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Feb. 11, 2022 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:15:16

Daily Wire Backstage: The Joe Rogan Experience

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	Hey, Michael Knowles here.
	The latest episode of Daily Wire backstage, the Joe Rogan experience, is available now.
	Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, and the God King Jeremy Boring as we discuss everything from the woke mob's attempt to destroy a DMT-loving cage fighter, the Democrats' sleazy 180 on mask mandates, and the Daily Wire's new movie, Shut In.
	Take a listen.
	Fake laugh in three, two, one.
	I like that Matt can't even fake laugh.
	Joyless scold.
	Tonight's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Don't like big tech and the government spying on you?
	Neither do we.
	Head over to expressvpn.com slash backstage.
	Joining us tonight, well, you know everybody, Ben, Andrew, Matt, Michael, me, Jeremy, the God King, the lowly, lowly guy who calls himself a God King.
	For tonight's show, Daily Wire members can ask us questions in the chat box over at dailywire.com, and we will answer them.
	I mean, we say that every time, we rarely do, but I promise we're going to try.
	If you haven't heard yet, Daily Wire is fulfilling our promise tonight of bringing entertainment that's actually, you know, entertaining, which is why we're very excited that you're joining us tonight, and we would love for you to join us after the show for the streaming premiere of our first original production, Shut In.
	I hope you are now.
	Again, that'll happen right after the show tonight.
	It's going to be on the Daily Wire channel as well.
	For all of you YouTube subscribers out there, head over to the Daily Wire YouTube channel after the show.
	Keep your eye on the countdown at the bottom of the screen.
	Click the link in the description to join the premiere to make sure you catch the film and a few other sneak peeks of what we've got in store for you throughout the rest of the year.
	Guys, it's a new day.
	It's a new week.
	Change is in the air.
	I would like to come out and say that I fully favor masking our children.
	Vaccines should be mandated for all.
	And my hope is that the entire right wing will change their narrative on this as quickly as the mainstream media seems to have been.
	If you did, you would only be following the data and the science.
	If you shifted, you would only be following the data and the science.
	Can I just say, I'm not sure what frustrates me more.
	The fact that they are claiming credit while changing...
	Or the fact that some of them are not even changing.
	Honestly, I'm having a tough time with this.
	Some of them are like, well, you know, like the CDC. Well, we'll just stick to our guns here.
	We still have to mask the children.
	It's very important.
	And to a certain extent, I have to say, okay, well, at least they're committed to the lie.
	They're just going to stick with this thing all the way through.
	And then you have the people who have told a new lie.
	And I think I find the new lie even more despicable.
	Because the new lie is that, yes...
	Yes, we're releasing our grip upon the throats of the American people.
	And yes, we're finally allowing some children to unmask.
	But it's only because we always wanted to, guys.
	We always wanted to.
	And now the data have changed, and we've been following the science.
	And honestly, it's because of you guys that it's lasted this long.
	Because if you had followed the science like us, we wouldn't have had to do it this long.
	Nothing changes like science.
	That's what I've always said.
	The real reason why they need to get rid of all the masks now is you can't smoke crack with a mask on.
	So if you want to put the pipe in, you've got to take the mask off.
	We now have to thank the truck-fudeau movement in Canada.
	We now have to be nice to Canadians because that's obviously one of the things.
	They're looking at their poll numbers, but they're also thinking, those trucks come here.
	It's not going to be a pretty sight.
	We're going to have supply-side problems out the wazoo.
	Truckers are officially the only Canadians that I support.
	Exactly.
	But they seem to be everybody.
	By the way, I'm just going to point out here that under no circumstances do I believe that Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro's son.
	I 100% do not believe.
	No, of course not.
	They don't look alike.
	Young Fidel Castro and Justin Trudeau.
	His mom was definitely not in Cuba when she was in Cuba about eight and a half months before.
	With a certain reputation.
	Certainly didn't have that.
	None of that happened.
	He's definitely not related to Fidel Castro.
	And all rumors, to the contrary, are scurrilous and baseless.
	Is he just channeling Castro?
	I said on Twitter, he's the bastard son of Castro either way.
	It is astonishing.
	Hakeem Jeffries, did you see this one?
	The Democratic congressman from New York, who is thought by many to be the heir apparent to Nancy Pelosi should she not be the speaker anymore.
	He actually gave a quote where he said that we can finally unmask and let go of all this because, after all, Joe Biden has won.
	Joe Biden has achieved victory over COVID. And largely that's because of the American Rescue Plan.
	If it had not been for the American Rescue Plan and Joe Biden's intervention, then we would all still be masking up forever.
	And all I wanted to do at that moment was reach through the television and commit acts that would get me thrown in jail.
	Except I'd be in New York, so I'd be okay probably.
	There's no bail.
	This is the part of politics I like.
	The lying and open corruption where...
	If you believe this, you deserve everything you get.
	As for me, it's high comedy.
	It's high comedy to watch a guy...
	He basically said, we lick this disease.
	This virus has done exactly what every virus that has ever existed on the face of the earth.
	It peaks, it goes away.
	It has nothing to do with anything they've done.
	The joke of it is...
	By their standard, it isn't going away.
	The actual hospitalization and death rates are higher today than they were when L.A. re-implemented all of its lockdown policies.
	I sent a shout-out to you.
	I don't know if you saw it on Twitter.
	I did.
	I know it hurt you.
	I did.
	I ripped it out of my side, like, you know, my kidney.
	It is.
	Because you were so right about the shutdown.
	And Dennis Prager, too.
	He said it was the worst mistake anyone had ever made.
	I thought, well, World War I. I still think World War I was a little worse.
	Absolutely.
	What shows you how evil this is, of course we know this is not unrelated to 2022 in the midterm elections, if I could engage in conspiracy theories, but when children started killing themselves in record numbers, that was not enough.
	In fact, that was happening for a year, and if you brought that up, I went and spoke at a school board meeting here in Nashville, and I brought up this problem with the psychological effects of masks, and that was still at a time when people would We'd laugh at you for it.
	What do you mean psychological effects of masking?
	And, of course, now we can talk about that, but kids were killing themselves at record numbers for a year, and that was not...
	But there is this aspect, the dishonesty, the incompetence, the lies, that's very annoying.
	The gaslighting is genuinely infuriating.
	Just picking at random here, Fauci and Walensky, they come out, they say, and Biden for that matter, they say, the vaccine will stop you from getting infected or transmitting the virus.
	They will do that.
	Then they come out later, they say, actually, the vaccine won't do that.
	Then they come out later, they say, we never told you.
	We never told you that it would do that.
	They did it with the crack pipes.
	They said, here's safe smoking kits, which include crack pipes.
	There are pictures all over the internet of it.
	And especially for black people.
	You know what these liars do?
	And it really is, it's gaslighting of the highest order.
	So Leanna Wen, who's been the lockdown, masking, crazy person this entire pandemic.
	Three weeks ago, she was literally asking whether we got to lock the unvaccinated in their homes.
	That's right.
	There's something she was saying three weeks ago.
	So she came out with this column in the Washington Post where she said, well, you know, there's really three groups in America.
	There are the people who are pro-mask, there are the people who are anti-mask, and then there are those of us who follow the data.
	And, you know, 2020 is not the same as 2022.
	And it's like, well, you know, there was this intervening period between 2020 and 2022.
	Because I think at the very beginning, nobody knew what to do with this thing.
	At the very beginning, they were saying, you've got to lock down because we literally didn't know who was going to kill.
	It could kill kids.
	It could kill normal, you know, people who are 40.
	It could kill people who are 70.
	Then within two months, we knew that it was mainly killing people who were highly vulnerable and/or elderly.
	We knew this within the first six weeks of the disease's course in the United States because we had seen this happen in Italy already.
	And then that data was clear.
	And so people started saying, well, maybe we should shield the most vulnerable and allow everybody else to live a freer life.
	And then there was still some debate over, okay, what if you infect somebody who's old?
	Then the vaccines hit.
	And at that point, we were done.
	Not one piece of data has changed since vaccines became widely available.
	The vaccines prevent hospitalization and death for the vast, vast, vast majority of people who take them.
	And they do not prevent transmission.
	And we have known this for months.
	And when it comes to Omicron, we have known that these masks do absolutely nothing.
	And yet, like, again, Not just with Omicron.
	That's the one thing I'll...
	Even Delta, by the way.
	We knew that the masks were meaningless from the very, very, very, very, very beginning.
	We glommed onto masks and the government glommed onto masks because they were desperate for any kind of ornamentation, any kind of symbol.
	A symbol, yeah.
	A symbol that we're fighting back against it.
	They knew before anyone had ever conceived of COVID, we knew what cloth masks do and don't do.
	You remember all of the, I wear my mask to protect you, you wear your mask to protect me.
	Right.
	That's if you use the mask precisely, which also no one does.
	does.
	If you've been in a grocery store in the last two and a half years, two years, you know that when someone who is masked sneezes, they remove their mask.
	Of course they do, because it would be disgusting to sneeze into your mask and then have, you know, snot in your face.
	It's also, of course, they do, because they don't wear their mask to protect you.
	At this point, if you are wearing a mask, it's either because of coercion or because you have been...
	Or delusion.
	Yes, delusion that you are so fearful that you do believe that the mask is protecting you from my germs, which is not science.
	And to me, that's the part that's offensive, because watching politicians lie amuses me.
	That is actually what I do for laughs.
	But making me lie, I don't like that so much.
	And I really feel that this has become part of the culture of America.
	It's like, you know, Matt says a man can't become a woman.
	I would never say that, of course, but Matt says it.
	It's like you get.
	You get penalized for that.
	You come out and you say, you know, I think this Hunter Biden may be corrupt.
	They throw you off Twitter.
	I mean, it is the truth.
	Literally, the truth that is being defined as misinformation.
	Any truth they don't like.
	If you read their fact checks, many of the fact checks will say...
	This is accurate.
	This is accurate.
	False.
	I think the biggest lie of all, the master lie here when it comes to this sort of stuff, is that they ban conversations, or they put critical race theory in the schools, or they put gender identity garbage in the schools.
	They do all this stuff, and then when you call them on it, they say, we're not doing it.
	We're not doing it.
	But...
	We should be doing it.
	And if we are doing it, it's good that it's happening.
	And they say these things simultaneously with a straight face.
	And that's the part that's driving everybody up the wall.
	Because that is true gaslighting.
	Simultaneously saying we are not doing X and also we are doing X and it's good that we're doing X. These are mutually exclusive arguments.
	And they will say these things in the same sentence on all of these topics.
	On all of them.
	We're not saying that you should mask forever.
	But if we were saying you'd mask forever, then that would probably be a good thing.
	We should keep in mind, too, that the government is...
	Yeah, they're not going to shut down COVID and they realize that, but they've moved on to bigger fish now because now Biden is going to end cancer.
	He's promised that.
	And the transportation secretary is going to stop all traffic deaths within the next few years.
	He's announced that as well.
	Through masking.
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	I should have emphasized, even if it's your business partner, because I have a life insurance policy on my business partner, that guy right there.
	And where did I get it?
	PolicyGenius.com.
	You should do the same thing.
	Insurance typically gets more expensive as you age.
	It's smart to get a policy sooner rather than later, and it's your responsibility to think about who's going to provide for those who depend on you, even after you plot.
	That's why Policy Genius is your one-stop shop to find and buy the insurance that you need.
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	You can save 50% or more on life insurance just by comparing quotes with Policy Genius.
	Their team of licensed experts will help you understand your options and apply for the best policy that you can choose.
	The Policy Genius team works for you, not the insurance companies.
	This is Really the important part.
	I think I've told you guys before, I got a policy from my wife and I when we were going through the process of adopting our daughter.
	It was at the beginning of the COVID pandemic.
	Everyone in the world was locked down except me.
	This is the honest to God truth.
	I never for one day didn't go to the office.
	But, you know, I let's...
	I'll let some of the peons who work for me not go so that they wouldn't infect me with their disease.
	I went to work.
	My wife was at the office with me.
	And we went to Policy Genius.
	We shopped for great life insurance because we were thinking for the first time about our responsibility to this child who we were going to be responsible for.
	And I didn't know, how will this work?
	The experts at PolicyGenius took care of everything, even at the height of the pandemic, the earliest days of the pandemic.
	They were able to find healthcare professionals to come and screen us for our life insurance policies to get everything taken care of for us and to do it at an amazing rate.
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	PolicyGenius.com.
	I'm very proud that PLOTS has now answered the question.
	I took it from you.
	I know you did.
	I'm not attempting to convert anyone except Drew back to Judaism.
	All the rest of you guys are safe, but I do wish to inject a couple of Yiddish words into common use.
	Plots is one.
	Shtup is the other one that you guys got.
	Shtup is a great word.
	Shtup is a great word.
	And shtup is what we have been doing to us.
	I wasn't going to get to Jeff Zucker quite that fast.
	Can I just say that...
	While we're getting rid of the masking and people are coming to their senses about it, it makes it all the more frustrating that the one place in the country where you still have to wear the mask all the time, and will probably have to always wear the mask, is the one place where there's never any good reason to wear it, which of course is on airplanes.
	So we've all been doing a lot of traveling.
	I've been traveling a lot over the last few weeks, and I get angrier and angrier every time I get on a plane.
	Because this is so...
	It's so...
	Everyone involved...
	And it gives the petty authoritarians such pleasure.
	They're so happy about it.
	Everybody involved in it knows that there's no reason to be doing this, and there never was a good reason.
	You know what I've noticed, though?
	What I've noticed on these...
	It's not airline-dependent.
	It's not day-of-the-week dependent.
	It's flight attendant-dependent.
	And it depends where the flight attendants are based.
	And if they happen to be based, actually.
	Because if you're flying from Texas to Tennessee...
	You're fine.
	No joke, I went on one...
	The stewardess was wearing a mesh mask...
	I did this.
	I went out and got myself a really fancy cloth mask that's kind of gauzy because I think if they're going to force me to wear a mask, I want them to know it's not going to do a damn thing.
	If I'm sick, I'm going to kill you.
	I actually spray COVID on the outside of the mask before I get on the plane.
	Yeah, it was only a few weeks ago that I was on a plane, and I got yelled at by the flight attendant because I was eating without a mask on, which, of course, how can you do them both at the same time?
	But she explained to me that, no, sir, when you eat, you need to just lower the mask and have it over your chin, and then you can't take it all the way off because the COVID fumes can come out.
	I got worse.
	I was eating popcorn on the plane, as I'm wont to do, and the flight attendant came by and she said that I had to mask up between bites.
	When you eat popcorn, that's like half a second.
	Between bites.
	It's like, oh, yes, you've saved the universe.
	Well done.
	I really think there will be a certain percentage of the population, maybe 10% of the population, that will continue wearing masks forever.
	Did you see the study today?
	A YouGov economist study just came out.
	Who knows?
	Take it with a grain of salt, if you will.
	38% of people say that they still today wear masks every time they go outside.
	They're lying.
	They're lying, right?
	It's not true.
	And only 9 out of 10 men masturbate.
	1% are damn filthy liars.
	You walk around D.C. and everybody's masked, except me.
	Are you serious?
	Still, everybody outside.
	Everybody.
	Outdoors, everybody's mask.
	Do they know what outside is?
	Do they know they're outside?
	I don't know.
	I feel like this is a great way to screen who you want to hang out with.
	Yeah.
	Really, at this point, if you're still wearing a mask consistently and you're not immunocompromised in some serious way, in which case, if you're really immunocompromised, you should probably wear a mask before this, after this, for all time.
	And only an N95 mask.
	Right, only an N95, not a cloth mask.
	But if you're not in that category and you're masking up at this point, I feel like I don't really want to hang out with you.
	You seem kind of paranoid.
	That's actually what the mask is about.
	I think we should be open about it.
	There are people who are still afraid.
	Why wouldn't they be?
	It's the biggest onslaught of government and media behind a narrative in probably all of human history.
	But...
	Most of it is actually about who you want to hang out with.
	Most of it is a kind of tribal recognition.
	If you're wearing the mask, you're one of us.
	If you're not wearing the mask, you actually deserve to die.
	That is the actual narrative that undergirds the narrative.
	What does it say about you if you feel that way?
	If you feel that you...
	You should die if you don't wear a mask, when what a mask is is a useless piece of fear-mongering that has made you a slave to the government.
	It's basically saying, if you are a bad boy, if you're not going to listen to the authorities, I don't want to know you.
	What kind of attitude is that for an American?
	When has an American ever listened to the authorities?
	Well, I mean, it's just a religious adherence tool.
	And all religions require you to make certain sacrifices on behalf of the religion to show that you are a member of that religion.
	I mean, I wear a yarmulke to do this, to demonstrate that I'm a Jew, for example.
	And Christians go to church on a regular basis, and they hang out in the Christian community specifically for this purpose.
	You have to have skin in the game.
	The skin in the game when it comes to the religion of government can't be taxes because everybody pays taxes.
	It has to be something else.
	It has to be a particularly useless sacrifice.
	It cannot be a useful sacrifice.
	If it were useful, we'd all be doing it.
	They have to pick something useless in order to demonstrate fealty to the cause.
	Behind a lot of theory of religion and religious practice lies this basic idea.
	There are certain things that you do, and you don't know why you do them, but you do them really because it's a group-building exercise.
	You know, the most popular day of the year in the Catholic Church is Ash Wednesday.
	More than Christmas, more than Easter, people who never show up to Mass, don't have the sacraments, they show up because you get the ashes on your head, and you feel like you're in the club, and people are searching for meaning and belonging.
	Yeah, I was going to say, Ben, I don't know where you got the idea that Christians go to church, but...
	That's a rumor.
	Misinformation.
	Yeah, the most frustrating thing to me with the masking is when we hear people say now that we've learned things about it, and so maybe that will change our approach.
	There was someone on The View, I think it was supposed to be the conservative woman on The View a few weeks ago, said that she's going to continue wearing a mask because of what she's learned about masking, what we've all learned.
	So what have we learned about masks exactly?
	I always knew that masks existed.
	I always knew that germs existed.
	Yeah.
	I always knew the basic idea of why you wear a mask.
	So what exactly has anyone learned about masks?
	I did learn some things about the Holocaust on the view the last couple of months.
	That's probably as valuable as what I learned about the masks.
	The mask works for Michael Myers in those movies.
	Yeah.
	I think that you're right.
	The only thing we've learned about the masks that we didn't know is how ineffective they are.
	Probably before COVID, I had not thought about the efficacy of a mask.
	And I probably would have guessed, it's probably pretty useful in a respiratory pandemic to wear a cloth mask.
	And as it turns out, it's not.
	That's the only thing we've learned.
	It's not.
	But you literally couldn't say it for a year.
	You couldn't say it for a year.
	If you said it, we still have this thing that is now on my show.
	It's almost every day.
	If I talk about COVID, because of the big tech overlords and because they have decided what you can and cannot say, there's an actual cut into my show.
	In the YouTube version of my show, where I have to say every single day, Guys, stop and head on over to dailywire.com and subscribe right now, because I'm about to say something true about COVID. And if I say something true about COVID, there's a very good shot that it's going to be taken down.
	So if you want the full version, you have to go over to dailywire.
	This is why they're going after Rogan, right?
	I mean, this is what they do.
	This is what's important, actually, about the crack pipe story.
	It's why I keep coming back to it, also because I'm jonesing.
	But with the crack pipe story...
	What they said on Snopes was, here's the claim.
	Here's what's true about the claim.
	Everything.
	Here's what's false about the claim.
	Absolutely nothing.
	So we rate this mostly false.
	And you look at that and you say, how can you do that with a straight face?
	What's the point of this ridiculous article, Snopes?
	Here's the point.
	Snopes is a fact checker partnered with Big Tech.
	And with that mostly false rating, anytime any of us point out the Biden policy was what it was...
	We will be censored for that.
	You can share the free beacon link.
	Facebook stopped you from sharing the free beacon link on an overtly true story.
	But the good news is, and they've been doing this all along, right?
	I mean, you remember the other Hunter Biden story, not the crack pipe Biden story, like the other one with the Biden and the crack pipe.
	You remember that one from right before the election?
	When they were removing all of the stories.
	Well, I mean, one of the things that has become perfectly apparent from big tech is that this is the end goal.
	They have created a false fact-checking system specifically to ding people they do not like.
	And this is the Rogan story.
	I mean, the misinformation stuff about Rogan had nothing to do with misinformation.
	It has to do with the fact they hate Rogan because Rogan said a couple of years ago during the election that Biden was senile.
	Ever since then, they've been very angry at him.
	They're very angry that Rogan hosts people like me or hosts people like Jordan Peterson.
	That's verboten.
	And so they went after Rogan, and it's not going to stop.
	It's not going to stop.
	And so this is why we here at The Daily Wire, we used to have a pretty anti-cancel culture view, and we still do.
	But there is one addendum.
	If you are a participant in the cancel culture, you should be canceled beyond all redemption.
	I'm sorry, I didn't quite understand that.
	What is the exception here?
	The exception is if you are a member of the mob, and you mob other people, and then you sin, and the mob comes after you, I am more than happy.
	Paraphrase Chesterton.
	There is a thought that cancels thought, and that is the only thought that ought to be canceled.
	But this is the thing that really bothers me now about cancel culture.
	It's the normal thing that the left does where they're saying, well, there's right-wing cancel culture and there's left-wing culture.
	Cancel culture.
	There is zero right-wing cancel culture.
	Cancel culture is an outgrowth of the left's strategy of defending the indefensible by calling new names.
	That's what it is.
	It's a strategy.
	Everything they've ever done has failed.
	Everything socialists have ever done has failed.
	And so what they do is they say, well, if you don't agree with us, you're racist.
	And nobody wants to be called.
	Cancel culture is also through the institutions.
	That's how you get canceled.
	And that's also why cancel culture is only on the left, because the left owns all the institutions, and the right, we don't, as much as we would love to.
	And what they call cancel culture is like when we say, we don't want you to indoctrinate my child into believing that.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	And then they'll be like, well, we'll pass a law saying, don't do that.
	Like they're doing in Florida.
	And they'll be like, how dare you, sir?
	This is canceling the teachers.
	You're violating the teacher's freedom.
	Well, I didn't delegate my child to some teacher.
	So the teacher can teach them that boys can be girls and girls can be boys.
	There's a whole article in the Washington Post about this supposedly don't say gay bill, which is exactly not what this bill is in Florida.
	That's right.
	It's amazing.
	The operative provision of that bill is two paragraphs long.
	It's very easy to read.
	It's in plain English.
	And what the bill basically says is you are not allowed to teach about sexual orientation or gender identity in a non-age appropriate way to primary school kids.
	Kids K through 3.
	K-3.
	It's not even up until 5th grade.
	By the way, I would back this level in K-12.
	Of course.
	Because here's my feeling about this.
	I did not delegate my kids to you at any point for you to teach this garbage to my children.
	And so Greg Sargent over at the Washington Post, he writes this entire article, he says, well, you know, this makes teachers very nervous.
	It makes them feel on edge.
	And I said on my show, I don't know a group of people in America.
	I want to be more on edge than teachers.
	I want them to be on edge.
	I'm delegating to you the most precious asset that is in my control, my children.
	You should be on edge.
	You should feel like your job is on the line every time you teach my kids.
	Yes, I want you to feel any moment that the trap door could go out from under you and you could be fed to the alligators.
	I want you to feel that way.
	And now that we know that they're a bunch of Marxist racist wackos, like we should be watching them double time.
	I have to say, I have to congratulate the left on the don't say gay thing.
	They're so good at this.
	They instantaneously brand things with this very...
	It's a repeatable name that makes it sound like it's hateful.
	Well, they have two things going in their favor.
	One, they use marketing and we don't use marketing on the right.
	The 1619 Project.
	I guarantee you a marketing agency came up with that.
	Ogilvy or something.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Don't say gay.
	And then the other thing is that they're so good because they control all the institutions.
	In less than a day, they can ensure that whatever they've created in their marketing agency is ubiquitous.
	On the right, we end up being victims of it.
	In the same way that atheists have to affirm God every time they say what they are, because the word contains theist in it, On the right, we almost exclusively talk about these issues while affirming the broad structures of the left's created narrative.
	We all say COVID. We all say COVID instead of the Chinese virus.
	Well, and worse than that, we say tested positive when we get it.
	Yeah, I know.
	Oh, I'm not feeling well.
	What happened?
	I'm tested positive.
	Really?
	Tested positive is a reference to AIDS at a time when AIDS was a death sentence.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Interesting.
	Why do we use the term tested positive?
	Why don't we test ourselves?
	And I'll go one step further.
	You brought up Joe Rogan, and you brought up the misinformation stuff, all of their objections or no objections.
	Yeah.
	That story was something like 270 medical professionals.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Signed letter condemning Joe Rogan.
	And we all reported on it.
	And we keep repeating it, too.
	And we keep saying...
	That's like.00001% of medical professionals in the country.
	It was also dentists.
	When we talk about it, a more proper headline would have been statistically no medical professional.
	But we grant them all these premises.
	And we're also always about three or four decades behind the left.
	So we talk about gender ideology and what's going on in the schools.
	Well, this is all a direct outgrowth of what they used to call comprehensive sex education, which has been in the school system since the 50s and 60s.
	And there's always been some people on the right who criticize comprehensive sex education, but for a long time, up until recently, you were considered kind of like a puritan, a prudish.
	But the moment that we granted to the government education system the right to talk to our kids, not about the biology of sex, but about their own ideas of the morality of sex.
	The moment we gave that, we ceded that ground to the government, then all of this stuff was going to follow behind.
	Because ever since comprehensive sex education came along, What we are doing now is that government employees are the teachers.
	They're talking to kids about not just the birds and the bees.
	This is how babies are made.
	But this is the right time to have sex.
	These are the attitudes you should have about sex.
	Why would you ever want a government employee to talk to your kid about it?
	You know, to that point, right now the move is to justify and normalize adult child sex.
	And we're not taking it seriously and we don't see it coming, but it's obviously coming.
	It's their next move and it's like, it's what they're pushing.
	And this time, you know, this time the guy gets thrown out of school.
	This time the guy gets fired.
	Next time he won't get fired.
	Next time it'll be like suddenly an editorial in the New York Times.
	You know, well, man, child, you know, The draw, the appeal is not true.
	No, they'll set the predicate.
	What they'll set the predicate for is they will say children have, they won't call them children, they'll say young adults have the power to make autonomous decisions.
	We know the science with regard to gender.
	And kids can choose their own gender as young as the age of three.
	And we know that kids need to have life-destroying surgery and hormonal treatment by 15 to prevent puberty from fully setting in.
	And those kids are capable of making those decisions.
	How can you possibly say a 15-year-old is capable of making And how can you?
	By the way, it is logically consistent.
	If you're making the argument that 15-year-olds can chop a penis off and turn it into a gaping wound, and that this is going to be treated by society as an overt good, it's going to be treated by society as a positive step on behalf of humanity.
	How can you rule out sexual identity?
	I actually think it'll be the easiest one that they ever do.
	Because...
	Convincing human beings to deny biological reality cuts against all of human history.
	Literally since the beginning chapters of the Bible.
	Male and female, he made them.
	We have understood since at least kindergarten cop in 1995 that boys have a penis and girls have a vagina.
	This has been part of what every human on earth has ever known.
	Conversely, for most of human history, adults had sex with children.
	I'm not suggesting it's a...
	Young adults.
	Young adults.
	I'm not suggesting it's a moral good, but I am suggesting that the age of sexual maturity used to probably be about 13, 14 years old in almost every society on Earth.
	And those 13 and 14-year-olds didn't have sex with other 13, 14-year-olds.
	They had sex with adults.
	30-year-olds, right.
	That's right.
	And so...
	This will be, it seems outrageous to us.
	You say we're not even talking about it.
	It seems so far-fetched.
	It's so much less far-fetched.
	Yeah, of course.
	In the comparative scope.
	Anthropology.
	Anthropology.
	Then the things they've already convinced us all must be.
	That's why I hate the slippery slope.
	This is not a slippery slope because we've actually, we've got to the bottom of the slope.
	We leapfrogged all this stuff and now we're just going to go back and cover the bases we skipped.
	Yeah.
	You know, before the show, Knowles and I were talking, and we were saying, you know, we now live in a country where we slaughter 3,000 babies a day, where, I have to say, slavery was a grave evil, and an offense to God, this is worse.
	This is actually worse, 3,000 babies a day.
	We're mutilating children, as you say.
	I have gone from praying, God bless America, to God remembers you're faithful in the day of your wrath.
	If there were even 10.
	Because we are really in a bad way.
	And when I talk to young people, when I talk to young people, they don't love America like I do because I remember an America that wasn't doing this stuff.
	You're living in the wrong place, man.
	I mean, I really, like, I'm such a believer in the big sort.
	I think the big sort is the best thing.
	I do too.
	And I think if they overturn Roe v.
	Wade, it'll double time.
	Yeah, good, good.
	Really good.
	Good.
	Honestly, I felt about the masking rules and about all this.
	I was like, listen, these are all bad, and I'm glad that more Americans are now living in freedom in blue states.
	But to a certain extent, I want blue states to govern exactly like blue states govern, and you get to choose to live there, and you get to choose to vote for this garbage.
	I want red states getting redder.
	I want blue states getting bluer.
	And let's see clarity above agreement, right?
	I'll paraphrase my friend Dennis Prager.
	Clarity above agreement.
	Then you get to choose how you want to live.
	Because I can tell you, people who are living in Tennessee are very proud to be American.
	People who are living in Florida are very proud to be American.
	People who are living in Texas are very proud to be American.
	People who live in New York are very proud to be international citizens with global perspectives on the innate non-difference between men and women.
	I will agree with you 100%.
	I will acknowledge That I find our national anthem painful to reflect on today.
	That it's impossible to watch children being masked.
	It's impossible to watch people being driven into poverty and despair and government dependency by their jobs being not only shut down, but all the wealth being redistributed to a very small handful of corporations at the government's Express doing.
	With no loyalty to the nation.
	And not because they won in some sort of competitive market environment, but because the government forced it to then sing the land of the free.
	Even freaking Tom Hanks can't with a straight face today say it's the land of the free.
	Which is why he says it's the land of the brave.
	The land of the brave.
	They took out the free because they couldn't say it.
	Here's a question for Ben.
	Why didn't our founders give us a process for kicking states out of the union?
	It never really occurred to them that states would have to be kicked out of the Union.
	What the federal government is allowed to do is intervene if certain things are prohibited by the state.
	So, for example, the federal constitution does require that the federal government has to guarantee to the state's Republican form of government.
	So, for example, if there's certain basic rights that end up being violated to the extent that there is no Republican form of government in the States, then the federal government does have the ability to intervene.
	But those were very, very narrow powers.
	And actually, the federal government, you know, this was the battle during the Civil War, and it's...
	Which is really separatable into two things.
	One is, does the federal government have the power to intervene when it comes to things like stopping slavery?
	And one is, does the federal government have the power to intervene over a vast panoply of issues that don't include slavery?
	These are very open questions.
	You can say on a moral level, the federal government had the power to intervene to stop slavery, and it was the right thing to stop slavery.
	You can also say that as a constitutional question, it was quite open as to...
	There were full-scale constitutional debates from basically inception until the Civil War about what exactly were the powers of the federal government if the states felt that they were going to go a different direction than the federal government.
	Was the power to secede present in the Constitution was a debate that encompassed everybody up to the former Vice President of the United States, John C. Calhoun.
	And you can read the dissent in our Supreme Court case about the OSHA mandate and see that three of the nine justices currently on the court actually believe that the constraint on the federal government is only what they think is best.
	If they think it's best, they should be able to do it.
	Daily Wire members, the chat box is still open.
	You can submit your questions at dailywire.com.
	And coming up in just a short amount of time here, we're going to be bringing you the premiere of our original movie, Shut In.
	The world premiere will be streaming right after this episode, so you'll want to click on the link at the top of the description after our show to join the premiere.
	I have absolutely no idea what this means in the teleprompter, but...
	Oh, it's the Helix advert.
	We should definitely talk about Helix.
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	I'm going to tell you the problem with Helix Sleep.
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	They told me it says Riff on Helix Sleep and how everybody on the show has a Helix mattress.
	And then I realized, wait, you all have Helix mattresses?
	That's great, yeah.
	I love it.
	They're really nice.
	Unbelievable.
	I'm the only guy on the set who hasn't slept on a Helix map.
	And then I think about how I make all the money for everybody, and I'm always freaking tired.
	And you guys come breezing in here rich, happy, satisfied, and well-rested.
	And I can only assume it's because you have Helix Sleep.
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	So, what else is there to complain about tonight?
	Not too much, because it's a very good night, because we're releasing our first original movie.
	Yeah, absolutely right.
	That's pretty good stuff.
	The Biden administration, they can try to get us all to smoke crack or whatever they want.
	But we're not just commenting on it.
	We're actually creating the culture.
	Yeah, that's right.
	I couldn't be more thrilled about the movie.
	We're going to hear from DJ Caruso, the director of the film, coming up in just a few minutes.
	And then Dallas Sonnier, our producing partner on all of our projects in development right now, will be joining us.
	But it really is a huge night.
	We get to do so many incredibly fun things in our jobs, right?
	I mean, just that Helix ad alone.
	We do.
	We get to work with great people.
	We get to be a part of historic events, as with the OSHA mandate case.
	We actually get to feel like we're participating in the democracy.
	I actually know that a lot of people are very depressed by what's going on in the country.
	And people ask me all the time, how do you live in this news environment and not get depressed?
	How do you get out of bed in the morning?
	And the answer is, I'm in the fight.
	And win or lose, we're expending our best in defense of what we believe.
	And that's rejuvenating and enlivening.
	Also, we get to make a freaking movie.
	We get to do the thing that our mentor, Andrew Breitbart, always said that politics is downstream of the culture.
	And he used to say, you know, one of these days, someone in our space is going to have to get upstream of the political and do something.
	Because of our DailyWire.com members, we've been put in a place where we get to do it.
	It really is a dream come true.
	It's funny.
	I see conservatives on social media sometimes ragging on us, you know, like for making movies and things.
	And I just think like, no, you're missing the whole point.
	I mean, this is celebration time.
	This is the best...
	They're addicted to losing.
	Some conservatives love...
	I think they're so used to losing that they cling on to it.
	I agree.
	One of the things that was important to Ben and I at the onset was to make movies that people want to see instead of movies that people want to want to see.
	It occurred to me recently that...
	Art is the only place where conservatives don't believe in meritocracy.
	Our entire worldview is premised on work hard, excel, do better, and rise.
	And when it comes time to make art or entertainment, we're like...
	Forget everything we just said.
	That was pretty good.
	I have to say, this is, not to get too intellectual, this is part of the Protestant ethos from the very beginning, from the Reformation, was that things should be...
	Art is a snare and a delusion, and it should have a good message, and the message would be better just said directly.
	And that was very...
	Right after Luther nailed the 95 theses on the wall, that was basically what Protestants...
	No, Plato was kind of...
	Not too happy about it either.
	But seriously, this is a thing that has leaked into our class.
	But it's a unique moment, because I was thinking about this a lot the other day, that virtually all great art is in some way subversive.
	Yes.
	It has to be subversive of something, because it has to comment on something.
	Art is a medium where you're commenting on the thing that you're observing.
	And I think that for a long time, it was hard for conservatives to make great art absent being Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union.
	Or absent living under East German Stasi rule or something.
	And now the truth is that when it comes to the culture, we are losing.
	And so that actually offers us a couple of opportunities.
	One, to make actual great art that I think is a commentary on the world that we live in.
	But second, there's no market for this.
	Jeremy, you and I started talking about making movies together before we talked about doing any other sort of business together.
	That's right.
	Our very first conversation was this.
	It was a conversation hooked up by, at that time, our friend Mark Masters over at Talk Radio Network.
	I was working over there, and he had wanted to do some movies.
	And he said, well, Ben, you know movies, and Jeremy, you know movies, you guys should talk.
	This was back in, it would have been 2010, probably.
	And our very first conversation was about this.
	And you were doing something called Declaration Entertainment, which was...
	A support-driven entertainment idea.
	The idea was people were going to essentially donate money to you through subscriptions in order to make movies.
	And the time wasn't ripe.
	And the reason that the time wasn't ripe is because Hollywood, as much as they hated Americans, was still making movies that Americans actually wanted to see.
	That was still at a time when things like Return of the King could win Best Picture and Dark Knight could be nominated for Best Picture.
	And now, Hollywood so overtly hates our guts that you cannot name a movie or a TV show where there isn't some sort of sucker punch.
	We were talking about this the other day.
	Try and name a movie or a TV show where there isn't some sort of message directed subversively at traditional values.
	It's literally impossible.
	Even films or television shows that are ostensibly conservative.
	So my favorite example is Captain America in The Last Endgame.
	Here's a guy from the 1940s who's a Christian, who volunteered underage to go fight Nazis, who subjected himself to human experimentation so that we could defeat the Nazis, who gets frozen and comes back, literally wears red, white, and blue and calls himself Captain America.
	And they had to have him in a scene at the beginning of Endgame where he's in a counseling session because of the horrors that the world has endured.
	And we come to find out through sort of a revelation that the person he's talking to is a married gay man.
	Now, what is that about?
	Well, that's about the filmmakers being embarrassed that they've been making a show about a guy called Captain America for the last 20 years.
	And they need to let you know that he may come from the 1940s middle America.
	He may call himself America.
	He may...
	Wear red, white, and blue, but he doesn't belong to you.
	You don't get to have him anymore.
	And, of course, it's not just around sexual ethics that they do this.
	They're doing it across almost everywhere.
	The best is Yellowstone.
	Of course, Yellowstone.
	You've got a rancher who believes in nothing more than his freedom.
	Get off my land, literally, is his mantra.
	And he decides that he's going to shack up with a Greenpeace protester And shock her with the degree to which he believes we've destroyed the earth.
	It's all for naught.
	He actually has a line in which he says, I don't think we have a hundred years left before God wipes us all out and starts over if he has the heart for it.
	What are you talking about?
	The bottom line is that the left, over the course of the last couple of years particularly, has decided that they are going to become what we are currently accusing the right of being.
	They're only going to make missional movies.
	For years, the left was like, I'll make a good movie, and then the mission will just sort of be there.
	Now it's like, no, no, no, that's not enough.
	This is why they're also doing the routine where if you are casting a gay person, the person who's playing it has to be gay.
	Or if you're casting a disabled person, the person has to be disabled.
	You can't have a white couple.
	Every single couple has to be either mixed race or black.
	And you can't talk about the problems of...
	If you ever have a movie about the problems of white people who are not wildly impoverished, it's a problem.
	And even if they are wildly impoverished, if you make Hillbilly Elegy, it's a real problem.
	Interestingly, when I was in England, this killed the British film industry.
	They hated four weddings and a funeral.
	I said, that's an entertaining film.
	Oh, yeah, we don't want to do that.
	We want to do two gay guys who are Muslim in a laundrette, you know, because everybody wants to see that.
	And it just killed their industry, which had come back because of these great films.
	You know, I have to say about Shut In...
	About 15 years ago, I went into a hotel.
	I stayed in the penthouse where there was one room at the top of the floor.
	I came in.
	I locked the door.
	I put the chain on the door.
	I took my clothes off.
	I went into the bathroom, closed the door, went to the bathroom, went to open the door.
	And it was locked, and there was no button on it.
	The only time, I've been in war zones, I've been in fistfights, I've been in all kinds of, it's the only time in my life I ever said to myself, don't panic.
	Out loud, out loud, don't panic.
	Watching this film, I'm going to get you for it.
	PTSD. Andrew Klavan walked into that bathroom with hair.
	It was like a shock of blonde hair.
	Somehow conservatives still hold on to hope for a franchise, for some of these franchises that exist.
	I don't know how they do.
	For example, the Lord of the Rings Amazon series.
	You still have conservatives.
	Oh, I hope it's not woke.
	Of course it's going to be woke.
	Amazon is making Lord of the Rings.
	What do you think they're going to do?
	There is zero chance.
	You have to understand.
	Every single franchise you love It's going in this direction.
	It cannot go any other direction but that.
	And we can't afford to buy those franchises, so we have to start creating something.
	Like, if I could do anything, I'd buy Superman to keep him Superman, but I'm not a multi-multi-multi-billionaire, so I can't buy Superman, so we've got to create some stuff.
	And, you know, you talk about these very overtly left-wing movies like Don't Look Up or things like that.
	I got nominated for an Oscar with 55% on Rotten Tomatoes.
	That's right.
	But I don't mind that.
	If you want to make an overtly left-wing movie, I'm fine with it.
	It's the sucker punch that I hate.
	Every conservative in America fell in love with Ted Lasso last year, and you're in the penultimate episode, and Ted Lasso refers to God as a she.
	That was a dishonest show from the first frame.
	What is the point?
	The point is to say...
	The Midwestern American football lover doesn't belong to you, Midwestern.
	He doesn't share your values.
	That was the whole theme of that show.
	I said, the minute it came on, I said, this guy is a fundamentalist Christian, except they won't let him believe in God.
	They won't let him not have sex.
	They won't let him keep his marriage together.
	Oh, the marriage thing was unbelievable.
	It was unbelievable.
	I mean, they literally, they're like, oh, well, you know what would be best for the kid is if you abandon your child and remain several thousand miles away, never seeing your son.
	But that's, you know, that's just the way modern families work now.
	The whole show is a lie.
	It's a lie.
	You know, it's funny with all these shows, though.
	I mean, I watched a little Yellowstone, but not too much.
	I watched a little bit of this.
	I never watched the franchises.
	I just won't do it.
	I love movies.
	I grew up watching movies.
	But I'm just not going to do it.
	My life is too precious.
	My time is too short.
	So what I will do is I will watch old movies and old TV shows.
	There's plenty of them.
	I can play those.
	Or on the rare occasion...
	That there is some movie that I know isn't going to cram some insane, insipid, tedious agenda down my throat.
	I'll watch it, and I just think, if you give me three shut-ins a year, I'll be happy.
	I'll get to see some movies, but I'm not going to watch this other crap.
	Here's a question from a member.
	Run, Hide, Fight, Shut In, and Terror on the Prairie all have strong female leads.
	Was this a coincidence?
	Will you make a movie with a strong male lead as well?
	We've been getting this question a little bit on Twitter, and I'm going to tell you that we have a fourth movie that we're going to surprise everyone with the trailer for later on tonight, and it also has a very strong female lead.
	So we're going to be batting four for four in 2016.
	We're misogynist.
	Yeah, we're misogynist.
	The question is why, and the answer is, It's very difficult to do what we're doing.
	Dallas Sonnier has read 400 scripts this year in his search for great content for us.
	We've interviewed Dozens of writers.
	We've paid many writers, Drew, to develop shows for us.
	Development is incredibly challenging.
	It's a lengthy process.
	You don't always hit the target that you're aiming at.
	Even when you work with some of the best people out there, you don't always hit the target that you're aiming at.
	It's a miracle when any movie gets made.
	Our goal over time is to grow up our own, our whole own industry, not to be dependent on Hollywood really much at all.
	You know, because obviously they don't like us over there.
	But in the beginning, you have to fish where the fish are.
	In the beginning, we're sorting through the kinds of scripts that are available.
	And we're finding the ones that do have our values in them.
	We're finding the ones that don't have left-wing sucker punches in them.
	We're finding the ones that Hollywood won't make.
	Nevertheless, no one has written a script that is perfectly what we might hope that it would be in 15 years because there's been no market for it because Hollywood won't buy it.
	And so I haven't read, I've read 100 scripts this year probably.
	Ten of them had male leads and they weren't very good.
	But you know, you get a thousand, if you make a thousand movies, 700 of them can be lousy.
	But people remember the good ones.
	If you make five movies, it's because that's what we can make.
	That's what we can make.
	But it's a good thing.
	It's a positive thing.
	It's a thing we should be celebrating every step of the way because we're climbing out of the pit.
	That's right.
	And of course we'll make movies with strong male leads.
	Also...
	We're so fortunate when we find a piece of content that we believe in, when we find a piece of content that we can make, we're excited about it.
	We're thrilled to get to go take a swing at it.
	And that doesn't mean you can't just say, well, next, a movie with a male lead, any more than you can say, and next, we'll make a movie with dinosaurs.
	You have to find it on the page.
	You have to find the content that you want to make.
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	What I'll say about Shut In, it was on the very prestigious Blacklist, which is probably the most prestigious list in Hollywood that you're scripting.
	I know it sounds like the opposite.
	When you think of Hollywood and Blacklist, you think about the things people don't want.
	It's the second best thing that can happen to you.
	But being on the Blacklist as a script is a great thing.
	This is one of the five best scripts I've ever read.
	The best script I've ever read is by my friend Roderick Taylor.
	It's called Goliath Awaits.
	It's just an absolute home run.
	Maybe one day, as our opportunities increase, we'll be able to make a project like that.
	When I read Melanito's script, I thought, this is 100% for us.
	In fact, we had to pay a lot of money to get it because the film was set up at New Line.
	Dallas had found it on the blacklist.
	He had gotten it a deal at New Line.
	Jason Bateman, Nicole Kidman had circled this project.
	COVID happened.
	The film gets knocked off of the production roster.
	And that gave us a window where we could swoop in there and pick it up.
	And we count ourselves very fortunate to have done so.
	You have to understand, though, that when we do this, Even the screenwriter isn't all that happy.
	She's getting her very first movie ever made.
	We're honoring her script.
	Keep in mind, I've been telling this story for a week.
	When New Line had the script, they rewrote it to take the kids out of peril.
	They didn't want the kids to be in peril because housewives won't watch it, which then takes away all the stakes in the movie.
	They took away all the Christian symbolism, which you'll see throughout the film tonight, which is critical to the story of her redemption.
	It's sort of the central ethos.
	They take all of that out because they homogenize the film, they sanitize the film to make it more broadly appealing, which of course takes away the redemptive message.
	So you've taken away the stakes, you've taken away the impetus for the transition, and then they took out the villain.
	And I'm not making this up.
	They replaced the villain with an evil dog.
	Really?
	Yes.
	Major Hollywood stars circled this script in a version that had no villain, an evil dog, no threat.
	Was the woman in a pantry with an annoying dog outside?
	Was the dog at least a pedophile or no?
	No, no, no.
	Also, the thing about the female lead thing is that...
	It's almost a leftist mentality in a weird way.
	If we were to say, well, now it's time for a movie with a male lead.
	It's like, well, let's go through each identity group and make sure they each get their own movie.
	I think the better approach is just what's the best movie and we'll make it.
	But the important point is that we're not saying that, you know, this is not a message that we're sending.
	Oh, the Dems are the real sexists, and so we're going to make a lot of movies with female leads.
	I don't think that's the point at all.
	And another thing I like about this movie is that it is a redemptive story.
	That's another thing that's missing.
	In most Hollywood movies, there's a story of real redemption.
	And especially in cancel culture, graceless society, where there's no forgiveness, to have a story where there's actual redemption, and that is, in fact, the story itself, I think is really important.
	That's what I liked about it.
	Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
	There's something else also, which is that we on the right, we tend to focus in a lot on the fact that masculinity is under attack, because it's 100% under attack.
	I mean, the left has pretty much attempted to turn...
	I mean, literally, in many cases, into women.
	But the other thing they've done is they've turned women into men.
	The idea from the left is that your strong female character is a bare-knuckles, brawling woman who can knock a man through a wall and all this kind of stuff.
	That's not what this movie is.
	And don't need no man.
	That's not what this movie is at all.
	I mean, by the way, if Hollywood had actually produced a film like this without the Haunted dog and such.
	The movie would be 35 seconds long because she'd get trapped in the pantry and then she'd bust out her female superpowers, her kick-ass girl power.
	She'd bust down the door and beat everybody up.
	That's not what this film is.
	Women are more under attack than men in our culture.
	I agree.
	It's just not as overt.
	They're attacking men in order to get to women, really.
	I observed recently, according to the left, men and women are exactly the same except that women are much, much better.
	That's basically the new mantra.
	But much better at being men.
	It's not that men and women are the same and women are much, much better at being women.
	It's men and women are the same and women are better at being men.
	Because the superpower that women have is the one thing that they are hell-bent on removing, which is childbearing, childrearing, marriage, nurturing, you know, all the things that evolutionary biology actually focuses in.
	And all the things that matter.
	And ultimately, that's what Shut In is about, right?
	Shut In is a story about a mom.
	A not very good mom.
	A mom who thinks that she's a victim of circumstance when in fact she's the victim of all of her own horrible choices.
	And you open the film, she's not very sympathetic.
	She is thrust into a position of raising her kids.
	She didn't choose to be in a position to have to raise these kids.
	She had her grandmother raising the kids and her grandmother died.
	And now she's stuck with these kids that she, by her own admission, didn't want and isn't ready for.
	And because of the trauma that she suffers, like Christ learned faith from what he suffered, we are almost all of us redeemed by suffering.
	And through her suffering, she becomes a mother.
	That's the thing that Hollywood doesn't want you to see.
	That's the reason that they have to change a movie like this before they can think about making it.
	They don't want you to see that the high aspiration of this woman, the high accomplishment of this woman, the thing that actually does redeem her, is that she becomes a mother.
	that in that way, yes, it's an action film, Yes, it requires the suspension of disbelief.
	Yes, because it's action-y, she gets involved in some action.
	Ultimately, though, what it's all in service of from a storytelling point of view is the elevation of motherhood.
	And to me, that's why when I read the script, it's terrific writing, but also just that particular theme.
	I thought, if we don't make this, I actually don't think a film like this gets made.
	We're going to be bringing the movie to you in just a short time.
	Remember, we're going to break the feed, but if you're on Daily Wire's YouTube page, as soon as we finish, you'll be able to click on the link in the description, and it will take you to the new feed where the countdown clock will be playing, and you'll be able to tune in.
	We're also going to roll out trailers for the first look teaser trailer of our new film with Gina Carano, Terror on the Prairie, and a new little something-something that we're going to be bringing to you one month from today, and we couldn't be more excited to show it to you The trailer for that will also be playing.
	But for right now, I'd love it if you'd take a look at the trailer for tonight's feature film, Shut In.
	Lady, where have you been?
	Jessica.
	I can smell the weakness from you.
	You had your way.
	No, stop it!
	Let me out!
	Please!
	Don't you touch my kids!
	- Your daughter, she's very pretty. - I'm scared. - That's our trailer for "Shut In" and it's coming your way in just a short time at eight o'clock right here at "Daily Wire" We couldn't be more excited.
	And we're joined right now by our producing partner and good friend, Dallas Sonier, who produced the film.
	Thanks for having me.
	Yeah, welcome back.
	We let you out of the pantry just for this.
	Yes.
	We were in there for two weeks straight, and prior to that in the very old house.
	So it was nice to finish the movie and be able to not be so compact.
	But yeah, we built the set on a soundstage here in Nashville.
	It's unbelievable, and we're so thrilled to be able to share the movie with everybody.
	You've been involved in this project, really, since it appeared on The Blacklist.
	Most of our Daily Wire members probably don't know much about The Blacklist.
	Explain to us how that whole thing works.
	The Blacklist is a good thing now, run by a guy named Franklin Leonard, who I've known for over a decade.
	And it's the best unproduced scripts every year.
	But then they expanded and they started to allow young unproduced writers to submit their scripts for coverage so they could reach representatives, producers, financiers, things like that.
	So they send out this email every week of the best scripts that week that they read.
	And I delete it every single week.
	One time, I didn't have a lunch, I didn't have an afternoon full of meetings, I got the email and right there on top it says, shut in, in the vein of panic room and a quiet place.
	So I read it, and right there on the cover page is the screenwriter's phone number.
	And I called it, and she answered.
	And about 24 hours later, I had the script under option.
	Was going to just make it in my system, and very low budget.
	But I said, before you do that, why don't we just take a shot?
	Getting you an agent.
	Getting you in front of the right people in Hollywood.
	Let's try it.
	And I sent it out and it just caught fire.
	CAA, UTA, all these different agencies coming after it.
	And then the studio started to read it.
	Another producer started to read it.
	And so all of a sudden I found...
	UTA signs Melanie, a big producer signs the script, and takes it into new line with me attached and her attached, and it sells in a bidding war with Sony.
	And then everything went to...
	Hell and back from there.
	It was the craziest thing.
	I decided to take sort of a mercenary approach to it, let it happen, right, as long as she was willing to do the work.
	And so it just went through this draft and that draft, and it was such a mess, right?
	We call it development hell.
	And I just would call her and say, this is just so bad that The second New Line lets this go, we're going to make the original script.
	And that's what happened.
	In fact, they didn't let it go.
	I took it away from them.
	And Jeremy and Ben read it in an afternoon.
	They had an evening, but they only took an afternoon.
	And we emotionally greenlit it on the phone together one day.
	And 30 days later, we were in Nashville prepping, and 60 days later, we were shooting.
	Wow.
	I mean, it couldn't have happened faster.
	Oh, it was awesome.
	I'm sorry we had some technical difficulties.
	I guess DJ isn't going to be able to join us, but DJ did such an amazing job on this movie.
	A real trooper at an impossible time.
	DJ, a very well-known director, huge hits, basically helped create the career of Shia LaBeouf.
	At the time that he came out and did this movie, he had another film that was still in post-production, which is Redeeming Love based on a really...
	A difficult, challenging Christian novel, but a beloved Christian novel.
	And DJ is one of the only guys now in Hollywood who in this month is rolling up two feature films.
	The amount of work that that guy had to put in.
	Unbelievable.
	He was finishing the sound mix and driving to his other premiere on our movie and then to the next.
	So yeah, DJ was so great.
	We sought him out.
	We knew he was a Christian.
	We knew he had big studio-level experience.
	And there is a common thought that once you make a big movie, you can't go back.
	You can't make a smaller one.
	You sort of lose that mojo.
	But in conversing with him, we had a lot of conversations with him.
	We got a good sense that he was going to hit the commercial beats on a movie like this that we needed because I want this to compete and beat Hollywood.
	I don't want to just make independent movies or low-budget movies or anything like that.
	I want to whoop them, right?
	And so this was important, I think, in many ways.
	That the first Daily Wire original production had a scope to it.
	Even though the story was contained.
	Big idea, little box.
	I think DJ knocked it out of the park.
	I think some of the camera moves in the movie are just awesome.
	The cinematography in particular is really incredible.
	It's...
	Yeah, I know.
	I've been doing a number of interviews to promote the movie.
	I don't know why.
	I had nothing to do with making a movie.
	But I've been doing these interviews to promote the movie.
	And they said, so what can you tell us about it?
	And I said, the thing that no one is going to believe, that is actually, I've really got to tell you, It's a real movie.
	It's like an actual movie.
	It's not the Daily Wire made a movie.
	Bingo.
	What is the release strategy here?
	Just so I understand it.
	How are we trying to reach people?
	Well, the reason we're premiering the movie tonight on YouTube for free as a live stream, what that means is the movie will play the second it's over.
	It's gone from YouTube forever.
	So if you were to join 15 minutes late...
	You're only going to get the last, right?
	Because one hour and 40 minutes in, gone forever behind the Daily Wire paywall after that.
	Why?
	Well, the reason it goes behind the Daily Wire paywall is because we're trying to build the golden goose.
	If conservatives really want to compete in the media in a major way, we have to own production, marketing, and distribution.
	Yeah.
	Things have changed technologically.
	For one, we built the Daily Wire, and the Daily Wire is an enormous marketing machine.
	We teamed with Dallas Sonier.
	Dallas Sonier is a fabulous producer.
	So now we have two out of the three.
	What's changed technologically, and we saw it so much during COVID, is the rise of the SVOD platform.
	What Ben and Caleb and I were talking about a year ago, or 18 months ago, in the early days of COVID, was SVOD is about to really ascend And we sort of accidentally built technologically an SVOD platform.
	We built it to distribute our podcasts, the video versions of our podcasts.
	But the technology is agnostic as to what the content is.
	We have a real opportunity.
	We could put films on this platform, use our marketing engine to promote them, and not just release a movie.
	But actually create an industry.
	We actually have a shot.
	Everything has to go right.
	We have to win.
	The projects have to be great.
	People have to support them.
	But if they do, we can build the golden goose.
	And the golden goose can produce not just a movie.
	The golden goose can produce movies.
	The power of the recurring subscription We're good to go.
	This is real.
	This isn't Hillary's Hard Drive Part 3 or whatever.
	This is an actual movie.
	I love that film.
	I'm not saying we wouldn't make it.
	There goes my pitch next week.
	As with our podcast, we've always taken a strategy that you have to put content out wide enough that people Want to then support the endeavor.
	I think that for us, sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking that there's a distinction between mission and value.
	But what I've come to learn throughout this business in particular is that the mission is part of the value.
	The reason DailyWire.com members become DailyWire.com members, yes, they want the value of the content that we offer, but they really want the value of the mission itself.
	They want to be a part of punching back.
	They want to be a part of the fight.
	They want to be a part of saying to the political left, no.
	and they want to be part of saying now to the cultural left, no.
	Welcome to the party, pal.
	I think that's great.
	That was the original thesis that Jeremy and I were talking about a decade ago, and it just took the technology to develop and the left to move into crazy domains where they don't even make any good movies anymore.
	That's the market opportunity.
	The market opportunity is the biggest thing.
	Honestly, we turned to each other in the middle of the riots last year, and we said, right now, if we just bought up shows about cops We would make a fortune because Hollywood literally will not make a movie in which the cops are just the good guys without some sort of self-flagellating speech about the internalized racism of the police and how they had to get beyond it and how the police used to be homophobic, but now they're super tolerant and have diversity, equity, and inclusion.
	They actually brought Brooklyn Nine-Nine back out of cancellation to do a season to apologize for Brooklyn Nine-Nine's existence.
	That's exactly right.
	That's exactly right.
	I mean, Dallas, you've worked obviously inside the Hollywood machine.
	Now you're working well outside the Hollywood machine.
	What's the difference?
	Well, keep in mind, I made a cop movie with Mel Gibson called Dragged Across Concrete.
	Very not political.
	Yes.
	It was a good movie.
	I mean, that...
	You know, it was interesting.
	Right when we announced the movie, I got a phone call from Color of Change, right?
	And they put me through a Maoist struggle session of just, you know, how dare you cast him and how dare you make this?
	And it was just, it was awesome.
	I mean, I really enjoyed it.
	I so enjoyed the conversation.
	And they really had never run into a buzzsaw before who told them, Absolutely not.
	I'm not changing a word.
	I even sent them the script.
	They never wrote me back.
	They never called me back.
	That's just impolite.
	It's like all the 16 years I was in L.A. and the seven years since making movies with Jason Sudeikis and Guy Pearce and Thomas Jane and Mel and Vince Vaughn and Kurt Russell I am bringing all of that, all those relationships in the agency world, all of my sort of understanding of how productions are made, but also...
	An incredible chip on my shoulder.
	And when I talked to the two of you, you and I meeting originally and you and I doing the deal for Run, Hide, Fight originally...
	I knew I had my tribe.
	I knew I had my team.
	And so now I'm evangelizing this to all the filmmakers out there, and I want to build this bigger.
	I don't want to be the only producer because I can't be on that many sets at the same time.
	So this is an opportunity of a lifetime for a guy like me, but also I'm just so happy to have this opportunity and have these relationships with you guys.
	But Hollywood is in the rearview mirror so far for me, I don't even remember.
	By the way, I think one of the cool things is that some of the people that we're working with, we know these people are just going to be blockbuster stars.
	And there is this stigma that attaches to working with a conservative outlet like the Daily Wire.
	But that stigma is just not true.
	It's not real.
	Isabel May was the star of Run, Hide, Fight.
	She's now the star of 1883.
	And how do you say Taylor Sheridan found her?
	It wasn't from Kate and Alexa on Netflix, right?
	It was from Run, Hide, Fight.
	And look, they then go out there and poke at us a little bit by saying, introducing Isabel May on the 1883 trailers.
	I spend a few minutes calling her manager and giving him my piece, but the truth is that you're right.
	Isabel May, now Rainy Qualley, she's going to explode off of this, and so on and so forth.
	It's also worth noting that I don't know the politics of either of those two actresses.
	We did a deal recently for the film that we're going to be introducing people to, our surprise trailer.
	I keep referencing it so it's not too much of a surprise.
	But we've acquired a film that we're going to release a month from today.
	And I doubt that anyone involved in making that film is a Ben Shapiro listener.
	But what they are is incredible talents.
	And what they are are people who are willing to make films that don't cut against our audience, which is really all we're asking for.
	We're not saying make things that champion right-wing causes.
	We're saying make films that are for everyone and in particular don't cut against or insult a conservative audience.
	Even that is unheard of in Hollywood right now.
	What you said before about assaulting Captain America, taking away things that are naturally, not right-wing, but just an old-fashioned traditionalist and American.
	That's right.
	That is their mission.
	And so just not doing that is actually...
	Do you think that in Hollywood there's a core of people who want to make real movies that don't have all the woke stuff, but they just don't have the mechanism to do it?
	Does that exist?
	I'll go a step further.
	There are people that call me.
	It's starting to become daily, right?
	Executives within the business, filmmakers, agents, managers, all kinds of different people.
	Just wanting to know what this is like for me.
	And they're not even conservative.
	They're just so sick of going through those implicit bias training sessions and having to act like they care And their heart and soul are just dying inside.
	And so they're starting to call.
	And I won't break any trust yet, but that number is going to grow and the squad is going to expand.
	True.
	I interviewed a writer yesterday who is certainly a Democrat, not a leftist, but certainly to the left of any of us.
	And willing to come right for us.
	Pitched us some stuff that was really good.
	And I said, what motivates you to do something like this?
	Obviously, you're not a perfect alignment fit with us politically.
	And he said, well, I'll be honest.
	He said, I've been building my career.
	I've worked my way through 250 episodes of scripted television.
	Starting as a producer's assistant, then becoming a script coordinator, working my way up.
	I've had scripts produced on major shows.
	He said, and starting about 18 months ago, it was just over for me.
	He said, I I've put in all this work to cultivate this skill.
	They gave a PA on my show.
	A PA is a production assistant.
	The lowest person on the set.
	It's an hourly wage job.
	Sometimes what a PA does, like the actual job, is sit by that door and make sure no one comes through it for 12 hours.
	Now listen, you can't make movies without PAs.
	Many people get their start as PAs.
	But it is the lowest job in the hierarchy.
	He said they went to a PA on my show who was black.
	Hmm.
	And gave him three episodes to direct.
	Wow.
	Didn't go to film school.
	Has never actually contributed to an hour of television being made.
	They made him an actual director because Hollywood decided during the Black Lives Matter riots in particular that they will not grow more straight white men into these positions.
	And so there's a lot of those guys who've put in the work.
	They've put in the effort.
	And because they're In a disfavored racial category at this moment, Hollywood just won't work with them.
	It's horrible for everyone involved.
	If you're that PA, that's actually horrible.
	It seems like your dreams just came true, but what a terrible thing to one day know that you're merit, even if you have merit.
	That PA may be...
	The greatest filmmaker who ever lived, if he got to put in the work and grow.
	But it isn't his merit that got him this opportunity.
	It's only the virtue-signaling charity of also-white guys in positions of power who don't want to leave.
	It's just like Biden saying, I'm going to have a black female just...
	Great, let's have a black female jurist on the Supreme Court if she's there because of merit.
	But if you've said from the outset that those are the only people who will be even considered...
	94% of the country is completely out of the running.
	That's right.
	Then you've actually said to the eventual nominee, even if you have merit...
	We all know why you really got the job.
	We all know why you really got the job.
	You know, it's funny.
	Working in Hollywood, I couldn't help but notice that the black guys I worked with were either the very best.
	They had worked over all the prejudices and all that stuff.
	And they were great.
	You just were thankful to be in the room with them.
	Or they sucked because they had been hired because of the color of their skin, which is degrading to everybody.
	It's just degrading.
	And now I know people who are having...
	Black writers attach and giving credit, black producers attach and giving credit on screen who aren't doing anything.
	And if that's not degrading to a person, I don't know what is.
	That's our show for tonight.
	If you're watching this on YouTube, click the link below to get redirected to the world premiere of Shut In.
	If you happen to be watching on the Daily Wire, Roku, or Apple TV apps, or at dailywire.com, don't go anywhere.
	The film is about to begin.
	If you're listening to this on podcast right now, well, you already missed it, because it comes out as a podcast tomorrow.
	But for a limited time, all of you can get 30% off with code shut in to stream the movie and unlock our full content library That's 30% off using promo code SHUTIN. That's only for this weekend.
	Thank you for tuning in.
	Now go grab your popcorn and settle in for the world premiere of Shut In.

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