun.
	And they're going to think, okay, well, if they lied to me about this one, I know that they lied.
	If they gaslit me about my own reaction to this, and they won't even acknowledge that this happened to me, then what about all these other vaccines?
	What am I doing?
	And you're going to start that process of saying, okay, I don't trust any of this.
	And for one big discussion that every woman is having, if anybody's paying attention, and they're just now starting to look into it, is that women are having, you know, menstruation is being affected by this.
	Whether it's, you know, coming later, starting earlier, you know, not to love to have a discussion with all you boys, but like this is a ton...
	Mine has been unaffected.
	Tons of women have been talking about this, right?
	And this is a very big deal for women that are in their baby-making years, like for me.
	This is the most important discussion to be having.
	I want to hear doctors talking about this, debating this, if you want to have children.
	And by the way, it could be because, oh, that's because of blah, blah, blah, that happened.
	There's tons of reasons.
	By the way, the CDC website openly admits that they have no data with regard to how this vaccine affects pregnant women.
	Exactly.
	And rather than having a discussion, they're saying, woman, you have to get this vaccine.
	That is so horrible to say to a woman that we don't have the data, we haven't looked into it, and we're not willing to have this discussion with you, but you damn well better get it.
	That's how you know that someone is not...
	Someone is pro-science if they're open to questions.
	If someone doesn't want any questions, then you know that this is not a scientific person.
	But even the phrase pro-science and anti-science, it's hard not to lapse into it, but the way we're talking about it doesn't actually even make sense because we have to keep reminding ourselves and everyone else that science is just a process.
	by which we come to understand the physical world.
	And so that's all it is.
	To say you're anti-science is like saying you're anti- I don't know, walking or something.
	It's like you're going to, it's a process of going to a certain place.
	So we talk about it like it's an institution.
	We talk about it like it's a person.
	We talk about it as if it's this idea that you could be against or for.
	Instead of a tool.
	A tool for understanding.
	It's a process.
	As I was coming in here, as I was coming into the shop, I was thinking, this is in some strange way an act of insanity.
	Not just because I'm here with Walsh, but here we...
	Ben, we'll talk about him as if he's not here for a moment.
	He's brought out a book.
	He runs a major media company.
	Despite the way he looks, he's actually a fairly intelligent fellow.
	He's written about a really interesting thing.
	The only place where you're going to be interviewed is places like this.
	And why?
	Why doesn't ABC think, you know, there's a guy I disagree with, but that's an interesting point of view.
	Let's bring him on and discuss what it is he sees.
	The fact that that doesn't happen is insane.
	It's insane.
	In fact, ABC finds Republicans to have on.
	They find the ones with whom they agreed the most.
	Right.
	What Republican disagrees with me the least?
	I'd be curious what he thinks about the court jester.
	Those are the only two possible options.
	But we saw this last week when NPR literally put out an article about Daily Wire in which they admitted that we don't tell lies on the site, that we don't engage in conspiracy theories on the site, that we were critical of President Trump from time to time, that we openly acknowledge that we are a conservative website.
	And then they were like, also they have traffic and that really has to stop.
	Successful.
	My favorite phrase was the professor who said, well, you know, any information stripped of context can be misinformation.
	Whoa, okay.
	Amazing.
	You might want to look at the media then.
	From time to time, you might want to actually look at the media.
	It is an amazing thing, and I think it does come down to the left's deep and abiding need to demonize anybody who they disagree with.
	They don't want to convince.
	They just want to destroy.
	Earlier this week, I put out a tweet that was sort of a fun thought experiment where I said, you know, if you want to...
	He's talking about polarization in society, how we all hate each other and all this.
	Okay, well, if you want to stop that, here's an easy idea.
	Just right now, all of us, pick somebody who didn't vote like you did in the last election, tweet at them, famous person, say, I like this person, I think what they have to say is interesting even though we disagree.
	Very, very easy.
	Super easy.
	All of us can list a dozen people off the top of our head who we disagree with, but we still talk to from time to time.
	Michael!
	Well, I said nice.
	And the only people, there were a bunch of people who did it, The only people who did it were people on the right.
	There was not a single blue check on the left who did it.
	In fact, Media Matters started tweeting back at me my bad old tweets to demonstrate again that it couldn't be me, right?
	It could never be, but it couldn't be anybody.
	That's the whole point.
	All of this has become a religious totem for them.
	The masking is now a religious totem.
	If you don't wear the mask, you could see how frustrated people were when the mask mandate ended from the CDC. There were a bunch of people in New York who were like, well, I'm still wearing my mask.
	I don't see why the CDC should be able to say that.
	AOC notoriously.
	I'm just not comfortable.
	Well, do you know AOC made a point exactly on what you're saying, Ben?
	She made it just this week.
	She said, it was unwittingly honest.
	She said, it's not enough to fact check Republicans.
	Subtext, because we can't do that because they're generally not lying.
	She said, we need to attack their core logic.
	I don't think she intended to say this, but what she's saying is we need to attack logic.
	And they do that.
	They say that logical argumentation, objective reality, reason, those are all dog whistles of white supremacy, and we all need to just club each other on the head with our interests.
	And this kind of gets into what we brought up before we started rolling today, but like the PayPal thing.
	Of everything that they said that they're going to start conquering on PayPal with any money to anti-government.
	Does that mean if I make a statement against Biden, you could just say, am I allowed to have a PayPal account?
	What are they actually saying when you say misinformation, anti-government rhetoric, all of this stuff?
	It's so...
	I'm sure that they mean that you can't use PayPal to give money to Kamala Harris after she said that she wouldn't take a vaccine that was created under Donald Trump.
	You know exactly where this is headed.
	It also goes to, and it creates the reactivity from the right.
	So the right looks at the left and we say, we know your game and we know what you're trying to do here.
	And so that's why it's so funny to see sort of the naivete of sort of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger on the January 6th commission.
	We're like, well, we have to uncover the facts or this is just a fact-finding mission.
	And then you have Adam Schiff crying, right, about January 6th.
	And you say to yourself, well, what is the actual purpose here?
	Like, we all know what the actual purpose here is.
	There's not a single human being in America who believes a single new fact is going to be uncovered by the January 6th commission, right?
	No one believes that.
	So what is this really about?
	They're going to figure out who left that bomb outside the RNC and the DNC. Yeah.
	Do you know what Kinzinger said, too?
	I mean, I'll go with the charitable read that it was naivete on their part.
	But Kinzinger, when people brought up, hey, you know, pal, you didn't, this guy is a liberal Republican.
	He's probably not going to be in Congress for very long.
	And they said, you know, you didn't raise any issues about a commission to investigate the BLM riots and who was involved in that, namely the sitting vice president.
	And And he said, well, that's different.
	BLM and Antifa, they committed crimes.
	But what happened at the Capitol, that was an attack on the rule of law.
	Because, you know, the Horn guy came in.
	And I don't mean to downplay it.
	They really made a big mess of things at the Capitol.
	BLM torched police stations and a federal courthouse.
	And people died.
	And people died.
	So you can burn a federal courthouse.
	That's not an attack on the rule of law.
	But you steal Nancy Pelosi's lectern and that's the worst.
	And nobody's been charged, by the way, with insurrection, treason.
	No one has been charged with that.
	No seditious conspiracy.
	They've been charged with trespassing.
	Because that's the best they can do.
	Because that's actually what they did.
	Vandalism, right.
	And if what they did, and this is the obvious point, but as you said, we have to keep, I don't know what else we could do, but keep repeating it, that if that qualifies as insurrection, then I don't know how that wouldn't also apply to going into a police station in a major American city.
	Ten times over.
	And burning it to the ground.
	I mean, that is, you want to talk about dark days in America, what everyone said about January 6th.
	I want to make sure that we don't seem like we're flying cover for what happened at the Capitol on January 6th.
	No, you're right.
	Obviously, there were a million people in town for the president's rally, a million people there to protest.
	I disagree with those million people about what they were there to protest, but they were well within their rights to be there to protest.
	So I don't want to paint with such a broad brush that I'm guilty of what the media is guilty of.
	A million Republicans sacked the Capitol.
	Of course, that's not true.
	There was a very small minority of those people who did do something that was wrong.
	They did do something that was criminal.
	They did do something that was...
	It was mostly peaceful.
	It was mostly peaceful.
	Yeah, it might say it was.
	It was mostly peaceful.
	Nevertheless, you may recall that someone on the left shot up the congressional baseball game and almost killed Steve Scalise.
	You wouldn't know that if you ever watched the media in this country.
	They're so selective.
	A BLM supporter shot six cops.
	Shot six under Barack Obama.
	A bottle of cocktail to police cruisers.
	The BLM supporter of the White House and 60 Secret Service agents were wounded in that.
	Last year.
	But this is what we're doing right now.
	This is whataboutism.
	So you're not allowed to do this, because whataboutism is a bad thing, apparently.
	Which, of course, it isn't.
	Whataboutism is simply...
	There should be a standard.
	It's right.
	It's trying to understand what the standard is, and it's holding you to your own standard, which we're not allowed to do.
	And, of course, here's the thing.
	I think everyone in this room...
	I know everyone in this room...
	has previously stated that they're not in favor of what happened on January 6th.
	So that's been said.
	We all understand that.
	We're all on the same page.
	What the media wants us to do is we have to continue repeating that over and over and over again just because they tell us to.
	Well, it's for 2022.
	That's what it is.
	Their program is unpopular.
	The president is not good at his job.
	His administration is blowing out the inflation and lowering the growth rates.
	People aren't going back to work.
	He didn't put an end to the virus as he bragged that he would.
	And so now, they have to come up with some other narrative.
	And the narrative for four years was Trump.
	Trump's no longer in office.
	So how do you keep that narrative alive?
	You just keep saying January 6th over and over and over again.
	Okay, the reality is everybody who participated in criminal activity on January 6th is now being prosecuted and they will go to jail.
	Hey, that is certainly not true of all the thousands of rioters.
	Well, they're actually being let off the hook in Manhattan and the Bronx.
	The majority of the people who were involved in BLM for looting are just being dismissed for that.
	Right, exactly.
	I just want to point out, the people who threw a Molotov cocktail into a police grouper during the BLM riots in New York were released on bail.
	So the kind of attempt, and we can see what's happening, right?
	The real goal here is not about January 6th.
	The real goal is to do exactly what, Jeremy, you didn't do, right?
	The goal is to say that it was everybody who's at the protest, and not only everybody who's at the protest, every single person who voted for Trump.
	Yeah, everyone who was sympathetic.
	And everybody who even didn't vote for Trump but is sympathetic to anything that doesn't resemble the left-wing position is in their heart guilty of this deep act of evil that happened on January 6th.
	And that is a – it's an argument that's bound to fail.
	It is not going to work.
	Most Americans don't believe that.
	Most Americans can see January 6th for what it was, which was an act of criminality and in some cases evil.
	And also that that does not represent, as one of the cops said the other day, all of America.
	One of the cops said, like, yesterday on the stand – it turns out this person tends to be kind of a left-wing activist on Twitter – that, unsurprisingly, that his experiences during January 6th when people were calling him racist names, this is indicative of something broad about America.
	And that is the left-wing pitch.
	Well, good luck with that, because I think the Republicans are just going to kick the living hell out of the Democrats in 2020.
	I think the Republicans are going to take the House.
	I think there's a 60% shot they retain the Senate.
	I think the Democrats are in for a world of hurt.
	Do you think, though, if we do not get the multiple election integrity measures that are trying to go through the states right now, if we still have things like widespread mail-in ballot harvesting, motor voter laws, Are you still confident that we're going to take the House?
	Yeah, I am.
	I hope so.
	I mean, the polls look good.
	I mean, first of all, I think that those laws have passed in a lot of these states.
	But second of all, I just don't think that the Democrats...
	Donald Trump ain't on the ballot.
	He's a great turnout machine for everybody.
	And him not being on the ballot is for congressional candidates, virtually all who outperformed her.
	I mean, pretty much every Republican congressional candidate, including in the senatorial seat, outperformed Trump in the last election cycle, which is why Republicans outperformed in Congress.
	With Trump not on the ballot in 2022, I think that Republicans, they've taken away the biggest Democratic talking point.
	That's the reason why Pelosi keeps saying Trump in January 6th over and over and over again.
	She wants that report to come out next year.
	She wants to claim that all the Republicans were complicit in that.
	But guess what?
	Americans are not into this.
	They're not into this.
	Trump has not been in office for six months at this point.
	The President of the United States is a doddering, senile old buffoon who can't hold it together and is presiding over the most radical agenda of our lifetime.
	And on whom they depend.
	Yes.
	That doddering old senile president is their only hope.
	If God forbid something were to happen to him, Kamala Harris cannot win a national election.
	Kamala Harris couldn't win a California primary.
	She is the worst politician I have ever seen in my entire life.
	And the Democrats know this.
	They know how fragile this is.
	And the thing for Biden is that Biden also recognizes that because he's the ones from president, they've really...
	Put themselves in a rock and a hard place.
	Biden knows that he's a one-term president.
	He also knows the only way he goes down in history is to do a bunch of radical stuff in this one term.
	And he knows that by the end of next year, he didn't control Congress.
	Before we call her the worst politician, let's not pretend that Hillary Clinton never existed.
	Kamala's worse than Hillary.
	Hillary won votes.
	The thing with Kamala, though, on the worst politician thing, because I liked her.
	I didn't like her.
	I think she's awful.
	But I said she might do well from the beginning.
	And she's a terrible politician with the people.
	But she's pretty good behind the scenes.
	What do you mean by that, exactly?
	Alright, I don't want to get too into detail.
	But at least in terms of the presidency, I'm not talking about California, in terms of the presidency, the woman ended up the vice president of the United States.
	Yeah, but that was an easy woman, black, Indian, that's it.
	That's how they think.
	That's literally how they thought.
	That's the whole reason they put her up.
	They thought she was going to perform much better.
	I think you can leave Indian out, by the way.
	I don't think they know about that.
	Black woman candidate.
	Yeah, that's it.
	There was no other reason because they actually thought she would perform much better and they were shocked when the black community didn't respond to her because they were very aware of her record as a prosecutor and they were not about Kamala Harris.
	She's also fundamentally, she has that Hillary Clinton factor where she's just fundamentally unlikable.
	Every time she speaks, she just looks so bad next to Pence in that debate.
	She looks petty and I think that they realized that and they just sort of pitched her onto Joe Biden's wagon because who else?
	Cory Booker?
	I mean...
	I have certain lifelong dreams.
	One of them is to, you know, play Brahms with Condi.
	Another one is to, you know, go and have a long interview with Thomas Sowell.
	One of the third is to play poker with Kamala Harris.
	Because I will take her for all her money.
	It will be so rich.
	I mean, that woman's poker face.
	She has the worst poker face in the history of politics.
	She's actually just a bad actress.
	So here's a question.
	Everything is true.
	I want to take some member questions from our members over at DailyWire.com.
	You can become a member right now.
	DailyWire.com slash subscribe.
	And this question is for the whole group.
	Though the Olympics have gotten a little woke, you have to remember the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid when the United States hockey team defeated the Soviets and went on to win gold.
	I'm hyped just thinking about it.
	Do you think we will ever get back to that?
	Funny to think that the country actually bonded over the communist hate and how quickly we have forgotten that communism used to be the common enemy.
	Russia will beat us first.
	I don't think we will.
	We're not going to get back to that anytime soon in terms of that sense of national unity and cheering together.
	Because the thing that's lost, and I think this is why people find, for example, the women's soccer team to be so disgusting and we were happy when they lost.
	And I know I certainly was.
	It's just there's this sense of gratitude for the country that's been lost.
	And that's a lot of what patriotism really is.
	It's being grateful for the blessings you've been given by our country.
	And I think we've got a whole generation of people, multiple generations, that haven't been raised with that.
	We don't have an American pastime anymore, right?
	Because we don't have an idea of what Americans are uniting around.
	You know, this is a very interesting thing.
	But I've been a little under the weather, not with COVID. Whatever you're going to catch from me is far, far worse.
	LAUGHTER But I went home from work early yesterday because I was taking some prescriptions and just needed some rest.
	And as I was laying in bed, I watched the pilot episode of a show from the 90s called Star Trek Deep Space Nine.
	And I'm a big Trekkie.
	I've watched every episode of every Star Trek series except Deep Space Nine.
	And the real hardcore Trekkies say it's the best.
	I just never got into it.
	And I was laying there sick.
	And I thought, well, I'm going to watch it.
	So I download this episode.
	I'm watching it.
	It's famous for being the first Star Trek that had a black lead.
	Black commanding officer.
	Because I hadn't prepared to talk about it, I don't know the actor's name off the top of my head.
	But the character's name is Sisko.
	And this was a major moment in the 90s.
	Star Trek was a major franchise.
	Star Trek The Next Generation, a major show.
	And they gave us Captain Janeway, who was the first female captain.
	That made big news.
	And just before that, they gave us Commander Sisko, who was the first black lead.
	And as I was watching the show...
	I was so struck by how disingenuous this racial moment is that we live in right now.
	Because here you had this actor playing a role.
	And the role was a 24th century Starfleet commanding officer, right?
	And we know, if you ever watch The Next Generation, in particular, it's very utopian.
	And in the future, humans, we're a little bit more collectivist and we're a little bit more evolved.
	And we have all these common thoughts about what it means to be a person and what it means to be sentient.
	And This actor gives a performance in which essentially the role that he's playing would not have been dramatically different had it been played by a white actor.
	And in fact there's a scene where he's on the holodeck where you can make all your fantasies come true.
	He's on the holodeck with his son and they're playing a game of baseball.
	And he's having to explain to this non-corporeal alien life form who doesn't understand the physical universe or time.
	And he's trying to explain to them what memories are and what imagination is and how we linear corporeal beings can move ourselves out of this moment and into moments that don't even exist, our past aspirations for our future, this game of baseball that he plays with his son, and the Because it's on the holodeck.
	It's like a 1930s game of baseball.
	It's a different world even from now.
	And part of his speech is about how this is the great pastime.
	This is one of our great endearing pastimes.
	And how illogical it is in its way, but how what we're really doing when we engage in sport We're facing, as linear beings, we're facing an almost unlimited number of possibilities that don't become a predictable reality until you've already done them.
	You can't know what's going to happen.
	Anyway, all of this to say is this very aspirational speech about, essentially, about humanity from a Western point of view.
	I mean, he was declaring what's great about America, although they certainly didn't say America.
	It's in the 21st century.
	And a white actor could have played the role.
	An Hispanic actor could have played the role.
	Race was incidental.
	And I thought, by God, in the 90s we had this thing licked.
	You can't say today that Ibram X. Kendi, all this crap about structural racism, you can't say that the reason that they're burning down Minneapolis and all this stuff is about Jim Crow.
	And in order to be able to say that, you have to be able to draw a line straight back from today to Jim Crow, and you can't have the 90s exist in that thread.
	You can't have a time when Bill Cosby was the most famous You can't have a time when Michael Jackson was the most famous person on Earth.
	Whitney Houston was the most famous female singer.
	The most famous female singer in the world.
	You can't have that time when a black actor playing a role in which he defends Western civilization essentially could have also been played by a white actor and could have also been played by an Hispanic actor where race was not the defining central.
	The fact that that time existed and that it culminated in the ascension of Barack Obama who was the bow on top of our victory over Jim Crow and over the legacy.
	I'm not saying that there are no lingering effects of the treatment of black people in America.
	Of course, that would be a silly thing to say.
	What I am saying, though, is that you can't take this moment And go straight back to Jim Crow without ignoring that moment.
	I really believe that this whole thing is the Democrat hysteria over the failure of the great society.
	Because the fact is, you can't take that moment even before the great society.
	Before the great society, perhaps we're rising into the middle class faster than after the great society.
	It has been a massive, massive failure and the left has been feeding off it like a tick.
	And so they don't want it to go away.
	They don't want all that money and all those bad programs to go away.
	And that's why they're telling...
	I'm sorry.
	I travel all over the place.
	We all travel all over the place.
	I meet people of every color.
	There are lots and lots of black people making it in America and really grateful to be here and really grateful.
	Like all of us are grateful to be here.
	I do not believe they can sell this thing past a certain point of hysteria.
	They own the media.
	They own the government.
	They own the academy.
	But at some point, the truth will unfold.
	But there's this problem, actually getting back to the viewer question, there's this problem of what are we focused on right now?
	And so the American left always shilled for communism and for the Soviet Union, especially on the fringes of it, and they never apologized for it.
	But the American right was really unified because you had all these disparate factions, the libertarians and the hawks and the traditionalists and the religious right and all of them kind of came together to fight the Soviet Union, which they hated for various and diverse reasons.
	And then the Soviet Union falls.
	And so...
	You're not fighting an enemy.
	Then you start fighting terror, broadly, or you start fighting...
	You start fighting each other.
	Because there's no unifying external enemy, now we're all just focused on these issues that we basically had, like, in the 90s.
	Which is everything.
	Working together is everything.
	I mean, if we start to have these arguments between the Trumps and the RNC and all this stuff, we'll fall apart.
	They are so organized.
	You know, the people who took over Russia, who formed the Soviet Union, it's like 23,000 people out of the millions of people who populated Russia.
	It just takes an organized minority to take over a government and take over a country.
	It feels like a dream now or something, but it was real.
	Growing up in the 90s, as I did, and I can remember, you know, in the school system, I went to public school, unfortunately, for all my schooling years.
	And I'm one of many failures to come out of that system.
	But I can remember, I went to a very diverse school system.
	And we had, you know, black kids, white kids, a lot of, there's a heavy Asian population as well.
	I can just remember that we never talked about it.
	It was never an issue.
	There was never any time when we all sat down and talked about our racial differences and what does this mean?
	Let's confront the sins of whiteness.
	That never happened.
	I'm not saying that it was harmonious and everything was great.
	There were a lot of problems.
	But it wasn't an issue.
	And as kids, this is what makes me so angry because having experienced that, I know that if you kind of leave kids to their own devices and you put them in an environment together, yeah, they're going to ask questions, sometimes awkward questions about their differences and that sort of thing.
	But they're not going to see any great deep significance in that.
	They're just going to see each other as kids and they're going to play on the playground.
	Yeah.
	You have to make it an issue.
	You have to go to these kids and say, oh, you see that person over there?
	They look different from you.
	That difference is important and significant.
	And here are some feelings you should have about those differences.
	And that's what we're doing to kids now.
	And it just infuriates me.
	I just want to say, also running parallel to this argument, though, to answer the question another way, and I made the joke, Russia will have that moment first, but I'm being serious because we're moving away from a meritocracy.
	This goes back to our earlier discussion about, like, you're winning by not even competing, right?
	Winning in your heart.
	You're winning in your heart.
	This is now becoming the American perspective.
	So how do you expect America to have a moment in which we win and have something triumphing, like...
	Against Russia, against the Soviet Union, ever being able to replicate that moment when we don't even understand fundamentally what winning is.
	We're starting to say that the concept of winning is wrong.
	That's what's going on in America right now.
	So, no, unless we reverse the Titanic away from the iceberg, I don't see how we have that moment, at least not in our lifetimes, until we...
	We're going to need to have, as Michael says, an existential threat.
	Normally, it would be perfectly obvious what that existential threat is, which is the rising tide of China.
	China is an existential threat to the future of the United States.
	It's an existential threat to the future of the world.
	They're a communist authoritarian power that is on the move.
	They have made radical moves against Hong Kong.
	They've made radical moves in the South China Sea.
	They just unleashed a virus, whether accidentally, which I think, Or not accidentally, that is killed in excess of 4 million people, probably closer to 6 million people if you get the actual stats from India.
	And yet the West's response to that has been, can we yell at each other some more?
	One of the things that's been so amazing is that Europe, which is usually where bad ideas come from in America, usually there's a bad idea in Europe, and then we take it here and we're like, what if we just up the ante on the really terrible idea?
	Now Europe is looking at us and they're going, what are you guys trying to export over here?
	Are you seeing the French go, what is this woke crap that you're trying to push over here?
	When the Europeans are telling us that we're too far to the left...
	I think that we have to start having some conversations.
	So here's a question from a dailywire.com member.
	Should we start a movement to boycott sports that succumb to the woke mob?
	Do you think that type of movement could be organized?
	Would it even work?
	So I think that long-term boycotts are very difficult to make work.
	What does work is the immediate blowback effect.
	So you can have an immediate blowback, because the left never has a long-term boycott.
	The left couldn't even long-term boycott Chick-fil-A. What they did is they created a bunch of headlines in the moment.
	And the headlines are enough to scare the corporate bosses into thinking they're going to have a bad quarter, and then they just kowtow.
	So you can certainly do that.
	And I think, frankly, that the right kind of successfully did this with MLB. I think that Major League Baseball, after the All-Star game, felt the heat.
	And it seemed like they sort of backed off of some of this stuff a little bit.
	And you've seen it with other corporations.
	Coca-Cola did the same sort of thing.
	They sort of backed off.
	In order to renormalize an institution, which is one of the things that I talk about in my book, The Authoritarian Moment, in order to renormalize the institutions, all it requires, as you say, and this is the correct stat, is about 20% of an institution that is diamond-hard, rock-core, aggressive, and will not give up on the principle.
	And the left has used that in order to cudgel everybody else into silence, but The right and the center is like 50-60% of the country.
	And so all you really have to do at your place of work or in response to MLB is say, listen, for one week, none of us are going to a game.
	Just a week.
	We're going to flex our power for one week.
	We're not going to go to any MLB games.
	And that would have the sought-after impact.
	I think the idea that people are going to boycott the NFL or boycott MLB for the rest of time is probably a pipe dream, but you don't have to.
	I actually don't think it's a pipe dream.
	I think it's happening right now.
	I was going to say, I think this is already happening.
	It doesn't even need to be organized.
	If you look at the numbers, the viewership has tanked compared to five years ago.
	The viewership has absolutely tanked.
	In the NBA Finals, I don't even know who played.
	I canceled my MLB. Everybody is canceling their subscription.
	And it's not even, like I said, it's not even because I'm trying to be like, ah, I'm trying to stage a boycott.
	But because I fundamentally, I'm like, I don't feel like being lectured.
	Here's the problem.
	I used to watch sports to tune out.
	Now you guys, every time we're watching a sports, it's a lecture.
	We're seeing people on their knees because they have to say something.
	People are wearing a shirt because they have to say something.
	Someone's wearing a BLM mask because they have to say something.
	And quite frankly, that's not why Americans watch sports, you know?
	So I think we're seeing that naturally.
	And at the same time, The UFC is picking up Dana White.
	The UFC is great.
	The UFC has gone off the chains in the last couple of years because they decided not to make wokeism corporate.
	But I think the problem with what you're describing, Candace, is that that's a bifurcation of the culture.
	And there's no question that the culture is bifurcating, the economy is bifurcating to some degree.
	For a boycott to be effective, it actually has to be organized.
	The reason is this.
	We all stop watching the NBA because screw the NBA. But they don't care because China will keep paying for the NBA. They can accept the loss.
	What they can't accept is instability in the predictability of income, which is why a boycott actually has to come both with the threat of removing the support and the potential to restore the support.
	Only when that exists is there an economic incentive for them to change their behavior.
	When we all just stop, because we have stopped watching the Oscars, we've stopped watching the Golden Globes, we've stopped watching the NBA Finals.
	When that happens...
	They double down on their audience.
	They double down on the people who are still watching.
	That's right.
	Which, in this case, is the Chinese.
	But who cares?
	What's the downside of that?
	Who cares?
	Well, only that it creates a bifurcation.
	It's actually changing who the celebrities are, and they're realizing this, right?
	So once upon a time, everybody, and Osher's just a great example, everybody watched it.
	The speeches meant something, because we were all tuning in.
	Now we're tuning out.
	So if they want to just still say, we're going to have it every year, and we're going to flood in a bunch of money from China, who cares?
	They're not having an impact on our culture anymore, because nobody actually looks up to those people that are giving the speeches.
	There's one issue with the boycotts.
	I don't have any problem with it in principle.
	I think it's a good idea.
	But there's a certain futility to it.
	Because, sure, as conservatives, I stopped watching the NBA too.
	Another issue here is, I'll have to admit, I was never a huge NBA fan.
	So a lot of the people doing these boycotts on the left and right were never using the product to begin with.
	So I was a moderate fan.
	I just stopped watching.
	I wasn't much to give up.
	But if we as conservatives were serious about it, we're going to start boycotting companies that are not in line with our values, that are working against us in the culture, that hate us.
	How about Disney?
	That should be the first place we start.
	Because Disney hates our guts.
	The amount of filth that they put out into the culture.
	And remember, Disney owns ABC, ESPN, so on and so forth.
	But you put that out there to a lot of conservatives and they say, whoa, hang on a second.
	I gotta watch Marvel.
	I can't give that up.
	I mean, this is my whole entertainment repertoire you're asking me to give up.
	And so then you start making these calculations and you realize, well, if I'm going to go down this road, I gotta give up everything or at least all of the things that I care about as a consumer.
	And I identify myself so much as a consumer because we all do as Americans.
	And then I think people just sort of, like here and there, we'll kind of, okay, we won't watch the NBA. But I kind of think, you're not watching the NBA, but you're still watching Marvel movies.
	So what difference does it really make in the end?
	I think that Ben, I agree with Ben that short-term boycotts are fine.
	Long term, though, we have to create our own stuff.
	And this is the actual reason we call you the God King.
	You know, because the stuff we're doing here, I think that's the answer.
	That's what I'm saying, yeah.
	People are watching this.
	This is the reason NPR writes an article, right?
	Why is this, despite the fact that we used to be the kingmakers, we'd have this person speak on the Oscar stage, and they would be the number one person to watch, listen to.
	It's just not happening anymore.
	This is why they're actually demanding more censorship.
	This is the reason why CNN goes, oh my gosh, we need to censor Candace Ellers and the Daily Wire and all of a sudden it needs to be gone.
	Conquering misinformation is what they're always saying.
	But in reality what they're saying is that they're becoming powerless.
	So let them have their shows.
	I don't care.
	For this reason, people should go over and become subscribers at DailyWire.com.
	We started on Monday.
	I can't tell you much about it.
	On Monday, we started producing our next feature film.
	It's not one that the audience knows anything about yet.
	It's not the Gina Carano film, although that begins production very soon as well.
	And we're very excited about it.
	But this is something we haven't even told you about yet.
	And Ben and I were watching dailies in my office earlier.
	It's pretty spectacular.
	It looks great.
	It looks great.
	It's fabulous.
	Here's a very important question from a DailyWire.com member.
	If you were an NFL player, A, what position would you each be?
	And B, how would you handle the forced vaccination situation?
	Drew?
	The forced vaccination situation?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Well, I think that I would have to be a defensive lineman because I'd only live through one play, but no one would get past me.
	So I think that's where I would have to be.
	Fair.
	And yeah, I'm with you on this.
	I'm not for forced vaccinations except in certain situations.
	And I think they've got to refuse them.
	I think they've got to refuse them en masse in sports.
	Yeah.
	I mean, look at me.
	I'm a kicker.
	That's just the reality of the situation.
	Every so often I'll be called upon to fake a pun and then I'll throw the ball four yards and then get back.
	That's pretty much how that works.
	I'm already vaccinated.
	But obviously I agree with Drew.
	I think that the whole point of vaccinating is to protect you.
	If somebody else is unvaccinated, you have taken that upon yourself.
	You have now made the choice because we're all getting immunity one way or the other.
	You're either getting COVID or you're getting the vaccine.
	Those are your two options.
	There's really not a third option where you just don't get COVID. It's here to stay.
	I think I'd probably play third base if I had to pick a position.
	That's the worst.
	I assume I would.
	I don't know.
	I'm a lefty, so maybe first base.
	I don't know.
	The issue of the athlete protests is, I think, the craziest one because these are the healthiest protests.
	Most virile.
	There are the people in the best shape in the entire world.
	And we are telling them, no, you who are, are we allowed to say it, statistically not at a great risk of death from COVID? Is that, I think the CDC would agree with that?
	Young and healthy people, yeah.
	Young and healthy people.
	But the reason that they're forcing it on them is the reason that they're forcing it on the kids going to school.
	Because it's about the imposition much more than it is about any of the data.
	Although I will say, there's a funny line from somebody whose podcast is directly opposite my own, John Lovett over at Pod Save America.
	And he said, it is sort of ironic that the athletes who very often are turning down the vaccines have not turned down cocaine from their friends.
	Candice?
	Quarterback.
	I couldn't see that one coming, Candice.
	Yeah, definitely.
	And obviously, I think everybody knows where I stand on it.
	I think this is another one of those things that I'm going to say.
	You give the government this power now to be able to force vaccinate you with something that is not FDA approved in which they have removed themselves and the vaccine makers from liability.
	And you will never get that back.
	I don't have any opinions that haven't already been taken or any funny answers that haven't already been taken.
	That's it.
	You're not the coach?
	Well, I mean, in this fantasy world where I can actually play football, I guess I'd be the quarterback, too, if that's what I'm doing.
	Yeah, yeah.
	If I were in the NFL, the sport would truly have reached me.
	Drew, what are your thoughts on women being entered into the draft?
	I'm entirely opposed to it.
	I'm entirely opposed to women in combat roles.
	I think that women as ancillary staff is fine.
	The whole point of the military is men going out and killing other men.
	I think that women who leave their children behind and go overseas are doing a terrible disservice to their children and their families.
	I love the people who do it.
	I understand that they are service people.
	I understand that they have served.
	But I think our society should just say, killing is something that men do.
	95%, I think, of crimes are committed by men.
	We are the people who do this stuff.
	And I think we should keep it that way.
	I wonder if this would actually be, we talk about something that would ignite something within the American people to actually resist and stand up for themselves.
	Maybe this, because I can tell you for sure, for me, I would, as a father of two daughters, I would go to jail in a heartbeat.
	I would move from the country.
	I would do whatever was necessary to actually protect my daughters from being drafted into combat, if it would ever come to that.
	And I think that's how most people instinctively feel.
	I mean, I could be wrong.
	But of course, the problem is, yeah, I'm totally opposed to drafting women for the reasons that you gave.
	This is the whole point of having men fight is to protect the women and children.
	But then there's also that sort of that You've got to say to feminists, this is what you wanted.
	This is what you called for.
	You said that you're saying there's no difference between the two sexes, and it's not just feminists saying that, the whole left.
	No real significant difference.
	We can have men competing against women in track and field and wrestling, and it's not a big deal.
	And so you should be celebrating this.
	You should be throwing a parade celebrating this because it's such a profound statement of gender equality.
	Candace, I'm not going to ask you your opinion because I get so tired of people saying, well, you didn't get the woman's opinion about an absolute moral issue.
	What are you talking about?
	The absolute moral issue is kind of it, because what you always hear from the left, they always say, they're like, well, you know, but actually, some study that I did actually shows that women with a certain kind of hormone, they actually are just as strong as men.
	It's like, first of all, that isn't true.
	But second of all, second of all, that's not the point.
	The point is, it's wrong.
	It's ugly.
	It's not right.
	It's not just to send women to go die in combat to protect.
	It's just because men and women are different.
	If there were an If there were a truly existential, like in the real meaning of existential threat, and this has happened at various times and various places where women have had to take up arms because of the severity of...
	I watched this Chris Pratt film because I absolutely love Chris Pratt, and it was like a $200 million movie on Netflix.
	Tomorrow War, yeah.
	Tomorrow War.
	God, it was terrible.
	It just was awful.
	I wanted it to be good because it's got everything.
	Chris Pratt, aliens, Chris Pratt, time travel, Chris Pratt.
	But it wasn't great.
	But one of the things that offended me about the film is actually that these soldiers come from the future and they say, we're your sons and daughters, 20, 30 years on, and this alien force has invaded and humanity is down to 500,000 people and we have to ask you, our fathers and mothers, to come forward To save your progeny, basically.
	We need you to come forward through time to be soldiers in this existential war that we're in.
	And then the next scene is this montage of things that happen very quickly over the next couple of years.
	And the peoples of the world mobilize.
	And you see Taliban warlords going through the time portal.
	And you see people down in the Amazon who've been untouched and never met any outside human.
	They go through the time machine to fight for the future.
	And you see Americans go through and fight for the future.
	Women and men go through a fight for the future.
	And I thought, it's such a bullcrap concept to think that if soldiers came through a wormhole and said, we need you to come save us in the future, that the Taliban would sign up for it.
	There's this thing that Hollywood does, and it's part of this whole corruption that we started with the Simone Bills conversation tonight.
	The entire corruption of our society that ultimately results in you making women register for the draft.
	Is the one that says everyone, everywhere is the same.
	And deep down, if we all knew there was a problem, we'd all band together.
	What you're basically doing is you're taking Western values.
	And you are superimposing them on people who do not claim them.
	I mean, to your point earlier, Simone Biles told us why she didn't do it.
	You can't take what would have caused you to have not.
	People are making all these...
	This is because of the sexual abuses that were taking place in gymnastics over the last several decades.
	She didn't say that.
	You can't.
	It's after 9-11 when people would say, well, you know, I mean, Osama bin Laden just wants to be able to raise his children in peace.
	No, that's your values.
	And in this instance, in a weird way, and I agree that feminists earned it.
	They asked for it and now they've received it.
	But essentially what they're saying is the values of men should be superimposed onto women.
	And that is fundamentally corrupting.
	Because, this would be my controversial statement for the night, because discrimination is neither good nor bad.
	Discrimination, like science, is simply a judgment.
	The judgment can be used for good, and the judgment can be used for evil.
	If you make a discrimination in which you say a black man cannot eat at the same counter, at the lunch counter, you have used a valuable tool, discrimination, for an evil purpose.
	If you say women should not be going into combat roles and murdering people overseas, you have used discrimination, that same tool, for a very good and noble purpose.
	I think any person who has formerly, formerly believes, a woman who formerly believes that there are no differences between men and women should be drafted.
	I really do.
	Call it controversial, but if there's enough out there, go ahead, Lena Dunham, you know, do your thing.
	You know, like, I'm totally okay with that.
	I've been so actively anti-feminist, but I think that the feminists should, yeah, I mean...
	I should have asked a woman her opinion.
	It's the best opinion.
	I think they should have to go.
	It shouldn't be all women.
	I have acknowledged biological differences.
	We acknowledge biological differences.
	Why not?
	I think that's the best way for people to come up against the truth.
	I say send them all.
	Lena Dunham, Taylor Swift.
	I'd love to see it.
	Can we just draft them for a mission to Mars instead or something?
	Send them off the planet?
	Why not?
	Last question.
	How do people not see that all those Cubans who risked their lives to escape actively vote against the progressive Democrats?
	And by the way, this is true for people from Eastern European countries who fled here in the 60s, 70s, and 80s as well.
	Has it really never occurred to people why all those who escaped from communism now lean toward conservatism?
	Those are bad Latinos.
	Those are the bad Latinos.
	Those are the ones that Biden administration is actually going to stop from coming.
	You swim here, you're going back.
	Eleanor Gonzalez needs to go back to Cuba.
	It's really, really important.
	If you're crossing the southern border and you come from a country where the Democrats perceive you to be sharing their values, then you should come on in and bring your COVID with you.
	Yeah.
	And if you are a Cuban refugee attempting to escape actual overt tyranny, then you are a bad listener.
	So well said, Ben.
	I'm sorry, it's so absurd.
	But it does go back to the point that you were making, Jeremy, which is that we are so America-centric in this country.
	First of all, America is such an amazingly broad country and a big country that very few Americans have actually spent any serious time abroad.
	Or in America.
	That's true.
	Right, exactly.
	Or outside of California or New York.
	But it really is more about they've never spent any time in an impoverished country or in a country that doesn't share our values.
	And so they tend to think, okay, everybody shares our values.
	And so when somebody comes from one of those countries and then they mirror the sort of Republican values, conservative values, they go, well, they're an outlier.
	There's something wrong with them.
	They don't understand that true communism has never really been tried.
	It's like, well, I've noticed a fact about the vast majority of communists who live in the United States.
	None of them come from communist countries.
	It's very pleasant to be a communist in a capitalist country.
	It's very unpleasant to be a capitalist in a communist country.
	And so the complete failure of our education system to even teach about flaws everywhere else.
	This is one of the things I mean, this really ties together a lot of things.
	It ties together the Olympics as well.
	The insanity of people from America kneeling for the national anthem or protesting the national anthem in front of the Iranians and in front of the Chinese government and in front of some of the worst regimes on the planet.
	And the State Department of the United States, by the way, saying that we should empower people at the U.S. embassies around the world to explain to foreign countries all the flaws that are inherent in the U.S. system.
	to, like, the Saudis or to the Pakistanis.
	The utter madness and navel-gazing narcissism of our country is what's destroying it.
	It's that we're too focused on ourselves.
	It's not...
	In some cases, it's not even narcissism, right?
	So what you're talking about is the majority of students can't point out the 50 states, right?
	If you told them, hey, could you just give me a general area of where you think Nebraska is?
	They're going downward, you know, to the left.
	They have no idea.
	And it goes back to what I was saying earlier about Bill Gates, who's funding this initiative to equitable math.
	So that getting the wrong answer, you get an applause, you still get correct because it's white supremacy to get the right answer.
	You know, so that that Marxism that we're talking about, seeping through the education system is what's leading to this because they they have they have their absent any facts.
	They've never left their country.
	Many of them haven't left their states.
	It's very rare.
	People have been to three states, let alone to to talk about going into another country.
	And America is unfortunately it's one of the only countries or very few countries where you can be in a plane for six hours and still be in your same country.
	You're allowed to be ignorant and travel before we before we leave.
	I just have to this one off the subject for a minute.
	Our pal, Steve Crowder, who makes the best ashtrays in the country, is in the hospital fighting for his life, and he's really come close.
	He's come close to the dark edge of things.
	And I just want to say that, crazy as he is, we love him and we're thinking about him.
	We hope he makes it back.
	You're a better man than I am.
	Well, that's true.
	I was actually just looking forward to the show being over so that I could text him and say, you know, hope you don't make it, pal.
	You know, actually, this is a real story.
	Last night I had to go for a drive.
	Long story, but I had to burn down gas to take my car into the shop.
	And so I was going to smoke a cigar and, you know, I was going to say my nightly prayers.
	I thought, oh, you know, I should probably pray for Crowder, you know, because he's in this.
	I thought, oh, well, you know what's great?
	I'm going to light up one of the cigars that Crowder sent me.
	Crowder, this guy who's a complete maniac, He sent me these beautiful cigars.
	And I was like, oh, pal, I'm going to send you some cigars right away from my humidor.
	Haven't sent him a single thing, you know, but that guy, you know, really a generous fellow.
	I actually did text him and say that we were praying for him at great risk to our souls.
	And if he dies, I personally will kill him.
	Last thought, Ben, on what you were saying.
	I've had the opportunity to travel in the third world, in developing nations and in the third world, in Cuba in particular, in Africa in particular, in Latin America in particular.
	And always in group settings.
	I traveled in Africa and the Middle East with actors from Hollywood.
	I traveled in Cuba, Michael and I, and encountered a lot of Americans on the various stops that we would make on that trip and would engage with them.
	Every time I've been in the third world and engaged with Westerners in that setting, there are two...
	Polar opposite reactions.
	You either look at the abject poverty, the abject despair all around you, and think, my God, what have we done to these people?
	Or you look at it and say, my God, what have these failed systems done to these people?
	And if you're standing in the literal pile of trash that is Djibouti, Africa, I mean, as far as you can see, it is like a landfill from horizon to horizon created by the French.
	A landfill.
	And people living in it.
	If you look at that and think, the history of slavery, you've missed the entire point.
	Of course, slavery.
	What you should be seeing when you look at this kind of poverty, when you see the kind of poverty that exists, people staring down at their shoes, people in, like, our driver in Cuba wasn't allowed to go in the hotels with us.
	Because they don't want the people to actually see what exists past the sliding glass doors.
	It's not for Cubans.
	It is not for Cubans.
	What you should see when you see all of that is the beauty of what we've created in the West, flawed as it is, the beauty of what capitalism has created, flawed though it may be, the beauty of what Christianity has created on a civilizational scale, flawed though Christians mightily are.
	It is a kind of hubris to look at the suffering that exists in the third world and think that it's because of you.
	It isn't because of you.
	It's because of these systems and the people in those settings have no power to overthrow them.
	And what we're seeing in Cuba right now...
	They're not just winners in their heart.
	They are probably losers.
	But by God, they're brave.
	They are actually doing something that puts them in actual jeopardy.
	And they will probably fail.
	And like Stephen Crowder, they're worthy of our prayers.
	Thank you everybody for tuning in with us tonight.
	As always, we're very happy that you've joined us.
	If you'd like to become a member, we would sure love to have you.
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	Michael Knowles' books were just too expensive.
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	It's too bad that Mark Levin beat you to publication by two weeks.
	That book, my God.
	Unbelievable for him.
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