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Aug. 24, 2023 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:33:01

Daily Wire Backstage: Debate Me, Bro.

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	Hey, Michael Knowles here.
	The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage is available now.
	Join me and a star-studded Daily Wire cast as we discuss the most important news of the day, the cultural insanity spreading across the country, and take live questions from the viewers, all while enjoying a wonderful cigar.
	Take a listen.
	Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.
	That was like my fourth try at that during the countdown to the show.
	Welcome to Daily Wire's Backstage, brought to you by ExpressVPN.
	Tonight, I am joined by Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan, maybe a surprise guest.
	There's all sorts of stuff going on here.
	Obviously, the debate with all of the candidates.
	We all want to know what Doug Burgum has to say about 2024.
	We've all got Burgum momentum.
	We've got Asa Hutchinson fever.
	And of course, we will see the launch of the croissants, the croissants for short, for Mr. Christie's campaign.
	Gentlemen, before we get too far into the show, predictions for the debate.
	absolute cataclysmic boredom.
	I mean, so here's the thing about this debate.
	Basically, it's gonna be all against DeSantis, and the only question is whether DeSantis can survive.
	DeSantis has been taking incoming for weeks.
	He's dropped in the polls from, in April, he was in like the 24% range.
	He's down to, in the RealClearPolitics polling average, in the 14-15% range, a significant decline.
	About half of that support has gone to Trump.
	About half of that support has gone to Vivek.
	The big question for DeSantis is, can he weather the storm tonight?
	Because I'm not of the opinion that he can actually win tonight in any way, shape, or form.
	He's challenged on one side by Trump, who's 40 points ahead of the field.
	On the other side, by the entirety of the field, which is seeming to claw him down like a crab pot back in there so that somebody can take that second place slot.
	The other contenders on the stage all have sort of various motivations for even being there in the first place.
	I'm not of the opinion, for example, that Vivek Ramaswamy actually believes he's going to be President of the United States.
	To me, he seems like a candidate who pretty clearly is running for Vice President of the United States, Senate in Ohio, or a media slot.
	If you look at Mike Pence, Pence is there basically just to provide a counter to Trump.
	He has to know that he has no shot at the actual nomination.
	If you're Nikki Haley or Tim Scott, you're basically just hoping that you're standing around when somebody dies and that you have kind of a small percentage of the base.
	And if you're Chris Christie, you're a kamikaze.
	And Chris Christie is showing momentum in New Hampshire, which he's up to second by some polls in New Hampshire.
	He's still like 14% and really doesn't have a real shot at the nomination, which means that their real motivation on the stage is claw down DeSantis because basically everybody is now waiting for something bad to happen to Trump.
	I mean, that really is the dynamic of the race because the only way to defeat Trump, realistically, there are only two possibilities.
	And one really doesn't exist.
	Possibility number one, you make the case to the American people and to the conservative base that Donald Trump was a less-than-stellar president who would perform worse as president than you would, and that he made a series of mistakes that he will repeat.
	That case has very little durability with the Republican base, which has a lot of faith in Trump by virtually every polling metric, even if I think there's merit to the case that he underperformed particularly in his last two years as president.
	Then there's the second part of the case, which was always the case against Trump, and particularly the case for DeSantis.
	And that was the electability case.
	DeSantis' entire case for Trump was, I'm Trump but electable.
	The problem is, in order to say that Trump was unelectable, you have to say the one thing that Trump people don't want you to say, which is, he lost in 2020.
	Because if he won't say he lost in 2020, he's not unelectable.
	He was very electable in 2020 if he won, right?
	And so his entire case that he won in 2020, and the entire field being very shy about saying, no, it was a bad election, a lot of bad stuff happened, and you lost because you were in a bad race, and you're a bad candidate, and you lucked out against Hillary Clinton because everyone hates Hillary.
	People don't hate Biden as much as they hate Hillary.
	That's the case that somebody's going to have to make.
	No one has made it yet.
	If one of those two cases doesn't get made, Trump's the nominee.
	You can't make the case in a primary race if you're trailing Trump by 30 to 50 points for some of the single-digit polls.
	I think you can make the case in a primary race saying that in general I'll do better than Trump, but the problem is you need to show polling data that suggests that, unless what you say is that We already know how this race ends for Trump.
	You don't know how the race ends for me, because things could change.
	But you know how the race ends for Trump, because we already did this one time.
	Do you want to do this thing again?
	And honestly, I think that's a pretty robust case, but nobody's willing to make it because they're so afraid of saying the reality, which is that Donald Trump did in fact lose to Joe Biden.
	Yes, the rules were changed.
	Yes, the media were corrupt.
	Yes, the media jobbed Trump.
	All that stuff is going to happen again.
	I was told by Judge Michael Ludig, a once respected conservative judge who now plays Ed McMahon to every hack on MSNBC, I was told that 2020, I'm not joking, he said this, is the most fair election ever conducted in the history of the United States.
	And because I want to stay on YouTube, I of course agree with that.
	On the DeSantis point, I actually think...
	I don't see any way that he loses unless the people on the stage find a way to attack him from the right.
	That's the one advantage that he has in this context.
	Fox News debate, friendly audience.
	Almost all the attacks against DeSantis have been, number one, just kind of ridiculous on the merits.
	But also they've been from the left.
	I'll tell you the point.
	The one who's going to go kamikaze, obviously, is Christie.
	Christie committed a murder-suicide against Marco Rubio in 2016.
	He's going to try and do the same thing on the stage right now.
	What he's going to do, he's going to say, Ron, everything you say is scripted.
	We know the script because it was revealed to us.
	And then he's going to say some line that Ron says.
	He's going to play exactly the same prank on Rubio.
	He's going to try to do the same thing with DeSantis and with Rubio.
	Remember he did this with Rubio and Rubio saying the same phrase over and over?
	I have a slightly different analysis here.
	I'm watching all this campaign, and DeSantis, everything DeSantis says is true and effective, but he's not charming, and so he's losing points.
	Everything Vivek says is charming, but complete crap.
	I mean, every word out of his mouth is complete nonsense, and he's gaining points.
	So this seems to me that Senator Scott is the guy, because he's absolutely charming and saying absolutely nothing.
	So he should have a great evening.
	And then, as for Trump, the fact that he lost this election, it reminds me of the scene in Game of Thrones, where the dwarf is talking to the cripple, and the cripple says, I'm not a cripple, and the dwarf says, I'm not a dwarf.
	It's like, he lost.
	He lost the midterms.
	He lost the next midterms.
	He keeps losing.
	He won by a short hair against the least likable candidate on Earth by a fluke of the Electoral College, which I support, but still.
	He's not gonna win the general election. - I suppose the argument against it is, I agree, he won by a short hair against Hillary in these decisive states.
	But then, actually before the election, the FBI saw him as enough of a threat to spy on his campaign.
	Then the DOJ saw him as enough of a threat to consistently undermine his presidency.
	Now, I think the Democrats see him as enough of a threat to upend two centuries of American history.
	Yes, no question.
	More than that, throw him in prison.
	Is he enough of a threat or enough of a mark for them?
	Like, they see someone who's vulnerable.
	I don't know.
	I mean, listen.
	I have a question.
	Does that matter?
	Meaning, like, the one question that Trump has never been asked and has never answered is, you say the election was stolen from you.
	Let's say that's true.
	What is your plan to unsteal right?
	Right.
	To avoid the lockdowns that permitted the policies to change.
	Now, before I explain to you my brilliant theories about everything in the world, we have got to get to brains before beauty here.
	We have our friend Candace Owens is actually in the field in Milwaukee right now at the GOP debate, perhaps announcing a run for president.
	I think she's polling higher than Doug Burgum.
	Candace, what is going on in Milwaukee?
	Hey!
	Well, I'll tell you one thing.
	It's really hot, so if I look like I'm sweating, it's because it is unbelievable weather out here.
	But people are very excited.
	I'm listening to all of your predictions.
	Tend to agree with Klavan tonight.
	I think that I would not be sitting comfortably if I was walking in as a Santas, obviously, having lost effectively 10 points since June, at least according to the Emerson College Poll, which recently came up.
	I think the person that everyone wants to watch tonight is Vivek, because he kind of snuck up from behind.
	This seemed to be a dog-on-dog fight between Trump and DeSantis, everyone was paying attention to them slinging mud at each other and no one sort of watched the youngest candidate in the field.
	And here's the truth, he's hustled harder than the rest of them.
	He's doing every podcast, big and small.
	He's running this like a startup.
	And I think that what Vivek said was accurate on my show when he said that what DeSantis is suffering from, aside from a communication problem, I think there are too many people communicating on behalf of DeSantis and we don't know what his thoughts are versus his communications team's But aside from that, I think he just had too much of a big start, too much money.
	You know, he came in like a corporation, not like a startup, and it's hard to know which direction to focus.
	So the question tonight will be whether or not DeSantis can refocus his campaign, actually listen to some of the criticism and realize that, you know, you know, you got a little bit of a personality problem.
	We want you to sound a little bit more excited.
	And by the way, he showed this issue back when he was debating Gillum, Andrew Gillum in the gubernatorial election.
	You know, he struggled to get over the finish line.
	Obviously, we don't have Trump here tonight.
	So people are going to be paying attention to the next two candidates, which are Vivek and DeSantis.
	Ben, you might be right.
	We might see Vivek go for DeSantis.
	We might see them both try to stay clean.
	Vivek has thus far kept his hands pretty clean, so it'll be interesting to see if he shifts his strategy.
	Overall, I think Vivek will thrive in this environment only because he's a true academic, and I just imagine that he was probably in the debate club back when he was in Yale, but who knows.
	In fact, I can vouch for some of that.
	Do you know, though, Candace, if any of this will change the polls?
	So let's say they all tear each other to shreds, and DeSantis murders Vivek, or Vivek murders DeSantis, or they gang up and eat Chris Christie.
	Does that actually affect the standing?
	That was a softball.
	Do you think that affects the overall polls?
	I think it will, and I think here's how it's going to affect it.
	The names that we're not saying tonight.
	You guys aren't saying Tim Scott.
	You guys aren't saying Nikki Haley.
	Well, where are those points going to go when they realize that their candidates are effectively going nowhere?
	We're not even talking about Pence.
	I don't think any of you guys, at least since I've had you on, have mentioned Pence.
	Their donors and their followers will say, okay, this is obviously not going to work.
	Where are we going to jump ship?
	Are they going to jump on the DeSantis ship?
	Are they going to jump on the Vivek ship?
	I would assume if they're with Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, they're probably not going to go on the Trump ship.
	So I do think that, if I'm making a prediction tonight, that Vivek will get a bump in the polls after this.
	And for DeSantis, it's going to be all based on his performance tonight.
	I don't know what I would be thinking if I was him.
	Okay.
	Anybody else with questions for our lovely friend in Milwaukee?
	What are you hearing from the Doug Burgum camp?
	Is he going to bring the magic that we have been promised?
	And the gift cards that we've been promised?
	Well, the crowd is wild for Doug Burgum, and that is the truth.
	The absolute truth.
	That's great, Candace.
	And just obviously, before we go, where do you stand on Asa Hutchinson?
	Do you think he should be only a vice president, or should he be at the top of the ticket?
	I'd like to see him at the top of the ticket, and if that doesn't work out, press secretary for sure.
	He's so good at communicating.
	Candace, thank you so much.
	You probably have to get in there.
	Enjoy the debate.
	We'll probably be texting you for updates, and give our regards to all our pals out there.
	Okay.
	Alright guys, we'll check in soon.
	Can I say one thing?
	Oh, two things.
	No.
	Only one.
	The thing about they go after Trump, the deep state goes after Trump because he's effective.
	I reject that premise because the deep state will go after any Republican.
	They hate all Republicans.
	They hate DeSantis.
	They'll do whatever they can to destroy you.
	If you make it easier for them, then they'll be able to destroy you even more.
	Trump tends to make it easier for them.
	Second, on DeSantis, what I would love to hear DeSantis say, maybe he's already said a version of this, but I'd love to hear him say it tonight, is just like, listen, If you're looking for a homecoming king, if you're looking for Mr. Personality, I'm not that guy.
	I admit it.
	That's not who I am.
	But if you're looking for a killer who's just going to get things done, and you can look at the scoreboard and look what he actually achieved, then I'm your guy for that.
	I think he just has to... That should always have been his message.
	Right.
	100%.
	The big problem, I think, is that... Listen, when you're explaining, you're losing, but I think the reason why DeSantis' campaign has run into some choppy waters is because he made a couple of core assumptions about the nature of the Republican electorate that just are not...
	One of those core assumptions is that racking up wins would actually matter to the electorate.
	And this is a core assumption that is not true.
	I mean, the fact is that...
	People have short memories.
	Well, not only that.
	DeSantis doing a thing is being treated exactly the same thing as Vivek saying a thing.
	So Vivek will say something like, critical race theory is terrible.
	And then DeSantis will pass a bill in Florida banning critical race theory in the classroom.
	And people are like, those are the same thing.
	Those are basically the same thing.
	And it's like, well, that's not the same thing at all.
	So when he says, listen, I'm competent at being governor.
	I'm competent at doing these things.
	The Republican base doesn't vote for that anymore.
	I've always felt that there is Trump the person who is the person but there's also Trump the voice of the people and he embodies the voice of the people.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Trump represents something.
	I've always felt that there was Trump the person who is the person, but there's also Trump the voice of the people, and he embodies the voice of the people.
	This is 60 years of culture war, of telling the American people they stink.
	Their country stinks, their religion stinks, their patriotism stinks, their way of life stinks, their race stinks.
	Everything about him stinks.
	And Trump, as far as I'm concerned, is a polite response to that.
	The response could easily have been pitchforks and torches outside.
	I don't disagree with any of that, but that has nothing to do with actual policy.
	wins on board.
	What I'm saying, though, is there was a time when a DeSantis would have been easily the frontrunner, when people would have been paying attention to policy, when people would have been paying attention to results.
	They're not anymore, because they're just too damned angry.
	And I think the anger is justified, but it's also self-destructive.
	There is, I'm with Ann Coulter, circa 2016, when she wrote this book with a ridiculous title, but it had good substance.
	E Pluribus Awesome in Trump We Trust was the title.
	But the thesis was that people, a lot of people think people voted for Trump for his personality, forgetting about his policies.
	She said it was the opposite.
	And what I would say differentiates Trump from the other Republicans, at least in my lifetime, are three big issues.
	Immigration, which he, yes, other Republicans have been anti-immigration, he took it a lot further.
	And called Mexicans rapists and murderers.
	Trade.
	Every other Republican and every other Democrat in my lifetime was for basically more free trade, more globalization.
	Trump opposed that.
	He's now calling for mercantilism in the 21st century.
	And war.
	Every president who gets elected would bomb Iraq.
	That was a rite of passage for every president in my lifetime.
	Donald Trump was generally opposed to these imperial wars.
	Those are three priorities.
	How did he advance those first two when he was in office?
	Well, illegal immigration plummeted during his first year in office, and then after it became clear that the established bureaucracy was not going to enforce the laws, then immigration ticked up again.
	But he had a massive drop in the first months of his presidency.
	He built some of the wall.
	But this is what we're always hearing.
	We're always hearing, well, for the first part, it was good.
	It's hard when you've got an entrenched bureaucracy.
	It's hard, but that's part of the problem.
	Okay, when you're explaining you're losing, I said it about a campaign.
	It also happens to be for administrations.
	I guess, except Trump's 50% in the polls.
	So it looks like he's winning.
	He also didn't get it done the way he treated it.
	Now you're changing the metric of winning.
	So I'm not denying that he's winning the primaries.
	Yeah.
	He is winning the primaries.
	The question is, did he advance the conservative agenda enough as president?
	I think there are many legitimate objections to, for example, his COVID handling, or for example, handling of the BLM riots, or for example, his spending habits.
	I mean, there are a lot of problems.
	But the thing that I most object to, aside from your person You know, just as a human.
	The thing that I most object to is this idea, this intellectualization of Trump as Trump was a basket of issues.
	He was not.
	He was an impulse.
	The impulse is what Drew is saying.
	The impulse was a giant pulsating orange finger to all of the people.
	But he's a person, and people matter in Democratic politics.
	So his personality does matter.
	I agree with you.
	I think it was chiefly about personality, which is why right now he is shifting around on a wide variety of issues, and it doesn't seem to matter one iota.
	On those core issues, he's pretty consistent.
	It's not true that he didn't achieve things because he was up against the deep state.
	Every Republican president, any Republican president is going to be up against the deep state.
	He mistreats people, and that's not the way you run politics.
	He couldn't repeal Obamacare because he treated John McCain like a piece of garbage.
	And all I hear from Trump supporters is, well, he is a piece of garbage.
	I don't care.
	I don't care.
	You needed his vote.
	You need his vote.
	You kiss his ass and let him get his vote.
	And also, the excuse that, well, he tried and they blocked it.
	I could almost buy that, if there's evidence that he really tried.
	But for me, the number one unforgivable thing, putting aside COVID was bad, BLM was bad, but the fact that he didn't lock her up, like he ran on lock her up and then he's in office. - They would have prosecuted him the second he'd locked her up.
	- Okay, but there was-- - And a lot of Republicans would have opposed to him. - But there was no attempt.
	There was no even discussion or attempt to actually hold any of these people accountable.
	- That's actually the one where I blame him the least.
	- Yeah, me too. - Because there was actually a generally agreed upon idea that you did not prosecute the person who was the candidate of the opposing party.
	It's just that he was fibbing the entire election when he said he would.
	Well, I know, but Trump's supposed to be the guy that does that.
	That's what sets it apart.
	So the transgressive speech didn't actually match the policy in a lot of ways.
	And, you know, if you're looking for, you know, people to do the thing they promise, I recommend you try ExpressVPN.
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	The Daily Wire's most trusted privacy.
	I'm in there.
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	That's it.
	So here's the thing.
	So here's the thing.
	I will acknowledge that the arguments that we are currently making about his shortcomings on policy have no truck with the base.
	They don't.
	And this is the big problem for a lot of the other candidates.
	DeSantis is like, look at my record, look at Trump's record.
	My record as governor of Florida is better than Trump's record as president of the United States, which by the way is fairly inarguable.
	Look, I love DeSantis, so I'm not knocking him, but it's easier to run a state than the United States.
	That's a fair argument, but...
	In terms of what DeSantis has done to reshape the state of Florida in a conservative image, there is no question he's had significantly more progress.
	And I'm, whether you're talking about shifting a .5 percentage point state to a 20 percentage point state.
	A lot of that was migration.
	Yeah, but why was that in-migration happening?
	I can tell you because my family moved there.
	I'm personally responsible for almost 20 people in my immediate family and surroundings moving to the state of Florida, and that is because of the governance of people like DeSantis.
	But, again, I will fully acknowledge that it doesn't matter almost at all in this primary, and this is the thing that DeSantis is finding out, which means that the only thing that he could pitch... I think what he thought is, I'm gonna pitch strong governance, plus I can talk like Trump.
	I can be confrontational, I can be spicy, I can say a lot of the same things, but I don't also have the kind of crazy attributes of saying every weird thing that comes in my head in all of this.
	Meek is fictional.
	Exactly.
	And that didn't work because you can't out-Trump Trump.
	And the former part of it, which is the solidity of governance, clearly is not of top priority to the conservative movement, which is really interested right now continually.
	And again, I understand the emotional appeal of throwing the giant orange.
	There's no substitute for the giant orange middle finger.
	Listen, I've done it myself.
	It is fun to go up to left-wing celebrities, I've done this, and explain to them that I personally will vote for Trump before I vote for the Democrat if Trump is the nominee.
	They lose their minds.
	It's fun to do.
	I totally get it.
	It is fun.
	Okay?
	And by polling data, this is one of the big gaps between Trump and DeSantis.
	Trump is fun, DeSantis is not.
	Totally get it.
	You know what's not really supposed to be fun?
	Governing and winning.
	Okay, governing and winning is supposed to be victory.
	You know what?
	You know what's not supposed to be fun?
	Politics is not supposed to be about the entertainment value of the politics.
	It's not.
	You know we live in a democracy, right?
	Do you know democracy has been about bread and circuses and about at least appealing to people on a basic level, going back to Pericles.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Bread and circuses comes from my old friend Juvenal, who was saying you gave up your democracy for bread and circuses.
	That is the problem.
	So it's like that is the stage we're at now.
	People are willing to give this stuff up for fun.
	But I think we should add here for just a minute, because I'm not completely, I mean, it's most likely Trump's going to be the nominee, but I'm not completely sold on it.
	The DeSantis campaign was objectively crappy from the very start, and it's gotten better, and it's getting better.
	But he started out going, basically, I'm little Trump.
	I'm Trump 2.0.
	I'm the nice Trump.
	All the stuff he said, even his slogan, which I can't even remember anymore, was MAGA.
	Two or whatever, you know.
	It's a bad campaign.
	And I think the people he fired, they look at that and they say, that's chaos.
	But it's also an improvement.
	His staff knew nothing about social media.
	They didn't let him say the things he was going to say.
	If they let him go, he's won elections before.
	It's possible.
	The other thing that DeSantis really needs to do.
	And they know it, and they have to do it.
	He became famous not just because his policies were good.
	Every politician makes this mistake.
	They think they became popular because their policies are good.
	It's not true.
	He became famous because the entire media made him the enemy.
	And he beat him up.
	And he punched them in the face.
	And he has avoided all confrontational media for the entirety of this campaign so far.
	You cannot do that.
	The reason that Vivek is doing well is because he goes into confrontational media spaces He's confrontational.
	Now, I think he's fibbing, right?
	I think that he'll say things to the Atlantic, and then five seconds later, he'll pretend he didn't say that thing to the Atlantic.
	Yeah.
	And then he'll crap all over Caitlin Collins for asking him about it.
	But, DeSantis has to go into unfriendly spaces, and he has to punch people.
	I think he assumed that he had stocked up enough goodwill with the base that he could avoid that.
	And he's wrong.
	It's not true.
	Speaking of going into unfriendly spaces, do I, do I have to, this is a message to the producers, this is not to the audience, this is not even to you gentlemen, do I have to talk about this stupid nonsense about the aliens coming into our spaces?
	Do I?
	Yes.
	They're telling me yes in my ear too.
	Are they?
	Yeah, I don't know, it's silent in my, do we have, did you, I heard you made a documentary, Matt, is that true?
	Yes, we did.
	We're going to play the entire thing, apparently.
	It's about 45 minutes long.
	I don't think a lot of setup is necessary.
	Obviously, Ben and I have had our disagreements over the Alien issue, and it made me think, and I've spent the last several weeks I'm doing a deep dive investigating.
	What I was really trying to figure out is, his arguments are so terrible, and I've embarrassed him so much in this debate over aliens, and yet he persists.
	And so it made me think, what is really going on here?
	And I put together a report, and... Take it away.
	Please, take it away.
	Please.
	UFOs exist.
	The U.S.
	government found quite a number of them, and they are indeed of non-human origin.
	I'm just gonna go no.
	We have spacecraft from another species.
	There are no aliens.
	Do we have the bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft?
	Non-human biologics came with some of these recoveries.
	We are not alone.
	We're definitely not alone.
	- That mother !
	That mother back there is not real! - Facts don't care about your feelings.
	This catchy cliché was coined by Ben Shapiro, owner of the popular conservative news outlet, The Daily Wire.
	Mr. Shapiro recently targeted me in a public smear campaign after I provided a mountain of evidence proving the existence of aliens.
	For some reason, he refused to acknowledge the fact that we are simply not alone.
	Matt Welch is a very controversial person for a number of reasons.
	Dude really thinks that, like, the aliens are here.
	Let's take this logically for just a moment to destroy Matt with facts and logic.
	The evidence you're presenting me is gonna have to be better than, a guy saw a shadowy image that appeared to defy the laws of physics.
	Probably it's aliens.
	Again, this is a question of likelihood, Matt.
	You have nothing.
	I'm sorry, you have nothing.
	There are no aliens on planet Earth.
	I don't believe it.
	I don't see the evidence for it.
	And I think all of this is a giant waste of time.
	Sympathy poured in from around the world to comfort Mr. Shapiro after this public embarrassment.
	However, he continues his anti-alien campaign to this day.
	This irrational alienophobia, while easily dismissed as quackery, raises the question, does Ben Shapiro pretend to hate aliens because he is one?
	To protect the integrity of this investigation, all of the evidence you're about to be presented was collected by our trained investigators.
	Using the most advanced strategies, equipment, and techniques, we'll finally learn if the one who smelt it dealt it.
	In 2021, Young America's foundation hosted a speech at Florida State University featuring Ben Shapiro.
	At this event, Mr. Shapiro demonstrated alien mind control capabilities in front of a live audience.
	Hi Ben, how are you?
	Doing okay, how are you?
	Great.
	Um, how come you claim to be 5'9", even though you're like 5'5"?
	I don't know, how tall are you?
	You're 5'9"?
	I'm actually 5'9".
	Okay, come over here, let's see.
	Spatial perception is affected by distance, So, considering the student in the video was close enough to see Mr. Shapiro, it's reasonable to assume he was close enough to accurately judge his height.
	Yet, the young man's calculations were off by four inches.
	Take another look.
	A leaning expert on extraterrestrials testified on Twitter that aliens possess the ability to control human minds, make us see things differently than they really are.
	Did Ben Shapiro alter his perception in order to publicly own him?
	Does this explain all of the college students Shapiro has destroyed?
	According to Wikipedia, Ben Shapiro was born in January of 1984 in Burbank, California.
	Our researchers checked online for any birth announcements with the name Ben Shapiro in 1984 and found nothing.
	Aside from a certified birth certificate, no evidence exists that anyone named Ben Shapiro was born on that day in Burbank or anywhere else.
	Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking made a startling confession at some point before his death that, unlike his contemporaries who speculated aliens are friendly explorers, he believed aliens might actually hate humans.
	Is there evidence Ben Shapiro is hostile towards humanity?
	Our team pieced together this video from clips they found on the Daily Wire's website.
	The company tried to suppress this evidence behind countless hours of newer content, but what we were able to uncover was shocking.
	Why do I hate Michael Moles?
	Because the gods have smiled upon Michael Mowles for no reason I can discern.
	What the f***?
	I'm going to be trapped in a locked room with Michael Knowles for a given period of time, which sounds technically like the definition of hell.
	Michael Knowles.
	A man who only fails upward.
	You went to Yale.
	I could not find any other productive thing that you had done in your entire life.
	Michael Moles, a man hired at this company for one job, did not do that job well, and so was given a podcast.
	You were an unemployable person, so we apparently just kept paying you.
	Yeah.
	And then I'm gonna hand this over to you.
	We'll take a picture for the cameras.
	This is really incredible.
	There we go.
	Thank you.
	Absolutely.
	We've had many complaints about you walking around shirtless in the office.
	See, in the movie, the pedophile's outside the room, Michael.
	Never go in the dressing room when Knowles is in there.
	Five more minutes and I was gonna Murray and eat you.
	Yeah, huh?
	That's why Michael Knowles will eventually pay the ultimate price when I run him over with my car.
	We reached out to Mr. Shapiro for comment right before recording this video, but our email went unanswered.
	For more information and a closer look at the evidence, visit Ben ShapiroMightBeAnAlien.com.
	Wow, Matt, that was some really bang-up work.
	Yeah, amazing.
	Thank you.
	Don't believe it.
	Don't believe it.
	Yeah, it might just be the... I don't believe it.
	You guys don't believe it either.
	No, I don't believe it at all.
	Is it something with the lighting, perhaps?
	Don't believe it.
	That's a great mask, actually.
	The human mask that he puts on the bird.
	Exactly, that's what I'm talking about.
	Yeah, I think you just keep that on for the whole rest of this.
	That's my life, apparently.
	I like what's so interesting about the alien species is that they have beige colored skin just below the neck.
	Well, that's actually what people have said.
	They've said that my only skin was my tan skin.
	So they throw you off.
	Yeah, well, it's incontrovertible.
	I like that, you know, there's a lot of other shows that are doing very serious debate analysis before the big debate.
	Yeah.
	And we played a five-minute video about... I can't breathe in here like a... Oh, Ben!
	Oh, God.
	There was just an alien where you're sitting!
	Ah, well, I felt like Joe Biden in there for a second.
	I can't breathe, I'm falling asleep.
	I also love, at our multi-hundred million dollar media company, I like that all of our gags cost about 14 cents at most.
	Want to know why we're a couple hundred million dollars?
	That's how it works.
	Can we officially put an end to this and all future discussions?
	No, that was a setup for at least a 20 minute conversation.
	Who is the most like an alien on the Republican debate stage?
	Nate, ooh.
	I'm, you know, this is.
	This is a good question, right?
	Now you're thinking about it.
	This is a credit to him.
	Actually, it's not an insult, but the answer is Mike Pence.
	Because he's just so solid.
	This guy, he doesn't sweat, he doesn't blink, he doesn't move.
	He's unflappable.
	And only he, only he, doesn't know that he sacrificed his career when he saved the republic by not overturning the election.
	He's the only person in America.
	He's a friendly alien.
	He's a friendly one.
	I do want to get to at least one topic that actually matters tonight.
	But before we get to that.
	I want to plug Candace to go.
	I was feeling it.
	Okay, before we do that, I want to get to... You know Candace.
	You saw her earlier today on the show.
	Well, I want to take a moment.
	To remind you that in case you weren't aware, we are mere weeks away from the premiere of her new 10-part docuseries, Convicting a Murderer.
	The series will finally reveal the evidence that was omitted in the popular docuseries, Making a Murderer.
	If you know anything about Candace, you know that she loves to bust up media narratives.
	Well, that is exactly what she's done in this new series.
	Take a look.
	This is a collect call from an inmate at the Calumet County Jail.
	The man served 18 years in prison until DNA evidence cleared his name.
	The Two Rivers man was convicted of sexual assault in 1985 but exonerated with DNA evidence in 2003.
	So this is the infamous Avery lot.
	Now, two years later, he again finds himself tied to a police investigation.
	Accused of murdering Teresa Hallbuck on the Avery property.
	Stephen Avery's 16-year-old nephew admitted his involvement in the rape and murder of Teresa Hallbuck.
	The car is discovered just around the bend.
	It was just this worldwide phenomenon.
	I think they framed this guy.
	I think he intended to crush the vehicle, but ran out of time.
	Avery thinks the $36 million lawsuit he filed is why he's being targeted in this investigation.
	1021 and 24 Main Street, copy.
	Do we have Steven Avery in custody?
	Netflix made millions of dollars from making a murderer.
	But the filmmakers left out very important details.
	Mountains of evidence that you have not yet seen.
	The blood vial.
	The most egregious manipulation from the movie.
	Interrogations.
	That's when he started beating me because I told him that he's sick.
	Cell phones.
	And I saw melted plastic parts of a cell phone.
	Interviews.
	Her arms were pinned behind her head.
	They made Steven Avery look like a victim.
	You don't believe your brother's guilty?
	I don't know if I'm a suspect.
	- I got an eye. - I'm getting sick and tired of media deception.
	Evidence piling up.
	Why would they omit so many different things?
	Why are you editing my testimony?
	I am not going to make the same mistake that the filmmakers did.
	Rearranging the testimony.
	They delete a portion of it at the end.
	How could they claim to care about the truth?
	They all know that Stephen Avery committed this crime.
	911, what is your emergency?
	The evidence forces me to conclude that you are the most dangerous individual ever to set foot in this courtroom.
	Thank you.
	you you Thank you.
	Convicting a murderer is available exclusively for Daily Wire Plus members.
	Head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe to sign up.
	Right now, you'll save 25% on your membership.
	There has never been a better time, so sign up tonight.
	I have to say, as a former court reporter, a guy who used to cover courts, everybody's guilty.
	Everybody's guilty.
	And every one of these shows is some sweet little white girl coming in and saying, I want to help people.
	Here's a murderer.
	I'll set him free.
	No, no, that's not how you do that.
	Also a great way of getting out of jury duty.
	Just say that one.
	Yeah, I'm glad we're doing this because I remember making a murderer and that was when that show came out it was whatever little bit of faith in humanity I had left to that point was gone.
	Just the way that everyone bought that.
	There was no and I remember very distinctly afterwards trying to tell people like no just spend five seconds on Google and you'll clearly see some some facts about this case.
	Or serial.
	Cereal, yeah, that was the one.
	Same girl, except just a different girl, but the same girl.
	Speaking of human tragedy with more questions than answers, at least in the popular narrative, we all know about this tragedy in Maui.
	We were told 100 people dead.
	Obviously, the number is probably an order of magnitude, at least higher than that.
	Biden finally gets guilted into flying into Maui, and he decides to spend his time cracking jokes and falling asleep.
	We are a community that relies on family, on Ohana, whether by blood or by friendship.
	I don't want to compare difficulties, but we have a little sense, Jill and I, what it's like to lose a home.
	Years ago, now 15 years ago, I was in Washington doing Meet the Press.
	It was a sunny Sunday.
	And lightning struck at home on a little lake that's outside of our home, not a lake, a big pond, and hit a wire and came up underneath our home into the heating ducts, the air conditioning duct.
	To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my 67 Corvette, and my cat.
	But all kidding aside, I watched the firefighters, the way they responded.
	You know, there's an old expression.
	I grew up right across the street from a fire hall in Claymont, Delaware.
	You guys catch the boots out here?
	That's some hot ground, man.
	Pretty hot ground, man.
	A thousand people dead, or more, many of them children.
	This guy makes it about a kitchen fire he had, almost losing his car, and how funny it is that his shoes are a little bit hot.
	What's amazing, too, is the press coverage of this has been virtually non-existent.
	Yeah.
	Especially when you look back.
	I mean, it's ridiculous at this point to care, but the coverage of George W. Bush during Katrina, where basically they made it sound as if he had blown really hard and that caused the hurricane and destroyed New Orleans, which was destroyed by 1,000, not 1,000, 100 years of Democrat malfeasance in that city, which didn't support the dams that were destroyed.
	The levees.
	Yeah, the levees that were destroyed.
	You know, this is an actual disgrace.
	This is an actual American tragedy, the worst fire in 100 years, the worst, most fatal fire in 100 years.
	3,000 people died on 9-11.
	And this guy shows up, this guy shows up and talks about a kitchen fire that he had, falls asleep.
	You know, I mean, it's- And the media spinning for him is just- And the media's not just spinning, they're not even covering, how did this happen?
	Why were the roads blocked?
	Where did the fires start?
	Why wasn't it stopped?
	All of those things are not being covered anywhere except by Brett Barrett.
	They just say climate change.
	Climate change is always the excuse for complete human failure.
	And remember the big thing with Bush was that he flew overhead Katrina.
	That's right.
	Rather than rappelling down into a flood zone, he flew overhead.
	We were told by the media, they still say it's a defining image of his presidency, an image that will live in infamy.
	It was a total disgrace.
	That was two days after the hurricane hit.
	Two days later, he's on the scene, not there physically, because it's literally a flood.
	It took Joe Biden two weeks to show up.
	And also, by the way, that... After a couple of vacations, right?
	Right.
	He was on vacation.
	We can't forget also the no comment.
	When he was first asked about the victims of the fire, he said, no comment.
	But also, that clip there of him sleeping, it's actually true.
	NBC News did run cover for him and they ran a video, high resolution, to show you can see the whites in his eyes.
	He actually wasn't sleeping.
	That's true.
	He actually was not sleeping.
	But that's more concerning.
	The fact that you can't tell if he's awake or asleep.
	Well, he's got his eyes open, but he's dead in the — yeah, his eyes are open, but he's just sitting there.
	Well, you can see the breath.
	I mean, like, he's breathing so deeply in that particular clip.
	I mean, that's like REM breathing.
	But in any case, it doesn't even matter.
	I mean, the bottom line is that the great lie that the media have been telling about Joe Biden for literally his entire career is that this is the captain of empathy He is such an empathetic human being.
	This is a pitch in 2020 as well.
	He's just so filled with empathy for others and caring for others.
	And sure, he has no actual vision.
	This is the rip on him that Richard Benkramer writes about in What It Takes, that he has no actual vision.
	He has no actual policies.
	He doesn't actually care about things.
	But he just has the connect, right?
	He just connects with people.
	And he's so empathetic.
	And he's so caring.
	It all goes back to the pain that he experienced when his wife and his daughter were killed in that car crash.
	And then it goes back to Bo's death and all the rest of this.
	Here's the thing, you can get away with that for decades when you're young, vigorous and you can lie with alacrity.
	As you get older and that stuff falls away, all you look like is a callous narcissist who's constantly citing himself in order to talk about himself rather than about others.
	In the Jewish community, I talked about this on my show, in the Jewish community, when somebody dies, you hold what's called a shiva.
	A shiva is seven days in which, basically, you shut down.
	You live in your house, you do not leave your house, the entire community comes to you, they bring you food, you're supposed to pray three times a day, so they bring an entire minion with them, they bring a Torah to your house, the whole thing, and they come and they just listen to you talk about your family and ask you questions about the person who died.
	Number one rule of visiting a Shiva house or any house in mourning, do not talk about yourself.
	Don't do it.
	It's like the number one rule.
	If somebody has died and you walk into a house in mourning and you immediately start with, well, you know, my dad also died or, you know, I also had a similar experience.
	This makes you a garbage human.
	You are not supposed to do that.
	And every time Joe Biden runs into somebody who's experienced some sort of horrible tragedy, sometimes tragedy that's his fault as in the case of Afghanistan, he immediately starts telling tales about how, well, I know exactly what that's like because I've gone through exactly the same thing that you have because Beau came home in a flag-draped coffin, which is a lie, he didn't.
	And he tells these kinds of stories.
	All the damn time, because he is a pathological narcissist who cares only about himself, and then projecting that narcissism into faux empathy that the media eat up and pretend like it actually... How would you like it if somebody came to... You know, your family got burned to a crisp.
	How would you like it if somebody arrived and was like, well, there was that one time where I had a bad kitchen fire?
	Yeah, I almost lost my car.
	So there are three theories here on what caused the fires.
	The liberal establishment theory is that it was the sun monster, it was climate change, because we didn't placate Mother Gaia, she burned Maui to a crisp.
	The second theory is that this was malfeasance by the energy company, that they diverted all their money into green energy policies, to no avail apparently, and four years ago they were acknowledging the risk of wildfires, they didn't do anything to stop it, so it was government incompetence.
	There's a third theory, which I'm not saying is applicable here, but it's applicable a lot of the time, which is that we know for a fact, many reports from the Department of Homeland Security, that radical environmentalists start a lot of these fires, that arson is a concern.
	We know arsonists were setting fires all over Maui, even within the last year.
	We know that the Hawaiian Police Department was investigating that.
	We've seen confirmed examples of many hundreds of these cases in recent years around the U.S.
	I know, and you know, I would guess the most likely thing is that there was an electrical, you know, fire and the winds made it spread.
	That's the most likely thing.
	But why shouldn't you have a conspiracy theory when they're not telling you anything and they're purposely lying to cover for...
	I also don't know why that's a conspiracy theory when you're just positing possibilities.
	Meaning, like, it's not impossible.
	And you're not saying that it actually happened that way.
	Well, from the very beginning, people were saying, like, Oprah burned things down so she could...
	Well, I mean, that kind of stuff is crazy.
	Like, Oprah, I feel like, has better...
	I mean, she does own a space laser.
	So, I mean, theoretically, you could...
	But the...
	You don't even need to go that far.
	First of all, I mean, I don't know how many of you guys have spent any time in Maui or in Lahainas.
	So that used to be because we were on the West Coast.
	That was like my family's getaway every single year.
	So we were in Lahaina like 7 out of 10 years.
	And it is just a spectacular little, it was a spectacular little town.
	It was a wonderful place to hang out.
	And it was always packed to the brim this time of year because that's where you would go to watch the sunset.
	I mean, it's just a gorgeous place.
	And the fact that it burned down this quickly is really insane.
	It has nothing to do with climate change, by the way.
	Every climatologist will tell you.
	If they're worth their salt, it has nothing to do with climate change.
	The temperature there is incredibly variable.
	They've had a very dry summer.
	They had a very wet winter.
	They had a very dry summer.
	But what this always comes down to, for me, every single time, is government mismanagement of these disasters.
	And you know the way you can tell?
	It's when they start blaming the other stuff.
	Right, so when there was a hurricane that hit Florida and knocked out a bridge, the bridge got rebuilt inside of two days and things got fixed.
	When the same hurricane then moved up into the Northeast and flooded part of the Northeast, the media spent the next week talking about how climate change was responsible for the fact that there was flooding in the streets of New Jersey, as though the human failures there had nothing to do with anything.
	The human failures here are astonishing.
	I mean, astonishing.
	There's an article from the AP Today, where they go into detail about what it was like to be in Lahaina and what exactly was happening on a minute-to-minute basis.
	The cops set up perimeters around Lahaina because there's only one road in and one road out of Lahaina.
	It's really hard to get in and get out.
	That's particularly true if you're on Front Street, which is the part that's like right by the water.
	And it's a very crowded place all the time.
	And they were telling people to turn back because there were downed electrical wires.
	So, you talk about, like, triaging a problem.
	How about, like, direct people around the electrical wires, the people who disobeyed the cops lived, the people who listened to the cops went back to the line and died, because all of the winds just picked up and rammed right through it.
	That's why the question is not, well, there is a question of what started the fires, but to me, no matter what started them, even if environmentalists did start them, the bigger question is why was the fire Why did it kill a thousand people?
	Or more?
	Why did they close the only roads out?
	I'm not suggesting that it couldn't have simply been incompetence.
	It probably was incompetence.
	But you can certainly see why people would conclude, huh, something's a little screwy here.
	Is there something more going on?
	This is the way you solve the problem of disinformation, as Obama always wants to solve that problem by cutting out everybody who has an opinion different from his.
	That's how he defines disinformation and misinformation.
	The way you solve misinformation is by telling the freaking truth.
	If you were the authorities, get the information, spread it to the people, then when other people come up with crazy conspiracy theories, they sound like crazy conspiracy theories.
	Now, crazy conspiracy theories sound like perfectly reasonable explanations because the government Could you hear what the mayor of Maui says?
	The mayor of Maui was confronted by a reporter in a small press gaggle.
	What were there?
	Half a dozen reporters there?
	And here was his answer on how many kids are dead.
	I don't know.
	Yes you do.
	How many children are missing?
	You know.
	I wish I knew the answer to that.
	I would be happy to answer that.
	You have no estimate as to how many children are missing?
	Nothing?
	I guess we can end this right now, if you guys want.
	This is one of the biggest questions that the people of Lahaina have, but you don't want to answer it.
	It always takes one or two to ruin it for everybody.
	Well, we can say that about you.
	You've ruined it for everybody.
	You're a disaster.
	If you've been the worst mayor we could possibly imagine.
	Respect?
	Respect what?
	This is the most dismal response we've ever had.
	Why don't you give them the real answers then?
	- How did you give him the real answers then?
	Give him the real answers.
	- That's not his question.
	- Let him, let him.
	- Yeah, yeah.
	- Okay, yeah, I remember you.
	- He's already changed.
	- Sorry.
	- Oh, sorry. - You know, one guy asking a tough question, not even a tough, a basic question, I guess this is my other question.
	Even if you could say, well, the cops shut down the roads because they just had no idea what they were doing, and they were down power lines.
	How is it, I mentioned earlier, 3,000 people die on 9-11.
	Here we're looking at 1,000 people, it seems to be the estimate.
	A third of the worst tragedy in American history, and the media basically blacked it out?
	They blacked it out.
	Why are they blacking it out?
	I know.
	I mean, the part, again, I just come back to the insanely obvious double standard with regard to Biden.
	Like, that's the pure, that's the, let's be real about it.
	To protect Biden, basically?
	100%.
	100%.
	Or the governor of Hawaii, who's a Democrat.
	Yeah.
	Or the mayor of Maui, who's a Democrat.
	Or the senators who are Democrats.
	I promise you that if this had happened in Florida, all you'd get morning till night is, Ron DeSantis is to blame for this, his emergency management response has been dismal, where was he if George W. Bush, if Donald Trump were president, and he didn't show up for two weeks while he was on vacation, I promise you, every single waking media moment, and then if he went there and started telling fibs about how I had a kitchen fire, like, it's just, it's the most egregious possible thing, and you know, this is the one area where
	I think if you're going to say that Republicans have sort of a prayer of a hope, it is that the Democrats have created such an immense bubble around Joe Biden that he believes he can get away with legitimately anything.
	And there may come a, maybe he can, or maybe there'll come a point where he can't.
	Maybe there'll come a point where it doesn't matter almost to the Republicans.
	I think this is part of the logic behind Trump.
	Many of the Republicans are like, well, you know what?
	In the end, it's not going to matter who we nominate because Trump, because Biden is so eminently beatable and there's just such a wellspring of dislike.
	And that may be true.
	And that's not totally implausible.
	I mean, the fact is that they've been lying on his behalf for years on end.
	He's presided over the worst foreign policy disaster in my lifetime in the pullout of Afghanistan.
	He's presiding over one of the worst natural disasters in my lifetime in Hawaii.
	I think the economic disaster over which he's presiding is being soft-pedaled.
	What we are watching right now in the economy in the next six months is going to come to fruition.
	It's working.
	It's working.
	All of that, I think, that's the hope for Republicans, is that it almost doesn't matter who you nominate.
	I don't know why you'd want to take the risk.
	It seems to me the thing you'd want to do is nominate the person who has the best shot of beating Joe Biden.
	But I certainly understand the feeling, which is the dual appeal of maybe he's so weak anybody can beat him, and also screw you guys.
	That's a pretty strong emotional appeal.
	It's very powerful.
	Very strong emotional appeal.
	I'm open to the theories that there was malice and that some of this was intentional.
	I mean, I think that's a perfectly valid thing.
	We need to explore it.
	But right now, if I had to pick a theory, it just seems to be, this is bureaucracy.
	Like, it exists to not work.
	It exists to diffuse responsibility.
	No one's held accountable.
	And so in this case, you've just got all these different, you've got the power company, you've got the police, you have local, you have the local government.
	You have the people in charge of the water, and you've got this woke guy that was on record saying that, you know, when we're distributing water, we want to make sure we take into account equity.
	So you've got all these various different realms that in a moment like this need to work together and need to communicate in a competent way, and they just don't.
	It completely breaks down.
	My problem with this theory, though, is...
	That for years we've said bureaucracy doesn't work, bureaucracy is the problem, we need to dismantle the bureaucracy.
	But I'll tell you what, this bureaucracy, the federal bureaucracy, seems to work pretty well when it comes to rounding up Midwestern grannies from January 6th.
	I think the bureaucracy works pretty well when it comes to imprisoning political dissidents and the lawyers for Donald Trump, who is currently the chief political rival to the president.
	The bureaucracy seems to work pretty well.
	Spying on Catholic masses and arresting pro-lifers and trying to throw pro-lifers in prison for 11 years that they're doing right now.
	11 years pro-lifers are facing a completely unjust trial because they had the audacity to oppose abortion.
	So in many ways, the federal bureaucracy seems to be working all too well.
	It works when they want it to defend itself.
	That's what it does.
	They didn't care enough to, this is like a, that's politics, but this, being ready for a disaster is a practical concern where you have to actually care about the lives of human beings.
	And when DeSantis was available to help Florida after a hurricane, they called it his, this is his Katrina.
	When Ted Cruz went to Cancun, he's a senator, he's not a governor, he went to Cancun when there was a freeze, a cold freeze in Texas, and the media declared that this meant that Ted Cruz did not give a crap about anybody except himself and his family.
	Joe Biden goes on vacation for two weeks, and he's going back to vacation now, and he's declaring a lid every single day.
	And meanwhile, his FEMA team is going, well, it's really up to the localities to handle this sort of thing.
	It's insanity to me.
	And I understand, again, what I keep coming back to for Republicans, I get it.
	I get the feeling that inevitably the pendulum has to swing back the other way and the bad people have to get clocked.
	I totally get it.
	But there's no rule that says that's true.
	The notion that the unjust will pay their price.
	Well, there is something to this because the thing that the Democrats have done repeatedly, they call it the curly effect.
	They basically chase the non-Democrat voters out of localities by making it so unlivable there that the only people left are the people who will vote for them.
	So you get the doom loop in San Francisco.
	That actually works if you happen to be in government because the only people left in San Francisco will be the people who will vote you back into office every single time because they're doing fine.
	They're living on the streets.
	That's where they want to be.
	That actually works.
	The problem is it doesn't work for the entire nation because there's nowhere for the entire nation to go.
	People in California can go to Florida.
	People in America got nowhere to go.
	So ultimately, this government is now so corrupt.
	So unresponsive and so dishonest in dealing with the public that there is some chance that the people will just say, you know what, we've had it.
	They did it with Reagan.
	They did it with Giuliani in New York.
	They may well do it again.
	But to me, Trump is like a big fat elephant stuck in the door that he opened.
	He opened the door of the future, but he's now stuck in it and he's not going to let anybody get through.
	The only thing you're wrong about is there is a place for American conservatives to go.
	We've seen it in the recent years.
	And that, of course, is hunger.
	Now, speaking of human tragedy and speaking of protecting unborn life, did you know the abortion pill accounts for over half of the abortions committed in the country?
	Most abortions are because of these drugs and these poisons.
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	Now, we've been floating some conspiracy theories.
	Did you know this?
	By the way, you always say I never make you any money.
	I finally made you, like, a little tiny bit of money.
	What?
	Like, a little, like, enough to buy you, like, a new pair of shoes.
	My God!
	So, this was a little unexpected.
	I am the most popular game show host in America.
	This show we started on the Daily Wire YouTube channel.
	It is the yes or no game.
	We've sold a bazillion of these games.
	We sell out every single time.
	We now have the Expansion Pack.
	The Expansion Pack is the conspiracy theory pack, and the producers of this very show We want answers from four of the cards on this game.
	Listen, you're not being held to anything.
	Media Matters is going to clip it out anyway.
	If I say something about 9-11, I'll pretend I never said it.
	Hypothetically.
	Don't worry.
	If that were to happen.
	Your polls will go up.
	I did not write these cards.
	I take no responsibility for them.
	Just want to go round robin a little bit here.
	This is a mean one.
	This is actually a mean one.
	I don't even want to say it.
	I mean, ask me the question, I'll read it to you if you want.
	Michelle Obama is a man.
	Can I take that one?
	Yeah.
	I am increasingly convinced I have some validity to that theory.
	No, I really am.
	I've seen, look, some people have looked into this, and I think especially... Wait, who are they?
	Joan Rivers.
	She looked into it.
	God's sake, Matt, you're the only one in America who knows that women can't be men.
	Stop it.
	Well, but the question is I don't know look and we and we some some information has come out about about Obama recently that that also Confirms what we were told was once it did like dudes.
	He did like dudes.
	That is the thing that he wrote Yeah, so I don't know girlfriend, which is a weird thing to write to a girlfriend, by the way Yeah.
	Very weird thing, right?
	I can explain.
	Of course you can.
	No, I can explain.
	I was waiting for this moment.
	Listen, I know that I tap dance.
	I've done musical theater.
	I was by far the straightest man ever to enter my particular alma mater and live in New York and L.A.
	because a lot of people there, they say one in four, maybe more.
	And one thing I noticed is even the straight guys in these liberal enclaves act kind of gay.
	But he said he had fantasies about Yeah, yeah.
	Every day.
	No, look, he probably did fantasize about dudes, but the way he wrote it, he said, look, I think we can transcend sex.
	He actually was writing about transgenderism kind of early.
	He said, I think that we can transcend these things.
	I want to be larger than my attraction to this, that, or the other thing.
	But he also said, I just fantasize in my head, but I...
	He said, yeah, I channel it toward my ruthless political ambition.
	But he also said, I know my body tells me I'm a man, and so that's just what I'm going to do, both in my identity and in my desires.
	The only male I've ever fantasized about sleeping with is Winnie the Pooh, and I was very small and we were just cuddling.
	And I think if you're actually fantasizing every day about guys.
	It's weird, it's a weird thing.
	It's a little strange.
	But that doesn't mean she's a dude.
	There's a phenomenal interview in Tablet Magazine.
	The reason this came up again is because there's this phenomenal interview with his biographer in Tablet Magazine.
	A serious biographer.
	Everyone is dodging.
	Why are we dodging this question?
	Yeah, Michelle is obviously a man.
	Oh God, guys.
	I heard Ben Shapiro say.
	She's not a man.
	She's a woman.
	I heard Ben Shapiro say.
	She's a very bad woman, by the way.
	She's a woman.
	She's not a man.
	Also- I'm disappointed in you, Ben.
	I am.
	I've always thought of you as a fearless truth teller.
	For those who haven't read the interview between Obama's biographer and Tablet, it is fascinating because one of the things that one of the interviewers says is that when they went to interview Obama, Obama had like a stack of his writings on the table, like his old letters and stuff that he wouldn't let him see. Obama had like a stack of his writings on the
	And it's the belief of the interviewer and the biographer as well that Obama would literally sit there and like write journals to himself and then he would encode them in letters to his girlfriends with the notion that in one day these letters would be discovered and then eventually be used in biographies.
	And of course this thing got buried.
	This thing got buried, right?
	It ended up at Emory University.
	No one quoted it.
	Nobody ever He talked about it because it would have been super awkward when he was running for president.
	I fantasize about sleeping with men every day.
	It would have been kind of weird for him.
	It might have led to, you know, some further questions about whether that was acted upon by that guy.
	But no.
	But the guy who uncovered it, David Garrow, he's a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer.
	And a leftist.
	And he's a leftist, yeah.
	And as was the guy who interviewed him.
	Yeah.
	And we just have to ask why Joan Rivers died so suddenly after she said a certain thing that was on that card.
	Okay, next one on here.
	Dinosaurs as we know them are fake.
	Hmm.
	What do you mean, as we know them?
	I don't know.
	Interpret it as you like.
	No.
	Dinosaurs are not fake.
	They have all testified to me that they are absolutely real.
	They do?
	Well, you were friends with many of them.
	I was there, you know?
	Well, okay, I think dinosaurs existed, but probably a lot... The popular conception we have of them is like there's a lot of... There's a lot of probably baseless conjecture.
	Well, now they change it.
	Now they say they look like chickens.
	Right, so they have feathers on them.
	Yeah.
	Well, there's every possibility that some of the dinosaurs, and they acknowledge this by the way, are like the reconstruction of the lion in like 13th century Britain, you know, where they tried to bring a lion back from Africa to Britain, and it died, and it decomposed, and by the time they got it back to Britain, it was basically like a bag of bones, and so when they stuffed it back together, it looks like this bizarre cat cow kind of thing.
	It's possible we're doing that with the dinosaurs.
	And when you go in and you see all the bones put together, it's like, well, actually the neck wasn't that long or this was a tailbone or something.
	But also...
	These dinosaurs exist?
	We saw Jurassic Park.
	They were obvious.
	They were there.
	Chris Pratt told me.
	My take is that dinosaurs are real, but they were dragons.
	That's my take.
	I mean that sincerely.
	Breathing fire or no?
	No, like in the sense that dinosaurs are this construction of modern, scientific, atheist, materialist, stupid culture.
	And dragons are the product of the intuition and imagination of every... We're gonna go back to aliens, aren't we?
	And they were placed here by aliens.
	No, yeah, basically, dragons are to dinosaurs what... They were flying and breathing fire.
	They were at least flying.
	Well, I mean, we know they're flying, but they were breathing fire.
	Whatever legend cropped up, look, they may have been breathing fire, but whatever legend cropped up that they were breathing fire comes from a real place, like legends about all historical things.
	I don't know, but I will say I watch a lot of nature documentaries with my kids, and when you watch, especially with dinosaurs, and you have some scientist who pulls out a fossil with one little line in it and has this whole story about, well, this is clearly a triceratops that was, you know, 40 tons and a female and five years old.
	It's like, how can you possibly know all that?
	So I think there's a lot of...
	Yeah.
	I mean, they didn't know their gender, first of all.
	Who would?
	Who could?
	Nobody could.
	Okay.
	Things they said about Michelle.
	The CEO... Oh, this is going to get our company destroyed.
	That's cool.
	Really smart pick, guys.
	The CEO and founder of Facebook is a reptilian.
	Not a dragon, but a reptilian.
	Ben?
	Robot, not alien.
	Robot, not alien.
	He was constructed in a lab, not on planet Xenuf-10.
	Yeah, he's not like a reptilian alien who's wearing a skin suit and here to destroy humanity.
	He is what we, in modern notions, call Call robots, engineers.
	That is what he is.
	I think the more interesting reptilian question is the guy on the plane, on the infamous plane, the mother of the reptilian.
	It wasn't real.
	Yeah.
	Which is so strange.
	Everyone's like, where's the woman?
	Where did she go?
	And then we found the woman.
	Nobody ever asked, like, what about that guy?
	Have we ever heard a word from him?
	Yeah, what did she see?
	It was a real question.
	Did that guy ever do any kind of interview?
	And why was it okay to trace this poor woman down?
	I think it's so awful that they tracked this poor woman who had so many shards at the...
	Lobby, you know, or at the bar.
	She should have claimed parentage in the Biden family.
	And also, what does she have to apologize for?
	Right, exactly.
	It's actually crazy.
	That's not the same thing.
	But also, whatever happened, she really thought that there was some kind of reptilian monster on the plane, and so she did the right thing with the information she had, which was to tell everybody.
	Was there?
	Right?
	Well, we have the clip, actually.
	We have this very important piece of journalism.
	I'm telling you, I'm getting the f* off, and there's a reason why I'm getting the f* off, and everyone can either believe it or they cannot believe it.
	I don't give two f*s, but I am telling you right now, that mother f, that mother f** back there is not real.
	And you can sit on this plane and you can f***ing die with them or not.
	I'm not going to.
	Bye.
	Would you have stayed on the plane after seeing that, right before it takes off?
	Yeah.
	Of course!
	Those are bad vibes to start on a plane.
	No, I mean, I'm not getting off the plane unless Pershinski's on it or whatever.
	His mistake was getting Trump elected.
	I think he offended Hillary.
	He made the second most famous blunder.
	And the second most famous blunder is leading a revolt against the head of the Russian state and then flying a plane close to his border.
	The most famous is invading Russia in the wintertime, right?
	You shouldn't do that.
	Also, that plane committed suicide.
	That's what Vladimir Putin says.
	It fell off the fifth floor of a building.
	Putin's dismay when he was he was running up to the field with his gun in hands And he sees the burning wreckage, and there's just Hillary standing with a bazooka, and she beat him to it He must have been so that's crestfallen last one find out Epstein was on that point.
	Yeah, you know at first I felt bad for the other people on the plane with Purgosian you know head of the Wagner group leads the coup against Putin, but then I thought if you're If you're sitting on the plane with Purgosian... Well, it's a private plane, too, right?
	It's obviously a private plane.
	It's not like he was on, like, a Southwest flight.
	Well, he's not A-list preferred, you don't think?
	The head of the Wagner Group?
	If you're on, like, the private plane with the head of the Wagner Group, I...
	Good bet that you're not, like, the cleanest person.
	Yeah, yeah, you've got problems.
	Hopefully there are no children aboard or something.
	People are not responsible for themselves.
	This is the final question to debate.
	Taylor Swift is the clone.
	What is this?
	Taylor Swift is the clone of Zina LaVey, daughter of the infamous Satanist Anton LaVey.
	Right, I remember.
	Whoa, man, that's crazy.
	Yes, I've never heard that, but yes.
	Yeah, she is, right?
	You don't even have to explain beyond Satanist, yes.
	Whoa, man, that's so weird.
	Am I the only person who likes Taylor Swift, I think?
	Yes.
	Well, yeah, you're the only person who hasn't been just sucked into this, like, demonic cult.
	And the only non-millennial white girl.
	The only thing is, she writes her own music, right?
	So she's got that going for her.
	Not anymore, right?
	She used to.
	Her modern songs are one of those, like, eleven people write them.
	I'm trying to give her some credit, but... Well, she can sing.
	Nice legs.
	Damn it, Drew, all you care about is Xena or Taylor.
	Bill Buckley had that line.
	He was asked if he approved of miniskirts by some young gal, and he said, well, on you, I do.
	That's basically your point, Drew, absolutely.
	Okay, well, that was great.
	I can't believe that.
	So that's making money, is it?
	Guys think it's great, you should go buy it.
	I'll tell you, the one that really freaked me out, the Zina LaVey thing, man.
	Especially because, well, this guy's talking about aliens all the time.
	I point out that it's probably demons.
	And, man, that's some weird demonic stuff.
	That's some occult, weird Satanist stuff.
	If you play her records backwards, they sound exactly the same.
	They do!
	If you play them forwards, they sound the same.
	People playing the game aren't gonna have the benefit of that picture, so they're not gonna, that's a real, that's a deep cut.
	That's a deep cut.
	You have to listen, the audience is the real creme de la creme of the political public, you know.
	All right, we have to get to, I thought it was a good segment, by the way.
	Every moment was gold, basically.
	Now, we have to get to something that actually involves a colleague of ours, which we'll get to in one second, but we have to get to a shameless plug that involves another colleague of ours, who happens to be in the place that conservatives escape to, which is Hungary, and that would be Jeremy's Soap.
	Where is that guy?
	He is gallivanting all about selling soap.
	He's clean.
	We're seeing it more every day.
	He's a clean old man.
	Mainstream brands openly insult their customer base and they expect you to be okay with it.
	Well thankfully, Jeremy's Razors not only makes great products, but the company has no agenda either.
	Unless you count restoring sanity to the world one product at a time.
	Like with Jeremy's Hand Soap, an all-purpose cleaner.
	Both are free of parabens, sulfates, artificial dyes, and wokeness.
	And they're made right here in the USA.
	Remember, you are not responsible for woke culture, but you sure as hell don't have to participate in it either.
	Stop giving your money to woke corporations that hate you.
	Go to Jeremy'sRazors.com today.
	You do the ad all wrong if you're gonna do the ad right.
	You gotta hold it?
	Alright, let's see.
	Can we get a nice close shot there?
	Guys, you ready?
	If you're gonna do the ad, it's gotta be like this.
	See this hand soap?
	It's magnificent.
	It smells delightful.
	It is green tea and citrus hand soap.
	Each and every day, you'll be grateful that you use this particular hand soap.
	This right here is the all-purpose cleaner.
	For all purposes.
	There are literally no purposes for which you cannot use this particular cleaner.
	Could you use it to clean your emails off your hard drive?
	Absolutely you could.
	You should head on over to jeremysrazors.com right now and enjoy products like the ones that I just threw.
	Take my money and give me those beautiful products.
	We have an all-purpose cleaner.
	That's pretty cool.
	What is a paraben?
	I have no idea.
	I've been talking about it for weeks on the show.
	No clue what a paraben is.
	I think it's like seed oils.
	All I know is it's bad.
	It's like a quasi-ben?
	It's like a paraben?
	Yeah, it's a...
	Really cutting-edge hip humor on this show, folks.
	Drew loved that one.
	Started in 1911.
	A pal of ours, colleague of ours, is being threatened by Canada, America's evil top hat.
	This is Jordan's fault for being Canadian.
	I never heard that before.
	That's the first thing you said I loved.
	Thank you.
	No, I had a pun in that video.
	America's Evil Top Hat?
	The America's Evil Top Hat, and I had some joke about a cookbook that you also got.
	Oh, that was amazing.
	Thank you.
	That was a good joke.
	You're right, that was a great joke.
	In ten years.
	Two in a decade.
	Ontario is threatening to take away Jordan's psychology license.
	The Superior Court of Justice ordered Jordan to pay $25,000 to the College of Psychologists and upheld the order that he go through a so-called social media re-education program.
	I pity the re-education program.
	Can you imagine?
	I will not tweet what you want me to tweet!
	You know, they've been making this mistake with Jordan from the very beginning.
	If they had just left him alone, he'd still be, like, teaching university classes.
	For people who, you know, believe that the left in America does not want to actively shut down speech, They do.
	I mean, take a look again.
	I mean, they want to destroy your life.
	They really, really do.
	I was explaining this to somebody, again, a friend of mine who's on the left, and I blew his mind when I explained to him that if it comes down to Trump versus Biden, I will vote for Trump, and it won't really take much to convince me of that, like, at all.
	And he asked why, and I said, because of this.
	Because you want to trans my kids.
	You want to, or at least you want to make it good and proper for the public schools to work to trans my kids.
	You will attempt to shut me down if I speak freely.
	And then they'll be like, no, no, no, that's not true at all.
	Yes, it is.
	Yes, it is.
	I mean, look what they're doing in Canada.
	Look what they're doing in the UK.
	The goal here has always been and will always be to make traditional living illegal and make personal sexuality public.
	That's like the only thing that matters to these folks.
	So in order apparently to be a licensed psychologist, you have to be fully insane in Canada.
	You have to actually parrot insanity back to people to be a licensed psychologist in Canada.
	Honestly, Jordan is going to make their lives so miserable.
	It'll be fun to watch.
	It'll be quite fun to watch Jordan actually.
	I would love to sit in the room watching Jordan take social media re-education training.
	It would be one of the great experiences of my life.
	I would pay honest-to-God money to be available in that room.
	I would go get a Canadian bar license to go and be in that room while they try to teach Jordan the things he can and cannot say on Twitter.
	I just cannot imagine.
	This is a man who As psychology is facing this replication crisis, this whole crisis of identity for the entire field, this man has done more good from the field of psychology than anybody since at least Viktor Frankl and maybe just any psychologist ever.
	People come up to me with tears in their eyes.
	I'm not exaggerating.
	And they will say, Michael, you know Jordan Peterson, the man changed my life.
	And grown men, like serious men.
	And I think that's the guy That Castro's son goes after?
	That's why.
	That's why.
	Because he's changed their life for the better and he's made them feel better about being men and he's made them understand what it means to be a man and he speaks, you know, the funny thing about Jordan too is like, you know, because he has a, he can have a harsh, you know, affect on Twitter where he just, he gets so angry at these people because they pick on people who are smaller than them.
	He hates bullies.
	But he's the most gracious, Kindly person that you could possibly meet.
	Yeah, and he genuinely cares about the people who are being stomped on and that's why they're stomping on him Why wouldn't they?
	Why wouldn't they?
	By the way, you found the conspiracy theory I do believe in.
	There's no question that Justin Trudeau is Castro's son.
	No question about it.
	Zero doubt.
	I have started to keep an open mind on this because by some angles he's sort of vaguely kind of He looks like Pierre.
	No, no, no.
	I'm sorry that you're experiencing a stigmatism.
	Yeah, no.
	Okay, you're right.
	You're right.
	He's the son of the Cuban dictator.
	By the way, I think what you said is really important, because to me, that's the even more dire implication of stories like this.
	There's the free speech angle, really important.
	But the fact that this is what the psychology industry has become, people need to understand that.
	This is why I'm so skeptical and critical of it fundamentally.
	Totally.
	Before I would advise any loved one to go see a psychologist, I would be very, very careful because the entire industry has been totally ideologically captured.
	I mean, there was a story a few days ago about a child psychologist, prominent one in California somewhere, of course, I think, who was talking about gender, how some children are gender minotaurs, or you could be a gender Prius.
	Well, they made it illegal to practice actual psychology, right?
	If a kid comes into you and says, I'm sexually confused, And then you say, well, maybe you ought to wait on that and see how it develops.
	It's perfectly normal at the age of 14 to be sexually confused.
	That's a no-no.
	That's conversion therapy.
	And most psychologists have gone along with that completely, with very few exceptions, and the ones that have not gone along with it, like Jordan Peterson.
	This is the irony of the so-called conversion therapy.
	All therapy is, by definition, conversion therapy.
	Yes, and why should you not be able to go to somebody and say, I'm gay, I'd like to not be gay, can you possibly help me?
	And explore that.
	I don't understand that at all.
	Right, but if you go to any psychologist and you say, I have a mental problem, I've got some block, can you convince me to think in a different way and behave in a different way?
	That is a conversion.
	Every time is a type of conversion.
	Strain, and it is a strain under fire, no question about it.
	There's a strain of Christian psychology that I think can be very useful to people.
	I think it's useful to be able to talk to someone.
	I think talking to someone who cares about you and doesn't have a stake in your life can be immensely important.
	But you're absolutely right about this.
	I think it can be useful, but it can also cause more More damage than it does good.
	Well, if the person is incompetent or evil.
	But I think, you know, I'm also critical of just the idea of like, well, go to therapy.
	Everybody should always go to therapy.
	I think what drives people to go to therapy oftentimes is just that they want to just talk about themselves.
	Right.
	And they have a lot of fun talking about themselves, and they want to kind of wallow in their own misery, and they want to tell their own story.
	You know, all the suffering they've gone through.
	That's all they actually want to do.
	That's why there's no, as far as I'm aware, no data supporting the idea that simple talk therapy is worthwhile.
	It has to be combined with cognitive behavioral therapy, right?
	Which is an actual intervention by the psychologist saying, your train of thought, for example, you're anxious, and your anxiety is being caused by this train of thought.
	We need to intervene and say, is this train of thought logical?
	Is this correct?
	Are you actively realizing what you're doing?
	That's CBT, right?
	The CBT, actually, there's very good data that, but that's an interventionist approach to psychology.
	I don't know when the confirmatory approach to psychology came about, but even Freud rejected that.
	I mean, what's amazing is that when Freud talks about, for example, polymorphous perversity, right?
	This idea that there's like this human sex drive and that we're truly driven by the sex drive, he then suggests that that's bad and that the way that you actually end up being a productive human being is you sublimate that. - Yes, he does say that. - He does say this. - The beautiful bridge of sublimation.
	In favor of higher purposes.
	The act of maturing is maturing out of treating those desires as primary and sublimating them to higher desires and better things.
	That's the entire process of growing up.
	It's only in the 1960s where they say, no, no, no.
	Real authenticity is where you strip away the sublimation.
	Sublimation is a form of anxiety.
	There is an underlying philosophy to Freud, which he didn't intend, but it's simply built into the system, where the true reality of you is your basest desires, and everything else is laid on top of that.
	And that's not always been the case.
	I mean, if you think of Plato and the chariot analogy, all of our instincts, including our noble instincts, are included in us, and they're part of who we are.
	I have to say, on a more shallow level, I worked with a lot of suicidal people.
	I've been on hotlines and things like this.
	50% of them call up to tell you why they can't be helped.
	50% of them do not want to be helped.
	50% of them are looking just for somebody to say, you're not awful.
	And that's not a bad thing.
	I don't think that's a bad thing.
	I think that's helpful.
	But I think one of the problems with the psychology industry is that Jordan Peterson is a good psychologist because he's a good philosopher.
	And psychology is not really the idea that it's like medicine or science.
	It's not exactly.
	A good psychologist is someone that has a good idea of what a human being is supposed to be.
	Absolutely.
	And that's what you go to a psychologist with that question.
	What am I supposed to be?
	How am I supposed to think?
	What ways am I supposed to act?
	And those are not Medical questions.
	Those are not scientific questions.
	Those are philosophical questions.
	The reason why Jordan Peterson is so effective is because he's just a good philosopher.
	He's got a good sense.
	He's got wisdom.
	He's got a good sense of how a person is supposed to be.
	You're right about this because when it comes to medicine, there is an agreed-upon standard of what you are trying to achieve.
	When it comes to medicine, you come in, your leg hurts.
	The idea is, how do I make it so my leg doesn't hurt and functions properly?
	But functions properly is well understood.
	A leg that functions properly lets you go places, supports your weight, all of these sorts of things.
	When you come in and you say, I as a human am not functioning properly, that requires some explication.
	What does it mean to function properly as a human?
	And this is where you get into the philosophy section, right?
	Because we have millennia of traditions suggesting what it means to be a properly functioning human being.
	And really over the course of the last century and a half, we've decided that to be a fully functioning human being means to essentially humor your basest desires.
	That's what it means to be a fully functional human being.
	And it's really all of these other impositions by society that have prevented you from engaging in the great you that exists internally.
	And that's where psychology has gone utterly wrong.
	That's right.
	And that is not what the history of philosophy tells us.
	The history of philosophy has always said that there is an aspect of the human being that knows right from wrong, that can reason to right from wrong, and that can impose restrictions on its basis.
	And that's built into the human person.
	Modern psychology never asks, in order to accomplish what?
	So, again, when they say, like, heal your leg, it's in order to accomplish walking, in order to accomplish carrying.
	When they say, I want to be a whole human, in order to accomplish what?
	Because what you want to accomplish is going to be a large part of which direction we're actually directing the healing.
	If you say, I want to be non-anxious, and so I want to be non-anxious so that I can party all night long and drink without worrying about it.
	Then, a psychologist theoretically could do that.
	They could say, you know what, don't worry about anything in your life, get rid of all of your worries, get rid of all of your cares, live off of welfare, and do all those things and you won't be anxious anymore, and your anxiety is healed.
	But that's not a properly functional human being.
	The other way to actually deal with the anxiety is to say, you're anxious about some things that are actually real, let's figure out solutions that allow you to channel that in the most positive possible direction for your flourishing and the flourishing of your family.
	What's amazing, there used to be, in the olden days, before modern people ruined everything, There was a simple answer that old Uncle Aristotle gave us, which is this idea of the four causes.
	We have a formal cause, a material cause, an efficient cause, and a final cause.
	So the formal, for us, for people, the formal cause is the soul, the material is the body, the matter, the efficient is, well, God makes us.
	And the final cause is, Aristotle would say, happiness, eudaimonia, human flourishing.
	Christians would say to know God and to love him forever and to serve him here on earth.
	Modern people say, that's BS.
	That's a bunch of mumbo-jumbo from a pre-scientific age.
	Forget about the final cause stuff.
	Forget about the formal cause.
	You don't have souls.
	You don't have any of that.
	Come on, get out of here.
	But they don't actually get rid of it.
	What Aristotle understood is you have to have an answer to that, and the modern people have an answer to that.
	They say now, instead of the formal cause being the soul, they say, well, you know, man, it's just like my identity, man.
	It's my whatever.
	Authenticity.
	For the final cause, what do they say?
	What the implicit final cause today for human beings, they say, is just to feel good, you know, just to have pleasure.
	Physical and emotional pleasure.
	And it makes people miserable.
	And also, they have forgotten the fact that to do right, to do right is the path to feeling better about yourself.
	Ironically, as we've gotten rid of death... People speak as if there were no moral standards.
	Well, but in order to understand that, because we become such a healthy, physically, people, and we live so long, ironically our time horizon has disappeared.
	And so the idea always with eudaimonia, or simcha in Hebrew, or any of these words that we're talking about, The idea was, over a long period of time, right, the way that you establish whether you are happy is you look back at your life and you look at all the things that you built in the process of building those, and even the things that you're most miserable about in the moment may be the things that make you happiest.
	There have been a bunch of studies, Roy Baumeister does a lot of really good work on this, and he found that there is a wide differential between what people experience as joy and what people experience as meaning.
	They're not the same thing at all, and that becomes most apparent, obviously, when it comes to children.
	When it comes to children, What you experience as joy and what you experience as meaning are very often incredibly disparate.
	Because raising kids, as Matt knows even better than I do, because he's got six, but I've got four, that's a lot of kids.
	And it's not always, you know, roses and butterflies.
	There are a lot of times when it is rough.
	It is very difficult.
	I mean, last night, when you're up in the middle of the night, three to five in the morning, because your baby has too much snot and you're sucking the snot out of the baby's nose so the baby can breathe.
	Is that joy?
	No, but that's meaning.
	And that meaning is what leads to happening.
	But that requires a time horizon.
	You also just corrected something.
	I misspoke when I said the efficient cause is God.
	The efficient cause for our creation is our parents, is our family.
	That's the other thing that they totally deny, and they deny the truths that you're just explaining.
	And there's also a distinction between joy and happiness.
	I mean, happy, you win the lottery, you're happy for a day or whatever, you know, and then you become miserable because you have money that you didn't earn.
	But joy is something you can experience even in grief, even in crisis.
	And you're right, it's totally connected to meaning, it's totally connected to fulfilling who you are as a human being.
	And it's iterations over time.
	It has to do with iterations over time.
	As the time horizon goes away.
	Well, because in the moment, you're struggling, you're stressed out and all that stuff.
	But the joy can be there even in those moments because you understand that this is what you're here for, you know?
	I mean, to suck the snot out of your baby's nose when that's what we need, that's why you're here.
	And that purpose, It does.
	I mean, I can say this because I'm now at the end of life.
	You do look back and say, like, that was great.
	I'm so glad that happened.
	Now, speaking of reasons we're here, there's one topic we have got to get to.
	We talked about one of the Republican debates tonight, but it's about to kick off in ten minutes or so.
	I'm sorry, it's about to kick off in half an hour, but we've got to get to the member block.
	The other Republican debate is going to be the debate or friendly conversation, we'll find out what it is, between Trump and Tucker.
	Oh, we know.
	Well, probably we know.
	First of all, what do you think?
	Was it smart for Trump to skip the debate and talk to Tucker, or is it going to hurt him?
	And two, what are your predictions?
	So, yes, it's very smart for him.
	On a moral level, should he go to the debate?
	Of course!
	Does that matter?
	One iota?
	Of course not!
	So, this is the world in which we now live.
	So, is it smart for him to?
	Yeah, I mean, why would he show up for a debate where everybody's going to attack him and go after him and find angles against him and he may futz around for even a moment and that'll hurt him when he could just go hang out with Tucker in a pre-taped interview for 45 minutes on Twitter or X or whatever we're calling it these days.
	So, yeah, I will say this.
	For all those people who are looking to nominate Trump because they believe that the debates between Joe Biden and Donald Trump will be rock'em, sock'em, robots, entertainment, I just have some, I have a bad piece of news for you.
	There will be no debates between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
	It is not going to happen.
	Joe Biden will not debate Donald Trump, not under any circumstances, no way, no how.
	All he's going to say is, I don't debate people who are under indictment for attempting to steal an election, and the media will shrug, and most of America will go, eh, and then he'll go back to sleep in the basement.
	There will be no debate.
	Hold on, so are you implying that Trump is going to be the nominee?
	I mean, he's the odds-on-favorite to be the nominee.
	He's the odds-on-favorite, but you'd put your money on it?
	Of course, I mean I always put my money on the odds on favorite, that's why I'm wealthy.
	But that's the one, obviously I agree with ultimately the smartest thing is for Trump not to debate, but the one argument that you could make that he should have debated is that Biden will not debate him.
	And so when Biden says he's not going to debate, now Trump will have no leg to stand on whatsoever in objecting.
	He'll still object, obviously, and he'll have to depend on people having a memory that doesn't last more than 10 seconds.
	But that is going to be a problem.
	When Biden pulls out of the debates and Trump says, well, you have to come face the voters, and then Biden's camp can say, well, what about you?
	You didn't debate at all in the primaries.
	That's a problem.
	I will say that, I mean, I'm a huge Tucker fan.
	I do wonder if The counter-programming thing here is the best strategy, because he's going to be interviewing with Tucker, and it'll be on Twitter, and you could go anytime and watch it.
	So it would seem like the smarter move probably would have been for him to go do a town hall on CNN, and then you have that direct comparison, counter-programming, and then he could say, I got better ratings than you in that moment, and that would be... It's also slap at Fox, obviously, because Tucker and Fox are at odds.
	Speaking of therapists, I knew a therapist once who used to say the most dangerous words in the English language are, but I love him.
	You know, it's like what masochistic women do.
	You say, this guy's cheating on you, this guy's drinking too much, this guy doesn't commit to you, but I love him, you know.
	And I feel that that's the way Trump voters treat Donald Trump.
	It's obvious that strategically he shouldn't debate.
	It's obvious that morally he should.
	And if I'm a voter with any kind of sense of myself and the responsibility of politicians to me, rather than my responsibility to politicians, which is nil.
	I have no responsibility to politicians.
	All the responsibility is theirs toward me.
	You would be looking at him and saying, well, shouldn't you show up and make your case to me?
	Shouldn't you be talking to me?
	But it doesn't matter what Trump does.
	He can blow Georgia.
	He can lead people to charge into the Capitol building stupidly.
	He can do all the things that he, in fact, has done.
	But they love him.
	Let me ask, I mean you kind of shrugged at the notion that it was going to be a love fest between Trump and Tucker.
	Where do you see potential points of conflict?
	I could see potential points of conflict not in the promises that Trump is making, but in his failures in office.
	So I could see Trump's failure to finish the wall perhaps coming up.
	I could see Trump's... Maybe the Vax stuff?
	Well, Tucker has made the point that Trump has fundraised millions off the January 6th, the indictments and all that, but hasn't spent a dime to defend it.
	It really should be obligatory for Tucker to ask him those questions.
	I'll be very curious to see if Tucker does it.
	I think he has to bring up Fauci and the back stuff.
	I could see some points of conflict in Tucker trying to make Trump live up to the intellectual promise of Trump, as you would put it, rather than what we saw in practice, especially in the last couple of years.
	But my only question, as I guess the friendliest to Trump, you know, I still really like the guy, but though I'm not, I have no intention of endorsing in a primary.
	My question is, morally, should he debate?
	If it were another year, if it were another candidate, if it were another type of primary, I'd say that the candidates have a responsibility to the voters to go and introduce themselves.
	The thing with Trump is that we all know him.
	The fact that this primary is a lot like 1888, the last time we had a former president running for a non-consecutive second term.
	What on earth could Trump possibly say?
	What could Trump's rivals possibly say to him that would teach us anything new about Donald Trump?
	We already know him.
	That's the wrong question, though, because an election is always a choice between specific people.
	So we should see Trump in comparison to Ron DeSantis.
	We should see Trump in comparison to Vindman.
	I do want to see him asked by somebody.
	The simple question, you say that the election of 2020 was stolen from you.
	How do you plan to unseal the 2024 election?
	Yeah, I'd like an answer.
	Because honestly, if you love Trump, you should want an answer to that.
	Yeah.
	If you want him elected, you should want an answer to that.
	Like, that's a question for everybody.
	How about like, if you're a Republican who wants Biden beat?
	Yeah.
	How do you plan on winning an election against Joe Biden in which you're going to spend the entirety of next year in court?
	The entirety.
	He's got four cases in the first five months of next year slated for the calendar.
	And every dime that's going into his campaign fund right now is going directly into his legal defense.
	Another question I'd love to hear asked is, you're worth $10 billion.
	Why are you using your campaign funds to fund your legal bills?
	Why don't you just pay your own legal bills?
	Do you think he's worth $10 billion?
	Don't ask me that question.
	I mean, I obviously don't think he's worth $10 billion, but he's not going to answer that, right?
	So I mean, like, so that means that, like, it seems to me that when people donate money to Donald Trump's campaign, One of the questions they should be asking is, are you using that to target Joe Biden?
	I thought that was the tacit guarantee is that you were going to run against Joe Biden and not against Fannie Willis.
	Meaning, yeah, you have to defeat Fannie Willis.
	We'd like to see you do it.
	Yeah, it's all part of the same project.
	But you have a legal defense fund.
	By the way, I can show you how much Donald Trump cares about his legal defense fund.
	His legal defense fund, which was set up, I don't know, a month ago and got hacked on Friday.
	As of today, it is now Tuesday, it has not been unhacked by the team Trump, nor have they complained about it.
	They don't appear to care very deeply about whether that website for his legal defense specifically is up and running because they're directing money from his campaign.
	People are so identified with Trump that the way they see him, and I think this is fair by the way, I think he has been treated monstrously unfairly.
	I think every one of these indictments except the classified documents one is completely bogus, and I think the classified documents one is bogus when compared to what they did to Hillary.
	When she was doing the same thing.
	So I think he's being treated so unfairly.
	And what people are saying is, this is terrible.
	I protest.
	I will stand for up with him.
	And my feeling is, you know, I just want to do what's best for the country.
	It's not that I think he can't win.
	I think he's the least likely person.
	That's why I would like to see somebody on the debate stage tonight get up and say, listen, Donald Trump should not be in jail.
	These indictments are bogus.
	I will personally sign a check to Donald Trump's legal fund right now and take out a check and write it.
	And then say, and I'm running against Donald Trump because I do not think he's the person who's most likely to be Joe Biden.
	Because both of those things are simultaneously true.
	He should not be going to jail for this sort of stuff.
	Absolutely.
	It also happens to be true simultaneously that you shouldn't, with a giant red target on your back, then make yourself an even bigger target by doing dumb crap like not turning back in classified documents for no apparent reason and then informing Walt Mauder, like shift him around away from your lawyers.
	I'm sorry, that's unbelievable.
	That is the best thing that Ron DeSantis could do tonight would be to come out and I guess this was sort of leaked in the supposed debate memo, but if he came out and said, this is complete BS, they're crossing the Rubicon, this is a hideous miscarriage of justice, an upending of the political order, I will personally donate to Trump's defense fund, and I think I've got a better shot and here's why.
	Aside from purposely, aside from donating money to the defense fund, he has said all that.
	Yes, but I think in order to, I mean just on a political level, in order to create a defensive wall against the accusation that he's actively, secretly hoping that Trump gets indicted, the actual signing of the check is symbolically important.
	Because then he's saying to people, listen, I'm putting my money where my mouth is, and I'm way less wealthy than Donald Trump.
	The other thing about crossing the Rubicon, by the way, it's not just Trump getting indicted in Georgia, which seems to me the most egregious of these indictments.
	You know, it's 18 other people, some of whom are being indicted.
	Our friend Jenna Ellis, she's getting indicted for being his lawyer.
	Okay, I gotta say, this one is on Trump, in the same way that some of the January 6th stuff.
	Where is Trump signing checks for the people who went to bat for him?
	He's not.
	Does he not?
	I find that Jenna Ellis is openly appealing to people for her legal defense fund.
	But they're saying, you know, you supported DeSantis, now you're a traitor.
	That's right, she supports DeSantis.
	However, I did enjoy her OnlyFans mugshot.
	Did you see that?
	She's such an attractive lady.
	God bless it, Drew.
	She did it on purpose.
	She put out this mugshot.
	She looks great.
	She sent it to me.
	I thought, yeah, she should be an OnlyFans.
	You should charge people to look at your mugshot.
	That's the legal defense one.
	On that note, I suppose we'll talk more about the defendants, the indictments, OnlyFans, and then we'll take your questions.
	In the member block, the member exclusive portion of our show, Continues now at dailywire.com.
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