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April 14, 2022 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:37:22

Daily Wire Backstage: No, It Doesn’t Take A Village

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	Hey, Michael Knowles here.
	The latest episode of Daily Wire backstage, no it doesn't take a village, is available now.
	Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Clayton, Matt Walsh, the God King Jeremy Boring, and special guest Tim Poole to hear us discuss everything from Biden's pigeon problem to the leftist obsession with grooming kids across the country.
	Go check it out now. - Who can fake laugh in a world like this?
	Daily Wire Backstage is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Privacy is a right, not a privilege.
	Defend your rights at expressvpn.com slash backstage.
	I'm Jeremy Boring, god king of these lowly Daily Wires, joined as ever by the Ben Shapiro, the Andrew Klavan, the Matt Walsh, and the Michael Knowles.
	I gave Michael Knowles a V just because I'm feeling generous.
	We're glad you've tuned in.
	Oh, I think they already rolled the intro.
	They already rolled the intro.
	Mathis is in my ear going, no, we already ran the graphic.
	Anyway, we're off to a good start.
	The big news in the world today that I want to most talk about is how little Michael Knowles is willing to do for world peace.
	It's a slow news week.
	I've got to tell you, I was at Yale with Senator Cruz a couple days ago.
	We got lots of really high-level questions that you would expect from the geniuses in New Haven.
	One of which was, would you fellate a man to end world hunger?
	Ah, thank you.
	But it would have been the same answer with world peace, which is, no, I'm not going to do that.
	I'm not willing to do it.
	And people said, Michael, that's awful.
	They don't realize.
	If they had offered me a part on a sitcom, if they had offered me, I don't know, a hundred bucks, maybe that could have been a different answer.
	World hunger?
	World hunger.
	What does that have to do with me?
	It's an incredibly slow news cycle, which always, I think, leads to the most enjoyable backstages.
	I... Rather than sort of working our way through a bunch of stories that nobody cares about, like some bird craps on the president, he's totally unaware of it.
	It's just another day.
	That was the American eagle.
	That was just America.
	He's lucky bulls don't fly.
	I will say that I recently had an interaction with what may have been the same Bald eagle and it crapped on my God King cape.
	That's well deserved.
	Since the premiere of the Jeremy's Razors commercial and the announcements about DW Kids and all the great work that I've been doing in the world...
	People recognizing me on the streets thanking me.
	I just want you guys to know my head has not gotten smaller.
	It certainly hasn't happened.
	But I don't just wear my cape around the office or anything.
	No, I mean, just around your house.
	Just at home.
	The wife likes it.
	These are good times for us to talk about more philosophical issues.
	Like the left stealing our children and trying to indoctrinate them into queer theory?
	Like the left?
	That's just a...
	Just like an issue?
	Yeah.
	Obviously, this is something that Matt has, I think, taken a real leadership role in the conservative movement as far as, you know, Probing this issue, trying to get people around the world to define what is a woman.
	An amazing feature-length documentary coming from Matt Walsh in the month of May on that topic.
	But as we've been watching those events play out for a while, we actually haven't engaged, I think, in this forum and what we used to do in the old days of the show, which is talk about it kind of in a philosophical, religious, political context as opposed to just news of the week.
	Yeah.
	I mean, so I talked on the podcast the other day about this issue, not just because, obviously, it's perverse, but because it really says something about where we are as a society.
	And what it says about where we are as a society is that the cult of authenticity has completely destroyed entire generations of people.
	And now you have adults who are addicted to their own authenticity to the point where they feel the need to indoctrinate children so that children validate their own views of the world and their own activities.
	There's been a lot of debate about using the term grooming on the right.
	What I've said on the show is I don't think that all of these teachers who are doing this are grooming the kids so that they can have sex with the kids.
	I do think they are politically grooming the kids so that the kids will agree with them and approve of their lifestyles.
	And they openly say this.
	That is not a theory.
	That is just a thing that they say openly.
	They will say that parents are the real problems here because parents are the barriers to a better, more tolerant world.
	And so if we take your kids away from you...
	Like, Plato's either fake or real republic, right?
	And we take the kids away and we re-indoctrinate them, like Pol Pot would, except in sexual theories of the left, then we will have created a better world for ourselves, and we will also create a better world for children.
	And this runs so directly against human nature, it is unspeakable.
	I mean, what they're attempting to do with kids is unspeakable.
	There's a whole article from Derek Thompson in The Atlantic the other day about the rising rate of mental illness and suicidal ideation among kids.
	And the answer to this is very clear.
	When you have a left wing that is teaching people that it is wrong to civilize your kids, that it is wrong to impose rules on your kids and to set rules for your kids, that the greatest way you can parent and the greatest way you can bring up a kid is to destroy all of those rules and all of those rules and then tell kids when they're 15 years old at the stupidest point in their entire life, choose your gender, choose your sexual orientation.
	And you only get cheered, by the way.
	You only get cheered if you say you're a non-cisgender pansexual.
	You are destroying children.
	You are destroying minors.
	And you are doing this purposefully.
	The rates of suicide in this country are about to skyrocket like nobody's ever seen over the course of the next 10 years.
	I also think the grooming is happening in kind of the pedophilic sense as well, though.
	Because, you know, what we have to realize is that all of this stuff, there is a real effort to actually sexualize Children.
	I mean, this comprehensive sex education, you can trace back to Alfred Kinsey, and that's where it comes from.
	And he believed that children were sexual from birth, and he had all kinds of horrific...
	Wilhelm Reich or something.
	Right.
	So that's where you trace all this stuff back to.
	So it's grooming in that kind of general sense, but it also is.
	I think using grooming in a kind of pedophilia way is also correct.
	I don't think that it's...
	I agree with Ben that...
	I agree with you that grooming is happening in kind of a macro and that there are also very specific instances of grooming that are taking place.
	I think the point that you're making is that the average teacher engaging in this behavior is not engaging in a direct and purposeful act of grooming a child for sex.
	But they are promulgating They are attempting to pervert the child in order to pervert the society.
	I disagree with this because I think that they are in fact grooming the child for a world in which pedophilia is normalized.
	I don't think we're all saying, we're not disagreeing.
	The proposition on the table is whether they are literally taking this child and teaching this kid about sex, they can then have sex with this child.
	That the average teacher promulgating this worldview is not engaged in that direct behavior.
	There are some people who are, and those people obviously should not only go to jail...
	Actually, a lot of adults in the public school system are doing that.
	That's another piece of this problem, is that actually there's a real sexual abuse epidemic in the school system that's been going on for years.
	I mean, the Department of Education did a study back in 2004...
	And found that something like 4 million kids at that time...
	The rates of abuse in the public schools are about twice that of even the Catholic Church at the height of the scandal.
	100 times that.
	Depends on the measurement.
	Depends on how you measure it, but it's significantly more.
	But the reason that I'm hesitant to make it I think the issue is way broader than that.
	Meaning that the real wrong that I think is going to destroy an entire generation of children is not the minority of teachers who legitimately are going to engage in pedophilic acts with children.
	I think the major issue across the country is that school districts all across America We're indoctrinating small kids into these perverse ideas about what it means to be happy.
	And that the people doing it don't question their own motives.
	And one of the challenges when we on the right say that it's grooming, it's not that we aren't right in many sorts of ways, but to the individual teacher who is not themselves attempting to have sex with one of their students, but who is engaged in promulgating these perverse views...
	It gives them an excuse.
	The key word here is that word you said, Ben, which is authenticity.
	And I totally think you're right.
	But the irony, of course, is that the little boy who either thinks he's a girl or who just has been told by his teacher that he is a girl, he is not authentically a girl.
	He is authentically a boy, and he's being told to be inauthentic.
	When we use this phrase, gender-affirming therapy, it's ironic because you're not affirming their gender.
	It's sex-denying.
	Problem we have on the right, though, is that, you know, they bring out, Ron DeSantis brings out a bill that keeps teachers from doing this, from foisting this nonsense on these children.
	And the left immediately calls it the don't say gay bill.
	The entire press calls it the don't say gay bill.
	Nobody debates whether it should be called the don't say gay bill.
	But we come back with a great line, which is "OK, Groomer," which I thought was one of the great right-wing lines.
	And suddenly, at NRO, they're sitting around going, "Well, should we really call it grooming?" And my feeling is-- Oh, no, I mean, listen, I don't think anybody on the left has any grounds to stand on when it comes to the abuse of language and the lies about language that are told.
	And I'm not even saying-- As much as I know it's not a popular position, I'll take the least popular position at the table.
	If the only question is a question of politics, I agree with you.
	I actually prefer Vivek Ramaswamy's line that we should call it the wait till 8 bill, because it actually is very descriptive.
	The wait till 8 bill.
	So on a political level, I agree.
	Where I disagree is on the sort of...
	The efficacy at the individual teacher level.
	That if I'm doing something that I think is good and I don't have a sexual motive and you call me a pedophile, that doesn't cause me to reflect on my behavior.
	It causes me to defend my behavior.
	I agree with what I thought you were going to say, which is that we should discuss things and we on the right should actually talk about things as opposed to the left.
	But no, I'm not trying to convince that teacher.
	That teacher should be arrested.
	I don't care about that.
	I want to convince the country that these people should be arrested.
	But do you think that every teacher in America who is wrapped up in these curriculum should be arrested?
	No, but it's shame.
	You're putting shame on this shameful activity.
	That's part of what you're doing, which is what we should be doing.
	So if that teacher feels ashamed...
	And stops doing it.
	It's a shameful thing that they're doing to kids.
	I have no problem with the shaming.
	I don't even have a problem with the use of the term groomer.
	I have a problem with what I think happened here.
	I think one of the things that happened here is people started using OK Groomer.
	And I also thought, that's pretty funny.
	And not only is it funny, it's really not a specific term as people on the left immediately took it to be and then twisted it.
	Because when I saw OK Groomer, I read it as they are politically grooming children and sexualizing children in order so they'll reflect their points of view.
	And the left immediately took that, and in order to take the word away, they said, oh, what you really mean is that all these teachers are going to rape small children.
	That's right.
	And that's not what I think most people actually meant when they said groomer.
	I don't think that everybody who says groomer means...
	No, it means you're cultivating a sexual identity.
	Correct.
	I agree.
	So the point that I'm making is that we should clarify what we mean by it, mainly because it actually broadens the appeal of the argument.
	Most of the people are going to agree with us on this issue, which is the majority of the American people.
	Agree the teachers are perverting children.
	Of both parties, by the way.
	Of both parties.
	Agree the teachers should not be teaching kids this stuff because it is bad and evil to sexualize children.
	They don't agree, on a broad level, that all these teachers actively want to have sex with the children.
	So what I'm saying is that I don't think it's a political winner to accuse all these people of pedophilia.
	I think it's a political winner to accuse all of them of perverting children for their own sick political.
	So clarify what you mean, but keep using the word.
	Yes.
	That's one thing.
	What we cannot do is back off of it and say, okay, we'll find a different word.
	I agree.
	The only thing I've done on my program is when I discuss it, I just say political grooming, just to clarify what I'm using.
	So I'm using the same word.
	Sure.
	I want to take the left-wing argument and steel man it as best I can because I think they do make one point.
	When they're arguing against this Florida bill, they say, well, no, look, we're not talking about transing the kids or drag shows in kindergarten, but if I'm in a math class and I'm writing a math problem, am I not allowed to refer to Johnny's two dads or am I not allowed to refer to a they or an intersex or a pansexual or whatever?
	I can't bring it up even casually.
	And so the answer from the bill is, no, you can't.
	Just don't talk about sex.
	Wait till 8.
	Wait till 8.
	But it does raise this bigger problem.
	If you're in kindergarten storytime class, you're probably going to talk about a marriage or a family.
	That's probably going to come up in some storybook.
	Well, I guess that's kind of sexual education.
	And really what you are saying is, no, you're not going to talk about transsexuality or any kind of more modern sexual ideology.
	So then don't you get to the question of, Don't we just need to say the reason you can't teach your kids about transgenderism in kindergarten is because it's not true.
	Because boys can't be girls.
	No, I would go further than that.
	I think we have the right to defend the norm.
	There is no such thing, or if there is such a thing, it is anomalous.
	But there is really no such thing as a parent who wants their child to not become a parent of another child.
	That is what we're here for.
	That's what our bodies do.
	We want our children to go off and get married as we got married, form a family.
	We want to see our grandkids.
	That's all the things that we want, that we should be loving and accepting of people who can't participate in that.
	If your child is gay, like my child is gay, you know, I love the kid to death.
	You all know that.
	But, you know, I want my kids to marry the opposite sex person and have children.
	That's what we all want.
	That's what the norm is.
	And we have a right to defend that norm.
	It's a human norm.
	It's not a cultural norm.
	It is a human one.
	It's a really important point, too.
	We talked a little bit off air.
	I think this is where...
	The right can lose on this issue.
	I think this should be a winning issue.
	The trans, gender ideology.
	We obviously are correct.
	It's common sense.
	And most people, when you explain it to them, even if they're not political, they are going to be on our side.
	Where we could lose it, though, is where we focus almost too much on the kids.
	And we say, well, we just leave the kids out of this.
	But we're not criticizing transgenderism in general.
	Just leave the kids away from it.
	I agree.
	Our message has to be fundamentally, like you said, The reason we don't want the kids taught this stuff is because it's false and harmful.
	You wouldn't teach a kid that 2 plus 2 equals 7.
	Right.
	And it will send them barreling into a life of despair, and we're going to have a mass wave of suicides coming, even worse than what we have right now with kids, when 10, 20 years from now they're looking around and saying, what did you people let me do to myself that I can't reverse?
	The stats on this are pretty clear, and it's amazing to me.
	Nobody, frankly, has the balls to actually say it, but the stats are very clear that...
	I mean, according to Gallup polls, 0.8% of people born before 1945 identify as LGBTQ. For people who were born between 1997 and 2003, that number is 20.8%.
	If you go to people who are even younger than that, if you're going to go to the 12-18 crowd, because remember, everybody who was born in 2003 is now 19.
	So if you're going to people who were born in the five-year period after that, I would guarantee you it's at least 25 to 30%.
	And so if you're looking at that group, and then you look at the suicidal ideation rates among LGBTQ, you're talking about suicidal ideation rates that are in the 40% range, as opposed to the general population where it's closer to 10-15% among teen girls, for example.
	Maybe 8% among teen boys.
	So what you're doing is you're taking an entire population of people We're not going to be suicidally ideated.
	And you are celebrating them for selecting into a population that is having very, very high suicide rates.
	And almost 30% attempted suicide rates.
	In the trans community, yes.
	For people who identify as transgender, the actual suicide attempt rate is, depending on which group you're looking at, between 40 and 50%.
	I mean, these are insane statistics.
	And you're telling people that they will be celebrated And they will be cheered if they come out and engage in this behavior.
	And then you're saying that you're helping kids by doing this?
	And not only that, we know that if a kid is genuinely dealing with this, not they've got rapid onset gender dysphoria and all their friends are doing, but they actually have some form of gender dysphoria, we know that 70-90% of those kids are simply going to desist, but we know that 100% of kids who are given puberty blockers end up moving on to further states of transitioning.
	So you are actively locking people in To a choice that is going to harm them dramatically.
	Pretending this isn't happening is just insane.
	It's a social contagion.
	There is no way that evolutionary biology suggests that in the course of one generation, you go from 5% of the population identifying as LGBTQ to 30% of the population identifying them.
	But this is an important point because it points out the depth of the dishonesty.
	It's not just when they tell us that somebody who declares himself a female is automatically a female, which is incredibly dishonest.
	But it's also dishonest about the human condition.
	I mean, we know, as you're talking about evolutionary biology, we know what we're here to do is reproduce.
	We know that there's pain when you do not fulfill nature's template of a man.
	I think men feel bad when they're not soldiers, let alone when they actually are not sleeping with a woman and creating more children.
	This is what we're here to do, that there's pain involved in that.
	And tragedy, any honest gay person will tell you, any honest gay person will tell you that being gay comes along with a certain amount of pain.
	Now, we can be loving and accepting and understanding of that, but to foist it on people.
	As not only normal, but also as the only way you can avoid the evil of being a white person.
	In other words, some of these kids, that's their only strategy to get out of being the bad guys.
	So this goes back to the authenticity point that I was making earlier.
	So if you believe that one part, and I think the largest part, of human happiness lies in becoming a civilized human being, which is to say that you civilize to the major institutions that make you happy in life, being a father, being a friend, being a person who protects, being a husband, right?
	All of these things.
	Maybe not just a major part of life.
	Maybe all of life is in that.
	But then you're told by society that authenticity is to be measured by how many rules you shuck off.
	How many rules you get rid of, right?
	Because you can't really be yourself unless you destroy those rules and you break the rules.
	It's the rule breakers and the people who destroy the rules who are the most authentic.
	So we can measure how authentic you are by how many of these things you destroy.
	Is there any rational reason why The more authenticity you seek, the more unhappy you are.
	You are literally taking the things that make human beings happy and you are destroying them for the sake of supposed authenticity that lies within and really is not your own authenticity.
	It's a reflection of the social media idiots who are echoing you.
	Right.
	It's authenticity, ironically, that becomes a communal project.
	Right.
	It's authenticity that relies desperately on the affirmation and the acceptance of everybody else.
	So it's like we're giving kids this identity that's now...
	And by the way, that affirmation will not suffice.
	Even that will not suffice.
	It doesn't change the reality.
	Right.
	And that's why it's like, for me as a man, if somebody calls me a woman, it's just, it's absurd.
	It doesn't cause any problems for me.
	I just laugh at you.
	But this identity we're giving to kids, if you misgender them, which would be to correctly gender them, their whole world falls apart because they're utterly dependent on society to constantly affirm the untruth.
	Because it's an act of violence in their view.
	For you to subject them to reality or to shatter their delusions.
	This is why it has to be culturally crammed down.
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	And we have a great question that's come in from one of our DailyWire.com members.
	These guys are incredibly important to us.
	They make it possible for us to do the work that we're doing.
	You can become a member by heading over to DailyWire.com slash subscribe.
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	Here's the question from one of our said members.
	How does it feel that you guys have been the catalyst for the changing of the national political landscape and cultural landscape?
	How does it make us feel that we've had the kind of impact, I suppose, that we've been able to have?
	First of all, I'm glad that we hired somebody to send that question.
	It feels great.
	I want to answer this question first because I feel like I was banging on this drum in a wilderness for 20 years.
	And really...
	Dude, you know, you have actually done the stuff that I was making all these speeches about.
	And I kept making speeches and saying, you know, Fox News came on and they got 50% of the audience, basically.
	But they never said, well, let's do Fox movies.
	Let's do Fox comedy.
	And I could never understand that.
	And it was because they weren't you.
	No, and I flatter you, but it actually is true.
	I think it is an amazing thing.
	I think it's what is needed.
	I love the fact that they do not know we are coming and we're going to destroy them.
	Because we're going to destroy them.
	This is fruit lying on the ground.
	And this is why I don't get into inner discussions about whether we should use this word or that word.
	We should wipe them off the face of the planet.
	Everything they believe is wrong.
	Every single thing they believe is wrong.
	They destroy our cities.
	They destroy our children.
	They destroy our marriages.
	I mean, the thing is...
	For most of us, 90% of us at least, the relationship between a man and a woman is one of the major consolations for a tragic life.
	This is a very difficult life.
	It has lots of pain.
	It ends in death.
	No matter what you believe, that's the truth of the life we're in.
	The love between a man and a woman is one of the most beautiful things in the world.
	Even that, even that they want to poison.
	I saw this...
	I can't think of the right word.
	A punk.
	Go after you at one of your speeches.
	And he was screaming at you and he was saying, this is a white formulation.
	Well, BS. I mean, you know, this is a universal thing.
	Every story, the one thing I know about his stories, and every single story, in every single culture, tells the journey of a man to become a man and a woman to become a woman.
	That not everybody makes that journey, that people have other journeys and that there are physical reasons for that.
	I'm fine with it.
	And I've always...
	Listen, I've been in the arts all my life.
	Half the people I know are gay.
	They've been my best friends.
	They've been my great associates.
	And I respect them and I understand their worldview and I understand what they want.
	This is not the norm.
	We have a right to the norm and the human beings because it's creation.
	The norm is creation.
	The norm is what we were made to do.
	And I think God is a lot funnier than most people do.
	You know, I think he threw in a lot of variation, and we should respect that variation.
	But you can't be tolerant without a center, you know.
	And we are making this argument, and we are making the argument for the center, for the fact that this country is great, for the fact that freedom is great.
	And I'm just happy to be here.
	I'm just happy that I'm still alive.
	And I'm just going to add, for Media Matters, that asterisk.
	When he says white people off the earth, he does not mean that physically.
	It just means the ideology should be different.
	Yeah, I guess that's true.
	I'll try to get us some more Media Matters fact checks on this point.
	Speaking of diversity and variation here, I think that is kind of the point.
	In our first business, the first version of this business, we have...
	We have more political diversity than any channel on the left or the right.
	We've got the entire gamut of the right.
	It doesn't exist anywhere.
	And obviously the left is completely uniform.
	And we've taken that through every other new business that we're starting.
	The books and the movies and everything else.
	And it made me realize that Being a unique company either could have completely killed us in the first 12 months or it meant that it would be this rocket ship that we're on.
	When the game is rigged, you have to break the rules.
	There are places for conservatives in our rigged liberal society.
	You're allowed to write certain columns on certain topics.
	You're allowed to maybe give a few speeches here or there, even run for Congress, but there are things that you can't do, and that's why we're always going to be the losers and we're always going to be the second party.
	And then DW walked up to the window, kicked the glass in, and just started doing whatever the hell we want, and it's taken off like a rocket.
	I want to say one thing about this, which is that what it makes me feel most of all is grateful, mainly, not just to God, of course, but grateful that we went out on a limb because we knew that there was an audience out there for all of this, because we are a business.
	We are not a 501c3.
	Right.
	And what that means is that everything that we do is driven first and foremost by looking at the market and seeing, is there a market for this?
	Because Jeremy and I have been talking about doing movies since literally our very first conversation we ever had together was, how do we make conservative movies?
	And you were doing Declaration Entertainment at the time, which was a 501c3, in which people gave money so that you could make movies.
	And it didn't go anywhere.
	And the reason it didn't go anywhere is because it was not a market-based business, and the market was not right, because the left had not pushed far enough to the left At that point.
	And one of the things that I think is the most gratifying about all of this is the recognition that the reason we're winning is not because we're so great at this, although, to be honest, we are.
	But it's because all of our supporters are there.
	They're the ones who are picking us up.
	They're the ones who are funding all of this.
	They're the ones who are making all of this happen.
	I mean, that's an amazing experience.
	I get a lot of questions all the time because, you know, Not as much as Jeremy, but I get confronted a lot publicly and ask for pictures.
	Some people know who I am.
	And when that happens, I tend to be pretty nice about it, which runs counter both to my nature as well.
	Your nature and your reputation.
	Right.
	And I'm asked about that.
	And I say the reason that I do that is because when I'm like an actor, when people come up to me and they say that they enjoy the show, What they mean is that they've been actually listening to the ideas that I'm promoting.
	And so the fact that our ideas are finding fertile ground, that's the part that I'm really grateful for.
	The fact that there is a crowd out there that supports this and that feels emboldened by this and that feels energized by this and that wants to join the fight, that's what I feel really good about.
	Because, I mean, honestly, we would be doing this stuff for free, and we did do this stuff for free for literally years, but we don't have to do this stuff for free anymore.
	And because we're not doing it for free, we're able to do so much more stuff, so much bigger stuff, because of the people who support the agenda.
	And I'm more optimistic about the country now than I was a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago in many ways.
	Because I feel like the pushback has finally arrived, the pushback I think a lot of us have been waiting for.
	One of the beautiful things about building alternatives is suddenly, which is what the right has not been doing for basically our entire lives.
	But suddenly when you begin building alternatives, everything the left does actually becomes an opportunity for us.
	It becomes an opportunity for us to succeed.
	We talked at our town hall a few weeks ago about all the money that Disney is going to spend on kids' content.
	In this next year.
	And I thought, bring it on.
	It's just direct advertising for us at this point.
	When they say the kinds of things that they've said over the last several weeks about their open agenda with their children's content, I hope that they spend billions of dollars because I don't have billions of dollars to spend telling people that they need to come over here.
	So I'm glad that they're telling them that they should come over here.
	Well, first of all, I just want to say that I personally should be getting more credit As the trailblazer of children's content at Daily Wire.
	No, there's no...
	As the children's author.
	And there's our top LGBTQ. And women's...
	There's many hats.
	Rainbow plethora of hats.
	But the other thing also is that, talking about the opportunity, it's like Hollywood is kind of reverting back to what conservative and Christian entertainment was in the 90s, where it's just, it's message first, story, script, acting second.
	And so this is kind of our opportunity to actually put the entertainment...
	First and foremost.
	Have you seen...
	What unbelievable hypocrites these jackasses are.
	This story about how they took that new Harry Potter spinoff.
	Yes, I love this story.
	First of all, J.K. Rowling retconning Dumbledore into a gay man because she realized there was not enough wokeness in her series back in 2009.
	It was hilarious.
	It made her a hero for about five minutes.
	For five minutes, before they realized she actually thought women existed.
	She's a villain again.
	Who's in lead with Vladimir Putin, by the way, which is a new one.
	But Hollywood decided that they were just going to remove all the gay references from this movie, which is designed largely for pre-teens.
	In China.
	Because China was like, no, we're not going to show this movie and you're going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars unless you remove this six seconds that is in this movie basically just to please GLAAD. And Hollywood was like, well, you know, it's very important people in China see this movie.
	Very, very important people in China see this movie.
	So this tells me two things.
	One, these people have no principles at all.
	And two...
	This is actually really good news.
	They are responsive to a market if the market says no to them.
	And this is really good.
	Because our agenda is not just to provide a competitor for these folks.
	It's to show them that we are a competitor to them so that they stop doing this.
	So that they compete.
	Because right now, they don't compete for our business.
	They take our business for granted.
	I want to take my kids to Disneyland.
	I don't want my kids to go to Disneyland where they won't see ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls.
	So I'd like them to go back to saying ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls.
	Because as it turns out, that is the entire spectrum of humanity.
	There are no other people.
	Did you see at Dallas Love Airport, they're trying out these new seven-foot-tall robots that have cameras.
	They make announcements.
	They have cameras.
	And if you're not wearing your mask, they're going to yell at you for not wearing your mask.
	Really?
	And they can call the cops.
	They're just trying them out, but there's a possibility they'll roll these things out at other airports.
	They're called Karens.
	They're called, yes, the Karen machine.
	And it got me thinking.
	So now we've got surveillance everywhere.
	We've got robots yelling on us to muzzle ourselves.
	America is now a lot like China, except the movies are just a little gayer.
	The movies are just a little more woke, but that's a very scary thing.
	When you see it in the politics and the corporations, if you don't fight back now, if you don't get Elon to buy Twitter, if you don't start pushing back on that whole apparatus, it just suffocates.
	I love the people at Twitter complaining that Elon was going to stop them from censoring conservatives.
	It's I mean, at least they're open about it.
	Yeah, no, Washington Post had an entire article.
	From Jeff Bezos, thank you.
	Democracy dies in darkness, right?
	Democracy dies in darkness.
	But we need more darkness, or else democracy will die.
	And we can't have rich people telling us what to say.
	Yeah, we definitely cannot.
	Can we, Mr.
	Bezos?
	No, no, you can't have that.
	But it is, again, I'm very gratified that they're, I think the pushback this year is going to be huge.
	And I think, frankly, that the biggest vulnerability is something that Matt has mentioned before, and that is weak-kneed Republicans, man.
	I mean, if I have to watch Spencer Cox, the Utah governor, refer to his own gender pronouns again, Utah is the reddest state in America.
	Okay, like, what in the world is happening?
	The Mormons will tell you this.
	The Mormons are very left-wing religious, you know, they're very culturally left.
	I think that guys like Spencer Cox, he's kind of betting on The anti-gender ideology backlash among conservatives is sort of a trend.
	It's a fad, and we'll get over it, and we'll get back to focusing on taxes and all the rest of it.
	But I think that's the wrong bet.
	I think this is something people are going to find out.
	It's also just the cult of niceness.
	Niceness is not goodness.
	Niceness is not righteousness.
	But I think we should remain loving and accepting of people.
	Loving and accepting is not the same as nice.
	No, of course not.
	But I think we should remain loving and accepting, but understand.
	Well, loving but not accepting necessarily.
	But the thing is, in order to be accepting, you need a norm.
	You know...
	When you're an artist, you're an oddball.
	You're outside of the norm.
	All my life I've known that I'm here, I'm living in the house of the garbage man and the cop and the businessman.
	I've always understood that.
	I'm like the entertainer.
	I'm the guy, hopefully, I entertain and enlighten and do all that stuff.
	But I'm not the guy who builds the house.
	I live in the house.
	Homer lives in the house of the soldiers.
	That's the way it is.
	If the soldiers aren't there, there's no Homer.
	If Homer's not there, They're still soldiers.
	And I think that understanding that you're not at the center of things makes you more valuable in what you do if you do it well and if you serve the center.
	I do not understand why we on the right should accept every single argument for destroying the things that make the country free and good.
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	And we have another question from one of the members that Ben so eloquently pointed out.
	Pay our bills.
	Make it possible for us to engage in the cultural battles that we're engaged in at The Daily Wire.
	How can we help people understand that life involves pain and that not everything is supposed to be easy?
	That's like the great question.
	How the hell should we know?
	If you just wait around long enough.
	Yeah, they'll figure it out.
	The first thing is that we teach in gratitude, right?
	Understanding that life is not supposed to be easy is the first step toward becoming a grateful person, which means being a happy person.
	Because then you're grateful for the good stuff that happens rather than ungrateful for the bad stuff that happens.
	There's a picture for the Kansas City Royals in Dan Quisenberry.
	He passed away of brain cancer, I believe, in the 90s.
	And when he was diagnosed with brain cancer, He's still, you know, upbeat.
	People ask him, why are you so upbeat?
	He said, well, because when most people would ask me, like, people go into this mode and they say, why me?
	And he said, well, why not me?
	I mean, that's kind of meaning, like, that is unfortunately life.
	I mean, just bad stuff happens to everyone.
	And the question is, how grateful are you going to be for the good stuff that happens to you?
	And I think that because we I've said this before, but I think maybe the most meaningful single verse in the Bible, after human beings are made in the image of God, is, Yeshua got fat and kicked.
	I think that's the description of all civilized societies.
	It's from Deuteronomy.
	The idea being that once you live in a fat and happy society, you forget there's supposed to be pain.
	You forget that God is protecting you from a lot of these things.
	You forgot the foundations of your society that allowed you to escape that pain.
	You start wailing away at those foundations with a sledgehammer, and then you're shocked when the building comes caving in on you.
	I think that we are privileged to have lived in the freest, most prosperous country in the history of the world, and so we are not used to any level of pain to the point where we're idiots about even allowing certain baseline levels of risk to exist in our lives, which is why we're masking up two-year-olds on planes still.
	It's an interesting point.
	There's a great writer that I just discovered this year named Thomas Traherne who wrote what C.S. Lewis called the most beautiful book in the world.
	If you've never read this, it's a wonderful book.
	But he talks about this.
	He talks about this exact thing that Every day you wake up and the sun is still there and you don't see it.
	You don't see that the sun is there and it provides all this heat and warmth and gives you the vegetation.
	You do not see it.
	But when things go wrong, you say, why me?
	But you didn't ask all the other days, why me?
	Why am I here?
	Why do I get to do this?
	Why do I get to live?
	Where were you when I created the...
	It is a thing that every day is a day, and every day is like this kind of celebration of life.
	I do have an important tool, too, here.
	This is, as an attitudinal matter, probably the central Catholic insight, which is suffering is not necessarily bad.
	Right.
	You get the caricature of a Catholic flogging himself and running down the street bleeding.
	But there's a lot of wisdom in recognizing suffering is, as you say, Ben, it's a fact.
	It's neither morally good or morally bad.
	It's just something that you will encounter.
	You do have a moral choice here, though.
	And the moral choice is how you react to the inevitable suffering that you will endure.
	That's just the core of free will.
	Will you do it in a way that is destructive and harms you and harms the people around you?
	Or will you do it in a way that is edifying?
	I think spiritually edifying, but certainly even just physically edifying.
	You know, the old whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger.
	That's the only thing in your control.
	You are not going to avoid suffering.
	So how are you going to react to it when it comes to you?
	And it's such a mystery, the people who are political prisoners and political victims who get tortured, who get imprisoned, and come out saying, like, no, now I get it.
	Now I understand.
	And, you know, Solzhenitsyn is a good one.
	Viktor Frankl writes about this.
	Viktor Frankl?
	Oh, my God, what a great book that is.
	In Man's Search for Meaning, he writes at length about the idea that That's wonderful.
	It's also the meaning of freedom.
	If you are simply the victim of circumstance and you take suffering as depriving you of choice, then you're not free.
	Then you are a slave.
	But if you can actually be facing the gas chamber, the firing line, a lion in the Colosseum, and say, no, you actually can't take from me my dignity, you can't take from me my faith and my hope, You're a truly free man.
	And by the way, I agree with you as a person who will avoid suffering in every possible...
	Of course.
	I think that is an aspect of this that we haven't hit on, which is that the desire to avoid suffering or the desire to make life easier than it might ordinarily be...
	It's a great motivating desire in the market.
	I mean, it causes us to create new technologies.
	It causes us to create new therapies.
	It causes us to create the world, right?
	The mistake is to believe that simply because man can take steps to mitigate against pain and suffering, pain and suffering aren't part of the natural situation.
	And the other mistake is thinking that we've talked before about the definition of rights.
	So The modern attitude is that actually you have a right to a life free of suffering.
	You have a right to the avoidance of suffering.
	Which actually brings us back to the gender ideology conversation, because you hear it there a lot, where, for example, you've got to give someone puberty blockers because they didn't consent To puberty.
	I did not consent to this thing happening to my body.
	It makes me uncomfortable, and so therefore I have a right to stop it.
	But that's the natural order of things.
	When I was 8 or 10 years old, one of my uncle's wives broke wind in a public setting and immediately thereupon said, I can't believe that did that.
	Obviously it's a funny line and it stuck with me, but it is part of the heresy of the moment to believe that your own body is apart from you.
	We're back to Cartesian duality now.
	One of the great Catholic insights is, of course, that we are embodied human beings.
	Which is true for, I think, virtually all major religions, that you're an embodied human being.
	But the Cartesian duality that has been so thoroughly debunked is back with vengeance and all this.
	I also think that we need to separate out types of pain here.
	We've been talking about the natural pain that's just a part of life.
	Illness, death, real suffering.
	And then there's pain that people just wish to avoid because they wish to avoid anything that is difficult for them to do.
	And that's obligation.
	And that's not pain.
	I think that we in Western society have largely conflated the notion of obligation with pain, because obligation is a burden, and burdens are innately more difficult.
	That's why they are called burdens.
	But what we fail to realize is that those obligations are what make life fulfilling.
	The more obligations you take on in your life, Jordan Peterson makes this point a lot, but it's true long before Jordan was saying it, the obligations we take on in our lives are the things that make us the most human.
	They are the things that define who we are.
	Those choices we make to take on having a wife, having children, or getting married, having friends, being a building part of your community, these are all a pain in the butt.
	But when we say they're a pain in the butt, we don't actually mean that they're physically painful or that they're painful in the way cancer is painful.
	What we mean is that they are additional obligations.
	But a life free of obligation is also a life free of all of the bonds that actually root you in a community and root you to the things that make you happy in life.
	The word that we're looking for is discipline.
	The Bible says that God disciplines those whom he loves.
	It doesn't say he punishes those whom he loves.
	That's a completely different concept.
	Discipline, you know, it's by discipline that you graduated law school.
	It's by discipline that you write so many crappy books.
	It's by discipline that you avoid writing books.
	All of that is a great discipline, right?
	You're working against your worst impulses in service of perhaps some of the better you that can be revealed through those actions.
	Working out is a discipline.
	Learning a language is a discipline.
	And so it's not that there is no pain in discipline.
	Of course there is.
	If you just use working out as an example, working out creates physical discomfort, but through the process of that discomfort, one is made stronger, and then one can absorb more discomfort.
	That's part of the beauty of discipline.
	I've heard pastors before say that God punishes those whom he loves, which I don't see any real evidence for that in the text, but that he disciplines us.
	Certainly, that he allows us to face adversity, that we might gain strength.
	And probably, I would say, ultimately, he allows us to face adversity so that we can learn humility.
	Can we talk about the working out thing for a minute?
	Have you noticed that the left has suddenly become very, very anti-working out?
	Not just that they're very, like, there's this whole thing online.
	It's a right-wing conspiracy.
	Correct.
	It's a whole article recently.
	Where was that article?
	I think it was about in the New York Times.
	Yeah, or Slate or Salon.
	I can't remember.
	It was this little article about how it was right-wing extremism, all these right-wing extremists in there, and they're working out.
	It's unbelievable.
	First of all, Jane Fonda was doing workout videos back in the 80s, now shortly after she was hobnobbing with the Viet Cong.
	So I'm pretty sure that this is not necessarily a right-wing thing.
	But when did it be—the left has decided that they are so invested in breaking the bonds between cause and effect— That they will actively get angry at you if you're like, you know what?
	It would be better if you lost weight.
	I don't want to disabuse them of that because they want to get fat and out of shape.
	For the coming Civil War, it's probably better off.
	But it is amazing.
	I mean, there's this whole article...
	There's this whole debate online today because Shank Weger was saying that Joe Rogan and Tim Pool and all these crazy right-wingers, and they named a bunch of people who aren't right-wing, and he's like, all these people, they're very into working out, and they pretend that it's because they're anti-obesity.
	It's just because they hate fat people.
	It's obesity-phobic, and it's all cover for their, like Bill Maher, it's all cover for how much they hate fat people when they tell fat people to lose weight.
	You know what's really weird?
	Every condition is worse because of obesity.
	I don't understand.
	Like, what?
	In the New York Times op-ed page, almost every other day, but certainly every week, there's an article by someone saying, usually a woman, saying, I'm miserable, and you can be miserable too.
	Whereas, like, I get letters, because I'm very big on moms and families and homemaking.
	I think that they're essential tools of both society and freedom.
	And I think the problem we have with...
	The problem I have with feminism is not that women shouldn't have a choice, but that it advises them against their best choice, what is often their best choice.
	Now, again, there are exceptions, but still, in general, this should be one of the elevated positions.
	It's a superpower, for God's sake.
	It's a superpower, but not just giving birth...
	Raising children.
	That's the superpower.
	It's all part of a giant superpower called raising kids.
	Transforming houses into homes.
	I mean, this is a major, major thing that supports everything, and we don't give it enough credit, and we don't support it.
	Now, with feminism, we actually attack it.
	And I get letters all the time, like every single day, from women saying, you know what?
	I took your advice, or I was encouraged to do this, and now I'm so much happier.
	Where's the...
	New York Times actually has, every week, has an article by a woman saying, boy, I'm miserable.
	And you should do this too, because then we'll all be miserable together.
	By the way, we'll all be miserable together is basically the leftist pitch.
	It really is.
	From economics to social policy, it is all the leftist pitch.
	We will all be miserable together.
	We'll be equal in our misery.
	And that's utopia.
	Utopia is we are all equal in our misery.
	This is something that, I guess I can't say a lot about it, but making the film...
	We went to Africa.
	Easy now.
	That's in the teaser.
	You may want to leave this chat for a while.
	The one thing I will say is that talking to a tribal community in Africa...
	Very focused on duty and obligation.
	Like, that's everything is your roles and your responsibility.
	And this is not a lifestyle that any of us would want to live.
	I mean, living in mud huts and so on.
	But because they knew what their duties and responsibilities were, they had no questions about their identity.
	They didn't think about that.
	And there was also certain contentment because you knew what you were supposed to do.
	We've gotten rid of that sense of what are you supposed to do, so you lose your sense of identity.
	This is a great point, Matt.
	Are conservatives willing to articulate and defend, and dare I even use the word, enforce a norm and say that not all norms need to be blown up, to Drew's point?
	I don't know that we are, because we're nice guys and we don't actually care how people live their lives and we just kind of want to have a nice family and live in a nice society.
	Are we really willing to say, hey, don't chop off that body part?
	That's an important one, by the way.
	Doctors shouldn't do that.
	Are we really willing to do what our society did for all the time?
	Only in moments like that when they're chopping people up and we're disgusted by it because of some natural disgust that we can't defend and debate.
	But nonetheless it's right.
	Right.
	I mean the problem we have, and it is a serious intellectual philosophical problem, is we want to remain free.
	And we understand that in order to remain free people have to behave in a moral and probably religious manner.
	But we can't enforce that religious manner because we want to remain free.
	That's right.
	It is a genuine paradox.
	It is the Superman paradox.
	I always say that Superman is the secular American mythological god figure.
	That's what Superman is in our culture.
	Which is why the left hates Superman.
	They always try to make him less than that.
	But the great problem of Superman is that he has the power to defeat every evil thing.
	But were he to act upon that power, he would himself become the evil thing.
	And so Superman has to content himself with stopping petty criminals and rescuing cats out of trees.
	Because if he were to truly act as Superman, then he would be Lex Luthor.
	And that is the problem of free men.
	The problem of free men is the paradox that one cannot enforce freedom.
	It's just like the left are better capitalists than we are so often.
	They make movies that are basically propaganda.
	We pay to see them.
	That's right.
	In the same way, they are good at manipulating the culture, whereas we immediately say, like, we just need a law to do that.
	This is also the paradox.
	Actually, it's the left that always says we need a law.
	I think what the right is doing is a rearguard action.
	What happens is the left takes the law away from the right, and then the right says, okay, well, we need a law in response to fix that.
	And the law has to be equal and opposite.
	So if the left is forcing a certain behavior, we then have to ban that behavior.
	I've been thinking a lot about this lately.
	How you balance these things, how you achieve liberty without destroying roles.
	Because it is true that liberty can be a universal asset that just destroys everything around it if it's left unbounded.
	Including liberty.
	Including liberty, 100%.
	And the solution that I keep coming back to is that, because this is so true in my own religious community and it's true in my life, In my religious community, there can be an enormous amount of social pressure to engage in particular behaviors.
	And there can be actual social consequences for failing to engage in certain behavior.
	And that is good and that is appropriate.
	If people don't like it, they can leave.
	And that's true in my local community.
	And as you abstract out where you're now ruling over more and more people, you can't do that top-down.
	What the left does is they impose secularism top-down in order to destroy all the social fabric that exists at the local level.
	And what the right does in response, like, well, we can rebuild the social fabric by seizing the reins of power and then cramming down our values top-down.
	But the truth is that real religion and real social capital cannot be built top-down.
	You can only destroy social capital top-down.
	So what you have to do is you have to create freedom up here so that you can build the social capital down here with all of the actual enforcement mechanisms that exist in all of our lives, right?
	There are enforcement mechanisms.
	Take the basic unit, right?
	The family.
	In the family, there are tons.
	There's a lot of compulsion in the family.
	There's a lot of social consequences in the family.
	These are also the closest bonds you will ever have with any other human beings on planet Earth.
	And that is perfectly appropriate and that is right.
	Because this is the people who are most local to you.
	They're the people you agree with the most.
	They're the people with whom you share values.
	They're the people who you're going to share costs and benefits and pain and suffering with.
	And so you can have a lot of heavy-handedness at the local level.
	That's what a family is.
	As you abstract up the chain, I think it's a mistake for the right to think, okay, we can do what we do with the family up here.
	Because that's exactly what the left does.
	They say we can do what we should do up here, down here.
	And the right response should be, Up here, we're going to have to understand that there's a lot of disagreement up here, and so the basic functions of government, we cannot give mass enforcement power on tons of issues, unless they're really extreme.
	And there's wide agreement up here.
	But down here, we have to let the social capital be built.
	The only thing I would say to this, I agree with everything you just said, the only thing I would say is that we really do have to restore to the states a certain...
	In other words, I don't think it can just...
	The state is one of the intervening institutions.
	The fundamental institution is religion between man and God.
	The second institution is family, which is what Ben's talking about.
	Then you have religious community.
	Then you have local community.
	Then state, then feds.
	Right, but I think it's the state that is under the pressure.
	But I want to go one step further.
	You also have corporations.
	The reason that we're in collapse right now, the thing that nobody ever really wants to talk about, is that the final institution that the left has really rotted from the inside is corporate America.
	The corporations in this country served an incredibly vital civic role until, I mean, honestly, until the last 15 years.
	The states have been gone for almost a century.
	The corporations have kept Americans free.
	It's funny, I was just going to talk about this on my show on Friday.
	Then the corporations replaced the church, is what happened.
	That's right.
	But I just want to take a moment and compliment Ben, because I actually think, as someone who's, you know, I like to think one of the first people who recognized your talent and what you could be beyond just your intellect...
	I think this is the best idea that you've ever articulated.
	I think that we were on the phone when you sort of found language for this for the first time, and even hearing you say it again today, slightly more refined, I just think it's incredibly important, which is to say that one of the great lessons, I think, of 2016 is that the right needed to actually fight with the same vigor with which the left has been fighting against us.
	But one of the wrong conclusions that we've come to since 2016 is that the techniques that promulgate leftism can be the exact same techniques that promulgate.
	And it's not true.
	Religion is the only thing that can ultimately save our freedom in our country, and religion cannot be enforced top-down.
	And it's actually...
	It's not that the left...
	The left didn't destroy religion where religion works.
	They destroyed the religion by taking away freedom.
	And I think that this...
	One of the things I hear on the right an awful lot now that I really disagree with is that this is the inevitable outcome of liberty.
	Well, almost from the second that George Washington chopped down the cherry tree, we were always going to have Drag Queen Story Hour.
	I'm like, well, that's just a nonsensical point of view.
	You can't treat history as though 250 years didn't happen and as though every choice that was made was the only choice that could have possibly been made at all the millions of decision points that happened in between.
	You can certainly say this did flow from that, but you can't suggest this is the only thing that could have flown from it.
	And we think right now it's in vogue on the right to say, What we're dealing with now is the consequences of liberalism, meaning liberty, not meaning leftism.
	This is the consequence of liberalism, and the answer must be illiberalism.
	And I think, well, it's actually fundamentally not true.
	We're not fundamentally dealing with the consequences of liberalism on the left right now.
	We're dealing with the consequences of illiberalism on the left.
	What's really got everyone so worked up Essentially since 2012.
	I'll say 2012 because I actually think the beginning of the Obama era, I disagree with the ascension of Obama.
	I didn't vote for Barack Obama in 2008, but I do think that the ascension of Obama in 2008 is like What was in some ways America's highest aspiration for itself?
	That's why he won.
	He had no accomplishments.
	That's right.
	But we were saying something about us.
	We were saying we have defeated this sort of historical evil in the country.
	And then Barack Obama made an incredibly cynical political decision just before the midpoint of his tenure.
	Yeah.
	Which was, he was elected as the, there is no black America and there is no white America, there's the United States of America.
	He was re-elected as a, no, just kidding, there's only a white America and it's evil and we have to defeat it.
	Trayvon Martin's my son.
	Trayvon Martin's my son.
	If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.
	And from that moment, the left became utterly illiberal.
	And we're reacting.
	2016 was a reaction to that illiberalism.
	It was a reaction to the fact that we were being told that we couldn't freely exercise our speech, that we couldn't freely exercise our religion, that we couldn't freely even exercise our base expressions of what reality was.
	And it's that illiberalism fundamentally that we've been reacting to.
	And I think that this Obama moment changed the country in so many profound ways, including, you brought this up a little bit ago, the fact that The fact that the Don't Say Gay bill down in Florida, that line, Don't Say Gay, that might as well be the name of the bill in all mainstream publications.
	The actual centers of journalism for the country, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, they all, without a hint of self-awareness, identify the bill as the Don't Say Gay bill.
	If we say Joe Biden is president, we will get a missing context fact check for not saying, and he is also a great president.
	The most popular president ever.
	They will fact check us for it.
	The New York Times can refer to the legislation down in Florida as the don't say gated.
	Well, they put it in quotes, though, so that gives them...
	Or they say they're...
	So-called.
	But they won't say who says the so-called.
	That's right.
	But in doing that, they're...
	Promulgating a particular talking point of the left with absolutely no consequences, and it's because the illiberalism of Barack Obama fundamentally changed the relationship between news media and politics.
	Absolutely true.
	And it's always true.
	It was true in the Spanish Civil War that it was the socialism that spread out through the community that caused the fascists to rise.
	The right is always reactionary.
	This is why I am daily praying that the Supreme Court will have the...
	Guts to overturn Roe v.
	Wade, because in the same way that the evil of slavery tainted states' rights, I think the evil of abortion has tainted the federal government.
	And I think in the moment, if they have the guts to overturn it, I think we will continue this trend of what is cultural federalism.
	People will start to move to states not just because they can get a job there, but because people live the way they want to live.
	And I think that that's a beautiful thing.
	It could, if you follow the wrong track, it could lead to a civil war.
	But if you follow the more optimistic path, it could mean that we do what we're supposed to do, which is experiment in our states with a different way of life.
	That's a terrific point.
	Speaking of inequality...
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	I just want to make one point about, you mentioned the Obama moment, because I was thinking about this past week when we were hearing about Kentonji Jackson, and she was confirmed, and we're supposed to accept this as a great moment because we have a black woman on the Supreme Court.
	Wait, you don't know if she's a woman, neither is she.
	Oh, well, we don't know that, right.
	But assuming for a second that she's a woman, that she is black, because I guess we don't really know that either.
	But...
	Even if I wanted to accept that, it's like, well, because of Obama, we've made racism, systemic racism, into an unfalsifiable theory.
	So they say...
	You know, last week, it's a big moment.
	We've achieved something.
	And the very next day, we're back to where we started.
	It's just like slavery.
	How far we have to go.
	And that's what happened with Obama because they turned racism into this kind of like abstract thing that exists in the ether.
	And so you could ask them, well, okay, you say we have systemic racism or racist country.
	What would you need to see happen to convince you otherwise?
	And there's literally nothing that can happen.
	We can't even elect a black president to convince you otherwise.
	And that's one of the things that's just ripping our country apart right now.
	What they will say is the income of black Americans and white Americans will have to be identical.
	The number of college degrees between black Americans and white Americans per capita will have to be identical.
	In other words, we'll have to buck every trend that has ever been known to humanity.
	And two groups, who are disparate in many ways, will have to be exactly the same in outcome, no matter the inputs.
	But even that wouldn't...
	Even that wouldn't matter.
	I mean, Jon Stewart has been on this...
	He just recently discovered Critical Race Theory.
	So he's on this white guilt tour.
	And on his show, which I didn't even know existed until last week, he was talking about how the American dream doesn't exist for black people.
	And his proof of this was the three-fifths compromise.
	We have not improved since then.
	And not only that, but he's wrong about the three-fifths compromise.
	The three-fifths compromise is one of the better kind of concepts that the founders came up with to long-term enslavery in America.
	They didn't say a black person is three-fifths of a human.
	They said, you know, it doesn't make sense, slave owners in the South, that you're going to count your unrepresented, unable to vote and unable to function in everyday life slave population in your census for the purpose of representation in the Congress.
	Maybe you can't count them.
	And the South, particularly South Carolina, essentially said they wouldn't join the union if they didn't get to count them.
	And so the compromise was they don't get to count all the way so that you don't get to use it.
	An enslaved population is a voting base that cannot vote.
	That's an important academic point.
	It's true, but it's also like we should just be able to respond.
	That makes no difference right now.
	That has no bearing on modern America.
	- It is against this argument, the whatever it is, 1619. - 1619. - That America's DNA is racist because your DNA makes you more yourself and we have gotten less and less and less. - But the 1619 Project, it's being taught in schools.
	It's being taught in schools all around the country.
	I actually think this is why we're focused on the education issue.
	The reason we talk about girls' sports is no one cares about girls' sports.
	I don't want to be insensitive, but no one watches the WNBA. How dare you, sir?
	I know.
	I'm sorry.
	Media Matters is going to clip it.
	But the reason we talk about it is it's the only socially acceptable way to talk about transgenderism, which we all know is wrong, but we don't want to say it.
	It's the same thing with education.
	The reason we're focused on education, obviously it's because we care about our kids.
	We don't want our kids being brainwashed in this racial nonsense and the sexual nonsense.
	But it's also because of that paradox in education, which is education makes us free, but education is coercive.
	So to be free, we have to be coerced into learning things.
	And so it's not even just about, well, which grades, and we've got to wait until 8.
	The question is really, what is America?
	What is the nature of the relationship of the man to the state?
	What's the relationship of the man to his own genitals?
	What's the truth of the matter?
	And we're having this proxy battle through education, but ultimately, we just need to make some substantive claims, don't we?
	Yes.
	No, of course we do.
	But at the level of education, we can do it coercively beyond that.
	We can't.
	That's right.
	And to your point, we need to make these claims culturally.
	And this is what the left has been so successful at doing.
	They actually change the window for the conversation.
	They make it to where you can only talk about ideas on their terms.
	And they do this more than anything.
	They do it through entertainment because we engage so much more in entertainment content, most people, than we do in news content.
	That's why what we're doing at The Daily Wire over these last, I think, really since 2020, and particularly over these last several weeks, has been so important.
	We're rolling out feature films from Shut In, The Hyperion, Soon To Be Terror on the Prairie.
	We're rolling out documentaries now.
	What is a Woman Coming in May from Matt Walsh, another surprise documentary.
	I'm not going to announce it tonight, but just hold on to your butts.
	An unbelievable piece of documentary work that we're going to be releasing over the next couple of months that I know is going to catch the world on fire.
	And why we're engaging now in this children's content with our DW Kids initiative.
	It's because...
	You have to fish where the fish are.
	I've said this in business since we started the company.
	The great lie of the 20th century is if you build it, they will come.
	It's simply not true.
	One reason the Daily Wire has been very successful is because we believed, no, you have to build it, then you have to tell people that you built it, then they still won't come and you have to take it to where they are.
	And maybe then, if you take it where they are and you tell them about it, maybe then they'll engage with your content.
	When we first put Ben's podcast on radio, No one had done that before in that direction.
	Plenty of radio shows would also release as a podcast.
	We wanted to take a podcast and syndicate it to AM radio.
	And many of the people that we talked to said, well, you can't do that.
	It's a used piece of content.
	People want original content.
	I said, well, it is original to your audience.
	I said, well, no, no, no.
	It's the same audience.
	They're going to listen to you guys over there.
	And I said, it's not the same audience.
	Yeah.
	The people who listen to AM Talk Radio are not the people who in 2016 were downloading podcasts on their iPhones.
	That's a completely disparate group.
	We wanted to put our content everywhere that people engage with it.
	We want to fish where the fish are.
	We want to fight where the fight is.
	And the fight is an entertainment where people's eyeballs are actually affixed as entertainment primarily, where people get most of their ideas.
	It's sort of like every pastor hates this.
	But the truth is, in most churches, the music pastor has actually more influence than the actual pastor who studies the Word his entire life because people get a little drowsy when you start going through the Bible and they hear your same tired old jokes again.
	But in their own voices, they sing the hymns.
	In their own voices, they sing the songs.
	And the repetition of that, the power of music, the power of doing it yourself over time, that actually creates the framework.
	And that's how entertainment works.
	And that's why we're doing what we're doing at The Daily Wire.
	That's why we're asking you to go become a member over at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	Remember, for the next 24 hours from now, we'll be bringing to a close the longest sale that we've ever run at the company, which is 45% off of your membership.
	This is not a donation.
	It is very useful to us in helping to power the work that we do.
	It makes it possible for us to do what we're doing.
	It makes it possible for us to make this animated and live action children's content that we're hard at work on right now.
	But you get something for your money.
	It's a purchase.
	Terrific content from Ben, from Matt, from Michael.
	You also get Drew's show.
	You're purchasing Candice.
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	Use the promo code BUILDTHEFUTURE. 24 hours left on that promotion.
	And...
	Just to prove that we mean it, here's a question from one of our DailyWire.com members.
	Fellers, what are your predictions for the country in the rest of Biden's term?
	What should we prepare for?
	What wins should we focus on?
	Well, until Biden's out of office, the possibility of major wins are all going to happen at the state level, which is fine, frankly.
	I mean, as a new resident of a red state, I'm a big fan of federalism.
	Wasn't as big a fan when I was in California.
	And I'm fine with Florida continuing to have the best governor in America, Governor DeSantis, press forward excellent legislation.
	That's fine with me.
	You know, stymieing Joe Biden's spending plans is going to be a big thing.
	Trying to press to rebuild the military is going to be a rather major thing.
	I think economically speaking, the chances that we head into a recession inside of the next year are very, very high right now.
	I don't think, like economists say, it's like a 28% chance.
	I think it's more like a 75% chance.
	I don't think that the Federal Reserve, which has gotten it wrong every step of the way, is suddenly going to start getting it right now.
	So I think that inflation will be curbed by the Federal Reserve.
	It'll happen over the course of the next year and a half, but at the cost of a higher unemployment rate and at the cost of economic stagnation.
	I don't think anybody in either party has the actual stones to do what's necessary on spending.
	I think the new normal is we spend $6 trillion a year, which means that we go bankrupt sooner rather than later.
	And austerity measures will come down the pike, say, about 2030.
	That's where I think we're going for the next several years.
	As far as where the politics of the country go, I think the backlash has begun.
	I don't think the social backlash is going to let up because I think that the left is so disconnected utterly.
	Utterly disconnected from reality.
	That they cannot get back to it.
	I'm amazed.
	I mean, truly amazed at how wild the left is.
	Obviously, we all knew, because we'd spent a lot of time speaking on college campuses, that it was mainstream radical left thinking that a man can be a woman and a woman can be a man.
	Now you have the press secretary at the White House saying that it is best care to quote-unquote gender-affirm small children.
	You're supposed to be giving puberty blockers to small children to the extent that the DOJ is going to crack down on states that prevent doctors from giving puberty blockers and...
	Gender-affirming, meaning biology-denying, surgeries to minors.
	That is so patently insane.
	I cannot believe it.
	And so I think the backlash is going to just continue.
	The only thing I fear here in terms of the politics, aside from the spending issue, is that there is going to be some ability of the Republicans to screw it up, which normally they do.
	There's only one add-on.
	I agree with every single thing you said.
	The Biden administration is not going to pass bills.
	He can't even get his budget through.
	He's got two stubborn Democrats who are not going to let that happen.
	Republicans, presumably, are going to retake the House and they might retake the Senate.
	And so that's not going to matter.
	The problem, of course, is that the legislature doesn't legislate.
	That's right.
	And they don't actually make our laws.
	And I am a bill up on Capitol Hill is not the way that our government works.
	The government is run by the executive agencies.
	It has been for a long time.
	And you're going to still get a lot of terrible policy out of that.
	Just ask the person next to you wearing the muzzle on the airplanes.
	Oh wait, you can't ask them because they're going to sound like a teacher on peanuts.
	I think that the good news here is that the Supreme Court has been cracking back, as in the CDC case, where we fought back against the OSHA case.
	I think that the Supreme Court is going to do some heavy lifting there.
	But I'm deeply fearful, mostly, that Republicans screw this up in one of two ways.
	One, they go squishy on the issues that matter most, because we've seen this already in places like Utah and Indiana, where they are so shy of Larry Hogan in Maryland.
	Making the argument that we shouldn't engage in these cultural battles, because after all, you might offend somebody.
	So I'm afraid of Republicans going squishy, because they have a tendency to do this.
	And frankly, I'm also fearful that we get to 2024, and Donald Trump throws his hat in the ring, and he is less concerned about the priorities that I care about, and he's more concerned about his own viewpoint with regards to what happened in 2020.
	I mean, this seems to be what's happening in Georgia right now.
	And frankly, I gotta say, I... Listen, if he's the nominee, I'll vote for him.
	But would I prefer that he run?
	No.
	Would I prefer he be the nominee?
	No.
	Do I think there are more effective candidates, including Governor DeSantis?
	100% yes.
	I think that the enthusiasm for Governor DeSantis is justified.
	I think it is correct.
	And frankly, I think that he's an extraordinarily competent executive of a major American state who has stood up to the predations of the media in a truly effective way that's made a difference in his state.
	If Republicans, I think, make the mistake of trying to relitigate 2020 for 2024, I just think that's such an enormous political blunder that it could steal defeat from the jaws of victory for no apparent reason.
	I think when it comes to 2024, not that this is scientific or anything, but I did a poll on my Twitter about who would you like to see, DeSantis or Trump, in 2024, and there was something like 190,000 people voted, and it was 70% DeSantis.
	Again, not scientific, but I think if I had done a poll like that, Two years ago, certainly two years ago, it would have been 90-10 the other way.
	So I do think that there's something there.
	But I also want to say that with Trump, the argument against him in 2024, I think the main one is that, yes, he's going to make it about 2020 when it should be about Biden.
	It should be about the extreme nature of Democrat Party, gender ideology, culture.
	It should be about that.
	But we don't even need to get into that.
	I think the real argument is just age.
	I mean, we don't have to get past that.
	He would be...
	Our oldest president breaking the record set by the last president, who was Biden.
	So the idea that we're going to go from our oldest president to the next oldest president, I think that's enough reason not to happen.
	Do you think, though, that the poll result is about Trump or about DeSantis?
	Because I love DeSantis.
	He's the best governor in America.
	There's no question about it.
	He is unbloodied at the moment.
	They haven't given the deluge of attacks.
	He hasn't run for president.
	Trump obviously has.
	They threw the kitchen sink at him.
	So is it Is it merely that Trump has been so terribly bloodied, people say, cast him to the side?
	First of all, I'm going to disagree with the premise.
	The media spent the last two years crapping on DeSantis.
	The reason that DeSantis is a national figure is because the media decided that he was DeathSantis.
	He was murdering hundreds of thousands of people in Florida while Andrew Cuomo was grabbing ass up in New York.
	And so the idea was that he was the bad guy.
	And he was still a bad guy, right?
	He quote-unquote, don't say gay bill.
	He's killing all the trans kids.
	And he's attacking Disney and all this.
	The idea that they haven't been going after DeSantis is just not true.
	But it'll get worse in a presidential.
	It will.
	I mean, of course.
	But the fact of the matter is that On a pure governance level, I think the strongest case for DeSantis versus Trump, that on a pure governance level, DeSantis has actually been more effective in effecting change in his state than Trump was federally.
	And I like a lot of what Trump did federally.
	And if there were skeletons in his closet, if there was dirt on him, you'd think the media would have found it by now.
	It's not like they're not looking, so...
	By the way, here's the best proof.
	Florida went from a state that had a Democratic registered voter majority of 350,000 in 2018 to a state that has a 100,000 vote advantage, registered vote advantage, for Republicans in the state of Florida.
	Ron DeSantis, in his current gubernatorial race, has raised $101 million.
	His nearest competitor is Charlie Crist, who has raised $7 million in this gubernatorial race, and it's April.
	So, you know, like, I think that the enthusiasm, I actually don't think it's about Trump.
	I think it's about some waning enthusiasm because, listen, the fact that Trump was bloodied is what drove the enthusiasm on our side for him.
	The fact they kept attacking him that drove people like me into his camp.
	It was like, you keep going after him for the dumbest possible reasons because you don't just hate him, you hate me.
	And that's why I end up in his camp.
	It's not that they've hit Trump so hard that now everybody, the bloom is off the rose or anything.
	It's that Trump was unfocused at the last part of his presidency at the very least, if not throughout his presidency.
	He's very unfocused now on the things that I think matter most to Americans.
	I mean, he's busy trying to take Brian Kemp out as governor of Georgia and get Stacey Abrams alive.
	The problem with President Trump, and it ended up being a great strength for the first three years of his administration.
	In the last year of his administration, he really choked around with COVID.
	He choked.
	He choked going into the election, obviously.
	And that's not to say that the election was fair, that it wasn't rigged up.
	Of course, it was rigged by the media and others.
	But he also gave us Fauci.
	He did not handle the pandemic the way I would have liked for him to.
	But the great strength that made him so important in those first three years was, interestingly was how personally he takes attacks.
	Right.
	His great liability now is that he can't get over...
	I understand his feeling about 2020.
	I don't agree with every aspect of it, but I certainly understand where he's coming from.
	It was an unfair election.
	He can't let go of that and look to the actual concerns that his base is facing right now.
	He's not in the fight that we're in.
	And to make that situation worse is his endorsement of Dr.
	Oz this week, which is part and parcel of the same thing, that Trump sees everything through a lens of Trump.
	And Dr.
	Oz is like Trump.
	He's a TV star.
	They're probably friendly from their days in entertainment.
	Plus, the rival's a moderate, though.
	David McCormick's a moderate.
	But Donald Trump's support of Dr.
	Oz is not ideological in any way.
	It's Trump-apological.
	And that's sometimes what's hilarious about him.
	Sometimes what's funny about him.
	And to the extent that the left was attacking him as president, it was a very useful thing about him because he took personally their attacks against him, which, as you say, were attacks against us.
	I've always thought that Trump was a tragic figure.
	I always thought the two people who said this were me and Victor Davis Hanson.
	I said it first, but he wrote a great book about it.
	And I think that he was the guy that you bring in at that moment because his personal flaws are the personal flaws you need to break the wall that was between the right and these cultural issues that he knew were important and most politicians, most right-wing politicians didn't.
	He's too far off the next presidential election.
	It's too far off to worry about.
	We don't know what's going to happen.
	We actually don't know, though everybody I know who knows Trump says, I'm 100% sure he's going to win, run.
	I mean, we don't know that.
	We just don't.
	Because this is the only way he can stay relevant.
	The point I'm making is a little broader than Trump, which is just Republicans cannot take their eye off the ball.
	And they have a terrible habit of taking the eye off the ball.
	Don't look back.
	To quote the Bard, don't look back.
	You can never look back.
	No, that's right.
	But I think that Trump taught us something.
	If we don't learn that, I mean, Youngkin learned it.
	I think DeSantis learned it.
	You know, no question about it.
	If we don't remember that, we're going to be in trouble.
	You know, the point that you made about corporations, I just want to go back to this for a minute.
	You know, corporations do what they do almost always at an essential level for economic reasons.
	And the thing is that you can...
	Uh-oh.
	Hey, what is this?
	They just let anybody in here?
	Oh, my God.
	I thought we had security in them.
	No, I beat all of them.
	You're going to hang out with us?
	Absolutely, sir.
	Hey, that's great.
	And actually, you guys are taking over my show at the same time.
	Are we live right now?
	We're on Tim Pool's show.
	You are all my guests on TimCast IRL right now.
	Wow.
	I couldn't fit all of your names in the title, so I just went with Ben Shapiro.
	That's fair.
	That's the only one that's going to get Judy on.
	Nice set, dude.
	Oh, thank you.
	Nice job with this.
	This is way better.
	We're in a trailer out in your alley.
	Yeah, people don't realize that Tim has been broadcasting from our hill all week from a fifth-wheel trailer that he converted into a mobile studio, and tonight he's going to learn how God feels about it because we have thunderstorms coming through Nashville in 45 minutes, and he'll still be broadcasting from the most dangerous place in America to be in.
	Welcome to my show, everybody.
	Thanks for having me.
	Absolutely.
	This is the best lineup of guests I've ever had on TimKiss.com.
	I really like being on your show from here because when I go on your show from the hinterland, I've got to drive an hour through the woods with serial killers.
	It's like the Texas Chainsaw Man.
	It is.
	It's a cool house.
	Your security guy almost gave me a heart attack as I was walking out.
	I walk out in the dark of night and this guy goes...
	Well, it's funny when we've invited some left personalities who already have apprehension and then get really scared because, you know, we're in, it's Western Maryland, but it's the middle of nowhere.
	It's like the Blue Ridge Mountains.
	And you drive through pitch black and then you have to drive up a long, it's about a, you know, what, like 1,500 feet driveway.
	And there are security deer everywhere.
	They're ready to pound.
	Well, you know, when you're driving up in the dead of night and your lights are on, all of a sudden you see glowing eyes everywhere.
	And then you're like, I think most people are fine with it.
	In the summer, it's fine.
	It's still day out when you arrive.
	What were you guys talking about before I interrupt?
	We were talking about 2024 and what we think is going to happen.
	And we're sort of positing the thesis that Democrats are so wildly out of tune with the American public right now that Republicans look pretty good, but they could make the mistake of taking their eye off the ball, which brought up the inevitable T-word.
	Right, of course, which is Trump and whether he runs.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	I think so, but isn't it starting to feel like DeSantis might be...
	Your mouth's God's ears, my friend.
	I will say that Trump saying, I think just this last week, that his health would be a factor in making the decision is the first time that he said anything that in any way left him an out not to run.
	And in many ways, you know...
	He has a lot to lose if he runs.
	There's always going to be an asterisk beside his 2020 loss.
	If he were to run and lose in 2024, you remove the asterisk.
	And all the prosecutions that they're threatening him with is clearly political.
	Now that makes me want him to run.
	Keep playing dirty.
	No, I don't think so, because I think that he could actually be hurt financially by those, if he runs, if he doesn't run, they won't.
	I have this sense, everybody keeps telling me I'm wrong, everybody who knows Trump tells me I'm wrong.
	I have this sense he's not going to run, that he's staying relevant, he's raising money off his, you know, the hints that he's going to run.
	But I just don't think there's enough in it for him.
	And he's old.
	Well, I always like to tell you you're wrong.
	To your point, Drew, that the prosecutions could hurt him, this is the problem that the powers that be are powerful.
	They can actually wield that power and really hurt you.
	But why is DeSantis not in the same vein as Trump?
	Well, he doesn't run if Trump runs, I think.
	I'm beginning to doubt that's true.
	Really?
	I'm beginning to doubt that's true.
	And the reason that I'm beginning to doubt that's true is because I think that what DeSantis, like most good politicians, understands is there is a time.
	This is something that Jeremy and I have discussed a bunch of times before, which is that there are certain politicians where it's like if they had grabbed the moment, it would have been their moment.
	And if they missed the moment, they're toast.
	And this happened with, for example, Elizabeth Warren in 2016.
	If she had jumped in in 2016 and not let Hillary Clinton foreclose her, she would have been the Bernie figure in that race, and she would have stolen a lot of thunder from Hillary Clinton being the first presidential woman nominee.
	Chris Christie in 2012.
	Right, Chris Christie in 2012.
	There are certain periods where if you go for the brass ring and you grab at it, it's your moment.
	And then if you miss it, it's just gone.
	Also, the other thing is, I think DeSantis understands that the...
	In the primary of 2016, Republicans running against Trump, they either just ignored him and didn't attack him at all, which was a mistake, or they attacked him basically from the left.
	And they said, well, I don't like his attitude.
	It makes me uncomfortable.
	I think Trump is vulnerable.
	And what DeSantis probably understands, although I don't know him, is that if you can go at Trump from the right and you can say you can hit Trump on vaccines, you can hit him on Fauci, you can hit him on COVID. And I think...
	I actually think the best path for DeSantis...
	As you said, we're still two years away from this.
	But if DeSantis were to choose to challenge Trump, I actually think his best path is not to hit Trump.
	I think his best path is essentially to say, Mr.
	President, I voted for you.
	There's no question in my mind that you are the man we needed in 2016.
	The question is, are you the man that we need in 2016?
	Trump's not going to allow that.
	That's what they tried in 2016, and then eventually Trump will turn around and go after you, and you're just sitting there, you're not prepared for it.
	So I think you have to be more proactive.
	You don't have to be obsessive about it, but you make your argument from the right.
	I agree with you that a lot of Trump's appeal in 2016, because I felt this way when he was debating Jeb Bush, is that he just kept pummeling the guy who was more to the center.
	And Jeb Bush would be like, I'm really uncomfortable with how you talk about illegal immigration, and Trump would be like, you're stupid.
	Like, yeah!
	And there's a lot of that.
	I have a I feel like I have a different perspective from you guys because, for one, look how I'm dressed compared to you guys.
	I do think, in all honesty though, I come from kind of a different world.
	I grew up in Chicago and I didn't vote for Trump in 2016.
	I don't think everybody here did.
	Did you guys?
	No, I didn't.
	I did.
	I did not vote for either.
	In 2020, I've just been seeing over the past decade what I would describe as the left being so unreasonable and just out of their minds.
	I'm sitting with a group of prominent conservatives and this is not how I grew up.
	I grew up in Chicago, surrounded by Democrats.
	And now I'm looking at 2024, and I'm like, I would vote for DeSantis.
	I didn't like Trump in 2016.
	I voted for him because I know Biden, because I knew the Obama administration.
	You voted for him in 2020.
	2020, sorry.
	2020, I voted for Trump.
	I liked that he didn't start new wars.
	I liked the Abraham Accords.
	I liked school choice.
	And I did not like wokeness, because I think it's an affront to all of the civil rights battles that have been fought.
	Now we see DeSantis in Florida and everything he's doing speaks to me.
	Not everything, but a lot of it.
	So I don't know if I would vote for Trump.
	I didn't necessarily want to vote for him in the first place.
	This is, I think, the biggest issue for Trump.
	And that is that my theory of elections is that elections are oppositional and whoever the election is a referendum on loses.
	So in 2016, the great myth that the media tried to create is that it was a referendum on Trump.
	And it was not a referendum on Trump.
	It was a referendum on Hillary Clinton.
	People looked at Hillary and they're like, I hate that lady.
	She's awful.
	She's garbage.
	And I don't know this Trump guy...
	He's real weird.
	He says dumb stuff, but I'll take a shot at it.
	That's right.
	This is how Trump can get fewer votes in Wisconsin than did Mitt Romney four years earlier and still win Wisconsin because the election was really about Hillary.
	Democrats were like, eh.
	And then by 2020, Joe Biden ran what for him was, I think, the only campaign he could run, but it turned out to be kind of a brilliant campaign, which is he just lay in a basement.
	For six months.
	And every so often they would creak open the crypt, walk out and say...
	And then he'd go back downstairs and that would be the end of his campaign.
	And so the referendum was not on Biden, the referendum was on Trump.
	You go to 2024, if Trump runs again, the question is, I'm not sure who that's a referendum on.
	Is it on Biden or is it on Trump?
	That's a real question because they're now really, really prominent figures.
	If it's anybody, anybody but Trump, it's hard for it not to be a referendum on Biden.
	He's been president for the last four years and he's done...
	Honest to God, I'm amazed he's been able to set this many things on fire for a man who's not ambulatory.
	You know, there's a tactic DeSantis is using, a rhetorical tactic, that I think every Republican needs to adopt.
	The old Republican view of things, when they were asked a question, what do you want for breakfast in the morning?
	Let's say, hey, Senator Rand Paul, what do you want for breakfast?
	He'd say, Well, you know, some people want omelets and some people want pancakes.
	And the great thing about America is we can have whatever we want for breakfast.
	It's a very sort of ambiguous thing.
	And you ask DeSantis, what do you want for breakfast?
	He goes, look, we tried pancakes in Arkansas and we tried omelets and we're going to have scrambled eggs.
	Scrambled eggs work in Florida and they're going to work throughout America.
	And there's no question or ambiguity.
	It's very persuasive.
	Well, let me ask you, is Joe Biden even going to run in 2024?
	I mean, I think they have to.
	I think they have to strap him to a gurney, they have to turn him upright, and they have to just reel him around.
	Because they have to.
	What are they going to do?
	They're going to try out Kamala Harris, the worst candidate who's ever been created by God or man.
	It's unbelievable.
	He will not be able to speak at all.
	I agree.
	What are you going to do?
	Kamala Harris is, the best description I've heard is from the account JTLOL, which is that she is the human embodiment of a predictive text program.
	You start...
	Typing words into Google, and whatever is the next word is what she says.
	And so the importance of the passage of time is important with regard to the passage of time.
	And so she's terrible.
	And then they're like, oh, well, you know, we've got this other guy over here, and he's so great that he went on paternity leave for two months, and nobody even noticed.
	He couldn't fill a pothole in South Bend, Indiana, but on the other hand, he is gay.
	And that's literally the pitch for Steve Buttigieg.
	That's an impact.
	I don't know.
	First of all, I like that, Camilla Harris.
	To me, she's always like I was in high school when I have to give a book report, but I didn't read the book.
	That's what she always sounds like.
	You run into just a simple fact of age.
	So are you going to run a guy who'll be 82, right?
	And so, by the end of his term, he's 86.
	That's just like an impossible...
	Well, they don't have to get him to the end of his term.
	They just have to get him to...
	But for the purpose of running, they have to pretend that he's going to make it to the end of the term.
	No, he didn't pretend he was going to make it to the end of the term this time.
	The problem that they have, the reason I think they have to run him, and I think that the base doesn't care If he's still cogent.
	No, the base doesn't care.
	They don't care.
	The reason they have to run him is Kamala.
	They would like to sub him out with Buttigieg.
	They might even like to sub him out if we are making moves towards Trump with Hillary Clinton, which would be their great revenge fantasy playing out.
	But the problem is that there is a sitting vice president.
	And how do you get her to just move aside and let you do that?
	They do have one Trump card, right?
	They could theoretically call him Michelle.
	That is clearly their best move.
	That is their best move.
	Because as a black woman VP, you just say, listen, there's this other black woman, and she's more famous than you, and she's more popular than you, and she's a best-selling author, and we have now softened her image to the point where she's not the radical who is writing Princeton theses about how America is racist.
	Everybody wants to be president.
	She might not be.
	She likes being Oprah.
	She likes being Oprah.
	Oprah wants to be president.
	Oprah, that's a better selection.
	Everyone wants to be president.
	Listen, Michelle Obama is the nuclear option.
	No question.
	No question.
	Why wouldn't they use her?
	I think they would love to use her.
	I think the only question is whether she and Barack want to have his...
	Like, if she were to run and lose, whether this would tarnish the Obama magisterial image that he's created for himself.
	And that guy loves him.
	I mean, Obama loves him from Obama.
	I mean, when he came to the White House, that was...
	It's one of the sorriest displays I've ever seen.
	It was so sad.
	It really was.
	It was the first time...
	It actually did...
	I can't believe what it says.
	It made me feel bad for Biden.
	It did.
	He walks up on stage and he makes a joke about how he's Barack Obama's vice president.
	And then Barack Obama gets away and is like, well, yeah, over there's my vice president.
	It's like, you don't get to make that joke.
	That makes you a dick.
	The two things that were most on display in that entire episode were, one, what a sorry...
	Bastard Barack Obama is.
	And if you read Maureen Dowd during his administration, she hated him for his treatment of Joe Biden as his vice president.
	Biden was this completely loyal, subservient even, vice president.
	And Obama treated him like absolute dirt the entire time.
	So you just see how...
	His view of himself and his view of people around him.
	And then the other sorry thing is you saw the media's view of him.
	That horrible clip where Biden realizes that no one wants to talk to the President of the United States.
	Multiple.
	Because they're all talking to Barack Obama.
	He's got his hand on Obama's shoulder and Obama's shaking him off to shake hands over here.
	You just realize...
	All he wanted was somebody to guide him to the bathroom.
	That's right.
	The media genuinely believes that Barack Obama is a deity, and Barack Obama agrees with them.
	That's what was on display to me.
	Did Joe Rogan say something to that effect about Michelle Obama?
	I don't want to put words in Joe's mouth, but he mentioned something about Barack Obama being a great president or something to that effect.
	And Michelle Obama being a potentially great option.
	I think he's relevant for, one, having the biggest podcast in the world, but I think he speaks to a lot of people who are in the middle and confused or don't necessarily know how they're going to vote come 2022 and 2024.
	But I think if these people, moderates, independents, former left people, see Michelle Obama, I think a lot of them will be convinced to vote Democrat again.
	I'm not entirely convinced.
	For me, my brain exploded after 2020 with just, yeah, I'm done with this.
	Or 2018 even, when I think it was 31 seats, districts that voted for Trump, Vote Democrat.
	And all of these moderate Democrats said, we're going to bring you kitchen table issues.
	We're not going to focus on culture war issues.
	And the first thing they do is they move to impeach Trump.
	And it felt like I was just spit on.
	I was like, you know, I had faith that if I just, you know, push back, I donated to some of these Democrats thinking that they'll actually...
	You know, reconfigure things and fix this, and they only made it worse.
	The only thing I think that could really harm Michelle Obama if she were to run is I think that she really has ideologically, she always has been very radical, and I think that she will re-embrace wokeness because she too is in that bubble.
	And ironically, the thing that we complain the most about is probably the thing that may save the republic, and that is the media bias.
	The media bias is so strong that Democrats do not understand that there's an entire world outside of the beltway that just thinks they're crazy.
	And so the reason that you see the White House saying things like, well, you know, it's very important that we use the DOJ to crack down on people stopping little girls from being turned into little boys.
	The reason they say that is because the New York Times agrees with them and the Washington Post agrees with them and everybody they know agrees with them.
	The other thing about Michelle Obama is that she's attractive to people, I guess.
	Not to me, but to people as an idea.
	But if she's running for office, then she's actually going to have to be out there talking.
	And when you listen to her talk, kind of to your point about how radical she is, but also she's just really kind of a vile human being.
	I'll never forget this story she told on a podcast somewhere about when she experienced...
	She was still harboring this resentment because she went to get ice cream and a white woman didn't notice her and cut in front of her.
	And she told this whole story about how she was a victim of racism as the first lady of the United States because a white woman was getting ice cream before her.
	There's that story that she told about how she went to the grocery store and she was tall so somebody asked her to take something down from the top shelf.
	She said that that was racism.
	It's like, no, you're just tall.
	I'd ask Matt to get something from the top shelf for me.
	Who are the voters who fall for that stuff?
	I agree with you, Tim.
	I think that Michelle Obama, I don't think she would run, but I think that she is a good candidate if she runs.
	But, you know, the voters are not as enamored of identity politics as the Democrats are.
	In no way are they.
	Well, the poll about the parental rights and education bill in Florida has overwhelming support from Democrat voters who are polled at the very least, yet they double down on this stuff.
	It's like you were saying, the media bias is palpable.
	I don't know if you guys saw CNN Plus only has 10,000 daily active users.
	Wow.
	Hold on just a second.
	But I think I'll enjoy Chris Wallace's new show, What Have I Done?
	I think there's By the way, who was the business genius at Warner who was like, okay, so we have CNN and no one watches?
	What if we take the same host and we put them behind a paywall doing more boring things?
	I mean, how does this go wrong here, guys?
	This seems like a genius business plan to me.
	Well, they're simply giving you money every time you don't watch CNN. You know, make money.
	I like it.
	I will tell you guys something interesting, though, because Matt and I were talking about this the other day.
	When I asked you, why is it The Daily Wire is 600,000-plus subscribers?
	CNN can't even get 10,000 daily users.
	You mentioned Mission, I think is what you said, right?
	I said the reason is me.
	The number two reason.
	He did say that.
	He said he was better than everybody.
	When I was working for these big corporate media outlets, I was at a company called Fusion, which is ABC News and Univision.
	They said mission-driven storytelling.
	That was their line as to what their goals were.
	It's almost like they were either predicting or wanting politics to be the main driver of what was going to bring people to different media outlets.
	The only issue is I felt like their narratives were built on lies and manipulation.
	We have to withhold information from people, trick them, feed them only the information we want.
	Whereas I feel like with what you guys do, with what we do, it's here's everything.
	Let's argue about it.
	Yeah.
	That's what I love about this show that we get to do once a month, is that we quite often disagree.
	And those disagreements, I think, are central to what makes The Daily Wire work.
	I think at the core of The Daily Wire's success is our fundamental religious difference.
	We talked about it today, in fact, that our fundamental religious disagreement It means that central to our friendship is the idea that there's not unanimity in our thought.
	It's not that we don't have a strong perspective as a company, it's not that we don't have a side in the fight, but it's that we are actually engaged in the exchange of ideas and trying to always learn more and know more and be better.
	Tim, thank you for coming on uninvited.
	Please feel free to invite yourself on the show again in the future.
	Thank you to all of our DailyWire.com members for making this possible.
	We're going to wrap up because there's a thunderstorm rolling in.
	This guy's got to get back to his tornado bait trailer.
	And Ben Shapiro has to get on an airplane and get out of here.
	Head over to DailyWire.com slash subscribe.
	Use promo code BUILDTHEFUTURE. You still have 23 hours left to become a member at 45% off.
	We'd really appreciate you being a member.
	We appreciate our members making it possible for us to do the work that we're doing, including fighting woke Disney.
	So thanks again.
	We'll see you next week.
	We'll give you a fake clap.
	I don't know.
	One of these days.
	Should I just run out the door now?
	Yeah, you should leave.
	Thanks, guys.

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