The Michael Knowles Show - Daily Wire Backstage: Spring Break Special
Episode Date: March 29, 2019With students spending so much money on bribing admissions boards how will they afford the amount of Natty Light they'll need for a week in Panama City Beach? How much magic sand will Beto have to eat... to win the primary? Is Pauly Shore the only proper choice to moderate the Dem's debates? Join this roundtable discussion featuring Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, Daily Wire god-king Jeremy Boreing, and special guest Matt Walsh, as they get to the bottom of these questions and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hey, everybody. This is Michael. You're about to listen to our latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage,
where I joined Ben Shapiro, Andrew Plavin, and the man who will one day fire me for real,
Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring, for a great conversation on politics and culture,
and where we answer questions from Daily Wire subscribers. Without further ado, here is Backstage.
I think we're on.
Welcome to the Daily Wire Backstage, Spring Break Edition, unlike Girls Gone Wild,
Spring break, we have...
I can't even read that.
I got the Girls Gone Wild
in the whole show show.
So far, this is great, dude.
I like Girls Gone Wild, you just start drooling.
Roll opening graphic.
So that's why you always do a test
of reading the teleprone before the show,
which we definitely didn't do.
What if you hosted a show, did?
Yeah, that's what I did.
Yeah, Twitter thinks it'd be a great idea.
Twitter couldn't possibly be.
I am Jeremy Boring, God King,
of the Daily Wire, lowercase G, lowercase K,
with me tonight.
Ben Shapiro.
Andrew Claven.
Elisha Krauss, the only married pregnant mother ever to appear in a spring break edition of anything.
And we have a special guest tonight.
He is perhaps even grumpier than Ben about needing to be, uh, ne'n-na-n-ne-n-ne-ne.
And he does a show from a car.
You guys know this guy?
He works here.
Matt Walsh.
Yeah, Matt Walsh.
He's that well-known Buddhist?
Is that well-known yoghugent?
Yeah, that's right.
We're going to do something really cool tonight, so pay attention.
If you sign up to become a Daily Wire annual subscriber
during the live broadcast of this episode,
you and a guest will be entered into a raffle to win,
get this, a free trip to L.A.,
and an opportunity to sit in on the set and watch us
as we tape the Daily Wire backstage.
You'll get to meet all of us after the show
except for Matt Walsh, because let's be honest,
he doesn't want to meet you.
And also we'll probably never see him again.
In fact, tonight right now we have the winners
who won the raffle last time we did a Daily Wire.
backstage. They're sitting in on our smoke-filled set just off camera. They subscribe during the
live stream last time we were together and won the sweepstakes. And here he is with his wife.
Thank you guys for joining us tonight. Well, and I can never get a job anywhere, so.
So you two could win a chance to look as miserable as they do right now by becoming a
daily wire annual subscriber during tonight's live stream. Subscribers also get to ask
questions during the show. Elisha, let them know how.
You know, I once worked for a really generous boss
who gave my husband and I a pretty hefty check
that helped pay for a lavish honeymoon
on the beaches of Australia.
So when I heard the spring break edition
and the God King said I would get to go to a beach,
I thought it would be better than a green screen.
Anyway.
Elisha, you're not supposed to ruin the joke.
Those are some of our best special effects.
We've ever done.
I don't know, the special effect of Matt Walsh
in a Hawaiian shirt is pretty good.
Maybe you spend everything trying to convince him to get here,
and that's why I'm not actually on a beach in a Wahoo.
He drove here in his studio, all the way from the East Coast.
I'm glad it could make it across countries.
That's a lot for that car.
So yes, you should sign up tonight.
Oh, sorry, the beach is so loud.
Excuse me a moment.
You should sign up to be a daily wire subscriber tonight,
because not only do you get to submit your questions,
you could have the chance to win to sit in on that awful smoke-filled room.
I mean, feel really bad being a married,
mom of three.
Like, they're married and have two kids at home, and this is their idea of a date night.
We should really do better guys.
So go over to dailywire.com.
If you're a subscriber, be sure to type your question into the DailyWire chat box
so you can have it read and answered on the air.
And, I mean, if you thought that March Madness was all about college basketball,
which is something I just learned last year, is the reigning Daily Wire March Madness
bracket champ.
Did you just say that March Madness is about college basketball?
I've been wondering that for three weeks.
I'm more just angry that she won the pool last year, Alicia.
I'm just reminding everyone because I know I'm not going to win again this year.
But March Madness, I think, also stands for politics this week.
Because this week, the greatest news week ever, you can go over to our Facebook poll
and check out and vote, what do you think the best story is of this greatest news week ever?
A, the Mueller Report destroys the Russian hoax, the Russian collusion hoax.
Michael's super-deeper excited about that one.
B, not a single Senate Democrat votes for the Green New Deal.
C, Jesse Smollett gets off scot-free, or D, the economist apologizing for calling Ben an alt-writer.
Well, that sounds great.
Can we go?
I think that the poll tonight is just an outline of tonight's show.
I'm glad that we finally organized this thing.
Basically, what there is to talk about is the greatest news week in the history of that.
I do have to point out that our definition of great conservative newsweeks has radically changed
because it used to be that a great conservative news week was like, you know, appointing a Supreme Court justice or changing the
Berlin Wall.
Right.
Great conservative winning World War II.
Like great conservative news weeks.
Now it's like the president is not a Russian cat's paw.
Take that leftist.
The thing is, eat it.
The reason it's the greatest news week is obvious, I mean, it's not, we're saying, okay, good, the president's not a stooge of Russia.
That's great.
It's the fact that a narrative that the leftist told us.
For over two years, was not just 40% wrong, was not just 60%.
It was 175,000 million percent wrong.
That's Yale math right here.
That's Yale math right here for you.
It was, and it was just the perfect victory.
I think it deserves a bigger drink than we're used to drinking around here.
You should talk about that whiskey, by the way.
Did you see what it is?
Look at the label of it.
If you just...
It says it's the Republicans pounce whiskey.
That's right.
That's what it is.
Because Republicans have counts.
It's a little picture of you.
It's a little Shapiro
riding a tiger and pouncing.
How did they get that picture of you on the tiger?
I mean, it's a live action photo.
And then it says on the bottom,
in case of indictment,
breaks seal,
and pour over email servers.
It does say that right on the bottom.
Pretty fantastic.
So, yeah, the media fail here
is the real story, right?
The media and the Democratic fail here,
because all they had to do
was just say, President Trump, weird.
Right? That's all they had to do for like the last couple of years. Just say, this guy, really? Hmm?
And instead it was, no, he works for Vladimir Putin. No, without a doubt, the evidence is going to come forth. And you have schmucks like Adam Schiff, pretending that he has backroom knowledge.
My favorite, of course, was John Brennan suggesting for two years on national television that he had secret information that said that Donald Trump was in fact working for Vladimir Putin. And then it comes out that's not true. And he says, well, maybe I got a little ahead of the evidence. I just sort of assume. It's like you, you ran the intelligence services. That's right.
Right? You piece of crap. You are the head of the CIA.
What's so beautiful about this, I agree with you that it's a negative victory.
It's not a positive victory. I'm bringing down the president.
However, the destruction of the mainstream media that, as I've been saying for many years,
the thing about the mainstream media is not the way they cover Trump.
I'm happy to have the media go after the president.
He's a powerful man. I want all powerful people to be hunted like dogs.
That's absolutely great American.
He's a French revolutionary.
Yeah, great American journalism.
However, it's what they did with Obama for eight years.
They turned a blind eye during the IRS scandal,
the Fascafussian scandal.
He turned every department.
You know, you talk about Jesse Smollett.
He turned Washington into Chicago.
And what happened, all these guys who did this,
the John Brennan, the James Clapper's,
the James Comey's, they're all his guys.
And it's because they press acted
as a ring of invisibility.
It was like they turned Obama into Gallum.
When Gallum...
The truth is the great line.
They kept telling me about how Obama,
his biggest scandal was a khaki suit.
It was the khaki suit.
The truth.
The first thing ever uttered by an Obama was actually uttered by the first lady, Michelle Obama,
recently unseated from her number one position on the New York Times Wallseller.
Who did that?
I can't know.
It was an all right guy, I think.
It was an all right guy?
And she said, unironically, we're going to bring Southside Chicago values to Washington, D.C.
And all I know about the values of the South Side Chicago is, all I know about the Southside Chicago is that's the baddest part of the South.
It's the only thing I know about it.
The only film clip anybody knows about Chicago
is Al Capone beating someone to death
in the baseball.
So the only thing lower right now
than the media's credibility rating
is Michael Knowles' credit score.
Oh, the credit score.
You know how I know about that?
Lightstream.
Lightstream.
What a segue.
I worked on that segue.
I'll tell you why we don't jest about light stream.
You're talking to a man who,
if left to his own devices,
would spend himself into the ground.
If my wife didn't take care of me,
as you all know,
I would be living in the attention.
He's a captain of him.
I better be a kept man.
I'm a lost.
We do this, all of us.
We take our credit card, we spend it,
and then the bill comes due,
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I mean, that is a genuine credit card interest rate.
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It's L-I-G-H-T-S-T-R-E-A-M dot com slash backstage.
And now I have to read this part.
Ready? I read it really quickly.
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Visit lightstream.com slash backstage or more.
Were you improvising that last part?
I just made the other up.
It's a good ad ad ad, but I can do the last part.
Pass.
That's what he needs.
He's a fast talker.
I can't.
Exactly.
But, you know, so here's the question on a going forward basis.
What should Trump focus on when it comes to the Mueller report?
Should he let it go?
Should he try and ram this down the next Democrats?
What do you think is useful here?
My personal feeling on this is that he should obviously go at the media.
But if he tries to turn this into a cause to love that,
I'm going to uncover the corruption and the FBI and the CIA,
and we're going to go after all the nefarious actors,
it feels good.
But on a political grounds,
I'm not sure that that just doesn't look like petty vindictiveness
as opposed to because remember,
there's another half of this story,
which is that everybody's saying, you know,
the media were humiliated, which is true.
The Democrats were humiliated, which is true.
The truth is also.
that Donald Trump spent two years saying that Robert Mueller was a shill of the left who was going to indict him.
And then Robert Mueller turned out to be honest, right?
Robert Mueller ended up doing his job, which many of us were saying that that was probably going to happen.
So him going after everybody now, it seems like now would be the time where it's magnanimity in victory,
at least to the intelligence community generally.
Yeah, I can agree.
Or just ignore it and move on to the media are garbage.
They've been paid.
And then every time they attack him, he says, you guys were garbage on this, or garbage on that too.
Yeah, you know, I can't quite go with this for a couple of reasons.
One, Carl Rove says he should do this, so we know it's the wrong thing.
I don't know that.
Carl Rove, by his own admission, said his biggest mistake is basically positioning Bush above the fray.
And so the fray took Bush to pieces.
They blamed him for the weather in New Orleans, you know?
Hurricane, oh, that's your fault.
And Bush never struck back because he had too much dignity.
I don't think we have to worry about Trump having too much dignity.
I also don't think magnanimity is actually in his holster.
I don't think he actually has that weapon.
So what I would do, if I were he, I would definitely go after the corruption.
I would definitely make a lot of noise.
Nobody's going to jail over this.
Hillary Clinton's not going to jail.
But I would just make noise about it while doing other things.
One of the things about Trump that I really do appreciate is a lot of the noise he makes
covers up the fact that he's doing some important stuff.
He actually does things that matter to us.
Like he's revamping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which I think, is a huge deal.
And he does that like off to the side while everybody's,
focusing on the noise. That's one possibility. The other possibility is he doesn't even know that.
That is a possibility, too. But here's my problem with him going after the intel. He's not running
against the intel community in 2020. No, that's true. He's running against the Democrats. So run against
Adam Schiff, run against Chuck Schumer, running against all the Democrats who maintained that this was
the, it was always the end for Trump. Running against the media, because everybody hates the media,
as well, they should. But running against, like, who cares that? Like, James Clapper isn't a big
enough person from to punch at, except he, like, say what you want tonight, right? Tonight's his rally in
Michigan. Let him do his thing. Oh, yeah, have a victory
lap. Exactly. But the important thing, though,
that is on his side is that
so many people have been gutted
from the FBI that if the New York Times
ran a front page headline as it did during Watergate,
every time a guy quit, we'd all be sitting around going, this is the
biggest scandal ever, this is gutted the intelligence
community, but they're all gone. And the
people who are there are good, you know, most FBI
agents are great cops and they're doing a great job.
And so he can constantly praise the people who are there now.
He's really talking about Obama. And the
people running are echoes of Obama. You got Eric Holder making these stupid comments about how we should all feel guilty.
America was never great. You got Joe Biden apologizing for American jurisprudence. So it's a reminder of who he's running against and why he's there in the first place.
And so I've got an interesting question to take it in a slightly different direction. Why did this story stick the way that it did?
It occurs to me that you could say because the echo chamber is so vast and they were so dedicated to it.
But I tend to think that most false narratives that stick do so because they have some error of plausibility.
What made this story seem plausible and therefore what allowed it to get the kind of traction?
I mean, I think two factors.
And this is actually a question that I think is pretty well substantiated.
The answer anyway, two factors.
One, everyone thought Hillary would win.
When she didn't win, it had to be something nefarious that meant that she didn't win.
the Democrats still cannot understand that Hillary was the worst candidate in American history,
and then she proceeded to lose to the second worst candidate in American history.
So they can't deal with that.
And so what they've done is they've channeled that into, it must have been stolen somehow.
It's like Stacey Abrams in Georgia.
Right.
We can't deal with this.
The second thing is that Donald Trump with Russia is weird.
He was weird.
The entire campaign, he was weird.
He was saying things like, well, you know, he said to Bill O'Reilly, we kill people too,
just like Putin kills people.
No, we're not better.
And he's saying out loud at his rallies,
that Putin hacks our emails. And so if you put those two dots together, and it seems like for a
lot of the left, that's really what it was, because they were firmly convinced. I mean, really
firmly convinced that this was going to happen. You see that in Rachel Maddow's ratings. They
dropped 500,000 people in one night as soon as this happened, which shows you the kind of wishcasting
that was happening, not to be too self-aggrandizing, but I'm going to point out that when I was
on Bill Maher's show, this was exactly the debate. I said to Bill Maher, you could just be reasonable,
right? You could just say, Mueller's going to find what Mueller is going to find, and I have
fate that he's going to uncover the evidence. And I haven't seen any evidence thus far of actual
collusion. And Mar was like, you really don't believe that there's confusion? I remember that.
You're a smart young man. Right. He comes saying, I just can't believe that you, he said, you don't.
I said, I don't believe that there was collusion because I don't see any evidence of it. He goes,
you don't? Like, he just couldn't, he could not fathom the possibility there wasn't,
because it answers all the questions. It's an answer that answers why Hillary lost, it answers
why Trump is weird. It speaks to the idea that Trump is not. Also, I think there's a real sense of
digging at Trump because they really don't like the idea that Trump deep down is kind of a
patriotic dude. And so it bothers them. When he says, make America great, they want to feel like
they are more patriotic than Donald Trump is. So saying that he is a Russian Manchurian candidate.
This is kind of a leftist version of the Bertha thing, though, because the left is constantly
saying that the Bertha conspiracy was a racist thing. Trump was racist because he said he was from
Kenyan. That was about Obama's difference. Obama was not like other presidents. He wasn't
patriotic like other presidents. He didn't have that sense of American acceptance.
that other president, every other president had had, there was something about him that was
not one of us and it was not the color of his skin. It was the color of his philosophy. And so that
thing it stuck with people, even after we knew it was untrue. Right, it was the same thing people
were saying about how he's secretly a Muslim. It was a feeling. Yes, he was different. Right,
it was a feeling of foreignness. And Trump is the same way. Trump is like a moose cannon.
We're not quite sure of him. And when they say things like that, everybody thinks, well, maybe that might be true.
You know, the other reason why it's stuck, though, which- By the way, the brother thing is
We all agree the bird of things done.
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
By we all, you mean all of us except the president?
It was like the loudest proponent of it for it.
The other reason why it stuck is because it was a totally cooked up contrived narrative
pushed on every single medium.
And I think we're not giving that enough credit.
It actually reminds me of the Michael Jackson documentary, that leaving Neverland thing
on HBO.
How for so long did we, we saw this guy sleeping in beds with children for a long period of time
and we said, no, it couldn't be.
And it's celebrity. You had government celebrities at the DOJ and the FBI telling us this guy was working with Russia.
You had political celebrities, electives, Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, all of these people.
And you had news celebrities wearing ties with nice combed hair and makeup saying night after night for 791 consecutive days and average of three minutes a night that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians.
And it was a total lie, was a total empire of lies to use your phrase.
But that's part of it, and that's not Donald Trump's fault, and it's not the fault of a guy who had a weird tabloid history.
So I want to talk a little bit more about Trump's attitude toward Russia during the election, which I do think is a factor in this.
But you just raised something really interesting that I had not previously considered, which is that before Barack Obama, the government was not an organization that was trusted by the media.
One of the massive changes that happened during the Obama administration is that you could have political selection.
who had sort of cachet.
Has that ever existed before?
I mean, even when Clinton was president,
was it the case that?
I've never seen a news media
defend the intelligence community from doubters.
That was one of the most shocking parts.
This is what I was about to say is that this may be,
in many ways, the most damaging scandal
in modern American history, bigger than the WMD thing.
Because the WMD thing, people said Bush lie,
butch did not lie.
The entire intelligence community everywhere on earth.
And the media, and the media.
And the Democrats. They all believed this stuff.
And it turned out that Saddam Hussein was the one who was lying about his weapons capacity.
And despite the fact that, again, a terrible thing the president has said,
implying the president that Bush lied us into war and all of that,
this one, our institutions, the institutions that we are supposed to trust,
their institutional credibility was leveraged for this narrative.
That's right.
But it wasn't like they just reported what came out.
They leveraged the institution.
And key players in these institutions leveraged the institutions leveraged the institutions,
leverage the institutional credibility in favor of these narratives.
That's why I think that whatever he has to say about Brennan and Clapper and Comey is absolutely warranted
because these are people who were leading our intelligence.
Peter Strzok, these are people leading our intelligence agencies.
And they were going on national television night after night and suggesting they had secret knowledge
because they led these intelligence agencies.
And they knew in a way that you didn't know.
And Adam Schiff doing the same thing.
I'm on the Intelligence Committee.
I know in a way that you don't know.
Yeah, it's McCarthy.
And so when that collapses, how am I supposed to have faith in an intelligence community when people are legitimately using my trust against my trust?
By the same token, this is the same news media that told us, oh, you have to love us because we're the ones who ferret out the flaws of power.
Democracy dies in darkness.
Democracy dies in darkness.
And here they were saying, what do you mean?
You don't trust the CIA?
No, I don't trust the CIA.
I don't trust the NSA.
They were spying on me.
You know, why should I?
The idea of the press after Watergate, the press since Watergate,
suddenly coming out and defending our institutions,
and then the institutions turning out to be, in fact, corrupt.
I mean, this is the thing.
Every time I see Carl Bernstein, I think you have become what you beheld.
It became the thing that you exposed.
You are now Richard Nixon.
And that's an amazing irony, and it's an amazing truth
that's been kind of right beneath the surface for a long time.
I mean, and the media cannot accept what's happened.
No.
I mean, if you're watching, they're writing articles about how they still did a fantastic job,
How we really just went after the news.
That note from Jeff Zucker, where he's suggested.
We're not investigating.
We just report what comes across our desk.
Really, is that what you were doing?
It's like Dr. Strange.
You know, you can't do news in here?
There's a CNN?
You mean the chiron's with the parentheses, editorials?
Yeah.
I mean, what I want is a quiron on CNN that says Trump, Russia collusion proved wrong.
And then in parentheses, and we failed.
Right?
Because that is the reality.
That's exactly what happened.
And, you know, by the way, a news media that's 90%.
Democrat at the editorial level is corrupt per se.
You cannot be, this whole argument that they always say,
well, I can be a Democrat and still be fair.
One person can be a Democrat and still be fair.
A roomful of Democrats can't be fair.
And the idea that they have allowed the news media
to become that, a spokesperson basically,
the spokesman arm for the Democrat part.
When the Lear Center gives the Excellence in Journalism Award
to CNN for the Parkland Town Hall,
the Parkland Town Hall, most egregious single media events
I've seen in 10 years.
And the NWACCP, by the way,
just nominated Jesse Smallette for an image award,
making me wonder, yeah, his image is good.
They should nominate his two Nigerian attackers.
I think they should be in the image.
Those guys who were in Whiteface, then.
So last question on this topic, Michael, for you.
Why?
Why does?
I mean, why are you asking me?
I think his position will be the most interesting on this question.
Why is, why was Donald Trump so up Putin's ass?
for the entirety of the election.
The only thing that Trump was completely consistent about,
never equivocated for even a moment in 2016 during the election,
was that he respects Vladimir Putin,
were just like Putin's Russia.
I mean, you could not get the guy to criticize that.
First of all, he was much less up Putin than Barack Obama was
when he said, I have more flexibility after my election to Medvederey.
No, no, I don't agree with that.
I mean, he was actually offering strategic concessions.
Barack Obama literally colluded with the right.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right.
But the question is, why was Trump speaking nice?
Why was Trump a Putin sycophant during the election?
I'll tell you exactly why.
Because, one, his view of politics is much more realpolitik, for lack of a better term.
His view of politics is not terribly idealistic or inspirational.
It is pretty brutal and it's pretty New York.
He also talks like a New Yorker.
So he tells jokes such as, hey, what do you think?
Do you think the Russians are hacking the emails of Hillary Clinton?
I don't know, but we can't find them, so I sure hope they release him.
So in the final analysis, it can only be that Donald Trump did not believe he was going to be president
and was buttering up Putin so that he could build condos in Moscow.
I don't think it's that.
It's that Donald Trump's view of politics is you flatter strong men, you never criticize strong.
Not that. You'll notice with Donald Trump, he only attacks people who attack him first.
The classic example, this is Rosio Donald.
This is the real answer.
Okay, so all of your intellectualization crap is just intellectuals.
He doesn't have any real politic view of anything.
He doesn't know how to spell real policy.
He thinks that it has a C and a cane.
For a dummy, he did a pretty good job.
He got himself elected, you know, pretty well.
Okay, don't get, don't get that.
Seriously, like, have you seen Congress?
All those people got themselves elected.
They have a collective IQ lower than the IQ of this table.
That's true. That's actually the best answer to that question.
No, the real answer is that Donald Trump loves people who flatter him,
and he hates people who do not.
He has done this with Kim Jong-un, okay?
It's not unique to any of these people.
And everybody knows.
this, which is why even Justin Trudeau tried to flatter him for a little while.
And then as soon as Justin Trudeau hit him, suddenly Donald Trump went from, I love Justin Trudeau
to Justin Trudeau is Satan. He's just handsome Satan.
Hasn't everybody falling for Putin? I mean, didn't Obama? Didn't George W. Bush said, I saw the soul.
The guy is a gangster. Putin is Al Capone running a country. That's who he is.
He's, you know, honestly, I think he... I see his heart. I see his... No, this is, he is the
constant temptation, Putin, because what Putin does is he's like, well, if you
could somehow get me, then the world would be at peace because we'd be allied and you'd be
allied and everything would be great. And everybody is thinking back to the end of the Cold War
and they're thinking, it's so true if we could finally be on the same side. They can't believe
he's as bad as he is. Plus those conducts. That's right. That's the other thing is that nobody
in modern politics understands that Vladimir Putin is not a modern political leader.
That's right. Vladimir Putin is a thug, circa 1946.
And Vladimir Putin, the guy has invaded two separate countries in the last decade. Right? There's
no one else on earth who has invaded a country
in the last decade, at least in the
industrialized world. He's invaded two of them
and he's gotten away with it both times. We invaded
some countries, but not
to annex their territory. Right, that's what I mean.
Yeah, he legitimately tried to annex
both Georgia and Crimea
and accomplished him. Effectively.
He's the real deal. He's a real bad time.
So Bravo Company Manufacturing,
if we were going to invade another
country for the purpose of annexation,
you would want these guys by your side,
right? More importantly, if you want to protect
yourself from.
Let's be better about this.
If we were invaded, you'd want Bravo
Company manufacturing.
Well, you saved that.
Well done.
Yeah, you know, we're all on the same side
when it comes to defending our right to bear arms.
And all the other rights that we have
are defended by that right to bear arms.
We all, in this room, believe in that principle.
I obviously believe in that principle.
Pierce Morgan doesn't believe in that principle.
But you know who does.
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Great American company.
What I love most about so many of our sponsors, Bravo Company,
is a great example of it.
Our friends at Black Rifle Coffee
who were here with us visiting yesterday
is that they just own what they are.
They're unapologetic about what they are,
who they serve, and why.
And you, you know, in today's age,
that's a pretty good thing.
Elisha, we want to hear from some of our Daily Wire subscribers.
They're the reason that we are here today
and able to afford all these fancy cameras.
Do you have anything for us?
Mm-hmm.
I'm going to unapologetically drink this Pinnacolata.
No, I'm kidding.
It's a virgin.
Too bad.
All right, we do have some questions.
I think it's pretty funny when the pregnant lady is seen drinking on camera.
Because, you know, we're a traditional company of family values.
Yeah.
You guys would all probably be the ones, like, in the cigar, like in the waiting room while your wife is in labor with the cigar in the waiting.
That is untrue.
I watched my wife give birth both times.
So did I.
I'm joking.
It's pretty great, by the way.
It's unbelievable.
For me, I mean, I didn't have to do it.
No, but one of the great experience.
It was amazing.
I just want to be there when Knowles' wife eventually.
Well, I got to tell you, I don't know any of my children, but I assume I was smoking a cigar while they were being born.
Statistically.
Statistically speaking.
That's almost a certain thing.
There's going to be a Netflix documentary about Michael Knowles and all of his illegitimate children in like 10 years.
Why didn't we know?
We knew.
He was right in front of us.
He was saying it on the show.
Leaving backstage land.
Oh, Lord of Murphy.
All right.
First question comes from Lance.
He wants to know.
Do you think that Trump has pushed?
conservatives towards a big government mentality.
And why aren't we seeing Democrats turn away from a big government mentality when they say
Trump has too much power?
I do not think that Trump has pushed conservatives toward a bigger government mentality.
I think he has dialed back government in very important ways, especially in the regulatory
way, which is one of the worst.
He's appointed judges who seem more inclined to limit the powers of government to those enumerated
in the Constitution or something like.
The one thing he has done has not done.
done, which is really a problem.
He has not addressed
entitlement and spending.
And entitlements and spending
are basically the same thing.
And he promised the people,
he knows the people are dependent on that.
He knows the people in the Midwest
who lost so many jobs
in the last administration
and the end of the administration
before. He knows they need that stuff.
And so he will not come out and say,
look, these social security
was put in place when people died at 63.
It kicked in at 65.
When you live to 80, you've got to work longer
to make more wealth to live off in your retirement.
It's true for individuals, true for the country,
and that's the only way in which I feel
he's let the government get out of control.
I think that the key here is that the government
was already out of control when Trump got there.
I think everybody starts to think
that the world began to spin when Trump became president.
It's like when people look at the 1996 Australia gun ban,
they say, oh, look how the murder rate went down after that.
And it's like, yeah, look before that,
how the murder rate was going down.
It's a straight line.
It continues in the same direction after the gun ban,
so there's no actual market effect.
The direction of the government
was already getting bigger before Trump got it.
there. Trump got there. He didn't make it any smaller. It continues to grow at record rates
because Republicans are effectively full of crap when it comes to spending. And this has been
true forever. And also, you can't get a consensus on cutting anything because the American
people lie to ourselves all the time. We're always like, we want a small government with fewer
services. And then they're like, okay, how about this one? No, like that one. Bill Maher is
right about this. Bill Maher says Americans like socialism. And my answer to that is they like
opiates too, just because they like it. It's good for you, you know. Well, we like socialism
without the cost. Right. Right. Whenever they pull Medicare for all, it's like, yeah. And then they're like,
we're going to get rid of your private health care plan and your taxes are going to be 60%. And we're like,
oh, wow. Yeah. Actually, we're kind of good. Like, we're okay. We're kind of good. I mean,
the last Republican president to cut spending was Calvin Coolidge. Nobody has done. Reagan didn't do it.
Bush one didn't do it. Bush two didn't do it. So conservatives have embraced their bigger
spending priorities for a very long time. But I actually think, even with the tariffs,
which many Republican presidents have engaged in tariffs,
many conservatives have liked tariffs.
Going back to Abraham Lincoln,
I think he's actually a fairly mainstream conservative guy,
at least in his governance.
Who knows about his ideology?
He also is pretty restrained when it comes to constitutional governance.
He waits for the courts to make decisions.
He's never done, I mean, he's done some of the executive order stuff that Obama did,
but not anywhere near as badly and not in the same kinds of context.
He's actually, for all the screaming about what an authoritarian he is.
No, he hasn't fundamentally broken the institution.
He coded within the lines, yeah.
That's right.
Elisha.
All right, I think I know who this subscriber is.
This question comes from Laurel.
She wants to know, is it realistic to try to become an artist these days?
Or is it a foolish thing to pursue?
Michael, I think we better let you take this.
Hey, Laurel.
Well, I would say, and if you're the Laurel I'm thinking of,
then you're a wonderful artist.
You might have seen on Twitter, one of, one of,
the Daily Wire viewers, Laurel, paints these pictures of us and they're beautiful pictures.
You can be a very good artist.
By the way, if you're not the Laurel that we think you are.
Then, well, that's a coincidence.
That's really, yeah, gosh, who are you?
I think it's important for me to answer this question rather than say, like, Drew, you know,
because Drew's a very, very successful artist who's made a lot of money on his art.
It's an illusion.
And I think I've made about $17 in my artistic life.
I think it's a wonderful thing to do, though.
If you want to be an artist, if you have something.
to say if you have some artistic expression, you should do it. You shouldn't ruin your life
because of it. You shouldn't allow your life to fall apart and sit around waiting for the phone to ring
or some magic to happen. You should be out there. You were always working a zillion jobs while you were
writing your early novels, I think. Yes, no, no, but I mean, my answer to this question is always,
if you can do anything else, do it. Do it. If you're like me and you can't, you literally can't
stop, then you're an artist and you have to find a way to make a living. That's the answer.
But I will say that the romance of poverty does not apply to people actually in poverty.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And there's this whole thing with the starving artist, Popper, and it's like full rap.
The greatest art of its time is usually the art that makes the most money.
When people, when poetry was at its height in England during the romantic period,
Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, all those great poets, you got famous if you got a best-selling poem.
God, I hope that's not true now.
Hardy B is the greatest art of our time.
The other point on these famous artists,
like really the ones we think, T.S. Eliot, Chekhov, Wallace Stevens. I'm talking about poets,
Dana Joya, these guys, all were working jobs and taking care of their families. Good jobs,
insurance salesmen, doctors, all these sort of things. They were doing it. And I so agree.
I have a lot of actor friends who are really good, who are really talented actors. And
they're making $17 a hit doing off-off Broadway theater. And they're living in misery. And they don't
need to live in misery, they could
actually do something productive with her time as well.
They could learn to code.
Now our show is going to get kicked on.
One thing interesting about the Laurel that we know, though,
is she may be specifically talking about visual art,
which is something that none of the four of us have a lot of experience with,
but I do have one thought about it,
which is we live in an age where we basically have embraced the literal.
So if you think about a film is more literal than a play, right?
And a YouTube video is more literal than a film.
And so everything, all the trend, a photograph is more literal than a painting.
Than a painting.
So all art in the modern age moves towards literalism.
And the problem with literalism is that it's, you know, it leaves someone like Laurel, the
laurel we know anyway, in a place where it would probably be very difficult to understand how,
what is the role of visual artistic expression,
painting, drawing, in a world that has so embraced more literal forms?
Is there a place for a painter?
Is there a place for a sketch artist in today's society?
It may be a dated, you know, impressionism comes in as photography comes in,
and it may be, in fact, a dated form.
That doesn't mean that no great artist will ever come along,
just like they're great playwrights, even though the theater's no longer
are a main form of talking to one another.
I mean, I think there's great art being made in the digital space.
Well, that's what I was going to say.
In the digital space, it's unbelievable.
Some of the video games and the fact that you can enter into those worlds as you play, that's something new.
And I've never seen it before, and it's brilliant.
Did you see this, there's this new Netflix series, and it's not all good.
There's something that's called Love, Death, and Robots.
And it was made by David Fincher.
And a lot of it is just different types of animation.
And it doesn't all work, but it's like these little 10-minute snippets.
He just decided we're going to make the series, and we're not going to make it half an hour long.
All these things are eight to ten minutes.
And it's all different types of art, and the art is just.
astonishingly great.
It's amazing.
And the experience of playing a game, I mean, we've talked about this before, but the experience
of playing a game is so immersive that you get that thing that you used to have to use your
imagination.
There's still great art.
I mean, Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse is a piece of art.
Into the Spider-Verse is a beautiful piece of art.
And maybe this is part of the answer for someone like Laurel, is that you have to find
a modern application for those sort of antiquated skills, and that could be in the form
of animation.
We have great illustrators and animators who work for us.
It could be some sort of graphic design for which there's a huge home.
It could be video game design for which there's, I mean, it's bigger than Hollywood, one of the biggest markets.
But I do think, you know, art has always been subsidized by the wealthy.
This is correct.
Even in America, art is ultimately subsidized by the wealthy.
But you do have to find the place where the wealthy are willing to exploit it, where they're willing to subsidize it.
So part of it is finding some application for your...
There's nothing artistic about rejecting the reality of the world.
So true.
There's this thing I see among young artists, particularly people who are actors who have scripts and are working at coffee bean, where it's like, if only the world were fair, if only there were a market for this thing that I'm doing.
And it's like, well, the unhappiest people in the world are the people who argue with fundamental realities that they cannot control.
It's why teachers always get so bent out of shape about their pay, right?
They're always like, you know, teacher should make more than Congress people.
And I always think, well, I mean, there's only, you know, 435 Congress people in the country.
Like, they, you know, they got themselves elected to something unique and special.
break the teachers' unions and then you get paid a lot more.
But it is this thing of like,
teachers have never gotten paid more than this.
When you decided to pursue becoming a teacher,
there wasn't understanding of what the reality,
maybe it's fair, maybe it's, I think it's fair,
maybe you think it's not fair, but it is.
And one of the great lessons that you helped me learn in my own career
as a young artist who wasn't making any money,
I was once young, and I once didn't make any money.
And Ben helped me understand.
it is not, there is no pathway to a happy life peeing into the wind.
And the answer isn't that you have to stop peeing.
It's that you have to turn around.
But it's also, it's beautiful.
It's good advice.
But everything is a choice.
Everything is a choice.
You know, we live in a city where some handsome Dan who's never done a thing for anybody
can get paid a quarter of a million dollars a week,
pretending to be a police officer who risks his life, right?
Pretending to be a man who was victimized by a risk.
racial pills in Chicago.
But if you are an actual police officer,
actually helping people risking your life,
you make what Jesse Smollett makes a week in a year.
And so you just have to say,
this is the choice I'm making.
You can't say, oh, I should be paid more.
You say, this is the choice I made
because I love helping people,
because I love getting shot at
and treated badly by the press.
Racing into buildings that are on fire.
Or putting up with kids.
I mean, really, teachers do do a heroic,
I don't know it's not like I'm down on teaching.
Mostly I just want to clip that, and we can use it in the LAPD press release.
Elisha, one more question.
I'm still really bummed that y'all were knocking Cardi B.
I mean, everyone knows that she just makes money moves.
That's true.
She does make money moves by drugging men and then robbing me.
That works, right?
You know, she didn't have to specify in that song how she made money moves.
But then later she did, and that was great.
She does that, like, R-R-Thing.
I don't know how she does it.
I really want to master it, though, and just annoy the heck out of
Ben, when I do it. I don't even know if you want to know how she got to know how to do that.
Alicia, I would really know. Elisha, the question. For God's sakes, Elisha, don't do your God.
Sam, I'm going down the wrong path. Sam wants to know, will the left's newfound anti-Semitism really
alienate left-leaning Jews, considering that many are already reform or secular and will likely
favor their political identity over their religious identity? Well, I think the only person allowed
to answer that question is. Yes. Yes, let's hear. Why, hello?
So the answer is, as always, that Jews who care about Judaism are going to be offended by this,
and Jews who do not care about Judaism are not going to be offended by this because they don't care about Judaism.
This is like saying, will Maisie Hirono's anti-Catholic rhetoric alienate Catholics?
And the answer is, if you are a practicing Catholic, yes, it will.
And if you are not a practicing Catholic, you won't give two dams about it.
And this is true for Jews also.
There's this weird thing in the press because many members of the press are secular Jews
who still have cultural affiliation with Jewishness,
which means they have a bagel once in a while.
They like matzumel soup.
They've seen fiddler on the roof like three times, maybe even a fourth time.
And then they go to a synagogue like once a year, maybe, and then they break for lunch on Yom Kippur.
And it's like, well, now I'm Jewish because I'm not a white person.
I'm a Jewish person.
And it allows them a certain level of minority status.
And that's what they care about in Judaism.
That's not Jewishness, right?
That's cultural Jewishness, sort of.
But it's not really anything related to Jewish religion or Jewish principles or the Torah.
It's Jewish.
Right.
I would say culturally Jewish, but not religiously Jewish in any sense.
sense. And then the media poll people by ethnic Judaism, which again makes no sense because
there are plenty of people. Noam Chomsky's an ethnic Jew. He's also a piece of crap. So like,
why would I, Bernie Sanders is an ethnic Jew. What does he care about Judaism? He's an open,
militant atheist who hates Israel and thinks that the Bible is antiquated. Like, why would I pull him?
So my answer is the people who care about principles that Judaism stands for are going to be
offended by this. I think there's a group of older Jews particularly, people who are above the age
of 60 who've historically voted Democrat, who still care about the state of Israel, who still
care about going to synagogue, even if it's conservative reform, and they will be offended,
and you'll see a little bit of drop off there. But young Jews who don't have any affiliation
aren't religious. Honestly, I'm so bewildered why people would think it would be any different.
Can I ask a follow-up question? Whenever anybody asks me a question about, why do the Jews
vote Democrat? I say they don't. The Orthodox Jews vote 70, 30, or 80-20 Republican.
A follow-up question. Yeah. Toast slice bagels. Yes or no?
F was that? What was that? Did you see that? There's a bagel that sliced it vertically?
I mean, my feeling is, my feeling is, hell can't go away. Your nonsense is this.
You can't, you can't do a bagel wrong, so it's not terrible. But where do you put all the locks
and the scallion cream sheet? Where do you put that on a slice? You know, you know something true?
Yeah. It's absolutely 100% true. I'm from Texas. I have never had a baby.
Oh my word. What? I don't, how are you my business?
I'm pretty sure that I made it 30 years before I met anyone who had a day.
Okay, so, okay, I'm going to tell everybody in L.A., best bagels, they are kosher.
Western bagel, they have a factory.
On the Polver de Boulevard.
They bake them fresh.
So they take them out of the fat.
They put them in the window.
They are the best bagels in the history of mankind.
No.
Oh, no, no, no, best bagels in the history of mankind.
New York.
They are in New York.
They are in New York.
No, they are.
They have.
You had Western bagels, though?
Yes.
They are really solid.
No, I got them.
You recommend them?
I got them.
But New York bagels are another planet.
They really are.
I don't know.
Do you like more of like the air.
I like the big doughy ones.
Plus, people from New York don't know that there is anything outside of the movie.
It's the famous New Yorker cover, right?
It's the best New Yorker cover ever, where it was the best New Yorker.
The New Yorker's view of the United States.
And it's just in the foreground you see New York.
And then you just see Chicago and L.A.
And there's nothing.
And in the United States is three inches wide.
Exactly.
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I literally can't.
By the thing is, though, this week, as we pitch this,
The thing is everybody watching is already a subscriber,
because if they don't have the Tumblr,
then they have long since drowned in the news cycle.
They are gone, dead and gone.
There were no survivors.
There were none.
So let's talk about another one of the great stories of the week.
Can we talk about the Green New Deal thing is the best.
Cocaine Mitch.
I mean, you got to hand it to cocaine.
Hang on.
To Mitch.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you use the Tumblr for this one.
It means.
Oh, yeah.
Mitch Escobar McConnell.
Unbelievable.
So you, you, undoubtedly.
You know the story, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
whom we must refer to as Alexandria Ocasio-C
or AOC and not as Cortez, which would be in...
So fresh. So-face.
So-face.
AOC comes up with this piece of legislation
called the Green New Deal.
She writes it.
She writes it herself.
It basically outlaws, cowfarts, and everything.
Literally all things plus cowparts.
And costs $93 trillion.
And then they start berating the right for,
saying that it's a ridiculous piece of legislation. They say this is our World War II.
This is WW2. We're fighting the Nazis. And we have to put everything we have.
The world will end within 12 years. In 12 years. So this week, Mitch McConnell thinks, for a laugh,
just to make our week even better, he thinks, let's come a chance to vote on the Green New Deal.
He brings it to the floor of the Senate. But by the way, all of the Senate Democrats who are currently
running for president co-sponsor the legislation.
12 co-sponsors, every one of them running for president.
How many of them voted, Michael, for the Green New Deal?
Hold on, let me carry the Senate of it, but...
And none, none of them.
No Senate Democrats voted for the Green New Deal.
The best part of the story, though, is that AOC gets asked on Twitter,
why didn't the Senate Democrats try to save the world?
You've condemned to decide.
And AOC's reaction answer was, because I encourage them not to vote for it.
She's the boss.
She said she encouraged them to vote present.
And that's how senators make the decision when the Congresswoman...
What first term.
And all I could think is, why has she condemned us all to die?
I was 12 years.
I was so, I was assured by the press.
It was not only important.
It was deeply popular, I was told.
I was told that this was popular, particularly among the young ins,
that they love nothing but having air travel banned.
And every building in the United States retrofitted or destroyed.
They were into all of those things.
And every single Democrat voted presidents except for four who voted against.
Right.
Those are the ones in the red states.
Those Mansion and Doug Jones and Kristen Cinema.
and then Angus King up in Maine, who's an independent, but is a Democrat.
And the best reaction was the reaction afterward.
Because afterward, they were all like, can't believe the Republicans pulled this stunt.
We wanted to hold debate on this.
But the purpose of debate for legislation usually is to get to the vote.
And you guys were all like, no, you know, we can't vote for this.
Sorry, we just don't want to be associated.
You know, it's a little bit much.
It's a little bit much.
Also, Alexandria, I call her occasional cortex.
But Alexandria made a speech afterwards that was pure word salad.
She was talking about Flint, Michigan, where this Democrat town poured, took the water out of the river and killed people with it while the Republicans were saying, don't do that, don't do that.
What does that have to do with climate change?
There's nothing to do with climate.
My favorite thing was, have you seen the polls on her?
They're brutal.
I mean, people do not like her.
Trump is more popular in New York than she is.
It turns out that after all this media coverage, after putting her on the cover of Time magazine, after treating her as though she is the face of the New York,
Democratic Party, the more people see her, the more they dislike her.
Because when you see her at the beginning, you're like, oh, she's enthusiastic and kind of fun.
And then you listen to the things coming out of her face.
And you're like, these are bad things that come out of your face.
And she's also mean, she's also.
No.
Well, you see this about Ilhan Omar also, I mean, I mean, O'Han Omar is just a nasty.
She's a horrible piece of order.
She's especially mean to guys like you.
Yeah.
She doesn't like you.
Something about you.
She doesn't like.
I'm not sure what it is.
Guys, it's just that he's a supporter of Israel.
That's her only problem.
This was one of the great moments.
And then Mike Lee getting up on the floor of the Senate,
he was, he was magnificent.
He deserves some kind of awards.
Oh, it was so great because for those who didn't see,
you should go watch it.
He did basically a Bob Newhart routine.
He got up there with a,
and he's very low-key, Mike Lee.
He's a very serious guy.
He was considered pretty seriously
for the Supreme Court for the last vacancy.
And he gets up there with a picture of Ronald Reagan
riding a velociraptor while firing a machine gun
with an RPG strapped to his back.
And he gives an entire disposition describing the immense patriotism of the Velocera that is holding the flag in the tattered flag.
And then he says this has as much to do with the Green New Deal as the Green New Deal has to do with stopping climate change.
And then the press does what the press do.
And this is why the common theme of Donald Trump's presidency, and it is why he is president and it pre-existed Trump and it will post-exist Trump.
We hate the media.
And we deserve to hate the media because they are sheer freaking, burning, flaming,
piles of garbage. The way that they covered
the Mike Lee thing was such evidence
of intellectual dishonesty. Like, I will
acknowledge that Stephen Colbert is a comedian
and he was doing jokes. And I will acknowledge that
John Stewart, who I really dislike,
is doing jokes. I will acknowledge all of that.
But he's doing an obvious riff,
Mike Lee. It's obviously a joke. He's obviously making
fun of the stupidity of a
bill so bad, not a single Democrat voted
in favor of it. And the headlines were
Mike Lee makes bizarre attack on
Alexander Ocasio-Cortez using
silly painting. It's like, that's called a
comedy movie. Yeah, and it was genuinely funny, which is really rare in government. I mean,
it's actually... I wish that Senator Ted Cruz, hashtag the only senator I know.
Would have gotten up during his remarks and just bred green eggs and ham.
It would have made it the perfect week for me. It's pretty close to a perfect week. It is a really good week.
This is, this is...
Well, yeah. And since, since Kavanaugh, I've not been this.
Guys, even on the Green New Deal, we should... This story went unreported, but it happened during the throes.
It actually happened on the greatest day ever when you... You were out.
You were, you know, and getting medical treatment.
I was having propofal and, well, we missed one of these, right?
Because while I was having it, so I go in to get an endoscopy because I have esophagitis,
which is this weird esophageal thing.
And I go in, I get drug.
And I, and as I come out of my drug-induced coma, I read that Michael Avanotti has been arrested.
Oh, yeah.
And I thought to myself, this can't be happening.
Like, on the same day they released the Mueller report,
Michael Avanotti has been arrested for running the stupidest scam.
in legitimately all of human history.
And he's getting dumped on.
He's getting dunked on by Stormy Daniels, right?
Who's saying, yeah, he was a crappy lawyer.
And I legitimately woke up and I thought, like Michael Jackson,
I died of a propofoam.
I don't know what's going on here.
And don't forget, it's not.
So Avanotti, who was on CNN and MSNBC,
108 times between last March and last May.
108.
108 times.
Avinati goes down, frequent CNN guest.
His co-conspirator is Mark Garragore.
The CNN League.
analyst. He goes down in the scheme. And then I'm reading, I'm literally just reading the news as I'm on the air.
And I see this little underreported story, the world's fastest melting glacier. We're getting
ready for the Green New Deal boat. The world's fastest melting glacier on Monday stopped melting
and started gaining ice. Global warming itself ended this week. It's like Franklin Graham
from the president's inauguration. Mr. President, God has blessed us with rain just
as he started to speak.
Mr. President,
God, stop global warming
just as you were being exonerated.
You know what I love about the Michael Avanani story, though?
Everything?
Yeah, everything.
But they hit Trump on being associated with Michael Cohen,
a fair hit.
You shouldn't associate with guys like Michael Cohen.
He's a slime, right?
True.
But they associated with Michael Avanani.
They loved this guy.
Bill Maher said, oh, he's Donald Trump's worst nightmare.
If that's Donald Trump's worst nightmare,
I'm the Queen of Romania, you know?
That quote from him,
I mean, it was so perfect.
The writers of the season are just...
They're doing great work.
And they plant these clues, like, a season earlier,
and then they come to fruition.
I mean, like, the real payoffs, right?
He goes on the view, and he says,
all my fantasies involve handcuffs.
And then he ends up being arrested.
I thought that was wonderful for him.
He's arrested for trying to bully Nike, right?
The company of Colin Kaepernick, and he's trying to bully them.
What is it also with these lawyers pretending to be gangsters?
You see what you will about gangsters.
They're gangsters.
They're really dangerous characters.
when they threaten you, you're afraid, right?
These guys come and say, Nike, I'm going to take you down.
Oh, I'm going to tweet Nike.
Here's the thing about that.
Michael Avanotti knows he can get on CNN.
That's why he was able to do that, right?
The part of that story that is underreported is that when he says,
I'll take your market cap down a billion dollars.
What he means by that is I will go on CNN tonight
with all of my friends like Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo,
and I will talk very bad things about your company.
That's what he meant.
And he knows he can do that because he's on speeds out with the producers at CNN.
And Brian Stelter said to him,
I take you seriously as a presidential candidate
because you've been on cable news so much.
It's what he said to.
You know, so they build him up.
They actually are talking about him as a presidential candidate.
And one thing you've got to say about Trump,
he never talked about Michael Cohen running for president.
The press did that with Michael up and on.
Alicia, we want to hear from a few more of our Daily Wire subscribers.
After all, they pay for my house.
By going over to Dailywire.com slash subscribe
and becoming annual subscribers,
you too can help me pay my mortgage.
And if you do it, during this broadcast,
you will be in it automatically for a chance to win.
a trip to L.A. to, you know, sit in and watch us do whatever this thing is.
What are we doing?
So, Alicia, what are our subscribers asking us right now?
Oh, I'm real glad you didn't ask me. What are we doing?
Because, you know, let's have that answer.
Before we get to those awesome subscriber questions that make it possible for all of us to be stuck here,
me and, you know, a non-smoke-filled room. So thanks for that, guys.
We do have our Facebook polling results.
Turns out that people think that the economist having to apologize to Ben and change their headline,
at 7% of the vote about the craziest slash greatest news week ever.
Jesse Smollett comes in at 10%.
The Green New Deal utterly failing and no Democrats voting for it.
Came in at 23%.
But of course, the Mueller report showing absolutely no collusion.
You know, either Trump is a really super secret Russian spy or he's really dumb.
Democrats can't have it both ways.
60% of the people say that the Mueller report results showing no collusion with Russia
is the story of the week.
I can't believe that our Daily Warrior audience could be so wrong.
Clearly, the economist having to apologize to Ben today is the biggest news story of the week.
This was the first thing I saw this morning. It was trending on Twitter.
It was trending on Twitter. Ben, who writes a book about philosophy without his picture on the cover.
So like a guaranteed three copies sold your grandmother, each one autograph for her friends.
Ben made the New York Times number one bestselling book in the country this week,
unseating Michelle Obama, who's held onto that number one spot with her
becoming second place book.
That's what I'm calling.
Her becoming book for the last minute.
And then the economist does what I actually think of fairness was quite a nice...
The interview was good.
Yeah, the interview was good.
I thought so, too.
Yeah, I didn't mind the interview at all.
And then they tweet out the story today under the headline.
You'll get it right.
There's Ben Shapiro, the alt-right sage without the rage.
Which is wrong in two ways, right?
Right.
I mean, I'm surprised you didn't say three, but yeah, I mean, it's...
But yeah, the alt-right, man.
And I was like, really?
It's the Yamika with a swastick on it.
This is where they're going.
Like, do they not have, there's a company.
It's called Google.
And when you type things into the Google machine,
it tells you things about people.
So if you typed in Ben Shapiro Alt-Right,
the first results would have been
me ripping the Alt-Rite in the Washington Post.
And probably the second results
would have been me doing an entire episode
ripping the Alt-Right on my show.
Then it would be the Alt-Rite ripping you.
Right, there would be the Alt-Rite ripping me.
I've spent the last thing.
last four years doing open war with the alt-right. If they had bothered to do a control F inside my book,
I referenced the alt-right four times, all four times I called them racist pieces of crap.
So this seemed to be a bit odd. And so I mean, I never go to war with media people who attack me,
because I get attacked a lot. As it turns out, this one I was not going to stand for.
So I really went after them on Twitter. I mean, I called, I said, you need to apologize,
you need to pull this down, need to change the title. I said, I threatened to get a solicitor
in Britain because the libel laws in Britain.
are a lot looser than libel laws here.
So they're going to play by those rules.
And when people call you Nazis, you probably have a good libel.
Yeah, exactly.
And so within four hours, they pulled down the original headline.
They changed the, now I'm a radical conservative.
No longer the all-right stage without the rage.
They defended it first, though.
They defended their headline as long as they could.
And then I guess they didn't want a lawyer up, so they changed it.
Yeah, something happened, and they decided to change.
And then they issued a full apology.
They said, as it turns out, Ben Shapiro is a long-time critic of the alt-right.
We apologize, and they spelled it with an S, which just shows what jerks they are.
I probably put a you in color.
It's ridiculous.
Unbelievable.
It is amazing, though, because I thought about this morning how they could have come to such a patently absurd conclusion.
And then I realize it's because the left, and particularly the left media, is so ensconced in their ideological bubble that they legitimately cannot discern the difference between the right and the alternative to the right, which is the all right.
From their point of view, we are all white supremacists, Nazi, racist, violent, anti-Semitic, jingoistic, you know, one step away from murder.
I think that conflation is one of the most dangerous things in public life.
And the reason that I say that is because of what it conveys and also the view that it springs from.
So what it conveys is that if you are on the right, if you have a heterodox opinion, you're a Nazi,
we can't talk with you and presumably you should be banned because Facebook in the last couple of days has said that they are no longer going to allow you to post anything that's white nationalist or white supremacist.
I hate white nationalism. I hate white supremacy.
Turns out they don't like me much either.
But I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea of Facebook using data from media matters in the SPLC
to determine which speech should be banned.
The thing is you and Jordan Peterson, there's not much to go after you about, you know?
I mean, you're not a racist. You're obviously not a way.
But they always go after you on this transgender thing.
Here's a thing that didn't exist like two years ago.
I mean, and suddenly this is the worst thing they can say about it.
Also, it's called biology.
The real reason they're pissed, really, is because if you look at, you look at, you
the people that Jordan speaks to largely, it is young men who are dispossessed, and he is trying
to make them better. Right. And if you look at my audience, which is actually pretty diverse,
it is very young, and it is very large. And that means that if I am trying to teach people to be
better, then all they have to do is point out people who are not better and say, this is probably your
crowd, even though it obviously is not my crowd. But the real problem I have is, again, that
conflation is an attempt to write conservatism into Nazism and then toss it out the window.
And the view that that comes from is such a perverse view of what Western civilization
is. And this brings me to the Joe Biden quote that I think is one of the worst quotes I've seen
from a political candidate in a decade. When Joe Biden said at a rally in front of, I think it's a
racial minority crowd, he said something to the effect of English jurisprudence is white culture.
And I thought to myself... And should be... And we have to get past. And it needs to change.
And I thought, first of all, English jurisprudence is... Anglo-American jurisprudence is one of the best
things that has ever happened to humanity. And particularly to minorities. Because it turns out that
Anglo-American jurisprudence is about the rights of the individual. You know who don't have a lot of
minority rights? People who are living in non-anglo-American jurisdictions, right? Those people tend to be
charged head taxes. Those people tend to be victimized along racial and religious lines.
What the hell are you talking about? But for the left, for the hard left, like Joe Biden,
or for the intersectional left, Western civilization is a veneer. It's a post facto intellectual
veneer that we put on power relations. And what Western civilization really is, is white people
cramming down their viewpoints on everybody else, and then giving some sort of post facto justification
with a bunch of nice, pretty words about freedom of speech and equality under law. And so if we just
tear it down that Western civilization, then the hierarchy will go along too. That is exactly the same thing
that the alt-right actually says, except they like Western civilization. They say that they like
the power hierarchy in which white people are more powerful than everybody else. All the nice words about
freedom and free markets and all that stuff, that's a bunch of crap that we say just to just to sweeten
the tea a little bit. But the real tea is white supremacy.
and we like the white supremacy.
So you're suggesting that the two alternatives to the right,
the alt-right and the left, agree that the right is wrong.
I want to talk more about this.
I also want to finally get to those questions
that we promised we were going to take from our dailywire.com subscribers.
But first, we have a special guest.
We promised that one day this would happen,
that from his lofty perch on the American East Coast,
Matt Walsh would descend and deign to spend a little time with us here.
People ask for this all the time on Twitter.
They're like, oh, where's Matt Walsh?
The Daily Wire Guys get together and there's no Matt Walsh.
Jeremy grew up here just so that we wouldn't notice that Matt Walsh wasn't on the show.
But we today are demonstrating our great power because we got Matt Walsh to come join the show.
The host of the Matt Walsh show, if you aren't familiar with the show, you're missing out.
Here's some clips.
Hey, guys, over on the Matt Walsh show today.
Was Jesus a socialist?
No, you nitwits.
He was not a socialist.
Bernie Sanders is an arrogant, power-hungry, hypocritical, cowardly, morally deranged, communist.
They're going to chemically castrate this boy.
He is being physically, psychologically, emotionally abused.
Some old tweets from Cory Booker,
Sleep and I broke up a few nights ago.
I'm dating coffee now.
She's hot.
The Green New Deal is finally here.
It's the kind of thing that would sound brilliant if you were high.
that around half of all millennials
find socialism appealing.
They want Daddy in Washington
to supplant Daddy at home.
I think Cory Booker might have a condition,
actually.
I'm kind of worried about him.
Someone should probably check on.
Matt Walsh.
Thanks for being with us.
It just appeared like that.
That was crazy.
Wow.
It was a long drive to get here,
but I'm here.
How many episodes that you shoot in transit?
I got quite a few of them done,
so now I'm here.
You didn't wear your bathing suit?
I got an email.
I was told this was spring.
break edition.
It's Catholic bathing suit day.
Is Catholic bathing?
No, that is too short for Catholics.
Way too skimpy.
I need like a big owl or something.
That's right.
It's actually great because he's sitting between me and he's the only person more dower than I am.
And you and he's the only person more Catholic than you are.
So there's kind of a transition here.
Exactly.
So, Matt, we were just talking about the conflation of all conservatives with the alt-right
and how the alt-right and the left actually agree broadly on.
identity politics. They just disagree about who the victor should be. What makes us different than the
all right? Well, I mean, I'm sitting here next to the leader of the alt right, which is pretty fun.
From what I could tell, the main thing that jumps out of me about the alt right is that it's very
nihilistic. I mean, it's identity politics, yes, but at the core of it, there doesn't appear to be
much of a moral core. And so for me, conservatism should be, should have that moral foundation
of that moral core, which is also what makes the alt-right related to the alt-left,
and that at the end of the day, it's relativistic, it's nihilistic,
it's, you know, your truth is whatever your truth is.
I think they both share that foundation.
Michael, you wrote one of the earliest pieces sort of exposing the reality of the alt-right,
I think, to a mainstream audience,
and one of the things that you touched on in that piece
was the sort of religiosity of the alt-right
and how it's a religiosity without any connection to the spiritual truths of religion?
It's very postmodern, and this is an issue. I really wanted to get out and explain what the alt-right was when that phrase had meaning, which it no longer does, because Ben Shapiro is now the leader of the alt-right. Anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton is. They do this to a lot of words, racism, sexism, and they've done it to the alt-right, but it does have a meaning. And it's an alternative to what we would call the conservative tradition. And it's an alternative that emphasizes brutal power politics. It's a zero-sum game.
it's rooted essentially in racial identity.
And the trouble with it, as the trouble with so many of these things, is that it inverts reality.
You know, Andrew Breitbart, who everyone in L.A. knew except for me, because I got out here too late,
would talk about how politics is down from culture.
And culture, as Russell Kirk says, is down from religion, from the cult.
What they do is they invert that.
And so they substitute, rather than talking about recreating Christendom,
recreating Western civilization,
rooted in the religion that forms that, they say, no, no, no, we want all the trappings of
Christ without the Christ. They want all the trappings of Western culture without the cult that
makes the culture. That actually is leftism. It is like, well, it reminds me. It's like the sort of
people who drink decaf coffee and diet Coke. They eat vegetarian bacon. They want the semblance
of the thing, but they don't want the essence of the thing. And that's what the alt-right does.
So they use the sort of language that might get some conservatives excited.
We need to go back to our foundations.
We need to go back to Western civilization.
But they misunderstand what Western civilization is essentially,
probably because they haven't read the All Right Leaders book on the right side of history.
You know, if you can get past the aesthetic long enough to take Michael seriously,
he really knows a lot of stuff.
No, no, no, no.
Let's not over see the case.
You know, there was one time on the show.
We were talking about sort of debates among Protestants and Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, all these things.
And we were in this really intense debate. And I realized it was Halloween and I was wearing a Moana costume.
This isn't a great video.
Can we talk about Jesse Smolett?
Oh, can we not talk about it?
It's the great, to me, in a week of great stories, it is the greatest story.
It is the most fun story.
Because there's a Scheidenfried to the Mueller report.
Like two years in the making. It's a long windup.
When the pitch comes, it's really great.
but the Jesse Smolett being let off the hook for being a racial hoaxter,
and now his lawyer maintaining that he was in fact innocent,
he was the victim of a hate crime from two Nigerian brothers who he...
In his employ.
In his employ, his personal trainers who are extras on Empire,
who beat him up, and now his lawyers are saying
that they legitimately beat him up while wearing white face.
Under their ski masks.
Under their ski masks.
This is the actual theory of the case.
And I just think, this timeline is freaking great, man.
I mean, this is great.
And Michelle Obama's friends are calling up the DA over there and telling her, can you kick this thing?
And she's like, sure.
And I'll pretend to recuse myself, but I won't.
That was still only meant in the colloquial sense.
In the colloquial sense.
Because that's what lawyers do.
We speak in the colloquial sense.
When I'm lawyering, what I always do, when I write a contract, I say, I make it as colloquial as I can.
Hey, y'all.
Right, exactly.
Can we do some stuff here?
Like, you'll do some stuff.
I'll do some stuff.
We'll be happy.
That's how I write all my contracts.
Ben always says, hey y'all.
And in parentheses, party one.
You know, one of the things I've always, why corruption always makes me laugh is because when it gets as corrupt as Chicago, they stop hiding it.
You know, they says like, what did you do with the money?
Well, I put it in a little tin box kind of thing, you know.
And now the Chicago, the thing about this Smollett story is nobody is clean.
You know, you want to root for the cops.
I love the cops.
You know, our first responders and all this stuff.
But the cops in Chicago have been very, have not been so good before this new guy came in.
They hid that video of Laquan McDonald getting shot.
They hit it for something like 13 months.
Rahm Emanuel was part of that.
And that's the reason this woman who dumped the case is in office, basically.
She came in saying they're not treating black people.
So it's like basically bad Democrats versus evil Democrats.
But when you're too corrupt for a guy who legitimately used to send fish in newspaper to his enemies when he was on the hill, Rom Emanuel,
you may have gone a little too far.
You're like, you're past the rainbow.
The rainbow left you behind a while ago.
The unmentioned part of this, though, because once he got off the hook, once they said, okay, you're not guilty.
Although they kept the money.
Yeah, yeah.
You're not guilty.
Give us that 10 G's and you have to go do some work for Jesse Jackson's nonprofit.
Retroactively.
Retroactively.
But you're off the hook.
But initially we heard, oh, Empire is going to hire him back.
He's going to come back on.
He's going to have a career.
Everyone is forgetting the federal charges that could be brought against him for sending a hate hoax through the mail with white powder.
Will they bring federal charges?
I mean, I certainly hope so, although they didn't say that he's not guilty, because that's the thing is the prosecutors out there saying that he's guilty. Kim Fox said that, yeah, well, we think he's guilty. The charge has made sense, so they're not making any attempt to hide it. That's what really is kind of scary about it. So it shows you something about how privilege really works in our society. And it's not necessarily tied to being white, straight and male, apparently, as Jesse Smolette has shown us, or as Cardi B has shown us. It's privilege that has a lot more to do.
with, well, certainly money is the first thing that matters, but also, you know, identity,
the trendiest identity is not white and male, as we've discovered.
And connections.
Celebrity status.
Celebrity status helps an awful lot, right?
Joseph Epstein down in Florida getting off on his charges on, I mean, that guy should be in
jail forever and never get out.
For 100% of time.
Yeah, exactly.
Honestly, I'll be honest.
I'm really looking forward to them finally breaking all the people who visited his sex slave
island and all of their activities.
I want all this stuff out in the public
because I want to know
Jeffrey Epstein.
Jeffrey Epstein.
Thank you.
Anyway, I'm just going to head out of here.
Just is fine.
Just is fine.
And just the guy's fine.
Nobody ever invited you to any other.
I think part of the problem, too, is that
there's so little integrity
on either side of the aisle anymore.
So that's how people get away with things
is that they always have their own side
that's going to overlook it because,
and it happens on the other side too.
So that's part of the problem
is that the peanut gallery
who should be demanding justice
we're always looking at things through a political lens.
And so now the left is looking at Jesse Smolett and saying,
well, I guess he's kind of ours.
And so we have to sort of at least look the other way.
There was that thing that the black community said after O.J. Simpson,
I realized that's a long time ago.
But they basically said, you owe us one.
Like, we know he's guilty, but you just owe us one.
And I feel like that's one of the problems with identity politics.
Yes, on both sides of the aisle,
is that we tend to want this sort of broad sense of justice,
like a correction against broad injustice,
but there can't be broad justice
without individual instances of justice.
You can't get to justice through injustice.
Time line goes one way, you know,
and once it's over, you can't do a thing about it.
You can't correct slavery,
you can't punish a guy just because he's white
for holding slaves, which he never held.
It just doesn't work that way.
And the left frequently thinks without time,
like with abortion when they say,
oh, well, that's not really a person.
You think, like, yes, it is.
It's a person at a certain time
in this time that is his life.
And I think that the left does us all the time.
They just eliminate the dimension of time when they think.
Because how can you recompense people who are dead?
You can't.
That's what injustice is.
So this is a legitimate question for you guys about Jesse Smollett.
I referenced O.J.
And one of the most interesting things to me about OJ
is that he didn't get away with anything, right?
He got away in the moment.
But there is a kind of justice, a supernatural justice
that seems to exist on Earth.
And in the act of getting away with it,
I think O.J. Simpson was so not only corrupted because he's a murderer, but corrupted by the idea of his own invulnerability in the face of the law, that it led him to do other terrible things, which eventually caught up with him. Will a similar justice track Jesse Smollett at some point?
Well, the problem is he's going to need publicity for something else. Because if he just disappears into the ether and the last we hear of him is this nonsense, then he's never going to get hired again.
you know, maybe, although I will say that the nice thing, OJ was never, he was in Hollywood,
but he really was not of Hollywood.
I mean, Jesse Smolett is a Hollywood person, which means that everybody gets a second shot
in Hollywood.
Five years from now, Jordan Peel will cast him in a movie or something, and it'll just be kind
of a big joke that he did this five years ago and we'll all laugh about it and he'll be like,
oh, well, isn't that funny, that now he's back doing this sort of stuff?
Although you have to be pretty crazy to do what he did, so maybe that'll catch up with him.
He's self-destructive human.
I mean, that's absolutely true.
When you believe that everyone believes your lie,
I mean, it's pretty audacious to have the police say you're guilty,
the mayor say you're guilty,
even the prosecutor who just dropped the charges,
say you're guilty, and the court keep the bail money.
Yeah.
And then your press conference isn't,
I'm really sorry about this.
I'm very glad, obviously, that I'm not facing worse charges.
Instead, no, I was a victim.
I was always telling the truth.
I wouldn't be able to face my mama if I had been a lot.
You talk like someone who's never met an actor, which I know.
But it's actually true of everybody, right?
I mean, brazening it out is always the, is always the best thing to do in modern politics.
And anywhere in modern life.
I mean, we talked about this a couple of episodes ago.
In the graceless society.
In the graceless society, if you were to apologize, then it would be like, okay, he can't work again.
Right?
Because then he's acknowledged his guilt.
But if you never acknowledges his guilt, then he can continue to maintain that he was beat up by two Nigerian brothers in white face.
Under their ski masks.
Right.
Under their ski masks.
I mean, my going theory of the case, by the way, is that it wasn't the Nigerian brothers at all.
It was Ralph Northerman in blackface in white face.
Which is why I think I have no problem with them dropping the charges
All they had to do, I thought that that would actually be the best case scenario
Is if they dropped the charges on the condition that he'd go out on the courthouse steps and admit what he did
Right and then that's no problem then they can say yeah, you're fine
Because if even if they had given him two weeks of jail time
Something like that yeah you don't want to show you could maintain his innocence then he still wins in some respect
So that's what makes this such a travesty is that if they want to claim oh it wasn't worth going through the whole rigmarole of a trial fine I get that
So then tell him that he needs to go,
the fact that you let him go out on the courthouse steps
and claim innocence is what makes this such a travest.
And the fact that they sealed the court records.
It means we don't even know the deal that they...
They banished them.
Well, did you see what Kim Fox said about that?
She said, we accidentally applied to have the court records sealed.
She said we're now applying to have them unsealed.
Sure.
Like Al-Cabona, the gun just went off.
They were saying that this best week ever with all this crazy news,
the Jussie Smollett thing, that was why it was a little too bad
because that was injustice.
He got off the hook.
No way. What are you, that's the, that's a little cherry on top of the Sunday, because now it's such a gross injustice.
There is a chance that the feds look into this, look into both how he got his deal and look into the fake hate mail hoax.
But also, Republicans get to point to this as such an egregious example of hoaxes and identity politics gone wrong.
We can use this for two years.
The media coverage of Smollett has been hysterically funny.
Brian Stelter, the ombudsman over at CNN doing a more reliable source.
He gets on TV after all this happens.
He goes, we may never know what happened with Jesse Smollett.
Because no one was there.
I wasn't there.
You weren't there.
We may never know what happened with Jesse Smollett.
Weird, because for two years your entire network was proclaiming that President Trump was a cat's paw of the Russians.
And you had no evidence, and it turned out to be false.
And he still won't apologize for that.
We have this way of finding out called a trial.
The reason we don't know is the Chicago's corrupt.
This dudefist signed a personal check to the people who committed a hate crime against him
and called them on the phone an hour before it happened.
Yeah.
How many times you've been hate crime
over that sort of thing?
Guys, he didn't drop the Subway sandwich.
We have all the proof we need.
That, by the way, is the best.
That will never die.
That is the best part of the story.
Those are good sandwiches.
You don't want to let go on your Subway's family.
I got to say that if Subway does not hire him for a commercial campaign after this,
they've really missed their opportunity.
I mean, if they're two spokespeople are not Jared and Jesse, I mean, that's pretty fantastic.
So, Alicia, while we've got Matt here, let's see if any of our Daily Wire subscribers have questions
that he might know the answer to.
Lord knows we do not.
Elisha.
Oh, sorry.
You guys didn't even get me a working umbrella?
Dear Lord.
There's not even a working sun where you are.
Well, I don't know.
It's a good thing there's no working son
because you don't pay me enough to get Botox.
So, all righty.
That's true.
This question, I guess it's for all the guys.
Charles wants to know,
what would be your advice to somebody
who yearns for the freedom of the world
of philosophical commentary,
but also wishes to keep the security,
of a full-time job they consider a bore and mundane.
Give up that dream. That's not that.
He didn't know the answer, isn't it?
That's the problem these days.
And that's what makes it easier.
People say to me all the times,
well, how do you have the courage to speak your mind?
Well, it's easy for me because it's my job to be a loudmouthed and have opinions.
And we're all in the same boat.
Our job is opinions.
But it's a lot harder when you have a real.
job and and then you're trying to balance that and being you know the prudence of when do I speak up
so that's a much more difficult thing which is why I think people that are in the opinion realm
would get way too much credit I think for being warriors for truth would really it's this is what
we do this is definitely true I will also say that everybody I think underlying that question is
how do I get into sort of the opinion business and the answer is you do a lot of stuff for a free
for a very long time.
Yeah.
I mean, really, like, everybody sort of wants to go to immediately
Charles Crowdhammer status, where just you're on Fox News every night,
or how did you get where you are, how'd you this?
I'm in year 18 of this project.
I'm 35 years old, so I look, you know, somewhat young at this point still.
I've been doing this for nearly two decades.
And for nearly no pay for most of that time.
And you also acquired an expertise first.
You are a Harvard lawyer.
You've had a varied career in show business.
I have no idea what no one is.
Yeah, well, the real way to do it is to not run.
write a book. I mean, I hate to disagree with you. This is actually an interesting because,
you know, I like to bring in a little business advice for how people might be able to make
themselves successful. So I like a question like this. You bring up working for free. One of the
amazing things that you will hear people say routinely, especially young people, is I know my value.
I know what I'm worth. You'll say, hey, I mean, if you want to write something for us,
submit it and we'll review it. And if we like it, well, I don't write for free. I know my
value. I know my worth. I do too. I offered it to you. You have. You have to. You have. You
no worth, you have no value, your time is not automatically valuable. The fact that you
typed into a computer does not create value for me. Value is when I can take what you've
created and I can monetize it in some way that brings in money. And then I can keep some of that
money and I can give some of the money to you. That's the definition of value. And in order to
gain value as a commentator, you have to write a lot of commentary. It's when people in Hollywood
People will tell me they want to move to Hollywood.
They'll say, you know, in my hometown, I'm an actor.
Acting is my dream, so I want to move to Hollywood.
I'll say, well, you have the wrong dream.
Because when you move to Hollywood, the first thing that happens is you stop acting.
You could do high-end regional theater or community theater in your hometown.
Some of it very good.
And you could probably act in six shows a year if you're worth your salt back where you are.
You move to L.A.
you may not act for years.
75 auditions to book
a role is basically the average
for an actor in Hollywood, and the role might be
one line, one day.
Same with musicians. People will say,
I have this band, we play in bars
all around my hometown.
My passion is playing music, so I'm going to move to
L.A. or Nashville and make it.
Well, you have the wrong dream.
You play music where you are.
Moving to Nashville is a way to not play
music anymore because they don't pay you
$200 to play a lot.
to play in a restaurant in Nashville
because everyone in Nashville
plays music, the market is saturated.
They do pay you that in your
small town, and even if they did in Nashville, you couldn't
live off the 200 bucks the way you can in
your small town. Your actual
ambition is misstated. What you
really mean, but you don't want to say because it
sounds terrible, is
I would rather act less,
I would rather play music
less for the opportunity
to gain a higher
level of recognition or to
to play at a higher level with better people
or play on a greater stage with a greater audience.
But that sounds, you know, people don't like to say honest things about themselves.
And so they say, oh, my dream is acting or my dream is, stay where you are.
Yeah.
And at the end of the day, what it takes to be a musician is playing music
and what it takes to be an actor is acting,
what it takes to be a commentator is commentating.
And over time, you develop things.
And learning things.
And reading and getting good at.
This is what, you develop skill and you create out.
I will say that the YouTube culture has really hurt us in this way because there are people who somehow sort of stardom without ever having done anything or learned anything.
And listen, when I was younger, the dues-paying stuff pissed me.
Oh, yeah, of course.
Really pissed me off because I knew I was more talented than half the people that I was watching.
I knew that I knew more stuff than they did.
And I felt it was a grave injustice that I was not getting more recognition for the fact that my writing was very good and that I'd really studied these issues.
But the fact is that that required me to put it.
more time and the world didn't owe me anything.
And the same thing I feel like, I mean, Drew,
how many scripts have you written and how many have actually made it to screen?
Oh, my. I wrote, I think,
four novels before I published one.
And though
the thing about screenwriting is you can make a good living
without ever having them get to screen.
Almost none of the screen plays I sold
for good money made it to the screen.
I mean, that's the movie. I even want to puncture
one of the great dreams that
I get asked this question at every campus speech
because I actually did get paid
a ton of money to do nothing.
Like literally nothing, right?
Now you're a number one New York Times bestselling author,
so that does kid above, you know.
But this was a number one bestselling blank book.
I worked for, from the age of 18 to, I don't know,
when did I do the book, 27 or something?
I worked for peanuts all that time.
I worked a million political campaigns.
I did a ton of off, off, off, off Broadway plays for making pennies.
And the only thing that keeps you going through that
is because you want to do the thing,
because you want to write the columns,
because you want to write the books because you want to be in it you want to do plays you got to do it for that if you think you're going to get a payday for it i mean
people used to interview me when i started to hit it big and get big money for novels and they would say well you really made a lot of money i said we've got to pro rate it's right that's exactly right i mean for four years i mean for years i mean for years i mean so i've been writing a syndicated column since i was 17 years old
it started to make any sort of money that would even look like money
in the last three years, maybe.
But I want to challenge even this thing.
You said, you know, it's kind of unfortunate.
We live in the age of YouTube,
and people can legitimately become superstars who've done nothing.
And it is true.
And it's always been true in every medium.
Right.
Some guy scratches out, nothing on the page,
and it becomes a best-selling book.
I mean, that's a tale is old-est-time.
But that's not the norm.
But not only is it not the norm.
As you famously have said, luck is not a business model.
But there is a business model.
But there is more to it, which is they may attain a small measure of fame, a large measure of fame rapidly on the basis of nothing, but they won't preserve fame on the basis of nothing.
And a great example of this is Logan Paul. So Logan Paul and his brother are YouTube stars.
Logan Paul, I'm not a connoisseur of this content. As far as I can tell, he became very, very famous for doing very, very dumb things while a camera was rolling.
and you look at him and he makes like $600 to trillion.
He has a staff of Logan Paul and his buddies.
They live in a giant mansion.
And it is manna from heaven and beautiful women rained down upon them.
And you wonder, like, how is such a thing possible?
It seems like an injustice.
This week, Logan Paul put out a video, a documentary of his examination of the flat earth conspiracy theory,
which is as good as any comedy film made in the last decade.
It's a 50-minute feature.
The production value, unbelievable.
The skill, the directing, the editing, the performance.
His performance is subtle.
It's self-deprecating.
It's brilliantly conceived.
It took stones, the size of beach balls,
to actually put himself in the environment
that he did in order to create this piece of entertainment.
And I guess what I'm trying to tell you is,
Logan Paul may have gotten famous
for filming himself to stupid things,
and he may have ridden a wave
that seems from the outside to be kind of unfair.
He has maintained his level of fame.
He and many, many, pooty pie and others who have created
enormous brands, creating a brand,
difficult, maintaining a brand, nearly impossible,
improving your brand.
He also generates an insane.
an insane amount of content. I mean,
that's right. I mean, spoiler alert, we've met Logan Paul
and another spoiler alert. He called me
a mother bleeping G.
Which is a really interesting experience.
But Logan Paul told me, because I asked him,
what's your daily schedule? I asked this to kind of everybody
famous who comes by, what's your daily schedule? And he said,
well, I have a camera on me for 10 hours a day, and then we spend
seven hours at night editing. That's right. He worked
17 hours a day.
I think that's one of the great things that we talk about paying your dues
and everything. But these days, you could cut out the middleman.
And if you do have talent, you can just go right to the people.
And there are some people who, you know, I tend to think if you do manage to attract a huge audience,
that probably means that you have some sort of talent because there are a billion people on the internet trying to do it.
That's right.
And so if you manage to do it, it probably means that you've got something going on.
So it is different now.
You know, the paying your dues thing, I think, looks a little bit different than it used to.
It is also a matter of investment, meaning that what I see a lot is people who,
don't actually want to invest either their time or their money.
They want you to invest your time and your money in them.
And that's not a thing.
Either you've got to invest in an enormous amount of time getting so good at the thing
that I cannot turn down the opportunity to give you my money,
or you have to put in your own money and risk.
I mean, you want the reward, you've got to take the risk.
That's right.
Stuff like this is a huge risk.
That's the thing with artists and anybody who does a creative job,
you're risking your life.
You're risking your whole life because most people who do this stuff
are smart enough to have done something much safer.
You know, you could have been a lawyer.
I mean, you could have done, you know.
I did.
I worked at a law firm.
Right.
And that's the thing.
Most of them are putting aside a way of life and taking this incredible risk with your whole life.
You can wind up, and I've seen it happen to people.
You can wind up 50 with nothing, you know.
Well, this is why I will say.
Not me, boys.
It was smooth sailing all the way here.
And absolutely nothing else that I'm qualified to do on earth.
Listen, if you would like to come and sit in on a live taping of a show where we recommend Logan Paul feature films,
You are welcome to head over to Dailywire.com.
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where if you click on subscribe, become an annual subscriber,
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We'll pay for you a flight or an Uber to come down to our studios here in L.A.
And we'll light you up a nice cigar and let you sit in with us
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Alicia, for those who are already subscribers and able to ask us questions,
they able to get a leftist's hot or cold Tumblr if they're annual.
subscribers. They're able to tune in daily
to the Matt Wall Show, the Andrew Claven show, the
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show, and two-hour radio show
behind our paywall. They may
also want to, you know, just ask us something,
do they? Oh, I do
have a question, though, after seeing that wide shot,
now that Michael Knowles is closer to that
camera, he once asked me
for my waxer, and I thought it was
for his wife. It's very
apparent it was for his very own legs,
and now I am mortified.
Listen, I know that transgenderism is
Becoming the new dominant theme.
I'm just saying there aren't a lot of roles in Hollywood for men.
Half the roles are for women.
Why wouldn't I leave myself available for that?
Make it stop.
We've hit a new love.
Joe freaking name it, though.
Hopefully we can end on a high note and tell Sam where he can go for the most conservative vacation spot,
considering that this is a very special spring break edition.
Matt?
The best vacation spot?
Yeah.
The van.
Yeah, I've been living in my car for 32 years.
I don't go on vacation, so I don't know.
Six Flags, I mean...
I've got the most conservative vacation spot.
Yes.
Waikiki Beach in the, for some reason it's a state of Hawaii.
This is the most conservative thing.
Because one, it's beautiful.
It's almost entirely man-made on that beach.
It is so gorgeous.
Everything has been manicured perfectly for you.
You've got steakhouses.
You've got the cheesecake fact.
You've got every single beautiful comfort you want, no driving, no nothing.
They hand you big silly drinks and big silly glasses like this.
It is...
How's the cell service?
And this, oh, mm-hmm.
It's just absolutely, you can be Instagramming.
It is the most American vacation spot on Earth.
Andrew?
I got to say Rome. I got to say Rome.
All of Western history is right there.
You can turn over a rock and you've got like Catholic history.
You can turn it over.
You get the Roman Empire.
You can turn it over.
You get the Renaissance.
You get the Jews being oppressed.
Just a turn it.
Part of Western civilization, right?
I'll go one further.
Delphi in Greece.
I was once, by moon, there's a true story,
by moonlight, broke into the oracle,
hiked down the hill around the security station,
came in, beautiful full moon,
sat at the amphitheater,
had one of the most sort of transcendent experiences of my life,
lifted up a rock, looked under it,
and it said Socrates was here.
Benjamin.
In English.
I'll take the other half of Western civilization.
So I still think that visiting Israel is probably the most conservative place that it can be.
Not only is it a Western civilized country in an area that is not Western or civilized,
it is also the font of the Judeo-Christian morality that has shaped the West in the most profound ways.
And also, it is an order of magnitude more ancient than anything else you will ever see.
I mean, you go there, and it is astonishing.
Every so often it hits you.
And it's funny, I know it hit you, Jeremy, when you visit it.
But I remember that, you know, I'm a big history buff.
And so when I was younger, I was very into Revolutionary War history, this is my thing.
And so when we went to Philadelphia, I was like, oh, my God, this is so cool.
Here's the Liberty Bell.
And this stuff is like, it's so old.
I mean, this stuff is from like 1776.
This stuff is like 225 years old because it's like 2,000.
It's like 225 years old.
This is amazing.
And then we go to Israel, and it's like, okay, so take that and now multiply it by 10.
And that's, these are the stones where the Judean revolt,
was fought. I mean, I have coins in my house. Actually, I bought a couple of ancient coins. So I have a
coin from the Hirsannis regime, which predates Christ by several hundred years. And then I have
a coin from the revolt, the Barcahba revolt. And these things are thousands of years old. And you're
walking around and you're like, okay, well, what's great about it is the description of Jerusalem
in all of Western literature, sort of the Axis Mundi, is the central pillar of humanity. It's
just true. When you're there, it does feel
different than any place else I've ever been. I've been to Rome.
It's amazing. It would be my second favorite.
I mean, I love Italy. It is spectacular.
I've been to France. I've been to Britain.
Britain is a wonderful place. You go to Israel.
There's a different feel to everything there.
It's almost, it's like there's a different
spiritual dimension to just being
there. And then you're walking through a valley where
David slew Goliath. I mean, it's an actual
place. You're like, this
you know, the civil issue, we stand on the top.
I mean, this is the theme of my book, but it really
it's moving to me. We stand
on top, when you see a skyscraper in New York, when you see a car driving down the street,
that is standing, all of that is happening atop the iceberg. And if you just keep digging down
to the bottom of the iceberg, to the seabed, that's where Jerusalem is. And so we can talk as much
as we want about all the beautiful things that we've built up here at the top of the iceberg.
But the fact is, if you keep melting away and chipping away at the bottom of that iceberg,
that stuff ain't going to stand. It's just not going to stand. And you don't realize that until
you actually study your civilization, whether it is in Greece or whether it's in Rome or whether
it's, or whether it's in Israel, which I think is the place
where it runs the deepest. I'm just so pleased
to have heard Ben acknowledge the historicity of Christ.
Alicia,
Alicia, another question for it.
All right, Christian wants to know, should he get married at 18,
even if he has to live on ends meet
and work a minimum wage job?
If it will result, I'm sorry, result
in long-term happiness down the road.
Yes.
By show of hands.
Yeah, absolutely.
I say yes, but I didn't do it.
I mean, did you guys get married at 18?
I would have met the girl.
You get married young, and then that is the foundation of your adulthood,
rather than it being the capstone of it.
You begin there, and then you go through that journey and having nothing
and that struggle with your spouse, and then you bond over that.
I think the problem is when you have people that, you know,
they have their own life, and then they go get married,
and so you have a lot of these issues where now you're trying to merge these two separate existences,
whereas instead of forging one existence together.
I will tell you, I married the girl that I was dating at 18.
I am one of these weird stories where the whole culture told us split up.
It's insane, especially I'm from New York, it's insane.
You could never get married that young.
You've got to split up, go to college, whatever.
And I ended up fighting that culture for years and ended up marrying the girl I dated at 18.
If I had it to do over, I would have done it years and years and years earlier.
And I have to say, having been married longer probably than all you guys put together,
that you become a true partnership in a way that is mystical.
I mean, it is just after a while you are just, you know,
you start out with all these things like you're talking about.
You have to merge these two lives.
And after a while, you're one life, and that's an incredibly beautiful thing.
It's funny the other day.
I was talking to my wife about something, and I can't remember what it was.
And I said, you remember when this happened to me?
I said, no, that happened to me.
This is just something that you end up doing with your spouse all the time
where your memories become your spouse's memories.
Yeah.
Like you actually, you become two halves of one whole.
And that's, it is one of the great tragedy.
of the West that people are getting married to 28 and not getting married to 21.
It's a absolute stupidity. How, I mean, how old was everybody when they got married?
Yeah, I was about read. Well, now, when I, when we moved in together, I was about 21,
but we got married years later, but we lived together before that. How long did you live together?
Four years. Four years? Yeah. Michael Heldering.
I was 27, I guess, 28?
Matt? I was 25 years old. Yeah, when we got married. 24. I was the oldest at 30.
Okay, that's old.
I win again, guys.
Listen, there are consequences to getting married old.
Higher likelihood of divorce for one.
Higher likelihood of divorce.
Your options for marriage do change, right?
The nature of the foundations of your marriage is going to necessarily be different.
And there are biological consequences to getting married older as well.
That's not to say that people should be completely foolish,
although I do generally say that any Christian young man can marry any Christian young woman,
and it can be, and it will work if they believe in the institution of marriage itself.
I'm not saying that that's necessarily the preferred way of going about this,
although it actually did work for many thousands of years.
And I say Christian, I really mean people who share a foundational right.
You're right, that commitment to the institution of marriage is actually more important.
than the soulmate idea of marriage.
So there's a really interesting thread today
from the National Foundation for Marriage,
I think is what it's called,
about marriages are now lasting longer.
So we've actually reversed the trend.
And one of the reasons that is suggested
is that the 1980s and 90s version
of what marriage was supposed to be,
the soulmate version of marriage,
which ended so poorly
because people thought soulmate means
madly in love, passionate about each other,
in just the way that I was,
the first six months of the marriage,
which is not true for anyone.
Love changes, it transmutes,
it becomes deeper, it becomes more profound in many ways,
but it's not quite as like, I can't wait to be with the person every single second of every single day
the way that it is when you're first dating somebody, for example, that model completely failed.
And it's been replaced by what they call the all-factor view of marriage,
which is commitment to common goals, common values, the institution itself.
That's the good stuff.
And it used to be, I mean, the separation of sex from marriage has had dire ramifications for our society in an incredibly serious way.
The other problem with the soulmate thing is that if you say, well, I'm looking for my soulmate,
someone was destined in the stars, you know, we were met to be together.
Well, okay, well, then what happens when you marry someone you thought was your soulmate?
And then, uh, and then, uh, and then that feeling dies.
And then, oh, you meet the secretary at work and you say, oh, no, she was my soulmate.
Yeah, I got this wrong.
And okay, so I got to leave my wife and go to her.
Uh, no, it's, it's, you know, the person becomes your soulmate.
This is what the sacrament of marriage is in Christianity anyway.
The person becomes your soulmate literally, in a metaphysical sense, when you marry them.
It's, they weren't your soulmate before that.
Right.
But in that moment of bestowing that sacrament onto each other, now you're locked.
And that's why Christianity, it's supposed to be that you literally cannot separate.
And that is such a good point because I've asked people, before I got married, I said,
what's the secret to a long marriage to people who have done it?
And they gave a lot of advice, patience, all this sort of thing.
And don't get divorced, is what people told you, don't get divorced.
And it is, in the traditional Christian view, divorce is not permissible.
And so if you go in and you say, look, we better, if there is a little tiff, we better work this out.
Because divorce is not going to happen.
So you better work it out.
There is a real sense of security and comfort there.
You say, you are, by definition, my soulmate.
So we're going to be together.
I discovered this backwards because I was not committed to the institution of marriage or to anything when I got married.
I was too young and too nuts, you know.
And I think that what I was committed to, I was madly in love with my wife, as I am to this very day.
slowly I began to notice that there was a third thing that bound us together.
And it was really this marriage kind of purified all our own kind of shambolic flaws and
tendencies and was actually better than either of us alone.
And so I kind of discovered the institution of marriage by Providence.
And it really is a real thing.
It's a real thing.
And if you commit to it, I think that you're in solid because it's a beautiful way to live.
Kids too.
I mean, that's what, you know, the kids need the security of knowing that both parents,
are devoted to this marriage.
And I can remember when I was a kid,
and all of my friends, all their parents were getting divorced,
and I talked to my mom one night, and I was very upset,
and I said, all my friends are getting divorced.
What if that happens to you and dad?
And she looked at me and she said,
we will never get divorced, period.
It will never happen.
And I believed her.
And it was, but I needed to know that,
that they both felt that way.
No matter what happens, that that is just not an option.
It's not on the table.
And for me, as a child,
I needed that assurance, and there's a lot of kids growing up
who don't have that security, and I think it wreaks havoc on there.
You know, when I see people, and I know a lot of them
who have left their wives, mostly I know guys who have left their wives
with children, small children behind, and they always say to me,
and I know women who say this too, they always say,
the kids will be fine, the kids will adapt.
And I thought, yeah, you blew up their planet,
you blew their planet up, they're floating in space, they'll never be all right.
They will never ever be all right.
all right. And I think that that, it's such a travesty for a momentary thing.
You have that story of the person who got the divorce and their child became an adult.
It was many years later, their child's 18, 19 years old. I'll ruin this story.
It was 10 years later and the child went off the rails and went so badly off the rails.
They finally had to do that thing where they virtually kidnapped the kid and take them to a psychiatrist.
And they all sat down to the psychiatrist.
And the first words out of her mouth were, why did you get divorced?
And the mother said, that was 10 years ago.
And it's like, yeah, you blow up somebody's planet, it sticks.
You know, they remember.
I mean, Jesus had a lot to say about this.
And it always makes me laugh when they cast gay people out of the church,
but they have a divorce workshop.
You know what I think?
Like, yeah, you know.
Marriage is one of the few issues.
Divorce is one of the few issues, one of the few sort of hot-button societal issues
that Jesus spoke about very directly.
That's right.
And he, because on a lot of, you know, he spoke in parables, and sometimes it's very frustrating that you're trying to decipher.
Well, what does that mean?
On marriage, though, he said, no, you can't get divorced.
Can't do it.
If you do that, you're an adulterer.
If you remarry, then you're making that person an adulterer.
That's right there.
It's in all the Gospels.
Yep.
And yet Christians still find a way to, yeah, he said that, but.
And we worked hard.
You know, we worked hard to keep the marriage going.
I mean, in the Old Testament, there's a very bizarre section that's very hard to understand about a husband who accuses his wife of being an adulterist.
And so they're supposed to go to the Kohen Gaudel.
They're supposed to go to the priest.
And he is supposed to make her drink this kind of magic potion where he dissolves the name of God.
And then he makes her drink it.
And then if she's an adulterist, then she dies, essentially.
And if she's not an adulterist, then she lives, and they have to get married.
They have to stay married.
And it's very puzzling.
It's very weird.
It's called the Sota section of the Bible.
This is in numbers, right?
Yes.
And it's really strange, and people don't really understand it.
The purpose of that whole situation, the purpose of that illustration, is that it is forbidden.
in the Ten Commandments to take God's name in vain.
God is very serious about you not destroying his name.
In Jewish law, if there is a scroll, any piece of parchment, any piece of paper,
where you write God's why many Orthodox Jews won't write even in English the word God.
They'll do G-D because they don't actually want to throw it in the trash.
You actually have to take the scroll.
You have to go bury in someone.
It's how seriously we take the name of God.
You're not allowed to pronounce what we call Yud Kvke.
You're not even allowed to spell it with the letters.
That would be Jehovah in the English transliteration.
But in Latin.
Exactly.
But the purpose there is that God considers the institution of marriage so serious
that he is more willing to have his own name trampled and dissolved
than to allow a marriage to dissolve for bad reasons.
That's the message there.
I would say to, there are a lot of divorced people.
I'm married to someone for whom our marriage is not there first.
And it is true that Jesus says that if you, you know,
the New Testament holds that if you remarry, you make of your spouse and adulter.
Jesus also says that if you lust, you're an adulterer, not you're on the path to adultery,
not you're kind of like an adulterer, I mean, really, if you think about it,
Jesus wasn't smoking pot, and they're like, oh, it is kind of like that.
No, Jesus made a lot of very absolute statements about the nature of morality
so that people would understand the absolute nature of their state and depravity.
And one of the things that bothers me, you'll hear evangelicals of a certain stripe sometimes say,
Oh, you married a divorced person.
Well, you know that in God's eyes, they're still married to their first spouse.
And I'm like, when did God become an idiot?
That is obviously not true.
And if it were true, imagine what the morality of it would be over time.
So let's say you got married when you were 18, you got divorced when you were 22,
you got remarried when you were 30, you had four kids, now you're pushing 50,
and some evangelical gets a hold of you and says,
well, you know, in God's eyes, you're still married to your first spouse,
and you go, well, holy crap, I don't want to disappoint God.
So you walk away from the four kids and you walk away from the current husband,
and you go find, I guess, some person that you used to know 20 years ago
and see if maybe they also believe that you're still married,
and you knock on their door and you're like, hey, we're still married,
and they're like, what that?
God's not dumb.
God doesn't function outside of reality, right?
God isn't the hypothetical God.
God is the God who is. And while divorce is a terrible, terrible thing is absolutely a destruction of
the great analogy, according to Paul, that God gave us for our relationship with him,
is our relationship between husband and wife in marriage, as in all things. God's a God of grace
as well, and a God who functions within reality, a God who actually does know what we are.
I'm not saying that if you remarry, you don't make of your spouse an adulter,
I'm saying that the actual takeaway from the teachings of Christ is supposed to be, I'm an adulterer, not how could I possibly not be an adulterer?
No, I agree with this because what Jesus says is Moses gave you a law by which you could get divorced because he knew your hearts.
He knew, he knew basic.
Yeah, but from the beginning. Divorce is a thing in Judaism.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we are anti-divorce, but it is a possibility.
And I think I think you're absolutely right. We're not supposed to live in this savage way where people get stuck in a, in a, I know a lot of people who got divorced.
like minutes after they got married, like, you know, within months,
and then got a very happy second marriage.
I definitely think that's a very different thing.
But it really is a serious business to tear apart what God has brought to.
No question.
I'm not making any defensive divorce.
That's why I think, you know, the Catholic Church,
the concept of annulment, which is the idea there is,
it's also not like you're going to get stuck on a technicality
because God's not going to do that.
So just because you said the words, it's not like God is saying,
well, you're stuck.
But there's an investigation to find out if you can disagree with a situation where you get married and you get divorced right away.
Obviously, you weren't serious about the vows.
And in that case, then it wasn't, the marriage just never occurred.
You go to Las Vegas or something and get married when you're drunk.
You drink a giant one of the beads full of booze.
But there's also no question that I would assume in the Catholic view that that is innately connected to,
because when you're talking about annulment, you're talking about sexual activity also.
That's innately connected to the possibility of bearing children.
I mean, the real shift that has happened in Western culture is the disconnection of marriage from childbearing.
And it used to be that the, I mean, a plurality of people who got married, the woman was pregnant when they got married.
And this was as late as in 1930s and 1940s, a huge number of people.
The majority.
Was it the majority?
It was either the plurality.
A huge percentage of people were having seven-month babies, right?
Because people were not, but the expectation was, you know, you do the crime, you do the time.
I mean, because it's not about you.
It's not about you.
If marriage is about you, then you ought not get married.
Really, and this is true with your spouse.
It's true with your children.
It's true with your God.
If marriage is about you finding a way to personally satisfy yourself, then don't get married.
Because honestly, marriage isn't going to do that for you.
Marriage is not about personal satisfaction.
Marriage is about you becoming a better human being.
That's what marriage does for you.
The same way that that's what religion is supposed to do for you.
That's why when people look at religion like, oh, well, I'm personally satisfied.
I'm spiritually satisfied in my child.
I don't give a crap. You know what? God really doesn't either, because God has a bunch of things you are supposed to do that he expects of you and that our duties. Your spiritual fulfillment is last on his list. Yeah, Job wasn't particularly spiritually saddens. By the way, I mean, you know Jesus better than I do, but it doesn't look like if he were a human, it would have been a particularly satisfying life. Right? And if you look at Moses, Moses has a pretty miserable life. And Moses gets crapped on by fate one million times and then dies right before he enters the land of Israel. So he never even gets to achieve his lifelong dream. He doesn't even get to pass on the leadership to his son. He doesn't even get to pass on the leadership to his son.
God says pass it on to Joshua. You don't get to pass it on to your own kids.
These are people who live, I mean, David fights civil wars with his own children.
These are people who live hard, terrible, difficult lives.
Because God is the God of reality.
This is right.
But he's also, I have to inject this. I hate to do it, but he's also the God of Joy.
And all the things you're talking about actually are a great joy.
It may be at a different level than picking up a girl in a bar and going home with her,
which can be a pleasure.
But the joy is in you reshifting your mind to meet him.
Not him, not him reshifting reality.
But that's it.
But that's it.
He rewards you for that with joy.
And I think even people like Moses, like Jesus, who live these lives of great tragedy and great difficulty,
there is some kind of transcendent feeling when you have met your God.
It talks about Moses' face shining so strongly he has to put on a mask when he comes off of Mount Sinai.
Because the idea is that when you have aligned, I mean, this is the natural law of you on Catholicism,
when you've aligned yourself with nature's God, when you have aligned yourself with the God who created you,
created the cosmos, created this entire system,
then that's what's supposed to give you purpose.
That's what's supposed to give you meaning.
And when you disconnect all that stuff,
and then you demand of reality,
the reality changed to fit you,
then you are declaring war on the only thing that can make you happy.
Because God is the God of reality.
And when you love him, suddenly reality makes a whole bunch of sense.
You know, it always gets me when somebody says,
you know, my wife died in a plane crash,
and now I've lost my faith.
And I thought, why didn't you lose your faith
when somebody else's wife died in front of breath?
Because that is the world, you know.
I think one of the great messages of the Bible, Old and New Testament,
is to find joy through suffering rather than in modern times we find joy.
We try to find it by getting around suffering.
And it's just not out there.
You've got to go through it.
But that takes patience.
Well, this is why the entire question when people say,
well, how can you rectify the idea of a good God with suffering in the real world?
is because God's idea of good is not your idea of good.
You are not God.
And this whole idea where God is supposed to conform
to your idea of what's right and good,
you don't even know as much as the basic conglomeration of humanity
that sets the price of a pencil.
Why do you think that you know as much as God?
By the way, God is God, you're not God,
you're not God is almost the entirety of the gospel thing.
I'm always trying to think, what's the simple,
how can you get the gospel down to its simplest form?
The way they'd always put is God is not a gumball machine.
And people who expect got to be a gumball machine.
If I do X, Y, and Z, then I will get X.
Or why isn't this gumball machine working for me?
I don't really want to put in the quarter.
I'd rather put in the dime and get the gumball.
Too bad, man.
That's not how this works.
So if you are 18 and you are contemplating getting married,
I do have a patented piece of marriage advice.
I have several.
One is two bathrooms in a king-sized bed.
I promise you can't go wrong, but you may say, but Jeremy,
I can't afford a king-sized bed or I can't afford,
get married anyway.
But this is really good advice.
And no one will tell you this.
Go to bed angry.
This is my great marriage advice.
It's not great marriage advice day to day.
People will tell you never go to bed angry.
And that's fine advice if you lose the never.
What they should say is do everything you can not to go to bed angry.
But in the final analysis, sometimes when you try to navigate life with another human
being who is in every way different than you, where you can't even agree on the things that you think you agree about,
because you're actually using the same words to me.
different things, you won't figure it out for 10 more years. When you're in that situation,
you do occasionally come to moments that you simply cannot resolve in the moment. And you're in a
fit, you sit in that moment of complete desperation. You do not have to know how to reconcile yourself
to your spouse. And the best thing you can do in that moment, go to bed. And what I mean is,
go to bed, literally, because you will wake up in the morning and you will still be married.
The beauty of marriage is that marriage is. You don't have to, you don't have to, you don't have
to create marriage on a daily basis. Marriage will carry you through these problems if you
lean on it as an institution given to you by God. The only thing you can do is break your marriage.
So if you reach the moment of sort of irreconcilable conflict, stop trying to reconcile it
and just lean into the reality of your marriage. Lean into the fact that tomorrow you will
still be married as long as you don't do anything stupid, like stop being married, which has been
statistically, the cause of 100% of all divorces.
Elisha, we have one last question
for the group for the night.
Final question of the night is, I think, a question that is
on all of our viewers' minds.
Michael, do you only gym, tan, laundry,
everything else on your body besides your legs?
And why are they so pale?
And why is the control room showing them to me again?
I just...
I'll give you the real reason.
I can't handle this.
I'm so triggered. This is like sexual harassment.
I'm over this.
She's gone.
She's out of here.
No, wait, please, don't go.
The real answer for this is
men should not wear shorts.
I am doing it for you, people.
All right.
This is the spring break edition,
and you're going to see
the only part of my body
that is a little more on the white side.
This is the white supremacy
of my body right now.
It's really nice, you know.
But really, this is the problem.
Tony Soprano, I think, said it.
In the Sopranos, he said,
a Don is not supposed to wear shorts.
It's not a good look. It's for little boys, for grown men, not a good look.
Thank you very much for joining us on this, I think, rousing edition of the Daily Wire backstage.
We want to especially thank Matt Walsh and all the people who subscribe during the broadcast today.
We're going to be drawing a name tomorrow for someone to win a chance to come out here and see us.
Thank you to all of our subscribers, even the ones who didn't sign up tonight.
We appreciate you keeping Michael Knowles in giant comedic bottles of hooch.
And we look forward to seeing you back here next time.
Adios.
Fake laugh.
Three, two.
Bye.
