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Sept. 13, 2023 - The Michael Knowles Show
02:02:54
Daily Wire Backstage: America’s Identity Crisis
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Hey, Michael Knowles here.
The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage, America's Identity Crisis, is available now.
Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, and the lovely Candace Owens as we discuss everything from Candace's hit new docuseries, Convicting a Murderer, the possible impeachment of Joe Biden, and California passing a bill allowing judges to consider whether a parent affirms a child's gender identity during custody battles.
Take a listen. Take a listen.
That was a real laugh from Candace.
Welcome to Daily Wire's Backstage.
Tonight, I am joined by Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Andrew Clavin, the lovely Candace Owens.
I am not Jeremy Boring.
I'm Michael Knowles.
We have quite a lot to get to this evening.
Forget about the news stories.
Forget about the impeachment for a second.
Forget about Emily Ratajkowski for a second.
Forget about the man in the giant hamster wheel crossing the Atlantic Ocean, if you can.
I want to talk about convicting a murderer.
Candace, your documentary series is out.
You're proving that dirty, rotten guy to be completely guilty.
Is that right?
I don't know.
I haven't seen all the episodes yet.
Yes.
Well, I can't tell you.
You're going to have to become a Daily Wire Plus member to subscribe to see all of the episodes.
But yes, we released Convicting last week.
Very exciting.
It's obviously, it feels like a labor of love, and it is a very interesting story to dive into, especially after doing the BLM doc, because I think people always think that we jump, or I jump into something racially, and it's really just about wrong is wrong and right is right.
The Stephen Avery case came so much before BLM, but right when BLM was getting started and there was this anti-police sentiment and Netflix kind of seized on that moment culturally to make people believe that a guy, a most contemptible person, once you really get into his history, was plausibly being set up by the police.
And it was a smash docu-series at the time.
It honestly put Netflix on the map.
Back in 2015, all the usual suspects of celebrities going out there and saying he was innocent.
Alec Baldwin, update, he's killed someone since.
You have Chrissy Teigen, Trevor Noah, and you know, finally white people see that the system's corrupt.
You know, everything that you could expect.
And bizarrely, the people that thought he was guilty from the beginning, James Franco, Matt Walsh, Just unbelievable.
Me and James Franco line up on a lot of things.
It's just crazy.
And Donnie Wahlberg, for standing against... That's a murderer's show right there.
I know!
I just... I like that trio.
I don't know.
It feels right.
The prophets are right.
Drew knew that he was guilty.
But I think everyone's guilty.
I mean, I would like you to spend the rest of your career just convicting people who've gotten off by TV people.
Isn't the rule... Reverse series.
They're always guilty.
They're always guilty.
I mean, everybody... Because the cops arrest people who are guilty most of the time.
Right, but you know what's interesting is we're kind of in this spell right now in American society where they are pursuing this plotline everywhere that the villains are actually the heroes.
And in the imaginary world, like Disney movies, like Maleficent, suddenly, actually, no, there's a heart there.
The Joker, no, you really have to hear the backstory.
It doesn't really matter that he killed somebody.
Actually, deep down, something happened to him, and the villain is actually the hero.
And we see this over and over again happening.
The Green Witch.
Actually, she had a soul and people wronged her.
But when it trips over into real life, it gets quite dangerous.
It really does get quite dangerous.
And the cult behind Stephen Avery, the fact that he's had multiple fiancés in prison, that women are lining up, that they love him, which happens anyways.
Ted Bundy.
It's a weird phenomenon that people want to marry a psychopathic killer, I guess.
But to see how it impacts the lives of the victims who suddenly are accused of, in the case of Teresa Hallback, being alive, right?
People came up with conspiracy theories because they watched a Netflix doc, harassed the family, deeply faithful Catholic family, never spoke to the press, told them the daughter was alive.
They said they traced the cows and she was in Mexico.
I mean, really out there theories.
And you had the majority of people that were willing to believe it because of a documentary, which brings into the question, why do we trust documentaries naturally more than like a movie?
A movie, okay, some level of propaganda and storytelling, but a documentary, they obviously are telling me the truth on Netflix and the Central Park Five are innocent, right?
And Jeffrey Dahmer just actually had a bad childhood.
It's incredible.
Netflix does this over and over again.
They love a villain.
It's actually the hero story.
One thing you learn from the way people react to these kinds of fake documentaries is that I think there's a crisis in our culture of people not having Finely tuned BS detectors, which you should, you need to have that.
There should just be things that jump out at you.
So for me, it was, we talked about this in the Twitter space, the X space, I guess now, that when I learned, and Steve, I watched Making a Murderer, and then I learned that, and they kind of gloss over this, and they mention it, they gloss over it, but that he doused a cat in gasoline and set the cat on fire.
Now, that doesn't mean that he's guilty of murdering, raping a woman.
And who among us?
Right, exactly.
That's the kind of thing that you hear that it should immediately make you think, well, something's not right.
It's kind of the same thing.
I think it's very similar to, not to change the topics, but, you know, the Free Britney movement, and there was the whole Britney Spears documentary.
And then you learn with Britney Spears that, well, wait a second, she lost custody of her kids in California, you know, as a mother.
Again, that doesn't mean that she necessarily...
You deserve to be under a conservatorship, but it's one of those things that you hear that, and it should make you think, well, I gotta learn more about this, but people don't, they don't connect those dots.
One of the things that's really fascinating about this particular case, and I think you're exactly right to focus in on the sort of undermining of legal institutions on this one, is that there have been so many, as you mentioned, podcasts, like Serial, or documentaries like this one, that are basically outsiders to the justice system, who, and I promise you, I worked in a prosecutor's office for a summer at one point, And one of the things that's very obvious is that if you spin reasonable doubt to mean literally any doubt, you can construct any story you could possibly want to construct.
It's really not that difficult.
You can go through all the evidence and you can find the most crazy explanations for things and then hook those together.
And you can do it in literally any case.
It's really not difficult to do it in any case.
But if you don't know the system, then you've never really experienced that before.
And so it feels like something new.
It feels like, oh my God, no one presented some of the evidence that was on the other side, even if it was presented in court, or even if they're actually taking things out of context.
So I think it comes back to a level of institutional trust.
And so you can have a documentarian go in and sort of weasel their way into the institutional mistrust and then blow it up with a case like this, even if the case is bad.
It's also if people have never seen a cop work outside of television.
This is right.
Because, you know, the police, God love them, I love the cops, but they're not Sherlock Holmes.
I mean, in Britain they call them Mr. Plod, and there's a reason for that.
They plod along until they've got the guy.
And a lot of times, you know, even when the defense brings in police misconduct, it's usually misconduct because they know he's the killer.
They think, all right, we'll cheat a little here.
Well, actually that's a great example because you do see this all the time where you'll see a tape of a police officer doing a thing.
And everybody goes, oh my God, that's so horrifying, the police officer does the thing.
And it's because you've never seen a police officer do a thing before.
Right.
They're held to such high expectations, and it's funny that you said, because I mentioned that, that people assume it's like the movies, that they're like, why are the same police officers involved in this case, but were also involved when Stephen Avery was, I'm like, have you been to Manitowoc County, Wisconsin?
How many police officers Do you think they even have out here and then there's this moment the documentary because we had the police officers which I you know Netflix attempted to finger as there they were just in it for a plot and They didn't want to pay out this 36 million dollar lawsuit, and it's just so interesting to hear them say yeah We made a couple of mistakes We're human beings.
If I knew this was going to be turned into a Netflix docu-series, and that I would be getting death threats from Norway, maybe I would have not made that phone call without, you know, on my cell phone as opposed to on the police radio.
I mean, it's like little mistakes like that, and that's all they needed to believe that Teresa was gone, this victim, was gone with the cows in Mexico.
There's also something they call the CSI syndrome, where people actually think that police departments have these things where they can find an atom, you know, of blood scattered five rooms down.
Most police departments are lucky they have a mimeograph machine.
Or like, you know, an old Polaroid camera.
You know, it's just, they really do not understand what police work is and how much of a plot it is, how much of it just a kind of going down the steps until you get to the guy who's obviously the killer.
I wonder if too part of it is that we're now suffering from this moment where no one has trust in any institutions.
And I don't blame the people for that.
I largely blame the institutions.
But, you know, when that happens, what we call conspiracy theories spread.
Why do conspiracy theories spread?
Well, because often these days the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth is about six months.
And then neither side believes in our elections anymore.
And obviously neither side is going to believe in the justice system.
But, I don't know, sometimes they get the guy, don't they?
Right, exactly.
And I am fascinated by the psychological elements of it.
Just really understanding the fandom of Stephen Avery and the people that were willing to look over things like burning the cat, tying a dog.
His dog ran and got loose and according to his brother, who's featured in this documentary, he got angry because the dog got loose and so he tied it to a chain to his pickup truck and just dragged it, drove it down the street.
This is not normal behavior, but to see the justification that people will make and just be like, well, it doesn't mean that he eventually killed a woman.
Oh, well, he held a rifle to his cousin and ordered her into the car while she had a toddler in the car.
Well, it doesn't mean these people, they just keep going.
And then, well, how about the fact that he murdered someone?
Well, I've got the trump card here.
There's also the assumption, we talked about this off air a little bit, but the conspiracy theories, there's this, one of the problems with conspiracy theories is the assumption people make that government employees are capable, are so competent that they can come up with these kinds of plots, they hatch them, and then they execute them.
Oh, so you're talking about aliens now, sorry.
Oh, we can get to that because we found out off air that Candace Owens is a big supporter of the aliens.
You know, over 8 million people across all platforms Have seen this great documentary series.
It is the second most popular TV documentary on Rotten Tomatoes.
Episode 4 drops this Thursday night.
Take a look.
Coming up on Convicting a Murderer.
What would be the upside for this man?
I mean, he just got out of prison.
He has this new lease on life.
What would be the motive for something like this?
We're talking about somebody with unexplainable, impulsive behavior.
A pattern of violence and aggression.
There were a lot of coincidences on the day that Teresa Halbach was killed and Making a Murderer either completely omitted them or only presented half of the story.
Stephen Avery leaves work and doesn't tell his brothers.
He'd never used his sister's phone number to book an appointment before.
Stephen Avery makes two phone calls to Teresa's phone.
Why is he blocking his caller ID?
I don't think Teresa liked Stephen the way Stephen wanted her to like him.
You are the murderer because you turned your f*** down.
Candace, if they haven't watched yet, where can they watch?
DailyWirePlus.
At DailyWirePlus.com.
They can head over there.
The first episode we actually put up for free on YouTube, which I think will be enough to hook you.
We've really done an excellent job with this series.
I'm very proud of what we've done.
And then we have episode two available as well as free in case episode one did not hook you.
And then you will have to become a DailyWirePlus subscriber.
DailyWirePlus.com.
You can't go wrong.
I do want to ask you guys a question.
It was something that I started asking.
If you bring up these aliens, so help me.
No, I'm not.
I wanted to go back to that point.
We're going to get there, but I do want to ask you guys this question about just this series, like a moral question.
And I was kind of prodding you with this on the X Space, but, you know, Brendan Dassey is the second person who's spending life in prison.
He was 16 years old.
His uncle kind of coaxed him into this crime.
And it's interesting that even the people that believe that Stephen Avery is guilty have this soft spot for Brendan Dassey.
Now, I'd just like to say, She was raped by both men.
She was stabbed.
She was shot.
She was set on fire.
This is a 22-year-old woman with her entire life ahead of her.
What is your opinion when a youth is involved in a crime?
Because they kind of have been like, well, it's just sad.
Even the reporters that are involved in the case that he's spending the rest of his life in prison.
And I just think when I was 16, there was no person that could have coaxed me into doing all of these things to a person.
So do we just say, oh, yeah, he should be out because his uncle, you know, coerced him or not coerced him, but, you know, manipulated him?
It doesn't.
Here's what's the other option?
Because I think everyone would agree that, I hope everyone would agree, that you can't do nothing.
You can't just let him, he murdered and raped someone, so you can't just let him go.
The other option is to what?
To send him to prison, let him kind of like marinate in that environment with a bunch of other psycho killers for five or ten years and then release him back into society.
So that's not a tenable option.
It's not justice.
It's also not safe for society.
So really, I kind of feel the same way about the, you know, when people cry, you know, plead insanity.
It's like, well, even if that is the reason that you did this horrible thing, you still did it.
Right.
And if you are not capable of understanding that you shouldn't behave that way, that's all the more reason to keep you segregated from society for the rest of your life.
I don't think in a perfect world there would be a healthcare... I mean, he was the one thing in that documentary.
I'm like a total hard-ass about these things.
The minute I see the documentary girl come on and say, well, we just wanted to explore if this person, I think, is guilty, go away.
But the one thing that tweaked some dead spark of compassion in me is the fact that he seemed to be retarded, he seemed to be a little mentally ill, and in a perfect world there would be some, you know, like in the movie Halloween, some place where you could put insane people, but there's just not.
That's the perfect world, Halloween.
But he wasn't mentally retarded.
He is stupid, but all criminals, to some degree, are very stupid.
I mean, criminals are not like a high IQ population.
No, no, no, Unabombers.
Get away with these things, right?
Generally, they're...
I think that a lot of this also has to do with our society's weird perspectives on when people are responsible for their actions based on age.
Right?
We'll say that a 16-year-old boy can say that he's a girl and we'll immediately start feeding him full of hormones.
Or we'll say that a 16-year-old girl can get an abortion and suddenly that's her choice.
But if a 16-year-old boy rapes and murders someone, then all of a sudden it's like, well, that is an innocent child.
How dare you?
And this is something that is relatively newfangled, honestly.
Like, even if you go back to the 1950s in the United States, the notion that a 16-year-old who did this would not be tried and convicted as an adult would have been insane.
Because the idea would have been, you're an adult.
I mean, if you're 16, now we've got 25-year-olds and 30-year-olds now who aren't adults.
I mean, the sort of reversion to childhood, I think, for a lot of adults is one of the reasons why they're freaking out about this sort of thing.
And again, it's incredibly variable.
It's like, well, basically we hold you responsible for certain things, but not responsible for other things.
At 18, you're allowed to join the military, but if it's an 18-year-old who commits a crime, then he's a boy just in his youth, and how could a cop shoot him if he's committing a crime?
So true.
It's bizarre.
Now, when you are responsible for lighting your charcoal grill, what do you guys do?
Do you shirk that and put it off on someone else, or do you go grab it?
I set a cat on fire.
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Your incompetence knows no bounds.
I couldn't get that thing to light, wasn't that crazy?
You couldn't light a candle with a flame.
I tried.
What in the world?
Do you know why?
And they practiced that.
I did it like a dozen times.
Do you know why?
It's because the Michael Knowles pumpkin spice candle is just such high quality wax.
That is going to hold up for a long time.
Now, speaking of... It's such a high quality candle that it doesn't light.
It doesn't light.
You can't light it on fire.
Just for pretty.
It'll last forever.
Speaking of convicting people of things, Did you see?
The House Republicans are looking into impeaching Mr. Joe Biden.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy just announced it today.
He says that they've got a lot of juicy dirt on him and so they've got serious, credible allegations into Biden's conduct that will serve as the basis of an impeachment inquiry.
Just very quickly, there's not a ton to say about this because we impeach every president now, you know, it's not exactly... Multiple times.
Multiple times if we can.
Is this smart or stupid for the Republicans to do?
Well, I mean, there's a question for McCarthy and then there's a question for Republicans more broadly.
So, it's not stupid to push an impeachment of Biden unless you can't get the votes on the Republican side.
then it's stupid.
This is the real danger.
The real danger is you bring it up for a vote and you actually don't get a majority even with a Republican majority.
That's your real danger.
'Cause then you look foolish and you look like vindictive.
Democrats got all their people on side.
I'm not sure that Republicans are gonna get all their people on side.
What McCarthy did here was he was being held hostage by a group, first of all, can I just put this out there?
Legally speaking, the term impeachment inquiry doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't grant you any extra serious legal power.
You already have subpoena power in the Congress.
You already have the power to compel testimony, theoretically.
So it doesn't add anything.
It's just like a thing you say.
It's the equivalent of Michael Scott saying, I declare bankruptcy.
That's really what it is.
It's like, now we officially have an impeachment inquiry.
And the media's like, breaking news!
Impeachment inquiry!
If you want to impeach the guy, just impeach the guy.
But the reality is that, you know, I think that what happened here is that McCarthy was getting pressure from his right flank on the budget deal.
And he said, OK, fine, I'm going to do the impeachment inquiry.
He doesn't actually have the votes to open the impeachment inquiry, which is why he did it without a vote.
If he could have done it with a vote, he would have done it with a vote.
He didn't have the votes.
So he simply declared without a vote that there would be no impeachment inquiry.
Also, that's what Pelosi did.
Pelosi did it.
So he so he can certainly get away with that.
It's a smart political move on his part.
My generalized feeling about, quote unquote, impeachment inquiries is like everybody knows the story.
So either impeach the guy or don't impeach the guy.
I don't know what an inquiry is going to do at this point, other than theoretically, possibly, if there's not impeachment at the end of the inquiry, it's a giant fail, right?
So why would you light that candle if it's not going to burn?
It doesn't make any sense to me.
Where there's smoke, sometimes there isn't fire.
Is it possible that in this inquiry they could get more proof?
I don't know what more proof you need.
I'll be honest with you.
I'm sick of hearing that there's no evidence and there's no proof.
It's absurd.
There's a full-on text from Hunter Biden to his daughter talking about paying half of his dad's bills.
We know that he went around to a bevy of countries and collected $20 million in checks on behalf of various causes.
We know that Joe Biden has been trafficking using his name since he was 30 years old in the United States Senate.
I mean, all of this is like well documented.
He was using his connections in Delaware to get MBNA to hire Hunter.
He was trafficking with unions back in his early days in Delaware.
I mean, the guy's corrupt as the day is long.
They used to call him the senator from MBNA.
That's right.
From this bank in Delaware.
He literally was calling into meetings with his son.
Like, I'm not sure what else you would need if you want to hit him on a corruption charge.
And this is the thing that I am concerned about is I don't know that they're going to actually have another shoe to drop.
Because here's the thing.
Let's say that you're Joe Biden.
Do you actually need the money coming into your bank account personally?
Right.
I doubt it.
If it comes into Hunter's bank account and then Hunter is living at your house and Hunter just buys a car and then you use the car sometimes.
Or let's, I mean, we all have kids.
So, you know, if you were bribing me theoretically by giving my kid a job, that is a form of bribery to me, I would think.
Yep.
That is a form of payment.
Especially if he's a derelict, like Hunter Biden, who's literally one of the worst people alive.
Unemployable, drug-addicted, prostitute-abusing piece of garbage.
And you're getting a multi-million dollar — that is a bribe, is it not?
See, I think Ben's take on this is highly moral and ethical, and that's why I disagree with it.
I think this is a good political move, both for McCarthy and for the Republicans.
The FBI are using this ongoing investigation dodge.
They're not investigating Hunter Biden, they're just stalling until the statute of limitations runs out.
And so they're using this ongoing investigation dodge as a reason why they can't answer questions in a timely manner.
If they say it's an impeachment inquiry, it doesn't have any legal weight, but just in terms of the media, just in terms of the way it sounds, it sounds more important.
If the FBI says, well, we can't give you information, say, well, this is an impeachment inquiry, I think that's a good idea.
And even if it doesn't result in impeachment, you can drag this out forever.
And I think that that's basically the plan.
The plan is to just keep this going until and unless they can get the votes to actually... What I'm afraid of, I am concerned that there are going to be like five to ten Republicans who are just not going to get on board with it and then he's not going to have a majority of his, you know, he just won't go through.
If that fails in the House, that's actually a real black eye for him.
Yeah, but he can just keep the inquiry going for a long time.
So if the inquiry keeps going, then I saw this suggested by a somewhat prominent conservative today.
Do you think there is any chance that Joe Biden, who is a million years old, who can't pronounce his own name, who does seem vulnerable to certain corruption charges if the DOJ would ever bring them, Would he step aside, say it's for health?
Okay, all right, that was my answer.
No way.
All right.
You mean out of honor?
Is that the joke?
Is that the punchline?
What if he did it, what if he said, well, it's because my health is declining enough that I'm not going to run for it?
He can't step aside.
He's been in public office his whole life.
He can't let go of it.
I mean, this is the story of the country.
I agree.
We've got this gerontocracy running us into the ground by these old, ancient, decrepit zombies who cannot let go of power.
I mean, the boomer generation— I can't take this person.
He's a pre-boomer.
Yeah, he's a pre-boomer, but I mean, but you know, you've got- That's quoted in that Pony Soldier movie.
That's from 1952.
He was 10 years old when that happened.
He was 10 years old.
And you've got- I wasn't born when that movie was made.
That's insane.
Nancy Pelosi just announced she's running for re-election.
Dianne Feinstein.
I mean, it's, John Fetterman isn't old, but he is like a cucumber.
So it's the same, it's this same story.
Which is why, not to move away from the impeachment thing, but I'm actually, I don't know where you guys all stand on this, but to me, it's so obvious.
But if we were a serious country, we would be talking about and enacting age limits on the presidency.
I can't see any argument... Really?
I am opposed to age limits on any public office.
Of course you are.
The age limit is the ballot box.
75 years old.
So you've got from 35 to 75.
You have 40 years to get it done.
You can't get it done in 40 years.
It wasn't meant for you.
Go home, Gramps.
Sit on the porch.
I'm with you on that.
No, the Senate, the word Senate comes from old man.
What's the downside to saying we're putting the cut off at 75?
There's some actual people who are alive at 75.
I mean, like Joe Biden is not.
Of course, he'd have to be dead, you know?
I mean, like, not to, you know, I'm known for my great and abiding support for President Trump, but I mean, like, President Trump is more alive by a long stretch than Joe Biden.
I mean, he's the same guy he was 30 years ago.
So you think it would be harmful to the country to say we don't want people after 75 running for the most important?
I think that what that really speaks to, and this is just true of our politics in general, is that the voters suck.
Okay, let's be honest.
They do, which is why we need to put protections in place to accommodate for the suckiness of the voters.
You're asking the voters to vote for them not to put limits on themselves.
When has this ever worked?
Like, when has this been a thing that has happened?
Well, I'm not saying it would happen.
I'm saying that it absolutely should happen.
It sounds like you guys think that it shouldn't.
Look, here's the other thing.
After 80, Your chance of getting dementia is at, like, once you get 80, your chance is, like, 20%.
I mean, it's, you know, and then it goes up and up and up from there.
So, basically, by the time you get to 85, almost everybody has at least a little bit of dementia.
Uh, and almost... Drew, tell me.
Yeah, no, it's... What?
Where am I?
Who's Drew?
I would very much vote yes.
75 is fine.
I don't see anything that could be wrong.
So downside to saying you have to run between 35 and 75.
And if we have a lower age limit, why not an upper?
I would rather there be 30-year-olds running for president than to have 80-year-olds.
Oh, I totally disagree.
Have you met 30-year-olds in this country?
Well, hold on.
Right now, the 30-year-olds are the millennials.
The normal 30-year-old in this country right now.
Really?
Honest to God.
Have you met a lot of 30-year-olds in this country?
Have you met a lot of the 80-year-olds that are running?
Well, so we have a 38-year-old running for president right now, and he's doing a lot better than people thought he would, but he's just—the voters aren't picking him.
They're picking Trump over— The other thing is, when you're 80 years old, you almost—you probably have dementia, all kinds of—you know, your chance of having—you almost definitely have some kind of cancer.
Like, all these things happen.
But also, you're not going to be in the country that you are leading for very long.
You're at the end of the road for you.
And so whatever you do as a president, you aren't going to have to be around And I want to say Trump is an exception, not the rule.
Trump never drank his entire life, and that's part of the reason why there's no mental deterioration there.
You're right, he's on it, he had a lot of energy throughout the four years he was in office, but he is very much the exception, not the rule.
And I want to say Trump is an exception, not the rule.
Like Trump never drank his entire life.
And that's part of the reason why there's no mental deterioration there.
You're right.
He's he's on it.
He had a lot of energy throughout the four years he was in office.
But he is very much the exception, not the rule.
Joe Biden is the rule.
Right.
When you get to that age.
He's 80% comprised of actual preservatives.
Right.
He's like a French fry of a human.
It literally is defying life expectancy to say that above 75 people should be able to run.
Just another rule we don't need.
I agree with you.
We need rules.
We need tons of rules right now.
It's not a rule problem.
Let's assume that we need a rule.
That's fine.
What would you prefer?
A competency test at any age?
Or an age test.
I'll take the competency test.
I'd like to do both.
There are doctors they bring in that say that Joe Biden's fine.
No, like a public competency test.
First of all, it would make amazing TV.
Like a public competency test.
Like you put them on TV.
Public competency test.
Who decides on the test?
Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx.
Right.
It would be like Spellcat.
But I guess the real question here is, do we really believe that the problem afflicting the country is that the people have too much say over the direction of things?
And also, this is not a rural problem, this is a cultural problem.
The fact that we can't get past the boomers, and we can't, you know, we had Obama, and it was such a disaster that everybody's like, well, let's go back to those boomers.
But after a while, you run out of boomers, you know?
And I think we've kind of reached that point.
This is actually, there's actually a problem with new ideas coming into the culture.
There's, you know, it's shut down.
There's so much information flowing, but nobody knows what's true anymore.
And so there's no ideas that anybody is actually talking about that are serious, you know, progress from where we were.
Honestly, I also think that the senility attack on Biden is like the least problematic thing about Joe Biden.
Right, right.
I'd prefer that Joe Biden continues to stumble into walls.
That's fine.
I honestly don't care about that.
Like the fact that he's senile.
Yeah, it's shameful on the world stage, but I mean, Bill Clinton was, you know, shaming the world and shaming our country in a different way back in the 90s.
To me, the problem with Joe Biden is that he's a horrifically bad president, promoting incredibly bad policies, and he's deeply corrupt.
And by the way, I think that the senility attack by Republicans is actually not going to play.
The reason I think it's going to not play is because if the matchup is between Trump and Biden, which it seems like almost guaranteed it will be, if that's the matchup, Biden will just hide in the basement the whole time.
And he will run the same campaign as last time.
I'm a dead person.
I'm an unthreatening dead person.
COVID's back and it's bigger than ever.
Yeah, they're doing COVID again.
All he has to say, this time, all he has to say is, I'm not going to debate an insurrectionist.
Right?
That's the crap that happens.
I don't think that's true.
I mean, all the polls show that probably the attack that works the best on Biden right now is age.
Even a lot of Democrats agree with that.
No, but they agree with it, but that's not going to stop them from voting for him.
The truth is, I mean, so when you look at the polls that are extremely even right now between Trump and Biden, there are two stats that I'm a little suspicious of in the polls.
And I don't want to like poll read a year and a half out, but I'm going to do it anyway.
So here's the two stats that bother me about the polls.
One is the suggestion that Biden is only going to win something like 54% of the minority vote.
I don't see how that's true.
I just, I can't see how that's true.
I think that that number is much more like 62, 63%, mainly because that's been the number Pretty much forever.
And a stretch of that magnitude would be very, very large.
And Trump really outperformed on minorities.
I don't think he's going to outperform to the tune of 45% of minorities.
That's one.
The other one is that there's a massive enthusiasm gap right now in all of these polls that they're measuring.
And that enthusiasm gap is like in the last CNN poll that was really bad for him.
It was 71% of Republicans saying they were highly motivated to vote and 61% of Democrats saying that they were highly motivated to vote.
Well, I don't believe that either.
And the reason I don't believe that is because Donald Trump is amazing at two things.
One, getting out Republican votes, amazing at it.
And two, getting out Democratic votes, absolutely unbelievable at it.
Like, he's really good at those two things.
Democrats are not enthusiastic to vote for this old bag.
But, we used to live in California, and I promise you, Democrats will crawl over broken glass to vote for Trump.
And then there's also the fact, there's also the indictments and the trials, which are going to have no effect on Trump's base.
They may bring out more people on Trump's base, but they're going to completely obliterate any independence.
Those polls, do you think?
The same poll that shows him tied has him down among independents 47-38.
I just don't see how that lines up.
But, but the- Listen, he could still win, obviously.
I mean, look, I think all social science is bunk, but I cite it when it underscores my point.
And when it comes to the prosecutions, the majority of Americans believe that the prosecutions are politically motivated and unjust.
So that presumably includes a lot of independents and even some Democrats, right?
It's something like over 60%.
I mean, which polls are you citing?
Those same polls will suggest that a majority of Americans wish for Trump to be prosecuted.
Yeah, look, I'm not saying that there isn't contradiction within these things, but like, the fact that you can get People overwhelmingly agreeing with something that we all know to be true, which is that this is politically motivated, this shouldn't be happening, it is a rigging of the game.
I don't know that we could predict a year, over a year out.
They're saying two things simultaneously.
They're saying politically motivated and also we want to be prosecuted, which is not great.
And basically what you have right now is both parties locked in the predator meme, and the thing that they agree on is that there's no way we're going to lose to the other guy.
Yeah, yeah.
And one of them is going to be wrong.
And it's going to be a disaster when that happens.
It says something about the system that nobody wants this rematch.
Nobody wants this election.
And that's exactly what we're going to get.
Right now, it looks like what we're going to get.
I guess there's just no alternative to that.
Do we all say that right now it's just going to be Trump?
You said like 30 points.
More.
I'm the only person who thinks it's simply to, look, obviously it looks like that's what it's going to be.
But I still think there's many a slip between the cup and the lip and it's really early still.
And we still haven't seen what the donors will do around Thanksgiving.
I don't know.
I don't think the donors matter, but I do think that in order to knock Trump out, you're going to have to knock him out, obviously, extremely early.
So everybody's focusing in on Iowa, and they're forgetting that, like, a bunch of Republican candidates won Iowa who didn't end up winning the presidency, obviously.
Iowa hasn't decided the nominee since 2000.
That's right.
And New Hampshire only decided, really, McCain and Romney.
Yeah.
And so it's really South Carolina, which is sort of the make or break state.
And right now that's lining up perfectly for Trump.
Because you've got Nikki and Tim who are both in the race, both of whom will draw some support, and Ron, who's in the race.
So, I mean, right now that looks like a crab pot for everybody who's not named Trump. - Yeah.
I mean, the only thing that could change it is if a bunch of these challengers drop out, which just isn't gonna happen, right?
And even so, a bunch of the challengers drop out, but Trump nationally is like at 59% or some insane number, you know?
And even in all these states, he's still up 20% at least.
The truth is, nobody except for Vivek is running a good campaign.
And Vivek is running a good campaign because he's doing the things that a campaigner is supposed to do.
He's going to everyone.
He's talking to everybody.
I don't like a lot of the things he's saying.
I think that he's flip-flopping on a bunch of issues, but I'm not sure that matters anymore.
So, I mean, in terms of who has the energy and who's out there, like, just in terms of, he's not going to be the nominee.
I'm willing to bet money on it.
I like Vivek personally.
That's fine.
I don't even think, frankly, that he's running for the presidency.
I think he's running for the vice presidency or Senate from Ohio.
That's all fine.
Or maybe he's running for the podcast that he just launched.
Oh, that's fine.
He's allowed to do any of those things.
In terms of everybody else running campaign, they're all doing unbelievably crappy jobs.
I don't know.
I mean, I really like Tim Scott.
You know, he's been out talking about his girlfriend that goes to another high school.
Yeah, yeah.
High school from Canada.
Canada, yeah.
You know, look, I'm not making any claims about whether or not Tim Scott has this girlfriend he talks about.
But I will tell you, it is much more believable than the notion that Cory Booker is dating that Rosario Dawson.
That, like, still kills me.
He cast an actual actress to be— He literally cast an actress, a lesbian actress, to be— Did you see them when they kissed?
When everyone was like, give her a kiss, and they were like, I really don't want to do this.
And then nobody mentioned it.
Honestly, that kiss should be shown.
It was incredible.
And she's like a lesbian.
There's more sensuality kissing your grandmother than that kiss with Rosario.
More or less believable than Obama and that weird guy that Tucker interviewed.
Oh my gosh.
His boyfriend.
That's great.
So, speaking of odd incidents that took place, kind of a weak segue, wasn't it?
A little bit weak.
This is actually a very sad story, but it's sad for like five different reasons.
You saw that young woman, she was a pregnant young woman, I think 21 years old, Takiya Young, who died because she was in a car, gets pulled over by the cops, the cops say, hey, stop driving, and then she just starts driving and they shoot her.
She wasn't pulled over by the cops.
She had just robbed a grocery store, or a store of some description.
Shoplifting.
Shoplifting.
And she heard multiple people and they called the police.
We even have a clip of the shoplifting.
Yeah, when you're, when somebody is shoplifting.
Oh, it looks like, is that a liquor store?
Well, she's six months pregnant.
She's pregnant.
She's pregnant.
Choplifting and alcohol is a good move.
Choplifting, yeah, liquor.
All of this is obviously good decision-making.
I say this as someone who has nine weeks left of my own pregnancy here.
So this is just stunning to me, like, all the decision-making that's happening here.
And she...
They called the cops, which is what you're supposed to do, and the cops were supposed to come.
And she got into her car, they told her to stop.
She essentially just started blaming other people, saying, ah, the other person was stealing, the other person was stealing.
And then she made off in her car and could have killed the officers because it's a vehicle.
Get out of the car.
told her to stop, told her to stop.
She didn't stop.
So when they finally pull her, I mean...
Started running them over.
She's in the parking lot.
And we have body cam footage.
It's amazing how much footage we have of this entire incident.
Right.
And so there's not a ton of ambiguity here.
I think we have the clip.
1828.
Do not leave.
Get out of the car.
Then get out.
No.
Then get out.
Get out of the car.
Get out of the car!
Shots fired.
Shots fired!
Stop it! Car!
Stop!
Stop!
Stop! Car!
Oh my God.
Come on.
Rule number one, when they tell you to get out of the car and they have a gun pointed in your face, get out of the car.
I will say that the police, that cop did screw up as far as I understand police procedure in When you've got a suspect who might flee, you don't stand in front of the vehicle.
Like, that is not proper police procedure.
That's a very stupid thing to do, to use your body to block in a car.
Maybe if you're in your police cruiser, but not your body.
So that's, that was not the right thing for him to do for his own, for the sake of his own self-preservation.
But once she starts driving into him, she is wielding a lethal weapon.
He has every right to defend himself.
And that's why with all these cases, you know, this is the next BLM martyr.
And we always talk about systemic racism and all this nonsense.
And Black Lives Matter, you know, they're marching the street chanting Black Lives Matter again.
But, you know, the person who needs that message is Takia Young herself.
Like, why don't you value your own life enough, and the life of your unborn child, enough to make just a reasonable decision?
Like, once the cops are there, There is no way that running is going to make your situation any better.
It automatically... It's also self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
Like, you tell people enough that cops are going to murder them, and then they get in a situation with the cops, and then they do things that cause the cops to kill them.
Right, if you keep telling people over and over and over, over and over, that no matter what you do, no matter what you do, the end of this is the cop is going to shoot you.
And you're in a car, and a cop is pointing a gun at you, and you've been told it doesn't matter what you do next, the cop is going to shoot you.
Well, I can be out of the car and the cop can shoot me, or I can be in the car and the cop can shoot me.
And so you're in the car, and you decide to take a shot at it.
I mean, like, again, these lies actually have consequences.
The cops were not going to shoot her.
If she got out of the car, she'd be alive right now.
What I can't get over is the liquor store part.
Forget about the, we see this, someone gets pulled over and then they act like an idiot and then they do everything wrong and then they get into this dangerous situation.
I can't get over the liquor store.
How many wrong turns did this woman have to make in her life to get to the point where she is robbing a liquor store, by the way, not just, you know, a bottle of wine to have with a loaf of bread to feed her family, like she's putting bottles of hard liquor into her bag while she's six months pregnant.
How many bad choices, how many bad lessons, how many things went wrong?
And then, I don't want to sound like the bleeding heart liberal here though, but in a way, society must have failed this woman.
Society has failed everybody when the authorities pull their support from the police.
Yes.
You've got people out in the street doing all kinds of things that basically the authorities, the government, is saying, well, that's not really a crime.
Basically saying that the honest people deserve what they're getting.
Yes.
That the society is so evil, inherently evil, that if somebody's robbing you, it's probable.
There's that line in The Crown, about the monarchy, where it's the head of the household in the palace, he says, it's in the little things that the rot begins.
And I think every little lesson, every little wrong thing this woman ever did, where she got off the hook, where they said, oh, we're not going to prosecute that, we're not going to punish you, we're not going to teach you the right way to behave, all of those little tiny things Over time, get to the point where you're just robbing a liquor store and running over cops.
Before we get to society, though, you know, on a smaller scale, it's her family who failed her.
That's why every time, again, with the BLM martyrs, the family comes out and they're crying tears and they're upset.
And I believe that they're actually upset, but at the same time, I always have to think to myself, you know, where were you in this person's life?
How did they end up in this situation?
When was the last time you talked to them?
Right, exactly.
The dad comes out of the woodwork sometimes, I don't know if he has in this case, but where's the dad been?
We can pretty much guarantee you shouldn't have a dad at home.
We already know that without even looking into a biography, so it's the family.
I wanted to say that, you know, in some instances people look at these situations and you think, okay, well, she's operating out of fear, she's got a gun, and maybe that's why she... No, that's not what's happening here, and I want to be very clear.
This woman knew from start to finish that she was committing a crime.
Because of BLM, because of George Floyd, which is why you see in so many of these circumstances, they're saying, George Floyd, George Floyd, hands up.
They're saying these things because they're thinking no police officer, especially a white police officer, is going to have audacity to do anything else.
This is all just meaningless threats because we actually hold the power now in post-BLM America.
And in most circumstances, they're right.
Police officers are afraid to do their jobs because they're fearful of being called racist.
What she's suffering from is the arrogance that has transcended the black community and Since BLM and George Floyd, where we now think we don't have to listen to police officers at all.
We don't have to listen anymore.
We're officially above the law because we have been told by culture, we've been told by corporations, we literally ran in there, robbed the target and the CEO said, we understand, right?
We understand why you took these flat screen TVs.
We ran in and we took Gucci.
We did this.
And literally, the media and the politicians were saying, we understand, okay?
So she's been raised in this generation that says that even when you're committing a crime in broad daylight, the task is for people to be understanding, right?
So yes, is she a victim of media warping her brain and making her believe that she's above the law?
Yes.
Is she a victim of her own stupidity?
Yes.
The saddest part about this, obviously, is the loss of the innocent life.
And it's unthinkable of how selfish and narcissistic, how trashy, how awful of a human being she had to have been to put her unborn child in that circumstance.
And I say that as very fired up and close to the end of pregnancy of just thinking of how unbelievably selfish everything that she did was there.
Hormones surging.
Go online and see her trending under the hashtag Rest in Power.
It's absolutely sickening.
And the news media bears so much responsibility for this.
Crime obviously is a human problem.
There's always going to be crime.
But high crime is a policy problem.
The people who create policy, who make policy, are to blame for high crime.
The cop is the guy at the bottom whose only job is to keep you safe from the stupid mistakes that politicians make.
And the politicians go to the press and they say, well, it's the cop's fault.
The cop is a racist.
And the press goes off like a dog chasing a ball.
To me, that is so shameful.
That's the first thing that a reporter should say is, wait a minute, wait a minute.
You made that policy, not the cop.
The cop is suffering from the policy just like the neighborhood is suffering from the policy.
Our media sucks.
The one thing, if there's one thing I agree with Donald Trump about 100% is those people are the enemies of the people.
They are just not doing their jobs.
Speaking of perverse media and ineffective law enforcement, did you see the federal judge in Texas who just struck down An age verification law to access high-speed hardcore internet pornography.
This is Judge David Ezra, who ruled that HB 1181 is unconstitutional.
He issued a preliminary injunction against it, saying the law goes, quote, far beyond the interest of protecting minors.
But his problem with it is great.
His problem with it is that if- Government overreach.
The government will be able to see you're watching porn.
A solution for that.
And the other thing about these laws, by the way, is they work.
Because nobody wants to show his ID when they're looking at porn.
The porn people go out of business when they say you've got to prove your age.
And this whole thing is so absurd.
Now, obviously, like you, Michael, I would like to see all porn banned and the porn industry burned to the ground and we dance around its ashes.
But if we can't, you know, on our way to that, I think obviously age verification laws make a lot of sense.
And it's so ridiculous, the objections to it, because in any, literally any other context that you can think of, a, you know, an age-restricted item, we all agree, we all, there's no controversy that you're going to have to check ID.
And that includes, you know, alcohols, tobacco products, gambling, whatever.
R-rated movies.
R.A.
movies.
But that also includes physical pornography.
You know, I mean, back in the day, they used to have the porn magazines at the gas station.
And if they still had those, you know, you got to buy the porn magazines to show ID.
And everyone would also agree that if a 10-year-old kid went to a gas station and grabbed the porn magazine and bought it, and the gas station attendant didn't check his ID, that guy should be thrown in prison.
And so we carve out this exception for online porn specifically and say that they're at some sort of unthinkable invasion of privacy.
Now, I will say that The one point the judge made in this ruling that is correct is that he said it's a free speech violation, which is absurd.
Yeah.
He did also make the point that it's effectively useless because the law carved out all these exceptions where things like search engines are exempt, which is ridiculous, and people and kids can bypass it by just having a VPN or something like that, which is why, but that's not an argument against having the age verification laws, it's an argument for having them be stronger, and it's also an argument for having age verification laws That are not just at the website level, but at the device level.
So there need to be laws that every cell phone device that a child has on the device, the device is age protected.
Right.
So that they can access these sites.
Because by the way, to your point, Matt, on just burning the porn industry to the ground.
Let's go back to that.
Well, this would do that because every time that one of these laws is passed, an age verification law, Pornhub, MindGeek is the parent company of that, pulls service out of that state.
They would rather stop doing business in that entire state than have to comply with stopping kids from looking at their product.
Why is that?
One, because they know that even grown adult men don't want to admit that they're doing this perverted thing.
But two, it's because the porn industry relies on hooking kids, just like any drug dealer on the street corner.
They rely on hooking kids at age 8, 9, 10, and 11, and they know that they're going to have a customer for life.
I mean, to be fair to the porn industry, I think I've never said that.
There's one other element, which is the legal liability that attaches, right?
In the same way that you saw, you know, Facebook take itself offline in certain countries because of, you know, sort of laws that they had to pay particular news providers in a certain way.
And they said, well, if I violate that law, then the fine is worth way more to me than this.
That is one of the things that's happening, but good.
I mean, the goal is to bankrupt the porn companies.
They're bad.
And first of all, this entire notion that free speech encompasses pornography in the first place is absurd on its face.
It's ridiculous.
Robert Bork would have made an excellent Supreme Court justice before he was Borked by Joe Biden.
One of the worst things that Joe Biden ever did.
Bork, he has an entire article in the 1970s talking about the extent of the First Amendment.
He says, like, the First Amendment clearly was aimed at political speech.
That is what it is about.
It is about political speech.
It is about religious speech.
You know what?
It's not about naked pictures of ladies.
Appealing to the prurient interest.
How many people even know what the word prurient means anymore?
That was a term that was known in the culture and in the law and it would distinguish between meaningful speech and artistic speech and just smut to appeal to your lower interest.
I gotta say, I'm also perturbed by the left's sudden interest in free speech when it comes to pornography and complete disinterest in free speech when it comes to the government literally going to social media companies and telling them that they have to shut down searches on COVID, for example.
Right.
Like, that's an amazing thing.
The Circuit Court of Appeals ruled... For anyone who makes the free speech argument with porn, I always ask them, but you're saying porn is speech.
Okay, well...
Then what is it saying?
You know, the woman who's having sex on camera, what is she saying exactly?
What message is she trying to convey?
What message is the woman trying to convey?
Yeah, okay, I get it.
That's enough, thank you.
I'm writing Virginia State Assembly.
Okay.
That's another song.
What message is the woman trying to convey?
What thought is she expressing?
Help.
Yeah, help is actually probably the speech.
But to Ben's point, Ben's point is important though, because that is what the left believes.
The left believes that your expression of your personality is sexual, it's not political, whereas we believe it's actually based on ideas and politics and other cultural ideas, religious ideas, but your sex life is Kind of minor when it comes to that.
to the left here are the things that you can restrict under the First Amendment.
Religious speech, because it's offensive to LGBTQ plus right about science people.
You can restrict quote-unquote hate speech, because it might be offensive to people of minority status.
Even though some of that stuff is political, you can respect scientific speech, because obviously the science speaks.
What you cannot restrict is naked people screwing.
That you absolutely Because that's the core of you.
That's the core of you.
That's really the case.
The case is that the most political part of you is that.
It's the thing that I fear the most as just a parent is really understanding what happens when a child is introduced to pornography when they're too young.
It destroys their brain.
The pathways are established.
It's very hard for them to come back from it.
I really believe that.
And especially for young boys because biologically they're ticking differently when they're introduced to sex too young.
Now I'm having a second son.
So I think about this all the time and how you keep your children away from it when it's so readily available.
And we're talking about a big issue.
We're talking about, you know, Pornhub and pornography.
But as my husband always says, the reason he's not on social media is because it's all porn now.
It is all porn.
It's all porn.
He's like, you open up Instagram and the first thing you see are ass cheeks, right?
And it's true.
I'm literally, I've realized when he said this to me, how desensitized I have become It's all softcore porn.
I mean, it's a full frontal of Kim Kardashian.
It's Emily Rodjikowski.
It's every actress that, for whatever reason, has to be naked.
Oh, do you want to buy this Gucci bag?
Well, of course, there's a naked model behind it holding it because, God forbid, she was wearing clothes while she was holding the Gucci bag.
We have all become obsensitized to pornography, and we're not thinking about how it's impacting children.
And we're not thinking about how it's, you know, we're suffering every other major ill in society.
I just came off doing the Whatever podcast for Convicting a Murderer, available on DailyWirePlus.com.
And having this conversation, sitting down with sex workers, this girl, this 22-year-old girl who works in a brothel and is a prostitute, happily a prostitute, every other girl on this panel, OnlyFans, and they're, you know, angry at Matt Walsh for sharing the video, which I think we have and we might be talking about very shortly.
Because they think it's aspirational not to get married, they think it's aspirational to have a bunch of sex with multiple men.
And to hear women talk about that, to talk women having multiple partners, this is what's really at the root here.
So yeah, we could play whack-a-mole, and yes, of course, Pornhub is going to be worse.
But now we're dealing with OnlyFans, dealing with social media, we're dealing with celebrities turned into icons, like Cardi B talking about her WAP, which you are famous for.
I am.
My version slaps.
It is.
As it were.
And it's hard to even fathom how to deal with all those problems.
You saw that they came out with a sequel now.
They have a sequel song.
No, I know, and I can't listen to it just yet because I want your version dropped first.
Oh, I have to listen to it.
Yeah, you've got to drop your version and then I will respond to both versions and say whose is better.
Or a Wap vs. Bongo's problem, in which case maybe.
Does make me think, going back to your point, Drew, and you said this too, Ben, that the left views us as fundamentally sexual creatures.
And I do, I often think these social ills, even if people are not conscious of them, have deeper philosophical and theological foundations.
For most of the history of our civilization, we've thought that the defining feature of human beings is that we're reasonable.
It's our reason.
That's what separates us from the animals.
And that's Aristotle all the way up to about 150 years ago.
But then Freud comes along and says, no, we're sexual and libidinous.
And it wasn't what Freud thought he was saying, but it is implied in what he says.
And I think that, as they say of Nietzsche, you might get the bad luck that somebody takes you seriously.
- What he was saying was that this is basically the motivation of mankind, and it has tunnels through which it flows.
I mean, every generation takes-- - Right, it's a sublimate. - Every generation takes the highest level of machine and uses it as a metaphor for the human mind.
So in the old days, it was the chariot, then in Freud, it was the steam engine.
And now we talk about people being programmed and being hardwired and all that stuff.
But the steam engine idea was that this erotic impulse would come up and the ways in which it was sublimated and the ways in which it was restricted would set the path of your personality.
First of all, that's largely false.
What is true, and what Freud was right about, is that sickness, moral sickness and mental sickness, does often show itself in sexual terms.
Not to get into a particularly detailed discussion of Freud, but I think there's a case to be made that what Freud says about the power of the sexual impulse has roots as old as the Bible.
I mean, there's nothing new here.
Well, of course.
And so the real perversion is when the message that Freud gives, which is you have this deep sexual impulse that is what drives you, but you have a civilizational impulse that must be planted on top of that to sublimate the sexual instinct and use the passion that you would have for the sexual instinct and channel it in good directions, when that's removed.
See, I think that's the falsehood there, because under the chariot model that Socrates or Plato used, The moral impulse is built in, and Freud did not say that.
He basically said society impresses this moral impulse on you and suppresses your native animal.
Right, but he actually pushes it one step back, right?
Because then you have to ask where society comes from.
Yeah, but he doesn't talk about it.
He never distinguishes between a moral repression, which I think that all— Well, this is definitely a huge flaw in Freud, but he thinks there is one.
He just never actually establishes what that is.
Well, he believes in it.
Right.
I mean, clearly.
And that's part of the problem, I think, with most philosophy, is that the stuff that's unsaid is as important as the stuff that's said.
That's right.
This is true, and this is why you see reinterpretations of Locke, where Locke is a secular liberal.
And you're like, well, I mean, he really wasn't.
He was writing full-on defense.
He called to ostracize the atheists.
The stuff that Locke actually is just assuming is in the air around him, but that he never writes in his treatises on government, that's the stuff that actually makes the treatises on government work.
But when you remove it from that context, it no longer works.
And the same thing is true of Freud.
There was a young man who, at the age of 20, wrote a book called Porn Generation.
It came out in 2005, and it was all about how the attempt to mainstream softcore pornography through advertising and movies, how that was eventually going to corrupt an entire generation of people who were going to be addicted to this stuff.
And everyone in the media laughed at this argument.
I mean, this was like, of all the books that I've written, this was the one that was most- Wait, it was you?
It was.
Hold on.
It was.
I was 20 years old when I wrote this book.
And if you go back and you read it now, it looks Pretty prophetic.
I mean, I'm talking about how this is everything from Britney Spears being turned from a pop icon for small children into effectively a softcore porn star, which is what they did.
I mean, there's no escaping this in any populated area, basically, with access to the Internet.
And you're right.
I mean, the threat level to parents right now is the highest that it has ever been, because the threat used to be an organized threat of an institution that was going to come and hurt you from the outside and take your kid away from you or something.
And now the threat's in the house, literally in the house, in your phone.
There's one of my favorite lines from La Rochefoucauld, which I quote frequently, is that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
So even if there's some guy looking at porn, but he at least says porn is bad, maybe he's a hypocrite, maybe he's just a sinner who fails, but at least he's got that standard.
Now, the standard is you should sell yourself for sex, you should not be married, you should get divorced.
You mentioned Emily Radjicic-Kakoski, and she just had this viral video in which she encouraged people to get divorced before age 30.
So it seems that a lot of ladies are getting divorced before they turn 30.
And as someone who got married at 26, has been separated for a little over a year, 32, I have to tell you, I don't think there's anything better.
If being in your 20s is the trenches, there is nothing better than being in your 30s, still being hot, maybe having a little bit of your own money, figuring out what you want to do with your life, everything, and having tried that married fantasy and realizing that it's maybe not all it's cracked up to be, and then you've got your whole life still ahead of you.
So for all of those people who are stressed or feeling stressed, She looks really happy, right?
This drives me crazy.
This drives me insane.
Seeing women do this, this new culture, the dink culture, dual income, no kids, that's spawning up on TikTok.
The 29-year-old people tried to pretend was a victim when actually she was attacking people that are married and have children because there was absolutely no reason for her to make that video and talk about children.
She could have just said, I got up this morning and made chachuca, but she wanted to correlate it to the fact that, oh, well, and if you have children, this is not possible for you to be able to do, so don't get married.
Wink wink.
Hold on, you mentioned that, Candace.
That one was even worse than Ratajkowski.
Do we have that lady who Matt mercilessly bullied?
It's 10.45am on a Saturday.
I'm 29 and single and I don't have kids yet.
Here's what your Saturday morning looks like when you're single at 29 and you don't have a kid running around the house.
I didn't rise from my bed until 10.15.
Every time I thought, I should probably get up and do something, I thought, why?
Nobody's making me and I'm not missing out on anything.
I went to Beyonce last night and I didn't get home until 1am and I danced and drank my little heart out and I didn't pay a babysitter to watch my kids as I did that.
And I woke up a tad hungover this morning, which is probably why I was in bed for so long, and I was just scrolling on my phone and I saw a picture of Shakshuka and I thought, you know what sounds really good?
Maybe I'm gonna learn how to make shakshuka today because I have no plans and I don't have kids and I don't have a husband and I don't have errands to run.
I can go to the grocery store and learn how to make shakshuka so that's on my agenda today.
Also on my agenda probably a rewatch of some Real Housewives of New York.
I'm also doing a rewatch of Normal People on Hulu, which is really spicy and I highly recommend.
Weirdly, I'm into this documentary on Netflix about Blue Zone countries, so I've got a pretty stacked day.
Anyway, I say all this to say, whenever I'm hard on myself about why I'm not married and I don't have kids and I should be further along at 29, almost 30, I wouldn't want to do anything else this Saturday.
I know that you can do all these things when you have kids and you're married and I understand, but the effortlessness and ease of my life just kind of focusing on myself and the shakshuka I want to make or the Beyonce concert I want to go to.
Guys, guys, guys.
Let's play a drinking game.
Every time she says I, it's out of my sleep.
Can I say something?
As the bully, can I just say something about this lady?
First of all, obviously, I think most people know, I got killed.
I reposted that video.
I had my own thought about it.
I think my comment was pretty benign.
I did call her stupid.
You called her stupid.
Slightly harsh, but also probably not inaccurate.
I got killed over it.
First of all, the left and the media, they said, well, she just wants privacy.
Leave her alone.
She doesn't want all this attention.
And then they proceeded to spend the next week talking about her and doing articles about it because they just wanted to respect her privacy.
But also, this woman is a burgeoning TikTok influencer.
She has a podcast all about being single and childless and how great it is.
And so I have bullied her.
Of course, I've brought about the fate that all TikTok influencers dread by giving her a lot of attention.
So it's a terrible thing that I did.
But I think the real point I wanted to make about this that I also made in the tweet was that, you know, aside from the fact that she's promoting this lonely, terrible life, it's also like, if you are single and childless, and there are plenty of people who are 29 and 30 single and childless, maybe they don't want to be.
Do something interesting with your time.
You do have a lot of time, which can be an advantage.
So I admit that you have a lot more free time if you're single and childless than I do as someone with six kids.
So go out and do something, but instead of doing something... Make a tasty breakfast.
Yeah, make a tasty breakfast and then do something.
But it's all, it's just, it's just being a consumer.
That's, that's one of the big problems with the way they promote this single, big single childless is that, is they say, well, be single and childless and then devote all your extra time to being a really devoted consumer and go to a Beyonce concert and watch reality TV.
It's just a dead life.
It's worse than that, and this is what drives me crazy.
It's I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I. There's nothing wrong with being 29 and single.
And I think that that's what they were trying to say, that conservatives are suggesting that you've done something wrong if you're 29 and single.
There's nothing wrong with being 29 and single.
I know tons of people that are 29 and single, people that are 30 and single, people that are 31 and single, whatever.
It goes on and on.
There's no, you know, failure.
Maybe you didn't meet the right person.
Things can go wrong.
I get it.
It's a hard society to date in.
What's wrong is that what she's suggesting is that you should be a raging narcissist.
if you are single.
There are tons of things that you can do when you're single.
You can go hang out with your nieces and your nephews.
You can go, you know, offer yourself to help kids that are tutoring at church.
There are so many things you can do.
She sits down and she basically says, the best part about not having kids is that you can just be a raging narcissist and do everything for yourself and only think about yourself and wake up at 10, 15, 11, 15, whatever she says, which I just think is loser behavior and think about me, me, me, me, me all day.
She speaks to the narcissistic culture that we are living in today.
It drives me insane.
Even though I agree with everything you guys say, every single word, the only thing that I have to say about it is that...
Ninety percent, ninety-five percent of people are born into a culture, and that's the culture that they live in.
And I do feel in some ways, a woman like this, who just described one of the most empty lives I've ever heard, is a victim in some ways.
I totally agree.
You know, she's born into this world.
The people sitting around this table are by nature, by definition, people who say, well, wait a minute, you told me this, but I'm not sure I believe that.
That's not what most people are like.
Most people are born into a culture and they live in that culture.
And what we have done to women and what feminism has done to women is a crime.
My problem with shows like Whatever, even though it's an amusing show and it's entertaining, I'm not attacking it for that reason, but it's like they pick on the last person on the totem pole who's been created, basically, by a culture that has lost, so terribly lost its way, especially in regards to women and what they're supposed to be.
In her defense, Shakshuka's delicious.
I don't even know what it is.
It is, but you need some feta cheese on top.
Is it a breakfast dish?
What is it?
It is a breakfast dish.
You can eat it for lunch as well.
It is effectively a tomato sauce, like a spicy tomato sauce, which is the Moroccan term for it, and fried eggs on top.
Then you can put some feta cheese on it.
In my defense, I make breakfast, lunch, and dinner for my husband and kids every single day, and I have got three on the way.
Like, I'm sorry you're poor at time management and you wake up at 10.15.
You also have the option to have shakshuka and be married with kids.
Well, this is certainly true.
And you can watch me on TV, too, if you want.
Her narcissism is, I mean, you're right that she's a narcissist, but it's reflective.
And here's the real problem.
The aspiration is wrong.
Yeah.
Okay, it is in fact wrong to aspire to this life.
It is wrong to aspire to this.
There's nothing wrong with this is how your life turned out.
There's nothing wrong with you haven't set the preconditions to make a different choice, but to say that we ought as a society to be apathetic about two possible aspirations.
One is you're 29, you have a career, you don't have a career, you're married, you have kids, versus you're 29, your life consists of you stay out till really late watching a Beyonce concert and then you get up at 10:30 and maybe make shakshuka and then watch like eight hours of TV.
Any society that is apathetic between these two choices is a failed society.
Period.
A society relies on the idea that the better life, society does have things to say about what a better life looks like.
I'm not talking about compulsion, I'm not talking about tyrannical compulsion, but of course any functional civilization Has to rely on the basis that there is such a thing as good versus bad, and good choices versus bad choices.
And guess what?
A set of good choices is a set of choices that is directed toward a good end.
And that good end is you should get married, and you should have kids, and it is better for you to get married and have kids, and it is better for your community for you to get married and have kids.
This is a childless society.
That's the biggest thing.
Also, I think, just to build on your point, there's also I talk about this all the time, and people say to me, well, are you saying that everyone is supposed to get married and have kids?
And my answer is that most people are supposed to.
In fact, most people are called to.
It's a responsibility that most of us have.
Not everyone, though.
Some people have a different vocation.
A minority of people.
I'm a Jew.
I don't have to do that.
Everyone should get married and have kids.
Well, some people, it just never happened.
They tried to, and it will never happen.
But here's the point.
In my view, everybody, every man is called to fatherhood.
Every woman is called to motherhood.
Absolutely.
For most, for 99% probably of men, fatherhood will take the form of traditional fatherhood.
And for women, it'll take the form of traditional motherhood.
For a few people, it'll take a different form, but it has to take some kind of form.
So maybe you never end up getting married and you go and you're a missionary or something and you're taking care of poor people or you go work at a hospital or something, but you take on a maternalistic or paternalistic role.
The point is that we're all called Shockingly, I agree.
in that capacity in some way.
We certainly are not called to just serve ourselves and amuse ourselves for a whole life. - She's even wrong. - Shockingly, I agree. - I tend to share Drew's pity and sympathy for this lady because she's coping.
She's coping really hard.
And she's a creation of this.
And so what bothers me is our culture is so insistent on appearing happy all the time.
We're never allowed to admit, you know, that things aren't working out very well because it would cause us to check our assumptions.
But what she says that's most wrong is she said, look, I have so much ease in my life.
I don't have any obligations.
Sleeping until 10.30 in the morning is what depressives That literally seems like a depressed person.
It is, yeah.
But people have studied happiness for some millennia now, and to quote good old Uncle Aristotle again, like Aristotle has an answer.
He says, happiness is excellent rational activity in accordance with virtue.
And activity is the key word there.
It's not just a thing that you let happen to you.
It's not just passive consumption and letting flickering images on a screen just hypnotize you all day long.
It's doing something in an excellent way that's rational in accordance with virtue.
And if she's preaching this anti-gospel to a lot of people on TikTok on her podcast, it actually is our responsibility to say that's wrong.
It's a complete failure of her parents' generation.
I'm not going to blame her generation or her.
It's a complete failure because every generation has to impress on somebody.
Parenthood and growing up, it is like Plato's Cave because you can't experience it until you do it, right?
You have to have somebody from an older generation who did the thing and said, yeah, it was really hard because parenting is Difficult.
It's really difficult.
I mean, I have four, Matt has six.
Parenting is not easy.
It is a difficult task.
Your kids are paying the ass on a fairly regular basis.
And guess what?
It's also the most fulfilling thing and most important thing you'll ever do by a long stretch.
And it makes you a better person.
And there is such a thing as a better and a worse person.
Not all people are the same in terms of their moral quality.
I mean, everyone is the same in the eyes of God.
That's not the same thing as saying that their activities make them the same in terms of moral quality, because they're not.
Not every aspiration is the same in terms of moral quality.
It's a failure of older generations to inculcate on younger generations that they ought to try to get beyond the point that they are capable of experiencing here.
And that does require a leap of faith.
You know, this is when, you know, when I got engaged to my wife.
I gave a little speech at our engagement party talking about how basically anything good that you do in your life is, at some level, a leap of faith.
Everything.
Marriage being the biggest one.
But having kids is just as big.
Because you don't really know what you're getting into when you get married, because how could you?
Because marriage changes you, and it changes your wife, and it changes both of you in such unbelievable ways over the course of decades that even the first day of marriage is nothing remotely like the 15th year of marriage, and I can assume the 200th year of marriage, like Drew.
And when it comes to kids, it's so different.
Every single day is wildly different.
Parenting a baby is so different from parenting a three-year-old, which is so different from parenting a nine-year-old, let alone a teenager, let alone an adult child.
Every day is an act of faith, and we're a society that is faithless and not capable of taking the risk.
We're a very safe society.
What she's talking about here is a bubble of safety that exists for her, in which every day is exactly the same, and no risk is required of you, and no risk can be asked of you, and you're told that your risk-free behavior is actually the best thing that you can do, or at least morally equivalent to taking the risk that preserves future generations and a civilization worth preserving.
I want to ask Kansas a question, because I know you homeschool your kids, right?
Yes.
This is the question.
Professor Matt.
I'm assuming that it's Mrs. Walsh who does it, because the idea of being homeschooled by Matt is just...
I can't contain it.
I wouldn't do that to my kids.
Hit this piece of wood with this axe.
But what's your solution here?
What do you do?
Well, that's the thing is we're talking about homeschooling and also part of that might be we just send them to Matt's house because he seems to have it under control.
There's six of them.
We wouldn't even notice we have so many kids now.
Yeah, exactly.
If I just threw three more, I think maybe kind of... We just absorb them.
Yeah.
But, yeah, it's one of these things that, and also my husband just thinks the American education system in general is a massive failure compared to, I mean, it is, which it actually is relative to, you know, the UK, which still has some semblance of an academic culture.
And so we talk about this over and over again.
It's one of those discussions where we're like, it's crazy that we're even talking about this, but I don't want to have to deal with the fear of some other idiot having a phone and choosing him to pornography.
I don't want to have to deal with these young women.
And this is why it is so important to respond to these women.
It is so important because you are correct.
Their generation above them failed them, right?
They failed them.
They failed to communicate the message.
And so we're all left holding the baton.
And this is why I hit these people on my podcast over and over again because these cultural battles, they matter.
It is important to tweet this girl and to say what I said.
If you follow this girl's path, you are going to end up wine nights by yourself on Xanax, because that is where it ends.
It ends as you as Chelsea Handler, crying and bursting into tears over absolutely nothing and saying, well, Dylan Mulvaney just needs to be able to use this restroom.
That's where your life is headed.
Absolutely.
Because you've nurtured nothing, you've fought against your biology, sociology trumped your biology, and you will suffer at the end, because in the end, biology will win.
And, you know, I did the Bill Maher podcast last week, and we spoke about that, and what really happens to women when they get duped by feminism, right?
Because they get duped.
Feminism, I say, is like a drug you should try in college.
I did.
I experimented a little bit with feminism.
And then you're like, no, come on, I can't do this outside of college, right?
Never got on to the harder stuff.
Yeah, never got on to the harder stuff, right?
But if you keep going, your life is going to be absolute misery.
And so it is why I take the time to respond.
I mean, Emma Roger Kelsey, we just watched her say, there's nothing better.
Nothing better than being divorced before 30.
What?
I think another point that we have to make culturally is that there is a lot of joy to be found Absolutely.
It's a dense joy to be found in parenthood and in family life that just is not available to you if you don't get married and have kids.
It's just a joy.
But here's the important point.
Because you can also be deeply miserable as a parent.
You could be incredibly miserable all the time.
So the joy that is available to you as a parent is available.
It makes joy available to you, but it's an opportunity for joy, and it's up to you to experience it or not.
And this comes up in a lot of little ways every day.
So, for example, last Saturday morning I get up, my wife had to go out, and so I'm with all six kids, and they want breakfast, and the babies are crying and all this.
It's one of those moments where, right now, I can dwell on the fact that everyone needs me, and I can be really, really annoyed, and it's in the morning, and I don't feel like dealing with it.
Or I can think to myself, this is a house full of life, I've got all these kids that want to be around me, and it's just energy and life, and it's a wonderful thing.
So in that moment, I can really choose.
It's like a fork in the road, and it's a very deliberate thing.
I'm going to be very indescribably happy in this moment, or I'm going to be miserable.
And so if you are childless and you look at parents who are miserable all the time, and they do exist, and you think, well, I don't want that, what you have to realize is that those are parents who have chosen that.
Either way, you're going to be more alive than you would ever be without those children.
Well, I mean, there is such a thing as purpose, meaning, and fulfillment.
And that's what's left out of that video.
And when she talks about ease, she's not wrong.
It's very easy to be 29 and single with no obligations.
That's like, ease is the word.
It's this feeling of ease and floating free of time.
And of course, the biological clock is still ticking.
So, the reality is that, as you say, Candace, she can pretend that she's going to be 29 forever, but reality, she ain't.
Ten years from now, she will be 39.
And 10 years after that, she'll be 49.
And as far as the parenting aspect of it, Roy Baumeister is an interesting psychologist, does a lot of the social science on these sorts of issues.
He did some studies where he looked at the crossover between happiness and fulfillment.
And in many areas, they coincide, right?
For a lot of people, they get happiness from travel, but they also get fulfillment from travel.
The one area where there's wide divergence When it comes to parenting, single people will say very often they'll report self-report, which is always dubious, but they'll self-report happiness.
And people who have lots of kids will self-report not being as happy.
When it comes to fulfillment, people with kids self-report fulfillment at a far higher rate.
Because the truth is that, I mean, who cares about happiness?
To be real about this, everybody is chasing the wrong thing.
The phrase pursuit of happiness was supposed to mean what it meant to Aristotle.
It wasn't supposed to mean you feeling happy today.
That's not what happiness is.
If you look at any sort of religious literature, the definition of happiness is fundamentally different.
You're supposed to find fulfillment and happiness are coincident.
And this is why the Bible, for example, can command you to be happy.
And you say, how can I be commanded to feel a certain way?
I can't be commanded to be happy.
Like we have a bunch of holidays that are coming up and you're literally commanded to be happy.
It's like, how can I be commanded?
What if I don't feel like it?
What if I don't feel like I'm happy that day?
And the answer is we're not talking about a subjective state of mind.
We are talking about The meaning and purpose and fulfillment that come from doing a higher thing that actually matters in the universe and makes the society around you better.
And you can live this sort of bizarre floating life in a sort of strange solipsistic bubble, but is that going to be fulfilling in any way?
When you die at 80 and you look at, or 90, and you look back at your life, what exactly do you put on your tombstone?
Went to Beyonce concert?
What exactly goes there?
You know, one of the miseries that sometimes goes along with marriage is divorce, and one of the real miseries of divorce is custody battles, and one of the biggest miseries of custody battles is when Gavin Newsom tries to take your kid away from you and chop his genitals off, which is what is happening.
California may soon require the House and the Senate in California pass this.
Bill, to allow judges to look at whether a parent goes along with a child's gender identity during custody disputes.
And presumably, what that will mean is, if a father doesn't want to call his boy Sally, then he loses visitation.
The question now is, does Gavin Newsom look like Satan, or does Satan look like Gavin?
This is an evil bill.
Very evil.
Yes, and I don't know if it's constitutional, I don't know if it'll be struck down.
Or if it'll even get signed.
But it is, this is genuine evil.
And I think that the one thing, you know, you were talking before about God and faith and all these things and the idea that, the notion of who we are.
This was what was predicted by guys like Nietzsche who said there's going to be a transvaluation of all values, Dostoevsky who said without God, not only will you not have morality, but you'll have the opposite morality.
I think we've reached that point.
I think we've actually reached the point where we are doing evil and calling it good, which the Bible has something to say about.
People need to understand, on this particular bill, the designs here, there's some obvious designs, but it's also constructed to create more quote-unquote trans kids.
What's going to happen is that women who get divorced in California, and there are a lot of women in California getting divorced all the time, they're going to realize that, well, if I want to win custody very easily, then all I have to do is whisper in my little five-year-old son's ear that he's really a girl.
And you'll feel more happy and mommy will love him more if he wears a dress.
And I know that my husband's not going to go along with it.
And then, boom, I get custody.
So this is like entrapment.
And it's almost all women who do this.
That's just the reality.
And so this is designed to create more of that.
We have this representative, Lori Wilson, who introduced the bill.
And I guess we have that clip.
We got a clip.
Yep.
Take it away, Ms.
Wilson.
That parents affirm their children.
They have since the dawn of time.
Typically, it happens when their gender identity expression matches their biological gender.
But what happens is when it doesn't, that's when the affirmation starts to wane.
And that's what we're dealing with here.
Although it's called the TGI Bill, they're not mentioned anywhere in the law.
What's mentioned in the law is the child's gender, identity, and expression, and the parent's affirmation of that, whatever it is, because that is our duty as parents to affirm our children.
Good.
She just sounds so stupid.
Our duty is exactly the opposite.
How often do I say no to my kids?
All day, every day, forever.
90% of what you do as a parent is not affirming your kids.
That's 90%.
90?
You just said 90%?
Maybe 95.
I told a story on my podcast a couple days ago.
On Sunday, my 6-year-old son comes to me and says, Daddy, can I have a saw?
And I say, no, you definitely can't, but why?
Just out of curiosity.
And he wanted to cut down a 40-foot tree in our backyard because he wanted wood to build a fort.
And so it's like, that's just one example of when I'm not going to affirm my child, but also your child has just simply no concept of reality, of what's good for him, of what's safe for him.
My two-year-old asked me first things more if he could drive the big car.
I mean, I don't know, I thought that was something appropriate to say no to.
Like, I don't think he should actually drive the vehicle.
You do horrible, horrible things.
How could you?
I did not affirm him in his desire to drive the car.
What I love is when they say things with confidence like, since the dawn of time.
Did the dawn of time happen?
I need to check my watch on the dawn of time because I'm having some feelings about this.
It's madness.
It's ridiculous.
Name a civilization where anyone has ever affirmed their children in any way remotely like this.
No one thinks that, I mean, the Spartans used to affirm their children by leaving them out to die in the wilderness.
Throwing them off a cliff.
I am all for the fight, and I'm all for conservatives wielding more power than they're used to wielding.
But there's an important role in politics, which is you've got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, and know when to run.
And right now, if you are in the state of California, and you are in the kind of marriage, look, certain groups, they just don't get divorced.
The Jews, the Orthodox Jews, the Catholics, there are certain groups that say no divorce under any circumstances.
If you are in a marriage, though, Where divorce is a possibility, and you have kids, GTFO right now.
You just can't risk that.
By the way, you should stop the sentence as if you're in California.
Well, I just want to say, that's actually what I was going to say.
I'm done being outraged at these Democrats in California.
Like, when I see this, I'm like, whatever.
And I'm done feeling sympathetic for people that are in California, because they're basically watching North Korea be built slowly.
And it's like, and they have the option to get out, right?
And they don't leave.
They don't leave.
And I just, I don't understand the person.
Well, if you're a parent and you see this stuff and you hear them complaining and people writing on the show and all these things, I'm going, you obviously have to leave the state.
At what point do you understand that survival instinct kicks in and you say, if we're even kicking this around, I gotta go?
The real story of why this company is in Nashville and the reason why my family is in Florida, it actually starts, so 2020 was the year that we moved because of COVID and because of the Black Lives Matter riots and because of all of that.
My wife looked at me and finally acquiesced to my determination that we get the hell out of the state.
But at least five years prior to that, when our now nine-year-old was a baby, I turned to her and I said, I do not think that in five years it will be possible to raise our child in the state.
I just don't think it's going to be possible.
And I look at stuff like this and I wonder, How does anyone think that this is going to be possible?
Because they're going, I promise you, the next step, the next thing they're going to do is they're going to start deaccrediting any homeschooling program that does not affirmatively teach this stuff.
They're going to go after the private schools.
They're going to say that it's violative of the anti-discrimination law, not to mirror the Title IX prescriptions by Justice Gorsuch that suggest that transgenderism ought to be treated the same as discrimination on the basis of sex.
They're going to make it impossible to be a traditional person in the state of California.
That is their goal.
The government owns your kids currently.
If you live in California, there's no question about that.
And it's very bizarre to me that parents still stay there.
I mean, short of, I literally do not have the financial resources to pick up and move, which would shock me because you're in California and you're just being taxed the financial resources to be able to pick up and move.
But short of that excuse, I don't understand the whining and the moaning and the saying that this is really bad and refusing to move your feet because this should terrify every parent.
It's true.
There should be way more.
There is an exodus happening, but I think too slowly for the stuff that we're seeing.
And they're even trying to make imaginary walls.
You know, if you leave, they're kicking around the idea of taxing people 10 years after.
That's a communist, even the concept is mind-boggling.
You're building an imaginary wall.
It does remind you, I always hate these comparisons to the Holocaust and to Germany, but it does remind you of those people who escaped and came back and said, you know, they're killing everybody.
And the Jews were going, no, come on, don't be ridiculous.
I mean, you're absolutely right.
This is like an absolute nightmare.
Just the idea that they could consider this with a straight face.
That woman, if that's what she was, speaking, I just thought like, the minute I see that person, I'm on the next train.
I know.
You know, I had this thought 20 years ago, 30 years ago, when I'm growing up, and you'd hear these people say, America's evil and America's terrible.
I'd say, what are you talking about?
We're the good guys.
You're the bad guys.
Shut up.
This is America.
And I feel like I'm in that British sketch, you know?
You're looking around and you say, are we the baddies?
Sterilizing children, ripping them away from their fathers, say nothing of killing 800,000 babies a year.
You know, at a certain point, if the culture really becomes that we're living in the world upside down, where everything that's good is considered bad and vice versa, are we the baddies?
No, I know.
That awful Michael Knowles gets thrown off YouTube for speaking like basic fruit.
It is a fact that the counterculture is now the dominant culture in the United States.
Because culture is defined by the media, it's defined by Hollywood, it's defined by all the things that we watch and ingest kind of naturally in the air.
By the law?
By the air, in places like California.
I don't know how many of you were watching what happened over at Burning Man, which was wildly entertaining for a variety of reasons.
But one of the things that's so fascinating about Burning Man is how it went from just a bunch of nuts on a beach to 100,000 people showing up in the middle of the desert every year, including some of the most prominent people in American public life.
Suddenly, all these crazy people Or doing stupid things and having drugs and, you know, having sex with one another randomly.
And worshipping a literal idol, a burning man, who is the object of worship in the desert.
You know, I did a whole bit on this on the show, but you know they actually have like a list of their principles, a burning man.
Yes.
And the list of their principles, there are ten of them, as you would predict if you were going to create, you know, like a satanic counter to the Ten Commandments.
And three of the most crucial are self-expression, right, they call it radical self-expression, radical inclusion, And immediacy, right?
Those are three.
I mean, that's our culture.
That's our culture right now.
And that is the culture that is being foisted upon every kid they can get a hold of.
It's why it's important for them to make genderqueer available to your 10-year-old.
Anybody who's pretending that they are not after the kids, of course they're after the kids.
Of course they're after the kids.
How do you think they win over the next generation?
They're doing the work that conservatives have not done, and the people traditionally have not.
When we were talking earlier about how the older generation didn't inculcate in their kids a set of values, And instead they sort of want libertarians, like, whatever values you choose, those values are perfectly good and those values are perfectly innocent.
Well, the left never has that compunction.
The left is like, we will cram down our set of values on your child at the first available opportunity, and if you try to stop us, then we will say that you as a parent have failed and we'll try to remove the child from you.
I mean, this is, it should be terrifying to anybody who's got half a brain.
You know, if you've ever seen the horror movie The Wicker Man, Have you seen it?
I mean, this is basically about a Christian cop, an uptight Christian cop, who goes to this island of pagan worship because he hears that there's human sacrifice and basically finds out that the human sacrifice is himself.
But it ends with this tremendous wicker man burning.
It is burning, man.
And we could sit and talk about that film.
If we watch that film, we could sit and talk about it for about three hours as it Applies to this moment because it is the moment in which this kind of Christian cop is annoying and he's utterly serious and he's anti-sexual and the pagans are just lovely.
Free love, man.
Free love and it's all, yes, the beautiful naked children jumping through the fire.
Isn't this beautiful?
And of course, they're homicidal.
And we're kind of in this moment where that film has become a literal description of our life.
I don't watch scary films.
Yeah, no.
I was just going to ask, do you guys actually watch horror films?
I don't watch horror movies, I watch spooky films.
I feel like I've got the eyes of the window to the soul.
You just didn't make an entire series about a murderer, so... Yeah, that's real life.
That's real life, and we're living in a real-life horror film, but I don't watch scary movies.
I pointed out that this is just a pagan worship, like a bacchanal, and some people said this was crazy.
What do they think ancient cultures did?
I think they're just so radically removed and ignorant of history, they don't realize that what the Canaanites were doing was just that.
They were doing a bunch of drugs, they were getting very drunk, they were having weird sex with lots of different people and goats and things, and they were worshiping idols.
You know, you can look at all of Jewish history, seriously, if you read the Bible, you can look at all of Jewish history of God saying, stop killing children.
Yeah.
Well, we can kill some children.
No!
Just stop killing the children.
Well, what about this time?
What about this one?
I will say that what the Bible does say, and this is actually relevant to some of the discussion we're having, it says radical separation from this.
Radical separation from this.
The book of Deuteronomy is like, you'll go into the land and there will be people who will tempt you to participate in these sorts of cultures, and you will not participate in these sorts of cultures, or the land will spit you out.
There's a whole list of curses.
I mean, we just read this in the Torah the last couple of weeks.
whole list of curses of bad things that are going to happen to you if you do all of these things, because that's the natural consequence of doing all these things.
And people read that as like God saying, if you do this, I shall smite you with my hand.
But that's not what he's saying.
What he's saying is the world works in a particular way.
If you do these things, the natural consequence of these things is really, really, really bad.
And so when the consequences happen, because our society is so childish, they have no idea of cause and effect.
It's like they do the thing.
It's like my seven-year-old son sometimes.
He'll say he's about to do something bad, and I'll say, like, if you do that, this is going to happen.
And then he does the bad thing, and then that happens.
They're like, why did that happen?
I literally just told you one second ago why that was going to happen.
And that's our society.
We say, like, you know what happens if you completely disregard children and pretend that you don't have to build a future?
Well, then you have a childless society of miserable single people.
And they're like, but why do we have a childless society filled with miserable single people?
How could this have happened?
You know, something I used to love when I was a child, and that I still love as an adult, is eating a delicious chocolate.
And many of you know that we launched Jeremy's Chocolate back in March, and sold out our He, Him, and She, Her, respectively, nut and nutless bars within weeks of the launch.
Well, now, Halloween is quickly approaching, and we are back in stock, and we are ready to ship.
How phenomenal is it that you won't have to settle for ideological chocolate from people who think Frankenstein can become his own bride?
Huh?
Who writes this stuff?
These leftist corporations hate you, and they hate what you believe, so strike back by ordering your chocolate at jeremyschocolate.com before they sell out again.
I'm a little miffed that YouTube booted Candace on this big week and everything, but one thing I love about this show not being on YouTube right now is we can just slam transgenderism for the entire two hours.
I mean, we can shill the trans chocolates or the anti-trans chocolates.
We can talk about these stories that are going on very openly.
Usually, you have to go to dailywire.com and become a member to get the parts of the show that YouTube will not permit on.
Before we get to the member block, there's one very, very important story we have to get to.
I can't believe we haven't touched on it yet.
Aliens.
Close.
Maybe we'll get to that in the member block.
Unless I have anything to say about it.
No, this is a more important story.
A man from Florida, of course, tried to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a human-powered hamster wheel.
There's the hamster wheel, you can see it right there.
He was arrested by the Coast Guard for some reason.
And that's what people are asking.
This man's name...
Reza Baluchi, right off the Mayflower, traditional American name, he was arrested 70 miles off the coast of Georgia when officers found him during a, quote, manifestly unsafe voyage while Hurricane Franklin was headed toward the area.
Arrested on what charges?
Of being a... Hamstring.
Hamstring.
Being an explorer.
They found him, but there was a big standoff because he didn't want to go.
Wait, this is the first time authorities have found Belucia?
This is not the first time?
No, no, he tried it one other time.
How'd it go?
So, well, he didn't quite make it.
2014, the Coast Guard found him also 70 miles off the coast of Florida.
Man, they really set up that radius, 70 miles out there.
It's like, you will not pass 70 miles.
He only made it to 80.
It was an inflatable bubble that time during an attempt to run around the Bermuda Triangle.
He was very determined to run around in contraptions with water.
Out of, like, Tom and Jerry cartoons.
That's hot right now.
What?
It's still hot right now.
Just very quickly, before we get to the member block, was the Coast Guard right?
No, they weren't.
Can I have a lunch break?
This man is right down Broadway from that era.
This is an innovator, this is a voyager.
This is an adventure.
Look, we live in a world that's been already conquered and so people are looking for ways and most things have already been discovered.
You have to go deep in the Amazon or deep under the ocean like the intrepid explorers on the submarine.
Well, it's a tribute to him.
People are looking for ways to reach and to do something, to expand beyond the normal horizons of normal human behavior.
And so this man spent how many years making this hamster wheel?
At least a week.
Longer than that.
I mean, that thing looked very impressive.
And he finally launches it.
And then the Coast Guard shuts down his dream for no reason.
I'll tell you why.
It's because you're not allowed to dream anymore.
Jealous.
People are not allowed.
I'm doing a speech.
People are not allowed to have dreams anymore.
Yeah.
Yeah, right?
Hamster dreams.
Okay.
Uh-huh.
Wow.
That was compelling.
I had hamsters when I was young.
First of all, we need to immediately drop thousands of these hamster wheels in Cuba.
So we get more Republican voters in Florida?
That's correct.
That's right.
And cigars.
Democrats will buy them and send them over to Florida.
They're awesome.
I love the Cubans in Florida.
They're awesome.
So more of this.
More hamster wheels.
Not fewer hamster wheels.
The answer to hamster wheels is more hamster wheels.
That is the actual answer.
Also, again, I don't know, why does the Coast Guard care?
So here, can I be the wet blanket here?
Try a Chinese spy balloon flying across America.
U.S.
military, like, a weird guy in hamster wheels 70 miles off the coast of Georgia, like, Get him!
Get him!
I'm going to be the wet blanket authoritarian far right wing conservative.
I don't think that people should be permitted to commit suicide in elaborately cartoonish ways.
I think that's a bad idea for society.
I think people should be allowed to go into the ocean in elaborately cartoonish ways.
Is he dead?
No, he's not.
He's not dead.
I mean, you're right.
It's been a success, and I have more questions.
I want to know more about the contraption.
How high were the waves?
What was the experience like?
Yeah, I have so many questions about the story.
And what were the charges?
How many miles is the Atlantic Ocean?
Because if it's 80, I say let him go for it.
It reminds me of the case of, we remember many years ago, the man that took a lawn chair to put a bunch of balloons on a lawn chair, and he floated into the sky.
They took that man down also, and they arrested him.
On what charges?
On the charges of excellent cartoonish fun.
Exactly.
It's just terrible.
I don't understand it at all.
And it seems to me that, frankly, we should replace General Mark Milley with this fellow.
Reza Baluchi.
He has greater expertise on the high seas than apparently many of our military personnel.
I don't know how much white rage he has, though.
You know, that's going to be a point of contention.
And he's already lived longer than most hamsters.
He's playing with the house's money.
You know folks, it's time to take some of our member questions.
Now we're not going to switch over because we're here.
We're just here for Daily Wire Plus right now.
Got it.
So this is one of the perks of being a Daily Wire Plus member is that you can submit questions about any topic other than extraterrestrials and we will answer them from our lovely members who fund this whole place.
First question up, Candice.
Will you be doing a second season of Convicting a Murderer where you debunk Avery's new lawyer, Kathleen?
I think she does a good job of making it look like he was framed, and I thought season two of Making a Murderer was more convincing than season one.
Well, that's actually an unusual take.
People said that season 2 was not great and season 1 was one that hooked everybody.
Most people actually dropped off after season 1, after watching a few episodes in season 2.
But to answer the question, first and foremost, one of the things me and my husband always say is lawyers got a lawyer.
If you're a good lawyer, you know how to lawyer.
You just talk and like, you know, and bill people for tons of money.
And she had the crowd already because Netflix did all the work for her.
It's interesting to see that she hasn't yet said anything since it's come out.
We've already gotten so many tremendous emails from people saying that they've flipped their opinion, including people that were in the documentary, like hardcore.
Wow.
Stephen Avery, the cat incident, like they were just like personally just looking at this and realizing that they left out these details is already disturbing to me.
So I think it's going to be interesting, and I think especially because the documentary makers were women, Kathleen Zellner is a woman.
Once you learn what happened and how Teresa Hallback suffered, and then you realize that she was again murdered in her afterlife, figuratively, by a bunch of women who were just out to make money, it's not a good position to be in.
So I'm watching Kathleen Zellner.
I don't think she's going to be saying much.
So far, she seems pretty mum.
I'm working on a different documentary right now.
And if, you know, convicting a murderer, if there's tons of interest in the season two, which I think after you get through what we've unpacked, you're going to be like, no, this man's guilty.
Maybe we'll do it.
But I'm working on some other stuff right now.
I want you to do convicting a murderer on OJ.
Oh, my gosh.
I think it would be amazing.
I want you to do one of all the murders.
Especially after they did Central Park 5.
I mean everything.
It's just everyone.
They did that entire series basically proclaiming that it was because of the failures of the prosecution that he wasn't convicted when it was very clear why he wasn't convicted.
And I clearly remember actually in my childhood like my dad and people in my family being excited that he didn't like it was like this thing where your pressure was just you're black you're supposed to be happy that he didn't get off.
I was so young.
I remember I was in public school at the time.
But that was pretty much it.
If you were black, you cheered because he got off.
And then I got older and I learned the facts of the case.
And I was like.
That he brutally murdered his lawyer.
Or waiter, rather.
Yeah.
I remember they literally wheeled a TV into our classroom to announce the verdict on the OJ case.
And I remember there was.
How old were you?
It was crazy.
How old were you?
Well, that was 95.
So I was 11.
Okay.
Wow.
And I remember they wheeled it into the classroom.
And I remember there was a dramatic racial split.
It was like everybody who was, every black kid in the class was like, yeah!
Easy.
And everybody else was like, he's so obviously guilty.
Guilty, yeah.
But did you see the gloves?
Yeah, that's actually super interesting.
The gloves didn't fit on his hand.
But that really tells you how black America is so seized by their cultural icons.
You know, culture, he plays football, this person plays basketball, it doesn't matter what the facts are.
By the way, that was what was amazing about the O.J.
case, not to get completely aggressive here, is that O.J.
was completely disconnected from the quote-unquote black community.
I'm not black, I'm O.J.
He lived in the whitest area in L.A.
Brentwood was the whitest area in L.A.
And by the way, if he didn't try it in Brentwood, he is guilty as hell, right?
He goes immediately to death row if he's tried in Brentwood.
And the minute they moved it to downtown L.A., that case was over, basically, because they had a different jury pool.
But the black community rallying around O.J., who had done nothing for the black community, like at Not at all.
But he was good at sports.
It was an amazing, amazing thing.
Speaking of murders, this is a question for the group.
Is it now spooky season?
Personally, for me, it is.
But collectively, what do you all think?
I wouldn't use pagan crap.
That's what I think.
I'm trying to get my husband to be Prince Harry so I can be Meghan Markle.
Wow.
For Instagram.
Oh, you should totally do it.
Come on, just for Instagram.
Oh, you 100% have to do that.
Just get dressed up.
Why do we have to tell them to make that happen?
I know.
That's nice.
I know.
I'm like, it's perfect.
All we have to do is moan and, we want privacy!
We want privacy!
You're actually anti-Halloween?
Yes.
But you have Jewish Halloween.
You have Purim.
Purim has nothing to do with pagan spirits and weird pumpkins and crap.
They get to dress up and have fun.
Purim is like most of our holidays.
It's like they tried to kill us, we defeated them, let's eat.
In this case, let's drink.
And we'll read some stuff.
And put on silly costumes.
And put on silly costumes.
You don't celebrate Halloween.
Look, I used to be really into Halloween back when I was just a vicious Pagan.
But I'm into it now in that it has great religious significance.
You know, All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day.
And so there's a question for Christians, which is the really trad, like good, wholesome thing to do is you dress your kids up not as monsters and ghosts, but as saints.
And the thing is, The saint costumes are pretty gory, too.
Like Peter Martin's got an axe on his head.
Saint Simon the Zealot's carrying a saw that sawed him in half, you know?
So those could be pretty... Or you just wear, like, white robes.
Yeah, but then the advantage is you go trick-or-treating with a kid and you have to explain the costume to every house.
They're like, who are you?
Oh, I'm Saint.
You get the blank expressions when you explain it.
But I'm still pretty into it.
So we split between like a horror show and a saint.
My kid last year just went as Elvis.
And now I'm thinking about Curious George for the little baby and the man in the yellow hat for my eldest.
We do do porn.
And so this year it'll probably be something Star Wars related because my kids are very, very into Star Wars.
And the good news is there are a lot of characters in that.
So we're doing that plus my sister's family.
So that is eight kids combined, four adults, and my parents.
Who gets to be Jar Jar?
No one is Jar Jar.
Greatest character.
The baby is always Baby Yoda.
Aw, so cute.
Are you pro-Halloween?
Oh, I'm fine with it.
Yeah, I don't... We don't like, you know... It's shocking to me.
It's like Captain Yoga is the root of all evil.
Is like fine with Halloween and it's crinitory.
Because for the reason Michael just pointed out, it's actually got deep Christian significance.
I mean, the kids aren't going to dress up like devils or whatever, but it's just a fun... And it's really modern Halloween.
It's just a commercial invention.
It doesn't have roots any deeper than that.
I'm with Matt on this.
I like Halloween.
It's fun.
I can't believe I'm the fundamentalist Christian on this.
You are.
You are.
We haven't done it.
It's coming to now.
We haven't done it.
You get candy, so... And you get candy, which is... And the parents get to eat the candy.
But they put razors in the candy.
That's what I always heard, they put razors in the candy.
I've never once had a razor in my candy.
I did that to my kids, but most people don't do that.
Not to the neighborhood.
My kids very much believe that there are bad guys out there that might poison candy.
That's why daddy had to check.
By eating the candy.
Sacrificially check the candy to make sure it's not poisoned.
You're a good man.
I want mini, like, Jeremy's chocolates, but I want to launch my own Jeremy's chocolate.
Candace, it's okay to be white chocolate.
It just feels appropriate for Halloween.
And they would sell out at the Daily Wire, and I'd like to pitch this live.
Ben?
Ben?
Put it in the hopper.
Put it in the hopper.
We'll get back to you.
Thank you.
Okay.
Just throwing it out there live.
Candace says it's okay to be white chocolate.
We'll just go crazy.
My original white chocolate proposal was the Rachel Dolezal.
Yeah, yeah!
That's the best idea the Daily Wire has had.
In quite a while.
Just trying to, you know, sell out some chocolate here, guys.
This is a question for the panel.
My brother has come out as a trans woman.
My family fully supports his decision and I seem to be the only person that seems to disagree with it.
I'm stuck between submitting and supporting him and getting shunned for being transphobic.
Any thought would help?
Thanks.
Matt Walsh.
laughs Well, you know, I think we all, I mean, this is probably the number one question I get when I'm out doing college talks, is a version of this question.
What do I do?
Such and such family members come out as trans, what do I do?
And I mean, the answer is that, unfortunately, there's not any easy, like, I can't give you, I don't think anyone can give you a three-step process that you can follow and everything will be fine.
The answer is just, it's just going to be difficult.
But for you, there's just, there's no option of going along with it.
You absolutely do not submit to it.
And all you can do, so you're not going to submit, you're going to stand, With the truth.
It doesn't mean that you are being aggressive or necessarily even confrontational, but you're not going to go along with this delusion.
Your brother is a male, and you're going to stand by that.
And all you can do is have faith, and I think it will work out this way.
Oftentimes it does.
Where in the short term, he's not going to want to be around you.
He's going to want to disown you as a sibling.
That is the case.
But down the line, you might plant some seeds, and down the line, Quite possibly, he will realize that not only were you right, but you were the only person in the family who really loved him in any way that mattered.
Yeah, so you know, I actually had, I was walking around Tennessee the other day, and a gal came up to me, we were chatting, and she watches the show, and she was with some liberal people, and then as we're talking, she goes, hey, before I left, she goes, by the way, can you tell Matt that his movie really helped me because my sister is and I said, "Oh, I'm sorry, that's very difficult." And she goes, "Yeah, I mean, she's like had the mastectomy.
Like, she's pretty far along in this." And I could tell this gal didn't, you know, she was surrounded by liberal people.
She didn't know what to do.
And so she was standing for truth as best she could, but she really felt the pressure.
And your movie, apparently, shaped her view on how she can handle this kind of thing.
Honestly, the counter-message to what you're saying is one of the worst messages in our society, which is that love means unconditional support for any decision that a person makes, no matter how damaging to themselves or others.
That is not what love is.
I mean, when the Bible says don't place a stumbling block in front of a blind person, this is what it is talking about.
Yes.
This is literally what it is talking about.
You are not allowed, you are biblically forbidden, and you should be morally forbidden from somebody who's doing something wrong, humoring them, going along with it, because if you truly love that person, you have to let them know that what they are doing is a mistake for them, it's a mistake for the family, it has extra, and it's so hard, it's so bad, it really is.
But, as Matt says, there is no other choice, because if you surrender to that, that's not, Love that's just acquiescence.
There are ways and ways of doing this.
One of the things is very disturbing on the right is that the choice is between accepting what somebody's doing and condemning them.
Throwing them off a rooftop.
Burning them at the stake.
There are plenty of ways to turn to somebody and say, listen, I love you.
I'm always here for you.
I'll always talk to you.
I'm just telling you where I stand on this.
And anytime you need me, I'm here.
And that's a different thing.
Also, by the way, I mean, listen to any detransitioner, Chloe Cole or any detransitioner that's spoken out about this, and they'll all say the same thing about, I mean, they feel deeply betrayed and used by the medical industry and by therapists and counselors and all these, I mean, all these systems and institutions that have abused them, but they also deal with, you know, they also look back at their family members and they think, like, why didn't you, why did you go along with this?
Why didn't you stop me?
This is a question for Ben.
Ben, any updates as to how Pendragon is going and when Jeremy is coming back?
So, Jeremy will be there forever.
And he will force me purgatory-like to come to this set, despite the fact that he started this show mainly so that he could be part of a show with all of us.
Come to this set, the backstage set.
This specific backstage set.
I'll be doing that for the next 20 years while Jeremy is... In Hungary.
No, the reality is I spoke with Jeremy today, and it's apparently going great.
He was shooting a battle scene, which sounds...
Yeah.
Awesome.
I know that you actually visited the set.
It's a better question for you than it is for me.
So I was over in Budapest, but it was before... So I saw Jeremy, obviously, but it was before they started shooting.
I've seen on an iPhone, you know, I've seen some of the... It's out of this world.
I had no idea.
I mean, I am... They built like an entire village.
Yes, they're going to have to start selling furniture from this set and all of it just to start funding what's going on over there.
It is...
The scale of this cannot really be overstated.
This is not the ordinary film.
So it's very cool and yes, he's going to be over there forever and that's too bad.
I hope I get to see him again at some point.
This is a question for me.
Catholics believe that once married you can't be unmarried.
What if the marriage was not done by the church?
Let's say that a man gets married outside of the church, and then gets a divorce.
Is it okay for him to get remarried inside of the church?
I am not a priest, so this is actually not an answer, a question for me.
There is a process for this in the Catholic Church, which is called annulment.
And people think annulment is just the Catholic loophole around divorce, because the Catholics say, no divorce, punto e basta, sorry, it's over, not going to happen.
And the question of annulment is, was your marriage valid in the first place?
Which is kind of what you're getting at.
And I don't have the answer to that, because I need a lot of the specifics.
So this is why there's an investigation.
It's actually kind of difficult to get an annulment.
What happens after a marriage?
You can say, well, my husband's a big jerk, and he cheated on me, and that doesn't matter.
I mean, it's bad.
It's horrible.
It obviously matters in your marriage.
But that wouldn't determine whether or not your marriage was valid at the time.
So what you would do, and this is not really The sort of thing that in our individualist society we like to hear is, you would go to the church and you would have the relevant authorities investigate this.
And a lot of times there are issues with how marriages were done, but if not, you're stuck, man.
Sorry to tell you, but you've got to work on your marriage.
And if people took that more seriously, maybe the divorce rate would be a little bit lower.
How's that?
Question for all.
I want to get married, but I haven't found anyone.
I'm so scared of dating apps after a friend got kidnapped from one.
Well, yeah.
Go on.
I'm 20 and getting old for my culture, family, and faith.
20?
Yeah, are you like a Wahhabi?
How do I find conservative Christians?
I'm in college.
I'm active in my community.
I need a guy like you guys.
What do I do?
Well, I'm taken, baby, so sorry, not gonna work.
You know, but I'm hearing this a lot from young women of, you know, who are of good standing and actually cling to conservative values, that guys aren't stepping up.
Well, that makes perfect sense.
Why would guys step up?
They have a free field of sex available whenever they want, in any place, from any woman, basically.
What is the actual... Well, also, the consequences... I agree with you.
The thing that we're picking on with that lady is that she's promulgating that as a standard.
Yeah, that's one element, and then also the consequences of the Me Too movement, which I was just talking about yesterday, is men are scared to even approach a woman and ask her on a date, to compliment her, tell her that she's beautiful.
These natural things that were happening between men and women have now been cast as perverse.
The perverse stuff is not It's considered perverse.
Being naked online is totally fine, but then a man just being allowed to go up to a girl and say, you look beautiful, or talk to her, and women are suffering because they're like, why aren't men stepping up to the plate?
Well, because they're terrified.
They're terrified because they hold the door, and a feminist screams at them and says, I can do it all by myself, and you're saying that about me all week.
It used to happen to me all the time.
I never cared.
Exactly.
A cultural sickness.
Or if they try to initiate, you know, if they try to flirt with a woman or something, they're afraid.
If I could just to give some practical advice well, I'm not really equipped to give practical advice I haven't been on the dating scene in over a decade, but she brought up the dating apps, and I think that A lot of these dating apps, from the little I know about them, many of these dating apps, probably most of them, are pretty bad because they're really just hookup apps and the people that use them aren't interested in having relationships.
But if you can find, I think there are still some apps and sites out there, dating sites, where people tend to go there because they're interested in actually having a relationship and they are.
Really, even if they don't put it this way, it's more of a courtship site.
And so I think that's a very practical tool that people these days should use.
And really, I think for a lot of people, they're like, if I don't have that, if I don't have the app or the website, then how am I supposed to move?
The other thing is you do have to make friends.
If you're a single person, you do have to make friends with people who are married.
Because if you ask a group of married friends, if they have somebody for you, very often they will have someone.
Traditional matchmaking.
Go backwards.
This is how it happens in our community.
And they love doing it.
Honestly.
No, I know.
In the Orthodox community, the way that it happens is basically you have a single person and you invite them over for Shabbat with a bunch of other people, and the person will say, I'm single.
And literally the first question all the married couples ask is, okay, what are you looking for?
Like, we'll immediately start what we call the shidduch conversation, right?
We'll start talking with them, what they're looking for, and then we all start like racking our memories for like, okay, who's still available?
What does that mean, though?
What conversation?
It's called shidduch.
It's a shidduchim.
That's like the Hebrew term for fix-ups.
So you start having the shidduch conversation.
This is stuff that, like, I don't know a couple that hasn't fixed up other couples in the Jewish community.
Especially, yeah, I remember the woman I introduced you to that I used to nanny for.
It was Orthodox Jewish family in New York, and they were all like, I love you.
But anyways, she was a matchmaker.
Yeah.
Yeah, she was a matchmaker.
And it works.
It actually works.
100%.
I mean, if you watch it, so I rarely recommend shows on Netflix, but I did do a YouTube video about a show called Jewish Matchmaking, which is on Netflix.
And the lady who does it is what they call a Shadchan.
She's a full-time matchmaker, and it's an Orthodox lady.
So what she says is actually pretty good advice.
I mean, she's actually having people date for values.
She tells them that they really should stay chaste, that they should try to actually get to know one another and determine whether they're into something maritally related.
But the broader question is, I see this in my community, I don't know if you guys see this also, there is a wild imbalance between the number of girls who want to get married, which actually in our community is larger, the number of guys, because there's an age gap also.
So what's happening is that guys can marry up to the time like they're 30, but girls by the time in our community, they're like 25, are already starting to get on like you're on the older scale of getting married in our community.
And that's a real problem.
And so the only way to fix that is by going back to, I know old-fashioned words here, chastity.
It's the only way to make it go back.
Because, again, the old bargain was that, yes, you would have sex within the confines of marriage.
And it was a real draw, you know, it was a real selling point.
It was like, if you would like access to this thing that will give you extraordinary bliss and pleasure and also comes along with a family, then you're gonna have to get married for it.
And then women were like, what if we just have sex randomly?
And guys were like, okay, sounds amazing!
And then women were like, well, but where did all of you go?
Why exactly, where did all the men go?
To the lady next door!
Sure, that's where all the men went.
This is, you know, sometimes people will, before dating apps, they would go to bars, or they'd go to whatever, you know.
That was my life.
Join the softball league or something, I don't know.
Probably not going to find a lot of men in the softball league.
But that's fine, you can meet people there.
However, my friends who I've kind of helped guide to different little romances and things, it's not when you go to a common interest group, it's when you go to a common values group.
Correct.
And it could be political, it could be religious is better, but that's going to be much, much more effective because the guy you see at the bar, maybe he's a good guy, but you just have no way of knowing that.
The guy you go to the sports league with.
You're never going to meet the girl you want at the bar.
Yeah, it's rare, it's rare.
Not to sound like a self-help book, but you know, There's some basic things here, like you have to work on yourself.
That's the only thing you have direct control over right now.
If you're single and you want to meet someone, you have direct control.
You can't force anyone to be interested in you, but the only thing you can directly control is yourself.
Very often when I talk to single people, whether men or women, And they have complaints like this, and even, you know, not to be rude, but even just, like, looking at them, I can think, well, there are some things you could dress better, you can go to the gym, you can work out, you can work on your appearance.
Things like appearance that really does matter.
That's what's going to initially draw you to someone and draw people to you.
So, like, basic things like that, and I think... And also to be virtuous.
I was going to say, where are you?
Where in location?
Are you in a church?
Are you in a temple?
Are you in the places where you're going to meet the guy or the girl who's doing the same things that you're doing?
Because if you're doing, listen, back in my, I was an atheist for 10 years, you know, some of my single days, I was, did a little blow.
Did you?
Now listen here, I ate some dogs and did some blow and hung out with Larry St.
Clair.
Like I did, I wasn't like going down the Obama path, but I, you know, when I was, I'd hope not.
Either in my mind or in real life.
With him, maybe it was both.
But when I would date gals back in my single days, I was kind of a degenerate.
I was kind of a derelict.
I was not at the appropriate degree of virtue to which I could even expect to, other than through solely unmerited grace, to end up with a virtuous lady like sweet little Alisa.
You can work on yourself in that way, too, to be the kind of person who is even remotely deserving of the kind of woman you want to marry.
Yeah, but it's more important to just be hot.
And be hot.
And look smack.
You gotta look smack.
I feel bad because I feel like I have a marriage, an exemplary marriage.
I can tell people about being married, but we did everything wrong.
You know, I picked my wife up hitchhiking, you know.
Every single thing wrong.
Why'd you get in the car?
That's the crazy part.
Not you.
Her.
What in the world?
Well, it's still her.
I don't understand it.
But still, I don't know how to meet people.
Because I did everything wrong.
Hitchhiking.
Hitchhiking.
That's the way to do it.
That's the answer to your question.
Hitchhiking.
Stand out, get that thumb ready to go.
Works every time.
This is a question for everyone.
Thoughts about evolution?
I think that other animals probably evolved, but I have a hard time believing that animals without human souls birth a human with a human soul.
So let's see how lib everybody is here.
Do you all believe in that Darwinian nonsense?
Yes.
I mean, like, in which sense?
That's a good question.
Because there are a bunch of sort of versions of Darwin that are competing with one another.
The classical Darwinian sense is not correct.
There is no smooth scale of evolution where over time...
Punctuated equilibrium is the way that evolution really works, where there's sort of like random explosions that you can't really explain as to evolution, where it's basically stable for a long time, then bam, all of a sudden, huge variety of new species.
And then it kind of winnows, and then bam, huge variety of new species and great advances.
And, you know, to me, like, one of the things that Stephen Meyer talks about this a lot is that there's all this DNA that's kind of pre-existing the explosion, and then the explosion happens and suddenly it gets activated.
And so you wonder, why is all that stuff there in the first?
Like, God can use whatever mechanism he wants to make a human being.
I'm always confused by this idea that God must have, the only way this would have happened is if God was like a, you know, was a potter and he just went and he like made clay and that's how he did it.
Like, no, maybe that's how you would do it, but God can do it however he damn well pleases.
And as far as when the soul adheres, the answer would be when the soul adheres.
I mean, I don't have like a straight answer.
That's sort of what C.S. Lewis said, was that there was some, maybe there was some kind of animal thing, but at a certain point, God touched some baboon and that baboon became Adam and he had a short soul.
That's why I've never quite seen this as a great spiritual problem like a lot of people do, I think.
I mean, to Ben's point, we know that God could create however He wants to create.
We already know that God creates gradually.
That's how He chooses to do it.
That's how He creates every individual person.
Every person starts, you know, in the womb as a microscopic human being, and then grows from there.
Initially, it's unrecognizable as a human, becomes more recognizable over time, but is always a human.
So, we know that God creates gradually, and we also know that I mean, what is evolution?
It's just genetic traits inherited over time and small changes over time that build.
We know this kind of thing happens, and we've observed it even through the course of human civilization.
You can look at, like, not human... Well, we could look at, you know, a dog, domesticated dogs.
Every dog is descended from wolves, and we know this, you know.
And so, you know, the golden retriever is, if you go back far enough, a great, great, you know, times a hundred grandfather.
It might be a little tougher.
The key issue is randomness.
know that we've actually seen this, we've observed this in human civilization happening.
So it doesn't challenge my faith at all.
It might be a little tougher.
The key issue is randomness.
This is the stupid part of evolution because the randomness or order of a system is outside the system.
So if you're inside the system, you can't tell whether it's random or ordered except You can deduce it.
And the idea that this is random is absurd.
And all of the arguments for atheism from evolution are about the randomness, they're not about the evolution.
That's a good point.
And it is not, you know, we are not in a random universe.
I mean, the larger question for me, I definitely believe in evolution, but the larger question for me is, like, devolving.
Which I think is actually happening right now.
I'm watching people that are going back to Homo sapiens and Australopithecuses screaming in the streets and acting like bamboos.
I'm actually terrified of devolving.
I think I might be the most Darwin skeptical then, perhaps.
There's a good essay by David Galerter, who's a genius polymath, who put it in the Claremont Review of Books, and he said, it's called Giving Up Darwin.
And he did it, he's a mathematician, and he just now finds Darwin to be mathematically untenable.
There wasn't enough time.
It's a really interesting article.
And it's a good article, and it's based on another book by David Berlinski called The Deniable Darwin, I think it's called.
And what David Galerger says is, look, I find evolution to be a beautiful theory.
It pains me to give it up, actually.
And I don't blame Darwin, because there have just been advances in mathematics that we have now that Darwin wouldn't have had available to him.
Directed evolution, though.
Directed evolution, or even the kind of resuscitation of Lamarck, who had his own version of evolution, and then it kind of went away for a while, and then it's come back through epigenetics and the notion of inherited acquired traits through life.
I basically don't care about evolution.
If I found out tomorrow that it's all completely bunk, I wouldn't be surprised at all, and I wouldn't care.
The one part I think that is, and if I found out it were true, like, I guess it would be fine.
The one part that I think is spiritually significant is something that Pope Pius XII insisted on in Humani Genares, which is we have to be descended from a common ancestor.
We human beings have to be descended from a literal Adam and a literal Eve, whatever their names were, wherever they were, however they looked.
Because if that is not the case, then things like human solidarity, then things like, well, then so many aspects that go along with political life and that have theological bases.
Those kind of go away, as do issues of original sin and salvation history.
And so I do kind of stick on that point of monogenism.
It's become increasingly accepted, though.
A lot of scientists Also, far from it, and far from it, me, to, you know, contradict the Catholicism, but I will stand with Aquinas, which is, you know, if science and the Bible contradict, one of them is wrong.
You're interpreting one of them wrong.
And so, the basic, like, if I found out tomorrow that actually humanity had evolved separately, but the same, in multiple different places at the same time, and then crossed streams at some point, Would that significantly bother me?
No, because the sin that exists in every human heart existed in all those human hearts whenever those human hearts were created.
And I certainly wouldn't suck the truth of the depth out of Genesis, which is probably the deepest.
But wouldn't it, at the very least, complicate the choice of that.
In Adam, we all sinned.
Well, I mean, but that depends on how you're reading the Adam and Eve story.
So you read that absolutely literally, that there was one man and one woman, and they were in a garden, and then they ate a piece of fruit, and then God cast them out of this garden for which a location is given, and all of this, then sure.
But if you read it the way that I think it is meant to be read, which is the greatest piece of literature in human history, Yes.
And which is meant to embed the most fundamental messages in all of human history.
The first several chapters of Genesis are like the most fundamental stuff ever written by anybody ever, because God wrote them.
And so what that means is that like, by the way, I read Cain and Abel the same way.
I read the stories of Noah the same way.
But Adam can be a genre of thing.
But if there were lots of Adam and Eve stories, right?
I mean, there's chapter one and chapter two.
They're not the same.
But if there were lots of different Adams who all just coincidentally happened to sin, does that... No, that's buried in human nature.
The story of Adam and Eve is that human beings attempt to supplant their logic for God's logic and are kicked out of the garden because of it.
And every human being recapitulates that journey throughout the course of their life.
Did Adam and Eve not have the ability to obey God and not to disobey God?
They had the ability to obey God, but the temptation of every human is to supplant his own logic for God's logic, which is why no one ends up in the garden.
Because in the end, human beings are fundamentally, without an act of complete faith, human beings are fundamentally incapable of identifying completely with God's will because God's non-existent.
But Adam was able to before he sinned, wasn't he?
I mean, that's the Christian understanding.
Without asking questions, but then he starts asking questions and pretty soon It's entirely possible that there was an Adam and Eve, but if there wasn't, the Bible is still... This is what I'm saying.
I'm not going to take the risky position of, I know exactly how everything went down.
The one thing I do know is that the Bible remains true no matter how it went down.
It remains so incredibly true.
Well, on that cliffhanger, on the cliffhanger of the origin of... We did get a chance to talk about Oh, what topic did you want?
I think that's it, guys.
Too bad.
But we'll be sure to get to it next time.
And we'll sit around here talking about it after.
We will.
Can't wait to do it.
Thank you so much for tuning in to Daily Wire backstage.
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