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Dec. 15, 2022 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:16:42

Daily Wire Backstage: 2022 Season Finale

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	Hey, Michael Knowles here, and do I have a treat for you.
	The latest episode of Daily Wire backstage is right around the corner, and you do not want to miss it.
	Don't miss me, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan, and the God King, Jeremy Boring, as we discuss the latest news and cultural events, all while enjoying some fine whiskey and cigars.
	It is going to be all that and more.
	Take a listen.
	Oh, Merry Christmas, everybody, Merry Christmas, everybody, everybody, and welcome to the Daily Wire backstage.
	Don we now our gay apparel?
	Yes.
	Yes, we do.
	We donned.
	I am Jeremy Boring.
	I am joined by Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, and Michael Knowles, and we're going to be talking about so many important things that we haven't even made up yet.
	You're in for quite a treat.
	But I want to tell you, before we get started, that at the end of this show, we're going to have an unbelievable members block.
	That's for our Daily Wire Plus members.
	If you're not a Daily Wire Plus member, head over to dailywireplus.com.
	Click that subscribe button.
	Grab a membership.
	Join us for the rest of the show and the wonderful things we're going to discuss, including our Secret Santa...
	Names were drawn, money was spent, and shenanigans will ensue.
	That's going to be in the members block as well as our chance to answer questions from you, our members.
	Which brings me to sacrilege, which was spoken just moments before the cameras rolled when one Matthew Bartholomew Walsh suggested that the Dark Knight does not hold up, end quote.
	What the hell, dude?
	I put it on for my kids.
	They're probably too young to watch it in the first place.
	Oh, this is nine.
	Yeah, they were traumatized.
	My wife was shooting me dirty looks the whole time.
	It's not a problem.
	I can't imagine why.
	It's been a while since I've seen it, but then I'm also reassessing it.
	I'm thinking, first of all, the Batman voice really did bother me.
	The Batman voice is a mistake.
	It's hard to take seriously.
	The Two-Face storyline is an absolute afterthought.
	They just throw him in.
	They turn him into Two-Face 30 seconds before the movie's over.
	And it just didn't have...
	I think it really is that Heath Ledger's Joker, you take that out of it, and it's just kind of a basic B-plus Batman film.
	And also, as a sequel compared to the original with Adam West, it doesn't look like that.
	I would like to add, I always liked the first movie best of everything, and I preferred Batman Begins.
	Batman Begins is a great movie.
	It is.
	The first 45 minutes of Batman Begins is just spectacular.
	See, this is the thing.
	I think the first 45 minutes of Batman Begins are fabulous, and then the movie doesn't hold up.
	I agree with that.
	Dark Knight, I don't agree with the Two-Face criticism.
	I think it's just a different...
	They're using Two-Face in a different way than we're used to seeing villains used in film.
	The Batman voice is a problem.
	I watched Dark Knight Rises recently, and between Batman voice and Bane voice, and listen, Tom Hardy's an unbelievable actor.
	Well, Nolan also uses sound in the theater in a way that I'm not particularly fond of, and I'm a Nolan fanboy.
	When you actually see these in the theater, you now have to watch Nolan films with the subtitles on, so you can actually understand what the dialogue is.
	But...
	How are you a Nolan fanboy, though?
	To me, he's a cold director.
	He doesn't really...
	Oh, wait, I forgot who I was talking about.
	I'm sorry.
	He talks really fast.
	The honest answer is that he is a director with ambition.
	He tries to do interesting and fun and creative things.
	And so I actually cut a video that's going to come out shortly on YouTube previewing the films for next year.
	And there's like 13 big films next year.
	And of the 13 films, 11 of them are either sequels or remakes.
	Eleven.
	And a couple of other legacy properties, like a Mario movie or a Barbie movie.
	There are two that are original movies, one from Scorsese, one from Nolan.
	The only guy who now has a budget to make actual creative film is Christopher Nolan.
	And there's stuff that he does that, like, I didn't like Tenet.
	I thought Tenet was not good.
	But Inception is brilliant.
	I'm the only person who likes Interstellar.
	I love Interstellar.
	I think Interstellar is fantastic.
	Interstellar was an insult to me.
	I was so excited for Interstellar.
	There wasn't a single alien.
	Yes, there's no aliens, which was really disappointing.
	But then I thought it would be a film about space, and we spent the whole time listening to Anne Hathaway talk about the power of love.
	That's not true.
	It's three hours long.
	She was there for like seven minutes.
	Okay, but he beats you over the head with the message.
	We don't need the speech.
	I don't care about that part.
	But the creation of the planets is amazing.
	I will say, you allude to the film that's coming out next year, which is Oppenheimer.
	Right.
	I read this week that he, you know, the whole movie culminates apparently in the Trinity test, the first atomic explosion ever to happen on planet Earth.
	Dude, don't spoil it.
	And he refused to use CG. He said if he's going to make a movie, they have to figure out how to create an atomic explosion.
	Really?
	Right.
	60,000 people were killed.
	He created his own stock of film.
	He actually did.
	He created his own stock of film that had never been used.
	Of IMAX film.
	Of IMAX film.
	Just so that it would not degrade.
	And irradiated all the members of the crew.
	Just to make sure that it was realistic.
	I've said many times of Nolan, I don't think, with the exception of Dark Knight, which I think may be a perfect movie other than Batman voice.
	I think that he rarely sticks the landing, but he is the most ambitious filmmaker.
	But he's the only filmmaker who could have made the rescue at Dunkirk a downer.
	When those ships show up on the horizon, it's supposed to be the moment when you stand up and cheer.
	You're like, oh, there's a ship.
	There's no passion.
	Oh, a ship.
	70mm.
	But do you think if you take Keith Ledger's performance out of that film, is it still a great film?
	I think it's a very good film and Heath Ledger's performance certainly takes it to a whole other place.
	I feel sort of out of place here because I hate all of these movies and I don't watch any of the superhero ones.
	I don't want to seem like a total Philistine and totally out of the culture, but has there been any great, like actually great movie in the last...
	30 years?
	Like the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
	The Lord of the Rings was the closest thing to the great movie.
	I walked out of Lord of the Rings.
	I got bored in the woods.
	I have to say, I really believe that Godfather is the last great American movie.
	However, the Lord of the Rings was...
	So, Clayton, this brings us right back to the conversation you and I were actually having before the show.
	Because we were talking about, we were actively talking about this.
	So I just was talking with Robert George from Princeton.
	We were talking about art and how I cannot, I don't think a good book is actually, like a great book.
	Not good.
	A great book has been written since about 1965 in the United States.
	And I think that the reason for that, there may be a couple of exceptions.
	I think maybe American Pastoral was written a little after that.
	And mostly as a critique of the current culture.
	I think there have been some great books.
	But I think they're rare and few.
	Werewolf Cop.
	The thing that is good and great and also...
	But the reason for that is because art for nearly all of human history was directed at actual big and interesting questions.
	And then in the 60s, we decided that all of those questions had been decided in the negative.
	There was no God.
	There was no system of morality.
	There was nothing to struggle against.
	And when you...
	All art was directed at either upholding the system of morality and upholding the truth and justice of God, or at denying that in transgressive ways.
	But without the standard there at all, when the standard is obliterated, there's nothing interesting to be done with film anymore.
	The scales of everything just become extraordinarily small.
	The scope of every film becomes very, very...
	There have been some great...
	You said any great films in the last 30 years?
	Yeah.
	Another one I re-watched last week was No Country for Old Men.
	Oh, that's a good film.
	It's so good.
	Which I think, the first time I saw it, I was lukewarm on it, especially the ending, and I watched it after re-watching it several times.
	This is a great, and it's particularly the end, the last scene, when he's talking about this dream of seeing his father, and now he's waiting for him out in the cold, in the dark.
	I think it's a truly great film.
	It's in my top ten.
	But one of the reasons for that is because it's based on a Cormac McCarthy novel, and Cormac McCarthy deals with questions about God and death, and that entire film is about the nature of fate and death.
	This is one of the reasons I couldn't get on the Top Gun 2 train, even though I enjoyed it as a spectacle, a kind of rollercoaster ride.
	You know, if you can't name your enemies, it's because you can't name what you're fighting for or against.
	And so it was a completely empty film, except for the beauty.
	It was wonderful to watch.
	It was exciting and fun.
	I'm not knocking it as a kind of brainless entertainment.
	But it was brainless.
	I totally disagree with you, and I'll tell you the reason I disagree with you.
	And it's not because you're wrong.
	You're actually right.
	But I actually found the film moving.
	And the reason I found the film moving is not because of the film.
	It's because of what it's actually fighting in the culture.
	The enemy of the film is not in the film.
	The enemy of the film is all of Hollywood.
	The enemy of the film is a Hollywood that would never show a Taiwanese flag on the back of a jacket.
	A Hollywood that would never just have the United States military as the good guys.
	A film where a bunch of white men are competent at things.
	A film in which a traditional male-female couple...
	That's why it gets together.
	Hollywood fights every single aspect of this, and this film didn't do any of that.
	And so I found it actually nostalgically sad.
	It was actually sad to me to watch the film because I watched it and I enjoyed it, and I'm like, well, why aren't there more of this?
	And there aren't more of these because Hollywood refuses to make it.
	I actually thought that it was a bad movie.
	I enjoyed the hell out of it.
	I think the plot is so stupid.
	Well, you're a plot specialist.
	The plot is so stupid, and there's no excuse for the plot to be so stupid.
	You could have written...
	Five lines that made almost every set piece work and actually make sense.
	It doesn't matter.
	Obviously, it's spectacle.
	Obviously, it's fun.
	I also found it moving.
	I agree with everything that you're saying about what it means in the culture.
	And I'll say, the one other thing I'll say about it, I think that it is the greatest nakedly nostalgic movie I've ever seen because it somehow manages to do pure fan service but In ways, almost every time, that bring maturity to the character.
	What do you think about...
	Which I found really interesting.
	There's a line Robert Nisbet, who's a sociologist in the 50s, used about nostalgia.
	And this is why it made me sad.
	The reason nostalgia is sad, he says, is because nostalgia is what's left when the thing itself is worn away.
	And so the idea of the sacred, which is worn away in our culture, or the idea of the importance of male-female relationships, or the idea of the importance...
	Of competence and American patriotism.
	These have worn away and you feel nostalgic for them.
	And so, so much of our culture now is built on nostalgia.
	And then we refuse to acknowledge that there were things about that time that were better.
	Not everything was better, but it's a culture that simultaneously tries to leech off of the things that were amazing about, for example, the 1980s and making Stranger Things.
	And you're nostalgic.
	You're watching it.
	Why are you nostalgic?
	What was so great about the 1980s?
	You can't say.
	Nothing was great about the 1980s.
	It's a place of terrible racism and homophobia.
	Sexism is horrible.
	Reagan was president then.
	You can't mention it.
	But we're all watching Stranger Things and feeling nostalgic because we're watching Stranger Things.
	And this is half the stuff that's on TV now.
	You're watching something, and they're doing...
	I mean, even Disney Plus series like WandaVision, which are based entirely on nostalgia for old TV. Why are you nostalgic for old TV? Old TV is kind of bad.
	When you watch shows from the 50s, particularly, they start to get better in the 60s.
	A lot of the old shows from the 50s that are not, you know, the hour-long specials are really not very good.
	And you're nostalgic for that, because what you're nostalgic for is a more innocent time, when people actually took morality seriously, even if they were doing it wrong in ways...
	It's even worse than that because they've made movies.
	Recently they made one called Schmigadoon, which was a takeoff on Brigadoon.
	Remember in Brigadoon they go back and they find Old Scotland and they find this guy.
	It's a great musical.
	guy who's in a kind of loveless engagement with this woman in New York, and he finds that the old values bring him back to life, and he falls in love with the Scottish girl.
	They remade it, where they go back into the old Scottish town, teach them it's better to be homosexual, and it's better to have this.
	Then there was this movie that was just about going back into Ozzie and Nelson TV, and I cannot remember the name.
	I mean, that's Pleasantville also, right?
	Pleasantville.
	He goes back and he says, but, you know, the problem is you guys don't have sex and you don't know anything that life is about.
	Right, it's black and white.
	As soon as they discover sex, then all the color comes into it.
	So it's not only that they won't let you be nostalgic about what was worthwhile, they want to go back and ruin it, you know?
	Right, right.
	Let us go back and destroy it.
	Though it is worth remembering nostalgia is history after a few drinks.
	Part of our longing for that period is because the innocent time was our own childhood.
	So, you know, yes, the culture was more innocent in certain ways.
	But, you know, on this point of the nostalgic movies.
	I'm going to challenge you very briefly on that.
	I watched, over the Thanksgiving break, I went to see my in-laws in Kansas.
	And my father-in-law and the great tradition of father-in-law, father's in-law, Was watching Gunsmoke.
	I, the longest running live action television show of all time, made 645 episodes of this show.
	I've never seen a single frame of it in my life.
	I watched the last 15 minutes of an episode that he was watching.
	And I was so transfixed.
	I came home and downloaded Season 1, Episode 1 on Paramount+.
	Now, as it turns out, I did not know this at the time, that is a lie.
	And someone should sue Paramount+.
	It was actually...
	It's billed as Season 1, Episode 1.
	It's actually Season 7, Episode 1.
	But what that means is that this is something like the 240th episode of Gunsmoke that I watched.
	I believe it was shot in 1962.
	And like all television from the early 60s, the writing is sublime.
	It is sublime.
	Hard-boiled.
	It is subtle.
	It has no sentimentality anywhere in it.
	And I realize that all modern shows are about...
	A character going on a journey in which he overcomes his flaws.
	And what's amazing about Gunsmoke is that it's about the justice of God walking among mortal men.
	There is nothing interesting at all about Matt Dillon.
	He is just the justice of God.
	The supporting characters who come through bring...
	All of the color, all of the things that are interesting, because they have to encounter the justice of God.
	So these unbelievable performances.
	I would sit here, honestly, for 45 minutes and recount the entire plot.
	I loved it so much.
	And that is not my childhood.
	I am nostalgic for something that I never even experienced.
	I totally agree with you.
	I've been watching a bunch of old films lately.
	Over the last couple of days, I watched Battleground, which was a movie from 1949, and is sort of the predicate for Band of Brothers.
	And it's great.
	It's really phenomenal.
	The movies that they made in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, some of the 60s, a little bit of the 70s, are really fantastic.
	Maybe part of the issue here is that you talk about there are no great books.
	Also, the issue with films, maybe people are just moving into different mediums.
	The great storytellers these days are in different mediums.
	I just don't think TV is that great.
	Well, okay, so if Vince Gilligan was Russian in the 1870s, maybe he would have written Crime and Punishment.
	Instead, he made Breaking Bad.
	Breaking Bad is about fate and morality.
	Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are not about someone overcoming their flaws.
	It's sort of the opposite of that.
	Chernobyl, I think, is one of the masterpieces...
	Of all time.
	I agree with that.
	And it was made recently.
	I agree with this.
	The spirit moves from form to form.
	But I think overall the spirit is being lost.
	I think there are things on TV that are great, but if you read the Rotten Tomatoes reviews, everything is 100%.
	Yeah, I know.
	Literally everything.
	But remember, there's this telescoping thing, too.
	There's a lot of...
	You go back.
	I love 40s music.
	You go back and listen to 40s music.
	There's a lot of dross, but it all goes away over time.
	And so you telescope it down.
	Yeah, but if you look at the Oscar nominees from 1942...
	Oh, it's amazing.
	Well, that was...
	Every single movie.
	1939 was the peak of the movie industry.
	1939 is unbelievable.
	It's unbelievable.
	Every single movie.
	And it's not just the Oscar winner.
	It's also a great movie, an Oscar nominee.
	It's a great movie and a box office success.
	Right.
	So that's the other thing that's worth pointing out here, is that the things that we consider now box office successes are capturing a tiny slice of the market.
	The stuff that was a box office success was the thing that won the Best Picture Oscar in 1951 and also was a great piece of art.
	Right.
	You would see movies like The Best Years of Our Lives was, I believe, the biggest box office winner of that year.
	And it is a two-hour, 45-minute treatise about what it's like for men to come back from World War II and reintegrate into American society.
	It's difficult.
	It's difficult.
	It's not an easy movie.
	And it was like the number one box office movie because people used to be mature in this country and used to actually deal with real issues.
	If you're old enough to remember any of the movies that Ben and Drew are talking about, you need life insurance.
	Wow.
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	That's policygenius.com.
	Andrew Klavan.
	Has anybody watched The Peripheral?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I thought it was pretty good.
	You know, the thing about The Peripheral that got me is it's William Gibson, who's a very talented science fiction writer.
	I don't really love that kind of science fiction writing because it has no characters in it.
	But he invents this.
	He's an idea guy.
	He invented The Matrix, basically, before there was The Matrix.
	And that's what this movie is.
	However, the minute it started, I thought, who wrote the dialogue on this?
	And it's a guy named Scott B. Smith.
	Scott B. Smith was, for two novels, the second best genre novelist in America, next to me.
	He wrote a book called The Simple Plan, which is just a wonderful book.
	He was, to be clear, the first best genre title writer.
	Yeah, he did have that.
	And then he went Hollywood.
	And he's just done all this mediocre work.
	So it was nice to see him at work.
	And the dialogue was really hot.
	And a couple of the character things were good.
	Ultimately, it's one of these multiverse movies.
	Yeah, I mean, the end of it doesn't make a lot of sense.
	It's got some stuff in it that's really nice.
	The brother-sister relationship in particular is very nice.
	But again, Hollywood can't help itself.
	And so in the part of the key inspector has to be a transgender woman.
	Who's very, very obviously a transgender woman.
	I thought Severance was a great show.
	That was really interesting.
	Although I'm never going to understand how John Turturro and Christopher Walken are supposed to end up together.
	That's the weirdest gay couple of all time.
	We'll have to see if it's a great show.
	I have to see where it goes.
	The best thing about it was the outside where people have these conversations.
	They're take-offs on Park Slope conversations.
	People sit around going, you know, back in the day, they didn't call World War I World War I. There That wasn't politically correct.
	There was no World War II yet.
	People are so stupid and vapid.
	Have you guys watched, I was really into this recently, Harry and Meghan on Netflix?
	I thought it was really great.
	My own dear, beloved, probably watching right now, grandmother, my lovely nana, asked me if I had watched Harry and Meghan and I died a little inside.
	I'm not Harry and Meghan.
	I actually had to watch part of it for the show.
	I went through it on behalf of the audience.
	That woman gets more villainous every single day.
	The disrespect that she shows...
	The woman is dead.
	One of the greatest women of the 20th century is dead.
	And she's still disrespecting her on camera.
	And her husband has to watch.
	You're talking about transgender characters in movies.
	Whatever occurred there...
	It was much more emasculating to watch Harry.
	The worst cuckold of all time.
	Yeah, kind of, yeah.
	And what is this thing?
	How come nobody ever asked these people what they have accomplished?
	Elizabeth the Queen, Queen Elizabeth II, you know, we have to say she accomplished something.
	What has Meghan ever done?
	She was on suits.
	She held up the suitcase on that game show, right?
	Yeah.
	It was very hard for her.
	It was very hard.
	It was a brutal, brutal experience for her.
	People were looking at her for her beauty.
	They cast her for her beauty in a game show where she holds up a suitcase.
	How dare they?
	How dare they?
	And certainly, she would have been married into the royal family if she were 300 pounds and had a giant wart right here.
	This point that you're making for...
	This point you're making is so important.
	I said something about it on Twitter recently.
	Every time you see any sort of post about some sort of peak human achievement, Elon Musk lands a rocket on a ship at sea, NASA fires off their first lunar mission in living memory and returns it safely to Earth, probably going to start a new manned space program.
	There's always these comments that are like, Why don't you try doing something for the country, the world we've got right here first?
	I'm always like, who's we?
	You've done nothing.
	That guy landed a rocket on a ship at sea, an enormous achievement for a human being, and you're complaining because he doesn't give you his money.
	But you know what this is?
	The guys who pull down statues.
	It is exactly like the guys who pulled out.
	This is one of the things that, again, to mention Top Gun, I think that there is just an anger against competence in our society.
	People are angry at the competent.
	Like, if you're competent, this is a sign that you are somehow discriminatory or bigoted, because competence obviously suggests a meritocracy.
	Meritocracy suggests that maybe people, in some mild way, kind of deserve what they get as a general matter in life, and we're never allowed to suggest that sort of thing.
	And that's why, again, in Top Gun, when you're watching people be competent, I just realized I enjoy watching films and movies where people are competent.
	And it doesn't happen.
	And part of the reason it doesn't happen is because if it's a movie filled or a show filled with competent people, the writer actually has to be good at his craft.
	If there's a bunch of incompetence, you can create the dumbest ways possible out of a corner.
	You write yourself into a corner and someone just does a dumb thing.
	Then suddenly you're out of the corner.
	If it's filled with competent people, that's actually difficult.
	Because now you have to say, what would intelligent people do that would get them out of this situation or put them into this situation in the first place?
	And so I think so much of the writing is so bad now.
	Yeah.
	Just because people do dumb stuff.
	And you're like, why would they possibly...
	I mean, this is your thing.
	You watch movies all the time and read scripts.
	It's like, why is this person doing this?
	Are they just an idiot?
	And the answer is, yeah, they're an idiot.
	There's nobody who's competent on TV or in movies anymore.
	I haven't ever heard...
	heard, we've never discussed this idea of a sort of growing hatred of competence, but I think that there is something to it.
	Well, growing hatred of competence and dignity.
	I mean, that's what, when Meghan makes fun of the queen and having to bow to the queen, it's making fun of dignity and formality.
	And that, I mean, you see this now.
	I'm on a crusade.
	I think we need to ban athleisure wear.
	I think athleisure wear is a communist plot to destroy the country.
	Like soccer.
	Like soccer, actually.
	Exactly like soccer.
	And so it just deprives you of dignity and it speaks to a lack of respect for oneself.
	Can I wear it in my house?
	No.
	Not even in my house.
	No, you can't.
	A tuxedo to bed.
	A tuxedo at least to dinner.
	Speaking of Harry and Meghan, you watch The Crown and my favorite scenes, it's when Elizabeth and Prince Philip are sitting to dinner alone.
	And he's wearing a tuxedo.
	That was a better time.
	When you engage in ritual, whether we're talking about political ritual, religious ritual, we're incarnational beings.
	You've got to put your body into it, and that's going to affect the way you think of yourself.
	I completely agree with this.
	I worry about it personally, because I grew up in the 60s when it all fell apart.
	And I'm a naturally kind of...
	A casual person.
	So I just fell into it.
	And now I think, you know, I should have worn a tie my entire life.
	In bed, I should have worn a tie.
	Honey, I'm coming to bed.
	Are we getting rid of ritual or just replacing...
	The pronoun thing, for example, that's a modern, that's what it is.
	It's a ritual.
	You can't get rid of ritual because we have bodies.
	It is a replacement of ritual, but I think that actually, we're pretending that the ritual went away and it didn't.
	It transformed into a ritual of the catechism of poverty.
	It used to be that everybody aspired to be rich, and so you dressed like you were rich even when you were poor.
	If you look at the people on the bread lines during the Depression, they are wearing suits in the bread lines in the Depression.
	Embezzlers of billions of dollars at FTX, and they're literally getting money given to them because they are wearing gym shorts and a baggy t-shirt, and they haven't exercised, and they're slob.
	You know this in L.A. You go into an L.A. restaurant, and you can always pick out the richest guy in the room because he's wearing a ripped t-shirt and sweatpants, right?
	He's the sloppiest dressed person there, and it's become this kind of cult of degradation and poverty.
	Why did it take us so long to come up with these arguments, though?
	Because when I was a kid, you know, things like the rituals in Judaism where you wear, you know, a shawl, you know, and people say, well, why do you have to do that?
	And they didn't know.
	They didn't have the answer.
	I remember in school listening to teachers.
	Well, you went to a reformer conservative.
	That's a problem right there.
	When I went to school, the answer is obvious.
	It says directly in the good book that you're supposed to wear fringes upon the corners of your garments.
	And in the Talmud, it talks about you're supposed to do this.
	Actually, it says, you're supposed to look at them, and this is supposed to remind you of your obligations on earth.
	You're supposed to wear a funny garment in order to remind you.
	There's a reason we wear a kippah now also.
	It's supposed to remind you constantly that you're subject to a higher power.
	That's why you do it.
	The entire corpus of Talmudic law was written in order to explain why you do these rituals.
	I completely agree with you, and I also agree with what you're saying, but the people didn't know.
	The people in charge...
	You know what?
	There's actually a deeper point, because the reason they didn't know is because they relied, and it was okay to just rely on the tradition.
	It was just okay.
	And we have decided that that's no longer enough.
	And I know this has been a drum I've been beating for a year now, quoting Oakshot to Michael, and Michael...
	My heart's beating out of my dad's life, because I'm doing it.
	But it...
	But it is true that the vast majority of the things that we do in life are inherited traditions, and we used to just say that was okay.
	You didn't have to explain why it was important to dress well.
	We've gotten so basic now that it's like, why is it important to marry a person of the opposite sex, as opposed to a person of any random gender?
	I have to come up with an argument for this now, and I think because we were...
	Only the wisest were people who had actually bothered to come up with sort of a rationale.
	Everybody else just relied on the fact that there was a rationale, and they're like, I don't need to know how to explain this, because why would I possibly need to know how to explain this?
	You know, there's actually, here's a bit of what we would call in Hebrew Devar Torah, right?
	Here's a little bit of biblical wisdom.
	So this is taught to me by a rabbi near where I live named Rabbi Goldberg.
	I think it's really good.
	So in Hebrew, the word for taste and the word for reason are the same word.
	The word is ta'am.
	Yeah.
	Okay, and so there's a really nice idea.
	Why are they the same word?
	It's spelled tet-i-n-m.
	Why are they the same word?
	Because reason, just like you eat food to nourish you, but taste is what gives you pleasure from the food, you do the rituals and you do the things in life to nourish you.
	You don't actually have to have a reason as to why you're doing it.
	The reason just makes it better.
	The reason lives on top of the nourishing mechanism that is the rituals and traditions that you've been handed.
	And what we've done is we've reversed that.
	We've basically said that every tradition is subject to tabula rasa reasoning.
	Explain to me why everybody should wear a suit.
	They shouldn't wear a suit.
	You should wear athleisure.
	How do I defend a necktie?
	I don't know.
	I'm just going to wear it.
	I mean, this is why Burke defends the naughtiest word that you're not allowed to say today, which is prejudice.
	Prejudice in its simplest form, which is Pre-judgment, which we all engage in all the time.
	We have to.
	I cannot write a 50-page treatise on every single thing that I am going to do before I do it.
	I would be absolutely paralyzed.
	I'd be impotent.
	I couldn't act in the world.
	And so we rely on these things.
	We always did.
	But now, in the last 50, 60 years, it has completely flipped such that Every single little thing that we would just take for granted out of common sense, we now have to provide some hyper-rationalist explanation for it.
	That's why the best answer, I think, is the drum I'm always beating, is it's about burden of proof.
	So if you're the one coming along challenging the thing that people have been doing for generations, that's fine.
	You can challenge it.
	In fact, I'm interested to hear your challenge, but you have to explain why.
	It's not up to me to defend what everyone's been doing forever.
	What is your problem with it?
	And instead of asking people that, instead of saying, what's your issue with this?
	What's your argument against it?
	Instead, we scramble around looking for justifications.
	I think we should—we've already lost the game when we do that.
	Should we shift it back to you?
	You explain what the issue is?
	I think because people who are radical and challenge the tradition very often don't have a reason and they're very passionate about it, I think that people of traditional bent immediately look to short-circuit the conversation by looking for some sort of compromise.
	And they always think that this will be the last compromise.
	I mean, I think that's what you saw at the White House yesterday, right?
	You get 12 Republicans in the Senate to vote in favor of enshrinement of same-sex marriage because this will be the final compromise.
	This will finally be where the buck stops.
	And it's like, well, no, it won't.
	He's telling you it won't be.
	He's telling you, in 2006, this same schmuck was on national television.
	Joe Biden.
	People may not know exactly what we're saying here.
	Yeah, sorry.
	You're talking about the President of the United States had a schmuck.
	Yeah, that schmuck.
	I mean, that schmuck the president of the United States.
	It's Yiddish for president.
	Right, Mr.
	Schmuck President of the United States.
	Because they finally passed this Respect for Marriage Act.
	We only name acts that are precisely the opposite of what they are now.
	The Inflation Reduction Act.
	The Respect for Marriage Act.
	It's a mandate now.
	Soon it'll be these.
	So you can keep your kids act.
	Right.
	And so Joe Biden goes out there and he, in 2006, says, we don't need a constitutional amendment to protect marriage because everyone believes that marriage is between a man and a woman.
	I voted for the Defense of Marriage Act.
	What exactly is the problem?
	Why would you even want to pass a constitutional amendment?
	We're now 16 years later, and he's basically, not basically, he's openly saying that you are a bigot.
	You're a bigot, and probably you are a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, transphobe, if you believe in traditional marriage rather than same-sex marriage.
	I mean, he actually said that.
	I mean, I think we have a clip, actually, of the President of the United States actually saying that racism, bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, being anti-Semitism, they're all the same.
	All the things I don't like are in the same box.
	Let's play the clip.
	Racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, they're all connected.
	But the antidote to hate is love.
	This law and the love it defends strike a blow against hate in all its forms.
	I love you guys so much, I will punch you in the face to enforce my perspective on the evils of your tradition.
	And then he says that he kept saying over and over, this is the first step.
	I was like, wait a damned minute, hold up a second.
	So just to get this straight.
	No pun intended.
	Just to get this straight.
	The original case was, don't criminalize what you do in our bedroom.
	And everyone was like, okay, fair enough.
	I mean, those laws were not enforced in the first place.
	All right, fine.
	And then it was, well, we would like civil unions so that we can go visit our partners in the hospital and bequeath property to one another.
	And people were like...
	Okay, fine.
	And then they're like, well, we want same-sex marriage, and it's going to be called the exact same thing as marriage.
	And many of us were like, well, now you're starting to edging on our marriage.
	But they said, well, no, no, no.
	How does that affect you?
	If we get married, how does that affect your marriage?
	And most people, not understanding the flaw in that argument, are like, okay, fine.
	And then they're like, but we definitely, definitely will never say that your church has to do what we want it to do, or that your business has to do what we want it to do, or that we have to indoctrinate your kids with this stuff, or that we have to make sure that your educational institutions mirror all of our values.
	We would never do any of those things.
	So I have a question.
	Why in the world, unless you're an insane, stupid jackass, would you believe them?
	They've been lying every step of the way.
	Not only that, this thing that's happening with children...
	I'm past the point where anything shocks me.
	After a while, you've seen too much.
	But what shocks me is not that they're doing it to children.
	What shocks me is that people have not shown up with pitchforks and torches to say, that's great, you're going to do that, but now we're going to take you out and throw you in the river.
	Joe Biden, in this speech...
	It demonstrates what the actual agenda is.
	Because in this speech where he was supposedly upholding the value of male-male monogamous relationships, which was, again, the way that the left portrayed same-sex marriage was it's exactly the same as traditional marriage except it doesn't produce kids and it's two dudes or two ladies.
	But then he's in the same speech saying that you have to be in favor of transing the kids.
	what do these things have to do with one another?
	They have nothing to do with one another, theoretically, but in reality, they have everything to do with one another because they're about everything.
	Because they're about the destruction of the idea that there is a distinction between the sexes that matters.
	And more importantly, they are directed against the nuclear family.
	They're directed against the idea that there are intermediate institutions in society that shape and mold us from family to religious community.
	And the left considers these things actively bad, and these things have to be obliterated.
	They will not stop until we are a society of atomized individuals on the one hand and an overarching national government on the other, and nothing in between.
	That means getting rid of women.
	You've got to get rid of women.
	You cannot.
	Women are relational.
	They're the things that bind people together.
	They're the things that give men their motivations.
	You have to basically erase them or make them.
	Well, they've done a great job of convincing women not to be women.
	That's what they do.
	They convince the women first.
	It was also so disingenuous because they say, well, why do you care about what we do in our own homes?
	And then the direct consequence of what they do in their own homes is to light up the people's home, the people's house, in the rainbow flag.
	Because obviously this is not just a personal question.
	This is a political question, but it was always BS anyway.
	Because the libs go in and they tell me what kind of light bulbs I'm allowed to screw in in my bedroom, but we're not allowed to have anything to say about what You can't grow grain to feed your own family because it prevents you from engaging in interstate congressmen.
	That's right.
	And you know, the thing is, I actually do have...
	I have a right, as someone in self-government, to discuss how people relate to one another and what the definition of marriage is.
	And frankly, I think that we have a right to talk about what happens in people's bedrooms.
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	This minute.
	You're right this minute.
	It was kind of amazing.
	I'm saying that they say this is the first step.
	No, no, we would never.
	We're not coming after your churches.
	We're not coming after your kids.
	So Corrine Jean-Pierre, world's most untalented press secretary, she was asked a direct question.
	By Brian Karam, who's one of the world's most untalented reporters.
	And he asked her, but his question was actually the correct one from the left side of the aisle, which is, why does this bill, the Respect for Marriage Act, which that's how I respect people, is I just completely redefine them into non-existence.
	That's my favorite way.
	And then I destroy their businesses.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's my favorite thing.
	He says, so why does this bill enshrine bigotry?
	And she had no answer for it.
	Like, none.
	She didn't even bother trying to say that it wasn't enshrining bigotry, because of course she believes that it's bigotry.
	She believes that religion is a cover for bigotry.
	And so, all these morons, like, I'm sorry, Senator Mitt Romney and all of the morons who voted on the Republican side of the aisle for this in the Senate.
	Awful.
	Incredible.
	I'll give them the benefit of the doubt of thinking that they're not malicious, and that they're just unbelievably stupid and naive.
	Yeah.
	Anybody who believes that the left is going to stop at this is out of their damned minds.
	The only thing that stands between the left doing this at the federal level right now, the only thing that stops that is the Supreme Court.
	That is the only thing that stops this.
	And that is cold comfort because, frankly, you don't know what the Supreme Court is going to do 5, 10, 15 years from now.
	And so this notion that the left is somehow going to come to an arranged agreement, that they're going to come to a compromise, How many times can you feed this alligator?
	This is the black knight in Monty Python at this point.
	There are no limbs left.
	You're stumping around here.
	It doesn't even make sense from their perspective.
	Because if gay marriage is a human right, you have a human right to it.
	They often will compare denying gay marriage to slavery.
	Interracial marriage is in this bill.
	So, you know, if it's a human right, then it would be correct that a church wouldn't have the right to take it away from you.
	Just like a church, a church could say, oh, well, in our religion, we believe in slavery.
	That doesn't mean you can keep slaves in your basement because you don't even from a religious standpoint, you can't take away someone's basic human right.
	So if we're agreeing that you have a human right to gay marriage, then it's not a far leap.
	It's not a leap at all.
	It's just another step to say, well, of course churches can't take away someone's human right.
	Once you've agreed with that, you've already agreed to the destruction of religious liberty.
	Actually, I've been thinking about that, too, and I'm not quite sure that holds together because you can have a right to do something that's wrong.
	I mean, we do have rights to do—we should have rights to do things that are wrong.
	You have the right to say things that— The left doesn't believe that.
	Also, Drew, I'm talking to a couple of Catholics here.
	There is that, you know, that liberal stuff.
	The truth is, I'm actually not a believer that you have the right to do something that's wrong.
	I think that you may have an immunity from the government in doing something that's wrong.
	That's what I'm saying.
	I'm trying to distinguish between the two because we're kind of sloppy about how we discuss rights.
	Well, you have a political right to say things that are ugly and stupid.
	You have a political right.
	I personally think you have a political right to be a bigot.
	But the left doesn't believe that, right?
	From the left's perspective, If you have enshrined gay marriage as a human right, then it's a logical conclusion that obviously churches aren't allowed to deny that from their perspective.
	Whether they say it or not, it makes no difference.
	That is 100% where it leads.
	You see the whole thing as religious because Joe Biden, the most amazing thing that he did at this signing ceremony, it wasn't bringing the drag queen who does the creepy stuff to the kids.
	It wasn't bringing all the Hollywood celebrities.
	And he said that this was exactly what the Declaration of Independence was all about.
	Yeah.
	And he said.
	Oh, look at the wigs.
	That's right.
	There would have been a Morco here in argument.
	Because what he said was the Declaration of Independence talks about our natural rights that we have because they are secular values.
	That's what he said.
	He said from the Declaration of Independence, which explicitly grounds those rights in our creator, which grounds those rights in not being secular values.
	They are religious values because those rights don't make any sense without God.
	And he completely inverted it.
	Also, the attempt to separate off natural rights and natural law is completely nonsensical.
	Exactly.
	Where is he even getting the term natural rights except for the rubric of natural law?
	And natural law tradition is grounded in Judeo-Christian and largely Catholic theology.
	It's an absurdity.
	But again, the absurdity is sort of the point.
	They've appointed government as God.
	That's what this is.
	It is the whole reason why there are so many people who wanted the government to grant gay marriage in the first place.
	Because if you ask people why gay marriage is important, you already had all the benefits of marriage.
	You just weren't calling it marriage.
	So why do you need gay marriage?
	What's the difference?
	You were getting the tax benefits.
	You were getting all of the contractual benefits.
	Why do you need to call it marriage?
	And the answer is because we want the moral imprimatur of the state, which is actually God, determining for us what is right and what is wrong.
	And now that God has spoken, none can speak counter to the great God of government.
	And the state which can coerce you to affirm it.
	I do have some gay friends who...
	Wait, you have gay friends?
	I know.
	I'm not a Catholic.
	They get upset when we talk about this because...
	The world is different.
	We have made substantial social change, societal change, and there are people who have premised their lives, ordered their lives around these concepts.
	That happens very, very rapidly.
	That's a consequence of social engineering, is that you engineer society.
	You did do that.
	So I have friends, and they will hear us talk about gay marriage, and they will say, you know, I ordered my life around it.
	I'm in a committed, monogamous relationship.
	I want...
	I don't want to go back to a time when I have to live in fear, and I don't want to go back in a time where I don't have the sort of civil rights, the hospital rights, the equipping property rights, all the things that you mentioned.
	Can't you just fix that with a few bills and contracts?
	Well, this is the problem.
	I think you could have.
	We didn't.
	This is why I was adamantly against gay marriage.
	Adamantly against gay marriage.
	I always believed that the most fabulous and creative people historically ever to live, gay men, could probably create something fabulous for themselves that probably would pass muster in society, but that wouldn't encroach on the very concept of marriage itself.
	I think the language around that matters a great deal.
	We didn't do that.
	And this is where I think...
	The challenging part of the conversation is that since we...
	You could say...
	Don't say we.
	I opposed it.
	But we meaning...
	The society.
	The society.
	We did change the definition of marriage to make it...
	Marriage was always inclusive of gay people.
	It just wasn't...
	It included them marrying.
	But now we have changed the definition of marriage to say that a man can marry a man, a woman can marry a woman.
	For better or for worse, we did it.
	Millions of people have ordered their lives around it.
	People have adopted children on this basis.
	Again, you might say, I don't believe that two men should be able to adopt a child.
	Of course.
	That isn't...
	I'm not saying, what do you believe?
	I'm saying...
	They do.
	But can't we just stop it?
	Well, see, this is the thing.
	You can't really just stop it.
	It's not the same as abortion, for instance, where you're actually committing a crime.
	You know, if a man sleeping with a man is a sin, it's not...
	It's not a sin against us, you know?
	Okay, but desacralizing it doesn't make it right.
	Right, exactly.
	I think both you and Ben are talking about is there's a difference between the micro and the macro, you know?
	If you have a friend and he's gay and he's sleeping, it really doesn't bother most people at all.
	There's a new biography of J. Edgar.
	I mean, I'd prefer not to think too much about it.
	You don't want to think about it at all, yeah.
	But there's a biography of J.O. Hoover where Nixon would send a Christmas invitation to the Christmas party to him and his boyfriend, you know, because they all knew he was like living with a guy.
	And it doesn't bother people, and it never really has in American life.
	People always knew this existed, you know, certainly in sophisticated, you know, coastal circles.
	People always knew this was going on.
	But when the society says that this is a right and this is something that this is on a par with marriage, which is just a lie, then the society becomes a lying society.
	And the same thing was true with abortion, where you think, like, there's always going to be abortions.
	That's always happened.
	It always will happen.
	And that's an evil.
	But we live in a world with evil in it.
	But when the Supreme Court says it's a right for you to kill that, then you become evil.
	Then the country becomes evil.
	And so on this point...
	But this is why I was trying to distinguish between the language of rights that we were talking about earlier.
	But I actually want to get down to this very practical question.
	What does one do now?
	Not what should we do.
	Here's what we do.
	The Democrats were bragging today about how even the ones who voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, like the president, got rid of the Defense of Marriage Act and they repealed it.
	And so just like they repealed the Defense of Marriage Act, I think Republicans, if they could ever muster a spine and some other anatomical features, could repeal the quote unquote respect for marriage act.
	They could do that.
	We could overturn Obergefell.
	To your point, Jeremy, people have ordered their lives.
	Gay guys have ordered their lives to create something that resembles more than was previously done, something like a marriage.
	But they can continue to do that without the sacralization, as you're discussing, Ben, of the state.
	And so when I think back, just to use a personal example, two of my absolute favorite teachers in high school were gay, and Republicans, by the way, and just great guys, love them to death.
	Gone they then their gay apparel?
	No.
	They did.
	They had very gay apparel, actually.
	Yeah, they donned.
	But they had a kind of committed, stable relationship long before gay marriage existed.
	I don't think they supported gay marriage.
	I don't want to speak for them, but I don't think they supported the idea of gay marriage.
	And they just did that.
	And people could continue to do that without the state pretending that it's the same thing as marriage.
	And for the adoption, we just stop it.
	There are a lot of problems here.
	Not just gay adoption.
	I don't just mean to single out the...
	People who are attracted to the same sex.
	I'm talking about single parent adoption.
	Obviously wrong.
	The IVF is so...
	I think it's not moral, but it's obviously abused incredibly.
	No-fault divorce is at the heart of a lot of these problems.
	I think it's the heart of a lot.
	It is.
	And we could just get rid of it and...
	You know, there are social consequences that come from that.
	People will have children that, you know, and they're going to continue to raise them in that way.
	But we can do something.
	We're not totally in it.
	We can do that because actually what we hear from the left, we hear from Biden about people have the right to love each other.
	Well, right.
	And no one can take away your ability to love another person.
	Of course, you can continue to love whoever you want.
	There was never any law preventing anyone from loving someone else.
	So you change the laws.
	It's not going to change that at all.
	You're still loving them.
	Well, but I am saying that...
	I'm not trying to be clever.
	There is a difference between loving someone and living with them, having joint property, and raising kids.
	The one thing that makes it different than abortion, you said that it's different than abortion.
	I don't fully agree with the reasons you laid out, but here's one that makes it very different than abortion.
	If you change from having abortion in your society be lawful to not having abortion be lawful in your society, you are stopping something from happening.
	The individual act of abortion that will not happen because of that law changing is the one tomorrow.
	You can't do anything about the abortion that took place three days before this happened, right?
	It would have to be the same, I think, if you were to make these kinds of changes to adoption law or gay marriage or...
	You're not going to take people's kids away.
	You're not going to be able to break up the unions that they've created and the civil rights.
	Nobody was talking about doing that in the first time.
	I'm asking us to...
	None of us have said anything about this at all.
	I'm asking us to talk about it.
	No one's saying that you're going to go in and say, hey you, move out from your roommate's house.
	And get that kid back to...
	Yeah, but there would be no legal mechanism even to do that.
	I mean, first of all, kids get taken out of homes all the time because of abuses, so that would continue, but it wouldn't change...
	That's not what we're talking about.
	But that's not what we're talking about.
	And so, yeah, there'd be no way.
	I have to say that I kind of tend to agree with Knowles on this, at least in terms of aims.
	I think that, you know, there's no reason to say we can't do something.
	There's no reason to say that things can't change.
	What they can't do is they can't go backwards.
	And that's what you're kind of getting at.
	That's what I'm getting at, yeah.
	They can't go backwards.
	But that doesn't mean they can't go forward to a new thing.
	We have to remember that before, it's not like gay people weren't being gay.
	But a lot of them were being forced into situations that were degrading both to them and to the society.
	I mean, when people were getting together in bathrooms and, you know...
	And bathhouses.
	In bathhouses and things like that.
	That was actually bad for society.
	Maybe not as bad as what we have now, but certainly it wasn't a good thing.
	And so, yeah, I think there is a level of tolerance.
	You can go forward into a new thing that is different than the thing we got.
	And I don't know why when they essentially feed us a crap sandwich, we can't say, this is a crap sandwich.
	We don't want this anymore.
	Not to punt on the issue completely, but do we even have to get into the weeds of discussing all the practical implications of how this will be implemented?
	Because it's not actually ever going to happen.
	I don't know about that.
	The left never does this.
	They talk about the ideals and what they want, and they don't get into the weeds at all about how we're practically implemented.
	And I think sometimes on the right we do that almost too much.
	Right now, all that matters is the ideal, what marriage is supposed to be.
	I agree, and I'm all for upholding marriage and distinguishing marriage from gay marriage.
	Even if all they had come up with was the term gay married, even that would be better than just marriage, right?
	By the way, if we could get rid of no-fault divorce, we would get rid of gay marriage.
	Yes, and no one wants to talk about it.
	Intermediate steps to desacralizing marriage and reinstituting traditional marriage.
	I mean, there are certain things that we certainly could, and in my opinion, should do.
	I mean, for example, we should get the federal government out of the business of marriage entirely.
	Because what business is it of the federal government in the first place?
	What's the fundamental political unit?
	I agree with you, but if we can't get there, then why don't we start with disestablishing it at the federal level entirely, and then at least I will have the ability to have my state defined when marriage looks like.
	I can live in a state that actually agrees with me about what marriage looks like.
	Or here's another alternative.
	What if we defanged all of the insane structure of anti-discrimination law that we've come up with that prevents people from actually making decisions about their own life?
	And then they can make decisions about what are the consequences of whether they believe somebody is married or not.
	What if we just did that instead of having the government come in with this heavy boot and just stamp somebody on the face that doesn't like what it's doing?
	I have to interrupt just to say that one of the things about listening to Ben is an old expression comes to mind.
	He really knows beans.
	When I think of beans, I think of Black Rife and Coffee.
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	There's another point I think that's worthy of discussion here, and that is just the simple fact that we can try to redefine whatever we want, but in the same way that we are currently trying to redefine male as female and female as male, and it's just a lie, and it's not true, there is only one marriage.
	Yes.
	We can try to redefine this as much as we want.
	We can pretend that two men is the same as a man and a woman, and that the fundamental basis of society is not a man, a woman, and a child.
	We can try to pretend that that's the case.
	That is not the case.
	And if we continue along these lines, the real consequence, yes, it'll be paid by people in our society, and yes, it'll be paid by children who are indoctrinated with lies, and yes, it'll be paid by a society that increasingly devalues the fundamental relationship that stands at the heart of all durable civilizations.
	But what's going to end up happening is that we as a civilization just will not be the winners.
	That's all that's going to happen, because when you run directly up into the face of reality, it turns out other civilizations don't have quite the same problems.
	And so we can play this game as much as we want to play this game, and it's all fun and games up until precisely the point that our society has no children, which we don't, a society where people don't get married, which they are not, a society in which the center of all human life is the sexual identity, which is essentially what we've now created, and that will last about two or three generations, and then there won't be anything left which is essentially what we've now created, and that will last about And when that happens, we just lose.
	This is such a key, because, you know, they come out and they cleverly redefine the Cambridge Dictionary definition of woman, now it means man also, and Merriam-Webster has followed suit, and...
	And what do we do?
	We say, okay, well, you got your 2022 dictionary.
	Well, I got my 2012 dictionary.
	And now we're going to have a battle of the dictionary definitions.
	But it just doesn't matter.
	I mean, to your point, Matt, and to the heart of your movie, the answer to what is a woman is not some stupid definition in whatever dictionary.
	The answer to what is a woman is a woman's a woman, and you know what it is, and shut up.
	Yeah.
	Just shut up.
	You know what a woman is.
	She's the kind of person that's not a man.
	That's what a woman is.
	And we all know it, and that will be true no matter what these editors put in whatever dumb dictionary they come out of.
	I agree, but there is a...
	I agree, but one of the social consequences...
	We can talk about all the social consequences of Obergefell.
	One of them is that even gay men that I know who oppose the redefinition of marriage...
	Well, they're the more likely people to get married because they're conservative.
	And in fact, I think that the path we're on will lead to a place where the Christian church is gay.
	And marriage is gay.
	I think there's a chance that in not that long, that 20 years from now, you are more likely to go to church if you are gay.
	You are more likely to be married if you are gay.
	Because they're the only ones who want these things anymore because they feel they've been excluded for them.
	They're pursuing them.
	And everyone else has essentially abandoned them.
	Are you asking this, though?
	Because you can quote scripture in a way that I can't.
	I can never remember exactly.
	But in Romans, isn't there a passage where St.
	Paul says, I wish I looked this up before I came on, but I still wouldn't be able to memorize it.
	But where St.
	Paul says, they abandoned God and therefore God gave the desires of their hearts over to themselves and the women started sleeping with women and the men started.
	I think of that and I think like, wait a minute.
	That's not good.
	You are right that in a certain fundamental sense, one of the big things that happens here is it's not just an external attack that's happened on the churches.
	The churches have destroyed themselves from within.
	Yes.
	Synagogues do.
	And so in an attempt to modernize themselves, they've taken in the secular catechism and they've made it the heart of their own religion.
	And this is something Benedict talked about a lot.
	- Yes. - It's something that a lot of Orthodox rabbis have talked about, and most obviously, Joseph Soloveitchik, who was sort of one of the key founders of Yeshua University, which is now being sued to have a gay club.
	Yes.
	- Yeah. - But many of the mainline Protestant churches are giving in, many Catholic areas.
	- Don't just say Germany.
	- Evangelical churches too.
	- Evangelical churches, a lot of the synagogues are giving in, and once you give up the thing that you stood for, which was the traditional wisdom What the hell good are you?
	And why exactly would people go to church?
	The only people who wouldn't go to church are the people who want the medal.
	And the people who historically wanted the medal from you don't want that medal anymore, so you're right.
	The only people who will go are the people who want that imprimatur so that they can put it on their wall.
	But there's an amazing thing that happened in the Catholic Church, which even with...
	It was called the Reformation.
	It did start with the Catholic Church.
	He's always bringing up the Peace of Westphalia.
	Yeah.
	We were due for a mention of the Peace of Westphalia.
	Westphalia, carry on, you guys.
	You know, when I think of some of the most liberal...
	Some of the most liberal popes we ever had, Paul VI, right?
	Super liberal pope, concludes Vatican II. But Paul VI, everyone expected him to follow the Protestants and the Lambeth Declaration and endorse...
	Free love and contraception and abortion, all these things.
	And he didn't.
	He came out with Humanae Vitae and he said, nope, sorry, the traditional teaching is true.
	No contraception, no abortion, no nothing.
	Sex has a purpose.
	He reaffirms that.
	People were shocked.
	Pope Francis, who everyone portrays as a big lib and with some good reason.
	But Pope Francis has said that gay marriage is not a mere political issue.
	It's a machination of the father of lies that seeks to deceive and confuse the children of God.
	He did say that.
	He did say that.
	He came out, he told the German bishops to cut it out.
	He said that you can't have Christian gay marriage ceremonies.
	I mean, he's become very conservative on this sort of issue.
	And the reason for it, by the way, I don't know what they think about, I don't know what these men think about personally, obviously, but they can't do it because of a fact of the Catholic Church, which is, John Henry Newman explained this.
	He was converting, obviously, from Protestantism to Catholicism.
	And he said, with Protestantism and with so much modern thought, you follow your individual conscience.
	Which is good.
	We all like following our individual conscience.
	But with Catholicism, there's a big role for individual conscience.
	But ultimately, you must submit your obedience to the authority of the church.
	And so to zoom it out a little bit from denominational kinds of arguments, this is the thing about tradition, is that we...
	We surrender a little bit of our individual will and our own individual rationalistic ideas to just the way things have worked in the past and a little deference for our elders and our country and to tradition.
	That's what we used to do.
	And things tended to work a lot better before we surrendered that idea.
	Honor your father and mother.
	To Jeremy's point, I don't think in 20 years it's going to be only gay people at church, but I think it's more likely there'll just be no churches left in 20 years.
	But it is true that...
	Let's actually do get back...
	Let's get back together in 20 years.
	It's true that...
	This suddenly came up in my conversation with Joe Rogan on this issue, and it always comes up.
	Is that basically Christians and religious people in general lost the marriage argument 50 or 60 years ago because we gave up.
	Marriages are not just fundamentally procreative.
	They're also monogamous and permanent.
	And those are the three pillars, you might say, of marriage.
	And we gave up two of the pillars.
	We said that, well, it doesn't have to be permanent.
	And if it's not permanent, that means it's not monogamous.
	Basically, the church is bought into polygamy.
	It's just you have to do it one at a time rather than all at once.
	Right.
	And once that happened, it was like, you can still make the argument for so-called traditional marriage, but it's a much weaker argument.
	And people just don't believe you anymore when you say that you cherish the marriage sacrament.
	I think it just got to a point where the other side, they just didn't buy it.
	They didn't believe that we...
	Really cared.
	And if you got rid of that, if you got rid of no-fault divorce and remarrying and all that stuff, then you'd get rid of gay marriage because a very small percentage of gay men are going to stay married and be monogamous.
	But one of the positive consequences...
	of gay marriage is that probably for the first time in history a lot of gay men are considering that question.
	Yes, that is positive.
	I don't think that trade was worth it.
	I'm not suggesting that it's worth it, but I am saying that There are positive consequences.
	The two major changes that have happened societally, the major changes, are one, that marriage has been so redefined over the past 50 years that it essentially was transformed into a voluntaristic arrangement, rather than family being a matter of consanguinity and production of family units that provide the basis for society.
	That's what they were.
	They were just natural family units.
	The basis of the family was largely duty, not love.
	Which, by the way, is what it ends up being.
	You love each other, and that love comes with duties.
	The fundamental, durable nature of marriage and a family is a duty-based relationship.
	You don't spend every day in a tizzy over your spouse.
	You spend every day doing your duty because you're a married person who loves your spouse.
	And the same thing is true for your children.
	And so when we redefined family units themselves, away from consanguinity and from procreation and from being those little platoons into a voluntaristic arrangement, that was the first change and it atomized individuals.
	And that further atomization of individuals has now been exacerbated by same-sex marriage because all the stuff that I said before was prior to same-sex marriage.
	Right.
	The destruction of the family unit was prior to same-sex marriage.
	And so when you hear people who are talking about same-sex marriage, they say, well, your family units were already broken What do you have to say about same-sex marriage?
	The answer is, I mean, I have a lot to say about both of those things.
	You don't get to throw in my face the failure of marriage and say, okay, so now we just get to redefine the institution entirely.
	You're right about the failure of the institution, and that's our fault.
	And then there's been another thing added on top of that.
	And the other thing that's been added on top of that is this idea that the core of your being is your sexual identity.
	This is the thing that matters most about you in the world.
	And that it is not about your duties to family in the traditional sense.
	About your duties to have children and create children and live with the wife that you have and with whom you have created children.
	And build a family unit that includes, yes, a vital mother and yes, a vital father.
	None of that is imposed upon you.
	These are all impositions by a cruel, vicious society.
	And really what lies at the heart of you Is your desires.
	Well, I mean, there's nothing more, and I use this word advisedly, satanic, than the idea that what lies at the core of you is your desires.
	That is literally the temptation of things.
	You mean your appetites?
	You don't mean your high desires.
	No, no, no.
	I mean your passions.
	The things that you want at any given moment.
	I have to say, this brings to mind the wonderful poem of Ogden Nash, who said, O duty, why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?
	Which kind of defines our entire society.
	Well, that's super depressing.
	You guys got anything else to talk about?
	You want to go back to movies?
	Yeah, let's go back.
	All the best movies were made by gay guys.
	That is actually just true.
	I know that'll hurt the feelings of my dear sweet Nana, who is also still watching.
	But yes, even in the heyday.
	Jewish gay guys, would you?
	Even in the heyday of all the great movies.
	This is my whole point.
	This is my thing.
	He just loves Vincenzo Minnelli.
	This is why I guarantee you they could have come up with a great name for the institution they wanted to create.
	But the funny thing is their best work, the best work by gay people is gay people pretending to be straight.
	There's something about that.
	It's just like Irving Berlin writing White Christmas.
	There's something about the outsider creating something that gives it this wistfulness and this beauty.
	By the way, the best work of anybody in any society comes when people tamp down their sexual desires.
	And no one talks about it now because we're told that we're just all steam engines and we've got to let steam off.
	This is true.
	Hemingway said never have sex until nighttime.
	Yes, that's right.
	Never more than one woman at a time.
	By the way, you know who said this?
	Actually, Freud.
	That's right.
	Right.
	Sublimation was an actual thing.
	Yeah, the golden sublimation.
	Right, exactly.
	And then it was Wilhelm Reich and the rest of the crew who decided that part was...
	We need to dispense with all of the sublimation.
	The sublimation was actually the problem.
	By the way, a lot of people don't know who Wilhelm Reich is.
	Just for those who are unaware, he's a man who believed that...
	The fundamental force in the universe was something called an orgone.
	And the orgones, you had to sit in a wooden box, I don't know what you're doing in there, to have a lot of orgasms, to accumulate orgones.
	And if you simply had enough orgasms, you could cure cancer, war, sadness, poverty, everything.
	How did this not beat Scientology?
	Like, most important Hollywood.
	Also, hey, I'm willing to try, but you don't know.
	I'll try anything once.
	Orson Bean, every single time I think about our lost friend Orson Bean, I smile.
	What a wonderful little light that just moved through our lives there for a season.
	He He told the dirtiest joke I've ever heard at his son-in-law's funeral.
	That was a great moment.
	Even my jaw kind of went down.
	He was kind of the anime character of a Hollywood celebrity.
	You would have loved him.
	To switch topics, what do you make of the Sam Bankman freedom at all?
	You know...
	It's just quite a coincidence.
	And it's just damn bad luck that the day before he was going to have to testify, the second largest owner of the Democratic Party was going to have to testify about all of his scams and crimes that paid for all their elections.
	Dagnabbit, he just got arrested.
	Couldn't testify.
	What are the odds?
	Oh well, moving on.
	I'm just going to put it here.
	Sam Backman-Fried did not kill himself.
	You see Hillary creeping.
	The fundamental problem of our time is that there is no reason for conspiracy theories to be discounted.
	It's information.
	Information crisis.
	It is an information crisis.
	We cannot trust the source of any information.
	We were talking this morning, Drew and I, about what is the truth of the COVID vaccines?
	How right were we?
	How wrong were we?
	We all kind of had different positions at different points of time in this whole thing.
	Although people sometimes criticize some of us for some of our positions.
	And I would like to say almost everyone who criticizes us would be vaccinated if we hadn't sued the federal government to stop the vaccine mandate.
	So pound sand.
	But the question is, what...
	So Drew's question was, how right and how wrong were we?
	And the answer is, it is genuinely, in this moment, unknowable.
	Because all of those intermediary institutions that used to hold power to account have now become instruments of the state and instruments of the left.
	You simply can't...
	You can't even say, facts don't care about my feelings.
	You can't even say, I let the data...
	It is impossible to know what is happening in the world.
	Has anyone even done...
	Has there been a comparison?
	Because we keep hearing these stories about people dying suddenly at the age of 25.
	And has there been...
	They've just started it, right?
	So in Europe, they've barred now the use of the Moderna vaccine for people under the age of 30 because of the myocarditis events that were occurring.
	But how many people under the age of 30 die suddenly of cardiac events in 2019 versus now?
	Do we know that?
	The government has not spent the money to study this.
	The government has not spent the money to study mask efficacy.
	The government has not spent the money to actually...
	In Germany, there was a test where they found of 25 people, four of them, they attributed it to the vaccine.
	25 people who died young of that heart disease.
	Four of them, they attributed it to the disease, and that's why DeSantis brilliantly is now having...
	Right, well, I mean, it depends on the 25, as opposed to how many, right?
	I mean, these are very small sample sizes, but again, they banned Moderna in large swaths of Europe for people who are under the age of 30 because the risks of the virus are significantly lower than the risks of actually taking the vaccine for people who are young.
	I mean, they're still trotting out the idea that you should be vaccinating your six-month-old.
	There's not only no longitudinal data, there's no data, period.
	Yeah.
	Fauci this week was making that argument.
	I mean, it's totally insane.
	Honestly, as somebody who, you know, listen, I traveled in the expert circles, right?
	I went to Harvard Law.
	I tend to have a lot of respect for people who spend their entire career studying vaccines as opposed to, you know, people who have spent the last five minutes reading up on it on Wikipedia.
	But it turns out that those people were lying to us.
	And that's a serious problem, really.
	And that there was no media to hold them to account.
	Right.
	And that because we have such worship of the expert class now, unrelated experts will back the claims of experts outside of their own field.
	It is an amazing moment.
	We should probably stop talking about it so they don't ban us on YouTube.
	We're about to go to our members block.
	And members block is where we're going to interact for the next little bit with our DW Plus members.
	We're going to exchange gifts in our Secret Santa.
	We're going to answer questions.
	But before we part, there are two things that I think are very important for us to touch on while we're still alive for the masses, for the people.
	The hoi polloi.
	The hoi polloi.
	One of them is Jeremy's Razors.
	And the reason is, if a person wanted...
	to buy a great gift for that gentleman in their life whose masculinity is under constant threat from the woke left, who's being asked to drag a blade across his face in service of companies who want to teach your daughter to shave, who's being asked to subordinate the very who's being asked to drag a blade across his face in service of companies who want to teach your daughter to shave, who's being asked to subordinate the very essence of his manhood in
	This man needs to be given the greatest Christmas gift of all time, a Jeremy's razor.
	And if you order one right now, and when I say right now, I mean, no, right now.
	Because literally tomorrow, which many of you will be watching this, and it will already be tomorrow, will be the last day in which one could make such an order and still receive this before Christmas.
	Put under the tree for that gentleman in your life who deserves to be treated like a man.
	jeremysrazors.com.
	If you go right now, you're going to get 30% off.
	While you're doing it, you can head over to Daily Wire Plus.
	Click on that store icon.
	All of our Daily Wire merch, including our gift subscriptions.
	If you order them in the next 24 hours, 30% off, and you'll still receive that gift card to put in the stocking for Christmas.
	You couldn't think of a better gift, I don't think, than a Daily Wire Plus membership for, you know, the kid heading off to college, somebody who needs access to this kind of information, is being subjected to all kinds of, you know, woke propaganda all the time.
	So dailywireplus.com.
	Click on the store.
	Head over to jeremysrazors.com.
	30% off in both places.
	And right now is the time to do it if you want something before Christmas.
	And that brings me to that last thing that we absolutely need to talk about.
	Christmas.
	This is the last time we're going to see each other before Christmas.
	So, I thought...
	In the past, we've talked about really important Christmas issues.
	We've talked about what does it mean that God walked among man?
	What does it mean that the so-called Son of God and God reigned on a throne in far-off Rome when Christ was born and laid in a manger?
	But the one thing that we've never done is just had a conversation, the four of us, about how we're going to drive Ben out of our city in celebration of You know, long overdue.
	Long overdue.
	We really haven't been doing our bits.
	I just want the Cossack hat.
	That's all I want.
	The furry hat.
	Drew, you're next to go, my friend.
	Maybe the hat will protect me.
	I don't know.
	Turns out not, historically speaking.
	Yeah, Stephen Crowder, actually, on his podcast, he asked me, like, what's your favorite thing about Christmas?
	And I said, well, that we don't do pogroms anymore.
	Yeah.
	That is my favorite thing about it.
	That old tradition.
	That is a great answer for Steven Crowder.
	But you do live in a culture that celebrates Christmas.
	It's true.
	What is your view of living in a culture that celebrates Christmas?
	I mean, I would much rather live in a culture that celebrates Christmas than a culture that disdains it.
	And I think that that's essentially what we're on the verge of.
	As a Jew, I think it's very important that Christians go to church.
	And I think it's very important that they take the gospel seriously, and I think it's very important that they take the religious precepts seriously, because a Christian world is a better world, not just for Jews in the American context, which is obviously true, but also is a better world for the values that it helps to propagate.
	So you don't get offended when someone wishes you a Merry Christmas?
	No, in fact, last night at the holiday party, a bunch of people were coming over and saying, Happy Holidays, and I would respond, Merry Christmas.
	And you said to me, I thought it was a great line, you said, I don't mind if they say Merry Christmas because they're not having a pogrom.
	Right.
	No religious Jews ever get offended by Merry Christmas.
	This is 100% correct.
	It is only secular people, Jews and Gentiles alike, who pretend to be offended by Merry Christmas.
	Because, as Ben and I have discussed of late, the world is really breaking into the two camps of believe in God, do not believe in God.
	And the people who believe in God are in this room.
	Yes.
	That isn't always where the lines are.
	But it seems more and more in this moment that that's where the lines are.
	And so in that sense, we're all in a very important struggle together.
	For our parting words on the true meaning of Christmas, I'm going to leave you with a blast from the past.
	We're going to head over to Members Block.
	We'll see you there in three minutes.
	And we'll let one Andrew Klavan wish you the true spirit of the season.
	Lights, please.
	And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
	And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid.
	And the angel said unto them, Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
	For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.
	And this shall be a sign unto you.
	You shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
	And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.
	That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.
	Who the hell is Charlie Brown?
	Special effects are just great.
	Impressive.
	I love it so much, and it's funny to think about how much bigger we are as a company today than when we made that video.
	Drew, you look so young there.
	What we realized this morning is how few people have seen it.
	Our audience was so much smaller back then.
	It's true.
	It all happened so fast, too.
	I had some of our mutual friends who are celebrating their first Christmas over to the house this week to watch Charlie Brown Christmas is what it's called, right?
	Charlie Brown Christmas.
	And it's remarkable how cruddy the animation is.
	Not just rudimentary, cruddy.
	So great, though.
	And it's so great.
	I put it on for my kids, and my son said, Daddy, why are we watching this?
	For whatever reason, they didn't get it.
	It's because you destroyed them with the Batman film.
	Maybe.
	They're still traumatized from Heath Ledger.
	I don't know.
	So, it's Christmas time.
	We have gifts for one another.
	Secret Santa, we've done it almost every year.
	It's ended in near disaster, friendship ending ruin every single time.
	So, why not do it again?
	So, I don't even know how it came to be that we each were...
	We're tasked with buying a gift for the person who we were, but I thought we'd get right to it.
	That sounds great, because you know, in the past, I have gotten great Secret Santa presents.
	Have you?
	Yes, you gave me one of my favorites last year.
	You gave me a nice juicy meatball in tinfoil.
	I loved that.
	Ben gave me, I still have it on display in my office, in a beautiful Tiffany box.
	It was a nice little future diamond.
	You know, a nice black...
	A Santa Claus loves that for you every year.
	That's right, yeah.
	So I look forward to this year.
	All right, well, I think we should start with you, Michael.
	Okay.
	So I open, mine is here on my left.
	That's your gift right there.
	Okay, all right.
	And I don't, obviously, I don't know, because it's a secret Santa, so I don't know who my secret, okay.

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