The Michael Knowles Show - Daily Wire Backstage: Defending America… From Itself

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

What made Kamala finally decide to visit the border? How much progress can Democrats make on their political agenda? Is the leftist takeover of our culture at the point of no return? And did Michael Knowles really write a book with actual words in it? Join this roundtable discussion featuring Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, and Daily Wire god-king Jeremy Boreing to find out! Michael Knowles’ new book, Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, diagnoses the losing strategy conservatives have taken in the fight against the Left’s assault on liberty, virtue, and Western civilization. Can we find our way back? Order your copy at speechlessbook.com Don’t miss our newest addition to our entertainment library: Created Equal: Clarence Thomas In His Own Words. This documentary features rarely-heard personal commentary from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as it chronicles his rise from the segregated south, to a vicious confirmation battle, and finally to become the second black American ever appointed to the Supreme Court. Watch on demand as a Daily Wire member - use code JUSTICE to join now for 20% off! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, Michael Knowles here. The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage Defending America from itself is right around the corner. This episode will be terrific, entertaining, wonderful, handsome, swarthy. It will leave you speechless, controlling words, controlling minds. Available now, wherever books are sold. Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Claven, and the God King, Jeremy Boring, as we discuss everything from my new book to transgender athletes competing in the Olympics. And if it's good, the Juneteenth is now a national holiday.

Spoiler alert, it's not. Take a listen. We don't do them anymore? Fair. Welcome to Daily Wire backstage defending America from itself. I'm Jeremy Boring, known around these parts as the God King, lowercase G, lowercase K, and we're glad you have tuned in. Is President Biden planning to just hand the presidency over to Kamla

and claim the gold medal in recognizing my white privilege Olympics? It would be a good move for him. Will the left's push to abolish the American flag be enough to wake people up to the poison that is critical race theory? Did Michael Knowles really write a book with, actual words in it that is a diagnosis of the losing strategy. Conservatives have taken to combat the left's assault on liberty, virtue, decency, the Republic of the founders, Western civilization, and this show, frankly, I'm speechless.

That was you. That wasn't me. That was you this time. I feel so dirty. You should, yeah. This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Don't like Big Tech and the government spying on you. Visit ExpressVPN.com slash backstage. Joining me, the Ben Shapiro, the Andrew Claibon, the Michael We're very glad you're here. We're very glad that Matt Walsh isn't. He's been showing us up lately, so we decided to do the show without him. Plus, he's on vacation. Plus, he's very expensive. From pronouns to microaggressions, there's no question that political correctness has been rapidly seeping into every corner of American society. And that's why Michael Noles wrote speechless, controlling words, controlling minds. And it's available everywhere the books are

sold right now. So go to your local bookstore or grab one off Amazon today. If you're a fan of Michael Noles, then you should be a daily wire member. and help keep him employed. Believe me, it is literally the only way you can help keep him employed. Go join at dailywire.com slash subscribe. You'll get 20% off of your membership with Code Justice in honor of our newest content offering, created equal Clarence Thomas in his own words. A terrific documentary about Supreme Court Justice Thomas's battle to the highest court in the land. If you'll remember, this particular documentary was mysteriously removed from Amazon, but it absolutely was not canceled.

Again, that's dailywired.com slash subscribe, sign up and snag that 20% off membership with code justice. If you're a current DailyWire member, well, you can get your questions into the chat box right now for our Q&A later on tonight. These intros just get longer and longer. And I don't feel like this is right. Thank you for tuning in. Less work for us. So what's going on in the world? There is a whole lot.

I'm actually very lucky because, do you know what? I wrote the book, Speechless? For the money. I wrote it securely for the money. This is great, man. You can buy a lot with 50 bucks. I, no, I wrote the book speechless, in part because I thought it would be funny, if there's the ding. I thought it would be funny if you start with a book that doesn't have any words to follow that up by writing a book that is entirely about words. I just got a kick out of that idea. I wasn't convinced that this would be the issue. You know, I signed this book contract almost two years ago. Yeah. I didn't know that would be a huge. I mean, you're almost Barack Obama, like you almost blew through, had to repay, got another book deal. Exactly.

That has become sort of the issue at the very moment. Big Tech crossed the Rubicon, obviously, when they kicked Trump off of all of the platforms. But it's not just that kind of censorship. You're seeing it now. The radical transgenderism is going to the Olympics and nobody's allowed to say boo about it. You're seeing it obviously with what we're allowed to discuss in the public health apparatus and everything in between right now. There's even a tie-in with Clarence Thomas. I write about the Thomas confirmation at length in the book because that was a big shift, I think, for a lot of people maybe who weren't totally conservative

to realize, wow, this political correctness thing is a big problem. Our friend Andrew Breitbart, that was the defining moment of his political transition. Well, I mean, first of all, congratulations on a book that has words in it. I did endorse this one not facetiously, and it actually is quite an impressive accomplishment. It opens with Lewis Carroll, and then it gets more pretentious from there.

I thought, I felt Lewis Carroll that was too pedestrian to really, you know, you had to go much further. You know, I was impressed because, you know, Ben and I have sort of talked about, you know, made fun of you for writing a book with no words in it. But now, having read this, I feel like all your books should have no words. This is the proof. I'm going back to my original. I'm just in it for the cigars. If you guys can see, we're smoking speechless Michael Knowles cigars on the show. And they're good. They are very good. This is something that I got a real genuine, kick out of. Drew, you've written about 5,000 books in your life.

Ben, you write... You write about, what, seven or eight books a year, I think, and you kind of turn them out, and we don't even notice. We don't even pay attention. And then I publish one book ever. We were popping champagne in the back. We were pre-gaming

the bag. It's like when your kid says his first word, like anybody else could do it, but this is, you know, a kid. Yeah, that's right. We actually have a few questions from dailywired dot com subscribers about the book. So this one, Michael, for you. Congrats on the book, Michael. What triggered you into writing this book? How long did it take for you to write it? The thing that got me to write it is I actually, I mean, I felt that my first book was my magnum opus, and I felt it was extremely true in a Thucydidean sort of a contribution to Western civilization. But I did want to write a real book because, one, I had a few things to say, but moreover,

I wanted to write a real book with an argument and not just a kind of light book because I don't think I want to do it again. I don't know why you people do it. It is agonizing, especially if you put some research into it. You know, it takes months and months of research. Then you lay, I don't know about you. I'm so obsessive about every little comma, every little. It's just, it's not, no, not you. You're just, you've already finished another book by the time they're doing the first edit. Well, I finished my book comes out July 27th. And I'm halfway through writing a novel right now. I'm just in my spare time. Really? Yeah. So, like, yeah, we all have different writing styles. Yeah. And I know Drew is more of a craftsman. Like, I know that you read over your work and you really spend time with it. And for me, it's like Mozart. It just comes to me in four paragraphs. I really never go back. And there are no errors, as they say. So pretty much I don't have to edit. It's just like thousands of words at a time. No mistakes. It's beautifully flowing. St. Michael prays for over every word. I do. You know, Thomas Aquinas was known for dictating multiple books at a time to his various secretaries. So that's something to. aspire to. This next question is for the whole group. Group. What are the books? They changed the question. Literally, the next question in the teleprompter said, group.

So then I think, well, I got time. I'll smoke me a cigar or maybe try to get this thing going. And then I'll look up and read the question. They'd change out the question. You know what the producers did? Hoodwinked. You know what the producers did? They were controlling words and thereby controlling minds.

I'm speechless. Yes, you are. Yes. No, there's no ding. It's a production team. Michael, what are your book's pronouns? That's a great. My book's pronouns are whatever the opposite of the New Zealand weightlifters pronouns. Whatever that is, I don't want any part of it. Well, that's a great thing for us to talk about. I mean, it's been an unbelievable week in sports,

where apparently every single person going to the Olympics now is transgendered and wants to burn our flag. So, for walking through these various stories. It's terrible. I mean, I'm sorry. I do not understand. You know, I saw a guy, a newscaster in, I think it was Australia saying, I cannot understand why anyone would object to this. I cannot. I thought, wait, you literally cannot understand why a man lifting weights on the girls' team because he calls himself a girl is not as good.

And you're a journalist? Well, I mean, honestly, the whole thing is so ridiculous. Shout out, quick shout out to my friend Leon, because my friend Leon has a story. his wife just gave birth to their seventh child. So they've been very productive. Wow. And so this happened this week. And apparently when the child came out of the mother,

the doctor then turned to him and said, do you want me to announce your child's gender? And Leon said, if you can't, you shouldn't be a doctor. And this is not difficult stuff. First of all, I think what this really shows, and this is very sad news for the feminist, is men are apparently unbelievable at everything, including being women.

Like, they're just unbelievable at it. Like, this guy has apparently only been a woman for like six years and only been weightlifting as a woman for six years. And he immediately becomes the oldest female weightlifter in Olympic history. Yeah. I mean, men are unbelievable at this stuff. It's just, it's incredible. Like, men are great at being men and they're unbelievably good at being women.

As I have been saying, as I have now been saying for many years in the future, all the best women will be men. But this is my whole theory, though. There's a lot of people who say that men are unlawful. under attack. And I don't actually believe that's the case. No, women are under attack. Femininity is under attack. And what people are saying to women is you only have value if you are men, and therefore men have to be less manly so that women can be manly and compete with them.

That's the problem. The problem is women. And the problem is women because women add a certain non-materialistic, non-Marxist, non-spiritual idea to human life. But no woman will ever be able to win any sporting competition again if this thing really takes root, right? Every single, it won't just be that, you know, the New Zealand guy is the best weightlifter. It'll be that also the guy from Australia is the second best weight. Here's a problem. So today, it came out just today, actually, that there was another person who's qualified in the NCAA,

transgender woman, so biological man, who is qualified to run in the NCAA races, but violates the Olympics rules on how much the estrogen versus testosterone levels are or something like that. And so this person has now been barred from running in competition at the Olympics. So I really, really look forward to the International Olympic Committee, explaining why one of these transgender women is actually a woman, but one of these transgender women is not actually a woman. Well, it's also... It's ironic because we're told that your body has nothing to do with whether you're a man or a woman,

but we're also told that the actual essence of our sex now is just the amount of testosterone in us. It's the most reductive thing possible. The aspect of this, though, that I find really troubling is I think it goes back a ways. For a moment, I thought that this transgender craze was totally new and is taking everything by storm. It might actually upset feminism or it might upset same-sex marriage, which is argues against it in some ways, right? Born this way is very different than I can change my entire... Fluidity. Sex, yeah, the fluidity.

But I think I'd like to blame all of this on the feminists. And the reason I would like to do that is the essential argument of transgenderism, if one can even say there is an argument. It's a little out there. is men and women are exactly the same. Men can become women, women can become men. So it's expressed differently, but really one is the same. This was the same argument for same-sex marriage that the union of two men and the union of a man and a woman

is exactly the same. It's the exact same category. And it's the same argument of second wave feminism that women are exactly the same. They can do every single thing just like the men. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. It seems like this goes... But it's also the opposite argument.

Right. Because it's saying... Because it's saying that I'm a woman because, you know, I want to keep house and I want to bake cookies. And that makes me a woman. So actually it's saying that the essence of women. Well, this is a lipstick and stilettos. Yeah, exactly. By the way, this is. By the way, look, I look great.

This is a game that you see from the left all the time is to hold two completely mutually exclusive premises. Yes. And therefore, if you argue with one, then they hit you with the other. Right. And this happens, you know, in the realm of critical race theory as well. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanchek, who are two of the founders of critical race theory. They hold that there are essentially four tenets to critical race theory. The first tenets of critical race theory is that white supremacy is in the air around you.

It pervades everything. It's like the force. It pervades the air around you. It unifies all living things. The second principle is that white people are incapable of understanding their own racism, right? That white people are basically unable, but they benefit from it. They all benefit from it. Then there are two completely mutually exclusive tendencies inside critical race theory.

One is that race is a social construct. And the other is that we can define you purely by a race. Race is a social construct and it's been constructed by the powerful over time in order to subjugate other people. But also, because you are part of this social construct, either white or black, you are unable, if you're white, to identify racism or understand it. And if you're black, you're totally able to understand and identify racism in a way you can't even explain to white people. Well, the problem is, the minute you argue with one of those premises, they immediately hit you with the other premise. So if you say, well, that sounds like racial essentialism to me. I say, well, no, I say that race is a social construct.

And it's the same thing when it comes to transgenderism. There are a thousand mutually exclusive arguments inside the arguments regarding transgenderism. One is that gender is completely fluid, but also that stereotypes are apparently so rooted in your innate gender biology that if you abide by a stereotype, that is a stereotype. It's also essential. It's a stereotype that's constructed, but it's also not constructed. It's also essential. If they play this game long enough, what you realize, and I think this is the premise of your book, really, is that when you school around, with language this much. When you make words, this valueless and contentless, what it really is about is what they have always accused the institutions of being about which is power.

This is what Foucaulte says, right? Foucault always says that everything in the end, language, everything is about power. That is all projection. For Foucault, everything is about power. Because he wishes to use language as a tool of power in order to accomplish what he wishes to accomplish. I have one, I almost never make predictions because I feel like the future is unknown. My one prediction is that 1984 is going to be canceled, that pretty soon they're going to start

to say that Orwell was, we shouldn't be reading Orwell, because it is Orwell. I mean, it is every single thing that they do is predicted in that book, the rewriting of history, the use of words, all of this, everything that you're saying is all in that book. It's all outlined in 1984, so eventually they're going to have to say, like, no, we shouldn't be selling this. When they cancel 1984 and when they cancel Huxley, people can still read about it in speeches. But actually, to your point, Ben, I can't. I mean, your point is this excellent one, which is the left argues from these contradictory

premises. But my argument in speechless is that political correctness is this purely negative campaign. When we talk about critical race theory, which is a derivation of critical theory broadly, comes from Marx's statement that we need the ruthless criticism of all that exists. It's just trying to knock stuff down, deconstruct, debunk, and just bring it all to rubble. So we have this idea of human nature in the West, which is that we're body and soul. There's basically a simple idea. It's called hylomorphism, to use the technical term of Aristotle. And the left has these two completely opposite ideas of human nature. One, we're just material. We're just meat puppets. All of our hopes and dreams are just, you know, synapses in our brain firing off. The other one,

that were pure spirit. You know, I look like a dude. I've got an Adam's app. I got a low voice. But no, if I say I'm a woman, I'm really a woman. They'll go back and forth, sometimes in the same sentence, but the object is always to destroy the true and traditional understanding. But nothing is, I'm sorry. That's all the time we have. I have to talk about policy. Five minutes ago, or I'm going to need some insurance. Listen, I've been telling you guys about my experience with PolicyGenius, which is essentially that this beautiful daughter came into my life one year ago today. Thank you.

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I mean, we're bad, but I mean, like, you work for us. We pay you. You should at least be up. So, Drew, I actually want to get back to the point that you were about to make. One of the things I've observed by way of segue is that, you know, there's all this talk about how the sexes are interchangeable. But the net result in almost every measurable area seems to be that when men transition into women, they dominate all women. When women transition into men, they are unable to dominate all men. I'm talking about in sport. I'm talking about in physical. in physical areas, doesn't that very discrepancy prove that the whole thing is nonsense? It's the end of the question. No one has objected to a woman, a trans man, playing in men's sports, because they come in number 50 of 50. You know, that's why. So it's not actually a problem. And that's why I feel it is. Because there is a difference. But the thing about it is. Yes, mammalian species are sexually dimorphic. Also, I feel like we are sort of species-centric here in the West. Yeah, like nobody are. Nobody else has.

I've noticed that there are other mammalian species, and all of them have this peculiar tendency toward sexual dimorphism in which there are two sexes that reproduce with one another. One called the female and one called the male. But I think we should ask ourselves, we should ask ourselves what it is about women that these guys want to extinguish. Because that is the thing about feminism. Simone de Beauvoir said women should not be allowed to choose to be homemakers because too many of them will do it. And you think, like, well, what is the problem with that? What is the problem with making a home? Well, she says.

She gives the answer. She says, and she was arguing with Betty Friedan, a subject I actually discuss in Specialist. And Betty Friedan was a radical, said, it's actually a bad of, I don't know, we'll get it on the next episode. They'll ding it. Betty Friedan, a radical feminist in her own right said, hold on, whoa, hold on a second, Simone. I think that women should be able to choose if they want to go to work or they want to stay home, that's fine. And Simone de Beauvoir said, no, that is not conducive to liberation. And we need to force women out of their false consciousness to truly be... Well, see, this is what I wanted to say before when you said that political correctness is negative. It's only negative.

Really, nothing is only negative. Nothing that human beings do because human beings act in their own interest. So when they're tearing something down, they're tearing something down for a purpose. And this is why I keep going back to the idea that this is a move for power. I mean, it's got to be. It's the essential materialist essence and motive. I think there's something more than that. And this goes to sort of, again, back to critical race theory.

there's a lot of intertwining here because these are all sort of springing from the same root. And that route is this fundamental belief that human beings are replaceable widgets who are in essence exactly the same and therefore any inequality of outcome can be chalked up to the evils of the system. And so when you look at the inequalities between the sexes, the most obvious inequalities between the sexes are that women are capable of this superpower where they produce another child, they produce another human within them, and then have that baby. This is a thing men cannot do contrary to popular opinion.

Only women are birthing persons. And then men have their compensatory power is that they have great upper body strength, right? Like, these things don't match up in terms of human importance, by the way. You'll notice that the thing women do preserves the human species at an extraordinary rate, while men picking up heavy objects very often also drop those heavy objects on each other or themselves. But we win metal. But we are capable. That's why they give you medals.

It's useless. Exactly. But if you need a mover, you don't call a woman. And if you need a baby born, you're probably not going to call a man. Just as a general rule. So what the left has decided is basically if you can remove the most obvious differences between men and women, and these are the two most obvious differences between men and women, just to the outward eye, then you can treat everybody as though they are innately exactly the

same. And if they are innately exactly the same, then you actually have a plausible argument that any system that ends in inequality at the end is inequity. And this is the same argument that you see being made with regard to race in the United States. anytime there's an unequal outcome by race, it must be that the system itself is racist. This is explicitly, Ibram X Kennedy's argument, right? Any inequality of outcome must be inequity in the system. Because otherwise, you're suggesting that some people are inferior at things and other people are superior at things, and that's racist.

Or alternatively, maybe some people are making bad decisions and other people are not making bad decisions, and that's always going to fall disproportionately no matter which group you pick, if you split it halfway down the line. It's fascinating to me about this. Thomas Sol has written about this extensively, and I can't remember the exact term he uses, but it's something like... The quest for cosmic job. No, he calls it the unbeatable fallacy, the fallacy that simply will not die in the face of the facts. He wrote a book this may be about 30 pages, a tiny little book called discrimination and discrepancy. Discrimination and disparities.

Disparities. And it's just a brilliant, brilliant book that absolutely destroyed. He is our greatest living. Well, this is the thing. This is what I want to say. Our greatest living public intellectual is a black man. Ibrahim Kendi is not an intelligent man. He's not an intellectual.

He's just not. I'm sorry. The things that come out of his mouth are not. the sorts of things that people who read say. And Thomas Sol is this, I mean, come on, this is a most, this is a majority white country in which the greatest public intellectual alive is a black man. Probably second grade is too, Clarence Thomas. Well, right. And Clarence Thomas. And no, but nobody celebrates. Nobody said, they put up instead statues to George Floyd, this thug, basically. And they, and they let this guy go inside. By the way, I did predict this. I said that in the future,

the only, I told, I told Jeremy this like six months ago. I said, in the future, he, The only statues that will ever be built in the United States are people who are purportedly victims of the system. There will never be a statue of a hero again in the United States because heroism is not permanent. And every human being is flawed. So the minute you put up a statute to a hero, immediately you're going to get people saying, yes, but he also did X, Y, and Z. Whereas victimhood is permanent and infallible. If you were a victim of something, it doesn't matter what you did the rest of your life. If you are George Washington and you were the father of the country, but in a time when a huge percentage of the population held slaves, and most civilizations did, you held slaves.

slaves, we cannot have a statue up to you. If you're George Floyd and you spent literally the entirety of your adult life participating in criminal behavior, but you died at the hands of a police officer, then we can make a statue of you because again, your victimhood is irreplaceable, but heroism is always shaded by the fact that human beings are... You know, on 9-11, the 20th anniversary of 9-11 is coming up, which is the defining political event of my lifetime. Yeah. I mean, how we've forgotten that, by the way. Unbelievable. Antietam was the defining political person's lifetime, actually. Oh, what a battle.

And we, at that time, I remember being really offended by this idea. People would say, you know, 3,000 heroes died in the Twin Towers. And I would think, no, that is not what a hero is. That's right. Many heroes died in the towers. The firefighters. The firefighters. Undoubtedly, there were heroes among other people who were in the towers as well.

Cowards died in the towers. Child molesters probably died in the towers and crooks died in the towers. and they were all victims. From the point of view of justice against the actual crime that was committed against them by al-Qaeda, every one of them deserves to be avenged by a just system. But being a victim does not make you a hero. You can't interchange those two terms. But now the two terms are completely synonymous.

And you'll notice in the case of Clarence Thomas, an heroic figure, I think, and a really terrific figure, he never even got the statue to be taken down when they built the black history museum. Right. That's right. Which, by the way, I object to the black history museum, one, because the building is hideous. And two, because it suggests that black people shouldn't be in the American history museum, right? It's like, it's totally separate thing. But when they built it, they utterly marginalized Clarence Thomas. They gave Anita Hill better seating than they gave to this great conservative legal. I think part of this has to do with the very structure of narrative in a world in which heroism generally requires that you are defending something worthwhile. That's what

heroism generally requires. But because we've removed values from our system and we don't believe that there are that many things that are worth defending anymore, now what heroism has been reduced to is overcoming an obstacle. The pathway to heroism is there's an obstacle and you have to overcome it. So victimhood is inherently part of that process, right? If there's no obstacle for you to overcome, you're not a hero in this particular vision. Now, the way that we used to define heroism typically is, like, for example, if you ask me who my heroes are, I would say my parents. The obstacle is, the obstacle is, they had to overcome pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. They lived in the

free-its country in the history of the world. They lived in a household where they loved each other. They were middle income, and then over time grew to be upper middle income. And the obstacles, they had to cover everyday obstacles. They're my heroes because what they were defending was hearth and home and family, and they were raising children in a traditional way. That's hero, but that's not heroism that makes movies. Right. The heroism that makes movies is something bad happened to X. And what we've so become addicted to victimhood, that we now prize victimhood above everyday heroism to the extent that if you make a victim of yourself through your own choices, you're considered more heroic than the person who actually

acts responsibly. So, for example, my parents, again, married, and this is true for literally hundreds of millions of people across the United States, black, white, and green, the people who are championed in the movies and on TV are single, you will never see two parent families champion as a heroic story. You'll see a single mother champion as a heroic story because single mothers are overcoming an obstacle. Now, many of the other. those cases, the obstacle was self-made, but it's still overcoming an obstacle. And so victimhood is so tied into our narrative structure. It's hard to overcome. You're making a wonderful point about victimhood because so much of this, as we constantly are saying, is a perversion of Christianity.

And one of the things that built Christianity was martyrdom. And the idea of martyrdom was that you were willing that you had something beyond life itself, that was more valuable than life itself, and were willing to actually stand there and be eaten by a lion, which sounds incredibly disgusting and painful to me, because you were defending an idea. Now, that is. is a beautiful thing. People who die for ideas. I mean, I'm Martin Luther King who says, look, they're going to kill me, but I've done an important thing. This does move you. But when you take the values out of it, what are you? But this is exactly, so the George Floyd situation is a perfect example of this, right? I mean, Rosa Parks is a person who made a sacrifice, is a planned sacrifice,

which, by the way, I don't think makes her sacrifice any lesser. In fact, I think it makes it smarter, right? They actually planned it out in advance, and it was an actual smart thing they did. She actually made a sacrifice. Martin Luther King made sacrifices, right? There are many people over the course of the civil rights movement, who have made actual sacrifices in pursuit of a higher ideal. George Floyd did not willingly make a sacrifice in pursuit of a higher ideal.

He resisted for an idea. Correct. He died from hitting a crime. He died, I mean, almost undoubtedly, at least in part by accident, even though he was convicted of, Chauvin was convicted of first-degree murder. But the reality is that even if he was convicted

of first-degree, even if it was a murder, he didn't die because he willingly went to his death in order to achieve acts, right? And again, this is not a rip on George Floyd. It's a rip on Nancy Pelosi, who literally declared that he was a martyr in the same way that people have martyred themselves. To be a martyr means to stand for a higher ideal and then die for that higher ideal, not to die, and then be retroactively considered a martyr because the ideal that you can now

propagate off the death of that person is a benefit to you. But isn't this just evidence that, as the great political philosopher Bob Dylan points out, everybody's got to serve somebody. And we now pretend that we're an irreligious, totally secular country, total separation of church and state. We have a very rigid liturgical calendar. We're in the holy month of pride right now. We've got new liturgical saint feast days added all the time.

We just had a new one added. And it's just, I'm not even really knocking it in as much as man has religious longings. We obviously long for something beyond this moral. By the way, you're totally right about that. One of the things that's driven me up a wall, and it is being, like, people refuse to acknowledge this, is there's this move that is now being made all the time that somebody will, Ronda Sances will sign a bill, saying that women can have their own leagues and men don't compete in those leagues. And people will go, during Pride Month, during Pride,

or how dare you sign a bill against critical race theory during Black History Month? On Juneteenth. Right, you saw Eric Adams did this. Eric Adams is like, did you even see that Catherine Garcia and Andrew Yang were campaigning against me together on June team? It was like, I wasn't aware that Juneteenth was established specifically to prevent people from campaigning against you because you're black. That's weird. But that is treated in the same way that Jews treat like, I can't believe that they start. a war on Yom Kippur, you know, like the holiest day in the Jewish calendar in 1973, right?

It's like, those aren't the same thing. Like, if you're going to have a pride month because you want to demonstrate that you're out and you're proud, fine, whatever, although I think that the country declaring pride months of any sort, like literally any sort. Rast month is better. But it's like, mutiny month. Humility month. Yeah. But putting that aside, the notion that, like, we can now use this as a cudgel to beat you

and claim that you're a bigot because you're doing enduring pride. I mean, it obviously is religious treatment of a ruffinity. rather irreligious subject. So I want to talk about our friends over at Stamps, and the reason I want to talk about it is because I'm not the kind of guy who likes to go anywhere or do anything. And Stamps.com makes it possible for me to still be productive and quite successful, even with that predisposition. If you're still going to the post office, you're still paying full price for postage. My question to you is, dude, what's up? I wouldn't actually say that to you. But that would be the attitude that I would express, perhaps more eloquently. Thanks to Stamps.com.

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We do it here at the Daily Wire, and we've been doing it for a long time, mostly because my staff has to work around all of my laziness and bad attitude and agoraphobia, I think it's fair to say, but also because time is money, because getting in your car driving across town, especially today. Listen, stamps.com is my favorite kind of company, all joking aside, because they have made our lives more productive, more efficient.

And that gives us time to be better at the things that we need to be doing, better at running our businesses, better at living our lives. Stop wasting time, going to the post office, go to Stamps.com instead. There is no risk. And with my promo code, backstage, that's right. Backstage is the promo code. You get a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long-term commitments, no contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the home page and type in backstage. That's stamps.com, promo code backstage. Stamps.com, never go to the post office again. I won't. I would know. Is it what fun about your... I'd like to bring the conversation back to

back to Nolzee book. But, and I'd like to, I'd like to mention, I'd like to mention the title of the book, but he keeps spinning around so I can't... Oh, it's speechless. It's speechless there. Sorry, I've only got the back cover, but, but, you know, it seems to me one of the greatest acts of censorship that the left has performed, and maybe the essential. central act of censorship was under the guise of this made-up idea of the separation of church and state was banning the discussion of religion and the teaching of religion from the public square. And we accepted this. I think the right accepted this.

And we thought, that's fair. You know, why should one religion be put over another? But in fact, in doing that, we gave up the entire argument for our country. We gave up the essential argument for our country and can no longer actually make the argument for the rights enumerated. You know, for the ideas enumerated in the Constitution, and also for the spirit expressed in the declaration, all of which are dependent upon the idea that our rights are God-given. Well, if we had a true separation of church and state, which is a preposterous idea, by the way, and I debunk it in this book.

What's the books? It's called Speech. It's controlled. It's not. But if you had, you might not have heard of it. Even I'm tuning out at this point. Yeah. But if you really had a firm separation of church and state and religion really had.

to be banned from the public square entirely. One could not read the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July or any end of that. And this is one of the shortcomings of sort of the assumptions that were made by the founders in their time. They assumed, because they say that they held particular truths to be self-evident, that the waters in which they were swimming philosophically were common and well understood. And so if you read the declaration, you read the Constitution, they are implicitly filled with all sorts of Judeo-Christian language.

And if you read the founders' language, they're constantly citing the Bible. It's the number one most cited document in any of the founders writing. I mean, they've gone through all their writing, and they cite lock sometimes, and they cite a lot of blackstone, and they cite various people. But the number one document, by far, it's not close, is the Bible. And that's because that was the sort of error that they actually were breathing all the time. And because that was implicit to them, but was not made explicit, there was a move to separate off what was explicit. And we lost what was implicit. And when you have only the explicit, but you lose the entire fundamental basis, the entire thing.

In the same way that when you look at Picasso's early work, it's just paintings, right? When you listen to jazz, they're not playing the wrong notes. In order to deconstruct something, in order to critique something, I'm a critic of a lot of American evangelical theology. Because I teach the Bible. But you have to actually know something before you can criticize something, before you can deconstruct something. There's a lot of value in critical thinking. There's a lot of value the founders. If you take, you know, Adams famously said to Thomas Jefferson,

if the two of us were to behold the chakina glory, we still would be skeptical. But they weren't religious in the way that we think of people being religious. In some ways, they were far more religious, though, because they took a position of critiquing certain ideas from deep understanding, from deep literacy. But more than that, and it, it applies to you, too, is that you actually believe in the Bible so that we're arguing about something. Right. It's a common frame of reference. We have a common frame of reference and of faith and of faith.

So that if we get in an argument and I can cite a Bible verse, you have to respond with a Bible verse. You cannot just say, oh, that's take that book away. And I think that that's the position they've put us in, basically, is they've taken the book away. Yeah, and not just the Bible, although the Bible fundamentally, that's the fundamental document they've taken away. But in taking away all of our understanding of our own history, they've given us just the criticisms. But what they think they're doing is criticizing. What they're really doing is playing wrong notes. But it's also even...

They didn't bother to learn how to do it. Even if you want to read criticism, I like reading criticism. What the left has done is this little trick where they pretend that critical theory is critical thinking. And they've actually made this... It's not. It's its own horrific academic, pseudo-academic movement. But in order to... criticize something or to read criticism and commentary, as you say, you need to know what you're

talking about. Even if you don't believe a single word of the Bible, you consider yourself the staunchest atheist or the most tuned-out agnostic. You simply cannot understand any work of literature or history for that matter, for the most part, if you haven't read the Bible. And what is the one book that you're just not allowed to read in the public schools? That's right. Yeah. It's the Bible, the foundation of the civilization. There is a great line in G.K. Chesterton. This is one of my favorite lines because it concisely says what I'm always trying to say, where he says, break the conventions, obey the commandments. And in other words, there's plenty of room for originality, there's plenty of room for criticism, there's plenty of room for progress. But all of it should be

in keeping with the traditions that brought us here for the simple reason is that's what gave us our values. If we're arguing, the problem with the left is you're always arguing, they're arguing for our values. But they don't want any of the conventions or the commandments that bring us So here's a question from a dailywire.com subscriber. You could become one right now and get 20% off if you head to dailywire.com and use promo code justice. For the whole group, our tax money goes to pay for abortions, goes to pay for schools to brainwash our children, to bail out states that have crappy governance, among many other issues we find stupid, evil, or both? My question is, is there a line in the sand where we conservatives decide to stop paying taxes? Well, you put it that way. Sign me up. Sounds great. I mean, so the reality is that the only reason that people pay taxes in the end is because there's a giant gun attached to the other end of you not paying a tax. I mean, the government has the power of compulsion.

The real question you're asking is, why would you obey the edict of a federal government and when did the federal government lose legitimacy? That's really the underlying question to paying taxes because, let's face it, no one wants to pay taxes, no one likes paying taxes. I moved from California to Florida in part to avoid paying certain taxes. So the answer to that is at the point where you do not have any other options except to fight back. And I don't think we're at that point yet. Number one, because this country is so closely divided. Number two, I think a lot of people just do not understand the arguments at all. And our mission, in part, is to inform people and allow people to awaken to arguments they've never heard before because all these institutions are so unbelievably dominated by the left.

And number three, I'm putting a lot of faith these days in states. I just think that states are going to end up providing the only bulwark in the end. against the predations of the federal government, which is why it's wonderful that, you know, our company is located in a state where Governor Lee is presiding. It's wonderful that I live in a state where Governor Dysantis presides. You know, Drew, unfortunately, lives in a state where, yeah, where the governor either dressed in blackface or in a KKK outfit,

and there's no third choice. Which is worse. But it's it, but. Hey, we have the only black governor in America. Oh, wow. Wow, man. But it's it, but I think that the bottom line is, And I hear this argument about abortion also.

People will be like, well, one point you stand up and you do violence. And the answer is when all other options are exhausted. A lot of options are not been exhausted. Read the Declaration of Independence, right? Founders were, the entire reason behind the declaration was because they say that dissolving the bonds that tie one people to another is such a significant consequential act cannot be taken lightly. And so they have to make a robust defense of what they're about to do.

It's not just like, oh, we don't like it. We don't like the cut of your jib. We're kind of tired of this. We don't like that you do some things that are, no, no, no. It has to be, as you say, you have, it's like just war theory, right? There are no other options. The other options must have been exhausted. And the other thing I want to point out to the people who suggest we need a national divorce.

First of all, there's no such thing as a peaceful national divorce. That just doesn't happen. So if you're actually saying you're willing to take up a gun and start shooting your relatives, I don't think we're there yet. I don't want to do that. I think we should not be as flippant about it. But also, they're making the same mistake that has caused us to lose every single aspect of the country. Namely, they're saying, let's disengage, let's just give up.

How about we just do what these parents are doing at the local school boards and go in and say, no, you don't have the right to completely pervert my country. Oh, my gosh. We've got video of one of these fathers speaking out against critical race theory. If you guys didn't say, you probably talked about on your shows, this is so good, though. Can we play that? The only race it is is a human race. I never raised my sons to see anybody's color.

The color was never even discussed in my house at all. All we know is that as my children grow, they just see other kids, and they'll just immediately start playing. There is no a child see them and like, why is this skin color like that in mind? We never discussed that. When it all comes down to it, people are just people. My son's never had to talk about white people and about Asian people. All they know is that they were people.

They were their friends. They played with them. They never once came home and said, Dad. My white friend across the street, they just said, my friends. This is happening all across the country, parents standing up at school board meetings and objecting for the first time. And Michael, you bring up this idea that disengagement is a conservative predisposition. And it's the reason that we lose. And I've been talking for a long time, I think that one of the major problems in American conservatism is that American conservatism is largely comprised of American Christians.

And American evangelicals have a multi-hundred-year tradition or longer of being obsessed with eschatology. Being obsessed with the idea that the world is going to end right away. Christ is going to come back and justice is going to be wrought on the earth. And listen, I have no problem with eschatology. I have a problem with a fixation on eschatology to the point that it causes you to remove yourself from reality. So we're very good at winning elections. There are more Democrats than there are Republicans in the country. And yet we disproportionately win presidential elections.

Why? Well, because every election is the most important election of our lifetime, and the next election doesn't matter at all, because Jesus is going to come back, because I have a big supply of my Patriot food buried in the backyard, and I have 10,000 rounds of 2,23 ammunition. We're doomsdair's. These are all good art, only, you're now convincing me on the other side. We're doomsdayers, and we're not optimistic. And my rebuke of the American evangelical tradition of eschatology is that God commands optimism. from the very beginning of Genesis. Be fruitful and multiplies a commandment that predates sin entering. Hope is a theological virtue. Hope is a theological virtue.

Lift up now thine eyes is one of the most recurring terms in the book of Genesis. Meeting from the very beginning, God is saying have optimism, look toward a future. And it's one of the great ironies that the left is more optimistic about the future than conservative. We disengage. They plant seeds for generation. They plant, they sow a harvest that they will not reap for 40 years. We disengage and then we're surprised when they went. This is exactly right.

But I think it's inherent in conservatism to a certain degree. There's a wonderful Gilbert and Sullivan line. Every child that's born alive is either born a little liberal or a little conservative, you know. And I think that there's something to that because one of the things that a conservative can see is that if you pull the string, the suit might fall apart, that any little thing that you do might cause the destruction of everything we have. And so they're kind of got a negative point of view, not to mention any names. But no, you know, I think that is... I'm so much more pessimistic.

It's true. Jeremy and I, this is the nature of our friendship, is that basically we get on the phone, and we're going to have, like, a nice uplifting conversation. How bad do you think it's going to go? It's going to go. It's so much worse than that. No idea. It's true. They compete.

And I think that that leads to people. I hear this from conservatives all the time. It's over. Forget it. You want to fight. Forget it. It's over. And my feeling, when we sink into the mud, the last thing you're going to see is my...

Although what's ironic about that is that actually of the people on this particular show, the two who kept arguing that there will be future elections are actually the supposed two pessimists in the room. But when it comes to the sort of argument over what we can do at the local level, I mean, I'm so heartened by the anti-CRT movement. I'm saying it's most heartened. I've been more heartened, actually, I think, than the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party movement was a, quote-unquote, small government movement. It disbanded basically upon Republicans winning back office in 2010. and the Republicans took the heart right out of it because they kept spending. And so there was no fight back.

And maybe there was never going to be any fight back or any way to fight back against that because when you're in Congress, your job is to quote-unquote get things done as opposed to having a mandate to not get things done, which is really what the mandate was in 2010. But what we are seeing right now on the local level with people saying, this cannot go any further, is a wonderful and fruitful pushback that we are seeing from all sides of the political aisle. And I will say I am really optimistic.

about 2022. I'm optimistic about 2024. I'm optimistic that the American people are starting to have enough of this crap because if you look at the polls on things like CRT, they're devastating for the Democrats. There's a reason why in the last week alone, the Democrats have decided that suddenly voter ID, which was Jim Crow, until the last 27 seconds, is now okay with them. Stacey Abrams is like, I'm just never against voter ID, assuming, of course, that we are like guppies and have short-term memory loss. And Raphael Warnock doing the same thing in Georgia. When the Democrats are starting to back off of their defund the police nonsense. And because Eric Adams, of course, is probably going to win the mayoralty in New York running on the basis that we need stronger law enforcement,

now weaker law enforcement. And you're starting to see Democrats go out there like Maisie Hirono, who's a nut, saying, we're not the party of defund the police, and Jen Saki getting up and saying, no, it's the Republicans who are really, she said this. I'm not kidding. You said, it's the Republicans who are probably the party of defund the police. They're starting to reverse on their own key principles because it turns out that once again, because American politics is so reactive, Democrats didn't understand their mandate. when Trump lost in 2020, the mandate was, don't be that guy. But it was not get rid of all of his policies.

Americans broadly liked his policies. They just had problems with him personally. And Biden gets in. He's like, well, it seems like my mandate is to, you know, and also and cream wheat and come out and nuke America. And everybody's like, whoa, dude, that's not what you were elected for. Could he please not nuke us? By the way, hands up, don't nuke.

That was the most insane thing. I'm so confused. So it was a huge controversy when apparently Donald Trump at one point allegedly suggested nuking a hurricane. He didn't suggest nuking every gun owner in America. Hands up, don't nuke. That's what we're all saying now.

The president of the United States literally said yesterday that you shouldn't own guns or care about owning guns because after all, if you got in a shooting war with us, we will send our F-15s and nuke you. I've never wanted a gun more than this, by the Taliban left.

I've got to stop you right there before we say too many mean things about Joe Biden because, you know, look, my first book, my blank book was endorsed by the then-president of the United States, Donald Trump, who reasons to vote for you. That's a great book for your reading enjoyment. My new book, Speechless, actually did receive an endorsement from the sitting president of the United States. Joe Biden. Take a listen.

Mike Knows wrote a book called. Speechless control. Being. Core. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. For sharing the powerful story and for helping the country understand what's happening here. And in case you were wondering. He's a great and gifted writer.

I really mean it. The honesty with which he stepped forward and talked about the problem and the hope that it gave me hope reading it. Two hundred and I suffered the pressure. Thank you, Mr. President. And you're welcome. RBC Training Ground has discovered potential

in over 20,000 Canadian athletes and counting. Your story could be next. If you've got the drive, they'll help you find your path to the Olympics. Let's see what you've got. sign up for free at rbc training ground.ca. That is amazing. And also, I'm a little miffed that our editing team spent so much pretty obvious.

That was kind of worth it, actually. Now, the amazing thing about that is that you could have just gone directly to Biden and asked him to say that. Oh, yeah. And he would have just said it. And then he would not have understood that he said it. I mean, as I'm constantly saying, Joe Biden, it must be like a wonderful thing to be Joe Biden, right? You wake up every morning and somebody tells you a president. I am. I always wanted to be.

Here's a question for the group from our dailywire.com subscribers. Do you think conservatives have a blind spot in video games in gaming culture the same way that we did in education and Hollywood? Absolutely. Tell us video game. I do. I am a video gamer and I love them and I think that they have been attacked by the woke and they're trying to force them into wokeness and have succeeded to a certain degree. But they succeed in all these things because conservatives are. aren't paying attention. Video games are more popular than Hollywood. They have been more popular

than Hollywood for maybe 10 years. They make more money than Hollywood. They engage the imagination in a unique and original way. They take people into what are usually acts of heroism against evil. So they're inherently conservative. They're inherently religious in some certain sense. They're a wonderful tool. And they bring young men into experiences, I think, that train those. to the heroic mind. And they're fun. And they're fun. And they're artistic when they're done really well.

When I was in Afghanistan, a sentence I always like to say because I feel like Dr. Watson, when I was in Afghanistan, but I would see the soldiers go out and literally get shot at and then come back and play video games where they got shot at. And I think that they were actually, you know, a way of training themselves to the heroic mindset. And yeah, they can be an art form. They have once or twice elevated themselves to an art form. And I think that they bring people, young men especially, into an imaginative world that can be very, very fruitful.

Obviously, they can be overplayed and overdone. But we don't pay attention to any of this stuff. And it just drives me nuts. So I want to talk about privacy because you are on the Internet. That's how you engage with us. And when you're on the Internet, your privacy is at risk. We all take risks every day when we go online, whether we think about it or whether we don't. We think our connection probably won't be interrupted by hackers.

We think our data probably won't be used against us. But if you're using the internet without ExpressVPN, it's like you're driving a car with no insurance. Why would you take that risk? Every time you connect to an unencrypted network at cafes, at hotels, at airports, any hacker on the same network can gain access to your private data, whether it's your passwords, your financial details, Michael knows a cell phone number, any of it.

Which we'll just give out. Yeah, right? Exactly. Go to, yeah. ExpressVPN acts as an email. an online insurance. It creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet so that hackers can't steal

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ExpressVPN.com slash backstage. That's ExpressVPN.com slash backstage and you can get an extra three months for free. And is my little brother told me at a very young age, free is a very good price. ExpressVPN.com slash backstage. Don't drive without a seatbelt. Don't drive without insurance. Don't use the internet without ExpressVPN. Michael, I used up all my energy. What do you want to talk about? I'm glad that we focused on a little bit of hope because I do feel, you know, as you point out,

this line, my priest father, George Rutler, has this line. He says, difference between a Scottish optimist and a Scottish pessimist. Scottish pessimist rather says things can't get any worse. Scottish optimist says, oh, yes, they can. And we do it all the time. And I think there actually is great cause for hope. One of my fears for 2022 and 2024, I think we could easily retake the House and I think that we could do well in 2024

if the elections are fair. And I know we're not allowed to make any comments, you know, out of the big tech to shut us down. But I'm just pointing out there's always fraud in elections that both sides are always trying to game the system. And Democrats took a huge advantage by pushing widespread mail-in voting in some places in contravention of state constitutions, by pushing ballot harvesting, by pushing motor voter laws. They've been doing this for decades, right? This is nothing really new. And I was really pleased to see that the Republicans on Capitol Hill have shut down the biggest

election power grab that we have seen from Democrats possibly ever, S-1 and H.R. won the Corrupt Politicians Act. But they had to. You should have called it. I'm very down on the Republican Party and our elected officials. You know, during the first two years of the Trump administration, we controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress. Republicans who controlled the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature in Texas for 19 years uninterrupted. And what do we do when we have power? Virtually nothing.

And you can, everyone will always tell you why. Well, there was this mitigating circumstance. You know, we needed one more vote or we needed one more this. We need one more of that. At a certain point, though, you have to just realize, oh, no, they do exactly what they want to do. They don't want to do anything that changes the fundamental argument in the country. So, for example, the most unifying issue among Republicans is the abortion issues, the most important social issue, certainly of the last half century. If our politicians actually act decisively against abortion,

then there's no reason to vote for them anymore. I honestly think they think this way. So of course they stood up and did the right thing where the corrupt Politicians Act is concerned because they personally have something to lose. If they let the Democrats completely remake elections in the country, they might lose their power to tell us they're going to do a bunch of things that they'll never, ever, ever do.

By the way, notice this issue that you're talking about abortion. This is the one issue that basically all the conservatives can agree on. Notice, we've actually made some progress on abortion, We've at least held the line. Notice that that is basically the one issue that conservatives argue from the standpoint of justice. Right? So many other issues we argue from this kind of utilitarian or argument from efficiency. Well, you go work around the edges and you increase efficiency. But abortion is just, no, this is wrong and we're going to stand against it. And I'm noticing, especially those parents showing up to the school boards, they're making arguments. This is wrong, this is right, and we're going to stand for what's right. Because they're humans. They're not politicians. They're not pundits. They're actual. people who want their children to be taught moral things. And you're absolutely right about this. And the other thing that I will say, because what you just said, I could not agree with more, except that I do believe we are asking Republicans to do something that goes against the nature of politicians. We're asking them to have less power. And that means that they're paddling

upstream while the left is riding the rapids right downstream. And I think that is a more difficult job. So here's a great question from a dailywire.com subscriber. At what point did we stop pointing out the left's hypocrisy. They couldn't care less, and the sheep will never acknowledge the hypocrisy anyway. Are we doing the wrong thing to point out that they're hypocrites? I think it's important because there are a group of people in the middle who are under the fundamental assumption that the left is moral and the right is immoral, because that's the line that the left is consistently pushing. So when you point out their hypocrisy, you're basically saying, no, you don't hold any sort of moral high ground, particularly on these principles that you yourself do not hold. But

the general critique, which is that the right needs to stop whining about the left being hypocritical, and instead needs to just fight the left on its own terms. I think that there is certainly some truth to that. I think that that can go too far, and I'm a little afraid of that, because I think that there is a push on the right right now to subvert our own fundamental principles with regard to, for example, liberalism on things like free speech in order to, quote, unquote, fight the left. And that does not mean that there aren't things that we can do.

There are 100% things that we can do. But I think that very often, on the positive side, the critique of hypocrisy suggests that you shouldn't try to shame people who can't be shamed, which I agree with. On the other side, it seems to me that very often people who want to critique the right for pointing out hypocrisy really wants to subvert the fundamental principle, which is that there should be an evenly held standard across both right and left. Instead, what they say is, okay, well, if the left is going to be hypocrites about things, then we should do. We might as well just club them in the face using equally deplorable tactics.

Did you know, that I have some problems? The problem with the hypocrisy argument, though, is it too often accepts the values of the left. Yes, that's for sure. So if the left says, you know, We have strong women, and we say, well, Hillary just married into power, and we are women are stronger. And you think, well, maybe the answer is that strength is not the only virtue. Maybe strength is a male virtue and there are other things. We tell us as Caitlin General a lot, right? Yeah.

Where they would say, they would be using the argument. They're constantly saying, well, you know, when you critique anybody who's transgender, it's because you're transphobic. And then they would critique Caitlin Jenner would be like, well, now who's the transphobe? You're the real transphos. You're the real transphos. Did you see the argument when the Supreme Court cases came out and Amy Coney Barrett voted to not take this case on Obamacare.

Right. The third attempt to overturn ObamaCare and the court didn't want to take it. And there were some conservatives who came out and said, ha, ha, oh, the left is going to be so embarrassed. Because they said that ACB was going to be the vote against Obamacare. Ha, we showed them, take that libs. And I think, well, if we keep owning the libs by upholding Obamacare, you know, we're not going to have any conservative movement left. However, I will say that Senator White House represents many, not many, but several liberals who I know, belongs to an all-white club.

The guy's a thug to begin with. He's been committing thuggery against the Supreme Court trying to intimidate them into giving leftist decisions. And now we find out he belongs to an all-white club. And he says, well, it's a tradition.

Yeah. You know, it is. And my feeling about that is you should have the right, you should definitely have the right to belong to an all-white club or a club that doesn't let Jews in or a club that doesn't let anyone you want. But it means you're a schmuck.

But here's the thing about this. Okay, so this whole story is bizarre to me. The reason this whole story is bizarre to me is because it is illegal to have an all-white club in the United States. Okay, it is patently illegal. It is illegal under the Civil Rights Act. You cannot have a club in the United States that bars black people that is not allowed under the world. So the reason it is an all-white club, it does not have an all-the-well-white club. It does not have-well. The reason it is not having black people? It does not have- Okay, that's a different thing. So this club apparently had rules for admission that they said they've had black members in the past. They don't have black members now. Okay, so what Sheldon White House could have said, were he an honest human being, is our club have standards. Sometimes they're black people who meet those standards.

Sometimes there are black people who don't meet those standards. But the problem is he can't make that defense. Right? Because that defense, this is the point that everybody seems to be missing. He couldn't make that defense because on a principled level he cannot argue for standards based on merit. Because if he makes an argument on standards based on merit, he undercuts. his entire agenda. That's right. So this is how a club that is not officially all-white transformed into a quote-unquote all-white club, even though all-white clubs are illegal in the

United States. So I agree. I don't think all-white clubs should be illegal in the United States, but they are. I think the Civil Rights Act actually has... I agree with you also. I mean, I've been a long-time proponent of freedom of association, which was ended in the private sphere by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And I think that that's a problem, but I want to know who the animals are. I want you to go, like you said, I want you to go to an all-white club, so that I can go, oh, great, there's an angle. I don't want to have to deal with this human. But this is such a club against the right. Do you remember they did this to Rand Paul? And they do it often to people who make arguments for free association, often on libertarian. You just make it

on plain constitutional grounds, but on libertarian grounds. And so you get perfectly amiable libertarian like Rand Paul. And during his first rise to the Senate, do you remember they said, well, Senator Paul, we're going to ignore what you're talking about right now on Obamacare or anything would you have voted for the Civil Rights Act? And, you know, if you say no, or if you say I have certain problems with this, your career is dead politically. And yet, and yet, the arguments that Goldwater made at the time that kept him out of the presidency were quite right.

Yeah, I mean, you can see that there's certainly... Almost everything we're dealing with can really be traced back in some way to the civil rights. I mean, this is the case that Christopher Caldwell makes in the age of entitlement, right? I mean, and he's exactly right about it. I mean, the fact is that you could say in 1964, on balance, It is so important to get rid of state-sponsored discrimination. That is a temporary measure. I will vote to curtail freedom of association.

And in fact, many of the proponents of the civil rights bill suggested that this is going to be temporary. In fact, Hubert Humphrey, right, one of the great proponents of the civil rights bill, suggested that it was never going to go as far as it has been taken in sort of in terms of legal precedent. But if you, but to even point out that there are flaws in the civil rights bill now is to suggest that you are indeed, this is the game the left likes to play right now, is that if you're in favor of a right and the right can be misused, this means you're in favor of the

misuse of the right, which is just the greatest form nonsense to officery ever. So as long as we're in the part of the show that's going to be clipped up by media matters and shipped out to make us all more famous, here's the question. If Juneteenth is a national holiday, why isn't Election Day a national holiday? And wouldn't it allow us to finally say that we have ended voter suppression if it were? Well, Juneteenth is a national holiday, not because of the merits of Juneteenth. I think, People pointed out in Galveston, Texas, they said, we've known about Juneteenth a long time. That's true. It was a local tradition in very small parts of the United States. The reason that Juneteenth is a holiday is because it is being portrayed as a new National Independence Day.

The title of the bill was the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, and it's being promoted by people who are fans of critical race theory, who are fans of the 1619 project. It is a holiday that is being used to push resentment. That's why the emoji on Twitter for Juneteenth was the red, fist, right? What is the symbol of communism, of black nationalism, had some other associations. It's a pretty good trick because, first of all, Trump supported making Juneteenth a national holiday. And it is, you know, it's a good holiday. It's just galling that it should be put forward by the people who haven't let black children go to school for a year and a half. And the people who have essentially destroyed the black family through their... Well, this, I suppose this is the problem is people say, well, in theory, Juneteenth could be a good

holiday. And I say, sure, yeah, I guess if it were a holiday to acknowledge the Emancipation proclamation or the 13th Amendment. But it just simply, in principle. practice is not. That is part of this broader leftist. Well, you actually can't have a, you actually can't have a holiday to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation of the 13th Amendment because that would acknowledge that at some point in the history, white people in America did something

good. As the sole person on the panel who probably would have voted for Juneteenth. I mean, I thought Juneteenth is a fine national holiday. I have no problem with it. I really have no problem at all with Juneteenth. In fact, I like the idea of a national holiday celebrating the greatness of a country that ended slavery through the death of hundreds of thousands

of so of citizens, right? I mean, I think we all agree with that idea. The fact that it was immediate, the left was, they had such buyer's remorse over Juneteen. If you watched the media, they got angry that the Republicans had voted for Juneteens. They were mad about it. They were like, well, yes, but there's so much more to do. And Juneteenth is just a reminder of how much more there is to do. It's like, well, actually, because you won't teach CRT. Right. And it's like, well, no, Juneteenth is a reminder of how amazing America is that we sacrifice several hundred thousand of our own people to end an evil institution. But I will say that to Michael's point, that is what a good.

Good Juneteenth holiday would have been. That's not actually what they have. We had these same arguments over MLK Day. Back in the 80s, we had these same arguments over MLK. They didn't call it the MLK New National Independence Day. Well, okay, so yes, but how many people have actually read the bill? No one is going to call it the new National Independence Day, except for people who are like wild radicals.

Everybody else is just going to say it's Juneteenth, I have the day off. But don't you... In the same way that... And now, what you're going to get is the same battle that the left has been losing over MLK for a while here, right? Where they try to retcon MLK, right? They say, well, this is their new thing. MLK is going to be canceled.

I think that's my prediction. I agree with that because they've decided that the original iteration of Malcolm X was actually correct and that MLK is wrong. But the original arguments over MLK Day war, it's going to promote radicalism, it's all about. And then what did it become? It just became a simple tribute to the basic proposition in the I Have a Dream speech. I mean, that's really what it became. And that's what school children learned. And you know what?

It's a pretty damn good thing that school children learn that since that is now the chief weapon being used against critical race theory. Right. So I think that Juneteenth is going to come out the same way. I think what's going to end up happening, because I think we're going to win these critical race theory fight, which is a revision of what Juneteenth actually is. Juneteenth is a sign of American progress. It is the Frederick Douglass fulfillment of the Independence Day pledge. Frederick Douglass said, independent state doesn't apply to black people. He said before the Civil War, because it didn't apply to black people because they were not independent. They were slaves. And then he said, but I trusted the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States for a promissory note that's going to be cashed. And Juneteenth is the caching of the promissory note. So that's wonderful. Now we can also. So now we actually. So now we actually. have, honestly, I like Juneteenth in the sense that now we can, I think, with fairness, say to the left, we're celebrating Juneteenth because we celebrate July 4th. So why won't you stand for the damned flag now? Why are you kneeling for the flag? You got to pick one. You know, you like Juneteenth or you hate the flag. You cannot do both. I think you're much more optimistic, Ben, than people give you credit for and on this issue. Because the other aspect is, they say, well, we need a holiday to celebrate the conclusion of the Civil War and what that gave us.

We already have that holiday. That's actually one. Memorial Day is. It became more than that, but it was established after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. And I hope you're right, Ben. I mean, I truly, that would be terrific. But I do fear that there is this broad project that Hannah Nicole Jones put out in the 1619 project, not so much to pervert facts, though she obviously did that in the thesis. But as she said, the point of this is to reframe American history, to put slavery at the center of it. And Obama said last year, He said Juneteenth, and maybe he'll lose this fight, but he said Juneteenth is not about a victory. Juneteenth is only about the work that is.

He lost the fight. He lost the fight. When a thing becomes a holiday, nobody except the Jews. Celebrates holidays where you lose. Right? Seriously. Like, this is not a thing. Like, there's no holiday that America celebrates where we celebrate a bad thing about America.

Right. Here's the day when we're going to celebrate all the crappy things about America. So what people are going to take away from June. is this is the day America ended. But what it will end up being for most children in the United States, I predict, and I don't think this is being too optimistic. I think it's pretty realistic. It will be, hey, look, I have a day off. Why do I have a day off? Because this is the day America ended slavery. That's how people think. That's as much deep as they go into politics. And all these people who are like, and it's a reminder of the next hundred years of reconstruction,

people are going to be like, well, then why are we celebrating it? See, this is the problem with the left's constant move. They're constantly engaging in the self-defeating move. And it's kind of funny to watch. They just did it this week with Carl and the Seeb, the linebacker for the Oakland Raiders, or Las Vegas Raiders. He came out as gay. He's a historic moment. He's this NFL player, active NFL player comes out as gay. Now, I thought to myself, well, first of all, there was this big hubbub over Michael Sam. You remember back in 2013, so I'm not sure what the deal was there. But is it historic or is it not historic? Because if it's historic, then you kind of have to say, hey, look how much more tolerance America has become of gay people in the United

States that you have professional NFL players who are being celebrated for being gay in the United States in 2021. Every time the left declares, it's a historic moment. They immediately have to buy it back and go, it's not historic because America, it just sucks even more. This is right. I agree with men on this. I think that there is something galling. Now we really need that ding. Yeah, hold on a second here. No, I think there is something galling about the Democrats using Juneteenth the way they are using it. But there is a kind of time bomb in there that's going to blow up in their face. I mean, they celebrate, they celebrate so often, for instance, the Tuskehigi airmen who were heroes of mine because when I was flying planes, I just loved all the different stories about fighter pilots

because when you fly a plane, you suddenly realize fighter pilots are out of their mind. They're the bravest people who ever lived. And seriously, the only person on Earth, on Earth, and I've met like every famous movie star there is, the only person on Earth who ever overawed me was one of the Tuskegee Airmen came on my show. I think Harry Stewart was his name. Yeah, unbelievable. I was unbelievable.

Like I was reduced to the level of like a stammering, you know, fanboy, basically. Because here was a guy who flew up into the air and fought Nazi pilots, some of the greatest fighter pilots ever, and fought them in a country that wouldn't let him be who he was. He had to fight just to become the pilot. And he believed in that idea so much. He believed in the country so much. And he just said, I said to him, how could you go up and risk your life like that? He said, I kept my eyes on the prize.

I kept my eyes on the prize because he knew the country was going to fulfill it. just like Martin Luther King knew the country and demanded the country fulfill itself. And that blows up in the left's face again and again over time. It's why they, it's why they need Biden so badly. Honestly, is Kamala Harris does not speak this language. She does not speak this language. Joe Biden, because he's an old school Democrat, he is speaking, when he speaks about how he still is kind of patriotic about America, I actually think that that is truer to kind of old Biden. Yeah. And I think that the hypercritical, critical race theory woke Biden that we're seeing right now, it's almost, it's weird to watch him. It's like he's speaking a second language.

speaking it awkwardly. Whereas for Kamala Harris, that is first language, right? Like when she's speaking about how America's great, that is second language to her. And she's speaking about how America sucks. That's kind of first language to her. And it is a generational difference. I mean, Joe Biden was born in the 1940s. So if you're born in the 1940s and you grew up in the United States in the 1950s and 60s, no matter how far left you are, unless you're like full Howard's in, you still have sort of a baseline appreciation for the United States. Whereas if you grew up in the 60s and 70s, then you kind of have the opposite. The first language you speak if you're on the left is how much America sucks.

This is a strange historical circumstance, by the way, that we've just had three boomer presidents. We're all born the same year. We're all born the same year. And then we went back to a pre-boomer president. That does actually worry me. People don't really talk about this too much. It does worry me a little bit about the future of the country. George Bush.

I think that's 110, right? But, you know, I think there's a reason for that. And I think it's because I think that Americans think we can't take care of ourselves. I think we are looking for parental figures. And those parental figures are old because America is an older country now. I mean, and so they're looking to old people to lead us and parent us because finally they're realizing to a certain extent that the old people might know better than they do. If they'd only realize that in the 60s would be a hell of a lot of time. I want to correct myself. I want to look at the numbers. Obama might not be a boomer, right? Obama's Gen X.

We had, it's actually stranger than what you out with. It is. Yeah, yeah. You had Bill Clinton, who I believe is, I believe the year is in 1942. Yeah. Clinton, born in 42, boomer. George W. Bush, born in 1942, boomer. Barack Obama, post-boomer. Yes. Donald Trump, born in 1942, the same age as Bill Clinton and George WBooch, boomer. So we went forward a generation.

We went back to the boomers, and now we've gone back even further to a pre-boomer. So Joe Biden's older than Bill Clinton. We've got to find the last Civil War veteran. The last widow of a Civil War veteran just died. I think that there... Before she could be elected president. But think about that, it makes a certain amount of sense, because we're fighting all the old battles of the 60s still.

Yeah. And we never got past that. And so there's basically an empty generation of politicians between the age of about 68 and 30. Like, there's like this entire empty generation of politicians who were either sort of just kind of emptily following in the footsteps of the boomers. But there was no harsh rejection of that so much. And so it's, it's, there really has been a dearth in American life, right? I mean, it's symptomatic of a culture that has serious decline issues.

Absolutely. So here's the question for the whole group. Besides your own, which book from the other Daily Wirehosts is your favorite? Oh, my goodness. I hate to answer that because I'd have to say speechless because he's selling his book. I kind of like, you know, what's his name's, you know, right side of history? That was pretty good, too. Right, right, that history is good.

Mickey. I have to say, you know, I really, I hate to give a sincere compliment of the gentleman on the stage here, but I really have enjoyed all of your writing. And Jeremy, you haven't published a book, but I have enjoyed your writing as well. I have, no, because even when I vigorously disagree with your outrageous heresy, it's very interesting to engage with, and I learn something. But I think my favorite one, beyond all the theological stuff that I love in Great Good Thing, Beyond All That, I Love, Werewolf Cop. I was going to say Werewolf Cop. It's a great book. I love it. I love the title. The title killed you, and you probably sold a tenth of

the copy is whatever was. There's the title that really killed me. You guys make fun of my titles. That's the title that really killed me. Wherewolf cop is a far better title than the great good thing. No. Or your upcoming the greater, gooder thing. I'm sitting around stewing over this. The truth and beauty is about Christ and poetry. It's about the truth

and beauty. It's a great title. I don't think you understand what a title is. Do you understand the titles are supposed to convey information? Right? Like, this is it like, you know, like what the book's about? Like, if I were to pick up a book called the truth and beauty. It's about Jesus and poetry. It's the truth. Well, how could I not see that?

Because it's not called Jesus in poetry, Drew. If you'd called it Jesus and poetry, I'd be like, oh, this is probably a book about Jesus and poetry. I think that the fundamental problem is that Drew is a old school writer who thinks that a title is part of the art. I am a rich internet entrepreneur. You understand that titles are headlines meant to elicit action from the audience. Ten things you need to know about William Wordsworth. Number eight will shock you by Andrew Playwright. By Andrew Playton.

By Andrew Playton. Thank you. By the way. 100% I would publish that today. Actually, the book that I like is also one of Drew's novels. And as you did with me, the name completely escapes me. But it is the newspaper man who's racing to stop. Oh, true crime. Yeah.

True crime is great. And the characterizations particularly are spectacular. You know which one of the characterations at the beginning of a werewolf cop are fantastic. What Drew writes better than any American writer today is the inner monologue. This is right. This is right. The thoughts of a man, you're, you are the king of the crap. I want, I want Drew to write Dostoevsky, and Drew wants to write Mickey Spillane. And it's like, you should read Identity Man, which is somebody described it as Dostoevsky meets Raymond Chandler. And I think that's, that's probably, okay, but I mean, see, the thing is I wanted

divorce you from Raymond. Like, I also love Raymond Chandler and I also love Mickey Spillane. But the stuff that you do the best is the, is the Dostoevsky stuff, which is why the great good thing is a really good memoir, right? Because it really effectively is that thing. Yeah, it's the inside of your mind. There's too much nice stuff about Drew. I don't know. I know. I was just going to show.

Here's a question for Jeremy. Where's Jasper? Here's the thing. One year ago, I mentioned, I was gazing in the face of my brand new beautiful baby daughter. And one of my thoughts, as I told Ben, was I should commemorate this beautiful moment by buying a watch that I really, really want. And I didn't. Like, I put the well-being of my daughter first, and I've regretted it for 365 days. Like, I really want that watch.

The other thing that I thought, as I gazed into the eyes of my daughter, was, what is my dog going to do? He doesn't like children. My dog famously, his worst quality does not like children. Or Jews. Yeah, it's true. I was talking about his worst quality. But he agrees with the daughter. Actually, Dennis Prager always puts a little Keepa on Jasper's.

Yeah, but Dennis is too big to be a Jew. He was in the dentist. He's like, who is this albino giant? So I was very nervous about how Jasper would react to my daughter. And then we got home from the hospital with this little adopted baby and put her in the crib. And Jasper was whining and didn't know what to make of it. And then he never went to work with me again. He will not leave her side. He's her little shadow. If you put her down for a nap and then you leave the room, he won't leave the room until she's asleep. He'll stay up there until she's firmly asleep.

Then he'll come down and find it's so good. It's the sweetest thing, yeah. It is. A question for the group. Has Matt Walsh been using his vacation time to search for the real Abuela? You're his employers. I mean, I want the insight. What's going on?

Tune in next month for backstage. First of all, if he did, that would be unbelievable. Right? Absolutely. My favorite moment of the entire situation, not exposing AOC's hypocrisy, and apparent lies, actually, about poor little of But it was Matt Walsh's follow-up to it, where he just tweeted out very simply. Yes, it was the best. I'm sorry, abuela, I tried.

For the group from a dailywired.com subscriber, Matt named his fans the sweet baby gang. What do you guys call your fans? I call them recent customers with receipts or speechless, controlling words, controlling minds. That's the proof, baby. That's what I want to see. I call all of my fans Laurel. I've got one fan. True.

Yeah, I just call my fans and ask them for money. I don't know. And I don't really call my fans anything. I mean, so much of America loves me. Frankly, it would be hard to, you know, I think box them in. It's just too great. Just call them America. Exactly.

It's just too great a panoply of humanity. It's a big of you. You know. As I would have expected. So a thought that's been on my mind, and we hit on it a little bit the last time we were together, but I think that it... Why didn't drive on parkways? Yeah, you know.

I think it merits a little consideration. And it's our... We live in a remarkable time wherein we are almost a different species than all of the people who have come before us. In the 20th century, I've said before, after the second war, we in the West essentially defeated war, disease, poverty, and death. We essentially arrived at a place. were the common tragedies that befell 100% of the population now are quite rare. And I think there are a lot of consequences of this, many of them good, but there are negative consequences of this. So one example is, during the pandemic, the great fear that overwhelmed

so many in the West about this disease. Well, the reason that that great fear about a disease that had a fairly low mortality rate could exist is because of how successfully we have defeated disease. If you go back 100 years, everyone died from some disease all the time. Same with war. One of the reasons, so many of our soldiers returned home and have horrible bouts of depression and even suicidality is because their experience in war makes them so utterly unique. There's no one with whom they can relate. Whereas, if you go back a couple hundred years, there was a fighting season in which all fighting-aged men went and fought, and you would fight until it was time to go get the crops out of the ground,

and then all the fighting was over for the year. And so you experienced horrors, terrible things would happen. But you had every other man, every other person in your country with whom you shared that and could relate. So you weren't unique by the tragedy of the Bethelieu. I have a very dear friend who lost her son a little over a year ago. And that event has become very defining in her life. That tragedy has become very defining in her life.

But if you went back in time 100 years, every single parent lost at least a child. Oh, so many. Or multiple children. Every single child who came of age probably had lost their mother and lost siblings. Death was such a constant companion that it didn't make you unique and therefore didn't define you. War didn't make you unique, didn't define you. Disease didn't make you unique, didn't define you. and everyone lived in subsistent poverty, really, until the Industrial Revolution.

For that reason, we almost cannot relate to any humans who have ever gone before us. And because we can't relate to them, we can only assume that they were somehow evil. Like, you can't place your, it's almost impossible to place yourself in a time and in a place and in a reality of circumstance that you've never experienced. And so I was thinking about that. It's funny to say this, but I was thinking about it in relation to the UFO conversation that we had the last time we were together,

that even the fact that we see something mysterious in the air and our first thought is extraterrestrials is because we live in a time and a place where we have so much fiction around us. If you had seen that exact same phenomenon 200 years, ago, it could have landed and ET could have walked off. And you wouldn't have thought extraterrestrial even then. You would have thought demon or you would have thought ghost or you would have, because in the reality in which you lived, you had a completely different framework

with which to understand the world. And so what I want to touch on here for conversation for the group before we close is how do we, how does one overcome all the bias of now? for lack of a better term. The fact that we can only think in the very narrow parameters of our own experience, how can you understand your place in history,

how can you understand your place in the cosmos, how can you understand your relationship with God, how can you understand your relationship with the people on the earth today who don't live

in Western luxury, how can you understand your fellow man if you, if you cannot step out of your experience. Have you, did you see the headline that ran a couple of weeks ago?

It's, I forget which paper. They said, Shocking new study from researchers concludes that the aging process cannot be stopped. And I looked at that. I said, I was scratching my head. What does it? Oh, that all the expert geniuses at all the top schools just discovered death. They just discovered mortality. We've totally lost a sense of that. We've lost a sense. You see this in the religious sphere. We're no longer preparing to die. We just don't see death happen. We talk about forever wars because we've been in a country now for 20 years. 20 years, that's the blink of an eye. The Brits used to judge their wars in not just decades, but centuries, you know, a hundred years war. And even in America, I think, forget just us moderns where we think everything that is older than five minutes ago is somehow crazy and illegitimate.

Even in America, we really only judge history on the scale of 200 years. People that came before us were real. They were people. They were real people. They actually thought about things. The ideas that we're all discovering for the first time have been discussed. for millennia, actually. But I think this goes actually to why the left goes after the education system.

Because if we recognize that people have been grappling with these problems for a very long time, some problems that we consider fixable political problems are just eternal difficulties that we're going to have to grapple with. That would give us a lot more grace for one another and to let us think more seriously about politics. This is the great delusion of technology is that things improve. And you read this, if you read Stephen Pinker's book, he says, things are so much better now. Things are not better now at all except technologically and medicinally. And it's wonderful. Science is a wonderful human advance.

But it hasn't changed the human heart one little bit. Hasn't changed people. Right. And one of the things that is both dangerous and also hopeful is that the generation younger than everybody in this room will accept this stuff without even thinking about it. It'll just be the air they breathe. When Spencer, my son was growing up, he and I played video games together. Till about the age of 12, I was teaching him how to play video games,

but at a certain moment, he understood what it meant to sit with a controller and control the images on screen in a way I never could. He could see a scene and understand it and see the mission that he was given before I could ever understand it, because he just grew up with this thing that was, to me, an actual miracle. And so as these children start to learn this world, that we can't possibly grasp the change that is to be. taken place that you are outlining exactly. The change is so huge that those of us who were

born really even within 20 years ago cannot quite grasp what has happened to us. They will be able to grasp it. And the danger, of course, is that they'll walk into an evolutionary trap that they won't be able to get out of. They will advance beyond femininity. They'll advance beyond childbirth. They'll have their children in little toasters in the kitchen and will not know what they have lost the humanity that they've lost. That's the danger. But the hopeful thing is, is that they'll rediscover what you're talking about, even seeing, because all these machines will simply be part of their lives, they'll start to understand, oh, when still dies, the eternal questions are still there. Freedom versus authoritarianism will still be there, whether we care for the few

or the many. Still, those are always going to be tensions in human life. And once those tensions come back into play, possibly they'll get more realistic, and that's the hope, because they will understand, I'm telling you, the people who are younger than anybody, you know, 19, 18, 17, they will understand this technology in an immediate, instinctive ways that we just never will. So I think that the reality is that we absolutely can understand people of the past, which is why we read documents of the past. It's why we bother to read history. It's why we bother to read the Bible. It's why we see ourselves in David or in Moses or in Jesus or why we see ourselves in characters from fiction from 300 years ago. It's why we watch movies that are rooted in those same exact

archetypes as Jordan Peterson would say. But I think that this is why there's a fundamental war on human nature happening right now is that as we defeated all of these forces that had been so present and ever present and heavy in life, as we defeated war and death and as we defeated poverty and as the world became richer and more connected and informational deficits could be remedied with a piece of technology that you carry around in your pocket. As we did all of that, and as it turned out that the problems of human nature were in some cases exacerbated, made worse. People have become crueler in many ways in Western society than they were even when I was growing up, far crueler online than they are in real life. People have become far more nasties toward one

another. People have become far more tribal, and you're seeing it happening in real time. The answer to that from people who are at war with the basic religious concept, which is that there is a fundamental and universal human nature. People who are at war with that have decided that the problem isn't our failure to recognize human nature and to adapt to human nature. Our real problem is in acknowledging that human nature even exists. So if we can just obliterate human nature utterly and completely, and we can do that with linguistic tricks, we can pretend that human nature is all a social construct as opposed to biologically ingrained. We can pretend, I mean, it is called human nature for a reason. They can pretend that it has nothing to do with reality

and that reality itself is an obstacle to your utter fulfillment. This is why when people ask me to steal man Marxism, for example, what I always say is that Marxism is a terrible economic theory, but it's actually a spiritual theory. It's a spiritual theory that's been around a lot longer than Marx. And that spiritual theory is, if you restructure the systems in which you live, a new man will be generated, a better man will be generated, a new sort of human will be generated. And that new sort of human won't be susceptible to any of the things that actually make war and poverty happen. Right? Because war and poverty don't happen in a vacuum. War and poverty happen because human beings are innately sinful, as every religious person knows. Right.

The, one of the stupidest things I've ever seen said was said by Nelson, Nelson Mandela, quoted online. And it was that the natural state of humanity is prosperity. And poverty is artificial. It is, of course, precisely the opposite. The natural state of humanity is poverty and prosperity is artificial. And it is only because we recognized our own human nature and then built institutions to militate against that human nature that we were able to rise above any of that. And once we rose above that, and it turned out that happiness was not the consequence, it turned out that we still couldn't fill that hole in the heart that God typically fills, then we went to war with human nature itself. And so if we wish to reconnect with history,

if we wish to connect to other people, like even have conversations with other people, we're going to have to understand that the person sitting across the table from me is not racially essentialist or even sexually essentialist. At the bottom line, yes, there are essential characteristics about all of us because we are embodied humans, because as Aristotle would suggest, we are, in fact, soul and body, and we are combined in one. But by the same token, we share that exact thing, and we share all the same flaws. And once we understand that, we're going to be a lot more understanding toward one another.

We can actually have conversations, and then maybe we can talk about actually solving some problems. But white boys can't tell. That's right. Absolutely clear. White man can't jump. That's all the time that we have tonight. Appreciate you hanging out with us, and we look forward to seeing you again here in about a month.

As always, thank you especially to our DailyWire.com subscribers. If you want to get it in on the action, head over to DailyWire.com. Subscribe right now. Use the promo code justice for 20% off of your new membership. And please go pick up, I hate myself for this. Please go pick up a copy of Michael Knowles' new book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds. You'll be glad you did. I'll be glad you did. Not because it's good for Michael, but because it makes it look like we still have some clout out there. We'll see you guys next time. Daily Wire Backstage is produced by Mathis Glover. Executive producer is me, Jeremy Boring. Our technical director is Austin Stevens. Our production manager is Pavel Wadowski. Studio and equipment management is by Patrick Kennedy. And broadcast engineering is by Mark Herman. Editing is by Jim Nicol. Audio is mixed by Mike Coramina. And our audio assistant is

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