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Nov. 11, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show
01:32:19
Daily Wire Backstage: Turning Of The Tide
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Hey, Michael Knowles here.
The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage is available now.
Don't miss an episode of your favorite Daily Wire hosts pouring a glass of whiskey, lighting up fine cigars, and relentlessly owning the squishes and the libs.
This is an episode you do not want to miss.
Take a listen.
Welcome to the Daily Wire backstage.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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Joining me tonight, we have Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and, well, me.
I'm joining me.
We want you to head over to dailywire.com slash do not comply.
Listen, we don't do this very often, but I'm going to be serious on the show for a minute.
We need your help.
We need your help because we're in the fight of our lives against the Biden administration on behalf of medical freedom for all Americans.
As you know, the president in September gave a big speech in which he said he had lost patience with the American people as though we care.
And then he said that he was going to stick the bureaucracy on anyone who didn't get a vaccine by way of threatening your livelihood.
His new mandate came down last week, and it made good on his promise.
He basically said that any company with more than 100 employees, and that includes The Daily Wire, is going to be required beginning on January 4th to say to our employees, are you vaccinated?
Give us that fundamental private information about your private medical decisions.
If the answer is yes, then you are welcome into our company.
You're a fully realized citizen.
If the answer is no, oh, that's fine.
We just have to test you every week and require you to wear a mask to work.
It's not, of course, that surprising that the Democrats are passing basically segregation legislation.
Discrimination has always been part of their playbook, but it's never been part of ours.
We said no, and we immediately filed a lawsuit in the Sixth Circuit to try to put an end to this.
You've probably been following the news.
You know that the Fifth Circuit issued a stay against President Biden's unconstitutional order a day or two after we filed our suit in the Sixth Circuit.
But that doesn't mean that the fight is over.
In fact, President Biden...
Somewhat audaciously, I think, said to businesses, hey, ignore the stay and continue prepping for my order to go into effect on January 4th.
Why does this matter?
Does it matter because I hate vaccines?
You know I don't.
I'm vaccinated.
I'm pro-vaccine.
If I were a dictator, I'd make sure that you were vaccinated too.
See, that's the point.
I'm not dictator and neither is Joe Biden.
I'm pro-vaccine and that's my choice.
That's my opinion.
You don't have to share all of my opinions and you don't have to choose everything that I choose.
That's not only a fundamental American principle but it's a fundamental right that you have as a human being not to have to do what I want.
So we're fighting on your behalf and of course we're fighting on behalf of our employees.
Nobody really talks about this aspect but we're also fighting for our business.
If Congress had claimed the authority, which I don't even believe Congress has, but they had claimed the authority to make a rule like this, then they could have at least mitigated against the downside risk for employers, as is since Biden is doing this through the unelected bureaucrats at the Department of Labor.
They aren't able to actually mitigate against all those risks.
Here's just an example.
Let's say that an employee of mine doesn't want to be vaccinated.
Let's say that they tell me they don't want to be vaccinated.
Let's say that I now start subjecting them to costly tests and requiring them to wear a mask to work when I don't require that of other employees.
And now let's say that for whatever reason, I have to part company with that employee in the future.
Have I not discriminated against them?
Have I not retaliated against them for not doing what I want or putting the company?
Of course, that's not why I'm letting them go.
But how do I prove that in court?
I've just opened myself up to so many liabilities by doing the wrong thing and discriminating against my employees.
So we have to say no.
We have to say we do not comply, Mr.
President.
And we have to have your voice added alongside our own.
This fight that we're in has already cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It's going to cost many hundreds of thousands more.
Of course, we couldn't do that without our DailyWire.com subscribers, and we're very grateful to them.
But we know not everyone can become a DailyWire.com subscriber.
So we're asking you instead to join us by adding your voice to our petition.
We think it's important for the president to hear from millions of Americans.
No.
No, we will not comply.
You can add your voice to ours at dailywire.com slash do not comply.
We've set an ambitious goal for tonight of 500,000 signatures on our petition.
We're 315,000 signatures along that path already, so we're only looking for that extra 185 tonight.
Of course, that's just the start.
The president's order affects over 85 million American workers.
We think he needs to hear from millions of Americans, but our ambitious goal for tonight, 500,000 We're suing the government.
We're suing the government.
And by the way, I think a part of this that people are missing is we were right about this from the beginning.
You know, I hate to say I told you so, but from the beginning, when Biden reversed his opinion on mandates and said we are going to push this mandate, I said, many of us said, this is a bluff.
He doesn't really have the right to do this.
This is not constitutional.
I asked our pal Ted Cruz.
I said, you're a constitutional lawyer.
He said, it's bogus.
It's going to be struck down in court.
But it doesn't matter.
Because by that time, by the time it's struck down in court, the government will already have pressured the businesses to pressure the workers to take the Fauci-ouchie.
And so people really need to stand up right now.
It's so corrupt.
It's such a sneaky way to do it.
But as you said, this fight...
Doesn't come cheap.
It costs a lot of money to do it, but someone's got to do it or we're all just going to roll over.
And then when it is struck down in court, Biden will say, whoopsie-daisy, we got exactly what we want.
You also have to draw the line somewhere.
And I think that what people are neglecting is that this is the first step.
step.
It's not the last step because things seem to be getting better in terms of how many people are vaccinated and how many people have already had COVID.
And because the numbers are going down a lot in the South, for example, a lot of people seem to think that the government is now going to leave them alone.
I even hear this from some conservatives.
Well, you know, if we just get past this, then everything will go back to normal.
I see no evidence whatsoever that blue state authoritarians have any interest in ever allowing this to go back to normal.
They've already started changing their rhetoric about masking up forever.
They've already talked about openly forcing five-year-olds to get this vaccine.
They're already doing it in San Francisco.
Whatever starts in San Francisco goes to LA, then it goes to New York, then to Chicago, and then national.
They've already talked in that OSHA regulation, which is 490 pages long.
Great, great piece of law.
Yeah.
In that regulation, they have pages dedicated to if we want to make this rule permanent, what should we do?
And some of the things that they are proposing are things like no exception if you have natural immunity.
No exception if you're going to get tested.
You must get vaccinated.
No testing out of it.
They propose the possibility that...
Face masks have to be KN95s or N95s, not cloth face masks anymore.
They talk about fully masking everybody who's already vaccinated.
That is what they're talking about for their permanent rule.
They want this to be forever.
There's a whole thread from Andy Slavitt, who used to be a very COVID hawkish guy, to say the very least.
He was an advisor to Obama.
We got this long thread yesterday talking about how so many people think the pandemic is over, but just because you think the pandemic is over for you doesn't mean it's over for everybody.
And what he means by that is, until I say it's over for everybody, it's not over for you.
And they are not going to allow this thing to end.
Not with vaccines, not with kids getting vaccinated, not with masking, not with mandates, not with anything.
They have to maintain the control.
Also, people aren't talking about this.
The OSHA rule, for the first time ever, essentially says that a worker at a company...
OSHA was created to protect workers from externalities.
Now they're saying the worker is the externality.
The worker is the threat.
The worker is the safety violation.
That's a complete redefinition of the role between OSHA and workers around the country and a redefinition of what a human being is in the eyes of the government.
And don't be fooled, by the way.
They're declaring climate change a public health emergency now.
So if you say that on the basis of a public health emergency, they can seize these extraordinary powers, well, now everything is going to become a public health emergency.
I think it's important, too, to point out that when we ask people to join us, we actually ask people to join us in the fight.
You know, so many people on the Internet are fundraising, asking for money.
I'm doing this.
Give me some money.
I've gotten a lot of emails already.
How can I donate?
And I give my personal address, of course.
Weird to your initials, C-A-S-H. But we actually ask people to join us and become part of what we do and to get all the benefits of membership.
We actually are fighting back through capitalism, which I think is a double fight because there's just so many guys, even on the right, and I hate to pick on our own people, but there's so many people who are not running capitalist organizations like we are.
And I think that this is what the fight is about.
It's not about give us some dough and we'll go out and do this fight for you.
It's join what we do here It receives value and also empowers the creation of new value.
And it really doesn't mean anything because there are a lot of conservatives now who will complain about it, but they're still going to go along with it.
So if you're complaining about it, that's the thing with compliance.
You can comply begrudgingly, but the government doesn't care about that as long as you're doing what they want you to do.
And so, you know, here we're actually doing something about it.
And I think to Ben's point, if it was Rochelle Walensky, CDC this week said that talking about masking and said, hey, you know, by the way, masks also are great for the common cold and the flu.
And I'm old enough to remember the last, I don't know, 18 months to two years where if we suggested that, hey, they're going to make this connection between COVID and the cold and the flu soon.
If we said that, we were conspiracy theorists.
And of course, we see the trajectory here now.
Because it makes sense.
If you can require masking for this communicable disease, then why not any other?
This is the fundamental problem that the squishes fell into.
This is the thing they missed.
They thought, if I just give them this.
They were so desperate to get back to normal.
Okay, I'll give them.
The mandate.
Okay, I'll give them this.
Okay, I'll give them that.
But then it's okay.
Finally, we'll get back to normal.
It's day 600, folks.
It was 15 days to slow the spread.
And they're getting something really important about this.
They're getting fear.
That's right.
Fear they now sell as a virtue.
If you're not afraid of the climate, you're a bad person.
If you're not afraid of racism, which they've also declared a health issue, a health emergency in some states, if you're not afraid of racism, if you're not afraid of COVID, you're a bad person.
When Trump tore off his mask, remember that?
Afterwards, he stood up on the balcony, tore off his mask.
There was a round table on every single network, every single news network saying, no, be afraid, be afraid.
Meanwhile, if we don't like something they call us phobic.
That's right.
That's right.
And, you know, this is something C.S. Lewis talked about.
He said that courage is such a beautiful virtue that you can't trick people out of it, so you have to keep them afraid.
And he has a description in the Screwtape Letters, I think, of exactly what they're doing, of precautions getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
You mean the how-to novel?
The how-to novel for the devil.
Exactly.
I think that the biggest thing that we're fighting back against, obviously, is not just a vax mandate.
I think there's an entire mentality that is set in in the American public over the course of the last hundred years, and a huge percentage of the population has bought into it, but not the people who tend to watch shows like this one.
And that is that the government has a giant magic button that they can hit at any time and end all your problems.
And that giant button exists somewhere in the executive branch.
It's hidden somewhere deep in a regulatory agency.
And they can smash it at any time.
And they can fix all your problems.
And so with COVID, the problem that Biden has is that he made that promise.
I will be elected and I will end COVID, right?
I won't shut down the economy.
I won't shut down your life.
I will shut down the virus.
He can't do that because nobody can do that because no one is capable of doing that.
But this is part and parcel of the entire left-wing pitch, which is government is God and government is capable, if you give it enough power, of fixing all your problems, economic, Racial, disease, death.
All of these things can simply be ended if you give them enough power.
And then, when people see through it, which is what we've seen, right?
Because a huge percentage of the population in this country, on the other side, is we've been living like normal for months.
I mean, some of us for a year.
We've been going out.
We've been doing what we want to do.
Some people who have already had natural immunity, they're all doing it.
As soon as I got the shot, I was like, done.
And that's a huge number of people in this country.
Those people are seen as heretics.
And they must be seen as heretics by people like Joe Biden.
Because once people see through the myth, once they realize there is no magic button that fixes everything, now the people in power have two choices.
One is admit they were lying to you the entire time.
And the second is, if it were only for those people, if they would shut up, I would show you the magic button.
If those people would just do what I said, then the magic button would present itself.
It's these people who are standing in the way of me achieving utopia.
It's your neighbor who's the problem, not me lying to you.
Yeah, it's like all faith healers, right?
Anytime a faith healer comes around, they say, don't talk to anyone who doesn't have faith, because that will somehow...
You know, undermine your faith.
God wants to give you this great gift, but if someone else tells you he doesn't, then he definitely won't.
But God is dependent on that guy?
I don't understand.
I don't know the math.
I'm not a Democrat.
They're also literally redefining all the terms now.
So I don't know if you saw Dr.
Fauci arguing with Rand Paul.
Rand Paul's destroying him again.
And what they're doing is retreating into nominalism, to use a technical phrase.
What they're trying to do now is just...
Define all of these things.
He says, Senator Paul, we do not do gain of function.
We do, you know, increase of utility.
Yeah, that's it.
It's not gain of function.
And they literally took the webpage down off of NIH. Are you the people's front of Judea?
Ah, the people's front of Judea.
- Right, right, right, right.
- We're the people's Judean front.
- They're doing this with everything, right?
Did you see that whole argument online over the last 24 hours about whether people should continue to use the word woke?
- I know, I saw it.
- A bunch of people on the left saying, Republicans, conservatives, they're racist for using the term woke.
We didn't make up that term.
- Pure word.
- You guys made up the term.
They keep doing this over and over.
They coin a term, we notice that their term is terrible and that it represents a terrible set of thoughts, and then they go, how dare you use that term anymore?
Critical race theory.
There's no such thing.
Liberalism became progressivism.
It was progressivism.
They said progressivism is bad.
They're like, no, no, it's liberalism.
Liberalism is bad.
They're like, no, it's progressivism.
And then it was leftism.
And the funny thing is, it never occurs to them, it's the actual ideas.
You can call them Fred, and it's still going to be a bad idea.
A conservative apparently.
He is the most right-wing conservative.
He's the liberal professor at Harvard.
It's funny because he is a free thinker.
I don't agree with a lot of what he says, but he is a free thinker.
That makes him a conservative.
So Pinker has this idea of the euphemism treadmill.
He doesn't only apply this to the left, but that you just change the words.
You change the euphemisms.
And the thought is that it will change the...
The reality is so ugly that you just have to change all the words.
But eventually the reality catches up with it.
The crazy thing is they've taken this to an extent now.
They say black lives matter.
But you're killing people.
Yeah, but black lives.
You don't believe black lives matter.
But you're killing black people.
Yeah, but black lives.
It's like I want to start a movement called Cats Are Nice, you know?
And then it's just you give me money because cats are nice.
Yeah.
So head over to dailywire.com slash do not comply if you'd like to add your voice to ours.
We'll keep you kind of posted throughout the night on how our petition is doing.
We'll make it very public and send a loud message.
But what I want to talk to you about next is your own sense of mortality.
People depend on you.
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An ambitious goal, 500,000.
That's what we're chasing.
Join us in this fight for bodily autonomy against the Biden administration.
Of course, this isn't the only fight that The Daily Wire has picked recently.
We also basically elected a governor in Virginia.
I wasn't going to say it.
Thank you so much.
Andrew Klavan now lives in a red state.
I do.
So does Matt Walsh.
We have two Virginia restaurants.
The Virginian, as we call them, yeah.
No, I voted before anybody else because I was leaving town on Election Day, and I just said, follow me, folks!
And it was just this incredible wave of that.
It was actually, I mean, we contributed in a lot of ways.
Obviously, we weren't the only ones.
Chris Ruffo played an important role.
The Virginian himself, Matt Walsh, making an appearance down in Loudoun County to fight on these issues.
But then, I really think you cannot give enough credit I'm going to prove that I am a liar.
Because this son of a gun broke the most important story of 2021, and it had an immediate impact in helping to elect Youngkin as governor of Virginia.
By the way, I have to say, being an actual Virginian, I'm not mentioning anything.
What do you imply?
Trans-Virginians are Virginians.
You know, the thing about where I am, which was a pretty blue area, compared to L.A., it's a different blue.
It's a different color of blue.
A lot of Marines, a lot of service people, they are patriots.
They hear this woke stuff, and I hate to use the name, but they hear this woke stuff, and they don't like it.
And some of them are afraid to say so, but when they start messing with their kids, they're not afraid.
That's what struck me at the rally, talking to people there, and it was not, I mean, certainly if you were to do a political poll, probably the majority are lean conservative.
But I talked to – there were teachers there and, of course, just a lot of normal parents.
And a great number of them were not – didn't identify themselves as Republicans or right-wingers.
But they're concerned about their parents – about their kids, rather.
And the other thing is also – We've talked a lot about how critical race theory has had this great effect on the Virginia election, and it did.
But there's another theory in the school system, which is more pernicious, much more harmful, more insidious, and more widespread.
And I think it's going to be the next big theory that we're all talking about, which is gender theory.
And that plays into the rape case there.
That's what...
I would say a majority, not to speak for them, but a majority of the people at the rally that I attended were most concerned about.
Because there, with gender theory, with critical race theory, it's a terrible thing because you're foisting white guilt on white children and you're dividing people by race and it's a horrible thing.
Even worse than foisting white guilt on white children, by the way, is foisting victimization on all the other children.
And self-loathing on everybody and it's just a terrible thing.
With gender theory, though, you are fundamentally altering the way a child's identity.
I mean, you are reshaping.
You are corrupting children.
You are reshaping who they are.
There was just a poll that was released, a survey that was released a couple weeks ago, that found that in Gen Z, 40%, 40% identify now as LGBT. And we could look at that and say, oh, it's a fad, or maybe that's an exaggeration.
Maybe something's in the water.
I don't know.
You know, there have been...
They are turning the frogs.
You've got to check the frogs.
But this is not just a fad.
This is a very real...
Well, it may very well be a fad, but it's a fad with consequences.
Well, it's a fad.
I've heard people say, when I was a kid, it was emo or goth or whatever.
But yeah, that was a fad.
But the thing is, if you identified as a goth kid, adults were not going to sit you down.
Adults would say to you, this is a fad.
You're going to get over it.
You look ridiculous.
Right.
But now, with this fad, adults are going to say, well, this is who you are.
Here's a flag.
Go march in the street.
This is your truth.
This is the most important thing about you.
And so it sets in and it cements.
I think this is the biggest problem facing the Democrats right now.
What Virginia brought up, and it's true in New Jersey also, which was not about critical race theory, but it's true nearly everywhere.
The minute people start thinking generationally, Democrats are toast.
The minute people start thinking beyond their generation, they start thinking about what happens with the kids, Democrats have a real problem on their hands.
There's a really telling headline from the Huffington Post right after Virginia, and the headline said something to the effect of, Republicans want to make parents angry, Democrats want to give them money.
And I thought, this is it.
This is the whole thing.
Because what Democrats really think is that all parents want is to be given money.
They don't care about the future of their children.
They do not care about the lessons their kids are being taught in school.
They want to just hand off their kids to the Government-sponsored daycare, and then to the government teachers, and they just want to take the money from the feds, and then they're going to be happy.
And the reality is that people who have kids do not think like that.
If you have children, you don't think like that.
You are thinking honestly, like all the time, about how do I want to bring up my kids?
What kind of world do I want to bring up my kids?
What kind of bubble do I want to create for my kids to protect them from the predations of a set of values that are likely to not only confuse, but corrupt them and make them into deeply, in some cases, Kids who are not only confused about identity, but participate in behaviors that harm them, that actively harm them.
And parents have every right to think that way.
And Democrats, if they call those parents intolerant, which is what they're going to do, that'll be the next step, just like they called everybody who pointed out critical race theory racist.
The next step is going to be, if you say to your child that there are things like two genders, and that your girl is a girl and not a non-binary eight-year-old, that if you say that, you're an intolerant bigot.
Good luck with that argument.
That one's going to go way worse than critical race.
This is the thing.
Your children are always your softest point.
And all of these ideas are luxury ideas.
For all of human history, in every society, everywhere, men and women have been considered different, have been assigned different roles.
Some of those roles have become elaborately performed, but they've always had different roles.
There is no new science.
The first thing that a doctor used to say to you when your child was born, it's a boy, it's a girl.
This is universal, and there's no new science that has changed this.
There is not a single discovery that anyone has made that suddenly says, oh no, all of this was wrong.
It was there to observe.
It was, as Matt was saying, it's the first thing children come to terms with, is that they are a boy or a girl.
And we have this luxury where we think we can do anything because we're so safe.
Our armory is so powerful.
Our oceans are so broad.
We're so rich.
It was so rich.
It's so hard to do anything, but your kids are always vulnerable because you love them and you want them to.
This point, I think it's very important to take this fight to the Dems.
We've got to make sure that the establishment Republicans, the leadership of the Republican Party, gets this.
Because right the day after the Virginia election, when our Virginian friend over here and our investigative reporter helped elect a governor, the big tweets from the official Republican accounts were, Virginia proves Americans don't want socialism.
I don't think Americans want socialism.
I hate socialism.
I think socialism is evil.
Socialism had nothing to do with Virginia.
Terry McAuliffe is a regular old corporate Democrat crook, Clintonite.
He's not a socialist.
And Glenn Youngkin didn't really run against socialism.
People went out to vote not to stop the workers from seizing the means of production.
It was to protect their kids.
And if these freaking Republicans don't get the message and don't run on that winning issue, they deserve to lose.
But this is, you know, to speak the unspeakable word, this is the purpose of Donald Trump.
His purpose, I think, is now served, but if the Republicans do not pick up that this was his power, this was his superpower, this is what made people follow him, right and wrong, if they don't get that, Youngkin got it.
Youngkin got it.
He would not have had the temerity to fight the culture fight that he did.
Because he's a typical old Republican.
It took him some time.
Youngkin got it eventually.
He started his campaign as a kind of standard cookie cutter corporate Republican type.
And then there was a definite shift, a definite change.
I like to think that at the Daily Wire we had something to do with convincing him to make that change.
But yeah, as soon as he...
This has been the lie that conservatives have been fed from the Republicans for so long that we don't need to engage in the culture war, the so-called social issues.
It's all about business.
All people care about is their wallet.
No, your wallet is not what drives you at the deepest level of your being.
Well, some of us.
It gets very close to the deepest level, but for a lot of us, your values and also your kids.
And that's something that the Democrats are going to learn, maybe are learning, is that with your children, here's one thing.
There are Americans who are willing to give up their own freedoms.
They shouldn't be, but they're willing to do that.
They're willing to comply.
They shouldn't be, but they are.
But even many of those Americans, when you come for their kids, because that's something that almost all parents, you'll die for your kid.
You might not even die for your own freedom, but you'll die for your children.
And if we reach a point as a population where we don't, then civilization's dead and there's no point.
Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right.
And I think that it's important to note here that you can chart this even with regard to Joe Biden and his presidency.
So the moment that broke Joe Biden's presidency was not all this inflation.
What broke his presidency was Afghanistan.
Look at the polling data.
He was around 50 percent.
Afghanistan happened.
Americans saw that as a core attack on our values.
They saw his surrender and his abject cowardice as a core attack on how we think of ourselves.
And he's not been able to recover from that since.
The economic downturn harms him for sure, but the culture war issues are the places where the progressive left is the most separated from the rest of the American population.
And that's where, honestly, just from a political analyst point of view, I have to say, I think that Joe Biden might be insane.
I don't mean like senile.
I mean crazy.
Because he ran as a moderate who is going to bring people together and now he is running this government like he's a member of the squad.
The furthest left president in my life.
By far.
By far.
It's not close.
He makes Obama look like a moderate.
It's insane.
And he's also...
Can I just say, he's also farting all over Europe.
No one wanted to bring that, according to reports.
But this goes to that separation between the elites.
I mean, this really is an elite Democratic Party that is run for the wild progressive left.
There's a Pew study that came out today.
It says 6% of the American population about is what they call the progressive left.
Actually, I'm sorry.
6% of the Democrats are what they call progressive left.
It's like a very small percentage of the population is progressive left.
And that's the wing that they have chosen to placate with their equity talk.
They're sending out Pete Buttigieg to talk about how the roads are racist.
They're sending Nancy Pelosi over to Europe in the middle of a gas price spike to talk about how oil and gas are the worst thing that's ever happened.
One thing I love about American progressives...
And this has always been true, right?
All throughout the Cold War, this was true.
American progressives lag Europe so far in terms of the ascendancy of their values that Europe has already learned the lesson and moved on.
They're still saying, we should be like Norway.
Norway's going, no!
No matter what.
Here's a question from a DailyWire.com member.
Given what happened in Virginia, do you think there's any hope in California of voting out Newsom during the next election?
People thought the recall would never get as far as it did, so I still have some hope we can moderate things here.
Well, this is very interesting.
My friend Owen Brennan, we all know Owen, he does a great...
Generous of you.
Call him a friend.
He has a great organization called Madison McQueen where they make videos for candidates.
He told me, and he follows this stuff very carefully, and he believes in winning back California.
He believes it is possible to win back California.
Gavin Newsom, his numbers, which were negative, never changed during the course of the recall.
They never got better.
What happened was our friend, another friend, Larry Elder, came in and was just too far for a blue state like California to go.
If a moderate Republican had come in and was prepared for questions like should transgender whatever is, whatever bathroom and all that stuff.
I think he could have been toppled and I think he can be toppled now.
There is always, and you've pointed this out, there is always in California a little bit of the American dream alive.
People don't come to Hollywood because they're cowards.
They don't come to Hollywood because they want to be socialists.
They come to Hollywood because they want to make a fortune off their creativity.
And so there's still a strain of libertarian conservatism in California that can be tapped into, but it's not going to be tapped into on the culture side because it is a culturally left state.
Well, I generally agree with that, but I do think there is a little nuance here that you can learn from Virginia.
And it's to Matt's point.
Matt says, you know, the culture wins and just running on taxes is going to lose, and I agree with that too.
But not all culture war issues are the same.
So if Glenn Youngkin in Virginia had run on a strong pro-life, you know, let's outlaw abortion campaign, I would have loved it.
He probably wouldn't have won it.
If he had run on overturning Obergefell and returning the traditional definition of marriage, I would have loved it.
He definitely wouldn't have won.
But he picked a culture war issue that had broad appeal that really, really mattered.
It wasn't just opportunistic or cynical.
It really, really mattered.
And he tailored the campaign to that.
So I do think there's a sliver of hope.
There's another political nuance, though, that's important, which is we talk about the squishes.
I'm very upset with the infrastructure bill passing, very upset that Republican congressmen bailed out the squad.
Basically, the squad was going to kill this thing, which would have been a terrific moment for the country, and Republicans bailed them out.
But it's also naive of us to say that all conservatives across the country have to be the same.
It is simply not possible for California to elect Ted Cruz.
That cannot happen in California because that's not the demographic makeup, the political demographic, I'm not talking racial, but the political demographic makeup of California.
That's not what people think in California.
Even conservatives in California don't think the way that Ted Cruz thinks.
They don't think the way I think.
California is, you say, the American dream is alive there and that's true.
California is a giant state.
San Francisco is as far left as it's possible to be.
LA isn't.
But LA is culturally left.
LA is a place that's almost like the inverse of what we say about America.
LA is a place where people are very left on social issues.
And pretty right on economics and liberty.
And so you have to just realize that politics does sometimes make strange bedfellows.
And we do live in a two-party system, necessarily.
Someone who is to the right of Gavin Newsom in California is going to be a Republican because them's the options.
Mm-hmm.
But while they should be our allies, I'd be very happy to see a moderate Republican win in California, even though I might be very unhappy to see that same moderate Republican win in Tennessee.
I'm just going to say, no, get out.
Leave.
Seriously.
We've all made this decision.
We've all left.
And it's a little hypocritical for us to be here like, yeah, California's going to go great.
Nope, it's not.
It's going to suck.
You should.
I agree.
California is toast.
It's been toast for a while.
It is not like Virginia.
Virginia had a Republican House, Burgesses, not all that long ago.
It wasn't that far in the past.
Virginia was a much more purple state than California.
Virginia went by 10 to Biden.
California went by, what, 20-something to Biden, probably.
I mean, it was just a massive blowout state.
But California had a fake Republican governor not that long ago.
Yes, a lifetime ago.
I will say on this infrastructure bill, you know, first of all, I don't believe that the squad would have sat it out if the Republicans gave them cover to sit it out.
But if three of them had gone along and three of them had sat it out, they could have still made it.
Either way, it would have broken the squad.
If they had voted in favor of the infrastructure act, it would have broken them.
And if they had voted against it, it had gone down.
No, I think that's better political thinking than our Republicans are capable of doing.
I agree with that.
I'm just saying that the bill still would have passed.
I think that we have a serious problem.
Nancy Pelosi has created Pelosi and the Democrats have created the structure where they elect moderate Democrats in in blue in red districts or purple districts.
And then Pelosi bullies them into voting with her and then they lose.
But it doesn't matter because the left wing ratchet only goes one way.
We have a problem that a lot of these Republicans who went along were in purple states might have lost their position if they had voted against the infrastructure bill, which was very popular.
And now they'll get primaried by some right wing crazy who can't win in their in their districts.
So we have a structural problem because freedom is always under threat, but leftism sticks because you give people free stuff, you buy them all.
On California, there's also a question of who cares?
Let's say we could elect a Republican governor in California.
What difference does it make?
I kind of like the idea at this point.
I mean, I'm with Ben on the cynical view of this, no surprise.
I think there's no saving it.
Also, why should we try to?
I kind of like the idea at this point of being able to point to California and say, look, this is what it is when the left runs something, and having a Republican on top of that, how does that help us?
I'm the joker about California, honestly.
I'm like, we're out.
You know, whatever happens to you guys next, that's your business.
You decided that you want to govern yourselves this way?
Enjoy, right?
As Hillman says, people are going to get what they deserve good and hard, right?
And by the way, my preferred strategy is if you are a Republican in California, which is still the most popular state for Republicans because it's such an enormous state, move to Arizona, move to Georgia, move to New Hampshire, move to Florida, move to Tennessee, move to Nevada, any place that is purple or close to purple, Move there and help shift the state.
Do that.
Can I ask a question about the strategy, the Leninist strategy of destroy California?
A serious question.
Let it destroy itself.
I'm not going to go in and parade the places.
But isn't the purpose of letting it destroy itself that eventually people wake up and shift over?
Or is that not the purpose?
No, it's also to serve as an example of failure for the rest of the nation.
By the way, I think that's what this election mostly was.
I agree with you, Drew.
Yes, right now, California's a good cautionary tale.
I want the caution to be well told.
Eventually, in the cycle of history, I want people to go, oh, that didn't work.
But the way this is actually going to work is, this has been my 100-year theory of California for many years now.
My 100-year theory of California is that every good state starts with a bunch of conservatives moving to a place, building a thing.
A bunch of leftists follow them there, make the thing significantly worse, drive the conservatives out.
The conservatives leave and go to an uglier area of the country.
And then the left has to follow them there because they have to go where all the money is.
And so they follow the conservatives there.
And so eventually California will be completely cleaned out and the Republicans will move back in and take over Robert Strauss' house on the beach.
This is why I support gays because the Republicans should have the gays because they make the best restaurants.
And why should the left have all the good restaurants?
You're so helpful, Drew.
There's another aspect of this that we haven't really talked about.
I don't hear anyone talking about it, and it's reconciliation in Congress.
That basically, if you remember all the way back to the heady days of 2009, and we had just given the Massachusetts Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy to a Republican, Scott Brown, so that we could overturn Obama's attempts to get Obamacare through Congress.
And Nancy Pelosi came up with this novel strategy, and her novel strategy was, we will deem the bill to have been passed.
We won't actually do what has historically happened, which is a bill starts in the House, then the bill goes to the Senate, then they have to come together and figure out how to make that into one bill.
Nancy Pelosi said, we'll do the opposite.
This thing started in the Senate before the seats turned over.
They passed something in the Senate, totally different.
Now, we'll vote on something in the House.
By the way, the infrastructure thing ended in the House.
It didn't end in the Senate.
You say, well, what about that part where they have to come back together and vote again to make it one bill?
They just don't do that anymore.
They've just decided that the Senate and the House can vote on completely separate pieces of legislation.
And then, by sleight of hand, they'll just deem that it was one bill.
That's one of the tricks that they're doing.
The other is using reconciliation to pass sweeping, which is where you do come together and make the math work, to pass sweeping changes into how the government...
Actually functions.
The idea that we even have a legislature at this point is basically untrue.
It's very scary end of Roman Republic stuff.
It's essentially this vestigial...
This is why I really feel that laws should be legally short enough for us to read, and they should have to pass 50 of them if they want to get 2,000 pages of them so that we can see the bills.
Which, even though we've always passed bloated bills in this country, but this idea of these sort of monstrous...
Even the Supreme Court doesn't read them.
That's why the infrastructure bill, honestly, because we passed bloated bills, listen, I think the infrastructure bill sucks.
I think that we are dumping money into a spiral of inflation that's already occurring.
I think the vast majority of it's waste.
I think that even the stuff that we think is not waste is waste.
Yeah.
Whenever we say things like, oh, we need to spend on roads and bridges, what people should understand is that every single year in the United States, the local, state, and federal government spend upwards of $300 billion upgrading roads and bridges in the United States because the vast majority of roads and bridges in the United States are not run by the federal government.
The federal government runs the dams.
The roads and bridges are run by states and localities.
So even the stuff they're spending now is just crap.
But with that said...
A big bloated spending bill that basically just throws money at things, that's what Congress does for a living.
I'm much more concerned about Build Back Better.
The roads and bridges, though, make a big problem for us, and it gets to this problem of, well, just let California die and be a bad example, or to your point of there are different conservatives, different kinds of states, to Drew's point, too.
That was certainly true in the past.
I mean, the states were very, very different.
All politics was local.
That's what Tip O'Neill used to say.
But increasingly, since we built the interstate highway system, since we had TV, since we had radio, since we have the internet, since we have this gigantic federal government that homogenizes everything, all the politics seems to be national.
And so to your, you said it too, Ben.
It starts in San Francisco, it goes to LA, it goes to Chicago, it goes to New York, then it's for the whole country.
And so there is this fear, as goes California, so goes the nation. - Yeah, but I think that that's a little different.
The reason I say that is, I will say, my mind has changed radically in terms of optimism, which is a rare thing for me, having moved from California to Florida.
Because when you're in California, you grow up and you think of yourself as Californian kind of culturally.
Like, I was born there.
So you think of yourself as, like, you're culturally California in the same way you're culturally New York.
But you don't think of yourself as, like, a citizen of a state that is sometimes in opposition to the federal government.
When you're in California, what you mostly think of yourself as is an adjunct of the federal government who likes beaches in Hollywood.
That really is how you think of yourself.
It's not like you're a separate citizen of California.
The federal government is never something that is radically opposed to you.
It's something that's doing most of the things that you would be doing in your own state anyway.
But now you're a Florida man.
Now I'm a Florida man.
And let me just tell you, Florida is damned incredible.
And it's one of the reasons that Florida is so great is because Florida does oppose a lot of what the federal government is doing.
And so you start to think of yourself as, of course I'm an American, of course, but I'm also a Floridian.
And my state does not agree with the federal government.
325,000 signatures over on our petition.
We really appreciate the extra 5,000 people who've come on since the last time we updated.
That's at dailywire.com slash do not comply.
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We have a question here.
From a dailywire.com subscriber.
And I think it's an important one.
It kind of goes to what we've been talking about here.
They say, I believe the Republican Party is dead.
I don't consider myself a Republican anymore.
I'm a starch conservative.
I'm very right-wing.
And I'm very Christian.
My question is, should we give up on the...
Republican Party, but still vote Republican because it's all we have right now and because the Democratic establishment is evil.
And should we start a new conservative movement like the traditionalist conservative or something like that?
I think they mean a party.
Should we start a new party?
I'm going to take a crack at this one and say you're just a Republican.
I know you hate the Republican Party, but we do live in a two-party system.
And our two-party system gets a bad rap.
It's good that we have a two-party system.
Generally, the two-party system has served us well in this country for a long time.
It actually has a mitigating effect against the worst kinds of extremism.
If you go to Europe, even in the most conservative countries in Europe, there are communist parties with elected representatives in their parliaments.
And those parties can, over time, wield real political power.
In, obviously, many parts of Europe, there are very far right-wing parties.
This is how you get real radical right-wing movements, like the National Socialist in the late 20s in Europe, which rose up and became the Nazi Party.
All of this happens because of a multi-party parliamentary system.
And one of the reasons I think that we all think that a parliamentary system would be better is because we don't know much about it, and because it's easy not to like what you've got because there are constraints, right?
The Republican Party lets us down all the time.
But the other reason that we like parliamentary systems is because the left loves them and they're constantly in this sort of low-grade propaganda campaign to erode our trust in the two-party system.
If we move to a parliamentary model, that's my conspiracy theory.
And to your point, though, historically, the left has to go further and further to the left.
Everything they touch turns to crap.
Yes.
Ultimately, even the left starts to come back to the center.
So you get a Reagan who turns everything around.
And when Clinton comes in, he's actually a very conservative, middle-of-the-road president.
Bloomberg in New York, the same thing.
When Giuliani turns the city around, Bloomberg kept it alive until this communist crazy came in.
And now, even the Democrats.
You likely would not have had Ronald Reagan as president.
You likely would not have had Donald Trump as president.
You wouldn't have had Youngkin win in Virginia if we had a more parliamentary system.
Because they could just fracture off the moderates into these coalitions.
In multi-party systems, you build coalitions.
And so you could go and say, well, yes, we agree with you a little bit about that and we'll compromise here, but we'll pull everything over with us toward the left.
There's just a numbers problem here.
The listener is writing in and saying, I'm a traditional conservative, and so I assume that means he's not a neoconservative, libertarian, populist, this...
I mean, I could probably name half a dozen other factions of the right.
And I agree.
I'm with you, buddy.
I'm a traditional conservative, too.
I don't think 50% of the country plus one would call themselves traditional conservatives in that way.
And so, yes, I would like for the traditional conservatives.
I'm not sure if 50% of the people on backstage tonight would.
Well, right.
This is sort of my point.
Fusionism gets a really bad rap, and it kind of failed and fell apart after the Cold War.
But it did a pretty good job during the Cold War.
And what was fusionism?
It was this plan to bring together traditional conservatives and libertarians and some war hawk Democrats and bring them all to fight communism.
And whether you support fusionism or not, it is just a fact of politics.
You need to include enough people that you can win elections so that you can do things.
We also know that conservatives and the grassroots and conservative voters can force the Republican Party to do things it wouldn't otherwise want to do.
It's just a vehicle.
Donald Trump is one example, and Virginia is sort of another example as well.
And there's the Tea Party.
I mean, the problem a lot of times...
I do put some of this back on us as the voters, where we sort of lose track of the ball and let things kind of dwindle away.
I put a lot of the blame on the establishment of the Republican Party, but we have to continue holding them accountable, and I think very often we end up getting distracted by other things.
This is a great point.
I think that the tendency for Republicans tends to be we think that an election means we can go back to our regularly scheduled programming, right?
An election happens in Virginia and say, okay, I'll go back to my regular life and I won't pay attention to what's happening anymore.
Whereas for the left, this is the business.
The business is there's an election, and then you wake up the next morning, and the next business is there's an election.
And for the right, because politics generally is seen as a distraction from more important things like family and business and community, it's like, okay, we did a great thing in Virginia.
Let's go back to sleep for three years and find out how things are in three years, and we'll tune back in.
And it doesn't work that way.
If you go to sleep, then you're going to lose control of the party, the people who are the professional politicians, and the professionals do not sleep at this.
You know, a friend of mine pointed out...
I also think it's a positive thing that, like...
To have a party that includes sensible people like me and Ben and Jeremy and theocratic fascists.
That actually is a positive thing that we take ideas from one another and we see where our ideas are weak.
A friend of mine pointed out that for the right, obscure political monikers are the right-wing version of gender pronouns.
We've got like 10 million of them and we get really focused on them.
But look at the Democrats.
Terry McAuliffe and AOC are not the same thing, but they do somehow all kind of play basically well together, and they're politically much more effective generally than Republicans are.
Then you look in Virginia, you get this one breakthrough issue.
Education brings in people who are not traditionally Republicans.
Good.
Let's do more of that.
And also, Republicanism, conservatism works.
So, God willing, Youngkin will do a better job than So there's a question from a dailywire.com subscriber.
And the question is, do we believe that private employers have the right to have vaccine mandates for their employees?
That's a separate concept from should they give in to the government's demands that they follow with the government's I think this is an interesting question.
I want to quickly get everybody's answers, and then I think it's a nice segue into another thing I want to talk about.
Michael?
I think it depends on the state.
So I'll go back to federalism and subsidiarity here.
I think that the people of a state have the right, have a broad political right, to craft laws about exactly what the limits are on corporations and exactly where the rights of the corporations and the rights of the individual begin, the rights of the state government begin as well.
And so I think right now, if you were to ask that question state by state...
You'd get different answers.
In Florida, the answer is no.
In other states, the answer might be yes.
True.
I basically agree with what Noel's just said, except I just want to add that personally, I don't think employers should have the right.
You know, if I'm in the state I'm in, where I cast a vote, I would say no.
Individuals, Trump, they're...
I would actually say it slightly differently and say, I mean, I kind of agree with you about the states, but I also think it depends on the employer.
And so an example of this is if you work in healthcare, or if you work in nursing homes...
You probably have different sorts of criteria that you can ask your employees to meet in order to work in those environments.
And this is true.
I'm sure if we were to get...
I haven't given this a lot of thought today, but if we were to give this a little more expansive thought, that there are other kinds of rules like that that might apply in very particular circumstances.
But obviously, as a general rule, not only do I think that it's sort of morally and philosophically wrong for your average employer to enforce...
To insert themselves into the private health decisions of their employees.
I actually think that it's illegal, that it's against federal law, that it is basically discriminatory, that it is basically retaliatory.
I think that it increases your liability in some ways, violates things like the ADA. I mean, there are questions about private health that you simply, HIPAA, you aren't allowed to ask these questions until suddenly now we're all...
Pretending those rules don't exist.
We're in violation of many of those regulations, rules, and laws, and we're just all going along with it because the left wants it.
But it is a good chance for me to talk a little bit about what we're doing here at The Daily Wire.
By the way, 340,000 signatures on our We Will Not Comply petition.
You can go over to dailywire.com slash do not comply.
Add your voice to our own.
We're trying to get 500,000 people to sign our petition tonight.
And then we hope to get millions more over the next few weeks as we continue to sue the Biden administration to block this mandate.
And we should be clear, the Biden vaccine mandate isn't a vaccine mandate.
The Biden administration isn't mandating that American citizens get vaccinated.
They're mandating that employers force their employees to get vaccinated.
Not only are we suing the Biden administration to stop that, but you know we announced last year that we're going to launch into entertainment.
And we dropped our first film in January, run Hide Fight.
We wrapped production on our second film, Shut In, in the spring, and that'll be coming out next spring.
And just this weekend, we wrapped our second feature film, which is the film that we produced with Gina Carano after her horrible cancellation by Disney.
We've made a deal with Gina.
Very thrilled to be able to announce that we've wrapped production on the film Terror on the Prairie.
And the thing you may not know about this is that after Gina came on board, she came to us and said, you know, when we make movies, there are all these union-enforced rules.
That say we have to test people for COVID. People have to wear masks.
There are all these different zones, these concentric circles where if you're in the special zone, you can take your mask off.
If you're in the not special zone, you have to have your mask on.
SAG was talking a lot in the weeks leading up to us making the film about implementing their own direct vaccine mandate.
And Gina said, listen, I've taken all this flack.
I was beat down by Hollywood.
I was essentially kicked out, kicked to the curb for being...
Moderate, not even right.
It's true.
Being moderate.
They kicked me all the way out.
She said, why would I, having gone through that, now turn around and force the people who want to work on a movie with me...
To be vaccinated.
Force the people who want to work on a movie with me to wear masks.
Force the people who want to be on a movie with me to be tested in all these horrible ways.
Why would I participate in that?
She said, I'm just not going to do it.
She put her money where her mouth was.
She left SAG and became what they call FICOR and insisted that we make the movie Terror on the Prairie in a way that allowed not our direct employees, but the people employed by the film that we're producing to have dignity and bodily autonomy.
And that's exactly what we did.
And to talk about that, I've invited on the villain for the film, a friend of ours, I'm loathe to say it, a friend of ours named Nick Searcy.
A villain in real life.
A villain in real life.
In fact, what happened, our producer Dallas Sonnier called me and he said, you know, who do we cast as the villain in the film?
I mean, we need, like, who's the low-down, dirtiest son of a...
Nick Searcy.
If you haven't even read the script, Nick Searcy, I say.
And sure enough, here he is joining us by Skype, Nick Searcy.
Yeah, but I'm the good guy in this movie, by the way.
I just want to set the record straight.
I'm trying to avenge my daughter who was murdered, so I'm not the villain.
So tell people a little bit about the film, because we actually haven't shared very much with the audience.
It's kind of a throwback western in that sense of it's about revenge, and it shows life on the prairie, and how isolated and how hard life was back then.
And it's action-packed.
And it also, to me, hopefully, the outlaws are understandable.
You can kind of, if not sympathize with them, you can at least understand their motives.
And I think that makes it for a much richer story.
And it makes it a little bit more unexpected.
You know, it's not so predictable what's going to happen in this movie.
Honestly, I think it's the best role I've ever had in a film.
I've done some things on stage that maybe were of a similar kind of scope and size, but there's something Shakespearean about the character, and it was just an honor to get a chance to play that role.
And the whole production really is kind of an FU to the Hollywood establishment and the left more generally, which is just demanding that everyone comply with all of these totally unscientific rules and comply with the president's absurd mandate.
Yeah.
It's all about power.
It's never been about health.
I mean, I don't know where we got where everybody's just convinced that the government cares about your day-to-day health.
I mean, you know, when I grew up, it was distrust of government.
And I don't know how it came to be that suddenly it's now do everything the government says or you need to be segregated from the rest of society.
It was quite difficult to do a film that didn't have to comply with all of the absurd vaccine mandates.
And that in order to do that, actors had to take some risk, step outside of the union.
This is very important to Gina that we not require the people who she was working with to vaccinate or mask or test.
And in order to do that, she was willing to leave the Screen Actors Guild and become what they call five core.
And we had to find other actors who were willing to take that sort of risk.
Of course, you were one of them.
What was it like working in this environment?
Do you feel that the risk was worth it?
You know, I did a movie last year.
I won't say the name of it because I don't want to get anybody in trouble.
But I did a movie last year that was a SAG film in Oklahoma, all the SAG rules.
And it was just absurd.
I mean, you could barely get anything done.
Somebody tested positive.
They had to shut down production for two weeks and quarantine the star.
And then it turned out that it was a false positive.
And you're going in and you're doing scenes.
I did a scene where they were supposed to be about 75 extras.
And the scene was supposed to be in 1975.
And I go in and everybody's in costume and they've all got their masks on and they're standing shoulder to shoulder.
And the first AD says, okay, everybody, when we say rolling, take your mask off and put it in your pocket and make sure that none of the loops hang out.
And as soon as the scene's over, we'll cut and you can put your mask back on.
And I'm like, yeah, because we're acting like it's 1975.
The virus didn't exist then.
So as long as your acting is good, you're going to be safe.
So when the camera's rolling, you cannot catch COVID. But as soon as the camera cuts quickly, you have to mask up.
You're contagious again.
Right.
And just sort of having to not deal with that madness.
I mean, it was really such a pleasant set.
It's...
It's the most pleasant production I've worked on, crew-wise, everything, actor-wise, in so many years.
It was just a relief not to have to put up with the nonsense.
Well, Nick, thank you for joining us, and thank you for making a stand out there and doing our film with us.
Jeremy, thank you for the opportunity to do that film.
It was really a great experience, and I'll stand with you guys anytime.
That's the only way we're going to win this.
We've all got to stand up for our freedom.
That's absolutely right.
Got to stand up for our freedom.
And we're thankful to Gina and to Nick, not only for being in our film, being great talent and choosing to work with us, but also being with us in this fight against these horribly unwell thought through, to say the very least, unscientific, tyrannical vaccine mandates.
Again, I think it's worth pointing out every now and then that I don't hate the vaccines.
I hate tyranny.
And because I hate tyranny, I'm willing to fight against it.
And I think that's, you know, I'm proud to work for a company that will stand for freedom.
So that's what we're trying to do.
Join us over at dailywired.com/donotcomply.
We're at 345,000 signatures.
Very grateful to you guys.
Sign our petition, help us send a message as we sue the Biden administration to stop their unconstitutional and horribly conceived mandate.
I wanna talk a little bit about Kyle Rittenhouse.
I think it's taken us 50 minutes to get here, the story that obviously everybody in America is talking about today, and rightly so.
Ben, fill us in a little bit on what's happened over the last two weeks.
So essentially, the prosecution made the defense's case.
I mean, that is basically what happened in this trial.
So as soon as the testimony started being given, it became perfectly obvious that the prosecution witnesses were actually witnesses for the defense.
So there was testimony by the guy who was shot and didn't die that he had been approaching the defendant with a gun, that he had actually been raising the gun at the defendant, and that's when he shot.
We may have a clip of that.
Here's the clip, actually, yeah.
It wasn't until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him, with your gun, now your hands down, pointed at him, that he fired, right?
Well, that is directed verdict territory.
I mean, that is the...
And you can see the prosecutor.
The prosecutor's like, oh my god.
Look what just happened here.
He's the full face bomb.
And it was like that throughout the entire trial.
There were witnesses who were there who were testifying.
The prosecution kept trying to say...
So there were three people who were shot.
The first person who was shot was chasing Rittenhouse through a parking lot.
He threw a bag at him, but there was another guy who was chasing who fired a shot in the air.
Rittenhouse turned around because of the shot, and the guy who threw the bag in the air started lunging forward to try and grab his gun.
All of this is on video, and there's witness testimony to this.
As he's leaning forward to grab the gun, Rittenhouse shoots him.
They tried to make it seem as though Rittenhouse had shot him.
He was shot in the back because he was reaching forward to get the gun.
Rittenhouse shot him over his shoulder in the back.
They try to make it seem as though Rittenhouse had shot him while he was running away or something.
It's just obviously untrue.
Then the second guy who was shot and killed, there's tape of this, right?
It's all on tape.
That's the thing that's unbelievable about this.
It's all on tape.
The second guy who was shot tried to attack Rittenhouse and hit him in the face with a skateboard, right?
Which could kill you.
And Rittenhouse shoots him for his trouble.
And then the third guy who gets shot is the guy you just saw in the testimony.
Who's literally carrying a gun and he lied to the cops.
The cops said, what happened?
He said, oh, the gun came out of my pocket because I dropped it.
I dropped the gun.
And then he was asked, no, he didn't drop the gun at all because it's all on tape.
Okay, so the question is why this was even brought in the first place.
That really is the big question because the prosecution had no case.
The judge has been pissed about it literally since the first day because it was obvious to the judge they had no case.
The judge just reamed the prosecutor today.
And then finally, today, Rittenhouse took the stand, which, frankly, as a lawyer, I'm scared to death of, right?
If you're a lawyer, first rule is you don't put your client on the stand if there's no reason to put your client on the stand.
And because the prosecution had not made the case, there's a very solid defense case that Rittenhouse doesn't have to take the stand at all.
And so I'm really interested, I'm sure we'll hear later, what the logic was in terms of putting Rittenhouse on the stand.
But Rittenhouse gets up there on the stand.
And he essentially has a panic attack on the stand, which you can understand.
He's still a very young man.
He's 17 years old still.
And he's on trial essentially for his life in a very clear-cut case of self-defense.
And the entire media world goes insane.
How could he cry?
It's all fake.
There are a bunch of blue check marks essentially suggesting that.
And the prosecutor, again, has nothing on him.
The prosecutor starts asking him questions about whether he plays Call of Duty.
That's literally one of the exchanges.
He starts saying, in Call of Duty, don't people carry around AR-15s and shoot everybody?
And Kyle Rittenhouse says, you mean in a video game?
They carry all kinds of guns in the video game.
Right, and he says, so we're talking about a video game here.
The prosecution has nothing, and so what this really raises, and I think everybody who's watched this knows this, what this really raises is, how can you say that we live in a system of justice when prosecutors who have the discretion whether or not to bring cases are so clearly, in many cases, driven by public media pressure to bring the case in the first place?
Can we take, like...
Look at the whole picture here because This happened.
It was on video.
We saw from the very beginning some of the video, but not all of it.
And all the video evidence that we saw was very clearly self-defense.
And then all the big tech companies, Twitter and Facebook, they say you're not allowed to say that you think Kyle Rittenhouse is innocent.
You're not allowed to raise any money for his defense.
So he's got all the big tech companies against him.
And then the DA brings these charges in like 48 hours with no evidence whatsoever.
And then during the trial, they start coming out with other videos.
Oh, the FBI had a drone out.
And they didn't share the video with the defense?
And no one saw.
There's actually two videos of the first shooting.
Because the first shooting, we had the second shooting on video from the very beginning.
The first shooting, it was a very good circumstantial reason to believe there was self-defense, but we didn't actually see the shooting itself.
The FBI had that.
They never showed us that.
And then we find out, at least according to a witness who testified in the trial, I think it was today or yesterday, that according to him, The prosecutor tried to suborn perjury, tried to convince him to testify that he knew the name of somebody he didn't really know the name of.
And then you've got the prosecutor up on the stand today, you know, insinuating that, well, Kyle Rittenhouse, he didn't want to talk to the police.
And if you didn't want to talk to the police, what were you hiding?
Insinuating that if he was silent, that he might have been guilty.
You should give up your rights.
Right.
And he got reamed out by the judge for that.
Then he did it again.
He got reamed out by the judge.
Yeah.
The judge said, don't do that.
He said, yes, your honor.
Then he did it again.
The judge actually sent the jury.
What I'm saying is because...
What?
And then he tried to readmit evidence the judge had already ruled out of evidence.
Right.
And so you hear from some people that, well, prosecutors, they do this kind of stuff all the time.
Maybe some of it they do.
But this is so out in the open that there is a real conspiracy by the most powerful forces in our society to send this boy to jail as a blood sacrifice who is not only innocent, but I believe acted heroically that night.
He went to his community where he worked.
He crossed state lines.
Who gives a damn that he crossed state lines?
He went 20 minutes to where he worked, and he was there to help his community.
He was cleaning up graffiti.
He had a gun, which I think was smart to have a gun, given where he was.
He tried everything he could to preserve the lives of these people who were chasing him.
He only fired the shot at the very last moment.
And they have nothing on him, and they are trying to, in front of everybody, send him to jail.
This is corruption.
This is like the death of the justice system.
This is the most...
This is the scariest part about it.
When you watch the footage, and forget the media coverage, which was just a complete lie, but when you listen to him speak, when you look at the prosecution fall apart, you realize this kid did not take a bad shot.
This kid is 13 years younger than I am.
I have some amount of firearms training.
I don't think that I necessarily would have been as controlled as he was.
He doesn't take a bad shot.
He takes the stand today.
Can you imagine that?
And his answers were absolutely on the...
He had a panic attack, and his answers were still on the money.
The prosecutor said, you had the intent to kill this person.
And he said, I intended to stop the direct threat to me.
And he said, by killing him.
And he said, no, I'm...
It's like the law of double effect.
I was just stopping the threat at the very last minute.
Everything this kid was so tightly controlled, including his testimony, and it's still up in the air as to whether they could get him.
It is so scary.
I have to say, because in my youth I was a courtroom reporter, I was a reporter who covered courts, I've always really slow...
To second-guess juries and to say, oh, I saw the video so I know what happened.
No, I agree with this.
This is an exception.
This is an exception.
Walsh is right.
This is a complete miscarriage of justice.
It's a lynching.
It's a lynching.
And it reminds me of trials that happened in my youth where they put some poor black kid on the stand with his all-white jury that hated him and he never stood a chance.
Why is this guy on trial?
I do not understand why he's on trial.
Well, because the left believes things about him that are simply not true that were fabricated by the media.
So, this whole, he crossed state lines.
They say he carried a weapon across state lines.
He didn't.
He did not carry a weapon across straight lines.
They say that he's a racist.
That's the thing.
He didn't shoot any black people.
Not a single person who was shot in this situation.
They call them a white supremacist.
They call them a white supremacist.
But this is the other thing.
They also said that these riots, which were happening all over the place, over every little thing, were mostly peaceful.
Anti-racist protests.
They were riots.
And so the whole narrative, he swept up into this narrative that he's in this mostly peaceful riot, and he somehow It's as though there's a conspiracy to destroy the institutions of our country.
It really is because what you said earlier is right.
So I've said about nearly every criminal trial that I've ever covered on my show that I will wait until I see all the evidence and then I will make a judgment as to whether this prosecution was properly brought.
And so I waited on all the evidence to come out in the Chauvin trial and then I still think that Derek Chauvin should not have been convicted on the murder charge at the very least.
But I waited until all the evidence was brought out because my faith in the justice system is such that when all the evidence is presented I assume that people aren't making completely insane decisions.
In this case, I waited for the prosecutor to come forward.
Maybe he knew something that I didn't.
And when it turns out that not only does he not know anything that I don't, he's just lying about the stuff that we do know.
It's the most disquieting thing.
And we've seen this over and over.
I mean, it feels similar in effect to what we just learned, for example, about the Steele dossier.
Right?
You have some faith that the people at the FBI and the DOJ aren't complete political hacks or just doing what they are told in order to achieve a particular political purpose.
And then you find out it's exactly what conspiracy theorists thought it was in the first place.
It's enough to make you a conspiracy theorist.
But this is exactly what's happening with the mandate from the Biden administration.
Joe Biden knows that this mandate is unconstitutional.
They could have, even if you believe that it's unconstitutional, as I do.
They could have gone through the process.
If you believe it's constitutional, they still could have gone through the process.
Yep.
Right?
They skipped all the administrative procedures because he actually wants the court to strike it down.
He knows that the policy is wrong.
He wants credit with his base for having done it anyway.
And then he wants to be able to turn the American people against the institutions that stand between them and leftism.
So when the court strikes it down, he'll be able to run against the court.
He'll be able to say that the court is the problem.
They do want to undermine our trust in the American system because they want to replace the American system, and you can't replace a system that people believe in.
I really think that that is correct.
And what it does lead to is if you're a person who wishes for the system to be upheld, it puts you on really shaky ground.
Because we live in a society where the first person to shout conspiracy, if it turns out that the conspiracy was right...
Ends up getting a lot of credit because they were the first off the line.
And I tend to be the last person to shout conspiracy because frankly I think that conspiracies tend to be rare.
People tend to be stupid.
I usually attribute to stupidity rather than malice.
But when you see that you keep attributing to stupidity rather than malice and then it keeps being malice, at a certain point you have to start rethinking We have to realize, too, that for the left, it's this very Machiavellian ends justify the means thing.
And so they believe, you know, they are willing to cut down all the laws and destroy all the institutions for the sake of what they consider to be the greater good.
And they, you know, they know.
And by the way, when we say they, you know, they were saying this and that about Kyle Rittenhouse.
That includes the current president of the United States, all the high ranking Democrats.
All of them came out right away and called him a white supremacist.
They know that it's not true, but he represents something that That they have fashioned him as a sacrifice.
Even if it's not true, it gets to a greater.
Right.
It does.
Did you see the piece in 538 today about how in Virginia when they elected, why white supremacists are electing black people?
Because they're stupid, I guess.
No, no, no.
It's because they like black people who agree with their political ideas.
No, no, no.
It's because they're black white people.
Yeah, they're black.
No, that's what it is.
It's because the white supremacists like black people who are actually white people.
This is a question from a dailywire.com subscriber that I think is best for you.
Watching this case, could there be legal repercussions for the prosecution if Kyle is acquitted?
I mean, if he's acquitted, it wouldn't be about the acquittal.
The legal repercussions would come for violation of particular standards of Activity in the courtroom.
He could be disbarred.
The judge could theoretically hold him in contempt.
There are certain things that could certainly be done, and his behavior, I think, would warrant a lot of it at this point.
So here's something that we've never done before, but I want to talk about a news story.
And in order to do that, I have to bring a pizza onto the set.
This is...
Oh, boy.
Thank you, thank you.
Very good.
We should talk about this story all the time.
So this is a one-byte Everybody knows the rules.
Cheese pizza.
This is from Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports.
You can buy it at Walmart.
And you should go buy some of these frozen pizzas at Walmart.
I'm going to review the pizza because apparently that's what CEOs do is they review pizzas.
Let me see here.
The undercarriage is on the bottom.
There's melty cheese on the top.
Looks like a pizza, right?
Yep.
That is a pizza.
If I had to give that a rating...
I'd say that it's very pizza.
I don't know anything about pizza.
I'd like to say that it's because, you know, I'm a god king and rich and snobby, but it's actually because I only eat Pizza Hut, because in the small town I grew up in, we only had one restaurant, and that restaurant was pizza.
It's snobby, yeah, yeah.
Here's the thing.
That's a good frozen pizza.
And you should buy it.
And you should buy it because this guy, Dave Portnoy, is being railroaded by the media.
And when somebody stands up against a good media railroading, they deserve our support.
I'm going to tell you the story.
I'm going to monologue about it for just a second because I want to get one piece of it out of the way so we can talk about what I think is the pertinent piece of the story for our purposes.
Dave Portnoy, who I sometimes say is my spirit animal.
I like him as a CEO. I like him as a media figure.
I like the character that he's cultivated online.
He has this sort of devil-may-care attitude.
I get a big kick out of him.
He is, nevertheless, I think it is fair to say, a scoundrel.
A lovable scoundrel.
A lovable scoundrel.
And by scoundrel, I mean that Dave Portnoy has three sex tapes.
That are out in the wild.
Dave Portnoy.
Prolific.
Yeah.
You don't accidentally have three sex tapes out.
One sex tape.
Maybe.
Chalk it up to luck.
That's right.
Dave Portnoy is a scoundrel.
He's a rogue.
He talks openly about the fact that he likes to have sex with lots of women.
And a few, what happened here is that Business Insider did a story, apparently eight months in the making, where they just started tracking down people who had had sex with Dave Portnoy and talked about it in social media.
Well, they started by saying that the story was about his finances, right?
That's right.
It was about his business and it was about not this.
They were just investigating his business growth and then randomly it turned into a story about all the women he had sex with.
That's right.
Since the dawn of time, rich, powerful, and famous men have had sex with lots and lots and lots of women.
It is because...
Except for me.
Literally except for me.
I'm the only exception in history.
This is because there is a certain subset of women A subset?
A subset.
The morality piece of this story doesn't err in favor of Dave Portnoy.
Nevertheless, you can't act traumatized or scandalized by the fact that a rich, powerful, famous man is having sex.
Solomon had 1,000 wives.
Between his wives and his concubines, King Solomon had 1,000 women whom he could officially have sex with.
I want to put that in context because those numbers don't mean anything when you hear numbers like that.
If King Solomon only had sex with one of his wives or concubines a day, he would not repeat for almost four years.
In a different context, he's one-tenth of a Wilt Chamberlain.
King Solomon got to build the first temple and write three books of the Bible.
Like, the world is a messy, complicated place, and while morality is a very interesting topic and important for us on this show to talk about, it's not what I want to talk about today.
What I want to talk about today is Business Insider writing a story about two women in particular, both of whom reached out to Dave Portnoy on social media, DM'd him, knowing that he's a scoundrel, knowing that he has sex tapes, knowing that he's a rogue, and began flirting with him.
We live in a society where young women...
Have not been taught that if you DM a rogue, a well-known rogue and scoundrel, lovable though he is, great CEO though he is, who has three sex tapes, if you send him topless pictures of yourself, if you tell him that you would like to have sex with him and live out your rape fantasy, if you get on an airplane and fly to his house, if you have sex with him, it may be the case that after this, you don't feel great about it.
It may be that while you have always looked up to Dave Portnoy, Dave Portnoy has never thought about you One single time.
And never will again.
And that that may cause you to feel some regret.
And unfortunately, in the moment in which we live right now, the left has concluded you can do any sexually deviant thing that you want.
You can say anything you want.
You can do anything you want.
You can be anything you want.
But regret is rape.
If a woman regrets a sexual encounter, that is almost definitionally rape in the eyes of the left.
That's a horrible thing.
I feel bad that these women were not taught better.
I feel bad that they made bad choices all around.
Why is this a story for Business Insider to cover?
Because they hate Dave Portnoy.
Dave Portnoy is not the only rogue, rake, or scoundrel among the rich, powerful, and elite.
I would probably guess that there are rogues and scoundrels who work for Business Insider if they have fame, money, and power.
I would also say that Dave Portnoy has suggested that since this story broke...
The same reporters have started calling his advertisers because they would like the follow-up story of finding out that the advertisers reacted to their first story and dropped Dave Portnoy.
So it's not just...
It's activism.
It's activism masquerading as journalism, people feigning outrage at behaviors that they actually encourage in other contexts, that they actually...
And I think it's important here for you to remind people that no rape charges have been filed.
No rape charges of any kind have been filed.
And we were talking off air about this a little bit earlier.
And you make a good evidentiary point.
Even if a woman claims that something happened that she was not into.
And that is certainly possible.
That you do all of these things and that you go up to the bedroom.
And something bad happens.
Yes.
There is literally no way for anyone outside of that circumstance to tell what happened in that room.
And it's particularly difficult to tell when you have a trail of evidence that suggests consensuality all the way up to the time the door closes.
And in some cases, he shared some DMs on Twitter.
Posted, like afterward.
And by the way, not only have no rape charges been filed, There's no claim of rape.
In that article, which we see the title right there, now the headline, and of course they put it behind the paywall, so most people weren't reading the article, they were just sharing the headline.
And the headline says, you know, I was literally screaming in pain.
Dave Portnoy has violent and humiliating sex.
Now that right there should be a red flag, because violent and humiliating, screaming in pain sounds really bad, but if this was a rape claim, that would be in the headline.
Yeah, the word rape would appear?
And that's not it.
And when you talk about young women and men don't realize that regret is not rape, one of the reasons for that, we've talked about this before, is that when it comes to sexual morality, we've boiled it all down to consent, and there's nothing more than consent to sexual morality these days, so we have no language to describe a feeling of, you know, I just...
I did this.
I feel like my dignity, like I've sacrificed my dignity.
I feel like I've been dehumanized.
We don't really have that language anymore because that's not supposed to happen with consensus.
And in part, we don't have that language because we did a search before the show because of places like Business Insider, which ran headline after headline praising 50 shades of gray.
Like...
So exactly what is the charge here against Dave Portnoy from this publication?
What matters to me, the thing that makes the story...
None of that makes the story novel.
That's just how they treat anyone who goes against their narrative.
Dave Portnoy's great crime is being successful, having a bad attitude, which I think is a very hilarious attitude, and going on Fox News, coming on the Ben Shapiro show.
They hate him because...
Talking about Trump.
Talking about Trump.
They hate him because he's not...
Walking the party line, therefore he must be destroyed.
But what makes this a novel story is not that.
They'll do that to anybody.
What makes this a novel story is that Dave Portnoy is telling them to pound sand.
What makes this story interesting is that you can go to Walmart and buy a One Bite Everybody Knows the Rules frozen pizza and put money directly in Dave Portnoy's pocket and they can't take this advertiser away from him because this advertiser is him.
And this actually shows us sort of like the Gina Carano coming over here and doing a movie with us.
They can't cancel you if you don't quit.
Dave Portnoy, they have no actual power over Dave Portnoy.
And in that way, this rogue, this rake, this scoundrel, this hero of mine in many ways...
It's actually fighting a fight on all of our behalf and showing us how you're supposed to fight it.
Well, there's the story and then there's the story about the story.
And that's what's most interesting to me because, just as you say, Jeremy, the left encourages this exact behavior among everybody at all ages, across every state.
All 97 genders.
All 97 genders.
And they do it.
Until you cross them on anything.
It's like they're just trying to get compromise on everybody.
The left is a religion.
And all religious cults practice this same kind of thing, where they build confidence and cause you to behave in certain ways.
But they know about the ways that you behave.
And now, if you want to leave them, they can bring up the ways that you behaved around them.
This is why we on the right get into trouble when we talk about morality, which we all believe in.
We all actually believe that women should be treated.
I believe in gentlemen and ladies.
That's what I believe in.
I think that's a good thing.
However, you know, Brett Kavanaugh was accused of attacking someone in his teens by a woman who could not even prove that she had ever met him.
You know, Molly Hemingway traced this out in her book.
She couldn't prove that she ever met him.
This was weeks and weeks of stories.
People cornered Senator Flake in the elevator and wept.
Saying, you're approving of my rape because you're approving of this rape.
Joe Biden was plausibly accused of hurling a woman up against the wall and penetrating her with his fingers, and the New York Times didn't cover this for 20 days and then buried it in the Easter Sunday edition.
And when they asked Dean Becke about this, he said, well, you know, Kavanaugh was up for an important position.
I mean, it had the corruption.
It had the arrogant corruption of a boss tweet, that interview that he gave.
It's never about the morality, and we, because we're interested in morality, because we care about it, we end up discussing that, but that's not the question.
When it comes to behavior, we also tend to look for standards.
And then when somebody violates the standard, we say, okay, that was a violation of the standard.
And our standards happen to be higher than the standards of the left.
So we can look at behavior that we don't like, and we can say, we don't like that behavior.
The left has completely arbitrary standards.
And so the person who comes to mind here is not somebody who crossed the left, but got this treatment anyway, and that's Aziz Ansari.
Remember the story about Aziz Ansari?
That's right.
Very, very similar story, right?
He goes on a date with a woman, the woman comes back to his apartment, they have sex, I think twice, and then later she claims that he treated her poorly, and then he wasn't very nice to her, even though the story literally said, it's like a 10,000 word story, said that when she asked him to stop doing anything, he stopped doing the thing.
And this was somehow a major story.
And Aziz Ansari came out and he did this kind of mewling, pathetic sort of apology routine on his show.
I should have dealt with her sensitivities.
Well, I mean, I actually agree that you should deal with people's sensitivities regardless.
As Matt says, their consent is not the only question as to your activity.
If somebody consents to activity that is degrading to them, that does not mean that you must now go forward with the activity.
But that's our standard.
That is not their standard.
Their standard does not exist.
Consent is the appropriate legal standard.
Right, of course.
They're not even making a legal claim, though.
I think, to Jeremy's point, what's really important about this story, when you talk about consent, what Dave Portnoy is proving is that at least if you're a powerful person in a position like he's in, you have to consent to being canceled.
You have to go along with it.
And so what he's saying is, I don't give my consent to this.
I am just not going to be canceled.
And it's so important for him to do that because not everybody's in that position.
I mean, we can think of so many...
You know, there's a million crazy—think about that truck driver in California last year who lost his job, lost everything, because he was making this motion outside of the window while he was driving the truck.
And, you know, his life was just destroyed.
He had no ability to defend himself, and that's it for him.
So he didn't consent to that, and there's nothing he can do about it, which is why people like Dave Portnoy, who are in a position to say no, have to say it, because they have to start drawing that line there.
If you're not going to draw it there, then it's not going to— That's why I say the morality piece of this is uninteresting to me.
It's not that I'm not interested in the morality of the situation.
Of course I am.
It's that we actually do a good job of talking about these issues on Backstage all the time.
It is not the unique aspect of this story that a rich, powerful, famous man is kind of a louse with ladies.
That isn't novel.
If you like an actor, whoever it is, unless it's Kirk Cameron, they behave worse than Dave Portnoy.
If you like a politician, you know...
Eight out of ten of them probably behave the same way.
And by the way, the ones who aren't get ripped up and down by the media, right?
If Mike Pence has a stand, it's the opposite.
Or by the way, Henry, you remember there's this whole story about Henry Cavill having the same issue, right?
He said, it's hard for me to get a date because if I have a date with a woman and I take her home, I don't know what she's going to say the next day.
And the media went nuts.
How could you not trust women enough to just bring random women back to your apartment?
Like, it's...
So that is an interesting topic, but it's not what's interesting about this story.
What's interesting about this story is that we live in an age when they can cancel anyone, anytime, and most people, immediately upon being canceled, come out and grovel before the left in the vain hope that they will be reestablished to their former glory.
They never are because the left is graceless.
The only thing that keeps them from just having t-shirts made that say, don't bother, we are graceless, is that they want you to grovel.
So they dangle the idea of grace out in front of you.
So that you will humiliate yourself and they can fully put their boot on your neck.
And Dave Portnoy, because he's the stool presidente, says, uh-uh, no.
And that's what we're doing with these VAX mandates?
Uh-uh, no.
We don't care if we run afoul of your virtue.
We don't accept your virtue.
We don't acquiesce to your virtue.
And we're not going to accept a rebuke from people who are worse than us.
Because the left's virtue is vice, actually.
Yeah, their virtue is vice.
You know, the story here is not even the bad date or the many bad dates or whatever.
That's not right.
I would be more interested in that discussion.
As you say, we all have these discussions.
If the story were that there was this bad date and the woman came out and said this was so terrible, that's not what happened.
What happened was Business Insider hates Dave Portnoy, spent eight months looking for anything.
By the way, the New York Times has had a reporter for the last four months calling every single person who used to work for the Daily Wire and according to their own LinkedIn now says they don't for four or five months now.
I've gotten call after call, at least a dozen former employees.
Hey, you should know, this New York Times reporter called me because they saw on LinkedIn that I'd stopped working there, and they want to know, are you going through financial hardships?
You know, what's the culture like?
Just a fishing expedition.
For all I know, listen...
If ladies had any care for me whatsoever, one could only hope that he could be accused of being a rake roger scoundrel.
But they will find something.
If you dig on somebody long enough, they'll find something.
This is why I believe in making jokes.
Seriously.
I make jokes about black people.
I make jokes about gay people, transgender people, white people, all people.
Not because I hate any of them, because I actually don't, but because...
You had me right up until that white people.
I'm trying to give Shapiro a heart attack.
That's the first thing.
Yes.
That's kind of the purpose of my life.
But also because I think, like, where did they get the right to take away my right to make jokes?
I like jokes.
I think jokes expose the absurdity of life and make us happier in living in this absurd life.
They also demonstrate love and companionship.
You know, you actually make jokes about people you like.
You're just making the Chappelle point now.
And I think that we are starting to see major cultural figures.
That's right.
I'm just making my point, actually.
Yeah, that's fair.
You are old.
The sight now of major cultural figures starting to say, we're not going to go along with this sort of stuff is really a fantastic thing.
And I think that's why you're also starting to see so much of the top-down communications infrastructure trying to crack down on alternative sources of media.
I really believe that this is all connected.
When they lose the monopoly in the conversation, the next step is, where are these people available and how do we get them shut down?
You see it with Joe Rogan too, right?
I mean, when the attempt to go after Rogan Because he didn't take the vaccine and then he got COVID. And then he took ivermectin.
And the entire media decided that not only was he worthy of getting COVID, he should probably die from it because he was taking quote-unquote horse dormer.
And Rogan was just like, screw you.
It's not a horse dormer.
As he said, I can afford people medicine.
His refusal to just go along with the narrative is scary to these folks.
And so the next step is going to be elevating it to the next level of censorship, which is if they refuse to acquiesce to the social pressure, then we get into, How do we go after the advertisers?
How do we go after the places that platform these people?
How do we shut them down and prevent them from being able to talk?
People ask me all the time, what can we do to fight back against cancel culture?
I mean, I get tweets, I get DMs, I get emails.
What can we do to fight back against cancel culture?
And the answer is, you actually have to support the people who fight against cancel culture.
And that sometimes means people who you don't necessarily like everything about.
That's right.
And you have to actually focus on the parts of conversations that matter.
So, for example, I think what Kyle Rittenhouse did was dumb.
I don't think Kyle Rittenhouse should have been out there defending those buildings.
Not because there isn't virtue in defending those buildings.
There is.
But because I think that a 17-year-old young man arming himself with a rifle and going and standing in front of that business was not wise.
I think it showed a lack of judgment.
The kind of lack of judgment I expect from a 17-year-old doesn't mean that I think he's of low character.
It certainly doesn't mean that I don't think he's brave.
Might be too high a character.
Maybe too high a character.
I don't think he should have been there.
That would be a fun debate for you and I to have on a backstage.
would probably engage in that debate if they weren't trying to destroy Kyle Rittenhouse.
Because they're trying to destroy Kyle Rittenhouse, I'm not gonna get hung up on, should Kyle Rittenhouse have been there?
That's not the interesting part of the story.
Kyle Rittenhouse deserves, he merits our defense because of what the left is trying to do to him.
And similarly, Dave Portnoy, with his delicious one bite, everybody knows the rules, frozen pizza available at Walmart, deserves our support in this fight, Not in every fight, in this fight.
It's kind of funny that it's called everybody knows the rules.
Everybody knows sort of the point here, right?
You should go to Walmart and you should buy this pizza.
I think that Dave Chappelle, I realize that this is like blasphemy.
I don't think Dave Chappelle is funny.
I think that he used to sometimes be funny, and then I think he essentially got into whatever the opposite of claps, not laughs is.
He is essentially a preacher who preaches through something that is loosely a joke.
I think he was a lot funnier before he did that.
And I think 50% of what he's preaching about, I disagree with.
But by God, he deserves our support.
You should go watch that Netflix special.
Of course.
You have to stand with the people who are standing.
It's not always going to be the guys we love who make a stand.
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