The Matt Walsh Show - Daily Wire Backstage Live at the Ryman

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Daily Wire's Backstage returns to the iconic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, TN, bringing together the most trusted voices in conservative media: Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Andrew Klavan, and Jeremy Boreing. Gain unmatched insights into the pivotal 2024 election that will define America's future, and prepare for the surprises and unexpected guests that make every Daily Wire Backstage Live unforgettable.   - - -    Today’s Sponsors:   Good Ranchers - Shop the NEW Daily Wire Good Ranchers Collection: https://www.goodranchers.com/daily-wire   Birch Gold - Text "BEN" to 989898, or go to https://birchgold.com/ben, for your no-cost, no-obligation, FREE information kit. Qualifying purchases will get an exclusive GOLDEN Truth Bomb. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Terms apply. Hey, everybody, this is Matt Walsh. Drop everything you're doing and check out the latest episode of DailyWire Backstage. You're going to hear Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Clavin, Michael Knowles, and yours truly talking about all the important issues affecting you and your family. You don't want to miss it unless you're leftist, in which case, you're canceled. Nine years ago, notorious troublemakers Jeremy Boring and Ben Shapiro made a decision that would send shockwaves through the political and cultural landscape of the world. They decided to found the Daily Wire.

A decision that would live in infamy depending on who you ask. From humble beginnings, they started filming the Ben Shapiro and Andrew Claven shows out of Jeremy's pool house. Which isn't that humble if you think about it. many people have a poolhouse. I've never had a poolhouse. I'd love one. The Daily Wire would continue to grow, adding Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, and lacking diversity, they decided to expand their roster to include a token Canadian, Jordan Peterson. They later added Jake, Blaine, and David of Crane & Company, and the incomparable Brett Cooper. And, and, and Morning Wire. And Morning Wire.

All the facts. All the facts, none of the noise, the news you need to know in 15 minutes or less. Join the Internet News Revolution. That is Morning Wire. It's a top 10 show. It brings you all the best type. Can you stick to the script, please? Come on.

Morning Wire never gets any moment in the spotlight. We're always in the recording booth. Yeah, seriously. And look, I'm going to ask the question that no one wants to voice, all right? Why are the two best-looking hosts in the entire company in an all-audio podcast format? Thank you. Thank you. It's outrageous.

Guys, we talked about this. All right, listen, you're not going to just forget about Morning Wire and roll some stupid hype reel or something. Yeah, they will. At the Daily Wire, we have a mission. the left and build the future. Am I racist? Please leave. We want to rename the George Washington Monument to the George Floyd Monument.

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This tragedy has only strengthened our resolve to expose the truth. Gentlemen, welcome to the historic Rime in Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee. Tonight, the greatest show at this time in this specific section of the country. Right now, Daily Wire backstage. live now please welcome to the stage the face of Mayflower cigars the man Michael J. Noh! Stop it get out of here! No! No! Thank you very much! We're kind, thank you. And now, score of

of the upcoming blockbuster hit, Am I racist? Thank you. He's clever. He's wise. He's possibly older than this very building. Thank you. To the stage champion,

a tiny had it, Tyson. Yeah, what's going on? Laham, brother. Oh, great to see you, Claven. Looking clean, looking clean. Live here in Nashville, Tennessee! Oh my good.

I got to tell you, I miss you guys so much. I know last time you saw me, I wasn't as thick, but I put on some weight. I got a, I don't... Are you just going to do the whole backstage live? Is that... Wait, wait, backstage live. I thought this was blackstage live. I am at the wrong show.

I'm supposed to be in East Nashville. right now. I got to get out of here. Hey, leave the grapes. Grape stuff. Unbelievable. Wait, wait, one more. Okay, hey, don't forget to buy all new razors at jeremyraisers.com, Amazon and walmart.com.

Black Jeremy, out! I get absolutely no respect in this. No. Unbelievable. Welcome to backstage live at the Riemann Auditorium. We're absolutely thrilled to be with you guys again. Of course, I'm joined, as always, by Andrew, Michael, Matt, Ben. Jordan Peterson sends his regrets we couldn't afford him.

A lot's happened since the last time that we were here, and we're so happy to get to be with you at this really critical juncture for the country. It's 83 days until America votes for the next president of the United States. If you go back in time, a mere like seven minutes ago, Joe Biden was a Democrat nominee. And it seemed like we were going to be able to sail our way to victory in November. We're not going to sail our way to victory. We're going to have to fight for every inch, which is why we're glad to be with you guys today. I hope in some ways this is a bit of a pep rally to remind all of us that we have to get out there now and win the game.

That's going to come down to every person here and every person watching at home. I've said it before, but you don't win presidential elections by supporting candidates. You win presidential elections by voting for candidates. There's an actual step. If everyone who said, well, I supported Donald Trump, had actually voted for Donald Trump, now you get a chance. We all get to get back out there in just a few weeks' time and try to make Donald Trump the president of the United States again and try to do something about this slow decline that our country has been in the midst of.

We do not have to tolerate it. What the Daily Wire believes more than anything is that we have a mandate to fight the left and build the future, that we must be optimistic and that we must be in action. That's what we try to do every day. and we do it with your help, and we're so grateful to get to spend this time with you. Thank you for being here. Choice Hotels gets you more of what you value. Comfort in.

It's calling your name. Save on the stay. Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Book direct at storeshotales.com. So my least favorite thing to talk about at backstage is politics. I think we're... You guys talk about politics all day. Every day, I think when we get together, we should talk about big issues.

You know, my favorite conversation, one of my favorite conversations we've ever had is on this very stage two years ago when we got into that great discussion about marriage toward the end of the show. And I hope to touch on some great topics like that throughout the evening tonight. But I do feel like we have to address the politics of the moment. We have to address the election and the changing dynamics in the election because that's the moment we live in. So, Ben, why don't you give us your perspective on exactly where we are? Well, I mean, I think that it's hard not to feel frustrated. and outraged at this point in American politics. Because if you go back a few weeks, it was clear exactly who the Republicans were running against, the current sitting president of the

United States, who, despite all appearances, is still supposedly running the country. And Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party decided that they were going to throw him out as the nominee and then leave him as the president of the United States. And so he's asleep on a beach somewhere in Rahobo Beach, Delaware, and the world continues to spin. And somehow the media have decided this is no longer important. They've decided it's not important to ask Kamala Harris any questions at all, as I've been saying on my show, we are now on day 25 of Kamala Harris becoming the de facto nominee for the Democrats without a single adversarial question, not one, not a single adversarial question. And what this means is that Donald Trump is not just running,

of course, against Kamala Harris. He is, in fact, running against the legacy media. Yeah. For about three weeks there, there was this nice illusion that they were going to actually do their jobs, and it's when Joe Biden basically pants them all on national TV. They'd spent three years saying that he was not senile. He was totally fine. And then he went on national TV and he appeared to be a complete dullard, a senile Alzheimer's written old man, which is what he is. And it made them all look terrible. And for about three weeks, they had to do their job. And then they forced him out and they went right back to the urine-filled kitty pool they really enjoy with the rest of the Democratic Party. And so they've been spending every day since Kamala Harris

was put in place without a single primary vote as the nominee, just enjoying this kind of warm bath of adulation that they've been creating themselves from their own bodily orifices, perhaps, with Kamala Harris. And it is, it is an amazing thing. thing to watch them perform this incredible transformation of one of the worst candidates in presidential history into a candidate of joy and happiness and love and unity. And it's unbelievably frustrating. It's incredibly frustrating. And it's also frustrating, I think, because if you look back a few weeks, Donald Trump was going to win. And now if you look at the polls, Donald Trump is, in fact, down in the national polling anywhere from two to five points. He's down in many of the

state polls. In the real-cler politics polling average, he's now trailing in the blue wall states that he needs, in order to win. So what does that mean? It means that the path forward for Donald Trump is to do something that he actually has not had to do in quite a while, and that is to define his opponent. Even in 2016, he didn't really have to define Hillary because we'd known Hillary for a full-on 24 years before she actually ran for president in 2016. When he was running against Joe Biden, he didn't have to introduce us to Joe Biden. Joe Biden had been on the political stage since well before I was born, and he was already president of the United States. I think those of us in the room, we're all very politically active, politically interested. That's why we're here. But that means

that we think that we know Kamala Harris. The American public does not know Kamala Harris from anyone. They really don't know her. They've never met her. They've never seen her, which means the only way that Donald Trump can change the trajectory of this election right now is to define Kamala Harris. That's the only thing he can do.

First of all, we have to stop starting with Ben when we have these conversations. Well, this is what, no, hold on. This is what Jeremy does. I don't mean to put, but he says, okay, Ben, let's get your take first. He says all the things it's possible to stay on the subject in like 20 seconds. And the rest of it are like, well, there's, okay, let's just move on and not talk about it anymore.

But if I could add one note on that, I think that when it comes to defining Kamel Harris, the advantage that she has right now, because people are acting like it's a big mystery. How did she go from 1% of the polls to being this popular? Well, it's because the media, they could pull any random person off the street and say, we're going to make a star out of you. Now, it won't last, but they could get about two to three months. It's a fleeting thing, but they could do that with anyone. They could pull someone out of this room. They can make a star out of one of us somehow, if that's possible to do.

Look at the Hawk Tour. Lord knows I haven't been able to. Kamala Harris is basically like the Hawk Tour girl of politics. I don't. No, hang on. Get your minds out of the gutters. I didn't mean it like that. How did you mean it, Matt?

How did I? I meant that she was a flash in a pan who became a star with very little substance. And Kamala Harris is the same sort of thing. Is that all you meant? I'm skeptical that that is all. You know, on the reintroduction point, I think you're totally right. But what's so crazy is, Time Magazine, you probably didn't see it because no one reads Time anymore, other than the liberals and the moderates. But there was this new cover, and it's Kamala looking so admirable.

and noble. Into the future. She's looking, and it says, reintroducing Kamala Harris. She is currently the vice president of the United States. Before that, she was a senator, before that she was the AG of California. And then if you read the article,

which I don't recommend, you'll find out that Kamala was asked to do an interview for the article, and she said no, and she still got all that positive coverage. So the problem with defining Kamala Harris for us, is on the one hand we want to point out, she's the furthest left senator when she was in the Senate to the left of Bernie Sanders, wants Medicare for all, for illegal aliens, totally open borders, you go down the list.

However, she's also the most establishment of the empty suit Democrats there are. She doesn't really believe anything. She blows wherever the wind goes. The really crazy problem is, I actually didn't mean it like that. He set you up to think that. I did not. But get your minds at my, my dear Nana is in body. I do not mean the point I wanted to make before you people intervened was it now you seem like you got these two poles, the radical left and the establishment Dems, actually they're the same. Transing the kids is being pushed not by just some crazy fringe street person. It's being

pushed by the White House. Abortion on demand being pushed by the White House. Totally open borders being pushed by the White House. So is she radical left? Is she establishment Dem? Yes, she's both of those things. How do you get that message across? I don't know how Trump does it. I have to say, we have to acknowledge that Kamala has certain advantages in this moment. We were told one day that Joe Biden was the smartest guy in the room. Then he got up and did that debate. And then we were told, oh my God, this is a drooling idiot. He's got to leave. He's got to step down. Then he stepped down and he was suddenly George Washington. He was the most selfless person. He was letting go of power by his own. They were

dragging him out the door, but he was letting go of the power. And now suddenly Kamala Harris, somebody that everybody hated, including the news media, is absolutely the savior of the nation. If anybody who believes that wants to believe it. And if there are people who are actually buying into that, and there are, the poll show that there are, they must desperately want to believe it, either because they hate Trump or they're just so thrilled that the candidate it is actually alive and not, you know, not a weekend at Bernie's. And the other thing, the other thing about this moment, and I think this is really important because we have all forgotten it, is Donald Trump got shot in the head, which slows you

down. It's like, you know, I mean, the guy is such a bull. He is such an absolute iron man. He's been indicted. He's been convicted. He's been, you know, just absolutely reviled. And he just keeps coming back and he won't move. And then they shoot him in the head.

And he gets up and shakes his fist at them. Still, still, we think he's untouched. I think he's lost a step in these last weeks. I think he was taken aback, perhaps, by the completeness of the press. Press's dishonesty, the media's dishonesty. I think his game will come back. I simply think the guy is just too tough to go down. Well, I was speaking with Nate Silver, the poll analyst,

and he was saying that the turning point for Trump, if there is going to be a turning point, has to be the debate. It has to be September 10. Now, Kamala is running away from the other two debates. Trump is doing the right thing. He said, I want three debates, not one debate. And the truth is, he should say I want a debate every single week on a different topic

because she has been running away from cameras. I mean, it's insane how fast she's been running away from anything that looks like a microphone or a camera. And so it's his job to drag her into the limelight. And that is his superpower. His superpower is to direct the spotlight on things. And then the media are forced to cover the things at which she directs the spotlight. The problem is right now, as you say, the spotlight is pretty scattered.

He hasn't really decided on his line of attack. I think that the joy line, this is a vibes election now. That's what it is. And the media are right when they say this. It is a vibe, because if we're on policy, there's no way in hell that a candidate, who is the vice president of the most unsuccessful administration in modern American history could be running a winning campaign if this were on policy. This is not about policy.

What happened is that the American people were largely depressed because they didn't really like either of these candidates unless they were a Trump fan, but they certainly didn't like Biden. And so you can see it in the polling. Democrats went from 47% enthusiasm up into the 80s or 90s as soon as Joe Biden was out of the race because they felt the vibe. They felt suddenly as though there was somebody who was not Joe Biden who was in the race. So the question is not how do you

reverse the policy discussion. The question is how do you reverse the vibe? It ends up sort of being the same discussion, but he has to come up with the thing that Trump is best at, the thing he's a professional at. He's a professional labeler. This is the thing he's best at. He's amazing at it. You had Lion Hillary and Crooked Hillary and you had Sleepy Joe and you had lion Ted and you had little Marco. And we all remember all the nicknames because this is what he is best had. He's literally a man famous for putting his name on giant shiny buildings. This is the

thing that he's amazing at. And he has not yet come up with anything that remotely looks like a good moniker to hang on Kamala. And I think that that is a symptom of his inability to come up with the right angle. The scambla thing, it doesn't work. Nobody even knows what it means. I think he's trying to do a version of DeSanktis or something, but it doesn't work. In my opinion, the thing that he should be pointing out is that she is a damned liar. She is a liar. She lies about everything. She lies about who she is.

She lies about what she stands for. She has in the last three weeks reversed every single major policy position she has ever held. But she's done it through surrogates without even saying it out loud. And the media just swallow this. So it seems to me that the only thing that he can do here is point out that she is radically dishonest, that this joy is fake. All of it is fake. And in the debate, the first thing you should say is you should say, listen, there's one thing we know about my opponent.

My opponent is dishonest. And if you catch her in her dishonesty, she will laugh. And that laugh is not a laugh of joy as the media would have it. That is a laugh of awkwardness and discomfort because she is a liar. But, yes, true. I agree with the labeling. He's very good at labeling. He's lost a step on the labeling thing, as you point out.

And the nickname, you know, this has become a personal project of mine. I have no influence and no power at all, but I'm trying to get some suggestions to the Trump camp because they're really flailing right now. Kamabla is not it. It's not doing it. Lion Kamala. He's used lion too many times. You go back to the well too many times.

So my thing is, I don't know how you guys feel. I think Kami Kamala or Kamila. Right, Kamila? Do we like Kamala? My alternative proposal was Kamala. Come on. Kamala. It's too already, Ben.

Paktula? That's where I thought you were going. That's where I thought you were going. That's good. But there is a corrupt And Kami and corrupt. There's an alliteration. There's a labeling there.

Oh, now I get it. I like Kahn. I got to slow things down so you guys can pick up on it. I liked Kami Law. And also, Trump has a real issue with his nicknames. He never wants to do an alliteration. It drives me nuts. He never does it.

He said that. He said that. the demographic breakdown. There's some polling today. And what it showed is that Kamala is actually gaining among white men, non-college-educated white men. Now, I don't know how much to believe that, because that seems ridiculous to me. Like, it seems ridiculous to me on the face. And the original sort of political hot take when she became the nominee was that she was going to lose with the act crowd to pick up minorities. And it seems to me that, again, so much of this is media manufactured that the only thing he can do is spend money like water at this point.

He needs to be spending money like water. The statistic that I saw, I don't know if you guys have been spending any time on the YouTube's lately, but on YouTube, you cannot open, you cannot open a single video. You can't open a cocoa melon video, not the trans one. The other cocoa melon videos for your kids without there being a Kamala Harris ad at the beginning of the cocoa melon video. Apparently in the last three weeks, they have dumped in excess of $30 million on YouTube ads. In that same period of time, Donald Trump's campaign has spent less than $4 million on YouTube ads. this is the time when she is defining herself for the entire American people. This is the time

when he needs to be defining her for the American people. So I agree with you that he's not on his game and there are a lot of reasons for that. I think part of it is the almost being killed thing, but I think a lot of it is that he had this election ripped out from under him. I mean, everyone thought that this election was basically over because it

was, and then it wasn't. And I think it takes him a little while to find the footing. He doesn't have time. That's the whole game. The voting starts in Pennsylvania in three weeks, in three weeks. But there There was a moment that probably a lot of you saw on Stephen Colbert. I'm sure you didn't see it on Stephen Colbert, but you probably saw it on X, where Stephen Colbert told a CNN reporter, CNN plays it straight.

It's completely objective. And Colbert's audience burst into hysterical laughter so that Colbert actually had to blush, sort of and say, I didn't think that was a laugh line, but I guess it is. The people know. The people have gotten the point. And Trump is kind of waiting for the honeymoon to be over, and I keep thinking, well, The honeymoon's not going to be over because the press won't let it end. But the press has not got the control that they had before.

They still are powerful. They still exist. They still create an atmosphere that we haven't quite learned how to counter. But I think we're as powerful almost as they are because people will turn to it. They know they're being lied to. They know they're being conned. And they will turn to places like X, like the Daily Wire, to find out what's really going on. And I think the honeymoon period will end, not because the press ends it, not obviously

because the Democrats end it, but because the people. people end it and come listen to what we're saying. Good point. I agree time is short, but also we're in silly season. So then what ends silly season? The press is not going to end silly season. They'd lock her up until Election Day if they could. But she's agreed to do at least one debate.

And so it just seems to me they're not going to make her talk. She's not going to voluntarily talk until then. She's going to keep dumping zillions of dollars into these YouTube ads. President Trump is going to be giving lots of interviews, many of which are extremely successful. It's not going to be able to totally break through. So we're all just waiting for the debate. And the debate is going to end silly season.

In a normal election, that would have been over this month. But look, President Trump is pretty good at debating. I'm not saying he's the greatest debater since Pericles, but he's pretty good at it. In fact, he beat the last guy in the presidential debate so bad that that guy is not the nominee anymore. So it just seems to me this is our office. opportunity. And Kamala knows she's terrible at this stuff. That's why she dropped out of that debate, or out of the primary in 2020, before the first votes were cast. The only line she had during that whole debate was that Joe Biden's a racist, then she ends up on his ticket. Then, you know, her debate strategy against Mike Pence was just to interrupt him in an extremely obnoxious way. I don't think that flies with Trump. You don't do New York or obnoxious better than Donald Trump, so he's going to beat her on that front by a long shot. And so it's annoying. It leads to apprehend.

I wish they were spending more money, absolutely. But unfortunately, I think that's our chance. The debate is the chance, and we're basically putting all the chips on red 23. There's one more group of people that were at war against right now and not just the media. And to your point, Drew, that the media has, that the people now know, I agree that the people know that the press is corrupt. But I don't think knowing that the press is corrupt is enough. No, I agree. I agree.

The press still has such hegemonic power in the culture that even though you know they're corrupt, it is still the only thing you hear. And so it's one thing to say, I don't trust them. You still wind up agreeing with them a lot if you don't actually know alternative voices to listen to. But again, that's not the only problem we have. We have another problem, and that is the actual political institutions in the country. You say that President Trump got hit by, hitting the head with a bullet. And yet the director of the FBI said before Congress,

that he doesn't know if Donald Trump got hit by a bullet. He may have gotten hit by glass or shrapnel or it may have been the vibrations in the air from the sonic boom that scratched his ear or maybe the Secret Service nicked him on the way. The head of the FBI said this, not in the hours after, during the confusion, a full week after, when all of the facts were known.

And if you go back in time a mere four years, I love to use the line 51 current and former intelligence officials say that Hunter's laptop is Russian disinformation. Listen, in my opinion, if you're a former intelligence official and you knowingly lie to the American public, that's called freedom of speech. I hate it, but it's called freedom of speech. If you're a current functioning employee of the federal government and you knowingly lie to the American people, that's called treason. And that's not legal, and that's not covered by the First Amendment. And Christopher Rice should be in prison.

He should be in prison. There is no question. But the point, you know, this is absolutely true. And since Obama are the top echelon of both the intelligence and the law community has been corrupted. It's no question that he planted people in there. But the press, obviously what you say about the press, I 100% agree with. They still have the capacity to create an atmosphere of unknowing, if we will. Here's an advantage I think Trump has in the debate, a big advantage, I think he has, which is this.

ABC is one of the most corrupt venues of media information that there is. I mean, George Stephanopoulos made his bones silencing rape victims so that the Clintons could get elected. First Bill, and then Hillary, because he killed the Epstein story at ABC, they would not have the restraint that Jake Tapper had at the last debate. He is going to be debating the entire network, and Kamala has a very close friend in the executive echelons of ABC. They're going to come at him with everything, and I think if they pile on him and people are watching, first of all, He can take them. He's like King Kong on the, you know, with the planes flying around him, you know, take them out of the sky. But secondly, I just think it's unfair, and people are going to see and experience viscerally how unfair it is.

So I think there is another thing that's actually going to happen between now and the debate, but we'll get to that in a moment first. It's time for our moment of good, from Good Ranchers. We went on a search for our longest active Daily Wire Plus member, and we found Nick Houser, who's been with us in September 2015. Yay. Nick became an All- Access member on January 6, 2021. that January 6, while the left was losing their minds, he was investing in truth.

When we launched Jeremy's razors and Jeremy's chocolates, he bought both, so he's got lots of razors and lots of chocolates. All of this surprised us, so we thought we owed him a surprise. Let's take a look at how we surprised our ultimate fan, Nick Hauser, with a moment of good. And now, for a moment of good, brought to you by Good Ranchers. Hey, Nick, nice to meet you. Good to meet you, too, Lee? Yeah, absolutely. I just want to ask you a couple of questions today, but I have my customer service assistant here. We're going to be taking some notes.

And so we'll just jump in and, you know, just get to know you a little bit. And no way, no. How's it going? Is that an avatar? Is that an avatar? Yeah, the AI is just getting this good, man. Wow. Pleasure to meet you.

Pleasure to meet you. Yeah. You are our longest active subscriber. You're a member since September of 2015 and All Access member since January 6th, 2021, and Jeremy's Razor's customer. So we wanted to formally invite you, and a guest to join us at the Riemann Auditorium, August 14th, and everybody's going to hang out with you. It's going to be me and Matt and Michael. God love him. Andrew, Jeremy, we'll take care of the flight,

hotel transportation. You think you're up for that? Oh, no way. Yeah, well, yeah, I'm actually blown away by that. I mean. So that's awesome. I can't wait to see you on August 14th. That'll be great. All right. Sounds good. Pleasure to meet you. Thanks, Ben. Hey, good to meet you. All right. Let's give up. Big round of applause for Nick Hauser. That is what dedication to conservative values looks like. Our pals over at Good Ranchers came to us and said, we want to do a moment of good at backstage. They explained the whole thing.

And I thought, I mean, it's cool. Now we need a sponsor for like our kiss cam, because the whole thing feels like a sporting event to me. Yeah, can I just say it? I thought it was nice that we invited Nick. The fact you still made him pay for a ticket, I thought, was something like. I'm trying to run a business. I get it.

We are not a charity. So the thing that I think is going to happen, obviously, between now and September 10, because that's still actually a fair bit of time, is the Democratic National Convention. And there are a few things that can go wrong here for Kamala Harris in a pretty serious way. Number one thing that can go wrong, Joe Biden is really pissed off. I mean, he is super pissed off in his waking hours. When he is not being cleaned by his night... He's waking hour.

Yeah, exactly. When he is not being cleaned by the night nurse or spoon-fed by Dr. Jill. when she's not with Doug Emhoff golfing. In any case, when I know he's doing that with the nanny. Stop it. Anyway, the, when he is awake, he has ticked off. He's been doing interviews, more interviews than the actual current nominee for presidents of the United States.

He's actually done more interviews now as the non-nomony than she has done as the nominee. And he is clearly ticked off at Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Kamala Harris because he believes that he was still going to win that election and that he was ousted unfairly and that his record is excellent. And so there have been rumors that he's going to show up for night one for his big tribute. They're going to give him a gold wash. They're going to shuffle him off to the hospice. And he's not going to show up for the rest of the DNC.

So you could see a little bit of a rift open there and some negative media coverage. The place where you're going to see a very serious rift is there going to be probably 10,000 protesters who show up for their buddies in Hamas. And they are very excited to be there. They're excited despite the fact that Kamala Harris kind of likes them and is very much pro them. Kamala Harris selected a vice presidential candidate who Hobbsna, who hobnobbs with the pro-Khamas crowd. Kamala Harris's only real public statement on policy since becoming the nominee was one where she was ripping into Israel

for its supposed human rights violations. It doesn't matter. They're still protesting because they know that they've got the Democratic Party and they know that they can shove the Democratic Party even further left. And so that is going to be a good news cycle for Republicans. Because it turns out you know what Americans don't like watching people wave Hamas flags in the streets of Chicago while burning. People just generally don't like that.

And so... Yeah. The one area, this I think is a place where Donald Trump really needs to mind. A place where Republicans historically, the Republicans have only won one popular vote election really in my lifetime almost. I mean, you have to go all the way back to 1988 before George D. Bush in 2004, right? Other than that, Republicans have not won a popular vote election in my lifetime. And so, that being the case, 2004, what made it different was that Americans felt a serious sense of insecurity. This administration is making Americans feel insecure, insecure economically, insecure in terms of

foreign policy, insecure from things like terrorism. And that is where Donald Trump really needs to hone in because Kamala Harris is a weakling. She's a weakling and she's terrible and her party is radical and they are dangerous and they endanger you and they endanger your family. And Donald Trump, his world was a safer world. There is no way to argue that. Donald Trump was the best foreign policy president of my lifetime, bar none. By the way, we are absolutely. going to see the return of the Democrat Intifada at the convention. There's no question that'll happen this month, but it won't just be the convention. This is the moment that the schools open up again, you are going to see the same

Kefia-clad, purple-haired, half-lesbian, leftist protesters, going, waving not only the Palestine flag, but burning the American flag. And this is a case where I think, look, I want to make sure that all the students on the campuses are safe, I don't want Jewish students to be obstructed from going to class or anything, But short of that, let these people protest. You've got leftists, protesting leftists, burning the American flag, turning off leftists. And the first rule, the most basic rule of politics is, when your opponents are fighting amongst themselves, don't stop them. When they're showing the American people who they are.

When they are lighting the symbol of the country on fire, that's a wonderful show. And I want that to be every YouTube ad that we see between now and November. Yeah, that's right. I'd say it's also a point of optimism, which is rare for me, but I think one of the good signs of this election that I'm kind of happy about, even though it's absurd to watch and it's infuriating to watch, is the fact that Kamala Harris is attempting right now to run to the right on immigration. And she's attempting to present herself as all of a sudden a hardliner on immigration. She's never been a borderer-tors-ar, but she would like to be them. Exactly. Exactly. But that shows you something. That shows you that when even Kamala Harris, the most radical left presidential candidate of all time, feels the need to present herself as law and order, you know, the prosecutor type, putting the bad guys away. When she feels the need to present herself that way, that means that we are winning on that issue. And Donald Trump should embrace that. He should say, okay, if you want to have that competition, who's more right wing on immigration and crime, let's have that conversation. Yeah, and Kamala hasn't got Obama's advantage.

Obama lived a shadow life. He actually kept his politics pretty well buried. He didn't vote on a lot of issues. He, you know, kind of finagled answers to questions for a long time. Remember when he sat and told Rick Warren that marriage was between a man and a woman? And then the minute Obergefell was decided he lit up the White House with a rainbow flight. She didn't have that. We've got all the receipts.

I mean, we've got video going forever of her saying all the things that she believes banning fracking. I don't know. You know, this is a bad moment. This is a tense moment. I was one of the people who said, along with Nikki Haley, that the first person to dump one of these candidates, Biden or Trump, is going to win. I thought that that was something. Nobody wanted that election. Nobody wanted to see it. This moment makes me nervous. I would be lying if I said it didn't. But I am kind of optimistic because I think that the onrush of lies, the wave of lies that hit the public staggered them back. You can't do that for 90 days. I'm sorry. I do not believe you can get away with that for 90 days. There's another thing I think that Democrats, listen, Democrats are professionals of this. I mean, they really are. This is professional level criminal behavior. They took their president out back and they shot him like old yellow.

And then they supplanted him with Kamala Harris. And that's, by the way, what parties used to do. I mean, that actually is what a powerful system does. And the Democrats just supplanted one member of the system with another member of the system and they're running the exact same program, except in the new face on top of it. But they're doing something else

that is quite clever, but it's a clue as to what they're afraid of. And that is they are campaigning on two specific words, weird and joy. Yeah. Right? They are filled with joy. So much happiness. Can you feel the joy? That weird cackle that Kamala Harris says, that's not a weird cackle. That's just what joy looks like. When she's dancing all strange with those kids in the high school and then cackling about buses and Venn diagrams, that's not strange. That's joy. Right. And it turns out that it's not weird when she's hanging out with Tim Walls, who's busy transing the kids in Minnesota. And it's not weird when they're inviting every strange-haired person with a bizarre facial tick to the Democratic National Convention.

That's not weird at all. What's truly weird is J.D. Vans, who's married and has kids. That's what's really weird. And that he thinks that it's good for people to get married and have kids. That's the most weird thing of all is that he thinks that. And so I think what they think is that the best defense is a good offense. They know two things. Americans are actually quite depressed about this administration. Americans hate this administration. Americans are not optimistic about the state of the country or the future of the country under Biden Harris. And so what they're doing is they're shifting that question. Are you better off now than you were four or five years ago? They're shifting that into, can you see the joy on this one person's face? She's a person, right? It's about

her. So it's about her joy, but not your lack of joy over 20 percent inflation over the course of the last four years. And on the weird thing, the thing they're afraid of is that the normies in America, you know, 80 percent of Americans might notice that these people are weird. They're weird. I'm sorry. It's a weird crew of people. I mean, they're weird. I'm sorry. It's a weird crew of people. I mean, they're all the people that Matt is making fun of and what is a woman, right? Just by asking them simple questions. It's people who legitimately believe that if you cut the penis off a boy, he becomes a girl. I mean, that is what these people think. And that is all strange and weird. And so, I think that this election could be, if Donald Trump has the, has the, again, it's always if,

with President Trump. But if he actually has the discipline to point out that this election is the Normies versus the actual weird that this election is the people who want a joyous and optimistic country, not a fake, Nutra Sweet, joy candidate who's covering up an ugly policy agenda. That's where they're vulnerable, because they are weird and they are not joyous. And I think your idea that it's a vibes election, it's dicey, it's a vibes election right now because the entire force of the media has been poured into creating the vibes, but if ever it should become an issue's election, Kamalo's finished. Well, and this is the key. It occurs to me now, as we're talking about the weird, and Tim Walls was the guy who started that attack even before he was picked for VP. But don't the libs like weird? Haven't we spent the last 30 years keep Austin weird? The word queer means weird, and they've appropriated that as one of their favorite identifiers.

But the word gay means joy, too. You're right. They're weird and joyful. And so at a certain point, you know, we get into this fight. We degrade ourselves to their lives. level of third grade. You know, you're weird. No, you're weird. No, you're gay. No, you're gay. I'm going to give you a swirly. But what's funny to your point on the issues is, hey, hey, guys, the borders open, and it's her fault. She's the borders are. I love there was that Politico article. It said, Kamala promises that she's going to go really hard on the border. Today, she is the borders are. She didn't stop being the borders. She is the border today. So you think, hey, hold on, maybe all this weird stuff is like a trap, you know? And if we point to the like zillions of foreign nationals and terrorists and drugs

pouring across the border and you point to the horrible inflation and you point out the world's about to go up and smoke in World War III and like every actual thing that's happening, I think we win, right? Yeah, but we should also point out that the stuff, it's important for us to also point at them and say, no, no, no, the stuff that you guys support is legitimately weird. putting tampons in the boys' restroom is a very weird thing. I think it was CNN. They were talking about MSNBC, you can't tell them apart.

But one of them said that, no, well, Tim Walts put tampons in the boys' bathroom. That's great. That's big dad energy. I'm like, well, what the hell kind of dads are you hanging out with? Because I'm a dad, and if my son comes to me and says they put tampons in the boys' restroom, I'm going to walk into that restroom and put. pull the freaking thing off the wall and throw it on the ground. Like, that's what a dad does.

That's big dad energy. That's big dad energy. Pull that off. Yeah. But you know, it's funny. The left knows all this. You know, the left says DEI. What a great idea.

We're going to hire people according to the color of their skin and according to their identity. This is a great, great thing. So they say, we're going to appoint a vice president who's a female and black. And you say, well, she's a DEI hired. That's a terrible thing today. How dare you say that? Well, wait a minute. You say, this is a wonderful thing.

We're going to put pornography. in elementary schools, it's going to be great. Let me just read to you what's in there. No, no, no, don't read it out loud because that would be terrible. But I thought it was great. They know, and they continue this gaslighting of basically saying, we're doing it, we're not doing it, but it's great that we're doing it, but we're not doing it.

You know, Mike Anton at the Claremont Institute, he has a name for this. He calls it a shout-out for Mike Anton out there. He calls it the Celebration Parallax, which is, it's happening if you're talking about it positively, but it's a crazy conspiracy theory. if you're talking about it negatively. And of course, we actually have Joe Biden in official White House transcript

referring to Kamala Harris as the prime example of a diversity, equality, and inclusion higher for his administration. His exact words, if you say that, however, it's a terrible thing to say. It's a terrible conspiracy theory. We'll get to more on this in a second,

but first we need to talk about something else. Anyone with a basic understanding of economics can see the economy is in bad shape right now. I'm not saying the sky is falling. But would you jump out of a plane without a parachute? No! Well, consider this your economic parachute warning. I've been telling you for years to diversify your portfolio with precious metals.

If you haven't yet, now is the time. Birch gold makes it easy to convert your IRA or 401k into a precious metals IRA. It's a smart way to protect your hard-earned savings from the impending economic disaster. But hey, if protecting your financial future isn't motivation enough, how about this? Back by popular demand. Now through the end of the month, you can get your very own 24-carry gold-aid Truth bomb on qualifying purchases. It's a little reminder of the truth bombs we hear at Daily Wire Deliver every day and the smart decision you made to invest in gold. Full disclosure, your golden truth bomb will not be quite

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Claim your eligibility qualifying purchases made before August 31st. Can't get a golden truth bomb to serve as a reminder of the great decision you made to protect your savings with gold. That's Ben to 9-8-9-98. Nine eight, nine eight. Republicans are Nazis. You cannot separate yourselves from the bad white people. Growing up, I never thought much about race. Never really seemed to matter that much.

At least not to me. Am I racist? I would really appreciate it if you love. I'm trying to learn. I'm on this journey. I'm going to sort this out. I need to go deeper undercover. Joining us now is Matt.

Certified DEI expert. Here's my certifications. What you're doing is you're stretching out of your white. This is more for you and this field. Is America inherently racist? The word inherent is challenging there. I want to rename the George Washington Monument to the George Floyd Monument. America is racist to its bones.

So inherently. Yeah. This country is a piece of... White folks. White. White. White supremacy. White woman.

White boy. Is there a black person around? What happened? Black person right here. Does he not exist? Hi, Robin. Hi. What's your name?

I'm Matt. I just had to ask who you are because you have to be careful. They're going to say you racist. Buy your tickets now in theaters September 13th, rated PG-13. Back to sort of the weird conversation. I actually do think that this is the biggest conversation in the country, and you can tell, by the way, the media are focused laser-like on the cat lady comments that J.D. Vance made, right?

So the attempt to turn J.D. Vans into the weirdest person in American politics because he's a happily married man with children, in a biracial marriage, by the way, and that this is somehow symptomatic of him being a deep and abiding weirdo. because he said on Tucker Carlson that he believes, in essence, that it's very important for a civilization to have children and focus in on children. You know, the idea that that is somehow weird is in and of itself deeply strange. Every society, every civilization, of course, has to have, as its center, childbearing and childbearing.

Any civilization that doesn't do that is a fundamental failure. On every level, there's no way to sustain or grow a civilization without that. And that is why they're so angry at J.D. Vans for having mentioned that thing, They're not angry at the Cat Lady comment. They're angry at the underlying actual issue that he was uncovering. And they did that. Let's remember because the conservatives that look at the attacks on J.D. Vance and say, oh, it was a mistake to nominate J.D. Vance.

I find that very annoying because what they don't realize is that the media in the left, they'll do that to literally anybody. Anybody that Trump happened to choose was destined to become a weird degenerate in the eyes of the media. Let's not forget that Mike Pence, okay, say what you want to, Mike Pence. Mike Pence, the most normal guy who's ever lived on Earth. was made into a weirdo by the media in 2016 because he didn't want to go on dinner dates with women who weren't his wife. And like, that was weird to the media. So this is what they do to everybody.

It doesn't matter who they are. That's 100% true. The Mike Pence thing was particularly annoying because they had the simultaneous rule, which was that if you were in a room alone with a woman, and then she accused you of something, she had to be believed. And also, you must be in a room alone with women. Right? Because he said, I'm not going to do that. And they're like, that's so weird that he won't do that.

But I think that this has to do with the fact that any cohesive society has to be. has to have a center, and that center has to be normality. And normality has a definition. And you can have people who are flitting around sort of the edges, who are in orbit around the normal sun. But when the normal sun begins to dissipate, when it begins to crack up, when it explodes outward, which is what the left is actually attempting to do, then there is no center to hold the civilization together anymore. And the most fundamental, basic things that our civilization are about are the things that are under attack. It's why, again, I go back to the first comment I made, which is that I think we're all feeling like gaslit and annoyed and angry. And that's the first thing. And

That's because when you're being lied to your, people are lying to your face, they're telling you there's no such thing as truth, as Drew likes to say. They're telling you there's no such thing as a man, no such thing as a woman, that it's crazy to say that a civilization is dependent on people having kids. Or, God forbid you say, that is a morally superior thing for you to do to spend your life having kids and raising them, as opposed to not having kids and not raising them. And they should be asked the question, when in history has a sexual revolution taken place and sexual freedom become the norm? and it has not marked the end of a period of civilization. It is always the end. I mean, all you have to do is go to the movies and you see, you know, the hunger games,

and what do they show you, to show you that the society is oppressive and decadent? They show you men dressed as women. They show you effeminate men. They show you, you know, absolutely a sort of rainbow of sexual difference. But there's that one babe with a bow and arrow. A girl with a bow and arrow. It's like Diana, you know.

But, I mean, I think that this is the thing. This is what civilizations look like in decline. It doesn't mean that there won't be a new rebirth. I think there will be. But still, this is what they look like when they're declined. So I want to talk about the cat ladies comment from a different point of view, which is something that I've seen a lot online in the comments on X, and that's conservative women who are irritated by the cat lady comment

because it seems to be an attack perhaps on women who can't have children for whatever reason, and have not yet had children for whatever reason. And it might be easy to say, well, they're reading a little bit into what J.D. Vance was actually trying to say. He said it wasn't specifically. But I think that the reason that they're getting to this actually is a problem that we have in conservatism that we have to figure out how to deal with. We've talked before about how one of the problems with the way that we frame issues as a movement is, you know, you can say, well, as Ben does and rightly, that, you know, in America we understand.

the steps that are necessary to have a successful life, just finish high school, get married before you have kids, don't do drugs. If you do those three things, your chances of having success in the society go up exponentially. But for a lot of people, they hear that and they say, well, I already had a kid before I got married. Or, well, I didn't finish high school. Or, well, I have struggled already with drugs in my life. It sounds like you might be saying that opportunity in our society is already discounted for

them in some way. And the left doesn't put up any of those sorts of impediments when they present their path for a person to have happiness. So I think that sometimes the way that we approach issues seems like it doesn't allow for actual people who've actually made mistakes in their life to live. And I also think that because feminism has been so ascendant for so long in our culture, there's a generation of conservative young men who are pushing back against it and have pushed it back against it to the point that that they begin to express a kind of hatred for women. And so there are young women on the right who think, well, there are men on the right who seem to hate us, and there's a sort of absolutist rhetoric on the right that says if we haven't had children yet, we're not, we don't have a possibility of happiness or a possibility of contributing fruitfully to civilization.

Where are we? Where does that leave us? You know, I think, though, it comes back to what Ben said about a center and the surrounding area outside. And this is something conservatives have been really bad about, talking about when Harrison Butker made his speech where he said, you know, you young ladies, the thing you're probably looking forward to most, his family. And all the young ladies said, yes, that you in fact are telling the truth. The media is always the left, let's just call it what it is. The left is always going to portray that as bigoted and small-minded. But in fact, we all understand that there are women who don't want to have children or can

have children or who are doing something else with their lives. We understand that they're individuals, but all we're talking about is the center. And maybe that is the kind of language we should start using more often. There's also, though, there's a difference here. You know, I was just listening to a great lecture at the To Mystic Institute on how to resolve this exact question. So I'm going to steal all of their ideas because they're better than ours. You know, good writers borrow, but great writers steal.

I think it's true of podcasters, too. Poor writers don't even use words. That's right. To use a word. Reasons to vote for Democrats. Available now on Amazon. You can go get it. before, if you want.

Back to my point. Aristotle, who a lot of conservatives love, he's kind of the main man in political philosophy, especially for conservatives, he would say that some people are just not capable of attaining virtue. He uses this term natural slaves to not mean

like chattel slavery, but just people who they lack the ability to have an education, they've screwed up so much, they're just not going to be virtuous, they're not going to be free, they're total losers, right? Which is the really, I think, unfair reading of what JD is talking about. But so for Aristotle, he's right about so much, but he would not be able to understand someone like St. Augustine. St. Augustine, who's a complete degenerate, who does all sorts

of terrible things in his life, and then has a radical conversion and becomes one of the most influential thinkers ever in the history of the West. What's the difference? Well, the difference, which would be not knowable to Aristotle, is Christianity. The difference is grace, and we happen to be a Christian country. We are of Christian civilization. And so that's really a very, what we're talking about, aren't we? The people who want to willfully misinterpret what J.D. is saying are going to do so because they hate him and their rabid partisan Democrats. But I think J.D. He's speaking of a caricature, which is a real problem. But obviously, we're talking with grace here. You know, if someone has made mistakes, has gotten hooked on drugs, is that a bad education?

Look, society is pretty broken. The education system's terrible right now. And it's never too late to repent and turn your life around and make something of yourself. And, you know, That's America. That's Christendom, you know. But that's the difference. I think there's something else there too. And that is that when I hear J.D. talk and he talks about this sort of stuff, I think that he's speaking in the terms that we tend to use in our communities. And the United States, unfortunately, because of feminism, because of the sexual revolution, and because of the fact that the government has become so involved in every aspect of our lives, it has replaced community, which is the place we used to have these discussions.

The place where the social standards used to be set were in your community. And you can see this in the communities that have kids versus the communities that don't have kids. So actually, tonight, some of our friends from Florida are here. They have eight kids, which is a lot of kids. So a small Orthodox Jewish family, I think. Yeah, exactly. They have a minion at their home. Yeah, almost.

And the thing about our community is that everybody has at least four kids. Like, you're not in the club unless you have four kids. We came to the community, we had three. We're like, we don't belong here, so we had four. And that's actually the way that communities tend to be built, right? So in the cat lady sort of lingo, there aren't a lot of cat ladies in the community because everybody wants to have kids. Even the people who can't have kids, they want to, so they don't count as the cat ladies, right? The cat ladies that JDA are talking about are people who are like militantly anti-having kids because it is a superior way of life to not have children.

But that conversation used to happen at the local level. Because of the decline of church and because of the decline of community, there's been an attempt to remake that at the national level. and I'm not sure that it's actually possible to remake that at the national level. I think that it has to be remade primarily at the local and then the state level, and then you can try to have those conversations at the national level. And I think that J.D. wasn't even speaking in the context of being a national politician in 2021 when he said all of this. It doesn't mean you can't say this as a politician. It means that the things that the federal government can and cannot do or has a major and minor role in

are different from the things that your local community and your state have a major or minor role in because this is an extraordinarily diverse and heterodox country in which we have less and less in common at the top levels. And that's why it's so easily alienate huge numbers of people by saying something that in any of our religious communities would be considered perfectly normal. Can I also, I have to chime in on this because I win the contest with six kids at this table.

So I have to have my piece. I also think that what J.D. Vance is saying, what like all of us are saying, is not that every single person on Earth is supposed to biologically have a child. We recognize that some people just can't because they have physical issues. Some people want to get married and they never do. It's a great tragedy.

Some people go into the religious life or some people have other vocations. But what I would say is that every single person on earth, every adult, has a maternal or paternal vocation. And for most people, if you're a man, that means you're going to get married and have babies. if you're a woman you're going to get married and have babies. But there are people that they're going to find that vocation in other ways through missionary work or the religious life

or something like that, adoption. But the point is that nobody is called to live a life totally in service to themselves. Nobody is called to... Right. Nobody... This is our response to the feminist girl boss stuff. It's not that no woman should ever have a job,

It's that no woman is going to be happy if she tries to find her meaning and purpose in life in going to a corporate job and earning a paycheck. That is not supposed to be anyone's meaning and purpose in life. And that's our point, I think. I'm just glad that we don't have to put all the women in those red dresses and white bonnets. I love those. That's a good visual to leave you with for intermediate. We're going to go back and use the restroom.

I'm not going to lie about what we're about to go to. Hopefully you can go out front, do the same thing. We'll be back right after that. What? They just said something in my ear. It's not right now. That's how that goes? Huh, in front of all these people.

Hmm. You really would have thought they would have put that in the teleprompter. Well, everything I just said is a lie. We are going to put women in the red dresses. And apparently I just have to pee myself sitting in this chair. I really need to go backstage. But what they tell me is that instead of this being intermission, it is instead an opportunity for me to introduce you

to three more of our beloved Daily Wire contemporaries, our peers, our colleagues. These three, stronger than... the rest. These three, more athletic, certainly, than the rest. These three look better in dresses than anyone else on this stage. It's our very dear friends, Crane & Company. I love it. Can you feel it? Welcome to the Craning Company almost halftime show presented by Jeremy's Razors. All right, gentlemen, first half of the show, a lot of excitement, a lot of enthusiasm, some great analysis. We even had a choir, How awesome is that?

You gotta come on, come on. Come on. David, I know you're a former Michigan guy, but how do you think the first half win? Look, very well executed in the first half. How could it not be for the brightest minds in America plus Michael Knowles? It's so nice day bringing.

Hey, look, massive election coming up, huge implication. There's nowhere else I'd rather be on a Wednesday evening than on the rhyming stage with a room full of patrons. That is true. I love when you get excited. That is true. I love it. I love it.

Blaine, I've been watching you. You've been staring unbelievably intently at all the gentlemen up here. To be honest, it's kind of creeped half of us out backstage. What have you thought so far? I'm to be honest with you, I have no idea what these guys said the last doubt. All right, but there is one massive thing we haven't talked about yet. And that is, am I a racist? Hey, hey, you're not a racist, man.

No, not me, David. David, no, no, no. For the thousand time, nobody is calling anybody racist. Come on. We're talking about Matt Walsh's new movie. The trailer just dropped, Am I Racist? Yeah. That's what we're talking about.

And please, David, check your privilege. Please check your privilege. Which reminds me last season, the Daily Wire released what some people are saying is the first ballot Hall of Fame. All-time great comedy. I don't know if y'all saw it. Lady Ballers? How do you top that? The actors were unbelievable.

The production was incredible. I know. But do you got a play or something maybe they could scheme up? First of all, I have a play for everything, and I'm glad you asked. We're going to start this off with little cute Matt Walser. here with his cardigan. All right, remember this about Matt Walsh. He didn't just fall off a coconut tree. All right, he exists in the context of making what? And that is, show him. What is a woman? Right here it is. Boom. Kind of looks like my ex, but you get it. Yeah,

that really kind. That's actually, that's actually better looking than your ex. That is but besides being unburdened, let's not forget that what is a woman is the second best movie slash documentary we traded at the Daily Wire. Which, second's not bad to Lady Ball. No, no, no. But every single movie the Daily Wire puts out gets censored by the political left. I'm talking about Shadow Bands. D-DOS attacks.

I don't know if you have a play for that, man. Oh, I have a play for everything, David, and what you don't know what we have on our side. And that is a horde full of base patriots. There we go. And right now, all right, those base patrons are running a little screenplay. But the Daily Wire has one more trick up their sleeve. Do y'all want to know what it is?

A reverse. Do y'all want to know what it is? Leaf liquor. It's movie theater. Come on. Take it over the movies. Come on. Hey, but this is what needs to happen.

All right? Lock in. Every based American around this country, you have to go buy a ticket. And when you do that, this is what will happen. Matt Walsh, with his great beard, all right, his cute little cardigan. And the Daily Wire can start. slide in for the touchdown. There we go. And if we're going to talk

about touchdowns, let's talk postseason awards. I don't know. Maybe the Oscars. Look, it feels like a... Maybe a best picture? Hey, it feels like a Nickelodeon award to me. I'm going to be honest. Matt Walsh getting slimed is great for a 100%. All right, so you heard it here first. Go buy your tickets for

Am I Racist. It's available now. You can get merch in the lobby. Some really cool stuff out there. We got a great second half of the show. Let's get Matt Walsh to the Oscars because we know he's not going to a NBA game and as well for Cran and Company, we're going, going. Go on. See you. Go on. Thank you. My bless. Hello, everybody. I wish I could be there with you tonight.

I have exciting news. Since I joined forces with the Daily Wire Plus two years ago, we've built a comprehensive collection of premium content. We've developed these shows not only to provide you with a structure and framework for meaning, but to arm you against the sadistic troll demons. My collection, which we've titled Mastering Life with Jordan B. Peterson, acts as a guide to help you win at the series of games that make up life. My series, marriage, was designed to help you strengthen your relationship

so that you can create the perfect date that repeats endlessly. In the series on masculinity, dragons, monsters, and men, I outlined the way of discovering your purpose of slaying the dragons that stand in your path. Invision and destiny, that will help you transform the chaotic potential of the future into the actuality that you need and desire. This fall, we're adding even more exclusive content to my Mastering Life series. My new series negotiation offers practical guideline

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While we walk through that, at the practical level and then right down to the neurodemeanor. scientific level in my five-part series, depression and anxiety. In addition to our mastering life series, we've explored biblical writings and their cultural influence, including a deep evaluation of the books of Genesis and Exodus and how the biblical corpus, the biblical library itself, came into existence. Our new ten-part series on the gospel delineates the accounts of the New Testament writings. And finally, join me on a journey through time to find out where we came from and how that formed who we are

what we believe. Foundations of the West. The first episode is out now on Daily Wire Plus. Rome, Jerusalem, Athens, five-part series. I had a blast making it and I hope you find it extremely useful to watch. For those of you who have already subscribed, thank you very much. Stay tuned. We're releasing new content now every week through the end of the year. For those of you who have yet to sign up, use promo code Jordan and save 35% on your annual membership. It's a hell of a deal. dot com to get the entire collection of mastering life plus all the new releases that are to come. The work I'm doing in conjunction with the Daily Wire brings the spirit of adventure forward. Join us on DailyWire Plus today, onward and upward.

Who's having a good time tonight? Let's hear it one more time for our gospel choir tonight. And who's ready for more from the Daily Wire backstage lives? We've got more coming. It's now time for more Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, Andrew Clayton, Jeremy Boring, and Ben Shapiro. Come on. Keep going, keep going.

Andrew's almost old enough to be president. Please don't start a way. How about that choir? Wow. So good. Wow. Oh, my God. I'm embarrassed.

I'm embarrassed to follow them out. That is the second best musical act ever to play a Daily Wireback game. Which is saying something. That's impressive. Well, they couldn't get number one back together again. No, they couldn't. It's the whole problem. So not on the stage.

The people demand a gun show. Not on the stage. It's not time. for that? What do you think I am? Running for president? All right, folks, that's enough outbursts. Security. Look for the troublemakers. Get them out of here. So you look at the world right now. It's very easy to focus on our domestic problems, which are immense. But the world's actually a very frightening place everywhere you look. And if you listen to our shows, it can be something of a discouraging experience in moments like this. like this. You know, you've got Ukraine is conducting offensive operations in Russian territory

today, the first time that in Europe there's been a war of any consequence since the Second World War. You've got China on the move. You've got massive political upheaval in huge percentages of the world. I mean, the prime minister of Bangladesh just had to flee her office. There's massive uncertainty happening, economic uncertainty. We see our stock market doing things that no expert can actually tell us why it's doing the things that it's doing. At the moment, you have people very unsure about their future, and yet, the five of us are generally optimistic fellows. The five of us are generally positive fellows. Like two and a half of us are sort of optimistic. Behind the scenes. I think it's no surprise

that we're a fairly religious lot. Each of the five of us has a pretty pronounced religious point of view and very distinct religious points of view, one from another. And while people listen to our shows and they know that about us, we've never, like I don't actually know any of your stories other than Drew's because he wrote it in a book. And then made me read the book. It was good for you.

And so I thought it might be an interesting way to kick off the second act to be a little bit more personal and just kind of go around the horn and talk about, briefly talk about each one of our sort of religious journeys that brings us to where we are, and then have a discussion about how, where's the commonality between our points of view and where are the distinctions between our points of view?

Drew, tell us about the great good thing. Well, you know, it's been 20 years since I was baptized, so I was about 90, I think, at the thing. And it would almost be an understatement to say that in that time, Christ has moved to the very center of my life. And there's just no question about this, that this is what I wake up, what I think about.

And more and more, I become convinced that the ways we talk about God need to change. And the reason is simply this. I think too often we talk about God the results of faith. Faith makes you happier. Faith holds families together. Faith makes a society better.

All of which is true, but it's true for a simple reason that God actually exists. And once you catch on to that stirring little fact, everything about your life changes. What changes about your life is that you're actually seeing reality. My big fear, if you read the Great Good Thing, which is my memoir of conversion, my big fear was that I would lose my sense of reality. I would become one of these Jesus people who thinks everything's going to go great now,

and I'm chosen and favored, and nothing can go wrong. and there's no death. I don't have to think about death anymore because all that's taken care of. And I was afraid that that would just absolutely detach me from reality. Instead, the weirdest thing has happened as this religion has become centered to my life. One, my outlook on the world has gotten much darker.

I see it as a darker place than I used to see it. So I've become more realistic in that sense. And at the same time, I am far more joyful and serene than I've ever been in my life. And what a strange paradox that is. And I don't want to talk forever, but just what that means to me is that this moral vision that we get from the Bible is true. We do violate it every day in the deepest, most evil, most corrupt possible ways. The world is a corrupt, evil place.

But we are in touch with the doorway out. You know, we're walking toward the door and the doorway takes us out of history, out of corruption, out of the world, as they say. And I got to tell you something, guys, every day, and obviously I'm about 10 minutes from leaving the world, in fact. But every day I am just more at peace with the world as it is and optimistic at a level that goes way beyond the next election. And I think it's a beautiful thing. Not even optimistic, maybe you would say, but. you have the theological virtue of hope, which is one of the three theological virtues.

You know, I was not 50 when I got baptized, but I was a cradle Catholic, but I fell away for about 10 years. I was practically an atheist and explicitly an atheist for a lot of that. And I had kind of a weird way back into religion, which is that this worked on C.S. Lewis, but I haven't heard it work on other people. A friend of mine presented me the on ontological argument for God, which is one that even St. Thomas Aquinas doesn't really like. And the short version of it is, God is the maximally great being, and it's better to exist than not to exist. Therefore, God has to exist. That's pretty much it. There's fancy ways to say it, but that's pretty much the argument. And the crazy part is I was 18, and it convinced me.

And then I looked into more robust and I think really irrefutable arguments for the existence of God, St. Thomas' Five Ways, and et cetera. And so then I came to the conclusion, as the first Vatican Council did, that the existence of God can be known with certainty by natural reason from the created world. Not everything about God can be known from reason. That's where revelation comes in. That's where faith comes in. But you can know that. So I still thought, because I was raised in a liberal New York, and, you know, if anyone even believed in God, they were considered weird, weird like J.D. Vance, that I was, I still believe that reason and faith were opposed. And actually, there are many people who call them

religious who think that. But then I just decided I might crack open a book one day. You know, I might read, I might, I might, and so this is all even before I really start praying. Boy, prayer, highly recommended. That really opens up your religious life. But even just reading, you know, you, it turns out that all these questions that perplex us today, it turns out that smarter people than we thought about them a long time ago, and they've debated them for millennia, and they've come to some pretty good answers that might be better than the ones that you've come to. So anyway, I broadly then agreed with Christianity. I read the Gospels, and I believe that Jesus is who he says he is, but I didn't know about

Protestantism or Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. And anyway, I came to the conclusion that the historical claims of the Church are true, of the Catholic Church are true, and I also came to the, there we, I hear some mackerel snappers out there, even in the heart of the Bible Belt. And so I came to that conclusion, and I came to the conclusion, ecclesiologically, that the claims about authority that are made by the Catholic Church are true. So that authority has to rest in an incarnational real institution with real men. And this is the part that actually comes back to politics, because I know there are a lot of people who say, you can't legislate morality and you've got to get religion out of politics or whatever. I'm not one of those people.

I suspect many of you are not those people. I came to understand what separates Christianity from other religions, especially like the Darmic religions, the non-theistic religions, is that ours is a faith that is grounded not just in poetry, not just in philosophy,

but in journalism, in fact, you know, the claim of Christianity is God becomes man in a place, in the fullness of time, under the Roman Empire, which is actually significant, and he picks real people, and he establishes a real church, and he leaves us real sacraments, because we're not just floating spirits.

You know, in modernity, liberalism tells us that we're just kind of floating in the ether, man. There's no time, there's no body. I'm a man, but I could be a woman, you know, whatever. I could be whatever I want to be. No, what Christianity says is man is irreducibly historical. Man has a body. He lives in a place. He's born to a family, in a political community, and that all means something.

And so that then informs one's political views because it means that this is the moment that we're chosen for. This is the country we were meant to be born in. We have real bonds of kinship to people that points to something beyond the world. We have a dual nature, a corruptible flesh and an incorruptible soul. We have a mind that partakes of eternal and universal things, but we have a flesh that's contingent and dependent on all sorts of other things.

And you can't separate those two. St. Paul says, if the resurrection is false, then we're all just a bunch of dopes, basically. You know, it has to be historically true. And the final point I'll make on this that's important to politics is if all of that is the case, if the word is made flesh and dwells among us, and actually the second person of the Trinity lives in time and is crucified by a legal authority with jurisdiction over the whole world, It means that history is not merely literal. It means that history has an allegorical meaning, that we interpret history.

The political events that we're in, this very moment that we're all in right now, we can't understand the full meaning of this event in our lives as it happens. We do that in retrospect. We do that as we interpret history, which is just the record of the political events that have happened. And that means that there is meaning, profound meaning, imbued in every single moment that we live, it means that we encounter some random Joe on the street, to use a phrase from C.S. Lewis, we're encountering an eternal being, and we cannot possibly overstate the significance of that.

So, obviously, I'm a little... Yeah, bring it, Ben. We're for you. We're for you a hundred of them. It's okay. It's okay. You know, so me and my five Jews in the crowd. I'm going to get a big shout out. But, so I mean, the story of my family coming to religion, both of my parents grew up in non-religious homes. They became more religious. When it was about eight years old, they started going to a synagogue pretty regularly. They were looking for a community to be a part of.

They'd always been interested in more authentic forms of Judaism. For people who are Orthodox reforming conservatism, like conservative Judaism, not political conservatism, are not authentic forms of Judaism. Authentic Judaism takes the Torah, meaning the five books of Moses seriously, as well as literally. and takes it so seriously that we enact the commandments that are in the five books of Moses every day of our lives, from when we wake up to when we go to sleep at night and also we wear these funny hats. And so my parents, when I was maybe eight or nine years old, they started going to a congregation down in Venice. That was led by a guy named Daniel Lapin, who is friends with Jeremy as well. I'm a very interesting person.

They started becoming sort of ensconced in orthodoxy. We became fully Orthodox when I was probably 11 or 12 years old. So I remember eating a KFC and McDonald's. Brutal. Brutal, that you have the memory of it. Yeah. I mean, I will say that the... Can I say that it's brutal every time I think about it, too?

I mean, so I will say that I was envious of that until I went to Israel where they actually have a kosher McDonald's and I tried it. And I was like, what are you guys all talking about? I was great about this. Anyway, the hash browns were really good. In any case, we became orthodox, as I say, when I was maybe 11 or 12 years old. And then like everybody else who's sort of religious, you go through a period of maturation in a religious viewpoint.

And I think that one of the big mistakes that people make when they grow up religious is not actually going through that struggle and trying to come up with good answers to solid questions about the things that they believe. And the biggest step, I think, is there's an attempt when you are 11, 12, 15 years old to suggest that there are proofs for everything in life, that anything can simply be proved by talking about it enough or thinking about it enough. And me being a particularly rationalistic type of person who really enjoys the process of logic and reasoning.

It's why I like debate, for example. It's why I love reading. It's why I love writing. But for me, that's a very sexy idea, this idea that you can sort of logic your way to the proper conclusions about the world. And you can theoretically, but the reality is that in the end,

the choice to believe is, in fact, a choice. It is not merely a thing where logic compels. because for every proof that Aquinas gives, there are, in fact, sophisticated ways that you can argue against them. I don't think they're fully convincing. I agree with Aquinas' proofs. But with that said, are they fully dispositive such that they demand that every person who reads them immediately convert to Catholicism or convert to belief in God at all? I don't think that's the case. I think the best proof of God and the thing that I've really settled on is that we live in God, whether we believe in God or not. What I mean by that is we live by God's rules. The reality of the world

is a godly world. So whenever we get up in the morning and we do a thing and we find that thing meaningful, that does not exist in a non-godly world. In a world, we're just meatballs wandering through space. None of that has any meaning, nor are you making any choices in the world. This is an argument that I had with Sam Harris, where he was making the argument there is no such thing as free will, for example. And I was saying, well, then I don't understand why you find any of this discussion meaningful, interesting, or worthwhile, and you're using an awful lot of active verbs for a person who doesn't believe in free will who say, we think about X, or we say, well, you don't do anything. I mean, it's a bunch of synapses that are doing that for you as the result of millions

of years of evolution. The reality is that if you believe that there is a relationship between the things that you do and the result that is obtained from those things, you are living in God's universe. If you believe that there is a moral logic to the universe, you are living in God's universe, and there's hardly a soul alive who doesn't believe those things deep down in the marrow of their bones. And that's not something you can be proved through logic. It's just a way that you live. And that's why whenever we have discussions about what you believe, I think that you don't, no one really believes in God in the same way that you believe in a logical proposition. You believe in God in the same way that you believe you love your wife, for example. And the way

that you believe that you love your wife is that you wake up every morning in the house with your wife and then you do things that are the love. Right. And that, and this is where Judaism really speaks to me on a personal level. Judaism is an action-oriented religion. It's a thing you are reifying concepts in the world via what are in Hebrew called the Mitzvod, via the commandments. And they are very complex and they're very abstruse. And that's the point. You don't understand all of them. You try to understand as many of them as you can. But the reality is that any system that tries to bring the profound down to real life has to meet with reality. And that has to be done in a system of rules and laws that govern your behavior and help you achieve what Aristotle

is trying to achieve actually when he suggests that you actually build virtue through repetition. That is what the commandments are for. And so, you know, when I think about my own Judaism, what I think about is the fact that I'm a link in a chain that carries back thousands of years into history. It's, as, as far as what an actual social contract looks like, it's not just a contract to people who are living. It's a contract between the dead and those who have yet to live. And to me, that's what religion is. That's what Judaism is. I'm carrying down a tradition that was held by my ancestors thousands of years ago. With the help of God, it's a tradition that will be held by my descendants, thousands of years.

from now. And it is a testimony to God in history, the continuation of the Jewish people. That is a testimony to, that's not my point, that's Mark Twain's point, that's Arnold Twainby's point, despite himself. The reality is that the continuation of the Jews as a people who are keeping the same biblical religion that was brought by Moses on Mount Sinai, 1,300 BC, or BC, that that is a testament to the fact that God does speak to humanity and speaks to humanity in the terms of history. see this history play out in our own time. When I think about October 7th, the meaning of October 7th to me is different because I'm a religious person than if I were a non-religious Jew. The fact that I'm a religious person means I look at October 7th, and what I see is an age-old hatred that is directed

against my people, against a people that I belong to on the basis of my religion, and that is never going to go away. That is always going to be a part of humanity. And the best parts of humanity, Jews and Christians alike, fight that. And they fight for it together. Because in the end, when I say Judeo-Christian religion, I'm not doing that to denigrate Christianity. As a Jew, I'm doing that because I have such respect for Christianity. Right? I understand when I say Judeo-Christian, it's not me trying to water down Christianity in some way. That's me saying that Christianity is a wonderful outgrowth for the world that has its roots, obviously, in Judaism because Jesus was a Jew. And so, you know, that reality is what religion means to me.

It's what I hope to pass down to my children. And it's how I find meaning in the morality that I think that we all, I hope, draw from the same wellspring. You know, there's a very beautiful point. I love when you said we reify something, meaning, you know, to make manifest, to make it real and tangible. Because this is a point that one of my main men, kind of my main man in all of literature is Dante. And Dante makes this point. What? Love Dante.

I don't know if you heard of him. He's a medieval Florentine who wrote a poem. Wait, you like Dante? A little bit. A little. They're like three Italian authors, so I had to pick one. And Dante makes this point in a letter to his page. He says, there are four layers of meaning in his poem, and he really thinks in the Bible

and throughout literature. And the example he uses to demonstrate this is the Exodus. He quotes from Psalms and he says, the Lord leads the people, the Jews out of Egypt into Jerusalem. And he says this has four meanings. There is a literal meaning, which is the Israelites leave, you know, Old Testament Israelites are leaving Egypt. going to the promised land in Jerusalem.

The allegorical meaning is the salvation one for us in Christ. This is the Christian reading of it. The moral meaning is the turning from sin through grace into a good life. And then the anagogical meaning, meaning from the perspective of the end times is the leave-taking of this corrupted world for heavenly glory. The four layers of meaning all in one line of scripture. And so when you discuss this, you say, look, my people, are a literal instantiation of this thing.

There's something really beautiful about that idea because, you know, we write our stories in sounds and scribbles. We use words and sounds and writing. But God writes his story with us. Another writer, more eloquent than I, has said that we are the syllables in God's story. And that's obviously the case. And so to focus in and say, you know,

I like the allegorical and the moral and the analogical too, But to say, no, there's actually a lived and historical thing that is going on that is telling God's story. Well, yeah, that's how the story is told. Michael, it was not your turn to go again. Oh. Were you going to use the term anagogical? I was. I had a whole thing about anagogical.

Like, Michael's that kid in school that does the homework and the extra credit. Like, if I could just, and I also just want to say that before we went on air today, I asked Jeremy, what are we talking about? And he said, oh, I don't know. And because right before we walk on air, we have no idea what we're going to talk about. But in his head, he was planning that we go around in a circle and I'll talk about our faith journeys. And I would go after the guy who wrote a spiritual autobiography and two Ivy League. people. So I'll just give a much more simplistic.

I'm a simple man story of my faith journey, which is actually, it is quite a simple thing because I was born into a very Catholic, very religious family. And I had the, yes, I had the blessing of not really not having a conversion story per se, because I was brought up in the faith. And I, you know, I have five brothers and sisters.

One of my sisters is now a cloistered nun. So there we go, Cloister. We got some Cloister fans in the audience. It's good. Just to give an idea of how Catholic our family is. So we were brought up in the faith, and we were not just told to believe it because that's what we believe,

but we were equipped with the intellectual tools to understand why we believe these things. And so for me, it was more a process of not so much learning the truth because that had been, because we did learn that. It was learning to stand in the truth boldly and proudly. And that was a process that I had to learn.

You know, I was raised in a very liberal area, went to public school for all 13 years, K through 12. And, you know, going into an environment, and it's much worse in public schools today than it was even 20 years ago, but it still wasn't great back then. And you're going into an environment, a hostile environment, of people who ridicule you for your faith. and I would go home, you know,

and we would all sit around the dinner table as a family, and I would sometimes talk about these experiences of talking about my religion in school and being made fun of. And the answer from my parents was always, oh, people made fun of you for that. Well, good, good. That's because you're standing for the truth, and that's what happens.

That's how you know that you're standing in the truth. In high school, we had a, I went to a high school that had a, an abortion clinic, not in the high school, but that would be extreme. Not quite, we weren't there. There was an abortion clinic that might as well have been because it was in a parking, it was practically in our parking lot. It was literally a stones throw away was the abortion clinic.

And my mom and my sisters used to go and pray outside this abortion clinic on Saturday mornings. And I wouldn't, and at first I didn't go because I was, I was, you know, as a 14 year old boy, I was sort of embarrassed. And especially Saturday mornings, you know, I was. you have buses of kids that were coming to school for practices and football players that were going to games and stuff on Saturdays. And there was one time in particular that some friends of mine happened to, they were going into school on a Saturday morning for something. And they saw my family standing outside of the abortion clinic holding rosaries. And they asked me about it.

They said, was that your family doing that? That was weird. And I kind of didn't respond because I was embarrassed. And then I went back and I told my mom about this and she said, you were embarrassed that your family is there standing against the murder of babies. That's embarrassing to you. Why is that embarrassing? And of course, I couldn't explain it.

And it was sort of like from that moment on, I realized that this is, that if anyone should be embarrassed, it should be them for not understanding why that is wrong. And that is also. That's also how I learned to enjoy being a contrarian asshole. So, you know, I really want to hear Jeremy's religious journey, but first, because we're just getting all this religious talk out here, I want to bring the choir back out here. Can we get the choir back out? All right. Please.

Thank you. All right. because I really want to talk about something. Thank you, fellas. We would not be here tonight without our good friends over at good ranchers. I said, we would not be here tonight

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Remember to use code backstage for $25 off your order. when they go through all that vocal training this is what they dream of my religious journey started with a commercial a commercial for golden meat those guys are unbelievable my journey is a bit like yours mad in that I don't have a conversion story I didn't grow up in a church-going family really but I grew up in a face faithful family. And I think we thought we went to church probably more than we did. But, you know, we were a Christian household. We read the Bible together and we, you know, all the sort of things that kids in the 80s and 90s had in America from Salty the Singing Songbook through, that guy

I love Salty to singing comic book. It's a little creepy at this point, I have to say. But we always had religious conversation. My maternal grandfather was sort of a spiritual leader of our family. When I got to college, I would say that I started having somewhat more independent thought about theology. I have a friend Jay Lemon who was being paid to teach me piano. I'm not a very good piano player now, but I had very good religious conversations with him throughout college that became really sort of definitive for me.

And then I got to L.A. And L.A. as a city, as I've said before, that's always trying to kill you. And because it's always trying to kill you, it forces you to be whatever it is that you're going to be. You have to decide who you are in L.A. And you can decide to be what the city wants you to be. That's one way you can survive it. or you can decide to be as securely what you are apart from it as possible so that you can withstand it.

That's the other way that you can survive it. And I picked the ladder and wound up sort of teaching this home church for a little over 15 years in one form or another. And like many people, I would say that I learn best through teaching. I mean, that's just a way of – it's just another way of approaching. It gives you responsibility. Now you have to learn something. Like, you're going to have to say something on Sunday, so you better learn something between now and then.

But my, the particulars of my journey, probably like all of you, the particulars of my beliefs just continue to evolve with time as you live in this world and you realize that everything is trying to kill you. Like, I had this great realization. I've been talking about it a little bit lately, that the sun kills you, that the one thing that all things on earth have in common. They don't have it in common measure, but they all have it in common, is that everything in the world is bad, that you can be the best parent possible. Like, you can look back and say, my parents traumatize me and I'm going

to be the best parent possible, and yet you will traumatize your child. One of the things that your six children will have to overcome in their life is you. Oh, yeah, especially. It goes without saying, yeah. And one of the things that, things that your three children will have to overcome in this world is mad. Exactly. I tell them all the time. And I only say that to say. I'm not saying that all things are equally bad.

That's certainly not true. There are some things that are genuinely terrible, right? There are some things that are very, very, very good, like the sun. But the sun, the source of life on earth will, in fair measure, it will also kill you. That all things in a fallen world, all things in a corrupted world, are corrupt, except for the thing that isn't. except for the thing that isn't corrupt and isn't corruptible, and that's God. That God is the... Shout out to God.

That guy loves God. Big ups. Big ups to God. It's salty the singing songbook guy and God guy. They're sitting very close to each other. That God is the incorruptible thing. He's the only thing that in any measure is only good for you. And for that reason, I've been thinking of late about our vice president,

Kamala Harris and this saying that she has that she repeats over and over and over. Did you fall out of a coconut tree? Is that the one you mean? Among others. She likes to say that what might be unburdened by what has been. And at first that sounds like just an inanity, right? It just sounds like another one of these gobbledygook things that she says, which are of a kind with the gobbledy-gook things. things that her predecessor likes to say,

come on, Jack. Go on Jack, yeah. But it isn't in Aene at all. It's actually an incredibly evil philosophy. It has real meaning, and she means it. And it's the opposite of my worldview, because I'm a bit of an idealist as well. I'm not big on dogma.

Part of my religious experience is when I realize that all of the claims of the Catholic Church aren't true. I kid. I kid. I kid. He's not kidding. He's not not kidding. Some of them are true. I'm just going to sit over here, guys. Some of them are true. No, but that like all other things on Earth, our dogmen, our doctrine also contain the corruption of the fall, that all of them which can be used for good, can in measure be used for bad as well. And yet, my idealism about what can. be is not unburdened by what has been. It's decidedly built on what has been. And I think that part of our job as human beings is to look to the wisdom of the past, identify the flaws because

humans are flawed and our institutions have been flawed, and to try to take the best things about what we've inherited and to give correction to the worst things we've inherited. And we will in doing that create things which in some which contain good and which in certain measure will kill you. And so a thousand years from now, people will look back on the things that we've bequeathed to the future. And we'll have done so for very good reasons, faithful to God, prayerfully, you know, not cynically. We'll have done them for very, you know, hopefully for as pure a motive as possible. And yet even in those will be contained flaws. Our children will have to overcome the trauma of us, right? And yes,

the thing, the ultimate foundation that we're trying to pass along is the incorruptible foundation. The real wisdom of the past is what our ancestors and forbearers all knew, which is that our life is rooted in the incorruptible. And one last thought, and then I'll stop, which is, you know, listening to Michael, you were talking about the proofs of God, and Ben, you were suggesting that God, while you agree with many of the proofs, there are no conclusive proofs of God, and I think that that brings us ultimately to the most important of the theological well I suppose the most important is love but there is one other of the three and that's faith that faith is the thing that

lives between what proofs we can have and what proofs we cannot have and we are our ultimate experience of God is through faith that's where that's where we live in this in this material world in this time and in this place, our experience of God is primarily an experience of God through faith. And that's not an accident. That's the exact way that God wants us to experience him is by way of faith. It's a very important point you're making to on the ubiquity of at least some modicum of corruption, and usually more than a modicum of corruption in this world, because it gets to, this would be our disagreement about the church, which is, you know, when Christ said, I'll be with you, even until the end of the age, I'll send the Holy Spirit to guide you.

That's a special claim because of all this corruption. And so this is why we say the Bible is inerrant. This is why Catholics believe that the church is preserved from error on dogmatic teaching, though on certain other teaching, you know, there are all sorts of debates. But it gets to a political problem then too. And this is something I think that everyone on stage, and I suspect everyone in the audience will agree with, which is this matter of authority, political authority.

Where does political authority come from? Does political authority come from some piece of paper? Not really. There are plenty of great pieces of paper in America. We like the Constitution. We like all sorts. But that's not really. Political authority comes from claims of authority

that are accepted by the people. You know, we don't like that Joe Biden's the president. Some of us doubt that he's even still alive, but we still acknowledge him as the president right now. He has... Salty guy, God guy. Joe Biden might be alive

guy. They're all sitting right here. But where... How does the government get to say were the government do what we say? The way they get to do that

is they make a claim of authority. They claim to speak for justice. They claim to be an enactment of justice. But in order to make that claim, you have to believe in God. You have to implicitly believe in God because you have to believe that there's such a thing as justice. You have to believe that there's such a thing as a moral order that you can put into practice and enforce and legislate.

And so even our hideous liberal elites who say that they're atheist or secular, we can live with a total separation of church and state, they don't believe that because they're making claims about justice. They never shut up about justice and God. I actually, I don't agree with that entirely. I mean, I think that the line, you know, in Paradise Lost, was another poem. I think I've heard the rip-off of Leonty. No, in Paradise, Lost, Milton is trying to work out why it was okay for him to rebel against the king, Charles I, a human king, and why it was wrong for Satan to rebel against God, a godly king. And what happens to Satan when he separates himself from God is he separates himself from reality. This is my whole point about God being real.

And Satan starts out by saying, well, I can make reality. I can turn heaven into hell and hell into heaven. The mind is its own place. And he ends up realizing that because God is reality and not just reality, but the goodness of reality, he ends up saying, myself am hell, whichever way I fly, there is hell because he can't attach himself to the reality, the good reality. And I think that some of our friends on the left have reached this point, which that satanic theory is passed down to us through Nietzsche, who said, there's no God. God is dead, therefore we have to make the moral order. And then to Foucault, he is like the hero of the left. Foucaulte is the hero of the academic left, a guy who said, there's no such thing as truth.

Everything is just a power structure. So I'm going to destroy all the power structures in myself and proceeded to go on an orgy of sadomasochistic sex until he got AIDS, killed everyone he was in contact with, and himself. And the academics think, that's my guy. I'm with him. And so I think they do believe, they do believe that there is no God and there is no truth and there is no morality. And my only point about this is that we all know deep down,

here's where I agree with you, we all know deep down that that's nonsense, but they are willing to actually follow the king of death into his territory. This is a great point. And so I guess what I mean to say, because I agree with that entirely, what I mean to say is when the left says, you know, where the government listened to us, they're making a claim of authority, which implies some claim about justice, which implies that God exists. But sure, they don't really believe in God. So I guess this would be... But here's the distinction, I think, and it goes all the way back to the first pages of that one book, that they are speaking in a God framework.

Yeah. But they have replaced God with them. Right. They are God. This is the difference between making a claim about authority and a claim from totalitarianism. You know, in one, you're, in one, the government is actually being kind of humble because you're saying there's this moral order that I'm enforcing. In totalitarianism, it's just whatever I want. So in one, the reason is mediating between the appetite and the divine will. In the other, it's just pure will. And that means that it's bound to fail. Because if you go back to the original biblical structure, of how government was supposed to work. If you go back to the five books of Moses, before we actually get to the breakdown of the judges and the kings, when there's a first

discussion of what the king is supposed to do, it says that he actually is supposed to write his own copy of the Torah and he's supposed to carry it around with him, right? Because he's subject, he's the only person in the entire Bible who has to write two copies. So everybody is enjoined to actually participate in the writing of a Torah in Judaism. My family's been lucky enough to do that. It's a really cool thing. But if you're the king, then you actually have to not only write, you have to carry it around all day because you're subject to the law. So the idea is that even God's king is subject to God's law. What the left decided to do was take away God and leave the law.

And when they did that, what they became was Satanic. What they became were representatives of these free-floating ideas that are no longer connected to the roots of the ideas. So they're speaking in language. It's actually very reminiscent of nearly all of the left's political campaigns. They use buzzwords of the right, empty them of all meaning, and then proceed to weaponize them against the rights. They'll do this with things like weird or joy.

They'll empty them a meaning, refill them with a different meaning, and then use the cut-out husks of those things as their props. And they do that with justice by substituting social justice in favor of justice. Or they'll say law. Or woman, for instance. Or woman. Or law.

I mean, like very, very bit truth, these very basic concepts, they'll empty them of contents and then they'll use them because in the end, the only concepts that human beings have to work with are religious concepts. There are no other concepts. All of these concepts are religious. The backing for science is reliant in a very, very deep and profound way upon certain basic religious truths, like the predictability of the

universe, like the idea that there is a cause and effect, like the fact that your human brain, your meatball of a brain, can understand actual absolute truths that exist out there. These are all faith principles. And you mentioned before the importance of faith. In Hebrew, the word for faith is emuna. That word actually doesn't mean faith. Really, it means trust. It's also the source of the word amen, right, or amen in English. The basic idea is that when somebody says a blessing and you say amen, what you're really saying is that you trust. that that's true. When you say you have faith in God, you don't mean that, again, that you sort of have faith in a random concept out there. God doesn't care, in my opinion, too much about your

opinions. I think God cares very much about his opinions. But what that really means is that you have trust, if you're a smart person, in that what God says is true. And what the left keeps running up against is that reality. They keep doing stupid things and running directly against a brick wall and then being angry that the brick wall of reality exists. And so they're constantly at war with reality. And they're bound to fail. They're bound to fail. And so what they've decided, as their system of government, in response to this, is a risk-free existence. Because the only person who can take a risk is the person who's willing to jump knowing that there is another side to that cliff, right?

You can jump off the cliff, and on the other side there's going to be a gap. And then on the other side, there's something there, right? Not necessarily knowing. Every person who's taken a risk, which is to say Americans, because we are a risk-taking people above all else. If there's one thing that characterizes America, it's that we are a place of risk-takers, were people who came from all over the world with nothing, literally nothing, to a place where there was nothing. I understand, yes, there were Native Americans who lived here, but there was no Western civilization, there no buildings, there was no system, there was no government that was capable of spanning the vast territory.

And then they were told by the government not to cross mountains. They crossed the mountains. They went there. They lived in the middle of nowhere. They got shot at. They got scalped. And then they built a civilization. They're all risk.

Americans are risk takers. How can you take that risk? You can only take that risk if you have trust that there is a system of reality. that when you take that risk, you land on the other side. And what the left has decided to do is eliminate risk in life and give you, in compensation, the only risk you're allowed to take is sexual risk. So they give you sexual risk and they took away all the other risks,

economic risk and faith risk and all the risks that actually make life for a living. Because it turns out that actually one of the least important things in life is sexual risk taking. It's actually not a very good thing for you. But it turns out that entrepreneurship is quite good for you. Creativity is quite good for you. The ultimate leaps that we all take in our lives, the leap of family. The leap of family.

The leap of family is a massive leap of faith. No one knows what the hell it's going to be like when you have kids. I mean, Matt has six of them, and every time, sure, I won't speak for you. I'll speak for myself. Every time we have another kid, we have four, it is a risk because it's like, I don't know what this kid is going to be like. Even now, I don't know what my kids are going to be like tomorrow. I don't know what they're going to be like in 10 years.

It's a huge risk. And we are people being robbed of our initiative and robbed of our risk-taking abilities because the ground upon which we walk, which is a faith-based ground, has been ripped away from us by a secular life. And the thing about it is, the thing about it is, Because they say this is because of science, because science has revealed that all the things in the Bible are untrue. My brilliant son, Spencer Claven, no relation to me, has written an actual book about

this about the fact that you come to places in science where it suddenly seems that the human mind cannot actually conceive of reality. So you start to make up things like multiverses and, you know, we're in a simulation, things like this. But in fact, every time a scientist has taken that leap of faith and said, you know what, my mind and God's mind are not disconnected. Every time science has advanced and you've gotten a renaissance and a renaissance of science. There's wonderful book coming out about this in a couple of months, so I won't plug it now. But still, it's a brilliant insight that science itself depends on just the kind of risk. That God is still God on the other side of the mountain.

That's right. That's right. So we have a few minutes left, and I want to talk about the most important thing happening at the Daily Wire right now, and that is Matt Walsh's movie, Am I Racist? It is fair to say that it's the biggest risk that we've yet taken as a company. We're putting the film in theaters. It's our first major theatrical release, and tickets go on sale right now. So at this very moment, as we all sit here, tickets are officially on sale for Am I Racist? And because you made a point to come see us today and spend your Wednesday night with us. We're going to give you an exclusive look at the first scene that we're

releasing publicly of the film. White participants and the group feel that there's something in themselves that they have to overcome when all that's being requested of you is that you be. Hello. Hi. How are you? I'm sorry about that. Oh, no problem. You good? Yeah. Remind me of your name again. Steven? Steven? Yeah? Okay. Um, did you want to come up?

Come up? Yeah, do you want to come up and share anything? Sure, what do you want me to share? Whatever's on your mind? I just want to know that, like, my physical safety and yours and everybody else is here is okay. Why would your physical safety not be okay? Did I miss something? I don't feel comfortable.

What? Can you guys catch her up to speed on what's going on here? You don't need to be caught up. We're going to be silent. Is it because I said I had 17 black friends? It might have been 15. I... It depends on how you count them.

I would really appreciate it if you left, so that the people who actually want to be here and deserve to be here can get what they need. I do want to be here. Can you please leave? I would like it if you left. I'm trying to learn. I'm on this journey.

Come with me. Well... Thank you. I didn't consent to be touched. I'm not offering to touch you. I'm offering to walk you out. Will you walk with me and I'll answer your questions? Okay.

You all admit it. I'll admit it. My name's not Steven. Maybe you already knew that. My name is Matt Walsh. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. We know.

I just was here on this journey that I'm just starting, but I see that I'm not wanted. If you were on your journey, then you would have told us who you were your real name, but you didn't. Are you saying I needed a better disguise? Is that what you? I don't know, maybe. But you can figure that out as you walk out the door.

Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Thank you so much. I really had. the transformative experience myself. And my pronouns are he, him? I did everything I could to fit in. I opened up.

I was raw and emotional. I told them about my black friends. It was no use. They rejected me. And they called the police. My mere presence in the room caused them pain. I'll never be accepted if I look like this. If they know that I'm Matt Walsh,

I'll always be an outsider. I need to go deeper under cover, a whole new identity. If I want to be an ally, I need to look like one. Like someone who is progressive, tolerant, enlightened. Let me think. Have I ever met anyone like that? Ah, yes. Yes, I have.

What is a woman? Why do you ask the question? This is rated PG-13 by tickets. Thank you. I feel like I need to back up here for a second. Explain a little bit what you just saw there. So that was a, I don't want to explain it too much because I want you to go pre-order the tickets and go watch it when it comes out. But that was a white grief support group, which is a real thing that exists.

All this stuff is very, very real. And that was a support group for white people who are grieving the fact that they have privilege. Yes. And so we started this journey of making this film and we found out about this group. And we said, well, of course, I have to go. This is a good place for me to start my journey. And when we walked in there, the first thing they told us, so this became a theme with some of the other people we talked to in the film,

that they said that you're not allowed to have white tears. And if you cry, if you're a white person and you're crying, you need to leave the room. We have a cry room for you outside of the room for you to cry your hideous tears. And so I go into it. to the white group, the white support group, I'm very emotional. I get quite emotional up to this point,

revealing my struggles as a white man to the group. At a certain point, I had to leave and go to the cry room. I was so emotional. And the problem is that while I was in the cry room, apparently one or two people in the group realized who I was, and they talked to everybody else in the group so that when I came back, from the cry room that's what happened so so you also have to understand how

how hard that is for me that I was already emotional and then I come out and that's what happens and they did did they actually call the police they did in fact call the police now I was I was long gone at that point I in fact our camera crew was calling me and saying they're calling the police I don't know what to do I said well I'm leaving the state you guys just stay there and figure it out. I was in New Jersey by then. I'm like, just get it on tape, is all the matters.

But they were very, very upset about it. And all I'll say is that, you know, that's just the beginning of the movie. That's what starts the journey. And that's where we realize that I need to dawn some kind of disguise. You know, lots of people that have seen the trailer have said, like, it's not much of a disguise. How did that fool people? That I don't know. But, I mean, I...

It's like... A man bun will do wonders, is what we do. So the movie is a great successor to what is a woman, but it is an evolution. It's not another sort of documentary where Matthew Everyman goes in and has conversations with these people. It really is something that we haven't seen before from the right, which is it's a genuine comedy in which you allow these people to be the butt of the job. joke in a way that we've historically only seen from Sasha Baron Cohen or even John Stewart

in sort of the heyday of the Daily Show where you just, you both mock and allow these people to mock themselves in a way that I don't think we've ever seen on the right. It's a truly special film and a true risk. Which is why just to reiterate, that's why it's so important that pre-ordering tickets is so important. And I know that if you're like me, I've never pre-ordered a movie ticket in my life because I don't know. Like I get to see one movie every 10 years. I don't know when that time will come. When it comes, we go.

But it's so important in this case because that determines a lot. It determines how many theaters get to show the movie. and it determines the success of the movie in a big way. And if we want more films like this to make it into theaters, then that's why we need all of your support. But the thing is, we're not just asking for charity here. I promise that when you go watch the movie, you're in for really fun time at the movies as well.

Friends, we're so grateful to you for spending your Wednesday night with us at the Ryman Auditorium. Thank you for being a great audience. Remember to get out there buy those advanced tickets for Am I Racist at Amiracist.com? Let's show Hollywood that Nashville is now Movie City. Special thanks to the Gospel Touch Choir for making this a beautiful show for us. Special thanks to our sponsors, Birch Gold and Good Ranchers, to all of our Daily Wire plus subscribers who make it possible for us to do the work that we do.

And to you guys for being here tonight. Thank you very much. God bless you and we'll see you next time. All right. Thank you. Good night, guys. Hey. Thank you, guys. clear what's happening in this country. It's Nazism.

Republicans are Nazis. You cannot separate yourselves from the bad white people. Growing up in the 90s, I never thought much about race. Sure, you noticed, but never really seemed to matter that much. At least not to me. Being a white, straight, cisgender, and it's

the top of the pile. I'm on the top of the pile. That's me. Am I racist? I would really appreciate it if you left. I'm trying to learn. I'm on this street. Can you please leave? I'm going to sort this out. I need to go deeper undercover. If I want to be an ally, I need to look like one. What is racism?

Margaret King said not to judge people by the... Why was their king said a lot of stuff. Is America inherently racist? What the hell is that? The word inherent is challenging there. America is racist to its bones. All of the... So inherent.

Yeah. The entire system has to burn. And I'm not going to even use this country. This country is not worth saving. This country is a piece of shit. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Joining us now is Matt.

Certified. DEI expert. Here's my certification. Where are you guys in your anti-racist journeys? So look around the room and point to who we believe is the most racist person in the room. We want to rename the George Washington Monument to the George Floyd Monument. Would your mind signing it? You will?

What do you think about this issue of heteronormativity and how it intersects with the broader structures of racism in society? Ah. What's up with white people? What are you doing to de-center your whiteness? Who's making it to the center? Why are they doing that? And what you're doing is you're stretching out of your whiteness. This is more for you in this field. White.

White. White. Watt. White supremacy. White woman. White woman. White woman. White.

White. Is there a black person around her? What happened? Black person right here. Does he not exist? They don't say I'm racist. Hi, Robin. Hi.

And what's your name? I'm Matt. Matt. Matt. Hi, Matt. Thanks to meet you. I just had to ask. ask who you are because you have to be careful.

Never be too careful. In theaters September 13th, rated PG-13. Buy tickets now.