The Michael Knowles Show - Daily Wire Backstage: One More for 2024

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's groundbreaking new series, “The Gospels,” takes center stage in the final Daily Wire Backstage of 2024, sparking a meaningful conversation about faith, beliefs, and the resurgence of core values in America. Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Andrew Klavan, and Jeremy Boreing tackle Biden's broken promises, including Hunter’s controversial—yet expected—pardon. They also share an update on longtime friend and colleague Dennis Prager and much more!   - - -    Today’s Sponsor:   Hallow - Join Hallow’s Advent Pray25 Challenge! Get 3 months of Hallow FREE at https://hallow.com/DAILYWIRE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, Michael Knowles here. The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage. One more for 2024 is available now. Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Claven, Matt Walsh, the God King Jeremy Boring, as we discussed Dr. Jordan Peterson's new series, The Gospels, the Hunter Biden pardon, and our thoughts on the Christmas season, also known as Advent. Enjoy. Welcome to Daily Wire backstage. I'm Jeremy Boring, joined by Ben Shapiro, Andrew Claven, Matt Walsh, and Michael Knowles. We're in for a good conversation. a lot's happened since the last time we were with you. Of course, on that occasion, we were celebrating the victory of Donald Trump over that other guy, and that other guy was a woman. I honestly goodness, I honestly goodness, I think he was Biden. It's amazing come back. She just disappeared from all of our collective minds. She started drinking early. She never existed.

But not only that, there's been a lot that's happened in news. Obviously, the fastest appointments for a presidential cabinet, I think, that we've ever seen in the history of the presidency. But before we get to all that, we've released an incredibly important and I think special piece of content at Daily Wire this week from our friend Jordan Peterson called the Gospels. One of the amazing things about having Dr. Peterson on the platform has been being able to host these now two incredible seminars, the first on the Book of Exodus. The second one is on a harmonization of the four gospels where Dr. Peterson assembles, intellectuals, people from diverse backgrounds, people of faith, people not of faith, but all people with great insight and intellect to discuss

these biblical texts. And, you know, one of the things that I read in the news this week is that Bible sales are like at a 40-year high or something in the country. People are very interested in the text of the Bible, and yet church attendance is in decline. And the church in America seems to be following about a century behind the church in Europe into a sort of post-Christian state. The church is failing, but people's interest in these texts does not seem to be failing, and they seem interested in pursuing the text, not through traditional Christian sources, but through thinkers like Jordan Peterson. That's one of the things I want to talk to you guys about having watched some of the show. But first, Dr. Peterson himself wants to beam in here for a minute

and tell you a little bit about the series. So here, Dr. Jordan Peterson. Hello, everyone. It would have been good to join you for backstage tonight, but I'm currently on my We Who Wessel with God tour. Information about that and information on the book that it's based on is available at jordanb peterson.com. In the meantime, I wanted to share an announcement of deep significance regarding my work through the biblical corpus.

Yesterday, marked the premiere of the first two episodes of the new series I did with the Daily Wire, the Gospels. This project constitutes some of the most meaningful work I've undertaken, and I'm very happy to be able to share it with you. The series is an exploration of the most profound and transformative texts in Western civilization, the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These remarkable ancient stories have shaped the moral, philosophical, and cultural foundation of the free world.

live in today. I was joined in this endeavor by some of my closest friends and colleagues. These are people that you'll recognize from the Exodus series. Intellectuals and spiritual leaders who brought along their insights and wisdom for the journey. Together, we unpack these sacred texts to the best of their ability, wrestled with their meaning and attempted to uncover and illustrate their continuing relevance to our modern lives. Episode one is available to everyone, free of charge. I hope you'll watch it and see for yourself the value this series holds. The remaining nine episodes are available exclusively on Daily Wire Plus. I encourage you to become a member and join us as we embark on our voyage through the text.

The stories in the gospels are not mere tales of the past. They're living accounts, narratives that continue to challenge, inspire and guide us. If we engage with them fully and in good faith, they can change how we can change how we we see the world and how we conduct ourselves within it. Thank you all for your continued support of my work and of Daily Wire Plus. Together, we have built something extraordinary, something that stands as a bulwark against the chaos of our time. I look forward very much to hearing your thoughts on the new series, The Gospels.

Thank you and enjoy the rest of your evening. As Dr. Peterson says, episode one of the Gospels, absolutely free to watch. but new episodes will be premiering every Sunday at Dailywireplus.com. I think we're still running our Cyber Monday sale as well. So head over there tonight and you'll still get 50% off. Biggest sell of the year at Daily Wire Plus. Members get to watch not only Dr. Peterson's body of work that he's done with us, including the Gospels and the Exodus series,

but also hit films like Am I Racist from Matt Walsh? In one of these days, something from Andrew Clayton. A fella can dream. So I want to talk about it. for a minute about this series of the Gospels. We usually, in our December episode, talk about things about which Ben knows very little. And so I say, why not make this December backstage

in keeping with our holiday tradition? But actually, you know, your views of the Gospels wouldn't be more heterodox than some of the people. That's actually what's interesting about what Jordan does is he approaches the text with serious and with rigor and with even reverence, but he doesn't approach it in a sort of traditional, from a traditional religious point of view. And people seem to be hungry for that kind of

perspective on this text. What do you think that's about? You know, it's funny, I asked Jordan about this many years ago in an interview and, you know, basically he was teasing him saying, when are you going to plunk? You know, faith is a virtue. And he said then, I think people get a benefit from watching me struggle with this because they're struggling with it. And I really do believe that church attendance doesn't bother me. The fallen church attendance doesn't bother me, but I don't think we know how far we've fallen from simply approaching the Gospels as an authoritative wisdom text. Years ago, I was on this panel for Wedgwood, which does these things about the arts. And they said, if you could have one wish that what the arts would accomplish, what would it be? And I said,

well, at this point, I'd be happy if we could just convince people there's such a thing as truth. And the guy next to me, who was a religious, wrote religious young adult books, started screaming at me on the same, you know, you intellectuals, you know, you don't understand. That's Jesus is the only truth. And I said, hey, you know, I agree with you,

but you don't realize how far we are from understanding that there even is such a thing as the truth that we can find. And so I guess this is important. I think this is important. As you say, this is a heterodox group. I laughed to see my friend Greg Horowitz, who is a very fine thriller writer.

He's a colleague, you know, and we've known each other for a long time. He introduced me to Jordan. He's the guy who got me to interview, Jordan. But, you know, he wouldn't know Jesus if he died to save mankind, you know? And he's a brilliant guy, and I'm always happy to hear his thoughts.

But I think that people need to hear this. They need to hear just the fact that people are coming to a text and getting wisdom out of it instead of imposing their worldview on it is revolutionary. And I think that's important. I think that one of the reasons people like

to hear what Jordan has to say, about something like the Gospels and Scripture generally, is that he's really fascinated by the text. And I think sometimes if you grew up Christian and you went to church every Sunday, you can tend to take the Bible for granted and take the Gospels for granted. And you lose sight of just how...

It's like... The book itself is extraordinary. The fact that we have these writings after 2,000 years is extraordinary. The story behind how these things were written, how they came to us, how they were transcribed by manuscripts, and then pieces of manuscripts were recovered and found over, it's miraculous that we even have the books at all.

And then when you dive into the text, as they do in the gospel series, to discover what each gospel writer is, they're actually trying to do different things with how they tell the story and what parts of the story they tell. And so I think sometimes people gravitate to people like Jordan, because along with the insight, he's just very fascinated. blown away by it. Yeah.

And sometimes if you go to, like I said, you go to church every day or every week and you hear people talk about it, kind of taking it for granted, not approaching it with not just the reverence, but the fascination that I think these books deserve. There also is this problem we have in modernity, which is we clearly took a wrong exit at some point, and you see that all around us. But if you take a wrong exit and you go 500 miles down the road, you don't just get to teleport back, barring some miracle. difficult to teleport back. You have to take another exit. You have to drive all that way back.

And so when you see the problems that have come up in Western philosophy and especially theology and religion and ecclesiology for the past 500 years, 700 years,000 years, whatever, what I love about the way Jordan speaks about this, and a lot of these other guys here, too, by the way, in the Gospels, is they give you a bridge back. So I was an atheist for 10 years. when I returned to religion, I did not jump headfirst into Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine. I read a little C.S. Lewis, a little Chesterton, a little Alistair McIntyre to find out that virtue even exists. And I became convinced that, okay, God in principle could exist. Okay, then I read the Gospels for the first time really seriously. And I thought, okay, Jesus, I think is who he says he is. And then I read some of the early church writings.

I think the church is kind of what she said she is. And that was a process of years and years and years. So if you have this culture now where people aren't going to church, they don't even believe the truth exists, you need to give them a bridge. You need to give them a way to get back to reality. I think Jordan does it very well. Yeah, I mean, I think that that is the relevant point.

That's exactly the language that I would have used is the bridge language. I think that whether we took a wrong exit as a whole civilization or not, I think the one thing that has happened is that there used to be in the way. a cohesive view that your secular life and your religious life were one. To be a religious human being, this is mostly how religious people still live, right, whether you're a religious Christian or a religious Jew, it infuses your whole existence. Everything that you do is infused with that value system. And somewhere along the line that was bifurcated, that was bifurcated into sort of the secular side of you,

and then the religious side of you, and you're religious at church, and you're secular when you're not a church. And as people stopped going to church as much, there was a link that was now missing, this sort of bridge from one to the other that went missing. And when people hear a priest or a pastor or a rabbi talk to them about religion, they feel like they have a vested interest. My goal is to get you back in the pew. My goal is to get you back in the church or the synagogue or whatever. And so they're likely not to trust it because after all, they do have a vested interest.

I mean, it's not like a hidden secret or anything. And meanwhile, no one in the secular world is talking about these values at all. So when Jordan comes at it from an angle where he says, let's talk about the importance of these things. Jordan's angle, so far as I've heard, unless he changed it in the Gospels and in one of the future episodes that haven't yet seen. I don't think he talks about much of the historicity, or about his own personal belief in the absolute sort of historical veracity of what the Gospels are saying, as much as it is about the deep abiding importance of the Gospels. And that's always the first step to why somebody embraces religion. The reason that people embrace religion is because

religion is important, and then they embrace it because they think that it's true. But first, they have to think that it's important. That matters at all. Yes, because there are lots of things in the world that are true, but you don't invest your entire existence in the true thing. You invest your entire existence in the important thing. And very often, those important things that you invest your existence in are things that are very hard to prove. I mean, you know, you invest your entire life in your marriage. How do you prove that you love your wife? Right. I mean, how, what is, how do you even define love? I mean, the few kids doesn't hurt. Right. I mean, for sure. Listen, that's a very

the Judaic perspective is, of course, exactly that. That the way that you define love is all the things that you do for your spouse in the context of a marriage, and it's very action-defined. But the point that I'm making is that that's not a truth like two plus two equals four. That's something that you invest in because it's important to you and it's important to your life. And that's what Jordan is constantly talking about. He'll talk about the importance of these stories. And even as a Jew, all agree that these stories are incredibly important. That's what Dennis says also, right?

That you can look at these stories. You can say Western civilization was founded on these stories. And some people are going to take that even for. I hope Christians do take that further. I hope that people who are, you know, who are Christian or who used to be Christian may have fallen away. They take the importance because I think that most people when they, when they discard religion, they don't discard it because they think that it's false. They discard it because they think that it's not important. It's scarred it because they think that it's inhibiting to that.

It's unspeakable. You know, therapists today, one of the things I really like about this is everybody sitting at the table is very, very bright. Yes. They're very bright. Intellectual people with intellectual lives. Therapists today won't use the word love in public because it's unscientific. And I think that is at the heart of the problem that we face. And a lot of therapists are women, and they won't use it because the men will tell them that it's unscientific, because men think that objectivity is a thing. And so just to have people use the word God, it drives me nuts when people, I was just reading a book about the poets and how they're connecting us to the cosmos. And the guy said, connecting to something that I would call God.

And I was saying this dispenser, and he said, apparently not. Apparently he wouldn't call God. Or he would have just said God. And I think that that just. bringing that language back into intellectual life is huge. It's a hugely important. You know, there's also something very important that Jordan does. He does it at the beginning of the series of episode one, which is he draws the parallel between Exodus, which he says is the most important story of the Old Testament and the Gospels. And this is a very traditional

and orthodox exegesis. The notion that the Exodus is actually the typology of history, all of history is contained in the story of the Exodus and is fulfilled, Christians believe, in the person of Christ. What's so interesting about Jordan reading the Gospels is that the Gospels are not exactly poetry. They're not exactly philosophy. Our Lord is not a philosopher. He is the truth, Christians believe. And so the Gospels are journalism. There are accounts that differ from certain perspectives on, but, you know, they agree. I totally agree with you. And so, you know, this is why C.S. Lewis calls Christianity, the Gospels, the true myth. That for people who are, watching this, who may be agnostic or atheistic even, they will be lured in by just the myth,

by the story, by the metaphor. And the other thing that I think Jordan is very, very good at is part of the atheism of our age comes from people's hubris and scientism. They think that religion is for dumb people. And atheism is for smart people. And Jordan, and everyone on that stage with him, they are smart people. And if this happened to me in my atheism, I was a little punk who who thought he was smarter than he was. And so I returned to, I returned in a different way than other people do. He says he was a little. I was, yeah, now I'm the real thing, I say with my cigar.

At the time, I needed permission to believe that smart people could be religious. I think there's one other, I think there's one other piece of this, which we've kind of around but deserves exploration. And that's that Gen X and the millennials are coming into their own, right? Gen X, in many ways, responsible for Donald Trump winning the election a month ago. Our audience at Daily Wire is not the traditional conservative audience. When you tell people you work for the Daily Wire, they go, your audience is, they're all boomers and they're in red states.

That's really not true with the Daily Wire. Our audience is predominantly made up of Gen X and millennials, and it's predominantly urban and predominantly coastal. And so that group of people, which it shocks people when you say it because they think those people don't exist. This election proved that they exist, and the existence of the Daily Wire for the last decade had already proven that they exist. Gen X is defined by a belief that the greatest crime you can commit is to sell out.

The millennials are defined by a belief that the highest virtue is authenticity. You can see then that both of those groups of people will despise partisans. That's one thing that distinguishes, Gen X and millennial conservatives, for example, from baby boomer conservatives. Baby boomer conservatives are far more likely to find appeal to partisan thinkers, partisan hosts, which Gen X and millennials don't. Gen X and millennials want to listen to shows like yours, which feel more personal, they feel more perhaps honest because you'll, you will say what you believe, even if it goes against sort of the party line. That's why you're far more likely to find conservatives disagreeing with Republican talking points on the internet than you

are on cable news because you're speaking to a completely different group of people with a different set of values. Part of what, as a Gen Xer, part of what I believe is that ideology is important so far as it goes, and doctrine is important so far as it goes. But they can also both be used to obscure things that are true. Right. Yeah. And so what I love about watching the Exodus series, I thought the Exodus series was the best thing we'd ever put out as a company. And I think, you know, I've seen the first episode of the Gospels and I'm already in love with it. What I love about Jordan's approach and the other panelists is that they're not approaching the text as doctrinairs. They're not approaching the text as partisans.

It's good that they are outsiders. They're not just telling you talking points about the text that they learned in Sunday. It kind of goes to your point a minute ago, Matt. They're not just telling you the things that they learned in Sunday school that are sort of wrote and that we take, perhaps. take for granted or that sound familiar to the point that they don't sound like anything at all. Jordan says the name of his book, which is number one on the New York Times bestseller list right now, is we who wrestle with God, obviously are allusion to Jacob. To Jacob. They wrestle with the text. They're approaching the text as people who are earnest about it, inspired by it,

but haven't grown up in a tradition with, you know, some of them have, but most of them have not, have not grown up in a tradition. And so you hear ideas that perhaps contain truth that you might not get to through simple doctrine. In the same way that in politics, there are things that are true that we don't get to just through ideology. And I think that that's important to this new audience, to whom we speak, to whom Jordan speaks. Because you have to build the intellectual scaffolding that will permit you to pursue truth even further. You don't want to just have it downloaded to your head. And so once you build that scaffolding, especially with religion, It's not enough just to know the true things.

When it comes to virtue, it's not enough to know virtuous things. You actually have to do it and put it into your body. And that means if you want to be holy, you have to pray, which is why I'm so happy to tell you about Hallow. As Christmas approaches, there is a season that people don't talk about anymore. But it's a beautiful season known as Advent. We need to make America great again, make America healthy again, and make Advent solemn again.

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collections, while actor Kevin James explores the spiritual classic Divine Intimacy. The experience is enriched with beautiful Advent music. Yes, there is Advent music, believe it or not. It's not all just Mariah Carey and jingle bells from award-winning artists, including Gwen Stefani, Lauren Daigle, and Matt Marr. Drew, I believe you use Hallow. I do use it to meditate on scripture, guided meditation through the scripture. I use it. I've started to use it for rosaries, which I've been experimenting with. And it's great. And Liam Neeson is in it, so I'm afraid if I don't use it, he'll kill me. That's a good inducement.

It's more than just daily prayer. It's an invitation to experience God's love, mercy, and healing in a deeper way at a very important time of the liturgical year. Do not wait. Get three months of hallow for free at hallow.com slash daily wire. Make this time of putting God at the center of your life and experience the good that comes from it. Go to hallo.com slash daily wire for three months free. So one of the things that, as we were talking this morning about how to approach conversations about the Gospels, our producer Mathis brought me a sort of series of topics, and one of them really stood out to me.

And it's in a world where doctrine isn't everyone's path to beginning to wrestle with the text of scripture. We're sort of forced to reflect on what you might call cultural Christianity or cultural, you know, the presence of these sort of religious traditions in our culture, but detached from necessarily faith in them. And because there are pretty pronounced distinctions between the theology of the five of us, I actually thought it would be kind of an interesting thing to explore for a minute. This reminds me of the Chesterton line

that we open our minds for the same reason that we open our mouths, namely to close it on something solid, that skepticism has utility only when it leads to conviction. So this is what I love about the gospel series, and really everything that Jordan has done on religion, which is that it gives people an opening, it gives them an entree. And then they need to figure out

what they're going to do with that. And so, you know, it seems to me that if God exists, it's important to know that. That seems like a big question. And if God exists, then we want to know something about him and how we relate to him. Well, this is, to me, this is everything.

If God exists and he wants us to know something about him and how to relate to him, then we might want to come to some conclusions about that. We might want to live that out in our lives. And that will lead us to doctrines. And that will lead us to sacraments, and it will lead us to inform everything in our lives. And you ignore that question at your peril

and to your unhappiness. I read the Bible from the age of, seriously, from the age of 15 on, and read it many, many times before I became a believer in any kind of God whatsoever. And the only time when I finally understood the Bible was when I started to believe there was a God, and it came to me that I should be baptized,

and I was shocked. I was shocked that this is the voice that was in my head, you should be about it. And so I thought, I'm just going to go back and read it as if it were true. I read it as if it were history. And I've come to a lot of radical and eccentric conclusions about that

because I think that if a man landed from outer space in the year zero and people wrote that down, certain things would happen. There wouldn't be this magical thing where every single word could be detached from every other word and phrases pulled out.

It would just be a report and there would be discrepancies between two people's reports, but they would all have truth if you gathered them together rightly. And to me, this is the reason to believe in God, and for me it's the reason to believe in Christ, because it all happened. It's all real. And otherwise, you lose me.

If you're just going for the meaning, if you're just going to the fact that it's foundational, I think what you said about it's being journalism, that's the thing that sings for me. When I pick up the Bible, I am reading journalism. And that means that sometimes I'll hear a guy say something and think, that's not what I would have thought if I had seen what you saw.

But that's okay. I wasn't there. Yeah, I wasn't there. And still, and this thing that you were talking about, about going to this literature for wisdom, I can't tell you, as a person who reads a lot of literary criticism, which most people don't read, I can't tell you how radical that is in this time.

Current literary criticism, when I say current for the last 50 years, has been essentially to call writers into the dock for why they haven't lived up to your virtue. So you read Jane Austen to say, see how she was polluted by being part of the imperial British Empire, you know. And that's the kind of Edward Said idea that this is polluted by, you know, imperialism and colonialism and all this stuff. Whereas my attitude towards literature is, no, these people are people of brilliance

who are coming to me through time to speak eternal verities that are captured in their moment. And so I'm taking wisdom from them. I'm not giving my wisdom to them. And that, to me, is what's great about this, and it's also what's good, I think, about going to church and having a tradition of possibly thousands of years of people doing that to relate to. You know, you're going to the past for wisdom, not to scold it, not to impose your superior views on it, but to get the things that are always true and are forever true. I think another reason why maybe the Bible is becoming popular again in our society is that there's the wisdom. There's also, just, maybe one thing we're missing is people live now in a culture where nothing is permanent

and we're just surrounded, you know, we've got this constant stream of content on our phone and everything lasts for two seconds and nothing matters for more than two seconds. And so there's a permanence to the Bible that I think is appealing to people. The fact that it has existed and persisted for more than 2,000 years, something permanent and deep and beautiful, something that feels sacred. I think people are just longing and hungry for that. It's one of the reasons why the Latin Mass is growing at a rate much larger than these kind of more liberal parishes are. You know, Shilabu...

Because of that, the sacredness. And when Shailabuff converted... Yeah, right. Yeah, it's true. There are a lot of federal agents, but that's all going to end when Trump gets into office. When Shailabuff converted to your points, when you were talking about, you know, the vested interest of Prelets trying to sell things. One of the reasons Shai Leboff said he loved the Latin Mass, and he told Bishop Aaron, who's one of the stars of the Gospels, is he said, I didn't feel like they were trying

to sell me anything. That's very attractive to a lot of people. I mean, the biggest factor in all this is something that you mentioned briefly, Michael, which is that we're in a time when people are very hungry. So the thing that they're hungry for is one element, and then the fact that everybody is deeply hungry is the other big element. So I made the mistake recently of going back in watching some Woody Allen films. And there is one, I'm sure Drew probably likes Woody Allen films, but I do. No, I'm not a Woody Allen fan. I like his early writing.

So I think that his best film is a film that he made, I believe it was 91, called Crimes and Mistameters. Yeah, absolutely. And this film, for those who haven't seen it, is no longer available on streaming. You basically have to bootleg it or buy it on DVD or something. And the film is about a character Martin Landau, who is married, and he's having an affair with some woman. and the woman starts bothering him.

She wants to come to tell his wife. She wants him to break up with his wife and all of this kind of stuff. And so he goes to his brother and his brother is kind of an underworld criminal and the question is he going to have his brother kill the girl. And, you know, spoiler alert, he ends up having his brother kill the girl.

And he goes through this whole spiritual crisis afterward in which he thinks about, well, if there's a God, God's going to be very angry with me for having done this. I looked into her eyes. I saw that something isn't there that used to be there. And you think that maybe Woody Allen

for the first time in his life is actually going to go in kind of a religious direction. And instead, he takes this wild left turn near the end where they fast forward about a year. And the end of the film is, Martin Landau is now hanging out with Woody Allen. They haven't met the entire film. And Martin Landau is telling the story of what happened to him.

And Woody Allen says, so what ended up happening? He said, everything was fine. He said, because it turns out that I thought there wasn't a God. And if there wasn't a God, then what does it really matter? What I did? And I thought, you know, that is actually a baldly brave take on what it means for there not to be a God. Good for Woody Allen for actually just saying the quiet part out loud, which is that without God...

It's his answer to crime and punishment. This is the... Right, exactly. I mean, that's crimes and misdemeanors, right? Crime and punishment is the idea that you are going to repent because there's a loving God waiting for you to repent, and you can still be a useful person after having done something truly evil, but evil does exist, and you have to repent of that evil. But he makes a spectacular mistake, because this film in Matchpoint are both his war with

crime and punishment, matchpoint has the wonderful joke that he uses crime and punishment as his murder strategy. That's what he gets the idea for his murder from crime and punishment. It's a great joke. But it ends crimes and misdemeanor with the Jewish philosopher, I think, saying there's no, there's no fairness or goodness in life. Is that one? Yeah, I think it is that one.

He says, no fairness and goodness to life. So we have to bring in creation, creation left out the goodness and the love of them. So we have to bring it as if we weren't part of creation. But I think the point is that he even undercuts his own point is that philosopher kills himself. Yes. Right. So, everything goes wrong in that film. Right, right.

But I think the point is that it's the best explication of nihilism that I think has ever been put on film. And it's that nihilism that we're watching played out in real time throughout the West right now. I mean, I don't think that it's a coincidence that the same civilization that wants to engage with Jordan is the civilization that's determining that it's time to greenlight euthanasia in the UK. Or that has decided that abortion is not just something that should be, you know, it's sad but should be legal and rare. it's actually something you should ought to, that you ought to cheer for. When you're a civilization that is basically sold out your birthright for a mess of pottage, and you've decided that what you're going to, what you're going to do instead is engage in essentially sex consequence free, and that the meaning of life is your hedonistic pursuit of pleasure within it. That opens up this massive gap

for somebody who says, wait a second, that's not what a meaningful life looks like. I mean, this is how Jordan became famous is talking about a meaningful life. Well, it turns out that in the West, the key element of a meaningful life is engagement with this tradition. And so, I think that that's why there's been this hunger for the Bible, because if you, everyone tends to compare themselves to their parents, right? And this is what we all do. And particularly in an unhappy age, you compare yourself to your parents. Well, the reality is that there are a lot of kids today who are not as happy as their parents or certainly as their grandparents. And so they're looking back even beyond. They're looking at their grandparents and saying,

you know, what did they have that I don't have? I have better technology. I have cooler stuff. I have more access to all of the forbidden fruits that my grandparents weren't supposed to engage in. And yet here I am miserable. What were they engaged with that maybe I'm not? Maybe I ought to re-engage with the things that they were telling me when I was a kid. And so I think that you're seeing a lot of that and what's happening. And this is really the important point that Drew you touched on earlier, which is, you just mentioned, Ben, that the euthanasia bill, so-called, a good death. It's the worst kind of death imaginable.

It's suicide. And the UK just voted to kill off vulnerable people, and Canada has done it, and the whole West is going that direction. And Adrian Vermeule at Harvard made a very good point, which is that it is insufficient to argue against assisted suicide on the basis that there's a slippery slope and hard cases, and some people might actually have violations in their will and their consent as they're killed. He said, that's not going to cut it, because if you accept the premise that life is fundamentally one's own and we have full autonomy over it and death is just a matter of our own individual, will and the whole point of life is to just seek hedonistic pleasure. Then you've given away the whole game. You actually have to offer something different. So I love the introduction to say, why do these stories captivate us? Why do they maybe have meaning? Why have they maybe helped us live in civilization for millennia before? You have to keep following that line of thought.

You have to say, why does it seem that they have meaning? Is it possible that they're actually meaningful? Is it possible that there actually is a truth there that is correct? in principle, not just as a matter of utilitarian convenience. What does it even mean for a story to have meaning? It means that somebody's telling it. If a story just appears, if something just appears out of nowhere, it has no meaning by definition. If I tell you a story, you know I'm telling you something.

I'm telling you about some thought that I have, some vision that I have. And I think when you read, when you look at life and you start to see that it is a story, it does have meaning, you realize it's being told. I mean, you realize you're not the subject. You're not the object of life. You're the subject. So here's a challenging thought that I've been wrestling with the last few weeks. And last night I had this opportunity to go to a Presbyterian church here in Nashville. I'm not Presbyterian,

but I love this time of years. Some call it the most wonderful time of the year. Thanks a natural, I think we're. Yeah. And I was looking for, I was looking for things around Middle Tennessee to do sort of in the spirit of the Christmas season. And one of the most beautiful church campuses I've seen anywhere. but certainly in Middle Tennessee is this First Presbyterian Church here in Nashville. Beautiful, beautiful campus. And they were having this K. Lee,

which is a Scottish tree lighting ceremony. I thought, well, that'd be a wonderful thing to go to. I want to go. And took my family, took some friends, our business partner, Caleb, and his family went with us. And it was wonderful. They had the, I won't get the name right, but the pipes and drums of Middle Tennessee,

this bagpipe and snare drum, group who play, you know, they wear tartans and do traditional Scottish music. They had the Highland Dancers of Middle Tennessee who came out and did traditional Scottish Highland dancing. And they played traditional songs, but then also Christmas carols on the bagpipes. It was a wonderful family sort of event. And at one point, Caleb and I were talking about keeping the old ways alive. Because here you're, were many thousands of miles from Scotland and many centuries removed from the time when the Highland dance was a real thing, or the pipe and drums were a real thing, right?

But there are people who maintain those traditions, even in a place like Tennessee, so far away. Obviously, in British military, there are people who still play the bagpipes and do the dance. But you would never find something like this in, it would be very unlikely to find something like this in a Baptist church happening as a form of a Christmas celebration, but here in the Presbyterian Church,

you would experience it. And that led me to a further thought, which is, I'm going to go to some lessons and carols, which is the great Anglican way of approaching Christmas. They have the nine lessons. Yeah, that's lovely. Yeah, and it's one of my very favorite things to do.

I love it so much that I almost flew to Britain just to go to one this year and decided, well, I found some in Middle Tennessee. So I'm going to this. Probably just as good. I'm going to this Episcopal Church next week that has one here in Middle Tennessee, and it's very musical, and there's these wonderful choirs. And then a week later, I'm going to another Presbyterian church that also has one,

a different Presbyterian church. And what I realized is all of these churches are keeping these old traditions alive. Even the idea of the sort of choir and, you know, it's not that churches don't have choirs, but not many churches anymore have choirs. And I thought, well, isn't it interesting that the more liberal than I'm, denominations are more likely to be keeping the old traditions alive. And so the most liturgic, with the exception of Catholicism, in some ways, although not a full exception, but I will grant that with the exception of the trads, with the exception of the trads, the older high church liturgical

churches are the most left-wing, most liberal theologically churches in the country. And yet they are keeping the old traditions alive the most of any of the, and in some ways, isn't that a rebuke of something about, there is something about the conservative. I know all these words, we can argue about the meaning of all of these words, but it's interesting that conservatives are less likely to engage in Highland dance. Yeah, yeah. Well, conservatives, conservatives are less like, but not just Highland dance, because you say, well, it's fruity. They dance on their tippy toes. Okay, I mean, far better men than you engaged in Highland dance and more skirts well doing it. But conservatives are far less likely to keep the old religious traditions like the lessons Carols alive.

What is, you would think, by, you would think in a sort of definitional way that we would, the conservatives would want to conserve those old. No, I'll tell you the difference. I'll tell you the difference. I'm not sure the, I don't know about the premise. I don't know if that's true. No, I can clarify the premise. I think the words you're looking for, which is often synonymous with conservatives, is the fundamentalists. People who are fundamentalists

are the ones who don't want the Highland dance and they don't want... Because they say, no, I want to go back to the original. I'm so conservative. I want to go back to the original. But there is paradoxically something very conservative about accepting that time goes on and... No, but I think... Go ahead and...

Because I think you're going to say something. Well, I just... I'm not sure about the premise. I mean... Because I think one of the defining things... think about liberals as Christians and also just in the culture generally is that they don't value tradition. So they may keep some traditions alive, but they empty them of meaning typically. But the idea that liberals are more likely to maintain a tradition, I just... Yeah, I went to... I think the left this infiltrated some of these churches and were wise enough

to keep the traditions there while they ate the meaning out of them. Right, exactly. They keep the form of it, maybe in some cases. But I think that it's fair to say. Cultural Christianity point from earlier that nobody ever answered. But I think that's kind of the same idea. Cultural Christianity so-called is keeping some of the forms of these

things, putting up the Christmas tree, etc. But emptying of all of its spiritual and also historical meaning. But at least in America, the answer to it seems to be, again, with the exception of the Trad Catholics, that the people who are most likely to say that they are religious conservatives, that people who are the most likely to say that they

believe that the Bible is literally true. And we can argue about what literally true even means. That's not exactly the conversation I'm trying to have here. Those people are the least likely, not only to engage in the Highland dance, but the least likely to engage in liturgy, the least likely to know what Advent is, the least likely to have a choir in their church. And yet they're the most likely to actually believe in the religion of their church. Because part of that is because they're Protestants, though, and they, they, they, they're, they, decided that all the things that the Catholics were doing were bad and got rid of them all. And that's why you're...

I guess some of the Protestants would, and I totally disagree. But they would argue that, well, they're going to reject some of that stuff because it's not traditional enough. And that stuff was invented later. And so they want to go back to the Bible. There's no stare decisis in other words. Right. It's an originalist argument about the Constitution, basically. They're just saying, like, if you go back to the gospel, there's no Highland dads in the gospel, there's no reason we should be doing that. Right. Yeah. And so, you know, I certainly hear that argument. I think there's also a tendency... But there's also no, like, ethus four.

in the first century church either, and it's in every Protestant. Have you listened to the Psalms of David, though? Are you certain? I mean, but I do think there may be a broader point here, which is that, you know, in a culture that, as Matt says, has been infiltrated in so many ways, where we're, you know, these sort of old rituals and old things have been worn around like Hannibal Lecter's face mask, right? Like they've been emptied of meaning and then worn around as, as, but what you've seen,

this is true in politics also, is there's a tendency on the right to say, well, to hell with the whole thing. We're just going to blow up this thing entirely. That's not salvageable anymore. It's not that we're going to seize it back or we're going to re-enter, we're going to kind of re-infuse it with meaning. We just have to blow the whole thing up. And you get the tendency. I mean, you understand it. If you think, for example, that Christmas has been so commercialized that a Christmas tree literally means nothing. It has no bearing on Christmas anymore. You can see somebody saying, okay, well, there's no Christmas tree in our house because, after all, all it means is commercialism at Macy's or something. You can see why somebody would say that, whether you agree with it or

disagree with that. I mean, I went to a very liturgical church in L.A. And my joke was it was the bottom at the hill where I lived. I said if a Muslim place was at the bottom of the hill I'd gone there just to stay at a traffic. But it was deeply liturgical, deeply, you know, good

choir, all the things you're talking about. But I had to leave because the guy would then get up and give these sermons that were absolutely corrupt. You know, they were corrupt religiously, they were corrupt logically, they were corrupt spiritually. And finally, I just thought, you know, I love this liturgy. I love everything that's going on until this guy opens his mouth. And then I just...

But I do want to be clear that I'm not suggesting anything about the first Presbyterian Church of National. I didn't go to one of their sermons. I'm only generally saying that the Presbyterian Church or the Episcopal Church, broadly speaking, tend to be more progressive. They are. But this is why cultural Christianity is a doomed and offensive project. And I appreciate the desire, at least the desire for beauty and tradition might lead one in a good direction. But it's just, just so hopeless and despairing and it will lead you nowhere. It's just so sad because it has to be real. And this gets to your point, Jeremy, on the distinction that I would put as being one between conserving and tradition and fundamentalism, which is fundamentally revolutionary because you're

saying, forget about 2,000 years, I want to go back to my image of what the first century was, is it has to be real. If the religion is real, as I believe it is, if our Lord really is who he says he is, as I believe he is, then that is lived. That's not just written on the pages of a book, that is lived in the lives of men for 2,000 years, more than 2,000 years, going back many, many thousands of years, actually. That's got to be real and lived. If it's just like nice buildings or something, I don't know, Yale and Harvard happens. I'm going to argue with you that I think cultural Christianity is really important, but not as a final goal. Yes. Right, as a stepping stone, right? As a stepping stone it is. Because, again, you do need that bridge. And I think that

the fact that there are people, because, again, these sort of Laplace argument to Napoleon has been the winning argument for the last couple hundred years, even though it's a really crappy argument, right? There's a famous story that Napoleon is talking to Laplace, he's a mathematician, and he says, where's God in your theories? And Laplace says, he's unnecessary. He's unnecessary to the theory. And that's been sort of the scientific take on religion for a very long time. And so the cultural Christian, you know, take Richard Dawkins, who's a fundamentalist atheist, right? He really does not believe in God, thinks the Bible is kind of bad and all the rest of this stuff. When he says, but I'm going to acknowledge the civilization is built on this thing, that is the

first step toward the thing. I agree with you. As an end point, it doesn't do anything. It remains a cut flower in a vase, right? It needs to be reconnected with its roots. But is it actually a step- I was just thinking, I was thinking of the doctorate's, though. I think the answer for a secularist is yes. Again, that goes back to the importance point. Once you say that it's important thing.

In a way, you're saying cultural Christianity might be bad in a nation full of Christians, but cultural Christianity might be good. Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. It's a way station. It's either a way station out or a way station in. Because we're in a fundamentally secular age, I think it's more of a way station in than a way station out.

I think there are very few Christians who are looking at cultural Christianity and going, hey, this is cool. I can just say it's important but not do anything Christianity says. There are a lot of secularists who are looking at cultural Christianity going, hey, I never thought about Christianity as something even important in my life. I mean, frankly, it's an argument that I've used myself with a lot with regard to religion. I say to people that, you know, when people say they believe in God, I don't think that people believe in God the way they think they believe in God.

Meaning it's not, maybe for Michael, you know, he approached it from an intellectual point, of you. I don't think most people, when they say they believe in God, it's because they're going through the ontological argument. It's not an intellectual engagement with God that makes you believe in God. You believe in God because you live in God, because all the fundamental premises in your life are godly premises, and you live in those premises. And the truth is, a bunch of secular people also live in those premises. And when you make clear to them, they live in those premises, then maybe it's worthwhile for them to start investigating the source. But cultural Christian, I agree, it's a waste station in or not. I think it's a good way of putting it. But for us right now,

we're in the waystation out phase, I would argue. So that's why I would say... I'm saying I'm more pessimistic than you, as usual. I think they... That's not going to argument. I don't know that. As usual, may be wrong. We were a Christian nation, and then we were way stationed out to cultural Christians,

and then became secular, and now we're going back this way? Yes. So that's... No, that's not more pessimistic. I have the more... I'm saying it's all the way out. Okay, so you're more pessimistic about the future, and I'm more pessimistic about the status quo,

meaning I think that there are so many people who are outside the religion that you need a way station back in, whereas you're saying there are a lot of religious people are looking for a wastage station. Think how anti-intellectual Richard Dawkins is. And I like Richard Dawkins as a science writer, actually. But he never thinks through anything that he says. And when you say, gee, I want to keep some of this cultural Christianity alive,

as Dawkins now does in his waning years, and don't think the next step that why do I want to do that? You know, Mary Harrington, this brilliant kind of former, were far left-wing feminist to Oxford student. She has conversations with my son Spencer. I do not understand what either of them are saying. They're so far away in this intellectual world.

She had a baby. And she said, I like this baby. I like taking care of this baby. And she had the intellectual integrity to follow that thought into a new way of thinking. And Dawkins never does that. And it drives me crazy about it. It just seems like so much of the cultural Christianity

is a Christmas tree, which is lots of fun. presence. Maybe, but I wonder if maybe you should have more grace for Dawkins, not in the sense that you are wrong to ask him to go all the way. I mean, I think that if you're a Christian, you want people to go all the way. But I think that the point is that the fundamental assertion by him of the importance of even Christianity to his project is going to lead some of his followers to say, hey, wait a second, maybe I should take a look at this thing. When you can see that. That's pretty optimistic. When you have, when you have Jordan having that conversation with him.

And Jordan is encouraging people, okay, well, then maybe you should, maybe, like, because the next logical step that you could say to him, if you're having that conversation is, I totally agree with you that Christianity lies at the heart of our civilization. But the thing that you're celebrating, which is a beautiful building in the middle of Paris, if you're looking at Notre Dame, means nothing if there's not anybody in there worshiping Christ, right? I mean, it's just a big building. And then that's the end of the building. And, you know, a thousand years from now, it'll probably be knocked down. And if it's not, it'll just be empty. But it'll have as much meaning as the pantheon in Rome, right?

I mean, it won't mean anything. Nobody's worshipping at the Roman gods in that building. It's just a really nice building. And so does that have any sort of interior meaning to the civilization? Not really. Yeah, you know, it's funny you bring up Notre Dame because part of what I've been thinking about as I've been wrestling with this question of, you know, the liberal denominations tending to keep certain kinds of tradition alive.

And I'm interested in your idea about fundamentalism versus conservatism. I'll spend time on that in my thinking. But I thought about Notre Dame because they rebuilt the building after the fire. And to everyone's surprise, they seemed to have really honored the building that was instead of trying to reimagine it as a building that could be. And put a pool on top right. Yeah. But even that it did occur to me is only good in a post-Christian Europe. And even – and I mentioned to Mathis that I may bring this up.

And I said, Michael will disagree with me, but I think if he thinks about this for a minute, he may not. disagree with me, which is we romanticize the cathedrals of Europe. I romanticize the cathedrals of Europe. I'm to a point now where, listen, I go to a lovely Baptist church here in Middle Tennessee, filled with wonderful people. I love the pastor. He has a real vision for his fellowship. I don't agree completely with Baptist theology, but it's a very good place for me to have my family right now, and I enjoy the church. but every time I'm there, and it's a beautiful building, every time I'm there, my heart sort of longs to be in the UK.

I want to be at St. Albans, or I want to be at St. Paul's. I want to be in one of these thousand-year-old cathedrals. But I've begun to realize that even my view of those thousand-year-old cathedrals, I'm seeing it through the flattening. You know, when we look at history, we tend to flatten it. And we'll say things like, imagine starting a work that your great grandchild would have to finish. which is what people often say about the cathedrals. And I think, well, first of all, you misunderstand time completely

because they didn't start a work that their great-grandchildren would finish. They started to work that their great, great, great, great, great, great, great-great, great-great-great-great-grandchildren would finish. These buildings were started as wood structures, replaced by stone structures, that then burned down because the roof was thatch, replaced by another stone structure that then fell over because they weren't very good at building stone structures. And then they built a third stone structure, and that one stayed. And then they expanded it. And then they tore the roof down.

By the 1,200s, they could build the, what do you call the arches? The flying buttresses. Yeah. The flying buttresses, yes. And then they spires and then stained glass. And this goes on and on and on until the Victorian era. And then they were just all done. Yeah.

And we now think of them as done, but they were never intended to be done. Yeah. Oh, there's a garada familiar. That's right. Which is still not done. But we'll be. Yeah. But there is this idea that when the guy started it, his great-grandchild would finish it.

Not only did you leave out a bunch of grades, but you misunderstood the premise. He started it thinking it would never be complete. The tragedy is, we look at them now, 100 years or more, past their completion. And the thing that we long for isn't. I actually think... I agree with this time. But here's the funny thing. At every stage, the traditionalists hated what they did.

No, no flying buttresses. It's been a thatched roof for 200. years. We should maintain what was old, but the religion was alive. The truth is, when we look at the beautiful cathedrals at Europe, we're looking at proof that the religion died 120 years ago. I would go further than that. I agree with basically every point you've made. Traditionalism, you know, as an ideology, is pretty recent. And it's a reaction to modernity, and it's a reaction to the cracking up of the faith. Right. But the truth is, if Christianity in Europe hadn't died, those cathedrals would have modernist components to it

because they would have kept building them. Or would modernism happen? Modernism, yeah, is a problem right there. But they would not look like they look. There would be 120 years of modernity. It's just the buildings that modernism and its children produce are so hideous because the faith died.

The modern churches are built, I mean, the fundamental problem is they're built like they're embarrassed to be churches. They don't want anyone to know. know that God's being worshipped. As if we're back in the catacombs and we have to hide, but of course that's not the case at all. And that's the problem with those churches.

But I agree with your face is point about it. But what we're actually longing for, we're not longing for that moment. We're longing for the time before time stopped. There was a great, we're longing for the time when the faith was a lot. We're longing for the time when Bach could sit down and write a song like a minute. You know, a song in the same time it would take you to,

make up a limerick, basically, that was explosively beautiful, like beyond beauty, because that was what was in it. You know, and I think that that's the problem. If that's missing. But America was never a part of that tradition. America has always been, uh, utilitarian, disposable. No, in America, you start a church in a cafeteria at an elementary school that's closed, and then you buy a small church that's been abandoned, and then you build a church, and then 20 years later you build a bigger church. And I'm not even knocking that because at least that's not European. It doesn't result in these beautiful buildings.

But it is still alive. Christianity has still been alive here. And that's how, you know, we don't have family country homes like they do in England either, where your family lives in the same house for a thousand years. We have a disposable approach to this, an innovative approach to it. People also like to be involved in the building. Yeah. Really.

I mean, if you're part of a community, people like being involved in the building. Like we're dedicating to it. Yeah, exactly. Adding on to it. Like adding new rooms, changing the structure. of it, growing the footprints of it. And the minute that it stops growing, it's dying. Then it just becomes a bunch of 70-year-olds who are in a fading church that's beautiful. But it was finished 30 years ago, and there's no young blood in there to actually make it, you know, different. But this is,

I think this is also why I love Christmas music this time of year. I know Michael won't listen to Christmas music for three more weeks. Until 12.01 a.m. on Christmas. No, the Thanksgiving Day parade is over it. But when you, but when I say I love Christmas music. What I mean in particular is I love the Christmas music from the Great American Songbook era. Yeah, yeah. Because that's when... I knew there was something I liked about you. Because that's when America was still alive.

Yes, that's what gives us a beautiful, wistful... No, no, no, I've talked about that before. We've talked about this before. I'm talking about something different. That is Christmas music because that is when America was culturally still alive. Yeah, that's a good point. I listen to Taylor Swift, and I'm not a Taylor Swift hater. I think she's a genuine talent.

national songs. But I listened to her Christmas song today, and then I listen to a Christmas song by Ed Shear and Elton John. I think Ed Shearin's incredibly talented. But the culture is gone. They're very talented people who live after the culture. They don't feel like Christmas songs. And they don't feel like Christmas. Paul McCartney killed Christmas songs. He murdered. We cut to commercial. He tortured them to death. They've died after Paul McCart. This man is not having a wonderful Christmas. Nor a wonderful Adventist.

Wars over. We're going to hear more from our sponsor, Halo, Halo right now. Halo, Halo, oh, my God. Halo's a video game. I told them, never let me read any app, but they just put it right there. We're going to hear from our wonderful sponsor, hello while I eat this cracker, fight with Matt about, well, everything but Paul McCartney in particular. Then we'll be right back.

It can be so easy to get busy and distracted during the holidays. Easy to lose focus. Easy to lose sight of what this season is. what it's really about. For God so loved the world that he gave us his only son. Don't lose sight this advent. Pray every day on hell.

So my premise... We actually were arguing about Paul McCartner. Well, my premise and conclusion is that the things that we long for are actually civilizations that are thriving or civilizations in which the faith was thriving to maybe make it central to what we've been talking about the whole time. And I think it's even true. true for my friends, the Jews, too. Because when you see Orthodox Jews who are wearing,

sorry, whenever anyone uses my friends, the Jews. Yeah, they're just before they kill you, right? Hold on all of them. In fairness, I've only got two. But when you see Jewish people, traditional Jewish people wearing the black hat and the black suit, and you think, oh man, they're the most traditionalist Jewish guys around. And then you go, well, no, they have a 3500-year-old religion and they're wearing a 100-year-old costume. But the, but the, but, but, the, but, they're doing the exact same thing as me wanting to be in a cathedral from the Victorian era, they're going back to the time when Judaism in Poland was thriving. Right. And they're, and they're longing, they're not actually longing for their ancestral religion. They're longing for their religion

being alive in the culture. That's right. They're locking in amber a particular way of life because that's exactly the time when the Enlightenment started. They're doing the same thing, right? The Enlightenment started and they said, okay, well, you know what? What we've got right now? We've got to protect that. Time to bubble it off. And that's what we're going to do. But there are are, you know, obviously thriving wings of Judaism in the Orthodox community that are very different and have evolved in a very different way. Of course. And you can see it. And when you go to Israel, you can see all the different modes of dress and you can see, you know, by actual yamika type, you can identify exactly the ideology of the person who's wearing a yarmac.

You really can't. Like it's an actual thing. Like if they're wearing a ultra-Orthodox Karatea black hat sect, if they're wearing what's called the Kippus Rugal like a woven keepup, which is what I wear, then they would be what's known as Dati Lumi, which is sort of, you know, Zionist, modern, orthodox. I like the one that looks like a piece of matza. It's very whimsical. I call it the Encino reform Jewish. Usually it's not a woman.

Yeah, exactly. But it is interesting how these things felt. But I think that one of the things that's interesting about the Christmas music of the 50s and the 40s is that there's a wistfulness about it because I think even then they can sense that there's something happening in the culture, like the kind of the glimmerings of something not so great happening. And even they're being

nostalgic about like being home, right? They're long for a white Christmas. Part of this is because of the war. Yeah, yeah. So some of that's because of war. But a lot of it is also just because there's something they feel is calling them away from sort of those ancestral roots. And so they're feeling like they're sort of almost on the outside looking in. And I think that's why those things are perennial. I mean, you can listen to that stuff now and it's still. There's no irony. There's no irony. But you say, you want an authentic period. It's so funny. We're such a, whatever. Our society's because we're obsessed with authenticity, but then we're ironic about the actual authentic people.

It turns out people in 30s, 40s, 40s, and 50s were actually pretty unironic. But what you're getting at is that when Jesus said, the thing that comes out of your mouth is important because that's what's in your heart. That's what we're really talking about. If the heart is empty, it doesn't matter what building you build. And if your heart is full of God, you'll build a beautiful building, ultimately. There is a strange thing in that I really, really love cathedrals about it, as much as you do, I think. But you really love cathedrals, too. And I really love them, and I love high liturgy, and I think it's not only beautiful but important, and I think God wants to be worshipped in reverent, serious ways.

And maybe the most thriving parish I've ever been in, the mass takes place in a tiny little room in the parish hall because the church was wrecked by a tornado. And it takes place in this tiny little room, and everyone's packed in, and there's a thousand kids, and they're all sitting on top of each other, and they're crying and screaming, and there's a small little altar up there. And it is as unornamented as a church can be. But it's all real. This is right.

And everyone thinks it's real. The people inside a place of worship make it a place of worship going on. I just came back from Israel, and one of the places that we were in was a place where it's called a Hester Yishuvah. So this is like a place where kids study, like 18, 19 years old. But in this particular place where they study, it's a joint program with the Army. So they study, and they all serve in the Army. So it's not like when you think of Yushiva, you think of kids who are like avoiding the Army in Israel. There's like a whole segment.

And so these people coming on Friday night, and you know they're all going to be in Lebanon, like the next morning. And they're all praying to God. And they're doing, and they're singing these songs. And it's like, this is probably 400 kids. And it's amazing. I mean, the word in Hebrew is Kavana, which means to, it means intent, but it really is, it comes from Tobakas to, like, cling to God. So it's about clinging to God.

When you feel that anywhere you are, that's going to be the mark of the religion. And this place was, I mean, the Shiva itself wasn't anything special to look at. It was basically a cafeteria of learning. But I bet people, I'm thinking of two, one parish I was in a New York, one parish here. it doesn't matter if it's unornamented or, you know, you're in circumstance. But I have noticed people do naturally want then ornamented with themselves, with their, with their art, with their, you know, it just, it comes, don't worry. If you get the essentials correct and the interior life of the people correct, don't, the cathedral will build itself. That's it. That's it. You know, I just have the strange, the strange thought, which I present to you without having thought it through.

But it's, you know, people are always accusing Ben of having dual loyalty, accusing him Jews, but Ben as being a king of the Jews. Lower case K. Yeah, really. It occurs to me that we should all have a dual loyalty to Israel because it is the place that God hallowed with his presence. And it is like still the living presence is there. If you've ever been there, you know it is.

And it's like that even St. Paul says that God is not done with the Jews. God is not done with the Jews. At least we should have dual loyalty to the papal states. Do those still exist? Do those still around? A minute ago. You ruined my brain and thought. But I don't mind.

A minute ago I referred to my friends, the Jews, and said there were only two. One of them has been. And the other is our pal Dennis Prager. And we can't talk about Jordan Peterson's gospel series, which is available at Daily Wire Plus, without talking about our friend Dennis. The last time we, the five of us, sat here was one month ago, the day after the election of Donald Trump to be our 47th president, or 48th, depending on how the next 15th, days

co-for-old, but Dennis was right here with us. And as people at home probably are aware, only a few days later after returning to his home in L.A., Dennis had a terrible

accident and has been in the hospital since that time. Dennis is one of the major voices in this gospel's series. And during his time, shooting it,

I got to have dinner with he and his wife, Sue, and Dennis talked about the making of this. with Jordan and what he thought his role was as sort of an outsider among outsiders. I mean, if no one involved in the, well, not no one, but if many of the panelists here are sort of heterodox in their thinking, Jordan's not Christian at all. I mean, he's one of the most famous Jewish figures probably in the world, certainly in the country. And what Dennis told me is that he thought

certainly he had things to offer about Christianity's role in the world as an outsider. kind of like the writers of the Christmas songs. He had ideas about the connection of the text back to things like Exodus, which he thought were really valuable. But he also thought that part of what he brought to it was levity. He said, you know, you've got these great minds.

And Dennis is no slouch. Dennis is a brilliant guy. But Dennis has this real charm, which is that he's still very connected to the human in a way that sometimes intellectuals are not. And Dennis, as you watch this series, It's so wonderful to see him sort of grab these big thinkers and pull them back to the human. Because obviously, if the church isn't filled with people of faith, then it's a meaningless body.

And if your theology isn't ultimately in service of humans, I mean, it's because God so loved the world that he sent his son, which is what the Gospels is all about. And so here's a clip of Dennis on the first episode of the Gospels, which I think just sort of perfectly captures his contribution to the work. Here's Dennis. The death of Christianity frightens me. It is my nightmare. And I ask people all the time, name me one ideology that has supplanted Christianity that has done good for humanity.

And nobody can come up with an answer. There is a quote attributed to G.K. Chesterton, though it's not verifiable that he actually said it, but it's brilliant. When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything. And as I point out on my radio show,

each day, I'd probably say this once a week. only secular people say men give birth. Not all secular people say that, but only secular people say that. We have entered a post-Christian, or really post-Judeo-Christian, world of the absurd. I see Christianity as a divinely ordained vehicle

to bring the world to the Torah. So I have a very pro-Christian Jewish-based view. It hasn't always been done right, but Christians are human, and human nature is awful, or at least not particularly good, so people can screw up anything.

But when done properly, and I think America and Britain have been particularly good, it was Christians who abolished slavery. It's also Christians who made the Inquisition. I'm well aware I wrote a book on anti-Semitism and I pray that Christians come forth now and speak out against a raging anti-Semitism that I did not think I would see in my lifetime. But nevertheless, this Jew, this Westerner is very frightened of a post-Christian society. That's our friend Dennis Prager in Jordan Peterson's new series, The Gospels at Daily Wire Plus. And for those of you who have been following along with Dennis's ordeal and praying for Dennis,

we thank you for that. Obviously, such a good friend to all of us on the panel and to Ben and I these last many years in particular. And Dennis' situation is quite serious, but there is great hope. And he has shown a lot of progress in the weeks since his accident. And I know that it must be what an amazing thing. that you know, Dennis' worldview, central to his worldview, is the idea that happiness is a moral obligation. And here he is in this very difficult moment. And he's certainly sad. But he isn't depressed. His worldview is being tested, and he's standing up to the test, which is a beautiful

thing, even in a really tragic moment. And I can't help but wonder what it must feel like to be him and know that millions of people are praying for you. Yeah. What a powerful thing to experience. my daughter got very ill when she had her second child, and her life was under threat. My wife was sitting there, and she said she could feel the people outside brain for him. She knew they were, and she felt it'd come into the room. And my wife, this is not particularly a mystic or anything like that,

but she said it was there. And I know Dennis has said this, too, that the people who have spoken to him says he feels it too. Yeah, I said when we heard that Dennis had this accident, I said to Elisa that night, He said, you know, Dennis had this very serious accident, and her reaction was a very human reaction. It was basically my reaction when you came to tell me in my studio, which is, she said, no, no, no, but we were just with him four days ago.

And he was so vivacious, and he said on air, he said, this is the best day of my life, get me a glass of alcohol for the first time in 75 years. And that's a very human reaction because you say, no, no, no, whenever anything bad happens to any of your friends, You say, no, no, no, that can't possibly be true because yesterday it wasn't true. But, you know, ain't that just how it goes? Yes. And Dennis is well aware of that. You know, Dennis is a wise guy. He's not, he's quite clear on these things.

Dennis is a magnus in human being, as we all know. And I think that one of the things that has to be of a special comfort to his family is that so many of the people who are praying for him are people who didn't use to pray. And then started listening to his show and started listening to Dennis. And now are people who actually believe in God. and pray. So many of the people who are now calling out to God on his behalf are people he brought to God in the first place. Yeah. I have heard Dennis talk about many times, you know, being this, the interesting position that he occupies, which is that his sort of mission in life has been to

lead people back to Judaism, lead Jews who have fallen away from Judaism back to Judaism. And yet along the way, he's probably led more Christians back to Christianity than most pastors ever have. because of the thing that is so special about Dennis, which is that he really does remember the human. Dennis would rather talk to you about music than about the ultimate issues. Then one of the most wonderful things about Dennis is that when you are in mixed company with Dennis,

he wants to talk about disposable diapers with the women at the table. He just, whatever the most human thing that could be discussed, that's the thing that fascinates him the most. And for that reason, he's reached a lot of the table. those humans that he cares so much about. And God willing, we'll continue to in the future and certainly does in this gospel series. I think that we're going to take a few questions from our Daily Wire Plus members who make it possible for us to be here. If you're not a member, head over to Daily Wire Plus.

We're offering 50% off our Cyber Monday sale, best sell of the year. And if you are a subscriber, we thank you. And we'll take some questions from you right now. Question number one for the group, speaking of biblical texts, do you believe the New Testament teachings outweigh the teachings of the old Testament. I mean you'll go first, no. Well, that is the correct answer. Outweigh would certainly not be the way to phrase it. The New Testament, if you're Christian, you believe the New Testament is a fulfillment of the Old Testament, but it's not like the two are in competition and one wins out. And in fact, they can't be in competition. Right, they can't be incompetence. That's a Marcy and Heresy, right?

Right. So there aren't things in the Old Testament that are now like negated or abolished or they don't count anymore. Not a jot or tittle. Right. Which is an important point when you get into, you even public policy things, issues like, for example, the death penalty, and some Christians believe that, well, because of what the New Testament says, we can't believe in the Old Testament. Well, in the Old Testament, God commands a death penalty, so we know that it can't be inherently evil act. And the Old Testament has not been outweighed. No, that's it. St. Paul also defends the death penalty explicitly in the abyssal.

It's one book. It's one book. It doesn't make any sense any other way. And the beauty, the beauty of the echoing themes in the New Testament that run through the Old Testament is, could not have been conceived by any mind. Maybe Shakespeare could have come up with something. Maybe he could have come up with something that intricately interwoven. But you can't, pulling him apart, it's like pulling the bones out of a fish. He just can't do it. It is also, not to belabor the point, the New Testament is inexplicable. It is not possible to understand it, except through the language. of the Old Testament. And the Christian believes the Old Testament is inexplicable outside the

lens of the New Testament. So they are, to your point true. It is one cohesive whole. Another interesting thing about that is that even when Christ was walking among men, as recounted in the Gospels, the connection between the Old Testament and the theology of Christ still wasn't obvious, so much so that we're told the resurrected Christ had to open the eyes of the apostles to the intricate connections between the old and the new. And what does the resurrected Christ do on the road to Amas? He opens the scriptures. The book, he opens the scriptures. You know, one of the funniest things you ever said. You probably don't even remember it was in your home church. You once said if you took people back on a tour to

show them Jesus, they would all say, where is he? Is he behind that Jewish guy over there? That sounds like something I might as. Yeah, you did say it. Another question. Another question. question from a Daily Wire Plus member, are we on the brink of a spiritual awakening? What will be said about our current time in 50 or 100 years? Yes, we are. We know this because I have been predicting it for about 15 years. And you're a prophet. Well, you at least lived at the time of the profit. Yes, well, I did live. Somebody, a game we were playing over Thanksgiving was we went around the table and asked what our superpower is. And I said, my superpower is knowing what's going to happen five years too soon.

But no, there's absolutely, I mean, look, we could go down the drink, but I don't think we are. I think this is the moment when this will catch fire in the hearts of men. You know, God's not going to let his church die. And we can reject God. You know, he gives us that absolute option. So it's all contingent on what we do. But I just feel already it's happening. Already, you know, people of real thought, real intellection are finding this.

It's going to be like the New Oxford movement. My prediction has always been that it's going to come down from above. It's not going to be, it'll become a street thing. It's not going to be like old awakenings where people get out of tents. It's going to be in the universities where people go like, ah, wrong. The comparison of the Oxford movement, that's a very apt comparison. Yes. I will say that just on a general level, it does feel weirdly as though God is pulling away a lot of ales in the last 10 years.

Yes, doesn't that? It just feels like, you know, there's my favorite section of the Old Testament, in the Book of Exodus, there's part where Moses, is talking to God, and he says to God, I want to see your face, and God says, you can't see my face and live, but I'll let you see my back, and he puts him in the crevice in the rock, and then God, it says God walks past him, and he sees God's back. And so what does that mean? There are all sorts of commentaries in the Jewish tradition on what exactly that means. My favorite commentary, which I had actually posited and then found that, obviously,

always there's a wiser mind than you said it 500 years ago. But the basic idea is that you can't see God when he's staring you right in the face, when it's happening in your life, when the immediate is happening, because you're too involved. in the immediate. You can only see God through the rear view mirror. You can only see God as he walks away. So you can see God as he's walking through history. But, and that's why when you look back at your life, you can see all these terrible things that happened in your life and how one thing led to another and all that wove the tapestry of your life. And that's true throughout civilizations as well. It feels like God's writing has been incredibly obvious the last 10 years or so. I mean,

the amount of things that are happening right now that are just of almost biblical proportions is, is truly kind of an astonishing thing. I do want to say, though, and this kind of goes back to Jeremy's point about the time frame, building cathedrals happened over, you know, it's your great, great, great, great, great grandchild would finish it. And so I think when we get, anytime we get these questions of, are we in the middle of spiritual awakening? You know, are things changing for the better? My answer is always very unsatisfying because my answer is always, well, well, I don't actually know the answer to that. And I think that maybe my kids will know and hopefully my grandchildren will know the answer. because this is, if there is a spiritual awakening, that's a generational.

It's going to happen over the course of generations. And so if the question is, what will they say about the spiritual awakening 50 years from now? Well, hopefully, if it's happening, they're going to be in the middle of it for 50 years from now. And so one thing for sure is if we want there to be a spiritual awakening, we have to be spiritual and religious and have our children and raise them up in the faith. And so we can get the ball rolling that way. But we're not going to live to see sort of the, awakening complete.

I'm glad you said. Not be afraid to talk about it as if it were real. That's the thing. Yeah, but I was going to say something similar, but from a slightly different angle, which is I don't believe in the rapture. Nor do I. Catholics tend to not believe in the rapture, but I don't, I don't much care because if I'm wrong, I'll grab Drew's ankles.

What I know is that someone, God, God, God, comes for someone every day. And spiritual awakenings, I think you have to approach it the same. I don't know on a sort of global level or societal level what's happening. Maybe it is. I hope so. I'm hopeful. But today is someone's spiritual awakening. And may it be yours. Like you can interact with God right now today. If you have not interacted with God before, I remember all the way back in the long time ago days when I was a fan of of Andrew Claiband because I didn't know it. Yeah, yeah, we'll do it.

The two things that you're here. That happens in many such cases. And Drew put out a video, a whimsical but serious video about how if you were wrestling with God, the thing that you should try doing is praying. And he essentially said, you should pray for 10 minutes a day. And he said, it doesn't matter if you believe in God or not. Just assume you believe in God for a minute and talk to him. It's been 10 minutes every day praying.

He said, and I can't remember. It was kind of a sales pitch was a very funny video. And I guarantee you, in 60 days, money back guarantee or whatever, that you'll find that you do believe in God if you start. His lines were open. Yeah, his lines are always open.

And I see it that way. It's like the rapture is coming for somebody today, and spiritual awakening can also, it's sort of the other side of that, can also come for you today. And to your point, there is no global spiritual awakening without a whole series of individual spiritual awakenings.

So to whatever degree we play a part in that, now's a good time to do it. For Drew, I don't know why for Drew. Do you see the Gospels as four different news outlets or authors covering the same story or biography? And as much as each reporter interviews different witnesses and has a slightly different take on the same news story. If you were a cop and you interviewed four people and they all told you the exact same thing about what they saw, you would know that they had conspired and lied. So I think what you have is four different people. people from four different points of view, and it's meant to be this way, obviously, it wasn't an accident, giving you their take on the story. So it's why I never worry, for instance, if somebody

says, well, this doesn't fit in with that, that if it did all fit in, if it all just absolutely fit in, I would think, no, this is a conspiracy. But these are people who each saw the same thing in a different way. And I think that that, to me, is part of the evidence of its truth. Man, I'm glad they made that one for you. Well, I know it wasn't for me, but I do want to add one thing. that I think this, and you said earlier, that it's kind of like journalism reading the Gospels. I think that's true of the synoptics, Matthew Mark and Luke, I think John's doing something different. And I think that John's actually not journalism. It's, it's, it's something, it's more of a spiritual

biography of Christ. That's who he is. Yeah. Right, right. So. There's another question in the teleprompter only seconds ago, and it was for Matt. It was really good. But I think it's gone. Matt and the thing's gone. Yeah. Ah, here it is. Matt, I just wanted to say thank you for speak. Oh, wait. Hold on. Everybody else got a question and he gets praised? This is a great one. I just, oh, man. I just wanted to say thank you for speaking out about the new sexual abuse in schools. I'm interested in looking into doing a documentary about

sexual abuse in the schools. As a documentary king, do you have any suggestions? Just do it. Just start doing it. We're up as an abuser. You're going to schools. Yeah, well, I'd stop short. I guess for that, I'd stop short of some of our, am I racist methods. But I certainly hope that somebody makes that documentary, because this is a major crisis, an epidemic. Like, nobody talks about, and it's crazy.

What, if anything, can actually be done about the Hunter issue? Is there any legal way to overturn a presidential policy? Presidential policies, yes. This is a presidential pardon, which is somewhat unique, and it brings us to the political section of the show. We've been lost in the sublime, and now we have to get down into the ridiculous. The dirty. The ridiculous, yeah. Obviously, the big news story of the weekend, President Biden pardoned his son, Hunter, of any crime that he may or may not have committed.

Or may yet commit. The best thing about that pardoned was that it came down, and it went all the way until midnight last night. night. So there was like a four-hour period where Hunter could have done anything long as the federal crime and out of state-level crimes, he could have done anything. He could have gone and could have crossed interstate lines, the process. He was like, anything that he wanted, just really enjoyed himself for like four hours right there, had been totally clean. It is the most sweeping pardon in modern presidential history because it didn't pardon him just for the offenses that he was convicted for or pled guilty too.

It pardoned him for everything and anything that he, it was like a, it was like a note from the Three Musketeers, the bearer of this note has done what has been done. It began, it began, unshockingly, January 1st, 2014. He joined the Board of Burisma, April of 2014, which is why it was dated this particular way. They didn't make a boo-boo here, I will say. If the goal here was to immunize Joe, which is more than likely, at least part of the goal here, they were afraid that Hunter was going to be flipped, that essentially the new Trump D.O.J. was going to come in, they were going to start looking through Hunter's finances, they were going

to find that were checks to the big guy, and then they were going to try to flip Hunter on Joe. Well, there is one problem. He always could have pled the Fifth Amendment. He can't do that anymore. Once you've pardoned, the Fifth Amendment goes away, legally speaking, because it's a right against self-incrimination. You can't incriminate yourself for a crime that you're not going to be convicted of, and that you can't be convicted of. So theoretically, they could drag him before Congress or before a jury or in a subpoena, and they could say, you can't plead the Fifth. And so you'll just get a bunch of I don't remember, as I'm sure. So the president has very broad pardoning authority for federal crimes.

Other than the Nixon pardon, are there examples of pardons for... Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter pardoned the draft Dodgers, didn't he? Yes, he did. And that was also quite broad. This one, yeah. That is broad, but it is for one particular thing. Yeah, it's for a ton of people, but for one particular thing.

I'm not sure I know about a pardon this, like for any all unspecified crimes during this gigantic... That may or may not have been committed for a... It's actually hilarious in so many ways. It's hilarious. He has committed to searching the rest of his life for the big guy. That's what I think. It's also hilarious to watch as the entire narrative that they'd constructed.

Joe Biden is the president of norms and he's normality and Donald Trump is a threat to the system. This is what I kind of like about it. It's a completely exploded. I don't, I had a very unpopular take on this that I disagreed on X with our esteemed colleague, Mr. Walshier. But really it began with, I was shocked that people were shocked. Were there seriously people who believed that this would not happen? No, I got this wonderful, wonderful email from a conservative friend in Hollywood, so he's obviously undercover, who had dinner with a liberal friend.

And before this happened, and he said, obviously, my friend said, obviously Biden's going to, you know, pardon his son. And the guy said, never happened, never happened. So they bet a million, I said, I'll bet you a million dollars. And they shook on it. And now the guy said, well, it was a joke, of course. But I think it's incredibly touching to me that people really did believe that Joe Biden, who is a weather vein, who is one of the most routinely corrupt politicians of our lifetime, was a man of honor who was going to abide by his word. But they did. They did believe it. It's kind of touching. It's crazy to me. I mean, in part, I think. To Ben's point, was he trying to protect himself? Yeah, probably. Does Joe ever do anything as a selfless matter? No. But I don't think Joe is a complete sinning.

Meaning, I think Joe really loves his kid. I think that most people in that position, if their kid were not just 18 years old and you're going to let him sleep a crime off in jail, but, you know, a kid is looking at serious jail time. You're on the brink of death. He's your last living kid. I think most people probably would pardon their kid or at least commute their kid's sentence unless he were actually liable for lots of other crimes that are more serious. I think that if he had commuted Hunter's sentence.

But he'd stolen liable. For the known crimes. The crimes for which he was actually convicted. But he wasn't prosecuted for the serious crimes. He was prosecuted for this. Yeah, but that's the point. That's why. This to me is the interesting question with the,

and it's probably irrelevant because he did do it for his own sake, but just pretending that's not the case for a second. The interesting question is, like, would you do this for your own kid? And my answer is, hell no, I would not do this from the other kids. No, here's what I would do. If my kids were convicted of some tax crime or a gun charge, absolutely. I would pardon everyone ever convicted.

of a tax crime or a gun crime. Or a gunman. Blanky pardon for the drug. But what I would not do is if I had a 54-year-old drug-addled loser of a son, who's been an absolute loser's whole life, I would not give him a blanket, get-out-of-jail-free card for any crime he may have committed up to things like sex trafficking, federal crime, for a period of 10 years. Okay, let me ask you.

Hold on a second. Your number one duty as a parent, and you know this, is to lead your child to virtue. and to heaven, ultimately. This is Plato's argument in Gorgias. Right. So by giving him that get out of jail free card, you have impeded his ability to develop... This is over comes down to the selfishness of Joe Biden, though. The thing that nobody has pointed out about his relationship with Hunter for years is that he enabled this.

He did. I mean, he enabled it. He profited off of it. He knew his son was a drug-addled mess. Everyone knew his son was a drug-edled mess. He knew his son was trafficking with prostitutes and smoking meth. He knew all that stuff, and he sent him to get million-dollar jobs at Burisma so he could bring home the bacon. You know what you don't do with a kid who's in serious drug trouble?

Give him free access to large quantities of untraceable cash. That is a thing that you don't do with a kid who has serious drug problems. So then let me ask this question. You take that kid and you put him in rehab and you dry him out and you chain him up so he can't make bad decisions, at least until the time where he's capable of making good decisions. Instead, he decided he's going to trot him out as a bag man for the Biden family business for full on a decade. That's the point though. And so this is the question for the table and especially for Mr. Walsh year. You say you would not, and I think this is a good point, you would not just give a blanket pardon to your kid if he had all these serious drug problems,

because you'd actually want to help him and dry him out and all the rest. Now, let's say, instead, you were not Mount Walsh, but Joe Biden, and you had profited, allegedly, to the tune of, allegedly, lots and lots of money over many decades, and maybe even sent your kid out to Ben's point to raise all that money. In that instance, if you were a deeply corrupt president who had ordered your kid to do this stuff, would you, pardon? I mean, you're asking that if he's a different human. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just saying, I mean, I get your point, but I refuse to agree with you. But, but yeah, I mean, if it's a guilt thing where he's like, well, this is actually all my fault. He did it for my sake. I'm not going to let him

take the fall. Of course, then the real courageous thing would be, and the real honorable thing would be for Biden to admit all this, which he would never do. But in that case, I guess I could could see an argument. The level of corruption here is truly astonishing, but it's really bad for the country. And I have to say that now when you go back and you look at American history, you have to admit the Clinton presidency broke the country, truly broke the country. I mean, between the corruption and the pardons and Lewinsky and the basic idea that virtue no longer mattered in public life, like that followed by the Iraq war, by the mishandling of COVID, by all this stuff.

Like every institution is broken. And so now what you have is people who are sinning more than the last guy's sinned in the projection that the future guy will send more than they have, right? That's exactly what Joe Biden said here. Well, that is the part of this that's interesting to me is in the past, this pardon would have been unnecessary. And even when Biden was swearing he wouldn't do it, he probably thought it wouldn't be necessary. Because had Kamala won the presidency, there'd be no need for the pardon. And if Donald Trump weren't essentially promising to go back and punish people from the previous administration, it also wouldn't be necessary because generally speaking, we've had a don't

look back, you can never look back approach to presidential politics where, you know, we survive the Carter administration and then we just never talk about it again. But because Donald Trump isn't doing that, he's basically run on the promise that he is going to do something about this, I'm not saying that. And by the way, the only reason he's doing that is because Joe Biden did it to him. Did it to him. Yeah. Right. You remember that Donald Trump ran in 2016, pledging to lock up Hillary, and you know it's the thing he didn't do. He didn't lock up Hillary. But you know who actually tried to lock up the other guy?

Joe Biden tried to lock that guy up. 100%. So things have changed. Yes. To even make this a thing that one would... Somehow our politics have gotten even worse because now the way that it's going to work is legitimately, you are going to have to have to part... Every president's going to have to do this now.

You're going to have to pardon yourself of all blanket crimes on the last day of your term. You're going to have to. Yeah. Because the next guy's going to come in and find some excuse to prosecute the last guy. So my question for what a lawyer... Before you ask you, I have one response to what you say, though. If Joe Biden had come out and said, I'm sorry, I know I promise not to do this, I'm broken, I cannot let my son do time.

I may be wrong, but this is the way it is. He's my son. I love him. I can't do it. He wouldn't have damaged the country. You would have seen it as his personal weakness. We all would have sympathized with it. But that's not what he did.

He lied even in pardoning him. He was targeted. He was targeted with... Well, he was treated by a different standard. A much more lenient standard than anyone else. Did you see it? And then today, Kareen Jean-Pierrez out there, attempting to explain why Joe Biden suggesting that the DOJ was corruptly targeting his son was

different than Donald Trump. Yeah, of course. Of course, he was going. Again, this is the thing that- Joe Biden's lying. There's a point that Nate Silver was making. He was saying that, you know, it's not that the, that people are getting the normality argument wrong.

Things are not normal right now. But the point is that Democrats were not normal either, and they haven't been normal for a super long time. And this was the reason why Donald Trump won the election. It wasn't because people love January signal. like in deeply, it's because they don't believe that the other side is any better. They believe the other side is exactly. It's actually, go ahead.

My only question for the Harvard lawyer, because what do I know? I don't have a law school education. But to your point, Jeremy, does this pardon hold? Is this legit? Yes. Yes. It is. There's no question, no challenge. There are no restrictions on the pardon power in the Constitution itself. It's very difficult to see a situation which the Supreme Court overrules a presidential pardon.

The only interesting thing about it to me is that it's not for any specific crime. Right. Which does create now the precedent of blanket pardons. I'm going to do that. If ever I'm elected, guys get ready. Y'all get blanket pardons for everything. It's like the purge. It's awesome. I was about to say, why would Biden stop here? Why wouldn't he, between now and leaving office, pardon all the most high-ranking members of his administration for example? I want to say if people can start getting prospected parties. I really want prospect of part. He doesn't have to admit that they did. Let's go all the way.

That's the thing about five years of activity. Right. Like, not just like stopping today. Like, like, you can do anything. You can do anything. you want until 2041. Let's go. That's amazing. If he did that, the Democratic Party would cease to exist, I think. Do you think so? Yes, because this is, because of the father-son thing, you know, this has this kind of shroud of sympathy and all this.

But if he pardoned, like Christopher Ray, you know, like, I don't think. Don't you think this, to your point, Drew, wasn't this pardon also a little bit of a shiv to the Democrats who overthrew him? A little bit of a, yeah, I lied. I said I wasn't going to do it, but I'm not going to pay anything. Of course, you might, in the midterms. for my lies, but I don't care about you guys anymore. I mean, certainly now nothing Trump does with the pardon,

vis-a-vis, say, the January 6thers, or maybe even pardoning himself. Yeah. I think if I were Joe Biden and I were going to do the wrong thing, because I think he did the wrong thing, obviously. I may have commuted Hunter's sentence, but the blanket pardons too much. But if you were going to do it,

what I would have said is, I am pardoning my son, Hunter Biden, and I am pardoning Donald Trump for all the allegations related to classified documents, and the federal charges against him. The era of political persecution of your political enemies ends now.

By the way, I thought that Joe Biden I think he would have gotten away with that. I think that he should have done that during the race. I always thought that would have been smart of him during the race would have been to say, listen, he may have committed crimes, Donald Trump, but you know what? We're a bigger country than that, and pardon Trump.

It would piss Trump off something fierce, right? Pardon him for crimes the Trump said he didn't commit. And it also would have been seen by the American public in something magnanimous. But now it's a little bit late. It is a wild story, though. and again, goes to just the complete decrepitude of our politics. It's also the reason why Donald Trump is selecting people like Cash Patel to clean out these institutions.

These institutions are really, really corrupt, and he's appointing people to clean out an enormous amount of dead wood inside these institutions. Now, I may quibble with some of the strategory here, just because he's going to lose an awful lot of steam, trying to ram through some of the more controversial picks, and I think there probably were people, not probably, I know there are people in positions who would have done exactly the same thing, but without a lot of the controversy.

And I think that if it were me and I were trying to do the same thing, again, I like a lot of his picks, but I think that there are some of his picks where you could have gotten 99% of the juice with, you know, zero percent to squeeze. Yeah. And that's going to, that's going to be a problem. There's going to be some resistance to Cash Patel. There'll probably be some resistance to Tulsi Gabbard. You know, again, will the speaker, will the speaker allow him to adjourn Congress so that he can push the group? No, no. You don't think the Senate would push back. You really, you don't think, though, that Mike Johnson would. put pressure from the House? No. I think even some of the supporters like me

would be very unhappy with that. The Senate exists for a reason. It's an advice and consent mechanism. I tend to believe that you should be able to find people who, you know, 50 of your 53 senators can agree on. And that's why most of these people are going to get through, including, I think, some of the more controversial picks.

I think Pete Heggseth is going to get through, for example, at Seck-Def. I think Patel is going to get through, actually. I think Patel will probably get through as well. I think that right now the two most controversial nominees are probably gabbered and... R&K at HHS. You know those children's illustrated books that have like trucks with eyes, you know, like that's who I would promote at this point.

I would vote for like a bulldozer with eyes. Yeah, yeah. Destroy every institution. I think Tulsi gets through. Because you've got to remember with Tulsi, some Republican senators might not like. She's a Democrat. She disagrees with them on certain things. Trump did not hide the ball on Tulsi Gabbard or Bobby Kennedy, for that matter.

He campaigned with them ceaselessly at the end of that campaign. The American people did vote for them. And I think the Republican senators will get that message. The question is going to be the math, right? So if you look at, for example, Tulsi or RFK Jr., you're looking at a drop off of three immediately, probably, right? You're talking Collins, Murkowski and McConnell. So those are the three likely to drop out because McConnell is done after this term. And so he's figuring, who do I want to vote for, who do I know, what do I care? Like, I'm just going to do what I want to do. And so all you have to do at that point is peel off one more. And so when it comes to, you know, RFK Jr., he's going to have to make some commitments. And I think he should make some commitments, by the way, to, for example, in state the Mexico City policy. Yeah. Like his pro-choice bona fidees are going to definitely be on the table in these hearings, and they should be on the table. And that's why I think it's good to have confirmation hearings and just not let the president

rough shot over the recess appointment. So I don't think that the president, I'm against the recess appointment thing. We have a Senate for a reason. I understand the argument that the department heads aren't part of the checks and balances system. And as long as you know, I'm talking about violations of the Constitution, that's probably true. But the Senate decidedly is an independent branch of government and is supposed to hold the

president in check. It is part of the checks and balances. I think that it is a broken system, however, and has been for my entire adult life. You know, by the time 9-11 happened, George W. Bush hadn't seated most of his cabinet. It took two years to seat most of Donald Trump's cabinet in the first administration. The advice and consent was never made. If you had told the founders, a president could get halfway through his term and not have a cabinet, they would have told you absolutely that's not what this means. But I also believe that the advice and consent clause as pertains to executive

department heads, I would let Barack Obama appoint almost anyone he wants if I was in the Senate. That's how it was for most of the history of the country. I despise many of Trump's picks. I wouldn't... I'm against putting left-wing Democrats in a Republican

cabinet. I think it's wrong. But the president absolutely has the right to do that. So I would... Do I think Tulsi Gabbard should be in the cabinet? No. Do I think RFCG Jr. should be in the cabinet? No. But if I were senator, I would vote to confirm them because I think the president has the right. I feel a little bit differently about judicial nominations. I think that... That's different. They have like an actual nonpartisan job they're supposed to do, as opposed to working for the president. You can fire them at any time.

I'm against many of Trump's appointments. I think it's kind of hilarious that as I've been saying for the last eight years, everyone who tries to build an intellectual framework around Trumpism is lying to themselves and others. Michael Anton gets basically booted. The whole Claremont Trumpism is meaningless, not a single member of their sphere is ascending? The NAC cons? Who are the NAC cons ascending? No one. Here's two complete intellectual schools. Maybe. Maybe. Here's whatever J.D. Vance is yet to be seen. But whatever is, and also the vice president doesn't do anything. Here's two intellectual frameworks invented to assure us what Trumpism is all about. They got nothing. They didn't ascend a single person.

There are more Democrats being ascended than NAC cons or Claremont cons in the Trump administration. The only one who I would have voted against, though, as a senator, is Matt Gates. Yeah. Because I think that's what the advice and consent clause is actually about. It's not about, for partisan reasons, do I approve of this person? I don't approve of, I think RFK Jr. is a great, by all accounts, a great guy. I think he has some kind of fun ideas. I'm a Republican.

I don't want Democrats in office, but I would still vote for him because I don't, I think that's proper. Because clearly there was stuff that hasn't been released yet. That's right. That was really bad. Gates is what they're there. drugs either. There's also, I mean, with Gates, the problem is that. That dude practiced a lot for less time than I did. I mean, really, he was a lawyer for like two years. And then they were like, what if we just make you attorney general? It was like, well, I mean, again, that was one where it's

like, I understand what I think Trump was trying to do there, but. Yeah, don't you think that was part of the point? No. No, I didn't think it was a brazen. No, you know that it wasn't the wasn't. Neither do you. Neither do you. Neither do you. You've literally told me off camera that you don't think it was. I think there was. That Trump doesn't do strategy. That's not a thing. I have heard that it was not strategic. However, from whom? A high-ranking source, shall we say? A high-ranking, someone who knows better than you. A high-ranking source told me that it was not strategic. However, again, to your point on building intellectual strategies, and to your point, Drew,

Trump, I don't think, consciously writes out long white papers or anything like that. I think he moves by his gut, and I do think that there was a gut move with someone like Matt Gates. The fact that he is a tugilist and not a long-practice. 100% is the point of nominee. This is why I've been so mad at you and Drew for eight years. Me, yes. Trying to tell me. What did I do?

Henry Olson says that what Donald Trump's really doing, screw you. There is no intellectual framework that you can put around Trumpism. The only thing that's true of Trump, and it's definitely represented in these picks, is that Trumpism is an attitude. Yes. That I can completely agree with. I've never said he had an intellectual... I've agreed with you about the intellectual structures.

The people trying to do what National Review did for Reagan have failed utterly because he's a gut politician. I agree with that. But gut politicians... I mean, you can hate me for other... I'm not been mad at you for eight years about it, but I'll let it again. I was going to say there are plenty of reasons. I'll let it. I guess my only point is

gut politicians have a gut, you know, and the gut has a kind of good argument of itself. Oh, for sure. His gut is doing wonderful things. I mean, honestly, that's great. He wants to disrupt the system. Yeah. And so you think, look, by the way,

I do you want to call out, Jeremy has a proposal that I think we should air right now. I have mentioned this to people in very high places in power, and I think it's a good proposal, and we should get some momentum behind it. So Democrats right now

have decided they once again love the filibuster, right? So they hated the filibuster into the last 30 seconds. And now they love the, filibuster again. So Jeremy has a proposal, and it's a very good proposal that I urgently recommend that the Republicans in the Senate take up. And that is constitutional amendment to enshrine the filibuster in the Constitution of the United States must be done within the next 18 months or Donald Trump nukes it. Because the...

By the way, I would do it with the nine justices on the court, too. Yeah. Fix the Supreme Court at nine justice. We're all against court packing now. Right. So let's put it in the Constitution. And if you don't get it done within the next 18 months, I'm packing the court. Excellent ideas. I'm not just going to wait for you to do it. We can either all agree not to do it. The trust is gone at this point. I totally agree with Jeremy's point on this. It's a great idea, so I think we should publicly air it and get behind.

Well, on that note, I think we can go home. I just got agreed with by Ben Shapiro. Thank you for hanging out with us tonight at Daily Wire Backstage. We still have a little bit of time left on our Cyber Monday deal, 50% off of Daily Wire Plus membership. And you can get Jordan Peterson's great new series. The Gospels will be releasing new episodes every Sunday. I think this is the last time we're all together until Christmas. So I'd like to wish, you know, all of you of Merry Christmas.

Ben. Whatever you guys do. Whatever you guys. Wanzah, you know. Night, everybody.