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Feb. 14, 2024 - The Michael Knowles Show
02:07:49
Daily Wire Backstage: Red Pillers are Wrong. Marriage is Good.
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Hey, Michael Knowles here.
The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage, Red Pillers are Wrong, Marriage is Good, is available now.
Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klaven, Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, and finally, Jeremy the God King Boring, for his glorious return.
Enjoy as we discuss everything from the world's number one rapper, to the Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce romance of the ages, to why the red pill movement is wrong about marriage.
Take a listen.
Welcome to The Daily Wire backstage.
I'm Jeremy Boring, joined by Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, Andrew Clavin, and Candace Owens.
I'm your host, you may not remember me, I've been gone.
It's actually been one year, I think, since the last time that I got to do a Backstage in my absence.
They tried it a few times with the God Prince, Michael Knowles.
You can't keep that.
He's your son.
I regret saying it.
It didn't go well, so they just canceled the whole damn thing until I got to come back.
We're gonna do things a little bit different, and by a little bit different, I mean kind of the way we used to do them.
I think when the show first got started, it was a really special part of what we did at The Daily Wire.
Part of what made The Daily Wire unique was that we could have these conversations once a month, and they Would cover whatever was on our minds.
Sometimes it was political, sometimes it was philosophical, sometimes we agreed, sometimes we disagreed.
And as the show grew, as the company grew, the show became more, a little bit more, I was a DJ and we were doing news, but you guys talk about the news every day.
I'm not saying we won't talk about the news, only that I want the occasion of us all coming together to maybe be something a little bit more befitting that occasion and have a little bit more of a long-form feel to it.
And so hopefully this will be a little bit more like the backstages of yore when Andrew Klaben was, well, already very, very old.
It was just me and Ben yelling at each other, as I remember.
I remember those days.
Let's change.
It was great, yeah.
Actually, the very first ones, you guys agreed all the time.
And then came the election of 2016.
And that's probably why we turned it into a new show.
Which we're redoing now, by the way.
The election of 2016.
We're just back in the election of 2016.
It's like being in hell.
It just keeps coming back again.
It's the Hotel California of election cycles.
We are going to take questions from our Daily Wire Plus members.
You can submit your questions and have them answered live on the air toward the end of the show.
Also, something we're doing a little bit different, instead of doing members block, we're going to keep the show live for everyone, but we're going to hear exclusively from our Daily Wire Plus members.
And, you know, a lot's happened since I was gone.
Obviously, my little daughter started using the potty.
Drew went to a once-a-week show.
Michael launched a cigar brand.
It smells delicious.
Matt will just continue to devolve into paranoid insanity about extraterrestrials occupying the earth.
Candace had a kid.
Like, lots of things have changed.
Ben never changes.
He's just Ben.
I mean, I am the number one rapper in America.
I was going out of my way not to say that.
I know you were.
I was going to let that just lie.
Dr. Dreidel, sitting right next to me.
It's over.
The magic is over, guys.
I am retired from my chosen career.
Today, today, Billboard put out that it was the number one rap, the number one selling rap song.
And R&B.
And R&B.
Two Billboard number ones.
Two Billboard number ones.
Because that is my chosen career that I've loved all my life.
And number 16 on the Hot 100, I think Legitimately, you owe as much to Tim Pool as... Oh, for sure.
...as to Tom McDonald.
I mean, it's been... Well, to be fair to Tom, I mean, Tom put the whole thing together.
But it's been Pool's dream from day one to see anyone on the right chart.
And I feel like he had his best week, even though it wasn't his song.
I had my worst week because Tim tried this a month ago with Smokey Mike and the God King song, and we did not chart.
Yet.
Yet.
Well, I mean, that's because you guys played actual music, whereas I talked into a camera briefly.
Yeah.
And, yeah.
It's a yarmulke homie, no cap.
It's a great line.
And the, you live with your parents, I make stacks on compound interest.
Okay, so here's the reality behind this particular story.
The compound interest line, I absolutely insisted on being in the song.
It's great.
I said, I'm not going to even be in this unless I get to drop compound.
Originally, my original lyric had EBITDA in there as well.
And Tom was like, no, it's too much.
Did you write your section?
I mean, is that your content?
It's a collab.
It's a collab.
So, I did write the content interest line.
The dog eats a yamaka homey no cap leaves Tom.
Really?
Yes.
That's a good line.
Which is a great line.
It's a good line.
Who came up with Dr. Dreidel?
Because I thought that was so funny.
I texted you to say how funny it was.
Walked out of my office and fell down a flight of stairs.
Absolutely.
I did.
You barely survived.
I barely survived, yeah.
That's the end take, this man.
You know, if you want to know what I look like falling down a flight of stairs, true, go on YouTube and type in, fell down a flight of stairs to his death, and an animation will come up showing exactly what I look like.
But that was right after I texted you, how funny I thought that was.
I mean, there were a bunch of them, right?
I mean, there was Jude Chris, Jude Chris, 2 Live 2.
Was Dr. Dre at all terrible quality memes?
It could have been.
It was not original to me.
Jukebox was good.
The one I take credit for was Meshug Night, which I felt was... That's pretty good actually.
Thank you.
It played a little softer, but there were a lot.
I will say, you stayed on beat.
Pretty well.
I was impressed.
You were auto-tuned.
There was no melody.
There's a beat.
There's a melody.
I just wasn't part of the melody.
That was part of what Tom was doing.
But, I mean, this is what my parents paid for 15 years of classical music training for, was that I wouldn't clap on one and three.
That was pretty much it.
And that was my entire shtick, was, can I talk to a beat?
And the answer is yes, because I can bow to a beat.
Slower than you talk in real life?
Much slower.
Can I suggest something?
I think the next challenge, what I would love to see, Play classical music and make that chart.
And I'm serious about it.
So I would love to do that.
I would love to do that.
Are there classical music charts?
There are.
This would actually be super easy to chart.
Make a classical music piece the number one billboard chart.
No, you make a classical music video.
On banjo.
It's time for a collab, Matt.
Bring out the banjo.
We'll do country.
We'll do bluegrass.
I think it could happen.
I think it could work.
I wrote a song with my best friend about this girl who we were both in love with in college called The Queen of 2D Town.
And the whole chorus has a very esoteric Steely Dan line about clapping on one and three, and no human on earth other than you would appreciate it.
Well, thank you for telling me.
I'm going to find it.
Yeah, I'm going to find it and send it to you.
I don't know.
I pretended I know what that means, but I don't.
Typically, in four-four time, there are four beats to a bar.
If you clap on two and four, that's the syncopated rhythm.
So typically, if you're listening to rap or jazz, you're going to get the two and the four, right?
That's one, two, three, four, right?
That's two and four.
If you clap on one and three, it sounds like this.
One, two, three, four, which is very square.
It sounds like classical music.
But if you play live music anywhere in America today, and you'll see this, after I tell you this, you'll witness this.
Every musician alive fights constantly with their audience, trying to get them to clap on two and four, because the natural thing for a human is to do the uncool thing and clap on one and three.
Anyone, doesn't matter the genre.
Whenever we see white people parodically dance, it's because they're clapping.
This is the introduction to The Jerk with Steve Martin.
Yes, that's exactly right.
Where he has to clap on one and three.
He has to clap on one and three.
He wanted esoterica to start the show.
Yeah, well I said it was going to be a different show.
This brings me to the next thing that I wanted to talk about, which is, this is a true thing that happened to me while I was overseas and hungry.
I discovered Taylor Swift.
And I discovered Taylor Swift on account of my young daughter discovered the movie Sing, which has the greatest soundtrack probably of any movie ever made, and these two little pigs sing Shake It Off.
And I thought, that is a...
That is a surprisingly catchy tune.
I wonder from whence it came, and I googled as much, and was led to this young artist named Taylor Swift, and I watched her music video, and by golly, I think she's going places.
You know, she, she, this is honest to goodness truth, I thought of Candace when I watched it because some people just have it.
The thing that can only be described as it.
And no one in this room, other than Candace, has it.
Candace has quite a healthy dose of it.
You've never heard me sing Shake It Off.
It's a different experience.
You had it.
I didn't say no, no.
I invented it.
It was just it back then, you gave it to him.
But I watched this video of Shake It Off, and I watched Taylor Swift, and of course I was familiar with Taylor Swift, but I legitimately even now couldn't name a single other of her songs, because I'm just at the exact wrong age to have cared about music at the time that she was making it.
But she is a genuine star.
You watch this video and you're like, my God, she absolutely oozes it.
And then this amazing thing, I come back to the country and she's taken over the NFL.
She's actually led to the largest ratings in the history of the Super Bowl.
You're part of the sci-op as well.
At what point did you realize she was constructed in Langley to subvert the American right?
She's a hologram being controlled by the George Soros laser or something.
The way that the right played the Taylor Swift phenomenon is one of the dumbest I've ever seen.
And the fact that, and other people have pointed this out, you know, you have that image of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, you know, the football player and the blonde woman hugging after the game.
The fact that some on the right have made that like a liberal coded image is the stupidest, unforced error I've ever seen.
And obviously, yeah, she's liberal.
Travis Kelce is kind of a tool.
He pushes the VAX.
I understand all of that, but the smarter thing to do is just to say, fine, yeah, we own her.
It's a heterosexual couple.
They're going to get married, probably.
I totally agree with this.
She might save civilization because a bunch of 30 year old lonely women who are wine drinking cat moms Are going to suddenly realize that marriage and children are good if she marries Travis Kelsey and has kids.
Also, even just the fact of she and Travis Kelsey, that's his name, right?
It is.
The fact of that he doesn't have it.
No.
And he didn't have any songs.
His brother has it.
Jason has it.
Have you seen Jason?
I think Jason drank it.
Nevertheless, they might be conservative.
This is the other sort of problem sometimes with how we talk about Everything on the right is that we we stick a pin in this exact moment But you know people get married and it does change them it changes their views getting married is an actual It has an actual civilizing effect.
If you look at the demographic numbers in any election, single women all vote left and married women tend to vote right.
So, you know, we might at least hope that in the act of them having this relationship, things come up.
When he opened the door for her to get into the limousine, he actually pushed the bodyguard aside and opened the door.
Women swooned.
I mean, it was amazing.
They were like, oh look, that's what I want.
There are two great Twitter accounts that explain this phenomenon.
Two, obviously I get all my modern philosophy from Twitter, and one, one of the great living modern philosophers, Edmund Smirk, whose avatar is a picture of Edmund Burke, but kind of like smiling with sunglasses, and he calls it Swiftian normality, which is what we want.
We want to not be freaks, we want Swiftian normality.
Pretty girl, dates the football player, they get married, they have kids, that's really good.
Another Twitter account, who I think, I think he's a Marxist, but maybe like a right-wing Marxist, I don't know, Logo Dedalus, he pointed out the reason why we're such freaks about this is because today the conservative party is the liberals, right?
The party that controls the institutions, the party that is now defending the NFL, for goodness sakes, it's all the liberals who are doing that.
The conservatives are the ones who are completely out of power.
We have nothing to do with the political establishment, the status quo.
So, oddly enough, now the conservatives are the revolutionary force in American politics, and as a consequence, sometimes we act like freaks when the pretty girl dates the football player.
And meanwhile, in the NFL, and I'm an NFL fan, so I'm a little bit biased, but This is another area where conservatives have a major unforced error.
Many of these football players are extremely conservative.
Yes, they are.
And very religious.
I mean, the things that they'll say, it's very common to have NFL stars, bona fide stars, stand up in the podium, you know, at the press conference after the game and say, you know, I want to begin by giving glory to Christ.
By the way, both starring QBs in the Super Bowl.
Both of them.
Yeah, I mean, they will give glory to God in these really intense, personal, powerful ways.
And rather than celebrating that and saying, wow, this is incredible, we have to find a problem with it.
In fairness, it only worked out for one of them.
That's true.
God didn't want the other one to win.
If it was a cynical play, I'm— But it will be fascinating to see, honestly, if Taylor Swift does write a song about marriage and children.
Because that'll be the real break for her, right?
Because she's been writing Teenie Bopper stuff since she was like— Well, she keeps getting dumped by these— Yeah.
Or she's dumping them, right?
I mean, she's 35.
My big critique of Taylor Swift has been that she's 35, but every song sounds like she's 17.
Right?
That everyone was tweeting out the meme from High School Musical of like Zac Efron and the girl in High School Musical, whose name I can't remember, singing to each other.
And it's like, right, but that's High School Musical?
And she's the age of, like, my wife, who has four children.
Right.
Right?
And so it just shows how we've delayed marriage in the society to the point where, like, mid-30s marriage is now considered normal and healthy, as opposed to when mid-20s marriage was considered normal and healthy for women and even younger.
And so it will be fascinating to see how her audience reacts to if she gets married and has kids.
Yeah.
Her starting to sing songs not about kind of these teenage-y feelings of breaking up and first romance, but like a mature relationship with a human being that lasts longer than six months and results in children.
It actually could be a seriously powerful cultural, I hope that's the direction she moves. - Yeah, 'cause otherwise she turns into Madonna.
She's dressing like that for the rest of her life as she's falling apart, with just the costume is moving around the stage, yeah.
But I, I'm sorry, sorry. - I was just gonna say, I didn't want to burst anybody's bubble.
Is it all in hope?
We can dream, can't we?
She's Taylor Swift and he's Travis Kelce.
I mean, that's why they're not getting married.
She only has relationships.
I mean, she was just dating a guy five minutes ago, Matt Healy, and she said she had never been happier in her life.
And then she dumped him after.
But that guy was a total cock, wasn't he?
Because her fans didn't like him, she dumped him.
And now she's back into this other, like... Obviously, Taylor Swift is crazy.
I mean, I just want to like... Obviously, the problem is not the guys.
She's a baby in a pop song.
Well played.
But I mean obviously if you've seen what she's even done in business and how she tries to manipulate her audiences like to get out of like deals and contracts like she's totally insane like she's the most toxic feminist that's ever existed and what she does is basically the threat is that if she doesn't get what she wants she writes a song about a guy and then has 15 million girls singing the songs and drops little clues they know who it's about I mean it's totally psychotic.
I don't think you appreciate how psychotic that is, that you can't date her for two weeks without her writing a song about you.
I mean, what she did to John Mayer as well, it was like, I literally did nothing to her.
Like, we went on one date, and I didn't deserve this.
And then there's a bunch of, like, 10-year-old girls whose brains are not developed who then go and attack whoever it is.
Like, Scooter Braun's family, his young kids, literally had to go into hiding and get security because Taylor Swift wanted out of the deal that he legally purchased her catalog of music.
And she wrote this, you have to go find it on Tumblr, this like glorious rephrasing of basically like, my dad signed a contract, a legally binding contract for me when I was 15.
He now has the catalog because he purchased it.
And she was just like, you know, as a woman, I sat on the floor and I wrote these songs.
And then they tried to kill Scooter Braun's family.
And he did nothing wrong.
And he only had it for like six months before he let somebody else purchase it, but like she hated Scooter Braun.
This is a room full of Swifties you're talking about.
No guys, I'm sorry, like I just like obviously she's not getting married.
And Travis Kelce, Travis Kelce has exclusively only dated black girls.
He had a whole show only dating black girls.
This is not even his type.
He just realized that this is like a good business move for him and it is.
It's a genius business move for him.
But this is gonna be one album and then it's over.
I totally agree with her.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be depressing about it, but it's one album, and he's not going from black girls to Taylor Swift.
It's a scientific fact.
We have to pull up the articles.
We will.
The science has been done.
Trust the science.
You don't go back.
I basically agree with everything you're saying about Taylor Swift.
She is awful.
I think calling her the most toxic feminist ever is quite a statement.
Well, that's a high one.
Toxic feminism is when you use being, it's like Kesha, Taylor Swift, they've been doing this.
It's a new breed of feminism.
She's a new breed.
Yeah, I agree.
I'm writing an entire book on this.
It's like the Lena Dunham School of Thought.
She literally said, Lena Dunham taught me feminism, which basically means that you can get whatever you want so long as you're able to sell to people that you're a victim because you're a woman.
And she has done it to the tune of a billion dollars.
I agree.
Like, she re-recorded her catalogue and resold the same album because Scooter Braun legally purchased her catalogue.
Her dad was sitting on the board of the company and she said, I didn't know it was getting sold.
You didn't know it was getting sold?
Your dad is sitting on the board of the company.
What are you talking about?
But eight-year-old girls don't understand business.
So they then just tried to kill Scooter Braun.
You don't think she's going a little baby crazy, though?
No, no, her ovaries are going crazy.
She wants a baby.
She might get a baby.
Was Healy the one who made her like a permanent girlfriend?
Was Healy the one where they dated for like five years or something?
Who?
No, no, no.
Healy was the one.
The six years one was the London guy who didn't want any press.
That's the one I'm thinking of.
Then she had a relationship right after that and she burned the guy that she was with for six years.
She burned him, then dated Matt Healy, but then her fans freaked out because Matt Healy is kind of based.
And like he made fun of Ice Spice and her fans were like, this is racist.
Okay, then I rescind calling him a cuck.
Is that why Ice Spice was next to her?
Yes, because Taylor Swift fucked her like a psycho to do a PR move.
That's a psychotic PR move.
I have to say that's the only thing that made Taylor Swift even palatable to me at the Super Bowl was the fact that Ice Spice was next to her because Ice Spice not knowing what football was and being lectured by Taylor Swift and then celebrating as though she like totally knew what football was by the end of the game.
It was, it was entertaining to me just in that sense because the only person more inauthentic than Taylor Swift in that box might have been Ice Spice.
Yeah.
But I, this is like, I didn't know enough about Taylor Swift.
I gotta admit.
That's something racist.
Her fans freaked out when they said it was racist.
He was just joking on a podcast.
He's kind of really into like the topic of masculinity and he's actually quite interesting even though he dated Taylor Swift.
But her fans dug up old stuff and said he's a racist.
And it also turns out that he was watching, like, really gross black porn.
And her fans dig this up.
And then Ice Spice, they were like, how could you let him say this about Ice Spice?
So Taylor Swift just, like, went and plucked Ice Spice up as a friend and took her to the Super Bowl.
Like, that's totally psychotic.
Can I ask you this?
I gotta get the question.
We're all being informed.
I didn't realize, so you're the Taylor Swift biographer.
I didn't realize that.
So she is awful, total agreement.
And Travis Kelce is a total tool.
And I despise him and the Kansas City Chiefs in general.
But hold on, do you agree that as a political strategy...
You agree that it's a bad political strategy for the right to go after her and try to demonize her.
Best strategy is either to just ignore her, or say, OK, she's going to get married.
Great.
Fantastic.
Not a problem.
I have no problem with that.
But I just want to also let you know, they're not getting married.
I agree with you.
I'm also right.
You're also right.
Here's the thing.
You guys don't know this, but this is absolutely true.
I had a brief sojourn in the music business.
When you dated Taylor Swift.
I'm the only man who has not dated Taylor Swift, I believe.
And it was proverbial that female pop singers were insane.
I mean, it was like, you know, people would say, oh, he's crazy as a female pop singer.
They're all like this.
But I don't really think it matters, because the NFL is just a big image that you see, and you see it for today.
And nobody's going to remember the whole thing.
It's just, we should have played the image.
Do we accredit to Taylor Swift the unbelievable ratings, or do we give that win to the fact that they very deliberately tried to make it less political?
I'll tell you what that is.
That's 100% gambling.
Yes.
And that's just the fact.
The reason why the NFL, well, people love football.
It's an American sport.
But why are the ratings 7% up?
Because of gambling.
They recently legalized sports gambling.
You can do it online.
Lost more money than I will admit to on air this season.
But that's what it is.
It's because of sports gambling.
You can gamble on every single aspect of the game.
There was one other thing, which is that there was an artificial dip in the NFL ratings because of all the woke crap.
So because of all the woke crap, a bunch of people, including me.
So you think it's just this?
Yeah, yeah.
So there was this U-shape, and then it jumped back up.
And then, yeah, Taylor has something to do with it in the sense that, like, my wife, who doesn't care at all about this stuff, and she doesn't even care about Taylor Swift, but she's like, why is everyone talking about Taylor Swift?
Even, like, if I'd been watching the Super Bowl and Taylor Swift was not part of it, she would have walked by and never looked at the TV.
In fairness— And here she kind of randomly looked at the TV.
I hosted a Super Bowl party this year in my house, and in years past, it's hard to keep the wives engaged.
And this year, the wives all stayed up there and were watching the game with us.
And I asked at one point, is this because of Taylor Swift?
And one of the wives informed me that no, it was because of Usher.
That's a true story.
That performance, not good.
Alicia Keys was worse.
Alicia Keys was like a capping run over by a cement mixer.
My goodness, that was bad.
They fixed it, do you know this?
They did.
He sounded like a 45-year-old man trying to dance and sing at the same time, which is what he is.
But he can roller skate.
Again, this is another place where I think that we reject culture too fast.
I was shocked by what, that guy freaking dances like Michael Jackson.
He's 45 years old.
He's a good dancer.
And it was amazing.
I thought so too.
I didn't watch one minute of the Super Bowl.
What?
No, I just want to be honest.
Why are the one who cares about the culture the most?
No, I already know what's gonna happen with Taylor Swift, so I didn't need to watch the Super Bowl.
And you knew he wouldn't propose.
I did watch the first minute of Usher's performance, and I was like, yeah, these are all old hits, so I'm glad that he did that, and there was nothing, there was no satanic meaning.
So for me, a win at the halftime performance is no satanic meaning, no political message, and not too many ass cheeks.
Did you not watch and stand, though, for the Black National Anthem?
I did watch the Black National Anthem the next day, because I just can't believe we're still doing this.
By the way, I think it's, I'm not joking, I think it is now the Negro National Anthem.
No, yeah, according to a Tennessee congressman, he just went out there and tweeted in defense.
He was like, why is no one standing for the Negro?
And I was like, oh, we're really going back.
Okay, black people are Negroes again.
Awesome.
It's happening.
I just didn't understand anything that was going on during the halftime show, to be honest with you.
Oh, no, I didn't either.
I didn't understand, like, suddenly, he was wearing, like, three layers, and then suddenly, like, the middle layer was Mithril.
And then all of a sudden he was bare-chested and dancing like Terry Crews.
Hey, if you look like that bare-chested at 45 years old on roller skates, I'm just saying.
I've never listened to a single note.
I can name one Taylor Swift song and zero Usher songs.
And I still thought.
He deserves it.
I thought when they said it was Usher, I thought it was going to be the guy who dusts off your seat before you sat down.
I was also wondering, like, I do admire that Lil Jon showed up, and he is famous for saying four words.
That is literally his entire career.
Turn down for what?
And he said them.
He did.
He yelled them extremely loud, and people went crazy because they love turning down.
And where were you?
Imagine if, though, imagine if you're... They didn't even let me sit at the Grammys.
They didn't even let us at the Grammys.
By the way, we tried hard to get on the Grammys, right?
Oh, absolutely.
Are you kidding?
Were we going to give up that troll?
By the way, is Nicki Minaj a crypto-conservative?
They think that everybody on this show is a crypto fan of Nicki Minaj.
Have you ever followed the online chatter?
I'm an explicit fan.
I said that too.
I said I'm explicitly, we're explicitly team Nicki at the Daily Wire.
Against Megan, of course.
Against Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion.
Thee Stallion.
The problem is Thee.
That was really your best tweet.
It was truly the best Ben Shapiro tweet of all time.
I think it was the funniest thing I had ever seen on the Daily Wire.
I still laugh about it.
The tweet.
Are you talking about the song?
No, I was talking about his performance.
The tweet surpassed the song in every way.
So basically, as we were climbing the Billboard charts, and we were passing everybody, and Megan Thee Stallion, 2E's, was next in line.
And so I tweeted at Megan Thee Stallion, hey Megan, we're coming for thee.
That's Hall of Fame.
That's pretty good.
You think that's the best tweet of all time?
Yes, because why are there two evils?
Stop ruining everything!
Literally his job.
100%.
The access of evil.
I'll be honest.
So, all of this Taylor Swift isn't just in service of having a conversation about Culture.
He's going to go direct to Joe Biden dying in office.
I also want to talk about Joe Biden, who's probably going to die in office.
No, I want to talk about marriage.
Like, this is the big, you know, I think one of the great conversations we ever had on this panel was about marriage.
One of the ones that I got the most positive feedback about from people who felt like it really edified them.
But there's a real move on parts of the right to oppose marriage now.
It's run by the ostensible Red Pill crowd, which it's interesting how the meaning of Red Pill has evolved over the last five years to essentially now mean, I would say anti-woman.
They would say pro-man, but I think it's far beyond pro-man.
I think it's decidedly anti-woman in many ways.
And you see people who, I think some of them are bad actors who are peddling, but then you also see people like Pearly Things who, I don't know Pearl, I don't know if she's a bad actor or not.
I kind of get the sense that maybe she's just a naive person being kind of dragged along out of half desire to be famous and half probably hasn't read a book.
And half of that I can relate to.
And the other half you can also relate to.
But I do think it's this interesting question that is harder to talk about in one-on-one settings, it might be a fit this format.
Just to talk about what is the role of men and women, what is the role of marriage in a society that has essentially turned its back on the concept of marriage that is legally encoded, It's not anti-man, they've abolished difference.
They've abolished the difference between men.
The distinction itself.
You know, I just went on the Whatever podcast for my, I think it's now my like 28th hour on that show.
That was six hours.
After a three hour debate on the show.
That was a separate thing?
Yeah, I did nine hours, basically.
Nine hours?
Right, yeah.
But it was worth it.
How?
Why?
It was great.
It was great.
I really love that show.
I love it.
You got almost every question.
When I did it the first time... You couldn't pay me... If you paid me a million dollars, I wouldn't know.
No, I love it, because these poor girls, man.
The whole thing with that show, which is why it's so funny, is that you get... Hold on, I'll pay you $10,000.
You're really going to do it, aren't you?
No, the thing with that show that makes it very funny is guys go on and they make fun of these girls who have only fans, who are like 18 and don't know anything.
And then the guys completely destroy them, and then the girls look like dummies, and then the clip goes viral.
And I felt it would be wrong to do that.
I felt I might get a lot of views, but I might also burn in hell for eternity.
And I thought about it for a moment, and then I thought, no, OK, I won't do it.
And so I went on.
You also have a rule.
Never give the audience what they want.
Yeah, exactly.
I went on a great discourse about the Treaty of Augsburg actually.
So I go on there and I just felt it's not these girls' fault.
All of them have some weird family situation.
We live in a culture that teaches them a ton of lies.
They have no education.
Even if they went to good schools, they have no education.
So I felt, OK, let's just talk about what's really going on here.
And they're victims of feminism.
And the Red Pill guys are victims of feminism.
And the irony about the Red Pill guys, I sympathize with them in a lot of ways.
The family courts are totally stacked against dudes.
The culture promotes divorce and abolished the definition of marriage and blah, blah, blah.
But the Red Pill guys are feminists.
Their sense of men and women is basically... That's right.
It's just that men and women are interchangeable.
Yes.
And go around, screw around, you owe nothing to women.
If it's good for women, it's good for men.
And that's just a lie.
You know, the fundamental unit of society is actually not the individual.
Right.
I love individual rights.
It's good to be an individual.
The fundamental unit of society is the family.
It's men and women together who have a love that becomes so real that you make more people.
Well, to have an atom, you have to have a proton and an electron, right?
So it's like a man is a proton.
Very important, but essentially nothing until it's unified.
To have an atom, you need to have an Eve.
That's where I thought he was going.
That's where I thought he was going too.
I thought he was going to go for the Steve thing.
Not Steve.
Two protons an atom does not make.
I dare say.
I've always, with the red pill, you know, and I've been in many altercations with the red, I've run afoul of the red pill crowd many times talking about these issues.
And the question I've always had for them that they've never answered, and I'd love to hear an answer from any of them, is that, you know, because I agree with 95% of their criticisms, as you point out, the family courts and how it's stacked against men and so on and so forth.
What's the other option?
Like, okay, we agree with all that.
So then men should just be alone and give up on their bloodline and die?
And their bloodline is extinguished?
What you are suggesting is despair.
You are telling men that men are already feeling despair.
They're feeling meaninglessness.
They're feeling lost.
They're feeling alone.
They're feeling like everything's stacked against them.
And so your answer to them is, yeah, well, just be in despair and then die.
And my point is that that's just not an okay answer.
That can't be the answer.
And have lots and lots of sex.
Sterile sex.
Although not as much as a married man.
But this is what you were saying, is that that's how it turns to the anti-woman.
Because it's not about the despair.
The way that you find meaning is then by disparaging the people who have victimized you.
Right?
In any victim-victimizer sort of narrative, when there is no actual victim and victimizer and it has to be sort of put together artificially, then the person who self-perceives as the victim is very likely to then strike out at the person who they perceive as the victimizer.
And so for a lot of the red pill men who perceive the woman, the great woman, as the victimizer, the idea is that you lash out at women by having lots of sex with random girls and basically treating them like trash.
And it's okay because they said that it's okay with them, but that doesn't...
I've never understood the argument that it relieves you of responsibility for treating a woman well just because the woman has consented to be treated badly.
But he's right about the despair.
This is permeating the right.
It permeates the politics of the right.
The idea is basically it's all over.
They think of people basically, Ben, like you and me, as sitting on an ice floe, kind of floating out as the ice melts away because we're sitting around thinking about civil debate and, you know, Constitutional governance, and they think that's all over now.
And their despair permeates the right.
And I listen to a lot of these young guys, and they're talking about bringing back monarchy.
They're talking about, you know, yeah, the king... I know, you look... What?
I didn't say anything.
I didn't say anything.
Yeah, you know, but you had monarchy.
It's not that great, you know?
It actually isn't.
You know, if you think our elections are bad, well, you see the beheadings, you know?
Because that's how most of the king's men were killed.
Yeah, I know.
That's fine.
I'm not saying we need an imam or a sheikh, you know, or like a sultan.
I'm just, you know... Wait, am I missing this?
What does the Red Hill no marriage thing?
I feel like I'm pretty in there.
Oh yeah, no, it's a big deal.
Am I missing?
I feel like I totally missed this.
That's their whole position.
They think that marriage is a... What men are anti-marriage?
Well, yeah, that's the point.
They shouldn't be, you know, but it's... No, but he's right.
This is true.
All the guys that pop up on our Twitter feed... But tell me, I'm actually missing this.
I didn't know the marriage thing.
I'm very pro-marriage.
Pearl made that argument.
She made the argument men, literally, men should not get married.
Okay.
Because the institution... But are men listening to that?
Like, are men saying that men shouldn't get married, or is that a woman saying that a man shouldn't get married?
Well, Pearl, I think that there are examples of men saying it as well, but I think Pearl is sort of a prominent, one of the prominent voices.
A lot of the people I hear.
But she's not married.
No, no, no.
Yeah.
Okay.
So then that, I think that's first, that's a huge thing, right?
I mean, obviously it's like listening to people that don't have kids tell you why you shouldn't have kids.
Like it doesn't really work, right?
Because when you're telling them about what changes inside of you when you get married, and I think it's very easy to gravitate towards that.
That is a feminist message, not to get married.
And if her argument is, if your quarrel is with the courts, I could agree with you.
Like, you know, the courts have done tons of things that are awful.
I don't even agree necessarily with the courts taking marriage at all.
It was a church thing and they took it.
And this is how we ended up with gay marriage rights, which I'm very much opposed to.
Well, I would say that a big part of the red pill thing that we would all probably agree with is they diagnose...
actual problems.
When Pearl or other people in the movement come along and say, "This is a major problem in society," I almost always agree with them.
It's when they get to the prescription that I think that it falls apart.
The prescription being lashing out at women generally or embracing despair or a kind of nihilism.
That's a feminist message.
Fundamentally, to be anti-family, I don't understand how you could identify as a conservative at all.
Because everything that the left is trying to do, every Marxist principle, every feminist principle, is about disrupting the family unit.
It's what connects everything, from the climate change lobby, to don't have kids, the planet's going to die, to feminism, be like men, we should be like men, it's all a disruption of the family unit.
If you are now arguing in favor of something that's fundamentally Marxist, then you have to examine whether or not you're conservative at all.
That would be my pushback on that.
That's what we're trying to decide.
I haven't heard any men say that they're anti-feminist.
No, I have.
I don't want to give them press because they're all jerks to me online, but there are a handful of these guys, and the irony of it is they put themselves out there to be these big, virile, you know, pinnacles of masculinity, but their anthropology is fundamentally, for lack of a better word, Gay.
Their anthropology is fundamentally sterile.
And it's saying, yeah, we shouldn't get married, we shouldn't have kids, we should just have sterile relations with random women.
And so it's kind of had the irony that, you know, we end up at the topic that no one's allowed to name anymore that Matt made a movie about.
And, you know, people say, well, that's so crazy, you know, we should dial that back.
But that's just a consequence of the very same sexual revolution that has said for many decades now that men and women are exactly the same, which comes from feminism, right?
Fortune theory.
Totally, yeah.
I mean, it's, the logical conclusion of Gloria Steinem is these red pill bros and they don't even realize it.
Well, I'm erotically pro-marriage.
What I run into a lot, I mean, whether these people identify as red pill or not doesn't really matter.
When I talk about marriage on my show, and I promote it, and I talk about my own experiences with marriage, I hear all the time, I mean the comments are full of people who are conservative who are saying, well that's just your experience, that's a, you know, you got lucky, you have it easy, and you're trying to trick men into this deal that isn't going to work for them just because you happen to find a good woman And that's the kind of defeatist mentality I hear all the time.
All the time.
And what I want to say to these men is like, it's...
No, it's an easy way to dismiss it, but we're all married in this room, we're all happily married.
So we didn't get lucky.
You have to work at it every single day.
It's a choice that you make, and there's a lot of women out there who are looking to make that choice also.
So it's very easy to just kind of dismiss it.
To get back to Drew's point actually, so I'm going to back your point before you back your own.
So the real question is why that's arising on the right.
You understand why that revolutionary movement exists on the left.
I mean, can't have spelled it out.
It is fundamentally a Marxist movement that seeks to destroy the institution of marriage in order to level all of society so that you can build up, based on the ashes, some sort of weird scrap heap of new creation.
But the question is why that's happened on the right.
And this is where I agree with Drew, is that because the right, and this goes back even to some of the Taylor Swift points that you were making earlier about why the right is getting Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce wrong just imagistically.
I mean, I now agree with everything you said about the town soap opera.
But the reason that that's happening is because since every institution has now been fundamentally taken over by the left, or at least that's the belief of the right, if you extend that to every institution, that extends even to the most important institutions.
The right is looking and they're seeing every institution that we once relied upon wrested out of our control individually.
Including things like church, right?
Things that were very fundamental to our lives.
Rested out of our control and then militarized against us.
And so that's sort of the argument that the Red Pillars are making.
What they're saying is that the institution of marriage was rested out of our control and then perverted and used against us.
In the same way that they're arguing that about the government or arguing that about the church or arguing that about the universities or the press.
And the problem is that when it comes to marriage, because it's so personal and because in the end, there is no substitute for it, you can't just despair of the institutions and say build a giant alternative in the way any like you have to actually do the thing that conservatives really should be doing nearly all of these in all of these modes, which is seize control of the institutions back.
So what the big debate that's happening right now on the right is, can we do that with these institutions or you burn them to the ground?
And it differs institution by institution, right?
I think most of us in this room would say, like, the university system, go ahead and burn it to the ground.
Or the legacy media, go ahead and burn it to the ground.
But when it comes to the institution of marriage, you can't burn it down.
That's not something you can burn down.
Well, it's not an institution invented by man, for one thing.
Right, exactly.
And so, you actually have to... Well, you can burn it, but you burn civilization with it.
Exactly.
And so I think that what's happened is a broad category error that the right has made.
And being anti-institutionalist broadly, you're starting to see the most right-wing edges of the right-wing say, well, that includes all institutions.
And that's why you see the link between, hey, there's bad divorce law.
Maybe we just shouldn't get married or not participate in the institution of marriage.
It's fundamentally broken and it's dead.
The thing that the right, I think, needs to get back on board with is, no, many of these institutions, even if they seem like they're not savable, are so important that there is no ready alternative to them.
And so you actually have to seize back.
And marriage, specifically, are based on individuals.
What individuals do, that's what the institution will be.
And the thing is, when you live online, you're living in this fantasy world of loud voices and angry voices, and it's very easy to be overwhelmed by it.
It's very easy to think, I mean, I think this happens, probably has happened to all of us, where people are screaming at you online.
And you suddenly think everybody's angry at me.
And it's six guys with like a couple of bots that are just coming after you and they're the loudest thing and they're surrounding your head.
God, I want to get in the bot business.
Yeah, no, because you're stuck in this make-believe world of the internet.
And the thing is, you build institutions by doing things with the people in your community and with the people that you'll, you know.
In real life.
We're incarnate beings in time and space.
Yeah, it's the meat robots.
This is important.
Marriage in particular is a thing that you do, right?
Marriage...
We need to fix divorce laws.
Like, I think that we should start a non-profit think tank.
All of us should pitch in.
I know what you all get paid.
Start a think tank just aimed at addressing the horrible inequalities that exist in family law right now.
There's no question that, in particular, women are incentivized to leave their husbands.
If you got rid of default divorce, you would solve 72% of these problems.
I'm with you, by the way.
I don't disagree with you, but that is a That's an all-or-nothing proposition.
I'm not saying all divorce.
No, no, no.
I'm only saying that we're not a year from moving away from no-fault divorce.
That's a generational activity, just like introducing no-fault divorce was a generational undertaking.
There are a lot of goalposts between here and there, places where we could make an immediate difference in the lives of a lot of men.
You could actually go tackle this problem.
It shouldn't be the case that a wife is economically incentivized to leave her husband, and a husband is not economically incentivized to leave his wife.
In very broadly speaking, that's a bad incentive structure.
We might be able to do something about it.
But ultimately, whether you fix that bad incentive structure, or don't fix that bad incentive structure, whether we get rid of no-fault divorce, or don't get rid of no-fault divorce, your marriage is not a statistic.
Your marriage is the actual marriage that you, the actual person, is in with another actual person.
And you have enormous agency there.
And the worst thing that's happening on the right, in my opinion right now, is this victim victimizer mentality is settling in.
And I completely understand why it's settling in.
It's settling in in particular because the left was so effective at using it to build their winning coalition in the mid-2000s.
It's not exactly how they elected Barack Obama in 2008, but it is how they re-elected him in 2012, is with this hierarchical victim mentality.
Coalition of the Ascendant, right?
That's right.
So then you end up with the right seeing that that's what works and recognizing the only group of people to whom it doesn't apply is white Christian male, like the people who traditionally have voted Republican in the country.
And so they basically took that same victim mentality and tried to make it work over here to build a coalition.
And the problem with it is if everyone is a victim, right?
Once you reach every human is a victim, then we are all basically nihilists.
Like there's nothing left anymore.
There's almost, I agree with you, Jeremy.
There is a point that we're the right.
We want to deny oppression generally because that's the language of the Marxists.
But I almost think we should acknowledge it for a second and say, you know what?
There is oppression.
There is victimization.
It happens to all of us.
It's not the result of the white guys or men or the women or whatever.
It's sin actually is what oppresses you and it leads you to form vices.
And when you form those vices, you become a slave to your appetites and you have a crappy life in a crappy country.
And so, you're right, let's acknowledge that.
And recognize that you do have it.
It's easier when you have a society that impels you toward a better life and more human flourishing, but you actually do have some agency.
And the law, the Constitution, is only going to be as good as the people who enforce it.
Did you see this ruling came out of the Hawaiian Supreme Court that said it was a gun case?
I did not see that ruling.
This was amazing.
It's really funny.
So it's a gun case, and this is after the New York case, New York Rifle and Pistol Association, which upholds the Second Amendment in the state of New York.
They take it to Hawaii, and the Hawaii Supreme Court says, no, you don't have your Second Amendment rights, because even if that's what the Constitution says you have, there is a higher law, and that higher law is the spirit of Aloha.
That's seriously what it says.
In those words.
In the face of that, you realize, oh, the Constitution?
That and a buck fifty will get you a cup of coffee.
The laws, the Federalist Papers, all of that is worthless if we have a people who just don't know how to comply.
Your marriage.
You're talking about the fundamental argument that people make.
To support their power.
So somebody recently said that every political argument is BS BS BS.
That's why I should be in power.
But the normal argument is I should be in power because I will give you safety security from violence and I will make the economy work or keep it working.
They changed the argument.
To, they want to put you all back in chains, but if I'm in power, you will not be put back in chains.
It's a very different argument, and it's not the American argument, and it's the argument that now dominates.
So essentially, you're talking about a form, an argument for governance that depends upon your sense of being aggrieved.
Who doesn't have a sense of being aggrieved?
I mean, I work for Jeremy, I'm aggrieved.
You could write books, poems.
I am a victim.
So I think that this is like...
We let the arguments get away from us.
You know, in everything, in everything in our society, as Lincoln said, public sentiment is everything.
You can get public sentiment either by making an argument, or by inciting emotions, or by simply oppressing people, by simply stomping on their neck.
And what we have got now is we've got both sides, including the right, are just basically inciting emotions.
They're just basically saying, run for your life, or, you know, the other guy will win.
We don't have any avenue.
Outside of this room, we actually don't have an avenue for making arguments that people believe in.
And this is why I find it so infuriating.
I fell for this with W a little bit, George W. Bush.
If you may remember him, he was president.
But I fell for this a little bit where I thought it doesn't matter that the president can't speak.
Because it's what he does.
And now people say that about Trump.
It does matter.
You have to be able to speak.
You have to be able to convince people.
And we've lost that power.
And that's why this thing with Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift matters, because we've lost the power to simply say, this is what's good about this.
This is what's bad about it.
Whatever.
But do you have to be?
You know, I guess I agree, ideally, that would be the case.
But when I think about the classical definition of freedom, of free will, is not just volition.
It's not just choosing.
Perfect willing predicated on perfect knowledge, perfect intellect.
That's why only God is totally free and we are more or less free depending on how we control our will and what we know.
And so if you live in a country where people basically know some things and basically can control themselves and they have morality and they kind of practice stuff, then yes, the president being able to make a persuasive argument is going to make you more or less flourishing and more or less free.
But if you live in a country where that has been severely degraded as we do today, I actually don't think that if we had Pericles getting up there giving a great oration, it would do very much of anything.
I don't know.
I think that there are certain things that we could actually change that might change that.
I mean, I watch debates now, and this is one of the reasons they say these ideas are obsolete.
I watch a debate now, I have no idea what anybody thinks.
And I don't even understand why a journalist is asking questions.
I think, like, that journalist is not, he's not a journalist, he's a, you know, advocate.
Why is he determining what Ron DeSantis can talk about, or Donald Trump can talk about?
Why aren't these guys just getting up and saying, this is what I have to say?
You know, Lincoln and Douglas didn't have a moderator, they don't need it.
We have no venue.
Well, I truly, I truly believe no one should be able to be elected president Who doesn't do three hours on Joe Rogan?
I'm not joking about that.
No, I understand.
If you can't sit down for three hours and talk about what you actually... Yes.
Well, that was why the Putin interview was fascinating.
Like, just the opening hour sermon that he gave.
I don't think Tucker knew what quite to do because that's never happened before.
I actually think... I'm no fan of Tucker Carlson.
I actually think that he comported himself very well in that.
No, he did.
I'm saying that he literally said at the beginning...
Yeah, because he said he thought, is he filibustering?
Because this is how unaccustomed we have become to someone being able to sit down for an hour.
The 8th century, I was like, oh wow, he's gonna just be quick.
No, the 9th century, the 10th.
It is an incredible thing to realize that Tucker thought he was filibustering because he had never seen this before.
We've never seen it before.
Obviously, Putin is very bright, right?
And we're not used to, we're really not used to that at this moment.
But we used to have that, you know?
Like Richard Nixon could do that.
And then Biden thinking, this is a good time for me to go up and get on a podium and have a press conference.
Like, please don't do this right now when everyone's watching Putin deliver a historical sermon about Russian history.
And I want to say this one thing.
I don't want to stick too much on the Putin thing because I do want to finish this marriage conversation.
But the best part of the Putin interview to me is that Whereas I thought going in that it would mostly be Putin posturing, and of course he's a politician and did posture.
It would mostly be him sort of propagandizing, and he's a politician and did propagandize.
But it was predominantly Putin actually telling us what he thinks.
Yeah, that was astonishing.
And you can say that he's wrong.
I think a lot of what Putin said is inaccurate.
I think a lot of what he said is wrong.
But I far better today understand Putin's motivations than I did before this interview, because Putin told me what his motivations are.
By and large.
And the fact that so many people reacted, especially to that first part of the interview, by saying how boring it was.
I thought it was absolutely fascinating.
Fascinating.
But we're not used to, he's giving this historical discourse and he's connecting actions that he's taking today to things that happened 500 years ago.
So there's two things going on.
First of all, as Americans, we are used to intellectual, lightweight politicians who would not be capable of offering any kind of explanation like that.
But also, We're so disconnected from our own past and our own ancestry.
That's right.
That the idea that people are motivated by things that happened a thousand years ago is so foreign to us.
But what we don't realize is that this, outside of the modern Western world, this is how the entire world works and has worked forever.
That, you know, for us, it's... Even in the United States... I really disagree with this.
I mean, even in the United States, it used to be that people used to be able to speak to the constitutional values and the development of those constitutional values.
Yes, yes.
Not that long ago.
Right, and not that long ago.
If you read the single best speech that's like this, the July 4th speech by Calvin Coolidge on the 150th anniversary of 1776, it's a phenomenal speech.
And it really does explain sort of where we are in historical time.
And it's pathetic that American presidents are no longer able to do that.
That is pathetic.
But as far as what Putin actually had to say, listen, I think that his view on history is deeply flawed.
I think that he elides significant facts.
I think that it's obviously biased in a particular direction, which is why he does what he does.
But the thing that was interesting about it, and I agree with you, and Tucker I thought did actually, I said this on the show, I thought he did a really good job actually just letting him talk.
I don't want to hear what the interviewer has to think.
I want to hear what Putin has to think because you actually don't really hear that all that often.
And actually, it sort of underscored to me how aggressive he is because when he spells out the history of Muscovy and he explains that basically everything in the entire region was once Russia, you know, it's hard for me to see that as not territorially ambitious.
But the kind of broader point, which is that Countries have histories.
Philosophies have histories.
Ideologies have histories.
And those histories have consequences.
That's something that we don't have in the United States.
And because of that, you can have frauds like Nikole Hannah-Jones walking around not knowing history and falsifying history, and no one even knows what to say to her.
So, I want to cover three things, and then there's a major topic that I want to introduce that none of you will have seen coming because it wasn't until right this second.
They just told me something in my ear.
We have to talk about it.
First is, we often diagnose problems.
It's the nature of our job.
But for anyone who tuned in for that entire conversation about the red pillars in their view of marriage, what is the hope that you offer to a young man right now in this actual world, in the world where family courts bias against him in such extreme numbers, where women drive such a large percentage of the divorces, where he does feel that if he even makes an overture to a woman, he runs the risk of being kicked off of his college campus or worse.
What do you say to that young man in despair about the institution of marriage right now?
What hope have we to offer?
I say this all the time.
You have to begin with yourself.
This thing that somehow the society is supposed to change for you to change is the exact opposite of manhood as far as I'm concerned.
You start out, who am I?
What do I want?
What am I doing here?
Where am I going?
And a guy who doesn't understand that about himself isn't going anywhere, you know?
Part of that is developed in a marriage, but the way you get to marriage is thinking, you know, this show, whenever you're on that show, whatever, I watch a little bit of it, my wife looks over my shoulder and says, is that Michael?
This show is disgusting.
Every single time.
Because I'm on it.
That's why.
She says, why is he doing that?
And I say, well, he's actually the best thing on it, which is true.
But it's like, it's disgusting to bring these victims of a society on because it's a healthy impulse in human beings that they're born into a society and they live according to the rules of that society.
That's a healthy impulse.
Not everybody can be a rebel.
Not every age is supposed to overturn the norm.
That would be insane.
So most of us were born into a society and we adopt the values of that society.
Right now, we're in a position of climactic change.
We're in a position where a generation, my generation, is passing away, possibly by the end of this show.
And these transitions usually don't go very well.
They usually are filled with violence and upset.
This is the moment when you have to say, I stand here.
I stand in this place.
I am this person.
All of those guys who are making fun of those girls, they're actually An underlying assumption there that they are somebody else looking for something else.
And if what they're looking for is a lot of sex and I conquered this and I conquered that, you're right, that's essentially homosexual.
It's essentially a gay lifestyle.
But if they're actually talking about the opposite of what those girls represent, then live that way.
Out loud, you know?
I mean, this is that moment.
This is that moment when, if you are not saying... I'm an anti-feminist.
I think feminism was a mistake.
I think, just like what you were talking about before, they identified real problems, you know, there were unfairnesses and all that stuff, and they came up with the wrong solution.
I say this all the time, and people are always going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Conservatives are saying this.
They're saying, like, well, you know, but you do believe this, but don't get me wrong.
Yeah, get me wrong.
Get me wrong.
I think feminism should be thrown out.
I think it was a mistake.
And I think it was the wrong solution to an actual problem.
If we don't live like that, if we don't live speaking out, if we're constantly dropping our voices when we say the truth, we're done for.
We're done for.
That's my line to individual men.
But I think also, to build off that, the hope for men, and this is also to your point, Jeremy, is that we are not condemned by the choices that other people have made in their own lives.
So for example, this supposed statistic that 50% of marriages end in divorce, which is basically made up, but let's just pretend that it's true for a moment.
It's like, okay, but that's not my marriage, okay?
Because that statistic is being weighed down by a whole bunch of people who made all the worst choices, and their marriages failed very quickly.
And so that's how you come up with a 50% statistic.
But if you do basic things, like, for example, if you're religious, if you just spend time together, if you listen to each other, if you're honest with each other, The great advice Andrew Klavan gives to young men, don't have sex with people who aren't your wife.
If you do basic things like that, your chances of not getting divorced are much, much better.
So you don't, just the fact that this has happened to so many other people really has no bearing on you and your own life.
And that's the message I... The basis also of hope.
Here, in this regard, is the basis of hope generally.
Hope is not optimism.
Optimism is just a sentiment.
Hope is a fact.
It's actually a theological virtue, and it's based on an objective reality.
So, this sounds a little mamby-pamby pie in the sky.
I think this is the best cause of hope for young men, which is there is an objective reality outside of you.
Marriage is a thing that is not just or primarily about you.
Marriage is a sacrament.
It is the meeting of two people who take a vow before God and before the law and before the community, before the public.
And you say you're gonna do a thing and commit to a thing and your love is gonna be so real that there is another person that comes out of that.
And things are known by their purpose.
The purpose of this delicious Mayflower cigar is to smoke it.
The purpose of the leftist tears tumbler to quench my thirst for leftist tears.
Men have a purpose, too.
Marriage has a purpose, too.
So people, I think, fear when they get into an argument with their wife, it's going to be some negotiation or some mere battle of wills that's totally irrational.
No, we have reason.
You can actually resolve many conflicts using your reason and coming to terms and just doing the things you're supposed to do.
To quote Don Corleone, talking to Johnny Fontaine, you can act like a man.
Even when it kind of hurts your feels a little bit?
Even when you're kind of tired and you worked hard and your kid is screaming?
Well, just do your duty, you know?
People have a purpose, and virtue is doing excellent activity over a period of time.
You know the nature, frankly, by the activity that you're doing, so do what you're supposed to do, man.
It is true that one of the big red pill voices out there, I won't name him either, he is somewhat well known, And I saw him railing about how these Daily Wire guys all talk about marriage and not one of them will actually sit down and talk to a man who's been hurt by the injustices in our family law and you've all, you know, my wife left me and destroyed my life and took half of my money and more than half of my money, you know, and he goes on this long, long rant and then he gets to the end, I kid you not, and he gets to
And, and yeah, I lived on the road and I made a bunch of mistakes, you know, but I blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I thought, oh, you're blaming the institution of marriage for multiple affairs.
Not a mistake that you've made, a lifestyle that you embrace, an anti-marriage lifestyle.
You were living outside of the vows of your marriage, and you're upset that your wife decided to formalize that.
And we could say that maybe in a no-fault divorce situation, she would still have a claim.
There might even be societies in which she wouldn't.
Have had a claim.
None of that's actually the thing being debated.
The thing is, you can't be unhappy that your marriage doesn't work if you didn't work on your marriage.
This person obviously didn't.
This brings me to the last thing I want to say, which is that you never know out in the wide world and all the craziness who's actually a good guy and who's a bad guy.
Sometimes you know who's a bad guy.
It's often hard to know who's a good guy.
Would anybody sit down and talk to Pearl?
I invited her on the show.
I feel sad.
I actually miss this.
I don't know how.
I feel like I'm on the internet, but I missed this trend and I would definitely sit down with her because that makes me sad.
A woman not aspiring to marriage, your life gets so much better.
I talk about marriage the entire time on my podcast because I want women to know that.
It's not a message that's often reflected in culture.
If you look at just this integration of shows, we've talked about this on past backstages, but, you know, I grew up watching the Winslows and, you know, all that great Nick at Night TV, the Jeffersons, and it was all about family togetherness.
And now what's being projected on the screens is that men cheating on men, love in hip hop style, you know, real housewives, everyone's crying and hysterical.
And the truth is that if you don't have that man and woman coming together in this institution, what you end up with is hyper femininity and hyper masculinity.
And neither one of those things is good, actually, because what happens when you come together is you have the perfect, Masculine and the perfect feminine I would agree to those men that feel impacted and hurt by what's happening I very much agree with I actually believe that we're living in a matriarchy And that's why I like it's hell tell on earth right now because women are in charge even though we're saying we're not and They're not even mothers.
They're likely responding to the matriarchy.
I'm radically anti-feminist.
You're anti-feminist.
I'm radically anti-feminist.
I'm like willing to give up, forego voting to let men do it.
Because women, you know, we just are too emotional.
Men are hyper.
I'm there.
I would do it easily if the vote was up tomorrow.
But because hyper femininity yields to really bad things, women's emotions get hijacked very easily.
men's aggression can get hijacked when you get the hyper-aggression.
When you come together, you weed out those hyper-elements.
And so I am a marriage stan, as the kids are saying.
I've learned his slang.
Stan is a new slang.
Have you ever noticed that in the old days, like the old movies, before even I was born, if you can imagine that, the guys were like small guys, like Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable, They looked like guys.
And the women looked like women.
And then right around the time that feminism had its first surge, which was in the 80s, you got like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.
I used to sit and think, who are these guys?
All they do is shoot people.
They don't have any romances.
You couldn't watch Schwarzenegger kiss somebody.
It would be like an act of murder.
And they would have these gigantic guns.
And I thought, what the hell?
That's actually not a story.
You know, it's tough to be a man because you're the guy who has to be in a fight if somebody insults your wife.
And, you know, you may not be that guy.
You may not be a fighting guy.
Those were the old movies.
The old movies were guys, A, who were small and normal and just had the guts to do what they had to do.
And B, also, like, they stood for a thing and they were a thing, but they weren't just these incredible...
So I think you're missing one step only in the Hollywood evolution, if we're going to do this, and that is that you had kind of normal, iconic masculinity in the 40s and 50s, and then in the 60s and 70s you had the feminization of men, and then you had the uber-masculinization of men.
That's a reaction.
Yes, everything is reactionary.
Everything's a pendulum.
Women.
Women, when we get to it, men, the matriarchy.
Now that I've said it, you'll see it everywhere.
You give them your pinky, you know?
So I don't want to talk about news.
I led the show by saying I don't want to talk about news, but something happened since we've been sitting here that merits discussion, and that is that... Is the president still alive?
The president is still alive, and that is that Mayorkas just became the first sitting cabinet member since the 1800s to be impeached by Congress.
Who did?
Scalise got back?
Mayorkas, Mayorkas.
Mayorkas.
Wow.
So, by the way... 214 to 213.
The last one was William Belknap, Secretary of War in 1876.
Yeah, you know, I've been waiting for this one.
There are going to be a lot of Democrats who start arguing that there's no basis to impeach him because they're merely impeaching him on maladministration, which is not a sufficient cause for impeachment.
In the impeachment, the only other time this happened to a cabinet member, it was for failing to fulfill his duties.
And in this case, I think one would argue that Mayorkas is being criminally negligent here.
He's actually violating the law.
And, you know, if you're not going to enforce the most basic law of a country, which is... The spirit of Aloha.
That's right.
You know, it's like Mayorkas.
He's just undermining the Aloha spirit.
Then there would be nothing to impeach a cabinet secretary.
Well, they should impeach Joe Biden for the exact same thing, then, because he's Mayorkas' boss.
Right.
I mean, the ultimate responsibility to enforce our borders does not sit with the Secretary of Homeland Security, which is a 20-year-old department.
It sits with the President of the United States.
So this is why I actually see both sides of the vote in favor and against.
So, when it comes to impeaching Mayorkas, first of all, he's not going to be convicted by the Senate, so obviously it's just for show, right?
It's essentially the same thing as censure, it's just saying he sucks at his job.
And he sucks at his job so much that he shouldn't be in his job.
And, okay, that's fine.
The reality of what it really is, and this is why I support it politically, even if I don't support it in principle, and this is where I'm sort of divided.
In principle, I think that you should actually have to allege high crimes and misdemeanors in order to impeach a person.
Which is why I opposed both of the impeachment efforts against Donald Trump, even though I radically disagreed with what Donald Trump did between the election and January 6th.
There was no high crime or misdemeanor that was actually alleged in that impeachment.
Same thing with the first impeachment effort, I opposed both of them, specifically because impeachment up till that time had generally been used for high crimes and misdemeanors and none were alleged in the actual documents.
Here, there was no crime or misdemeanor alleged, as you point out.
Right.
And so on a principled level, I would suggest, okay, well, you know, then he shouldn't be impeached.
However, the rules apply to everyone or they apply to no one.
If you're going to impeach Donald Trump twice on the basis of no high crime or misdemeanor, that gun is off the rack now.
And now that gun is off the rack, everybody should know that gun can be pointed in any direction.
So now it can either be weapons down or it's going to be free fire.
That's what this is.
Either everyone is going to have to go back to neutral positions.
Everyone's now going to learn.
Either stop impeaching people for not crimes or everyone is now impeachable.
And that's just the way this is going to work.
And by the way, if Republicans were to gain a super majority in the Senate, they would not just impeach, they would remove.
Now, on a perfectly kind of Mayorkas level of all this, you're totally right.
I was talking with Brandon Judd, who's the head of the Border Patrol Union, and he suggested that, you know, he's had conversations with Mayorkas and he says, like, this is Biden.
Like, Mayorkas may have principled bad beliefs, but in the end, These people all work for Joe Biden.
And the vast majority of things that even Mayorkas would want to do are being stymied by Joe Biden.
It's Biden who's really sitting there and saying, I don't want the border closed.
This remain-in-Mexico policy is the easiest thing in the world.
It's the single most important thing that Biden got rid of on day one.
And he opened that border wide open, and he wants the border wide open.
And this is on Joe Biden.
He should lose the election because of it.
Again, if you're going to- Probably the most important thing Donald Trump did as president.
Oh, it's clearly the most important thing he did as president, because actually, if you look at the beginning of his administration, he actually didn't do it right.
Like, the very beginning of his administration, you actually had pretty high levels of illegal immigration right at the beginning, and then he realized, and he flipped, and he started to actually enforce things like Romada Mexico, which he negotiated with the Mexican government, which was actually a really good piece of negotiation done by the administration.
So, Romada Mexico Completely stymied the flow to the border because if you have to wait for your asylum hearing in Mexico, you're not being released in the center of the country to just escape and run around and never be heard of again.
You have to wait in Mexico.
You show up, we reject your asylum, and you go back to wherever it is that you came from.
By getting rid of Remain in Mexico, Joe Biden turned the Border Patrol service into a ferry service for illegal immigration.
That is what they are right now.
That is on Joe Biden.
It really isn't on Majorca.
So it's a good piece of politicking is what I'll say.
Yeah.
Why?
Does Joe Biden want the border open?
That's the question, right?
Because this conversation we're having now doesn't matter.
The fact that the mainstream media is now acknowledging that we have a border issue means they already accomplished their goals.
Right.
Because we've been talking about the border for years as conservatives.
They ignored it, pretended it wasn't happening, reframed it, said they all needed a home.
And now they're all in a mass panic and saying the border needs to be closed, which means that whatever their nefarious goals were, they've already been accomplished.
There's 10 million people already in the United States.
What is the actual reason?
Because it'll give them a permanent electoral majority.
Yeah.
That seems to me the great replacement is the thing we're not allowed to say.
Only they are allowed to say that, you are not.
It's obviously the voters, but it is also the demographic shift.
The fact that it's more non-white people and less white people, they're very much a fan of.
As they tell us.
As they tell us.
They're very clear about that, and that's the reason.
I think there are a few reasons.
One, as far as why they're starting to realize that the border's a crisis, it's because his numbers got so bad on this thing.
Yeah, I think that's right.
What they're really trying to do now is suck Republicans into making a deal so they can say, he made a bipartisan move, the issue's off the table, Trump can't run on it.
I think that's more of a political move.
Because if they could facilitate more illegal immigration, they certainly would.
I mean, Joe Biden would love to have more illegal immigrants in the country.
And there's a variety of reasons.
One of them is actually ideological.
The hard left of Joe Biden's base really believes that the United States on a global level is a guilty country and that we should not have a border because people are owed a spot in the United States.
You are owed the ability to enter the United States under all circumstances, so long as you claim that you have a rationale for being in the United States.
And it doesn't matter if you actually have a legit asylum claim.
The United States has unfairly exploited the rest of the world's population, and thus everyone has a slot in the United States.
And you hear people talk like this on the hard left.
So that is part of it.
And Joe Biden is really, really beholden to his far left base because he's so unpopular.
If you're riding at 55% of the polls right now, he wouldn't be doing this.
I think one of the reasons that he's doing this is because He realizes that his coalition is trying to duplicate Obama's 2012 coalition, which is the great sort of mirage that Democrats have been trying to duplicate ever since.
Hillary tried to duplicate it in 2016.
She couldn't do it.
Minorities hated her, and so they didn't show up to vote for her.
And a bunch of white people didn't show up to vote for her either, thinking Trump was going to lose, so why bother?
And then in 2020, Biden tried to duplicate the coalition, and the only way he could do that was essentially by rigging all of the rules so that 60% of all Democratic ballots could be turned in via mail.
Which, as opposed to 30% of Republican ballots that were turned in via mail.
And so you had the single largest increase in voter turnout in modern American history.
You went from having 136 million voters or so to 160 million voters in 2020.
That is not able to be duplicated.
The voting numbers are gonna go down this year.
What you're gonna see is actually those numbers are gonna be close to 140.
So you're gonna lose 20, 15, 20 million voters from the actual vote in this cycle because all the rules changed and because you can't gather the ballots quite as easily.
And so what Joe Biden is freaking out about Is how does he get the people who are low propensity voters, right?
The people who are like 30% likely to vote.
That was Obama's magic in 2012.
Everyone who's 50% likely to vote is going to vote and they already will.
Everybody's 30%.
Can you get those people to vote?
The magic for Trump is that he does that with some of the Republican low propensity voters.
The problem for Biden is he really, really does not in the absence of all the rigging of the rules in 2020.
And so what he has to try to do now is jazz up the minority base and jazz up young people, right?
This is why he's caving on virtually every issue to like the most radical people in his party.
And so that's another reason, but obviously the idea that he wants to bring in a huge group of people who will vote.
The lie that they're not going to vote because they're illegal immigrants?
No, what's going to happen is these are all disproportionately, not all, they're disproportionately young males and they are going to get married to American citizens who already have status and they're going to be sponsored for a green card by the people that they marry and then they will indeed vote.
I don't care about the race.
I care about the ideology.
I don't think that they care about the race, by the way.
I think they care about the ideology.
graphics.
A part of it is that they're trying to change America from a predominantly white nation to a not predominantly white nation.
Ben, you've taken a lot of flack online for commenting a couple of times over the years that you don't give a damn about the browning of America.
What do you mean by that?
I don't care about the race.
I care about the ideology.
I don't think that they care about the race, by the way.
I think they care about the ideology.
If they could import 200 million liberals from Sweden, I think that they would do it.
But isn't the point that just, it's so hap- I'm not saying it's good, I wish we could shift the whole black vote, I wish we could shift the whole Hispanic vote, but it, we just haven't.
It just hasn't happened.
Well, I mean, but I don't see how that's relevant.
In other words, the way that the left likes to slander the right when they talk about things like the Great Replacement Theory is by suggesting that the reason that the right is opposed to mass migration from these countries is because they want fewer brown people.
The point that I was making is we don't want mass migration from countries that don't share our values.
I don't care whether they're brown, whether they're green, whether they're white, like, it doesn't make a difference to me.
If you come from a country where you are used to gigantic government services that take care of you, and you're coming here to be reliant on those government services, or you don't share American feelings about how family ought to work, or about how government ought to work, or about many of these values, I don't care if you're pulling those people from Latin America, whether you're pulling those people from, like, the most liberal parts of Europe, like, that doesn't matter to me.
The ideology of the people who are coming in matters to me.
So when I say about the browning of America, Again, race is of no relevance to me insofar as it's just race.
The ideology matter.
This is another area where the right has despaired though because they really do believe that there's simply no way to change, you know, there's no way to change the way these people think, the people who are coming and think.
And so they're just now talking about ethnocentricity in ways-- Well, I think they're falling into a trap.
Yeah, I think so too.
Meaning I don't think that they even have to make that argument.
I agree that many of the people coming in are not going to change their minds.
That's why Democrats are importing them, is because they won't change their minds.
I think it would be weird to go to UK-- or I guess this is happening now-- but I do think it would be weird to go to Sweden and then everybody was black.
I don't know.
I think it does kind of matter a bit.
But those countries are based on race.
Yeah.
I'm not saying...
This is an important distinction, I think.
Because Sweden is Sweden and has always been Sweden.
But what if they just suddenly...
Yeah.
But America wasn't built out of race in the same way that Sweden was built out of race.
It was overwhelmingly...
But if you put aside the color of people's skin, it was a bunch of people who had been at war for 2,000 years.
The people in Europe were killing each other the entire time.
But you know...
But race is everything.
I don't want everyone to be Latin American in America.
Am I a bad person for saying that?
Am I going on a hit line tomorrow?
Probably.
Race has everything to do with it.
I mean, Ben, you said that you don't think that they care about the race either.
They care about the ideology.
I think they very much do care about the race.
They really do hate white people.
Well, they're building an ideology about race.
Right.
Right, and they hate, and the white people themselves feel an intense sense of guilt, as you mentioned, and I think a lot of, it kind of goes back to when we talked about Putin and he gave this historical answer and all this sort of thing, and you can disagree or agree with that, but he's got a, and Russians in general have a great sense of the history of their people, and in this country, white people in particular have no sense of our own history, they feel an intense guilt, like we don't belong here, because they don't understand
What actually went into building this country, and they don't have, and this is why I bang on it all the time on my show, that we should have, you know, we came here, Europeans came here, and conquered this country.
Fair and square, they conquered it, and it took incredible courage and ingenuity to do it, and we should be proud of that, and we should say, you know, this is our country, and this is ours, and it belongs to us, and I think, The fact that we don't have that pride in our own history is because we don't have a sense of it.
You have a national identity and it's gone away.
Why are we teaching so much Spanish?
When we see Spanish signs in certain communities, I don't want to see that.
This is America.
It did have certain demographics.
Whether you like it or not, obviously this was a country that was conquered by white Christian males, and then you decided to bring over black Americans, so we're here, we're staying.
And I do kind of have an issue with this system of suddenly we are importing South America here, and this country feels like it's turning into a Spanish country.
I feel like I go to some places and I'm like, am I visiting South America?
Is this America?
But that's culture, not race, meaning that if you import a bunch of white people from Spain, Those would be white Christians from Spain.
They have a different culture in Spain.
They do have a different culture in Spain.
That's my point.
What we're really talking about is what Democrats like to do is they flatten race and culture into the same thing.
And I don't like to see the right make the same mistake.
Meaning that even when we talk about quote unquote white culture, if you're talking about white culture in the United States, what you're really talking about is predominantly men, not of European descent, men of specific areas of Britain descent who founded the country.
And then, there was serious battle in the United States over the course of its history over, for example, the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, the Swedish... More Germans migrated to America than from anywhere else, but they had to assimilate into a largely Anglo... Right, yes.
If you brought these people over slowly and made them assimilate, I'd be fine with it.
I think that's what you're saying.
That's exactly what I mean.
You closed the borders and said...
say that...
Can you become an American in the same way that you can become, say, a national Swede?
That's kind of the question.
And over the course of American history, the answer typically has been yes, but here's the barrier to entry.
You have to accept these principles to become American.
But also there was a timing component, which is the melting pot can work if you actually have a melting pot, and if you import more things that are like what's already in the pot and fewer things that aren't, so that the things that aren't become more like the things that are instead of the thing that is becomes more like And you teach them that, because you're proud of it.
Can you assimilate a Guatemalan into America?
Yes, of course.
Can you assimilate 60 million Guatemalans?
And end up with Guatemala.
To your point, Candace, it is Look, we now have, what is it, they want to set the limit at 8,500 people per day.
Per minute.
I mean, the movement of people into the United States from 1965 to 2015 was the largest movement of people in recorded history, and the numbers have only gone up since then.
And so, this is, you know, some of my best friends are Guatemalan, okay?
Listen, hey everybody, don't worry, I'm a really nice guy.
You know, this has been an observation going back to antiquity, which is that immigration is always a destabilizing force.
It's the political advice that Dante's grandfather gives him in heaven, in paradise, which is, hey, watch out for migration, it can really destabilize your polity.
And so, to your point, Matt, when the Democrats are encouraging mass migration, yes, in part it's because they think they're going to get a permanent electoral majority because these people are more inclined to vote for Democrats, but it's also just Intrinsically destabilizing, and it upends the political order, and they think out of that instability they can craft a new political order after their own image.
Right, and the only point that I would add to this is there's a reason why Democrats don't want to import a bunch of Cubans.
That's why they stopped wet foot dry foot.
That's exactly right.
They'll open the southern border totally wide to people who are coming from the northern triangle in Mexico, but when it comes to Cubans who are trying to escape a communist hellhole who are going to vote Republican in Florida, then it's like, no, we want no part of these people.
That's why I say, again, it's politics and ideology.
Again, this is not an argument for broader immigration.
We also live in this weird moment where, in the wake of the Second World War, We essentially ascended an international morality based on the permanence of borders.
And we essentially said the definition of a good nation is one who never tries to expand its borders.
And the definition of a bad nation is one who does attempt to expand its borders.
And therefore, anyone who aggresses against anyone else is automatically bad.
This was a way that we thought we could keep the peace.
A, no one ever lived by it.
America grew its total land mass by over 33% after the Second World War, while pretending that its highest virtue was not to do so.
But also, in addition to just the hypocrisy, it just ignores the fact that a nation state is a living thing, and all living things grow or die.
And so, when you lock the borders of a nation, even sort of morally, even if you don't actually live by that standard, because we've imported all of Alaska, But when you lock the borders of a nation, you essentially doom it to a kind of death.
And now you've taken the energy of expansion, which is a natural, be fruitful and multiply, it's like the original thing that God spoke into life, in the garden, even before sin enters the world, be fruitful and multiply, expand, grow, be optimistic, try to advance.
You've locked that in.
A culture that's locked in begins to die.
It begins to fade.
It begins to not produce children.
And now, especially because we don't have a melting pot, and one reason we don't have a melting pot now is we have a multicultural welfare state, as you grow the welfare state, you cannot have the bottom strata of society become smaller.
And so they have to import workers, right?
And because Great Britain can't grow anymore, it's lost its animating spirit, and it has to reach out and import half of Muslim Africa into its nation, and now Muhammad is the number one baby name in the United States.
No, no, no, no.
Let's correct that.
Mohammed is not the number one name.
It is the number one name, but let me explain how that works.
I see people saying this, and I'm like, this is just so inaccurate.
Basically, it's because they all named their children Mohammed.
No, that's literally why.
There's not more of them.
All of them are Kishan.
That's culturally why they do that.
But there's still a lot of them.
And also, the reason that they're in the UK, I'm sorry, were you suggesting that they're intentionally importing them over to the UK for work?
Yes.
I think that they have to have, they have to grow their tax base because they're in demographic collapse.
Well, they started doing that, but then they had the Syrian revolution.
Yeah.
They had what?
They had that Syrian influx of all.
Well, there's the humanitarian.
And then it kind of started with Libya and then it's just been like a.
Right, but I think one of the things that, one of the points that Jeremy is making is that one is sort of an excuse for the other, meaning that they were intent on bringing in Vassar I mean, this is certainly true in the United States.
We're seeking to import a cheap labor base into the United States and undercut the wage base.
I mean, that's clearly something that's been happening economically for a long time.
We have to listen to the other side when they give us, not to repeat myself, but They will tell us what their reasons are for wanting mass immigration and not enforcing the borders.
And the number one thing they'll say is that we don't have a right to have a border.
Right.
Because we don't really have a right to the country in the first place.
Because we stole the land.
And that's why I think as conservatives we have to be much more aggressive in meeting that challenge.
Because usually what conservatives, either we won't address it, or we'll sort of agree with it and say, well yeah, it happened, it was a terrible thing, but you know, we're here now.
I think we have to have a much greater sense of our own history.
Oh, Europeans taking over the continent is one of the great things that's happened in human history.
Without America, this globe is doomed to be a hellscape.
I totally agree, but that's a case that is, I think, rarely made by the right.
We rarely talk about the pride we have In Conquest itself, that's a great... And that's essentially what I'm saying, too.
That's what you're saying, too.
The nation has to have an expansive animating premise.
And if you read Churchill when he's a kid, what's so amazing about it is that he's a completely animated Victorian Britain, right?
He's an empire man.
You actually are making a radical and really interesting...
Undeniably true statement, which is that you grow or you die.
You know, you read Shakespeare and in all the plays it's always like there's a season for war and there's a season for family.
There's a season where you get together and create new people.
But the idea that you can stop fighting one another and stop expanding And continue to live with frozen borders actually doesn't work.
And the thing about it is, is you kind of hope, what we were kind of hoping for, as the Europeans were hoping for just before they destroyed their culture in 1914, but what they were hoping for was that you do it without violence.
You do it through ideas.
You do it through cultural appropriation, essentially.
You say, you know, take over.
You go into a country and say, live like we live, and that will be better.
And that's the way that you expand.
But people don't do that so much.
They like to kill each other, you know?
There's another thing that happened.
There's something that happened in the 19th century when the United States hit the other coast, right?
When the United States made it to the other coast, the kind of exploratory nature of what it meant to be an American ended.
And then something else had to take its place.
And what took its place was commerce.
That doesn't work.
But it actually did for about a hundred years.
For about a hundred years it actually really did work, which is why America is the commercial republic and the most powerful country on the face of the earth.
Yes, we have great natural resources.
Also, we kick economic ass.
I mean, this country is dominant economically.
And that's because we didn't just build out, we built up.
Meaning the idea was that we were now going to build economic greatness.
The new explorers We're not people who are necessarily going to find uncharted lands, because all the lands have been charted.
They're going to discover new things.
They're going to create new products and services.
They were going to be like Elon Musk and find Mars.
We were going to shoot for something that was higher, and then we decided that we were complacent.
We weren't going to do any of that stuff anymore.
What we were going to do is we were going to shuffle around the tiles.
Everything was good.
We were all prosperous.
We were going to create a mass welfare state, and we were basically going to stagnate back into nothing.
Isn't what you're talking about that we fixed the borders of what was possible economically as much as we had?
I think the end of the wilderness is absolutely a big deal.
And you're absolutely right that we moved into trade, but we also moved into the space exploration.
And it was the end of the space program because it was taken over by the government instead of Elon Musk.
Because it was taken over by the government, it did a couple of fancy things and then died.
But there is this animal spirit that exceeds trade.
There's an animal spirit in the human heart in men, basically, that exceeds trade.
Well, typically it's innovation and creation.
Trade is not innovation, creation, and expansion.
But you can only create more space.
Trade gives you a broader market for the presentation, and I'm a supply-sider.
What trade does, and what broader markets do, is they provide you a new space to conquer with new innovations, and new products, and new services.
Because the footprint of the United States is much larger than the land we govern.
The footprint of the United States is the fact that everyone wears Nikes everywhere on Earth, that everyone has a McDonald's in their country.
Yeah.
So the glories of American capitalism, and I'm not a two cheers for American capitalism guy, I'm a three cheers for American capitalism guy, because I think that when people say two cheers for American capitalism, they're suggesting that capitalism is supposed to fix things like marriage, which is like suggesting that a hammer is supposed to be a screwdriver.
Capitalism for what it is, is the greatest thing And guess what?
It's not everything.
That's the trick though, isn't it?
That's why I'm not an Ayn Rand libertarian.
What capitalist markets are good for is, for example, things like assimilating new groups of people into your country.
If you look at the history of immigration in the United States, what you see is major waves of immigrants who must assimilate because if they do not assimilate, they will not have welfare dollars because there are no welfare dollars.
When my great-grandparents got here in 1907, my family's been here for 120 years.
When my great-grandparents, on both sides, got here in the early 20th century, they spoke Yiddish.
And within about five years, they didn't speak Yiddish no more.
And none of their kids spoke Yiddish.
Because they immediately picked up on the idea that you have to engage in a trade.
You have to become more American.
You have to actually imbibe from this well.
And so we've undercut in this country all of the fundamental bases for a growing and thriving society.
And now we're basically just importing new blood from a young... I think what Drew touched on is actually really...
That's really important and it's also very true.
We're tracing the decline and decay of American culture.
I agree that you trace it back to the end of the space age.
Because there is this need to actually explore physically and you find that you had the exploration age in the 15th and 16th century.
Early 20th century, it shifted to the polar exploration.
They were going up to the ice in the North Pole or Antarctica and just kind of like, people were dying and it was horrible.
But you're just doing it because we have to discover something.
And then that shifted to like, let's go to the moon.
We have to go somewhere and discover something.
And then we just shut all that down.
Saturn by 70.
And the whole thing about growing… I was talking about this the other day.
It's incredible.
Men have this need in your nature to want to conquest.
How does this work?
Men are engineering.
It just comes very naturally to men.
What's out there?
What's in the woods?
Why is a tomato cutting at me?
Women don't have the same instinct, so it's fascinating to hear you guys talk about this.
Literally, there's a reason men conquered the world, right?
There's a reason for it because it's just naturally what you're predisposed to.
You have two boys.
I'm down to be an Amish community and just raise some kids and learn how to bake bread, but you guys do you and figure out how to go to space.
Now I say we're also going in reverse because what's happening is we've stopped exploration and at the same time, We're turning back and either denying or expressing regret over the exploration we already did.
We're apologizing for the conquest of America.
I think some of that.
We're denying that the moon landing even happened.
Right.
I'm not trying to rope Candace into the debate.
Listen, if you want to burn your fan base, it's cool.
Do it again.
Why do you want to do it again?
You just don't know your base.
It's cool.
I already did.
I think that's part of it.
This turning back on our greatest achievements and saying, oh, that never happened.
I agree.
I think something that's self-justifying.
Meaning, I think that since we foreclosed the thing, now we're justifying to ourselves as a society why the thing is impossible.
Yeah, because we can't go to the moon, they couldn't, they certainly couldn't have gone to the moon.
Right.
Because we're better than them.
And also we shouldn't go to the moon.
Just to go back to what you were saying before, it's not a knock on capitalism.
It's not a knock on capitalism.
This is outside of the values that underlie capitalism.
Because without the values, capitalism is just selling fentanyl, basically.
It's like, it doesn't matter what you're selling.
But you can't continue to build on the same space forever.
You start to build inward.
When they say, oh, you know, in order for our economy to thrive, we need more consumers.
And that's degrading.
It's degrading to the human spirit.
That's not how you build a society after a while.
I don't want to buy anything.
Maybe I just want to live my life.
I have enough stuff.
You've got to move.
You've got to move.
For a guy who loves Frank Sinatra, You miss the most important thing that he left us with, it wasn't the music, it was the quote, whoever dies with the most stuff wins.
Wins, yeah.
You know, the thing we're missing too, one is the kind of a good, I agree, I got too much stuff, man, it's coming out of my, the kind of a good that you actually do want to continue to consume is the kind of good that you set on fire.
Yeah, that's right.
You know, like that you burn and then puff.
Almost like a cigar.
Almost like a Mayflower.
The thing that we're missing though is I agree.
Expanding commerce is a wonderful thing.
It's nice to have material goods.
It's actually necessary.
Yeah, it's not just nice.
No, it's actually necessary to sustain your life.
But the thing we're missing when we talk about American exploration and broader Western exploration is that I think we kind of buy into the left's argument a little bit, which is that they just undertook these great conquests for money.
They just did it for plunder.
And they didn't, actually.
I'm a big defender of Columbus, and I know the guy, maybe he did some bad things.
He was not motivated only or even primarily by money.
The man was trying to fund another crusade.
One of the great heroes of the West.
Ever.
I don't think that Charles Martel was motivated primarily by greed.
I don't think Jan Sobieski was motivated primarily by greed.
I don't think the American Founding Fathers were.
Almost all of them were impoverished.
Many of them were undertaking colonial endeavors to spread the faith.
Neil Armstrong or any of these guys, many of them were undertaking colonial endeavors to spread the faith.
They were doing it for the good of everyone.
I mean, there were politically incorrect poems written to this effect about the conquests in the Philippines.
But they really thought that they were doing good for people, and I think they really were doing good for people.
And when you lose that part of it, when you lose a sense of mission for the purpose of man, for what can be done when there is peace on earth and how we can flourish, then you're just left with buying more stuff, and that is degrading.
The spirit that gets into a shoebox, which is essentially what Columbus did and sails across the ocean blue, is bigger than the spirit that builds Amazon.com.
It's wonderful that there's Amazon.com.
It's wonderful that there's entrepreneurs and all these things.
Fantastic!
It's not a knock on them to say you also have to get into a shoebox and go someplace.
And you do it for spiritual reasons.
Or just thinking about the journey that they made.
Not knowing if there was anything there.
There was anything there, yeah.
You think about Cortez.
Conquering the Aztec Empire with a ragtag group of... One of the great men of history.
Right, right.
First of all, being motivated partially by resources and you gotta get gold, there's nothing ignoble about that to begin with, but that alone is not gonna drive men.
Especially if you think about what they had to do.
You're getting on a ship And going into an unknown ocean, you have no idea, you could easily die on the way.
The idea that you would do that just to turn a profit is... Right.
No, I mean, again, I totally agree with this.
When I say three cheers for capitalism, because capitalism is in the economic box, that is the mechanism by which you can actually effectuate this sort of stuff.
But the person in the modern world, so let's look at the modern world.
I mean, there's really only one direction to go, and that's up, which is what Elon Musk is doing.
But all the borders have been drawn.
Every land has been discovered.
There is no uncharted land.
We have satellites.
We know where everything is at this point.
So the question is, what is the modern man to do if he has that exploratory instinct?
And this is why I come back to the idea that the difference, maybe no one can be Columbus anymore, because you can't unless you're gonna actually get in a rocket and go to Mars or something.
But barring that, barring like the three people on Earth who are gonna be able to actually try that, you're just a normal guy.
Used to be a normal guy would pick up his stuff in New York and then just start going until they found wilderness.
But there's no more wilderness.
Right.
Okay, so what exactly does that guy do?
And the answer is, in fact, that he can still combine the desire to do good for people and the desire to serve a holier purpose with commerce.
That is still there.
It's just you can't get in a covered wagon and do it.
I mean, there's just no kind of so good wagon.
Although, I do think one interesting thing about what Elon Musk is doing is that his rocket ship, Starship, which is meant to go to Mars, doesn't seat three people.
It seats 100 people.
And he refers to it as a wagon.
He sees it in the same way that those wagons were in the West.
I think that Elon Musk could very well screw all of this up.
He's a human being and God has a funny way of knocking men down when they try to reach too high.
But right now, Elon Musk is probably the greatest living human.
I don't know if he's a good man, but certainly a great man.
And his actual desire is not to see a man walk on Mars.
His desire is to send hundreds and hundreds of ships.
And having spent some time with him, I can tell you that the thing that is motivating him is not the money.
He's got the money.
That's not what motivated SpaceX.
SpaceX was built as a profit-making vehicle specifically so he could do the thing.
Which, by the way, is true of most great entrepreneurs.
Most great entrepreneurs are driven by doing the thing, and they have to make the money in order to do the thing.
It's not that they do it in order to make the thing.
In fact, this is good business advice for pretty much anybody because we get a lot of people who ask us these questions.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is they say, I will do it for the money.
If you say you'll do it for the money, you're not going to do it.
Okay, you're not going to enjoy it, you're not going to like it, and it's actually... And you're not going to get there.
The reason all of us here do the things that we do is because we have a sense of mission about it, and the money is a good byproduct that helps incentivize us to continue the mission.
But it's not the reason that we do the thing.
We don't do the thing for the money.
And so for Elon, right, Elon has this very interesting sort of thesis.
He's not a religious person.
But there's sort of a quasi-religious justification what he's doing.
He thinks that, effectively speaking, the reason that... So his sort of guidebook is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, right?
He talks very frequently about this, and the punchline of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is what's the meaning of the universe, and they put it in the machine.
And the machine says 42, and then it says, you're just asking the wrong questions, right?
The punchline is you're just asking the wrong questions, the answer is 42.
And so Elon's entire shtick is, and his entire kind of way of thinking, is that the only way that we can actually discover the meaning of life is to ask the right questions.
The only way that you can discover the right questions is to broaden out the number of humans and the number of places those humans are in.
He kind of sees human beings, I would say, almost like neurons in a giant brain, almost.
And so the idea is that if you expand human consciousness, onto other planets or you put humans in different places and there are more humans, you have more kids, then you're actually going to be asking better questions about that.
You may not like that.
You may think that's stupid, but that's the thing that's actually driving it.
And to tie everything we've been talking about together, to go back to Candace's point about the way men are built, one of the things that happens to men much more powerfully than it does in women is that when we watch something, the same places in our brain light up as the person who's doing it.
So when you and I watch football, we have the experience of playing football in our brains.
So you don't have to, not everybody has to go to Mars.
If 100 people go to Mars, we all go to Mars.
And that's one of the things that is inspiring to men, and they see it, and it gives meaning to everything.
I grew up in the time of the space age, and it gave meaning to the world.
We all thought, oh, we are going to the moon.
And we watched that guy walk on the moon, and we all walked on the moon.
It is an amazing distinction between boys Yeah.
and girls, by the way.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, I have two boys and two girls.
And my oldest is super duper smart, like, reads it at high school level and all this kind of stuff.
But when she's talking about space, it's not the same way as my seven-year-old son.
My seven-year-old son, when he looks at videos of rockets or when he's watching, like, he will literally sit there and just watch documentaries about rockets because you can see him just absolutely light up in a fundamentally different way.
My boys like this.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
They watch the truck.
They watch the truck.
I'm like, dude, I don't want to look at the garbage truck.
Go find your dad.
They love the garbage truck.
The freaking garbage truck is like, the garbage man is a hero.
Landing, I was thinking about this recently, the landing on the moon, Was the last moment when the entire country watched something that was good.
It was the last moment of national triumph.
Has there been?
Like in my lifetime, I'm trying to think of a time.
Taylor and Travis, come on.
That's why I realize people are emotionally attached to the moon landing, but we'll save our debate for another day.
I've already had it out with Jeremy.
Wait, I want to say something very quickly because I want to add to this point that Ben is making and that we've all been making about the differences between men and women and men wanting to conquest and different things.
I will ask you guys this question.
Who are the top three most successful men in the world?
Just throw in names.
All time or living?
In the world.
Living, I guess.
Living.
Living.
Me.
And you fail.
Elon Musk certainly can't make the list and I gotta be honest.
Correct.
Maybe Bezos?
Correct.
What do you mean successful?
You guys are on the right track.
One, two, give me a third.
Cardinal Burke?
I don't know.
I guess I'm going down a different track.
Okay, now Richard Branson.
Great.
Perfect.
Three.
Give me the top three most successful women in the world.
Hillary Clinton.
Well, sweet little Elisa, without a question.
That was you.
Yeah, yeah, go on.
It's interesting.
Watch what happens.
Give me the top three most successful women in the world.
Oprah.
Yes, go ahead.
Our favorite artist, Taylor Swift.
Okay, that's correct.
Give me a third one.
Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Stop.
Give me a real third one.
I like that you accepted everybody else's garbage answer.
No, fail.
Governor Stacey Abrams?
Does she count?
Give me a third one.
Come on.
You've got Oprah, Taylor Swift.
Sheryl Sandberg.
Okay, great.
So what's really fascinating, if you look at the list of the most, like, success, if you ask them that question, they instantly give you the richest men in the world.
They are the richest men in the world.
Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, things that they've built.
When you go to women, you instantly start naming what women are good at.
Communication.
Taylor Swift is a singer, a motion.
Oprah is a communicator.
And when you look at the list of the most successful, like, richest people in the world, the only time women are on the list is because they've inherited wealth, which is fascinating, except for one woman.
No one's ever heard her name, and she is the wealthiest, self-earned billionaire in the world.
I can't even remember her name.
She's in my book that I'm writing right now.
No, no, she's in my book.
It's a Russian e-commerce billionaire, but nobody has ever heard her name because women are not interested in that.
Yes, that is her name.
No, no.
I think her name is literally Slepana.
It's like something like that.
It's a very Russian name.
And the reason why I was writing this in the book is just to say that what men and women are interested in is so different.
Women decided on who was the most successful women because we listen to Taylor Swift, we listen to Oprah, and they've kind of been able to monetize femininity, like communication.
Taylor Swift tells a story about a boy who broke her heart for the 17th time, and women are like, swoon and amazing in his emotion.
But when men are great, they're always building.
I don't mean to, I'm not trying to sound like Gandhi or something here, but truly, when you ask me that question, who's the most successful man in the world, or certainly the most successful woman in the world, I wouldn't have named any of those people, because they're all super rich.
I would not count money or- But Taylor Swift and Oprah actually are not anywhere near as rich as- No, certainly not, a billion dollars compared to 200 billion or whatever, but I really- A successful man is not- No, I would consider a successful man, I mean I gave the answer of Cardinal Raymond Burke, like I actually that the most successful...
You could not pay me to trade spots with Elon Musk.
I wouldn't do it.
She didn't ask...
No, I didn't ask if you would trade spots.
I said they'd be the most successful.
I said, yeah, the most successful.
So you want to be a cardinal.
Well, my wife might be...
She might be happy, actually, if I became a cardinal.
I just...
I really don't...
I don't know.
Maybe...
Don't worry.
I said in my book, the average person would say Elon Musk, and we all know that you are exceptional.
I've said it for years.
I just really, like, it does get into our heads a little bit that success is measured by money, and then women's success is measured by being most like men.
That's what the whole culture says.
I think probably the most successful women in the world are people we've never heard of, present company excluded.
It's going to be like some housewife in the middle of nowhere who has the most happy, flourishing, wonderful life.
That's different.
I used the word success and I asked you what your instant instinct is because it's just interesting that every person I've asked has said the same names.
Like if you say a man, they go Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and it's because they have conquested in a way.
The most successful man is the one that has the most kids, but is still married to a wife.
So I want to, we promised at the top of the show we're going to take questions from our Daily Wire Plus members.
These are the people who make it possible for us to do a show like this where we just talk ad nauseum about things that aren't even all that interesting to the average soul out in the world.
It's because of our Daily Wire Plus members.
People have come to us either because they love the shows, they love the content, what is a woman?
Huge success for the company.
Convicting a murder, huge success for the company.
All of us were in Lady Ballers, which was the huge success of the latter half of last year.
And a masterpiece.
Truly, truly.
Citizen Kane, Lady Ballers, Godfather.
Godfather 2.
Godfather 2.
But we're very grateful to our members, and so we want to hear from you guys.
The first question is for Candace.
Thank you for the amazing series, A Shot in the Dark.
It's impacted the way that I make medical decisions for my child in a big way.
Why did you decide to dive into the world of vaccines in the first place, and will you be covering other big pharma corruption outside of vaccines in the future?
I'm actually really happy you asked this question.
The thing that I am most proud of that I do is actually A Shot in the Dark, and I am really going to push that show a lot this year.
The reason that I do this show is because I was vaccine injured by the Gardasil shot.
Very traumatizing situation, totally healthy, no problems.
I was 20 years old, saw the commercials, everyone should get the shot, doctor told me to get it, and I had basically a mini seizure in the room getting the shot.
Now they have added that you can get a seizure getting the shot, you know, and when I looked into the statistics and I thought to myself, why did I get the shot?
Because they just did a commercial and said I should do it, doctor told me to get it.
I actually know nothing about this shot other than a doctor said I should do it, and that's not really a good reason to have a seizure, right?
So when I did my research, I was shocked at what I discovered, which is that effectively the lowest chance you have of getting any cancer as a woman is cervical cancer, We covered this in the episode.
And I just realized that people are not making informed decisions.
And I didn't do this series because I wanted every person to do what I did and not Baxter Children.
That's what I ultimately decided not to do.
I want to do this series so that people can at least have a conversation with their doctor and know something and not be tethered by arbitrary fears.
As an example, the tetanus shot.
I had a doctor tweet me today, I'm going to be really excited when tetanus comes back because of Candace.
At its peak incidence in the United States, in terms of cases, only 550 people in the United States were even getting tetanus.
Forget dying from it, even getting it.
Most parents don't know that, so it might change your mind about How severe it is for your kid to get 12 tetanus shots, and whether or not the risks that they don't give you in the office, which all of them basically say you can have a seizure, is worth it.
And I think it was just kind of special timing.
I pitched this hard to Jeremy and Caleb, and it was unique timing because I was doing this before the COVID stuff, and now there seems to be people that are interested in wanting to be more educated because so many people were injured.
Some people got injured by the COVID vaccine, some people didn't.
But I just want people to be informed, and obviously as a mother now, it's the most important topic to me.
Let me ask... Drew, did you vaccinate your kids?
My kids?
Yeah, the basic vaccines, yeah.
Basic vaccines?
No.
Anything?
A couple of them, but not all of them.
Not all of them?
We started to, like one or two, and then we stopped.
Yes, but not like COVID.
No COVID vaccine for the?
No, no, no, no, no.
And I feel like we could have never even said that five years ago.
Like, you would just, yeah, anti-vaxxers, we get all of them.
But the truth is, like, when I was growing up, there was 12 that you had to get, and now it's 74.
And that's a lot of vaccines.
So we should be having this discussion, and people should be able to say yes to some if they want to, no to some if they don't want to, and not have to wear, you're an anti-vaxxer, like a scarlet letter.
Which, by the way, I am an anti-vaxxer, and I wear it like a scarlet letter.
I'm very proud of myself.
I never encourage in the series.
We've done really amazing work here with the Shot in the Dark series.
We use only sources from like the CDC, you know, NIH, above board.
We're not on Reddit feeds, even though I am on Reddit feeds.
That's not what we're giving you.
And I'm just glad that moms are really responding to it.
What about covering other big pharma corruption?
Yeah, we actually just started the birth control series.
I'm also radically against birth control.
Let's go.
Now we're talking, baby.
I've been pregnant for three years.
Just kidding.
No, I really haven't.
That's not a joke.
But that's another thing.
Women are now increasingly infertile.
They don't know why.
And just thinking about, I only did birth control for a month, and I just thought it was weird that everywhere I went to the doctor, they were like, birth control!
And I was like, you have a pimple, birth control!
You're tired.
Birth control, yeah.
And now that they're passing laws that 12 year olds can decide without their parents there, and you're not thinking about when you're 12 your fertility, because you just think you're going to live forever, you don't care if you're going to have kids.
You're making decisions that right on the insert it says, this can give you breast cancer, this can, you know, impact your fertility.
Impact who you fall in love with.
That's also a fact as well.
You pursue more effeminate men because it's tricking your brain.
It's a brain drug.
It's tricking your brain, the hypothalamus region of thinking that you're pregnant.
Do you really want a 12-year-old to think they're pregnant until they're 30 and they're ready to have kids and you think that's not going to have any impact?
Common sense tells you obviously it's going to impact your body.
So we've just shot six episodes regarding birth control and we're going to keep going.
Let's see the next question, please.
The next one after this one.
The scrub does whatever it is.
Right there!
For Michael Bin, if Biden is ousted from office and Kamala becomes president, do you see her becoming the Democratic nominee or someone else, if someone else, who?
If Biden's ousted, meaning like impeached and convicted, that'll never happen.
Like he dies right now.
Like he'd die or 25th Amendment or something.
Yeah, the thing is they would probably have to, they wouldn't want to pick Kamala, but I don't see how they push out the first black.
Well, if Biden were to die, God forbid, that's a, nobody wants to see that story play out that way.
They wouldn't have to do anything.
The Constitution makes her the President.
But would she be the nominee?
And if she were the President, she would be the nominee.
100%.
I think there's no way.
They would try to oust her because they know she's a terrible politician.
However, I think if she were the President, they wouldn't even try to oust her.
I do know that right now there is a move afoot to have her step down as Vice President and to pay her a five-year, $100 million deal.
To run a foundation for the next five years.
So she would make $20 million a year.
That's because they know that there is the possibility that Joe Biden won't be able to run for president.
Maybe not likely, but certainly possible.
And they know how deeply unpopular she is.
And the Democrats are in a real bind because if they set aside Kamala for, say, Gavin Newsom, their entire coalition falls apart on them.
Yeah.
Which is why I truly believe that there is a 25% chance that Michelle Obama is the next president.
She doesn't want it.
She does not want it.
She doesn't want it.
But you say she doesn't want it.
Everyone wants it.
It's one thing to say she doesn't want it in a way that would cause her to run for president.
I agree.
Michelle Obama would never leave her cushy life of being universally beloved to run for president.
But if Joe Biden is incapacitated and they need someone who can Preempt Kamala Harris, which can't be Gavin Newsom, assuming that they can't get Kamala to step down by paying her off.
They have one option.
And that option is to put the ring on the table in front of Michelle Obama and say, you don't have to run for president.
It will be unanimous consent at the convention.
But there's a general.
She's not going to want to be in that general.
She will not run for president.
If they put the ring of power on the table and say unanimous acclamation at the DNC, she will never attend.
The percentage is higher than that.
She will never attend a single rally.
Well, maybe a few rallies.
She'll never attend a debate.
That's correct.
Certainly not.
She will just sit back and wait to be elected, and I believe if that were to happen, we would not be able to stop her.
Listen, it's terrible.
I hate that that's true, but that's what I believe.
I think she would just say no.
I think they would go to her, but I think she would say no.
Because she wants to have a private life now.
They've released everything about her husband being a homo.
It's a lot.
It's just a lot.
For her and her kids to go through.
Does America really need the second Black Panther?
No!
Thank you, Media Matters, for watching the show tonight.
For Ben, 2024, would you ever vote for an independent?
I think this is an RFK Jr.
question.
I would not vote for RFK Jr.
above Trump.
If the candidates are Trump, RFK Jr., and Biden, I'm voting Trump.
If there were another independent who better represented my values... Cornel West.
Yeah, obviously.
He loved Cornel.
Joel Stein.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't care about the party labels.
I care about the ideology of the candidates who are running for office.
And the possibility of us winning.
Yes, yes.
I mean like throwing away your vote on somebody who's likely to degrade the vote of the person who I think would actually have a shot.
It's why I don't vote third party.
So yeah, I think that the chances are really low.
Ironically, I actually thought that the smartest thing during the Super Bowl was that RFK ad.
I thought that RFK ad was quite brilliant during Super Bowl, even though I have no intent to vote for him.
I thought that what he was actively doing in that ad was effectively making a Make America Great Again argument.
He was running a 1960, I mean, I knew that because I studied this stuff, I knew that ad immediately.
Like, I knew that that was a Kennedy jingle.
I knew it was from 1960.
Like, I recognized all of it.
I could sing along with it.
So, but you don't have to.
You can see the aesthetic of it was obviously a throwback to 1960.
It was his face plastered above where his uncle's face once was, using all the imagery of a bright, sunny future for America.
And so he actively was basically saying, make America great again, but do it through me.
And then the key was vote independent.
And the polls show Americans really hate both parties, like really, really, really hate both parties and do not like either of the main candidates for the presidency.
I mean, Republicans, I think are, I think we've convinced ourselves that Joe Biden has no shot at the presidency.
And I think that's a wild supposition.
Yep.
Joe Biden is a dead person and he has a very good shot at the presidency.
That does not mean that he's going to win.
But it does mean that this is going to be a very, like right now, 86% of Americans say that Joe Biden is too old to be president of the United States.
And right now, in the RealClearPolitics polling average, he is within a point and a half of Donald Trump.
Yeah.
That should not be happening.
If you were running at 86, 86% of people think he's dead and he's still within a point and a half.
Trump should be up on him 10 points at this point.
And so what that says is that both parties are really dissatisfying the American people And so if there were a sort of a more mainstream independent candidate who just said, I'm running as an independent, I don't like you.
If Ross Perot were running this election cycle, he'd be president.
For?
Mwah!
I've been keeping up with the production diaries for the Pindragon cycle and it looks so cool.
Do you have a favorite memory from filming?
I loved coming home.
I can't speak highly enough about coming home.
I was seven months last year, all told, in Europe, six of them, more or less contiguous with the one exception of coming home from my grandfather's funeral and the Lady Baller's premiere, which happened to coincide.
It was an amazing experience.
Italy and Hungary, both in their own unique ways, wonderful places, very welcoming to us.
The food, unbelievable.
It was incredibly difficult.
If I were to say, so coming home really was a wonderful thing.
It was nice to be finished with it.
But I will say that one of my favorite things about making the show, obviously our cast was When you guys see the actors, you're just not going to believe how terrific they are.
But my far and away favorite memory from the show, we were at this place called Fasanova Abbey, which is actually where Thomas Aquinas died.
And it's this beautiful abbey south of Rome in these olive orchards, the whole mountain's covered in olive orchards.
And my first favorite memory is that the day after Lady Ballers, I shaved, because I had that silly Robert Downey Jr.
goatee.
And the next day, I got on a plane and flew straight to Rome, where they picked me up from the airport and took me to Fasanova to scout it.
And we scouted this abbey.
And as I drug my almost-dead carcass to the van, I hear someone say, is that Jeremy Boring?
And it was a priest of the abbey.
Who was of Argentine extraction, who recognized me without my beard.
And I just want to point out that when I got home that night that I'd shaved my beard, my wife didn't recognize me and almost shot me.
So, of course, it was very gratifying.
But my favorite memory was being at the Abbey many months later shooting a scene in which 50 background actors had to sing this song that we had written for the episode.
And we're in this beautiful 12th century church and 50 people raise up their voice in this vaulted cathedral-type building singing this song that we had written in unison.
Of a deeply important part of Welsh lore.
It was just one of those moments you'll never replicate in your entire life.
Just hearing that beautiful building filled with a melody and lyrics that you had penned.
It was just a phenomenal moment, one that I'm sure I'll Treasure for however much longer I get to live, which if I keep making shows like the Pendragon, it'll be long.
For Michael, we're going to take a couple more.
What is your opinion of matchmaking?
I met my current boyfriend, yes we're both Catholic, via a matchmaking site and we're planning on marrying next year.
Do you think this could be a viable option for people who are serious about marriage and family values?
Totally.
Frankly, you ask me, because I'm Catholic, probably Ben is the better one to ask about this, because people ask about the online sites, and I say, I didn't do it, I just missed it, but I'm not totally opposed to it, that's just how people date today.
I don't think it's ideal, we're incarnate beings, I think it's better to meet in real life through flesh and blood relations, and it's a little safer, and it's probably more conducive to happiness, but that's the way people date now, and so if you're going to do it, better to do it In a very intentional way.
Ben, are you a yenta?
Find me a find, catch me a catch?
Yeah, I've fixed up some couples before.
Yeah?
Yeah, really.
I mean, so first of all, if you are in a community with a lot of other couples, this sort of stuff comes up pretty frequently.
There'll be somebody who's single that you know, and then you ask your friends, like, so do you know anybody who's, like, around that age who might be a possible match?
And it's something that, in our community, is really huge.
Like, we really try to facilitate this because how else are people going to meet each other who are compatible values-wise?
I mean, frankly, I think it's a great way to, it's why I think single people should join churches, specifically for this purpose, not just because they're singles events at the church, but because you're going to meet married people, and the married people have sisters and brothers, and those people are going to say, I have a brother, I have a sister, and you really should meet that person.
And that's how, I mean, that's how everybody used to meet, and that was a much better filtering mechanism than going to a bar or something.
I match made two people that are getting married this year, and also, I played the youngest daughter in Fiddler on the Roof, so I got that reference.
It's a tradition.
Yeah, everyone needs a Yenta.
I played Rolf.
Did you?
Yeah, we would have gotten married if we were in the same production.
Oh my gosh, that is so crazy.
I played Rolf in The Sound of Music, which is a different, that's actually a totally different story.
You know, the other piece of advice though on this, that no one ever makes, because no one gets married until they're like 55 now, it's fine, there's ways to do it, it's okay, just get married, you'll have a good life.
Young love is great.
Young love is really good.
I married my high school sweetheart, and it's... You never hear this from conservatives, but if you're doing a sweet little high school dating thing, your entire culture is gonna tell you, you gotta split up, you can never get married, don't marry your high school sweetheart, it's crazy.
It's really great, actually, and I highly recommend it.
In fairness, your wife wouldn't, and anyone who had a chance to marry your high school sweetheart would have been lucky to have done so.
Matt, this question is for you.
Why do you not seem to grasp... Wow, this seems aggressive.
Why do you not seem to grasp that millennials were sold an American dream that doesn't exist anymore and that's a bad thing in spite of some of the woke takes on it?
Yeah, you boomer.
I love that Mac gets an angry question.
Has there ever been a single angry question on Backstage?
Of course it goes to me.
I'm not exactly sure what, what did I say that's... I have a sense of this.
Suggest that I don't grasp that.
They say you're a boomer.
They say that any time you see one of these videos of a millennial sort of lamenting their station, you always have a kind of... Get off your ass and go do something.
Get off your ass.
Yeah, I mean, look, I totally grasp the situation that Young people are in, that we're all in, that the economy is in bad shape, and I understand all that.
I also understand that working is hard, and that it's not fun, and especially if you're working like an office job where you don't really, you know, to work is hard, to work a job that you don't care about is even harder psychologically.
My only point is that, okay, yes, that is all true.
Now what?
So, now that we've agreed that the American Dream is dead, everything is terrible, everything is awful, we all got a bad deal, the world is a horrible place.
Okay, good, we're all on the same page.
What's the next step?
What are you doing next?
And my radical suggestion is that you can either lay down in a heap on the floor and cry yourself to sleep and wither away and die.
Like, that's one option.
Or you could just get up and get back to work And deal with it, because those are the only two possible options.
And so everyone that gives me one of these, frankly, bullshit questions, it's like, I grasp it, but what is your other... Bro, don't raise your voice.
It wasn't my question.
I'm the messenger.
What they'll say is, you're right on the individual level, but that we can also address the political problem.
Yes, we can.
Hold on a second.
We can address the political problem.
Let's address it.
Fantastic.
But tomorrow, you still have to wake up and do something, and that probably involves going to work, and you can go to work and you can cry the whole time and whine about it, or you can make the best of your situation and you can say, you know what you can say to yourself?
You can say, you know what?
Everyone else is crying about the fact they have to go to work.
They're putting in minimal effort.
They're lamenting it.
They have a bad attitude the whole time.
I will take advantage of that situation, and I will be the one who is ambitious and has a goal, and I'm in there, and even though I hate it, I'll put a smile on my face.
You could climb above all these people.
It's like when you go to the... Every time you go to a fast food place these days, right?
Like, unless you go to Chick-fil-A.
You go to a fast food place.
You feel bad when you walk in the door because they hate you for being there.
The employees aggressively hate you just for walking in the door.
And when the bar is that low, if you are a fast food employee, and I get it, I work these jobs, I hated it.
But if you just show up on time, tuck your shirt in, you're pleasant to the customers that come in, if you just do that, you already are rising, you're cream of the crop already.
And so my message is one of hope.
I don't understand why people don't see that.
This is a hopeful message of take control of Mr. Hope.
This is the maddest thing ever.
Mr. Hopefulness.
Is it not?
It is.
What am I missing?
Well, you missed one thing, which is that In-N-Out Burger also has friendly employees.
And Arby's.
Can I say one other thing?
Another point I want to make is that whenever I talk about this, I get accused, people accuse me, well you don't understand, you know, you were born with a silver spoon.
Give me a break, okay?
I was, I grew up in a family of eight, very middle class, we lived in a four bedroom house with eight people.
I'm not saying we were poor, we were not rich at all.
You walked uphill in the snow both ways.
We did.
I worked all of these jobs when I was 22 years old.
I was making $17,000 a year.
I was living in a one-bedroom apartment that had roaches all over the place.
I had drug addicts living next to me and below me.
It was terrible.
So I get it.
I do understand it.
But at a certain point, you have to say to yourself, this is the situation I'm in.
I don't want to be in this situation anymore.
What do I have to do to not be in it?
And then you set that goal for yourself and you obsessively pursue it until you achieve it.
And if it takes a year, if it takes five years or ten years... By the way, you're totally right.
That stupid defense mechanism, which is that if you're successful now, it must have been that you were born with a silver spoon, is so obnoxious and stupid.
I mean, to take the example of Elon Musk again, Elon Musk was not like an emerald scion.
That's not true.
He was like dirt poor and he came to Canada and was like driving around in a car with no money.
Your mom was a movie producer!
finagled his way into an apartment and a school.
And I mean, that's true for, I think, a huge number of us.
None of us?
By the way, I get that same crap.
I mean, I grew up in a...
Your mom was a movie producer.
She was rich.
My mom started off as an education major secretary at the lowest level of her company.
And my dad was a musician in Hollywood, which does not make any money, okay?
Let me be very clear about this.
It's why I'm not a musician.
It's because you cannot make money at that.
I grew up in a two-bedroom household with four kids.
There were six people in a two-bedroom household and one bathroom.
It was 1,100 square feet in Burbank.
We were like, you know, it's great.
That's America.
That's fine.
That's not like...
Living high on the hog, but the assumption in the United States is always and I find it ugly that if somebody succeeds Financially it's because they started off financially successful and that's not true statistically speaking It's really really not true a huge percentage of people who end up being rich did not start off rich There is something kind of funny.
It loops, sorry I keep calling you.
It loops into the, I'm just, I'm heated because I'm being challenged by the question.
Yeah, you boomer.
It loops into the question of marriage.
Shoot, because the same thing happens with marriage.
If you have a successful marriage, they say, well, you don't understand because you have a successful marriage.
You're lucky.
Well, don't you understand that I understand more because I have a successful marriage?
Don't you want to know how I managed to be married for 12 years and have six kids?
Aren't you interested to know that?
It's not an egotistical thing on my part.
I want to tell you what goes into it.
It's not easy, but it can be done.
I think in defense, not in defense, because I actually 100% agree with you, but I also see, like when I see these videos of the girls crying on TikTok, I just go back to this matriarchy.
And I feel, I do feel bad for them because the truth is, is that men are wired to do the same thing day in, and day out in a way that women are not.
And I think that a lot of these women go into, come out of universities where you're forced, I was forced to take a feminism 101 class, you've got culture booming at you, that this is gonna be so great when you get out, and that this is going to be empowering, and then reality smacks women so hard.
Because it's women that are cosplaying as men, right?
So you're not the man that has to cosplay as a woman.
It'd be like if society kept saying to you, Matt, just stay home and listen to babies crying all day.
Stay home.
And then you get there, you suddenly realize, I'm not really wired to do this.
So they're just kind of having their freak outs in real time of recognizing that they've been sold a bill of lies, and they would much rather be living.
That's absolutely the case.
And so it's men versus women.
I do feel bad for them, but I also agree with you that crying on the internet about it and trauma dumping, as they're calling the new trend, is not going to You're 100% right in everything that you said.
The only thing that I'll say, though, is that for a lot of these young women that are complaining, one of the things that they're complaining about is that they don't have enough free time and that they have to do a lot of work and it's very hard.
And my point is that, yeah, a lot of them would be much happier if they just got married and had kids.
But if you do that, guess what?
You're going to have even less hard free time.
But it's different.
You're wired for it.
True.
Women are wired for it.
So my, I would agree, but like when a baby cries, men, the way that they hear that is a lot different than the way women hear it.
Like men are like, just make it stop.
And women are like, I can, I want to go make this better.
All of that is absolutely true.
But my only point is that no matter what you do in life, It's going to come with work.
To live is to work.
Life is work.
It always has been.
People that try to blame it on capitalism, that's ridiculous.
Prior to the Industrial Age, your whole life, you woke up at dawn, you were out on the farm, you came home when it was dark, you went to bed, you hardly had anything to eat.
There were more feast days, though.
There were more days.
True.
Only in leisure now.
Leisure was not a thing.
We have this expectation.
This is one of the things built into these videos.
Well, they want to have a lot more free time.
They want to have free time in a way that has never existed for the human race ever.
Because free time for us means I want to spend hours every day doing nothing at all and having no responsibilities at all.
And my only point is that that kind of thing has never existed for anyone that's not on the table for most people.
I agree with basically everything that's been said.
That's why God literally had to say, take a day off.
I agree with everything he said, other than we used to have more feast days, we used to have more common goods, so we used to have more, like, nice cathedrals, so poor people could go see big beautiful art and go participate in beautiful liturgy.
They were a lot poorer, to be fair.
They were super duper poor.
They were poor, but everyone was a lot poorer.
Everybody was a lot poorer.
So I agree with all of this stuff.
All of us here, to your point, Matt, none of us grew up rich.
I guess, Drew, you grew up, like, a little bit richer?
More, probably, than the rest of us.
And then you chose to be poor.
You chose to be the poorest by becoming a novelist.
We all, you know, I talked to a buddy of mine the other day who's pretty successful, and he said, I said, it's so crazy, man, because he handles some of my financial stuff, and he said, I said, it's so crazy, man, I went from making no money to Ben promised me my check is in the mail, so I'm telling you, you know, it's coming, so just wait for it.
And he said, yeah, yeah, but you know, you, like me, like all of us, basically worked for free for, like, Years, you know, and now we make significantly more money.
So I think there's something to that.
Just, you know, grind really hard and have a vision of where you want to go and do all of that sort of stuff.
But to quote the new leftists who are very successful at changing the culture, and maybe conservatives can learn from them, as Chris Ruffo writes about in his new book, the fear is that if you merely accept those conditions that we all agree are terrible, the degradation of the family, the degradation of political order, it dulls the revolutionary spirit. the degradation of political order, it dulls the revolutionary spirit.
And so while we should do that and we should grind hard and get married and work hard and do all this stuff, we should also have an eye toward the political order and say, hey, you know, Hungary says you don't have to pay taxes if you have more than three kids.
That seems like a good way to encourage family.
Hey, maybe we can have, maybe we can close our borders, maybe we can do things that would improve the actual economic conditions in the country.
What you're talking about is what Jordan has been talking about and why he's so successful and why he deserves that success is that he says, you know, make your bed, fix your world, your world has to You have to fix your world before you do anything with the real world.
Because if you can't do that, I mean, these guys who, you know, throw tomato sauce on paintings, because then that's going to save the climate, have lost that simple idea that you have to start with yourself.
You just have to.
But also, it also underscores the point I was making earlier about men and women defining success in a different way.
So I think if a man goes to work and he climbs the ladder, it feels like success or like, I can be the best at here.
But for women, That sharing compassion is how they measure success.
And so even if you've got kids screaming around you all day, you feel like you've had a successful day.
And most of these women are at office jobs, and they're just realizing, I don't feel successful at what I'm doing.
And they're kind of, unfortunately, in the internet age, and they're crying online.
But you're absolutely right.
I mean, you're right.
What else are you going to do?
What I should do is wrap the show, but instead I want to give Drew the last question because I've never done that a single time, and because I actually think this is a question that matters going into 2024.
Drew, the stress that politics creates is beginning to cause strife in my marriage.
Do you have any advice leading into 2024 to keep a healthy balance between being involved while also not letting it break our marriage apart?
Sign Jill Biden.
Well, yeah, first I would take out the being involved with the politics.
I mean, if you're having a problem with your marriage, get rid of as much of the politics as you can.
Forget about it.
Just take a walk.
Make love to your wife or your husband, whoever you are.
You know, just do the things that are marriage instead of the things that are politics.
Because you can actually eliminate politics from your life and be perfectly happy without them.
In this world, it is difficult to do that.
I acknowledge that.
And so if you have to talk about politics with your spouse, which is probably a mistake, talk about principles.
Don't talk about people.
Don't talk about Trump did this, Biden did that.
Talk about the things that you believe and why you believe them.
And discuss them in a loving, polite way.
And then go have sex and take a walk.
Because really, the sex and the walk are much more important than who gets elected president.
I agree, and I would add one thing, which is have hope.
Have a sense of agency.
Always.
Have a belief that God unfolds history, not man.
And I'll tell you something that's helped me.
My whole life we've said every presidential election is the most important election of our lifetime.
This is not the most important election of our lifetime.
2012 was the most important election of our lifetime, and we lost.
And the work that's before us now, the work that we have to do because we lost 2012, is a generational work.
And knowing that it's a generational work doesn't mean that we don't need to win this election.
We do need to win it.
We might not.
That's not... We have to just put one foot in front of the other, take the steps, cast the vote, do the things that you need to do, and know that hope lies right out there beyond this moment that we're in.
I have to make one last point.
I wish you would.
When I arrived here, I was the only hopeful person.
Now you're all hopeful.
My work here is done.
That's a great note to end on.
Please don't go near, even near any stairs.
Yeah, really.
Thank you everybody for hanging out with us tonight.
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