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Sept. 1, 2022 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:32:28

Daily Wire Backstage: Now With Even More Dystopia!

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	Hey, Michael Knowles here, and do I have a treat for you.
	The latest episode of Daily Wire backstage is right around the corner, and you do not want to miss it.
	Don't miss me, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan, and the God King, Jeremy Boring, as we discuss the latest news and cultural events, all while enjoying some fine whiskey and cigars.
	It is going to be all that and more.
	Take a listen.
	Welcome to the Daily Wire backstage.
	Joining us tonight, Andrew Klavan.
	Accused hospital bomber mouthwash.
	Michael Knowles.
	And I'm very sorry.
	I know it will cause you great harm and pain that will always be with us.
	Ben Shapiro.
	I'm Daily Wire God King, lowercase g, lowercase k, Jeremy Boring.
	Listen, we're doing things completely different around here.
	And we've started adding a members block to every show.
	This show is no exception.
	So you'll be with us for the next 90 minutes.
	And after that, we hope you'll head over to dailywire.com and become a member.
	You'll get 35% off with code PLUS because we are, after all, Daily Wire Plus.
	And we'll be bringing you the members block of Backstage, which is just more of us doing the same thing that we're doing here, only you pay for it.
	And a thousand times better.
	So much advice.
	We do all the best stuff for that part.
	It actually is really important.
	And as we've made this transition to Daily Wire Plus, we're trying to bring more and more value to our paying subscribers there who make it possible for us to do all of this.
	And so the members block is just another way of us giving them a little bit of extra access.
	And we'd love for you to become a member if you are not one already.
	I don't know which one of the two threats to civilization.
	Hey, Jeremy, in fairness, so it's true we've got the hospital bomber and the podcast convention beer adder, but in fairness, according to Joe Biden, all of us are terrorists because statistically the entire Republican Party poses an extreme existential threat to the homeland.
	Well, you make a fine point.
	And undoubtedly, he'll be sending F-15s to remedy the situation at any moment.
	I want to start by talking, Matt, about your situation.
	About my plot.
	How did you think you would get away with it?
	It seems too on the nose, I guess.
	You know, the whole thing is just, it's obviously completely absurd.
	I mean, the story is that after a couple of weeks of not just me, by the way, lots of us talking about the fact that Boston Children's Hospital performs gender surgeries on minors, which which they which they do.
	That is a fact.
	After after talking about this, because what we've been told is that if you even acknowledge this reality, then you are inciting violence, even if you don't say that there is violence.
	That's right.
	And then what do you know?
	Last night there was supposedly a bomb threat and immediately the left realized.
	Realize that it's me and also Libs of TikTok as the others.
	We got together and we put this bomb threat together, I suppose.
	You have her number because of her being doxed recently.
	Libs of TikTok is an Orthodox Jew, by the way, so the Catholic Jewish Alliance rides again.
	There you go.
	Always, always.
	The thing is, of course, even if there was a bomb threat, there's no connection you can draw to the fact that we are simply talking about something that the hospital does, and then somebody called in a bomb threat.
	There is no connection there, and I also don't feel...
	When I first heard about this last night, I didn't go on Twitter and say, I unequivocally condemn bombing hospitals.
	Everyone knows that.
	I don't need to tell you that.
	That's the game the left wants to play.
	You say everyone.
	Again, unless there are brave right-wing patriots in there trying to fight their government, and then it's just F-15 the hell out of that children's hospital.
	That's true.
	But then, of course, it turns out this morning that it's like, was there even a bomb threat in the first place?
	But you said, is there even a bomb threat?
	Why would you doubt?
	Well, because we're hearing it from the media to begin with.
	But, you know, the police apparently showed up.
	The details come out later.
	The first indication is that the media, last night, they're all over this.
	This morning, I woke up, I thought there was going to be headlines all over the place about bomb threats at the Children's Hospital, and there's nothing.
	They're not talking about it anymore.
	So that makes you suspicious.
	And then you realize that the police showed up.
	They cleared the scene in like 30 minutes.
	and then the Postmillennial gets a hold of the police report.
	They put it out there.
	On the police report, it never even says there was a bomb threat, just that there was a call about one, and then they showed up, and there was nothing on the scene, and they left, which makes you wonder, was there even a threat, or did someone at the hospital see that someone left a bag and just call and freak out?
	Was it a hoax?
	This is an absolute true story that we had an employee quit one time and they filed a series of sexual harassment complaints against the company.
	When I say a series, I mean an exhaustive series of sexual harassment complaints.
	And one of them was that one of our employees had been listening to porn on his computer in her presence.
	And I couldn't, my very first thought was that in the long storied history of man's fall and sin, no one has ever used the term listened to pornography.
	That's just a complete non-starter.
	And this is kind of that way, like what is a call about a bomb threat?
	Like that language, no one has ever used this language before.
	Somebody just called the hospital and they said, hey guys.
	Have you heard of this thing called a bomb threat?
	What is it?
	They've rigged the game here.
	It's pretty insidious what they're doing.
	Whether the bomb threat...
	There was no bomb, but whether someone actually called and made the bomb threat...
	And even if they did, there's no way...
	Was that someone on the left?
	It seems more likely to me it's someone on the left.
	The left gains more from a bomb threat than the right does.
	So who's more likely to call it?
	Beyond that, the left has this stupid game.
	Which is that if they can in any way tangentially connect anyone to an act of violence who is prominent on the right, they will do it.
	And meanwhile, they will openly bail people out of prison in the middle of riots and then declare that they are in favor of funding the police, which is what Joe Biden did this week.
	So they're never responsible for any of the violence that they help.
	That's the game, right?
	Because on this particular issue, what the left wants to say is that there are no gender surgeries happening to minors.
	That's unequivocally false.
	It is happening.
	And then if you speak up and say, well, no, I have evidence that it is happening, then they say, well, you're a terrorist.
	You're inciting violence.
	By the way, it's almost...
	You're not allowed to present evidence against them without...
	It's even a little more insidious because what they will say, it's what Mike Anton calls the celebration parallax.
	They will say, hey, we're doing gender surgeries for minors.
	Isn't that great?
	And then we will say, wait, wait, you're doing gender surgeries for minors?
	And they'll say, how dare you suggest that?
	That's a lie.
	That's evil.
	And so they're allowed to celebrate what they're doing.
	The minute you repeat their words back to them with any criticism, you're a conspiracy theorist kook hospital bomber.
	I noticed this, by the way, this week about Lizzo.
	Lizzo is like, I'm a fat, sex-positive woman.
	You're like, you are a fat, sex-positive woman.
	How dare you?
	She's a beautiful, beautiful person.
	Thin.
	You bastard.
	Skinny.
	And just historically beautiful.
	By every classical standard.
	You know, I'll tell you, when I see all these kinds of headlines, it makes me want to crawl right back in my bed.
	And when I crawl back in my bed, where am I going?
	I'm going to Helix, baby.
	I want to invite everyone into my boudoir, okay?
	When you want a bed, you want to sleep in my bed?
	Maybe you do.
	Call me later.
	But I think you want to sleep in a bed.
	No one does.
	No.
	I think you want to sleep in a bed for you.
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	So I want to talk about the second big Daily Wire controversy of the last week, and that is Ben's dangerous...
	Essence.
	Essence.
	My essence.
	His very appearance.
	My spirit.
	At podcast movement.
	I think we have video here of Ben's assault on podcast movement.
	Just terrifying.
	Do you want me to take a picture?
	One, two, three.
	God bless you.
	Thank you.
	All right, Ben.
	Pleasure to be here.
	- No, heroin. - You reached right for him, look at that. - Thank you.
	Thanks for everything you do.
	Thank you so much.
	I appreciate it.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you.
	Unbelievable.
	That was harrowing.
	I just want to say exactly what happened.
	I haven't really spoken about this yet, but I actually do think it's an important story.
	And that's that podcast movement is the premier gathering of podcasters.
	It's an industry conference that happens every year.
	I spoke at it last year.
	It was here in Nashville at the Gaylord.
	And this year, because The Daily Wire is selling more and more of our own shows as we bring more and more of our sales infrastructure in-house, we sponsored Podcast Movement.
	You can go to their website, look under sponsors, there's Daily Wire, and we purchased a booth on the floor at the conference.
	A very good friend of ours, someone who's been very good to the company, who in the podcast space was also having a retirement party that evening, the evening of podcast movement.
	So Ben and I flew into Dallas to attend this guy's retirement party, slap him on the back, thank him for everything that he's done for the Daily Wire over the years.
	While we're there, we stop by the conference that we are sponsoring to visit the booth that we paid for and our employees who have been there all week working and doing the important work of helping us with our ad sales.
	And you can see from the video what happened.
	It's kind of a lightly attended conference.
	There's not like 25,000 people or something, but the people who were there, people came up.
	They wanted to get a picture with Ben.
	We were probably on the floor for all of five minutes, maybe ten.
	We made a loop, walked around.
	Went to the retirement party, came home.
	I wake up the next morning and I see these tweets.
	And I'm going to read the tweets in their entirety because I think that they're so remarkable.
	This was put out by the official Podcast Movement Twitter account.
	Hi folks, we owe you an apology before the sessions kick off for the day.
	Yesterday afternoon, Ben Shapiro briefly visited the PM22 Expo area near the Daily Wire booth.
	Though he was not registered or expected, we take full responsibility for the harm done by his presence.
	Good for them.
	There's no way around it.
	That's right.
	- That's right, at least they didn't shuck off the responsibility. - There's no way around it.
	We agreed to sell The Daily Wire a first-time booth based on the company's large presence in podcasting.
	The weight of that decision is now painfully clear.
	Shapiro is a co-founder, A drop-in, however unlikely, should have been considered a possibility.
	Many in our community are appalled, not just by this incident, but by our choice to take money from the Daily Wire in the first place.
	As a Twitter user said, this was signed off on by a human.
	Yes, during event planning, the dangerous nature of the company's messaging was overlooked.
	Many in our community are appalled, not just by this incident, but by our choice to take money from the Daily Wire in the first place.
	I'm repeating myself.
	The final two tweets.
	Those of you who called this unacceptable are right.
	In nine wonderful years growing and celebrating this medium, podcast movement has made mistakes.
	The pain caused by this one will always stick with us.
	Forever.
	We promise that sponsors will be more carefully considered moving forward.
	Just to clarify, the Daily Wire representatives were scheduled, no Daily Wire representatives were scheduled to appear on panels, and Shapiro remained in the common space and did not have a badge.
	If you have questions, we're here to talk.
	Thank you for reading, and we hope you'll continue to join us from here on out.
	I have to tell you, when I first saw this, I had my usual reaction to everything, which is I cracked up.
	And then, first of all, I started to feel resentful because I haven't received an apology.
	I've been here seven years.
	But the other thing is, it actually isn't as funny as it could be, you know?
	I mean, whenever anybody attacks George Soros, who is actually an evil plotter trying to destroy America...
	Everybody said, well, you're anti-Semitic, you know, because George Soros passed through a kind of fog of Jewry at some point.
	You know, like the incredible shrinking man, he went through this kind of radioactive thing, you know.
	An actual Jew is harming us simply by existing.
	And I have to say, I thought about that for a minute, and I thought, well, what's the answer to his existing?
	Right.
	What's the solution?
	I thought, this actually isn't as funny as I thought it was.
	For the first half hour.
	If Ben's mere presence does harm, then the only way to prevent harm is to ensure that Ben...
	Has no presence.
	The joke's on that because, honestly, I didn't tell anyone, but I did leave some of my aura in the H-Rest.
	So, well after I had left, I still lingered there.
	And I'll be there for years.
	Well, I appreciate that you have a sense of humor about it, but it's not funny.
	It is an actual...
	Rhetorical call to violence?
	Yeah.
	A rhetorical call to violence to say that...
	It's Walsh, and he's a dangerous man.
	If someone's presence causes harm, then the obvious conclusion is that they must not have presence.
	The second thing is, we gave these people our money.
	So, I immediately read these, and I go to DM the president of podcast movement to figure out what the hell, right?
	How to get your money back.
	He's preemptively blocked me on Twitter.
	Wow.
	So I call some of our pals around the movement, people who we've done business with, and ask them to apply some soft pressure.
	I say, listen, I'm going to have to go to war with podcast movement.
	This is an outright act of bigotry.
	That is the actual correct word.
	It is an outright expression of bigotry.
	But I don't want to do that.
	Please apply some soft pressure and try to get these guys to retract this statement and issue an apology and commit to having the dominant podcast conference in the country be inclusive of, The sixth largest podcast company in the world, and one of the ten largest podcasts in the world.
	It seems like maybe we should be present at Podcast Movement.
	So people made a few phone calls, and then I hear later that evening from one of the owners of Podcast Movement.
	And I'm going to tell you what the guy said, and I'm going to say something about myself that I'm actually a little embarrassed about, which is I cried on this phone call.
	My voice started to break.
	I got so emotional.
	I've never gotten emotional over one of these things.
	We get canceled.
	We get called racist.
	We get called whatever, right?
	And, you know, I take it.
	It doesn't bother me.
	Obviously, Ben's got a great perspective on it.
	But here's what happened.
	The guy calls me.
	And I'm just going to hear him out.
	I'm going to hear what he has to say, hoping maybe that this is the resolution we've been looking for.
	And he starts the call.
	He's got a great radio voice.
	All these guys have great radio voices.
	Truly.
	And he says, Jeremy, so-and-so gave me your phone number.
	And I just wanted to let you know that we have a policy here in Podcast Movement that the talent...
	Not appear.
	You'll notice, like, Joe Rogan has never appeared on our stage.
	We don't like for the talent to appear, and so Ben showing up caused some of my other sponsors to be angry because they want to know, why can't our talent be here if Ben can be here?
	And so I just want you to know this statement is a reaction to...
	Other sponsors being angry that their talent didn't get equal treatment.
	That's why I called for his extermination.
	That's right.
	And he said, this was not in any way political.
	And when he said it, I'm embarrassed about it.
	I got so adrenalized and so upset.
	And I said, not in any way political.
	And I just started reading from the tweets, the danger of this company, the dangerous...
	Endless pain.
	The pain that will be with us forever, the harm caused by his very presence.
	You're saying that that isn't political?
	You're saying that that's because he showed up...
	Podcast hosts appear on all of their panels.
	It's just nonsense.
	The whole fracking conference is for podcasters, for people in podcasting.
	I said, you're going to tell me this isn't political?
	You called, you canceled us from the place.
	You sent us an email that said we can't be here anymore.
	No, we did not ban you from the conference.
	Your people are there now.
	Right, because I told them to ignore your stupid email and go to our booth anyway.
	I said, there's no one else in the world who would be subjected to this kind of bigotry, and you get away with it.
	You could not treat a black man this way.
	You could not treat a lesbian woman this way.
	You could not treat anyone on the left in any way.
	Disney would have walked out of the conference, right?
	Like, iHeart and Westwood One, Cumulus, all would have walked out of the conference.
	But you can treat a conservative this way with unadulterated bigotry on the page.
	Anyway, what I told the guy, well, I didn't say all that.
	What I said to the guy was, Take down the tweet, apologize for the tweet, and commit to keeping this conference a neutral place for all podcasters.
	And he said, well, now the problem with that is that just makes it political on the other side.
	And I said, yeah, I can't unstep on the fucking rake for you, pal.
	This is an actual, take it down and apologize.
	I said, well, I'll have to talk to my people about whether or not we can do that.
	So, of course, the day goes by.
	It doesn't get taken down.
	The next day goes by.
	It doesn't get taken down.
	Then I get a call from the guy, and he says, hey, we're going to have a meeting.
	The conference is over now, and we're going to have a meeting on Tuesday.
	Everybody needs Monday off because we put in a hard week's work, you know, showing prejudice to Jews.
	Hard day's work.
	Yeah.
	He said, but I'm going to get the team together and see if maybe we can make a new policy.
	He did offer me my money back.
	We had paid $30,000 or something like that for the booth.
	No, I told him to keep the money.
	Really?
	Yeah, I said, I don't care about the $30,000.
	I care about my $200 million business that you injured.
	I care about my 250 employees whose jobs you put at risk by using your leadership position in the podcast movement to communicate that our very existence causes harm and that the words that we speak are dangerous and cause pain that will never cease.
	That's what I'm concerned about.
	Fracking apologize.
	So he calls me after the conference is over, says, "We're gonna get together, craft a policy, Maybe we'd like Ben to be on stage with somebody from the left next year.
	Maybe we'd like you guys to help us with the policy.
	Or maybe we'll decide in our policy just not to have politics from either side going forward.
	But one way or the other, we'll let the new policy be our statement.
	Great.
	And I said, well, I'd love to work on that policy if you take down the offensive tweets that call for the annihilation, essentially, the rhetorical annihilation of one of my close friends and business partners and commit to not doing that in the future.
	I said, and while you're at it, make sure that your apology is just as groveling as the apology that you put out for taking our money.
	Because...
	A bigot who commits bigotry really should grovel a little bit for all of our forgiveness.
	That's a thing that actually causes harm, that actually causes pain.
	So he says, well, I'm going to call you on Tuesday if you'll hold off on hitting us until Tuesday.
	And I said, I will.
	I will let you have your meeting.
	Don't worry.
	Backstage is Wednesday.
	That's right.
	Backstage is Wednesday.
	So yesterday at 6 p.m.
	our time, I get a call from the assistant of the man who preemptively blocked me on Twitter, who's the president of podcast movement.
	And she says, you know, the president of the movement, we'd really like to talk to you.
	Could you get back to us?
	So we returned the call probably within a half hour.
	They got back to us today and said, very much would like to talk to you.
	Our first availability is September 14th at 3 p.m.
	Stop it.
	September, two weeks from now at 3 p.m., I can finally get on the phone with a guy who preemptively blocked me after apologizing for taking my money and saying that the existence, the mere presence of my friend and business partner causes harm.
	This is...
	Again, I've said it before, this is a kind of bigotry that could not be expressed against any other kind of person that exists in our country today.
	And there will be essentially no consequences for these sons of bitches.
	They'll blow us off, they'll...
	They'll talk to us in a few weeks and maybe they'll write a policy.
	The tweets will stay up.
	There'll be no backlash.
	People will celebrate.
	They've already lied to you when they said it's not political.
	Lied to our face saying it's not political.
	And I'd like to point out here that, again, there are a lot of podcast companies there, and they are all supposedly in favor of things like open debate and talking about things.
	And I can guarantee you this.
	If they had said about, say, John Lovett at Pod Save America and come and he visited the crooked booth, and they had said that his very presence caused harm and therefore he was banned, I would have been openly mocking them, as would you.
	Of course.
	Online.
	We would have gone to podcast movement.
	We would have threatened to take our booth off the floor for that sort of thing.
	We would have said that we would not co-sponsor the event.
	As far as I'm aware, zero companies, I think maybe there's one guy, Dan Granger, from Oxford Road, who put out a statement saying this is unacceptable and ridiculous.
	Not a single other company, including companies that make tens of millions of dollars off my show personally.
	I'm the one whose essence is threatening.
	Our own representatives in this space who have made tens of millions of dollars could not be bothered To validate our right...
	To publicly validate our right to exist.
	Plus, when they do this to people like...
	What's that guy?
	Alex...
	What's his name?
	Alex Jones.
	Alex Jones.
	The guy's at least a loon.
	Whereas you're pretty much a conservative...
	But again, this isn't based on anything Ben said.
	Right.
	This is correct.
	I was there.
	I didn't have a conversation with anyone about politics.
	But even beyond that...
	But you represent ideas and all that.
	For sure.
	Those ideas are...
	Central to American thought.
	They always have been.
	You've never come on and said anything that made the rest of us move away.
	Your presence, of course, has.
	As I've said before, I'm not sure.
	It's bewildering to me on a personal level because you guys all know me.
	You've known me for years.
	The gap between me and the perception of me as highly dangerous human and then me in reality is maybe the greatest gap between supposed dangerous human and person in reality that I've ever conceived of.
	It's the fact that people listen to the show, and people watch what we do, and that's what scares the hell out of them.
	And so what they are actively attempting to do now is cast an entire side of the political aisle out of the movement.
	Which is central to this.
	There's not solidarity.
	This is so indicative.
	There were some people online who aren't part of the podcast movement space.
	Ryan Grimm at The Intercept, who's on the left, or Yashar Lee, who's on the left, who came out and said this is insane and ridiculous.
	Of course.
	But And good on them.
	Right.
	Good for them.
	In the podcast space, where are you guys?
	Where are you guys?
	So, I'll say this.
	The day before...
	Actually, not the day.
	The day this happened, we had a meeting with one of the companies that we do business with.
	And somebody at that company said, you know what I'd love to do?
	I would love to broker a joint show between you and the people of Pod Save America.
	And I said to them, that's never going to happen.
	And the reason it's never going to happen is because these people do not want us to be a company that is on the air.
	They do not want our company to exist.
	I mean, Dan Pfeiffer from Pod Save America literally went on MSNBC and said that we should be quashed because we have too much reach.
	I've said many times, I say on my show routinely, I say, if you want to know, people always ask, how do I discern the fact in an opinion podcast from the opinion?
	And what I always say, literally every time, is listen to my show, listen to Pod Save America, the stuff where we're saying the same stuff, that's the core of facts.
	Everything else is an opinion takeaway.
	That's at least a good rule of thumb.
	Okay?
	So listen to their show.
	They would never in a million years say that anyone should listen to the show.
	In fact, they would say that the show should come off the air.
	And so the whole predicate of us having a functioning republic is the idea that there are a bunch of people I disagree with who should be allowed at things like a neutral free speech space like podcast movement.
	And literally no one at that event filled with these companies that do free speech for a living.
	No one, except for Dan, literally no one said a public word to chastise podcast movement for this.
	That's insane to me.
	But this is the key.
	They take down libs of TikTok for basically putting the left on video.
	It's just holding a mirror up to what they are.
	It's the mirror that does it.
	When you're a vampire, you don't want to look at them.
	But you hit the nail on the head, Jeremy, which is that they're going after Ben because Ben is the big guy.
	He's the big dog in the space and you have giant reach, Ben.
	And so this is what really spooks me about this.
	You have giant reach because you are as mainstream as it gets.
	So when they say Ben Shapiro is too far, I say, you ever listen to my show?
	Are you kidding me?
	Ben Shapiro is as mainstream as it gets.
	So what they're really saying is...
	The entire right is gone.
	This is when Joe Biden says, listen, some Republicans are good Republicans, but the MAGA Republicans, by which he means statistically everyone, other than Bill Kristol and his four friends who have tea together, 100% statistically of the Republican Party is in a sort of sometimes kind of way MAGA Republicans.
	But am I saying get rid of half the country?
	Yeah.
	Here's what really worries me.
	The combination of things happening.
	Because on one hand, there's an escalation of it's not just your opinions that are harmful, it's your very presence.
	And then we're being told that all MAGA Republicans, which is most Republicans, are extremists and a threat to democracy.
	Voting is a threat to democracy.
	We're being told that if conservatives simply speak and present arguments or actually present facts that were terrorists, stochastic terrorists is the phrase now that they like to use.
	Libs at TikTok, as you point out, she got kicked off of Twitter They didn't even give her a reason.
	They just said, "You're gone." And then on top of that, so that's what's happening.
	And then also there's another escalation in just the total lack of accountability on the left.
	And we're sort of used to that, but it's, it seemed to be worse now than it's ever been, where there's just, they can do whatever they want.
	I mean, I've been having this back and forth with this person on Twitter who's been like openly organizing this drug running operation to minor children with hormone drugs.
	Committing felonies.
	Committing felonies.
	Breaking probably 50 laws all at once.
	And you contact the DEA. You contact everyone.
	Nobody cares.
	There's no accountability.
	All that's happening at once.
	And then what does that do?
	First of all, it creates an environment where they're basically setting the stage here to start...
	Essentially rounding people up and, I don't know, throwing them in prison.
	But then on the right, it also has this radicalizing effect because people get desperate.
	I mean, they're accusing us of being radicals and being dangerous, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
	It's actually what they want, and they're going to create that because people, when they look around and see there's no accountability, these people can do whatever they want to us, the rules don't apply to them.
	It is radicalizing.
	It makes people desperate, and desperate people do become dangerous.
	And it's the endgame of something that's been going on for 50, 60 years, though, this idea that they are the people who determine what virtue is, who determine what racism is.
	I mean, they call us racist not because we're racist.
	I don't actually know that many racists, but they call us because we disagree with them.
	And so if they set the standard, our ideas are the non-racist ideas.
	If you disagree with us, then ultimately we are going to be basically demonized.
	Absolutely.
	A lot of people, one of the things I really loved about this whole episode, the only thing I really loved about this whole episode is that on Twitter, I must have read 200 reactions that were, I guess they're going to start their own podcast movement now.
	Will they call it Jeremy's Podcast Conference?
	Like all of this kind of...
	Like, we've established a reputation at The Daily Wire as we don't take this stuff lying down, and we don't just complain about it, we challenge.
	And so, you know, a lot of people want to know what we're going to do.
	It took a minute to come up with IHateHarrys.com.
	Like, Jeremy's Razors wasn't like an overnight thing, right?
	And we're not going to tell you.
	We're just going to do it.
	We're not going to tell you.
	We're just going to do it.
	But I will say this.
	we will not allow podcast movement to continue to present itself as a neutral place.
	If you're a conservative podcaster, they don't want you there.
	If you're a conservative podcaster and you're with any of the major podcasting companies, they don't care to defend you.
	They want to make money off of your success while your political foes try to destroy you.
	And then they will watch you die when the left finally does land the kill shot.
	And then they will shake their heads, find another conservative talent, and go extract money quietly from them.
	It's even worse.
	That's the game.
	That's the game.
	It's the minute, not that they step out of line, this conservative who goes, it's the minute they get anywhere near as big as Ben Shapiro.
	The minute you're a little too successful, that's when you're out.
	It's also a sign of weakness.
	Of course it is.
	If you guys watch Netflix, I mean, Netflix fired a lot of its social justice warriors.
	But if you watch the stuff that they say is their top shows, for a while after George Floyd, it was all Black Lives Matter movies.
	Yep.
	And I was sitting there going, like, nobody's watching this.
	They're telling us this is number one, two, three.
	Then slowly it just vanished.
	It just disappeared.
	And I just thought, like, yeah, because, you know, it's basically a...
	It's still basically a center-right country.
	Black people are as conservative as anybody else.
	The...
	Hispanic group, whatever they want to call them now, they're drifting over to the right.
	They're losing.
	They are losing the people who have supported them all these years because they're saying, you know, this doesn't represent me.
	It doesn't represent most people to have their kids told that they're the wrong state.
	But they might be a center-right country, but our vote doesn't really count culturally.
	Whereas if you're in a protected class, your vote counts times 10, which is another important point here about this, about the podcast conference, is that from what I saw, There certainly was, it wasn't like they were getting, because Ben showed up, they were getting all this pressure publicly, people were coming out and blasting them.
	I saw one person, it was a trans person, right, I think.
	It was a woman.
	In the tweet it said, uterus.
	It was a trans man, I think.
	I had a uterus, and so I call that person a woman.
	You're a monster.
	As I learned from your film.
	So one person that we could tell complained.
	They're in a protected class.
	They have the LGBT thing that they can claim.
	And because of that one complaint, that's the power that they wield.
	At the time that podcast movement put out their groveling, bigoted, bullshit tweet, I believe that that original post had 15 likes.
	And I said to the guy on that first phone call, you chose, you made a calculated risk assessment and concluded that the higher risk to your company was to get on the wrong side of a person with 15 likes, as opposed to expressing bigotry to a company you made a calculated risk assessment and concluded that the higher risk to your company You made that calculation, and he probably isn't wrong.
	That is where the great risk is, the left, because they are so totalitarian, because they're so unforgiving, because they're so tyrannical right now, But is that a real risk?
	I mean, what if people just stood up to them?
	Well, then it would go away.
	It's like anything else, right?
	That would be the end of it.
	Which is why the fact that people who actually profit off of us couldn't be bothered To acknowledge our right to exist is the most deeply offensive part of the whole thing.
	And I will turn this into a promo because it is a direct attack on our business.
	I mean, we derive a great percentage of our revenue from ads on our shows.
	That's a big part of how we stay in business.
	And this is a direct attack on our ability to function in the podcast ad space.
	And that's another reason to be grateful to our Daily Wire Plus subscribers.
	Please go over to Daily Wire Plus.
	Become a subscriber if you're not one.
	If you are one, please stick with us.
	That is the only safe revenue that we have as a company, is the people who want to be in this fight with us.
	That's why we're adding things like members block.
	That's why we have been bringing all access back online now that we're recovering from those technological deficits that we've had.
	And there are still a few wrinkles, but it's all, you know, we're moving forward and trying to make this community part of the Daily Wire Plus really come to the fore.
	Because at the end of the day, it's the only thing we've got.
	Even the people who make eight figures a year off of us will not acknowledge publicly our right to exist.
	This is why the right...
	The right ignoring the culture for so long has gotten us into this position.
	That's right.
	Always talking politics, but this is pure culture.
	It's pure culture that he feels that a 15-like tweet from some, you know, protected class person is more dangerous than losing your audience, losing our audience.
	It's an amazing thing what happens to the mind when a narrative takes over, when a It's about the right being nice.
	We don't want to engage in tactics.
	We don't want to push.
	We want to be cordial.
	It's a free market.
	They can say what they want.
	Here's the thing.
	If you guys don't push back, then it's asymmetric.
	It's completely asymmetric.
	It means that they do, in a certain sense, have more to fear Until we existed.
	Until Daily Wire existed.
	They did have more to fear from the idiot with 15 followers on Twitter than they did from multi-million dollar or even billion dollar conservative companies.
	Because the conservative companies would just sit back there and they would take it.
	They would sit there and they'd say, okay, well, you know, we exist at your sufferance.
	We understand we exist at your sufferance.
	And so, you know, we understand what you're doing.
	We get it.
	We get that they're mean and they're nasty.
	We're over here.
	We're nice.
	But you know what?
	Screw that.
	Because the reality is that we're not nice anymore.
	If you're going to seek to destroy us, then we are not going to sit here and be destroyed.
	That is not something that...
	I do not acquiesce to the erasure of my own existence.
	That is not something to...
	I'm sorry, but I like existing.
	I'm addicted to breathing.
	There are certain things I'm not willing to do.
	And not existing is one of the things I am not willing to do.
	But we don't even have to fight at their level.
	All we have to do is speak out without fear because the things that we say make sense to most people.
	And I think that that's the whole problem.
	Cowards need to be punished.
	What's that?
	Cowards need to be punished.
	And we need to mobilize, too.
	The good news, I think, is that people on the right are hungry to mobilize and to get out.
	I hear this from people all the time.
	They're ready.
	They want to get out.
	They want to do something.
	That's one of the reasons why they love the Daily Wire so much is that we are out there doing things.
	So that's the good news.
	But they need an outlet.
	That's one thing.
	The left also, they own the culture.
	They're much, much better at mobilizing.
	If they're upset about something, they're going to show up.
	And you know they are.
	The right is much more reticent to do that.
	I mean, we could show up at the podcast movement conference next year and have 10,000 people picketing or whatever.
	Shh.
	We agreed not to talk about it.
	Oh, sorry.
	Hypothetically, I'm just saying, you don't want your thing to be political.
	We can make it real political.
	Make it more political than you ever.
	We could do that.
	So it's just, there is that hunger to really do that.
	I agree.
	For a long time, there was a strain on the right where the right wanted to lose.
	If we were going to lose, we were going to lose with dignity.
	We're going to step back and lose with dignity.
	And I think what you realize from that tweet thread from Podcast Movement, what you realize from them saying, yeah, Ben Shapiro shouldn't exist, That's not very dignified.
	And so I have no interest in losing.
	I don't want to lose in an undignified way.
	You know what I'd rather do?
	I'd rather win with dignity and honor and winning.
	And that's why The Daily Wire is committed to building alternatives.
	Because at the end of the day, one of the reasons that the right has gone along with this is because what else are you going to do?
	You still need a razor.
	You know what?
	Now you don't.
	If you're still shaving with a razor from a razor company that hates you, you're doing that by choice.
	You're not doing that because you don't have alternatives.
	If you're still getting your news from news companies that hate you, you're doing that.
	You've decided to do it.
	You have an alternative.
	We and others are providing.
	That's why we're launching into this kids' content so that you don't have to put your kids in front of what the left wants to serve them up.
	That's why we're launching entertainment.
	Who knows what we'll launch next?
	I think we're good to go.
	The economic sphere needs to be a place.
	You don't need to have to think about the politics of your toilet paper company.
	If you do, it is a real sign that your country is in trouble.
	Until we have Jeremy's toilet paper company, or Dan Bongino's toilet paper company.
	I'll look forward to that, actually.
	Bongino four-ply.
	But until we have these things, we can't create the conditions for the left.
	I can express a lot of hostility of Jeremy's toilet paper company.
	Well, folks, you know, this has all been rather a downer, and I have some even worse news for you.
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	We pay hundreds of dollars per year to protect our homes, our cars, even our phones.
	Too many of us aren't taking steps to protect our families and finances.
	Mortgage payments, private student loans, other types of debt don't just disappear.
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	So we've talked a lot about the threat that we represent, obviously, in the world, but we haven't talked about the great savior of the country against threats like ours, and that's, of course, our fearless and absolutely still cogent president, Joe Biden, who has declared us all to be renegades and scoundrels and to be bombed from the air.
	Which is like, we're semi-fascist, right?
	Which is like a quasi-Nazi.
	Nazi-adjacent.
	Quasi-Nazi has a ring to it.
	Quasi-Nazi, yeah.
	So he says that we are a threat to democracy itself.
	We're also a threat to the future of human existence.
	He said that because of climate change, of course, which makes us somewhere between Hitler and Thanos, which is exciting stuff.
	I mean, the phenomenal cosmic power we wield is just beyond compare.
	I think Gina Carano was actually canceled by Disney for comparing Thanos to Hitler.
	I don't remember all that.
	I don't remember all that.
	In any case, there was something that struck me when I heard Joe Biden suggesting that those who oppose him are semi-fascist.
	And that is, these people, people are so ignorant.
	And when they hear fascist, they just hear Hitler.
	And when they think of Hitler, they just think of the worst thing that Hitler did, the Holocaust.
	And so what Joe Biden means when he says semi-fascist is that you want to perform Holocaust or something.
	But when you actually think about the history of fascism, typically fascism begins with the usurpation of massive centralized power and executive authority free of legislative oversight.
	So I started thinking, can I think of any recent examples of massive usurpations of executive authority?
	Unconstitutional usurpations.
	You know, things where people say, I don't actually have the power to do that, and then they just go ahead and do it.
	Like, say, I don't know, $500 billion in student loan relief that you said one year ago you did not have the power to do.
	The single largest expenditure by the executive branch via an executive order in the history of the United States.
	Right.
	I mean, it would be, I could see why Joe Biden might forget about that since it was four days ago.
	He tried to ride a bicycle since then.
	That's true.
	He does have the memory of a guppy.
	But the fact that we are all supposed to believe that true fascism lies in resisting the centralizing impulse of a federal government that has over the course of the last year and a half declared on an emergency basis that you all have to vax, that you don't have to pay your mortgage, you won't be evicted, and that we can get rid of all of your that you don't have to pay your mortgage, you won't be evicted, and You can do all of that on the back of emergency declarations.
	It's so historically ignorant.
	And he counts on our ignorance to suggest that it's fascist to oppose that.
	When again, the very nature of fascism, what people don't understand if you actually want to look at the history of Hitler, centralized power in a dictatorship existed pre-Hitler in Germany.
	By 1930, Heinrich Brüning, who was the Chancellor of Germany at the time, was operating under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which is an emergency declaration making the legislature essentially an adjunct to all policymaking in the Reich.
	And then it was just a matter of time until the really bad guy took over using that authority.
	But that's been the pattern in the United States since Barack Obama said in 2014 he was just going to act with the pen and the phone if he didn't control Congress.
	So, if you're looking at threats to the American system and threats to democracy, you might want to start with the doddering old fool in the White House who can't string together two sentences out of his doddering stupid face hole.
	Did you see the op-ed in the New York Times by the Harvard and Yale law professors calling for the end of the Constitution for the simple reason that it got in the way of their brilliant ideas?
	And they said, we've got to get rid of judicial review.
	Because we've got to be able to pass laws permitting abortion and controlling energy without this stupid constitution stuff getting in our way.
	That would be one thing if it was a 17-year-old saying, I don't want daddy telling me what I can't do.
	But a Harvard and a Yale professor, that's just...
	I gotta say, my favorite thing about that is that they have controlled the direction of the judiciary since 1960, basically.
	And a string of uninterrupted successes from the left in the judiciary for 50-odd years.
	They lose one decision in Dobbs.
	And they're like, that's it.
	It's on the judicial review.
	Obliterate the institution.
	It's over, guys.
	Since when is the Constitution getting in their way anyway?
	Exactly.
	Yeah, if only...
	But it could, it could.
	But you know, when Biden said that, and when Corrine Jean-Pierre at the White House doubled down on it, that we're all fascists, my first instinct was, I would bet my life savings that neither Corrine Jean-Pierre nor Joe Biden have, forget about read, they've never even heard of the doctrine of fascism, the Mussolini essay they've never even heard of the doctrine of fascism, the Mussolini essay that defines what I studied history in Italian at college.
	The one thing I think you have to study if you do both of those things is you have to study what fascism is.
	They've certainly never read that.
	They've never read the early fascist manifesto by the founder of futurism actually wrote it.
	They've never heard They don't have any idea what fascism means.
	Fascism to them, and George Orwell made this point, fascism to the left means something I don't like.
	It's whatever I don't like.
	And if I don't like it, then you are, forget Mussolini, you're Hitler, and you're a Nazi, and we're going to treat you like we would treat Hitler and the Nazis, and you have absolutely no right to speak in our public square.
	That's all it means.
	So they'll change the definition like they change the definition of every other word.
	They change the definition of the word woman.
	All it means is we are going to shut you up and we are going to push you out of politics.
	And then they say, well, you know, what we want is unity.
	Tomorrow we're going to get Joe Biden's big unity speech on the heels of probably half the country of semi-fascists.
	He literally says that.
	He's going to speak to the soul of the country.
	Well, first of all, I think his soul left his body quite a while ago.
	So it's going to be amazing to watch.
	He is proof positive that resurrection does exist.
	Because he's been dead for quite a while and yet he's still ambulatory in some way.
	They do want unity.
	I actually don't think that that's...
	Right, through purges.
	Right.
	We have right now, ideologically, this vast canyon that separates us, and it's not bridgeable.
	There's no compromise area between it.
	So the only way to have unity is for one side to either just throw itself into the canyon and die, or to join the other side.
	So that's the kind of unity they want, is just we're obliterated by either assuming ourselves with them or just...
	I had a sad thought yesterday.
	Gorbachev died, the last leader of the Soviet Union.
	He was 91.
	And I had this thought.
	I said, Gorbachev, what can we learn from history?
	I said, there's some parallels here.
	You've got a very old dead guy.
	So, okay, Soviet Union.
	I'm thinking of my own president right now.
	Okay.
	And it came to prominence in politics in the 70s.
	Okay.
	Palled around with actual communists.
	Okay.
	This is right now checking out Gorby and Biden.
	They presided over the decline and fall of their nations and empires.
	Okay.
	I'm seeing a whole lot of parallels here, except for one.
	Gorbachev tried to make his country freer and more transparent.
	And he was sort of likable in Friends with Ronald Reagan.
	I thought, gosh, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, how on earth do we, the people who won the Cold War, how do we find ourselves in this really awful political...
	Do we learn nothing from the Cold War?
	It is really interesting that we defeat people and then take on their characteristics.
	It's really interesting that we start out.
	I mean, the Holocaust started with euthanasia.
	You know, it started with killing off people who were crippled or mentally ill and all this stuff.
	And now we have actual headlines that say, you know, we've gotten rid of a syndrome through abortion.
	You go like, good job.
	They're doing it in Canada.
	They're pushing right now.
	3.3% of deaths in Canada in 2021 were euthanasia, doctor-assisted suicide.
	And there's a bill...
	3.3%?
	3.3% of all deaths.
	By the way, it's going to spike way higher than that.
	And right now, in October, they're pushing for a bill that will legalize euthanasia, euthanasia, it's assisted suicide, for children.
	And what children are they going to kill?
	You know they're going to kill the weakest children, the ones with problems, the ones with disabilities.
	You just think...
	And it's all going to be done with a smile, happy, happy.
	And they're suggesting it, too.
	There was a veteran that called the VA, and they suggested to him, oh, have you thought about euthanasia?
	They're actually promoting it as an option if you're feeling down.
	This is the thing that I think people forget, and this was Jonah Goldberg's point in liberal fascism, which is that nobody actually shows up at the front door making the case for fascism wearing the shiny boots.
	The shiny boots come later.
	Yeah.
	It starts with all the happy promises and all the wonderful things we can do with you.
	We can make your life easier.
	If you just get rid of these moral standards here and these moral standards there, your life becomes significantly more convenient.
	If you don't have to listen to that guy on the other side of the aisle, your life is just going to be richer and better.
	All this stuff is messy.
	It makes it a lot less messy if you just give us the power to do whatever we want.
	I'm going to push back on you just slightly.
	I don't think it's if you give up this moral standard and that moral standard.
	I think it's if you accept this moral standard, it always comes in the guise of a higher morality.
	It's actually wrong of you to want what you want that veteran to suffer.
	You want children born with Down syndrome to have to live?
	Yeah.
	Imagine how hard it is for them to be alive.
	And their families to take care of.
	And their families to take care of.
	They frame all of this in a way that makes it seem like a virtuous thing.
	You're going to let Ben Shapiro, who disagrees with us, you're going to let him speak and cause emotional distress.
	Or you're going to let kids with gender dysphoria kill themselves.
	Yeah, you just want...
	You just want to erase trans people.
	It always comes back to the idea of having a hierarchy of values.
	What do you mean that homosexual marriage isn't the same thing as a straight marriage?
	What do you mean when you say being fat It's less attractive than being fit.
	What are you talking about?
	That you should have some kind of value system where you value things, natural things, more than others.
	And I think that is actually an elimination of moral difference.
	And I actually do think it comes out of the idea that we can all get together, we can all have our own religions, and they're all going to be equal.
	It's one thing to be religiously tolerant, which of course I'm for, but it's another thing to say that No religion is better than any other, which is absurd.
	It's just absurd.
	And people actually make the argument.
	It's really wild.
	How can you say that one religion is true when there are so many religions?
	It's like, easy.
	One is true, and the others aren't.
	It's like, There's no answers to the fat problem.
	How can only one be true?
	Exactly, exactly.
	So I think there is this kind of elimination of values, and it's put in terms of the fact that if you hold to values, people suffer, which is true.
	I mean, I think it's a very unpleasant thing to be fat.
	I think that people who are fat feel a tremendous amount of shame.
	They blame the shame on us, but it's there to begin with, and it is.
	But it's incredibly unhealthy and incredibly shameful and shaming, self-shaming, and an incredibly bad way to live.
	But just to say it is what makes you an evil person.
	To say that there's a hierarchy of values is what makes you an evil person.
	Well, I think that one of the things that they've done, and I'm thinking this through in real time, is they've made the core of human behavior the emotion you feel in response to the human behavior.
	That's the thing that we're supposed to focus in on.
	And so that means that the behavior is really secondary.
	So if you feel pain because you're overweight...
	And then it really doesn't matter whether you're overweight because you choose not to stop eating or whether you're overweight because you have an actual genetic anomaly that makes you fat.
	The pain is the same.
	And so therefore we cannot tell people that they should exercise because if we do that, well, you're ignoring the pain.
	And so the core is always the emotional response.
	It's not the behavior that leads to the emotional response.
	And so that's the difference in kind between how I think religious people who see cause and effect in the world and people who don't believe in cause and effect and only care about the emotional state in which you find yourself.
	That's just two different ways of viewing the world.
	And if all you're focused in on is the emotional state of people, At all times, regardless of the behavior that leads to the emotional state, number one, you're depriving people of their agency because the truth is that you can, in fact, in many cases, control your emotional state.
	That's what it's called to become an adult.
	Discipline, patience.
	Yes.
	The Bible very rarely, the Old Testament, very rarely commands emotion.
	It commands action.
	But there are certain times where the Bible literally commands emotion.
	It says that you have to love God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your means.
	So what does it mean when God says, I want you to love God?
	Or when God says, I want you to love your neighbor as your child, what is that actually supposed to mean?
	How can you command somebody else to feel something?
	So the left says, you can't.
	There's no way, because you can't change your emotional state.
	Nothing you do can change your emotional state.
	And what religion typically teaches is, fake it until you make it, essentially.
	Treat other people as you would wish to be treated, and you will end up loving your neighbor as yourself.
	That's the basic idea.
	It's an absolute certainty that if you are sitting in a movie theater watching a scary movie, and you become afraid, If you turn on the light and take your eyes off of the screen, your fear will mitigate.
	Because emotions are controlled by externalities, it doesn't mean that every emotion...
	This is this whole cause and effect, and we've talked about it on this show before, that some things can start in the physical and then infect the spiritual, and some things can start in the spiritual and then manifest in the physical.
	That door swings both ways.
	So you can have fear that isn't caused by an externality, certainly.
	But in many, many, many instances, your fear can be caused by the externality.
	And you can have irrational feelings.
	Of course you can.
	Of course you've observed.
	I think you can.
	Fear at a scary movie is actually an irrational feeling.
	Of course it is.
	You volunteered, and that's what you're there for.
	But it's also true that as you get, I think, a little wiser, you start to look at your life and think, well, I feel this way, but that's not really the state.
	That's the entire basis of the only area of psychology that has actually been proved over time to be effective, cognitive behavioral therapy.
	Yes, yes.
	Cognitive behavioral therapy is about the idea that you have an emotional response to a stimulus, and maybe that's an irrational and unreasonable response to the stimulus, and you need to change the way that you're responding to the stimulus.
	That idea in itself is offensive to the left, and so what that means, again, because they focus in on the emotional state, this is how you end up with, the right will say things like, wait, you took out a debt, and now you're pissed off because you can't pay back your college debt.
	That's your fault.
	You shouldn't have taken out a college debt that you couldn't pay.
	And maybe somebody was predatory and that person should be punished.
	But if you take out a debt and you can't pay the debt, that's not my fault.
	That's not somebody else's fault.
	By the way, they keep saying that the student loans are predatory, but they offer absolutely no solutions for how to get rid of them.
	Only forgive them and keep the system.
	On the emotion thing, the piece that we're missing, because...
	Yeah, they say emotion matters the most.
	That takes primacy.
	If they applied that across the board, it would still be bad, but it wouldn't be nearly as bad as the actual situation, which is that what they're really saying is that emotions have primacy for some people.
	Yeah.
	But then if you're in the out group, your emotions don't matter at all.
	They don't give a damn how you feel.
	You could be in the utter depths of despair and it doesn't matter.
	That's why I ask this question all the time about the women's locker room debate.
	And they tell us, well, the trans person, how are they going to feel if they're not allowed in the women's locker room?
	And then usually the response from the right is about, well, what about safety?
	I always respond, well, what about the emotions of the women?
	What about how they feel?
	And what you find is that, oh, their emotions don't matter at all.
	Who cares about them?
	They just have a phobia.
	Right, exactly.
	Which makes you think that maybe in the end it's all just, as always, a power game for the left.
	The emotional veneer is all just...
	The jackboot is behind the smiley face, right?
	The smiley face is the pitch.
	The jackboot is what's really...
	We almost sometimes make it sound like they have an overabundance of empathy in the Which is what they want us to think.
	Right.
	But that's not it at all.
	I think they don't care.
	This is not empathy.
	This is, I think, power.
	And the power game obscures the fact that they are erasing truths, central truths, about human nature that have been handed down to us through long centuries of wisdom.
	What we're really talking about is we're talking about the flesh and the spirit.
	You're talking about the fact that your flesh feels things that your spirit knows are false.
	You know, your flesh feels envy and then you sit and think about it and think, well, do I really want my friend to fail?
	No, I actually want my friend to succeed.
	My flesh maybe has this kind of, you know, instant response.
	Do I really want to sleep with that woman and destroy my family?
	Actually, no, I actually don't.
	But my flesh feels that.
	And this is where the cultural echo chamber that you're talking about really matters so unbelievably much because what they do is a path to unhappiness.
	It is a path to misery for millions and millions of people.
	I cut a video this week about Demi Lovato's new album.
	This is not my area of expertise.
	I'm not a Demi Lovato fanatic.
	I don't listen to this kind of music.
	As I said on the show, it's not that I'm a cultural snob.
	It's just I don't like sh**.
	But the real problem is that if you actually listen to her album, it's actually quite sad.
	I actually feel terrible for this person.
	Like, really feel terrible for this person.
	This is a person who alleges that she was raped at the age of 15 when she was on a set.
	Her parents were divorced when she was 2.
	She was put on TV at the age of 10.
	She was being dated when she was 17 by a man of 29.
	And she was in rehab by the time she was 17 years old.
	This is a person who has led an absolutely misery-ridden life.
	And her entire new album, which is titled, unsurprisingly, Holy F., Right?
	And the cover is a picture of her in bondage gear on a cross-shaped couch, right?
	It's her just taking Madonna's routine.
	But the whole idea of the album, she sings about being victimized when she's 17.
	She has a whole song about her being 17, how terrible that felt.
	And she has these songs about how it's terrible that she's a drug addict and she's had to fight that.
	But the entire album...
	Is geared at the evils of traditional morality, the one thing that she's never actually tried or been trained in or actually involved herself in, to the plaudits of the media.
	And so the point that I was making is that what the media do, they churn out misery, and then in order to alleviate your misery, they reward you for becoming a messenger of the misery.
	You attack the system you've never actually tried as the thing that's held you back.
	And the thing that actually has held you back is you champion it We will reward you.
	This is a form of porn that the New York Times op-ed page has now brought to absolute perfection, which is usually a woman, but sometimes a man, but it says, my life has been an absolute misery, and I defend to the death my right to have been this miserable.
	I mean, you know, and we see it, our pal Bridget Phetasy, who wrote a very touching piece about...
	She was sorry for being a slut.
	But even in that piece, she says, I'm not saying we should go back to Victorian era or the 1950s.
	I would just tell my younger self, if you cherish yourself, then someone will cherish you.
	I thought, well, that's what a woman in the 1950s would have told her daughter, too.
	So maybe they were just right.
	This is the power of practice, though.
	And it's why I think we've got to be a little careful about this neutral language.
	Because...
	Some things can't be neutral.
	The great example is you call the girl she or you call the girl he.
	That is not neutral.
	There's no neutral ground.
	You're making a moral claim there.
	And there's this idea.
	It's lex irandi, lex credendi.
	The way that we worship, the way that we...
	You're French.
	It's classic Arabic.
	So the way that we worship affects the way that we believe.
	And so these people who have been just trained in these rituals of leftism, liberalism, whatever you want to call it, they're trained in it.
	They know that it's making them miserable.
	The practices that have defined their lives have ruined their lives.
	They'll even admit it in a way in the paper, but they can't change the belief.
	That is the power because we are bodies in many ways.
	And so the things that we do every single day, our behaviors every day, are going to affect the way that we believe.
	We don't always succeed when we make totally...
	We rarely succeed, actually, when we make totally rational arguments for why our way is better than their way.
	It doesn't matter.
	They've got to do it.
	We also don't realize the tribal nature of some of this stuff.
	My favorite op-ed writer right now is this woman in the Times named Michelle Goldberg.
	Because Michelle Goldberg is constantly discovering that everything she believes is wrong.
	And then by the end of the column saying, oh, but it's all true.
	So she suddenly finds out that maybe the sexual revolution wasn't such a good thing.
	But...
	Yeah, but it was great.
	The other day she wrote one of my favorite of her columns, which is, Art is Now Boring.
	That's absolutely true.
	We've hit an absolute low in the culture.
	In my lifetime, this is the lowest the culture has been because of woke, because their values aren't conducive to art, because they're not conducive to life.
	But she starts quoting Karl Marx.
	You know, this is all explained, and I thought, like, yeah, okay, I know the rest of this column.
	Yeah.
	My favorite recent piece in the New York Times, as long as we're doing favorite recent pieces in the New York Times, there's a woman who wrote this whole article about, I'm in a progressive marriage.
	It was an open marriage.
	And I was miserable.
	I was just miserable.
	It was the worst marriage ever.
	But that just demonstrates that progressive marriage is actually a wonderful, wonderful thing.
	And we need to get past the morality of the past.
	It was great.
	And there's so much of this on the left.
	And that's why there's a study today that came out.
	And it's a study that every sentient human being knew was going to be true, which is that religious people have better sex.
	Right.
	There's a study that says religious people have better sex, particularly women, have a more meaningful sexual life when they are in a long-term relationship with a person who shares their values, which is the least shocking piece of news that has ever been broken upon the American people ever, ever.
	And it held true for men as well, right?
	Religious men tend to have better sex because it is in the context of a relationship that is actually fulfilling and it turns out married people actually have a fair bit of sex because they actually know the person they're having sex with so they do it fairly regularly as it turns out.
	You don't have to go shopping for it.
	Exactly.
	And so this entire study is written in the realm of Almost like Jeff Corwin in Australia, and he's going around in the Outback.
	It's Steve Irwin, and he's like, Crikey!
	Crikey, what?
	These people are bunnies.
	I can't believe it.
	And you're like, well, I mean, this makes perfect sense.
	Why do you think, even if you're not a religious person, let's assume that you have a naturalistic explanation for religion.
	Okay, then why do you think these religious rituals began in the first place?
	And the answer is they're outgrowths of evolutionary biology, even if you're an atheist.
	Because human beings are naturally driven toward a life of meeting.
	Women are naturally driven toward mating with people who are very specific so they can propagate their line with not the schmo down the block.
	And men tend to be driven toward polygamy.
	But if they are forced by circumstance, namely by women, into monogamy, they tend to lead healthier sex lives than people who are just outscrewing whatever is available.
	Yeah, that's...
	That's part of the trade-off.
	Right.
	This is right.
	And so, but the fact that we keep, there's so many, Christine Emba at the Washington Post, she keeps writing pieces about like, well, you know, it seems like the consent values that we've been promoting my entire lifetime, they're not sufficient.
	There are so many women who are consenting and then they regret and is really consent enough.
	It's like, where have you been?
	Can I recommend this thing?
	It rhymes with marriage.
	We've had it for I don't want to tell a tale out of school, but my friends and I, some male friends and I, back in my wayward youth, we were discussing this one day, and we had this kind of epiphany.
	We said, you know, fellas, I think, I just thought about this the other day, I think sex...
	Actually, it's better with people that you know.
	And furthermore, it's even better with people that you like.
	And we're sitting there like, wow.
	I'm being somewhat hyperbolic here, but those are the exact words we said.
	And we thought about that like an actual epiphany.
	We thought, you know...
	Maybe every person ever throughout history knew this, except for us.
	This is the battle.
	This was the hinge of my life.
	This was the hinge of my life.
	I was walking down the street one day and I said, you know what?
	I'm not sleeping with women I don't like anymore.
	I'm not going to pretend to like women I don't like.
	Within six months, I met the woman who became my wife.
	First of all, within six months, I was having the greatest dating experiences of my life because I just thought, I'm not going out with women I don't like.
	And then within six months, I met the woman.
	It's not just that you like the person, too.
	It's also, you're having sex with someone...
	And you can embrace the totality of the act and all of its consequences and see those things not as this thing that must be feared, but as a great blessing.
	So that's another part that allows us to enjoy it quite a bit more.
	You mentioned the flesh and the spirit a little bit ago.
	You mentioned...
	Certain people have genetic predispositions towards being overweight, and other people have eating disorders, etc.
	All of this is sort of one thing, which is that in the battle between flesh and spirit, you're being fed two ideas all the time.
	And the one idea is always a lie.
	And so it's like the fear of your spirit is a lie, and the promise of joy of the flesh is a lie.
	And so I've talked to, because we obviously, we've never had an obese society before until right now.
	You look at pictures from the beach in 1968.
	No one was overweight.
	And when I mean not overweight, people who we think of as not overweight now would have been considered overweight then.
	They didn't have seed oils.
	That's right.
	It's not even that they were...
	Side note, by the way, have you noticed that the sizes are changing?
	I'm talking about clothing sizes.
	Oh, yeah.
	They're changing.
	It's bizarre.
	Over the course of my lifetime, I'm 5'9", and I weigh about 160, which puts me normally in the medium category.
	And now I'm having to wear smalls because the mediums are for giants.
	Right.
	They're for giants.
	I thought I was losing weight.
	LAUGHTER This is definitely happening.
	But the point I'm making is that I've had to have conversations with people about the fact that almost no one is overweight because of hormones and genetics.
	And they don't believe you.
	You're just wrong.
	I've had to have conversations with people who I... I have true affection for about the fact that most of the mental illness that we're dealing with is inflicted, not biological.
	And my evidence of it is it's brand new and it's never existed before.
	All of this is because on one hand...
	It doesn't exist in most places right now, by the way.
	Even right now, most people aren't overweight in the world.
	Even right now, most people in the world don't have mental illnesses, among other things.
	If you...
	If you believe the flesh, then you think.
	So I did hardcore keto, right, for a while.
	And I've never felt better.
	I've never been in better shape.
	It requires some discipline.
	It requires routines.
	That's a big part of how you accomplish it.
	We move to Nashville.
	All my routines are broken.
	All of my discipline falls apart.
	All the places where I knew how to get the food that would still taste good, you've sort of solved it.
	All that goes away, and there are biscuits literally everywhere.
	Under this chair right now, there are biscuits.
	And I've gained 12 pounds.
	I feel worse.
	Every few days I start trying to go back to the thing that I know made me feel better.
	And every few days I'm tempted by the things that make me feel worse.
	And in the moment, the things that make me feel worse come with the promise of joy.
	The milkshake promises to make me feel better.
	The funny thing is it makes me feel worse immediately.
	I don't just feel like guilt.
	I actually feel bad from the sugar, bad from the dairy.
	And nevertheless, that temptation is real.
	This is every single thing that we deal with in life.
	Sex with a waitress is always better than sex with your wife.
	Except that sex with your wife is always better than sex with the waitress.
	It's not that one thing is true and the other is false.
	It's that both things possess in themselves a kind of truth.
	But only one of them is true, is fundamentally true, right?
	It's almost as if there's a conscious power trying to destroy us.
	That's right.
	With personality.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	You know, people write into my show constantly.
	I would say this is the most frequent question I get on the show.
	It's from young men.
	Why do you have a show?
	Michael, why is Ben still permitting?
	Signed, Ben.
	Ben, why do you let him into all access?
	The question I get more than any other is from young men who say, I'm addicted to porn.
	Yes, I get that all the time.
	I get it constantly, right?
	And it's one too, actually.
	This is the biggest one because now we have these portals to hell in our pockets and it's brand new really over the last 20 years.
	But it really can be applied to any addiction or any kind of vice or any temptation.
	And they'll write in, and in near desperation they'll write in and say, is there any way to get better?
	Is there any way to recover some lost innocence?
	That was a question last week.
	And the answer is, if you've ever disciplined yourself or recovered from any sort of addiction or anything, you'll know.
	The answer is, Yes.
	Eventually.
	You actually can get better.
	The temptation can go away a little bit.
	And it's because virtue and vice are habits.
	We're in the eternal present, so we want instant gratification.
	That's not how it works.
	When you have routine, when you have habits...
	In virtue, then the temptation gets to be a little less device, and it's easier to do the virtue.
	And then you go back to the biscuits, and then all of a sudden it's harder to go back to the keto, and it's easier to eat the biscuits.
	In order to actually do this sort of stuff, you have to have a realistic assessment of your own limitations.
	And this is something that society actively mocks.
	If you say, for example, like Mike Pence, You know what?
	I'm not going to have dinner with a woman who's not my wife in a room with a closed door.
	You are a bigot.
	You are a ridiculous person because what?
	Do you think you're just going to have sex with her?
	What do you think?
	You're just going to cheat on your wife just like that?
	Is that really what you think?
	You mock the notion that you have to set up prophylactic rules, which is what most of life is.
	Setting up prophylactic rules around the innate fallen nature of yourself.
	And this is true of literally everything.
	thing.
	You have to set up these prophylactic rules around the things that you care about so that you never come within 100 yards of actually violating the thing that you care about.
	And society mocks this.
	There's a section of the Tomlin that's actually quite wonderful about essentially what I think is pornography addiction, really, where it's talking about it says it's a sin for you to walk near a river and see women bathing.
	But or it's a sin where to walk near a river when you are bathing and avert your eyes.
	And so it's like, why is it a sin to avert your eyes?
	It's not.
	It's a sin that you went near the river in the first place.
	Because you're putting yourself in a position of temptation.
	All of society is designed.
	They keep saying this over and over.
	It's a mantra of the left.
	Well, I mean, if you can't resist the temptation, was it really worth resisting?
	What kind of person?
	Are you really so weak that you can't resist the temptation?
	Yes.
	Yes, I am, in many cases.
	And so we used to have a society constructed around the idea that you had to create all of these fences in order to prevent a lot of people from falling into the chasm.
	And then we were like, well, you know what?
	It's not really going to change your life if we get rid of those fences, as in a lot of people start falling into the well.
	I mean, it's not a shock.
	You also have to...
	The occasion of sin is one of the great pieces of advice, like ever, yeah.
	When I get this question about pornography addiction, the first thing I say is, well, if you want to beat the pornography addiction, stop calling it an addiction.
	Because, you know, I think that word in and of itself, there might be a sense in which it's true, but what that has come to mean is a disease.
	And when we say disease, we mean something you don't have any control over.
	So you need someone else to come in, and you're basically powerless to stop it.
	It's not an addiction, it's a...
	It's a compulsion.
	It's a habit.
	I mean, that's what it is.
	It's a bad habit, and habits have a lot of power over you, but you still have your free will.
	You're able to make a choice.
	And so every time you look at the pornography, you are making a choice to do it.
	And I think when you think of it like an addiction, then it gives you an out.
	It's sort of like, well, it's not my choice.
	It's the addiction.
	You're one step down, though, because it is an addiction, but an addiction is not a disease.
	I mean, if you could give up cancer, you would.
	That's what a disease looks like.
	For Lent.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	But you can beat it.
	I mean, the only thing I've ever been actually addicted to is cigarettes.
	And you beat it.
	You just beat it.
	And you curl up in a ball and it's awful.
	It is an awful experience.
	I do want to say, like, the apostles clear the things I don't want to do.
	I do things I want to do.
	I scarcely ever do.
	I don't think it's as simple as saying that everyone can simply choose to overcome any expression of sin.
	That's not true.
	We had a society with more condoms.
	I didn't understand exactly what you were saying before.
	Yeah.
	In the past, we had a society, there were condoms everywhere.
	Biscuits on the condoms, I don't know.
	And we had a society that had a lot of rules meant to prevent the occasion of sin, and it was still a sinful society.
	But in many ways, not all, but in many ways it was a better behaved society.
	And so, it's challenging when you talk about these issues to make the distinction between the absolute nature of righteousness, the absolute nature of virtue, and the sort of practical realities of life on earth.
	When When you say to a person that they can kick cigarettes, that is absolutely true.
	And sometimes telling them that is actually encouraging and helps them realize that they're not just victims of circumstance.
	Sometimes I think it can also be demoralizing to people because it...
	Almost obscures the other reality, which is that sin is very powerful, that sin can't be done away with.
	I think that that's why the genius of beating addiction—I was off cigarettes for five years, was in Amsterdam, where everybody was smoking on a book tour, and I thought, well, one cigarette.
	I was addicted like that.
	Yeah.
	I had to do it all over again.
	But that's the thing.
	It's not every day is a day.
	So if you get off it the next day, you're off it again.
	And that's what you have to do.
	Sin is always present.
	The flesh is always present.
	These things are incredibly powerful.
	It's very challenging.
	The problem, when I was a kid, and cartoons actually taught you things.
	They still teach you things.
	But you mean good things.
	The common meme in cartoons was that a person would have a decision to make and a little angel would appear on one shoulder and a little devil would appear on the other shoulder and this one would try to make them be bad and this one would try to make them be good.
	The problem as you become adult is that you realize there is an angel on one shoulder and there is a devil on the other and they're both you and they sound exactly the same.
	And that is one of the hardest things about life.
	And they both have your voice.
	They both have your voice.
	Yeah, the devil speaks to you in your own voice.
	That was Solzhenitsyn's great line, that the line between good and evil runs through the human heart.
	And it's not actually about political systems.
	It's not actually about where you live or who you are.
	It's right there, you know, and that's the battle you're in.
	And, you know, the thing about it is, I think Christians particularly have been very bad about depicting this as some kind of grim struggle, but it's actually a joyful struggle.
	It is.
	It's actually a struggle to get to your joy.
	And what you were saying before about the lies of the flesh and the truth of the spirit is actually just siding with joy.
	You know, it is.
	And it's a funny thing because in the end, you know, joy takes a little bit longer to get to.
	You know, it's like the pleasure, the bliss of sin is there.
	I mean, it's like there's no question about this.
	I mean, people yelled at me in another kingdom for writing a scene about how great sex was when you lied to a woman that she was going to get a part in your movie and then slept with her.
	It was cool.
	And they yell out, that's pornographic.
	I said, no, no, that's the problem.
	It is great.
	It's just that the joy, which is a deeper emotion, a much more global emotion, something that actually fills your whole life, takes longer to get there.
	But there's also, this is why Jordan Peterson is so popular.
	Oh, he's Jordan now?
	Jordan!
	One, it's because of the accent, and two, it's because he talks about dragons.
	And it's the same reason that the Latin mass is exploding in the United States, especially among young men.
	It's exactly the same reason.
	Because this lame...
	Super lib thing that we've heard for 50 years.
	Like, hey man, you know your spirituality.
	It's all just about peace, man.
	And all it is is just kind of acoustic guitars.
	No, it's about like there are actual dragons trying to eat me all around me right now.
	And I just want to slay that dragon in pursuit of something greater.
	Because the consequence of the spiritual combat that we're all in is not just that we're suffering a lot.
	It's that there's a pride.
	There's something actually worth getting out of it.
	That's much more motivating than just, you know, eh.
	I will say that the best thing about Jordan Peterson is listening to Knowles and my son Spencer do imitations of him.
	We would never do anything like that, Drew, and you better be sorry that you ever suggested we would.
	It is one of the funniest things I've ever heard.
	Bloody ridiculous!
	You start with Kermit the Frog.
	You take him to Toronto.
	Having Jordan on Daily Wire Plus has been a real treat for me because you guys kind of knew him better than I did, but I've gotten to interact with him a lot here.
	Here lately, and I'm so tickled by what a contrarian he is.
	I just hadn't really realized it.
	I know it of myself, and I certainly know it of Andrew Clayton.
	But Jordan is one of the only guys in public life.
	We're all contrarians, but we try to at least pretend to be good and decent and agreeable chaps.
	But with Jordan, you'll say something like, here's a question from a Daily Wire subscriber.
	Dr.
	Peterson, how can I be more happy?
	Well, I'm not going to answer that.
	And it's a damn foolish question.
	That's pretty good, too.
	I gotta say, we should just have a Jordan.
	Everybody does a Jordan P. It's like Bill Clinton.
	Everyone has a Bill Clinton impression.
	By the way, that answer, actually, that you just gave in Jordan's name is the right answer.
	Of course.
	But, you know, the Bible, the Old Testament, it does not really ever deal with the idea of happiness.
	It never discusses happiness.
	It gives you a bunch of duties.
	It tells you a bunch of things to do.
	And then it promises you that there will be some good effects from the things that you do.
	But at no point does it say you will experience more joy in your life if you do X, Y, and Z, just on a pure emotional level.
	Because no one can guarantee that, up to and including God, I think.
	I mean, that one really is up to you.
	What isn't up to you is that if you fulfill the duties, then you will be doing what you were established to do.
	That's the promise.
	I do believe that the New Testament offers up joy.
	I want to take an issue between using the word.
	Right, the Old Testament is not.
	But using the word joy and happiness as synonyms is not the right thing.
	I agree.
	I do not believe in happiness at all.
	You're happy, you win the lottery, you're happy for a couple of minutes, and you lose the lottery, you're not happy.
	But joy is a state of mind that actually is there even when you're in grief.
	It is that vitality of life, the presence.
	I always compare it to a movie where you're watching some character die and you're weeping and then you come out and say, wow, it's a great movie.
	Life is kind of like that too.
	The vitality of all the things that happen in life is what joy is.
	And I think you can achieve that if you side with the spirit.
	I think it was C.S. Lewis who described it this way.
	And if not, I'll just make it up.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	That joy is more akin to just about being able to answer a question.
	Like, there's just this kind of journey and this approach and this, you're so close to the satisfaction, which is very different than just, you know, hey, that was a good drink.
	Yeah, I'm happy now, yeah.
	There's this very cryptic sort of commentary in the Book of Exodus, which I'm supposed to discuss with Jordan.
	Actually, in the interview with Jordan.
	It discusses how the Jewish people come to Mount Sinai, and they're at the base of the mountain.
	And it says that they're tachat hahar.
	So the actual Hebrew meaning of that is underneath the mountain.
	Tachat means under.
	It doesn't mean at the base.
	It means under the mountain.
	And so there are a bunch of commentaries.
	And these commentaries, the Midrash, it suggests that what God actually did is he holds the mountain over the heads of the Jews, and he says, if you don't accept the Torah, I'm going to drop this on you.
	And so this raises all sorts of questions, like, okay, so was the Torah accepted by the Jews under duress, right?
	I mean, was this, if, and it's a full-scale conversation that goes on for a fair bit of time.
	And the sort of conclusion is, the only way to rectify that sort of bizarre take on the narrative, that God is literally threatening you with destruction if you don't take, is that that's not God threatening you.
	That's just the reality.
	Yeah.
	That unless you undertake the duty of living as you were supposed to live, the mountain will fall on you.
	Yeah.
	That is not because God is threatening you that way.
	That's just the way the world is.
	Meanwhile, we've got the culture which cuts off all the pathways to joy, which is what's so sinister.
	My favorite...
	New York Times piece recently, since we're talking about it, I think this was the New York Times, was the maternal instinct.
	Yes, that was the New York Times.
	Okay, good.
	Maternal instinct is a myth that men created.
	Fifty years ago we made it up.
	But meanwhile, what she's really militating against is women fulfilling their duties as mothers and finding joy and happiness in it.
	And it's the same sort of thing where she, I read the whole piece and it's very windy and securitist.
	She kind of She seems close to acknowledging that, oh, maternal instinct does exist.
	And by the end, she's like, no, it doesn't actually exist.
	But that's a path to joy, another one that they're trying to cut off.
	Almost as good as Scientific American, which sent out seven tweets.
	Did you guys see this?
	Oh, the idea of two sexes was invented in the late 18th century to bring more bigotry into human life.
	Right, they were less sexist in 1400 and 1700s.
	That's right.
	I don't know if you knew that.
	But before that, there was only one sex, scientifically.
	Man.
	Yeah.
	I don't know that men could have sex with men and make babies.
	It was amazing.
	We actually invented women.
	I know.
	You know, I wish I could take credit for that, but like...
	I guess we did out of our rib, you know.
	They just got their time scale slightly off.
	I did see that, and I don't see nearly as much as you guys do, but I couldn't even really figure out how they could possibly have arrived at this.
	It's the opening of my show tomorrow, and I have to say, whether I can get through this with a straight face, I don't know, because it is an amazing thing.
	I do.
	It actually makes me wonder if we're getting the gender conversation a little bit off.
	Because our argument now, which is manifestly true just looking around, is there's sex and there's gender.
	And the libs say that gender expression and sex are divorced.
	And we say there's no such thing as gender.
	It's just sex, right?
	Men and women.
	That's what it is.
	But in a sense, no, there is gender expression.
	Yes.
	There is, first of all, and second of all, the very fact that they are expressing gender in these weird ways kind of proves that there is.
	And really, what we're trying to say is, there is sex and gender expression, and the libs want them to be completely divorced.
	And if you want to have a good life and flourish and be in accord with reality, you've got to just bring them together.
	That actually, when men do manly things, they'll do better.
	And when women do womanly things, they'll do better.
	But that's not gender.
	That's what Jordan Peterson talks about.
	That's personality.
	Right.
	That's what we're really talking about.
	But I also disagree, because if reality has taught me anything here lately, it's that when men do feminine things, they do better.
	These days.
	I don't understand.
	They keep telling us that gender and sex are different.
	But then they also say things like, trans women are biological women.
	Which is a...
	That's because they're loons.
	That's...
	Oh, that solves it.
	It was a sleight of hand trick where they invented this distinction between sex and gender and then it was very useful for them for about three or four decades.
	And then in the last five years they got rid of it and they said, oh, it's actually the same thing again.
	So they got us to buy into this.
	It was pretty clever.
	But you know, we even have words for this.
	Like the word womanish We don't use it that much.
	Norm MacDonald used to use it a lot.
	But womanish is...
	Effeminate, yeah.
	Effeminate for a man.
	You wouldn't call a woman womanish, right?
	A woman is womanly, and that's good.
	And when a man is behaving like a woman, that's womanish, and that's bad.
	Why are we saying that's good or bad?
	Like when your voice starts to wobble a little bit when you're talking to that guy from podcast.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And you don't, and you say, get it together!
	Come on, boring!
	Come on, boring!
	What's the matter with you?
	Just punched myself in the crotch, you know, to try to...
	No, I believe.
	I do believe.
	I mean, I've mentioned many times that Brian Stelter missed a deadline in order to go to bed and cry.
	I think that may prove that you can change from a man to a woman.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Well, I was going to say, we have a few questions from our Daily Wire Plus members, but I'm going to save them for the member block, which is coming up here in 10 minutes.
	If you're watching on YouTube, head over to Daily Wire Plus.
	If you're a member, log in.
	If you're not a member, become a member, then log in.
	We're going to continue the show for an additional half hour, and we'll take a ton of member questions during that period of time.
	Let's wrap up the show.
	Ben, with your thoughts.
	Okay, so I want a quick roundtable here on what do you guys think is going to happen in the election, considering the polls have narrowed considerably and people are getting very, very nervous.
	I think it's all fake.
	I think the headlines are fake.
	And here's why.
	We had a 10-point lead on the generic ballot in July, which is amazing.
	I mean, that's when you talk about the red tsunami.
	Now that lead has narrowed.
	It's a 5-point lead on the generic ballot.
	And they're saying, see, the walls are closing in.
	The Republicans are going to lose it for all sorts of reasons, whatever.
	But if you look back to 2018, the Democrats at this point had exactly the same lead as the Republicans did.
	And by the way, it narrowed as the election got closer.
	That's just what kind of happens.
	And they went on to win.
	And they crushed it.
	Yeah, they absolutely crushed it.
	So I think the libs are just trying to discourage conservatives.
	I think the numbers don't bear out this fear that we're all of a sudden going to lose our...
	I largely agree with that.
	I thought you, on your tweet thread about this, you made a really good point that...
	Focusing on Trump may hurt us with independence.
	The people who attacked you immediately said, well, Trump's selections have won all these primaries.
	And you think, yeah, but that's not the point.
	You're talking about the generals.
	But I basically agree with what you're saying.
	Typically, summer polls are worse than autumn polls because they don't poll likely voters as much.
	They tend to favor Democrats.
	The polls have narrowed.
	The specials are not going as well.
	What's that?
	8% of people are showing up for those specials.
	I think that the abortion question may serve the left more than we thought.
	But I think that if Republicans can get their heads around the fact that they have to fight the culture war, that they have to fight the culture war, they can bring people out.
	One place where I disagree with you is you frequently say that people vote against things.
	But I think only conservatives vote against things.
	I think women and other Democrats vote against things.
	They basically do vote for things because they want the government to do stuff.
	But I do think you're right in terms of the numbers.
	Right now the numbers still favor Republicans, and I think as the autumn continues they're going to favor Republicans more.
	And I actually think we still have an over 50% chance of taking the Senate.
	Yeah.
	Might be like 52, but it's...
	Yeah, it is.
	It's like 55.
	I agree that the polls are fake and everything's fake, and that's probably correct.
	But I'm not as nervous about the polls.
	I agree with Ben's take on this largely.
	I'm just nervous about what I see from Republicans, which is it does seem like they're getting off message.
	When the FBI raid happened and there are all these predictions on the right that, well, this is what's going to lead to the red wave.
	People are not going to the polls to protect Donald Trump.
	That's not what they're...
	They're not getting up...
	Parents are not waking up in the morning thinking, well, how's Donald Trump doing today with the FBI thing?
	What Republicans need to think about is, what do people wake up in the morning worried about?
	What do they go to bed worried about?
	The whole cliche, classic thing, what are they talking about around the kitchen table?
	That is actually true.
	And what are they thinking about?
	They're thinking about their finances, they're thinking about inflation, they're thinking about, are my kids safe, crime?
	They're really, really worried about the fact that it seems to them that our culture is plunging into insanity.
	They're worried about What kind of culture we're leaving for our kids.
	These are the things that plague people's minds every single day.
	It seemed to me when Republicans were talking about that, that they were doing well.
	And then when we went on this detour and we're talking about Trump and the FBI, then that's when the polls start to travel.
	But the FBI raid, the issue with them raiding Mar-a-Lago is not Donald Trump.
	The issue with them raiding Mar-a-Lago is that Biden himself is saying it's about us.
	He's going to sick the IRS on us.
	I think, at least for me, the reason I care about the Mar-a-Lago raid is not I'm upset about Donald Trump's furniture getting moved around.
	It's like that meme he put out in the campaign.
	They're going through him to get to us because they call us all fascists.
	I don't disagree that you're right.
	He keeps saying he's going to send F-15s to blow us up.
	This isn't the first time he said it.
	They are fighting a proxy war against us by way of Trump.
	That still doesn't make it a winning thing for us to talk about right now.
	The average American is not sitting around today worried that the FBI is going to raid their houses and look for classified documents.
	The average American today is...
	Not re-litigating 2020.
	That's right.
	The average American today is trying to figure out how to pay for gas when it's so freaking expensive.
	And when Joe Biden is saying, oh, I brought gas prices down 43 cents, it's up two bucks.
	The average American is deeply concerned right now about what has happened to their kids over the last two years.
	The fact that suicidality is up so high, that drug use is up so high.
	The average American is worried about what their kids are being taught, about what kind of lives their kids should lead.
	These are the kinds of issues that if we run on them we win.
	And the problem with President Trump is that he wants this election to be a referendum on him because Donald Trump sees the entire world as a referendum on him.
	He puts his name in gold letters on everything that he touches.
	He is constitutionally, and I don't mean the document, he is constitutionally incapable of allowing the election to be about the things that matter to America because he wants to be the thing that matters most to Americans.
	And that may very well be fine in a presidential election.
	It is not, even then, I actually agree with Ben.
	I think that all modern elections are referendums on someone, and you should make sure it's a referendum on the other guy.
	But even if it could work in 2024 with Donald Trump, it is a losing strategy for Republicans.
	That's also what the Democrats want, too.
	I think this is very simple.
	Think about what your opponents want to talk about, and then don't talk about that thing.
	Think about the things they really don't want you to talk about and talk about that thing.
	The trans stuff, they will call you a terrorist if you talk about it.
	Desperately, they will kick you off of every social media platform if you talk about it.
	Obviously, that's the thing we should be talking about.
	The economy, they don't want to talk about it.
	Those are the things.
	They really, really want us to talk about Trump, but that is enough reason in and of itself to not talk about it.
	And you know, the thing about Trump is I keep getting these letters every time I criticize them, you know, like, oh, you're criticizing the great Trump.
	You know, I I have to say this.
	Trump, to me, is not what I'm here for.
	Like, I am here for this country.
	I got into this business because of this country because I actually do love it.
	And I think, like, if Trump can help, I'm for Trump.
	If he's past his point, and I think he is past the point where he can help, I'm for somebody else.
	You know, it's like it's not really about Trump.
	And I think that this attachment to him, and as you say, Trump is a narcissist.
	I don't think even Trump would deny that.
	I think Trump is a narcissist.
	He may not know what a narcissist is, but you give him the question of, Donald Trump, are you a narcissist?
	I'm the biggest narcissist.
	I'm the best narcissist.
	You know, I just think that we should be thinking about how to win for the country.
	Trump's not on the ballot.
	He's not going to be on the ballot.
	The people who are on the ballot, we should support them because basically the alternative is, are these guys who beat your children?
	If Donald Trump's the nominee in 2024, I will almost certainly vote for him.
	Yep.
	I'll never say certainly two years out from an election.
	You're just not going to get that out of me.
	But most likely, if Donald Trump is the nominee, I will almost certainly vote for the guy.
	Like you, he did an awful lot of good in the first three years of his administration.
	I think it's very hard to say that he wasn't...
	His presidency in the fourth year was a failure.
	He lost the country during COVID. Does that mean that he would be a failure in a second term?
	No.
	If the guy gets a second term, undoubtedly, a lot of great things will happen that I really like from a policy point of view.
	That's great.
	This is 2022.
	Alan Estrin, our dear friend and the founder of Prager University, has a theory, and his theory is that narrative is sort of an actual force that exists in the world.
	I'm actually somewhat persuaded by this argument, by the way.
	I'm 100% with this argument, yeah.
	In the same way that Ben often says of the Bible that it's not always prescriptive, it's almost always descriptive, I think Alan Estrin's new theory is that narrative isn't our way of talking about Yes.
	Yes.
	narrative is something that humans have observed about the world.
	And I'm compelled by this to some degree.
	He says in the great narrative of our time, it is all about Donald Trump.
	That it isn't even about whether or not Donald Trump makes it about himself, which of course he will.
	It's that they have made it about Donald Trump and that in this sort of grand narrative sense, the fight of the century has to happen.
	America will not be able to let go of this crazy moment in our politics until we see what happens with Donald Trump in 2024.
	When people tell me, well, if only Trump would go away, if only Trump would keep quiet, if only we can move past Donald Trump, I think, you know, if my aunt had testicles, she'd be my uncle, right?
	There's a lot of ifs here.
	She might still be her aunt.
	And these days, she might still be my aunt.
	That's not...
	That's not the way it's working.
	The Libs are targeting all of their fire on this guy.
	To me, that speaks well of him.
	But regardless, they're going to do that.
	They're going to put this in the news.
	The guy is polling 40 points ahead of anybody else for 2024.
	He's playing an active role in the midterms, as would Anyone who's going to run for president in 2024.
	And so that is just a fact.
	It's baked into it right now.
	And I just don't think there's all that much use in saying, well, what if this fundamental fact of the political landscape were different?
	No, no, no, no.
	I have made an executive God King-like decision to let Michael Knowles have the last word for the first time in the history of the Daily Wire backstage.
	And I'm going to say that if you want to hear what we all think about how wrong Michael Knowles is, you have to head over to dailywireplus.com and become a subscriber.
	You don't want to miss the rest of the show.
	We're going into the member block right now.
	If you use code PLUS, you will get 35% off and you can stick around for the next half hour.
	We're going to be taking member questions and talking probably more about Donald Trump because even when the message is, it would be better electorally to stop talking about Donald Trump You can't resist.
	And it ain't better for ratings.

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