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Jan. 19, 2022 - The Matt Walsh Show

01:58:10

Daily Wire Backstage: WE WON

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	Hey everybody, this is Matt Walsh.
	Drop everything you're doing and check out the latest episode of Daily Wire backstage.
	You're going to hear Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, and yours truly talking about all the important issues affecting you and your family.
	You don't want to miss it, unless you're a leftist, in which case, you're cancelled.
	[Music]
	I don't know, that one was actually kind of funny.
	Welcome to The Daily Wire Backstage.
	Daily Wire Backstage is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	You have a right to privacy.
	Defend your rights at expressvpn.com slash backstage.
	Joining us tonight, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and I am The Daily Wire God King, lowercase g, lowercase k, Jeremy Boring.
	For tonight's show, Daily Wire members can ask us questions in the chat box at dailywire.com and we'll answer them throughout the night.
	And now, we'd like to share another great update with you.
	This is the final trailer for our first original feature film, Shut In.
	Coming out in February, the film is seat-gripping, it's a thriller, it follows a mother in the middle of her worst nightmare, barricaded inside a closet by her violent ex-husband.
	She's forced to use Only her voice to guide her and her children on the other side of the wall to safety.
	All the while, the threat of her dangerous ex looms.
	The film will be released on February 10th and we'll be here together again for another great Daily Wire premiere exclusive to our Daily Wire members.
	You can watch the full trailer yourself and get release details at shutinfilm.com.
	So please head over to dailywire.com slash subscribe to become a member and get content without the woke.
	So we're just excited to have you on this journey with us.
	How can a film be seat gripping?
	Seat grips.
	The film is gripping the seat.
	Listen, I didn't write it.
	I read it off the prompter.
	The movie really is good, and I say that as someone who has seen the movie 16 times now.
	One of the worst things about making a movie or being involved in the making of a movie is that you have to just watch it and watch it and make notes and make notes and watch it and watch it and make sound notes and make sound notes and watch it and watch it and watch it.
	And at some point, you hate the movie.
	Yeah.
	And that very moment that you get to go share it with the world.
	But it really is fantastic.
	The cast did an amazing job.
	And it's--
	The script is tremendous.
	It's one of the best scripts I've ever--
	It's fantastic.
	Ever read.
	And it really is about motherhood, about a woman who probably shouldn't be a mother
	and who isn't a very good one.
	But through this trauma and through what she has to endure, she discovers what it means to be a mother
	and what it means to take care of her children.
	So at some point, they'll show you the trailer.
	I honestly have no idea when.
	What I wanna open up talking about though is how we kicked the government's ass last week.
	Unbelievable.
	Yes, yes.
	Yep.
	Kudos.
	And it's our first time to all get to be together since then.
	For Drew and Ben, because you guys weren't in office with us last week, I was in a meeting.
	You know, the day started out and we thought the court might make a ruling on the Biden vaccine mandate.
	And of course, We were the first in the nation to sue the Biden administration when the mandate came down.
	We've wrapped up, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars, picked a fight with the government to try to stop the vaccine mandate.
	The stakes could have been higher.
	I actually think people, even right now, most people haven't fully realized what it would have meant had we lost this case.
	You know, people would come up to me and say, well, if you had lost, you still would have been in the fight, right?
	And I said, no, if we had lost, it would have been over.
	Yeah.
	There's nothing to appeal to.
	There is no more appeal, yeah.
	And we're not talking about penalties of $100 a day if you don't enforce it.
	Bankrupt your company within two weeks.
	And that was the goal.
	I mean, the entire goal of the fines, I mean, they literally went out of their way to raise the fine in some of the regulations.
	The original fine was something like $14,000 per fine, and then they raised it to $140,000 for purposeful violation, which was specifically dedicated to going after companies like ours that had made a public statement that we weren't going to abide by the VAX mandate.
	And by the way, it's a 900-page regulation from OSHA, and what it never actually defined is what is an instance.
	So it was $140,000 per willful instance.
	And so take The Daily Wire, we have 150 full-time employees.
	Each one of them is an instance each week.
	So you're talking about 140,000 times 150 every week.
	The company wouldn't last.
	or 140,000 times 150 every week, the company wouldn't last.
	So what would have happened is it would have been enforced.
	What would have happened is the relationship between business and government would have been changed in the country forever.
	The relationship between employee and employer would have been changed in the country forever.
	And OSHA had already said, this won't just apply to companies with 100 or more employees.
	As soon as we find out that the courts aren't going to limit it, we're going to extend this down to everyone, including the self-employed.
	If you have an employee, even yourself, you'll have to enforce it.
	What's so insane about this to me is that, you know, I've been, like all of us, I'm sure, you know, kind of studying the vaccines and watching the numbers and watching interviews, and I've come to the conclusion that all over the world, especially all over the West, doctors, actual, not Tony Fauci fakes, I mean actual real Jewish doctors, Are doing tests and experiments and disagreeing with one another and coming to different conclusions and uncertain whether the vaccine, how long the vaccines work, whether they're strong and all this stuff.
	Only the government is absolutely so certain about what's going on, the government and guys on Twitter, are so certain about what's going on that they are willing to destroy the businesses.
	But this is the thing, I think you're giving them more credit than they deserve.
	I really do.
	I don't think they're certain of anything.
	I think they're certain that it doesn't work the way that it was originally pitched to work.
	And this is coming as a big advocate of the vaccine.
	Yeah, me too.
	Somebody who's double vaxxed, and my wife is triple vaxxed, and my parents are triple vaxxed.
	The fact is they are very good at preventing hospitalization and death, and they are crappy at preventing transmission.
	Right.
	Okay, this is the reality of the situation.
	Omicron is 140 times as transmissible as the original variant.
	The cloth masks don't stop it, not according to me, according to Michael Osterholm, who is a Biden advisor, according to Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, now according to Leanna Nguyen of CNN.
	Everybody now acknowledges that the cloth masks are completely useless against Omicron.
	Osterholm went so far as to say they've been useless since the beginning of the pandemic.
	I'm glad that we're allowed to say that now.
	But the government Kept doubling down because, again, the premise for the government is that the government is capable of controlling everything in your life, and if you don't believe them, they will try to control you even harder.
	I think because there were too many Americans who weren't listening to the government, they decided they had to ram it down that much further.
	And the thing to me that was scary about the case was that it was 6-3.
	Yeah, that's scary.
	This is the part that's totally frightening, because if you think about it for one second, I voted for Trump in 2020.
	I've been very critical of President Trump.
	I was as critical of him for many of the things he did during his administration.
	But he had three Supreme Court nominees, and they were the margin of victory here.
	If that had been a Democratic president, and there had been a Democratic president who was appointing Democrat judges, that would have been a decision in favor of the federal government being able to cram a vaccine mandate down on 84 million Americans And here's the thing, when you read the dissents, and it's the same three dissenters as in the eviction moratorium case.
	So according to those three justices, the federal government, using any auspices, right, using any four-letter or three-letter agency at its disposal, can do literally whatever it wants without any sort of statutory mandate.
	And it can do so at a moment's notice, so long as it declares that there is some sort of emergency.
	And you know that that was going to be the end.
	I mean, that's effectively the end of government in America.
	And it's frightening how many people agree with them.
	I mean, there are people who say, apparently a large number of Democrats, like half of them, say that the vaccinated should be cast out of their jobs and put in camps.
	It's insane.
	Actually, in the concurrent opinion which accompanied the court order... This is the conservative.
	Yeah, Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch.
	had a great line, Ben, to your point, saying that if they were to have found that OSHA had this
	authority because of the emergency of COVID, then, quote, "Declarations of emergencies would never
	end, and the liberties our Constitution's separation of power seeks to preserve would
	amount to little." So that really is what was at stake.
	And we know that for a fact, because they've already declared racism an emergency.
	And climate change an emergency, and every other thing.
	What's amazing is the conservative concurring opinion and the liberal dissent both begin with the same question.
	The first line is, the question is, who decides?
	And what the conservatives are asking is, who decides?
	Some technocrat idiots who have gotten everything wrong about this.
	Or robed lawyers on the Supreme Court.
	Or the legislatures, which actually have voiced an opinion.
	The United States Senate voiced an opinion on the mandate.
	They disapproved of it.
	And the liberals say, who decides?
	The Supreme Court or the experts?
	As if those are the only two options.
	As if the people in the- In fact, they say that the administrative agencies are the more democratic version.
	Because the courts are lifelong appointees.
	But the administrative agencies are answerable to the president.
	So this is literally what it says in the dissenting opinion.
	So in their opinion, the way the government should work is that every four years we should elect our dictator.
	And our dictator should be able to dictate whatever the executive branch does.
	And that is our only outlet for democracy.
	There are no checks and balances anymore.
	And by the way, the next dictator, because of public sector unions and other rules, can't fire the bureaucracy.
	So even the idea that- The ratchet only moves one way.
	That's right, the ratchet only moves one way.
	So you guys weren't in the office when the order came down, but we started the day thinking we might get a decision from the court.
	And then the court released an opinion for the day.
	It was a very random, like it was about some 1970 law about who gets Medicare or something.
	Something that had not, you know, society changing ramifications.
	And the code that they released, it had an R. And in the entire history of the court, When they release opinions, the one that has an R code is the last one of the day.
	And there's never been an additional court order or ruling made.
	Well, we're already in very unprecedented territory because one thing people don't realize, this case is only the second time in the history of the country that the court has heard oral arguments to oppose an emergency temporary order by the bureaucracy.
	So, a very rare thing that the court even heard our appeal, that the court even took up this case. I had all these cameras set up in my office the
	night before because we knew orders might come down the next morning. The R code comes
	down. We're all disappointed.
	I tell them to strip all the cameras out of my office. Poor Mathis, you know, was probably
	up all night single-handedly hanging lights. Has to go back in there and take them all
	down. And we go about our business kind of deflated because, you know, every day that
	they don't, you know, reaffirm the stay, the law is going into effect. Parts of it are
	actually already taking effect and the country is already changing all around us. So I'm
	in a meeting about some other, you know, shut in or some other thing. And I suddenly hear,
	because we have this sort of open seating concept in our office, 110 people out there
	suddenly just go into outrageous applause, like shouting and clapping. And I opened the
	door and it really was like, you know, I wish that just like a little kid with, you know,
	a little hat had run in with a newspaper.
	Extra, extra!
	Did you hear, mister?
	Geez!
	Our general counsel, Josh Herr, hands me the printed order, still literally hot off of the copy machine, and I got choked up.
	Because we've been living with the stakes of what this would actually mean, not just for our company, but for the country.
	And to be, you know, it's hard not to be cynical when you're in our line of work.
	To be handed this document and to realize that the court had done the right thing, that they had found in favor of the Constitution, found in favor of administrative law, found in favor of our God-given rights.
	Again, as someone who's been very pro-vaccine, I'm very anti-tyranny.
	Yeah, well that's not that hard a concept to understand.
	Not that hard a concept.
	What do you guys think?
	I'm really interested to hear what you think about Kavanaugh going over to the other side on the healthcare workers.
	I wish that they had found differently on the healthcare case.
	You know, some people attacked us on Twitter when we were celebrating our victory.
	And they said, but you aren't fighting for... Well, we don't have standing.
	We can't bring that lawsuit.
	That is not our... Yeah, you gotta celebrate victories when you get it.
	I got the same thing on my show.
	This is a huge victory that we pulled ourselves back from the brink, and I think there's a real wisdom in You know, celebrating that and even gloating over it a little bit so that it shows that we're not just losers all the time.
	Although, you know, for me, because I am always looking for the dark, clouded, with no silver lining, it's a very terrifying thing, as we talked about, that they wanted to do this in the first place, that they wanted to actually bankrupt A majority of the companies in the country.
	And that's something to keep in mind as we go into the midterm elections.
	This is what, on the Democrat side, it's not like there was debate about this.
	There were no dissenting voices, hardly at all, among Democrats.
	There's something else.
	There's a mentality that was made very clear to me by some of the folks on Twitter on the left over all of this.
	So I put out a tweet.
	You know, basically saying that we're really excited that we stood with our employees and our employees are now protected by the law and that they are going to get to retain their jobs.
	And a leftist who shall remain unnamed tweeted back and he was like, so what you're really celebrating is that you get to force your employees back into work, an unsafe environment.
	And I said, and I felt like, you can't name one of the employees of this company.
	You can't name them.
	I mean, this is, the leftist conceit is they know better than you what is good for you.
	And they care.
	And they care.
	They care so much that they would rather fire your... They care so much about my employees who they don't know...
	From Adam.
	And whose salaries they don't pay.
	And thank God, you know, we have the ability at this company to go out of our way for our employees and we try to do that as much as we possibly can.
	We've done that in a lot of different circumstances because we actually care about the people who work at this company.
	And to have some leftist jet in on a parachute and basically say, well, you know, but I care more about your employees and I'm trying to protect them and that's why they have to be fired.
	It's the same exact mentality as all of these jackasses when it comes to raising your kids, right?
	I care more about your kids than you care about your kids, which is why I have to dictate how your kids are going to be educated and how they're going to learn about race and how they're going to learn about gender identity, because I care about your kids.
	You don't know my kids.
	You don't know my employees.
	You don't care about any of these people.
	What you care about is your own vision of controlling the universe, wherein everyone is a widget.
	Everybody's either a tool of your vision or an obstacle to your vision, and you must control everybody top down.
	Well, you know what?
	You.
	And you know, on top of this, this whole idea of caring really bothers me.
	You know, the guy who said, the NBA owner who said, nobody cares about the Uyghurs.
	It's like, who cares if you care?
	You don't do the right thing because you care.
	You do the right thing because it's right.
	Everybody cares more about money than the Uyghurs.
	Every single person.
	Even the Uyghurs care more about money than doing the right thing.
	You do the right thing.
	I care more about myself than a stranger, but I'm still called upon to run into a burning building to pull the stranger out.
	That's right.
	Not because I care more about them.
	Yes.
	Because I care about something more than me.
	Exactly, exactly.
	When did we decide to stop upholding free speech as a basic right?
	What's playing out right now at big tech companies and social media sites sets a dangerous precedent.
	Look, it doesn't matter what your politics are or who you voted for.
	I mean, it matters to me at The Daily Wire, but it doesn't matter in regard to your privacy.
	Everyone should have the right to express themselves freely.
	Sadly, the big tech monopoly has instead opted for silencing tactics and censorship to fight back against big tech's control of the internet.
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	One other point about this I think is important to make because
	we know that there are still plenty of companies that are enforcing the vaccine mandate,
	even though they don't have to.
	And Carhartt was the most recent example, and they sent an email out, reportedly, saying that they're going to enforce the mandate.
	If you're not vaccinated, you're going to get fired.
	And so then there's a question about, to the employees of those companies, do we just say, you're on your own, what should we do about that?
	And there's not the same issue with rights, I suppose, that there is when the government's doing it.
	But there still is a problem here.
	And I think, if you're upset about that, about the companies that are still imposing this on their employees...
	What bothers me when I see conservatives in media or just on social media saying, well, you know, you should quit.
	You should quit your job.
	Totally unfair.
	If there's a vaccine.
	You should just quit and take a stand.
	Well, you know what?
	I'm in a fortunate position where my employer was suing the government to not do this, so I don't have to worry about it.
	But I've got four kids to feed, and I've got a wife at home.
	And I've got my family that I've got to worry about.
	So I can't afford to just storm out one day.
	It might make me feel good, but then I go home to my kids and I say, Daddy took a stand.
	And they say, great, how am I going to eat tonight?
	This is the common collective action problem that we see all across our society.
	It's very easy for sort of the armchair quarterback to say that other people should lay down their lives or lay down their livelihoods.
	Unless you have collective action, though, none of that will work.
	So if you quit your job over this, The government doesn't care.
	Joe Biden doesn't care if you can't provide for your family.
	That's great for Joe Biden.
	And Carhartt will just replace you with another employee.
	But here's the point.
	If that's your position, there's another group of people who could make a much smaller sacrifice and bring about the change.
	That would be the consumers.
	So all of the consumers of Carhartt, they could say, we're not going to buy your product anymore until you get rid of this VAX mandate.
	And for us, I buy Carhartt sometimes, it's basically zero sacrifice for me to buy no more car.
	I got 15 jackets in my closet already, or I could buy a jacket from somewhere else.
	So that's really where the onus, if we're concerned about this, And doing something about the VAX mandates that are chosen by these employers, then we should be looking at the consumers, I think, more than the employees.
	I want to make one defense, actually, of Carhartt and others.
	And it's a tepid defense, I'll grant you, but it's this.
	I believe that any company in America has the right to enforce a vaccine mandate, all things being equal.
	I believe that any company in America should have the right to not hire black people, or not hire Jews, or only hire left-handed leftists.
	I think the market is perfectly capable of solving that problem in practice.
	Because if you don't hire black people, no one is going to shop at your business.
	If you don't hire Jews in this country, no one is going to shop at your business.
	We'll drive you out of business with our dollars, with our market activity.
	That is, to me, what freedom should look like.
	But see, in this instance, things aren't equal.
	Because while I think in the abstract that a company may have the right to enforce vaccinations, I also think in the abstract a 22-year-old blonde-haired, blue-eyed intern at the Daily Wire may decide that she wants to have sex with an old, fat, rich guy who calls himself a god king.
	In the abstract, that is absolutely possible.
	You could dream, anyway.
	In practice, though, we have concluded as a society that I have intrinsic power over that intern.
	And that my intrinsic power over her, not an act of threat, I may never make a threat, but intrinsically, my authority results in a situation where she is in some ways being pressured, in some ways being brainwashed, even if she thinks she does like me, by the power that I have over her.
	The government isn't using intrinsic power To coerce businesses right now.
	It's using extrinsic.
	It's using every single power at its disposal.
	Local governments like Los Angeles, Washington D.C., state governments like California or New York State, and Biden through every federal mechanism possible, have been essentially telling businesses, you will comply or we will destroy you.
	You will comply or we will bankrupt you.
	You will have sex with me or I will fire you.
	They're actively saying it.
	And in that environment, with the media reinforcing it for two years now, I don't know that you can say that a company like Carhartt is actually deciding that on their own.
	But this is a little different than the other examples.
	I agree with you that I think a business should be able to be run by bigots and I would never go there and I think we should shut them down.
	But you're not allowed to force someone else to be a bigot.
	You're not allowed to say to somebody, you have to do this.
	This is actively Telling people to do something that they have a right to not do.
	But this is why I'm saying my defense is tepid.
	All I'm saying is that these businesses who are in places like New York, many of them in places like LA, in places like San Francisco.
	What you're actually saying is that state government should step in and say there will be no coercion of vaccines in this state.
	That's right.
	Because what you're saying really is that there is no neutral space anymore.
	This is what I'm saying.
	I'm saying that the government has coerced these businesses already.
	So the argument isn't actually a defense of the business, to make clear.
	That's right.
	I'm not defending segregation.
	What it really is is that you're saying that were there a neutral space, people could make
	their own decisions.
	There is no neutral space.
	The government has occupied the space.
	That means the only thing that can occupy the space is government in opposition to government.
	That's right.
	And I think there's a lot of truth to that.
	It's like segregation in the South.
	The government caused it.
	Only the government can fix it.
	But you get into a battle of the mandates here, which is actually in the concurring
	opinion.
	The conservative--
	Yeah.
	--concurring opinion with the three conservatives on the court said, we're not suggesting that
	state and local governments can't impose mandates.
	We're actually not even saying that.
	What we're saying is that OSHA does not have the legal right to do this.
	And so in certain conservative states, you can see Ron DeSantis saying, we're not going
	to have vaccine mandates.
	So it's an anti-mandate mandate.
	But that's still coming from the government.
	It's created a massive gridlock in Florida, for example.
	Governor DeSantis, right, he said that he is not going to allow hospitals to impose the VAX mandate.
	Well, the Supreme Court came down on the side of hospitals in order to receive Medicaid and Medicare dollars.
	They might be forced to do that.
	So this now puts hospitals in this bizarre kind of choice of law situation where, can they accept Medicare dollars?
	Can they accept Medicaid dollars?
	Do they have to abide by the VAX mandate or not abide by the VAX mandate?
	It's going to end up back in court is the answer.
	to that question, but if you're an administrator at a hospital, you now really have a problem
	on your hands, which is why what Kavanaugh did is so bad.
	I mean, Kavanaugh certainly should not have voted the way that he voted on the CMS case.
	There was no legal basis to do so.
	But you know, on a broader level, you know, putting aside the VAX mandate specifically,
	can we just say that this has been the second worst week of the Biden administration?
	I mean, this guy is a full scale disaster.
	I mean, I think a year in, it is fair to say that he is the worst president in American history, one year into his administration.
	It's astonishing.
	This is certainly the worst year any president has ever had.
	And here's the thing, it's entirely 100% self-caused.
	That's the part that's crazy.
	If you were to look at the first year of the Bush administration, Bush gets inaugurated in 2001, September 11th, you've got September 11th.
	Okay, that's a pretty bad thing to happen while you're president of the United States.
	Okay, but he didn't call it a September 11th conference.
	Oh, you're one of those.
	But Joe, every problem that Joe Biden is experiencing right now is because of Joe Biden, right?
	Inflation is because of Joe Biden.
	The complete collapse of the United States on foreign policy leading to, by the way, joint military exercises now between Russia, China, and Iran.
	That is because Joe Biden pulled precipitously out of Afghanistan for no apparent reason.
	The complete destruction of all semblance of rationality with regard to COVID, that is on Joe Biden.
	Because Joe Biden was handed the vaxxes, he was handed a distribution plan, and then he got handed the greatest gift that any president could be handed, which is the endemic nature of this disease.
	Omicron is a gift to the Biden administration, if you could just see it as that.
	It is an extraordinarily non-deadly form of this disease that every single human, including those who are triple vaxxed, is going to get.
	You could just say, listen, you're going to get Omicron, you should get vaxxed because of the lower chance of hospitalization and death, but your chances are extremely high that you're going to live, and now we should all go back to normal, and you should lead our lives, and we've done a great job of tranching out the vaccines, credit to us, pat ourselves on the back, what an amazing job we've done, go back to normal.
	He can't do any of those things.
	He's making trillions of dollars in more spending, and then he's swiveling to, what if I just call everybody in the United States who disagrees with me, all 7 in 10 Americans, vicious, brutal Jim Crow racists who want to turn fire hoses on black people and tell them it's insane.
	I've got to say, Putin must have laughed into his sleeve when he heard that speech.
	First of all, it was one of the ugliest speeches I've ever heard.
	For all the time, I have knocked Donald Trump for his comportment again and again and the way he treated people and all this stuff.
	He never said anything, anything remotely like this.
	And when Putin is sitting there looking at whether we're going to take strong action against him in the Ukraine, he's sitting there thinking, take strong action against me?
	They're fighting with each other.
	They're calling each other racist and bigots.
	You know, why would he even worry about what we're doing?
	We're so busy being at each other's throats.
	That was a disgrace, I've got to say.
	I agree.
	One of the worst speeches ever by an American president.
	Really, really.
	You know, this is what gets me all the time.
	It's not what politicians do, because politicians suck.
	You know, it is not what they do.
	It is having an utterly corrupt corporate press that will not call them out on this.
	There were some people, even on the Democrat side, who looked at this and said... Dick Durbin!
	Dick Durbin, the senator from Illinois who once compared Gitmo to Pol Pot and Hitler.
	I actually like, you know, who was the guy who said on CNN the other day that we don't have bad leaders, we have bad followers?
	Oh.
	A Democrat guy.
	He was great.
	And now they're saying that white women are no good.
	Who's going to be left to vote for these people?
	It's your point that, you know, Donald Trump Whatever you say about his rhetoric, he would attack specific individuals, usually people in media, other politicians, who attacked him.
	He had personal grudges.
	Whereas what you get from Biden and the Democrats is they just hate everybody.
	They hate the entire country.
	It is amazing.
	And we should also just know, I think it's important to emphasize that the entire premise of his speech is a total fantasy.
	And I say this, there's nobody attacking voting rights.
	I say this as someone who wishes that we would attack voting rights.
	So when I hear that voting rights are under attack, I always get my hopes up.
	I'm like, finally, it's happening.
	But I'm the only person who's saying we should actually curtail voting rights.
	I believe that.
	Nobody else believes it.
	Everyone else is saying, let's just have everybody vote.
	We don't even invite you over to our party.
	In a week where Kamala Harris gave us the soaring vice presidential rhetoric of, it is time to do what we have been doing and that time is every day.
	That is one of the great quotes indeed.
	Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall, it is time to do what we have been doing.
	Why not marry dad and make sweet love to that quote?
	That's an extraordinary quote.
	But it shows the Biden administration doesn't even have a pivot.
	They don't even know how to dig themselves out as their approval ratings are plummeting.
	But Joe Biden actually managed to give worse rhetoric than Kamala Harris, who is babbling
	incoherently.
	You know, to your point, this Omicron has a very strange structure where it's almost
	a different disease than COVID.
	It's as if COVID went off into a corner somewhere and recreated itself.
	It would have been a perfect time for them to say, well, this is a new thing.
	Get rid of the mask.
	Get rid of, you know, you're going to get this and it's going to be like a flu.
	It would be a perfect time to just cut people free.
	I had Omicron.
	I'm a survivor.
	We're both.
	I just had it.
	I likely had it.
	I don't know.
	Yeah, me too.
	I think I had it.
	I didn't test, but my kids all had it, and guess what?
	They're kids, and they're fine.
	I'm just saying, let's not- My dad had it, and he's an adult, and he's fine.
	Let's not deprive ourselves of the ability to talk about the fact that we're survivors.
	We survived our heroic battle with the virus.
	AOC, you know, in just inside a year, AOC has survived the ravages of a trip to the hellscape in which I live, Florida.
	She survived the Omicron, and she survived the brutal near-slaying that she experienced on January 2nd.
	And a boyfriend who wears sandals unironically.
	It was really all about his feet.
	The other really tricky problem with Omicron is there was this study that came out of Israel that suggested that the fourth shot actually won't protect against this new version of the virus, so you might need a fifth shot to do it.
	Actually, Israel is now saying no more Vax Passport.
	They said there's one of their top scientists today.
	He's like, these Vax Passports are completely useless.
	So naturally, the CDC is like, we need Vax Passports because that's what we do.
	But the thing about Joe Biden, just to get back to the race talk for just one second.
	So Nate Silver, I thought, made an excellent point.
	Everybody is acting like, why is Joe Biden doing this?
	Right?
	It's such a mystery.
	Joe Biden was elected as not Donald Trump, right?
	Dead person who's not Donald Trump.
	That was his entire pitch.
	I am an inanimate object who is not Donald Trump.
	And then he comes into office, and he's Bernie Sanders.
	He's still barely alive.
	He's mostly dead, but still a little alive.
	And he's Bernie Sanders.
	And so people are like, what is he doing?
	Where is this coming from?
	And Nate Silver makes the point that everybody treats Joe Biden like he's a moderate.
	It's not that Joe Biden is a moderate.
	Joe Biden is always dead center of the Democratic Party.
	So if the Democratic Party moves to the left, Joe Biden moves to the left.
	The entire Democratic Party has moved to the left.
	There's a Gallup poll that was out today, and it was showing the political affiliations
	of various groups of Americans.
	And what it found is that only 25% of Americans total across the country consider themselves
	liberal.
	But literally half of all Democrats consider themselves liberal.
	OK, well, what that means is that the base of the Democratic Party is wildly out of touch
	with the rest of even the Democratic Party, but the entirety of the American population.
	If you look at the polls and you break it down demographically, only 28% of Hispanics
	identify as liberal.
	Right.
	The rest of them identify as either more more Hispanics identify as conservative than liberal.
	31% to 28%, according to the Gallup polls.
	Roy Tashara, who was the author of this this entire theory in the early 2000s that was
	taken up by Obama to his his his certain amount of success.
	His theory was, you get enough minorities together, and you cobble together this majority-minority coalition, and you will never lose an election again.
	And in 2012, that's basically what Obama did.
	And Democrats have fallen in love with that theory.
	And Roy Tishera came out like three months ago, and he said, my theory is completely wrong because Hispanics are breaking in favor of conservatives.
	And if this continues, it completely upends my theory.
	And by the way, he came out today, he said Asians are moving conservative.
	Okay, if this happens... Some blacks too.
	Some blacks too, but the reality is the Democratic Party has basically decided the only minority group that they are going to pander to now, because it turns out that no one cares about Latinx.
	That was a giant fail.
	The only minority group that they're going to pander to is black people, and they're going to do so in the most ham-fisted, idiotic way, which is why you see Joe Biden out there doing the, everybody who dislikes me is in favor of Jim Crow.
	He did the same thing in 2012.
	The unsweetened oatmeal of American politics.
	Mitt Romney was going to put black people back in chains.
	This is his shtick, but the bottom line is he's alienated every single other minority group and majority group in the country at this point.
	And by the way, Hispanics comprise about 19% of the American population and black Americans are about 13% of the American population.
	So this seems unwise on a political level.
	I'm wishing we could clone our new governor in our state of Virginia.
	I love this guy.
	He's not only standing up for what he said he was going to stand up for, but he's also like a presentable human being, which is kind of weird.
	Well, you've got a few of those now, right?
	You've got Ron in Florida.
	You've got young kid over there.
	And Ron DeSantis apparently is...
	Maybe gearing up to face down.
	By the way, you even see it, this is to me the best sign for the conservative movement in the GOP, you even see it with the moderate Republican governors.
	So Kristi Noem up in South Dakota, she initially did not want to support the transgender, she didn't want to support a transgender bill that would have kept boys out of the girls' sports at all levels, and she kind of squished out on it, then she kind of backtracked.
	Now she's got a campaign ad saying, I never backed down, I was always supportive of this.
	Same thing with the lockdowns.
	Initially, she wanted power to be able to lock down.
	Then her legislature prevented her from doing that.
	She complained about that.
	Then she became the big anti-lockdown governor.
	I don't care one way or the other about Christine Ohm's personal political career.
	The fact that she feels that in order to be viable, she needs to move way to the conservative side, that is a great sign for the electorate and for Republicans.
	Well, I want to talk about Yunkin for a minute because we helped elect him.
	But first, I want to tell you about our friends over at Naturally It's Clean.
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	They gave me a sample of this ad to take home last night.
	It's a new advertiser, you don't want to stumble around like I do on every other ad.
	Because whereas you guys get to read like 25 ads a week, I read four a month.
	So I generally suck at reading ads.
	And I was going through the ad, and it had this whole Michael Knowles promo code at the end.
	And I ranted and railed and flailed about how I get no respect around here, but they obviously fixed it.
	I will say that.
	They're aces.
	Just one addition on Naturally It's Clean.
	Let me just say that I put it through the roughest test, which is I have three young children.
	And nothing creates just disaster, like three young children, unless it's more than that.
	Four young children is even more of a disaster.
	OK, if you want to try this product out, just let your kids loose in the house.
	And Naturally It's Clean pretty much fixes all the problems.
	It's an unbelievable thing.
	I mean, it was teaching my, it was tutoring my kids.
	So the only thing better than Naturally It's Clean is Yunkin up in Virginia.
	This guy had the best first day probably of any governor in recent memory, right?
	I mean, it's very rare that a politician does exactly what they say they're going to do.
	And I think that for some people, listen, we We like to boast about how we elected Junkin, but that's just because we completely and totally deserve all the credit for electing Junkin, starting with Matt's reporting on CRT and going all the way into these trans issues as exposed by our reporter Luke Rosiak.
	One more shout-out there.
	One more shout-out for a reporter, which I keep promising I'll never say his name again.
	Don't worry, he'll never remember it.
	But here's the thing.
	We didn't know about Junkin in a lot of ways.
	I mean, he was our guy.
	We were glad he was there.
	We've talked about how you aren't always going to get the reddest red guy in every state.
	And you should be happy if you have, as Republican, a guy you can get.
	And whatever place you can get him is my sort of way of looking at it.
	But I thought, you know, what are we really going to get out of the guy in the final analysis?
	If all you get is his first day, his entire governorship was worth it, as far as I can tell.
	And you know, this thing about comportment is not a small thing.
	Yeah.
	When you're dealing with people, when you're dealing with votes, it's nice to behave well, you know?
	It makes a big difference.
	And he was, I hate to use this word, but he was Reagan-esque on that first day because he was doing things that he said he would do, he was fulfilling his promises, but he was doing it in this kind of graceful, eloquent way where it made the opposition look like the loudmouths and the radicals, which they are.
	He even dressed the same way Reagan dressed on his inauguration.
	He wore a proper morning dress.
	And I mean, this is the thing that I believe, I deeply believe that Trump was the man of the moment when he ran, that he was the guy who had to be there to make this difference happen.
	But it's nice to see some politicians doing the right thing.
	If you can pour the fight into a more attractive bottle, right, then that's not a terrible thing.
	It's not.
	And conservatives need to learn this because we think if we say the truth, you know, it's like that Paul Simon song, I want some tenderness with your honesty.
	You know?
	I think the conservatives think if they say the truth, that's enough.
	But it's not.
	There's also one thing that the Junkin speaks to that Trump, you know, because Trump is sort of a blunderbuss,
	right, because he's a hammer and he hits nails and sometimes babies.
	He's not a person who attracts the core constituency that Youngkin ran on and that if Republicans
	run on, they will not lose elections.
	And that is parents.
	Trump was not a person who attracted parents as a constituency.
	It doesn't mean parents didn't vote for him.
	Parents did vote for him.
	But it means that there were all these problems with, like, can you even show what Trump rallied here, kids?
	Like, is this the kind of person whose behavior you want to model?
	But when you have Junkin or DeSantis or a thousand other Republicans who have realized, they've picked up the fact that Trump was a fighter, and that is a vital, vital thing.
	That's a gift that Trump gave to the Republican Party.
	It's a gift that I think that he gave to the country.
	If you can combine that Yeah.
	With the new constituency group the Democrats have created, which is the parent group.
	This was not a constituency group.
	Parents were not a constituency group.
	And the reason was, who would be stupid enough to attack parents as a constituency group?
	Who would be idiotic enough to attack parents' ability to educate their own children?
	Nobody expects a Spanish inquisition.
	I mean, it's insane.
	It's totally crazy.
	But if you look at how parents were treated in the past, and when they were actually a
	voting group, you take a look at 2004.
	It was security moms, right?
	It was Bush running on behalf of women with sedans, with minivans, with their kids in
	the back, and they were afraid of terrorism, and Bush was going to protect.
	But it wasn't like this had to do with parenting specifically.
	He was just campaigning on security.
	Youngkin literally campaigned on, we want you to be able to raise your own children.
	And also, we don't want to force your small babies into masks.
	And the New York Times would write articles saying, you should not be allowed to raise your own children.
	It's madness!
	These people said this crap out loud.
	They campaigned on it.
	Terry McAuliffe campaigned on, we should be able to indoctrinate your kid into racial essentialism and mask him like Bane for the rest of his life.
	And then Youngkin comes out and he says this his first day.
	And the first move of the left is to send Jen Psaki out there to be like, well, I'm not going to.
	You know, I'm just glad that the Alexandria public schools are going to put a big plastic bag around my kid's head and send him to the bottom of the ocean to avoid COVID.
	But does someone in California today suggest that the best way for California, the best way- It was a parody article.
	Fair enough, it was a parody article.
	I think he meant it.
	That's one of the problems, it's hard to tell anymore if they actually mean it or not.
	There is no parody.
	But I think with Youngkin, the interesting thing, we say that he campaigned on parental rights.
	He didn't originally campaign that way, and so there was this change, and this isn't to say that he's insincere now, but I think he noticed something, because early on, just from my own outside analysis, it seemed like he was sort of campaigning as a corporate, sort of normal Republican, and there was even a moment Early on in the debate, where he was asked the pro-life question, and he took this really kind of obfuscating, he was dancing around it, sort of answer, and then there was this switch, and I think part of it had to do with what we did at The Daily Wire, what other conservatives did, by showing that this is what people really care about.
	Also, the moment that will live in infamy with McAuliffe saying that, well, parents shouldn't decide what their kids are taught, and that was the switch, that was the moment when the Young King campaign realized that, look, I think with most voters, what they care about, if they're parents, they care about their kids, and they care about their rights.
	Also, the other big thing, the big issue of our time, aside from parental rights, is just sanity.
	People feel like, and if you talk to anybody anymore, any normal person, they'll say, look, it feels like the country's going insane.
	It feels like the society is losing its mind.
	And so they want basic sanity, and that's where things are.
	But this also speaks to something else.
	It speaks to why Leftist feminism, and feminism has become part of the left, have been telling women all this time that they're not important if they're just mothers.
	Just mothers.
	You know, I mean, we had a mom come by and visit backstage the other day, and she said, you know, I'm so-and-so's mother, but I also have another identity.
	I said, you know, you've walked into the mother fan club.
	You might as well grab hold of it.
	Because, listen, these are the most important people in the country.
	The guy who said the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world knew exactly what he was talking about.
	The reason they want women out of the home, the reason they want them out of the home is so they can do to our kids whatever they want to do.
	Our friend Eric Erickson tweeted out an article from the New York Times, an op-ed this week, and he was frustrated about it because his argument was that it encouraged women to abandon their children.
	And I don't know if you guys actually read the op-ed.
	I read it.
	That's not what it did.
	I think we... Well, it was observing that the culture is absent.
	It was observing that the culture is doing that, but the writer actually said something I thought quite nice at the very end, which she read all these books, which it's a new trend in literature to have absentee moms.
	Moms who essentially abandon their children to go pursue career opportunities and sexual dalliances.
	And at the end of the article, the writer said, you know, in the end I found that these works were kind of boring because they've created a fiction of their own, which is to say that the only way a woman can be interesting is if she stops being a mother.
	That's a wonderful line.
	This is a new genre in op-eds that I call misery porn, where they tell you that we're unhappy, and you can be unhappy too.
	I left my husband and deserted my kids, and you can too.
	And the entire standard should change.
	The other one that I love is, this standard didn't work for me personally, therefore it shouldn't work for anyone ever again, and the standard should be completely exploded.
	But to go back to Matt's point about sanity, It's amazing.
	What the left took away from the Trump era was things are insane and they're insane because of the mannerisms used by the President of the United States.
	And so if we just use nicer mannerisms, but we say completely batched loony things all the time, but we say it's super nice, then people will think that we're sane.
	It turns out that there is a deeper type of insanity that people really, really don't like.
	And that deeper type of insanity is the policy insanity that's now being pushed upon the country by the social left.
	The culture war was declared by the left.
	They continue to maintain those culture wars.
	They are the important wars.
	Anybody who tells you that the culture wars aren't the seriously important wars has got it completely wrong.
	But you realize the other gift... They finally figured it out.
	I'm on a kick right now of the GOP finally waking up a little bit and that this is a good sign.
	Kevin McCarthy.
	Kevin McCarthy, as establishment a figure as there is the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, he just did an interview in which he said the GOP is no longer the party of the Chamber of Commerce.
	The Chamber of Commerce hates our guts, so we hate them back.
	We are not going to run on just cut taxes and do whatever you want.
	We're going to run on cultural issues.
	Glenn Youngkin, as you say Matt, started his campaign as a Chamber of Commerce standard, just cut taxes Republican.
	He ends his campaign running against transgenderism, running against racism in the curriculum, running against all of these things.
	You look at the successful governors right now, it's Ron DeSantis, you're looking at every successful Republican in the country.
	The thing about politicians whose names you know, is that they're actually pretty good at being politicians.
	They actually know which way the wind is blowing.
	And when you've got the most establishmentarian types in D.C.
	realizing that the cultural battle is where it's at right now to win elections, you're in a pretty good spot.
	Well, it's because the left, I mean, they really have lost it.
	So, Matt, you were the first person I saw tweet out this new Canada law, the actual text of this new law in Canada, which effectively bans both religion and reason in the country.
	Yes.
	I mean, it is a bill that is just mad.
	It is a fall of the West bill.
	It is a stark, raving, mad bill encoded into law and punishable by five years in prison.
	If you use your brain or you worship God or both, then you are going to end up in prison in Canada for being a baseline decent parent, is basically the way that this bill is written.
	Why don't you talk about it a little bit?
	I saw it from you.
	Right.
	It's Bill C-4 in Canada.
	It's anti-conversion therapy.
	And there are several countries across the world that have banned quote-unquote conversion therapy.
	Always got to put the air quotes around it.
	There are, I think, 20, more than 20, dozens of states in this country that have done the same.
	And, of course, we're told that conversion therapy is this process of trying to convert a gay person to be straight.
	What they say is, what it used to be was, electrocute people, they get aroused by the same sex.
	Exactly.
	When you hear the term conversion therapy, it brings to mind, quite intentionally, this image of people, you know, someone strapped with a straight jacket being electrocuted.
	Right, exactly.
	But that, of course, is not happening anywhere in the West right now.
	And so then you ask, well, what exactly is conversion therapy?
	And so you read the bill that bans conversion therapy in Canada.
	Because you always have to ask, any time the government bans something that isn't really happening, you have to ask, well, what exactly is the bill doing?
	And you read the text, and it's right there.
	They define conversion therapy.
	First of all, it applies to both gender and sex.
	And it says that Essentially, if a child or anybody wants to change their sex, and you engage in any— I think the word is practice, counsel, or service, which is like anything.
	Or if you're a parent who refers them.
	Right.
	To try to convince them otherwise, or to try to suppress their true gender identity, then you're guilty of conversion therapy.
	You go to prison for five years.
	And the same goes for sexual orientation.
	Any counsel, service, or practice that encourages or suppresses gender identity or sexual orientation... Or sexual behavior, by the way.
	Right.
	Say, if you repress sexual behavior... ...is sexual orientation.
	So just think about that for a second.
	If you encourage your son, let's say, to embrace his biological identity,
	if you say to your son, you are a boy and that's good, and you're a male and that's what you should be,
	that's conversion by telling him to be who he is.
	That's conversion therapy.
	And you can go to prison for it.
	And it also means that, as many pastors in Canada have realized, that if they get up there at the pulpit,
	and very few pastors are even doing this anyway, but if they did get up there at the pulpit
	and read from the Pauline epistles, or give a sermon about biblical sexual morality,
	they are guilty of conversion therapy.
	You could go to prison for that.
	This is being described as an issue of religious liberty, and of course, to a degree, it is about religious liberty.
	They just outlawed Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
	But it's deeper than just religious liberty.
	They've outlawed the truth.
	They've outlawed the truth.
	If you tell your kid the truth about who he is, you'll go to prison.
	And that is a much scarier thing even than the already dangerous issue of limiting... It only works one direction.
	Yeah, that's the thing.
	In terms of falsehood.
	The law specifically states that you cannot try to convert someone to heterosexual or convert them to cisgender.
	It doesn't say, you know, it doesn't say you can't try to suppress someone's gender identity.
	It could say that, but instead it says you cannot suppress their gender identity of a non-cisgender identity.
	So it specifies that, which means that it's actually legal to try to convert someone to trans or convert them to gay.
	It specifically leaves that open in the law.
	Well, because if it weren't, the entire ruling class would be in the clink right now, because that's what they're trying to do.
	That's right.
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	The anti-gay conversion therapy does not happen anywhere in the West.
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	Policygenius.com Yeah, to pick up on what Michael said, talk about
	conversion therapy.
	The anti-gay conversion therapy does not happen anywhere in the West.
	That's right.
	It doesn't exist.
	But the other kind of conversion therapy, the type that Canada specifically says is still legal,
	that's the only type that really happens.
	I mean, you look at the numbers.
	There was a recent Gallup poll, and it found that 40% of Generation Z, 40% identify as LGBT.
	The trans identification of the youngest generation has risen tenfold over older generations.
	Now, this is unprecedented in human History.
	The history of civilization.
	We've never seen anything like this before.
	And of course, it's not accidental.
	There is a real effort ongoing to recruit kids into the LGBT ranks.
	It is happening.
	And anytime you talk about it, you're shouted down with the rage of a thousand sons.
	But that only shows you that it's correct.
	I mean, this is a real thing that's happening.
	That they are making a concerted effort.
	Did you see the viral video?
	There was a viral video going around.
	It might have been posted on the libs of TikTok.
	Two kids and a mother.
	And they were just answering questions.
	The mother's obviously exploiting these little kids for her own social media gain.
	And the kid said, look, he was asked about being LGBT.
	And she said, go ahead.
	Say it.
	Say it, Sonny.
	And he said, look, my mother doesn't care if I'm gay or a lesbian or trans.
	She just wants me to be some part of the LGBT community.
	And the mother kind of, her eyes opened.
	She goes, what are you saying?
	And he says, I'm saying facts.
	I'm saying facts.
	Wow.
	It's quite a terrifying video when you look at the expression on this mother's face.
	It's the expression of anger but also the expression of, specifically, you're saying something you're not supposed to be saying.
	I'm caught.
	And there are many kids that are in this exact position in their home.
	Well, we've set up an incentive structure.
	And this is true for a wide variety of things in American life, where being perceived as a member of a victim group is an effective good.
	And the highest victim group in American society right now is considered to be the LGBTQ community.
	And so if you can be not part of the majoritarian community, if you can be part of the LGBTQ community, this is why you're seeing people who are identifying as things that are not in any way sexual minority positions, for example, right?
	You saw this move toward people identifying as demisexual, which means you only have sex with people you love, which we used to call marriage.
	Right, we used to call that like normal human existence.
	Well, I don't know, a demisexual certainly always just meant women.
	Right, but the baseline sort of attempt to push the notion that if you are a member of a victimized group this means that you have additional moral authority and you're to be treated with tremendous care and people will celebrate you and people will give you attention.
	I mean, obviously, when it comes to things like rapid-onset gender dysphoria, which is a very real phenomenon documented by Lisa Lippman over at Brown University and shouted down by all the academics, when you document this stuff, there is a social contagion that is happening, and it is very clearly a social contagion that is happening, and it's particularly spotable when you look at the stats with regard to transgenderism.
	When you look at the stats with regard to this, which used to be a mostly male-to-female phenomenon, that was the thing.
	It was young men who were identifying as women, and now it's completely flipped, and it's teenage girls who are identifying en masse as transgender, and it's in specific social groups.
	One girl does it, and then many girls in the group do it.
	This has been shouted down as not happening.
	And if you mentioned that perhaps the thing to pursue here would be waitful watching as opposed to immediate hormone treatment and surgery and life-destroying surgery, then this means that you're a bigot.
	And I do love the way that the scientific community works on this.
	They declare something to be science that is not science.
	That's right.
	Then somebody says, wait, that's not science.
	And they say, well, you're a bigot.
	And then two years pass.
	And it turns out that, of course, they were wrong.
	And it wasn't science.
	And then they print an article two years later saying, well, it turns out the science may be more complicated
	than we originally assumed.
	But you're still a bigot.
	The New York Times ran an article this week talking about how there are some psychiatrists who
	say that perhaps before we give hormones out like candy, And before we start giving transgender surgeries, we might want to actually do a mental illness or mental disorder screening for people before we just start chopping off their breasts and restructuring genitals.
	You know, I get most of my information not from, you know, fancy books or anything, but from these TikTok videos.
	And there was another TikTok video of a gal who has dissociative identity disorder.
	So she's got lots of voices in her head.
	And she said, most of the voices are men.
	And because of that, I do not want to get the gender surgery, but I am going to transition.
	And it's hard for me, but it's going to make my headmates, that was the term she used, it's going to make my headmates happy if I mutilate myself.
	What is such an indictment of our culture is this girl can walk in and say, I've got voices speaking to me in my head, and at least as of today, she will get a diagnosis that she has a disordered psyche and she'll be treated for that disorder.
	But if that same girl walks in and says, I'm actually a boy, There's nothing wrong with her.
	Five years ago, she would have been told it was a disorder.
	Now, it is wonderful.
	And today, if she's told it's a disorder in Canada, the doctor will go to jail for five years.
	That's right.
	Exactly.
	And this obsession with labels, I mean, the disassociative identity disorder, which, by the way, I think is totally fake anyway, but I did a dive down the TikTok Sewage system with that recently.
	And there's been some reporting on this.
	This is actually a huge trend on TikTok right now.
	TikTok gives you a view.
	We could joke about it, but it gives you a view into what's going on with kids.
	I mean, because they all live on this thing.
	And so this is a real trend.
	There are like millions... Hashtags have millions of entries where lots of kids now are saying, oh, I actually have disassociative identity disorder as well.
	I have multiple personalities.
	We are legion.
	Teenagers have no preference.
	Teenagers have no prefrontal cortex and they are risk-seeking and attention-seeking.
	So if you combine risk-seeking and attention-seeking with an internet and a leftist culture that celebrates this stuff, you're all supposed to be celebrated for this sort of behavior.
	What do you think you're gonna get?
	But don't worry, it's strictly hardwired biologically.
	It's just that until now we didn't realize that 40% of humans are LGBT.
	Nature to ensure the continuation of the race has made it possible to convince teenage girls of anything.
	I mean, it does bother me that the Chinese have banned effeminate men from being celebrities, and the Chinese own TikTok, and are selling this stuff to us.
	You know, sexual disorder is It's funny.
	I gotta admit, it's hilarious to watch these people destroy themselves.
	But it's also not funny.
	It is like this sort of central question.
	When I think of every single dystopian novel, every great dystopian novel, the first thing that happens is women are erased.
	The first thing that happens is the reproductive Role of women is erased. Yeah, and I think that you know,
	we've gotten to that point and you have to start to ask yourself
	Well, wait a minute what are we trying to solve when we say that a
	Boy can become a an athlete as a woman can become a female athlete and beat every film female athlete
	What problem are we trying to solve and I think we're trying to solve the problem of women
	I am absolutely convinced that a horror of what women's bodies actually are has infested our society in general.
	And you can see it in the movies.
	If you look back to when the transition was taking place from the kind of From the traditional idea to the idea that the future was going to be different, you can suddenly see that all the horror movies were suddenly about women's bodies.
	The Exorcist is about a girl basically having her first period.
	Carrie is about a girl having her first period.
	The Omen and Rosemary's Baby are about a woman, you know, having Satan take over her body.
	The fact that these bodies are a connection with creation in such a physical way has horrified those people who don't like human beings.
	You see that there was a Planned Parenthood tweet that all the conservatives were dunking on.
	And Planned Parenthood from their main account tweeted out, folks with vulvas are not just reproductive machines.
	And now conservatives were dunking on this because it seems contradictory, right?
	You say folks with vulvas.
	You're defining women by their genitals.
	You say they're not just reproductive machines.
	But it wasn't contradictory.
	They used their words very carefully.
	They didn't say folks with ovaries.
	They didn't say folks with fallopian tubes.
	They said volks with...
	External organs that are more oriented toward pleasure than reproduction.
	Because what they're saying is, women are not just reproductive machines, they're also pleasure machines.
	They're also sterile pleasure machines that you can use for your own hedonistic desires, but don't ever think about what they actually do, the miracle that occurs uniquely within women.
	I was watching TV the other night with my wife, and a commercial came on.
	And this commercial was about this couple, and they had been attempting to get a better phone plan.
	So we got married so we could get a better phone plan.
	Then we had a bunch of kids so we could get a better phone plan.
	And so it shows like the entire room is now filled with children.
	Of course, they're miserable, and there's crap everywhere and all this.
	And then it cuts to a single woman living in a perfectly immaculate apartment
	with no one else in it, and she says, "Well, I just got a better phone plan
	"by going to whatever the company was."
	And I turned to my wife and I said, "Our society is selling unhappiness."
	Our society has decided that the apex of human civilization is to live alone in an immaculate apartment in New York City, working 2200 billable hours a year, but being able to watch Sex and the City with a glass of rosé.
	And this is what womanhood is supposed to be.
	I mean, I can't think of anything more flattening.
	Then trying to remove the single most central thing about being a woman from womanhood.
	By the way, we're doing the same thing with men because the single most important thing that a man does is become a father and raise the next generation and protect his family.
	And we've removed all of that from men too.
	The idea of the apotheosis of manhood now is basically, shockingly, the exact same as a woman.
	To live in an apartment alone by yourself drinking a glass of rosé and watching Sex and the City.
	It's the exact same thing.
	Because I don't think everyone needs to get married.
	I actually don't think everyone needs to get married.
	I don't think everyone needs to have kids.
	A lot of people can't have kids.
	And what traditionally would happen then is that people would join religious life.
	You'd become a priest, you'd become a nun, you'd become a brother.
	You would just consecrate your singleness.
	You would attach it to something greater than yourself.
	And many religions do that.
	But what the culture is selling right now is, no, no, no, don't consecrate yourself to anyone, to any family, to any God.
	Consecrate yourself to that glass of rosé and you do you, honey.
	I was just reading a philosopher that both Knowles and I like very much, Rene Girard, and he said that when you lose the transcendental aspect of life, you're divided into two things.
	One is that you basically magnify your feelings.
	Everything becomes your feelings.
	But you have no sense of the outside world, so you turn to experts.
	And you have to be ruled by experts while your whole life becomes about your feelings.
	I felt like this was a book that was written, you know, decades ago.
	And I thought, wow, that's bingo.
	That is the effect of losing your sense of the spiritual.
	Yeah, I think the point Michael makes is a good one, because anytime we talk about how women are called to be mothers, and we shouldn't encourage them to reject that, of course, immediately you get these objections.
	Well, what about women who can't have babies?
	Or what about this and that?
	Well, I think that it's still accurate, in fact, to say that all women are called to be mothers and all men are called to be fathers.
	It's just that that can take on different forms.
	The most obvious one is obviously adoption.
	Lots of people are called to that.
	But there could even be other forms of parenthood.
	I mean, you could go into missionary work, you could go into religious life.
	The point is that everyone is called to service in that capacity, in some form.
	Nobody is called to just live a life entirely for themselves in their apartment, watching TV.
	That's not a life that anyone's called to.
	It's also not a life that anyone can...
	I've been working on this theory.
	I think that's the point.
	When they have the term gender assignment, I think we have a gender assignment.
	I think it is literally an assignment.
	Everyone hates the term gender role, but that's exactly what--
	That's what I was about to say.
	--we do have roles.
	Exactly.
	Bingo.
	I've been working on this theory.
	I'm working on a book on sort of the roots of politics and freedom and where freedom
	lies in regard to rules.
	And I was trying to start from the very, very basics.
	Well, what are the things that we need for human happiness?
	And, you know, most philosophers try to start from the basis of what are the higher goods.
	And so they'll say things like justice or virtue.
	And the problem that I have with that is that it's very difficult to pin those things down, right?
	I mean, we've been trying to pin down what is justice for several thousand years at this point.
	We seem no closer to achieving the goal.
	But what is much easier to pin down is the roles that we all play in our lives, right?
	The stuff that goes on your tombstone, right?
	Because on every tombstone at the cemetery it says, beloved husband and father, right?
	Beloved brother and son, right?
	That's every single tombstone at the cemetery.
	Beloved drinker of rosé.
	Correct.
	Beloved Netflix Benjamin.
	And this is exactly the point.
	Society, there's a sort of sociological notion that's called structural functionalism.
	And the idea there is that there are roles in society.
	These roles have been constructed over the course of thousands of years in order to create a functional society.
	And these roles work with one another.
	Roles are not bad.
	Roles are extremely good.
	If you don't have roles, you end up as a free-floating agent without anything to hem you in.
	Your desires are not hemmed in.
	Your life is not hemmed in.
	You're essentially living on a desert island.
	There's never been a human being who is happy living on a desert island because that doesn't work.
	What you actually need are these roles.
	And what I mean in a practical sense is it's very difficult to lock down what is justice or what is virtue.
	It's pretty easy to lock down what does a good father constitute, right?
	Because we can see what a bad father is.
	We see tons of examples of them.
	All over the place.
	And so, if we geared our lives toward fulfilling these societal roles, and there are many of them that we simultaneously live, right?
	We have a role as a worshiper.
	We have a role as a seeker of truth.
	We have a role as a learner, right?
	These are all roles that we live throughout our lives at different points in our life.
	When you're a child, you're predominantly a learner and not a father.
	When you're older, you're predominantly a teacher and a father and not a learner as much.
	As we progress through lives, playing those roles, that's where happiness lies.
	And we are a society that is dedicated to the proposition That roles need to be exploded.
	All roles are bad because roles are an imposition from the outside.
	And, of course, the problem is that human beings are adaptable tools.
	They're adapted to fulfill those roles.
	And if those roles go away, then if human beings are sort of like water that is poured into vessels and we take the shape of the vessel, you get rid of the vessel, the water just goes everywhere.
	That's what's happened.
	This kind of goes to a thought that I've been nurturing for a few weeks now, which is that we need, the world needs the left.
	What I mean by this is that there are many good things that happen in a healthy society that are not intrinsically conservative.
	Journalism, interestingly enough, is one of them.
	Journalism is not a constructive task.
	It's a destructive task.
	It's an intrinsically left-oriented task, but it's a necessary task.
	And so journalists, they pull at the thread of something that's wrong in a healthy society, and they expose it.
	And in doing that, they're not They're actively involved in destruction.
	But in a healthy society, a better construction can be built through the journalistic practice exposing a problem.
	So, we might not like the journalists.
	In a healthy society, we as conservatives may think, oh, they're tearing down something important.
	But on the other side of the thing, if it actually is healthy and important, it will correct in response to that and become better than it was.
	So in a healthy society, you need an element of left.
	In a role-based society, as you're describing it, I like eccentrics.
	I say to you all the time, like, I'm a Christian.
	The world's better with Jews in it.
	I want to live in a world where not everybody thinks like me, where not everybody looks like me.
	I want my ideas challenged.
	I love Nashville.
	I'm very happy here.
	One of my problems with Nashville is that it's so Christian.
	And because it's so Christian, Christianity is easy.
	And because Christianity is easy, it's comfortable.
	And because Christianity is comfortable, it's in no way intriguing or stimulating.
	It's hard to actually engage the ideas with anyone and be disruptive and find better thoughts.
	But!
	In an unhealthy society, like the one that we have right now, the left is dominant in the culture.
	And when the left is dominant in the culture, everything has been destroyed, and nothing now can heal.
	It's like when you work out, you know, without resistance, there is no growth of muscle, right?
	Resistance is necessary.
	In a healthy society, the left creates some of that resistance.
	In an unhealthy society, you've broken everything under the weight, and now nothing grows back.
	This is why, though, this is why conservatives, though, I have a problem with the arts, because the arts are, by nature, cultural critical.
	And so you have a guy like Pete Seeger, folk singer and communist spy, singing about how Levittown and all these suburbs are ticky-tack.
	It's all ticky-tack.
	And you think, well, you know, princes would have killed to live like people lived in Levittown.
	And this is one of the great gifts of capitalism.
	But he's also right.
	And he's also—we have to question the conformity and the fact that all these—and that is a healthy society.
	You're absolutely right.
	And it should be that—you know, the guy who said this years ago is Prince Charles, who said, we need an avant-garde, but when the avant-garde becomes the leaders, we've lost our way.
	And that's absolutely right.
	The way that I've been thinking about liberty within all of these roles that I'm talking about
	is that each role does contain with it necessity for liberty.
	You need liberty to raise your child in a way that you see fit
	while still upholding the general rules of being a father.
	You need the liberty of the ability to learn, but within the institution of learner,
	meaning you're not destroying the possibility of rationality, for example.
	You're not destroying the possibility of a common language, which is what the left has done
	with things like deconstructionism.
	And what that means is that liberty is instrumental as opposed to the highest goal.
	Liberty isn't the highest goal.
	Liberty is a goal that lives within each one of these roles, and it is necessary for it to be there,
	because without it, these roles don't mean a whole hell of a lot.
	You see, there's just a, in the Constitution, in the preamble, it refers to not liberty per se,
	but the blessings of liberty.
	Liberty as an instrument.
	The notion of an instrumental liberty does not mean that liberty is of no consequence.
	There are some people on sort of the Adrian Vermeule side who seem to say that liberty means nothing.
	I don't know.
	I'm sympathetic to that a little bit, but you know.
	But, you know, that liberty can be flattened in favor of the ultimate good.
	But it is to say that when the critique that you see from some common good conservatives
	of classical liberalism is that classical liberalism, when it elevates liberty to be
	the highest good, what it is actually doing is it's leading the way for liberty to be
	used as a brick bat against all of those institutions.
	And once you wipe away those institutions, even liberty won't remain.
	And I think that that critique is fairly well taken.
	I don't think that that critique is entirely wrong.
	I think the critique goes too far when people start to say, okay, well, if liberty is a danger, then the answer is to pluck out liberty completely and destroy it over here in order to make sure that all of these rules are protected.
	I don't think that either one of those things is a possibility.
	I think that if you're going to have proper roles in society that lead to human happiness, one of our roles is as chooser, right?
	It is as the person who decides how we fulfill each one of these roles.
	We can't get rid of the roles, and we can't get rid of the liberty that's inherent in those roles.
	Well, this was the idea of liberal education, is that it educates you to make sense of your liberties
	so that you can fulfill those roles and have a little leeway in fulfilling them.
	But Edmund Burke, who is increasingly becoming my hero, just basically said,
	we need to allow people to do the wrong thing.
	I'm obviously paraphrasing, but we need to allow people to do the wrong thing
	and be free so that we have freedom.
	It is better than turning them into machines that are forced to do the good thing.
	The problem with freedom is that it allows people to do bad things.
	You need cultural answers to cultural questions.
	What I don't like on the right right now is that we blame liberty for our collapse.
	Liberty is not responsible for our collapse.
	I think, as someone who's a little more sympathetic to that view, we're not, at least I am not, blaming liberty I think liberty has been misdefined.
	So we say, you should be allowed to do the wrong thing.
	But we don't think we should be allowed to commit murders or violent acts against people.
	I don't think we should be allowed to use very harmful drugs, even though it ostensibly doesn't harm anybody else.
	It's just you.
	But I still think drug laws are great.
	I still think obscenity laws are great.
	Certain porn laws are great.
	All these are your opinion, and they might make for a very interesting conversation.
	But you actually started...
	You're invoking these as examples as though those are the things that have destroyed our country.
	Yeah, I think licentiousness has destroyed liberty.
	But, hold on, hard drugs are illegal in America right now.
	But they're increasingly legalized.
	They're being increasingly legalized in our collapse.
	They were not legalized, which precipitated our collapse.
	I'm not so sure.
	I think the broader philosophical point is not that pornography destroyed everything.
	I think the broader philosophical point is that classical liberalism relies on a view of the individual that is untethered from reality.
	This is the critique.
	The fair critique is that classical liberalism essentially devolves all responsibility to
	individuals untethered from the society around them.
	The only thing that matters is that they're not hitting somebody in the face.
	So atomistic individuals, so long as you're not hitting anybody else in the face, you're
	not providing a threat to anything else.
	That assumes that there is no sort of public space where there are a set of rules that
	apply and where rules must be upheld by that set of rules.
	Now I think that there's a model that I've frequently been using now in thinking about
	I think Wright's talk is really, really messy and sloppy.
	And I think the way that people think about rights is really messy and sloppy.
	So, a few, one of these ago, I asked a question, which is, is there a right to sin?
	And you said no, and you said no, and Jeremy kind of said yes.
	And I was kind of like, on the side, yes, kind of.
	But, you know, there's a model that I think that is helpful in thinking about this.
	And it was created by a guy named Wesley Hofeld.
	a lawyer in the early 20th century.
	And what he did is he said, basically, when you talk about rights, you're talking about
	four separate things.
	And you have to be exact about what you're talking about.
	The first thing that you're talking about is you have a right to do something if you
	have no duty to do otherwise.
	OK, so you have a right to eat a hamburger because there's no duty for you to forego
	the hamburger.
	Right, then there's a claim right.
	This is what the left likes.
	The left likes to say, I can claim against you a right to health care.
	I have a right to health care means I can claim from you the ability to take your services.
	That's that's the kind of right number two.
	Then there are there are rights that are there's power to control how rights are redefined, which is like as an employer, you have the right to control sort of how your employees do their work.
	And then their immunities and immunities are somebody does not have the right to redefine your rights.
	We as a society have confused the first type of right, right, that privileges with immunities.
	Okay, so what we have said is just because the government does not have the power to control a thing, that means it is morally right to do the thing or morally acceptable to do the thing.
	This is not the same thing.
	Right, so I would say that you have no right to drug use.
	You don't have a right to drug use.
	I would also say that there is a plausible argument that you have an immunity from government prosecution for drug use depending on whether it is practical or not for the government to effectively police that.
	And that depends on the level of government.
	But I think that where things get messy for libertarians is that they start defining the immunity from government involvement in a particular area as a right to do X. I have a moral right to pornography, and the government can't invade that right because I have a moral right to pornography.
	No one has a moral right to pornography.
	The government may be very bad at policing it.
	The government on a pragmatic level may not have the ability to police it properly, but that does not mean that you have a right as a human being to use pornography because you do in fact have a duty not to use pornography.
	But this is, even in what you're saying, I mean, look, the spoiler alert to this is there's no system, there is no system that perfects a human heart.
	Right.
	But some are better than others.
	Some are better than others, but we want individuals to be free because we believe that to be a right, but we have to inculcate in people An assessment of virtue, an idea of virtue.
	One thing I would say is that the sphere of liberty shrinks the more local you get.
	Because when you find the community in which you want to live, I don't think that it's equal, and I think everybody makes this mistake.
	I think libertarians think that you should be libertarian in your local community, and conservatives think that you should be national conservatives at the top level.
	But there is subsidiarity, right?
	The sphere of liberty never disappears.
	There's no point at which the government has a right to tell you to stop saying what you think.
	There are certain core liberties that can't be invaded, but that's a pretty small list.
	Are we skipping over the question of how we even know?
	Everything you just said about rights, a lot of interesting observations, but there's the real fundamental basic question of how do we even know where any of these rights come from?
	You say, well, I have a right to do this.
	Well, who says you have a right to do that?
	How do you know you have a right to do that?
	What I'm suggesting is that there are very few rights that you have.
	And when I say rights, I mean like a moral right.
	Right, a thing where you don't have a duty.
	I'm saying that there are very few things where you have rights in the way that we tend to understand rights, which is you have the moral right to do acts.
	I don't think you have lots of moral rights to do things.
	I think you have a lot of immunities from the government because the government's ineffective.
	To try to maybe tie this back to identity, I mean, part of the problem is we remove responsibilities from rights and then the whole thing falls apart.
	And kind of the same thing happens with identity.
	We have this obsession with identity In our culture today, where we're finding identity with all these different labels, and we want to categorize our identities and compartmentalize everything, but there's no role or responsibility that comes with any of those identities, so it doesn't mean anything.
	You could say, well, I'm a man, I'm a woman, I'm whatever, but it doesn't mean anything.
	Because it's all the same.
	Right, it's all the same.
	So you can list your identities and have 50 different identities and 50 different labels, but what does any of that actually mean?
	It doesn't mean anything at all.
	In our society, what it means is that you have a claim right against somebody.
	Right, it means that you have a claim against somebody.
	When you say I have an identity, you don't mean I, like, it's such a switch in how kind of religious people think.
	When I identify as a Jew, what I mean is I have this many duties.
	Right, I have this giant list of duties because I am a Jew.
	And when you say you're a Catholic, same thing.
	When you say that you are a Protestant, same thing.
	When you say you're a Burke-ian, actually, the same thing.
	Okay, but the way that we now do identity, when I say that I have an identity as a trans person, I don't mean this comes along with a list of duties.
	I mean this comes along with a list of demands.
	That's right.
	My identity is a list of demands against you.
	Can we go back to what you were saying?
	Because I thought that was a really important point that we have lost.
	I mean, we're living in a Jenga tower of certain ideas that have come down to us that have logically led to the idea of liberty.
	And if you pull out the bottom of that Jenga tower, the tower collapses and that's exactly where we are.
	I mean, we have people Like this guy Yuval Harari, who was a great futurist, basically, who says, no, this is all fiction.
	We just invented this idea of rights.
	But no, we didn't.
	We didn't invent this idea of rights.
	It comes from an idea of what a human being is and what a human being is in society.
	And we've thought this through.
	And if all those ideas are just fictions, then we can hurl them out.
	It doesn't matter.
	But if they're not, then we shouldn't understand where they come from.
	We've basically inculcated ignorance in people.
	Well, maybe there's something else that we should add, which is that we haven't thought them through.
	I'm not a big believer, like Michael Oakeshott, I'm not a big believer that our rights are the result of rationalism.
	I think one of the Enlightenment mistakes is this idea that rights spring full-blown from people's heads.
	Preach!
	My heart is beating pitter-patter in my chest.
	The basic idea here is that Rights are an outgrowth of thousands of years of sociocultural evolution, and most of that is done naturally ground up.
	It is not done by a bunch of thinkers sitting in ivory towers who are like, today I have a right.
	Those things were implicit in the way that people lived, right?
	When Locke came along and started discussing rights, rights already existed in Britain.
	He was talking about things that already existed.
	And so he was providing an intellectual framework for those things to continue to exist.
	And that's why I think that the attempt to sort of read Locke as a complete radical separate from Christianity is actually misbegotten.
	I think that a lot of the critiques of Locke are overwrought.
	But the basic idea, which is that rationalism is what brought us right, is extraordinarily dangerous.
	Because as soon as you start saying that rationalism is what brought us our institutions or our rights, the first thing that happens is that people start saying, well, show me the evidence.
	Show me the evidence.
	Show me how that's true.
	If that's not true, then maybe we should just get rid of that thing.
	And this is what they've done to marriage, right?
	Marriage is an institution which has a long and storied history throughout human existence.
	But defining, like explaining why marriage is important is sort of like explaining why error is important.
	It defies explanation.
	You can say, like, I need it to live, but I can't explain to you all of the biological pathways why I need the air to live because I haven't really thought about it.
	I just do it.
	I just kind of need it.
	I don't think about it.
	This is where Tolstoy gets things right.
	I mean, Tolstoy kind of devalued the individual, but he always thought of the individual as a historical entity, an avatar of what was happening in history.
	So he would say of Locke, History will throw up a lock when it's ready to have Locke say what he has to say.
	And there's a certain truth to that because it is a system of evolution or development that comes from basic ideas that just kind of infest, infuse the community and are part of the community.
	You're absolutely right that reason is not the path to liberation.
	Well, I think the one thing we can all agree on is that we have an intrinsic God-given right to a good night's sleep.
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	Now, as we mentioned earlier today, the final trailer for our first original feature film, Shut In, is out now, and they're actually going to let me play it.
	At this point, the film, unbelievable movie directed by DJ Caruso, unbelievable cast, one of the five best scripts I've ever had the pleasure to read in my life, and I think an important story.
	Listen, what we're trying to do at The Daily Wire with our entertainment program, as you know, is different.
	We're not pure flicks.
	We're not making necessarily just family-friendly rated G, sit around with the kids and watch it content.
	There's a great place for that in the world, and there are great people fulfilling
	that need in the marketplace.
	What we're trying to do is something different.
	We want to create mainstream entertainment, entertainment that challenges you,
	entertainment that makes you think, and entertainment that takes you on a journey
	and does all the things that art is supposed to do, but that doesn't punch you in the face,
	that doesn't hate you, that doesn't apologize to you for its values or flaunt the fact that it disagrees with
	your values.
	That's what we've got in Shudim.
	That's what we think is so important and so missing from our culture.
	That's why we're so pleased to our daily watch and grateful.
	To our dailywired.com members who make it possible for us to go on this journey and try to bring this great content to you.
	And it's our real pleasure tonight to show you the final trailer
	for our first original feature film, "Shut In."
	[dramatic music]
	[glass shattering]
	[sirens wailing]
	[door slams]
	[dramatic music]
	♪ Feels sorry now ♪ ♪ Feels sorry now ♪
	♪ Whose heart is aching ♪ ♪ For breaking ♪
	♪ Jessica ♪ I can smell the weakness from here.
	Lady!
	Rob!
	Robb owes me money.
	Let me out, please!
	What good is this doing now?
	I'm scared.
	♪ Now you must pay ♪ - Your daughter, she's very pretty.
	(static)
	(screams)
	(dramatic music)
	(upbeat music)
	Three, two.
	Great trip. - "Shut In,"
	coming your way on February 10th.
	You can watch the movie exclusively by becoming a dailywire.com member.
	We'll all be together once again as we did with Run Hyde Fight a year ago to watch the film together and to present it to you with our next backstage.
	Again, that's on February 10th.
	You can learn more at shutinfilm.com or if you want to watch it with us on February 10th, become a dailywire.com subscriber over at dailywire.com.
	So, obviously I'm the most libertarian guy on the panel.
	I think everything you're saying is true.
	What I don't like is that on the right today, as I said, we're blaming liberty for our current state.
	And liberty is not responsible for our current state.
	What's responsible for our current state is that we've abandoned all the important roles and structures that undergird our liberty.
	You can't have, as our founders were very clear, you can't have liberty apart from values.
	You can't have liberty apart from religion.
	You can't have liberty apart from morality.
	But it is necessarily the case that if you have those things, you must also have liberty.
	We've been talking about a lot of interesting things tonight, you know, about the nature of sexual preference and gender identity and these laws in Canada, and it raises certain questions about, you know, the mind.
	It raises certain questions about sin.
	It raises certain questions about liberty.
	It raises certain questions about the soul.
	You know, I observed to Ben earlier today that there's this question raging on Twitter about, can you be homosexual and conservative?
	And I think that we're so behind as conservatives, even having that conversation, that we don't know that in the future all homosexuals will have to be conservative, because the transgender ideology has gone so far that you won't be able to be homosexual without being a bigot, and they'll all move over to being conservatives.
	But the best debate raging on the internet over the last 24 hours, I think, was inspired by our very own Matt Walsh, and that's the question of It started, Matt, if I'm not mistaken, a tweet that you put out that was about the increase in episodes of depression, increase in episodes of anxiety by young people in this country, children in this country, because of these horrible lockdowns that the government has foisted upon us and that so many of us have willingly embraced and brought into our homes.
	And someone made the point that mental illness is on the increase because of COVID.
	And Matt, you responded by saying, well, there are two problems with Essentially what you're saying, one, is COVID didn't cause any of this.
	We did, through our misguided policies in response to COVID.
	And two, Your position is that you can't call it mental illness when we inflicted it upon children.
	It wasn't created by their biology, it wasn't created by virus or bacteria, or not even by birth.
	It was created by our very deliberate action, something that we did to these kids.
	And therefore, I think what you're implying is that the surest way to address it is to stop doing that to our kids.
	And from there, you can tell us more, but the internet melted.
	Yeah, I mean, I think the point is that...
	For kids who are in despair or they're anxious or they're stressed out or they're sad, especially over the last two years, that's a totally... That's not mental.
	They're not diseased.
	That is a totally justifiable and, in fact, rational response to the position that they've been put in.
	It's a response to their environment.
	And so we can look at a kid who's been... He spent one year locked away in his house, having to go to school online, taken away from his friends.
	Then he goes to school and now he's got to wear a mask.
	And he doesn't get it.
	You know, kids, some kids have gone two years not seeing their friends' faces and not being able to show their face.
	I mean, these kinds of things have a real effect on people's psychology and on their spirit.
	And so that's a response.
	Now, it's not a good response.
	It doesn't mean that we should just, oh, well, they're depressed and we should just, they've got to deal with it.
	No, but we have to understand the source of the problem.
	And then there could be counseling.
	There could be all kinds of ways to address it.
	But the problem is if we say, well, you've got a mental illness, And so we're gonna give you some drugs, we're gonna give you some counseling, and then throw you right back into the environment that caused it in the first place.
	And that started this whole debate about depression in general, and my position, which is what really provoked the wrath of lots of people on the left and right, is that I don't think that depression and anxiety for anyone, that this counts as a mental illness.
	I don't think that that's a mental illness, I don't think it's a disease.
	I think that it is always, that anytime someone is depressed, And you talk to them, or they go to a counselor.
	You can trace the reason to something that's going on in their lives, and sometimes it may go back to... Very often it's kind of obvious what's going on, and it could go back to their childhood.
	Many, many different factors play into it.
	It could go back to their understanding of their role in the world, and spirit, and religion.
	If nothing else, it goes back to the fact that we are conscious beings Living in the world and I think there's a certain amount of, you know, we used to know that to live is to suffer, right?
	And so there's a certain amount of suffering that comes with simply being a conscious agent in the world.
	And so to chalk that up to a disease, I think Yeah, I'm accused of minimizing it because I say it's not a disease.
	I think it minimizes it to say that, oh, it's just a chemical imbalance in the brain.
	Take a pill and you'll be fine.
	I think there's something much deeper and more serious going on.
	It doesn't mean that, oh, just toughen up and get over it.
	It doesn't mean that depression doesn't exist.
	It doesn't mean we shouldn't help people that are suffering.
	It just means that we should understand that it's much more complex and much deeper than simple chemicals.
	But before we launch off, and Michael, I'll go to you next.
	To be clear, do you believe that there is such a thing as mental illness?
	I mean, that's an interesting question.
	I'm actually a little bit, I was mentioning off the air, there's this guy named Thomas Zaz, who wrote a book called The Myth of Mental Illness in the 1960s.
	And he was a psychiatrist, and his position was that the entire category of mental illness, it's a category error.
	And in fact, we have brain diseases, which is like dementia, epilepsy.
	And you can look at what's happening in the brain, and it's very clear that the brain itself is diseased, and it's being destroyed by this disease.
	Mental illness is a separate thing.
	In fact, we call it a mental illness because its link to the brain is not exactly clear.
	And so what we're doing with mental illness is we're diagnosing behaviors.
	I mean, a good example, aside from depression, is ADHD.
	We see that a kid is being hyperactive or he's not paying attention, he's bored in school or whatever, and we're deciding based on the behavior that there's something wrong in the mind, but the trace back to the physical brain is always quite unclear.
	And so his point is that mental illness is really sort of a metaphor for behaviors that
	we find abhorrent or inconvenient or distressing.
	And that it, what we've done is we've medicalized these behaviors when in fact there's an origin
	that's deeper than that and it goes back to the conscious mind.
	So I'm sympathetic to that view.
	I don't know if I totally buy into it.
	But when it comes to depression, anxiety, ADHD, I mean, I think that these things are essential to the human condition.
	Anxiety.
	This is something that philosophers... It used to be, for thousands of years, who do we go to to find out about a problem like anxiety or despair?
	We went to priests.
	We went to philosophers.
	It was a philosophical question.
	And now we've decided that it's a medical question.
	And I don't think that things have gotten better because of that.
	I don't think anything's been clarified because of that.
	Michael?
	I'm very sympathetic to your take on this.
	Would you say that some people are born with, because it's a fallen world, or some people born with just some problems of their body or of their mind that make them perhaps a little more prone to melancholy?
	As we used to call it.
	Now we call it a clinical depression or something.
	That make them a little more depressive, or make them a little more eccentric.
	I mean, it would seem to me that these sorts of things can be inborn, that they can have some biological basis.
	Sometimes you'll hear conservatives, they'll say, nobody is born gay, or nobody is born transgender.
	And I think, well, I mean, what do you know?
	I have no reason to think.
	I mean, it's a fallen world.
	Some people are born with four fingers.
	But even if they're born that way, take ADHD for example.
	There are some kids who are born that way and they're much more hyperactive than other kids and maybe you can even trace it to the brain and see there's certain chemical reactions happening in the brain that make them more hyperactive.
	Well the next question is, and this again I think is a philosophical question, How do you know the kid isn't supposed to be like that?
	I mean, you have decided that that sort of personality isn't supposed to exist in the world, and therefore it's a medical problem.
	But that is a philosophical judgment.
	That is not a scientific judgment.
	And it's a judgment that we make, especially with ADHD, because we don't know how to deal with that.
	It's like when you go to a doctor and you say, my kid has ADHD, one of the first questions they ask you, the doctor, Is it causing problems at school and at home?
	Now, if you go to the doctor and he diagnoses you with liver cancer, he's not going to ask you whether it causes problems at home or at school because it's irrelevant.
	I don't know about you, but I hate being lied to.
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	To be clear, there are differences in degree and also in kind.
	So schizophrenia is a mental condition, right?
	The problem with brain science is that it's extraordinarily underdeveloped, right?
	We actually know very, very little about how the brain works.
	MRIs and functional MRIs really haven't done very much to determine even what the various centers of the brain do at this point, other than like the most broad-based sort of assumptions.
	Schizophrenia is an actual mental condition that requires actual medication.
	When it comes to anxiety, there's a difference between experiencing mild anxiety and experiencing
	such severe anxiety that you can't get out of bed in the morning.
	And sometimes that can be situationally caused, and sometimes it absolutely is not situationally
	caused.
	And when it comes to things like OCD, OCD is an actual disorder in which you see people
	who are performing the same tasks over and over and over again.
	For example, they'll sit there and they will write a word and then they'll erase the word,
	and then they'll write the word and then they'll erase the word, and they'll write the word
	and then they'll erase the word.
	That is not something that is coming in the vast majority of cases from some sort of deep-seated
	societal trauma.
	That's coming from an actual problem.
	But there's a social phenomenon that I think, Matt, you're reacting to, which I react against as well, which is it's very popular now to say we need to de-stigmatize mental illness.
	And what that means on the surface is we shouldn't make people feel bad if they wake up clinically depressed.
	You know, I was depressed once in my life because a family member died, and I got over it.
	That's not depression, that's sadness.
	That's sadness and despair.
	Now, some people wake up and nothing has gone wrong in their life and they're just depressed and that's a different thing.
	So I'm not denying that.
	And so you're saying, don't feel bad because you've got schizophrenia or bipolar or whatever.
	But I think the effect of destigmatized mental illness is now everyone takes to TikTok and brags about their mental illness and it carries some social... We're sort of dichotomous about this.
	On the one hand, we say destigmatized mental illness, so that means let homeless people live on the streets and push people in front of subway trains.
	And on the other hand, we say, destigmatize mental illness such that there is no such thing as normal anymore and so anybody's behavior has to be treated as normal even when it is completely abnormal.
	So I believe that there is normal.
	I believe that there are people who do require medication in order to reach some sort of stasis.
	So what you're saying is that we...
	I don't want to speak for you, but what I am saying is, then in a certain way, we need to re-stigmatize mental illness.
	Not to make people feel bad, but to make people seek treatment for these behaviors that are destructive to themselves and society.
	The problem is materialist bias in the medical community.
	I mean, having had the experience of actually having gone insane, and having been saved, healed, I believe, miraculously, by talking to another human being, never took any kind of drug at all, never, anything.
	But I was healed.
	I was remarkably healed.
	I do believe that these psychotropic drugs are tools that can be used sometimes even by people whose lives, the narrative of their lives has caused them to be unhappy.
	Sometimes they're so unhappy that they can't get to the point where they can profit by therapy without a little bit of help.
	My grandfather's life was saved by lithium, right?
	His life was saved by lithium.
	And there's no question that some people, as you point out, and I think this is a really important point, that some people are born with a chemical imbalance that can be fixed by chemicals.
	We are holy, material creatures who represent spiritual truths.
	That's what we are.
	We are the language of spirit.
	Matter is the language of spirit.
	And so the problem is that once psychiatrists went from being talking cure people to being Not good ones.
	Not good ones.
	incredibly in prestige.
	The prestige of a psychiatrist now is huge because all that happens, you say, "Well,
	I'm divorced and I'm sad.
	Here's a drug."
	That's what they do.
	That's literally what they do.
	Not good ones.
	What?
	Not good ones.
	Right.
	Not good ones.
	But a lot of them.
	And they're going, you know, their consequence, you look at the DSM, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and at this point it's longer than the Bible, and literally they have in fact medicalized and categorized every aspect of the human condition, and you know, everyone sort of agrees with that, and any time we have this conversation people always say, oh yeah, these problems are over-diagnosed.
	Well, maybe we should stop and think, why is our mental illness so often overdiagnosed?
	We don't have that problem with diabetes.
	We don't have that problem with cancer.
	I mean, there may be false diagnosis, but it's not nearly the same.
	And so maybe that's because there's a problem with the way we perceive the category.
	So to your point about schizophrenia, for example, you can trace it to the brain.
	Well, the Thomas Szasz sort of way of looking at this, which again, I'm not saying I totally endorse, I just think it's an interesting idea, but he would say, Well, okay, if you can totally trace it to the brain, and it's clearly a disease, then it's a brain disease, and call it that.
	Don't call it a mental illness.
	So maybe that's the distinction we have to draw here, because... I think... Yeah.
	Whatever you call it, the treatment is the question.
	I'm not sure, Ben.
	What we call it matters, and yes, the treatment's the question, but...
	The treatment is a question, but I'm not sure that it's the question.
	I think what we're... You really hit on something.
	The materialist bias of the medical community.
	And I think that that's where this thing lives.
	It's brain primacy, right?
	The meat primacy.
	Material primacy.
	That's how we solve every question.
	But even the word mental.
	Mental implies the mind.
	What is the mind?
	The mind is the obvious intersection between our meat and what is transcendent about us.
	My mind is where I am, right?
	It's everything that I physically am, but it's all the things that I am that are not merely physical as well.
	The mind is the intersection of the body and the soul.
	The mind is the intersection of of thought and feeling. The mind is where our actual
	identity actually lives, not the identities that we procure for ourselves through
	diagnoses.
	As such, the mind is not exclusively the brain.
	Right.
	The mind is not exclusively the material, and the mind cannot exclusively be treated through material means.
	But it is also the case that the mind is not exclusively spiritual.
	The mind is not exclusively transcendent, and therefore the mind can't exclusively be healed by exclusively transcendent means in every instance.
	And so there are people who will say, pray the gay away, or people will say, pray your depression away.
	I'm not an advocate for that.
	There are also people who will say, oh, you've got a feeling, take a pill.
	I'm not an advocate for that either.
	I think that we're in the most mysterious, least understood, and most essential part of what it means to be a person.
	And it is undoubtedly the case in a fallen world that as a child can be born with four fingers, a child can be born with a brain disorder.
	There are corruptions of the brain That can, left untreated, become corruption of the soul, because the mind is the sinew between those two ideas.
	It is also the case, though, that there are problems of the soul, problems of thought, that can become, and this is the part that no scientist will ever talk about, because it cuts against their entire materialist view, I can think thoughts that changed my physical brain over time.
	We know it's true, but we will not talk about it.
	Behaviors will change my brain over time, just like a lifting a weight will change the muscle in my arm.
	Well, of course, that's the fundamental basis of the only form of psychiatry that actually has been shown to do anything aside from drugs, cognitive behavioral therapy.
	That's right.
	The entire basis of that is that you repeatedly breaking the chain of your own thoughts changes the pathways in your brain such that you have a different reaction.
	Because everything is in Shakespeare, you know, you read A Midsummer Night's Dream and he asks the question, if I give you a potion and you fall in love, are you in fact in love?
	And I think the question now is if they give you a potion and you stop being depressed, are you in fact happy?
	And the best line about this came from a friend of mine who was given antidepressant drugs and she said, I'm still depressed, I just can't feel it anymore.
	I'm not sure I totally agree with all of this.
	That was a very profound remark because if you don't feel your depression, there are people who will say you are no
	longer depressed But clearly that's not true and just as I'm not sure I
	totally agree with all of us So the reason I'm not sure that I agree with all of this is
	because for a lot of people Clinical depression for example is an obstacle to have what
	you're talking about practical You're talking about practicality and I'm talking about the reality.
	Distinguish for me.
	Well, for instance, I know people who have so badly raised their children that their children have mental problems and they give their children drugs and both the children and they are happier.
	But I don't think that that has solved the problem.
	I think it has erased the effects of it.
	Well, I mean, I'm not saying that that's the solution.
	And sometimes that's the only thing you can do.
	Right, but the reality of the situation is that the best combination for some people, and again, I think that the reason people are getting uptight about this is because the suggestion when it comes to the notion that this is mostly a spiritual problem that can be solved through mostly spiritual means is that the responsibility for your own happiness lies with you.
	In many cases, that's true.
	I mean, I think we all agree that in many cases that's true.
	That the only thing that can change your circumstances is your outlook on the world, right?
	There's been a religious perspective since religion began, right?
	Or that the only way that you can change your approach to the world is through changing the way that you act toward the world.
	All of that may be true.
	And then, for a lot of people, there may be another problem.
	And that problem was not caused by an outside stimulus.
	Or if it was caused by an outside stimulus, it cannot be removed anymore by changing the outside stimulus.
	These are not mutually exclusive.
	That's right.
	What I'm saying about depression, I don't think it's a mental illness or disease, that doesn't necessarily preclude the option of taking a drug to help address it.
	You know, I'm skeptical of a lot of these drugs and I think that they're way overused.
	I agree.
	But there's no reason, just because if you were to subscribe to my idea that it's not a disease, that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't take a drug to address it.
	There's also There's a chicken or egg problem here,
	which I think Jeremy alluded to, which is even if we could trace depression
	back to a chemical imbalance in the brain, which by the way is a totally outdated theory,
	and almost any scientist you talk to now, or doctor who's being honest,
	will tell you that that's at best a massive oversimplification.
	But even if you could find a, quote, chemical imbalance in the brain of a depressed person,
	well the question is, are they depressed because of the chemical imbalance,
	or is the chemical imbalance there because they're depressed?
	And what I would say is that we talk about the mind.
	I mean, what's the mind?
	The mind is your conscious experience of the world, okay?
	And your brain is the organ in your head.
	So this idea that we can really simply and kind of blithely medicalize
	someone's conscious experience of the world, and say, well your experience is incorrect.
	And not only is it incorrect, but it's diseased.
	It's sick.
	I actually do have a fundamental disagreement with this.
	I think that there are certain circumstances where you can look at a person and you realize there's a reason why the person is depressed.
	So, for example, you had a friend or family member who died and now you're down.
	Right?
	We can tell that that is not a medicalization of your problem.
	You had a stimulus.
	You have responded to the stimulus in what we would consider a normal way.
	If you had gotten suicidal over that person, that would assume that there was probably some underlying problem with you that has now been triggered by this existential stimulus.
	But that problem could be.
	Yes, I agree it could be some problem.
	In other words, I'm saying that I don't think that it's a fully subjective problem.
	There has to be some sort of outside analysis of whether the reaction to a particular stimulus or to your surrounding circumstances... The problem is hopelessness.
	The problem is a suicidal person We're talking about—and that's why I use depression and despair interchangeably, because despair is— The loss of hope.
	It is the worst thing a person can internally experience is despair, which is why it was always—it's sort of strange to me people got upset when I compared depression to despair.
	Despair is the worst possible thing.
	I'm not minimizing it.
	Despair is worse than depression.
	Right.
	Despair is a total loss of hope.
	So, someone who's suicidal, they have no hope and they see no meaning in their lives, and that's why they're suicidal.
	Now, that's not good.
	We should not accept it.
	We should do everything we can to try to help them.
	But the question is, Is a lack of hope a medical problem?
	Is there a good reason for the lack of hope?
	No.
	Well, not in my world.
	I mean, really, it's a serious question.
	It's a serious question.
	If your entire family is, if you're Job, and your entire family is struck down, and then you are hopeless, that's not a medical problem.
	If, however, you wake up in the morning, you have a good job, you're married, and you have two kids, and you wake up hopeless, that's probably a medical problem.
	That's a philosophical question.
	That's probably a medical problem.
	Providentially, though, providentially, I was reading Job today.
	This is the way the world works, I guess.
	And there is this issue.
	Job remains faithful to God, right?
	Most of the book, he's quite cheery in the face of his entire family being wiped out and everything he loves going away.
	If someone...
	Loses a loved one, and they get down, and they're sad, and they're despairing, and then they become suicidal.
	It might be because there's some problem in their brain.
	It might be because their view of the world is that life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
	And that is not a chemical problem, though there might be some chemical effect of it.
	That's a philosophical problem.
	It's a theological problem.
	I believe that I went through mental illness for a moment at age 38.
	Uh, and I'm using that word loosely but also acutely.
	The worst thing I've ever gone through, I had a thought in my mind and I could not separate myself from the thought or of the consequences of the thought.
	The thought dominated everything.
	It was only a thought.
	It was only a thought.
	It was a thought that risked burning my marriage to the ground.
	It's a thought that, left unchecked, could have burned my life to the ground.
	Could have burned this business to the ground.
	It was only a thought.
	But it was also chemicals in my brain.
	I could feel, like when you were a teenager and you started having hormones for the first time, I could feel the wave of the chemical when it would come over me in response to the thought.
	And like a wash that would wash across my brain.
	Change how I saw the world from that moment forward.
	Now, all mental illnesses are not the same.
	It was not schizophrenia.
	It was not... I don't want to be overly simplistic in how we talk about these things.
	I am using the language mental illness.
	You may be right that that's a bad use of language.
	But whatever we're talking about, we know that they're a different thing.
	We're talking about a wide range of possible By the way, just on this point, I mean, you compare it to a teenager, let's say a teenager experiences love for the first time, and he says, oh, I have heartache.
	He's describing an actual physical phenomenon going on.
	And this was a physical phenomenon as much as anything, but it was also just a thought.
	And I believe that I was miraculously healed as well from that thought, which had power over me.
	And this is where the spiritual question, which is more important to me than the diagnostic question, it is more important to me even than the treatment question, it's the underlying spiritual question.
	In the underlying spiritual question, there is a belief in Christianity about being born into sin.
	That Adam was made in the image of God according to Genesis, but according to Genesis 5, Seth was born in the image of Adam.
	And that man born in the image of Adam has carried with him Not even the possibility.
	No act of free will could result in a righteous life.
	Righteousness is not attainable in the Christian view by a man.
	By saying that, we're acknowledging That something can exist that we cannot overcome.
	That you do not sin just because you want to sin.
	Paul says, the things I don't want to do, I do all the times.
	The thing that I want to do, I scarcely ever do.
	That implies that there is a limit to what free will is.
	That we cannot think our way into perfect health if sin is the root cause of all corruption And therefore, not your sin is the reason you have cancer, but sin is the reason there's cancer.
	That's an important distinction.
	I'm not saying you have a mental illness because of your sin, but mental illness is the result of sin in this way of thinking writ large across humanity, right?
	So, there is corruption.
	There are kids born with four fingers.
	There are kids born with a hole in their heart.
	There are kids born addicted to drugs.
	They never chose to do drugs.
	They're born addicted to drugs.
	There are undoubtedly kids who are born with, at a minimum, not solving all the answers of the cosmos here, with a proclivity toward depression.
	Proclivity toward homosexuality.
	Are kids born gay?
	I don't know.
	But there are certainly kids for whom that struggle is different.
	And there are people who have sex with other men in prison or on ships.
	And that was not in any way biological.
	Well, it's biological.
	But it's not that form of biological.
	Mostly convenient.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	All of this range of messiness exists in the human condition.
	And so when we talk about the spiritual underpinning of this thing, I'm not suggesting that it is exclusively a spiritual problem that can be exclusively solved by spiritual means.
	I don't think even, Matt, that you're saying that.
	I'm not saying that every problem is a thought that you can think your way out of.
	I am saying, though, that because the mind lives between the spirit and the brain, the corruption can flow both directions.
	And sometimes something that may have started as a thought May have moved over into corruption in my brain, and I may even need brain treatment to even help myself get out.
	I might need brain treatment in the form of a drug to even help right me enough to even be able to deal with these thoughts and get back to this other problem, or vice versa.
	It may be at every level.
	It depends on what perspective you have, from God's perspective.
	It all may be demons taking you over, you know?
	From our perspective, obviously, the tools that we have are drugs and physicality and all these things.
	You know, I often wonder, with schizophrenics who hear a demon in their mind telling them to do something awful, I often wonder, like, Maybe they should be drugged to get rid of their schizophrenia, but maybe their schizophrenia is allowing it.
	You've made the point before, no one ever hears voices telling them to do something.
	Good job, buddy.
	I agree with you that it's not exclusively spiritual, but I do think it's fundamentally spiritual, because to go to Ben's question before about You know, we're talking about someone who's hopeless and they're suicidal, and you asked, well, is there a reason for them to be hopeless?
	And my answer to that is no, there's no reason for anyone to be hopeless.
	But that is a fundamentally religious answer that I'm giving, and there's no way to separate that, because you could have a philosophical view of life, which is fundamentally hopeless.
	And there are many philosophers who argue that basically there's no hope, there's no meaning to life.
	I think that's incorrect, I think it's damaging, I think it's horrible, I think it's ugly.
	I think that people that suffer from that, we have to help them.
	But it's not medical, that's not a medical--
	But I do think that there are distinctions even here between questions that we ask
	that are within the realm of rationality and ones that we ask that are not.
	If somebody is suicidal because they didn't get enough peas in their alphabet soup,
	that's fundamentally different from somebody is deciding that they're suicidal
	because life is meaningless and there's no hope in the universe.
	I would push back only, I'm gonna push back and then pull.
	My push is, at the end of the day, my guess is that the person who feels suicidal because of the peas also has a thought problem.
	It may not be the thought of loss like Job's thought.
	It may be a thought of narcissism.
	It may be a false expectation of what the world can provide.
	There are thoughts related to that that are wrong, but here's my pull.
	My pull is also that there is likely something that we can measure in their brain and treat medically that may also be wrong.
	And this is why I say... That's right, but this is the ultimate thing that I'm driving at, which is to say, I agree with Matt that it is fundamentally a question, a spiritual question, in the way that all questions are fundamentally spiritual questions.
	But that doesn't mean in a very practical sense that our only tools are spiritual tools.
	Because, just like Paul says, the things I don't want to do, I do.
	The answer isn't try harder.
	That isn't even the spiritual answer, is not try harder.
	Sometimes as conservatives we speak in certain kinds of absolutes, and I think they're the correct absolutes to order a society.
	Free will, as a concept to order society around, is a far better concept than determinism to order a society around.
	Which is impossible.
	Which is impossible.
	But free will isn't a complete answer.
	It's a framework with which we can build around.
	Reality is often messier.
	Even a spiritual problem that As I said, cancer is the result of sin.
	That doesn't mean your cancer is the result of your sin.
	We live in this corrupted world, and in this corrupted world, we sometimes bear consequences for things that we didn't do.
	Again, the child born addicted to drugs did nothing.
	They are still addicted to drugs.
	The answer to their addiction isn't the same as the answer to your teenage buddy who's starting to experiment with drugs.
	Your answer to him is going to be a very whip-cracking, cut-that-crap-out answer.
	That's no answer to a baby.
	But I would say that the problem of the two people is fundamentally different, right?
	The child's not experiencing a spiritual problem.
	The child's experiencing a physical problem.
	I'm saying in the final analysis the child is dealing with a spiritual problem, but not an individual spiritual problem.
	This is a fundamental distinction that I think we ought to keep in mind.
	So if you go all the way back to Emile Durkheim, who was the first person to write very seriously about suicide, writing in the 1870s for a book called On Suicide, in which he looked at comparative suicide statistics across countries and across cultures.
	And he talked about why it was that he thought that there were certain cultures that were more prone to suicide and why certain cultures were less prone to suicide and all of this.
	All of that is well worth discussing because there are certain societies that are just sicker than others.
	There are certain societies that just have more social problems than others, that breed a spiritual malaise.
	There's no question that that's true.
	It is also true that to try and apply that to an individual inherently, To say that every individual who is suffering from depression is doing so because of this suicidal thing, because of this broader social problem.
	That's right.
	It's almost like the mistake that people make by saying that, you know, bad things happen to bad people.
	So, therefore, if something bad happened to you, it's because you did a bad thing.
	That's right.
	Right?
	Like there's a fundamental religious belief that--
	The rainfall, the unjust and the unjust alike.
	Right, but there's a fundamental spiritual belief that on a general level, if you do good things,
	your life will be better for it.
	But we all know people for whom that's not true.
	Okay, and that means that when you look at the individual, you can't say to that individual,
	the reason your life sucks is because you made bad decisions.
	Maybe that's not true.
	Okay, the same thing to me is true when we get to things like mental illnesses
	and depression and disorders.
	Yes, it is true that our society has bred depression.
	There's no question.
	We've gotten rid of fundamental societal institutions.
	This breeds depression.
	We have known about this, again, for 150 years.
	This is nothing new.
	Durkheim called it the problem of anomie, spelled A-N-O-M-I-E.
	The idea was that people are reliant on the fundamental institutions around them.
	When there are sea changes to those institutions, people fall into despair and confusion, and they can't find their center again.
	This has been happening throughout society, particularly in the West, for 150 years.
	With that said, I think the reason that you drove a lot of outrage is because what people did
	is then they applied it to the individual.
	They made the mistake that religious people sometimes make of saying, well, the bad thing
	happened to you, that's because it's a social problem that you have failed to somehow grasp with.
	And for a lot of people, that's not true.
	For a lot of people, you can say that society has a sickness, and you can also say
	that the individual has OCD, or the individual has generalized anxiety disorder.
	And sometimes that may be because of some sort of outside problem, and that can be cured by fixing the outside problem, such as taking the masks off your kids and letting them go to school and leave them the hell alone.
	And sometimes the kid just has OCD.
	Sometimes the kid just has general anxiety disorder.
	Sometimes the material corrupts the spiritual, and sometimes the spiritual corrupts them.
	It would be nice if we had psychiatrists who looked at people as whole things instead of as, you know, The consequence of this is that, talking about the outrage that came my way, is that
	We're dealing with these really big, complicated problems like despair, suffering, the human mind, and we can't even talk about these problems anymore.
	The conversation in our society is over about human suffering and consciousness and despair because we've decided that it's medicalized and there's no room to even discuss it anymore.
	And because of identity.
	Because when you make your identity something other than God, Yes.
	You now can't wrestle with those ideas anymore without it being an absolute attack on your actual person.
	It's also because what people are doing is they're doing the mistake that I talked about earlier in reverse.
	Right?
	So if the idea is, on the religious level, that good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people, but there are exceptions, then the reverse is.
	For a lot of people.
	If I'm suffering from depression, and it's not my fault, therefore, all depression in society is nobody's fault.
	Right.
	Right?
	And that's also a mistake, right?
	There's a mistake of individualizing the general, and there's a mistake of generalizing the individual.
	That's right.
	Yeah.
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