Friendly Fire: A New Host & Mr. Knowles Goes to Washington
Friendly Fire returns for episode two with Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and Andrew Klavan with no script, no moderator, and absolutely no plan. Watch as four of the most trusted voices in conservative media debate, discuss, and disagree while the entire internet watches and comments in real time, plus a special appearance from our newest Daily Wire host, Matt Fradd.
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Matt, you're all about collobbering your enemies into political submission.
I've reached Zen.
I became Buddhist.
I didn't tell you.
But the Yamaka is optional.
The ads are mandatory.
I object on the record.
I want to turn to Ben because you killed Jesus, right?
You make my life so difficult.
Like, seriously.
Hey, everybody.
Well, hi there.
Hey.
Am I the only one smoking today?
As always.
As always.
What do you mean by smoking?
I think we're all smoking in our own little way.
It looks like Josh is drinking.
I'm not talking.
Water.
Okay.
Maybe.
Maybe it's water.
Maybe.
I moved your location so that I could smoke.
Actually, this whole, it felt wrong if there was no smoking going on.
I don't have any booze, unfortunately.
I, fellas, I have a lot that I want to tell you about because I was doing big, important stuff yesterday while you were all just kicking your feet back up on the couches.
But there are a lot of questions to get to in this episode of Friendly Fire.
Did movies peak in 2008?
Will Zoron Mom Donnie lead America into communism or jihad?
Or why not both?
Do we have a new Daily Wire host joining?
Yes, we do.
Matt Fratt of Pines with Aquinas.
And is Catholicism rising in the United States?
All of that and so much more.
But fellas, before we get into any of it, Matt, today's a big special day.
Did you know that?
I didn't.
What's today?
I was reliably informed that today, I don't know why we keep doing these shows on Big Matt Days, but I believe today is your wedding anniversary.
Is that right?
Now that you mentioned it, yeah, 14 years.
And my wife was thrilled when I told her that we couldn't go out just now because I had to go do a friendly fire episode.
I told her that.
She said, Matt, get out there and do that friendly fire episode.
That's the most important thing.
It's the best gift you could give her, actually.
I mean, when you think about it, it really is.
I know.
We're going to shoot this episode and then our big wedding anniversary plan is we're going to watch the episode back.
So that's what we're going to do.
That's it.
What are you going to do?
So after you finish watching the arts, are you going to take her out to dinner in the middle of the woods somewhere?
What's that?
Actually, she wanted to go kayaking.
So we're going to go kayaking.
And that's an activity we like to do as a couple.
And a lot of, I like it because we'll go out kayaking.
And a lot of times once we get out on the water, I'll discover that silly me, my fishing pole is still in the kayak.
I didn't realize it was there.
And so then I have to fish also because it's there.
So that's what we'll do.
So her watching you fish is like your anniversary.
That's what it's going to be.
You have a very, very generous wife.
I did.
I mean, we knew that already, but that's kind of like an unbelievable level of generosity.
I mean, like, like truly.
I mean, I feel like Drew, for his anniversary, doesn't have to do much.
I mean, basically, he's just a skeleton sitting across a table from.
We have a very deep tradition, which is every big anniversary.
And now we've been married 130 years, I think.
Every really important anniversary, my wife turns to me and says, should we have a party?
And I say, nah.
And she says, all right.
And that's what we do every important anniversary.
For my fifth wedding anniversary, I said, Do I want to go somewhere?
And sweet Lilisa said, yes, I do.
And I said, well, where do you want to go?
You want to go to the Caribbean?
Do you want to go?
And she goes, I want to go to Memphis.
I kid you nuts.
She said she want to go to Memphis.
And I thought, this is great.
I just saved like thousands of dollars.
And we did.
We went.
We went to Graceland.
We saw the little ducks at that hotel and didn't get mugged, actually.
So that was pretty good.
I'll admit that for me, I'm usually the one who remembers the anniversary.
My wife does not remember the anniversary almost ever.
And so it is completely reliant upon me what we will do that day.
And so usually it's probably a dinner.
Although, you know, these days, as we get older, we're the kinds of people who have never stayed up a single time for the ball drop on New Year's Eve.
And so if it hits like 9.30 p.m., we're pretty much done.
I mean, we have a bunch of kids.
And I'm sure.
Matt, I have to say that yours is really, if I had predicted what your anniversary was going to be like, that actually was not, I was not off by much.
I really feel like that was a pretty good, you know, if I had to guess and I was like, okay, is it going to be Matt like taking his wife out to dinner or in a kayak on a lake with a fishing pole, not talking to anyone, but just kind of like staring at the water and musing about like, like, I, I definitely, I wouldn't have been off that.
I would like the odds on that were pretty good, I feel like, honestly.
They were.
And just one quick reflection, if I may.
If I have about 30 minutes, I'd like to offer because, you know, 14 years, I do just want to say, because I think this is important.
And I think everyone here is on the same page that, you know, 14 years into marriage, before I got married, I heard the same thing that everybody always says, which is, it's so hard.
Being married is so hard.
It's so difficult.
It's so, so, so hard.
I heard this over and over again.
I'm 14 years into it.
I'm waiting for the hard part still.
You know, I'm 14 years into it with six kids.
And I mean, there are challenges, obviously, when you're living with another human being, but for the most part, it's like it's great.
I mean, you have a person that you like, that you love, that you're with you and sharing life with you.
And it is actually, it is actually great.
It is now being parenting, parenting can be really hard.
That's the part that is also great and wonderful, but that's the hard part.
But just the marriage part, I honestly don't know what people are talking about.
I always like when people say it's work.
I mean, the one thing marriage is not is work.
It's marriage is life.
Drew's marriage is not work for him.
That's true.
But do you know what is work for him?
Writing books like this, after that, the dark, which if I'm is that at Lord Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson?
Very good.
You must have looked that up.
I guess that's it.
No, I remember.
That's like one of five poems I at some point probably had memorized.
Do you know where you can get this book?
You can get this book anywhere.
You can get it signed from the Daily Wire shop.
If you go on dailywire.com/slash Claven, you will find all the venues where you can get it.
And I hope people will get it.
I already put one book on the New York Times list.
And when I say I put it on, the audience put my book on the New York Times list.
If I can do that twice, I will stop calling the New York Times a former newspaper and I'll just call it a crap paper.
Well, you know, somebody gave me a gift here.
I don't know what it could be.
Oh, it's Drew's back.
There you go.
Just what I've always wanted, Matt, if you're seeking to get something for your wife for your anniversary, I feel like there's nothing.
Oh, look at that.
Wow.
Wow.
That's a man who thinks ahead right there.
Look at that.
That's incredible.
By the way, I will say that just a note about the marriage and anniversary discussion and all that.
I've been reliably informed that the best way to get people to live better lives is to tell them that they should never get married because women are absolutely awful in every possible way.
And that that actually is heartening and makes your life better.
I've been informed of that by reliable sources in their guests.
In any case, yes, I'm totally with, like, here you have sitting right here, four very happily married men with a wide variety of children.
Matt, again, we've discussed this before publicly, but I judge a man and his masculinity by how many children he has.
And so Matt is leading the pack here.
Matt has six.
I'm coming in at four.
I've said many times that Matt cheated because he has two sets of twins.
And so that really is cheating.
Like that's that's really like you know what one of the big downsides a wife is.
One of the big downsides to having a wife is she's always shopping and buying stuff.
Am I right?
Well, that can be really good for you if you own a business because when you go to Shopify, you can power your business.
You might say, Michael, I don't know how to make a website.
Doesn't matter.
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You might say, Michael, I don't know how to design things.
Don't worry.
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How do you like that?
Okay, guys, I want to talk about me for a second.
I feel like we haven't talked enough about me.
I yesterday was not in my studio.
I was in Washington.
I was down at Capitol Hill because they were holding a hearing in the Senate on political violence.
And most of the Democrats, I'd say about half the committee, was smart enough not to even show up because they know that they've got blood on their hands and they have absolutely nothing they can say about political violence.
But some of them peeked in every now and again, including the Thracian Senator Spartacus.
Here's what Corey Booker had to say: there is political violence.
Extremists who have left-wing ideologies and right-wing ideologies.
To say it's just one and not the other is to deepen the problem.
But we have an administration right now who is eviscerating the people that should be keeping us safe and who is pulling down from the website, as they did earlier this year when the Department of Justice removed from its website a government-funded report published last year that found that the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violence extremism.
If we can't accurately describe a problem and do it without partisan rhetoric or seeking to score partisan points, we will not solve this problem.
We need to stop all this awful partisan rhetoric, okay, and recognize that violence occurs on both sides of the right, which commits all of the violence.
Stop it, stop it, stop it.
So they're pushing this the whole time.
It's both sides, both sides.
And then they just spend all their time hitting the right.
Meanwhile, the actual data show, increasingly so, that the violence is a left-wing problem.
Even the Atlantic had to admit it.
And that's with the data sets not even counting most left-wing violence.
So as Booker's making his remarks, he goes on.
He says, we need to be introspective.
We need to be willing to take back some hot things that we say.
So we need to be willing.
I said, okay, this is great because you still endorse Jay Jones, who's running for Attorney General in Virginia, who's called for the murder of Republicans and our kids, says we're breeding little fascists and he wants to urinate on the graves of Republicans.
So Booker makes his point.
Then Senator Blackburn asked me something, and this is what I had to say.
I think Senator Booker made a good point just a moment ago when he said we have to self-examine.
We have to be introspective.
And, you know, I can't help but think of a line today.
Jay Jones has the vision, commitment, and integrity to keep families safe and make sure every Virginian gets a fair shake in the justice system.
I'll be working every day to ensure Jay wins this race.
That's the endorsement of Senator Booker for a man who would seek to be the Attorney General of Virginia.
This is a man who, if people have not been reading the news, has called for a Republican to be murdered, for his children to be murdered, for the children to die in their mother's arms in order to persuade the Republican to change his policy views, and a man who says that he would urinate on the graves of multiple Republicans.
Senator Booker, in the spirit of introspection, is standing by this endorsement.
So I suppose I would invite, perhaps I should have looked because Senator Booker has left the room and I think I can guess why.
Senator Booker, I think, should practice what he preaches.
So there was a Corey Booker-shaped hole in the wall.
Anyway, Drew, you were around for the caning of Sumner, as I recall.
You know, you've seen plenty of political violence in America.
Do the Democrats have any kind of point here at all on saying it's about both sides and not being partisan?
Or no, do we just have to say it's a leftist problem?
Well, I think it's good that Corey Booker did not kill Kirk Douglas with the trident when he was Spartacus.
I actually watched you on TV and I was thinking, oh, there's my friend Michael Knowles who probably dropped by my house because he's in D.C., probably dropped by my house for a drink and a cigar.
I'm still waiting by the phone, but nothing happened.
Here's the thing.
There's always going to be incidents of violence on both sides, but that is a very different thing than an atmosphere of violence.
When you scratch, go around scratching Teslas because you don't like Elon Musk, when you riot every night in Seattle.
These are things that are not happening on the right.
You can get a crazy right-winger, but nobody on the right and the center right is calling for violence with the constant drumbeat, that steady drumbeat of calls and entitlement as the left does.
I mean, when they were burning down cities because of George Floyd, an editor from the New York Times, from the New York Times editorial board, went on TV and said, well, it's not violence when you're just burning down buildings.
But you know what?
Yes, it is.
And people were killed in those riots.
And as you said quite well, I thought in your speech, it's the only nice thing I'll ever say about you.
You pointed out that they just don't count that as political violence.
They don't count the people who threaten Matt because they're transgender.
That's not left-wing political violence, but it is.
And when you count all of that stuff, it dwarfs any incident of right-wing violence.
So you were totally in the right.
I hate to say it.
Oh, right.
And I looked handsome too, as I think originally.
That's a nice tie.
I kind of like the striped tie there.
That was good.
You know, I will say that, yes, of course, you can find violent people all across the political spectrum.
It is true that the permission structures of the left are more deeply rooted than anything remotely similar on the right.
You don't see any sort of mainstream political right-winger who's not willing to denounce generalized political violence from their side or anything like it.
But you do see it on the left all the time, the sort of kind of feeding of the revolutionary left, this idea that violence that's coming from the left.
Well, yeah, we don't love it.
But at the same time, you can totally see where it's coming from and the conditions that give rise to the violence must be alleviated.
And that's why the violence is really, it's like, we don't love it, but it's kind of predictable.
And that sort of excuse making, that permission structure for violence is very much in tune with, I think, the entire left-wing infrastructure at this point, which is why they're so comfortable with, for example, the DSA, which is a revolutionary group.
I mean, I think that the attempt to foster the revolution on the left is deeply entwined with the violence.
That's why when Charlie got shot, and we talked about this, I think when Michael, you and Matt and I, we were on Charlie's show, we talked about the fact that there was a clip of Charlie talking with some sort of trans radical and the trans radical said, you're just so hateful.
And it's like, that is the problem.
Like your entire structure is, we oppose your point of view.
Therefore, we are hateful.
Therefore, we are a threat to you.
Therefore, you can kill us.
Therefore, you can do violence to us.
And that is deeply embedded in the left-wing ideology.
Now, I think there are parts of the right that do have very similar horseshoe theory ideas about the world.
I would hope that those parts of the right would remain marginalized.
I can't think of a single sort of mainstream elected political official on the right who gives credence to this.
It's given credence by pretty much all the mainstream elected officials on the left.
I think there are people in the commentary to give credence to it, but I don't think it's like a mainstream part of right-wing elected kind of Republican talk.
But as sort of a mainstream phenomenon, yes, it is disproportionately represented on the left, this permission structure for violence.
Well, this is what, so Senator Schmidt, you know, a very mainstream Republican figure, he calls this hearing to try to address the problem.
I think that was really good, shining a light on it.
We really haven't seen that from the Senate before.
A lot of great Republicans, the White House is trying to do stuff about it.
Matt, you're all about, you know, practical solutions as well as clobbering your enemies into political submission.
What do we do?
Well, I mean, consequences.
You know, that's the first thing, actual consequences for people who commit this violence.
I mean, this is one of the, when you categorize rightly, I think, Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, which is exactly what it is, by any reasonable definition of the term, well, that means that there should be consequences to that.
And what do we do?
If you're calling it a terrorist organization, then you're putting it in the same category as Al-Qaeda or ISIS.
And how do we handle those groups?
And what would we do if those groups were operating openly in the United States outside of ICE facilities and that sort of thing?
Well, we know how that would be handled.
And so that's how it should be handled here.
And you're also correct.
I think that this is, and it's a point that's not made enough about how the left gets around this reality, which is that all of the political violence is on their side.
And they do it by recategorizing their political violence as not political violence.
And by the way, this is a trick they pull with all forms of violence.
This is how they have tried to get away with claiming that some of these cities that we can all tell have descended into total violent chaos have actually, they claim that, oh, well, violent crime is going down.
Well, how do they get away with that?
It's because when you look at it, oh, well, they're just recategorizing violent crime as nonviolent crime.
There was a case in Kentucky recently of a child that was stabbed to death in his home.
And the rest of the family was also attacked.
And somehow the guy who committed that crime was categorized under the law as a nonviolent offender.
Yeah.
And so this is the game they play on so many different levels.
And it's really important to point that out.
No, this was, you know, the actual incident that I was there to testify about yesterday was this Antifa attack at the University of Pittsburgh, where two Antifa operatives showed up.
They had been members of a cell.
They were claimed by Torch Antifa Network.
The guy was caught with explosive material going through TSA multiple times.
They were there.
They threw an explosive, seriously injured a cop.
And luckily, there was an FBI agent there who was really forcing this up through the DOJ.
I don't think the DOJ wanted to move on it at all.
And then what happened?
The DOJ classified it as obstructing law enforcement, gave the wife probation, let her almost entirely off the hook.
And the guy got something like five years in prison.
What he did was attempted murder.
You know, it calls for a much more serious sentence.
I go through all of the sets, data sets on political violence.
It doesn't show up.
I look at the BLM riots that killed dozens of people, left over a billion dollars worth of property damage.
It doesn't show up.
It's left-wing political violence.
Some of the most prominent examples you can think of, it's just not there.
And so what's so crazy is even given the fact that they hide all of this, all of these data in their sets and in the federal statistics, even so, today the Atlantic has to admit the left-wing violence still exceeds the right-wing violence, even when you exclude most of the left-wing violence.
So, you know, Matt, you say, all right, we got to treat them like al-Qaeda.
I'm inclined to do that too.
But there is a distinction between a foreign terrorist organization and a domestic one.
And so do you handle them like al-Qaeda or do you handle them like, I don't know, the mafia or the KKK or something?
I'll take any of those.
Handle them like an organized violent threat.
You know, that's how you handle them.
And also there's another point about left-wing violence, which is that, in fact, when we're talking about left-wing violence in general, there's one entire category of it that is left out of the conversation, which would be the tens of millions of babies that are killed because of left-wing policies and have been killed in this country over the last 60 or 70 years.
And that's relevant because it is violence, tens of millions of babies.
But also it shows, it's one of the reasons why left-wing violence is a much bigger problem.
It's because they don't recognize fundamentally the dignity and sanctity of human life.
They just don't recognize.
They see it as, well, if you're inconvenient to them, that you actually don't have a right to exist in the first place.
And if they're going to apply that to their own children, well, then of course they're going to apply it to Charlie Kirk.
They're going to apply it to any one of us.
Right, right.
Okay.
Well, that's true.
It's been building for a long time.
It's by my count, you know, decades, because you can go back through even the 60s, the 70s, frankly, even earlier than that.
But I want to go back to where pop culture ended, which is 2007, according to Mr. Walsh.
We'll get to that.
And I want to go all the way back a decade, thinking about a decade of Daily Wire.
And I want to offer you the deal of the decade because we got really exciting stuff.
We even have a new host here joining the Daily Wire.
The Merlin died long before you and I were born.
G'day, everybody.
My name is Matt Fran.
Welcome to Pints with Aquinas.
It wasn't if it was going to happen.
It was when the United States was going to be attacked.
I see what you can do.
Edward.
Remember, Edward, I'm a demon.
The whole purpose behind this is to overturn Western civilization.
Bin Laden was getting very antsy.
A ton of new stuff at the Daily Wire, including the fact that we have hired yet another Catholic host.
That's right, Pints with Aquinas, Matt Fradd.
The labor department is going to investigate us for anti-Protestant discrimination.
Maybe we'll get some Protestants around there too.
I don't know.
But in any case, I'm very excited.
You know, I've been buddies with Matt for a long time, and he's a great cigar man.
And so Pints with Aquinas being on the platform is going to be great.
If you want it, then you need to give us seven bucks a month, which is nothing after Biden inflation.
That is absolute, that's chump change, okay?
But we're going back to our prices from 10 years ago to celebrate a decade of Daily Wire.
If you want it, go to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Matt, in the spirit of nostalgia, did pop culture peak in 2008?
It did.
Yes.
It's funny you ask me that question.
So I was actually surprised.
I was talking to the producers of this show and we were talking about topics and I pitched this topic.
I didn't think we'd talk about it, but we are.
And that's great because I actually find we finally stumbled on a topic that I find interesting.
So I was talking about it on my show this past week.
I kind of laid out this theory.
It's not just my theory, but something I've been thinking about for a while.
And I am legitimately interested to hear what you guys have to say about it.
So the theory is basically this, that pop culture and the culture itself peaked almost at a precise moment in time.
And I would say 2007, but you could go a year before that, a year after.
So from like 2006 to 2008 was the peak of culture, the peak of what some have called, what I think is a good term for it, monoculture.
So it's our shared cultural experience.
And it peaks right then and there.
And you could kind of pinpoint the peak with pop culture, with the things that Hollywood was putting out.
I mean, this was 2006, 2008, it was There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, Children of Men, Apocalypto, The Dark Knight, and a bunch of other great films came out at the same time.
This is also television.
I mean, it was like some of the, arguably, maybe the five of the eight greatest television shows of all time were airing, overlapping with each other.
The Wire breaking bad, The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Shield, The Office was in its prime, I think in its prime, probably the greatest comedy of all time.
And then a bunch of others we could name.
So all of this was happening at the same time with pop culture.
And what you find is this decline that started right around that time, in particular with comedies.
There were also great comedy.
Super Bad was like the last great teen comedy came out in 2007, I believe.
Some other, Tropic Thunder came out of 2008.
I think the last great comedy period.
And then you see it there and it starts to decline and then it completely falls apart.
And over the next, you know, pretty much from 2010 until now, there have been some good films.
There have even been some great films, I would say, even some great television series.
Chernobyl, I think is one of the best miniseries of all time.
Came out in 2019.
But you're never going to find that kind of volume all at one time.
And I think it's because culture declined and then collapsed.
And right now, when we're looking around, this is really a starting point for me.
I'm trying to figure out why does everything suck now?
Everything just sucks and everybody can feel it.
And why is it?
And it's because we don't have a culture anymore.
There is no culture.
The monoculture, the shared cultural experience is gone.
It's dead.
It doesn't exist anymore.
And it's only going to get worse, I'm afraid to say.
And that's because if we go back to 2007, 2008 range, some other things were happening at that moment when Hollywood was reaching, I think, like its pinnacle.
Other things were happening that would prove to be its demise.
And a lot of people on the right will point to, well, what happened in 2008?
Barack Obama came in.
And that was kind of the beginning of this era of wokeness that we're still living in.
And yeah, that is part of it, but that's not even close to the biggest part of it.
In fact, I would argue that if Obama was never elected, we would still be seeing a lot of these things today because the other thing that happened in 2007, in June of 2007, is when the iPhone was released and the iPhone was released.
And at that point, within a few years, social media took over.
I mean, there were already, of course, Facebook was on at this point.
Twitter was in 2006.
Instagram, I think, was a couple of years later.
But within a few years of the iPhone coming out, everybody now has the internet, of course, on their phone.
They're bringing it with them everywhere they go.
And social media comes online.
It dominates the culture.
And then you have the algorithms.
And now because of that, we don't have a shared cultural experience anymore.
Now we have what we have in our phones.
We have this algorithmic, personally designed experience.
And rather than it being like a radio station that you listen to with a DJ who's your local DJ and says, hey, listen to this great song, you know, and everyone's listening, or you go to MTV back in the 90s for the 90s kids.
Rather than that, we have this algorithm that just was, it just, it just feeds us content.
And the algorithm doesn't care.
You know, the algorithm doesn't care what kind of content it is.
It doesn't care whether you like it or not.
The only thing the algorithm cares about is that you keep watching it.
And so it'll serve you up a cute cat video and then it'll serve you up a video of somebody getting shot in the head and then it'll serve you up a video of somebody falling on a skateboard and then it'll serve you up a Taylor Swift music video.
It does not give the slightest damn what it is.
It just wants you looking at it.
And this thing becomes more and more personalized to the kinds of things that you tend to look at.
Even if you don't like them, you tend to look at it.
And so now we have this weird scenario where if you go to, you know, if you're if you're a parent and you have a, you have a 15-year-old son, your son has his own celebrities.
He has his own culture that he's in that is almost entirely inaccessible to you.
It's incomprehensible to you.
It's not like when I was a kid in the 90s and my parents knew that MTV and they didn't really approve of a lot of the pop music and the rap and all that, but they knew who those people were because they were the celebrities.
They were the stars and they might not have liked them, but they knew who they were.
We all shared the same kind of, we were in the same atmosphere of the same stars and celebrities and films.
And now you can have someone who, their favorite celebrity is some influencer who's got 20 million followers.
But if you're not one of those 20 million followers, you have no clue who that person even is at all.
And so things are becoming, you know, narrower and narrower.
And now we bring AI online and we extend that out another five years.
And now we're going to be in a world where five years from now, your favorite film may be a film that no one else on earth has seen because AI will just generate it for you.
And your favorite pop star will be someone who no one else has heard.
Your favorite song is something no one else has listened to.
We're already seeing that starting to happen.
I think it's going to get worse.
And the monoculture is dead.
And now we have this kind of fractured culture that is broken into a billion different pieces.
And I'm not sure how we pull ourselves out of it.
Depressing.
Thanks, man.
It is quite depressing.
I want to go first to Drew.
Did anything I said make any sense at all to you whatsoever?
It made some sense, but I think it's too narrow.
I mean, there have been many great peaks into popular American culture.
1939, if you look at the list of movies nominated for Oscars, they're not only the best, the biggest box office movies, they're also some of the greatest movies ever made, including, you know, The Wizard of Oz and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, real genuine classics.
What's that?
Yeah, Gone with the Wind.
Another big peak in the 1970s when all the Spielberg pictures came out and you had the godfather and you had people lined up around the block lines I haven't seen since the 70s were so that every single person in America had seen it.
And what you had at the time that you're talking about, most especially, is that surge in television when one form, the movies became kind of obsolete and it played out.
You had this incredible, what everything you said about television was true.
Like the shows were on, it was like dazzling.
My eyes were spiraling at what's happened.
And you're also right about this utter collapse, which I've been talking about on my show for almost five years of this absolute collapse of the culture.
But I think that what you're seeing, but I totally disagree with the negative prediction that you're making.
And here's why.
I think what we're really seeing is we're seeing the death of my generation.
I'm hoping they can leave without taking me with them, but we're sick of them and they're going away.
And all of their ideas have come a cropper and all of these left-wing ideas that just completely dominate, I mean, had a stranglehold, a monopoly on our culture.
All of them turned out to be untrue.
So you had this woke moment, which was what they thought was a discovery of a totally new morality that every generation before them had missed, but in fact, it was just calling good evil and evil good.
And you can't make movies out of that.
You can't make movies in which women aren't women.
You can't make movies in which abortion is good.
You cannot tell stories in which what is actually evil is portrayed as good.
You just can't do it.
I think this whole AI thing, yeah, is it going to change everything?
I think it is.
But ultimately, I see it already.
People are using AI.
It's going to democratize the culture.
People are already using AI to make films who would never have been able to make films.
Now, right now, they're small, stupid films, but soon they'll get better and better.
And I think that because of the power of quality and because of the tendency of things to coalesce, you will see what right now is indeed a dead and scattered culture and has been for several years.
You'll start to see it coming back together with new forms.
And this is the thing I'm worried about with conservatism.
I'm afraid conservatives are still back in the movie making days and they don't understand that people are going to be wearing oculuses or oculi or whatever and are going to be seeing 3D things.
They're going to be sharing things that were made with AI, with the help of AI.
And I think we're in the past.
I think we're doing Christian Rock.
You know, we're saying like, you know, oh, here's a form that's already there.
We're going to do it.
Except we're going to do it on the right wing.
And that's not what we need.
What we need is fresh new ideas and fresh new minds to make new stuff that no one's ever seen before.
I think it's coming.
I would even give it only two years before you're sitting around going, wow, I never even saw anything like that.
That's pretty cool.
So I'm much more optimistic than that.
I do also share, I'm kind of like, yes, obviously the technological changes are going to kill certain media, just like premium digital TV in the early 2000s really supplanted movies.
But yeah, I'm kind of with you, Drew, on the hopefulness in that like the fourth, we've made it this far into the show with only mentioning Aquinas.
Well, we already mentioned Aquinas get a math friend, but the fourth primary precept of the natural law is that human beings are inclined to live in an ordered society.
And I think that's true.
And liberalism sometimes tells us we're not inclined to live in society, that we're all just individuals.
And we just fell out of a coconut tree like Kamala Harris.
But no, we're inclined to live in society.
So I'm with you.
Even if we make our own weird AI stuff that it really only tickles our fancy, I think we're going to be impelled to share it with other people.
It's just part of human nature.
And so, yeah, we're in a kind of the gutters of culture right now.
But I agree.
History goes on.
There's no end of history until there is.
So I fell asleep.
I don't know how you somehow made this particular precept.
I don't know how you made a topic about pop culture this boring, guys.
I have to admit, it was a unique contribution to our own cultural moment to make it that unbelievably boring.
Like really, really well done.
I mean, I generally agree with Matt's take.
I think that the rise of the cell phone has made it incredibly difficult for us to have communal experiences.
The only communal experiences we have are live sporting events.
Other than that, people don't just get like the reason comedy died is because comedy must be experienced communally.
You cannot really truly experience comedy by yourself.
Like it's very rare to watch something unless you're a naturally garless person and just start laughing out loud.
You make chuckle to yourself, but like the only time you really laugh super hard is when you're with other people.
And so I think that the death of sort of that community experience means the comedy was the first to go.
I think when it comes to sort of the big blockbusters, because CGI got so prevalent, then stuff that used to kind of blow you away where it's like, you got to go to the theater and see it, you just don't feel that way anymore.
And you can watch it on your screen if you wait for two weeks.
And so I think COVID killed a lot of that.
But as far the biggest thing that happened, I think, is that as we removed all these limitations, so I'm a big believer in the idea that when it comes to art, limitations are actually quite useful.
Limitations force you to do creative things within boundaries.
And I think that as we removed pretty much all the boundaries, the art got significantly worse.
So if you go back to the writing of the 1930s and 40s, much of which was taking place on sound stages in Hollywood with a cast of rotating characters, the writing had to be really good because you had all of these limitations that had been placed upon you.
And as we started to go to $100 million budgets, most of which was CGI, it was like, okay, well, now I can do whatever I want, whatever catches my fancy.
It's like, well, what if I just write slop?
It's slop that I can just put money into.
And then it turns out that it's utterly forgettable.
And so for a while, TV was the place because TV actually had limitations, right?
You actually had a budget that you had to hold to for TV, particularly in the Breaking Bad era.
You could shoot those, aside from the actors, pretty cheaply.
It's not like a production that requires vast quantities of cash.
Same thing was true for sopranos, right?
These are all dramas that are very well written because of the limitations.
As you remove the limitations, things get significantly worse.
Now you don't have the limitation of having to, for example, write a minimum time.
You can write a 30-second thing and it can go viral.
And so that doesn't require you to be good at it.
You can dump AI in there and just make it slop.
So you don't have to actually be good at it.
So the quality goes down.
I'm not a big fan of the democratization of art in this way, because frankly, I don't think most people are very good at art.
I think that the kind of idea that everyone can be a poet, everyone can make a movie.
We had this with Facebook, right?
Well, we're all going to make new friends on Facebook.
And then what did it turn out?
It turned out that everyone used the internet for pornography and none of your friends on Facebook are your actual friends.
And I feel like the same exact thing is going to happen with art.
Most people are not going to be sitting around thinking about how do I write the next godfather for me or my friends.
Most people are going to think around, think about how do I, how do I like make the next piece of bizarre tentacle porn?
And it's just like, I have, I have such a low opinion of human ability and human artistic capacity and self-control that if there are no external checks, I think it gets worse.
No, but it's not going to be a good thing.
I want to get back to Thomas Aquinas.
But before we do that with Matt Frad, I have a question for you, Matt.
In Spanish, what's the number after Uno?
DOS?
Yes.
Is that the dose?
Yes.
No, is it Trey's?
No, it's DOS.
No, it's DOS.
It's DOS.
Stop it.
We're in the middle of an ad for dose.
That's it.
Look, we've all seen it.
Every week, there's a new miracle supplement promising to fix everything overnight, but that doesn't work.
One thing that does work is using herbal supplements like cumin or ginger, dandelion.
Like if you take these in the proper dosages, actually, these are quite good for you.
And this is where dose for your liver comes in.
Behold, behold, right here.
Yes.
I don't know if I have a bigger liver than Michael, but like Michael has a tiny liver apparently.
We have a normal, like this is a man-sized dose for your liver, Michael.
It's a tendency not to be put in my livers.
Not a tiny liver.
Please, please.
It's a liver health supplement that promotes daily liver function.
So your liver can do its job.
Think about energy production, digestion, fat metabolism, vitamin storage.
It's taken in a daily two-ounce shot.
It tastes like fresh squeezed orange juice.
That's what the ad copy says.
And we're about to find out right now because we're going to taste it.
Oh, we have to drink it?
We get to drink it.
Man, you are.
Wow.
Wow, Matt.
What do we even bring you on for?
I know you're asking yourself the same question.
Let's try this.
Okay.
It's good.
I can't get the thing off of it.
Yeah.
Did I say something?
Did I say something weird?
I love turmeric.
I love it.
I'm like, I'm like from the hills of Tiro Vanantapuram.
I love it.
I'm an Indian in my taste for turmeric.
Turmeric.
I've come back to life.
My advice.
It's alive.
I still haven't got my paper off.
I take back Matt's saying man for guard.
He's got to get his wife in here to open the cap for us.
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By the way, yeah, we taste it.
It's kosher.
That's why I'm allowed.
And it actually is quite good.
I like the taste of it and I feel fine and fit as a fiddle and ready for love.
That's the just TMI.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know.
Hey, you know what's one of the greatest changes in culture I've seen is that all of the political cartoons from the 19th century of the tentacles of the Roman octopus stretching out all over the country and the Pope just coming to conquer the world.
That is happening here at the Daily Wire because we are bringing on the beloved host of Pines with Aquinas, Matt Fratt.
Matt, welcome.
G'day, fellas.
It's nice to be here.
I've admired you guys from afar and I've seen that admiration just steadily plummet as I've gotten to know you.
But here we are.
Well, I mean, first of all, I have to say I've done a terrible job here with my Jew propaganda outfit.
Apparently, I hire and I'm involved in hiring only Catholics.
Literally only Catholics.
It's like Knowles and Walsh and Isabel and you, Matt.
I don't know what's either either it's an unstoppable force or I'm really bad at my job.
And it could be both.
I mean, it could be, it could be both of those things, actually.
Clavin, you texted me and said that you texted me and said that there are more Catholics at Daily Wire than at the Vatican.
And I wasn't sure if you knew that that may have been a dark joke about the Vatican or not, but it was good one.
I actually am impressed that the Catholics are actually getting nicer.
I mean, I actually like Matt, which is as opposed to these guys.
And it's getting, it is getting to me.
It's like the Vatican, except for straight people.
It's, you know, so it's really.
It's really exciting.
There's the clip.
Now, I object on the record to that.
Here's a subject that I want to talk about.
Are people becoming more Christian?
Are we in the middle of a Christian revival with a sort of a sort of emphasis on Catholicism?
And the thing is, I've been predicting that for over a decade.
And the numbers don't show it.
You know, the feeling is there, but the numbers don't really show it.
More people are going out of the Catholic Church than coming in.
More people are going out of Protestant churches.
You know, the tragic and disgusting murder of our friend Charlotte Charlie Kirk did cause a sort of surge, but it's hard to know whether something that that is going to last.
And I feel that we're looking at the wrong thing.
I think the thing that's important is that smart people, intellectuals, are becoming Christians.
And I think the reason they're becoming Christians is because the thing that we were told, which is that the science had made that impossible, the science had made it impossible for smart people to believe, has all fallen apart.
And as that has filtered into the universities, it has filtered into the humanity departments.
You're getting guys like Charles Murray, one of the most brilliant people alive, going, oh, yeah, you know, it actually doesn't hold together that there's no God.
So I want to ask, I want to turn to Ben because you killed Jesus, right?
I want to ask you a question.
You make my life so difficult.
Like, seriously, guys, it wasn't me.
I didn't do it.
Okay.
Like, seriously.
All right.
Anyway, where you stand on the revival and will you, will you, is it, isn't it time for you to accept your Lord and Savior?
Oh, my God.
Clavin, you're just, he will not stop.
I mean, as I've said before, whoever converts me gets a million, well, infinity heaven points, actually, is what is my understanding of the theology.
But when it comes to, you know, are people going back to church?
I think the overwhelming broad answer is no, but the people who are going back to more traditional churches.
I'll speak for my own religious community on this one.
Obviously, you know, in America, the Jewish population is declining because the number of people who go to synagogue is declining.
However, the number of people who are going to synagogue are going to Orthodox synagogues is radically increasing because the Orthodox are maintaining their own and their kids are staying Orthodox and they're having lots of kids.
And people who want to be invested in the religion want a form of religion that actually teaches the religion.
And I suspect the same thing is happening in the Catholic community.
There are a lot of people who are lapsing away from Catholicism as sort of mainline Catholic churches in some areas liberalize or there are disagreements with some, you know, the last couple of popes, particularly Pope Francis in terms of some of his politics.
But the people who are re-engaging are re-engaging in very, very strong and vibrant ways.
And so I think what we're seeing is not that the numbers are going up right now, but that the seeds are planted for the numbers to go up very rapidly in the future because the people who are sticking around are bringing their friends and they're keeping their families Catholic.
But, you know, I don't want to, I don't know why you went to me.
Why am I speaking to the Catholics?
I mean, you really should go to like Matt Frad or Matt Walsh or Michael Knowles, all of whom are Catholic.
And they're like, just lead me out of this.
I want to stay on Ben for a minute.
Wait, wait, wait.
I want to talk to Matt Froud because it's not just an intellectual pose like with Knowles.
You actually have faith.
And I want to know what you feel about the current situation.
Yeah, I think back in 2008, during the height craze of the new atheism, we were assured that as people gave up their primitive knuckle-headed belief in God, that a golden age of reason would be ushered in.
And then you've got some Sheila named Carol marrying a train station in San Diego.
And more recently, men can have periods.
And I think we've sort of just woken up in the wreckage that these lies have brought about.
And we don't want to live in a completely meaningless universe.
And so if there is an argument that's moderately convincing, it's better to go with that than to live a life in despair, which is what I think atheism gets you.
So maybe it was that the new atheists overplayed their hand.
They were very cool, but there wasn't much in the way of argumentation on their side.
And so it was like a smoke bomb going off in culture and people couldn't see straight.
We didn't know if we were abusing our children for teaching them the Christian faith, as Dawkins said, and these sorts of things.
But I think over time, we've realized that arguments for atheism aren't good, that there are compelling arguments for theism.
And also, I think we're just cultureless monads adrift.
And we are desirous for a culture, preferably a culture that was once our own, which is a sort of piety, a sort of natural piety, a desire to live the way that my ancestors lived, you know?
So I think that might be part of it.
All right, Knowles.
Nobody really cares what you have to say, but say something.
Go ahead.
Good.
I want to contradict your premise here, which is the notion that more people are leaving the Catholic Church and are coming in, which I guess is literally true because we have infant baptism as Christians have practiced for 2,000 years.
So that's a debate for another time, I suppose.
But because of that, you know, there are people who they'll baptize their kids so that they can have a nice lunch with Aunt Sheila, but they don't have any intention of practicing the faith.
And so, yeah, a lot of those people will fall away, echoing a little bit what Ben said.
But if you look at adult conversions, especially young adult conversions, those really are spiking.
And more traditional forms of Christianity, especially Catholicism, you are seeing a real surge there in America and in France.
And this got me wondering how Mr. Walsh would react to this, because it's a frequent tension in Matt's thinking.
Is there, you know, the natural instinct toward pessimism, which is, you know, things are collapsing and we're all going to be raving baboons.
Or is there this sense of victory that after many centuries of oppression, the Catholics are finally coming out of Augsburg and Westphalia, and now we're actually going to retake all of the West?
What do you think, Matt?
Well, I mean, there's always the ultimate optimism because we've read the last page of the book and we know how the story ends.
And we know it ends with triumph.
But in the medium term, before we get there, what's going to happen?
I think I have a mixture of pessimism and optimism because I do think that kind of to the point that's already been raised, the church is getting smaller, but it's also getting more conservative.
It's getting more faithful at the same time.
And that's kind of what the statistics show us.
But then also what you realize is that you can't really trust the stats because I think what's actually happening is that now that we live in this godless heathen world, there's no real cultural incentive to just show up to church, even though you don't believe and you don't care.
So there's no, you don't really have the cultural Christians anymore because there's no incentive for that.
You could just not go to church.
You could not claim any faith and you'll be fine.
And so I think that that is falling off.
Now, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, if you look at church attendance or whatever else, people that were claiming to be Catholic, claiming to be Christian, it was higher.
But a lot of those people, you know, they didn't really believe.
They didn't actually care.
They were just showing up.
They were going through the motions because there was a certain cultural and social, there's a social advantage to it.
And now that the social advantage is gone, a lot of those people are falling off, but they didn't have the faith.
They weren't faithful to begin with.
And now the people that are showing up, like they really believe they're there because they really believe.
And I also think to someone's point, I wasn't really paying attention.
There's this need for meaning.
And so what you have, especially with Gen Z, they came into a culture that there's no meaning.
It's directionless.
And so they have this real hunger for meaning, which means that that's why you have some Gen Z that they're super Catholic, they're super conservative, they're really traditional, and that's great.
And you find that they're going to the Latin Mass and all that kind of stuff.
And then you also have Gen Z, they've gone to the other extreme and they're getting into LGBT and trans and all that.
But it is all this intense hunger for meaning.
And some of them are finding the right place.
Some of them are finding the wrong place.
I mean, here I want to compliment our new acquisition, Matt Frad here, because I think that one of the things that is happening, and it's been happening in religious communities for a while, is that what you said there, Matt, which is that so many young people for a while in sort of the new atheist movement, they figured that it was just dumb to be religious, that if you were a smart person, you could not be a religious person because science said, and because if you were the kind of person who went to church or you went synagogue, that meant that you believed in some like weird old man in the sky who was manipulating the marionette strings.
And I think that one of the things that Matt Frad in particular has done, because you dedicated your life to making logical arguments on behalf of faith and on behalf of the Bible, because of that, even if people don't necessarily believe because of those arguments, they understand that intelligent people do believe those arguments.
And I think that this is actually a really, really important thing because there was sort of a cultural dichotomy that was placed for most of my childhood between sort of the dumb rubes who went to church and believed in God and then the very intelligent university goers who really believed the smart things and the smart people would never hang out with the church people and the church people were a bunch of backwater, kind of like how Barack Obama described them, right?
The bitter clingers and all of this.
And I think that two things happened.
One, the expert class completely fell on their face with so many of their beliefs and it ended in men can be women.
And at the same time, there was a new class of people like you who are out there intellectually saying, hold up a second.
Like here is a high IQ defense of what God is and how people believe in God.
And in fact, I don't have to make that up.
I can cite some of the smartest people who ever lived, including Aquinas, to actually explain all of this.
And so even if people don't necessarily understand the ontological argument, they understand that very intelligent people make the ontological argument.
And therefore, it is not stupid to believe in the ontological arguments.
This is such a great point, Ben, because it just gives a kind of permission.
This happened to me.
It's not like I, certainly not when I first encountered them, that I understood these arguments for God.
It just was enough to say, oh, wait, smart people can articulate things in a smart way.
Maybe I should give that a go.
And to your point, Matt, yes.
You know, 30 years ago, maybe the number was higher or the percentage was higher of supposedly practicing Catholics.
But to me, the test is, well, how many go to confession?
You know, and like 30 years ago, like everyone stopped going to confession.
And we believe as a matter of faith that you can't receive our Lord in a state of mortal sin.
And if you're in a state of grave mortal sin, you're really in danger of hellfire.
And so if you're not taking that part seriously, you do have to wonder how seriously you're taking the faith.
I think it was Padre Pio said that the confessional is like a bath for the soul.
And Mr. Fred, I can't help but notice that when you get out of the bath, you, unlike the other people on this panel right now, you shave what would be your beard.
Well, first of all, I think it should be, I want to just state for the record that I said to Daly Waiya, don't you think it's a bit tacky for me to shill your merch on day one?
And they just showed me a whip and totally shut up.
No, no, no, no, man.
I mean, I'm a big fan of Jeremy's razors myself.
I know Matt Walsh has made fun of the likes of me, and I don't think he's wrong to have done that, but my wife has really sensitive skin and doesn't enjoy kissing me when I have whiskers.
And so for a while, I had to decide, do I want the respect of men or the kisses of my wife?
And I don't know what it says about me, but it was a tough call.
But when I decided I got to go to the bathroom, Jeremy's razor and shave the face.
Nobody understands Jeremy's Razors better than I do because I have much more real estate to shave than the rest of you.
And I actually use and subscribe to Jeremy's Razors.
I don't even know if you guys remember that Harry's Razors.
I think it was you, Knowles.
They canceled you because what did you say?
Men can't become women, some kind of subversive trash like that.
And they actually canceled their ads.
And so we started Jeremy's Razors.
We named them after Jeremy Irons, I think.
And we started to put out razors that actually support the idea that men should be men and should be, you know, have a razor that can not just cut the beard.
You should just take their skin right the hell off.
That's why we're so tough that we can use Jeremy's Razors.
They're absolutely terrific.
And right now, you can get two full years of premium shaves for just 21 cents a day, which for me is like, I mean, you've got to prorate that.
That's like a penny a minute almost.
That's 730 days of a shave as uncompromising as you are.
Go to jeremysrazors.com and get the razor that works as hard as you do.
And be a man for crying out loud.
Be just an unrepentant man because that's what it's about.
That's what Jeremy's razors are all about.
Yeah, let me let me jump.
I mean, there's no, there's no, if there was a clever segue, I wouldn't be the guy to find it anyway.
But in this case, there isn't one.
I do want to tell you, though, about when you use Jeremy's razors, your face will be softer than a baby's bottom.
There you go.
No, that's terrible.
That's exactly what I meant when I said that there's no good segue.
So I'd already gotten into it.
We're going to just move on.
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Okay, Matt, I've had enough, Matt, Brad.
I've had enough talk about just generic theism and everything.
I want to know, it's been a little bit of a rough 500 years for Holy Mother Church, and there have been ups and downs, really great art, actually, in the Counter-Reformation.
So I feel great.
I feel really good.
And I know there's some people who always just want to be down and anything the Pope does is bad.
And anything that seems good about the culture, the Christian culture, or for the church, I don't know, somehow is bad.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm a little too rosy about it.
But are you feeling good?
Me?
Yeah, I feel fine.
Yeah, I think the reason I'm a Catholic is that I think Catholicism is true.
I think that God exists, that Christ is the second person of the Blessed Trinity, the long-awaited Messiah.
I think he established a church and I think he gave that church authority and that that church is the Catholic church.
We live in a day and age where we're constantly bombarded with the latest scandals and that can be very demoralizing and it makes sense.
And you think, well, how could this possibly be the true church of Christ when we see scandals, when we see abuses and we see cowardice?
But I was thinking this morning that that would also invalidate the true religion in the old covenant.
I mean, Rahab the prostitute, Moses the murderer, Solomon has his heart turned towards Baal by his foreign wives, David the adulterer.
So I think if you're looking for the true church and by the true church, you mean the church of perfect people, then you won't find it.
And if you did and then joined it, it wouldn't be because you're abysmal.
So I think when people are evaluating whether or not the Catholic Church is the true church, they should think, they should think of it that way.
Does God exist?
Has he revealed himself definitively in the person of Jesus Christ?
And has he established a church?
And which church is that?
Is that too serious?
No, no, that's fair.
Did that bring you over?
You're already almost there.
You're peering over the Tiber, just dipping your toe in.
But I do join us.
Everything's on fire.
We need to.
One thing that almost everybody has hit on is the fact that ideas trickle down.
Ideas do trickle down from the top.
And I talk to people, as you all do, all across the country.
One thing you hear people say all the time is, well, I'm not smart.
I'm not educated.
But I have this opinion.
And the opinion is usually far smarter than any university professor.
And now I think what you're getting is permission to believe because the science is simply very, it's not dispositive.
You never can prove a spiritual truth.
Proof is an actual material thing that you do, a material process.
But the science just shows that one, consciousness is almost certainly separate from material.
It does not come from the brain.
It comes through the brain.
And the other thing is that the world is simply built for us.
It is built for life.
The odds of this world being what it is are the same odds as a wind blowing across a junkyard and assembling a 747.
It's just not going to happen.
And the fingerprints of the Creator are everywhere.
I mean, the heavens declare his glory and all of that stuff is true.
Once you start getting into your own personal religion, I think things, you know, then you get into the old arguments.
And I believe those should be solved by violence.
I think the 30 years' war, we should just bring that back and just have utter like warfare and death across the different belief systems until the last man is standing.
I think that's the only, that's the only way, right?
I mean, otherwise we have to be nice to one another and kind of listen to each other's ideas.
And it would be like the show.
We wouldn't be able to stand it.
That's a great point.
Unfortunately, I can't reach through the screen.
Can I say something else?
Oh, you go.
No.
Yeah, no, please.
Okay.
I was going to say there's like a pragmatic reason to believe in God and Christianity as well.
Pascal gets into this in his Pensees, the basic idea being if I can't decide whether the arguments for atheism or Christian theism, if I can't decide that one's better than the other, then I still could have a pragmatic reason to prefer one over the other.
The Second Vatican Council said that when God is forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible.
And I think if you look around in our, what we call our culture, I don't think we have a culture, but when we look around today, I think we just see a lot of people who don't know where they're from, what they're for, or where they're going.
So, but I think the opposite is true too, right?
So if I can come to believe in God and his revelation, then I know that I've come from somewhere, that I'm for something, and that there's a way in which I should live.
And that when I act in accordance with that, whether or not I know how to out-debate atheists on the internet, if I put that into effect in my life and my life becomes better, if people around me start, like if my wife starts liking me more, you know, because I'm patient and kind, then that's maybe do that.
I remember I met several people like, I just, I just can't believe.
I'm like, just choose to do it.
Because if God doesn't exist, what are you afraid of?
Being a hypocrite, that wouldn't be immoral.
Just get over it.
Just be a hypocrite.
But if there's good reason to believe in God, start acting like that.
Although I think your first statement, I prefer, I prefer to believe because it is true and then let the benefits of it come to you.
I actually believe I agree with Matt Fred's second statement there, actually.
That actually is a practical person.
Well, no, I mean, I might be so bold as to call it the Jewish approach to religion, which is do the mitzvot and then you end up believing in God, right?
Like basically do the thing.
And it turns out that when you do the thing and it enriches your life in a particular way, then you end up actually with a deeper belief system about the nature of the system into which you are buying than if you had never done the thing.
I know there have been some jokes about, you know, if I, if, if I were to convert, would I end up as a Catholic or a Protestant?
And I've, I've offended both parties by suggesting that, well, I have tremendous sympathy for the rules-based order that the Catholics provide, if I were going to ditch an even more rules-based order, I'd go all the way and it'd be party time and I'm going full Protestant.
So I've pissed off everybody with that particular answer.
But the sort of acts-based form of finding religion, I think it actually is the way I think that most people actually end up believing in religion.
I think that the intellectual frameworks that all of us spend time creating around God and around the Bible, I think that those, it provides that permission structure.
But I think that the way that most people actually engage in religious life is they just engage in religious life.
And it's why even the very notion of I believe in God is such an intellectualized form of how most people actually behave with regard to God, that I don't think it has tremendous value in the way that I think that our overly intellectualized society sort of promotes.
Our society is like, well, do you believe in God or do you not believe in God?
If you believe in God, why do you believe in God?
What are all the reasons you believe in God?
And that's sort of like saying, you know, do you believe in gravity?
Do not believe in gravity.
If you do believe in gravity, please explain the physics of how gravity works.
Like, well, no, I live in a world that has gravity in it.
And so for me, I live in a God-created world and I act in a way that I would only act if God were a part of my world.
And I think that even people who are atheists or agnostic very often are living in that same world without recognizing that they're living in that God-created order.
And so I think that, you know, you have a problem.
I mean, I have a problem when I hear Christians say things like, you know, they'll say things like, nobody is born imperfect.
And you think like, I've seen some pretty tragic births in my life, you know, and I don't think that that's true.
If I found myself spouting untruths in the name of God, I would, I would begin to have doubts.
My experience was that having reasoned my way to the probability of God, I began to engage with God and found that everything made sense.
Everything made more sense.
Suddenly I wasn't talking nonsense anymore.
I mean, I am.
But no, I think that's it's a great point, but I also think that's why it's very important.
And this actually is, I think, a general statement about religion that I'll be interested to hear your guys' take on.
I think one of the problems with sort of the internet subculture around religion is that people go very quickly from new convert to preacher.
And that I think is actually a gigantic mistake.
I don't think that you get to convert to Catholicism tomorrow and become pope the day after.
And I don't think that you actually have to spend some time and become comfortable with the ideas to the point where you actually live the ideas, believe the ideas and understand them to be true in your heart in order for you to promote them rationally.
And I think that you can start off by not fully believing the thing that you're working through.
But I do think that you actually have to spend a lot of time with the thing before you actually believe the thing to the point where you can say to other people, this is true and not be dishonest about it.
Yeah.
And as you say, the smartest people in history have all believed and there's, you don't want to throw away their thoughts, which is what guys like Dawkins do.
It's what those new atheists did.
It's like, oh, that's ridiculous.
And then you realize they've never read Aquinas.
They've never read the people who thought these thoughts.
You know, they just have no idea.
It is simply a club, a sophisticated elite club of unbelievers that I grew up in, but I think it's falling apart.
And I think the reason it's falling apart is because of science.
I think science has just made it untenable to hold those opinions with that kind of sneering superiority.
I think that's all over now.
And I think that just frees people into belief.
You know, it frees people to believe.
Have you noticed that Mr. Walsh is sitting there like some kind of Hindu squamish like a bop, like a baba, just meditating?
Is it because you've reached a sort of spiritual enlightenment?
I have.
I've reached Zen.
I became Buddhist.
I do think, well, I was thinking about, Matt, the point you made about not to oversimplify, but it's a little bit of like fake it till you make it.
Like, you know, maybe you don't fully believe this, but if it's not true, you got nothing to lose by sort of acting as though it is.
And then maybe as you act as though it is, you'll come to believe it, if I understand kind of your point.
And I think that in many cases in life, I actually think fake it till you make it is maybe one of the wisest cliches that's ever been uttered because that is true for a lot of things.
I mean, I've said this many times about depression.
You know, people say, well, I'm so unhappy.
I don't know how to be not depressed.
Well, just pretend you're not.
Like, just act like you're not.
Pretend you're not unhappy.
Just go around, totally fake it, be completely fake and phony and act like you are not depressed.
And you will find that you actually become less depressed because you're acting like it.
So I think that that is often true with a lot of things.
Matt, how's that working out with you for the show?
I'm not faking it, though.
It's a thing.
I'm not faking it at all.
So I think there's a lot of truth to that, but the counterpoint when it comes to religion in particular is that like I said what feels like two and a half hours ago that it's like people were doing people people were doing that in the culture when there was a when there was a social incentive they were going to church they were going they were going through the motions and then as the social Incentive fell off.
They just stopped going.
And so, in a way, they were kind of faking it, but they didn't make it, you know.
So, it didn't, that didn't seem to quite work on a societal scale in our country.
So, that's yes.
And, you know, look, a lot of what this, a lot of what we're talking about is actually natural reason, right?
You know, a lot of it is, okay, we can know things about human nature.
Even to your point, Matt, on, you know, fake it till you make it.
There's just things about human nature and human behavior that will conduce to some kind of flourishing and maybe make you happy.
And all this talk of, like, if you live in accord with the truth, that's going to get you somewhere.
And look, there's truth in natural religion, even math's Baba Swami stuff from the Far East.
And but, but I think this also gets to the point we were talking about earlier when we were alluding to relitigating the 30 years war.
Is, you know, look, there's a lot we can know from abstract reason and, you know, from nature, but then there's particularity to it too, you know, and certainly Christians believe in a very particular religion.
Jews do also, you know, a particular people, a particular God speaks to a particular people on a particular mountain.
And so I think that's what's really interesting about this moment is we've gone from this bland, generic Gnosticism that says not even our bodies really matter to us at all.
That's where you get transgenderism down to, well, hold on.
Does God exist?
Okay, well, what is God like?
Okay, there's this God.
And did he really reveal himself?
Did he really, is he really incarnate as a real individual particular person?
And then to your point, Mr. Frad, you know, and does he really establish a particular church?
And does he really encourage us to do particular things, you know, leave us particular sacraments in a particular way?
And on that Catholic propaganda, Matt, I'm very much looking forward to Pinus with Aquinas launching, I think in January, is that right?
On Daily Wire?
Correct.
I'm pumped as well.
Thank you.
In a particular year, which is 2026.
Very good.
Matt, thank you.
I'm very excited about this.
I will say.
And he's already been initiated.
I mean, he read his first ad here, which, as we all know, is the actual real initiation ritual of joining Daily Wire.
The Yamaka is optional.
The ads are mandatory.
They did tell you you have to become Jewish, right?
Discussed that with you.
That's on the contract renegotiation, I think.
Okay, Matt, thank you very much.
So we're all obviously super pumped to have Matt Frad with us here at Daily Wire.
Matt is awesome.
His show is great.
One of the smartest people around.
One of the dumbest people around and one of the most horrific people around is about to be the mayor of New York.
That's Ron Mamdani.
According to the latest Kalshi odds, apparently he's an 87% favorite to become the Democratic nominee.
And that's people putting their money where their mouth is because that's essentially a betting market.
And yeah, it looks like he's very likely to become the next mayor of New York.
And my perspective on that, I believe we don't even have to talk about this.
I think we all know that he's a Marxist, pro-jihadi, terrible person.
And I think it speaks ill of an enormous number of people in New York.
And I think the only question really is, you know, do the people of New York deserve this?
Because, you know, they are voting for it.
And the theory of democracy is that people deserve what they get and they should get it good and hard.
And so, you know, I guess if that's the direction they choose to go, that's the direction they can choose to go.
We'll be covering that, obviously, all the rest of this week, next week as well.
Yeah, he's terrible.
And, you know, on that truly dark note, I'm going to give you a note of light.
And that is that lifetime memberships are available.
So if you want an entire lifetime of watching this show, I know that Matt feels like he's already experienced an entire lifetime of participating in this show.
But if you want an entire lifetime membership, you get to come here whenever you want for literally the rest of your natural life, which, you know, depending on your age, should be well beyond Drew's natural lifespan.
So you get to see who we replaced Drew with, which will be exciting, I think, for all of us, actually.
And then you'll be able to check it out with the lifetime membership here at Daily Wire.
You know, we announced this 10,000 lifetime all access members, only 10,000.
Already, 7,500 of those are gone.
So there are 2,500 left.
You can do the math, unless you're a New Yorker, in which case you're electing a socialist for no reason.
But 2,500 lifetime memberships left.
You can go get those right now.
Don't miss this opportunity to help us build the next decade of Daily Wire and Beyond.
You've seen all the amazing content we're going to be putting out just in the next couple of months.
And let me tell you, we have such a content schedule stacked for you for next year.
All right.
Like amazing, unprecedented stuff in the history of independent media, really, truly.
This is your exclusive opportunity to become the backbone of a movement to build the future and ensure that the best is yet to come.
Claim one of those 2,500 remaining lifetime memberships, as well as your gold, the Daily Wire Forward flag pin, which none of us brought with us.
We have them in our safe.
They're being guarded by armed guards, actually.
And that, so, you know, but you can have one.
You can have one if you go over to dailywire.com/slash lifetime.
I see that Drew has his hat on, which is, which is, you can get that at our Daily Wire shop as well, by the way.
The hats are very, very cool.
So go check that out right now, dailywire.com/slash lifetime.
And there's nothing else here.
Are we doing anything else together?
Or no, we're leaving them desiring something more.
Yeah, that's right.
Let them leave them wanting more.
I think we can all run screaming from the building now, right?
Let's friendly fire, everybody.
See you gentlemen next time.
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