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May 23, 2024 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:59:55

Daily Wire Backstage: Introducing the 2nd Greatest Commercial Ever

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	Hey, Michael Knowles here.
	The latest episode of Backstage, introducing the second greatest commercial ever, is available now.
	Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, and the God King, Jeremy Boring, for the world premiere of the most important commercial about shaving razors this year.
	Listen now to hear our decision on the definition of freedom, civil war, and, most importantly, the president's sex life.
	Enjoy. - Welcome to The Daily Wire backstage.
	I'm Jeremy Boring, joined by Ben Shapiro, Andrew Clavin, Matt Walsh, and Michael Knowles.
	Glad to be back with you guys.
	It's been a minute.
	Just a reminder that we'll be taking some questions during the course of the show from our Daily Wire Plus subscribers.
	If you're not a Daily Wire Plus subscriber, head over to dailywireplus.com and join today.
	If you are, head over there, ask us your questions.
	We're going to do our best to get a lot of answers out tonight.
	Interaction with our subscribers is one of the most enjoyable aspects of doing this show.
	It is, in fact, the only enjoyable aspect.
	Of doing this show.
	No, I like being with you guys.
	It's a great show.
	We have fun.
	We get to smoke Mayflowers.
	We get to, you know.
	We're also going to do something really enjoyable for me tonight.
	I don't know if it'll be enjoyable for anybody else, but they told me just as I walked on stage, hey, we've got a little bit of a problem.
	I said, what's that?
	They said, well, when we've been promoting the show all week, we've been saying, you know, tune in for Daily Wire backstage.
	You'll get all your favorites, Ben Shapiro, Michael.
	Plus, we're going to have shocking news like big news really big news i said cool what is it and they said well it was a bit of an oversell we don't have anything i said what do you mean you actually marketed the show publicly you said plus giant earth shattering something new and they said yes i said and you don't have anything earth shattering there's a no we don't have anything new at all i said how does And they said, well, we have, you told us to do it.
	That's fair.
	That sounds like something I would do.
	But what occurred to me is that I, in my back pocket, do in fact have something new and earth-shattering and cool that we could premiere on this show, except we weren't planning to premiere it until a week from now, which means they are scrambling backstage to put together, just for you guys today, the brand new Second generation Jeremy's Racers commercial.
	We're going to be world premiering it right here on the show in approximately 15 minutes.
	So call all your friends.
	Especially the scruppy ones.
	Tell them we will be doing something.
	I think people will enjoy it.
	Every one of you play some small role in the collection.
	I'm just glad.
	I'm really glad to hear because all week I've been reading off the teleprompter.
	I said, this is going to be the biggest show ever.
	Jeremy has a huge announcement.
	And I felt out of the loop.
	I was sad that I didn't know what it was.
	Now I'm glad that you also do.
	Matt literally turned to me earlier today in the makeup chair and he was like, so what's this thing that's happening tonight?
	I was like, I don't know.
	I'm just one of the owners of the company.
	Truly, when they said back, when they said, no, you told us to say that, I don't have any idea what I thought it was going to be.
	I mean, I must have thought it was going to, I think maybe.
	This is pitiful.
	What can occur?
	Maybe in the back of my head, I thought we were going to premiere the commercial.
	I can't think of any other huge news that I wanted to, but it is huge.
	We obviously, this is a long time in the making.
	You know, the first commercial has been called by some, including our marketing department who titled it on YouTube, the greatest commercial ever.
	Many people say.
	I stand by it.
	I think it was, in fact, the greatest commercial ever.
	It was the most well-justified launch of a company ever.
	But what it wasn't was the greatest razor ever.
	And as it turns out, making a razor is very difficult because it takes a razor-sharp blade and runs it across people's most sensitive spots.
	And so we've worked really hard over the last two years to completely redesign our razor.
	I never thought that I would employ engineers.
	One of my favorite things about being a guy who never made it through college is that, like, I employ Yale graduates and I employ Harvard graduates, I employ lawyers, you know, but I never thought I would employ engineers.
	And now we have full-time engineers on staff.
	We've been hard at work.
	We've got brand new partners.
	We've moved all of our manufacturing out of China.
	And this new razor is world class.
	It's on par with the best razors in the market.
	And it comes now, I think, alongside our other products through Jeremy's Razors, like our shampoo, our conditioner, our lotions, our deodorants, which are already top tier products.
	The only thing that was lagging Was that razor, because it's, again, a very difficult thing, takes a lot of engineering.
	We finally have a really competitive product, and I think we have a somewhat hilarious and deeply offensive commercial to attend to as well.
	So again, come back in here in about 15 minutes, and we'll bring that to you.
	Meanwhilest...
	The world doesn't get better between backstages, it only seems to get worse.
	And there's a new sort of, I shouldn't say new, it's been sort of fomenting for the last handful of years, but I think it's really gaining prominence now, both in the very intellectual part of the American right, but also in the very fringe parts of the American right.
	And the fact that what I'm about to bring up is happening in both of those places, like People who we all in this room read, people with whom we are friendly, people with whom we admire are participating in this conversation.
	Also, the complete whack jobs, the people who I don't think should have any voice in our movement, I think that they, that they're malevolent forces, are also circling the same idea.
	That makes the idea, I think, something that we should talk about, and that's This idea that the American experiment is over.
	This idea that none of our institutions that have taken us through the last two plus centuries on this continent exist anymore, that we can't find any solution to our cultural and political problems through the political system, and that perhaps it's time to look to older systems, strongman, monarchy, even dictator.
	I mean, when you have major voices in the sort of conservative intelligentsia Openly discussing the idea of whether a dictator would be required to save this country, or an emperor would be required to save this country, or a king would be required to save this country.
	I think that that's something that merits actual conversation.
	So I thought, rather than talking about the latest stupid thing Joe Biden said, or the most salacious details from the Trump trial, although they are fun to talk about.
	Let's talk about something that we can only talk about when we're together.
	Let's get to the deep stuff.
	So, Michael, you're a monarchist.
	Yeah, well, look, they tie in.
	He pins it on the Catholic that we're all crypto-monarchists.
	We all think Trump is Caesar.
	I didn't say crypto.
	By the way, we don't think that Donald Trump ought to be Caesar.
	We think that Barron Trump ought to be Caesar.
	Okay, those are very different things.
	The problem is this.
	I am not calling for the overthrow of the American regime.
	The problem is that the American regime has been overthrown.
	And it has been overthrown by the 17th Amendment, which fundamentally orders the relationship of the states to the federal government.
	It's been overthrown by Congress giving away all of its power to the executive agencies.
	It's been overthrown by any number of things that have taken place, not over the last 10 years, but over the past 150 and 200 years.
	And even that is not necessarily to be lamented.
	It just happens.
	You can't rewind the tape.
	You can't go back in time.
	But the argument to look towards certain classical thinkers, notably Polybius, is that there are different kinds of government.
	Our founding fathers and framers wrote about this a lot, and I think they were channeling Aristotle and Polybius.
	Polybius' idea of the cycle of regimes is that you got three acceptable forms of regime, and then you've got their kind of evil twins.
	So you've got monarchy, which can be good.
	Monarchy, when it's good, is governing for the common good.
	When it goes bad, it's a tyranny, and it's just like a dictator for his own self-aggrandizement.
	Aristocracy can be good.
	There have been good aristocracies.
	Aristocracy means good, you know, or governing for the good.
	The bad version of that is oligarchy.
	We see those all around the world.
	Democracy can be good, a republic can be a really good thing, but it turns into mob rule when it goes bad, and you ignore the common good, and you govern for yourself, and our framers and founding fathers wrote about that ad nauseum.
	So the question is, where are we in that cycle of regimes?
	Unless you believe that America just paused history, if you really believe, as Fukuyama, at the very least, is caricatured as having said, that we've reached the end of history, and it's over, and liberal democracy won, and unless you think history is really over, then you and unless you think history is really over, then you do have to entertain the possibility that something will come next.
	Yeah, right.
	I mean, I don't know who those guys are that you just mentioned.
	There's some buddies of mine from New York.
	Was it Plebius?
	Okay.
	I'm kind of, I agree almost with the diagnosis of the people you're talking about, Jeremy, that I do think that the institutions are fundamentally broken. - Yeah.
	I don't see any political solution to it, but I also don't think that a dictator is the solution either.
	So essentially we're just screwed.
	That's where I land on it, I guess.
	I might have guessed where you were with that.
	Hopelessness.
	You know, here's the reason.
	It's all a question of timing.
	I've been having this conversation with my son since he was little.
	When do you jump off the carousel?
	Because there's no point dying for a regime that is no longer worth it.
	There's no point pulling a Cato and saying, oh, we have to bring back the republic when the republic is over.
	Right.
	But here's the one indication that the republic is not yet over.
	Because remember also that despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
	If you despair and you don't fight for what you have, you're not going to keep what you have.
	One person, Donald Trump, was elected and the entire government and the press and the academy and the intelligentsia acted like a Jew had walked into a Nazi Bund meeting.
	They acted like the worst possible thing.
	There's one guy, one guy, a loud mouth, who doesn't really know what he's doing.
	He probably never read the Constitution.
	And all of this force had to be put together to throw him out.
	The lies that are being told as we're speaking, the trials they put him through, the violations of our norms, all of these things, which makes me think they're vulnerable.
	It makes me think that the system that is in place is not invulnerable, you know, that it can be taken down.
	And so if it can be taken down and if it can be taken down without mass violence, it seems worthwhile.
	Because the essential premise of the founders was, Was that people were a certain way, which is that they should be free.
	They didn't say that they wanted to be free.
	That was the George W. Bush ridiculous statement, that people want to be free.
	People don't want to be free.
	They want to be taken care of.
	But that people should be free, I think, remains true.
	And so that remains worth fighting for until it's not.
	But isn't there this observation of Tocqueville, who writes Democracy in America, probably the best He's an observer of early American politics.
	And he observes that the rhetoric of the revolution and the post-revolution is very liberal and enlightenment and abstract and, you know, about freedom and everything.
	But the behavior of America is a little different.
	It's a little more conservative.
	It's a little bit more about tradition and way of life and these tightly-knit communities.
	And so I sometimes fear that The thing we want to regain is the traditional American way of life.
	But we believe our forebear is press releases.
	So we're falling for the abstract liberal philosophy, when in fact what we need to return to is tightly knit communities with families having lots of kids and going to their churches.
	this critique of liberalism is true, is that liberalism unmoored from virtue turns into moral relativism.
	Liberalism is basically the idea that a thousand flowers should bloom, that free speech is a good thing in and of itself, that freedoms are of inherent value.
	Now, the reality is that without a framework of virtue, freedom is not of inherent value, actually, Because it turns out that when you freely choose to do something evil, it makes you a worse person, not a better person.
	Freedom is not itself a virtue.
	Freedom is instrumental if you have choices between a series of virtues and you can prioritize between those virtues.
	But freedom to use pornography, for example, is not actually a well-used freedom or a true right in any serious sense.
	What that means is that if you don't have that virtue, which is really what's falling away, then what you end up with is this inability to choose between value systems.
	And so all value systems are then treated as equivalent.
	And once all value systems are treated as equivalent, then you basically have post-constructionism and the idea that everything is just a matter of grabbing power and imposing it on people that you don't particularly like.
	The thing that I think everyone keeps missing, and it's fascinating.
	I think there actually is some consensus in the United States, even with many people that I truly disagree with, because I've had conversations with them about this.
	The consensus is not about values so much as it is about localism.
	The reality is that conservatism, that virtue, which I think conservatism really is about, conserving.
	When people say, what is conservatism conserving?
	The idea should be virtue.
	And it should be the institutions within virtue that allow you the freedom within virtue to live a wonderful life within this kind of virtuous framework.
	That's what we're trying to conserve.
	It's not merely the institutions, it's also that framework.
	It's why when you read Locke, sort of in a vacuum, for example, you end up with the sort of Yoram Hazony critique of Locke, which is that Locke is himself attempting to destroy virtue, but that's not true.
	Locke was spending half of his time doing Christian apologetics.
	So, like, the reality... Protestant apologetics, but sure, we digress.
	But the sort of...
	The basic idea is that conservatism is built ground up and leftism is built top down.
	And so those two things are now in conflict.
	And the left has used the top down structure in order to quash the little platoons, right?
	So it's quashed families and communities and religious institutions and churches and all this sort of stuff.
	But I don't think that they've gotten quite as far as either they think or as the right things.
	I think that they keep kicking the can down the road.
	If they really wanted to, if they really had the power to do full tyranny, does anyone doubt that if Joe Biden really had the true power, the real true power to do true tyranny, that he wouldn't go for it?
	I think he would go for it.
	I think that he's a little tyrant in his heart.
	And I think that was certainly true of Barack Obama, who was a big tyrant in his heart.
	But isn't there this problem?
	He doesn't actually have the power or the approval from the American people to do that, which suggests that this is not quite over yet.
	What would count as true tyranny in your mind?
	What would count as true tyranny would be the federal government Forcibly dissolving churches.
	Forcibly dissolving.
	We couldn't have this conversation.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	Like, I don't think we're that far from it, but I don't think we're there yet.
	Right?
	I think that what you see is kind of little bubbles of tyranny that bubble to the surface and pop.
	But I don't think that... You're never that far from it is probably... I would argue we had true tyranny.
	During COVID.
	I mean, I tend to agree with that.
	But the rights preferred monarch was the president of the United States at the time.
	Right, but it's not just that.
	It's also that that is also forgetting that there are many states that did not go along with the true tyranny.
	Right.
	Meaning that I moved my entire family from California to Florida partially because Florida was not a true tyranny in the way that California legitimately acted full on tyrannically during COVID.
	But even that was As long as it was, it still was, it was a temporary way station.
	Now, I think that there are other aspects of tyranny that are more permanent in California than just a COVID lockdown.
	I think that was like the most open and obvious.
	The real big reason I moved my family from California, aside from the tax regime, which is a form of property tyranny, is that I think it's going to be nearly impossible to raise a religious family in the state of California.
	I think they really will attempt to forcibly dissolve churches and go after full-on religious institutions.
	And that will be tyranny.
	But I don't think that at the top federal level, That power yet exists.
	I think that the founder's system of checks and balances is still robust enough despite all of the changes that have been, I think, terrible for the country in terms of the administrative state and the executive branch.
	But that, I don't think that we're quite there yet.
	But I would also argue that, just one quick thing, that they might not need true tyranny because once you Once you sort of capture the hearts and minds of people and you own them that way, you don't need truth tyranny.
	Once you just get us all addicted to drugs and porn.
	Right.
	So for example, shutting down the churches, well, we're at a point where they don't need to do that because people have abandoned church on their own.
	It's almost like a pointless endeavor.
	And they shut down the churches during COVID, and people stopped going and kind of went along with it, and they haven't gone back.
	But the thing is, there's a vacuum there.
	There is a difference between coercion And a vacuum.
	The vacuum can be filled by a resurgence.
	Coercion prevents the resurgence.
	True tyranny says you cannot come back to church.
	A vacuum is you left the church and now you're not coming back.
	And that's on you.
	That's not on the government.
	My shul was closed during COVID and you know what happened?
	We all went back to shul.
	And not only did we go back to shul, My show went from having about 100 families to having almost 400 families in the course of about three years.
	So, like, true, this is where things get rebuilt, is at the local level.
	And because, you know, listen, we all talk about national politics all the time, and the elections are fun to talk about, and they're interesting to talk about, and of course they make a huge difference.
	I think the area where they actually make the most difference is in foreign policy, because the president has plenary power over foreign policy, as you can see from Joe Biden running around like a child with a lit match in a factory of flammables on the international stage.
	But, you know, domestically, There is still real capability.
	I mean, the lives that you guys lead in Tennessee, or the life that you're leading in Virginia, or the life that I'm leading in Florida, this is not a life dominated by tyranny.
	This is a life that I've built in my community that I think is quite rich and filled with social fabric.
	But that's an act of will on my part, and it requires the vacuum.
	And the point that I'm making is that vacuum still exists, but it has to be filled by a bottom-up movement.
	Let's get to a corollary of all the stuff we're talking about because it's really important.
	What you just said shows the fact that we have been making the wrong argument.
	I'm sure you all saw Harrison Butker, the Chief's picker.
	The Chad meme, you mean come to life?
	With the yes.
	The guy was great, making a speech about the fact that the thing that women should be doing is building, making homes and having children and being homemakers.
	The reaction to it shows you exactly what they're afraid of, right?
	I mean, that is exactly the thing that they're afraid of.
	Which means that we've been arguing about the wrong thing for a long time.
	We've been arguing about systems.
	And systems, as you pointed out...
	Don't do anything without the value system in which they're enclosed and out of which they came.
	The systems came out of a form of Christianity that basically said, oh, people are individuals.
	That individualism was created by the Catholic Church, but it also led to Protestantism, so there was some kind of syncretism there that we have to deal with.
	But I know you hate it.
	Still kicking myself.
	I wasn't around at the time.
	But the thing about it is, when Butker made that speech, and they jumped on him with the kind of ferocity that lets you know immediately they were terrified, immediately.
	This cannot be said.
	It wasn't they said, we disagree.
	It was, this cannot be said.
	And the Kansas City chiefs, to their credit, said, well, you know, we believe in free speech.
	That's the wonderful thing about this country.
	And conservatives cheered.
	Conservatives should not have cheered.
	Their answer should have been, no, we believe this too.
	The owner of the chiefs said that.
	No, he's right.
	This is what we should be doing.
	And it's what we should all be doing.
	In other words, the system of free speech, I believe in free speech with all my heart, but I believe that we should be using it not to defend free speech, we should be using it to defend the values that underpin free speech and keep it private.
	What I'm not sure of is the contra-argument.
	I'm not sure that you can use coercion to instill actual values.
	I'll give you a great example of it.
	Just happened this week.
	Julia Fox.
	Who I never heard of before, but I think she dated Kanye West.
	That's the only way I've heard about her.
	And I think she was an actress and a model or something.
	She came out, she just did a podcast, I covered it on the show today, where she said, I am celibate.
	I have now been celibate for years because the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision.
	And my act to reclaim my power is I am going to be celibate.
	And I thought, Don't threaten me with a good time, honey.
	To prove... Even though she lives in a state where she can still get an abortion.
	Yes, and that's the key here.
	This is the national government versus the localism argument.
	I guarantee Julia Fox lives in a state where she can get as many abortions as she wants, and yet...
	The law is a teacher, and that change in the law changed her behavior.
	I don't even think she realizes it changed her behavior for the good, but it did change her behavior for the good.
	And she sounds more normal, by the way, than the last time I heard her do it.
	You know, it's funny.
	This is one of the arguments.
	One of the things that's happening on the right, the young right, is they've got a new name for racial thinking.
	It's human biodiversity, right?
	And so one of the things that they believe, though, is that we're in a perfect situation because the only people who could be having children are conservatives.
	And I think there may be something to that.
	We may have them exactly where we want them, you know?
	So here's the thing.
	One aspect of conservatism, as you talked about, is the conservation of virtue.
	But another aspect of conservatism, as Russell Kirk, a Catholic, talked about, was the idea that there is a certain gradualism and carefulness when it comes to the exercise of power.
	And so, yes, the law is a teacher, but there is a difference between a teacher and a jailer.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And what I mean by that is that you can teach people, but you have to teach people sort of where they are.
	I can't teach calculus to my 10-year-old.
	Evolution, not revolution kind of thing.
	Well, it's just you can lead the people, but you can't lead them from so far ahead beyond the horizon that they can't even see you.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And if you try to drag them from there, the chain's going to break.
	It's too long a chain.
	And so the idea of the law compelling things that the public is just not going to go along with, you will actually create a backlash instead of actually getting people to where you want to go.
	But aren't there so many examples of the law?
	Doing exactly that, where the law changes people's opinions about a thing and their values.
	I mean, you gave one example.
	Another, maybe smaller example, that I was thinking about recently is smoking cigarettes.
	I mean, you can still smoke cigarettes, but in the younger generations, they just don't do it anymore.
	Which was, 40 years ago, it was unthinkable that you would have a bunch of 25-year-olds that wouldn't even touch a cigarette.
	But that's an excellent example of gradualism in the law.
	So they didn't just ban smoking outright in the United States.
	What they did is they put significant taxes on it and they banned it for people below a certain age.
	And then those people all aged up into... But it was also all the institutions of power had this relentless message that this is bad and dirty and gross, don't do it.
	And you hear it over and over again.
	By the way, I agree with that.
	So I agree with that.
	I agree that our institutions ideally, and this is your point, Drew, our institutions ideally should be echoing virtue, and we've made a mistake on the right by suggesting, again, it is not actually, this is what I was saying before, the difference between an instrumental value and inherent value is very crucial.
	An instrumental value is a value that you hold in order to get to something.
	Money has instrumental value, not because you have a sack of cash in your backseat, but because you can use that sack of cash to do things with.
	Freedom is an instrumental value.
	It is not an inherent value.
	Just being free is not, in and of itself, valuable, because if you're on a desert island, there's nothing else around.
	You're totally free, and it's of no value whatsoever.
	It's object-oriented.
	You have to actually use it for something good.
	And so when you're talking about education toward proper use of freedom.
	You know, that's what all the institutions should be doing.
	And that's why it's important to give an example.
	When Job, it was not enough to me.
	Joe Biden gave a speech about, one of his terrible speeches, about the campus protesters.
	And he said, it's just terrible that they're breaking the law.
	But also, there is a right to free speech.
	Okay, we all agree there's a right to free speech.
	That wasn't the question.
	The question is, not even whether they're breaking the law, the question is, are they assholes or not?
	Right?
	Is what they're saying right or is what they're saying wrong?
	Because I promise you, if those were white supremacists on the lawn at Columbia University, he wouldn't have been talking about the inherent values of free speech versus lawbreaking.
	He would have been talking about the actual message.
	I'm not sure I agree with you about freedom, though.
	I think freedom is an inherent value, but in order to maintain it, the values that underlie it have to be in place.
	I mean, you don't have freedom— I mean, I always— This guy is always saying you have the freedom to do the right thing, but that's not freedom at all.
	Can I ask a freshman— What's of inherent value?
	Friendship, family.
	What is freedom?
	So the classical definition, I'm glad Drew brought this up as he was mocking me for articulating it.
	The classical conception of freedom is articulated not only by Lord Acton, who some of the libertarians still like, but articulated by Dante, articulated by many classical thinkers.
	And Donoso Cortes puts this very well.
	Freedom is not just the ability to choose.
	Freedom is willing, and willing is predicated on knowledge.
	So to bring that down to earth, if freedom were just choosing, we would be freer than God, because God can't sin.
	I can sin.
	Am I freer than God?
	I'm not freer than God.
	Freedom is willing and willing is predicated on knowledge.
	If you don't know anything, if you're totally ignorant, you can't really will.
	This is why kids don't have freedom, right?
	It's why we have age of consent laws and things like that.
	So God has perfect will in part because he has perfect knowledge.
	He's omniscient.
	So he's perfectly free.
	I am not perfectly free.
	This is why it must be the case that freedom is To put it really bluntly, the ability to do what we ought to do, rather than just... The problem is... Where did I go wrong in the logic?
	Because God knows what is right to do, and we don't.
	So the question is, who decides?
	And if the person who decides has complete control over you, to make you choose what he decides is good, you are not free.
	That's a pragmatic limitation on power.
	That is not a redefinition of freedom.
	Right.
	So what I mean by that is that you don't want to delegate to any power the ability to define right and wrong so narrowly that you can't choose between objects.
	But you also don't want people to have the quote-unquote, it's not freedom to harm another person.
	Why not?
	But why not?
	Why shouldn't there be freedom to harm another person?
	Because the same logic that creates freedom creates the right not to be harmed.
	Okay, how about trying a puppy?
	Do you have freedom to harm a puppy?
	Here comes Christy Noem.
	Take the human being out of it.
	There are certain things that we agree don't have to do with consent, which we can get into later, but we don't believe that you have the freedom to do those things because they are inherently harmful.
	Are you agreeing, Ben, with his definition?
	I do agree with his definition.
	Sure, sure.
	This is where Orthodox Jews and Catholics are united in their belief, but it is not a Protestant belief and it is not a fundamentally American belief.
	The fundamental American conception of freedom does include, at least in the Protestant definition of freedom, more precisely, includes freedom to fail.
	It isn't only freedom to succeed.
	It's not only freedom to do what's right.
	And Christ didn't just give us freedom from sin as though that only means that now you have the opportunity to do what's right.
	He gave us freedom from sin in that he ameliorated the consequences of sin on our behalf.
	If you went back to the Mayflower, like these cigars, and you talked to Governor Bradford And you asked him his definition of freedom.
	Governor Bradford, who took toys away from children on Christmas because they had no right to play on Christmas Day.
	Whose definition of freedom would the great Pilgrim Bradford have agreed with?
	That's ridiculous.
	There's no question.
	It would have been mine and Ben's.
	And I wouldn't ask him.
	But I'm saying that's the American definition of freedom.
	I'm interested in the biblical conception of freedom.
	I thought we were talking about America.
	Well, we are, because that's what the American experiment is predicated on.
	The biblical definition of freedom starts with the Exodus, and it is free from the tyrant.
	Hold on, it's freedom from Pharaoh, and it's a freedom that is accompanied by risk.
	Would that we were slaves again in Egypt, because when we were slaves in Egypt, we at least knew from whence our meal would come.
	And when they went and asked for a king, God said they're not rejecting the prophet, they're rejecting me, because they're asking for a king.
	How does that differ from what Michael said?
	Okay, so two things.
	You have to finish the verse.
	The verse in Exodus is, let my people go, so that they may serve me in the wilderness.
	Right?
	That's the actual finish of that particular verse.
	So, second.
	Which is, by the way, which is not what they did.
	Right.
	They didn't do that, and God smacks them around for it.
	Second of all, the biblical term, cherut, right, so the word in Hebrew for freedom is cherut.
	It doesn't apply, it doesn't appear literally anywhere in the Bible, so far as I'm aware.
	Cherut is a very modern term, and it really, When we talk about freedom, here's the reason I agree with Michael.
	In consequence, it doesn't make so much of a difference because what the founders were saying is that there have to be pragmatic limits on the government because a government that is powerful enough to define virtue is also powerful enough to ban virtue.
	Right.
	But that is not an argument for the good of the freedom itself to sin.
	That's not the same thing.
	This is two different types of right.
	And so you do have an exemption from the government in the sense that you don't want the government to be quite that powerful.
	But inside my own family, for example, my kids are free in the sense that they can do good things, but they are not free to do anything.
	Does it make them unfree?
	Are my kids unfree by definition?
	Yes, of course they are.
	A parent is a tyrant, and rightly so.
	Their children are not free.
	Okay, but is my kids deprived?
	Or is that good for my kid?
	The point is that a parent is not a tyrant.
	A parent is a parent.
	But the government is also not a parent.
	Well, some parents are parents.
	Right, but the parent is the boss of the house.
	The point, this is why I hate so much when you hear people on the left suggest that the government is a father and a mother, right?
	It's not.
	The government is neither of those things.
	But that is, again, a more pragmatic... I keep coming back to pragmatism because otherwise You have a universalist theory of what government can and cannot do, and I don't believe in that.
	I think that local government, me and my friends, in our HOA, we get to make all sorts of rules the federal government does not get to make.
	Right.
	Why?
	Because we have a broader level of homogeneity and agreement about values, which means that we can compel that there can't be a porn shop in the middle of our living facility, right?
	But that's not true on the federal level, because you have broader disagreements, and you have very pragmatic concerns about handing tremendous power to a power— But there's something even your HOA can't compel you to do, rightly.
	Yes, because they violate certain fundamental human virtues or the possibility thereof.
	But here's where the disagreement lives.
	You posit that freedom is only freedom if it's freedom to be virtuous.
	And I posit that there is no virtue apart from freedom.
	That this is a chicken and the egg.
	That it's a cycle.
	That it can't be defined only in one direction.
	It works in both directions.
	You can't compel virtue because it's un-virtuous to the exact degree that it was compelled.
	What is education?
	Well, education isn't coercive.
	It's very coercive.
	It is coercive.
	It's not tyrannical.
	It's coercive.
	But it's coercive.
	It's coercive.
	Doesn't it seem like the concept of freedom is just not a useful concept?
	Well, I think that's why many cultures throughout history, probably most of them, weren't focused.
	They didn't talk about freedom at all.
	Even probably today, you go to most places on Earth and you talk about freedom.
	It's not part of their language.
	They don't discuss it or worry about it.
	It's not that it's useless.
	It's that it's now the victim of tremendous semantic overload.
	Also, to the exact extent that we're told it is for freedom that Christ has made us free, it's pretty central to Christian theology to say that freedom is not useless.
	I think it's central to all theology based on the Bible, is that if you're not free, then your love of God is not Freedom of choice is vital to, you're correct, to achieve virtue.
	That is true.
	But that does not mean that the freedom to sin is an inherent good.
	No, but freedom of sin is a natural accompaniment to the freedom to choose.
	Jeremy's point I think is very good, especially on Exodus, when you view Exodus as the figure of history.
	This is a very, to quote my favorite, one of my favorite old dead men, Dante, you know, he views Exodus, he's pretty close to the top.
	Certainly his favorite dead man.
	He views Exodus as the figure of history.
	You know, like all stories have a literal meaning, they have an allegorical meaning, a moral meaning, all these different meanings.
	And so, what is the story of Exodus?
	It is literally the story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt from the Pharaoh toward the Promised Land, and it is allegorically the story of God's chosen leader leading God's people to the promised land and is anagogically, you know, from the perspective of the end times, telling us how we all escaped this slavery.
	I'm going to tell you something you're going to hate.
	You're misreading Dante.
	I'm going to let you argue about Dante because you have diverse perspectives, and diversification is key.
	One person who works the hard way is Isaac Newton, who invested a large sum of money in the South Sea Company.
	Unfortunately, when the South Sea bubble burst in 1720, Newton lost a lot of money.
	This is why diversification is really important, even for people like Isaac Newton.
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	Just text Ben.
	To 98, 98, 98.
	That's Ben.
	To 98, 98, 98.
	You know how much gold they've sent me for all the work we've done for them over the years?
	None gold, bilge.
	No gold.
	I would just think every now and then you'd open a pack and go, ah, gold.
	None.
	I said that at the 15-minute mark of the show, we were going to do something big, something huge, something unprecedented.
	We were going to premiere.
	The second greatest commercial ever.
	And we didn't do that, because it's now 40 minutes in.
	But we're going to do it now.
	This is, as I said before, we've been hard at work for two years on trying to move our manufacturing out of China, and we've done just that.
	I'm going to tell you more about it.
	Michael shaved with it.
	I've watched people shave with it.
	I have a beard.
	I mean, it's part of my shtick.
	And we'll talk about that when we come back.
	But first, here it is.
	We're proud to present the world premiere of the second greatest commercial ever.
	Oh, hey, I'm Jeremy Boring, CEO of Daily Wire and founder of Jeremy's Razors.
	Woke razor companies love to take your money while trampling on your values.
	Me?
	I just love your money.
	Cut!
	What the hell is this?
	Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
	Nobody calls cut on my set but me.
	What, do you run Hollywood now?
	Two on the nose.
	What is this?
	We're filming the commercial for the brand new second-generation Jeremy's razor.
	Yeah, I get it.
	We moved our manufacturing out of China.
	Plus, with the new Sprint 3 and Precision 5 blades, you can shave like a man, not a manifesto.
	But who's he?
	I'm Black Jeremy, huge fan.
	Do you mind if we get a selfie?
	Oh, yeah, come on.
	Look, we talked about this.
	Customers want diversity.
	Customers want inclusion.
	Customers want... Black Jeremy.
	And for the commercials to be less macho.
	Can we please lose the flamethrower and the car?
	It's overcompensating and we need... Who are you?
	I'm Jessica.
	I've been following you around half-naked for two years.
	That makes you some kind of expert on advertising?
	Besides, don't you think it's a little insulting to black people?
	Oh!
	We prefer people of color.
	Don't you think it's a little insulting to black people of color that instead of giving them their own roles to play, you just recast them as a beloved white character?
	Hell yeah it is!
	We don't do it for people of color.
	We do it for liberal white women.
	I'll spell it out for you.
	Liberal white women make most of the purchasing decisions for the family, so happy commercials with people of color smiling at each other make them feel hella virtuous.
	Bitches love to feel virtuous.
	They do!
	That's why there's no white people in commercials anymore?
	Exactly.
	But that's so... Gay?
	Sorry, I'm the body positivity hire.
	You are so brave.
	What is even happening right now?
	Think of all the razors you'll sell.
	And don't forget Jeremy's shampoo and conditioner.
	They are excellent products.
	Hey, what if I play your character a little less bitchy?
	Unbelievable.
	Jeremy's Razors isn't for liberal white women.
	It's for men.
	Conservative men.
	So stop giving your money to woke corporations who hate you.
	Give it to me instead.
	Hey liberal white ladies.
	You know what's up.
	Go to jeremysrazors.com now and buy the new, radically redesigned 2nd Gen razors, featuring sharper, longer lasting blades and superior durability.
	Now in more inclusive 3 and 5 blade models.
	Oh man, I am so offended.
	That was a thing that happened in all of our lives.
	Yeah, that was two days in March.
	It's actually the truth, right?
	You don't see any white people in commercials anymore?
	And everybody says, oh, it's like they don't understand that white people are still their customer.
	No, they do understand.
	They understand who their customer is.
	That's the problem.
	We know who our customer is, too.
	We feel like our customer will probably appreciate the commentary.
	We're doing something different.
	In addition to rolling out the brand new Gen 2 razor, as I said before, it's a truly world-class razor.
	It's on par with anything else that you've tried.
	We have a Precision blade.
	We have a Quick Shave blade.
	Michael, which one have you used?
	So, I've got the Precision, and I...
	I don't want to brag or anything.
	I have very supple skin.
	I've got a little cute little baby face over here and I dry shave.
	So I get out of the shower.
	I don't use, I hate shaving cream and stuff.
	And I was a little nervous that I'd lose half the money maker.
	You know, if I just, no, it's a beautiful shave.
	It's really, it really is an excellent shave.
	And then I get to keep my supple little face.
	I want to test this thing on my head for Friday's show.
	Give me the one that was going to work best on my head.
	I will do.
	And in fact, co-CEO Caleb has been shaving his head with it, and I've seen blood very few times.
	No, he's dead.
	We're doing something else new, which is we're selling on Amazon.
	Here at Afford, you've only been able to go to jeremysrazors.com.
	Today, you can go to Amazon.
	That's really important for us because we want, obviously, for the product to be accessible to more and more people.
	And that's important, A, because it's how we keep the lights on around here.
	It's also important, though, because we do have a mission with all of this, and our mission is to actually create competition in the marketplace on behalf of conservatives.
	For basically the last two decades, corporations have moved further and further and further to the left, taking for granted fully 50% of their potential customers in this country.
	They've done so because they just assume that if they cater to the right, the left will abandon them and have a lot of options in doing so.
	But if they pander to the left, you have no option.
	You're just going to keep buying their products.
	You keep giving them your money no matter what.
	That's what we're trying to challenge by building these brands and these companies.
	So we hope you'll go over to Amazon.
	It's hard, you know, getting into a new platform like Amazon.
	Obviously, everybody's there, but you need to trend, you need to rank.
	We need it to be Prime-eligible, which means that Amazon needs to see that there's demand for it.
	So head over to Amazon.
	This is what you're looking for, this lovely new box and the brand new Jeremy's Razr 2nd Gen Razr 2.0.
	Do it right now.
	We're really excited about the product.
	And, you know, if it's good enough for Michael Knowles, I mean, then it needs a better recommendation.
	Well, I mean, producing that commercial was the seventh circle of hell, so back to Dante.
	Yes.
	Oh, you had fun.
	Very good.
	Segues.
	By the way, you're really funny in the commercial.
	You are funny.
	That's nice of you.
	When we started the company, I used to routinely tell people you were a terrible actor, and I said so on account of, you were a, I mean, truly bad.
	Yes.
	Truly bad.
	Yes.
	But you found it.
	Let's talk about this.
	You found it somewhere.
	I feel like in Lady Ballers you were hilarious, in the commercial you were hilarious.
	Again, if you just give me, like, a very, a person who's just pissed off to be there, I'm a method actor.
	I have to be in the place.
	I have to find my motivation.
	Was he in the commercial?
	I had the most important role of the whole thing.
	He's a black guy.
	You were a black guy in there?
	Yeah, hold on.
	Is that you?
	Yeah, that was me.
	That's Roy Behar.
	He really lost himself in the character.
	Wow, that's impressive.
	Matt appears in the background of the selfie.
	That's good.
	Second viewing, you'll see it.
	I was hoping for a full Al Jolson, you know, I love to sing.
	I was going to say for a minute, I thought we'd let a black guy in here.
	By the way, Siaka, who plays Black Jeremy and also had a very funny role in Jeremy's Razors, is a good buddy of ours.
	Is now Black Jeremy.
	I think it's going to buy me a lot of freedom not to have to be in all the commercials.
	He's funny.
	He's genuinely hilarious.
	He's genuinely hilarious.
	And a good guy, too.
	It is true.
	And also, I will admit that I found it very funny when the actress says that she has been following around half-naked for two years and you never noticed.
	I do like that line a lot.
	Was the car different Yes.
	That was a different McLaren.
	So the God King's McLaren is a is a Bass Boat Blue.
	I don't know if that's the official color, but I call it a Bass Boat Blue McLaren 600.
	And we thought that for Black Jeremy that he needed something with a little more attitude.
	A little funkier.
	We've got a purple McLaren 720.
	So we now have two McLarens.
	Am I going to keep getting paychecks or is this?
	I don't know that I've ever gotten a paycheck.
	Ben said it was in the mail.
	So I assume it's coming at some point.
	Yeah.
	It's hard to find money to pay you when we have to keep spending day after day to change the locks over and over again.
	Just keep picking them.
	So anyway, back to the freedom conversation.
	Back to Dante.
	Let's go back to Dante.
	Do you want to talk about that?
	Yes.
	I'll let you.
	I have one final point on Dante, then you can tell me why I'm totally wrong.
	Dante was a little bit of a rhino.
	And this is a weird thing.
	Dante, he fights at the Battle of Campaldino for the Pope, the Pope side.
	Then he goes back.
	The Pope side wins.
	Then he becomes like a rhino of the Pope side and he's pro-emperor side.
	And then the Pope side kicks him out and sends him into exile.
	So the upshot of all of this is Dante argues to the point of like pragmatic limitations on power for a kind of early separation of church and state.
	And And it's not a total separation.
	He thinks the civil authority should receive light from the spiritual authority, should be guided by the spiritual authority and illuminated by it, but that they're distinct.
	That the state, the emperor, and the pope, the spiritual authority, both receive their power directly from God.
	And so that basically the emperor doesn't have to answer to the pope.
	And this is a kind of early limitation on the power of government.
	Though it's not this total secular, you know, the church should have no say in anything.
	Well, first of all, we're having a kind of conversation across purposes because one thing we're talking about is the nature of man before God, which is different than the nature of man before government.
	So that we're talking about two different things.
	And the quality of freedom in those two different situations is different, which is the problem with Catholic theocracy.
	In Dante, Dante goes into hell and views the people who are damned for the choices that they have made.
	And because Dante is an actual great poet, the people come to life in such a way that you actually feel for them in their situation.
	But he's told not to feel pity for them because they have made their free choices.
	So they're obviously, the freedom is a good, even in hell.
	And so, he's not saying that they only were given the freedom to do the right thing.
	He's saying we don't pity them because they have chosen where they are, and their humanity shines out of the palm.
	Well, hold on.
	I don't understand why that makes freedom to do the wrong thing itself a good, as opposed to a natural consequence of misusing freedom.
	Because it naturally accompanies the freedom to do what's right.
	That's right.
	Which is why, in The Exodus, We see that God's people sin, even on their way out, and God doesn't forsake them.
	And in Christian theology, that's fulfilled in Christ, who, yes, gives us freedom to do what's right, but that is accompanied by forgiveness for doing what's wrong.
	He does kill a bunch of people.
	There's a multiplicity of God just going hog wild on people.
	Okay, so the distinction that I was going to make about the definition of freedom is that people misuse it because it's such a broad term.
	Right.
	And so people mean a bunch of different things by it, right?
	Sometimes what people mean is, I'm free to do whatever I want to do.
	Sometimes it means that I need a freedom to have health care, right?
	Which is I want somebody else to do something for me.
	Like there are a bunch of different uses of the word freedom that are actually mutually exclusive in some cases.
	The two that I want to focus on that I think that get mixed up really easily in this particular conversation are a right in the sense that you have no duty to do X.
	Where you have two choices that are both morally justifiable or interesting or irrelevant.
	Like whether you're going to have meat or whether you have milk tonight, right?
	Like if you're a Jew, you're going to have meat or milk tonight.
	You're going to have a cheeseburger or pork if you're a Christian.
	Like that has no moral qualifications and really has no moral importance.
	And so there's no duty.
	So the definition of that kind of freedom is you have a right to do X because you have no duty not to do X. That is one kind of freedom.
	That is not the same thing as you have a freedom to sin.
	You have the freedom to choose among various different things because you have no duty not to do that.
	So, in other words, I do have a duty not to sin.
	I do have a duty not to sin, which means I don't have a right to sin.
	I have a duty not to sin on a moral level that is different from the thing we're talking about on a governmental level, which is an immunity, which is the government does not have the power to compel me to do this thing.
	That's why I keep going back to the pragmatic thing.
	Yeah, so the two different kinds of freedom.
	Right, so if you agree with that, then we're actually all in agreement.
	So then, that goes back to my point, which is that when I say is it a useful concept, I'm not saying it doesn't matter or it's unimportant, but in conversation and in political debate, If the definition of freedom requires, you know, we could debate it for two hours, and it has 50 different meanings, and people mean 50 different things.
	It gets to the point where, just in common conversation, when we're having a political debate, it seems like it's just not useful to talk about.
	And so I feel the same way about rights.
	We talk about rights, and what even is a right?
	And that's why I've tried to...
	Not use that term as much.
	Instead, talk about responsibility, which is the flip side of rights, like you're talking about.
	But people understand that concept more.
	It's a more useful concept and a useful term.
	Wait, there is an important thing about this, going back to Polybius, because I think the cycle of regimes is real.
	There's no question about it.
	All history shows it.
	But the question to me is this.
	When a democracy, or whatever you want to call it, when it becomes chaos such that a strongman has to be brought in and then morphs into a tyranny.
	I mean, Lord Acton's point in the fall of the Roman Republic that you were actually freer after the Republic fell in August, and this is actually true.
	If you think the Empire was bad, just wait until you hear about the Republic.
	Right, exactly, exactly.
	So you were actually freer in that situation.
	But my argument with Acton on this is that If you don't have the right to choose who governs you, you actually aren't free.
	And so my only point, my only point is this.
	In the fall, in the morphing of a democracy into a tyranny, you have lost something of value.
	And that's why I think before you let the democracy fall to bring order, you should actually try to preserve the democracy.
	And there is something at least, too.
	You know, I love American history.
	We're talking about the pilgrims and the revolution and everything.
	You know, America doesn't have a tradition of a king.
	We could have.
	There were very serious founding fathers and framers who argued for it, or for some kind of elected monarchy or, you know, Washington as king or something.
	But we don't.
	We just don't.
	We don't have a royal family.
	I quite like the Windsors for all of their, you know, foibles and eccentricities.
	I think they've been basically good for England over the last century or more.
	But we don't have that.
	So, you know, until Emperor Barron comes up, we've got to deal with our own political traditions.
	But don't we see in Washington turning over his sword to the, you know, political authorities, don't we see something amazing?
	I mean, aren't we seeing something there that is unique in history, almost unique in history?
	An inherent good?
	I mean, don't we see in that moment something that is inherently good, and in the fall of the republic, don't we see something that is unfortunate?
	King George is said to have remarked upon hearing that Washington handed over- The king said this.
	The king said this.
	He said that Washington might be the greatest man in the world.
	I think he said it to Benjamin West.
	Yes and no.
	I mean, listen, again, as a defender of the Republican and a deep non-believer in the return of a tyranny or a monarchy, just on a theoretical level, the idea that one form of government is inherently better than another because you vote, I don't think is true.
	I agree with you.
	Because I think that rights precede, if you like rights all that much, and I'm talking here about, or structures of law, property, these things historically precede the form of government.
	act as a result of the form of government, historically speaking.
	Meaning that if you want to look at the rights that existed for the British, those well preexisted the power of parliament.
	They started with a bunch of oligarchic lords fighting with the king to dissemble power.
	They weakened under the power of the growing power of parliament.
	And by the way, I mean, one of the cases that you can easily make with regards to the American Republic is that if you're looking at the rights, I mean, and here, obviously you get into very dicey territory because not everybody in America had rights, most obviously black Americans.
	But if you were looking at the inherent centralizing power of a tyrannical government, it was very weak early on.
	And one of the reasons that it was kind of weak early on is because not everybody could vote.
	One of the things that you get, along with full suffrage, is the ability to swamp rights in dramatic new ways, right?
	A welfare state.
	But to hear that you don't support democracy is going to keep me awake at night.
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	Starts now.
	So, 20 is Nightline did a full episode on our good friend Andrew Tate.
	Oh.
	The other day.
	And it was, you know, mediocre as Nightline usually is.
	And it included some interesting material and included some really dumb material from some sort of gender studies professor who's explaining why feminism is good for us all, which is exactly why Andrew Tate exists.
	Yeah.
	Legitimately, this is like, the episode was made about why Andrew Tate is evil and then Some of which I agree, large chunks of which I agree.
	And then the counter is not responsible manhood.
	It's some dude being like, but feminism is a solution for everyone.
	I was like, God bless it.
	ABC, you're the worst.
	But the most interesting part of the doc was that there are all these outstanding sexual assault warrants on the dates and sex trafficking warrants on the dates and all of this.
	And there are a couple of the women who have come out and said, I was not sex trafficked, I consented.
	And the prosecutor in that particular case says, well, it doesn't matter if you consented, it's still sex trafficking.
	If you were convinced to come via the lover boy method to Romania and then serve effectively as a prostitute on camera, it doesn't matter whether you wanted to do it or you didn't want to do that, that is still sex trafficking.
	It's a crime.
	It is a crime.
	And this raises the question of freedom, because freedom always sort of implies with it consent, right?
	Consent of the governed would be democracy.
	So this goes back to, is consent the core value?
	Because for the West, it's not just that, even if you argue that it's an inherent value, it has become the inherent value in the West.
	It's the only value that matters.
	And you can see the breakdown of that system of morality every single day, particularly with young women who have been told their entire life that their consent is a binary question.
	It's yes or no.
	And then men look at that and they're like, okay, well, if consent is all that matters here, then I can do whatever I want to do to you so long as you consent to it.
	And our society no longer has the language to condemn women for saying yes to the thing, or, even more importantly, condemn men for taking advantage of a woman who says yes to a thing, because it's not taking advantage if she says yes to the thing.
	And that's a sickness in a society.
	This is, if you read the New York Times, the New York Times writes like three or four sex articles every week, and every single one of them is musing over how things could have gone so wrong when they had consent.
	And this is again and again, in the New York Times, which I take to be the voice of the left as an old-fashioned, they're kind of a fusty old paper, they're dealing with leftism as it was 60 years ago, but now it's permeated our society, but their idea is like, Sex is the only willed human action that takes place outside of moral context.
	Yeah.
	So that if you have consent, you can do this.
	There's no such thing as... If you dress up in leather and have somebody stick cigarettes in you, you're not degrading yourself.
	No.
	As long as you consent.
	It's empowering.
	And the idea that you can degrade, because if you have no soul, there's nothing to degrade, right?
	As long as your body is having pleasure.
	Yeah, that's... I think the important...
	The important point is that they don't have the language, but the concepts are still there.
	Yes.
	But the only language they have to describe the concepts is consent, and that's how you end up with, you know, a woman who shacks up with a guy for a night, gets drunk or whatever, college campus, and then wakes up in the morning and she's feeling She feels a certain way.
	She feels degraded.
	She feels like her dignity has been violated.
	She feels like she's been taken advantage of.
	She was not raped, but the problem is that consent is the only word she has to describe how she feels.
	And so she says, well, my consent was violated.
	And so then this thing that is not rape becomes rape, because that's just her way of condemning not just the guy, but also her own behavior.
	Correct.
	But then it becomes, so then everything becomes free.
	Everything's a binary question.
	It's either on this side of the consent line or on that side of the consent line.
	But the reality is there's a whole X axis here, right, that you're ignoring.
	You've got the Y axis, which is like consent or not consent.
	And then you have the X axis, which is degrading or not degrading.
	And things can exist in all four quadrants, right?
	You have stuff that's consensual and not degrading, which is hopefully, you know, like marital sex.
	And then you have things that are consensual and degrading, which is a very real quadrant right there.
	And then you have things that are consensual and non-consensual and non-degrading.
	It would be probably empty.
	That's an empty quadrant.
	Then you have non-consensual and degrading.
	That's a huge quadrant.
	Consensual and degrading is a really big quadrant.
	Non-consensual and degrading is a very big quadrant.
	They've disappeared an entire quadrant from the charts.
	Non-consensual and non-degrading.
	Like a cocktail waitress runs in here right now, clips a cigar, shoves it in my teeth, lights it on fire, and forces me to drink a Macallan 25.
	Right.
	It's not consensual.
	It's consensual but not degrading.
	But it was edifying.
	That's fair.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	But that category of consensual... Consensual integrating just doesn't exist for these people.
	It just doesn't exist at all.
	And so women are lost for this language.
	And then because of that, because they've degraded themselves, it makes it very difficult for them to form normal human relationships.
	Also the fact that men and women have a nature that if you get drunk with a bunch of guys, you're making a mistake.
	And they say, well, that's blaming the victim.
	But it's not.
	It's just like walking down an alley at three o'clock in the morning, you get mugged.
	It's the mugger's fault.
	But you're an idiot.
	You know, and you've done something because there are muggers, because human beings are corrupt, and, you know, that's not a place to be at three in the morning.
	Walking out in a tsunami without an umbrella, I guess it's the weather's fault, you know, in a way, but these things are to be expected.
	Also, an umbrella in a tsunami is not going to do you much good.
	Not much good, no.
	You know, again, I think that does go to the, when you make freedom your highest priority without any countervailing values, you end up in these very ugly places.
	Yeah.
	Well, again, I think that we're confusing the The freedom that is part of the dignity of being a human being, and the freedom, the political freedom.
	Agreed.
	What do you want to talk about that's not this?
	Do you guys resolve your differences?
	What's that?
	I think we just have to excise Knowles.
	I was launching an entirely new business called Jeremy's Rise 2.0 when I said one minute before walking on set, Well, let's just release the razor.
	I didn't realize that they'd need me to, like, send out tweets and give instructions to the team and sign documents.
	I will say that when I host the show, I'm a little more involved than this.
	You're a better host than I am in a lot of ways.
	The only thing, the advantage that I have over you is that the less you know, the more charming you can be.
	Basically, for me, it just comes down to, like, I'm not going to give up my freedom.
	Yeah.
	I mean, it really is that simple.
	I know that's like a A simple thing, but even my freedom to fail.
	Economic freedom is an enormous part of freedom that I don't think you can maintain in a coercive... I mean, you don't have economic freedom in Russia because if you even start to build a successful business, Vladimir Putin comes and takes it away from you and makes it his business.
	Yes, but in the year 900 BC, he owned that business.
	That's the thing.
	But you don't understand, in the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Well, we've covered most of the big topics.
	We covered Jeremy's Razors 2.0.
	The Battle of Campaldino.
	The Battle of Campaldino.
	We covered Dante.
	We covered freedom in Exodus, consent.
	Julia Fox.
	I'd say the only thing we haven't talked about is Donald Trump's sex life.
	So I think it's probably worth just coming out of this beautiful, philosophical world that we've lived in and get down into really disgusting, salacious politics.
	I have to say, this is driving me crazy.
	I have to admit, this Trump trial is making me nuts.
	I love it.
	I love it.
	It's incredibly entertaining, but it is the greatest violation of American norms and principles and ethics.
	That I think I've seen in my lifetime.
	It reminds me of a Capra movie, you know, like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where everybody is corrupt.
	Except for Mr. Smith, you know.
	Well, this is the thing.
	They have turned this guy.
	They have turned this guy into a hero in the same way that Samson is a hero.
	If you shear him of his hair.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Loses his great power.
	Exactly.
	It's also true.
	And so I can't wait for him to be put in the doorway of the courthouse.
	It pushes down all of the pillars and all of the, it collapses upon the Philippines.
	But nothing stops him.
	This is like, talk about a tsunami.
	This is like a tsunami of oppression that has hit him.
	Everybody, every single institution we have is trying to bring this guy down and they can't stop him.
	This is the thing.
	Even I have come to admire Donald Trump.
	Everybody jokes Donald Trump has lived a very colorful life and he's talked about it and bragged about it.
	I cannot think of another human being who, with this kind of stuff thrown at him, four indictments, they want to put him in jail for 700 years or whatever, and he seems only to be energized by it.
	He goes to Harlem to do a little bodega rally.
	He's doing a rally in the South Bronx.
	A white guy, much less an orange guy, has not entered the South Bronx in probably 100 years.
	This guy's gonna go do it.
	And the reason I love the trial, it is so unjust, and it's so absurd, and their star witness has committed more egregious crimes than the guy they're actually trying to prosecute.
	Yeah, of course.
	And unprosecuted, by the way, for their star witness.
	Yeah, and basically just can't help but talk about them.
	Yeah, all the time.
	With all of that, they are so farcically bad at prosecuting Trump.
	Everyone, the AG, this judge is a complete joke.
	The prosecution didn't know what their sore witness was going to say.
	They didn't realize the defense had prepared anything.
	That every second this trial goes on, I feel that Trump gets stronger.
	I don't think it's just- It's a blessing for him.
	It's absolutely a blessing for him.
	It's a blessing in disguise.
	It's the worst thing.
	I would never want to be put through it.
	It's a massive blessing to his political campaign for a couple of reasons.
	One, as you say, it's on its face an absurd charge.
	Second, the coterie of witnesses that they have is legitimately a woman who sells sex for money on camera.
	But we're shocked to find herself in there.
	And a lawyer who stole $60,000.
	Right.
	I mean, when she said that she was shocked, how did I find myself here?
	I don't know.
	How do you find yourself there every single day on camera?
	On camera, yeah.
	You were just doing your job, is the answer.
	You found yourself shocked the same way I find myself shocked to be sitting behind a desk talking.
	Like, what are you talking about?
	The whole trial is absurd.
	But it's also done him the favor of putting him, as he says, the icebox.
	Yeah.
	That's actually great for him.
	Yeah.
	If I could have constructed a campaign wherein Twitter did not exist for him, he would be forced into fake Twitter where no one was, and he would just tweet into it and no one would ever notice.
	The oblivion, we might call it.
	Right, exactly.
	You might call it truth social.
	And he was then put into a room where he was literally not allowed to talk for multiple hours a day.
	But he could only emerge to speak about how he wasn't allowed to talk and then go back into And if he could do that for the rest of... I hope that this trial lasts another seven months.
	Well, don't worry.
	There's three or four more coming up right behind it.
	But they're not going to get there in time.
	They can't do it.
	This is the only one.
	This is the weakest of the four.
	Meanwhile, Trump is setting the world on fire.
	He's the worst president.
	He is the worst president.
	He is so terrible.
	Everything the man does is just trash.
	I mean, the world is literally on fire, and it's all his fault.
	It is.
	Every element of it is his fault.
	He is trash at this.
	It's unbelievable how bad he is as a president.
	Did you see he, so he releases, he's going to release a million barrels of oil from this Northeast Reserve, Joe Biden.
	He'll bring it down by two cents.
	Yeah, he'll bring gas down by nothing, but he needs to do it to have any shot of restoring gas prices.
	And so he can't, he can't just drill for more oil because the left won't accept that, but they need more oil.
	So they do it in this really inefficient way.
	Then Joe Biden, he goes after the International Criminal Court because they seem to be getting big for their britches.
	Even though Joe Biden is the one who rescinded Trump's sanctions on the International Criminal Court.
	Then he's whining about how Russia invaded Ukraine.
	Russia only invades Ukraine, according to Zelensky, because Joe Biden weakens America's stance on Russia.
	Because he said if it's only a minor invasion.
	Yeah, it's only a minor invasion.
	He literally did the just the tip routine.
	He's like, if it's just the tip, it's probably fine.
	This is after staging a room in Saigon in Afghanistan.
	Yeah, that's right.
	It should be, it should, it should, the strategic oil reserve thing, it should, that should be an impeachable offense in a lot of ways.
	You're stealing from the Strategic Oil Reserve during the election season.
	I know it's not impeachable, but... He's explicitly trying to buy votes now.
	Like, explicitly trying to buy votes.
	He's going to young people.
	He's like, just shoveling cash at them.
	He's like, here's a student loan bailout.
	You want some money?
	I'll give you some money, man.
	Here's some money.
	And he's like, you know what?
	The oil prices are too high.
	What if I just take some money?
	I just throw the money at you.
	And he's doing this over and over.
	I mean, it's so clear at this point that he's just handing out goodies to constituent groups.
	And it's not going to work.
	I think he's going to lose.
	Let me say this.
	I am hopeful that he will lose.
	After 2016, I'll never say again what's going to happen.
	I've been going to every election since 2008, by the way.
	But I think that he could truly lose.
	The thing that concerns me, I'm deeply concerned about this early debate.
	I think that the early debate is a mistake.
	On Trump's part?
	And I think that we will go, we meaning conservatives broadly, and I fear Trump himself, will go into the debate with the exact wrong set of expectations.
	Every time there's a State of the Union with Joe Biden, we're like, oh, I can't wait to watch this train wreck.
	He's probably going to poop himself and fall off the stage.
	And he doesn't.
	He's good.
	He mixes it up with the Republicans.
	He's good.
	Yeah, he was energetic.
	He's energetic.
	He's feisty.
	He was good in the debates last time, and Trump was not good.
	The first one he was not good.
	And we keep going in with these low expectations, like they won't give this guy a shot of adrenaline in the arm, and he won't be able to perform.
	And when you go in with those expectations, you lose every single time.
	If you think, there's no way Joe Biden can stand up to Donald Trump in a debate, first of all, he did.
	Okay, so number one, he should go in and he should just be calm.
	If he's calm, he's going to win.
	If he gets agitated, Biden is going to win.
	Go in here and fight for his life and win.
	But here's what he really needs.
	Okay, so here's my suggested strategy for the Trump debate.
	Okay, so number one, he should go in and he should just be calm.
	If he's calm, he's going to win.
	If he gets agitated, Biden is going to win because Biden, as you say, he's going to go into the back room, he's going to find a youth and he's going to suck the blood from the youth.
	He's going to reinvigorate himself, right?
	He's not just going to smell the youth this time.
	This time it's the fangs.
	He's going to go full force.
	But the other thing is that...
	I really believe that Donald Trump should push very hard to have RFK Jr.
	on that stage.
	I think he should really push to have RFK Jr.
	on that stage, and I'll tell you why.
	I think this is right.
	Because RFK Jr.
	right now is drawing somewhere around 10% of the vote.
	He seems to be drawing a little bit more from Biden than from Trump.
	And I think that's only going to grow because it turns out there are many never-Bidens, more never-Bidens than there are never-Trumps at this point in time.
	If you're voting for Trump, it's because you actually want to vote for Trump.
	Like, who's voting for Trump because they hate Joe Biden so much that they're voting for Trump?
	That's really not Trump's base.
	Trump's base is mostly people who really, really like him.
	His base is like 43, 44%.
	Joe Biden's base is right now like 36, 37%.
	It sucks.
	And not only that, RFK Jr., he thinks that he is running for right-wing votes, which means that in a debate, he's going to turn, he's going to smack Trump.
	When he turns and he smacks Trump, who does that attract?
	Not the Trump voters.
	It attracts the Biden voters.
	The Biden voters like that RFK Jr.
	is going after Donald Trump.
	Then RFK Jr.
	will turn and he will clock Joe Biden on being a bad president.
	And he will continue to bleed Biden's voters.
	Plus it's risky.
	Plus he fills time.
	Plus he fills time.
	And I think the more time, I think Donald Trump in debate is pepper, he's not salt.
	He's great in primary debates because he has about six minutes combined to talk and it's all little jabs.
	And if you give him 40 minutes on a stage to debate, I've never seen him be good in a debate that's 40 minutes.
	I don't agree with this.
	I think Trump jumped on this because he smelled blood, and I think he's right to smell blood.
	Even though, I don't actually think Trump is going to underestimate Biden.
	I think he's, you know, he's going to make, he's foolishly saying he's not going to be any good.
	But I think he knows that he has to do something here.
	And there's something else about this, and this is an insight I've actually stolen from my son.
	I'd let him say it, but he's in Edinburgh drinking Macallan.
	On his twin mattress, right?
	On his twin helix mattress.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Exactly, on Noel's mattress.
	Spencer only drinks those peaty ones.
	He does.
	He likes the dirt.
	He could eat coal as well.
	However, he pointed out that Trump has a new coalition.
	This is not just the minorities, but he also has a coalition of people who are saying, like, I don't like him, but I'm voting for him.
	The first time that people said that in 2016, when we sort of said, you know, when I sort of said, all right, I'm going to vote for him because he's better than Hillary.
	We felt that we had to join the crowd of the people who loved him.
	Now, we don't even feel that way.
	I mean, people yell at me for it, but I feel perfectly free to say, I don't think he's a good guy.
	I thought he did a good job for three years, a decent job for three years.
	But I'll vote for him twice.
	I'll move from state to state.
	Of course.
	Because it's just so obvious.
	And I think if he can go on and basically make that case, make the cases like, Joe, you have done a terrible job.
	You did this, you did this, you did this, you did this.
	He has to not get sucked into January 6th.
	That's the big trap that Biden is going to set for him.
	He's going to start off and he's going to say, you lost the election.
	You won't accept that you lost the election and then you led an insurrection.
	And Trump, because he's almost patholized.
	He's like Marty McFly in Back to the Future 2, right?
	It's like, chicken, chicken McFly.
	And then he's like, the Petzfeld Lynn, the Dolly Zoom.
	Exactly.
	If he can avoid that, if he can just say, listen, Joe, you and I disagree about who won the 2020 election.
	But there's one thing that everyone agrees about, and it's that you're a president.
	president.
	I mean, if he says that, he'll win.
	I mean, if he says that, he'll win.
	And I agree that I think that this will be a disaster for Biden.
	And I agree that I think that this will be a disaster for Biden.
	And it's different than 2020.
	And it's different than 2020, for the most obvious reason that Biden now is fully senile.
	For the most obvious reason that Biden now is fully senile.
	He's actually senile.
	He's actually senile.
	And he only has two gears now.
	And he only has two gears now.
	And one gear is confused, doddering and confused and incoherent.
	The other gear, and this is what we saw in the State of the Union, is angry and shouting.
	And the only way that he's able to be coherent for a long stretch of time is to be angry and shouting the entire time.
	He just did it at a commencement speech with Morehouse, where he just, it didn't make any sense tonally.
	Like he's angry and shouting at a commencement speech, because that's the only way that they can get this guy to make sense for a long period of time.
	So he's going to come into this debate, and he's going to be in angry shouting mode.
	And if Trump can just be not only calm, but also sort of just his whimsical sort of self, with this angry shouting old man, I think the contrast will be really favorable to Trump.
	Except that, if...
	If Trump makes the election a referendum on Trump, he will lose.
	If Trump makes the election a referendum on January 2020, broadly speaking, he will lose.
	And if Donald Trump makes the election a referendum on Joe Biden, he will be the 47th president.
	The problem is I've never seen Trump not make himself the center of whatever conversation he walks into.
	But I think, you know, I don't know.
	I'm kind of optimistic about this debate.
	I'm not even sure it's going to happen, to be honest.
	But like, I think if it happens, I think the minute the minute Biden said it, you could tell he did it because he's running scared.
	I mean, he has no reason for him to do it.
	And and the way Trump jumped on it, I just thought, like, he smells blood and he is.
	You know, people keep saying he's not a politician, but he kind of is a politician.
	You mean he was the president of the United States for four years?
	Well, not only that.
	Run three times to be president.
	He's a natural politician.
	Yeah, he is.
	Is there a world where a bad performance leads to a move to ouster Biden from the ticket at his convention?
	It's almost impossible.
	No way.
	No way.
	Is it impossible?
	Yeah.
	If you oust him, who are they going to put in place?
	There's no one they can put in place.
	There's one person.
	Well, it's Michelle.
	Michelle's the only person.
	They're not going to do it.
	I just don't think they're going to do it.
	I think they're going to ride this horse past its death.
	I don't know what chapter you think we're in.
	We are going to be taking questions from our Daily Wire Plus subscribers.
	We've been seeing your questions in the chat.
	We're going to take them now.
	If you're not yet a member, please head over to dailywireplus.com.
	Become a member today.
	Our subscribers make it possible for us to continue to bring you this great content, to continue to bring you this show, Ben's show, Drew's show, Matt's show.
	Michael's is more like a charity thing.
	You don't really contribute to that.
	It's full of love.
	I love you, man.
	I get points in heaven for that one.
	But also, the entertainment that we're doing.
	If you haven't seen Mr. Bertram, please go over to Daily Wire Plus and give it a watch.
	It's the fulfillment of Adam Carolla's really 30-year vision.
	It's the character he first created that brought him into show business, and we've helped him realize that with our first animated series for grown-ups, you know, other than our children's animated stuff over at Bent Key.
	If you haven't seen Judged, Matt Walsh, the fulfillment of Matt Walsh's 30-year vision to condemn people.
	Please head over and give that a watch as well.
	I will say this about Mr. Bertram.
	I wanted to say this.
	If they'd asked me at the premiere to say anything, I was going to bring up the fact that the first time I met Adam Carolla, He charged me $15,000 for the privilege.
	So Ben and I were running a thing called Truth Revolt at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
	And we were having a student conference at Pepperdine University.
	And Ben came up to me and he said, well, I think maybe I said we should have a speaker.
	And Ben said, I'm really good friends with Adam Carolla, but he would definitely come down.
	It's a 23-minute drive.
	I mean, he'll drive 23 minutes to do it for me.
	I've known him since I was a kid.
	So I was like, oh, man, they're close.
	They're good friends.
	I call up Adam's team.
	They're like, yeah.
	15 grinks.
	And I was like, but it's 20, it's 23 minutes.
	You've known Ben since he was a kid.
	Don't make me say 17 again.
	So I was thinking, look at how far we've come.
	The first time I met Adam, he charged me $15,000 for the privilege.
	And here we are a decade later, and he charged me $9 million.
	They get to go to one party with him.
	It's a fun show though, it's worth watching.
	Our Daily Wire subscribers make it possible, so thank you to you.
	And here is our first question.
	Is it worth debating falsehoods about Trump?
	The drink bleach falsehood, the find people falsehood, etc.
	With people who constantly complain about Trump and refuse to change their minds no matter how many times you disprove their statements.
	I think that question answers itself.
	Yeah.
	It does.
	I will say the one thing that I've done, so obviously, If he hadn't noticed, Jewish.
	And that means there are a lot of people I know who are libs.
	Not in the Orthodox community, but everybody else who's not.
	The Orthodox community is like 150% pro-Trump.
	And then you have all the lib Jews.
	The Jew-ish.
	Right, exactly.
	Not very religious.
	But there are some who are really, really mad at Biden.
	Because they're looking at how Biden, I mean it's long past time obviously, but because of what Biden has done on Israel, they are livid.
	And I talked to some of them and they're like, yeah, but I just can't vote for Trump.
	I can't vote because they're still libs and I can't, I can't vote for Trump.
	And what I've said to them is, okay, so either stay home or vote for RFK Jr.
	If you're not going to vote for Trump, do not give your vote to Joe Biden because the minute that you give your vote to a person with whom you heartily disagree, your vote means nothing.
	It means nothing.
	It's not malleable anymore.
	If they know they can just check you up in that car.
	I agree with this with someone with whom you.
	I would say I'll give my vote to someone with whom I heartily disagree.
	I heartily disagree with Donald Trump quite often.
	I would not give my vote to someone with whom I fundamentally disagree.
	Right, that's fair.
	Also, I too know many liberals for my sins, and one of the things that I've decided is I never discuss personalities with them.
	Because I'll say, the minute the conversation starts, I'll say, look, You're going to tell me how much you hate Trump.
	I'm going to tell you how much I hate Biden.
	They're politicians.
	There are many, many hateful things about them.
	Let's talk about the principles.
	And then, if I can convince them on the principles, then I'll say to them, then just don't vote.
	If you can't vote for Trump, just don't vote.
	I think you could also, on the questioner's point of, do you fact check, you know, all the fake propaganda, I think if you just calmly, you don't need to go tit for tat, because there will be 10 more lies for every one you correct.
	But if you just sort of calmly say, yeah, none of that's true, Just none of it's true, and I'm happy to disprove any number of them that you want, but at a certain point, you have to recognize the sources of your information are not credible.
	I know that you believe that they're true because of the bubble in which you operate.
	People will not believe that.
	I mean, even after this NPR thing came out, I would say to people, I've been telling people that NPR is poison for years, and when it came out that the woman who runs NPR is essentially a CIA operative, I said, now do you believe me?
	No, come on.
	They just will not believe it.
	Those lies just absolutely permeate the atmosphere.
	Wait, you're saying that government-funded propaganda isn't wholly accurate?
	But anti-American propaganda, that's the crazy part we're living in.
	That's one of the big mistakes our deep state makes.
	They're very anti-American.
	If only we had a good deep state.
	If the courts allowed Donald Trump to be kicked off the ballot in the swing states, do you think that would justify a civil war?
	I think justify is the wrong question.
	I mean, you can make an argument.
	Look, I mean, our founders thought that a tax on Snapple or whatever tea they were drinking justified a revolt.
	I mean, you can make an argument that, like, the income tax justifies a revolt of some kind.
	And how.
	But, however, you have to ask questions like, Does it have any chance of succeeding?
	Does it have any chance of creating a better situation than what we have right now?
	Do you want to shoot your cousins?
	Exactly.
	You have to start asking all those kinds of questions, and I think that, you know, so then the answer is obviously no in that case.
	I don't know.
	If they prevent us from being able to function as a country, which, removing the frontrunner from one of the parties from being on the ballot unconstitutionally, you are getting If not fully, they're very close to the point where the political system can no longer give you a win.
	But it's such a, it's such a hypothetical, like, it's just, that's not what's going to happen.
	What's going to happen is what's happened.
	The court's going to get involved and the court's going to say, yeah, that's not how, that's not how it works in this country.
	You can't pull that, those shenanigans.
	By the way, it's, I think that that's, it's such an important point because as seriously as, as We take the, you know, throwing Trump off the ballot thing is about, they take the January 6th thing way more seriously.
	Neither of those were destined to succeed or be in any serious way a threat to the working order of our own.
	That's right.
	And I'm so sick of this crap about how this is going to be the last election, there'll be no more election.
	Not a single person in the United States believes that.
	No one believes it.
	When politicians say it, they don't believe it.
	When hosts say it, they don't.
	This is not going to be the last.
	I promise you, it's not going to be the last election.
	I don't bet 100% on very many things.
	I will bet 100% that four years from now, we will be in the middle of another presidential election cycle.
	I'd be willing to bet everything that I own and all of my children's future ownings on that proposition.
	And anybody who says different, I gotta tell you, like, I don't believe you.
	And if you really believe that, then I think that, you know, if you lose the election, then right now, if you believe that Joe Biden is such a threat, for example, on the right to democracy, that it's literally the end of the country, the end of the country, if he gets elected, Then you have a duty to do something about it, and you don't, because it's not true.
	He's an evil guy who believes evil things and is going to do evil things, and we have a system that prevents the most evil things from happening.
	This is why the first conversation of the night was important, because if you believe that we can gain no more goodness out of our political system, then you have a duty to revolution.
	When the founders did what they did, yes, it was over.
	a one cent tax on Snapple.
	But it wasn't really over the one cent tax on Snapple.
	It was over the fact that they petitioned their government and petitioned their government and petitioned their government and they were given no voice.
	They were given no recourse.
	There was nothing that they could do to have a say in how they were governed.
	They could not affect political change in any way, if they had been able to affect political change.
	If George III and Parliament had just decided to give representation to the colonies in Parliament, there would have been no moral justification for the American Revolution.
	But they wouldn't, and so there was.
	But they also, but to go back to my point, that the other thing they had going is that they could win.
	Now, it's quite amazing that they won, but they could win given the situation they were in at the time.
	But, you know, the question that we have is that even if the government does something like they kick Trump off the ballot.
	Now, that's, we agree, that's full-on tyranny.
	Can some sort of movement like that actually have any hope of succeeding?
	Only if it's organized by the states.
	Yeah, it would have to grow up organically.
	It would have to be organized by the states.
	There's no, like, we the people.
	Like, your militia down in, you know, Plainview, Texas or something that's going to overthrow the federal government, of course that's not going to happen.
	Your militia up in Michigan, of course that's not going to happen.
	A move like that, if it were to have any chance of succeeding, would have to be a collection of the states doing it.
	And listen, again, you were talking about shooting your cousins.
	I get a little frustrated when people act as though they look forward to the idea of revolution.
	We haven't met my cousins.
	It depends on the cousin.
	Revolution is not the moment that we are in, and it is not a moment that we should hope to find ourselves in.
	We are in a moment where we are losing political battles at a rate that demands a change in tactics.
	At the same time, we're winning political battles all the time that still mattered.
	Donald Trump was president three and a half years ago.
	Roe versus Wade was overturned, which is something I frankly never thought was going to happen.
	That's exactly right.
	And so, I'm sorry to disabuse everyone of their fantasy that at 65 years old, you with your semi-automatic AR-15, as long as you don't have to run more than four steps uphill, are somehow going to overthrow the United States military.
	That's not true.
	That's not real and you shouldn't want it to be real.
	I'm hoping to be sent to France to flirt with the girls.
	That's what I have been, frankly.
	The fact that Biden's freaking out over everything and, you know, spilling oil from the Northeast and agreeing to the debates and everything.
	The one thing it shows you, it's not that Trump is going to win.
	It's not that it's not rigged.
	At least it's not totally rigged.
	That's right.
	At least Biden thinks he could lose.
	Yes.
	Which is a good sign.
	No, I'm telling you, they are vulnerable or they would not be behaving like... They wouldn't have reacted to Harrison Butker if they realized that women are waking up.
	Look what it took for Biden to win the first time.
	And they will not succeed.
	At shutting down the country again, going into this election.
	If they would, if they could, they would.
	What are the chances that the debate gets canceled because of Trump's insistence on a drug test?
	I think there's a high chance it'll get canceled, but I don't know if that'll be the case.
	It won't be because of that.
	I think it's funny to demand a drug test, but if you think that Joe Biden couldn't pass a drug, the way drug tests work, like giving the guy a shot of adrenaline two minutes before he takes the stage, your drug test isn't awesome.
	They couldn't get Jose Canseco in the night.
	Is he continent enough to pee in a jar on TV?
	Run him, man.
	If we lose this election, whose fault will it be in the lie?
	Mine.
	I take it to say...
	It's the fault of whoever you already didn't like.
	Yes.
	Here's what I know for a fact.
	It will be my fault.
	And I base this on the fact that no matter what happens in politics, It's your fault.
	I get blamed.
	You should have pushed harder for Ron DeSantis.
	What are you talking about?
	I literally voted for Ron DeSantis in the primary after he dropped out.
	That's how much I wanted Ron DeSantis to be the nominee.
	And then if I say that, people are like, you don't sufficiently support Donald Trump.
	And I'm just like, guys, I am a mere shampoo salesman on the internet.
	If you think that the Daily Wire being a little nicer to your preferred candidate would change the fact that the base, the voters, wanted Donald Trump, I did not want Donald Trump to be our nominee.
	I wrote an essay that said, I don't think Donald Trump, I think Donald Trump should be disqualified on the basis of his behavior in 2020.
	And by the way, some of your hosts have been very pro-Trump for many years.
	And some have been very pro-Trump for many years.
	We have a political process in this country, and also, we're a media company.
	It's not my job to get Ron DeSantis to be the nominee.
	That's not my job, that's Ron DeSantis' job.
	And you're missing an important point.
	It's the Jews.
	If you want to recast that question as, what can Donald Trump do to win?
	That's not on Donald Trump, right?
	I think everybody understands that if he loses, then he bears a large percentage of the responsibility for losing.
	I don't think people understand.
	No, I don't.
	I think they're looking for other reasons.
	But, if there's one thing that he can do to win, that is not just personality driven, Liberate the state parties to go get the votes.
	Build state parties that are not complete crap.
	The biggest problem the Republican Party has right now is not Donald Trump as a candidate.
	The biggest problem the Republican Party has right now is not even the media, although the media are, of course, a huge problem.
	The biggest problem the Republican Party has is that they destroyed their state parties in places like Arizona, and Michigan, and Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
	And you need people to go knock on doors and collect votes.
	That's what you need to do, because Democrats are doing that.
	You know how I know this?
	Because there's only one state in the country that did it right in 2022, and there was a red wave in that state, and that was Florida.
	Everywhere else, they blew it, and they got this little pink trickle at best.
	And so if Donald Trump wants to win, every dollar that is pouring into the RNC, every single dollar should be a get-out-the-vote dollar in the swing states.
	In the swing states.
	Donald Trump could lose and it not be his fault.
	It is more likely if he loses that it will actually be his fault because of his lack of discipline and his inability to frame the conversation.
	It's so funny that this is a conference statement because no one ever doubted this for one second about John McCain, about Mitt Romney.
	If George W. Bush had lost in 2004, people would have been like, ah, can't believe that guy.
	Part of it though is the extraordinary measures taken against Trump in 2020 and 2021.
	Correct.
	Agreed.
	So they re-upended a lot of the voter rules.
	I do think part of the state- The entire apparatus of the government is a raid against him.
	Yes.
	That could cost him the election.
	Yes, it could.
	Of course it could.
	So one thing you do, yes, you have to have the state parties to get out the vote.
	You also need a robust voter integrity effort.
	This is, I remember in my early days in politics, working on campaigns- Out of walking, out of knocking.
	Yes, exactly.
	Passing out palm cards.
	But we would have the ballot integrity people.
	And we would catch people and we'd catch SEIU busing in union members at a district and all that.
	That always happens everywhere.
	The Baltimore Board of Election Supervisor just got caught on camera this week and he said, yeah, there was some shady stuff that happened in that election.
	We still don't have clarity.
	Someone might have uploaded a thumb drive twice or whatever.
	You know, so that happens all the time.
	You know, to quote FDR's advice to LBJ after LBJ lost an important election to him.
	FDR said, you ran fine, but you forgot to sit on the ballot box.
	You forgot, in a way, it's actually to FDR's credit, you forgot who counts the votes.
	That's really what matters.
	And then LBJ took an extreme lesson from that and stole the election.
	Is the Democrats' election strategy delusional, or are they confident knowing it's already written?
	That's a strange question.
	I mean, the only thing delusional about it is that they thought Biden might be a good candidate.
	But as you say, they have no one else to replace.
	It's delusional.
	It is delusional.
	Because a normal candidate would, like Joe Biden is, I've been saying he's delusional for three years on a political level.
	He won in 2020 because he ran against Bernie Sanders as a moderate.
	And then he ran as a dead person against Donald Trump.
	And what the American people wanted was a moderate dead person.
	And instead what they got was a radical dead person.
	And they don't like radical dead people, as it turns out.
	It turns out that all the people that Joe Biden is pandering to are the least popular people in America.
	That's right.
	Who do not like the college protesters.
	People do not like the pro-Khamasniks in Dearborn, Michigan.
	People do not like the trans radicals.
	People are not fond of these people.
	And Joe Biden keeps doubling down.
	We've done this so many times on the show, I won't repeat it.
	2012 was the most important election.
	Barack Obama changed the way Democrats think about elections by basically cobbling together a coalition of the dispossessed and doubling down on his base while ignoring the moderates, and he won.
	And every Democrat since then has thought they can do that.
	The only reason it worked in 2020 is because every voting rule changed and everyone voted nine months in advance of the election.
	That's right.
	That's literally the only reason.
	What's the delusional part?
	The delusional part is that he thinks that if he keeps doubling down on his base and ignoring the moderates- He thinks that if he- Yes.
	The delusion is that Joe Biden thinks he's Barack Obama.
	Right.
	Yes.
	That's the delusion.
	Yes.
	But the Democrats are scared out of their wits.
	They're not delusional.
	They understand.
	But all the people around him are fully delusional.
	Because if they were smart, I mean, James Carville was saying this, if they were smart, they'd be in his ear.
	Roy Tishera is saying this.
	They'd all be in his ear saying, dude, The votes you're losing are in the middle of the spectrum.
	Those votes are wide open.
	They're so wide open that RFK Jr.
	is running at 10%.
	Those votes are wide open.
	What in the F are you doing?
	That's what James Carville said?
	All I heard was, You have to play it backwards.
	What do you make of big right-wing Twitter accounts starting to blame Jews for everything?
	They're all on my feed.
	Drew's leading them.
	What I like is that they hate Jews for making money, so they hate them for being capitalists.
	They hate them for being socialists.
	It's like you can't I mean, antisemitism, to give a definition, antisemitism is a conspiracy theory about the power of the Jew in society.
	Whatever you hate most in society, the Jew is behind it.
	It is why it is distinct in definition from other forms of discrimination.
	Doesn't mean it's better, doesn't mean it's worse, it is distinct because it is a distinct phenomenon.
	Again, not better, not more important, not worse, just distinct.
	Okay, the reason that you see right-wing Twitter accounts that are now doing this crap is because the right-wing does now have a grievance mentality.
	Part of that grievance mentality has been justified by the institutional dominance of the left and right-wingers who rightly feel that they have been ground under the boot heel of a culture that dispossesses particularly white Christian males.
	All of that is true, but this has resulted in a quasi-intersectional philosophy wherein white Christian males are at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy and those who are quote-unquote most successful in the society are to blame, which is identical to left-wing intersectional philosophy.
	The only difference is who they think is at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy and who's at the top of the intersectional hierarchy.
	And so grievance culture comes all the way around.
	The only thing that the intersectional leftists and the right-wing anti-Semites agree on is that at the top of the hierarchy is the Jews because the Jews are disproportionately successful.
	The thing is the intersectional hierarchy, they think that the Jews are white, so they're disproportionately successful.
	And the white supremacists and the alt-righters and the anti-Semites think that the Jews hate white people and therefore they're at the top of the intersectional hierarchy.
	So that's power.
	You're at the top of both hierarchies.
	That's the famous joke about the Jew in 1939 who walks past the other Jew sitting on the park bench reading Der Sturmer, and he says to him, why are you reading Der Sturmer?
	He says, look how much good news there is in here.
	We run the banks.
	I have to say, I do not agree with this thing about the source of anti-Semitism.
	It is a religious thing.
	If you go back and see pre-Nazis, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, all these guys were saying this weird Religion, Christianity has come in and stolen our true German values and it's all the fault of the Jew.
	That is what they say.
	They say Christianity is against our nature.
	The blood of the Germans, the Aryan blood is running in our veins.
	It's all the fault of the Jew who sold us Christianity.
	And that's why the thing survives as long as it does.
	And it is worse than other forms of bigotry because it's a bigotry against God.
	It is bigotry against God.
	And just one other thing I have to say is that As far as I'm concerned, the Jews aren't powerful enough.
	My biggest problem with the Order of the Elders of Zion thing is that it's a forgery.
	I don't understand.
	Where are the Jews?
	Why do they make things run better?
	You did use our space laser on Raisi's helicopter.
	That was good.
	But you missed the other two.
	Intentionally.
	We don't hit every time.
	I will say, I take a more limited and simpler view of anti-Semitism.
	And that I would classify it like any other bigotry, racism.
	Of course, racism is a big one.
	You know, if you're an anti-black racist, it's because you hate black people.
	You think that black people are inferior in some way.
	And if that's what you think about black people, then you're racist.
	Now, you might not hate black people, but have other views about black people, some stereotypical views even.
	And some of those views might even be, like, insulting.
	But it doesn't automatically make you a racist.
	That's true.
	Or the example I give is like, you know, let's say Asians.
	You might not hate Asians.
	However, you might subscribe to the stereotype that Asians are bad drivers.
	Now, are they actually bad drivers?
	I don't know.
	They're probably not any worse than anybody else.
	But if you believe that, you just happen to believe, it doesn't mean that you're racist or ethnocentric against Asians.
	And so I would say that anti-Semitism is A hatred of Jews.
	Okay, the reason I'm going to make a distinction here, no one ever says, I hate blacks because they're too powerful.
	That's generally not a thing.
	For literally hundreds of years, blacks were hated when they were slaves and not powerful.
	When it comes to Jews, the reason that anti-Semitism has so often resulted in anti-Jewish pogroms and violence, and this is going back centuries, I mean, there's nothing new.
	The reason is because when you perceive a group as unjustifiably powerful, typically that means that you're going to drag them in the streets and kill them.
	The Russians, they weren't powerful in Russia when the Cossacks came into their little village.
	No, no, no, wrong.
	So if you go back to the history of the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, second callback.
	Second callback, one show.
	The claim of the Cossacks was that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was dominated at the top levels by merchant Jews.
	This was pushed by the Cossack leaders.
	It's legitimately in their rhetoric.
	So again, that's true.
	By the way, that goes all the way back to the Bible.
	I mean, if you want to go all the way back, Pharaoh says it.
	He says there are these Jews and there are foreign people and they're going to become powerful and they're going to rise up against us, right?
	That's his justification.
	Hayman's justification in the Book of Esther is there's a people and they dwell among you and they're not going to listen to your laws and they're going to rebel against you, right?
	Every aspect of antisemitism is typically geared against the quote-unquote nefarious power of the Jews, which of course is what Hitler is talking about, which is why Hitlerian antisemitism crosses streams with these other forms of antisemitism, historically speaking.
	Muslim antisemitism is much the same thing.
	It's these perfidious Jews who have somehow gained power over Muslim holy sites and are using their world powers in order to manipulate.
	The reason that antisemitism This is why anti-semitism is so weird, in a sense, is that, typically speaking, when you are racist against a group, it's because you look down on that group.
	It's actually more akin, if you're going to make an analogy, the analogy that you'd make is more like no-nothing hatred of Catholics in 1850.
	Yeah.
	That's actually the better analogy.
	With dual loyalty.
	With dual loyalty.
	The whole same thing, right?
	Matt Fratt has actually made this point.
	I think it's a good analog.
	If you substitute Catholics for Jews, Then you'll understand this form of discrimination better, because this actual argument was made about Catholics throughout the 19th century in an attempt to limit Catholic immigration, suggesting that Catholics were nefarious tools of the Pope, who were coming in, taking over the financial industry, dominant in wide and varied industries in the United States, and had to be stopped because of that.
	Yeah.
	You see?
	Check, check, check.
	You see?
	But isn't... Jeremy's on board now.
	Isn't that just a... Is that really different in kind from what people who are bigoted against a group Always do to the group now.
	You're right that with Jews or with Catholics in this example The the you know, they're accused of being too powerful But what's really happening there is that they're being blamed for whatever happens to be going wrong in society.
	I would argue that When people are bigoted against the group, they tend to find a way to blame that group in some way for the problems in society.
	That's a better definition of racism than what you were giving before.
	I don't like the definition of racism, which is just, I hate people.
	No, but what I'm saying is that if you're a racist, legitimately racist against someone, this is what tends to happen next.
	It's what happens after the racism.
	Because you hate them, now you want to blame them for stuff.
	But that's, the blaming for stuff is not what the racism is.
	Again, this is a chicken and the egg thing.
	Because I don't think that racism starts with I hate them in my heart and then I blame them for everything.
	I think it can start with blaming them for everything and then become hatred in your heart.
	That's true.
	That thing, that cycle goes both directions.
	And even the whites who were holding black slaves in the South feared their power.
	It was they were going to cut your throat at night.
	That was that they all, that appears in all of their letters, they're going to cut your throat.
	But isn't that, that's more to my, that's more to my point.
	And on your point, Matt, look, all stereotypes are true.
	That's why they're stereotypes.
	That's how they became stereotypes.
	There's an element of truth in them, yeah.
	Yeah, and so it obviously doesn't apply to individuals necessarily, but so that's part of it.
	Another part of it is what Drew says, which is if you look into like esoteric Nazism, there is a deeply anti-Christian aspect in as much as it becomes pagan.
	Well, they said the head of the church advisory to Hitler said this idea that Christ is part of Christianity makes me laugh.
	The Fuhrer is Christianity.
	Yeah, yeah, positive Christianity is their like kind of a cult version of it.
	So there's that aspect certainly.
	But also then, it comes down to me at this basic level of different groups are different, right?
	And sometimes they have the same interests, sometimes they have different interests.
	And when you're living together, different groups find reasons to get frustrated with each other.
	So it's no surprise that groups with different religions find reasons to get a little hostile to each other.
	When it comes to the modern, again, it's in niche segments of the right, but this obsession with the State of Israel, I think, what's the big problem with the State of Israel?
	Let's throw out, as I do, the theological claims for the State of Israel, because obviously it's not my religion.
	Let's throw out even historical claims.
	Let's just get down to brass tacks.
	The right of conquest, as we used to call it before 1947, The Israelis went to a land that historically had been theirs, and they went back to it, and they were granted this land by international bodies, and then they fought a war, and now it's their land.
	How is that different from America going in and taking America's land?
	I would go beyond that, too, though, and the question that nobody seems to ask is, which do you want the world to look like?
	The state of Israel or everybody else?
	This is my point.
	You can always get into an argument, because if the right of conquest is all that matters, then why not conquer it back?
	That's not all that matters, but I guess my point on this is the very height of our civilization was a period where we, in Christendom, went to the Holy Land to take it away from Muslims.
	So the notion that we're now saying that the Muslims...
	What you're arguing is correct in the sense that when you talk...
	I've said this before when I talk about Israel.
	It's the only country in the world where I'm asked to explain the legitimacy of its existence.
	It never happens with literally any place else.
	Nobody ever is like, why does France deserve to be France?
	What is France-ness?
	Ukraine now.
	Right. - I mean, the United States gets the same challenge. - Yeah. - I mean, I would say-- On stolen land.
	At a far lesser level.
	Even the people who argue that the United States is on stolen land don't really.
	There's not UN charter or UN resolution after UN resolution.
	And also that group of people who are acknowledging stolen land, they aren't immediately calling for the entire country to be turned over to the tribe of the Sioux in a real way.
	That's bullshit, they say, in order to please their left-wing friends and pretend that they give a shit, which they don't.
	But when it comes to the state of Israel, suddenly you're forced to make these arguments about, like, well, is it based on history or is it based on religion?
	So your argument, I agree.
	If you win, you exist.
	End of story.
	Then the only question becomes, does the world look better or worse if it looks like this thing or that thing?
	And that's Drew's question, and that's really the only question that we tend to ask generally in foreign policy.
	Especially for us who aren't Israel.
	As an American, when I look at, say, Ukraine and Russia, I'm looking at America's interests.
	Now, I can decide that differently than other people.
	But do I want Ukraine to look more like Ukraine or do I want it to look more like Russia?
	Do I want China to look more like Taiwan or do I want Taiwan to look more like China?
	These are the questions that you typically ask when it comes to foreign policy.
	When you look at Israel versus Hamasistan in the Gaza Strip or the Palestinian Authority terror-dominated areas, and the question is, should there be a state there?
	In a vacuum, there shouldn't even be a state there.
	Forget about Israel.
	I'm not for the establishment of any terror state anywhere.
	I wasn't for the establishment of ISIS, Stan.
	Like, this is so absurd.
	And the claim that somehow it's bad for the world if Israel thoroughly destroys and defeats a terror group that is currently holding five Americans hostage is so beyond reason.
	It's so crazy to me.
	And that doesn't mean you can't critique Israel.
	Go ahead.
	Fine.
	Critique it.
	Critique it.
	All these places.
	America and France and UK.
	Do all of it.
	The one thing I will say is that the critiques that are brought against the State of Israel are never paralleled by any critiques anywhere else.
	They are unique to the State of Israel.
	You never see it brought on.
	Obviously, if you get me going on this topic, it's incredibly annoying to me.
	And one of the things that makes it so incredibly annoying to me is that now that Israel is at the top of the news, which it has been since October 7th, I talk about Israel a lot.
	I spent my entire career not talking about Israel.
	Literally my entire career.
	If you go back through the first show, through show number whatever it was, on October 9th, the amount of time that I spent talking about Israel was, I am sure, less than 1% of the total runtime of my show.
	And now you're doing well.
	Well under 1%.
	And then I start talking about the thing that literally is on the front pages every single day, and critiques are brought against me personally, that would not be brought against people who are Christian who say the exact same things.
	And there I find something peculiar.
	Unless it's a Catholic defending the Pope, right?
	Unless it's where you can invoke dual loyalty.
	There's something tragically comic about the fact that the Jews are in position.
	As you say, every country, every great nation, every great empire was built on conquest.
	Somewhere along the line, somebody conquers somebody.
	So the Jews are in the position of having to do what you do at the beginning of a society, but because much of their leadership is European-based, they actually have the mindset of people later on in society when they start to say stupid stuff like, maybe women should have power too.
	Maybe we should feel guilty about killing our enemies.
	Those are late-stage, civilizational things, but they're in a kind of first-stage, civilizational moment.
	It's kind of tragicomic.
	I need some advice.
	Is it off-putting if the girl asks the guy out?
	Off-putting to the guy, I suppose.
	Yeah.
	I would imagine this as a girl saying, is it a problem if I ask a guy out?
	Yeah.
	That's got to be what this question is.
	I never responded all that well to it.
	It actually happened on a few occasions.
	Good for you, dude.
	Yeah, thank you.
	I'm boasting.
	Just a little humble brag right there.
	And actually, I'm trying to think, because my gut instinct says, no, that'd be great, ladies.
	If I'm single, ask me out.
	But no, actually, when it happened, I did not like it.
	There's a way to do it, though.
	There's a way to do it.
	I mean, how hot are we talking here?
	That's no principles.
	You have no principles.
	It would be a total deal killer to me if a woman proposed marriage.
	Oh, yeah, for sure.
	Total deal killer.
	But if a gal came up to you and said, hey, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we ought to grab a drink sometime or whatever.
	There's a party I'm going to.
	Yeah, breaking the ice or something.
	Or in some cases, maybe the girl knows that the guy's a little shy.
	And I think that there's an appropriate version of that.
	The problem with asking, the problem with a woman proposing, though, Because now you've broken whatever those ices are early.
	Now you have to be in a position of actually agreeing to the institution of marriage, which is agreeing to a form of male headship over the family.
	Yeah.
	So it is a kind of perversion of a woman.
	Could you imagine?
	Also, let's be real about this.
	A man entering into a marriage is generally making a decision that males are hesitant to make.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Where women entering into a marriage is a decision that women are generally very eager to make.
	Yeah.
	Generally.
	Like, that doesn't mean true in every certain circumstance, but that is generally the way the math works.
	Men are giving up the field of women for this one woman, and that is a very, very important decision, obviously.
	And women, because they're not driven by the same impulses, have found the person they wish to sire children with.
	So of course they want to get married.
	So if they're saying to the man, Do you want to get married to me?
	That's a form of pressure.
	That's not actually a form of proposal.
	When a man says that to a woman, he's offering her a thing that she wants.
	How dare you?
	Generally speaking.
	How dare you?
	For Ben, during your first book club, you mentioned a dystopian sci-fi novel you had written would soon be published.
	Did you scrap it, or do you still plan to go ahead with it?
	That's for Jeremy.
	I mean, so I did write, in fact, a dystopian sci-fi novel.
	It's been done for like two years or something.
	They sent it to you, Drew.
	I like it.
	Yeah, Drew was kind enough to pretend he liked it.
	And, you know, maybe we'll do something with it, or maybe we won't.
	It'll go alongside the other two complete books.
	Ben writes books sometimes, guys.
	This question's for me.
	So you redesigned the Men's Razor.
	Are you doing the same for the Women's Razor?
	Indeed, we are.
	We will have a brand new Women's Razor, hopefully in time for the holidays.
	It's different in kind than the Men's Razor.
	I think one of the problems with the original Women's Razor that we released is that it was very similar To the men's razor and women's shaving needs are different than men's.
	So the razor we're going to release acknowledges those differences.
	For the whole group, what is the end game?
	If all of these nefarious characters are trying to bring down the country, what do they stand to gain?
	This country makes them rich.
	I can't imagine another country would offer them the same possibilities.
	I'll offer my thoughts and then I'll let everyone go around and answer this question.
	I think that you start from the assumption that politics are fundamentally rational.
	And I don't think that they are fundamentally rational.
	I think that they're driven fundamentally by the spiritual and that it is the nature of man.
	We can argue about what the Pope said about man being fundamentally good.
	And he was right.
	Or what Luther said about man being, or Calvin, about man being depraved.
	I think they're both right.
	As Bishop Barron pointed out today on X, by the way.
	But at the end of the day, man in his sin tries to accumulate material wealth to himself.
	He tries to accumulate power to himself.
	He tries to advance his needs, his wants, his ego.
	He tries to wheel and deal.
	He tries to get laid.
	I mean, you really can't imagine how much of human history Has been driven just by some guy in power trying to get laid.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, so much of what happens in politics does not happen in a purely rational way.
	People will vote against their interests, of course they will.
	You can't believe how much happens out of ideology, which is things that people believe are true that aren't.
	And so they'll do something that harms them that they thought would help them.
	All of this is always at play in any institution that involves human beings.
	And so, I just think you can't reduce our politics down to science.
	It is like every other aspect of the human experience.
	It's a projection of underlying spiritual truths, and people are kind of a spiritual train wreck.
	Yeah, I would say it's a little bit like asking, what does someone gain from revenge?
	Well, they gain revenge.
	They gain it for its own sake.
	And that's basically what's happening here.
	You've got a lot of people that have told themselves a story where they are the victims and they have all these forces victimizing them and they seek to destroy those forces just to destroy them because they feel like it's the right thing to do.
	And they have this instinct of destruction.
	I don't think they've thought, to your point, I don't think they've thought much farther ahead than that.
	Like, what happens next?
	What happens when you... And we talk about this all the time.
	They tear down things.
	They redefine things.
	They don't really redefine.
	They get rid of one definition, replace it with nothing.
	And so, there is no, like, step two.
	It's just the step one of destruction, and that's it.
	So, I'll break it down into... I think there are two distinct groups.
	And I think that one usually leads and then surrenders to the second.
	So, I think what you say about a certain group of people is totally true.
	Those are the revolutionaries.
	The revolutionaries don't care what comes next, and the great lie they say is there's going to be utopia after they tear everything down, but all they really want to do is just burn things, because they hate the system in which they live, and they have no idea for what comes next, but it's got to be better than this terrible thing that's victimizing me.
	I agree with you.
	That's a revolutionary group.
	Then you have the elites, and they're the ones who are the real mystery, right?
	Those are the people like the Joe Bidens of the world who have sat high on the hog for a very long time, or the idiots in Hollywood, or the people on Wall Street who support this whole agenda.
	What are they doing?
	And I think there the answer is that they believe, falsely as it turns out, that like elites do in nearly every society that ends up being transformed, that they can channel the passion of the revolutionaries into a gradualistic change in which they get to retain the levers of power, which is like the best of both worlds for them.
	They get to retain the elite status.
	They get to retain the money and the power and all these things.
	All they have to do is harness the 1.21 gigawatts that is the college protesters, and they can use that power in order to forward the mission of making the world a gradually better place.
	And when you're in rooms with people like this, and I've been in a lot of rooms with people like this, that is how they talk.
	They talk about, not in revolutionary terms, but we together can make the world a better place.
	And there are people who are agitating on the outside.
	The arc of history bends toward justice.
	Right, exactly.
	And I think that when they say stuff like that, what they fail to recognize is they have no systemic immunity.
	They have no immune system to the revolutionaries when confronted with them.
	Which is why when you look at the college campuses in 1968, 1969, or even today, you're like, why are these administrators just handing over the place to the revolutionaries?
	The answer is, they agree with the revolutionaries.
	It's not that they're handing it over.
	They are the revolutionaries.
	They just don't have the balls or the willingness to give up what they have in terms of power In order to just join the group.
	And so when they're confronted with that reality, their own hypocrisy, they end up just surrendering full scale to the revolutionaries.
	I basically agree with Jeremy on this.
	I think that the things are, the Pope is utterly wrong, and the reason he was utterly wrong... Here comes the Calvinism, here we go.
	No, it has nothing to do with Calvinism.
	It has nothing to do with Calvinism.
	It's because he wasn't saying what all the slavish Catholics who want to prove him right say he was saying.
	He was talking about people's behaviors.
	He was not talking about the creation being good.
	He was saying that, he said... He said we were all sinners.
	Two sentences before.
	He said you have the occasional sinner and road.
	Afterward, but before he said Wilson.
	But he said you have the occasional sinner and road.
	But the thing is.
	This is the problem with this program.
	Everything ends up being a post-facto clarification.
	It's Jesuitical.
	This is the thing.
	The thing that I saw in Hollywood is that people who think they are good usually have not had the offer of sex, money, and power.
	And sex, money, and power on the table, I would say about 85% of people will sell every principle they have.
	And so once you have the power, I think a lot of these people are just capturing the flow.
	I think Joe Biden is a perfect example.
	I mean, the guy's a weathervane, but he thinks he's capturing the flow.
	The guys who are dangerous are guys like Obama.
	I think Obama is actually, in some ways, has far more integrity than Joe Biden, because he's a believer.
	He believes that we're a bad country and that we're the problem, and that's why he wanted to realign us with Iran.
	Barack Obama is the least cynical evil president who did the most cynical thing to get reelected.
	Yeah, I agree.
	You know, it pains me to say that I agree with everyone, even Drew spouting this Calvinist nonsense.
	But especially I agree with your point, Jeremy.
	Even even bringing up the Pope who my my brief defense of the Pope which I'm obligated to do is a duly loyal It seems to me what he's saying is man God doesn't make anything evil So God makes man and the whole creation good but man abuses his free will and sins and sin and death pervade the world and so now we end up in this spot where there's concupiscence and all and we're all just gonna like sell everything for sex and money and everything but to know
	What the endgame is, you have to have some sense of the nature and the final end of man.
	And so, you know, I have a sense of it.
	I think we all have basically, roughly the same sense of it, you know, pretty close at least.
	And for a lot of people though, and especially for our liberal friends, they have a very different sense.
	They deny original sin and they deny heaven and hell.
	So they're actually, they disagree with us on both the, When we came from and where we're going.
	Exactly.
	People are inherently good and the kingdom of heaven can be made here on earth by my hands.
	Yeah, the most fundamental conservative belief is the belief that original sin is original sin and that only God can redeem what's fallen.
	That really is the heart of the whole thing.
	Every ism of the left is an attempt to redefine what is original sin, even libertarianism, and I have a lot of libertarian Lowercase l, libertarian tendencies in my theology and in my politics, but libertarianism just says that original sin is coercion.
	Yeah.
	Just like socialism says that the original sin is communism, it's class and socialism, it's the means of production, etc.
	Like, they've all just come up with a, if this hadn't happened, everything would be good, and if we can overcome that, everything will be good.
	And the view of the men at this table, with very important and notable theological distinctions between Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Jewish perspectives, I mean, there are places where we wildly disagree, but at a sort of fundamental level, we say, no, original sin is the thing that actually happened in the Garden of Eden, and the thing that man in his free will perpetuates.
	And there is no one doing that by man.
	No thing that we accomplish as a society will change fundamentally what human beings are.
	And that ultimate redemption is in the hands of God.
	And for the Christian, it's accessed by way of the cross of Christ.
	And for the Catholic, it's got something to do with the cross of Christ.
	It used to have something to do with the cross of Christ, but now... No.
	The thing that Protestant and Catholic agree, of course, is that the redemption of man is not in the hands... It's not man's problem to solve.
	It's man's problem.
	At some point we're going to have to do a seminar on just the people with the religious differences on the first couple of chapters of Genesis because it really is fascinating.
	The Jewish take is pretty different on some of this stuff.
	It ends up in much the same place.
	I was careful to be inclusive of you when I said that man perpetuates that sin through his free will choices.
	I understand that we don't agree on the No, actually, I was going to argue with the original sin part.
	Meaning there's widespread sort of dissension inside Orthodox Jewish texts about whether human beings were made good in the Garden of Eden and then brought sin about through the sin.
	or whether human beings were always conflicted.
	And then they brought sin about because, and they didn't bring sin about, they sinned by eating from the tree because what that sin was was supplanting their own conception of what the world should be for what God's conception of what the world should be.
	- Oh, that's my view.
	- Right.
	- I mean, so yeah, I think that- - Is it what, that's not- - No, I think the important thing is that when you put us all together, our basic beliefs, we're right.
	I mean, we are provably right about the nature of mankind.
	Yes, people can be really, really bad.
	And this notion that people are naturally wonderful and tend toward the good, like in their actions.
	That's false.
	Call it concupiscence, call it the Yetzir Hara in Judaism, call it sinful nature of man, whatever you call it.
	Human beings take a room full of people and they are not going to naturally do the good thing because of all of whatever you call it.
	And no curing any one particular flaw of man will lead to a utopia.
	No system will.
	No system will.
	I will close with this thought for you though, which is that in my personal view of the garden, It's not that man was sinful per se or virtuous per se based on his actions or choices or predilections from the moment of creation.
	It's that righteousness by God was defined and declared by himself.
	He made man just exactly how man was, naked and dumb and tripping over rocks in the garden and lonely and prone to who knows what kind of bad behaviors if it had all played out.
	That wasn't the definition of what was good to God.
	God defined his creation as good based on his own declaration.
	And the temptation of man was the temptation to judge whether or not God was right.
	It was to supplant God as the moral authority, as the judge.
	And so I don't believe that man got worse when he ate.
	It's not that I think his behavior got worse.
	It's that I think the deal that he made with the devil, in some ways the devil was lying with truth.
	He did suddenly see his nakedness.
	He did suddenly see his failure to measure up to God, whereas before that the question of whether he measured up to God wasn't even on the table.
	Which is why you like this.
	God made him and said he was good and that was good enough.
	That's why you should read the Bible and the original Hebrew.
	The word for cleverness and the word for nakedness are the same word.
	It's a rumor.
	It's the same exact word in Hebrew.
	At any rate, we could probably fix it if we just vote for the right guy.
	Thank you guys for hanging out with us here at Daily Wire Backstage.
	We're gonna do another one eventually.
	And please head on over to Amazon.com, buy your second gen Jeremy's Razors.
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	If you are, thank you again.

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