Benny Johnson, chief creative officer for Turning Point USA, leverages Star Wars lore like Order 66 to engage youth in political discourse, arguing that Lucas's Nazi parallels illuminate modern authoritarian risks. He highlights the shift toward decentralized platforms over traditional media, noting how "authenticity" drives support for figures like Trump and Sanders while critiquing Democratic dogmatism versus conservative inclusivity on extremism. Ultimately, Johnson asserts conservatives are winning the culture war by mastering internet vernacular, suggesting meme-driven strategies effectively bridge cultural divides where corporate narratives fail. [Automatically generated summary]
What I am doing, and what I do on a professional basis every day, is I take the meme culture world, the meme world, prequel memes, Star Wars memes, I mean some of the best memes out there are Star Wars memes, and you apply that to politics, and you are able to get an intersectional point where you can get a young kid or some young person who might know Star Wars but doesn't quite understand what's going on with impeachment, and you can frame it, the world for them, based on Star Wars and actually bring them into the political process, which is very important.
And before, you know, normally when I start an interview, I kind of ask people their background, a little framing of the interview.
But I thought, first, what we're gonna do is we're just gonna throw to this video that you just put up on Instagram.
This is you going to, this is outside of the impeachment hearings?
Yes.
Outside of the impeachment hearings, you're asking questions about politics and Trump and impeachment all through the lens of a little movie called Star Wars.
Hey everyone, Benny Johnson here at the United States Capitol, where the impeachment trial of President Trump is ongoing.
The Capitol has tens of leftist protesters gathered at it, calling for the impeachment of President Trump.
Specifically, we're asking them if Star Wars references about President Trump are worthy of having him be impeached.
I am the Senate.
We're going to see if these leftist protesters believe that the president should be impeached, for instance, of killing a fictional general, General Grievous.
Apparently he was killed with a thermal detonator.
That's just like, concerning to a lot of people.
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And the rule of law, either we have it and we need to live by it, both the citizens and our government, or we don't and we don't give a crap one way or the other.
All right, so that's just a small portion of this video that you put out there, and I think now my audience understands why I wanted to throw that before we do anything else here.
Now, that one gentleman at the end did make a good point.
Should we not have taken General Grievous in and put him on trial?
I mean, he was the leader of the Separatist Army.
He had just taken over from Count Dooku, who's a horrible human being.
Not a single, I kept asking about General Grievous.
And you can see in the video, I keep pushing him like, people felt a disturbance in the force.
It's very much a dark side to have this technology with a thermal detonator and X-Wing technology to kill this general.
No one.
Nothing.
I even say later in the video that Trump should just execute an Order 66 and dissolve the Senate, and then he can just get rid of this impeachment fiasco.
Before we get to the Star Wars element of it and why Star Wars memes really do work, What does this tell you about a lot of the activists that are out there and people that are purporting to know everything about politics?
I'm not even talking about these five people specifically, but these people that are just out there protesting all the time, and then whenever you see them challenged, Crowder's really good at this, they just suddenly know nothing.
So the purpose of a video like this is never to actually make fun of anyone.
What I'm trying to do is to show that there is a bankruptcy when it comes to the understanding of why we are impeaching this president.
Why are these people actually out there protesting?
Every person in the video is protesting for Trump's impeachment.
Yet even when asked if they should impeach Trump for killing General Grievous, which was my question, should we impeach Trump for killing a fictional Star Wars villain?
They said yeah.
And so what I am doing, and what I do on a professional basis every day, is I take the meme culture world, the meme world, prequel memes, Star Wars memes, I mean some of the best memes out there are Star Wars memes, and you apply that to politics, and you are able to get an intersectional point where you can get a young kid or some young person who might know Star Wars but doesn't quite understand what's going on with impeachment, And you can frame the world for them based on Star Wars and actually bring them into the political process, which is very important.
Because I meme the hell out of Star Wars probably only second to you, right?
And there's something particularly about the prequels that the memes just, you know, how does democracy die with thunderous applause and I am the Senate and all of those lines, they seem so powerful right now.
And it's like, what do you think it is about Star Wars specifically?
that leads to this, where other movies, you can meme some things from other movies,
but not like the endless amount from Star Wars that just feels right for the moment all the time.
Star Wars was, if you go, if you rewind the clock back to George Lucas, he based the empire on Nazis,
and he based the rebellion on fighting Nazis.
And so for people like us, particularly, you were able to find these moral threads
that you can pull out of the basic Star Wars story.
The evil of oppressive, overarching, brutalist government, how it tries to squash hope, how hope must rise in order to fight that greatest evil, which is an oppressive, overarching, massive, usually by emergency powers government that can take take over all of our lives.
And that is the truth that this was based on.
And I think it hits at a human truth.
Truth that goes all the way back to our founding and much of the Renaissance good that comes from
the idea that man is man and man wants freedom and man has liberties that should not be corrupted
Well it's funny because even though you're doing it in a funny way there, we could talk about the idea
that should the Jedi have captured Grievous, He was the leader of the separatist army, right?
So he was an insurgent, but should they have been allowed to just kill him as Obi-Wan did, or should they have captured him and taken him in for trial?
That actually is an interesting philosophical point that we debate all the time, because that's to your point, that when we killed Soleimani, everyone was saying, well, you can't just kill the guy.
You have to bring them in for trial or the rest of it.
Memes are a piece of non-corporate, non-establishment media imagery that reflects a moment in culture and reflects something that we're all going through and explains it in a very simple and shareable way.
All right, well, I'm pretty sure we could do the Star Wars thing the entire way, so let's just do a little bit more, though, in case there's anyone out there watching this that doesn't have the appreciation of the Star Wars meme meeting point that we do.
You mentioned something really interesting to me right before we started about how the way the Star Wars movies have progressed, or regressed, I suppose, depending on which way you look at it, is really reflective of internet culture in general.
The fandom Menace is a real thing and we can The feedback mechanisms are now available in a decentralized universe where the studios have to listen to the consumers and where we are able to online demand something or ask for something or consume at a rate where it's a
instead of them just making a Star Wars and hoping we like it, they make a Star Wars
and then we tell them if we like it, right?
You can hear what happened after The Last Jedi.
And the studio heard it, and then desperately JJ comes in to try to like fix it.
And there are four to five different moments in The Rise of Skywalker where they papered over
what Rian did, and that's because of the response online.
And so this mechanism can actually make you more powerful than the studios producing these things,
these things and the general, I love democracy.
The democracy of the fandom is actually a wonderful thing.
Palpatine would be thrilled at internet trolls, basically.
It's really interesting, though.
I mean, that concept is actually kind of cool because, you know, studios come out with certain things that often are not good, and I think the best version of this in terms of internet culture is the all-female Ghostbusters.
It had nothing to do with it all being women, but it was a patently terrible movie.
And then the audience goes crazy, and then you get the next layer of this,
which I wanna talk to you about, which is suddenly the media that runs protection
for bad movies, right?
And then starts attacking the audiences.
And that's what happened in Ghostbusters.
We saw that happen in "Last Jedi" too, where they say it's all angry white male trolls
who hate "Last Jedi" or hate Ghostbusters, and it's racist Trump supporters who hate these things.
And it's the media then attacking the fan base at, I don't know, is it at the behest of the studio,
or is it just because the whole machine just kinda works like that, or what?
I think it has everything to do with what's going on in society right now.
I cover politics, but the election in 2016 was precisely this bubble.
The same thing that happens with a Star Wars movie or Ghostbuster happened in 2016, where you have a group of people that are so insulated in their own virtue signaling and woke-tivism and slacktivism, and they must insert that into everything
in their lives, and it blinds them to understanding what an actual normal consumer wants. And
so then you have the rise of something, of real anger, that the things that we cherish are being
destroyed, and one of the last few good things out there was Star Wars. And from both sides,
you have this kind of yelp, this anger from the base when we watched The Last Jedi and realized
that it's now just a serving dish for someone's political worldview, and you must eat it.
And it's like, dammit, no.
I mean, the orcs are not just at the gate.
They've, like, come in and they've desecrated the temple.
One of the last few things that we actually all could come together on was that we all kind of loved Star Wars.
And then that's destroyed, and you're going to get backlash.
This happened in 2016, you got the election of President Trump.
And this is happening now when it comes to our entire culture,
whether that be Star Wars or Ghostbuster or national politics.
What do you think about the idea that because big studios now run so much of our
entertainment that that also has fed all of this?
Like the Star Wars posters look exactly like the Marvel posters.
It's always the same thing, the big guy in the middle, it's Iron Man in the middle, or Rey in the middle, and then everybody else smaller after, and they look exactly the same, like the branding is the same, the messages start becoming the same, that we don't have new stories anymore.
And I said to you right before we started, I hate to say that in a way, because it's like, I want these stories to continue, and Mandalorian was totally fine, Yeah.
And that is something that I think people are very much hungering for on a national level.
Like the world has moved on from George Lucas having to look at World War II
Yeah, and that is something that I think people are very much hungering for on a national level.
And you're watching now people running for, speaking of new stories, I mean, look at the number
of people who've never been in politics that are now running and winning
and becoming very, very famous.
I don't like AOC.
I don't like AOC in the squad.
I think they're going to wreck the country if you give them power.
Listen, they have become heroes now because there's a new story, there's a new narrative out there.
And of course, the opposite of that would be multiple people who have never had any experience on the conservative side of the aisle running for office and following a Trumpian model of I am the outsider.
And the idea that there's a new story out there really gravitates, it really brings people in.
And again, you have a president who's pretty much Our version of that elected outside of the media bubble, outside of the groupthink that occurs, inside of the Acela Corridor between D.C.
and New York, and the groupthink said, like every Marvel poster looked alike, every poll looked exactly the same in 2016.
Every poll.
Hillary Clinton, remember the Huffington Post?
98% chance Hillary will win, right?
Take it to the bank.
You've seen the same compilations I have.
And so it's like every poster looks the same and people start rejecting it and wanting a new story.
And now you have...
Arguably, I mean very easily, the most powerful man in the world, the President of the United States, has been elected because people were so desperate and hungry for a new story, and rejecting the same stuff that's been forced on us for decades.
All right, so before we go too far into the Trump thing, and I wanna talk impeachment and how this is all related to media and all that, now let's go to where I usually start the interviews, which is, how the hell did you get into this whole thing?
Like, what brought Benny Johnson to sit here right now and talk to me about Star Wars?
I was raised in Iowa, and Iowa's a magical place where you can really see candidates up close.
One of the things that we force every candidate who wants to be president to do is eat pork chop on a stick.
You want to dehumanize someone, and you really want to break them down to their core elements, right?
Force someone like Hillary Clinton to eat a pork chop on a stick on a 120 degree humid day in the middle of the Iowa Remember that picture of Michelle Bachman eating the corndog and Romney trying it?
So as a Iowa guy, is it shocking or strange or backwards, or is it the way it's supposed to be
that in just a few weeks, this straw poll, which seems so antiquated and ridiculous in so many ways,
is the thing that is going to set the next eight months in motion, really?
You know, we're just in the lead-up.
We're in preseason right now still, even though it all feels crazy, but the straw poll starts this whole thing and someone could get momentum out of nowhere and You know, if Biden does really bad, he's no longer the front runner and the rest of it.
Does that seem crazy to you as someone that grew up in Iowa?
It's like the various gladiator feats of strength, okay, to get there.
Federalism.
I mean, it's one of the last cherished things of federalism is that every state is different.
And the way that this was supposed to work is every state was supposed to be their own actual governance, and the states wouldn't have even come together and signed the Constitution if we didn't write, as a libertarian you know this, very firm grounds of federalism that each state was unique.
To be clear, I'm not condemning Iowa in any way, as much as the process, it's always the same order every year.
It almost seems like we have to mix up the order, because then it all just becomes so entrenched that the fakery is too obvious, or something like that.
Yeah, and Joe Rogan, one of your colleagues, one of the people who are so special
in this decentralized media industry, kind of said it the best,
which is the guy's just been a communist his whole life and he's just told everyone about his communism forever.
And that sort of authenticity is really valuable now.
Authenticity is the currency of the Internet.
People know if you're being fake, and people know if you're putting on a show.
And when someone like Bernie, who's just an old crusty communist, Who has just been an old crusty communist his entire life, honeymooned in the Soviet Union, let's not forget, when he comes into an age that's...
Internet-centric, then his authenticity really shines through, and people really gravitate to that.
It's the same thing that brought a lot of people over to Trump, and it's the thing that is really, I think, driving the boom right now for Bernie, that is putting him now up ahead double digits in New Hampshire, up ahead almost double digits in Iowa.
I think that that, like, I am the same guy that I've always been, is something that is more attractive now than ever.
Do you think the world was just waiting for someone like him, like it didn't actually have
to be him, but that because of everything you're talking about and the way that things have changed
and we've watched mainstream media crumble and the internet rise and all that,
that it was gonna be somebody to do this reckoning and he just happened to be the guy?
Or do you think that that really is unique about him, the lens that he views the world because of the way he's survived media over decades and all that?
The world was waiting for the Internet President, right?
The President who fully understood the Internet and brought it with him to the White House.
And Barack Obama bringing in YouTube celebrities, that's one thing.
But Barack Obama was not the Internet President.
Not at all.
The Internet President is Donald Trump who hosts the social media summit at the White House.
I had the honor of being invited to it.
And you walk into the foyer of the White House.
I mean, famous.
It's been in all Hollywood movies.
It's, you know, from the time of Lincoln.
And there are huge memes.
Printed out, on boards, hanging in the grand foyer of the White House, Dave.
Like, this is the world I've been begging for my entire career.
You walk around, you look, there's a meme!
And there's a Game of Thrones meme!
And they're all there, like, hanging inside of the most sacred house in America, right?
The most cherished and valuable piece of real estate in the country is the White House.
One of the most recognizable places on planet Earth is the White House.
And here are memes.
Hanging inside of the grand foyer of the White House.
This is actually the Internet.
President, I think it's really fundamental that Trump gets audience.
He understands where an audience is.
And right now, today, there has been a dynamic shift in where people actually are and where people are Our platforms and where they wanna get their information are platforms and from influencers.
So the last time that we actually saw each other in person was at the Turning Point Student Action Summit about a week before Christmas, couple days before Christmas.
I spoke that morning.
You were sort of the emcee of the whole thing, right?
You're shooting t-shirts into the crowd and you're getting everybody going.
But you didn't warm up the crowd for me that morning.
I don't know what you were doing that Saturday morning.
I wasn't gonna bring this up.
I don't know what happened.
I did okay.
That's not even the point.
I did just fine.
The point is that I spoke in the morning and then Trump spoke later in the afternoon.
And then when he spoke, it was the first time that I ever heard him speak live.
And it did help crystallize one thing for me, which is, How the media takes an hour and a half speech that he gives and how they really extrapolate whatever they want out of it.
Because there's a moment that I'm sure you remember where Trump gets up there and he goes, he goes, I know more about windmills than anybody.
I've been studying windmills my whole life.
And then he goes on this riff about windmills.
Now, obviously he doesn't know more about windmills than everybody.
Obviously he's not studying windmills, but he makes some interesting points about how they build windmills and all of this other stuff.
Then I saw it happen.
So he does the speech, and he's sort of basically like a comic, and he's working the room, and he kind of goes off script and then comes back.
But then it was the next part, and this is where I really, it all kind of crystallized for me, was then later that afternoon, what do I see?
Of course, Vox, Media Matters, the rest of it, with all of their headlines, Donald Trump claims he knows more about windmills than anybody.
Donald Trump claims he's studied windmills his whole life.
And it's like, did he say that?
He did.
Is that in context?
No.
Do you understand sarcasm?
No.
And it's like, when you really see it that way, it did shift the whole thing for me to actually be there and then see the headlines.
There is such a thing as sarcasm, humor, still in the world.
It's not literate, it's not literal, right?
Also not literate.
Both, actually.
But a good meme is something that takes, that is funny, that uses humor, uses pop culture to connote a greater truth about the world around us.
And Donald Trump speaks in memes.
That's what a lot of people I don't think understand, is that this era was actually made for him.
When Donald Trump looks Hillary Clinton in the eye and goes, "'Cause you'd be in jail.
That's like an impact font meme.
That was a meme, right?
Like that was one of the most memorable, maybe perhaps the most memorable, if you play it on a big screen to an audience, which I do regularly, the most memorable moment in 2016.
And that was Trump just speaking in a meme.
Short sentences, understandable dialogue, Joke, right?
Sarcasm?
But hitting a deeper truth.
And that's the way the president speaks.
And the hyper-literal, perpetually wanting to be offended, corporate media that exists today, they don't get them, but at their peril.
Well, CNN, when I give a speech to college kids, CNN, sometimes I say something about CNN, not to be funny, I'm like, well, you know, CNN is one channel, and they laugh when I say CNN as if that's the punchline, because it's so absurd to them, you know?
They want to get their information from, and I'm just going to be complimentary here, you, from a decentralized non-corporate influencer who is going to bring them the information that they trust you, they trust guys like me, they trust influencers.
We are the new nightly news anchors.
Our memes are our new news program, right?
And the new broadcast network are these platforms that they can follow us on and see more of a dimensionality of us and the world around them.
And that's how they prefer to get their information.
So obviously I agree with you in the broad sense there.
It's like all the mainstream media then had to do was sort of incorporate some of us And instead of trying to destroy all of us, which is what they chose to do instead, right?
They decided to say we're all bigots and racists and all the rest of it and try to crush our jobs and crush our reach on top of big tech and everything else.
But all they had to do was bring on a couple guys.
ABC, all they probably had to do, or forget ABC, CNN, you know, six years ago, your phone could have rang and they could have been like, can you be the guy that takes us into the, There's an industry story about Blockbuster's valuation and Netflix's valuation.
So something that has been interesting about the demasking of corporate media, specifically on places like CNN, is that you're able to see, in the era of Trump, who they always were.
You're able to see, like a viral clip that's going around right now is this clip of Don Lamont.
And look, he also knows deep in his heart that Donald Trump couldn't find Ukraine on a map if you had the letter U and a picture of an actual physical crane next to it.
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He knows that this is an administration defined by ignorance of the world.
And so that's partly him playing to their base and playing to their audience.
The credulous boomer rube demo that backs Donald Trump.
That wants to think that Donald Trump's a smart one and y'all elitists are dumb.
You elitists with your geography and your maps and your spelling.
So why should you be... That rightfully makes a lot of people angry, that clip.
But why you should be encouraged by that clip, actually, is that it happened a week before it really went viral.
So few people were watching Don Lamond's show that no one even noticed.
They were just screaming into the abyss.
They were screaming into the woods.
The tree fell and no one heard it.
And I know for a fact, I know for a fact, because I can pull the Nielsen ratings, that good videos that we make at Turning Point get more viewers than CNN's entire nightly lineup.
This show, Dave Rubin's show, gets more viewers per video than many headline news shows on CNN.
A good video with you and Shapiro and Peterson will get more viewers than CNN's entire ratings the whole week!
But what do you make of the cognitive dissonance of these people?
The same people who said the deplorables, thus thrusting Trump to victory, are now doing that, making fun of people's accents, making fun of people's education, all of those things.
When it's like, let's say these people are, let's pretend for a moment that they're less educated and that's why they're voting for Trump.
Aren't you supposed to be a good lefty who would want to help educate these people?
I mean, the smugness of it is, I think, the most, you know, I get the media side of it, but it's the detachment from what they purport to believe, politically or philosophically, that I find more disturbing.
And you're also gonna watch us work through it in real time, which is one of the things.
It's why I do the events that I always do at Turning Point, where I go up there and I always make a point of saying, guys, I'm gonna say a few things that I know most of you disagree with.
And not only do I get invited back, but if anything, I think that's why I'm getting invited in the first place.
Half of my speech last time was about Star Wars, because it had just come out.
The funny thing is, I ended up, I didn't want to lead too much, remember?
So I was like, I wasn't talking too much about Star Wars.
Then we do Q&A, and I always say to the kids, kids, students, whatever, I always say, if you disagree with me, come up first, and yet all the questions were about Star Wars, and I was like, wait a minute, guys, let me get this straight.
I give a political speech, the President of the United States is speaking here in an hour, and you're asking me about Star Wars, and everyone was like, going crazy.
This is why you gotta ask questions about General Grievous, right?
This is why you have to use Star Wars, use the billions that have been put in to tell the Star Wars story, to tell a story about politics, about the things that are going on in the world today.
And the people that really understand that are the people that understand where audience is going.
And this is where audience is going.
Whether they can laugh, They can laugh and they can be Nero and strum the harp while Rome burns, which is what I get when I watch a clip like that.
When I watch a clip like that, I think about Rome burning and about Nero playing his harp.
And I think that's just them laughing and cackling, being the last little elitists on their little pedestals.
As their ratings are crumbling, as their advertising dollars are going through the floor, and as people are tuning out in record numbers, and as they're being beclowned, quite literally, on a daily basis, that is Rome burning.
Do you ever think when one of these clips is going viral, and again, I think you made a really interesting point that this existed for a while before it went viral, which shows you that no one is really watching this stuff, but do you ever think, ah, maybe we should just let it be and I shouldn't jump in on it on every clip?
Because sometimes I feel that, because, you know, you see these things happening on Twitter and you see everyone kind of doing their thing and making it bigger.
And then there's this other part of me that's like, you know what, if we all just started ignoring all of this, That we could really be maybe better focused on whatever it is that we individually are trying to build rather than
They call you a racist or a Nazi for being on something other than a corporate media platform, right?
Instead of inviting us in and having to do the hard thing, which is diversity of opinion, and actually lean in to diversity of opinion, they do the thing that losers do.
And I'm not saying that in the sense of like losers, I'm saying that in the sense of these are tactics of people that are losing.
They're losing their base, and they're losing their cultural war, and when you see them cackling about Trump supporters and mocking accents and Southern accents and things like that, mocking people's careers and jobs, that's the tactic of a loser.
That's not the tactic of a winner.
That's the tactic of a losing side that's attempting to score cheap points on someone who's already defeated them.
Right, like who are you bringing over when you're doing that?
Does anyone watch that and go, oh, these guys, they really get it?
Like, I guess, yeah, there's the sliver of the base that's in on the joke or something like that, but do you get anyone Anyone that they would want to bring over to them.
I am thrilled when liberals slide right into my DM and talk about how much they hate me and my content.
And this happens, of course, you know this, this happens on a minute-by-minute basis, but if my content is reaching them, the Star Wars video pisses off a ton of people, right?
You tricked them into thinking General Grievous was killed in Iran.
So something interesting happened a couple months ago.
There started to be this, like, rise of what I would say are genuinely sort of far-right People that were going after Charlie, going after Turning Point, showed up to my events, probably showed up to things you were doing.
And one of the things that I was super impressed by was the level of fight that I saw people on the right fighting these people.
Where what I see on the left, and my audience knows how I feel about this already, obviously, that the left, there's nothing too far left, right?
Ilhan Omar's not left enough, and Sarsour's not too left, and you're never too left or bananas to be associated with on that side.
It's too confusing, but it's very basic in its element, which is that if you are a racist or if you are an anti-Semite, you have no quarter in my movement.
Those are things that I don't, Play footsie with.
And we will disown you.
And if those are the things that, if that's your worldview, then that's not going to be part of the movement that we are creating.
It's as simple as that.
CNN can try and conflate that, and people can try and conflate that all they want, but it's just really clear when you lay out the words that are being said and what is being said.
It's really stark, but it takes bravery to do a thing like that and it also takes a little bit of
moral courage and it'd be really exciting to watch that type of a disownment of anti-semitism and of
the views that play footsie with or just openly embrace terrorist regimes and anti-semitic
tropes to happen on the left to happen on both sides.
Isn't this one of the few things we should agree on, Dave?
But we're all going to embrace Michael Moore and we're going to, you know, literally communist Michael Moore, communist AOC, and open anti-Semite Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
I made my bones in Washington and I like being close to my subject matter, right?
It's very important to understand how these people tick behind the scenes.
So I have a very firm pulse on D.C.
and Washington and how it works.
I pride myself in this.
I set myself.
You wouldn't know impeachment's going on in Washington.
You can sense when something big is happening.
Kavanaugh, for instance, this is an example of the entire city being enraptured by a thing that's happening that affects us all.
You can't go to a coffee shop and you can't take the metro without seeing Kavanaugh's face, without hearing about it, without having someone come up and talk to you about it, people yelling in the streets, people screaming on both sides, ripping signs.
Because when I was on tour with Peterson, it was the middle of the Kavanaugh thing, and we were doing a Q&A in Ireland, and people were asking us about the Kavanaugh thing.
And I thought, how bananas is this?
I'm in Dublin, and people can ask Jordan anything they want, and they're asking him his thoughts on the Supreme Court justice, the potential Supreme Court justice of the United States.
That has no bearing on their lives whatsoever.
There's a million other things that this guy could talk about that would directly affect them.
But it's like, I don't think anyone over there is talking about it because nobody's talking.
My neighbor, I kid you not, I was walking the dog the other day, the neighbor came up to me and he knows what I am and what I do.
And he was like, so how about that impeachment thing?
And the way he laughed was like, I don't even know what his political feelings are, but he laughed as if like, it's just like you would say it to somebody.
If you look at the polling, if you look at Democrat voters, they don't care.
And if you want to put a bow on this whole thing, what has establishment corporate media been covering nonstop, 24-7, wall-to-wall, since October?
Impeachment.
They have been making the case and doing their best, many of them propagandists for the DNC, making their best case for impeachment of President Trump.
And a guy like me who has a show where I go out into the streets and talk with people, I went out into the streets of Florida, swing state, very political state, and asked people if they had been convinced or if they even knew why the president was being impeached.
And the responses I got in two straight hours of asking probably four or five dozen people was, no.
I mean, quite frankly, no.
They haven't been convinced.
They don't really understand why it's happening.
And all of the full force and weight of full establishment media and everything they've built and their entire kingdoms come together to cover one thing and no one cares.
And it's not getting through.
And it's not making sense.
But you know what does fly?
A meme on my Instagram about how stupid impeachment is.
Are you worried, putting aside the reasons that you enjoy the meme wars and everything else, I mean, are you worried that even if Trump wins, that the stage has been set here, that they'll just try another impeachment after this, and they'll just try another, that sort of the ship has sailed.
They've said, this is the route we're going.
They're saying, you know, now the new thing is he's not gonna, he won't leave the presidency.
And that's another reason we have to impeach him.
He won't leave.
I mean, they're the ones that won't accept the last election.
Like, there's so many backwards, you know, they usually tell you more about themselves when they're claiming what Trump will or won't do.
But are you worried about that just for the health of the republic?
I'm worried about that, actually, that let's say Trump wins again, which I suspect he will, and that if that happens, that we then just get another four years of this, and we'll ultimately have had six years of just endless nonsense.
That's what's crazy about being in Washington, being on the ground, is that there really is no energy there.
Something happened this last week.
Two big things, impeachment and March for Life.
March for Life had hundreds of thousands of people at it.
The city's a nightmare.
The city's catastrophic at the March for Life, whether Trump speaks or not.
Trump spoke.
Catastrophic.
Can't get anywhere.
I mean, it's easier to find a lifeboat on the Titanic than to try to find an open Uber or to try and get anywhere in the messed up grid at the March for Life because there's so many people in the city.
There were multiple impeachment protests.
I covered them.
It was legitimately tens of people showing up.
I can tell you honestly, I'm not trying to make fun of them.
I can tell you honestly, less than 100 people showed up to each of these pro-impeachment rallies.
It is not something that, it's not something that there really is any energy on that level, on the grassroots level, and polling shows this.
Polling shows that Democrat voters are like, just get it over with, just get it over with, let's move on, this isn't helpful.
It almost seems like that's where we have to get to this thing, to really kill this thing.
And I did this post on New Year's Day that went pretty viral about how this will be the end year of the woke stuff.
It never gets fully killed, but I think this will be the year that it fundamentally gets crushed enough to change or cause the split in the DNC.
But it seems to me that if you get the Trump-Sanders thing, Then we can sort of put, everyone can just put all their cards out on the table at that point, right?
It's basically capitalism versus socialism.
What do you want, people?
And the entire world will, by the way, be voting for Trump because nobody, no sane person in any other country wants America to become socialist.
Yeah, that's hard to explain to people in America for some reason.
This is why there's open warfare right now in Berlin.
Open warfare.
Democrat establishment are full of people who are investors, who are very wealthy, who have made money off the capitalist system, and they do not want to lose it all.
My crazy Bloomberg theory is that Bloomberg is running as an insurance policy to ensure that Trump wins.
I know that sounds nuts, but the idea being that if Bernie gets it, Bloomberg runs so that he can get maybe 5% of the decent Democrats, the old school liberals, thus making sure that Bernie loses because for as much as Bloomberg hates Trump, he at least likes capitalism.
I'll tell ya, if Bloomberg does not, Get the nomination, and if he does not become president, he can still, there's still a position open for him that he will be beloved and cherished throughout the land for, and that I think he's perfect for, which is playing Baby Yoda in the next season of The Mandalorian.
He's the perfect size, he'd fit in the costume, all right?
He has like the sensibility, I think he has the sensibility to play Baby Yoda, season two, Mandalorian.
If you're out there, okay, Disney, if you're listening, Disney, Yeah.
long enough, you get real beaten down as a conservative in D.C.
over the last couple cycles, and then you look at the actual data that is being produced right now from swing states, from the general electorate, And the same things that have always been true are true still today in the sense that people won't vote against a thing that helps them.
The American economy is doing better than it's done perhaps in the history of this country.
There is a lot of data to support that and that certain groups that are typically have a rough go are doing better than they have ever done in the history of this country and that people will not vote against their own interests.
And right now economically things are just Just going gangbusters, and so it just doesn't matter if Trump kills General Grievous with a thermal detonator.
People are going to not vote against their own self-interest.
And culture is something that can be shifted on a paradigm and can move quickly.
And if you play it right, and if you speak the language that the new audiences of the world are speaking, then you can control, you can be the person who creates the culture.
and who really does paradigm shifts.
I mean, look at what Kanye is doing right now inside of his industry.
Dr. Dre is gonna produce a Christian album with Kanye.
We could do a whole show on all of the dimensions there, but my God, that's a paradigm shift.
And that happened with Trump, where for the first time in my lifetime, and I was born in the last years of Reagan, first time in my lifetime, it wasn't about controlled decline for conservatism.
It wasn't about giving up and just stopping the boulder from crushing us.
It was about, no, we will move the boulder back up the hill.
And we can put this boulder back up on the hill and put our enemies, put the opposing side on their hindquarters and roll it down on them.
I like winners.
fight us for territory.
And so it's this, I know it's a meme, Dave, I get it, but it literally is winning and
losing.
I like winners, they're losers.
It really is winning and losing.
If you come at it from a standpoint where you haven't lost entirely, I love that.
And guess what?
That's what young people are attracted to.
Young people are attracted to people who win.
They're attracted to winners.
They're attracted to optimism.
They're attracted to your show for these exact reasons.
And may he rest in peace, Kobe Bryant, I mean, the guy was a winner in so many aspects of his life.
And he exuded that optimism, and he loved America.
I found this old viral clip of him talking about being... I shared it.
He was asked, like, is that cool to say America's the best country in the world?
It's like, it's cool for me.
People are attracted to that, right?
And there's thousands of people down at the Staples Center right now because that attracted people.
And for the first time in my life, conservatism kind of has that, like that winning sensibility with all of our new heroes and with this new Avengers cast of conservatives and the way that we are conquering the internet.