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Sept. 15, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:32:25

Daily Wire Backstage: WE DO NOT COMPLY

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	Hey, Michael Knowles here.
	The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage, We Do Not Comply, is right around the corner.
	Don't miss me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, and the God King Jeremy Boring when we discuss everything from Joe Biden's tyrannical overreach to maybe why Matt Walsh and I are right about severely regulating pornography.
	All those sickos, a lot of people want to keep porn around.
	That's not good.
	Don't do that.
	Listen to Why We're Right.
	Take a listen.
	Welcome to the Daily Wire Backstage We Do Not Comply edition.
	I'm Jeremy Boring, known round here as the God King, lowercase g, lowercase k, and we're glad you've tuned in.
	It got weird.
	Will President Biden's call for a vaccine mandate finally wake people up to the tyrannical leanings of this radical leftist administration?
	Does the Texas heartbeat law mean we may see an end to Roe v Wade in the near future?
	Is it too soon to count on the GOP winning big in 2022 as the Dems continue to author disaster after disaster?
	None of that was funny.
	Joining me to discuss all of this and more is the Ben Shapiro, the Andrew Klavan, the Matt Walsh, and the Michael Knowles.
	For tonight's show, Daily Wire members can ask questions in the chat box at dailywire.com, and we will be answering them throughout the night, so please head over and subscribe.
	Joe Biden announced last week that he's weaponizing the federal agency OSHA to force all companies with over 100 employees to either mandate vaccines or test their employees for COVID at least once per week.
	I think it goes without saying that this is one of the most tyrannical overreaches of government power Americans have seen in my lifetime, and here at the Daily Wire, we plan to fight it.
	As we prepare for a battle of epic proportions, we're calling on you to help us fight this obscene and tyrannical mandate If you will join us at dailywire.com right now by becoming a member, you'll be giving us the resources that we need to take this all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary.
	I really feel like if I say, take it to the Supreme Court, the light should flash and thunder should...
	Head over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and use the promo code DO NOT COMPLY because we won't be.
	You'll get 25% off.
	Americans have been putting up with this crap, ceding freedom after freedom to this authoritarian bureaucracy in the name of public health for long enough.
	So please, stand with us at The Daily Wire and perhaps most importantly, help us stand for the rights of all American citizens.
	I mean, it was a good...
	Self-promotion there, but this is like the big story, probably in politics of maybe in my lifetime, is this overreach by the president.
	It's been building.
	I mean, even under Trump, the response of our government to the pandemic has been so overwrought.
	And has just at every turn...
	And the use of administrative agencies to do it, right?
	The use of administrative agencies is overwrought.
	The CDC giving eviction moratoriums started under Trump.
	That's right.
	But this is the third straight president who said, I don't have the constitutional ability to do this.
	And then I'm just going to do it.
	We had that with DACA. We had this with the CDC. And now we've had it with Biden several times in the past couple of weeks.
	He's just accelerating the pace.
	So he said, the Supreme Court said you're not allowed to do that with the CDC. And then he's like, well, I agree.
	And then five seconds later, he turned around and tried to do it again with the CDC and the eviction moratorium.
	Here he said a bajillion times that you are not allowed to use the federal government to cram down a vaccine mandate.
	But then his patients began to wear thin.
	That's the part that's so unbelievably tyrannical about all of this is, who the hell are you?
	Your patients with me is wearing thin?
	I pay your salary.
	He is my employee.
	This notion that his patience with me is wearing thin.
	He's not my father.
	He's not my wife.
	He doesn't get to tell me that his patience is wearing thin with the American people.
	And the thing about this, again, is I've said this a thousand times.
	This has nothing to do with whether you're pro or anti-vaccine.
	This has to do with whether you are pro or anti-liberty.
	The question is not, like, I am as pro-vaccine as it is possible for a human to be.
	I've made this clear over and over and over.
	I've been pro-vaccine since before.
	It's cool to be pro-vaccines.
	And the fact that this president of the United States is using an OSHA rule, a vaguely worded OSHA delegation of power, in order to cram down an emergency temporary decree...
	On 100 million Americans.
	Let's be real about this.
	It really is not even about the employers.
	It's about the employees.
	Because he's going after us as a proxy for going after our employees.
	If our employees won't take the test and don't want to get vaccinated, we have to fire them.
	He's found a loophole around the fact that he doesn't have the power as president to force the citizenry to become vaccinated.
	As he admitted.
	But he may have the power to force us to force the citizenry to be vaccinated.
	And it's not about our freedom.
	Here's the president.
	This is not about freedom or personal choice.
	It's about protecting yourself and those around you.
	The people you work with.
	The people you care about.
	The people you love.
	My job as president is to protect all Americans.
	So tonight...
	Unbelievable.
	His job as president is to protect all Americans.
	This protecting people thing.
	I thought the vaccine is what's supposed to protect you.
	This is the contradiction that no one has ever been able to satisfactorily answer.
	If the vaccine works, then you don't need to force it on anybody else to protect yourself.
	And the message seems to be from the COVID cult that, well, you need to get the vaccine and To protect me because I got the vaccine and I don't trust it to protect me.
	And so there's a real disconnect there, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
	He said in the same speech those two things.
	The thing that drives me crazy, the thing that is so frustrating to me about this is that it's all openly a joke.
	We've got thousands of guys pouring across the border completely unvaccinated.
	Every time, it was either Knowles or AOC at that Met Gala the other night.
	We've won I couldn't tell the difference.
	I mean, I think because her backside was kind of nice, I don't think it was you, but I was staring at the back of her dress and then somebody told me there's something written on it and I missed it.
	But here's the thing.
	Only the help, only the help is masked.
	The rich people aren't.
	And we've seen Gavin Newsom do this at the French Laundry, go out with his friends in this kind of small gathering.
	And the thing is that when you come to Tennessee, When you go to Florida, you're in another world.
	I had to go to California for two days.
	It was like being an alternate reality.
	The fact that people have bought into what is clearly, clearly a joke, is clearly no longer serious, is amazing to me.
	This is the next part of what Matt's talking about, which is if the vaccines really work and they're super-duper effective, then you don't need to worry about the unvaccinated people.
	But furthermore, if the virus is really the deadliest plague we've ever dealt with, People would probably be all clamoring to get the vaccine, right?
	You wouldn't have such high rates.
	So I actually see it a little bit different.
	I don't think that it's contradictory.
	I don't think that there's inherent contradiction in saying, as the president said, we have to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated.
	You see that as contradictory because you're judging it on the merits of the actual words having actual meaning.
	But they don't.
	He's speaking politics.
	And politics in the 21st century is only a game of turning out the base.
	Yeah.
	The president's poll numbers are collapsing because of the absolute travesty that is his withdrawal from Afghanistan.
	And his own base is starting to question whether or not he's a successful president.
	And what he's saying to them is, you, hardcore left, are very worried about COVID.
	You're very concerned that COVID is a threat.
	You mask your children outside in summer when they're alone.
	I want you to know that I am going to protect you from these Republicans who are literally...
	Disease-ridden, walking pustules of death.
	You have to vote like your life depends on it.
	And those people, who are all already vaccinated because they're, to Ben's point, very worried about the disease, they hear that message and go, yes, please, please protect me from the unwashed Republicans.
	The Pelosi strategy.
	Pelosi strategy has been to win every other election, every other election cycle.
	What she does is she runs these blue dog Democrats.
	They go into fairly conservative areas and they win.
	Then she sacrifices them by forcing them to vote for her left wing policies.
	Then they're gone.
	She loses the majority.
	She waits because she knows the ratchet only goes one way.
	Once a government acquires power, it never loses it.
	So she doesn't have to win every time.
	So two things.
	One, we definitely need to start a garage band called disease-ridden, rotten custules of death.
	There's just no question.
	I thought that was a personal reference to me.
	Yeah, but the second thing is that the intent here, I think, is not just to mobilize the base.
	It's to shift blame away from his own failures.
	Because he keeps saying that the economy is not recovering because of Delta.
	This is not true.
	The economy is not recovering in blue areas because blue area Democrats have decided to legislate that the economy not recover.
	The way that I know this is that the top 10 states in terms of the best unemployment rates in the nation are all red with the exception of Vermont, which has seven people and a cow.
	The bottom 10 states in terms of unemployment rate, in terms of the worst unemployment rate, are all blue.
	And the reason for that is not because of the vast death that is occurring in New York.
	New York is one of those states or New Jersey.
	Those are states that are not experiencing a current massive COVID wave.
	The reason that that's happening is because people in those states have decided that they want to lock down forever.
	There's a pagan worship of government that has now taken place.
	Joe Biden made a promise.
	The promise is that if you give up all of your liberty and if you give up all of your freedoms and if you give up all control to him, he will protect you literally from everything.
	He'll protect you from death.
	He'll protect you from impoverishment.
	And all you have to do is just climb in that bathtub.
	I mean, it's I wrote a column this week called The Wally Strategy, because that's what this is.
	I mean, they're literally just going to push you into a lazy boy, and then they're going to put a screen in front of your face, and they're going to keep you there for the rest of your life.
	And this is the promise.
	That's not the threat.
	That's the promise.
	And for a lot of people, that promise is actually good.
	You will protect me from death.
	He made that promise last year, by the way.
	He said, I won't shut down the economy.
	I won't shut down the country.
	I will shut down the virus.
	How?
	Hell, you won't.
	No human being is capable of, quote-unquote, shutting down the virus.
	That's not a thing that can happen.
	And so when he inevitably came up short, his next move was, it's not my fault that the virus wasn't shut down.
	It's all these guys.
	So you need to turn on your neighbor.
	And then that jackass has the capacity to go on national.
	He finished that speech with an appeal to unity after saying that everybody who is unvaccinated, including, by the way, everybody with natural immunity.
	I know that we're all supposed to pretend natural immunity doesn't exist, despite the fact that it is multiple times more durable than vaccine immunity.
	But...
	All those people, according to him, are bad and morally benighted.
	And the only thing that we have to do is target them and yell at them and target their employment.
	And that will force them to get vaccinated, which totally is not going to happen.
	It's not about getting people vaccinated.
	It's not about making the world a better place.
	It is purely and simply about he does not want the blame for the promises he can never fulfill.
	And the only solution is give him more power.
	I don't want the blame when big tech uses your data to target you.
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	So it's not just that the president is seizing all of this power over workers.
	And we're going to talk a little bit more about our response here at The Daily Wire to that.
	So Matt, something you've been great on is the impact that this is having on school kids.
	Listen to a story today about schools in New York.
	They're open for the first time after more than a year of being shut down.
	And not only do kids have to wear masks inside, kids who are at...
	Almost virtually, not no, but virtually no risk of severe illness from COVID. But they have to eat lunch outside.
	They have to not face each other when they eat.
	They have to not talk to one another.
	And if it's raining, then there's no lunch at all.
	Because you've got to eat lunch outside.
	And during recess, they can have physical activity, but they can't come within six feet of each other.
	So no kinds of activity that involves participation with other kids.
	They actually have outlawed any activity that would cause...
	There is exact phrasing in the handbook or in the guidelines.
	I want to say it's excessive breathing.
	So they don't want excessive breathing.
	There was someone on CNN that was referring to...
	There was a doctor on CNN a couple days ago talking about...
	I think a lot of it...
	When we're talking about schools or what the government is doing, a lot of it is they want power and everything that we've talked about.
	But I also think there's something simpler, and it's a disease that we've seen in government for decades now, which is this mentality that someone just has to do something.
	Yep.
	And it's this someone do something mentality.
	It's kind of like any time there's a tragedy or there's a high-profile murder, then we pass a law with that person's name on it, and here's that person's law.
	And it's always a law that was unnecessary because this stuff was already illegal.
	Wouldn't have stopped the crime.
	Wouldn't have stopped the crime, but it's just, let's do something.
	And so everywhere you go now, I mean, I've been traveling...
	Last couple weeks in a few different cities.
	I was in New York most recently, which is just an absolute hellscape.
	But everywhere you go there in New York now, it's just...
	Every place you walk into, they're doing something in response to the virus.
	None of it makes any sense.
	There's no reason to be doing almost any of it.
	But at least it's something.
	And one other thing I want to mention in the schools...
	In New York, there's a video of what they call the COVID buster team, and they're walking through the classrooms before kids show up, spraying some kind of chemical into the air, which what is that supposed to do?
	But nothing, but it's something anyway, and it makes us feel safer.
	No, you're exactly right.
	And when you talk to folks who are in favor of these sorts of measures, and you say to them, there's no data to back this.
	I mean, we actually cite data.
	They get angry at you for citing the data.
	So if you point out that there is not a single study that shows that masking school children is an effective tactic.
	Like, not one.
	And in fact, the single largest study was a study done in Georgia.
	It was a 90,000-student study.
	And it found that there were lower levels of transmission when teachers wore masks, because adults are still transmitting it, but that when school children up to the age of 12 are in school, they actually buried the result.
	They wouldn't print the result.
	They file-droid is what it's called.
	There is no difference between masking and unmasking for kids of that age group.
	When you say this to people, you say, well, then you really shouldn't mask kids.
	They'll say, ah, yes, but what if one of the kids gets sick and they're not masked?
	And you say, well, then the same exact thing as if they were masked because I just gave you the data.
	And they'll say, yes, yes, yes, but then they don't have masks on.
	They'd be like, right, but the data says that that makes no difference for children because children don't know how to wear masks because cotton masks aren't doing damn bit of difference for little kids and all the rest of it.
	And they just they can't let go of it because, again, the idea is that if something bad should happen, I think this is really what it comes down to for a lot of the decision makers.
	Yeah.
	And this has been the incentive structure all along.
	If something bad happens, you need to be able to say to somebody else that you did the thing.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	It doesn't matter if the thing was useful.
	I sacrificed the chicken right this morning.
	I sacrificed the chicken.
	And yet the covid got the kid.
	But I sacrificed the chicken because I sacrificed the chicken.
	And you can't tell me I didn't try to propitiate the covid gods.
	I did.
	I tried to do it.
	You're really speaking to something important.
	It is a kind of paganism.
	100%.
	We live in a new paganistic age, and paganism is sort of like science but without controls, right?
	Which is exactly what we're seeing.
	They say trust the science, but of course science has controls.
	Increasingly, science is also science without the controls.
	Right, yeah, yeah.
	But what they mean when they say science is really just anecdotal data sets.
	Yeah, and we have rituals that we engage in in the pagan cult of science.
	We have the secular keffia that we put on our mouth now.
	And, you know, speaking of New York, this does remind me.
	I was just in New York about a week and a half ago.
	We can do something, too.
	You know, we always have to do something.
	We've got to pass a law.
	We can do something, too.
	If you get on the subway now, it is so creepy.
	Signs everywhere.
	Wear the mask.
	Pull it up over your nose.
	Not quite.
	They come on the loudspeaker.
	Don't breathe.
	Don't do this.
	And so I decided, you know what I'm going to do?
	If I'm on a plane, they're going to make me wear the mask.
	I won't be able to fly.
	Okay, that's a prudential judgment.
	On the subway, they're not going to do anything.
	A lot of weird stuff happens on the subway.
	I've spent a lot of years in New York.
	So I just wouldn't wear it.
	I wouldn't wear it on the trains, and I wouldn't wear it on the subway.
	And you know what people said to me?
	Not so much as boo.
	Me too.
	I've had the same experience.
	If you just, in your own way, resist this stuff, it's important.
	Because to Ben's point earlier...
	We've got multiple liberty battles here.
	You've got the individual liberty battle.
	That's obviously being taken away.
	And you've got even the higher political liberty battle.
	We're not allowed to have a say over the future of our country because the administrative agencies and the public health priests are telling us what we have to do.
	And now this is all going to be enforced by OSHA. What's so crazy is...
	Even the priests of public health, even the administrative agents, just a year ago were saying, that would be overreach.
	By the way, did you see that video of Fauci from 2019 talking about what you should do to prevent yourself from getting sick?
	Did you see this video?
	It's astonishing.
	It's a video from 2019, and he's Joe Rogan.
	He says, the guy literally asked him from Bloomberg, he says, so should we be wearing masks to prevent ourselves from getting sick?
	He says, no, you shouldn't do all that sort of paranoid stuff.
	Why would you do all that paranoid stuff?
	You need to eat healthy.
	You need to exercise regularly.
	I mean, he sounds exactly...
	And by the way, if you want to know the reality about the public health establishment, all you have to...
	Understand is that one of the major complications from the very start of this thing was obesity.
	Obesity was a major complicating factor when it came to COVID from the very beginning.
	And one of the things the public health establishment should have said when there was no vaccine available was not just put on a mask.
	It should have been get outside and exercise.
	Right?
	Get healthier.
	Meanwhile, they were putting out magazine covers of fat women saying this is healthy.
	I mean, you also get cancer at an amazing higher rate if you're obese.
	You know, the other thing about this is there's no way to talk to anybody, like a reasonable person.
	You know, you and I both were on the vaccine train.
	We both like vaccines.
	And a reasonable person can say, well, vaccines are good, but mandates are bad.
	And We're good to go.
	But you can't do any of that.
	You can't discuss it.
	It knocked off social media.
	Even in the nuance and in the conversation, you could go even further.
	If you say, okay, I'm even willing to entertain some vaccine mandates.
	Washington mandated it for a sort of inoculation for the troops.
	You have mandates in schools.
	But what Fauci is doing that's so dishonest is he's comparing COVID to smallpox and polio.
	These are different diseases.
	And what I think is really important for conservatives to take away from all of this is...
	The government does not work the way we were told it does in Schoolhouse Rock.
	You know, I'm a bill up on Capitol Hill.
	That's not how it actually works.
	What happens is some bureaucrat whose name you've never heard of writes a bunch of jargon on a sheet of paper and you don't even know the law was passed.
	And they actually have power, and they're actually forcing it on you now.
	And the left knows this.
	That's why the left is so good at mastering the administrative state.
	Conservatives just never have done it.
	It's like we bury our heads in that.
	I will say that this is a failure going all the way back to Reagan.
	Reagan came into office saying he was going to get rid of the DOE, get rid of the Department of Education.
	He didn't do it.
	Bush came in saying he was going to rein in the administrative state.
	Instead, he added to it.
	Trump came in saying that he was going to rein in the administrative state.
	And they passed fewer regulations, but he certainly didn't dismantle it.
	I'd like to pass a law that no law can be above 3,000 words and no contract can be above 3,000 words.
	I mean, when you sign those things...
	But that law is 5,000 words, right?
	But here's the real problem, is that the Congress...
	The one thing that the founders never foresaw, it was a form of...
	I think, human shortcoming that they really didn't see because it was not them, and that was that human beings are not only ambitious, but sometimes they're ambitiously lazy.
	That's what they didn't see.
	They didn't see, they felt that what the competition over power would be was a bunch of people trying to grab power from one another, and so the way that you rein that in, I will say, though, that in some ways, in some ways, we helped...
	create this situation on the right because we came out against pork barrel spending. - This is a great point. - This was, you know, one of John McCain's big initiatives was to get rid of the earmarks because they're unseemly and they are unseemly.
	They're disgusting, they are disgusting.
	They're immoral, they are immoral.
	This is where congressmen will get together behind closed doors and they'll promise each other things.
	They'll be like, "Well, I'll support your crappy bill, but only if there's a bridge built." Bridge to nowhere.
	Yeah, a bridge built in my district.
	And you go, well, what do you want with that bridge in your district?
	It doesn't even go anywhere.
	And they're like, yeah, but my name will be on it.
	And so I'll have taken, you know, $64 million for the taxpayer money, and you'll have the JW Boring, my middle name doesn't even start with the W, but Bridge to nowhere.
	And you're like, well, I need your vote, so here's the money.
	And it's so ugly, right?
	They're taking the fruit of your labor and just spreading it around.
	Yeah.
	And so we were against it because we didn't like it.
	But this is a version of conservatism that Michael talks about that I actually usually disagree with.
	But it's a very practical kind of conservatism that you shouldn't change anything that is, even if it's not great, until you've really thought through the ramifications of it.
	Right.
	Pork barrel spending goes all the way back to the founding era.
	And what pork barrel spending did is incented legislators to legislate.
	Because it turns out that doing something, voting affirmatively for something, is a risk when you're having to run for office every two or every six years.
	Every time you take an action, that action can be held against you.
	If you take no action, nothing can be held against you.
	And so the only reason these people voted for 250 years was to get Bridges named after themselves.
	And as soon as we took away their ability to get something personally out of the act of legislating, they went, oh, well then if I want job security, I should never vote on it.
	Aren't they talking about bringing this back?
	Aren't they talking about...
	They've been talking about it a little bit, and of course there's a lot of blowback, particularly from the talk radio, which wants to be purist about this sort of stuff, which is why I always say, as part of that, I always say, you should listen to us when it comes to principle, but when it comes to implementation, you listen to us so you know where the marker is planted, not where the marker is going to end up.
	My job is very different from the job of a legislator who actually has to do the job.
	That's kind of a different thing.
	The reason this came up, too, was because we were defending John McCain, right?
	John McCain was the nominee, and John McCain was a big spender.
	That guy didn't want to reform any entitlements or any aspect of the administrative state.
	Frankly, he was probably trying to grow it.
	And so we said, okay, well, we can't make the argument there.
	Let's make it on pork barrel spending.
	And we all went along with it.
	But here's the truth.
	OSHA was passed all the way back in the 70s, right?
	So the rise of the administrative state...
	But the administrative state has been rising, of course, all throughout the 20th century.
	The radical rise was in the 60s.
	No, if you look statistically, the radical rise of the administrative state didn't even happen during FDR as much as it did during the 60s.
	I blame John McCain.
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	Head over to PolicyGenius.com.
	You'll be happy, too.
	You can get started right now.
	When it comes to insurance, it's nice to get it right.
	PolicyGenius.com.
	Who's going to explain to Jeremy that the accent in insurance does not go on the first syllable?
	You know, you take the boy out of Texas, but you can't take Texas out of the boy.
	It's a deeply disquieting fact that we now live in essentially an elected dictatorship.
	We have an elected monarch, we elect him every four years, and he comes in and he says some stuff, and maybe the deep state helps him, maybe the deep state doesn't.
	And that's pretty much it.
	But do you think that he is really the ruler of the country, or is he just sort of this figurehead, and it's the deep state or the agency?
	When the deep state agrees with him, he's the ruler of the country.
	When the deep state disagrees with him, no.
	Then they're the ruler, right.
	Trump try to formulate a policy.
	And as you see General Mark Milley, apparently calls up the Chinese.
	This is an unbelievable story, by the way.
	Like, you had the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff calling our enemies the Chinese and being like, if we're going to strike you, I will call you first.
	So I trust the Chinese military more than I trust, you know, the commander in chief.
	You may have that personal belief, but let me just say, it's an act of treason to call up our enemies and say, I mean, aid and comfort to the enemy is literally you calling the enemy and being like, by the way, guys, if we decide that we're going to take you on, My first phone call is going to be to you.
	You know what you can do in the chain of command?
	You can refuse.
	You're allowed to say, no, I'm not going to carry out that order.
	You can do like Mattis and step down.
	Right.
	You can do plenty of stuff, right?
	The problem we have is that our failed state and our failed elected officials and the bureaucratic state And our stateless businesses, these multi-country businesses, all have the same agenda.
	And the Chinese have the same agenda, which is to control us and to spy on us.
	And that's really, they're all doing the same thing.
	Every single one of them.
	And there's nobody left in power to say, you know what?
	I mean, it's us.
	It's all us.
	This is it.
	This is like the bunker, you know, the hidden bunker.
	You know what?
	I think individuals should have their own choices.
	Literally, that is true in the sense that the federal government was very involved in the development and growth of Google.
	I mean, it basically bankrolled Google Maps just for one issue, and they obviously work with one another.
	Google has a relationship with China.
	All of these people are not only surveilling us and compromising, predicting where we're going, they're actually impelling behaviors.
	When they took the don't out of their slogan, don't be evil, I think we all should have been an alarm for all of us.
	I don't like that rebranding.
	That's another point about the vaccine mandate.
	We talk about the alliance of big business with the government.
	And with this vaccine mandate, I think probably big businesses have no problem with the mandate because they can deal with it.
	It actually takes the problem out of their hands.
	This is something that small businesses will have to carry the burden for.
	And that's something else that you notice when you talk about going around the country.
	It's here in Nashville.
	It's everywhere.
	Uh, everywhere you go, it's, uh, we've almost gotten used to it by now, but there are just small businesses shut down everywhere.
	And you talk to the, talk to the, to the locals in any town, whether it's a small town or a city, they'll tell you, oh, that place over there used to be a great place.
	Shut down during COVID. Never opened again.
	Never will open again.
	And meanwhile, Walmart, Amazon, you know, all the target.
	It's fine because they can work with it.
	Right.
	They're doing, they're doing great.
	So this, this is a, we have never seen.
	It's why big business has always been in favor of higher minimum wage.
	That's right.
	Because they're like, okay, we can pay the mom and pops.
	And regulations too, they It's a conspiracy.
	It really is a conspiracy by the most powerful forces in our country to destroy small business.
	And we've never seen anything like it.
	Ron DeSantis did something along these lines.
	Obviously a big fan of Governor DeSantis.
	But you remember when the cruise line said, we're thinking about having cruises again, but everyone will have to wear masks.
	And then Ron DeSantis said, no, if you're going to run a cruise out of the state of Florida, you by law cannot require people to wear masks.
	And then the cruise lines for like exactly seven minutes were like, Oh no, that's awful.
	Please.
	The cruise lines were thrilled because they know no one wants to go on a beautiful sunny Caribbean vacation wearing a diaper on their face.
	But they were afraid of the liability of saying we're going to pack a ship with thousands of potential spreaders.
	And what DeSantis did is he basically took the bullet For the cruise industry.
	He said, well, the liability ultimately isn't on you because the state is actually forcing you to do what you want.
	And in a way, that's what's happening here with big business.
	A lot of these big companies, listen, at The Daily Wire, we took a few weeks and let our people work from home when this was first starting and we didn't know what COVID was going to be.
	We very quickly came to realize that if we didn't ask our people to come back, we would lose the opportunity to ever ask them.
	To come back.
	And so even though it was in contravention of the executive orders from the mayor of the city of Los Angeles, we invited our people back.
	And we didn't say you have to come back.
	We said if you would like to come back, almost 90% of our workers were back in two days.
	But these big businesses, they kept waiting and they kept waiting.
	And 15 days to slow the spread turned into weeks, turned into 15 weeks, turned into 15 months.
	I mean, here we are more than a year and a half into this.
	People have moved, people have changed, totally reordered their lives.
	How do big businesses now get their employees to go back?
	What can they point to that has changed?
	How can they say, no, things are safer?
	They missed every opportunity to say that you should incur some risk in life, to say that something has happened that made the circumstances different.
	And so now the only way that they can get people to come back to the office is to have the government say, you can enforce these mandates.
	And they can go, oh, these mandates are terrible.
	We expect you to work on Tuesday and be vaccinated.
	You know, it's really interesting that when I was in Hollywood, the age of the star ended.
	There's no Hollywood star who opens a movie anymore.
	It used to be the last one was probably Will Smith, but before that, there was Julia Roberts who could open a bad movie, but people went to see it because it was a Julia Roberts movie.
	That doesn't happen anymore.
	But still, the star system is in place in Hollywood.
	And the reason the star system is in place in Hollywood is if you're an executive and you hire George Clooney, none of whose movies make any money unless he's starring with Matt Damon and every other movie star in Hollywood.
	But none of his movies make money.
	But if you hire him, you won't be fired if the picture...
	Nobody's going to turn to you and say, you're the son of a gun who hired George Clooney, and that's why our movie died.
	An artist comes in and says, I'm taking this risk.
	It's beautiful.
	I've got this beautiful idea.
	And the executives used to support this to some degree.
	I've got this great idea.
	No one's ever done this before.
	You've never seen this before.
	And you go out and think like, wow, Jaws.
	I mean, that's amazing.
	And then they just copy it all over again.
	We're living in this period of success.
	We're living in the tail end of the American century where people stopped wanting to envision things because they were playing with the house's money.
	They didn't want to lose the money they made.
	Nobody wants to take the risk anymore.
	The risk is what it's all about.
	First of all, it's the only thing that makes life worth living.
	That's the first thing.
	And secondly, it's like how you make a great country.
	And instead, we've got all these people who do not want the blame.
	They don't want to be the guy.
	What DeSantis is doing...
	If they call him Death Santus and all this stuff, that takes guts.
	This is right.
	He can be right or wrong, but at least he's governing.
	The media, of course, set up the narrative that the act of bravery is to shut everything down.
	When the real act of bravery is to say that human beings are allowed to be human beings.
	That's a true act of bravery.
	Because you don't get blamed if you shut everything down and then a bunch of people die.
	You don't get blamed for that.
	Then you did everything that you could.
	See Andrew Cuomo.
	Exactly.
	But if you say, listen...
	People are going to have to make their own decisions.
	They're going to have to bear their own responsibility.
	And I will take responsibility for allowing people to take responsibility for their own lives.
	The media will kill you.
	The media will spend the next several years talking about how he's Ron DeSantis.
	You'll have Joy Reid on TV every night saying that DeSantis wants people to die.
	That's literally the language she uses when she's not being batted about by Nicki Minaj.
	That Ron DeSantis wants COVID to win because he's allowing people to live their lives.
	And the inevitable result of this is a dependent people who are waiting for some sort of kingly figure to come and save them from all risk.
	This is why it's so important to go back to Michael's point.
	If our leaders aren't going to take risks and they're not going to take the lead, then it's important for us as individuals to decide where are we going to draw the line.
	And even with things like masking, I decided early on in this that I'm not going to wear the mask anywhere unless...
	I'm asked by someone in the establishment in a position of authority to put it on.
	And if they do, then I'll decide whether I want to put it on or just leave.
	But the instinct for a lot of us is to just wear the mask because you don't want to cause any trouble.
	You don't want to be in an awkward social situation or whatever it is.
	I think as individuals, we have to decide, well, we're just not going to go along with this.
	We're not going to do it.
	We're not going to play the game.
	By the way, you will notice, we're all in a lot of airports.
	All around the country.
	There is a federal mask requirement in all the airports.
	And yet, not everyone wears the masks in all the airports.
	It doesn't matter.
	Depending on what city you're in, you cannot wear it.
	You cannot comply.
	And there are enough people that no one is going to force you to do it.
	And you just think, well, what if all Americans did that?
	What if we all just stood up?
	I admit...
	This does go to, and this is where we kind of veer into the AOC territory.
	I think so much of this is cosplaying virtue.
	It's just cosplaying it.
	People who are wearing the masks at this point must know that everybody who they're around has had the ability to either get the vaccine or decided not to get the vaccine.
	Yeah.
	To me, the masking issue was much more complex and nuanced when there was no vaccine.
	Now that there's a vaccine and every adult has had the ability to get it, then the issue, all nuance is essentially removed.
	Because if you get COVID, because I'm vaccinated and I breathe in your general area and then you get COVID, you did not have a right to never be sick again in your life.
	What you did have a right to do, at least to a certain extent, was to avoid deathly disease.
	At least the case can be made.
	That's an externality.
	In the same way that I can't pollute a river, I can't sneeze my COVID on you when you're 65 years old or 80 and living in a nursing home.
	Right, which is why even when it comes to vaccine mandates, I've said before that when it comes to, say, nursing homes, I don't see anything necessarily wrong with a vaccine mandate for employees of nursing homes because you're around vulnerable people literally all day long.
	Or mask mandates in hospitals where you're around people who are vulnerable all day long.
	However, once you're in just the general public and everybody's had the opportunity to get vaccinated, you don't have a right to require me to wear a mask on my face because you were too dumb or because you decided not.
	And here's the thing that's most amazing.
	No one who is unvaccinated is asking anyone to mask.
	It is vaccinated people who are asking people to mask.
	That's the part that's utterly insane about all of this.
	I've drawn this Venn diagram on my show at this point probably ten times of the unworried and the worried.
	In a normal, logical world, what you would assume is the unworried are the vaccinated and the worried are the unvaccinated, right?
	It is precisely the reverse.
	All of the worried are the vaccinated and all of the unworried are the unvaccinated.
	Which means that the pandemic is over for all public purposes.
	Because once all of the unworried are unvaccinated, then nothing you do is going to get—they're not worried.
	They're not going to spend their days sitting up at night worrying about COVID. So how are you going to worry them into getting the vaccine?
	And everybody who was worried got vaccinated, and now they're still worried because you guys keep telling them to worry.
	But you actually—you saw literally the AOC play-acting of it all at the Met Gala, right?
	Because she— She's cosplaying the revolution.
	She's showing up there as the revolutionary.
	I'll show you at this $35,000 seat dinner.
	I'll show you people.
	She's actually now got an ethics complaint because she may not have been able to accept the dress that she was given.
	But when she shows up there...
	I don't know if she knows it, or if she's...
	Maybe she does know it, and she's just playing along.
	But AOC is not in any way challenging the establishment.
	She is the toast of high society.
	It's why she was invited to the Met Gala.
	She is a tool of the plutocratic establishment.
	She is exactly the opposite of what she's...
	The plutocratic establishment and the left are the same people at this point.
	Yes, they are.
	They're identical.
	And it's a problem that the right hasn't caught on to yet.
	The right has not caught on to the fact I mean, to me, this just proves the fact that the whole problem with Ayn Rand is that John Galt is just the biggest son of a bitch as the people in government.
	Anybody with power, anybody with too much power is a threat to liberty.
	I mean, and that doesn't mean you take their power away.
	It means you control the things that they can do.
	You put limits on it.
	You say you have certain rights.
	The individual has certain rights that no powerful person can take.
	Whether it's Google or whether it's government.
	Can we also just stipulate on a tax the rich thing?
	I don't personally care what tax rate Jeff Bezos pays.
	You can raise taxes on him.
	I don't really care that much, to be honest.
	But the idea that the rich are not taxed is so absurd.
	I mean, they pay the vast majority of taxes.
	All.
	All.
	When you remove the government benefits, they pay literally all taxes in America.
	Just today, I saw a report on CBS, which was a couple months old, Just because I'm curious on how did this idea get out there that the rich don't pay taxes when they pay all the taxes.
	There was just a good example.
	It's not like it's just from this report, but there was a report done by ProPublica, I think a few months ago, claiming that the rich pay almost no taxes.
	And then you look at the report, and the way they come to that conclusion is they're using Jeff Bezos for an example.
	And they said, Jeff Bezos, between 2008 and 2018, he paid like $1.4 billion in income taxes.
	He's like, how's that almost none?
	That's $1.4 billion.
	Well, they were saying, well, compared to the $200 billion that he's worth...
	It's only like, you know, it's just a fraction of a percent.
	Because they don't understand how wealth works.
	Right.
	You don't pay an income tax on your whole net worth.
	That would be a disaster for everyone.
	If you imagine, you know, April 15th.
	You have to liquidate your house every year.
	Right.
	Exactly.
	The New York Times is complaining about this in the paper today.
	Right.
	And they're not taxing the wealth they already have.
	And I think part of the problem is that, you know, you've got the elites, of course, who spread these ideas and they know better.
	A lot of people in the peanut gallery who go around screaming that the rich aren't taxed, they have no assets, no net worth at all, and they don't even understand the difference between income and net worth.
	They don't understand that Jeff Bezos doesn't have $200 billion.
	He doesn't have like a Scrooge McDuck money vault out back filled with $200 billion worth of gold coins.
	Not much in it.
	He has ownership in something with an imaginary value of $200 billion.
	If he liquidates any of that, meaning if he converts any of that imaginary money into real money...
	If he sells his stock.
	If he sells his stock, he now is taxed on it at the point that it becomes...
	And it tanks, by the way, too.
	Well, that's the bigger point, right?
	I mean, there's one point where Zuckerberg, who's worth a trillion dollars, where Zuckerberg tried to liquidate, I think it was $1 billion of his stock, and the Facebook stock tanked by like 10%.
	Why is the founder getting out?
	Correct.
	So this idea that the wealth is worth what the wealth is worth is just absurd.
	First of all, there are a thousand different valuations on every single company.
	It's only worth what it's worth at the moment of liquidation.
	It changes based on the moment.
	This is why my favorite Warren Buffett take was in 2008 they asked Buffett, you know, you just lost like a billion dollars in the market over the course of this crash, you know, if you look at your stock holdings.
	He said, what are you talking about?
	I didn't lose a dollar.
	He said, what do you mean you didn't lose a dollar?
	I said, I didn't sell anything.
	Yeah.
	Correct.
	If you don't realize the loss, the loss is not realized, right?
	If you own a house and the house loses value, you did not lose anything unless you sell the house after it has lost the value.
	I had a driver, a chauffeur, explain this to me because he was day trading.
	And he said, you know, I said, how are you doing this week?
	And he said, fine, I just haven't sold anything, so I haven't lost anything.
	But he knows...
	But the cosplaying of it is the entire point.
	I think that our entire politics right now is not about doing virtue.
	It is about cosplaying the revolution.
	It's about, I am a revolutionary, not for, like, she wasn't standing outside the Met Gala holding a sign saying, screw these rich people and their giant bags of cash.
	She was going in there.
	We hang out with them and take pictures with them with their arms draped about each other, all unmasked, except for the help, who are in the back, like the peons they are, wearing the masks.
	Keeping their filth away from all the good.
	Right, you saw Carolyn Maloney.
	Carolyn Maloney is, that was the best picture.
	There's a picture of Carolyn Maloney, the congresswoman from New York, and she's wearing an outfit that says, equal rights for women.
	And behind her, and she's unmasked, and behind her is a bunch, it's like 10 women, all wearing masks.
	And she's not, right, because Because she's a special person.
	Now, we know, according to the CDC, you're supposed to mask even if you're vaccinated.
	So clearly, they're violating the CDC's own standards because vaccinated people can pass the disease.
	It doesn't matter to her because she's one of the specials.
	It's all about the signal.
	The signal is the only thing that matters.
	It's not even that it is a thing that matters.
	It is the only thing that matters.
	You can do whatever the hell you want so long as you are signaling properly.
	And AOC thinks that she was signaling properly because all of the glitterati are cheering her.
	All the blue checks are cheering her.
	I mean, I tweeted out, Robespierre was not famous for going over Versailles and saying to Marie Antoinette and company, gang, screw the monarchy, and then eating the cake with them.
	If you're going to eat the rich, you actually have to eat the rich.
	You know what was so scary to me?
	I was on the subway in New York, not wearing my mask, and I looked over and I saw what looked like a political advertisement.
	It said, we're starting a revolution.
	This is about equality.
	This is about freeing people.
	And I was looking, I said, what is the revolution?
	I looked.
	It was an ad for Old Navy.
	It was an ad.
	The revolution is what sells products.
	And this is what AOC either doesn't understand or she does understand and she's pulling a fast one on all her constituents.
	They called themselves the resistance all through the Trump administration.
	They agreed with the corporations.
	They agreed with Hollywood.
	They agreed with the Academy.
	They agreed with media.
	They agreed with everybody in power.
	They're the tools of capitalist hegemony.
	They were resisting the people.
	And it's an interesting question, too, though, about why...
	AOC, she was around a bunch of rich people.
	And why would rich people embrace this message of tax the rich, tax me?
	Because, you know, and that's the point people are making in AOC's defense.
	Well, it's actually brave for her to go around rich people with that message.
	But it's not exactly the same thing.
	I mean, if I were to go to a Planned Parenthood fundraiser with a shirt that said, you know, imprison abortionists, I would probably get a very different reception.
	So why were they embracing her?
	And I think the reason is...
	Which actually sounds like a great idea to do that.
	The reason is, number one, they know it's not serious.
	It's virtue signaling.
	But also, for these rich people, this is the ruling class, they know that, okay, yeah, you raise the taxes on me a little bit.
	I can afford it.
	But also, we're all comrades.
	We're part of the same crew here.
	So I'm investing in you, and you're going to advance my ideological agenda.
	So sure, take a little bit more of my money.
	It benefits me in the end.
	Not so much the...
	Also, let's be frank about this.
	Most of the people in that room have very good accountants, and those accountants are tasked with avoiding the taxes.
	Yep.
	Right?
	Just like every other human being, which is why they're not giving charity, and it's also why they're not actually bothering to sign checks that are above and beyond what they're supposed to pay to the federal government, to the federal government.
	Every single person in that room, there is a provision on your tax forms that allows you to send extra money to the federal government.
	Not one person in that room has ever signed a dollar to that provision, because no human being has ever signed that provision of the IRS tax form unless they are completely and utterly delusional.
	It is insane to me that we are supposed to pretend that this was some sort of act of true bravery when she's walking to a place where they are cheering.
	They are cheering for her.
	There's a quote by Thomas Sheraton Williams put out a fantastic quote from Stefan Zweig, where he says, anybody who is saying something supposedly revolutionary, who is risking nothing, is of course not saying anything revolutionary.
	She's not only risking nothing, she's benefiting from all of the, look, slay queen kind of nonsense.
	The reason these people do this is because it gets them off the hook, for the same reason the corporations do it.
	Now the left is fine with all of them being wealthy.
	It's the reason why the left doesn't care whether athletes are wealthy.
	They only care where the business people are wealthy.
	Because business people might actually live their principles, but athletes signal their principles and then live like the business people.
	Did anybody go with AOC, though, on this?
	Did anybody like this AOC stuff?
	Yeah, the left did.
	Rolling Stone called it iconic.
	Did they really?
	Yeah, they did.
	Absolutely.
	Well, it is iconic.
	LAUGHTER I'm sure that some of us have read Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic.
	This is all just Radical Chic.
	The single greatest political essay ever written.
	If you haven't read it, you should go read it.
	It's an essay about Leonard Bernstein holding a dinner party.
	That whole book is great.
	Unbelievable.
	And this chapter of the book, which was originally a cover piece in New York Magazine before New York Magazine was complete trash, And the entire article is about Leonard Bernstein, the famous conductor, hosting the Black Panthers in his penthouse apartment with all of these white celebrities.
	And all these white celebrities are fawning over these exotic revolutionaries.
	And the exotic revolutionaries are saying directly to them, yeah, when the time comes, we're going to kill you.
	And all of these people are clapping for them and cheering for them.
	And the thing is that in this particular analogy, AOC is not the Black Panthers.
	She's Leonard Bernstein putting on the cap.
	Right, right.
	She's not even black-handed.
	Right, that's a great point.
	This scene was in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, this exact scene where she hosts, there's a woman, a rich woman who hosts all the radicals in town who are actually blowing people up and killing children and all this stuff, but she's hosting them and they keep saying to her, you know, you're next.
	And she goes, yes, I know, it's wonderful.
	So this week...
	I'm a young man, 42, and yet I had to subject myself to the humiliations of an older man of 45 and get a colonoscopy.
	Oh, my God.
	Welcome to the club, pal.
	It was not great.
	It was not great, would be the official way to report it.
	Oh, you don't know what fun is.
	Literally the only time in Jeremy's life he has not been full of shit.
	You're not.
	They clean you out.
	But all I did yesterday was sleep.
	And as you spend an entire day sleeping, you think, man, I love my mattress.
	I hate that phrase.
	That was the worst phrase ever.
	I love my mattress.
	That was really bad, yeah.
	And that's because of our friends over at Helix Sleep.
	Helix Sleep has a quiz that takes just two minutes to complete and it matches your body type and sleep preferences to find the perfect mattress for you.
	Oh man, they're so going to ask for their money back.
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	Listen, sleep is one of the most important things we do.
	Most of us don't do enough of it, especially if you've got kids.
	Every moment that you can be sleeping, you should be sleeping.
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	Again, head over to helixsleep.com slash backstage.
	You know what they teach you in podcaster school?
	They always say, there is nothing advertisers like to be associated with more than colonoscopies.
	Well, they always say, like, at the top of the ad...
	So which advertiser gets the prostate exam?
	I always say at the top of the ad, like, riff on your personal sleep experience.
	I did sleep all day yesterday.
	You know, one of the things that was so amazing with MacGal is to see all of these people who truly are both brave and stunning, and also victims...
	They're all victims.
	Every single one of them is wearing...
	AOC is a victim.
	She said this in her own statement.
	She said, people are constantly policing intersectional bodies.
	Oh, yeah.
	Jonathan Swift couldn't write this stuff.
	It's an incredible parody.
	Not a week goes by that she doesn't come up with some victim group to superimpose herself.
	My favorite is when they come up with victim groups that make no sense.
	My favorite recent one was when Cori Bush recently tweeted out that the Texas abortion law had a disproportionate effect on black women, brown women, and queer women.
	And I thought to myself, well...
	I hadn't heard that one before.
	You're going to have to explain the biology of how queer women are particularly affected by abortion law.
	That doesn't make so much sense to me.
	But beyond that, the victim complex was with all...
	You have Megan Rapinoe, who is celebrated for playing a sport that people watch once every four years because it is mandatory under the Constitution of the United States for us to care about women's soccer once every four years.
	I missed that, I guess.
	Well, that's because you're a traitor.
	Your execution order will come through tomorrow.
	And then complain about a contract that she herself signed to be paid inordinate amounts of money to play a sport that no one cares about.
	And she goes to this thing with a little clutch that says, In Gay We Trust.
	Because she's a victim, right?
	Because she's a lesbian, she is a victim.
	But also a hero.
	But also a hero and a hero.
	And so victimized but heroic.
	It's like Normandy.
	But if the heroes were also victims, who were heroes?
	That's what it's mostly like.
	Let's not forget, speaking of sports heroes, Naomi Osaka.
	Wow.
	Yes, yes.
	Stunning bravery.
	Yeah, who's too much anxiety to answer questions from the media showed up with a very outlandish outfit drawing attention to herself as well.
	My favorite thing, though, that AOC said was she was talking about her fashion designer and trying to put the fashion designer in a victim group.
	And she said something like, this is a black immigrant fashion designer.
	It's like, yeah, but she's from Ontario.
	So, you know, it's...
	Technically an immigrant, but...
	So, like, that lady is in charge of a massive fashion line that sells...
	I read the prices on her website today.
	She sells shoes that are, like, $1,000 shoes.
	She ain't selling, like, pay less for the people.
	At every turn, you must be a victim.
	You can't...
	She couldn't say, my fashion designer, truly one of the greatest fashion designers in the world today.
	Because that compliment bestows no virtue.
	Correct.
	Instead, you have to say, my fashion designer, an immigrant.
	My fashion designer, a person of color.
	My fashion designer, a survivor of childhood abuse.
	Whatever it is, that's your way of saying a good person.
	Right, exactly.
	And it's every single person who is there.
	So it's Cara Delevingne wearing a bib that also looked like a straitjacket that said, peg the patriarchy.
	And you're like, you seem to have benefited pretty wildly from the patriarchy.
	And by the way, if you believe that America is a patriarchy, let me just say that if we airdropped you into a true patriarchy right now, let's say Afghanistan wearing that outfit, then you would last approximately.2 seconds.
	And if America were a patriarchy, you wouldn't get away with that slogan.
	And if the rich weren't being taxed, you wouldn't get away with that slogan.
	This is exactly right.
	It's everything.
	I mean, it's Lil Nas X showing up wearing...
	Variously, ball gowns that he stole from Billy Porter or a gold suit of armor that, I mean, honestly, like, still less gay than C-3PO. But it's inarguable.
	I want to stand up for Lil Nas X, though.
	He admits it.
	He admits it.
	He comes out and he says, I'm doing this just to make the right angry because I love it when they yell at me and it makes me...
	You know, I felt like, okay.
	Okay.
	Speaking of him, we've already forgotten, because this was a big week for Hollywood Degenerates, because just the day before that was the VMAs.
	And there was something, and nobody cares about the VMAs.
	Nobody even knows the VMAs happened.
	I don't even know what the V stands for.
	Yeah, I don't either.
	But it's one of the saddest things I think I've ever seen, which I just saw on Twitter.
	Of course, like everyone else, I didn't watch it.
	But...
	Madonna comes out in an age-appropriate coat at first, and then...
	Grand Madonna.
	Right.
	Grand Madonna.
	She's 63.
	And then she strips it off, and she has this...
	Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS. Right.
	Yeah, this weird dominatrix outfit.
	It's the kind of thing that when you see that, you know that it's time to put Nana in a home, but it really was...
	In a way, it's just sad to see.
	By the way, we're being told that is the height of liberty.
	That if a 63-year-old woman can dress up like a prostitute and sort of jiggle around, that is the height of liberty.
	Like a Nazi prostitute.
	Like a Nazi prostitute.
	And you just think, maybe there were some other life choices that may have involved a little more patriarchy or may have involved a little more reigning things in, where you would be happier.
	I'll never forget, Lucille Ball did an interview in the 1970s or something, and they said, oh, Lucille, you're a prominent woman, a powerful woman.
	Are you in favor of women's liberation?
	She said, you know...
	I think I'm liberated enough already.
	I think I've got a lot of money.
	I'm very powerful.
	I want a more stable life.
	She had a cigar in her hand at the time.
	She certainly did.
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	And here is our first question from one of our Daily Wire subscribers.
	How dirty is the right allowed to play before we lose the morality stance?
	How what?
	How dirty can we play?
	I think what they're saying is, before we lose...
	I'm a big advocate of wielding government power in a just and moral way.
	I think probably more so than a lot of people on the right.
	I think one of the big mistakes we've made is that we have not wielded the power, even the power that the people have given us on the happy occasions that we win elections.
	I don't think there's anything wrong with wielding government power.
	I don't think you need to be immoral to do that.
	I don't think we need to do the stuff that the left does.
	But I think if the people vote for us, if we have the ability, if we control the Congress or the Senate or the presidency, if we have people on the court, we ought to use that in a way that is right and just and oriented toward virtue and also in keeping with the American political tradition.
	And I just think a lot of the reason Republican politicians have not done that, they've talked at good game about how it's immoral to use government power, I think largely it's because they're cowards and to the points we've all been making tonight, they don't want the accountability of actually making decisions.
	So I will say, I think there's a pretty major distinction to be made here in terms of wielding power and using tactics, between defensive tactics and offensive tactics.
	What I mean is that when you're talking about, for example, this is true in pretty much every area of law.
	So, for example, if I were to walk up to somebody and just kill them, I'm now a murderer.
	If that person is trying to kill me and I kill them, that's now self-defense and nothing happens to me.
	I may be performing the exact same act, namely taking the life of another person, but the circumstance determines the morality of the actual activity.
	The same thing is true with regard to the use of government power from time to time.
	If you're using government power, for example, to get rid of government power, there's an edifice that's been built up, and now you need to tear down the edifice.
	That is a different thing than using the same level of government power in order to impose.
	The same thing might be true with regard to, for example, boycotts.
	We've had this discussion before.
	On a pure, nobody's boycotting anybody level, I think it's probably immoral to boycott people based on the political views of the people who own the company alone.
	Not how the company acts, just based on the political views of the people who own the company.
	I think it's bad.
	However, if we now live in a world in which the left is doing this to all companies and therefore forcing all companies to the left, You have a moral obligation to defend yourself by using a similar tactic and creating mutually assured destruction.
	What's wrong with imposing?
	I would go further, yeah.
	I would impose.
	Is the assumption that it's wrong for the government to impose?
	Because I'm not sure I would agree with the...
	Well, it depends on the level of imposition that we're talking about specifically.
	Here's an example.
	Isn't every law an imposition?
	I mean, even every prohibition is also a mandate, right?
	I mean, if you're prohibited from driving over 65, you're mandated to drive 65 or under.
	So...
	Let me give an example.
	Let me give an example to maybe clarify it, which is this.
	I don't think the founding fathers would have considered a drag queen story hour to be a constitutional right for anybody.
	I think it's perfectly right and just and preferable to ban a drag queen story hour.
	Maybe you do it at the local level.
	Maybe you enforce obscenity laws.
	To ban drag queen story hour from what?
	From the libraries, from the schools, from these sorts of places where they exist.
	From places paid for with public dollars?
	Or private dollars, for that matter.
	Would you ban Drag Queen Story Hour in my private home?
	Yes.
	Yes, probably I would, yeah.
	I would not.
	I do believe that that is an...
	Yes, the school...
	Well, schools are different for two reasons.
	One, because to the extent that you're targeting children at all, children don't have the same rights as adults, and we have a responsibility as adults to...
	But Drag Queen Story Hour always targets children.
	To the extent that Drag Queen Story Hour is specifically referring to something involving children, then yes, I agree that it could be prohibited.
	But take one that doesn't involve kids, because kids, you're now talking about a subgroup of people who literally, you know, have to have...
	Would you outlaw a drag show at my private home?
	For adults.
	Well, I attend your drag shows, so I obviously...
	Let's take it even...
	I mean, the debate that this usually hinges on, and I think it does clarify the point, is pornography.
	Do we say that we can never impose our views of pornography on anybody, or do we, in what I think is the American political tradition, say, you know, there's no right to obscene material, and we should really reign this out.
	But I think...
	We're on the same page, I believe, outlaw all pornography.
	But with that, you can also hinge that argument.
	You don't have to do this, but I think maybe the most effective argument is that can be entirely hinged on children also.
	You can make the argument for banning all pornography, all internet pornography, which is the only kind of pornography we're talking about, because children exist and because they have access to the internet.
	And so by putting it on the internet, you are putting it potentially...
	I don't agree with the two of you about pornography.
	Yeah.
	I don't agree that you can say the fact that kids exist means that a thing that isn't right for kids shouldn't exist.
	An example would be cigars.
	You could say the existence of cigars in the world, it does necessarily follow that some kids will have access to tobacco.
	Are you just talking about because I started smoking cigars as a kid?
	Is that what you mean?
	Because of the internet.
	The cigars can't exist on the internet.
	You can buy them on the internet, but you can't smoke them on the internet.
	Because of the unique medium, which the internet is, there's just no way, as long as you put that stuff out there on the internet, any child can access it just by hitting a button on a computer.
	Yeah, I think we would all agree that something should be done to make porn far less accessible to children.
	But that is different than saying I would outlaw all porn.
	But then to broaden it out, though, to the point we are suggesting using the government to impose...
	But again, we're still using examples that are centered around children, and children aren't imbued with the exact same rights that adults possess.
	What about banning pot?
	Banning marijuana.
	I mean, it still is technically illegal.
	Marijuana's been illegal my entire life for all the good it's done.
	I think that that's a pretty uneffective law.
	I think more people use it when it's legal.
	I don't think that the same number of people use it when it's illegal as use it was.
	So I think that there's also questions of prudence that then arise in terms of at what level you're going to do these quote-unquote moral things.
	Yeah.
	Right, so I think that one of the big problems here is that we fail to get specific enough when we talk about which body ought to do this.
	So I have far less problem with quote-unquote legislating morality when you're talking about a local level with a much more homogenous population than I do when you're talking about nationally, for the specific reason that if you want to share a polity with people with whom you're a heterogeneous— Yeah, you're going to have to acknowledge that there are differences in perception on issues like, for example, marijuana or even pornography, which is consensual activity between adults.
	Most of the ones where I think that the federal government ought to get involved in general bans do involve children, which is why I think abortion is a federal issue, right?
	You're talking about literally the removal of life from other human beings, which is why it's not a state issue.
	When you're talking about...
	Do you want to this is this I think it isn't a question as to whether and maybe that we don't whether we want to share a country with New York.
	Yeah, really.
	I mean, this is a this is a serious question because New York obviously doesn't want to share a country with us.
	So if you have a federal government that, for example, is saying that there is now a federal standard is what Joe Biden has now said.
	Right.
	There's a federal standard that you must allow abortion in your states.
	Yeah.
	What he's effectively saying is that New York should govern Texas.
	But don't you.
	And if Texas says, OK, well, you know what?
	The same way you feel about abortion, that is the way that we feel about pornography.
	And so we're going to do this.
	Eventually what you're going to get is just the country splitting.
	What you're not going to get is everybody living by your standard because in the end...
	This is...
	I think this is the right answer.
	The fact is that local government...
	It has a lot of power of states.
	It has a lot of power that the federal government should not have.
	And there is no reason, there really is no reason, why New York can't govern itself as it wishes to govern itself.
	The problem is, continually, and this is true continually, is that California wants Texas to be California.
	But Texas doesn't want California to be Texas.
	And I think this is where we have to make our stand.
	I mean, we have to make the stand that Texas has the right to be Texas.
	Because, you know, I think on abortion this is a different issue because, as you say, it's a question of killing people.
	But states make their own murder laws.
	No, murder laws are statewide.
	Yeah, so then wouldn't it...
	Well, but there is no...
	No state would have the right to decriminalize murder.
	Well, yeah, we haven't tried it, I guess.
	No one's...
	And murder is also the right.
	But it makes...
	Violating your federal civil rights.
	You'd have a federal case against the state government if they decriminalize murder.
	I think pornography is just...
	We really have to grapple with what pornography is.
	I mean, first of all, when it comes to splitting the country apart, I actually think that ultimately that is what's going to happen.
	That may very well be, but the question is, do we want to have a country?
	But pornography is such an insidious and damaging thing, which is helping to destroy our country and the next generation of children in such a particular...
	And devastating way that I think it does call, it will never happen.
	There's never going to be a federal ban on pornography, but I think it could be justified.
	Also because the idea that anybody has a right to have sex, record it, and then upload it to the internet for everyone to see, I just don't, I don't believe that that right exists.
	Why are we afraid to give states different cultures?
	I mean, Arkansas is not the same place as California.
	Why can't they be different?
	I don't understand this.
	I do not understand the compulsion.
	And it does exist on the right, but it really is prevalent on the left.
	I don't understand the compulsion to make other...
	This country is so huge.
	I lived in Europe for seven years.
	I lived in England for seven years.
	I couldn't explain to people that England is the size of Oregon.
	You can do different things in a country the size of Oregon than you can in a country that includes both Oregon and Florida.
	So I agree with your point, and I do think that states have different cultures, and they ought to have different cultures.
	But one of the reasons here why California wants Texas to be like California, and why I understand that, is...
	In order for there to be a nation, we need to have something that kind of links us together.
	We don't come from the same stock.
	We don't have the same religion.
	Those things were not true at the founding era.
	They were truer at the founding era, I suppose.
	We increasingly don't speak the same language, even.
	I'm not talking about Spanish.
	I'm talking about English.
	We can't even speak the same English language.
	We don't even have borders.
	If you don't have anything in common, then you can't have a republic.
	A republic refers to the things we hold in common.
	I agree with that, but one of the principles that we used to have in common was a sort of leave each other alone principle.
	So that's why I think that I go back to the defensive point, which is that if California wishes to legislate California on everybody else, I can see where the drive comes from to say, okay, well, let's legislate Texas on everybody else.
	And this is why it's a little bit of sophistry, I think, to say all laws regulate morality.
	Sure, that's true.
	By definition, it's true.
	That's true as far as it goes.
	But it's obscuring another truth, which is there is a fundamental difference between laws that preserve liberty and laws that encroach on liberty.
	But is that not a moral?
	That itself is making a moral claim.
	That it is good to...
	That's the sophistry, though.
	No, I think it's just a true thing.
	It's not that you're wrong, but you're still obscuring the fact.
	It's like saying, well, if we have power, we should use the power to make whatever we want happen.
	And if they have power, they should use power to make whatever they want happen.
	And I'm saying we should use power...
	To constrain the power.
	But I am not saying that.
	I am saying when we have power, we should use that power to pursue good and avoid evil.
	And what you're saying is when we have power, we should use that power to pursue good and avoid evil, which you're defining as maintaining individual liberty.
	No, but we never make this argument.
	This is one of my big problems with Trump.
	It's essentially the way he behaved during the COVID thing.
	Forget about the stuff that...
	Garbage that came out of his mouth.
	But one of the things that he did was he let each state basically make their own rules.
	Now, how can that not be right in a state with the population density of South Dakota versus a state with a population density in Manhattan of New York City?
	Of course they should make different rules.
	Of course they should make different rules.
	Is it part of the problem...
	But he never said it.
	He didn't make that fight.
	Part of the problem...
	I mean, I don't mean to make this even more obscure and broad, but...
	One of the reasons why these conversations never go anywhere, we talk about whether the government is supposed to preserve liberty or preserve rights.
	No one even knows.
	What the hell is a right in the first place?
	And what is liberty?
	And how do you distinguish it?
	What liberties should you have?
	Where does any of this stuff come from?
	How do we know that we have any of it?
	Who decided any of this?
	I'm not saying that they don't exist or that rights are...
	Purely a human fabrication or construct.
	I think you actually can kind of make that argument, and it's not a totally crazy argument, but that's part of the problem.
	We talk about what we don't have in common.
	We might have once said that we all had in common this belief in human rights.
	Well, now you get 100 people in a room and you ask them, define a human right, you're going to get 99 different answers.
	Right, but I think the discussion can be made a lot more specific by asking, do you ever have a right to be sinful?
	Is there ever a right to be sinful?
	No.
	Okay, so I think that the answer is that...
	The answer is yes, active.
	I think the answer is yes.
	So how would you define Lord active?
	And the reason that I say that is because the minute you say you do not have the right to be sinful...
	I know, but the reason that I say that you do have the right to be sinful is specifically because of the definition of a problem that you now have with regard to sin.
	What I mean by this is this was the Treaty of Westphalia, essentially.
	Right.
	Because if you I mean, not to steal Clavin's thunder by citing the Treaty of Westphalia, eventually we always end up.
	It's like the Internet argument.
	Whoever invokes Hillary first on this show.
	I was there.
	I think there is a reason why this conversation is breaking down along Catholic versus non-Catholic lines, really.
	Because the basic idea that human reason allows for the possibility of you have to be able to find virtue, but that does require you to have to explore in order to get to virtue.
	And not only that, but you have to also accept the possibility that your definition of virtue may differ pretty significantly from that of, say, the Protestants or the Jews who are living under the auspices of a Catholic country.
	The basic agreement of Westphalia was at a certain point you have to leave each other alone.
	Definitionally, virtue has to be chosen.
	But the other problem with virtue is that virtue is a habit.
	And so, while we say culture influences politics, but politics influences culture.
	Statecraft is soulcraft, you might say.
	So, it is certainly...
	I mean, this is like Plato would say the very same thing.
	And it's...
	He might take it a little far.
	But I think statesmen throughout all of history, including the Founding Fathers, when they say that, for instance, liberty is not the same thing as licentiousness.
	What they're saying is a different version of it.
	The reason the founders demanded that the people have religion is because they understood that without religion, the government will become...
	But they also had established churches in the States.
	I'm interested in what your answer is.
	What is a right, would you say?
	How would you define it?
	So what I would say is that a right, I mean, going all the way back to, you know, the Aristotelian sort of definition of natural law, it derives historically from natural law.
	So the idea being that you can derive from the universe that there are certain laws that apply to humanity and there is a set and fundamental human nature and interaction with the world generates laws that you are best off living by.
	Okay, the converse of that is that you have to have the right to use your mind to investigate the natural law because nobody has yet been able to peg down exactly every specific of what natural law constitutes, right?
	This is a point made by Grotius, who's really the first person who starts talking about natural right.
	So the fundamental right to use your mind to investigate the world requires things like freedom of speech.
	The fundamental right that you have to property is predicated upon a natural law notion that human nature is acquisitive.
	And therefore, once I acquire something, you do not have the ability to encroach upon me and steal it.
	Right.
	So life, liberty and property are, to me, the basic natural rights.
	Now, that does include the possibility that as we create polity, we now have to use pragmatic means to determine what the polity is going to look like, which is why I think that you can encroach more on, you know, on trying to restrict law to virtue on the local level than you can on a broad level. on trying to restrict law to virtue on the local At a certain point, morality and ideal morality are going to have to conflict with how you actually govern.
	And so this is actually almost two separate conversations.
	In the ideal state, should we have a monarch who is perfect and also instills virtue?
	Or how do we actually set up a system of governance?
	What the founders came up with, and I still think it's the best system, is a system whereby these rights, life, liberty, and property, are left to two dual things— We only think about government whenever we have these conversations.
	But they're really left to two dual and necessary means.
	One is a government that is large enough to stop the negative violation of your rights.
	large enough in many of its essences in order to promote virtue and a social body that promotes virtue.
	This is what Tocqueville talks about.
	Can I add one thing to this, though?
	Rights involve doing what you want with what is yours.
	And this is to Jeremy's point, that if he wants to have drag queen story hour, leaving children out of it in his home, that's his right because...
	It's his home.
	But the statesman in America of the...
	The kids going to the...
	No, no, no.
	We're leaving the kids out.
	This is just for us.
	Drag hour, not drag.
	This guy's dressed up as women.
	They're telling the stories just to him.
	Okay.
	The statesmen of the founding era, it seems to me, I think we are misrepresenting here.
	I don't think that they believed that you had a natural right to sin given to us by the Treaty of Westphalia.
	It seems to me they had laws.
	No, I don't agree with this.
	Hold on, they were Protestant.
	They were.
	And a core component of Protestantism is a belief that Christ set us free from the law.
	That freedom particularly means freedom to fail.
	Then why did they outlaw obscenity?
	Why did they outlaw adultery?
	Because they lived in a different time.
	They outlawed all these things that were saying we all have a natural right.
	Michael, hold on.
	But they didn't at the federal level.
	Not at the federal level, but they did it everywhere else.
	This goes to my point.
	If you're talking about homogenous communities where people generally agree, then you have the right to make your own community.
	This goes to your point more.
	One of the rights of a community is to form a polity.
	You do have a right to form an HOA, for example.
	And essentially, a local government is an HOA. And you have the right to decide that.
	And as long as people also have the right to leave that HOA and go somewhere else, you do not have the right to restrict that somebody has to stay in the area.
	No Berlin Walls.
	So you do have the right to set up a moral system.
	And America is the history of rowdier and rowdier Protestants leaving town.
	And going west.
	This is how we end up with 13 states, right?
	I mean, you literally have people who say, we don't want you here because of your religion.
	And then they just go and they found Delaware.
	Right?
	And thank you for that, Joe Biden.
	Anyway, but I think that the generalized point, which is that we should use as much power as possible on the federal level, which is really what we're talking about.
	When we talk about the common good conservative versus the libertarian conservative argument, which is really what we're kind of boiling this down to, we're never talking about this at the state level nearly as much as we are at the federal level.
	I'm not sure.
	Because in my local community, if you ban porn in my local community, I really don't have a problem with it.
	I really don't.
	In fact, I argue specifically for it in my second book.
	But then to Matt's point, the problem with the internet is, because of technological development, some of these things happen.
	I agree.
	By the way, I even think with regard to pornography, there's a fairly good argument to be made that it's more like drugs than it is like anything else.
	It does have the effect of drugs on the human psyche.
	But it's worse because of how accessible it is to everyone.
	Well, I don't think any of us disagree that it should be less accessible.
	And this is one of, you know, Blake Masters from the Teal Foundation wrote this terrific piece in the Wall Street Journal this week where he basically said one of the things we have to deal with is they are using our brains as drug dispensers.
	And I think that that's a really interesting question, especially for all these people who don't believe in God, who are materialists, then essentially they're drug dealers.
	I guess when it comes to politics, I guess what I'm arguing for is when we think about what does the moral polity look like?
	We should stop thinking top-down.
	We should start thinking bottom-up.
	Sure.
	Meaning, what does the moral polity look like in your family and then in your local community?
	And then, are you willing to have a local community that is a common polity with a bunch of other local communities that may disagree with you on some stuff and forces you to be in a local level?
	But what happened is that America is a Protestant country, and the Protestant church was overrun by evangelicalism, particularly in the second half of the 20th century.
	And it gutted itself and is in collapse.
	And what we're living through right now is as Protestantism is collapsing as the moral center of American, let's call it American traditional conservatism for lack of a, we could argue about all these terms, but American conservatism at a moral level has always been a Protestant movement.
	The Protestant church in America is in collapse.
	And what we're seeing right now is that there is an urge to now use the government To enforce on us what we used to basically do ourselves.
	And one of the changes that's happening in the American conservative movement is that there's an enormous amount of American conservative Catholics now that has not historically been true in American history.
	I think historically it is true.
	I think the entire conservative movement has had this bizarre, because I agree it's a Protestant country, but I think it's had this bizarre, a Protestant idea, but it's had a bizarre Catholic heart.
	Bill Buckley, Russell Kirk, Phyllis Schlafly, Brent Bozell, the list goes on and on and on.
	The American hardcore conservatives, bizarrely, have been Catholics.
	Maybe that tells you something.
	No, it makes perfect sense because it's a Protestant idea and the Protestant idea, like the Catholic idea, has a borderline where it starts to fall apart.
	These two forces are actually in a good relationship of struggle in this country.
	Historically, I think right now they're not.
	No, because of what you said.
	I think right now...
	One of the things that's happening that is encouraging is that the sort of subsidiary that we're talking about is happening naturally.
	Because what you're seeing is a massive sorting effect.
	We all left California, except for Walsh.
	We all left California, and now we're all living in Tennessee or Florida or Virginia, variously.
	We're moving to, except for Drew, more red areas.
	Virginia's still more red than California.
	Yeah, Drew was like, this place is so left, I've got to get out of here, and It's like moving to Mississippi from California.
	But the basic idea is that subsidiarity is being chosen by people in how they live.
	People are moving to communities where they are getting the communities that they want.
	Which, to your earlier point, may actually exacerbate the balkanization.
	Right.
	It may exacerbate the balkanization.
	Well, now we're going to have a choice.
	This is where I really think the future of the country is.
	The choice is going to be Do we want to share that polity?
	I keep coming back to that question.
	Do we want to share the polity?
	If we want to share the polity, you have to have a set of weak rules that we can all agree on at the top that are pretty universal, which is why the founders set up the system to require essentially supermajority across nearly all the spectrum in order to get any broad thing done.
	It required huge majorities of people, not bare majorities, not 51 votes in the Senate or 50 plus 1 and 50 plus 1 in the House.
	It required federal state balance.
	It required the Supreme Court to sign off on things.
	It required all of these checks.
	And if it was really big, it required a constitutional amendment.
	That's right.
	All of this was designed to create the notion, and the founders were brilliant about this, that at the top level, very few rules.
	Because if you want to share a polity with people who are very diverse, then you are going to need very few rules at the top.
	And then, increasingly, as you go down toward the bottom, you don't mind if there's, like, I don't mind in my local community.
	My local community is very orthodox, right?
	It's a very orthodox Jewish community.
	If there was a regulation among members of my community that on Sabbath you don't drive, Yeah.
	deeply immoral about that?
	I mean, I'm not sure that I see something truly deeply and horrifically immoral about that, so long as people are given the opportunity to leave.
	But it would be if Joe Biden said...
	Right, right.
	This is exactly right.
	Here's a question kind of along these lines, as long as we're talking about the death of evangelicalism and the sad, sad fact that nobody's yet killed Catholicism, is the very argument that Biden is making about vax mandates that it's sinful to be Is he making fundamentally a religious argument?
	Well, I think with another Catholic, Cardinal Manning, I think all human conflict ultimately is theological, and it might be at a very removed level, but when we're having arguments about how we ought to live together, ultimately we're making kind of religious arguments.
	That's what we see from the left perspective.
	Always.
	They always make the moral argument.
	You make the practical argument.
	Exactly.
	Every policy proposal, they make it on a moral grounds.
	They say this is just the right thing to do.
	And they don't bother a lot with the practical stuff.
	And then, right, the conservatives will respond, well, this is too expensive, or this is going to cause this practical effect.
	And it's almost always the wrong response.
	The fact that we've ceded the moral argument.
	I agree with this 100%.
	I think this is so true about the way we talk.
	We've ceded the moral argument to insane perverts, basically.
	And we're right.
	And we're right.
	We've ceded the moral argument, and we are right on moral justice.
	The irony, though, we have to point out is Joe Biden is making this moral argument, and he says he's a devout Catholic, and he's making a religious argument, but it's not a Catholic argument.
	He's making a progressive religious argument.
	But that makes perfect sense.
	He argues like a Catholic without Catholicism.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	I mean, he took all the doctrine, he threw it out the window, and he kept all the attitudes.
	Right.
	Like, really?
	You see the secular Jews all the time.
	Yeah.
	A lot of them will keep this sort of very midactic is the word, like very specific articulation of particular issues.
	But they just got rid of the whole religion thing.
	They just sort of kept the sensibility.
	So true.
	Takuna Lam.
	So here's a question from the DailyWire.com subscribers.
	You can get your question in at DailyWire.com slash subscribe.
	The vaccine mandate seems like a stepping stone to some very authoritarian legislation.
	My question, where do you see this leading?
	Well, I think that if they can do a vaccine mandate simply through the power of the administrative state, it's hard to see how they can't do it with regard to all other forms of health problems.
	And you've seen how they've done this with nearly everything, right?
	They declared last year that racism was a public health problem.
	They say this in Chicago.
	It's a public health crisis.
	Well, if you can declare...
	That post-vaccination, COVID is such a public health crisis that the federal government can cram down mandates on everybody else.
	If racism is a public health crisis, why can't OSHA cram down rules about CRT and workplaces?
	And you think all this is bizarre and crazy, except that all of it is bizarre and crazy.
	Well, the head of the CDC, right after saying that the eviction moratorium was going to continue, said that she wants to turn her attentions to guns as a public health crisis in America.
	I think rock and roll is a public health crisis, right?
	Rock and roll's over.
	You're still talking about rock and roll if so Barack Obama didn't happen.
	Honestly, it's for another day, but Barack Obama destroyed rock and roll.
	You have convinced me of this.
	There was rock and roll, then there was Barack Obama, now there is no rock and roll.
	So he did something good.
	Because rock and roll.
	Rock and roll was about white male angst.
	White male teenage angst.
	And then Barack Obama came along and said young white men aren't allowed to have angst.
	They're not allowed to basically express their dissatisfaction because they're so toxic.
	And so, truly, rock and roll just stopped.
	Yeah, I think you're right.
	I was hoping to see Norm Macdonald on the book club.
	I should have read ahead because I actually do want to talk about Norm.
	Did Michael ever hear any of Norm's thoughts on crime and punishment?
	Michael?
	Yeah, I will say, I wish I could say that I was a close, dear friend of Norm Macdonald.
	I've been a fan and admirer of his since I can remember, since I was a kid.
	And...
	I did get to talk to him.
	I mean, Jeremy and I went to see one of his shows, and we wore...
	We actually had custom hats made from his book.
	Like, it was a total...
	And he looked at us kind of in the crowd, like, we were these crazy people.
	But I noticed this strange thing, which is when Norm got on Twitter, he followed me, like, really early on.
	And I thought, this is so weird, you know.
	But I never abused it.
	I didn't want to DM him.
	I was so in awe of him.
	He was the funniest man that was alive in our age.
	And...
	One day he sent out a tweet about how he was in pain, and I feared that he was depressed or something, so I sent him a note and I said, hey pal, I'm in awe of you, but if you want to talk.
	And we had a very long exchange.
	We had this long correspondence of like 10 paragraph DMs, and it was about religion.
	And I'm not going to, you know, I don't intend on revealing this private correspondence, but the man, he did this thing, and he did it publicly too, where he'd say, you know, Michael, man, you're really educated.
	You know, me, I'm just an old chunk of coal, and I'm totally uneducated.
	And then he would use a word.
	That I didn't know.
	Which means his reading was so deep.
	The one thing I will say about our correspondence is I am convinced the man had not only incredible wisdom, but a deep, profound, abiding, lifelong faith.
	I am 100% convinced of that.
	The last part of our correspondence was he was going to come on the book show and do...
	Crime and Punishment, or one of the Russian novels.
	Actually, one of his most famous jokes is based on the death of Ivan Ilyich, which I ended up doing on the book show with Matt.
	And he wouldn't come on and he said he didn't want to, during the coronavirus, he didn't want to go into a studio.
	And I thought this was just him being eccentric.
	Now, looking back, it's clear he was in cancer treatments.
	Michael, we actually have that joke queued up.
	Let's play it for everyone.
	A moth goes into a podiatrist's office.
	A moth goes into a podiatrist's office.
	You are correct.
	A moth goes into a podiatrist's office and the podiatrist's office says, what's the problem?
	And the moth says, what's the problem?
	Where do I begin, man?
	He goes, I go to work for Gregory Olinovich and all day long I work.
	Honestly, Doc, I don't even know what I'm doing anymore.
	I don't even know if Gregory Olinovich knows.
	He only knows that he has power over me, and that seems to bring him happiness.
	But I don't know.
	I wake up in a malaise, and I walk here and there.
	The podiatrist says, oh yeah?
	The moth goes, yes.
	At night, I sometimes wake up, and I turn to some old lady.
	In my bed that's on my arm.
	A lady that I once loved, Doc.
	I don't know where to turn to.
	My youngest, Alexandria.
	She fell in the cold of last year.
	The cold took her down as it did many of us.
	And my other boy.
	And this is the hardest pill to swallow, Doc.
	My other boy, Gregorio Ivinolitovich.
	I no longer love him.
	As much as it pains me to say, when I look in his eyes, all I see is the same cowardice that I catch when I take a glimpse of my own face in the mirror.
	If only the cowardice was stronger, then perhaps...
	Perhaps I could bring myself to reach over to that cocked and loaded gun that lays on the bedside behind me.
	And in this hellish facade...
	How long a drive was this?
	Do you live in the valley?
	Where do you live?
	Please, sorry.
	He says, Doc...
	Sometimes I feel like a spider, even though I'm a moth, just barely hanging onto my web with an everlasting fire underneath me.
	I'm not feeling good.
	And so the doctor says, moth, man, you're troubled.
	But you should be seeing a psychiatrist.
	Why on earth did you come here?
	And then the moth said, because the light was on.
	I have to tell you, this is in his memoir, his wonderful memoir, and I listened to it in the car.
	And I'm not joking.
	I had to pull off the road three times because I was going to die.
	I was laughing so hard and driving in L.A. at the same time.
	And it goes on and on.
	And it reflected also, I mean, just on top of this, a deep knowledge of Russian literature, which he really had.
	And, you know, Crime and Punishment is the book that essentially made me a Christian.
	I mean, that's the book that changed my life.
	That book changed my life.
	I mean, I was 19 years old.
	I read that book and all the relativism that was rising through the university system that I was in, I thought, oh, it's all wrong.
	I get it.
	It's all wrong.
	And it genuinely changed my life and put me on a 30-year track toward Christianity.
	And that joke, I just thought it was just...
	I don't know.
	It's a profound joke, but it's hilarious.
	He had an almost religious...
	His commitment to the joke.
	And I actually think it held him back in his career.
	Oh, sure.
	Because he was an artist.
	He was fired from SNL because he wouldn't stop telling the funniest jokes, which at the time were about O.J. Simpson.
	About O.J. Simpson.
	They said, we will keep paying you, but you have to stop making that joke.
	He would bomb deliberately in settings where he thought the funnier punchline was for him to fail.
	Goes to Bob Saget.
	Amazing.
	Unbelievable.
	He...
	And what's funny is that a guy that committed to the joke, a guy who would put the joke ahead of his own career, ahead of his own happiness in many ways, I think, here at the end, carried around this cancer for nine years, apparently didn't even tell his family.
	Was willing to carry all of that on himself.
	Told cancer?
	Yeah, told cancer, so that the joke wouldn't suffer.
	And yet...
	I think that this is the most united, if you look at social media right now, the most politically united of anything, there's the most political unity around the death of Norm Macdonald that I've seen about the death of any public figure in the last 10 years.
	Universally beloved, left and right.
	And this is an excerpt from his book that I... I think his greatest work is based on a true story, a memoir.
	And this is Norm MacDonald talking about meeting God outside of the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas.
	He said, I find my way through the casino, and in a moment I'm on the strip.
	There's a dry chill that begins to freeze my naked face, and the buildings of iron and glass feel as immortal as the ancient streets they sit upon.
	I look above the sun shining amid the blue sky and the white, white clouds as they cast a pall of futility over the man-made monuments in their sickly neon lights.
	And I stand by the pyramid of Luxor and gaze upon the firmament above.
	And in a sudden, the sky becomes a face, and I look away in fear and shame.
	It's the face of God, and He speaks.
	And His voice is both your voice and mine at once.
	And He speaks unto me.
	Why do you not look at me, neither yesterday nor today?
	And so I remove my dirty work hat and I look upon him and I study his countenance.
	Now people always wonder, is he's got a man or a woman?
	Is he black or white or yellow or brown?
	But I'm here to tell you that none of that silly stuff matters.
	He's a white guy, by the way.
	He's a true master craftsman, and I doubt it sounds cliche to say we will not see his life.
	Oh, we will not see his bike for a long time.
	Well, thank you for joining us.
	As always, we're very happy to have had you, and we're very pleased that our DailyWire.com subscribers make it possible for us to do this show.
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