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Feb. 8, 2023 - The Matt Walsh Show

01:17:56

Daily Wire Backstage: State of the Union 2023 Coverage

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	Hey everyone, it's Matt Walsh.
	You're about to hear a very special Daily Wire backstage featuring Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Andrew Klavan, Candace Owens, and yours truly.
	Join us as we talk about the Grammys, Chinese spy balloons, Biden's State of the Union speech, and so much more.
	Trust me, you don't want to miss this one.
	Thanks for listening.
	(upbeat music)
	Madam Vice President, Mr. Speaker, my fellow Americans, welcome to The Daily Wire backstage.
	I am Jeremy Boren.
	I'm joined by Candace Owens.
	(all clapping)
	Ben Shapiro.
	(all clapping)
	Andrew Claven.
	(all clapping)
	(clapping)
	(applause)
	Matt Walsh.
	[applause]
	Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo!
	[applause]
	And Michael Knowles.
	Hmm.
	At the end of this, this is going to be basically what you're getting from us all night tonight.
	This is the kind of wit one can expect when we're forced to stay at work late and watch a boring ass one hour and a half speech.
	If you want to hang out with us after that, and honestly, I can't imagine what would motivate such behavior, we will be doing a killer members block where we take questions from our Daily Wire Plus members.
	You can become one and get your question in there by going to dailywire.com slash subscribe to get 40% off.
	Why 40% off?
	Well, because 40% off may not be enough to buy the president, but it's enough to influence the culture.
	That's right.
	It's our President is for Sale sale at Daily Wire Plus.
	Daily Wire Plus slash subscribe.
	Guys, the last time we were all together, of course, it was election night, and it was disappointing.
	Not as disappointing as having to watch the State of the Union, of course.
	And Stephen Crowder was with us, which just goes to show that Things happen really fast in our business.
	Again, not State of the Union speeches.
	They're interminable.
	And the Grammys had not come out as openly satanic.
	It's true.
	It's true.
	Sponsored by Pfizer.
	So on the nose.
	I'm telling you, his writing is really degraded over the past year.
	His writing is so on the nose.
	He's casting weird German Nazi-esque characters as the head of the World Economic Forum.
	And he's got the president's son being a drug-addicted derelict who's taking money from the Chinese, probably, and dad leaving classified documents next to the Corvette.
	And they already used that storyline already.
	This is lazy, lazy writing.
	Chinese spy balloons.
	And now the Grammy's going totally satanic.
	I will say about the Grammy's going satanic that I think it does say something a little bit deeper about our culture that Jill Biden was there.
	There was a time when satanic imagery was at least fringe, right?
	It was the counterculture and it was rebelling against the culture.
	And now it's just the culture.
	It's what we just call the culture.
	And the reason for that, we're going to get into here, John Milton's Satan is the villain of the piece in Paradise Lost, right?
	His whole thing is that he's rebelling against God, not because he's doing anything good or anything noble or anything true or beautiful, but because he would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.
	And over the course of time, I think Western culture now sees Satan as the hero.
	And Satan is the hero because Satan is narcissistic and into himself.
	And that's exactly what you saw at the Grammys.
	A bunch of people who are narcissistically prancing around calling themselves non-binary, genderqueer, transgender people.
	Who was it you said was there?
	Jill Biden.
	Dr. Jill Biden.
	Oh, great.
	The surgeon.
	Oh, Dr. Jill Biden.
	Damn it.
	I always mess that up.
	I always mess that up.
	It's so frustrating because my wife's a real doctor.
	That's what people don't understand when we talk about How the left is satanic, or a lot of pop music is satanic.
	And most of it is satanic, but it's not theologically satanic.
	Like, they're not literally worshipping the devil as far as they understand it.
	They're worshipping what the devil worshipped, which is the self.
	So it's kind of like a secular satanism.
	At the same time, I think we should also recognize that the left likes to use the term gaslighting.
	Which is all they do with things like this, because part of the reason that they do it is that they can have the satanic ritual being broadcast by CBS, and then conservatives react to it by saying, hey, look, there's a satanic ritual on TV.
	And then the next day, you get the headlines from The Daily Beast and all those, saying, well, conservatives, with their conspiracy theory, that there was a satanic ritual in the Grammys.
	It's what literally happened.
	We're just observing.
	Face tattoo syndrome, right?
	It's like when you go into the Starbucks and the barista has a giant face tattoo, and you're like, Give him a weird look, he's got a face tattoo, and then he's like, what are you staring at?
	It's your face tattoo, that's what I'm staring at!
	But it brings up the point that Jill Biden was saying that they are now the culture, and we're the counterculture.
	We should stop reacting to them and just let them react to us, because they do.
	But they baited us intentionally.
	But if they had gotten up, if we had gotten up and sung Jesus Loves Me, This I Know, they'd have gone insane.
	We should do it that way.
	I would have gone insane too, that song's terrible.
	I would have had some problems.
	But the one thing is though, when you say that they don't worship Satan per se, they actually do worship.
	They actually do worship something satanic.
	I mean, there are only two ways to look at life.
	One is that your body is your real you, and your lust and your desire is your real you.
	And the other is that your lust and desire are in the way of something even higher, that they, you know, they're part of your life, but there's something even higher that you're striving for.
	And what they're saying is, no, they're not.
	And unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned, that's what rock and roll has been saying since it started.
	You know, so it's only coming to fruition, and it's coming to fruition in dullest... That number was so boring and so anodyne, Well, do you know what's so sad about it?
	With Sam Smith in particular.
	Sam Smith is actually, I think, a talented pop musician.
	He's got the voice of an angel, now the voice of a demon, and his songs are pretty good.
	And what was amazing is his biggest hit, the one that I knew him from, was I Know I'm Not the Only One.
	You know, you say I'm crazy, but you don't think I know what you've done.
	It's about this marriage where the husband goes out and cheats, and it's falling apart, and it's presented as this terrible tragedy.
	You like that song.
	I do actually like that song.
	I think there's a lot of things about it.
	No, listen, I'm a pop culture maven, you know, but it's sung beautifully.
	It's got a lot of longing and tragedy to it.
	This song was about the exact same topic.
	In fact, it followed the exact same formula right down to the seconds of the time codes.
	The difference is this was about how funny and hot and titillating it is when, you know, daddy goes to the body shop and gets hoochie-hoochie or whatever.
	And so it's so sad because he had an instinct toward beauty, then he sells his soul to the devil, and it didn't even work.
	It was a crappy song and the ratings were in the gutter.
	Michael, I really hate to tell you Santa's not real here, but all of his prior music, which I absolutely adore.
	I love the Catholic reimagining of it.
	It was not about a marriage between a man and a woman.
	It was about his gay affairs.
	No, wait, he's a gay guy?
	Yeah.
	Yes, but it was music about love and about loss, and his music was so beautiful.
	And what's really happened, and because I question this myself, it's you were so talented, you had everything, you made it, people were listening to your music.
	Why did you have to give yourself to this sort of demonic nature that we're seeing inside of you?
	What happens when you get to Hollywood that they basically say, okay, now you just have to do a demonic ritual to prove that you're really one of us?
	The most bizarre part of the entire performance is a standing ovation at the end, by the way.
	You can see a couple of things, I think J-Lo and Ben Affleck were maybe for a second like, should we be clapping to this or are we actually at a satanic ritual?
	But they got a standing ovation.
	No one in the room went, okay, this might be a little far.
	And they keep moving the goalposts.
	By the way, this is not the first time they went full satanic at the Grammys.
	WAP, can we forget the WAP performance?
	I cannot.
	Wholesome.
	I cannot.
	I will never be allowed to.
	No, you will not be allowed to as an expert on all matters WAP.
	And, you know, it's been going this, treading in this direction for a very long time.
	I think this time is the first time that they just were so in your face.
	First it's a conspiracy theory.
	The left, you know, we always say it's satanic, it's demonic, Hollywood's evil.
	And then they go, oh no we're not, no we're not.
	And then they do this!
	And they acknowledged it, too.
	You saw CBS tweeted out, they said, in response to Sam Smith, said, we are ready to worship.
	And it made me think, 1952, CBS would not allow I Love Lucy to use the word pregnant.
	So scandalous was that word.
	Now, CBS News is essentially saying, hail Satan.
	You can't convince me that it's an accident that that was going into the break sponsored by Pfizer.
	Of course it was intentional.
	Of course it was intentional.
	It was.
	No, because, look, we're a conservative media company.
	We sit around thinking, okay, how do we own the lives today, right?
	I mean, that's one of the things we think about.
	drink their delicious tears.
	Because it's so tasty and it fills the tumblers.
	They think the same way.
	They're a news network.
	If you think that it was an accident, it was a mere coincidence that Pfizer was the commercial
	right as the devil is walking off stage, I gotta bridge the gap.
	There's something to what you were saying.
	One high point though was that Ben Affleck's face, since you mentioned Ben Affleck,
	it did reflect how I feel about having to listen to the State of the Union.
	(laughing)
	I just wanna point out that Matt Walsh's laryngitis voice is the sexiest voice on the panel tonight.
	And for that reason, Matt, I think you should read the first ad.
	Yeah, well, speaking of Satanists, that's probably not the right intro.
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	One other thing, by the way, I think it's worth noting that the guy that was performing that song with Sam Smith,
	Kim Petras, right?
	[BLANK_AUDIO]
	And they won, it was a big moment because two white males won Best Pop Duo because they both don't identify as white males, but Kim Petras transitioned surgically to become a female at the age of 16.
	And this is something we're told, of course, never happens.
	Well, we don't do surgical transitions of minors.
	Yet, like, one of the biggest pop stars in the world right now, that's literally what happened to him.
	You know, I think also his real name is Tim, which is kind of clever to go from Tim to Kim.
	And he goes up and he says, look, people say that this performance was religiously not cool.
	You might say it's actually burning with the eternal fires of hell.
	Cool.
	But look, I've always been interested in religion, but religion doesn't want me because I'm trans.
	And I thought, you know, look, religion is a habit of virtue and justice to render to God what he's due.
	Religion wants you.
	God wants you.
	God loves you.
	If you say that, well, the condition of my going to church or being religious is that you have to pretend that I'm a woman, you're demanding that everybody affirm a lie.
	And that's something that religion cannot do.
	Oh, come on.
	Shockingly, I know.
	These guys always do this though.
	They say it's God's fault.
	It's the church's fault.
	They don't want me.
	They don't want me.
	There's a point to what Drew was saying earlier about how anodyne, the actual number was.
	And it was.
	I mean, it was almost bizarrely sexless.
	Like, it's satanic, but there's nothing sexy about it or interesting, really.
	The same with the law performance, by the way.
	It wasn't actually sexy.
	I tend to agree, obviously.
	I mean, I think that one of the things that happens is that when the taboo becomes the culture, there is no more forbidden for people to even be tempted by.
	And this is one of the things that you're seeing in our culture is that, you know, by every available poll, married people have better sex lives than people who are single because what they're doing exists in the boundaries of love and also within the boundaries of commitment.
	But there's also something to the idea that the human being is constantly seeking the new and the fresh or whatever it is.
	When nothing is new and nothing is fresh, and you've made all the taboos just the mainstream culture, there's nothing left to transgress.
	So when Madonna was doing the, you know, kind of virgin slut routine back in 1980, and that's what they call it, it's not my term for it, that's sort of the cultural term for it, when she was doing the kind of taking advantage of the imagery of the Virgin Mary and then subjecting that to, you know, very sexy movement, then the idea was that she was subverting expectation, but there was no expectation left for them to subvert.
	And so, how exactly do you transgress?
	There's nothing, when there's nothing left to transgress, it becomes very difficult to be transgressive, other than ideologically transgressive.
	Yeah, I would like to add, I talked about this on my podcast, because I was very interested in this, like, why is he doing this?
	And I started talking about just the actual meaning of the word diabolical, and I played a Catholic priest.
	There we go.
	Very proud of that.
	Let's talk about the actual meaning of the word diabolical, where it comes from and what it means is to separate, and what they're actually aspiring to do.
	You go, why put on this diabolical performance?
	And really, when the serpent comes up to Adam and Eve, and one of the first things that they recognize after they bite into the forbidden fruit is that they feel shame.
	Right?
	Which means in order for Satan to assert dominance, he needs to remove people from their shame.
	He needs to separate them from this wholesomeness and this goodness, right?
	And to say, there's actually nothing wrong with you being naked.
	Why do you even feel that?
	So you see that Hollywood is kind of pushing for people not to think that there's anything to be shameful for.
	And the androgyny.
	There was a story this week that actually made me want to move away from Earth.
	You know how sometimes you think, I want to get out of the country, but this made me want to leave the planet.
	Was this girl on- The newsroom.
	Yeah, yeah, really.
	For some reason.
	But there was this girl on YouTube who does a show, I think she's a gamer girl.
	Twitch.
	Called herself QT Cinderella.
	Twitch.
	On Switch, right.
	That's right, Switch, the gamer channel.
	And somebody made a mock porn of her.
	They put her into, what's it called?
	Deepfake.
	Yeah.
	A deepfake porn thing of her, and she was shattered.
	She went online, and it was absolutely heart-rending.
	I mean, it was such a cruel, low, stinking thing to do.
	And at the same time, she was sitting there going, you know, F the internet, F everything.
	And I thought, well, yeah, you know, like it's not her fault that the culture fell apart,
	but it did, and she is part of it, and she's in it.
	And this is what people are doing to one another.
	It was one of the most disgusting acts, and conservatives were laughing at her.
	Yeah.
	For crying about it.
	And I just thought like, you know, it's like taxi.
	Could we go to Mars, please?
	Because I think that this is, you know, the results of worshiping Satan are not good.
	They're not fun.
	Their bodies stacked in rows.
	They're women being abused and people treating each other like garbage.
	Part of the reason, not to take this into the direction of talking about porn again, because I feel like that happens on every show now, but the reason why, because I saw some of that too.
	Conservatives were laughing at the girls who were in the deepfakes, and the reason they were laughing about it is because, you know, the conservative argument against porn has always been this kind of like practical, well, porn feeds the sex trafficking industry and it's bad.
	It's like those kinds of arguments and then you do AI or deepfake and then now those conservatives are out of arguments against porn because there's not any actual person involved.
	That's a great point, man.
	But what they lost is like what does porn do to like, what is it fundamentally?
	What does it do to the person consuming it?
	What does it do to the culture that allows it?
	We never had those arguments.
	And there's, well, you know, there's three kinds of beings.
	We're just talking about demons, right?
	And some beings are purely body.
	They're corporeal beings.
	And some beings are pure spirit.
	That's angels and demons.
	And then we are hylomorphic.
	We're both body and spirit.
	And the problem with porn is it just treats us like animals.
	It treats us like we're pure meat, and then when we see that, even people who have gotten accustomed to it in the culture, when you see that, when someone violates you and puts your head on a body, or I don't know, whatever they did in the AI porn, you just think, this is a violation not just of my body, obviously it's not of my body, it's a violation of my soul.
	This is, I think, one of the broader points that ties back into what happened with the Grammys and the reaction to it.
	It's why the libertarian instinct, which is, well, if you don't like it, just turn it off.
	The question is not whether people have the freedom to turn things on or turn things off.
	The question is, what does it do to the common pool of culture in which we all live when this sort of stuff is promulgated by the biggest institutions in our culture?
	We shouldn't be arguing over whether someone has the right to do it or not have the right to.
	That's actually a secondary question when the primary question is, is this a good thing or a bad thing?
	And people refuse to even have that argument.
	They're so consumed with the secondary question of what we ought to do about it.
	That they completely allied the first question, which is, as a society, can we agree that this stuff is just bad?
	How about that?
	Well, no, we can't.
	And this actually goes... I mean, obviously, the president of the United States' wife is there when this thing was performing.
	Well, the president of the United States is there.
	The effective president.
	The de facto.
	But I want to say that there's another piece of this that, Candace, you hit on, which is that it was actually boring, that it was sexless, that it's anodyne, that it's joyless.
	And I've been thinking a lot about You know, people love to call us grifters, and they like to call us grifters because sometimes we say things that our audience disagrees with, which I always think that's really funny.
	So you mean that in order to be authentic, I'm willing to say things that might risk...
	Some of our money going away.
	That makes me a grifter.
	But the greatest grift of all is the purity grift.
	In politics, it's the political purity grift.
	And the political purity grift says, whatever moment we're in, you must be so truly that moment that you can always stab anyone on your own side who isn't perfectly, absolutely in line with this exact moment.
	But of course, you can't actually apply that.
	Across any period of time, because human beings are messy, human circumstances are messy, politics changes, like all the people who are right now, political purists, you know, if you don't support Donald Trump, they all voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.
	Every one of them voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.
	And if you've reached a point of political purity where you're like, Paul Ryan is the scourge of the earth, Kanye may have had a point about the Jews.
	You've reached a point where this political purity nonsense reveals itself as a grift.
	And in a way what I think you're watching at the Grammys is just the left's version of the political purity grift.
	Why does a guy who is so talented Who can put together such beautiful music, who can truly transcend politics, can transcend moments, can touch us all.
	We've all, with all of our diverse points of view, been just as enthralled with his music as anyone on the left has been enthralled.
	Why is he putting out something that means not only nothing to us, it means nothing to them.
	Because it is a virtue signal.
	It is a way of appeasing the political purity grift on his side.
	And the true grift in politics is to never authentically Be what you are, or say what you believe, for fear that the dominant power of your tribe will reject you for it.
	In their case, the devil.
	Hence the standing ovation.
	I'm like, none of you thought this was weird.
	Because if you don't stand up, you're not pure.
	You haven't survived the purity test.
	That's right.
	And that's the whole point of liberty, is we should all be disagreeing with each other.
	I mean, that is the great thing about this place, is we've all been fighting with each other since we started.
	But our conservatism consists of We're being concerned about liberty and the things that make liberty work.
	I mean, I don't only think that it's bad because people are going to do things that are bad if they're free.
	I think that there comes a point when it's actually threatening to the body politic of a free country to do certain things.
	And I think that, look, there's plenty of things that you can do in the privacy of your home that I might disapprove of that aren't going to pick my pocket or break my leg and aren't going to threaten the polity.
	But some of this stuff, when you have the establishment The Dr. Jill Bidens of the world supporting this kind of garbage, which is not just artistically bad, but it's also morally bad.
	Something has gone terribly wrong.
	You've lost the authority to say that.
	One of the things that we talk about all the time now is the distinction between adults and children, and we should allow adults to do things that children can't do.
	Obviously that's true, although I would say that there are certain things that adults should also not be allowed to do.
	There's plenty of limits, yeah.
	But one of the things that we ought to say here is that popular culture is designed for
	kids.
	Okay, to pretend that the Grammys is not directed at kids is a lie.
	To pretend that what was put on the Grammys was designed for adults 18 and up, it's just
	not true.
	Okay, because if you ask a 12-year-old what exactly they are listening to, they are listening
	to exactly the same thing that a 15-year-old is listening to, which is exactly the same
	thing an 18-year-old is listening to, particularly when it comes to music.
	Music happens to be an area where those boundaries are unbelievably permeable.
	I'd say I watched the Grammys more as a child than I did now.
	And what's the message that came out of that performance?
	I got dinged by our publicists over at Media Matters on this point, but it's a true point, so I'll reiterate it.
	Symbols have a purpose.
	We live in a semiotic world.
	Symbols are very, very important.
	That's what makes the world intelligible.
	And what was the performance?
	At a physical level, it was a bunch of transvestites.
	Sam Smith calls himself a pansexual or something.
	He's a non-binary gender.
	Please get that straight.
	Natural, oh I'm sorry, I didn't want to be imprecise.
	Please get that straight.
	No, good point.
	Don't get it straight.
	Don't get it straight.
	And get it very crooked actually.
	And the other one is a transgender and then the rest were a bunch of drag queens
	and you see this in a bunch of Sam Smith's videos too.
	It was a very pro-trans performance as we see everywhere and the symbol of that was the devil.
	And I couldn't help but notice, very often artistic depictions of demons
	and weird occult stuff is androgynous and trans and weird.
	And I think the reason for this is--
	Wasn't that Lil Nas X also?
	Lil Nas X did the same thing.
	The reason for this is, at least the traditional Christian understanding is, the devil hates human beings especially because we have flesh and he doesn't want to bow down to some ape that has flesh on him.
	And the fleshiness of this world is very offensive to demons that are pure spirit.
	Our publicists knocked me for making this connection.
	I didn't make the connection.
	Sam Smith is the one putting on the performance.
	The fact that Lil Nas X made the connection, the fact that this is the symbol they're all using, should tell us something about this real political problem.
	Transgenderism is really a mockery to creation itself.
	I mean, it's the ultimate mockery to creation itself.
	I gotta say, I did, after seeing some of the performance, I did leave quite encouraged for the reason we've all kind of outlined already, which is that Like, these people are really out of ideas.
	They've just totally run out of ideas.
	You mentioned Lil Nas X. This exact thing was already done.
	And it was done in a more shocking way even then.
	He was like giving a lap dance to Satan.
	But even then, at that time, you're like, okay, I've seen this exact imagery.
	It's been used so many times.
	This is the thing.
	Tribalism, cultural ubiquity, the purity grift, it is boring.
	Because the thing you actually can't do in the transhumanist moment, the thing you actually can't do is transgress the popular opinion of your tribe right now.
	Of course.
	And so to be a political purist isn't to have the right ideas.
	It's to see which ideas are the most in vogue and then just emulate them.
	Just repeat them back.
	So all that he did Is he said, oh, Lil Nas X did this and it worked.
	I'll do it.
	I mean, it's derivative for a reason.
	It's derivative by design.
	There's a reason that in dictatorships everybody dresses like the dictator.
	There's a reason that communist countries can't produce art.
	It's this, because art is transgressive, because you're trying to make statements that are not always in vogue.
	You're trying to challenge an audience.
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	Oh. (laughing)
	It's so pretty. (laughing)
	Don't shoot it down.
	Let it flow above my head.
	What should we do?
	What should we do?
	No, no, no.
	I just want to be clear that I ordered them not to do this joke, but I was overruled by my generals.
	I heard somewhere we have a $100 million entertainment budget.
	How much when... 10% for the big guy.
	Is this going to be there the whole time?
	It's going to be here for eight days, actually.
	Yeah, it's going to fly over all of our important installations.
	I didn't know it was an actual balloon.
	That's surprising.
	Sophisticated technology.
	My hearing aid and or Corvette.
	Does it contain classified documents?
	What was it?
	No one knows.
	The comedy on this show has just been tremendous.
	I was going to say, this is the death.
	We just lost 20,000 viewers.
	No way, people deserve to lose limbs.
	Yeah.
	What is he?
	Oh my God.
	Is he slipping your hair?
	Mr. President, Mr. President, not again, Mr. President.
	(laughing)
	This is the most fun we're gonna have before he starts actually speaking, so.
	Let's bring it all out.
	Today, Jen Psaki said.
	No, Ms. Fritz, not Jen.
	I'm a great story teller, so I'm gonna tell you a little story.
	You're not even moving the mouth while you're talking.
	(laughing)
	Would you like to do this?
	(laughing)
	No walls?
	No, I don't.
	Dog face, pony soul.
	(laughing)
	My dad was standing with me in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
	One day on the street.
	Watching Sam Smith.
	(laughing)
	Two men.
	Mr. President, you walked with MLK, right?
	I did, but let me finish my story.
	It's funny when the mouth moves.
	Okay, thank you.
	I can't do it all the time.
	Not much.
	There were two men going at it like jackhammers.
	My father said, Joey, Joey said, that's what love looks like.
	And I said, thanks, pop.
	Corn pop.
	That's another story.
	No, Mr. President.
	No more stories.
	Thank you, Mr. President.
	Thank you, Mr. President.
	That's enough, Mr. President.
	The eyes are so realistic.
	Now I'm looking forward to the State of the Union.
	Yeah, they say there's no great comedy at The Daily Wire.
	That was me, I think.
	What about this balloon guy?
	Yeah, we haven't talked about the balloon.
	We probably should, Mr. President.
	I think we all got played with this whole balloon story.
	I agree.
	I think the whole thing is just a sham to get them out of having to go have their meeting with the Chi-Coms, right?
	And to get us to stop talking about Pfizer, as far as I'm concerned.
	It's amazing.
	Finally, there's a huge release on all this information.
	You get the guy who was a year below me in college, oddly enough, the Pfizer exec guy.
	He's there.
	He says, yeah, we're doing directed evolution, gain-of-function research.
	Yeah, it definitely affects menstruation.
	Yeah, this, that, and the other thing.
	And then what?
	All of a sudden they say, hey, look, a squirrel.
	Look up there.
	Hey, look, there's a shiny object in the sky.
	And then we all fall for it.
	Do you really think they were just trying to get to the Chinese conference?
	Yes.
	Wow.
	Why?
	Why would you think that?
	Because I think that the Chinese are spying on us all the time.
	This is from Montana?
	Yeah, but this balloon was the size of five Greyhound buses.
	They keep showing it as a thing at a carnival.
	It was enormous.
	It was like, you know, you can't let them fly this.
	It was carrying the Wizard of Oz.
	I agree that you shouldn't, that we should oppose Chinese spying, but they didn't even stop.
	They didn't even do that.
	Yeah, they didn't.
	They just blew it up, made a big news story, drug it out for as long as the news cycle would allow for it to go.
	Oh, you're attributing cleverness to... Yeah.
	Oh, I look smart.
	No, what happened is that he's an idiot, and he was like, oh, look, my generals told me that there is a Chinese spy balloon above American soil.
	Perhaps no one will see it.
	After all, I cannot, since I'm clinically blind.
	And a bunch of people in Montana looked up in the sky, and behold, an enormous spy balloon.
	And they said, a spy balloon!
	And Joe Biden said, huh?
	Donald Trump gazed directly into the sun, looking for it.
	And for eight days, it floated above American soil, moving slowly past all American military installations.
	And then, I can tell you, honestly, like, the proof is in the pudding.
	The timeline is obvious.
	This thing was crossing American soil early last week.
	On about Friday, this started to become a major issue for Joe Biden.
	And everyone on the left came out and said, you can't shoot this thing down.
	Why would we shoot this thing down?
	We can never shoot it down.
	If you question him shooting the thing down, it's because you just don't understand foreign policy or politics.
	Of course he's not going to shoot it down.
	They were fully in control.
	And then Saturday morning, the schmuck comes out and he's like, well, I said on Wednesday, We should shoot it up.
	And apparently everybody ignored him.
	And then it floats all the way to the ocean.
	It's like, it's over water now.
	And then they send the F-22 to kill it.
	The whole thing is ridiculous.
	And the clearest attempt that was an obvious indicator that it was an attempt to backfill is that they sent out anonymous Defense Department officials who tried to claim that this happened during the Trump administration.
	Unbelievable.
	It's a lie.
	It did not happen during the Trump administration.
	Even John Bolton said it wasn't true.
	They're calling him xenophobic, hate Chinese people, and then now they're like, oh no, he did let them float balloons.
	I mean, that was the most ridiculous part.
	The PR maneuver to try to blame Trump was like, wow.
	And then you saw the response after all the officials, not just pro-Trump ones, but John Bolton, you mentioned, who said, I've never heard any of this.
	They said, oh well, yeah, we, no, they were there, but we didn't see them.
	We missed it.
	Yeah, but we definitely know they happened.
	You're right, that's totally the same thing as a giant Chinese spy balloon floating across the entire continent of the United States over the course of a week.
	Can I just say, you have to twist it into a dog.
	Are you gonna hold that the whole time?
	I think he has to.
	How dare you suggest that the president is a meat puppet of other people?
	By others.
	Outsiders.
	The president is his own paper bag.
	How dare you suggest that?
	Is that what symbolism is?
	You're the one who said that.
	Yeah, hold on.
	I'm seeing symbols.
	Who's going to be the most excited when he comes in?
	That's what you really wonder, right?
	Like, when he walks in and they do, like, they all pretend to be excited and, like, as if our world... Oh, great!
	So great to see you guys.
	I invited Bono because he's famous.
	I hope they fly the Ukrainian flag again and Bono... I mean, this is crazy.
	Literally, what is he doing here?
	I told you, when I was a young man, when I was an actor, I had a job as a fake sommelier at George Soros' wedding.
	It was one of my weirdest jobs I ever had.
	Do you know who was at the wedding?
	-Bono. -He's at, like, every liberal event in the world.
	Bono.
	-I love the excuses they have for this.
	So, clearly, they invited Paul Pelosi so that Joe Biden can point up there and be like,
	"And there were people --
	there were people in this room who wanted him to be hit in the head by a weird naked man."
	-Who he'd called for a game.
	Right, exactly.
	That is why they're doing that.
	Other people are a bunch of cancer survivors that he can talk about his cancer moonshot.
	Because as we all know, the thing that prohibits science from solving cancer is that we don't have sufficient commitment to solving cancer.
	That's it.
	If we just focus on cancer more, that will do it.
	That's an exciting one.
	And he's also having the family of Tyree Nichols, who they didn't care about five minutes ago and will not care about five minutes from now.
	But Joe Biden can pretend that he cares deeply about the fate of- Yeah, Ben, you talked about this on your show last week about how Disgusting it is that politicians show up at funerals like that.
	I'd never actually thought about it.
	It is genuinely disgusting.
	It's gross.
	It's so gross.
	You listen to the speeches that Kamala Harris and Al Sharpton gave at that funeral, and it is just a political stump.
	It's gross, and they do it all the time.
	So you remember the Paul Wellstone funeral?
	Where they showed up at the Paul Wellstone funeral.
	Paul Wellstone was a senator from Minnesota.
	He died in a plane crash, and they basically held a political rally.
	And then you remember that there was the Arizona shooting, and Barack Obama showed up at the memorial for victims of the Arizona shooting.
	He did a whole gun control pitch.
	And then he did the same thing in Dallas.
	And people showing up randomly at the funerals of people they don't know, and then giving speeches there, is disgusting.
	I'm sorry.
	George Floyd's funeral, the Holiday Funeral, anything could have been grosser than that.
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	I only wish I had hair for me to smell.
	Don't let that stop you.
	Can we talk about the Paul Pelosi thing for a second?
	We just saw Paul Pelosi.
	Can we talk about the Paul Pelosi thing for a second?
	Because I think it was a totally botched, the conservatives botched the whole story completely.
	Of course.
	By, you know, and I don't blame people for speculating because they're being weirdly secretive about things.
	They just released the 9-1-1 tape.
	Selective leaks.
	Right, and then we find out later that they only didn't release it because the 9-1-1 operator Completely makes a fool of herself, and I think that's that that was the issue with that But the real story with the whole which I said from the beginning.
	It's like It's very plausible that this really was just a a homeless drug addict in San Francisco that broke into the house There's no reason to get into any good theories about gay lovers and all that kind of stuff so the real the real story is that The crime problem in San Francisco is so bad that even Nancy Pelosi's house isn't safe.
	And that should have always been the point, but instead we went into this whole thing about being hookers.
	I do think one thing that is true, though, is that when these incidents tend to happen to her, they keep it very hush-hush.
	Let's just give you an example on the right.
	Brad Parscale.
	When he got arrested, that tape was out before he made it into the cruiser.
	It was like circulating on Twitter.
	It was unbelievable how quickly it was released.
	And for whatever reason, when it involves her husband, it's so hush-hush.
	They go through everything not to give the public any information.
	In this situation, actually, when it actually was revealed, I thought this would have helped them.
	Right?
	It actually would have put to bed a lot of the conspiracies.
	When I saw it, as much as I detest Nancy Pelosi, you can't see an 80-year-old get hit like that and not feel a tremendous... I mean, like, I was like, wow, I feel really bad that he actually went through this.
	This is an old man that's getting beat up in his own house, and you hear the call, and it's like he's in such pain for the dispatcher to understand, no, this is a hostage situation.
	And he's not being subtle either.
	I need you to just, you know, have a basic level IQ here to understand.
	She's trying to hang up the phone.
	She's like, okay, bye.
	He's like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	No, not by... Remember how they originally played it, that she did an amazing job?
	Yeah.
	They did, for like weeks.
	They saw the subtleties of what he was saying, and she could see his coded language.
	It really was an amazing thing.
	And they took down that reporter at NBC, and he actually factually stated, so there was a lot of room for conspiracy because they were being... What I said at the time, I said at the time, it is perfectly plausible that this was exactly as it has been described to us.
	But, the problem is, they've created an environment where it is also plausible that if Paul Pelosi were hit in the head by a gay, naked lover, they also wouldn't tell us.
	The media is now so uninvested in ever scrutinizing anything that could have any negative consequence for the Democrats, that we're ready for, the conspiracy is happening all the time right there in the open, so we're ready to not believe or believe anything on that basis.
	We were all asking, who's lying and who's covering up?
	Is it the Democrats or the Republicans?
	What everybody seemed to miss here is there was a third party that could have been lying and trying to hush stuff up, and it was the cops.
	Who released the information to the press that, oh, actually he referred to the invader as a friend on the phone call?
	Who released to the press, oh, he was in his underwear?
	Oh, he had a drink?
	Oh, he had this?
	It was the cops who were releasing that to fuel the conspiracy theories to cover their own derrieres because they were incompetent.
	Can we talk for a second about what the political situation is for Joe Biden going into the State of the Union?
	I hate the State of the Union more than any of you, probably all of you combined, with the fiery, passionate hatred of a thousand sons.
	I despise it.
	I think it's a monarchic institution that elevates the Article 2 branch of government above the Article 1 branch of government.
	Those are references to articles that That Joe Biden's judges don't know about.
	And the pathetic spectacle of a doddering old fool walking down the aisle to the throngs of cheering morons, pretending that they like him and care about him, while we all sit here for 60 minutes and watch him read a canned speech from a teleprompter in which he pledges to do a bunch of things that he will not do and lies a bunch, is the worst thing in the world.
	But what exactly is he trying to do?
	Is this, as they say, the launch of his second Successful?
	I was going to say a second presidential campaign, then I had to correct myself because he's run for president like one million times.
	So presumably he's running again or at least being ambulatorily wheeled again toward the presidency.
	What does he have to do here?
	Well, I think that the one thing that always gets me about Joe Biden is after four years of listening to how Donald Trump lied about this and lied about that, and no one's going to defend Donald Trump as the icon of truth.
	He was kind of a carny barker, exaggerated things.
	This guy lies with such aggression that it's offensive.
	It is offensive to be told that you can afford bread when you can't.
	It's offensive to be told that everything is tickety-boo when everything is going down the crapper.
	This immediate moment.
	He has had this jobs report, which I'm suspicious of.
	I'm not sure I believe this jobs report, which has cut the unemployment rate to something like its lowest level, which, by the way, is actually bad for inflation, which is our real problem.
	Right now we have this tremendous problem that ordinary people are having a hard time buying the staples.
	That is the state of play.
	Would you like me to explain the jobs report, by the way?
	The reason that the jobs report came in hot at 500,000 is because they underestimated the jobs growth in November, December.
	And so when you average it all out, it doesn't look nearly as good.
	Right, exactly.
	So you tend to get these kind of like weird snake-ate-the-rabbit kind of bumps sometimes in the employment markets.
	But the real problem is that there's only one chart that matters.
	And that is the line of employment before the pandemic versus after the pandemic.
	So if you look at the line of employment before the pandemic, it looks like this.
	The pandemic hits.
	If that line were to continue, it would be in this trajectory.
	There is a, the pandemic hits, the job market goes boom, plummets.
	When it starts to recover under Trump, it takes a V shape.
	It goes like directly straight up back toward that line, that original line.
	And then Joe Biden takes office and it levels off.
	And so it's been trailing almost in parallel what the line should be, except there's all
	So all those missing jobs are missing.
	So we've regained the jobs that we lost during the pandemic, but we should be well ahead of that considering that we're now two years out of the pandemic.
	But the important thing is you have polls showing more people than ever saying they're unhappy with the government.
	A, the government is the biggest problem we're facing.
	That's the largest problem, according to the polls.
	B, people say they're worse off than they were two years ago.
	A record number of people say that they are doing worse than they were doing.
	two years ago and a record number of people are saying that the government is going in the wrong direction.
	To have this guy stand up and say everything is great, it's just insulting, you know?
	So it's boring and insulting, which is just a bad combination.
	I'll tell you what's not a bad combination.
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	Magnificent.
	Smells like victory.
	You win.
	You killed it.
	I believe that.
	Honestly, if I had to rate, that was... That's correct.
	You're getting strong now.
	Never heard better.
	You're getting strong.
	Yeah, I think that it's true.
	Donald Trump's lies were so offensive because of the way in which he lied.
	And when I say they were offensive... You mean hilarious.
	People will get angry with me.
	They were hilarious.
	People get angry, but they were offensive.
	They offended our sensibilities because we were used to being lied to the other way.
	All of our sensibilities were sort of formed to embrace political lies.
	And then he came along and offended those sensibilities.
	And in some ways that was his superpower when he did it for the good.
	When he did it to cover his own rear end when he was doing bad things, when he was not being fully honest.
	It was a bad thing.
	Trump was a mixed bag and he's extreme in both directions.
	You didn't hit the slides in the same way because you did that.
	But they did offend the political sensibility and this is why the left really thought he was Hitler.
	This is why people were weeping in the streets and all this crazy stuff.
	People lost their minds.
	The strange thing about politics Yeah.
	is that Joe Biden's lies are so much more consequential.
	They're so much more damning.
	They're so much--
	They're planned.
	They're so much more planned.
	Yeah, yeah.
	He is truly one of the most corrupt people in American public life in our lifetimes.
	But his lies do not offend the sensibilities of the public.
	And so, people at home can't afford eggs, and he's gonna get up there and say that we have a great economy, and people will fill the fence, but they'll look around, and there won't be anybody screaming in the streets, and there won't be any journalists fainting, and there won't be any celebrities, you know, threatening to leave the country, and so they go- They'll be defending the lies.
	But that's the press doing that.
	They create that atmosphere.
	I don't believe that.
	I understand that that's what it is.
	I think people at home are, like the Democrat people that I know and am friends with and that are in my family, actually they are offended.
	And I think that we don't believe so because the press pretends not to be offended and we take that...
	Yeah, the press is telling us, oh, it's on a big deal, and they keep moving on.
	But the average American, I think, is suffering enough.
	They understand that they're being lied to.
	They're not happy with the entire balloon gate, Chinese balloon gate.
	And so I do think that there is this disparity between what the press says and what the people actually feel.
	And I think that's shown by, you know, CNN suffering, their numbers and things of that nature, because they're no longer seeing their viewpoints reflected in what they're watching.
	Numbers is a kind word to use about their audience.
	And also, to answer the original question, To answer the original question, what does he need to do tonight, politically?
	Yes.
	Talk to the bag, man.
	The answer of course is that it really doesn't matter at all what he says.
	The State of the Union has zero political impact whatsoever.
	I don't think there's any evidence that it affects the polls in any kind of long-standing way at all.
	Not in the year before an election year.
	Whatever happens tonight, everyone has forgotten it by Thursday at the latest.
	Matt, would you like some ice cream?
	Donald Trump has already forgotten.
	I'm sorry, Joe Biden has already forgotten.
	Did you see the Washington Post column today saying, the headline, I'm not getting it verbatim but it's pretty close, eggs are not really that expensive.
	I love that.
	The thesis was, when you really think about it, you know, when you really think, I know you're paying 5, 6, 10, 15 dollars for eggs, when you can get them.
	They were sold out the other day at my grocery store.
	Oh yeah.
	They're not, it's really actually These are not the droids you're looking for.
	They're actually, these are not very expensive eggs.
	I was a chicken farmer once.
	No, you were not, Mr. President.
	Is there going to be a part where he blows into the bag and just smacks it?
	This is the thing, though, that when there is no social proof to reinforce the thing that you're feeling inside, you tend to second-guess yourself.
	And I think this is part of what explains the poor showing that we had on election night.
	Why did Barack Obama... Barack Obama won re-election with the worst sort of economic indicators of any president who'd won re-election in modern life.
	But there was no social proof to validate the way that people felt.
	This is the power that the media has.
	If we get that Obama had the advantage of that 2008 crash...
	So even though his economic numbers, we knew his economic numbers were bad, but they were better than when he took office.
	He lost a ton of votes.
	He had the entire press corps with him.
	And so they kept saying, oh, they're so much better, such an improvement, so great.
	I mean, there was a piece in the New York Times today, I think it was, in the op-ed page, or knucklehead row, as I call it, where Michel Goldberg... He has no money.
	She's a wonderful columnist, because she sees like a sort of shadow.
	She sees the truth, but she's not allowed to think outside of the New York Times philosophy, so she can't quite grasp what it is.
	So she wrote this thing saying, this is a great president.
	This is a great, great president.
	It was like listening to somebody...
	He's a great president, but he shouldn't run again.
	But he shouldn't run again.
	Which is the first time, which by the way, is kind of the subtle undertones,
	a lot of what the, the problem for the Democrats of course,
	is the people backing her up are Kamala Harris, the least talented human being,
	maybe ever to walk the earth.
	I mean, it is truly astonishing, the levels of talent that she does not have.
	They are nearly infinite.
	It's like an infinite regress of talentlessness with Kamala Harris.
	And so, they kind of are wedded to her.
	And every so often you'll see a hit piece come out about Kamala,
	and it's like, okay, Pete Buttigieg, in the study with the wrench,
	because you know that he's setting all of those up.
	The truth is I think that the best ally that Biden has is not even the media.
	The best ally that he has is that he is a dead person.
	I'm not kidding you.
	It is that he is an empty bag.
	Indeed.
	Because he's a deeply unthreatening human being.
	He's a very threatening person in terms of his actual politics and the stuff that he wants for the country is actually genuinely terrible and in some cases even evil.
	But, he's also non-threatening because you look at him and you're like, he's such a non-entity.
	Like, can you get- Like he's walking- the president's walking into the joint session right now.
	Well, he's walking?
	It's a miracle!
	It's a miracle.
	And you just look at him and he does look so harmless.
	Right.
	He's an old man whose eyes have closed because he's got so much Botox in his forehead.
	He's senile.
	This is a guy who pooped his pants in front of the Pope.
	I wondered when you'd get an issue.
	He's been waiting all show for that one.
	The question though is how do you feel, how do you generate a sense of threat around a person who is like that?
	You can try to generate a sense of threat around his agenda but he doesn't have the same sort of Threatening talent.
	See, it takes talent to be threatening.
	Barack Obama was a threatening president specifically because he was charismatic and talented.
	But I keep imagining what a textbook is going to look like 500 years from now when they show us the last president of the republic and he's just doddering old mail.
	Like, this was the man they thought was going to... It's threatening in a different kind of way.
	I understand that he's not evil looking, but he looks like the end of the republic.
	It doesn't say something about him.
	Right, and that's the problem, is that the American people generally don't like to look directly in the mirror.
	When we look at the problems that the country faces, the reality is we can blame our politicians all we want.
	A lot of this is just generated by the American public.
	I mean, this is a democratic republic, and the fact is we keep electing these dolts over and over and over again.
	And that's why the Chinese feel so just sanguine about floating into nearly every arena of American life and just being...
	What's happening right now?
	Xi Jinping is sending us messages.
	I'm feeling threatened.
	Andrew Klavan, would you like to shoot that down for us?
	I was looking for something sharper.
	It's Sputnik flying overhead.
	The flamethrower, Michael.
	The flamethrower.
	You heard the flamethrower go.
	No, no.
	Drew almost got it.
	This is the most amusing things we'll get all night.
	An old man trying to prod a balloon with a cigar.
	Yes, we have reached that point in the broadcast and we haven't even begun.
	Actually, that's a great metaphor for the State of the Union.
	No, no.
	It wasn't lit enough.
	These Chinese are amazing.
	I'm almost made in America.
	So now here's the President of the United States, or the husband of the President of the United States, wandering through the room, shaking hands with a bunch of Supreme Court justices, and past Supreme Court justices, it looks like.
	And you have just Kevin McCarthy standing there, and Kamala Harris standing there, and they clap like automatons, and we all pretend that we like the President, which is always, that's always one of my favorite things about the State of the Union, is where the President walks in and everybody on both sides of the aisle pretends they like him, like for that brief moment before they start cheering.
	Oh, they do not with Trump.
	I want to know if Kevin McCarthy is going to tear up the speech.
	I hope so.
	I hope he makes it into some sort of origami thing.
	Maybe just into a swan or something.
	You know, what's amazing about this setting, though, I'm probably the most pro-State of the Union person here.
	Not this.
	I mean, this is going to be interminable and terrible.
	Because you're a monarchist.
	Because I'm Catholic Italian.
	But I like, the looks of it are so majestic, and the idea that we're all coming together and we actually have something in common, and both houses of Congress are meeting in the same place, and both parties.
	It's a nice fiction.
	Yeah, no, the idea of it, I mean it might be a noble fiction, but you know, I like it in theory, and then it always makes me think, why does the opposition party Yes.
	feel the need to give the response to the State of the Union.
	When you're doing it from some random room somewhere with Rubio grabbing for a bottle
	of water, it cannot look good.
	I was so sorry to see that Sarah Sanders is giving the response, because I like Sarah
	Sanders.
	I think she's very talented.
	She's the only Republican who probably won't run for president.
	Yeah, that's true.
	You're right, in 2024.
	But I just think, let them... Has there ever been a good response?
	No, there can't.
	There cannot be, for all the reasons that Michael was saying.
	I'm sorry, the president looks so addled.
	Look at him.
	He probably just had an adrenaline shock.
	He's not with us.
	He's just not with us.
	And he's... Alright.
	You know this is going to be bad?
	You know this is going to be bad?
	Because the New York Times, before it even began, ran a piece about how he's overcoming his stammer.
	They did, and it's like, that's just been in public life for longer than I've been alive by a factor of like... It took them 80 years.
	Alright, the President of the United States about to start.
	He's handing his speech to Kevin McCarthy.
	We'll be back with you at the conclusion of the speech to tell you how bad it was.
	We'll see you then.
	Wow, that was a hell of a horse, huh?
	Franklin Roosevelt.
	See, you're for fear instead of hope, and you're for darkness instead of light.
	What you don't understand, Ben, is that Franklin Roosevelt defeated Nazi Germany, and Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union, and Joseph Robinette Biden defeated resort fees.
	I'm so moved.
	He was very concerned about ticket fees at the airport, like significantly more concerned about that than China.
	China came much later in the speech than that.
	That was actually the part where he was just listing stuff he was annoyed by and saying he'll ban them.
	That's exactly how I would handle a state of affairs.
	Most relatable he's ever been on.
	Yeah, I know.
	That'll get him elected.
	So, I have a few personal favorites.
	You know, we're going to play the hits a little bit here.
	Yeah, let's do it.
	One of my personal favorites was the part where he said, you know, I approached all these oil companies and I told them they need to start drilling.
	And they said to me, well, how we can build new refineries when you're trying to transition away from oil?
	And I say, well, we're going to need oil for at least about 10 years.
	And people broke out laughing.
	People broke out laughing because you're making their case.
	Because you're a sad, screamy old man.
	Yeah, because you couldn't get the EPA approval to even start digging to build a refinery in 10 years.
	That's the actual truth.
	It is.
	You know, that was serious.
	I don't even have anything to say on the specifics of that speech because I felt the entire thing was like standing in a bar with a guy next to you who's drunk and won't leave you alone.
	And he's just, like, reacting.
	Look it up!
	Look it up!
	This is like slurring words for me.
	throughout all of that. I mean, people have a lot of conspiracy theories about
	watching the COVID shots. You better hope it's a healthy bout of amnesia because
	he's pretending that he is going to be the person that is fighting against Big
	Pharma as if he wasn't the same person that we all just had to fight.
	Tonight's State of the Union, sponsored by Pfizer.
	Because OSHA tried to mandate, Joe Biden tried to mandate via OSHA, the vaccine to everybody's arm.
	I just-- I--
	They're applauding, as if he's the person now that's fighting.
	I don't understand it.
	The insulin move with Big Pharma, he stopped Trump.
	Trump already did this, lowered the prices for insulin.
	He blocked it, and now he's reintroducing what Trump did.
	So I think people's memories must be going.
	This comment that we pay more for drugs than other countries is because they have single Pay your healthcare.
	So the drug companies have no one to bargain with except the government.
	And when they come to us, they have to bargain with various different people.
	If they're not making profits off us, they're not making profits off anybody.
	If they're not making profits off anybody, 20 years from now, when cancer might be cured, when some cancer might be cured, it won't be.
	You won't even know what you missed.
	You will not even know what they took away from you.
	I like the part where, so which one of you guys hit Paul Pelosi in the 100th hour, guys?
	I think it was all of us.
	I think it was all of us.
	It was all of us.
	It was all of us.
	Really, it was all of us.
	Who wasn't hitting Paul Pelosi in the head with a hammer while half naked and stoned out of their mind?
	It was really because, you know, the big lie and January 6th and Trump.
	So that's why Paul Pelosi got hit in the head with a hammer and also unity.
	But like, really a lot of unity.
	And Joe Biden wants to be like, he's standing up for all of us, especially the people who hit Paul Pelosi in the head with a hammer.
	I thought that part was really profound.
	And speaking of gaslighting, he brings Tyree Nichols' family on and then transitions immediately into a discussion about racist police officers when it was, of course, black police officers that killed him.
	And then also, can I say that this whole thing about the talk, well, white families never have to have the talk with their kids, but this is such nonsense.
	When I started driving, my dad explained to me that, son, if you ever get pulled over, be respectful to the police officer.
	If you don't agree with the ticket, Fight it in court.
	By the way, 10 and 2 on the wheels.
	Doesn't literally every parent have that talk with kids when they start driving?
	And as someone who gets stopped quite often because I drive badly, I drive too fast, I turn on my lights, I put my hands on the thing, you know, I say officer, it's almost the first word out of my mouth.
	Because the minute they hear officer, they know that you respect them.
	I roll down the window and say, I'm white!
	I cannot stress this enough, officer.
	I'll start using officer.
	Officer's good, yeah.
	How did you like the random screaming?
	Random screaming, Joe, is one of the best.
	Screaming whisper is when he goes really quickly.
	This was an historic State of the Union, and I'm not actually joking.
	It was the first time that an octogenarian has ever addressed The country as president of the United States.
	Congratulations to us, man.
	This is a great country.
	Literally anyone can be president.
	And it was an old man's speech.
	It was incoherent.
	It was rambling.
	It was shouting.
	It was off his personal peaks.
	The real giveaway, too, was because he's accomplished nothing and he's only failed, the whole speech was just about the stuff that he's definitely going to get to really soon.
	And by the way, the stuff he's going to get to really soon was fixing the luggage fees, right?
	I don't agree that he's failed.
	I think he's passed a lot of stuff.
	I mean, whatever the hell they call the inflation reduction bill.
	The global warming bill?
	The fact that it's bad is different than the fact that he's passed anything.
	But it hasn't fixed anything.
	He succeeded in doing the thing he wanted to do.
	Yes, but I just mean he can't come out and say inflation is really great.
	He tried to a little bit, but it didn't work.
	Yeah, not yet, not yet.
	Now we're going to get the whole routine from the media about the Republicans were so mean to him, guys.
	They were so mean to him because they kept yelling at him during the speech.
	He kept yelling at us.
	I thought that was good.
	I've never seen, has there ever been a State of the Union address where twice the president makes a claim and then walks it back in real time and yelled at him?
	He actually, because we have the transcript of what the White House releases beforehand, and he literally had to lie in full paragraphs of his speech because he said, the Republicans want to take care of Social Security and Medicare.
	And the Republicans are like, no, no.
	And he's like, no one wants to take your Social Security and Medicare.
	Isn't that great?
	And they're like, yes.
	And then he just had to cut out like two paragraphs of his campaign stump speech.
	You're right.
	I mean, he walked that one back.
	I did like the part where he was shouting about how no one wants to switch places with Xi Jinping, which I have some news for him.
	There are a lot.
	All of them.
	You know, we're ignoring the real issue, though, and this was an issue that Matt pointed out to me at the very top of the speech.
	Can we talk about the weird kiss between Dr. Jill and Kamala's husband?
	The weird, like, make-out session?
	Oh, was that Kamala's husband?
	It was weird!
	It was weird.
	It's not a personal matter here.
	What they do in the public forum isn't a personal matter.
	I'm actually going to push back on this and say that it was bad optics at a political speech, and I will enjoy for the next ten years of American public life tweeting out the photo with funny quips, but if you actually watch the video of it, it is It's a slightly out-of-touch thing for them to do in a political environment.
	If they did the exact same thing at the Grammys or... Or at one of the Eyes Wide Shut parties.
	No.
	My point is that... In the privacy of their own bedroom.
	My point is that if we had seen them do that at an Oscars afterparty, no one would think anything.
	Oh, they're having an affair.
	Let's... I just want to make a declarative statement.
	Alright, alright.
	The media are already going nuts over people yelling at Biden.
	Biden was yelling at us, that was the whole thing.
	I'm super tired of this whole nonsense where a politician who gives a speech like this, no one can yell back at him.
	I remember they did this with Joe Wilson also.
	Remember the you lie moment?
	Yeah, yeah.
	It was like the biggest deal in the world, you lie.
	Okay, first of all, you guys claim that Donald Trump was a Russian plant for like four years.
	Yeah.
	For four years, and you spent tens of millions, and you ripped up his speech.
	You're like, can we drop all of this garbage about how, you know, civility must dominate.
	No one can ever say to the president you're wrong when he's clearly lying about you.
	Have you ever seen British Parliament?
	Right.
	It's the best thing.
	We should do it like British Parliament.
	Like, the Prime Minister can get up there, and we should mock him, we should all yell at him.
	It's much better.
	It's much better.
	This is nonsense.
	Or our own Congress, historically, when they're beating each other over the head with spokers from the fire.
	Even when the King, now King, previously Queen for all of our lifetimes, opens the government in the UK, and they summons the commoners, the House of Commons, over to the House of Lords, For the inaugural speech to open the government, they actually go through this kind of pantomime as they cross through Westminster Palace of talking loudly and kind of stomping over there as a way of saying, we don't have to show respect to the king.
	So even in a true monarchy, they...
	When they have a truly monarchial speech by the monarch, they don't have this idea, this faux dignity kind of concept that we have.
	What Ben says is true, this question time where they beat the living daylights out of the Prime Minister, is because they have this useless king.
	That they can project their country onto.
	They can then go after their politicians as what they are, which is a line.
	Did you see the biggest applause line of the night, by the way?
	This was actually truly sad.
	They love abortion, right?
	The abortion one, when he said, well, I'm going to get up there.
	I, devout Catholic Joe Biden, I'm going to codify the killing of many more babies into federal law.
	And it was the most enthusiastic.
	Brought the house down.
	By the way, Pelosi clapping, all the Catholics.
	One of my favorite parts of these speeches is where the president of the opposing party pledges to veto legislation that will never even come close to his desk.
	The Republicans don't control the Senate.
	They ain't passing a national abortion ban.
	It's not going to happen.
	I'll protect you from this thing that's never ever going to happen.
	Can we talk about the gap between who he is and the policies he's pushing are going to be a real dilemma for the Democrats.
	Because he is, in fact, as Drew says, a vehicle for all of their cherished hopes and dreams.
	He's spending more money than has ever been seen in the history of mankind.
	He's pushing all of their most valuable and cherished goals, from transing of the children to completely restructuring the American economy.
	He's doing all of those things.
	But also, he's an incoherent old fool who's yelling at the clouds.
	And so that is a very odd combo.
	This is one of the reasons they are begging for Republicans to run a bad candidate in 2024.
	They're begging for it.
	Because anybody could tear this guy apart on stage who at least has a sentient bone in his body.
	Biden is trying to trans the kids.
	You know who else is trying to trans the kids?
	There are actually razor companies that are advocating that we trans the kids.
	But there's one razor company that's not.
	You know what that razor company is?
	Tell us.
	That would be Jeremy's Razor.
	Well, ladies, look at your man.
	Now back to me.
	Now back at your man.
	Now back to me.
	Does he have a coif as healthy and hydrated and magnificent as you see here?
	Of course not.
	And how could he, when he's using chemical-laced products from so-called men's grooming companies that hate him and his masculinity?
	This Valentine's Day, get him a gift that says, I don't hate you.
	Get him a Jeremy's Razors 30% off hair, body, or shave bundle.
	Unlike Mr. Claven over there, I use Jeremy's Tea Tree and Argan Oil Shampoo and Conditioner.
	And the results speak for themselves.
	Stop it, AOC.
	I will not date you.
	Ladies, your man isn't toxic.
	He just needs a shower.
	But order tonight to make sure it arrives by the 14th.
	Get your Valentine's bundle for 30% off.
	Just go to jeremysrazors.com.
	And there are people out there who think that I control you guys.
	I wrote every word of that.
	Why do we put all of our worst bits into the same...
	It's like a Greatest Hits in real time.
	Somebody on Twitter said, Ben is a better Joe than Ben.
	Oh no.
	I thought, that is fair.
	Put the bag away!
	Put the bag!
	Joe, come back!
	Oh no!
	Oh no.
	Joe's back.
	Oh good.
	Usually, right now I'm controlling him, but usually it's the media who are up his ass.
	It's a sad story.
	I do think that... He cringes in shame.
	He crinkles in shame.
	We are literally paid political commentators.
	Our only job in life is to watch the speech.
	And sitting here with you guys for the last almost 90 minutes, We could not watch the speech.
	We were all sitting here.
	I think they just came and took it before the cameras rolled.
	They had to print for us printed copies of it because it was so incomprehensible in real time.
	It is interesting to me how bad he is.
	Some people say, oh, there's no way he could run again.
	But I do believe it's a feature, not a bug.
	I believe his his age, you know, we were talking as he entered the
	chamber that in some ways his sort of harmless aesthetic, but it's not just his harmless aesthetic. I
	think it actually is his sort of disconnectedness and his mental slippage. All of that works
	to their advantage because it makes it makes him this sort of Trojan horse in whom they can
	plant all of their ideas. I mean, he really is more than more than any, you know, everybody
	everybody used to say that Dick Cheney really controlled George W. Bush and my
	argument is always, listen, that's nonsense.
	The president is the president. In the president is vested the power of the presidency.
	But it never occurred to me what happens when you have a president who is actually mentally incapable.
	But this is his strength, as you point out, Jeremy, is Joe Biden first entered national politics more than 50 years ago.
	That's right.
	And so it doesn't matter if he mumbles and slurs his words and screams and is totally divorced from reality.
	People are very comfortable with him.
	I feel bad for any person that poops their pants.
	Old or young, you just go, this person can't hold their bowels.
	And if they do it in front of the Pope, it's hard to be like, I really, really hate this person because he pooped his pants.
	And that's what you're trying to say, using a lot of nice words.
	Yes.
	What you're trying to say is real bad for any person that poops their pants in front of the Pope.
	And that is true.
	You are correct that he can run again.
	I don't think he will.
	It feels to me like the media is turning on him.
	I think it's purposeful.
	Suddenly they're willing to cover the Hutton-Biden laptop.
	They're willing to talk about his corruption.
	They're willing to find the classified documents.
	They knew that they were there forever.
	They're not idiots.
	And it seems to me like they're kind of gently kind of trying to back away from this.
	And I do think, Tucker Carlson had done a segment on this a few weeks ago, that they may be priming Michelle Obama for a run.
	And by the way, that's a serious run.
	That's not, and I said on a show, that's not something to mock.
	Michelle Obama is not something to mock.
	No, Michelle Obama does not run for president and not become president well before.
	I just, I have to push back, I have to push back on this idea though that this is a superpower of his that he is incomprehensible and unthreatening.
	It is a superpower if the Republicans don't run someone against him who is a statesman with a point of view.
	I think that, listen, I know.
	That's all right, I just thought of something else.
	Unrelated.
	No, but I mean, I think that Trump was an amazing moment in history when things shifted as they had to shift.
	They were shifting already.
	They changed under cover of Trump so that the Republicans are now the party of the working class.
	They are now the party of the ordinary man, which they weren't before.
	And the Democrats are the party of the elite.
	And I think that if somebody stands up who is an actual statesman, I'm not going to say it's Governor DeSantis, but it's Governor DeSantis who stands up and says, I can do the things that you need me to do in a statesman-like way, like the President of the United States.
	I think he will wipe even Michelle Obama off the map.
	You're such an optimist, Drew.
	What's that?
	You're a real optimist.
	I do not think another television personality, which is what Michelle Obama is, let's face it, is going to win against an actual person who stands for something.
	But that's very rare.
	I will say that there's something that was interesting, believe it or not, in what Biden
	was trying to do strategically with the speech.
	And you can see it in how he backloaded all the controversial material.
	So he actually backloaded, he knew everybody was going to tune out in the first 20 minutes,
	so he backloaded everything that had to do with the equity agenda, that was all backloaded,
	the policing stuff was all backloaded, the stuff about transing the kids, all backloaded.
	Even some of the environmental stuff tended to be more backloaded.
	He was focusing a lot on what he sees as the blue-collar base.
	He's trying to wrest back away some of those Trump voters.
	And so he's focusing a lot on protectionist economic policy, on subsidies for various types of industry, on unions, right?
	He thinks that he's going to run sort of the Tim Ryan, Ohio campaign, and that this is going to stand him in good stead.
	I don't think that his party is going to allow that to be the center.
	I don't think the media are excited about that.
	They wouldn't be cheering when he said that.
	When he said we need fossil fuels for 10 more years, there was like dead silence from the Democrats.
	Right, so I think he's going to have trouble squaring that circle, but you can see he's trying to make that move.
	He understands that in order for his coalition to be durable, he does need to expand it and win back a certain base that the Democrats have lost.
	I don't think the rest of his party understands that it's a real problem.
	On the point of wedges, though, we were knocking him because it was a horrible speech.
	There is one really clever thing he did, though, and it was right at the top, which is he got those two lines in about Kevin McCarthy and about Mitch McConnell.
	And there were lines to say, I'm actually looking forward to working with you, Kevin.
	I hope I don't hurt your career here by saying that, but Kevin, I think you're great.
	And Mitch, you know, it's going to be great to work with you too, Mitch.
	And that's obviously a dig at MAGA, but it's really a dig at both those guys, because he knows... We can see them in the eyes of MAGA.
	Of course, yeah.
	And after the most contentious House battle in, what, 150 years, I think it was?
	House leadership battle.
	That was smart.
	It wasn't his idea, but it was smart.
	I did like the part where he's going to fight inflation by giving everybody $1,000 back on an electric car and building 500,000 cars.
	That'll work.
	That'll pay for my Tesla.
	It won't, by the way.
	The Tesla was expensive.
	It's a great car, but it was expensive.
	It is true.
	It is peculiar that all of the Democrat social policy now is aimed at helping well-off people.
	Yeah.
	We're going to pay for your college.
	No, we're going to pay for your electric car.
	No, we're going to pay for your housekeeper.
	No, we're going to pay for your... Even the stuff about the non-compete clause.
	They're going to want to get rid of non-compete clauses.
	He pretends that this is about helping fast food employees, which apparently maybe there are a few that are on non-compete clauses, which I can't imagine.
	I never had one when I worked.
	The vast majority of that is not... Yeah, it's tech sector.
	It's high income.
	Resort fees.
	Yeah.
	No one worrying about how they're going to pay for eggs at home today is like, yeah, finally, resort fees!
	This actually is a great point, is that he was talking about how, like, very specific ways he was going to reduce very specific bills, right?
	I'm going to mandate that there are no more resort fees.
	I'm going to make sure there are no baggage fees.
	I'm going to make sure that you can get a refund on your airline ticket.
	And meanwhile, the elephant in the room is that inflation, which he says is quote-unquote down, is currently running at 6.5%, which Which is three and a half, which is more than three times, like 325% what they're aiming at, right?
	Normally you're aiming at a 2% inflation rate, it's running at 6.5% and that's down, right?
	So he's avoiding that like the plague and instead proclaiming that he's going to lower your costs in this way and that way and just hoping that you ignore the elephant in the room.
	There's so many sort of tacit lies that he was telling, his whole inflation reduction nonsense.
	Donald Trump blew out the No, it's just that the programs under Trump sunsetted, and so therefore less money was spent under those programs.
	Those were unanimously passed by the Republicans and the Democrats because of COVID.
	I love how he blamed COVID simultaneously for the crime increase, as well as for inflation, right?
	And then he said, you know, COVID just kind of magically shut, COVID shut down our educational system.
	No, no, you shut down.
	our educational system. He kept blaming extraneous factors for all of his problems,
	while of course he gets the personal credit for all. By the way, teachers are all going to get a
	raise, so there's that. He did such an amazing job not teaching during COVID. Yeah, exactly.
	They didn't teach during COVID. They didn't want to go back to work. Also, we have students that
	are suffering. People can't pass basic reading exams. Literacy exams are the lowest they've
	ever been in this country. You know what we're going to do?
	Let's give teachers a raise. That will definitely help the problem. And a couple more years
	of school. Yeah, because we need, yeah, let's extend it to daycare.
	It shouldn't just be 12 years.
	He said we need more years, and that obviously is something that parents should be really paying attention to.
	That's also something that he backloaded.
	Go on.
	That's how you fix educationalism is by putting more money into it, but if you want to fix law enforcement, you take money out of it.
	Yes.
	A perfectly sound argument.
	One thing that Matt said that I think is absolutely true is this is not going to be a political event at all, that usually the State of the Union has a blip afterwards, it lasts like two days, and it's going to go away, and this, I think, is going to be... But the only thing about this is that You know, it's interesting to us because we're political types and we like political stories, and it is a political story.
	It does tell us how the government is, how the strategy of the Democrats is playing out.
	But aside from that, it's not actually a political event.
	The only thing about it that I think helps Biden is that there keep being kind of rumors of his demise, and they are greatly exaggerated inside of his own party.
	Not physically, he's dead.
	They propped him on a horse, like El said, and they're just riding him around.
	But the thing about what keeps happening is that they proclaim that he was dead before the midterms.
	And then the Democrats slightly overperformed.
	It's back.
	It's back.
	Go ahead.
	Come on.
	Oh my... You didn't break it, but you brought it down.
	You did what Biden would do in nine days.
	That's amazing.
	We call him... America!
	After eight days, the balloon has been... Finally, finally.
	Yes, what a success.
	We took care of that thing right away.
	Tell us how you did it.
	Tell us how you did it, Mr. President.
	It was all me.
	I was here the whole time.
	I didn't see you anywhere, Mr. President.
	It was part of my plan.
	I actually only notice now that it's an ice cream cone in his hand.
	That's a nice touch.
	That's a nice little touch.
	Leave that poor woman alone.
	No, no, no, Mr. President.
	Not again.
	Nope.
	He's a country.
	If you want to spend even more time with us, you're welcome to come over to Daily Wire Plus.
	Yeah, I can't imagine such a thing.
	But we're going to do our members block here in a few minutes, and there's still a little bit of time to get your questions in.
	We're going to be taking only questions from members at the members block.
	That's why we call it the members block.
	Become a member at dailywireplus.com slash subscribe.
	You can get 40% off because it is our president is for sale sale.
	And what do we mean by our president is for sale?
	Well, we literally mean China owns the President of the United States of America.
	It's a subtle, it's a subtle lie.
	Now I get it.
	It's a rental.
	It's a rental.
	This is the worst show ever.
	Can you promise me a paper block that paperbag Joe Biden's not going to be there?
	Yeah, so I agree.
	Nothing's going to come of this.
	It was over before the speech was over.
	The political impact, you know, he almost went out of his way not to dream big.
	I mean, you could say that the cancer thing is big, except there was literally a plot line on the West Wing almost 20 years ago, whether or not to announce that we could cure cancer at a State of the Union.
	You know what they concluded?
	You can't.
	No, you can't actually say that.
	He's also been doing this schtick for like seven or eight years.
	That's right.
	Cancer moonshot.
	Yeah.
	Just one more year, guys.
	I think he's going to do it.
	I think he's going to do it.
	I hate... Bold statement.
	Feed me someone!
	Who doesn't want to be a musician?
	Feed me!
	No, please, take it all the way off.
	Take it all the way off.
	It was a good run, Joe.
	Can we go home?
	No.
	We can't go home, but we can go do our members block.
	Head over to dailywireplus.com right now.
	For the rest of you, we're going to catch back up with you on the other side.
	There are plenty more horrible political events coming this year.
	And we will be here to cover each and every one of them.
	We will suffer them all.
	We will suffer them all together.

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