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Oct. 27, 2022 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:31:01

Daily Wire Backstage: The Red Wave

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	Hey everybody, it's Michael Knowles.
	You're about to listen to Daily Wire backstage featuring me, Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan.
	We're going to be talking about the trans recession.
	We're going to be talking about why I love my heart arrhythmia medication and so many other things.
	You're not going to want to miss this one.
	Thanks for listening.
	We'll be right back.
	Welcome to the Daily Wire backstage.
	Joining me tonight, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and I, your lowly god king, lowercase g, lowercase k, Jeremy Boring.
	We're very happy you're here and want to tell you that...
	Right after this show, as per usual, we will be doing Member Block, and that's a time that we go behind the paywall and just interact with Daily Wire Plus subscribers there who make it possible for us to do what we're going to do tonight, what we do here at the Daily Wire every day.
	They're a big part of the team, a big part of the mission.
	We're very grateful for them.
	So head over to dailywireplus.com, click that subscribe button if you want to join us at the end of the show for a Member Block.
	In the meantime, we're going to talk about a lot of great A lot of good stuff.
	Some might say great and good stuff.
	Only one of us would actually say that.
	That's Andrew Klavan, because he likes to name things in such fashion.
	I want to talk a little bit, though, about the election.
	Obviously, this is what is on everyone's mind.
	We're only two weeks out from what I think...
	I know you guys may not think this.
	This is an original contribution.
	It may be the most consequential election of our lifetime.
	I tried to trademark that today.
	Anyway, a very important midterm election if ever there was one.
	and because we're going to be covering live here at dailywireplus.com on election night, as we are wont to do, we'll get together.
	We'll have Candace here with us.
	We'll have also the Daily Wire news crew with us, John Bickley and team from the Morning Wire and Election Wire will be joining us.
	I asked them if they would stop by tonight, maybe give us a chance to ask them a few questions about what's happening during the election and what their predictions are, what it's looking like.
	And so I want to welcome them to the show.
	Here we have Cabot Phillips and John Bickley.
	It's John Bickley and team.
	John Bickley and Paul.
	Small team.
	Hey, yeah, we're excited about election night, and the polling is fascinating.
	The debates this week were kind of incredible.
	We saw something last night we've never seen before with this Fetterman debate.
	It was stunning.
	It was alarming in many ways.
	But what we're seeing here is there's a red wave coming.
	A red wave coming.
	Might be a tsunami, certainly in the House.
	The question is the Senate.
	And we've been tracking this in terms of the polling.
	We've got some original polls, some exclusive polls with Trafalgar Group that have been very fascinating, very enlightening.
	But we've also looked at some other polling.
	The Harvard poll that came out a couple of weeks ago, I think, defines this election.
	It summarizes it for people.
	What is this election about?
	It is an election about the misprioritization of the Democratic Party with what the voters prioritize.
	And if you look at this Harvard poll, it asked voters, hey, what do you prioritize?
	What are most important to you?
	The top three, inflation, jobs, immigration.
	Then it asked, what do the parties prioritize?
	What do you think the parties prioritize?
	And you have a perfect alignment of the Republican Party with those priorities.
	Immigration inflation jobs.
	The Democrats, there's not a single issue within the top four of the prioritized issues.
	January 6th is number one for Democrats.
	January 6th.
	Maybe dead last in the poll.
	Abortion, that was number five, still not in double digits for people in terms of priority.
	And climate change, those were the top three for Democrats.
	The Democrats looking back on this election cycle are going to say, we misprioritized.
	And it's not even about, hey, do people like your answers?
	Do you even care about the issues that voters care about is the question here.
	So that's something very fascinating.
	We saw that last night in one of, we were just talking before the shows, in one of the debates, the question of crime came up and the Democrat just blew off even the importance of the question.
	You had Lee Zeldin, this Republican who shockingly is leading, at least according to some polls in New York, And I've worked Republican campaigns in New York.
	There are a lot of Republicans and conservatives in New York, and they almost never really make it over the finish line, especially at statewide races.
	Zeldin's doing very well right now over Hochul, and he kept hammering crime.
	And Zeldin has been almost the victim of some pretty serious crimes recently.
	And Hochul's response, of course, was, Lee...
	Why do you keep bringing this up?
	Why is this so important to you?
	Why do you care about putting people in jail?
	And I just think if you're a New Yorker, I don't care how blue you are, you've got to listen to that and say, man, this lady has no clue.
	They're literally pushing people in front of subway trains in New York City.
	I mean, crime is a massive issue in New York, and Hochul blew it off like it was nothing.
	You saw this, by the way, across the board.
	board, there's another debate that people aren't paying attention to, which was the Tudor Dixon, Gretchen Whitmer debate over in Michigan.
	And Whitmer was getting hammered over and over and over again by Tudor Dixon on her handling of COVID.
	And this to me has always been the elephant in the room.
	You know, people are still really ticked and they should be ticked about how they were handled by their local government during COVID and the economy and inflation and jobs and immigration.
	A lot of this actually is still proxy for the COVID policies that locked everybody in their house and the rage that people feel.
	Yeah, and all the money that they printed to try to cover it up.
	Yeah, exactly.
	The inflation is a result of that.
	And so when Whitmer had no answers for that, Tudor Dixon is now running within spitting distance of Whitmer.
	A month ago, Tudor Dixon was running 10 points behind, 12 points behind.
	Now that's looking like a two-, three-, four-point race.
	And you have Cenk Uygur out in Los Angeles, our old stomping grounds, saying that he's going to vote for the former Republican for governor.
	For Mayor.
	I'm sorry, for Mayor.
	Over Karen Bass, who was theoretically going to be the VP pick for Joe Biden.
	She's one of the finalists for that VP slot.
	There's an incredible hit on the press, too.
	Now, the latest Gallup poll, 7% of people trust the press.
	They invited, after that shooting outside of Zeldin's house, they invited him outside to talk.
	The press said, would you come outside and talk to us?
	So he came outside and talked.
	And the first question was, why are you politicizing this incident?
	Inviting me out here, you know?
	And the press just looks so clownish, trying to cover for these guys, trying to cover for Fetterman, who was falling apart.
	It's a real blow to them.
	And I think, like, nobody's paying attention to John Durham because he keeps losing these stupid little cases.
	But he's destroyed the press in court and just shown how dishonest they are.
	And at this moment, they look...
	There's a real worry, though, especially watching the Fetterman debate, obviously.
	I actually didn't make jokes about it on my show today, because the guy has brain damage.
	It's almost impossible to make jokes.
	On my show, I went in wanting to make jokes.
	Wait for my show.
	I did make jokes, so I'm the worst.
	I went in thinking I was going to make jokes, and I watched two clips of him, and then I watched three clips of him, and then I watched four clips of him, and suddenly it turned from this is comic into, this is actually quite tragic.
	But he's also...
	My defense of making jokes is that he has put himself in this position because of his thirst for power.
	And as I also brought up, he is responsible for that, but it's also the Democrat Party putting him there.
	And his wife.
	Exactly, his wife.
	I think Jill Biden and Fetterman's wife are just failing in their responsibility.
	This is a unique aspect of the American Democrat Party that they genuinely, and not just of recent vintage, but for most of my life, they've taken the position that if you run someone and they are actually incapable of serving, it is perfectly acceptable just to give the job to their spouse.
	Right.
	I genuinely don't understand.
	Do you know the guy who won, I guess, an Oscar, an Emmy for that Don't look up the one about David's wrote up.
	Yes.
	He actually sent out a tweet saying, you know, being a senator is not hard.
	Right.
	But, you know, we he can say yay or nay just as well as any of the other senators.
	And he said, he actually said, it has nothing to do with character.
	It has to do with just what they vote for.
	I thought, so voting for Donald Trump is fine, right?
	On one hand, we're told that if we give the election to Republicans, it's the end of democracy and the end of civilization.
	But on the other hand, police jobs don't even matter, so give it to a brain down.
	I will say, though, in his defense, foreign policy is made by the bureaucracy.
	Most domestic policy is made by the bureaucracy.
	Frankly, I don't know.
	Even a man with brain damage might be able to be a senator.
	A lot of these guys are making the case, frankly, for direct democracy.
	I mean, if the basic idea is that we don't even bother electing people to exercise independent judgment, it's just a straight-up vote, then why don't we just online poll everybody and we can decide what to do as a country?
	I do want to ask the election wire guys, you know...
	Looking at the polls right now, I've seen some ballpark figures on the chances that the Republicans take the Senate.
	You've seen Nate Silver, for example, say that he thinks it's a 50-50 toss-up.
	But it seems like the momentum is moving pretty strongly in the direction of the Republicans.
	Can you give us a quick rundown on the closest Senate races and what those look like right now?
	Yeah, so Republicans are coming in right now knowing they're going to get at least 48.
	That's assuming you throw in North Carolina and Ohio, which got very close over the summer.
	They were classified as toss-ups.
	Republicans have pulled ahead there.
	So they're coming in at 48.
	Essentially, of the last five toss-up states, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Republicans need to win three of those five states if they're going to get to 51.
	And as you guys have talked about, as crime and the economy are increasingly on the minds of voters, you see them coming up the most in the debate, as we've seen Dobbs and that ruling really fade over the summer, more and more people prioritizing crime and the economy, that's what's driving this Republican optimism that we've seen lately.
	And now you're starting to see the polls reflect that in All five of those states now, Republicans are either tied in the lead or within one or two points.
	But Cabot, is it too late?
	One of the tricks that the Democrats have pulled over the last couple of election cycles is pushing off things like debates where the voters get to actually hear from candidates until well after voting actually begins.
	We've essentially destroyed even the concept of an election day.
	Have too many people voted for the tightening polls to play in Pennsylvania?
	You've had voting in Pennsylvania since September.
	500,000 people at least in Pennsylvania have already voted.
	The good news is, though, if you look at some of the early voting totals, Republicans are well ahead where they were in 2020.
	Even in Georgia, well ahead where they were in 2021.
	So there's been a huge uptick in the number of people voting early.
	A lot of that's because of after COVID, a lot of people voted for the first time remote.
	They said, oh, I kind of like this.
	Let's keep doing that.
	But you've got to think a lot of that has to do with people being fired up to vote.
	And Republicans in Georgia, for example, they're making up a much higher portion of the early vote than they were in 2021.
	So it might be too late.
	It remains to be seen.
	But Republicans shouldn't be too discouraged if they see a lot of these early voting numbers coming in.
	Will Stacey Abrams be able to hang on to her?
	Interesting point brought up by Robert Cahaly from Trafalgar.
	He said he thinks a lot of Republicans are voting early because of suspicions about how votes are cast and counted.
	Yeah, I'm more worried about the votes that come in at 2 a.m.
	after they shut down the...
	That could backfire.
	That entire strategy could backfire on Democrats in this election cycle.
	I think a lot of Republicans are also thinking like I'm thinking, well, I don't know what election day is going to bring.
	Am I going to be busy or whatever?
	I went and voted two days ago.
	I want to make sure that I'm not busy.
	I'm going to be here, right?
	We're going to be covering this stuff.
	So I actually went and voted with my wife.
	We got our votes in as fast as we possibly could.
	One of the things that's really fascinating is the kind of clarification.
	This is pretty typical.
	As you get closer to the election, the mind really begins to clarify about two, three weeks out from the election.
	You start to see the polls really start to tighten.
	This happens nearly every election cycle.
	And in this one, you've really seen that happen in a major way, and all of the trends are moving in one direction.
	This is why people are talking about a wave.
	A wave only moves in one direction.
	So if you look at these races, there are a bunch of races that seem like they were out of reach, and they're no longer out of reach.
	And some of these races, which, frankly, Republicans should probably lose given the candidate quality.
	And here I'm mentioning Herschel Walker, large segments of whose voter base might be his children.
	Herschel Walker could easily be dragged across the finish line by not only the fact that Raphael Warnock is a nut, but also by the fact that Brian Kemp is dramatically outrunning Herschel Walker and Stacey Abrams.
	Remember, Stacey Abrams was supposed to be the president of the universe, according to Star Trek.
	And Stacey Abrams is getting crushed by Brian Kemp.
	Brian Kemp is up somewhere between 6 and 10 points.
	You want to see the red movement in this country.
	Florida is an amazing example.
	Ron DeSantis won his seat in 2018, the gubernatorial seat.
	He won that by 30,000 votes over a meth addict who was caught with a gay prostitute in his hotel about six months later and now is under indictment by the DOJ. He won that race by 30,000 votes.
	He's currently up in the polls, 11 points in the average.
	It's not in one poll, it's in the average.
	There's a poll that had him up 14 today.
	So Ron DeSantis is running away with that.
	Marco Rubio is supposed to run a competitive race with Val Demings.
	He's up six points in that particular race.
	When you look across the board, A lot of these races, Warnock, in the summer, he had somewhere between a four and a six-point lead over Walker.
	That is now a dead heat.
	You look at Oz and Fetterman.
	Fetterman, six months ago, had like a ten-point lead on Oz, and now the polls are showing Oz either dead even or ahead.
	Blake Masters is an amazing example of this, right?
	Blake Masters is running six points behind Mark Kelly.
	Suddenly, Blake Masters is running absolutely within margin of error in Arizona.
	And Carrie Lake, who Democrats made an enormous mistake because they backed Carrie Lake thinking that if they backed an election denier, then suddenly she was going to lose the main election.
	The problem is that she's amazing on TV. She's done a great job.
	She's terrifically charismatic.
	She could easily drag Blake Masters over the finish line, and then they're the unsung heroes, right?
	Adam Laxalt, people are now taking his seat for granted.
	That's in Nevada.
	By the way, Nevada's going to go Republican.
	It's going to have a Republican governor, it's going to have a Republican senator.
	Ron Johnson, he was expected to lose that seat.
	He's going to win that seat, walking away in Wisconsin.
	So, now they're talking maybe Don Balduck.
	It's competitive against Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire.
	That race was supposed to be over.
	So when you see all the trends moving in one direction, it means you're going to start to see some weird people winning.
	And so what I'd be interested in, actually, from both the Election Wire guys and you guys, do you have any sleeper picks?
	So my sleeper pick is Zeldin over Hochul.
	I think Zeldin's going to win that race.
	The reason I think that Zeldin's going to win that race is because you look at New Jersey.
	Yeah.
	In the last election cycle, right, where Phil Murphy won his last race by 13 points, and suddenly she had a rally.
	Nobody even knows how to pronounce his name.
	He comes within a whisker of almost beating Phil Murphy in that race.
	Who in New York is enthused to go vote for Kathy Hochul?
	Who?
	I mean, nobody even knows who she is.
	No one ever has voted for her.
	That's exactly right.
	She's run out of spots where she can inherit them because somebody can't keep their pants zipped.
	There's literally no one.
	Until now, it was like she was in Congress and now she needs to elevate.
	So whoever is above her, she has to gain that seat because the guy can't keep his pants zipped or he gets involved in a corruption scandal.
	Same thing with the governorship.
	Well, now there's no place to fail upward to.
	So I think Zeldin is going to outperform in that race.
	She just has nothing at all to offer the voters.
	This is, I think, the problem for Democrats in general is that they only have ideology to run on.
	They run entirely on ideology, but most Americans are not ideological.
	People always talk about, well, what's the kitchen table issue, but really it's, what are the things people think about when they first wake up in the morning?
	And you see there in that poll there, it's like people think about, you know, how they're going to feed their kids.
	They think about, am I safe or is my family safe?
	Whereas for Democrats, you know, it is abortion.
	It's January 6th.
	And this is the big argument that they're selling in the New York Times, is what's wrong with you people?
	You should be voting on principle instead of...
	Did you see Matthew Downs?
	Matthew Downs, who was the greatest, he said, you know, people worried about inflation is how Hitler came to power.
	If you don't want to be poor, you're basically a Nazi.
	Hitler coming in off the top rope in that particular tweet, I mean, my goodness, you didn't see that one coming.
	I came into your office looking for a job, and he said, yeah, I'm going to bankrupt your company and destroy all your people, but I believe in abortion.
	Okay.
	I've got a sleeper race.
	And it's also New York.
	I think New York 17, there's a very good chance that Sean Patrick Maloney loses to Mike Lawler.
	That happens to be my old district.
	It's redistricting, change the numbers.
	I was on the race where Maloney won for the first time.
	He's a very good candidate.
	He was a Clinton guy.
	That's why he became the head of DCCC. I think he's weak there right now.
	I think Lawler's run a good campaign.
	The Republicans are obviously doing very well in New York right now.
	If Maloney loses, I believe he would be the first head of the DCCC, which is the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee, to lose his seat while he is running the organization.
	We're going to have it.
	Is it possible?
	It's absolutely possible.
	And it's interesting.
	Also, when you look at the D triple C, Michael, as you bring up one of the best kind of full circle moments that we've seen this cycle came from them.
	They sent an internal memo to all of their house candidates around the country.
	And they said in 2020, defund the police absolutely killed us.
	We have to run away from that.
	Find a former sheriff, find a current police officer, get someone in law enforcement to cut an ad for you saying that you support law enforcement.
	That's an internal memo they sent.
	And As far as other sleeper races go, though, I'm looking out at Oregon.
	They have not had a Republican governor in 40 years.
	That's the longest drought of any state in the entire country.
	Two things right now seem to show that a Republican is going to win.
	First off, the current Democrat outgoing governor, Kate Brown, is the least popular governor in the entire country in polling.
	Her protege is the Democrat nominee, Tina Kotek.
	She's hugely unpopular in the state right now, but she's the nominee.
	Also, there are three major candidates on the ballot.
	Betsy Johnson is running as an independent.
	She's a lifelong Democrat with a huge name recognition in the state.
	She's pulling 10 to 20 percent of the vote away from the Democrats.
	And then you've got the Republican, Christine Drazen.
	She's in the low 40s, high 30s.
	But that's enough to win this race because there are three serious candidates.
	Oregon could have a Republican governor.
	One other interesting note there.
	Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, famously hates Kate Brown, the current governor.
	He has donated now $3 million to the Republican, Christine Drazen, because he wants the Democrats out of power in Oregon where he has the Nike headquarters.
	And then there's Michigan.
	Michigan was not in play in the state.
	It is now in play.
	Tudor Dixon within three.
	I think Ben maybe mentioned this.
	Gretchen Whitmer was ahead by 17, 18 points just two months ago.
	That race is within three in a lot of polls.
	That's a shock.
	No one deserves to lose more than Gretchen Whitmer.
	No.
	And this is interesting.
	You've been talking to voters on the street.
	Tell us what they're thinking.
	This has been really enlightening.
	And again, we talk about the polls.
	We listen to other pundits.
	The people on the street is all that matters.
	They consistently, again, the pattern is amazing.
	What are your priorities?
	That's what we ask them.
	What do you care about most?
	What do you think is going wrong in this country?
	And it's crime.
	And it's the economy.
	The economy of the economy.
	The economy.
	Inflation.
	All the different iterations of the economy.
	Answer, you can imagine.
	Almost none of them responded with abortion.
	That's the number one issue.
	And you've looked into those numbers.
	Democrats are sinking in tens of millions into the abortion messaging.
	Almost none of them have responded that way.
	It is the economy.
	It is crime.
	It is immigration.
	We consistently hear that.
	We actually have a little reel for you guys if you want to listen to some people from the street that we talk to from all over the country.
	Let's tee it up.
	I think fentanyl is number one for me, obviously.
	Economy and then crime.
	So I live in Philadelphia.
	Crime is very important.
	So I'll rank crime number one, women's issues number two, inflation number three.
	No doubt, the border.
	The electrical cars.
	They're pissing me off.
	And also inflation as well.
	I mean, I'm not made out of money.
	I don't think anybody is.
	Securing the border so drugs and anything else that's coming across that's not legal doesn't come across.
	There's not enough battery technology to cover that many electrical cars.
	You can't do away with gas cars.
	You can't.
	Everything is through the roof.
	The economy, the border, and getting the Bidens locked up.
	Okay.
	Forgot to mention the Bidens getting locked up.
	But those are people, again, those are people from all over the country.
	That's not just people from Nashville.
	It's people from all over the place.
	You hear really consistent themes there.
	John and Cabot, thank you guys for the work you're doing over at ElectionWire, and we look forward to seeing you here with us again on election night.
	We do, too.
	Thanks.
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	Matt, that was...
	Yeah, so enthusiastic.
	Like butter.
	I did tell them that I don't think I should be doing any of the ads, but they forced me to do it.
	I'm going to give you the opportunity to redeem yourself since we obviously just lost an ad sponsor.
	And that's by talking about the unbelievable event that you hosted here in Nashville last week to end child mutilation.
	I think everybody out there knows that you've been the leader in this battle over the last several months.
	The work that you've done in exposing Vanderbilt Hospital here locally, the work that you've done in trying to organize legal opposition to that in the state legislature and governor's office, I think that it's really heroic work But this event is something unique.
	We've never, as a company, been a part of anything quite like it.
	And I happened to be out of the state at the time and wasn't able to be there.
	I really wanted to hear from you.
	What was the experience like of assembling maybe 3,000 people and speaking to them about what I think is one of the most important issues of our time?
	Yeah, I haven't been a part of anything like that either.
	I don't think anyone has because there have been sort of disjointed efforts across the country by people to organize rallies, but there hasn't been anything quite to this size or scale.
	And so going into it, I know I was certainly nervous because it's a gamble.
	There's a risk that if you're planting your flag and calling your shot and saying, we're going to have a big rally and we're going to speak out and then only 300 people show up, then it sends exactly the opposite message of what you want to send.
	And we are working at a disadvantage as conservatives because, first of all, we don't have any of the institutions on our side.
	The media is not going to advertise for us.
	But then also conservatives in general just aren't as eager to get involved in activism.
	They don't know how to do it quite as much.
	It's just not, they don't have the systems in place.
	And they don't want to risk their reputations and their jobs.
	Exactly.
	And they have jobs to begin with.
	So there's all of those things you're worried about.
	And so that was my concern going in.
	I thought we would get a good turnout.
	I was hoping for 1,000 and show up there on the day of.
	we had police estimate Well, if you listen to the media, we had hundreds that showed up.
	But the police estimate that we had, about 3,000 that showed up.
	So it exceeded my expectations.
	And it was just, the crowd out there was, they were...
	They were very passionate.
	We hear about diversity from the left.
	It was a very diverse crowd.
	It's hard to peg.
	Was it a younger crowd or an older crowd?
	I think it was just a wide variety of people.
	Most of them were local, just people in Nashville or in Tennessee that came out.
	And, of course, the left showed up, too.
	And it was kind of interesting because I've been to other rallies before.
	I've been to plenty of them.
	And in my experience at rallies and marches and that sort of thing, there's a section that they say, well, if you're a counter-protester, you go here.
	And then if you're a part of the actual event, this is where you go.
	But at this event, for whatever reason, they were allowed to just...
	It's on government property, so First Amendment.
	So they were allowed to come into the crowd.
	And the counter-protesters, they came right up to the front.
	They had bullhorns and sirens and everything.
	But it didn't matter.
	It didn't derail any of the speeches.
	And I think in the end, it actually helped us because they were outnumbered 20 to 1.
	But also, it just showed this incredible contrast between these kind of normal, everyday Americans who are concerned about protecting children versus these crazies with these vulgar, disgusting signs, screaming incoherently into a megaphone I think it was a really helpful conversation.
	I saw the video clip of the counter-protester with the bullhorn literally screaming in a woman's face.
	I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it could have done damage to this woman's hearing.
	What are you trying to prove at that point?
	Right.
	And the woman, she just stood there.
	She wasn't rattled by it.
	That was the theme of it.
	The other thing that I was worried about when I showed up, and I was happy about the crowd, but the other thing I'm worried about is that a lot of our speakers, Chloe Cole is a detransitioner.
	She's 18 years old.
	Yeah.
	She's not a professional public speaker.
	And so my concern is, well, going up in front of this crowd with people screaming in your face, are you going to be able to handle that?
	But she did, all of our speakers did a phenomenal job.
	You also didn't only have conservatives and Republicans.
	As I saw, I was also overseas, but I saw the pictures and video.
	You had a Democratic presidential candidate who showed up.
	Did we?
	I think you did.
	Tulsi Gabbard.
	Former Democrat.
	Former Democrat.
	Well, former Democrat, but at the time she ran.
	Now she's independent, but Tulsi Gabbard came and gave a great speech.
	Of course, Senator Marsha Blackburn, our state legislators The other thing we wanted to accomplish, of course, with the rally was we wanted to send a message to the country that this is a movement and that people care about this, but the other practical concern is to send a message to our state lawmakers that you have to follow through on getting this law passed because the people in the state care about this.
	I talked to the lawmakers after the fact and before, and they were just blown away by the crowd.
	They hadn't seen anything like it before.
	So I think it achieved exactly what we had.
	Well, I haven't spoken to you about this, but I spoke to a lobbyist here in the state who said that not only are they highly confident that the state will take legal action and that Tennessee will be a leader in the nation of stopping this because of the work that you've done, but that in the wake of your coverage and in the wake of this rally, they've also heard that but that in the wake of your coverage and in the wake of this rally, they've also heard that Alabama is taking steps to go ahead and get ahead of it and outlaw this horrible practice of castration and mutilation of
	So I think it's unbelievable work that you're doing.
	And I want to point out that when you see the Daily Wire doing these things, when you see us suing the Biden administration to stop the vaccine mandate, when you see us putting out this unbelievable content like Candace's greatest lie ever, George Floyd and the rise of BLM or what is a woman.
	when you see us being able to put these events like your in-child mutilation event on, it really is in no small part because of our members at Daily Wire Plus who In a very real way have made an investment in The Daily Wire's ability to do the things that we do.
	I think it's fair to say no one in my lifetime in the conservative movement has had an operation akin to ours, which is a for-profit, growing, thriving organization that is also highly, highly effective.
	And in some ways that's like saying, you know, there's always that New York Times headline that's like a Crime decreases despite increasing gun ownership or whatever.
	Crime falls despite increasing gun ownership.
	Right.
	It is because The Daily Wire is a for-profit company that we are so effective.
	The reason we're doing more than any organization in the conservative movement has done in the last 40 years is because we're driven by business principles.
	Because our economic lives depend on us continuing to be successful, continuing to deliver for our audience, and in particular, the part of our audience that subscribes, or the part of our audience that becomes members.
	And that means giving them unbelievable content, but it also means giving them unbelievable accomplishments missionally.
	I think that that is part of the actual value proposition for the people who become members at Daily Wire Plus.
	They're saying, yeah, we want new content from Jordan Peterson.
	Yeah, we want member block.
	Yeah, we love What is a Woman?
	It's an Awesome Documentary.
	Yeah, we also love that you fight with We also love that not only do you fight, but you win.
	We also love that you guys, instead of being in that sort of non-profit cycle of lose, bitch, repeat, lose, bitch, fundraise, repeat, you seem to be more in the cycle of win, tell us about it, ask us to trade value for value, and then go win again.
	And so I think this is just...
	It's amazing.
	I think it's also important to juxtapose what you were doing and what we as a company have been doing with what the White House is doing.
	There's a whole group of people out there, many people on the right, who do not understand the nature of the battle.
	And this has been a historic problem with the Republican Party.
	It's been a historic problem with conservatives.
	That conservatives shy away from what they think are the hottest battles.
	They think that it's too scary.
	If we invest in these battles, it's going to make us look mean or it's going to make us look cruel.
	And the natural outcome of that is that the left keeps pushing and pushing and pushing and transgressing and transgressing until there's nothing left to transgress.
	And one of the things that happened this week at the White House is what I think is the most morally perverse thing I have ever seen at the White House, which is a hell of a statement because I've seen a lot of moral...
	I mean, I wasn't there for Bill Clinton and Monica, but this was in many ways worse, honestly.
	The White House swimming pool during JFK. Yeah.
	There's some pretty bad stuff.
	But in terms of the ideological immorality of what we saw at the White House this week, I'm not sure it's ever been surpassed.
	So there's a person, for those who missed it, named Dylan Mulvaney.
	Dylan Mulvaney was a former Broadway star, was in Book of Mormon.
	Yeah.
	Dylan Mulvaney started a TikTok series after becoming lonely during COVID and starting an Instagram, or a TikTok, rather.
	In March of this year, started a process of transition, declared that he, in fact, was a she, and started doing a series called Day Blank of Girlhood.
	And so it was Day 1 of Girlhood, Day 2 of Girlhood.
	And these videos are absurd.
	I mean, they're absurd.
	They're stereotypical.
	Somebody called it woman-face.
	It is woman-face.
	It is mockery of women in the name of women.
	Day one is this man dressed up in a woman's outfit and speaking in a high-pitched voice, talking about, I cried three times today, and this is what makes me a woman.
	On day one of being a woman, I've only been a woman for one day, and I cried three times today.
	And then we have this person cutting videos about how he walks around in very short shorts that...
	Demonstrate his manhood and how people are staring at him because of this, but he's going to normalize that on behalf of the trans community.
	Okay, so this person has a series of ad contracts with a bunch of different makeup companies, ranging from Sarave to Mac to Ulta.
	And this person did an interview with another non-gender binary person, gender non-binary person, for Ulta.
	They went viral because Dylan Mulvaney says, I know now that I can be a mother.
	Spoiler alert, you can.
	You're a dude, ain't no way.
	Ain't gonna work.
	The White House invited Dylan Mulvaney to the White House to interview the President of the United States.
	The President of the United States will not grant an interview to reporters, to actual people who do this for a living, because the President of the United States can no longer speak words out of his face hole.
	But this person did invite Dylan Mulvaney.
	So Dylan Mulvaney is sitting there and asks the President of the United States, this is a man dressed as a woman pretending to be a woman, And the president of the United States says it is immoral.
	Not just illegal, immoral, to deny any kid this sort of care.
	Immoral.
	He said this from the position of the White House to a man dressed as a woman.
	And this was seen as the height of bravery by the media.
	There's the President of the United States standing up for the principle that boys can be girls, girls can be boys, and that we should mutilate children and mandate that states allow the mutilation of children to that effect.
	So when we say that Matt is standing up to something that's very powerful, he is standing up to something that's very powerful.
	There are people who have been poo-pooing these sorts of issues for you.
	Ah, what drag queen story are?
	Who cares?
	Ah, you know, when it comes to transing the kids, who cares?
	Ah, you know what?
	A bunch of bad school books at the libraries.
	Who cares?
	The answer is, everybody cares.
	Everybody should care.
	And Matt is proving that everybody should care.
	You know, I have to say, I made a discovery.
	First of all, Matt, good on you.
	You know, this is God's work.
	It really is.
	I think gender is a fascinating and complex topic.
	Butchering children is demonic.
	And I think, you know, if nobody stops it, it just goes on.
	But I actually sat down so that you guys don't have to and read the book Gender Trouble by Judith Butler.
	Which is really the book that started this all.
	It is the underlying philosophy and it's famously written in this very, very obscurantist prose so you can't understand what she's saying.
	And so I actually went through it.
	What fascinated me about it is that her premise and Matt's premise are exactly the same.
	She starts out by saying that the problem with feminism is they keep talking about we, but there is no we because there's no such thing as women.
	That's essentially what she's saying.
	So I thought, gee, here's the woman who started this.
	And she agrees with you.
	They are eliminating the category of female from the human population because she makes the argument basically that only men exist in our horrible chauvinistic mind.
	And I don't want to go into it too deeply because it's so stupid and so empty and so based on nothing, no factual material.
	But...
	You caught them.
	You caught them.
	That is exactly what they're saying.
	They're saying, ladies, you do not exist.
	Your lives don't exist.
	The experience of being in a female body and having children be a possibility, having periods of having all the things that women have in their lives that most of us here respect deeply and think is one of the great parts of human nature.
	It has no reality.
	This is such an important point because a lot of people think the transgender issue, the ones who poo-poo it, like Ben is saying, they say, oh, this cropped up in the last five years.
	Nothing.
	But it's the same premise that you had in feminism, which is men and women are basically the same.
	It flows naturally into the gay marriage movement, which is men and women are exactly the same.
	It flows naturally into the transgender movement, which is men and women are exactly the same.
	So when you're fighting against that...
	You're not fighting against some weird fad on a college campus five minutes ago.
	You're fighting against an issue that has been building for at least 60 years, maybe longer.
	Listen to Carl Truman, who also appears in our film, but this goes back to...
	The romantics.
	Yeah, it goes back centuries.
	It goes back to the whole idea that what matters most is our...
	I told Carl to stop picking on words with...
	He mixes all the romantics together.
	Conservative romantics are great.
	I think, to your point about what Joe Biden is doing, I actually appreciate it because it's like we're a team now.
	We're working together.
	Because he is showing the fact that this guy...
	First of all, you've got this guy who decides he's going to become a woman And a few months later, he's got corporate sponsorships.
	He's invited to the White House to speak on behalf of women.
	I've never believed in the idea of male privilege, but now I have to amend that because there is male privilege as long as it's a male who pretends to be a woman as the most privilege of all.
	In the future, all the best women will be men.
	Exactly.
	And so he ends up in the White House And we're doing this rally, it's kind of the same, sort of having the same effect, which is to show people that this is happening, and that it really does matter, because this is the number one hurdle we've had to get over in the fight against this gender ideology madness, and is that for a lot of conservatives, they don't even understand, not even just conservatives, just normal people, they don't realize that this is happening, how pervasive it is.
	That's probably the most common...
	Feedback or reaction I get to what is a woman, I hear from people, including people that you think are clued in, like politicians, who tell me, well, I saw that.
	I had no idea that all that stuff was happening.
	And when you've got Joe Biden speaking about mutilating kids from the White House, I think it shows that this is going on, it's happening.
	And we have to...
	The other thing is...
	You have to show up physically, okay?
	Yeah.
	I talked about how on the left they're much better at activism, but that's a crutch that we can't rely on anymore because it does matter to actually show up.
	It's one thing to tweet about it, talk about it, as we do in conservative media, but the image of actual human beings out there holding signs against it.
	Well, the whole issue hinges on the physical body, so it's no surprise.
	And they're right about that, actually.
	You do have to physically show up.
	Yeah.
	I didn't believe in gender transitioning previously.
	I did not believe that a man could become a woman.
	But when you say that this Dillon fella cried three times in one day, I'm going to reevaluate.
	You've never seen Brian Stelter.
	That's it.
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	There is one additional point that I wanted to make when it comes to, I think, why so many people don't Know what's going on with the trends issue.
	They look at it and it's so weird and it's so bizarre and it's so strange and people look at this and they say because it's weird and bizarre and strange it must not be happening.
	They literally cannot believe that it's happening and that is because it is an outgrowth of an ideology that nearly everyone has bought into but they didn't realize the consequences of that ideology were going to be.
	And that ideology is essentially, this is Truman's point, that identity is to be found in the sexual pleasure instinct and anything that inhibits it needs to be destroyed.
	And because we as a society have bought into that so much that what we are is just the sexual instinct.
	What we are is our feeling inside.
	And literally all of our modern literature is written on this basis.
	All of our movies are made on this basis.
	And my favorite example is all the Disney movies where it used to be that when it was Pinocchio, it was about how do you learn to do your duty so you can become a real boy.
	And now every movie is how do you find your inner bliss so that you can truly be free?
	How do you buck society's conventions in order to truly be yourself?
	And because we've all bought into that model, We never saw this coming.
	And so when people actually take that to its logical extreme, which is, you ought to celebrate however I feel.
	And if I feel like something that's absolutely counterfactual, you should still celebrate it, and it's a denial of what makes me me, then people are shocked by it.
	It's like the lights suddenly go on.
	And what makes it even harder is that in order to root that out, you can't just root out this particular issue.
	You have to root out the entire ideology.
	You have to actually start to see identity in a way that we have not seen identity in the West for solidly 100 years.
	You have to go back to fundamental principles that About what makes human beings human beings and what makes human beings fulfilled.
	And that's something that many people in the West are just incapable of facing up to.
	Because again, when you spend all day every day thinking about how do I feel and what will make me feel better, which is what we are trained to do from the time that we are small kids.
	I mean, it's Brave New World.
	We are trained to do this stuff from the time that we are tiny kids.
	This is what C.S. Lewis called the great movement of internalization.
	Because once you lose contact with the idea that there is a spirit in whose image you're made, there's nothing but...
	It's what's inside you.
	And so it becomes, Eros becomes the most powerful thing you've got.
	I mean, this is Freud's point, right?
	I mean, this is...
	No, he's part of it.
	He's a big part of it.
	Exactly.
	And so, you know, there's something that I've started to do, and I want to do it more, and that is re-term what I think the left is now.
	They've been calling themselves progressive, falsely, for generations.
	And what they really are is transgressive.
	All they are is transgressive.
	All they want to do is tear down all of the standards, all of the institutions.
	They want to transgress.
	The transgression is the point.
	Everything has to be torn down, and it has to be torn down so that you can be liberated on the inside, and the destruction is not the bug, it's the feature.
	What's another simpler word for transgression?
	Well, sin would be...
	You know, I have to tell you, Ben, that...
	They're the transgressives.
	I hate to give you this great compliment on the air.
	That's so good, and it's so much better than...
	We used to say, they're not the progressive left, they're the regressive left.
	They're not regressive.
	And it's like, by the way, when you use regressive, you're granting the progressive point, which is there's a back end.
	But transgressive, that's it.
	Because you're saying there is an objective moral reality here, and these guys just transgress it every step of the way.
	And that's the goal.
	The goal is they must destroy.
	And you see it, by the way, in literally everything.
	I mean, I know later on we're going to talk about what happened at this art installation.
	But, I mean, the destruction is the point.
	And by the way, they have to train the kids.
	It's important to train the kids in transgressive mentality because you can't take a normal human being and tell the normal human being who hasn't been brought up in that transgressive mentality that it's good to destroy all the things that person relies upon.
	You have to take kids who are tabula rasa and don't understand any of the institutions and you have to tell them that their greatest happiness is to be found in joining the mob and tearing things down.
	It's not like you wonder why they're doing Drag Queen Story Hour.
	Why are they targeting the kids?
	Why can't they just do it for adults?
	Because they can't do it for adults.
	The whole point is that they are building an entire generation of people who are going to engage in this.
	When we talk about grooming, it's not grooming for sex.
	It's grooming for ideology.
	The idea is you're going to ideologically groom kids so that they are part of a group of people who celebrate you.
	And by the way, they openly say this.
	Remember there was a video that came out not all that long ago, a couple years ago actually.
	I think it was the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus.
	You remember this one?
	Yes, yes.
	They put out a video.
	They say, we are going to make your kids gay, right?
	And they do a whole song talking about how we're coming for your kids.
	Yes, we're coming for your kids.
	And then they took it down because it was too close to home and people noticed what they were doing.
	They said the quiet part out loud.
	And they said, yes, we're going to make your kids fair and we're going to make your kids tolerant and we're going to build a better world on the bodies of your kids.
	And that's what's going on here.
	When you talk about how we're conditioned to accept a lot of the premises here, I think also conservatives have a condition to accept this trump card of, well, it makes me happy.
	If someone says, well, it makes me happy, then the conditioning is, well, then, okay, if it makes you happy, it makes you happy.
	This is one thing, filming what is a woman and going around to cities all across the country and talking to people about these issues, that's one of the most common responses that we heard.
	It's just that, well, this is what I believe, but if it makes somebody happy, then they should be able to do what makes them happy.
	What is a woman screening, our most recent one, which was Wisconsin-Madison, where I was talking to a young man who's transitioning to try to become a woman.
	And he said that, well, I take this medicine and it makes me happy.
	And that's supposed to be the trump card that we're supposed to back away from.
	Of course, I tried to explain that that's not actually happiness.
	It's not the goal of life.
	It's not the goal of life, but it's also not the goal of medicine.
	The point of medicine is not to make you happy in the moment.
	It's your overall wellness, your overall well-being.
	It's to treat...
	What is actually wrong with you?
	There's nothing wrong with your male essence.
	That's who you are.
	But what the left has also done is they've played a wonderful trick here, which is they said in the sixties, the personal is the political, right?
	This is one of their big slogans.
	How you act personally is an action against the man, right?
	If you decide to buck the patriarchy by engaging in premarital sex or extraneous sex or alternative forms of sexual arrangement, this is bucking the patriarchy, right?
	The personal is political.
	And then you say, okay, well, if the personal is political, then I don't like your politics and I don't like that.
	And I think that that's wrong.
	And they say, well, how dare you attack me personally?
	Yeah, yeah.
	You're attacking my happiness.
	And the answer is, I don't care about what you do personally nearly as much as I care about what society says about what you do personally.
	You change the rules of society, and that's what makes the difference.
	This was always the argument about gay marriage.
	The argument about gay marriage was always, you know, what do you care if two men get married?
	How does it affect your marriage?
	How does it affect your life?
	And the answer is, that marriage doesn't affect my life.
	How society decides what is a relationship that is worth upholding and cherishing, and what a society decides is not worth upholding, that does change my life.
	Marriage is a fundamental political That's right.
	And when it comes to the rules of the road, who makes the rules of the road matters an awful lot.
	And conservatives have run away from this, I think in the name of sort of a value-neutral libertarianism.
	When the left wasn't quite so crazy, you could make the argument that a neutral space was going to be enough.
	Okay, you do you, and I'll do me, and we'll all get together at the end of the day, and we'll have a beer, and it'll be totally fine.
	But when the left started to take over all of the neutral spaces and bar everybody else, and then demand that you lose your job for saying that men are men and women are women, and started to demand that we be able to take your kids away from you.
	I mean, the craziest piece of legislation that won't be crazy in five years, I guarantee it, because I've been saying for at least five years that it was going to be a thing, is this piece of proposed legislation in Virginia by that Virginia Democrat who suggests that CPS should be able to come and remove your child from you, If your child goes to school and expresses gender confusion, and then comes home and you say, no, Billy, you're a boy, that CPS... They're doing that in Canada, right?
	100%.
	And by the way, this will be common practice in the United States within the next five years, in California, in New York, in New Jersey.
	I'm calling my shot right now.
	That's conversion therapy.
	The thing about this is, though, so much of this has to do with the press because it's hard for me to even pick on Republicans who are, after all, politicians.
	This is what they do.
	That's their profession.
	They're politicians.
	Their basic goal is to be loved and reelected.
	They're surrounded by this press.
	And if you're in D.C., you are literally surrounded by this press that is telling them that they are bad people if they disagree.
	And so if they say, well, the economy is not working, if they say, well, this is more practical.
	You've got to put criminals in jail.
	They can get away with that.
	But if you say, you know what, you can't change from a man to a woman necessarily.
	The press, as one, sits on their heads and says, you are evil.
	And they break.
	But this is where the crowd matters.
	So, the perfect example of what Matt's doing right now, you're basically, what you're doing is on a new issue.
	issue.
	What you're basically doing is what the pro-life movement did in the aftermath of Roe, right?
	Because in the aftermath of Roe, if you actually look at the constituency of the party, there was pretty broad spectrum overlap in terms of abortion.
	There were a lot of pro-abortion Republicans.
	There were a lot of pro-life Republicans.
	There were some pro-life Democrats at the time, right?
	And pretty quickly, the political incentives started to change and they started to realign.
	And suddenly you could not be a pro-choice Republican.
	This was not something For the Democrats, it was the opposite.
	You could not be a pro-life Democrat.
	You can't name a pro-life Democrat today in the Democratic Party.
	What you're doing out there is performing the political function of what you should be doing, which is politics is not about electing the right people.
	Politics is about making the wrong people do the right things.
	And that starts with changing the incentive structure, and that starts with the public pressure campaign.
	You think any of these politicians five seconds ago cared about school boards?
	You think any of these politicians five seconds ago cared about Vandy?
	You think any of these politicians five seconds ago cared about the transing of the children?
	They didn't even know about it, right?
	It's because people wake up.
	And that's the job of what Matt's doing, and we're proud to sponsor a lot of that work here at Daily Wire.
	But, you know, Matt being out on the front lines and all of us talking about this stuff daily, raising the awareness of people who then go to their politicians and say, you best do something about this or we will turn your ass out of office.
	That's what's going to change.
	And it is about the family, too, because what is the basic thing that people will show up for?
	They will show up for their kids.
	And mothers especially, I think, will show up for their kids, and that's why they want mothers out of the house.
	And parents are terrified.
	Of what's happening to kids, especially parents that send their kids...
	There's no way to overstate this.
	This is, I mean, parents are...
	I talk about people wake up in the morning worried about.
	For a lot of parents, I think millions of parents, this is probably number one even before the economy.
	I agree with you.
	They might say, you know, in a poll or something that people name the economy.
	It is something people care about.
	Because they still don't actually think about their kids as a political topic.
	So when you go to someone and say, what's the most important political issue?
	They...
	They don't associate the feelings that they have about their kids.
	But I will tell you, it was a massive factor in me personally moving my family out of California.
	I said to my wife, in 10 years it will not be possible to raise my kids religious and traditional in the state.
	It is not going to be possible.
	Plus you'd be a target.
	You personally won't.
	Oh, 100%.
	But even if I weren't, I just don't think that the left is going to make it livable.
	I don't think the transgressives will allow tradition to exist.
	Again, the entire basis of transgressive philosophy is that tradition is bad and must be torn down.
	There's another area where You know, the right has sort of lost its way, and that is we lost even the language to defend tradition.
	The language to defend tradition used to be really simple.
	You see it, by the way, like I was just in Israel.
	One of the things that you see from people who have not spent a lot of time with sort of the West, and here I'm talking about Sephardic Jews from places like Morocco, right?
	Israel is broken down to Ashkenazic and Sephardic.
	You have the people from Eastern Europe who tend to be a little bit more high income than you have the people who are from the Arab areas.
	So the people from the Arab areas are fairly new immigrants.
	Like in the last 50, 60 years, they moved to the state of Israel because the state of Israel is only 73 years old.
	And so a lot of them, if you even ask them this stuff, they would look at you cross-eyed in the same way that the Kenyan tribesmen were looking at you when you asked them about this stuff.
	Like, what in the world are you even...
	And if you ask them, can you justify to me...
	Why what you're saying is true?
	They would look at you and they would laugh.
	They wouldn't try to give you some sort of secular humanist explanation for why what they're saying is true.
	They would look at you and they would laugh.
	And by the way, that is the proper response of a human being to absurdity is to laugh at the argument.
	But we have lost the capacity in this country to laugh at the argument specifically because we have said that it is no longer good enough to just say, listen, my tradition says, and it's a tradition that's worked for several thousand years, that what you're saying is stupid.
	You're not allowed to say that anymore.
	And so what you end up with is this bizarre situation where huge swaths of the West have no language to even discuss these issues.
	So Jonathan Haidt gives a really good example of this in The Righteous Mind.
	He says, go to a college campus today and ask college students, is there anything immoral about a man going down to the grocery store, buying a frozen chicken, bringing it home, and copulating with the frozen chicken?
	And if you ask most college students, they will say no.
	It's a victimless crime.
	There's nothing immoral about a man copulating with frozen chicken.
	If you ask most people of every other culture on planet Earth, they'll say, of course there's something wrong with it.
	There's something wrong with him.
	What in the actual world?
	But we've lost the language in the West to be able to just say that.
	And we've lost the bravery in the West to say that.
	But this is the thing that they're doing.
	It's an actually...
	An act of idolatry, as Barfield would point out.
	What they think is by changing the map, they can change the territory.
	There are structures of language that we use.
	Language is a rude tool.
	It's not an exact tool.
	Language is a rude tool with which we try to describe what our experience of life...
	Oh, we can destroy the language and therefore we've destroyed the reality, which of course is exactly the definition of idolatry.
	The fact is, there are certain words that are primary words.
	Man and woman are two of them.
	God is one of them.
	There's nothing to compare it to.
	You know, Republicans, conservatives tend to find, well, a woman is this, a woman is that.
	We all know what a woman is.
	It's beyond language.
	Every single, you know, my little grandson knows who mommy is and who daddy is and that mommy's a girl.
	They don't have to be taught that.
	They know it.
	They absolutely know it.
	There's no way to basically argue this.
	You just have to say you're an idiot.
	And laughter is exactly the right relationship.
	You know, there's a great concept.
	I mean, that's such a great point.
	I remember when I was a little kid and I asked my dad, I said, you know, I was probably three years old.
	Dad, I remember it clearly.
	The difference between a boy and a girl, right?
	The boys have short hair, the girls have long hair, right?
	He said, oh, there's a little more to it than that.
	But it didn't matter.
	My definition was just as good as any other.
	And there's this great concept that Leon Kass, the great bioethicist at UChicago makes, which is he describes the wisdom of repugnance, to use John Haidt's example of going home with the chicken, or many other examples.
	There was just one that cropped up in the press the other day, and they said, why would it be wrong for two siblings, let's say the two siblings are the same sex, twins, to have an incestuous relationship?
	Because they're twins, there's no risk of procreation, no worry about...
	Too many babies or anything, yeah.
	Yeah, so what's wrong with that?
	And...
	For most people, spur of the moment, they probably wouldn't give you the rational explanation for why that's wrong.
	Not saying it can't be done, but they wouldn't give it to you.
	But we have something which is a wisdom of repugnance, and that carries a hell of a lot more weight than some cockamamie answer from a man in a dress talking to the president on air.
	But it's interesting, if you read Jonathan Haidt, because there is this movement, this evolutionary biology, where they say, oh, all this evolved and created.
	The fact that when you smell something disgusting, you know, you suddenly think it may be immoral.
	They think, well, this just evolved.
	The moral sense in that case would be the only sense that we've evolved that refers to nothing.
	You know, our eyes refer to things that you can see, all right?
	You know, the moral sense refers to morality, an actual thing that is actually there.
	And Jonathan Haidt is interesting because he makes the argument, basically, that it's all evolved.
	But something in him stops, which is not true of Paul Bloom, I think his name is.
	It's not true of him.
	He calls evolution the origin of good and evil in his book, which is nonsense.
	But Jonathan Haidt stops and says, you know, there may be something to this.
	There may be something to this repugnance.
	And I think that's the only logical, sensible way to behave.
	That's absolutely true.
	Something I always consider very moral is for my beautiful wife to come back and spend the night in my bed, in our marital bed.
	Now, I'm not inviting you to my marital bed, but I'm inviting you to a similar bed when you check out Helix Sleep, okay?
	Please don't knock on my door, but you can have your very own.
	That's right, baby.
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	You've got to go check it out.
	I've had Helix for, I think, two years now.
	They've got several different mattress models to choose from.
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	That was the best one of the night, I guess.
	Stop it.
	Come on.
	I thought mine was better.
	You would.
	You know, two of our compatriots aren't with us tonight.
	Candace is off baptizing her child in the UK. I think you were with her briefly.
	In fact, you know why I got picked for godfather?
	Tell me why.
	Are you the godfather?
	I'm the godfather, actually.
	You know why?
	So some people think, you know...
	You're Sicilian.
	That's obvious.
	The Catholic thing has nothing to do with it.
	It's so that I can grant favors on the day of my goddaughter's wedding.
	Right.
	Yeah, that's fantastic.
	And, of course, Jordan Peterson not with us, although he was with young Spencer Clavin in Athens two weeks ago, and he was with the two of us in Israel the week before that, and an unbelievable experience.
	He jetsets more than any human.
	He is a force of nature.
	And right after this show tonight, we will be releasing our new special with Jordan, the first episode of our new special on marriage.
	I'm really excited about our project with Jordan.
	We announced in June that he was joining Daily Wire Plus, but we didn't have a lot to show for it.
	We had that first special, which is a tremendous piece of work, Dragons, Monsters, and Men.
	And we had his podcast in Members Block.
	Okay, that's great.
	The podcast pre-existed us, so we're very happy to have it, but it's not like something that Daily Wire brought to the table.
	Between now and the end of this year, which is only two months hence, We're going to be releasing so much incredible, premium, exclusive Jordan Peterson content that has never been seen before or can't be seen anywhere else.
	People aren't going to believe the body of work that we're going to be putting into the world starting tonight with the first episode of Marriage.
	We have an incredible special coming out with Jordan on Vision, an incredible special that he shot in Athens on depression and anxiety and how to face those demons.
	I can't even talk about all of it because it's not my place.
	Some of it is his to announce, but I think it's fair to say that by eight weeks from today, there will be We're good to go.
	I'm thrilled about this one because on the night that we announced that Jordan was joining us at the Ryman, we had an unbelievable conversation about marriage.
	I think it's something that our audience really responded to.
	We've gotten so much great feedback about it.
	So we asked Jordan just to expand on the issue, and he did so in this three-part special on marriage.
	You can get it tonight right after the show if you're a member of Daily Wire Plus.
	You know, our members are what make it possible for us to make really premium content like this marriage special.
	And so they'll be able to watch this tonight.
	You can head over to dailywireplus.com, click that subscribe button.
	And I brought here for sort of a world premiere.
	I hate that Jordan isn't with us for it, but we're going to get to see the first minute of the special that's ever been released right now.
	What grows you up?
	Responsibility.
	Sacrifice.
	A vision of the future.
	And so people grow up when they get married.
	And it's probably better to get married when you're young.
	Because then you grow up.
	If you're still an adolescent by the time you're 40, you're a creep.
	You're the sort of person that you don't even want to be around.
	So, you don't want to be the oldest person at the frat party.
	That is not pretty.
	There's something rotten about that.
	And I mean in that contemptible sense.
	It's something that's overstayed its welcome, man.
	And, you know, people are willing to forgive you your immaturity when you're 22 or 23 or 28 maybe, or even 30.
	But, man, if you're still playing that game when you're 40, You are not a happy person and you're going to be motivated to go out there and make everyone miserable.
	And so grow the hell up!
	But what does he really think?
	Don't beat around the book.
	It's such an important topic.
	People get married on average like 10 years later now than they did.
	It's destroying the country.
	That's right.
	And all of Western civilization.
	It really is.
	People aren't having babies.
	He's exactly right.
	People aren't getting married at an age where they actually are able to grow up with one another because your wife shapes you and you shape her and that makes you both better people.
	When I married my wife, I just turned 24 and she was 20.
	And we've spent our lives growing up together.
	I mean, now I'm 38, and she's 35, and that's a long time to spend.
	Half her life, basically, we've spent together.
	And that means that you grow, and you change, and you have experiences, and then you bring kids into the world, and that radically changes you even more than just the marriage.
	And when Jordan says that if you're 40 and single, you're blowing it, he is cutting directly against the grain of all current conventional wisdom, which is the best thing that you can do, is delay marriage and delay marriage until you make associate at the law firm working 2,200 hours Well, now they say grow up and then get married.
	And in the past, they said get married and grow up.
	So that you can grow up.
	My dad used to make a point about this.
	He used to say people would ask him about when to get married.
	And he said, well, or how to find the right person.
	And what he always said is you have to make the decision to get married before you find the right person.
	Because if you didn't make the decision that you wanted to get married, then the right person could come along and you could just...
	I'm out of the water.
	We live in a society where we decide the opposite.
	We'll fall in love with the person, and then we'll have sex, and then maybe four years down the road we'll get married.
	We've completely reversed the polarity and the order of events.
	Look at the sitcoms from the 90s versus the sitcoms from the 60s.
	In the 60s it was, you fall in love, you get married, you have sex.
	Now it's, you have sex, and then it's really hard for you to say if you fell in love with the person.
	That's the big move in a sitcom now.
	Did you fall in love?
	And then you never get married.
	Marriage is so past that.
	Marriage is the series finale.
	You know, there's another aspect of this, which is that as we delay the onset of adulthood, the left also wants to reduce the age of things like voting.
	You know, I don't think 18-year-olds today should be able to vote, is the honest truth.
	And you could say, well, you're saying that people should be able to serve in the military and they shouldn't be able to vote.
	Well, I'll let those ones vote because they're doing something that grows you up called joining the military.
	Right.
	But no, the whole point of having a voting age is that we don't want children voting.
	Children aren't mature.
	They don't have stakes.
	They don't understand the stakes that they do have.
	So we don't want it.
	Matt got in a little bit of trouble for some comments that he made back when he was a shock jock about at what age people should have sex.
	I don't want to rehash all the terrain, except to say that it is absolutely the case that for the vast majority of human history, people who were of the age of sexual maturity were considered candidates for marriage.
	We all agree now that that cannot possibly be the standard because you're still a kid for so long.
	It's creepy for people to get married super young now because we know—because it cuts against everything that we think about the maturing process and the age at which people should be mature.
	And in some ways, that's a byproduct of our success, right?
	We've been very successful as a species.
	We can protect people younger.
	We don't have to shove you out in the field to work in the sun when you're nine years old.
	We don't have to put those responsibilities.
	Your life expectancy isn't 35.
	Life expectancy isn't 35.
	And so I don't want to make it sound as though every aspect of that progress that we've had is bad.
	But the fact that we say that one should not grow up or that marriage isn't an instrumental part of the process of growing up, I do think is really good.
	It used to be that we said, okay, we'll delay adulthood, right?
	Adulthood isn't when you're 14.
	My wife's grandmother got married at 14 in Morocco, right?
	Almost all of our great-grandparents probably got married.
	The Virgin Mary was probably 15 when she got married.
	But we don't do that anymore.
	But real adulthood sets in when you're 18.
	And now real adulthood sets in after death.
	The idea in our society is not to push back the line a little bit so that you actually have a little bit more brain development and can make better decisions about your values.
	The idea is obliterate the line so it doesn't exist.
	Well, the problem with that goes both ways.
	One is that you are obliterating adulthood so that you have fully grown adults who are acting like children.
	The other is that there's no distinction between adults and children.
	Then you can start treating children like adults.
	And this is what you're currently seeing with the trans movement.
	The next thing that's going to happen, again, I think we are living in that meme, the slippery slope meme.
	We did a whole podcast on this last week.
	The slippery slope meme that shows the slippery slope, and it shows it's not going to happen, it's not going to happen, it's not going to happen.
	And then at the bottom, there's an arrow that says, you are here.
	And that's exactly what it is.
	They keep saying it's not going to happen.
	It's never going to happen.
	We're never going to do that.
	Well, you guys are currently making the argument that a five-year-old is capable of choosing his gender.
	So I'm going to need you to explain how it's okay for a five-year-old to choose his gender for the rest of his life.
	But that child is not capable of sexual choice.
	By the way, I don't think a child is capable of either, so I'm consistent.
	So I'm asking you, why don't you be consistent?
	Explain to me how kids are able to consent to chopping off their dicks at the age of 16, but they're not able.
	What you're saying is that we're on the verge of the moment when the left tries to say that children can engage in sex with adults, essentially.
	Yes, and what they're going to do is...
	It's happening, also.
	That very movement.
	Oh, 100%.
	And what it'll start with, it'll start with what they've already started to do with sort of these Romeo and Juliet laws, right?
	It'll start with, it's okay for a 15-year-old to have sex with a 13-year-old.
	What's really the problem?
	And then it'll be, what was 16 so bad?
	And then I was like, what is 18 so bad?
	I mean, there's so...
	I mean, just why I disagree with you about grooming, I think they are grooming children for sexuality.
	That is their definition of identity.
	But is it that you're disagreeing or you're discussing the two sides of the very same thing, which is you're describing the physical enactment of it and you're describing the metaphysical version of it.
	But the whole point is, they're kind of the same.
	They're kind of intertwined.
	By the way, what you talked about growing up in a marriage is...
	Doubly important because you're growing up with a woman.
	Yes.
	You know, I mean, I married my wife like most people marry their wife because she was hot.
	She was beautiful.
	She was fun.
	She was smart.
	She was all those things that really attracted.
	But it wasn't until about 10 years after we had been together when I started to think like, oh, you know, like for the first 10 years I was thinking, well, of course she has no capacity for a reason.
	You know, she's, I don't understand a word she said.
	But then I kept noticing that she was right a lot of the time.
	And I couldn't understand it.
	I started to think, oh, she's actually seeing the world from a different point of view.
	And that is like putting on those red and blue glasses that suddenly turn the world into three dimensions.
	You suddenly become one flesh, one person, and you see things in a new and deeper and richer way.
	And that, to me, transforms everything.
	Yeah.
	Because, you know, I'm never going to stop being a guy.
	She's never going to stop being a girl.
	She's the girliest girl I know.
	I'm a very guy-like guy.
	But now I live in a unity of male-female that actually transforms everything into reality, into a reality you don't see before.
	And the other advantage of getting...
	It's kind of like marriage is the cornerstone of adulthood or the capstone.
	And the advantage to it being the cornerstone of young adulthood is that, as you said, you're building a life together, an existence together, as opposed to, let's get married when we're 35 or 40, and now I have...
	I have all of my own stuff.
	Everything is mine.
	I have my own life, my own money.
	This is all mine.
	And now you are coming into this thing that I have built without you.
	And by the way, all your own experiences and all the crap from your past, which you see really break up marriages.
	People come in with all these terrible experiences they've already had with members of the opposite sex, and then they get married.
	And they're already heavily shaped.
	And that's why we hear so much about, well, you know...
	At the root of a lot of divorces is money.
	And I guess that's the case.
	But for someone like myself, I got married young.
	I can't even imagine why that would be the case.
	We don't have any money issues in my marriage because all the money...
	I make the money, but it's our money.
	It's in a joint bank account.
	It was in a joint bank account literally the day we got married.
	And I'm also aware because I have...
	As I've been growing and building my career and all that, I've had my wife with me, and none of this would have happened without her.
	So it's very clear to me that this is something we did together.
	One of the things I love to ask, by the way, for, I think, all of us.
	So I think none of us were either rich or famous.
	Some of us are still not rich or famous.
	But for those of us who are both wealthy and famous, I think all of us were married to our spouses long before we had any of those things.
	And that is a wonderful thing.
	It's a wonderful thing.
	My wife married a writer.
	Exactly.
	But the fact that your spouse can still look at you, and this is what you're saying.
	If the marriage happens late, this can't happen.
	The fact that my wife can still look at me as the person who was 23 and just out of law school, and she can say, I see through all this crap.
	None of this makes a bit of difference to me.
	The person who you are is not the person who the rest of the world sees.
	It's the person who I've known since long before you were that to the rest of the world.
	That's an amazing thing.
	It also gives you the ability to...
	Have somebody who calls you on your bullshit, which is like an actual real thing.
	Once you get to a certain level of power, people just are really, really afraid to call you on your bullshit.
	And having a group of people, whether it's friends or particularly your wife, who's able to do that is vital because if you don't have that, you spin off the rails incredibly fast.
	Yeah.
	It actually didn't occur to me until you said that, that I think every single one of us got married relatively broke.
	I think every single one of us did.
	Totally.
	I have noticed, too, that the harshest critic and kind of best shaper of my show...
	It's sweet little Elisa, where I'll have something that I'm going to do on the show or in a speech or something where I think it's absolute dynamite.
	And she'll say, you know, Mac, it just doesn't work, Mac.
	I'm sorry.
	No, but it actually...
	Nah, you're right.
	You're right.
	She's always right.
	That's kind of what we're talking about with Fetterman, is that I think a good wife...
	Is your number one fan.
	She really believes in you and believes in your dreams and your aspirations.
	Because you're her number one fan also.
	Right, exactly.
	But she also, you know, I think as men we need a woman to let us know when we're biting off more than we can chew, when we've hatched.
	Because as men we're going to hatch all kinds of crazy schemes and plans.
	I know that I do anyway.
	And you need a woman there because she can see that blind spot and she's going to tell you, well, that's not going to work.
	Whereas I think for men, on the other hand, This is my gender stereotypical way of looking at it.
	I rely on my wife to let me know when I've got some idea, some plan that's just utterly self-destructive and it's going to destroy the whole family.
	That last sentence is the key.
	That last part of the sentence is that it's going to destroy the whole family.
	My wife tends to think in terms of the effect on the family.
	As a man, my main thing is, what is my effect on the world?
	I literally do that for a living.
	What is my effect on the world?
	What's my effect on society?
	What's my effect on the people who listen to the show?
	I'll try to overcommit.
	I want to get all these things done.
	There's so much to do before you die.
	You've got to get out there.
	You've got to travel.
	You've got to change people.
	My wife will say yes, but what about the kids?
	Do you want to be away for that night?
	Do you want to be able to put the kids in bed?
	Matt, I want you to finish that thought.
	Yeah, well, so I think on the other side, that's what we rely on women for.
	I think, on the other hand, as men, women will tend to get involved in—they might get involved in personal feuds and take things very personally and have a tendency to overreact in those sorts of situations.
	And that's where men can be the voice of reason and say, well, I don't think they really meant it like that.
	I don't think that's exactly what— Now, it doesn't mean that women are going to listen all the time, but I do think that's the kind of...
	We can both be the voice of reason and calm for each other in these different situations and see each other's blind spots.
	We actually have an explicit deal with my wife, which is neither of us is allowed to be...
	We're not allowed to be grumpy at the same time.
	We have to take turns.
	We'll balance it out.
	I'll literally be like, it's my turn to be grumpy.
	I get to be grumpy right now.
	And she'll go, okay.
	All right.
	And then when it's time for her to be grumpy, then I'll say, okay, you know what?
	You're right.
	It's your turn to be grumpy.
	And you do need that balance.
	And again, the differences between men and women are not only beautiful, they are vital.
	And pretending that those differences are of no consequence whatsoever, and that other alternative forms of family structure are therefore equivalent in any way at all, they're different.
	They're different.
	I mean, there's no other way to put that.
	But this is why, I mean, to both of these points, this is why the personal is the political is so powerful.
	One, it obviously came from the feminists because women tend to be more personally focused.
	And traditionally, women took care of the private part of life.
	And men were more public facing and were more interested in the political side.
	And so it's no surprise that the feminists would then seek to meld those two.
	But then it's obviously the case that the personal is the political.
	You know, the country is just made up of people and of our personal lives.
	And so we think of marriage as being private.
	Well, if marriage becomes completely distorted, that's obviously going to have political effects.
	And you've seen that play out now for 60 years.
	It's also amazing to me that the left has managed to take what is, for most of us, the central consolation of tragic life and make it, as they say, problematical.
	I mean, I was just reading, you know, I was looking, you know how you have those things that come up, pop up on your thing.
	You might want to look at this and it's just clickbait.
	And I fell for it and I was reading some BuzzFeed thing about, you know, tweets in marriage or tweets about marriage.
	And it was all this kind of low, you know, bathroom humor.
	It was all about, oh, you know, now we're so intimate, we're in the bathroom together.
	I don't do that.
	I live with a lady, man.
	I don't treat her like my sister.
	I treat her like my wife.
	You went to the bathroom with your sister?
	What's that?
	I said, you went to the bathroom with your sister?
	I didn't have a sister.
	I probably would have spied on her.
	But no, this is actually the joy of every day that you are living with a woman, which is one of the fun, happy things of life.
	It's a celebratory thing.
	To your point, too, because this came up in our members block.
	I've got an email from a guy.
	I don't think he's a leftist at all.
	In fact, I know he's not.
	But he was of this certain frame of mind that, well, we're just going to give up on.
	Men should just give up on marriage.
	It's a losing game.
	It doesn't work.
	The system's rigged against us.
	Go your own way.
	Family courts are rigged against us and all that.
	And then he reveals at the end that apparently he was married and it didn't work out.
	You don't have sex anymore when you get married.
	All this kind of stuff.
	So he had a negative experience with it.
	He's projecting it onto everybody else, saying this is how it's going to be for everybody.
	Younger men hear this and they take it to heart.
	When, of course, our message has to be, well, that was his experience.
	It doesn't have to be everyone's.
	But also...
	It's important to have the message that what you're articulating, there are risks in marriage, and some of that is just the nature of the beast.
	It's human nature.
	Some of it is built into our system.
	I mean, I think the family courts are rigged against men.
	It is a risk, but it's a risk worth taking because of what you get out of.
	You know, I have a solution to this.
	This is the Knowles prenup.
	Because I know people's marriages who have broken down, and the main reason they break down is because two people go in with a completely different understanding of marriage.
	And so naturally it's going to break down.
	So sometimes people write in, I don't want to get a prenup because I have this sacred traditional view of marriage.
	But I don't know, these days the courts are rigged against men, and we've got our own stuff, and blah, blah, blah, whatever.
	So the Knowles prenup is this.
	When you both have the same idea of marriage and you're both committed to it, you sign a prenup saying, okay, whoever breaks up the marriage, whoever wants out of the marriage, forfeits everything.
	Forfeits the money, forfeits the house, forfeits the kids, forfeits everything.
	Maybe you have a few exceptions and some kind of crazy...
	Domestic abuse, yeah.
	Domestic abuse or whatever, you know.
	But you have these little carve-outs, but you say, okay, that's my...
	I think that would be a way to use the legal system that's rigged against marriage to help save...
	Marriage was always a contract.
	Right.
	I mean, it's literally, in Judaism, what got me married is called a ketubah.
	It's literally a contract.
	It is framed.
	It is in my house.
	The ketubah is written in Aramaic, and it specifies things like my duties to her and her duties to me.
	And these things include providing for the family, a sex life, the basic things of marriage.
	But we've become so individualized that even the things that everybody understood were part of marriage are no longer considered part of marriage.
	Dennis Prager got himself in all sorts of hot water, I remember, a few years ago for suggesting that in a marriage, a woman has a responsibility to have sex with her husband.
	Oh my god, they did this to my sister-in-law, Caitlin.
	Right.
	How dare you say this?
	No, there is never an obligation to have sex.
	Well, I mean, okay, then there's not an obligation for the marriage to continue.
	I mean, like, that's obviously, conjugal duties are part of marriage.
	They always have been.
	In fact, one of the chief draws of marriage was the conjugal duties from the very beginning.
	And the Bible actually explicitly says not to withhold yourselves from one another.
	I mean, again, this notion that you only have sex when you are in just the greatest possible mood, then no one would ever have sex pretty much ever, except for dudes, right?
	I mean, that's just the way that it would work.
	But it's an absurdity that's been pressed forward by the radical individualism that we've been talking about so far all along the way.
	There's something else when it comes to marriage also, and that, of course, is the fact that you said that it's one of the great consolations in the face of tragic life.
	Well, the greatest consolation in the face of tragic life is marriage because it produces children, which is the challenge to death.
	The way that you overcome death as human beings is you have future generations.
	And this is clearly laid out in Genesis.
	This is perfectly obvious.
	When you look at the story of Genesis, it's so beautiful.
	When you look at the very beginning of the book of Genesis...
	And it talks about a man shall leave his family and he shall cleave to his wife and they'll become one flesh.
	At the very beginning, it talks about Adam and Eve.
	Eve doesn't have a name at the beginning.
	She's just woman.
	For the first several chapters of the Bible, she's just woman, right?
	He's Adam.
	His name doesn't change.
	He's Adam, which just means man.
	And she's Isha, right?
	She's woman.
	The only time that she gets a name is when she has a kid.
	Hmm.
	Once she has a kid, he renames her.
	Why?
	Because she's the mother of all living, right?
	Eve is the mother of all living.
	That's when she loses.
	His sense of her, up until that point, she's just my other half.
	She's just my complimentary half.
	She's not an actual individual who's worth respecting as a different person.
	Then she has kids, and suddenly I see her as something else.
	This is one of the most amazing things about this book by Judith Butler, this gender trouble.
	I don't think there's a single mention of motherhood in the entire book.
	And I kept thinking, you know, this is this idea that there's no such thing as a telos.
	There's no such thing as a purpose to anything.
	It's all this kind of random thing that just unfolds.
	But if sex has any purpose, and of course it does, why would we have it?
	It's to create.
	It's also like if you wrote a book about Superman, you don't mention that he can fly.
	Yeah.
	Ever.
	It's exactly right.
	That is kind of a defining factor of why we're here together and what happens.
	But they've obliterated the meaning of that.
	Dylan Mulvaney did an entire video for Ulta talking about how he can be a mother.
	No, you effing can.
	No, you cannot.
	I want to talk about this point that you made, though, that we all were broke when we got married.
	Because that actually is...
	I think there are so many lies put forward in the culture about marriage, and most of the lies target men, but not all of the lies.
	There are a bunch of terrible lies on social media that target women, and women perpetuate them, and I hate them.
	All this, like, it's wine 30 kind of bullshit that you see everywhere in woman culture.
	I hate it, because it essentially says that being a wife and a mother is something that you need to basically drown out, that it's just miserable and misery and terrible.
	Yeah.
	It's awful.
	But a lot of the cultural lies are aimed at men.
	You will have less sex when you get married.
	People who get married never have sex.
	The only people who have sex are married.
	What are you talking about?
	It is true that you will have sex with fewer distinct humans.
	Hopefully.
	Hopefully.
	Once you're married, unless you...
	Although, by the way, today, that ain't even true.
	Given the rise of pornography, to go back to our conversation from last time, that probably ain't true.
	But it is certainly the case that, on average, married people have far, far, far more sex.
	Because they have a partner to whom they have obligations.
	You'll have less money.
	You get so much richer once you're married and have obligation.
	The thing about men is that men only want as much as they need, basically, when they're single.
	That's the...
	That's true.
	It's true.
	It's why you walk into a man's apartment and it's like a box with a TV on it and a toaster.
	That's right.
	It's when you have responsibilities that you begin to earn.
	Yes, I was dead broke when I got married and...
	I've been married since 2009, and I am not dead broke.
	But if you look at the, it is a hockey stick graph.
	If you look at, here's Jeremy's life before he gets married.
	Oh my gosh, he figured it out.
	Now, part of how I figured it out is that men helped me understand, as I've discussed before, that my values about money needed to actually be practiced.
	And my friend Frank Brunner also helped me with that problem.
	But marriage is the fundamental thing that changed.
	Responsibility is the fundamental thing.
	And then you get a kid, and you're like, oh, I've really got to hurt.
	And by the way, it's not because you're like, well, crap, now I've got to take care of this kid.
	Crap, now I have to give up what I want.
	I had so many dreams in life.
	My dreams picked me up out of my small town.
	They moved me west to a place that I'd never been.
	They dropped me in a city that didn't want me.
	They motivated me to grind it out, to work so hard.
	I couldn't figure out how to make money.
	But I worked so hard.
	I was so devoted to pursuing those things.
	All my dreams came true once I had responsibilities.
	It's not as though I had to give up all my dreams and then go grind it out at the salt mine to provide for my kids.
	It's the exact opposite.
	Yep.
	I gotta tell you, I was just talking to a young man, a very good-looking young man with a lot of money.
	Thank you.
	It was a different, another very good-looking man.
	And he was telling me how you date today, and he has 10 apps on his phone, and he says, if I don't have sex with a girl by the second date, you know, it's not.
	But he was complaining about the fact that he couldn't find a wife.
	And I said to him, you know, there was a There was a point where I kind of envied young men for growing up in this sex-positive world where they could just have it anytime they essentially wanted.
	I said, but when I listen to you, I actually don't envy you at all because this has reduced you to an animal.
	And he said, you're right.
	He said, I can't fall in love because I think, oh, there might be somebody else who will sleep with me down the road.
	And I just thought, this is like an actual tragic situation.
	It's a situation that we watch movies and you watch pornography and it's what they're offering you and everybody thinks they want it.
	But to actually live it is very, very depressing.
	Yeah, I think...
	One of the purest joys available to men that you can't understand until you actually have kids is the joy of providing.
	There's a certain joy in being able to provide for your family.
	I'm going to have six kids now, and the fact that I can actually provide for seven human beings is an enormous, profound joy.
	You're welcome.
	Hold on.
	Are you not going to eat or is your wife not?
	Where's the 70s?
	I also think Jordan brought up, to start the conversation, was that you're not really a man until you have kids and have a family.
	I think part of that is because being an adult is learning how to serve, learning how to find joy and service.
	That's part of adulthood.
	Which means that you can, there are other paths.
	Not everybody is called...
	To be a parent.
	Or there are other forms of fatherhood anyway, like in the religious life, for example.
	But that is just another form of fatherhood for a man, and it also is centered around service.
	And if you're not living a life of service, then you're not an adult.
	And you know, there was a psychologist whose name I forget, so I'm just going to take his point and claim it as my own.
	Yeah, yeah.
	He defined addiction as the constant narrowing of things that give you pleasure and recovery as the expansion of things that give you pleasure.
	And this is so true because when we're just living for our own base appetites and we reduce ourselves to animals, it's always just some kind of form of idolatry and addiction.
	So it could be drugs or booze or sex or porn or whatever.
	But ultimately, if you've ever fallen into any of these temptations, you have experienced addiction.
	That becomes the thing that gives you pleasure, and it crowds out everything else.
	Necessarily, when you get married, when you have children, hopefully when you go to church or something, when you serve others in your community, there are many other things as well, but especially with a family.
	It just so inevitably expands your capacity for joy and the categories of things that give you joy.
	It just breaks those idolatries and addictions.
	The thing about service, though, to me is everything.
	Because there's a bad...
	Way of doing everything and a good way of doing everything.
	And ambition is one of those things.
	And if what you're ambitious about is to serve your family and also to serve, to find out what you can do that is actually worthwhile to somebody else, you have a very pure ambition that actually doesn't depend on money, though hopefully it will bring money in.
	And it just makes you so much happier.
	It's so much richer way to There's something to be said here about when you talk about serving your family.
	One of the things that you see very often these days is the idea that I'm going to serve humanity.
	Men always have this kind of appetite to serve humanity.
	It's an immature appetite because you can't serve all of humanity.
	Politicians are constantly talking in these terms.
	I care about all the children.
	Nancy Pelosi does this all the time.
	She goes, I'm doing this all for the children, chomping away on her chompers and all the rest of this.
	The reality is that the best politicians are people Who I think, I'm stereotypical now, they do have families.
	Because they know what it's like to take care of a family.
	And then they say, the values that I have in my family are values that I think might be promulgated for other families so they can have a happy life like the life that I have.
	And when you don't have that, when there's nothing to go home to, when you've never lived in the context of that and seen all the competing interests, and when you've never really had that locally, I think it's very difficult to not become a utopian world creator, right?
	Because family life presses in on you, right?
	It sets rules for you.
	Yeah.
	You can't break those rules.
	You think you're in control of your kids?
	You ain't in control of your kids.
	Your kids are in control of you.
	You're in control to a certain extent, but in the end, you're not.
	The fact is that there's just going to be realities that you run up against because that's the way life is.
	It gives you a certain level of humility going into the political world, and maybe you try to achieve the...
	Really what family to me is about.
	You try to achieve the really key things, the most important things.
	It's liberty within the important things.
	As a parent, you're only going to get a few chances to inculcate the really important things in your kids that really, really matter.
	So you build entire structures, entire worlds around them to inculcate these really important things.
	But the rest of the time, you're not in control.
	Well, the same thing is true in politics.
	But when you never have that experience, then the tendency is to say, well, I care about all of humanity equally.
	All of humanity can be molded in my utopian vision.
	I can change all the rules for everybody.
	I can control every aspect of their life.
	It's fascinating how many of the leaders of Europe over the past 15 years have been childless.
	Yes.
	So many of them.
	And I think it also, you know, there is this idea that at some point you start to think, well, this is going to happen in 30 years.
	I'm not going to be here.
	I don't care.
	But if you have kids, you start to care.
	You know, you have grandkids, you really...
	And it does really worry you when you see so many of these crazy activists with all the crazy hair that protested your rally, Matt, that...
	They don't have kids.
	Yeah.
	Almost without exception, they don't have kids.
	And they're really, really interested in your kids.
	Yeah.
	And that's a horrible combination because they have no frame of context.
	Their view is totally wrong.
	And, but they have that desire to shape the next generation.
	They just want to shape your next generation.
	Yeah.
	On that dour note, we're going to head on over to the member block.
	Again, if you're not a DailyWire.com, a DailyWirePlus.com subscriber, you're missing out.
	You want to head over to DailyWirePlus.com, click that subscribe button so you can join us for the rest of this conversation.
	We're going to be taking questions from our members.
	A couple of things I want to talk about real quick before we head over.
	One of them is election night.
	November 8th, it's coming up.
	We're going to be here.
	Hopefully it's going to be a great night.
	Either way, I intend to do heavy drinking.
	We'll have the entire Election Wire and Morning Wire teams here with us, and we're going to be bringing you results in real time.
	So that's November 8th.
	I want you to join us for that.
	And there's one other really big thing that just happened today, and that's that Andrew Klavan released his 1,000th book.
	When he first started writing, you had to handwrite on papyrus every individual.
	chisel on stone.
	But Andrew released today the sequel to his Christmas thriller from last year, and Ben said that I would forget the name of it.
	He was absolutely right.
	Andrew, tell us about the book.
	It's called The Strange Habit of Mind.
	It is the sequel to When Christmas Comes.
	I have finally created a character in Cameron Winter that I want to make a series, build a series around, which I've First of all, it's already gotten all these beautiful reviews, incredible reviews on Amazon, and I think people are going to love it.
	How long did those take you?
	Yeah, I know.
	I'm still writing.
	What's the first one?
	Sold out super quick.
	I mean, it was a big hit.
	Yeah, no, it was just gone.
	I know.
	We went through like three, four printings right away.
	But this one, they printed more copies, so that's good.
	But if you go out and buy it, A, you'll love it, and B, you will show the publisher that this is a series, and I've got at least ten great stories for this guy.
	You You want to write ten books around this character?
	I do.
	That's unbelievable.
	That's great.
	Yeah.
	And it's available right now.
	Available today.
	And it's called A Strange Habit of Mind.
	A Strange Habit of Mind.
	I actually did remember what it was called, but I thought it was funnier.
	So go get Andrew's book, The Strange Habit of Mind, right now and head over to Daily Wire.
	Plus, click that subscribe button.
	Join us right now for Members Block.

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