The Megyn Kelly Show - Ben Shapiro on Firing Fauci, Uncanceling Carano, and Ditching California | Ep. 68

Episode Date: February 24, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Ben Shapiro, host of The Ben Shapiro Show and co-founder of The Daily Wire, to talk about Dr. Fauci and COVID fear, vaccines and lockdowns, "The Science," Govs. Cuomo and DeSantis (and media hypocrisy), the Ted Cruz controversy, Rush Limbaugh's legacy and Shapiro's New York Times column, Gina Carano getting uncanceled by The Daily Wire, and The Daily Wire's plans to expand into the film world, the left's culture war and what happens next, the problem with mainstream diversity training, how the Biden administration is doing so far, his move to Florida and the differences with California and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today we've got Ben Shapiro. Very excited. I love talking to him. He's so funny, so clever. He's always got new insights on the issues of the day. As you know, he's the host of The Ben Shapiro Show. Huge, huge podcast. So super successful. And co-founder of The Daily Wire, which is just branching out to become this huge conglomerate fighting back against all the things we dislike. So looking forward to having him on in one second. But one of the things that we're going to talk about is something I want to kick the show off with today. And that is we've got great news, wonderful news today. While we were all dealing with winter

snow and ice and power grid losses, we jumped. We jumped forward leaps and bounds in the fight against COVID. Dr. Marty Macaray, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, reveals to us publicly that cases are down 77% right now. This is in the Wall Street Journal the other day. As he put it in that piece, if a medication slashed cases by 77%, we would call it a miracle pill. And this guy says it is time to level with the public about the good news. We will have herd immunity by April. April. That means we've only got one more month to get through. By April. It's amazing. We can finally take off these damn masks and go back to normal, right? Well, not so fast. Dr. Wet Blanket Fauci says the masks, you might still be forced to wear them

through 2022. Listen. You and the president have suggested that we'll approach normality toward the end of the year. What does normal mean? Do you think Americans will still be wearing masks, for example, in 2022? You know, I think it is possible that that's the case. And again, it really depends on what you mean by normality. Right. That's what I want you to define it. Exactly the way. No, Dana, it's important because if normality beyond what the terrible burden that all of us have been through over the last year. OK, so you might still be forced to wear your mask for another year or two. Just no. OK, no.

We're not doing that. I mean, I just, like, I'm not doing that. I'm not wearing my mask through 2022. And it's absurd to suggest that that long after achieving herd immunity, the country should be asked that. Some of us are not hysterics. Some of us see that the virus is not currently the existential threat that the drama-prone have insisted it remains. Some of us are willing to tolerate

a certain amount of risk in our lives and not hand sanitizing 20 times a day or wearing masks interminably. It's a dare that we're willing to take. We sucked it up because we were told we had to for the good of society. We did it for a damn year, but it's ending. It's better, admit it.

We could wear masks forever. We could prevent all sorts of germ spreading if we did that. I'm sure the flu is way down this year, but most of us have zero desire to live like that. And it's not up to the government to tell us that we must. So no, I for one will not be wearing a mask through 2022. I am pretty much done doing it now, but so far have been compliant out of respect for the fear of others. And I don't know about you, but I don't have much more of this in me. I am over the mask. We did our part.

We shut down businesses. We stayed at home. We didn't eat out. We missed weddings and funerals. Our kids missed a year of school. The suicide rate went up. So did the overdoses, the bankruptcies, depression, and enough is enough. So you know what? If Dr.

Macri and others say that we have achieved herd immunity in April, I am going to accept that and celebrate it. I won't be wearing my mask for another year. And I don't really care if Dr. Fauci or Joe Biden or the preening mass brigades on the streets of the Upper West Side of Manhattan don't like it. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think it is. I'll get Ben Shapiro's thoughts on Fauci, and they're interesting today in just a second. But first, let's talk about the zebra. This is an insurance situation. You know, when you shop for insurance, it's not fun. Nobody enjoys doing it, and it can be complicated. That's why these guys created this company called The Zebra. When you use TheZebra.com, insurance finally feels like it's in black and white. No more confusion, just honest rates from real companies. The Zebra is the nation's leading insurance

comparison site for car and home insurance, so they help you save money in a super easy way by comparing accurate insurance quotes for free. Just go to thezebra.com. You answer a few questions. You get all the info right there. The Zebra will protect your personal info and they will make sure that there are no hidden fees or surprises along the way. And you can secure your insurance from the zebra.com either by going to the website, or you can do it over the phone with one of their licensed insurance agents. How much money can you save on car or home insurance? Visit TheZebra.com slash Kelly. That's T-H-E-Z-E-B-R-A dot com slash Kelly for insurance in black and white.

Check it out. And now, Ben Shapiro. So let's start with Dr. Fauci. And by the way, it's not just Fauci. Other doctors, too. There's this guy, John Klein, Dr. John Klein of the University of Louisville Med School. He's suggesting we may need to wear masks, quote, for years after herd immunity. I mean, let's just wear them forever. Let's just never take them off. I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. No. I mean, at this point, it is pretty clear from the studies that we have available that not only does the vaccine prevent you from dying of the disease, like at a 99% efficacy rate,

but it also prevents you from transmitting the disease, according to the new Israeli data, at like a 90% rate. So if it's preventing you from transmitting and preventing you from dying, and we all get it, then what exactly are we waiting for? I remember Dr. Fauci a couple of weeks ago said something like, you know, when we have the point of zero transmission, then we can go back to regular life. Zero transmission does not exist with virtually any disease in human history, especially a disease that is as virulent as this one. We don't shut down all of American society for the flu. And I know we're not supposed to compare COVID to the flu, but post-vaccine, it's significantly less deadly than the flu. So what exactly are we waiting for at that point?

It's maddening and it's insane. And by the way, it's super counterproductive for Fauci and the rest of the public health administration to be saying things about vaccine doubtfulness when the chief goal here should be to get as many people to take the vaccine as humanly possible. Right now, we have one third of the military saying they don't want to take the vaccine. Outsized shares of the black and Hispanic communities saying they don't want to take the vaccine. And so you've got the public health people being like, yeah, well, you know, even after you take the vaccine, maybe you'll still have to socially distance from grandma

and never go to a ballgame again. And and by the way, wear a mask until the end of time. This is like the dumbest possible strategy. It's incredibly, incredibly stupid. It's anti-scientific. And at a certain point, you have to say to yourself, this is more about control than it is about the science, which is something I've been pretty hesitant to say throughout, but it seems like it's getting to be that way at this point. No, but it's a good point. I mean, people, some people are already scared to take the vaccine because they don't know what they're getting themselves into. They don't think the trials were long enough. You know, they heard about some negative reactions in some small percentage of

cases, what have you. And so now you take away the main incentives to get the vaccine, which is return to normal. No, there won't be any return to normal. He's like here on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I don't know if we have an little bit on the older side and they're very scoldy. You know, like if they see you without that mask on, they will get in your face and they're terrified. Ben, you can just tell that they've been terrified by a lifetime on this earth, by the media, by their liberal circles, whatever it is. But I feel like he's of them. Dr. Fauci is of them. He's basically hiding under the kitchen table with 40 masks on saying, never, don't take it off. There'll be no more movie theaters. There'll be no more Broadway. And he does it with a smile and he has a genteel manner.

But the rest of America doesn't feel like this. I don't think we're in a mask interminable. It's just fine by me phase as a people. So, I mean, this week I called for Fauci to be fired. And the reason I called for Fauci to be fired after a year of saying you shouldn't be fired, by the way, like every time people would say on the right, Fauci, Trump should fire Fauci. I was like, no, I don't really see the rationale. But here's the thing. Fauci has outlived his usefulness as a public servant.

He is putting out mixed messaging. And he's pretty clearly a political tool of the Biden administration at this point when he's out there recommending CDC standards that overtly have input from the teachers unions when he's out there trying to defend Kamala Harris after Kamala Harris says the teachers essentially need to be vaccinated in order to go back to the classrooms. He's saying that teachers must be prioritized. In what world must teachers be prioritized? There is no evidence that I'm aware of none that the that the teachers are at outsized risk of getting this from students. In fact, I've yet to see a single story in the United States of a teacher confirmed to have gotten covid from a student who then died of the covid. I've not seen a single story of that in the United States. All the

stories about it that you see, a teacher infected by other teacher at the school, teacher infected a grocery store, a teacher infected somewhere else and happened to be a teacher. So then we pretend that it had something to do with the school. The thing about Fauci is I don't think that he's actually scared of the virus. I think that he's what you would expect him to be. He's a bureaucratic ass covering guy. He's somebody who works for the federal government. The logic goes something like this. If he says, listen, get the vaccines, then you can go out in public and enjoy your life. And then people get the vaccines, they go out in public, they enjoy their life. And then another variant comes around and clocks them. Then Fauci is on the hook.

But if he says, if you get the vaccines, then you still shouldn't go out and enjoy your regular life. And then things get bad. Then he can say, well, I told you guys that we should have been cautious all the way through. So you're sort of prisoner's dilemma here in terms of politics always tends toward the worst possible solution and also the most impossible solution here, which is you should get vaccinated and also continue doing all of these other things. As I tweeted out, there's this presumption in the public health community that is obviously untrue, that there are three different outcomes here. One is you get vaccinated and go back to your regular life.

One is you don't get vaccinated and you don't go back to your regular life. And the third is you don't get vaccinated or you do get vaccinated and you still don't go back to your regular life. So here's the reality. Everybody's going back to regular life. The only question is whether they're going to be vaccinated or not. Why would you not encourage them to get vaccinated before going to regular life? Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And Fauci, he's also out there talking about, you're talking about how he's

been a mouthpiece for the Biden administration, for the teachers union. And by the way, to your point, yes, so he's a bureaucrat. But the good thing about when Trump was in office is, you know, you had a leader above him who would take other considerations, you know, into under advisement, right? It's not all about Fauci and his public health warnings. There are different kinds of public health you have to take into account, right? And so I felt like before we were looking at that, I'm not so sure now. And the other thing I heard Fauci saying this week was, he's touting how our first graders may be able to get vaccinated by September, that testing on young people is underway now.

And my first thought was, but we don't want that. I have a first grader. I'm not getting him vaccinated. I'm not getting my children vaccinated. They don't need it. It hasn't been sufficiently tested. And even if there's some test between now and then over the next few months, I don't think it's going to be satisfactory to me.

And I'll get myself vaccinated tomorrow. I'm not an anti-vaxxer. And all my kids have been vaccinated on the MMR and all that stuff. But this one, it's not necessary. And the risk benefit, you know, calculation is much different on this one since it doesn't affect them really at all, COVID. And so now this is the latest push, like, don't worry, your first grader can get it by September. You mark my words, Ben, as soon as it's available and you don't get it, they're going to start to's available and you don't get it, they're going to start to be rules that you can't send your kid back to school.

I mean, this is madness. So I checked the statistics this morning. According to the CDC, as of February 17th, the total number of kids aged 14 and under who have died of COVID is 140 in this nation. 140, according to the CDC stats, that says of February 17th. According to the same CDC stats, some 2.4 million kids under the age of 17 have actually gotten COVID. And we know that that multiple is significantly higher because there are a ton, a ton of kids who have had asymptomatic transmission of this thing because kids very often manifest asymptomatically, probably more often than the rest of the general population. So what you're actually talking about is not 2.4 million kids who have gotten this. You're probably talking 10 times that number. You're

probably talking at least 20 million kids who have gotten this so far. And of that, you have 140 children, 140 who have died of this. Now, every one of those is a tragedy, but if we're going to pretend that that is a broad national public health crisis on the scale that requires my first grader to get a vaccine? The answer is no. I mean, this is supposed to protect the elderly. I mean, let's face what this is. If you're under the age of 20, the flu is more deadly for you than this thing is.

If you are between the ages of 20 and 65, it is more deadly than the flu, but by a multiple of maybe three or four. If you're over the age of 65, it is very deadly. And that means that you should be getting vaccinated if you are over the age of 20, because why the hell wouldn't you? But why would I vaccinate? Like this notion, and you heard it

from the teachers unions, that every kid has to be vaccinated before they go back to school. Are you nuts? This is crazy. What are you even talking about? And the fact that the Biden administration, which is supposed to be the people with the plan, remember, it was Trump and his very unserious people who are in charge. And when they came in, there was no plan, even though Joe Biden, by the way, I noticed was a beneficiary of the plan that got him the vaccine on January 11th. I noticed that nine days before he was inaugurated, he was vaccinated. But apparently the plan didn't exist to the point where there were a million shots that happened the day that he was inaugurated. And now the constantly moving goalposts, the bizarre attempts to downplay the efficacy of

the vaccine, the ridiculous attempts to suggest that there are deadlines that are hard to meet that are actually extraordinarily easy to meet. I mean, you're seeing from the Biden administration now the new line is, well, I mean, it'll just be an amazing accomplishment if we get 300 million people vaccinated by August. That won't be an amazing accomplishment. The hell are you talking about right now? We already have tens of millions of people who have already been vaccinated. We have more tens of millions of people who have already had it, which means they probably don't need to be vaccinated at all in the first place. And even if we continue at current pace, we're doing about

two million shots a day. That brings you to wait for it. About 300 million vaccinations by August. So what in the world are you talking like? None of this makes any sense. It is all just an attempt to spin a narrative when the reality is that the vaccination process, the development of the vaccines, all of this stuff was already marching underway before Biden got at the head of the line. And now Biden is using the lockdown as a sort of political rationale for everything else he wants to do. Remember, this is all connected with $1.9 trillion stimulus package. They're talking about another stimulus package after that. And in order for you to generate this kind of outsized spending, this outsized agenda,

you have to define everything as an outsized crisis. This is not at this point an outsized crisis. Over the course of the past year, it has been. We are not now at a point where COVID is an outsized national crisis that requires trillions of dollars in additional spending. We've already put $7 trillion out the front door. He wants another $2 trillion on top of that. That's aside from the budget. We're going to have a GDP that is well below what we are actually spending this year, which is insanity. I mean, our GDP to debt ratio is actually negative this year. What in the world is he talking about? But we know what he's talking about. And this is why I say, I was very much on board with the, we can have bipartisan measures of science and public health. And that went out the window so fast with this crew that now I was

willing to hold off. I'm not willing to hold off anymore. Fauci should be fired. This administration is doing a terrible job of rolling out the vaccine, not just in terms of the practicalities, but really more in terms of the public, the public health rhetoric like that. That's way worse to me than the practicality of rolling out the vaccine. Yeah. He's finally coming under scrutiny, more scrutiny now because he's got this outrageous messaging. And when you get to vaccinate mandatory vaccinations, which is definitely where they're going to teachers union in the country, was on Meet the Press over the weekend. And she she was trying to sound like she was offering a different message. It was basically, look, if the NFL could figure this out, we can figure this out. And she said, and I quote, I want to debunk this myth that teachers unions don't want to reopen schools. We do. We want to. It's and it's bull. And then, of course,

she goes on to say, but we just have to make sure it's safe. But then when you look at like the criteria that the teachers unions are setting out, including her, for what equals safety, it's an impossible goal. You can't meet it. And there was a there was a report just this weekend than your old state, California, that the labor organizations out there left the governor, you know, Democrat Gavin Newsom, so frustrated that he said, and I quote, we might as well just pack it up and just be honest with folks that we're not going to open for in-person instruction this school year. He even he's gotten to the point where he can't handle these unions. Yeah. I mean, the teachers unions are, you know, ruling the roost in all of these cities. And

eventually you end up like Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who is really cattling to them, eventually saying, you guys are saying stuff that is completely disconnected from reality while you're doing your interpretive dance about how schools need to be safe. Safety in this context is sort of like the exception for the health of the mother in the abortion context.

It's just a term that is supposed to encompass literally all the things, right? This is the reason why there are so many pro-lifers who object to the health of the mother provisions because that encompasses like, oh, well, you know, she might have a slightly additional risk of X, Y, or Z. The same thing is true when it comes to safety. When they say we want to reopen schools safely, safely, as Joe Biden continues to say, can you define safely? Because my kids are in Florida. My kids have been in school since they got here. We moved in October.

They've been here every single day this year. They've been in school. They're wearing masks, even though my son is four years old and my daughter is seven, they're wearing masks. They got the plexiglass shields on their desk. They are socially distanced, but not 10 feet apart. They're fine. By the way, they would be fine if they did none of that stuff, in my opinion.

But they're still doing that stuff. You're telling me that these teachers unions are saying that that's not enough. We got to get all the teachers vaccinated and all the students vaccinated. And we got to put them in a bubble like John Travolta and the boy in the plastic bubble. Oh, my God. I loved that show. I love that movie. I didn't think you were old enough to have seen that. How have you seen the boy in the plastic bubble? That is from my childhood.

I've got like 15 years on you. Yeah, you know, classic oldies. But but the reality is that like what are they even talking about? And we know what they're talking about, which is we want money not to teach, which is always the agenda of these teachers unions. We want more money, more taxpayer money not to teach. We want better pensions not to teach. And if it has never been clearer to American public school parents that they are getting jacked by the system than it is right now, I mean, it is amazing to me. The right could, by the way, should be doing such heavy lifting right now to get kids into

private school. Like this is a perfect opportunity to get kids into homeschool and private school and take them out of the public school system entirely because the public school systems have been broken for decades. And frankly, if the left is going to see COVID as an opportunity, every crisis being an opportunity, the right should see the way the public schools are being treated right now. And they should use that as an opportunity to get these kids out of these failing schools anyway. Can I tell you a nice story? Here's a good news story for you. We too have our kids in school and they've been doing a great job.

These teachers at our son's school, they've had many cases of COVID. They isolate the kids. The kids have to go out and quarantine as do the kids who are immediately around them. But the school goes on. The school has not closed because of COVID one time this year.

But here's the other good news story. I know you and I both constantly call out these activist teachers who are really more interested in developing little progressives than little smart people. And my son, Yates, who's in fifth grade, was just telling me last night, my husband and I, my husband, Doug, and me, that they were talking about politics and they were just talking about the political system and electoral politics and so on. And his teacher said, I don't want to get political. I'm not going to take a political side with you guys because my politics may not be what your politics are. And your parents should really be your main influencers on your politics and

just stuck to procedure. I love this guy, Ben. I love him. And by the way, he's 65 and he's been in there teaching a bunch of fifth graders all year long. They wear the masks, they socially distance. But this is a guy who's in the high risk group. He does it anyway. Why?

We need more teachers like him. Well, that's for sure. I mean, I keep hearing over and over there are tons of teachers who want to teach and I'm sure there are, which is why we should break the teachers unions. And the teachers union should not be the governing force here. Public sector unions are a disaster area. Teachers unions are particularly strong example of a disaster area, the most corrupt bargain in American politics. And it is

absolute overt corruption that is purely in the public view is the sort of public corruption that happens when public when public school, public unions, public teachers unions, when all of these unions elect the people they then negotiate with and then take their member money and leverage taxpayer dollars out of the people they're negotiating with to get those people elected again. It's the most corrupt, like the same people who are talking about campaign finance reform and corporate power and all this kind of stuff. They're perfectly fine with big labor, taking money from their members, using that money to get people elected to office and then bargaining with the people they elected

to spend taxpayer money on them. It's the most obviously corrupt thing in American politics. And they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on this stuff every single year. Big labor spends tons of money on this stuff and they are running the show at the Biden administration. We haven't heard that much from the Trumps since senior left office.

But Junior Don Trump Jr. released a video within the past day. He's he does this video in front of a wall of guns. And so you've got people freaking out over it, saying it was a veiled threat and so on. But he that he's talking about the teachers unions. We have a little clip. Listen, one of the things I want to talk about that I've been reading a lot about lately is sort of the stuff as it relates to the teachers' union. You've seen what they've done over the last couple of months, the way they've basically held up progress, prevented schools from opening. The teachers' union and those representing them have definitely failed our children in terms of education and everything else.

I mean, the teachers union has certainly failed the science they're supposed to be teaching us because, again, it's all political. It was a rant. It was a threat. Like that was no one's listening to what he says. It's all about the fact that he had guns behind him and he took aim at a treasured group and therefore has to be dismissed as a rant. But he's raising a good point. Yeah. I mean, just on the content of it. I mean, forget the optics of it for a second. Just on the content. Can somebody rebut it? I mean, like the reality is that the teachers unions are ruling the roost. The CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, she came out and she said, you know, teachers don't actually have to be vaccinated to go back to school. And then the Biden administration came out and they said, oh, she was speaking in

her personal capacity. No, she was not. She was sitting in front of a step and repeat from the CDC on a CDC phone call when she said that. They said it was in her personal capacity. Then they released the CDC guidelines, which, as Jake Tapper at CNN noted, would have meant that 99.9 percent of all school children in the United States ought to be in either hybrid or at-home models of learning, when right now only about 50% of kids are in hybrid or at-home models of learning. And they did that, and Walensky acknowledged

that they had done so with the input of the teachers' unions. What the hell are the teachers' unions doing setting CDC standards? What in the world do the teachers' unions know about science? They're a political group. That's like saying that you're going to, you know, have the NRA set the reopening standards for gun shows. Like, what are you talking about right now?

This is an invested group. You can't do that. It's the CDC. And then there's, and you won't follow the science. This is one of my chief, I mean, I've been going nuts over this really since probably April or May of last year. The perversion of science in favor of what I call tusscience, right?

Trademark, the science, meaning that you have to stay in your home forever until the end of time. But if you're out there protesting and spitting on each other for George Floyd in the millions, then that's totally fine. And not only fine, public health experts tell you that racism is a public health crisis too.

You actually need to do it. That if you're out at a church and you're praying and shouting, then that's super bad. But if you're out there in the middle of the street dancing and singing for George Floyd, then that's not only good, that is recommended by public health experts. When you have people treating Andrew Cuomo like he knew what the hell he was doing, writing books on leadership while overtly lying like this, I'm amazed to see the media treating this Andrew Cuomo nursing home

scandal as something new. It just demonstrates how dishonest they are. You know about this in May. I knew about this in May. Everybody on the right knew about this in May. We all knew about this last year. But weirdly, it only gets reported in the aftermath of the election. And so I'm supposed to believe that our scientific institutions are purely basing their advice on the science. It has nothing to do with the science. It has to do with politics. Again, I'm perfectly willing to hear a scientific argument for anything. I just have not heard a whole ton, a whole bleep ton of science here coming from our supposed scientific institutions. I'm hearing a lot of propaganda coming from Dr. Fauci about defending Kamala Harris and the teachers unions.

It's the same when it comes to the whole transgender issue. Like they don't care about science at all. They don't. Science says there are only two genders, male and females. That's what science says. And science says that there are biological differences between girls and boys, especially that give boys advantages during sports in sports, even if they go on hormone therapy, even for a year. We're not supposed to pay attention to that because trans rights are human rights. That's what Jen Psaki said. But let me get to you.

Let me let me follow up on Cuomo because, boy, the news is getting worse for him. And I have to say, I'm loving it because he deserves it. He lied. His own party's turning on him. They're coming at the Democrats are coming out to say hearing different reports that they stonewalled them, that they did not give them information. And that would be obstruction. There's a really good opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal today saying that's what we call obstruction of justice. And Cuomo ought to be really concerned about this FBI investigation, because if what his own Democrats in New York state are saying is true, he committed a crime and this guy ought to be going to jail. But still, the media just barely, just barely, Ben,

I mean, I'll get to in a second, but they spent far more time talking about Ted Cruz than they did on Andrew Cuomo possibly being a felon. Oh, yeah. No question. No question. The amount of ink spilled over Ted Cruz going to Cancun, which again, terrible optics, bad political decision, like politics 101, don't go do something fun while people are suffering. It just looks bad. Send Heidi and the kids off. But to equate that with Andrew Cuomo literally following a policy that killed people and then covering that up for months and months and then threatening fellow Democrats in order to cover it up for months and months, that's insane. I'm sorry, that's totally crazy. And if you're

talking about hypocrisy, it's not active hypocrisy to go to Cancun while things are bad in Texas. Hypocrisy would be if Ted Cruz was like, you all should stay in Texas and freeze while I go to Cancun, right? But that's exactly what you saw from Democrats during COVID. You saw Gavin Newsom being like, you can't open your restaurant, but I'm going to go eat at the French Laundry. You saw Lori Lightfoot saying, you can't go get your hair done, but I'm going to go get my hair done because I'm special. And I consider that Laundry. You saw Lori Lightfoot saying, you can't go get your hair done, but I'm going to go get my hair done because I'm special. And I consider that an essential service. You see Andrew Cuomo saying that

he is the greatest governor of all time while simultaneously following policy that kills people. This is the stuff that's actual hypocrisy. The media devoted every spare minute to Ted Cruz getting on that plane, which again, bad political move. Is it immoral? Is it hypocritical?

Not really. It's just a bad political move. But again, none of this matters. All that matters is that Republicans are the bad guys. The one that's the most obvious here when it comes to the imbalance of coverage is obviously my governor, Ron DeSantis, who I will say is the best governor in the country. DeSantis is fan-freaking-tastic. He's kept this state open. This state is the second oldest state in the country after Maine. Maine has eight people in it, which means that effectively speaking, Florida is the oldest state in the country. It certainly has the most seniors by percentage.

It's 25% of the entire state of Florida is over the age of 65. It ranks somewhere like 27th or 28th in terms of death per million. Andrew Cuomo ranks two. Okay, his neighbor, Phil Murphy, ranks one. Okay, and yet Andrew Cuomo is somehow amazing at this and Ron DeSantis is killing everybody.

Over the weekend, NBC News came out with a story suggesting that Ron DeSantis was evil because his vaccination program had prioritized seniors and Holocaust survivors. And the idea was that he was trying to vaccinate seniors and Holocaust survivors because those are the people who are most likely to vote for him. How about he's prioritizing those people because those are the people most likely to die of COVID? By the way, if you use that same logic, presumably Andrew Cuomo is attempting to murder all the seniors because they're the people least likely to vote for him. That's exactly right. And the Ted Cruz thing, I mean, let's talk about that for a second, because I had a couple of thoughts on that. First

of all, Ted Cruz needs to cut that hair. I just want to start with that. I was in favor of the beard and I made it public, but I am not in favor of the mullet. He's gone too far. And I realize it's tough to get a haircut sometimes, but not in Texas. He can get a haircut. Even I could cut that hair. I've cut Doug's hair before I could do that one. I'll do it for you. It's an offer right here, Senator Cruz. Come on, come on the program. He's a friend. So yeah, it wasn't a smart idea. And then but I thought you had a really good point about it's never a good look saying that you you did something controversial because your kids wanted it. But you were like the same people criticizing him for listening to his children are the ones who say a three year old should be able to decide to choose their gender.

Right. Exactly. Listen to your kids on everything except when they want to go on vacation. It's it is it is truly an amazing thing. And by the way, you know how that whole thing went down. Right. It's very obvious how that whole thing went down. It was probably Ted was like, you know what? Really, I should stay here. And Heidi and the kids were like, we're freezing our butts off. Let's just get out of here. And at a certain point, like as a dad, I could see saying to my wife and kids, all right, fine, let's just go. And then you get to the airport and you're like, oh, this is a bad idea, right? I mean, like that, that's probably how it went down. It wasn't like Ted was like, ah, ha ha, I'm leaving and going to Cancun while all you suckers out here freeze. By the way, I'll tell you who's the real jerk in the whole story. All the people who are

texting in the neighborhood. OK, so I'm not saying Ted's decision is good, but all the people in the neighborhood texting with Heidi's with Ted's wife, Heidi, who decide to leak that to The New York Times. Those people can just F off. Like if my wife were texting with people about like evening plans or something, they decided to leak that to the New York Times. How gross is that? I mean, the behavior surrounding what Ted did, I think is frankly just on a personal behavior decency level, significantly worse than what Ted did. You see the story from the Huffington Post today

about how the flight attendants were leaking information about Ted and his family to the press. Oh my God. And the Huffington Post, so United Airlines launched an investigation and the head of the flight attendants union tweeted out, we are all the leakers. Ted Cruz has lied too many times to be protected this way.

That's nuts. This is nuts. You're saying you're having overt. You're having unions, businesses say your private information ought not remain private information because we don't like you politically. And Ted's the one who's the worst in this whole thing. Again, none of that's a defense of Ted going to Cancun, which is a bad political move for the optics.

I got to say, I hate optical games. I think it's always dumb when politicians jet, like during Hurricane Sandy, when Obama went into Jersey and then stood there at like the FEMA desks. I understand it's all optics and it's not his fault. Those are the rules of the game. But I've always thought that these rules are incredibly stupid.

Like that politicians are supposed to go stand there as though they can do anything. Like they're Neptune King of the waters and they're going to stop the weather or something. When Trump went to when Trump went to Puerto Rico and was flinging paper towels at people, you remember the media didn't like that either. I mean, he was very upset at him for doing all of that. So it's like the rules are really dumb. I tend to think of politicians like plumbers. If they can't do anything, why are they there? Yeah, well, I mean, now you've got Ted Cruz out there handing out waters and getting photo ops. And we all know what that's about, too. It's like, oh, Ted. I mean, he's a politician. They

have to do it. Part of it makes you respect the Melania. I really don't care. Do you, Jacket? Because that was just like a big middle finger to everybody. Like, I'm not here for you. I actually don't care what you think of me. But the Ted Cruz thing, I totally agree with you that the neighborhood women who are on the group text with Heidi, who is supposedly a friend of theirs, can go pounce it like I don't want to hear from those women again. I didn't know about the flight attendants. That's horrible. But I did see April Ryan tweeting out that not only did Ted Cruz abandon the people of Texas for a vacation in Cancun, but he also abandoned his dog. She's the White House correspondent. She's a White House correspondent and she's the political analyst for CNN, actually.

So anyway, so she's tweeting this out. We know it's not true. The sad little pictures of the dog looking out the front door. Meanwhile, he had a dog sitter, but we're supposed to. It's not enough that he went to Cancun for four days. There was supposed to, right? It wasn't like he was abandoning Texas forever. He had a return ticket for a few days later, which he then, you know, upped. So he returned within 24 hours. But now he's got to be basically a dog endangerer, right? He's like, they just, they always overreach.

I saw an article yesterday talking about Cruz going to Cancun. And it was something like he was in Cancun while people were freezing. And this is like the argument that your mom used to use on you when you were like eight and you weren't eating your peas. She'd be like, well, people in China are starving. Like, right, but the peas don't go to China.

Like if I don't eat them today, they're not going to China. Like the argument that if Ted Cruz were in Texas, those people wouldn't have froze is a less than compelling one. Like that's a tragedy and it's horrific, but I don't know what Ted Cruz going to Cancun has anything to do with that.

Again, for the one millionth time, bad optics, bad political move. We all know the rules of the game, but the idea and it's horrific, but I don't know what Ted Cruz going to Cancun has anything to do with that. Again, for the 1 millionth time, bad optics, bad political move. We all know the rules of the game, but the idea that it's like he did something deeply, horribly immoral by not, by not standing there in the freezing cold and handing out water bottles.

Like, I'm sorry. I just, I don't buy any of this from any of these people. I don't buy it from the media. I don't buy it from his fellow politicians, all of whom are doing this. If they're there handing out water bottles, I don't think they're doing it. Call me cynical. I don't

think that it's purely for altruistic reasons. I think they're probably all doing it for politics because those are the rules of the game. And then, of course, the paparazzi being what they are, pour salt in the wounds by going down to Cancun and getting bikini shots of Heidi Cruz, who, by the way, at 48 years old, looks pretty damn good. Mother of two girls. What is that? I mean, by the way, like, is Heidi and the kids supposed to be there? Those damn kids. Why aren't they out there handing out water bottles? He should get his daughters out there, you know, scrubbing down the pipelines. What what what what is Heidi or the kids have to do with it? Like what Ted should have done is put them on the plane and stayed, obviously. But this notion that

like once Ted's gone, the story's gone. Like what are you taking pictures of his wife and his kids for? Like they're supposed to get out there. And, you know, those kids need to work for a living. It's about time, you know, get in the family business. No, they were trying to embarrass her. They don't like her because she's Ted Cruz's wife and they're Republicans and they don't like any Republicans. And so it's just an opportunity. But I will say, I don't think they succeeded in embarrassing.

I have been the victim of unexpected bathing suit pictures, Ben. And let me tell you, I've learned a thing or two. If you try to run from the paparazzi on the beach as they try to get you, you do not wind up looking good in the photos. But if you just suck it in and smile and let him have his photo, it works out much better. So I'm just, you know, for the people out there,

if this ever happens to you, I heard it here first. And for you too, Ben. For you too. This could happen to you, Ben Shapiro. Well, I don't have to worry about it. I have the body of a Greek God, cultivated over long years of sitting at a computer and typing. More with Ben Shapiro in just one second. But first, you know how snowy and icy and cold it's been? You look outside, you're like, I don't feel like going to the post office right now. That is the last thing I feel like doing. Well, that's where stamps.com comes in. Stamps.com to the rescue. Trips to the post office, let's face it,

that's not how you want to spend your time. That is why you can figure out how to mail and ship online at stamps.com from your couch. You can mail and ship anytime, anywhere, right from your own home, from your computer. You can send letters, ship packages. And by the way, you pay a lot less with discounted rates from USPS, US Postal Service, UPS, and more. Stamps.com, in fact, has saved businesses thousands of hours and tons of money. With Stamps.com, you get the services of the post office and UPS all in one place, plus big discounts on mailing and shipping rates. So look, they make it super easy for you. I don't know why you'd actually bother going to the post office. You can just hit print on your computer.

And for that, you just go to Stamps.com. They will bring everything right to you. It's a must have for any business, small offices, sending out invoices, online sellers, shipping out orders, or even a giant warehouse sending out thousands of packages a day. Stamps.com can handle it with ease. You just print the official U.S. postage from your computer 24-7 for any letter, any package, any class of mail, anywhere you want to send it. Once your mail is ready, schedule a pickup or drop it off. It's that simple. And by the way, if you're wondering, like, what's the postage? They will take care of that for you and you're going to get a free scale. How do you like that? You don't have to figure it out. You get discounts of up to 40% off the

post office rates, up to 62% off UPS shipping rates. And it's a no brainer. It saves you time and money. So do it, right? Just do it. Stop wasting time going to the post office. Go to stamps.com instead. No risk. And with my promo code MK, you'll get a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and the digital scale I mentioned. How about that? No long-term commitments or contracts. Give it a try.

Stamps.com. Click on the microphone at the top of the homepage. Type in MK. That's stamps.com promo MK. Stamps.com. Never go to the post office again. Let's talk about Rush Limbaugh. You're in Florida now.

That's where Rush Limbaugh lived. And he died last week. It was, it wasn't shocking, right? We knew he had lung cancer. We knew he was 70. He was really battling. But still, it just felt like a before and after you know and i you actually wrote that i think in your in your piece on him in the new york times that was like before rush um before his his life as a national

figure i guess is what you meant but you wrote a piece and three other people wrote pieces some of which were highly critical yours was not not. That, of course, caused controversy in and of itself. I'll give I thought your piece hit it spot on, by the way. And I said nice things about Rush the other day on my show. And I realize he said controversial stuff in his life, but he was in talk radio like you don't color between the lines. You don't stay between the rails. And also Rush was very funny. And his brand of humor may have been offensive to some, but a lot of the stuff that they pulled back in the pieces about him posthumously were totally taken out of context. You know, he was trying to make people laugh and he was a little irreverent.

Anyway, OK, so this is some of the pushback to you. Some guy named Dan Frumkin of PressWatchers.org. Dan has probably never actually been a member of the press in his life, but I don't know his story. But Dan writes, Ben Shapiro is guilty of a deceptive whitewash. And then he says, post Jim Bennett,

that's the guy who got fired from the Times for having the nerve to allow the Tom Cotton op-ed about putting troops in the streets during the riots this summer. Post Jim Bennett, open lines of communications were supposed to be flagging offensive, valueless, performative trolling going forward. Has nothing changed at the New York Times? So he doesn't like the fact that you had nice things to say about

Rush Limbaugh. And he and some other guy, Mehdi Hassan, who's at NBC, wanted you to be spending your peace and I quote, wrestling with his his record of bigotry and misogyny. And you didn't grapple with it at all. Yeah, I mean, and by the way, I will say the editors of The New York Times wanted me to do some of that stuff, too. And I just I'm not going to do that. Number one, I view The New York Times as opposition press. But but number two, the the picture that I have of Rush and Rush and the experiences that I had as a young person growing up listening to Rush, that is not what you got from listening to Rush on a daily basis.

In the same way that if you listen to you on a daily basis or me on a daily basis or Sean or Laura or Tucker or anybody on the right on a daily basis, what you're not going to come away with is these people are vile bigots who hate people. What you're going to come away with is these people make jokes. They sometimes make mistakes. They're speaking for hours a day live on camera. And that's just the way life works. But what the left was determined to do is essentially turn Rush's life into a compendium of media matters hits. And we know that that's what they're going to do to you or to me or to anybody else who's

prominent on the right. We all know this, right? I thought that the main point of my piece was the point that came about two thirds of the way down when I said, we all know that like after Rush died and the left went nuts and they celebrated, they were popping the champagne. I mean, I've rarely seen that kind of celebratory atmosphere on the left. Certainly not when somebody dies. It was amazing. I mean, honestly, the celebration of Rush's death on the hardcore political left was significantly more joyous than the celebration of Osama bin Laden's death. I don't think there's any question. If you go back and check Twitter that day. It was disgusting. Rest in piss. Rot in hell.

Trending. Satan friended. Right. Like all this kind of stuff. The the we all know that if you just substituted any prominent conservatives name there who was not seen as, you know, the strange new respect recipient of the moment, it would be exactly the same. I mean, there's a very narrow class of people who are seen as, quote, unquote, the recipients of the strange new respect right now.

It's Mitt Romney. It was John McCain at the end of his life, although not in 2008. And, you know, unless you are on that side, unless you are a person who can be used for democratic interests at a particular point, they're not going to treat you that way. So if you're kind of a down the line conservative, it doesn't matter how polite you are. It doesn't matter if you're a reverend. None of that matters. The idea is that you're a bad person who made the world a worse place and the world is better off with your absence. I mean, the headline from the New York Times the day that Rush died, it talked about him as a person who polarized the country. I mean, their headline for Mao was significantly more laudatory. Their headline for Castro was significantly more laudatory. I'm not kidding. I mean, I actually looked up the headlines when

they did the obis for these folks. And their headline for Ayatollah Khomeini was Ayatollah Khomeini, 89, the unwavering Iranian spiritual leader. Their headline for Hugo Chavez was a polarizing figure who led a movement. Their headline for Yasser Arafat was father and leader of Palestinian nationalism. For Mao Zedong was he began as an obscure peasant and died as one of history's greatest revolutionary figures. And their headline for Rush was, quote, Rush Limbaugh, who built talk radio into right-wing attack machine, dies. Oh my gosh. I mean, come on.

I mean, come on. I didn't realize it was quite that bad. I did put that in my original New York Times piece. They cut it. But I figured I had to at least give it a try. You had a couple of great points in your piece. Number one, that we sort of touched on, that they treated this highlight

reel of his controversial comments as the bulk of his work. And that was a lie. That's a lie. Rush had such a more important legacy than some. And by the way, all like the freak out over what he said about Sandra Fluck. I lived that. I was on air when he called her a slut and she was complaining about the cost of birth control and thinking the government needed to pay for her birth control. She was a student at Georgetown with nothing but a bright future ahead of her. And yes, was it a nice thing to call her? No. Was it his best moment?

No. But he was trying to make the point that, give me a break. Government doesn't have to pay for everything. We don't have to pay for your birth control. You can find a way like the rest of us did. And as somebody who went to Albany, not Georgetown, I felt the same. I was just as poor, if not poor, as Sandra Fluck in law school. And you know what, Ben? Somehow I found a way without the

government's help to cover my own birth control. So, of course, the New York Times and the other woman, Jill Filipovic. I know that's like one of the only times he ever did. But of course, when she writes it up, I don't know how you pronounce her last name, Jill Filipovic. When she writes it up, she spends paragraph after paragraph on what a misogynist he is because he called this Sandra Fluck and he coined the term feminazis, radical feminazis, which is a thing. I'm sorry, but it's a thing. Anyway, yes, totally out of context.

And you were sort of trying to say, no, his legacy is much different and that he broke the monopoly that the left had on the media. And for that, they will never forgive him. Oh, that's right. And you can see them not forgiving all of us for maintaining that lack of monopoly. That's why you saw. I mean, honestly, like I was kind of agape at Peggy Noonan's column about Russia. She ended it by essentially suggesting maybe the fairness doctrine should be restored. I mean, like that, mean, that is crazy. I mean, there's this perception out there that the world was a better place when the fairness doctrine was in place because it allowed for this

nice comedy and monopoly in the media. Well, when you're the beneficiary of the monopoly, of course you think things are calm and nice. It's when you're the person who's getting victimized by the monopoly that you're like, maybe there should be another option out here. What Rush did is he presented the reality, which was that there was an entire half of the country that had been neglected and sneered at by the establishment media, and that those people could be not only marketed to, but were hungry for information. Without Rush, there is no Fox News. Without Rush, there is no Daily Wire. Without Rush, there are no podcasts. Without Rush, none of this stuff exists. And that was the point that I was making. The left not only can't forgive Rush for that,

they cannot forgive social media today for providing a forum for dissenting voices, which is why you're seeing them go after Facebook and why they're going after Twitter and why they're trying to cudgel all the social media titans into restricting the flow of information. They want a restoration of the monopoly. They're angry that anybody else should be out there providing information. It's why they've set up a cadre of fake fact checkers whose entire goal in life is to pretend that right wing outlets are somehow less trustworthy than left-wing outlets like CNN or MSNBC or The Nation. It's complete madness, but it's why they kept calling Rush polarizing.

From the perspective of the monopolizer, the person who provides competition is polarizing the market, right? Before, there was only one option. Now, there are two. The person who provided the second option is obviously the person who created the polarization. Well, those of us on the right, you know what we think? We think that the monopoly was inherently polarizing. It was just that when the floodgates finally opened,

we were finally able to say what we wanted. The monopoly ended, and that's why you're truly ticked. That was always the problem with the Fox News. I used to laugh. I'd be like, can't the conservatives have one? They can't have one channel? Not even one? That has to go away.

And we're back to that now, of course, with people calling for Fox News to be canceled. Everything comes down, of course, to identity politics and Fox doesn't, you know, toe the right line. And that was one of the feedbacks and one of the criticisms of the Times, too, is the four people they selected to write about Rush. This is from Tommy Christopher, who's an insane lunatic over at Mediate. Quote, all were white. I'm sure he would have been thrilled if Ben Carson and Larry Elder had been selected to write pieces. He's not pissed they were white. He's pissed they were that any conservatives got in there, that any non-rush haters were allowed to write anything. Right. And honestly, like I've been thinking about this as I've been watching you with Gina Carano, like there used to not be a forum for conservatives who get targeted or people who even just aren't conservatives, but have some thoughts that are to go. That was it. They had to deal with the mainstream media, mainstream Hollywood, all of it, sports now, corporate, corporate America, all how it's going. And there was no other place to go if they got canceled,

they got forced out, if they got criticized for being for being quote white um and that's where daily wire comes in i've been loving watching what's been happening over the past two weeks so gina carano i confess i didn't know who she was um but she's a star of star wars the tv show right the tv show and uh she got canceled effectively by disney plus and who's the other one? It's like Lucasfilm. Yeah, Lucasfilm. Okay. Because she sent out some post that it didn't exactly compare our modern day situation and cancel culture and demonization of Republicans to Nazi Germany. But I was flirting with that idea. And you see her get fired after half of her colleagues had said, had done exactly the same thing, had made comparisons between our country to Nazi Germany, but they were saying the

Republicans were the Nazis, so it was okay. So she gets fired. And just for the listeners who don't know, tell us what you did. So we hired her. I called up Gina, and I said, listen, they can try to cancel you, or we can just go do what we do here, because we're building an entertainment side over here. We had brought out a movie called Run, Hide, Fight a little bit earlier in the year. And so we said to Gina, you don't need to be part of the Hollywood monopoly that hates your guts and wants to destroy your career. So come on over here. We'll make a movie with you. We'll let you produce it and we'll develop it with you and you'll star in it and it'll be great. And our people will love you. And we will show that there is actually

opposition out here that you don't have to work at the behest of the Hollywood glitterati and their perceptions of reality. And it made big news, mainly because it's the first time anybody on the right has ever punched back against this sort of machine. Because if it had not been for that, right, this happened on Thursday. On Friday, we announced that she was going to come work with us. And the world kind of exploded because the left has never been hit with that. By Monday, she would have been an old news item, right? By Monday, she would have been just, oh, you remember that time that Gina Carano was on the show? And

then she kind of said some stuff we didn't like so much. And then whatever happened to her, I don't even remember. But instead it was, okay, she'll just walk across the street. She'll make material that we like to make for people who want to hear from her and she'll continue to do what she does. That sort of alternative needs to be present in virtually every industry, because we're watching this being crammed down, not just on people like Gina, who's a great person, by the way.

Gina is a sweetheart and a very nice person. If you watched the Sunday special I did with her, it is perfectly obvious this is not a malicious human being who's trying to hurt anybody. She was absolutely bewildered and stunned by the blowback on that particular tweet. The entire tweet, by the way, or Instagram post, was essentially that treatment of people in horrific ways begins with dehumanization of the other, which is a perfectly decent generic point, right? If you treat your neighbors badly

and you treat them badly because of their politics, eventually they can escalate to hatred that gets dangerous. That was the point of the post. Now, I'm not a big fan of Holocaust analogies because I think they're generally overwrought. That's fine. But you can say, but people called it anti-Semitic. It's 100% not anti-Semitic. As the official Jew, okay, I can promise you that is not even close to anti-Semitic stuff. And yet the same people who are promulgating Ilhan Omar memes are saying that Gina is like some sort of vicious anti-Semite. It was craziness. So we are glad to provide Gina that opportunity. She's excited about it. We're really excited about it. And I hope that it crops up in nearly every industry because we're seeing Coca-Cola push anti-racist training. I want to be able to have enough companies out there on the

right who say, listen, you get fired for not attending the anti-racist training. We've got a job over here for you. They want to keep firing people who are quality people who are doing a decent job in their jobs and are getting fired for complete nonsense reasons. Come over here. You're creating a competitive advantage for us. Guess what? Were we going to hire Gina Carano before this? Absolutely not. Gina Carano is a big star on a Star Wars show. Now we can hire her and now we can make a bunch of money. I will tell you this, within the first four days of us announcing we had hired Gina Carano, they were the best four days in the history of Daily Wire in terms of our company, in terms of just the number of people who subscribed. Tens and tens of thousands of

people subscribed because they were so ticked off at Disney and because they want her content. And you know what? We'll keep doing that. You want to cancel Chris Pratt? Believe you me, we will go hire him. You want to cancel anybody else on the supposed center or right who has the temerity to speak out? We got room over here and we will make room and we will be happy to produce excellent material that Hollywood isn't making anyway. And it's not going to preach to you about hardcore woke values and our people will love it. They will love it. And you will just be deprived of that audience. You wanted to play this game. We're happy to play the game with you. Honestly, that actually gave me a chill like that. I feel so inspired by what you just said. And this

is, you know, we've all been talking about like, what's, what's the answer? Because we have to build an alternate infrastructure in so many lanes and there's only one way to do it. Start, start, start doing it brick by brick. By the way, I think your official title is, let me just look it up. It was this guy, Noah Bertlatsky, who writes for NBC, the Atlantic Washington Post, and so on. He calls you king of the Jews. You are officially king of the Jews. And he's mad you're not mad at Carano because he's like, oh, you know, it was anti-Semitic. And so, you know, Ben Shapiro, king of the Jews, he should be giving her a hard time.

Barry Weiss goes down too. She must be queen. She's queen of the Jews. And he's mad you give Gina a free pass, a free pass on her anti-Semitism. Oh, yeah, that piece was particularly egregious because that piece was, he was comparing the treatment

of a far-left socialist academic who had lost his column at The Guardian for tweeting a bunch of pretty radically anti-Israel stuff with Carano. And I defended that guy. Like, I think that guy's a dirtbag. Like, I don't like anything that he says, but I don't think that he should have been canceled from the Guardian for saying stuff that I don't like about Israel. And he's like, well, why would he defend? Why would he

defend Carano? Because I defend a lot of people I disagree with. And by the way, Carano is not an anti-Semite. And anybody who thinks she is, is an idiot. It is perfectly obvious she's not an anti-Semite. Like this is like the notion that you're going to lump her in with people who hate Jews, right? Like under what rubric are you going to do this? These are the same people who, again, make repeated excuses for a sheet of Taliban, Ilhan Omar saying that I'm somehow selling out the, what I don't understand anti-Semitism when I see it. I was the number one recipient of it in 2016, according to the anti-defamation league. Like I'm, I'm one of the most visible people on planet earth. Where's the Yamaka, but I don't, but I don't know anti-Semitism, but Noah Berlatsky is going to judge it.

OK, makes perfect sense to me. Well, at least he called you the king. Gina, if you need look no further than her history of controversy, and you really brought this out nicely in the Sunday special, which I recommend everybody check out. I couldn't believe the amount of pressure they put her under just for not tweeting her pronouns. They wanted her to change her bio, Twitter bio for, you know, pronouns, she, her, hers. And I, I, I'm like Gina, I refuse. My, my motto is figured out.

Um, Gina said, no, I don't, I don't want to do that. And they wanted her to, to have a zoom meeting with 40 LGBTQ employees and said, oh, you will be apologizing. And she was like, I think, how about we just have like a lunch? I don't really think I want to do a Zoom where I get berated by 40 people of your selection on something that I just don't really feel comfortable doing. Yep. I mean, so here's the thing about Gina, and you see this throughout this Sunday special when you talk with her. She's a person who likes to have in-person contact. So she was saying to them, I'm happy to get together with anybody and eat over lunch and look them in the eyes because then they know that I'm a human being as opposed to just a target on a Zoom meeting where they're

taping it, which is what it was going to be. It was going to be a struggle session on Zoom. And if you don't show proper remorse, then it's bad. By the way, what she originally did that was the cause of the controversy is she posted in her Twitter profile, beep, bop, boop, right? As her, as her, as her pronouns. And what she was making fun of was not transgender people. What she was making fun of was all the idiots on Twitter who insist that if you don't put your pronouns in your Twitter profile, this somehow means that you're transphobic. So she posted making fun of was all the idiots on Twitter who insist that if you don't put your pronouns in your Twitter profile, this somehow means that you're transphobic. So she posted a bunch of droid noises. Beep bop boop.

This turned into a multi-day struggle session with Disney trying to push her to apologize and offer this abject apology for having offended the transgender community. Like, first of all, like, God, if you have nothing better to do than look at a person making a joke, beep bop boop on their Twitter profile and feeling like super offended. And that person has to be canceled. It's crazy. And, and then they, they said, okay, fine. Well, you know, you're good to go. You've been cleared by the, the woke karate here at the, here at Disney, but they did say, you're not allowed to go and do interviews anymore. Meanwhile, you've got everybody at Disney doing whatever interviews they want about any other topic, but Gina goes quiet. Okay, fine. So she's quiet, but then she posts some Twitter stuff that

they don't like. And it's not bad Twitter stuff, right? I mean, like on the scale of Twitter stuff, this stuff is like, this doesn't even rank. And suddenly they're like, she's disparaging groups. She just, she's, she's being bigoted against groups. They can't explain how she was being bigoted against groups because she wasn't, they literally cannot explain it. It's just that she disagreed with them on issues that they don't want disagreement on. And so they fired her. And by the way, if she had been the lead on the series, they wouldn't have fired her. If she was a supporting actor on the series, if she had been Pedro Pascal,

she wouldn't have gotten fired. It's that simple. Because you know that if Disney had been making enough money off of something, they would have left her on. You know how I can tell? Because Disney keeps putting up movies. They just put up The Muppets, okay?

The Muppets, the show from the 80s. That show, as soon as they posted that on Disney+, I knew in a heartbeat, in a heartbeat, I said, I tweeted it within three weeks, they're going to cancel the Swedish chef, right? There's a bunch of stuff that's sort of politically incorrect. It wasn't three weeks. It was three days within three days, Disney had placed a warning on the Muppets, the Muppets saying that this contains offensive stereotypes. My favorite part of the statement was, but we're going to leave it up because, you know, we think it's better to contextualize than to take it down. No, the answer is you left it out because you're making money off of it. Now you're covering your butt with a little statement up front, right? So if you're, if you can, if you feel like you can, you're going to lose more money than you're going to make, then you are, then you, you, then you fire people. And this is the dirty little secret about the way that virtually all business in the United States works, works right now. The right does not cancel businesses for being left wing. The left cancels businesses for being even center to right wing. There's good data to back this up.

There's a study from Harvard Business Review came out a couple of years ago. They had a large survey group and they asked the survey group about three types of company. They called it, I think, Jobs Corporation or something. And Jobs Corporation version one was apolitical. Then Jobs Corporation version two was liberal. And the third version was conservative. The apolitical one, the kind of Q rating, right? The sort of popularity rating, was people kind of liked it, right? It was good. It made good products. They're happy with it. The liberal version, people also kind of liked that. That was okay. The conservative version

dropped 33 points in positivity ratings simply by being labeled conservative. Didn't even explain what that meant. It dropped 33 points entirely due to people in the selection group on the left who decided they simply would not shop at a place that was labeled conservative in any way. The left has decided that they are in control of, they're an intransigent minority in terms of view. And intransigent minorities can renormalize industries. This is something that I've been pointing out on the show for a long time. They're renormalizing industry by industry. You form a hardcore of the woke. You form a hardcore of quasi-revolutionary thinkers. And those people say, we will not compromise with anybody on our core principles. And we are going to yell and scream. And everybody who's in the middle goes, well, they are kind of loud. What

if we just went along with them? And then everything will be okay. And soon you have the entire corporation mirroring the priorities of people like this. And it's bad for the country. But there are only a few alternatives for people on the right. One is that they could get people in the middle to recognize that there are countervailing concerns. We could become our own intransigent minority and say, listen, we're not going to cave inside. You want to give us anti racist training inside of Coca-Cola? I got several thousand employees here who say we're not doing it or you could do that. The other thing that you could do is you could actually start pushing from the outside and saying we're not going to shop at these corporations in the same way the left does. I don't prefer either of those two alternatives.

The alternative that I prefer in the end is going to, and the one that I think is going to end up being the case, will eventually be parallel structures being built. There will be a conservative coat company. There will be a conservative film company. Now, in the best of all possible worlds, would everybody just go weapons down and we'd go back to normal life and just shop where we want and say what we want? That would be the best. But I don't think the thought I was on the left side. I mean, some people were like, are you secretly one of us? And conservatives all just assumed like she's one of us. And I was like, I'm kind of independent, open minded and just care about facts. But we'll see how it turns out. And when I asked Trump that question at the debate and then he got all up my business and so on for all those all those months, the media was writing the nicest

pieces about me. And like, I remember even Hillary Clinton, even Hillary Clinton Ben came out and said, Megyn Kelly is a fantastic journalist and he ought to, you know, stand up for questions to her because he was threatening not to go to that second debate because of me. And meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, I got on the air and I was like, if I'm such a fantastic journalist,

why don't you come on the Kelly file? Let me practice some of my fantastic journalism on you, which, of course, she never did. She never gave me an interview. And as soon as I went to Trump Tower to try to make up with Trump, you know, just get him off my back, get him to put me back on the sidelines and off the playing field. Nobody apologized for anything. Nobody had to just want to move past it, which he did. And I did, too.

We moved on. It was great. Man, they turned on a dime, right? I never needed their love, but it was amazing to see just how brazen they were in their abandonment of anything nice about me.

That was sort of when I became their scourge because I made up with Trump and you have to be against Trump. That's very clear. You can't tweet anything nice about Trump in defense of Trump. You can certainly never report anything nice about Trump.

And as Gina Carano learned, you cannot tweet anything, forget Trump, but that might just be supportive of the right or Republicans. Otherwise, it's instant hatred and exile from their club. That's exactly right. But here's the thing. We have an entire side of the aisle here that is just beginning to mobilize and it's just beginning to realize its own power. So you go out and you form your own podcast and it does great, right? I don't have to worry about these folks so much because I have hundreds of thousands of people who subscribe over at Daily Wire and that's great. And Gina, by the way, is not going to have to worry about the cancel culture

anymore because Gina is going to make a movie with us. It'll be great. And she's going to get paid more probably than she was making over at Disney Plus. So there's an entire side of the political aisle that is capable of doing this sort of stuff. But we have to start thinking like the left does. We have to start thinking, how do we defend against their predations? Because there is this idea, and it's really, you know, I think it's just a vestige of old thinking. We're all nostalgic for a time when we actually could be friends with people on the other side. And I still have friends who are on the other side. But the future of the country is really going to lie with two factors. One,

can conservatives unify and create our own markets? And two, will the people who are on the other side. But the future of the country is really going to lie with two factors. One, can conservatives unify and create our own markets? And two, will the people who are in the middle, will liberals, will the moderates, will they decide that they would rather have a country where we respect each other or are they just going to sit this one out? And when it comes to liberals, liberals have a real choice. When we're talking about liberals,

like the Harper's Weekly liberals, you know, the 150 liberals who signed a letter saying they don't like cancel culture. There wasn't a single Trump voter on that list, right? What they're going to have to decide is they agree with the left on a lot of the left policy priorities, but they apparently disagree with the left on the left's cancel culture, anti-individual rights nonsense. They agree with the right on that. So do they go along with the left to achieve policy utopia at the cost of those rights? Or do they go along with the right

and defend the rights, the individual rights, even though it might mean that it'll be a slower road to policy utopia? They have to make that choice. We can't make that choice for them. And whichever way they choose is going to define the future of the country. Well, and they'll get weeded out. If they choose the left, they'll get weeded out soon, too, because, you know, they're they're apostates already just for signing that letter in support of free speech, which started with we all hate Trump. Trump's awful. Orange man bad. We all know that. But it'd be nice if we could have free speech still in the country and express different viewpoints. They were already basically kicked out of the true left-wing club. I want to make two other points on Gina just that jumped out at me.

Not only was she pressured to add her pronouns to her Twitter bio, which she then didn't, she was pressured like we saw others getting pressured, to post something positive about Black Lives Matter. This happened to that best friend of Meghan Markle who lives in Canada. What is that girl's name? What's her name, Abby? Remember that girl? She's best friends with Meghan Markle. Anyway, she hosts some show, she used to, on GMA, and she had her own wedding show in Canada. She's like an influencer. And she refused to post something positive about Black Lives Matter. She was she just wanted to stay out of it. And she's like, I don't want to Jessica Mulroney. And she wound up getting canceled

because she got into like a tiff with a with a African American woman who was asking that she do it. She wouldn't do it. But that's the state we're at now where Gina, too, got in trouble because she didn't want to post something positive about Black Lives Matter. And you know what? I agree. I don't want to post anything positive about Black Lives Matter either. The organization, I don't have anything positive to say about them. I actually think we need to work against them because they're a very culturally destructive force. And I'm in a position now where I can't get canceled for saying that. But Gina learned the hard way. Not only is it, you can't even be neutral.

You got to be on board and actively supporting their causes on the left. Yeah, well, there's been a shift that's gone on. The left's been very clever about it and how they've approached conservatives and people who are in the middle. There's a general belief on the right and certainly among liberals that compassion matters and that you should be nice to people. And there's sort of this general cordiality principle. So the left side is you're being non-cordial if you say something offensive.

And we're like, oh, well, you know, that's weird because some of the stuff I'm gonna say is probably gonna be offensive to you, but I kind of get it. All right. Then it went to speech is violence, right? It's not just that you're being offensive. It's that your offensiveness is violence.

So we have to stop your speech. So you have to shut up. And then it went to the final step, which is silence is violence, right? Which is if you'd be quiet, then that is still a form of violence. You have to actively be a member of our mob out here shouting our slogans or you are doing an act of violence.

So we went from we want you to speak a little bit less or at least be cordial about it to if you speak, you're doing me violence to if you don't say what I'm saying, you're doing me violence. And you can see, you know, how we are now in the realm of if you don't listen and believe as as Robin DiAngelo, that fraud is fond of saying, uh, then you are on the wrong side of history and you're going to be destroyed and, and they're going to wreck your life. You gotta, you gotta post the black square. You don't post the black square and they will come after you. Yep. And, and, but you know, you and I are over here telling everybody, just remember, you can choose not to post it. You're

not alone. Remember that their whole goal is to make you feel like you're the only one. And you're not. You know, and I noticed that not only did Gina get fired by Disney Plus and Lucas, but her agency, God, these agents are the worst. UTA dumped her too. What cowards. They are disgusting that they would dump her over something that is obviously a milquetoast offense at best. If you're looking to be offended, you could find a way. Just shows how weak they are. I mean, and there actually are agents, too, who are more middle of the road, more fair and balanced, as we'd say. It's just another example of how like virtually every lane needs to be recreated, a new sort of place in society where you can go. And as you pointed out in your last

answer, it doesn't just have to be conservatives. You know, I don't consider myself a conservative. I'm certainly leaning more conservative than I am liberal. But I think I'm center right. And I've got some views that are more center left. But if I have to choose, I'm not choosing them. Absolutely not. I hate what these people are standing for, like the total silencing of speech, the total absence of grace, forgiveness, the understanding that, as my therapist says, people are complicated, that life is short, that we shouldn't get caught up in these petty, meaningless differences. We're going another way. We're going the way of Coca-Cola, which, Ben, if they don't know that story, can you just tell the listeners what Coca-Cola did? Yeah. I mean, I mean, Coca-Cola

has been using Robin DiAngelo anti-racism trainings, including telling people to be less white, which sounds like a super racist thing that you should be able to sue them over at the civil rights, uh, at the civil rights commission. So, um, it's, it's pretty incredible. Um, but yeah, I mean that, didn't we just learn with the whole blackface controversy that if you try to be less white, it's bad? But they don't mean skin color. They mean, this is how Coca-Cola defines white. Whites are, and this was reportedly distributed to their employees, whites are oppressive, arrogant, certain, defensive, ignorant, not humble, they won't listen, they're apathetic. And they're all about white solidarity. And it really does. It did come from Robin DiAngelo. And I read all of that. And all I could think was, fuck you, Coke. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. My favorite one of those descriptions is the one that makes it a cult, right? Which is defensiveness is an aspect of being white, right? So if you deny any of these accusations, it's because you're being defensive, which means

that you're white. It's not that you are not oppressive or not bad or not racist. It's that you're being defensive about being all those things. And so your very defense against the charge is what convicts you of the charge, right? So that's, I mean, that's just cultic nonsense. So it's the fact that Coke is pushing that sort of stuff. Like, why would you work at Coke? Why would you buy Coke? I mean, like, this is the kind of stuff where people are going to start looking at these companies and saying, I don't want to patronize these companies anymore because they're actively proselytizing

for an extraordinarily destructive viewpoint in American society. And that's exactly right. But we need to actually construct these alternative businesses, give people places to go because it's easy. Look, I speak for a living and I've been able to build a business here.

So I get to work for myself. But we all should be working on, especially those of us who have the power to do so, on providing cities of refuge for people who are immediately, you know, cast out for non-sins because the left is not going to stop with this stuff, unfortunately. More with Ben in one second. But first, if you haven't tried Super Beats heart shoes, you are missing out. They are delicious. They kind of curb your appetite a little bit, you know, to hold you over to the next meal. And they're good for you. That's a great combo and they're not expensive. Boom, boom, boom. Super Beets Heart Chews combine non-GMO beets with a powerful new

ingredient, grapeseed extract. The grapeseed extract used in Super Beets Chews has been clinically shown to be two times as effective at supporting normal blood pressure as a healthy lifestyle alone. That means more energy the way nature intended without the jittery caffeine or stimulants or the weird power drinks you get at the 7-Eleven. Don't drink those. Now you can take just two delicious chews a day, anytime, anywhere. They're small. You can stick them in your bag to get the blood pressure support you need and the energy you want. Or men, you can put them in your pants pocket. They're that small. Check them out because I have thoroughly enjoyed them and they have a couple of delicious flavors just to mix it up. It feels like a treat. Do what I did. Support your heart health with delicious Super Beats Chews. Get your Super Beats Chews today at getsuperbeats slash MK. And when you buy two bags, they will throw in the third for

free. That's GetSuperBeats.com slash MK. GetSuperBeats.com slash MK. Jodi Shaw, you saw she resigned from Smith College. Our listeners have been following that because we interviewed her. And they had placed her on like double secret probation, basically administrative leave while they investigated whether she sent one email that in passing referenced a student to her personal account. and asking for an investigation into the neo-racism that they are unleashing against her and all the other staff, forcing them to believe all that stuff that Koch just said about white people. So she's effectively been forced out. We'll see what she does next. I hope she does something in her own independent lane. But part of the problem, Ben, is, you know, I mentioned the nice story about my school. Well, that's, of course, as you know, we pulled our children from their other school, which was very different. And we had left that school, but they got extremely indoctrinating in their ideology and their messaging.

And we were like, peace out. We're out of here. Then I see this story over the weekend about the Cartoon Network slipping in the messaging while your kid is watching the damn cartoon, teaching the children what they need to do is see color. I think we have a clip of that. I think it kind of does matter that I'm purple. I mean, I'm purple because I'm literally an alien. Well, I'm not an alien, but it definitely matters to me that I'm black. Yeah, it makes a difference that I'm white. I know the two of us get treated very differently. Adding a fantasy race in there helps distract from the actual racism black people have to deal with. Right.

My experience with anti-black racism is really specific. Other people of color experience other forms of racism, too. But you won't see any of that if you don't see color. Oh, my God. Can't my kids just watch Wonder Pets? Can't they just watch a little Einstein? And by the way, that, that, that fundamentally cuts, I mean, this is getting pretty deep on a cartoon network piece of idiocy, but that fundamentally cuts at the very basis of the enlightenment, which is that you have the capacity to understand other people's experiences without being them, right?

If you can't understand anybody else's thought process without being them, you fundamentally cannot have a democracy. There's just no way to do it because you literally cannot understand somebody else. They have absolute authority within their purview. And if you're talking about racial policy and racial policy is supposed to, according to the Biden administration, infuse everything, equity is supposed to infuse everything, right? If that's the case, and I'm not allowed to ask not only whether your feelings are authentic, but whether they are justified, if I'm not allowed to make a reasonable assessment as to whether your policy is well calibrated to achieving a desired effect, because I haven't had quote unquote your experience, that's the end of democracy right

there. You may as well do what Ibram Kendi actually suggests because he's an actual honest to God fascist. You should have a department of anti-racism in the federal government, unelected, that strikes down every law that ends with inequality of outcome, right? He's actually suggested that. He did that in the pages of Politico and that guy's a well-respected thinker. So indoctrinating kids with this kind of crap, it doesn't, and by the way, quick note, the evidence on diversity training shows that in many cases,

it actually exacerbates racial conflict. It does not make it better. It makes it worse. Absolutely right. It causes racism. And even if you have latent racism, the studies have shown it brings it to the frontal lobe. You are much more likely to behave, actually behave, whatever your personal views are deep in

the recesses of your mind. As long as you don't act racist, you don't generally have a problem at work, in the law. But these training sessions, of course, because they're telling all the white people that they're terrible, bring up actual racist behavior. They lead to actual racist behavior. So they actually do do more harm than good. That's why we need more Chloe Valdry's out there. Who's got the real solution. All right, let me shift gears with you for a second. I've been curious to get your overall view of Joe Biden and how he's doing so far. I mean, I think that he's being about as radical as I thought he was going to be. I think the lie that he was going to be a moderate in any way has been pretty much disproved. He's not been a moderate. He's, you know, you can

say that he's not in charge of his own administration, but he's the president. The bottom line is that by tying all of his policy preferences to quote unquote equity, he's made a massive mistake. He's pushing a $1.9 trillion package that is going to blow out the budget and result in, I think, in inflation. He is, he's pursuing policies via executive order that are bad. He's pursuing bad foreign policy. He's being bad as bad as I thought he was going to be. I don't see anything particularly unifying about the guy. The media coverage of him has been absolutely worshipful. But I'd be lying if I said that I thought I was surprised by any of this. The only thing I'm surprised by is how often he lies about what he inherited with COVID and how

often the media let him get away with this. That part I'm kind of surprised by. And I'm not really shocked, but I'm a little surprised. I'm kind of surprised by how he's been leaning into wokeism. I didn't know. I realized he was surrounded by people who are true believers. But part of me wonders whether this is like a bone he's throwing to his party because he's going to be more moderate on other issues. So he's decided, hey, what do I care if we go hard left on all this weird stuff? I mean, like, I don't know what he's thinking or if he's thinking, but I've been a little surprised at, you know, how hard left he's gone on wokeism and also concerned. Yeah, I mean, I think that he went that hard left and he made references to this pretty early on in his campaign. Because remember, I mean, he's only the nominee because of his

extraordinary level of black support in the primaries, right? The first three states in the primaries really ran away from him, right? When you're talking about Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada, none of those went well for him. It was South Carolina with its extraordinary level of black support for Joe Biden in those primaries that really started the comeback for him. And he said this in his speeches, right? He said in one of his speeches, I believe, what, you know, the black community put me over the top and I'll never forget, you know, I know what you did for me and I won't forget what, and I'm going to do stuff for you,

basically. And to break people down into racial groups and saying, you're going to do something for them as a racial group, as presidents of the United States is always like, he was saying that during the campaign and it got completely overlooked because people weren't paying attention to anything he said during the campaign. It was all Trump all the time. But, um, yeah, I think that it has more to do with him as kind of political dealmaker. I think Obama had more of an ideological tie to the sort of critical race theory,

you know, deep roots than Biden does. I think Biden is a back-slapping, good old boy, you know, Congress person who really is just interested in the backroom deals. But he understands that if he wants to hold his coalition together, he's going to have to do a lot of this. I think that he's pushing that it allows the radicals to feel seen and heard. And I don't think he's ideologically committed to it because I don't think he even understands the ideological ideological commitment. I think if you asked him, what do you mean by systemic

racism? He would not actually understand what you're talking about. If you said, explain the difference in equity and inequality, then he wouldn't understand what you're talking about. If you said, explain the difference in equity and inequality, then he wouldn't understand what you're talking about, right? These are all just buzzwords that he knows he's supposed to say. By the way, most Americans also don't understand this stuff. That's why he says equity, right? When he says equity, what he means is he's going to cram down policy that treats people differently based on the color of their skin. That's what he means when he says equity. But nobody understands that because it sounds so much like equality. So I don't think he understands that either. I think that he's just, here's a bunch of rote democratic policies. I'm going to push these forward. I'm going to say that it's on the basis

of race because that's how Barack Obama was so successfully cobbled together this new coalition. I've sort of revivified that same coalition. And we can carry forward into the future with the sort of woke coalition and a bunch of college educated whites. And that'll be our new coalition. The ascendant Obama coalition from 2012 has been remade in Biden. And I think that he's, you know, doing the same thing that Obama did in 2012. I don't think he's anything new. I think he's he's Obama administration part three. Yeah, so far, we haven't seen much reason to believe otherwise between him and his spokesperson. Let me ask you something personal. So now, as you mentioned, you're in Florida now, Daily Wire's in Nashville, Tennessee, not far away. And you moved from California,

your business and your family. So what have you noticed in terms of the differences? Obviously, the weather's not that much different, I would imagine, than California, but a little bit, maybe more humidity. But what have you noticed are the biggest differences? So I will say that it is significantly cleaner in terms of just the streets are kept cleaner than they were where I was living anyway. There's significantly less homelessness in the area where I live, which is definitely an upgrade. I wasn't living in a bad area in California, but homelessness has completely taken over the city of LA.

There is less crime in the area where I live, certainly less taxes. There's a general feeling of freedom. Like people in the area where I live, certainly less taxes. There's a general feeling of freedom. People are wearing masks where I live because they want to be safe, but people are still going out and doing things. The stores are basically full. You'll go to a bookstore with your kids and there's still people there. There's a general sense of people get to live their lives and be left alone. That's really, really nice. There's a feeling of oppressiveness that set in over the course of the last year in California. And that's coming from somebody who lived there my entire life. The the that just doesn't exist in the same way in Florida. I think it's why you're seeing this mass exodus from a lot of these blue areas to

Florida. Florida is getting redder, not bluer because of it. Now, Florida is more conservative than California. Obviously, it went for Trump this time around, but it doesn't always go Republican. I would say it's getting redder, though, in the way that, you know, Georgia is getting bluer. It's got a pretty, pretty big expat community from New York. A lot of our Jewish community winds up moving down there. It's got a big Jewish community, too. And as somebody who is the king of the Jews, according to whatever that guy's name is, and a conservative guy. I was thinking, you know, because they're talking about Ivanka Trump taking on Marco Rubio, which I don't think

is ever going to happen. I just don't think Ivanka Trump is going to win office. I could be proven wrong. I don't think she's got anywhere near the, she doesn't have the spark. She doesn't have what the old man has. I think she's a perfectly nice person, but she doesn't have it. You, on the other hand, have it. So what do you think? Might there be people talking about you as the heir to Rush? I'm thinking about you as the heir to Marco. Oh, man. Holding public office sounds horrible, like horrifyingly bad. First of all, I get the ability to say what I think on a regular basis, which is precisely the opposite of what you do when you're in politics. Because if you're in politics, then the game, of course, is to pretend that the policy you come up with fills all of the hopes of your ideals. And it's usually the reverse. If you're honest in

politics, what you say is, here's what I was aiming for. I got like 70% of it. And then you see if people are happy with that, right? But most people are not happy with that. So the more honest you are as a politician with your constituents, the less they tend to like you. So that wouldn't be fun. Also, you know, frankly, I think we're making a huge difference in the culture with what we're doing at Daily Wire and holding public office in a lot of ways, I think would be sort of a downgrade. As a senator, you're one of 100 running running Daily Wire and doing what we do here. I think we're impacting tens and tens of millions of people. And that I think is really

cool. So, you know, one of the things to consider is, you know, whether it's you or whether it's Rush or anybody else who's sort of a huge media figure, how many people do you impact? And is it more than default senator from, you know, purple state? And I think that typically the answer is yes. I speak to a ton of young people, thank God. And, you know, if I were senator, it wouldn't be nearly the same thing. So when I was younger, I thought about running for public office a lot more when I was in my 20s. And now I have a family. First of all, I also don't like the idea of just my entire life being made subject to scrutiny. I don't want to have to worry about where I go to eat for dinner or if I buy my wife a nice piece of jewelry, how that's treated in the press. It's none of your damn business. I kind of like my privacy and I like my kids to have their privacy as well.

Right. And then you really will get the bathing suit bikini shots. Yeah, exactly. I mean, my wife is hot, but I certainly am not. So that would be unfortunate for everyone. What do you mean? I thought you had the body of a god. Now, wait, I do. I think you're right. I remember O'Reilly used to say this when I was young and up and coming at Fox and people talked about whether he would run for president. And he used to say, I have I have more power here at this anchor desk. And I think he, you know, in some ways, maybe not the president, but certainly as a U.S. senator. Of course, O'Reilly was always drunk in his old one on his own wine. And there was I'll give you just another bit of color he went um he he took a trip to afghanistan and uh he's like yeah i had the security team you had to watch out bin laden this is before

bin laden been killed and i'm like you you you were worried that bin laden was gonna take a hit out on you while you're in afghanistan and he goes this is a quote he goes they watch the factor he's sitting i like okay you are a national figure but hello bill that that is spectacular that is so good oh my god i wish i had said that that's so good. Oh, my God. I wish I had said that. That's so good. I love that so much. All right. So back to The Daily Wire, because I do think this is the maybe it's not the solution to all of our problems, but it's certainly a very meaningful one.

What's what's next? Like, how do you fight back against big tech? How how does how could The Daily Wire ever fight back against ESPN? How like and how can the rest of us, you know, like, what's the next step? So, I mean, we're moving into the entertainment space, obviously. So we're producing a bunch of stuff right now in the entertainment space, which is sort of the Netflix Disney Plus space. We would love to move into sports. So we've, you know, been looking at a few different options in terms of sports.

There are some other good outlets out there. Our friends over at Outkick do a really good job. But, you know, we would love to really good job. But, you know, we would love to, we would love to, to, you know, work with them. There are a lot of folks that'd be fun to work with. We, for us, we have always seen this and you know this because we work with you also, you know, just in terms of being friends. We, we think of this as like a big pie and we want to expand the pie and we want more people involved. So it's not just Daily Wire, right? We would love to see there be, we'd love to see Outkick get enormous.

We would love to see, you know, all aspects of the culture covered by conservative alternatives. And the more of that there is, the better. If we can do that from inside, great. I mean, we happen to be an excellently run company, I think. We have a great marketing team. We really take our business seriously.

I think there's a reason why we were profitable 18 months in and haven't been non-profitable for, you know, essential, not essentially any year that we have been in operation. a reason why we were profitable 18 months in and haven't been non-profitable for not essentially any year that we have been in operation. We've been growing by leaps and bounds every single year, almost 50% year on year, I believe. So we think there's a lot of space here and we'd love to bring more people in. But if people want to stay out and they want to be independent, then we want to see those people succeed also.

We want to see them provide other alternatives. We need a lot of us out here. It can't just be us. Yeah, no, you guys have been wonderful to me. I mean, we were friends before I launched this company, but you and Jeremy Boring, your partner have been delightful and so supportive. And so you, you practice what you preach is what I'm trying to say, but you, I like that you, you think about it even outside of building infrastructures and support systems and, you know, actually putting your money where your mouth is when it comes to people like Gina,

you've got some other good advice that jumped out at me. And I actually hadn't heard you say this before. And I read it, but somebody was asking you, so what do we do? Like, what do we do in our day-to-day lives? Maybe we're not going to watch Netflix because of cuties,

or maybe we're not going to drink Coke because of this nonsense about white people. And you said, I got two solutions for you. Go to church or synagogue and make sure you take your kid to the 4th of July parades. I love that. Yeah. Yep. Well, I mean, those things have been shown by social science, by the way, to be some of the most determinative of the values of your kids. It's little things like that. Like there's a very high correlation between do you

take your kids 4th of July parade and does your kid end up being conservative? Do you take your kid to church and does that kid end up being conservative? Because those are the stuff that I mean, what do you remember from when you're a kid when you say what are your patriotic memories as a kid? Virtually everybody's gonna say I saw fireworks on the fourth of July when when they say, you know, when you think of your your defining ideological and philosophical experience as a kid, usually there's only a couple and one of them is usually in church, either for good or for ill. Right? So so forming community with other people, you know, forming a lifestyle with other people is really, really important and forming that common connection with people and people can get cues from shows like mine or shows like yours, but in the end, it's going to be them forming

communities with others who they see on a daily basis and actually look at them face to face, uh, and get to know them as people and, and believing that they're going to support them. If something goes wrong, uh, that is, that is really going to allow for there to be a resistance to the dominant leftist culture in the country right now. I think that's another good thing about your move to Florida is, you know, and as you know, we're leaving the Upper West Side of Manhattan, too. I do think there's something to be said for, you know, maybe not being 100% surrounded by people who are ideologically aligned with you, but you need some. It's kind of exhausting not having any. And, you know, I think about like we go out to Montana

and we go out there for the rodeos in the summer and we're totally immersed in the culture out there and it's awesome. And just to your point about the flag and patriotism, we were sitting there a couple of years ago. Thatcher was, I guess, four at the time, my little guy. And we're sitting in the stands. And at the start of the rodeo, they, of course, play the national anthem. And Thatcher, you know how like four-year-olds are, right? Like you got one. They don't move that quickly. They're kind of, he lollygags a little. And there was this real cowboy, like he had been a rider back in the day, a bull rider. He leans down, he's got like the chew in the mouth, and he's got the cowboyans down, he's got like the chew in the mouth and he's got the cowboy hat and he's got the accent

and he goes to Thatcher, he goes, son, you better get up on your feet immediately. I'm like, that's so great. And of course I would have gotten Thatcher up too. But you know, it's- Yeah, that's fantastic. The community weighing in, like we respect our flag, kid. Yeah, well, that's right. I mean, listen, I've always grown up in a in a Jewish community,

which means that there's people who surround us who tend to think like we do. But it has to be a broader community than that. It has to be a lot of people who agree with you on broad issues in American public life and also who shield your kids, because this is the other thing. Part of parenting is about making sure that your kids are surrounded by the values they want. And part of it is about making sure that they're are surrounded by the values that you want. And part of it is about making sure that they're not hit with the values you don't want. And that is really important. And I understand that there are people out there who want to shape your kid and who think that their values are better than yours and who get to parent your kid, but they don't. And it's why my kids have not watched TV since October. I'm dead serious. My

kids do not watch television. And I have no intention of letting them begin to watch television other than the TV that I personally approve because I don't want them exposed to things I don't want them exposed to. I don't think that I should have to explain to my four-year-old about transgenderism. I don't. I think it's confusing to him. And I think it's wrong to do that to a four-year-old. I don't want to have to explain to my daughter abortion policy.

She's seven. This is absurd. So I protect her from that. And I think everybody should have the ability to protect their kids from stuff that makes them not innocent. It used to be the chief goal of parents to keep their kids innocent. Now it's to apparently be friends with them or to allow them to make their own decisions. I wouldn't let my four-year-old make his own decision. Are you insane? He'd be dead inside of 24 hours. I'm not going to let my seven-year-old make a decision. She's like, that's crazy. If I let my seven-year-old make decisions, she'd be taking the golf cart and

she'd be running it into one of the ravines over here. Like, what are you even talking about? So it's just the creation of a space that you do actually have to create safe space for children, not for adults, for children. But in order to create a safe space for your kids, you also have to be comfortable to live your own life because your kids can tell when you're on edge as well. My kids know I'm more relaxed down here. Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you. So we don't, we do the same with our kids in terms of this messaging as much as we can here where we live and try to keep it out. But I go beyond that because another thing I don't talk to my kids about is school shootings. I don't, I've never discussed it with them and I don't plan to discuss it with them. There's very little,

God forbid this ever happens that they could do. And there's very much worry that will weigh on their shoulders. If I do get into this with them, there's no reason to saddle them with that kind of stuff. So that's the kind of safe space I would create for my kid, like emotional safe space from, from borrowed worry, as they say, and something about which they can do nothing.

Might as well make them worry about terrorism. You know, a little kid can't do anything about it. However, we're not all about the safe spaces. Cause I'll tell you something, Ben Shapiro, what I just did this past weekend. I went with my family and Janice Dean and her family to the Kalahari Resort in the Poconos, Pennsylvania, waters. I assume I don't mean to disparage them. It was amazing. And it was one of the most delightful experiences I've had in two years.

And it was packed because people are ready to get back to normal, to have their freedoms restored, to take a little bit of risk. You know, and it's probably no accident that most of the people there were more middle class or working class. And I thought to myself, I'm home. Yeah. I mean, you know, I think that there's a lot of people who are searching for freedom. There are a lot of people who feel like they've lost their freedom and feel deplatformed and feel as though they're living under a constant threat of an anchor dropping on their head. And, you know, those of us who have the ability to provide them with either a ray of hope or a

lifeline ought to do it for sure. Absolutely. Well, thank you for leading the way, my friend. It's always a pleasure catching up with you. And let's do it again soon. Great. Thanks so much, Megan. Great to talk to you. This hour is brought to you in part by The Zebra. Find out how much money you can save on car or home insurance easily by visiting thezebra.com slash Kelly now. And don't forget to tune into the show on Friday because we've got Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi Gabbard by popular demand. I've never interviewed her. I've watched her with fascination as many of you have. And I'm really looking forward to this conversation. So don't miss it. This is a must, a must download. Tulsi

Gabbard and yours truly this Friday. Go ahead and subscribe now so you don't miss it. This is a must, a must download. Tulsi Gabbard and yours truly this Friday. Go ahead and subscribe now so you don't miss it. Download five-star review if you feel so inclined and I'd love to get a word from you. Send me a review. I read them. I laugh. I cry. I look forward to doing better.

But I'd love it if you sent one, if you posted one. And in the meantime, let's get ready for Tulsi. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.