The Michael Knowles Show - Daily Wire Backstage: Watch and Wait Edition

Episode Date: September 5, 2019

Will Hurricane Dorian make U.S. landfall? Which Democrats will be left standing after the third debate? Can America ever fully recover from the Fried Chicken Sandwich War of 2019? Join this roundtable discussion featuring Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, Daily Wire god-king Jeremy Boreing as they get to the bottom of these questions and more. Date: 09-04-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, Michael Knowles here. So you got stuck watching the seven-hour CNN Democratic climate change special and you missed Daily Wire backstage. No big deal. I mean, sure, we only have 11 years left and you just wasted seven hours watching Democrats talk about all the things that they want to ban in the name of climate panic. But hey, look, nobody is perfect. Make up for lost time by listening to Daily Wire backstage with me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Claven, and Jeremy Boring. We're just a lot of you. We're promise not to take away your cars, your air conditioning, or your cheeseburgers. Enjoy. You guys want to do a fake laugh or just kind of... Kind of like a sigh. Just read the intro, man. Just do it.

Welcome to the Daily Wire backstage, the Watch and Weight Edition. I'm Jeremy Boring, known around these parts. This is getting... It's old. I really feel like it's old. People don't I'm the God King now, don't they? They do. I'm the God King. Spill it with lowercase letters, you heathens. We're glad you've tuned in. Will Dorian make landfall? Which dim will be the next to retreat from Hurricane Radical Leftist Primary? Will Trump light up an aerial nuke to keep the Popeyes versus Chick-fil-A cyclone from getting even bigger?

Let's find out by rolling graphic. We're back. Hey. Oh, hello. Thank you to everybody for tuning in. Joining me tonight to speculate on all of that and more is Ben Shapiro, Andrew Claven, and Michael Knowles. Also, we are supremely happy to have the lovely. Lovely Elisha Krauss, back with us via satellite.

Elisha! Yeah. Back in the broom closet. I mean, that wonderful backstage live appearance where I got to share the stage was very brief. You shared the stage which you're like off slightly to the right. Yeah. Which I felt like was an inappropriate.

But she finally got to breathe fresh air, and then we shoved her back down into the basement with a baby. This is the Michael Noel studio, also known as the broom closet here at the Daily Wire. But it is great to be back. And if you hear the baby, she's in the green room. So hopefully she'll nap the whole time. But what's really exciting is hopefully you aren't napping at home.

I know that the show can sometimes get boring, but hopefully it's not back then. But what's going to make it really exciting tonight is that usually only subscribers get to ask the questions here on backstage. But for tonight, everyone watching at home is going to be able to ask the questions. How do you ask the questions? Well, head on over to the DailyWire's Facebook page and the DailyWire YouTube channel. where you're probably streaming and watching right now. Just comment. We have a couple of amazing producers here and I that are going through,

and we're going to be taking your questions for the guys tonight. Again, everyone has the chance to watch. Usually I'm sitting here saying only subscribers get to ask the questions, but tonight everyone watching gets to ask. So get those questions in right now, and we'll be tossing into the guys real soon. Thank you. Elisha, you know, the hardest part of doing the show tonight

is not having 3,000 adoring fans. I know. ...wit, thought, or every witty remark. I always have 3,000 adoring fans in my mind. That's how I get by. Well, it's another slow news cycle. Great, let's do two hours of broadcasting. That's a hell of a pitch, dude.

Never stopped us before. Never stopped us before. I actually think it's good, because one of the things that we should do better about on this show is taking more questions from the audience. And as Elisha said, for the duration tonight, we're going to have this thing open not only to our subscribers, respect to everyone who's watching to be able to write in and ask us questions,

and we're going to be pretty diligent about taking a ton of them as we go through the show tonight. You may be wondering what's going on with the DailyWire website, what's going on over at dailywire.com, why isn't it subscriber only? What's with these YouTube video embeds where once there were not YouTube video embeds? The answer is, at long last, and I know this is going to be hard to believe, the Shapiro store is... No, I'm kidding. We do overpromise and underdeliver some time.

But not this time. We are launching a brand new dailywire.com and a DailyWire mobile app. Yay, about time. They're fantastic. I've been able to spend a little time in the new technology over the last week or two. The official launch date, not on the calendar yet, but it is weeks. It is not months. It is not a month.

It will be sometime probably in the next 14 days. And probably in the next six or seven days we'll announce the launch date so that people can mark the calendars and start getting ready. But we're really proud of this new piece of technology. It's going to make the user experience much better. New features, and one of them is more access to, well, that shouldn't probably be a sales point. More access to Ben. Access to our riders, access to all of our podcast hosts.

And if you see, we want to see Noel's shirtless. Just basically walk down the street at any point in Los Angeles at any time of the day. Is that why you installed that new webcam in my bedroom? It's just for the access on the app. You aren't supposed to notice that. Yeah, I don't know. Come on. Let's be real.

installed that webcam. Jeremy, here's the link. Here it is. Plug it in. So we will have the new daily wire.com coming soon. It's going to be pretty rad. I think it's a big improvement for, mostly for our subscribers.

It's a great improvement for our subscribers. So we'll be looking forward to that. Before we get to questions, though, it's not like nothing has happened. I think the most important story that's happened in the last several weeks actually happened last night, and that is Walmart saying that they're no longer going to

sell certain kinds of ammunition, mostly because as far as I can tell, This is because of like six people on Twitter. This is right. Six people on Twitter. The MSNBC hosts. If Sam Walton were still alive, he would be the richest man in the history of the world because he died and he divided his fortune among five different people. Each one of them is one of the richest people in the world.

I mean, what he created in terms of economic activity, what he created in terms of efficiency in the marketplace, is one of the great achievements of the 20th century. what a shame to now see them cow towing to the radical left on Twitter. It is pretty pathetic. I mean, the fact is that all these corporations are risk-averse, or at least a huge number of them are risk-averse. And what this leads to is this bizarre divide where the left sees corporations as evil and terrible and horrible

in every possible way. Corporations are not people. They shouldn't be making corporate donations. But also, corporations should be the most moral people who do all the things that we want them to do, and they should be paternalistically deciding what products you should be able to consume. And if they don't do that, well, then they're bad again. And the corporations, because they're seeking to avoid the PR limelight for five minutes,

they decide, okay, well, you know what, is it really worth the hassle? Sure, we'll just go along. I mean, maybe we make a couple million bucks a year off the ammo. But we just won't sell the ammo, and then we don't take the temporary hit, and then we can pretend that we're on the side of truth and justice and the angels, and people will stop bothering us. But they don't understand a couple things. One, there will be blowback from the right.

Eventually, there will be people on the right who say, listen, you guys keep coutowing like this, and we're just going to build our own businesses, and we're going to shop at those businesses, because we're not going to be subjected to the whims of MSNBC and woke scold Twitter. That's not going to be who decides what we can consume and what we cannot. There will be market opportunities for people to move into the space. The other thing is that if you think that if Walmart's leadership is so delusional that they believe that once the left has its foot wedged in that doorway, that they're not going to shove it open wide,

they're out of their damn minds. because the fact is that Bernie Sanders is ripping on Walmart daily about their salaries and their health care benefits, that Elizabeth Warren, if she could do it, would break up Walmart in a heartbeat. These are the same people who've been ripping on Walmart for years, even though Walmart is by far the largest employer in the United States. They employ something like 2.1 million people in the United States, and they are the great villain to the left. And so naturally, the CEO of Walmart thought what, that he was going to cater to the left and the left is going to lay off of him? Now they think, okay, well, now that we've got you on the run, now you better become a lobbying group for all of our cherished causes. And here's the thing, the left is constantly moving.

So there's never a point at which Walmart. It's blood in the water. This is exactly, right. The thing that gets me about this is the fact that all we've heard since Donald Trump has been elected is we're living in a post-fact universe. But Donald Trump is an amateur when it comes to post-fact world. I mean, it's really which post-fact world we're going to live in. There's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that any of the things that they propose about guns anywhere would do anything to stop what is, you know, in fact, a horrible scene that we're watching. of these young men exploding.

If they went in and reinstated the kind of policing that they were doing in New York until the New York Times and the left got on them, the kind of stop and frisk, the compsat-based policing, the low-tolerance policing, that would cut down on gun violence, but the only problem is it would be young black kids in Chicago

and the left doesn't care about them because they know they're dying from leftist policy. So it's really, and they talk about, we get hit by a hurricane, a terrible hurricane, and we hear about, oh, my God, when is Donald Trump going to do something about global warming? It's a complete fantasy. It's all a fantasy world. And then they blame Donald Trump for the fact that he plays fast and loose with the truth, but nowhere near as fast and loose as the left has been playing forever. And it also shows you just the effectiveness of the left

at getting into every single institution. You know, a few years ago, I did a fellowship with a big conservative donor, you know, billionaire type guy. and he was funding all these think tanks and all these great academic programs. And he said, my strategy on philanthropy is to spend all my money before I die. He said, oh, that's so interesting. Most philanthropists set up a foundation. It goes on for generation, generation. He said, I'm not going to do that because what the left does is within one generation,

they get in there and they completely invert your mission. If Sam Walton were alive today, this sort of nonsense would not be going on. But so quickly, how quickly, after he's gone, does the left come? in and totally changes. It's the Osovereign rule. Kevin Williamson has a new book out. It's called The Smallest Minority. And Kevin, of course, is the columnist who was hired by the Atlantic, and then was immediately

fired by the Atlantic upon them finding out that he was Kevin Williamson. And he... None columns later. Exactly. And his book is basically an explanation not only about the left trying to use the methods of government to shut down free speech, but also about the subversion of the institutions, about corporate capitalism and how corporate capitalism. has actually created this new avenue for the left to pursue its aims.

See, in the realm of politics, I was pointing this out on my show today. In the realm of politics, the Washington Post has a big editorial today where they list off all the people killed and mass shootings over the last couple of years, and they say, this is Mitch McConnell's fault. And you know what Mitch McConnell does? He takes that he wazard up and he throws it in the garbage. None of those people vote for him, right? He's worried about what Kentucky voters are doing.

But you know who does care about what the editors of the Washington Post has to say, the CEO of Walmart, right? Meaning that his constituents are not even his own customers now. the constituents for a lot of these major corporations is, who are the people who follow me on Twitter and who can make my life miserable for 48 hours or for a week by yelling at me? And it's, of course, the same exact thing we've been talking about for years

when the left decides to do secondary boycotts of advertisers on conservative programs. They understand that all they have to do is simply pretend that there is a groundswell of anger at CEOs. And CEOs seeking to avoid wrath from their board, seeking to avoid the angry phone calls, they figure, okay, well, if I just surrender here, then everything will be fine.

And what they don't understand, again, is that the only way that all of this is going to stop is if all of these corporations stop acting paternalistically. It's so funny, the left keeps saying that corporations are affecting our culture. I want the corporations to stop being paternalistic. I don't think that it's the job of social media to better me. I don't think that it's the job of Walmart to decide what products that are legal I can and cannot have. I do not think that it's the job of visa to determine what kind of things I can spend my,

my hard earned money on via my credit card. There was an article in the New York Times today by Andrew Ross Sorkin, one of the co-creators' billions and CNBC contributor. And he explicitly says, we need more corporations doing what Walmart does. And he calls out Visa. He says, Visa keeps saying that they want to facilitate legal transactions because that's their job, which is literally their job. And he's like, no, what we need is them to stop allowing the purchase of guns using Visa cards. Wow. Dude, does you have any idea how dangerous it is when you have a country where they're a separate group of credit cards just for people on the right,

a separate group of credit cards for people on the line? This is actually the angle that we haven't hit on yet that I want to talk about. And Drew, you've mentioned this in the past. Liberty in this country, yes, the Bill of Rights only constrains the government. Yes, the Constitution in theory only enumerates certain authorities to the government, although we're way past acting. So that were true. Nevertheless, liberty is a way of life.

It's a philosophy in America. And while it is true that Walmart is not bound by the Second Amendment, we've only maintained our Second Amendment privileges in this country over time because everyone agreed to them including businesses. You've been able to go to a hardware store in this country since the very founding and buy ammunition and buy firearms. If you cannot purchase a firearm, if you cannot purchase ammunition, if you can't readily purchase them, you don't have a right.

The right doesn't exist. If you can't express yourself on the largest social media platform, on the planet, or the second largest social media platform on the planet, or the third largest social media platform on the planet, or the largest search engine on the planet, or the second largest search engine on the planet, or the largest video platform on the planet, you don't have a First Amendment. It's not fair to say, yes, but the government doesn't, Walmart taking away your right to buy ammunition at their store, aren't they just a private corporation?

Of course, yes. I'm not suggesting that there should be a law that says Walmart has to sell ammunition. All I am saying is that if Walmart won't sell ammunition, you will not long have the right to have ammunition. And if you don't have the Second Amendment, as it's been said, many times, you don't have any of them. That's why I want to talk about our pals over at Bravo Company, manufacturing. Oh, my week.

The arch, the arch. That was magnificent. You're getting so much better at this. That was just terrific. You know, when the founders crafted the Constitution, the first thing they did was to make sacred the right of the individual to share their ideas, without limitation by their government, that would be the First Amendment. The second right they enumerated was the right of the population

to protect that speech and their own persons with force. That would be the Second Amendment. And that's why we are so grateful for Bravo Company Manufacturing, who will not be withdrawing from the sale of weaponry, as it turns out. Owning a rifle is an awesome responsibility. Building rifles is no different. It was started in a garage by a Marine veteran more than two decades ago. Bravo Company Manufacturing, BCM,

builds a professional-grade product which is built to combat standards. Bravo to company manufacturing is not a sporting arms company. They design, engineer, and manufacture life-saving equipment. And believe it or not, folks, you might actually need a gun to save your life. Despite what the left has to say, you don't only own a gun from... That never happens, man. That never happens. No one uses guns to actually protect themselves with their families. You know who disagrees with this.

Bravo Company Manufacturing. And you should too because it's the... Slash science. Slash everything in the universe, because always. To learn more about Bravo Company Manufacturing, head on over to Bravo Company MFG.com. You can discover more about their products. special offers, upcoming news. That is bravo company, mfg.com. If you need more convincing, check out, check out all their stuff on YouTube at YouTube.com slash bravo company USA.

Again, YouTube.com slash bravo company USA. Again, we love people who love the Second Amendment and nobody loves the Second Amendment more than BCM. That's right. And Bravo Company Manufacturing and others like them are as much a reason. So it's not just that the Second Amendment protects all of our rights. It's that companies like Bravo Company manufacturing protect our Second Amendment. Because only by providing us with the good that we can actually engage in the commerce and purchase, only by having high-quality rifles like the ones that they make of a Bravo company available to us on the market at prices that we can afford that are determined by the invisible hand, not by bureaucrats, if we don't have that, then it really is this sort

of vestigial right where maybe the gun that your great-great-grandfather left to your great-great-grandfather left to your great-grandfather left to your great-grandfather left to your great-grandfather left. Well, they want to take that away, too. They want to take that away too, right, because universal background checks would prevent you from inheriting a gun so they they actually want to take that away aOC made that reference to dan krenshaw today our friend dan krenshaw so dan tweeted out dan dan dana dana tweeted out that universal background checks would prevent him from giving a gun to one of his friends to defend herself if she were going into a dangerous area and knew there was a high risk of crime and aOC was like so you want to give guns to your criminal friends and dan krenshaw's like

wait hold up a second she said his friends beat their wives yeah she did and dan krenshaw's like uh what because she doesn't speak English. That's my only explanation for how she could possibly misunderstand this. Because one of two things, either she doesn't speak English or she's incredibly stupid. So I'm trying to go flattery. You know what it is? I'm going to be. You know what it is.

She said, look, we don't know because your friends ostensibly haven't taken this background check or you haven't checked. And all these people are checking. So therefore, we have to assume that Dan Crenshaw's friends all beat their wives. But here's my question. I don't know that AOC has ever taken about it. background check. I don't know. Are we willing, willing to take this risk that we have a member of Congress who may very well beat her boyfriend? I don't know. I'm not saying she does. I'm not leveling that act. How would we know? How would we know? It really is guilt before innocent. Like the

presumption of guilt as the new standard of the left. One of the reasons I both love the right and I'm incredibly frustrated with it is I would rather as a person, as a human being, I would rather sit with other gentlemen or you guys and discuss morality, truth, the complexities of history. But the left understands that narrative is like a freight train. It's simple, it's straightforward, and it runs you over. And so while we sit around and we discuss this, and I get this all the time when I read, some of the magazines I love best, some of the people I love best, as they're discussing the details of who did this and, you know, this guy did this.

They are constructing these simplistic narratives that simply sweep away the idea of the rights, sweep away the principles that we live by because they spread so fast. It's the lie that goes around the world before the truth gets its pants on. But really what it is is storytelling because stories are simple.

Stories have basic ideas and they just take people over. And this idea that the gun, you can see the gun, it's ugly, it shoots, it kills people. That's to blame for what's going on is absurd. That's not really even the story they're telling because the real elements of stories,

you know better than anybody else in the room. the real element of story is that you have to have a villain and a hero. And so for the left, it's not about the gun. It's about the person who is not stopping the gun is the villain. And the person who is calling for all the guns to be removed is the hero. And that's that Washington Post editorial today, which is, look at all these dead people. Why isn't Mitch McConnell doing anything? And they said, why isn't there a moral imperative to act?

And it's like, well, act to do what would be the actual question, right? In a political context, you would be saying, what are you talking about doing here? Like act to throw yourself off the highest turret? And we would rather sit around and talk. You would like someone more who sits around says, what do we do here? Here's the situation. Let's sit down and figure out a solution. They understand that the good guy and the bad guy, the simple solution, the simple answer is just much more powerful.

This is the line that they use. The cowardly line, the ugliest line that they use in politics is, we must do something. You, and it's never even we. It's you, Mitch McConnell, you must do something. Do what? articulate one policy that you proposed that would have prevented any of these shootings that would have prevented any of these debts. They never articulate the policy.

Even Politifact admitted that none of the major gun control proposals of the last 10 years would have prevented these shootings. There's a dude I'm friends with named Adam Grant over at Wharton Business School. And he said to me one time, and I thought that it was a great line. He said that any time you want to stop a conversation, start with the problem. If you want to start a conversation, start with the solution. because then you can actually discuss whether the solution applies or not. But what the left understands is that politically speaking,

it never helps to start with the solution. It always helps to start with the problem. Because if you diagnose the problem, everybody goes, ah, you're right, that is a problem. And then you never have to get to the solution. In fact, Donald Trump actually has an inherent gift at this. He was very good at this in 2016. He'd be like, you're being screwed by the man,

and that's why you lost your job. Okay, you've identified a problem. Now, none of the solutions you're talking about necessarily make any sense, right? But that is how you draw narrative. The difference between narrative and solution finding is that solution finding requires a focus on specificity. The more specific you are, the more you can find consensus with some. And it can be tested against reality. Right. And you're defining terms. This is the reason Congress can't pass anything other than sweeping

omnibus legislation anymore. Because you don't do anything. You don't do anything. Because you can tell people, Kamala Harris had a tweet today where she said, when elected president, I will combat climate change by green checkmark, making sure that our most affected minority and poor communities receive the help that they need. It has nothing to do with climate change. Check number two, making sure that big corporations and big polluters pay their fair share. Also has nothing to do with climate change. And number three, like, you know, make people turn off the air conditioners. Whatever it is, I thought it was a glorious tweet for every reason. One, because she ain't going to be president, so I love it when they use this when I'm president language. Right. As it never going to happen.

two, two out of your three solutions don't address climate change at all. They're just about basic liberal redistribor, leftist redistribution schemes. But three, because when you present the problem and not the solution, you're able to posture as though if you had power, the change would be so revolutionary and so sweeping that there won't be hurricanes anymore and there won't be poor people anymore and there won't be big corporations anymore and everything will change when you're president. The reality is if she's president, Wall Street's going to do a little bit worse. Our freedoms are going to get eroded and then she won't be president anymore because we have to run into this country. And Donald Trump is the president. The economy does a little better. Wall Street does a little better.

No wall gets built. That's just it. They have limited power, limited windows of opportunity, but in the old days, they would pass incremental bills that would then you could test the results. We built a bridge in Alaska. Cool. Where does it go? And then we'd be able to look at that. And they would have budget appropriation committees, and they would talk about where they were going to spend instead of the bureaucrats coming in and just whipping through.

But now they don't want to pass anything that undercuts the narrative. That's right. That undercuts their narrative. Well, this is why you saw. Did you see that they're having this climate change debate on CNN tonight, which, I mean, we have nothing to talk about, and our counter-programming is wildly superior. That is going to be just a death slog.

And what was fascinating is that there's this talking point that obviously went around to the Democratic Party about what exactly they should be. So Amy Klobuchar said it, and then Jay Inslee said it, and basically all of them said it. They all said the same thing. We need to get the climate change denier out of the White House. That's not a solution. That's not a policy. Because here's the thing. The reason that the left wants to boil down the climate change debate into denier versus non-denier is because the people who are not,

denying climate change, right? I'm a lukewarmer, meaning that I agree that human activity is causing climate change, and that the majority of climate change is in fact being, we have disagreement in this room on this, and that the majority of climate change is being caused by human activity, and that probably over the next century, the climate will warm somewhere between two degrees Celsius and six degrees Celsius, right? That's the IPCC consensus. I'm not denying any of their underlying facts. I just think all of their solutions are crap. That's right. And aren't actually going to solve anything, and are specifically designed not to solve anything, actually. They don't want to talk about that. Instead, they would prefer to go, got to climate change

and I are out of the White House, as though that solves a thing. But they have no solutions. Their solution is, let's have a bidding war to show how much we care. So you get Toml Harris going, $10 trillion for climate change fighting. And then Bernie Sanders comes along, he's like, infinity! Infinity! And everyone's like, oh, he must care the most.

It's offering infinity. Infinity is so many more than 10. Did you see Prince Harry gave this speech about this on climate change today? Because his big issue for the month was climate change, and then he got caught flying on a private jet four times in 11 days. And so he said, oh, you know, Prince Airy doesn't look like you really care about what you're talking about. Just for safety. So he gives this speech today. And the

premise of the speech was, Britons should not go on vacation. People who are in the United Kingdom should never go on vacation anymore because they fly in the planes and that's really bad for the world. Let them eat cake, but not very much cake. But not a lot of cake. Not too much cake. If he were actually going to give a serious talk on climate change, you would talk about the biggest carbon emitters in the world, right? Which is not the UK, it's not the U.S. It is China by multiples, right? China emits twice as much carbon as the United States does, and we're certainly number two. It emits 25 times as much carbon as the United Kingdom. When you look at plastics in the ocean, we're not on the list. We're nowhere near the list. It's all China, it's Vietnam, it's Indonesia,

it's all of these East Asian countries. If you wanted to come up with a solution to climate change, You would invade China. You would shut down their government. But that's not really what this is about. This is about flogging oneself on the back and making everybody feel really bad. And most importantly, villainizing and vilifying your opponents

to kick a matter of all. Also, collecting all power in one place. Right. To me, the big story of the week is Brexit. And the reason it is, there's a wonderful article about this by Christopher Caldwell in Claremont Review. I have to say,

I shouldn't say it's by Christopher Caldwell. I should say it's edited by Spencer Claven. But it's a brilliant piece about the difference between EU governance and parliamentary governance, which is parliamentary governance, it's delegated governance that people give power to their representatives. EU governance is governance by the elite through the courts. You have rights, the court will decide whether that law that this guy passed is going to stand. And that's what we're really dealing with. Everything, every story, every story that the left tells is really a story meant to funnel power

to a small number of urban elites. Everything. The climate is meant, you say, the solutions don't work, but the solutions all gather power in the central place. Guns, they take away the power of the individual to stand and say, I am a complete thing that needs to be defended and can be defended even against the government.

Every story they tell is about collecting power. And that's why I think the right needs to start selling that narrative. You know, you have power. You have power as an individual. have a complete right as an individual to self-defense, to self-government, to self- decisions that you make yourself. And everything they do takes that away. And we constantly talk about the money.

We constantly say, who's going to pay for that? I want to know how much freedom it's going to take. I want to say, yeah, you want to solve the gun problem, solve it without taking my freedom away. You want to solve climate change. Hey, you know, I love the environment. I want the air to be fresh, the water be clean, solve it without taking my power away.

But everything they do is built on this. And if, you know, I know how dearly you love Steve Bannon. But Steve Bannon had this one quote where he said, if you think they're going to give your government back without a fight, you're kidding yourself. And that's what we're seeing in Brexit. They are doing everything they can to stymie the will of the people.

More people voted for Brexit in Britain than have ever voted for anything in Britain. More people voted for Brexit than have ever voted for anything, and they can't get it done. And they don't even think they're supposed to get it done. They think they're supposed to stop it. And the reason they think they're supposed to stop it is if you don't have to govern. It's just what you said. If you don't have to govern, you don't have to take responsibility. You can just shove it off on the administrative state on the courts. It's all their fault.

And you never have to, you never have to stand up for anything. So I think you're right, the Brexit thing is an enormous story. I wouldn't mind talking a little bit about it, but I think before we do that, we should talk about our friends over at PolicyGenius who make it possible for us to talk about all the other things. It's one of the worst segues. It was just a plummet and the quality segue. I've only got, at best I've got one in it. If that segue made you want to die, perhaps I'm actually thinking about life insurance right now. September is National Life Insurance Awareness Month. I'm not sure that you knew that because who knew that before I just said it?

September is, in fact, National Life Insurance Awareness Month. Getting life insurance is an important thing for you to do as an adult human. Okay, if you're a child, then you don't think about death. Then you become an adult and you realize one day you will plot. And there will be lots of people who are here after you plots. And perhaps you should leave them some money. The best way to do this would be for you to go get some life insurance, but don't think about it too much. Because you don't want to spend the next five years thinking about your impending doom.

I mean, hell, we only have 10 years until we're all dead anyways. I mean, now would be a great time to get life insurance. PolicyGenius is the easy way to shop for life insurance online. In minutes, you can compare quotes from top insurers and find your best price. Once you apply, the PolicyGenius team will handle all the paperwork as well as the red tape. And PolicyGenius doesn't just make life insurance easy. They can also help you find the right home insurance, auto insurance, disability insurance. They can make sure that you're not buried in a pauper's grave like Mozart,

because frankly, you're not going to have his legacy and you'll be just as dead. If you need life insurance, but you haven't gotten around to it, National Life Insurance Awareness Month is a great time for you to check out PolicyGenius.com. Get quotes, apply in minutes. You can do the whole thing on your phone right now. In fact, pause us. If you're listening to this on your phone, go to PolicyGenius,

get your life insurance, and then come back and listen to us ramble for another hour and a half. Policy Genius, the easy way to compare and buy life insurance. My family is in the Tombstone business. I don't know if you guys know this in the headstone business. Now, that was a good transition. That was a really good one. Thank you. I grew up kind of in cemeteries with my grandpa,

which I realize it's a little weird to people who didn't grow up. But not shocking, but not shocking. It's not that macab, really. The one thing that I know is that death is expensive, and nobody really thinks about this. People think, well, I don't need life insurance because I don't need to leave money to my family. It's not my job to make sure that my family's rich.

I had to work, they need to work. That's not the purpose of life insurance fundamentally. Isn't that. It's that when you die, you're leaving liabilities to your family. You're leaving a mortgage that they can't pay. You're leaving a funeral that they can't pay. You're leaving a tombstone, a casket that they can't pay. All of that is covered by having good life insurance.

That's why I think companies like PolicyGenius, I've said before, I think they're the future of the Internet. These are terrific companies that make it so easy to find the best deals possible for you. But it is absolutely true. You don't want to leave your loved ones. It's going to be hard enough when someone goes through a death of a loved one. Just the emotional loss to also leave people with a huge financial loss. That old jackass didn't leave you anything to take care of the funeral.

This is why I'm not only having myself stuffed, but I've already had myself stuffed. When those people have noticed, it's an animic corpse. When those people on Twitter said, get stuffed. I don't think that it meant what you think they meant. So let's talk just briefly about Brexit, because I don't know that everybody understands everything that's going on there. And really, the machinations, even just over the last 48 hours, have been pretty unbelievable. So, Drew, explain, why do they have funny accents? They have funny because they just have never lived.

You know why? I once asked somebody in England, You know, how come you guys are so eloquent? And he said, well, it's our language, dear boy. So they have those angry. Also, why are they the villains in every movie? Every movie, it doesn't matter. I actually have a good theory about that.

Vestages of the Revolution. Yeah, it is. It's the same reason that priests are villains in Gothic fiction. It's because they're afraid they'll come back and take the world back again. You know that the British at the time of the founding probably didn't have British accents? That's the British at the time of the founding. Well, they would have talked more like Virginians, probably. And that when we watched,

kind of long time ago in movies, everyone has a British accent. Like even George Washington has a... But I mean, like, founding era, like George Washington has a British accent. But the truth is that actually the people in Britain didn't even have British accents at that time. They probably sounded like Virginians now. But the thing about Brexit that is fascinating,

I mean, what they do, what they have now is they have this new guy, Boris Johnson, and everybody compares him to Donald Trump because he's a little wild and he has that hair. He has the same hair. But he is also... He's a classics professor. He's a classics professor.

Yeah, he's a very... very, very intelligent guy. Donald Trump's only classic was like a 1972 playboy. That's not a thing. I thought you meant Trump was the classics. What in Boris Johnson? It was one of them went to eat in the Knoxville. I can't remember which one.

The other one went to Wharton. But they voted for Brexit and then they put Theresa May in there who was anti-Brexit. And she made the sound. She said, Brexit means Brexit, but she didn't mean it. She really thought it was something that had to be handled.

And if you go to the EU, who does not want Britain to leave, because once Britain leaves, All the other countries are out. Oh, yeah, it's over. And Britain, you know. And they're blackmailing Britain. It's important to remember that things have happened on the continent that Britain has not partaken on.

Nazism, the Napoleonic revolution, the Inquisition. All of these things Britain said, I don't think so. I don't know what I do. That's why they are, what Winston Churchill said, part of the English-speaking peoples. Britain and us, Britain would be far better being the 51st state than they would be in the EU. They have much more in common with us

than they do with the rest of the continent. And they don't want them to leave, and so they've done everything to foil them. And what they've done is they've basically said, oh, you know, how are you going to land your planes in Paris if you don't have a trade deal with us? So you have to make a deal with us if you want to leave. And what Boris Johnson has said is, let me tell them,

just like Donald Trump, he says, let me negotiate and tell them we will crash out on October 31st, as we're supposed to, if they don't make a deal, and they will make a deal. and they have mobilized both the conservatives and the left. Although I think that everybody who's saying that Johnson misplayed this, I think Johnson knew exactly what was going to happen here.

I think that... He's not done yet either. No, I mean, well, he's already suggested snap elections. Yeah, but he's got to get a vote for that so far. He's been signing in that. The deal is that basically, if the conservative sign along with the left, that there will be no, no deal Brexit, then there will be also snap elections.

That's the deal they're trying to cut right now. And I think Johnson can live with that. He's figuring, okay, fine, so let's do this thing. And then I'm going to come in with my own majority. and Brexit's going to, the Brexit party will join the conservatives, and will have purified the rump. Interestingly, Theresa May took the same chance and lost, but I think Johnson will win.

Nobody wants Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn is a madman. He's a communist. He's an anti-Semite. He's a bad guy. Nobody wants him running. But the day for a no-deal Brexit, like they're out of the EU on October 31st,

compel our high water. Well, not anymore. So they just voted that Parliament has the capacity to stop a no-deal Brexit. That was the vote that happened today. Right. So that people were saying, well, that's the Trump card against Johnson. Now he's basically sort of a vestigial organ of government because he can't get the Brexit. He can't do a no-deal Brexit. He's not going to be able to make a deal with the people who are in the

government. That was Theresa May's problem. So he said, okay, fine. Well, then let's just do a snap election. And let's find out what the British people think of all of this. And the conservatives will probably go along with that much of it, right? The conservatives will probably go along with labor and liberal Democrats and say, okay, well, we'll sign on to the no-no-deal Brexit, but in return, you have to do a snap election. And the results are not going to be pretty for labor. I think labor is wildly overestimating the level of support. And I also think there is a reason why we love the British. Down deep, they are a stubborn, nasty people. And they will stand up, they will stand up for their rights. Now, all my friends in England are kind of moderate liberals. You know,

they're all kind of in this liberal, not all of them, but a lot of them are liberals. But when you say to them, isn't the fact that the EU won't let you leave a reason to leave? There's always this long silence. They go, yeah. And I think they may have had it. Weird, weird, unrelated question. So have you guys ever seen these kind of counter, these history counterfactuals? So for just a second, what do you think would have happened? This is so weird and out of the blue.

But what the hell? There's nothing to talk about. So what do you think would have happened if the Americans had lost the American Revolution? Because there is a school of thought that basically the Western world would have been better off if the British retain both Canada and the United States. Because eventually America becomes bigger than Britain.

We become the capital. We become the capital of Great Britain. and World War II never happens because the Germans are like, why would we possibly want to take on this enormous empire that is never going to be broken up, basically. Although Hitler really didn't want to fight with English anyway. He put it off as long as he possibly could.

Right, but he at least had a calculated decision that he might be able to take on Britain, but he couldn't take on both Britain and America, at least not without the Japanese attack. The thing about these counterfactuals, is things always work out better in them? Which makes me suspicious. And I do, you know,

Edmund Burke, the great philosopher of kind of modern conservative thought, did draw this distinction between the American Revolution, which is good and the French Revolution, which is bad. And so much of the logic of the American Revolution is we were just Englishmen. And as a result, we were stubborn and nasty and demanded our freedom and demanded our rights. So something tells me if we lost the American Revolution, we probably would have fought it again, that there was something. I don't think anything in history is inevitable, but as near as you can get to inevitable, something tells me American independence was going that way. military, probably in the world at the time of the American Revolution, they did not have a great enough military to hold

this continent. I mean, they tried in 1812, right? It doesn't exist. It just doesn't exist. I think is what if they hadn't been a civil war? Because I think the slavery would have disappeared almost in the same amount of time and with a lot less dead. That's the one counterfactual I've always kind of believed in, that the Civil War didn't

have to happen and slavery was a doom. Although the South's push for extension of slavery across the continent. No question. No question. Was very successful in the 1850s. So there is the argument that at the very least, like I think the idea that slavery would have lasted until the 1960s or something. That's an absurd argument.

But I think there's a fairly good argument that slavery would have lasted into the 1880s. It probably would last another 15 or 20 years post-Civil War simply because the slave states had such an interest in maintaining it, and they were expending westward. That was what the entire 1850s were basically about. And the other one, of course,

is if John Wilkes-Boot had missed or hadn't killed Lincoln. Well, that would have been, I mean, that really is the greatest tragedy is the failure of the Republican reconstruction in the aftermath of the Senate. That really is the great tragedy of American history because right after the Civil War, the radical Republicans were ready to basically,

they were talking about ending segregation. They were talking about really using the power of the federal government to quash the Jim Crow laws. I mean, it really would have been a sea change in the history of the United States. Jim Crow certainly would have been what Jim Crow later became. That's why the election of 1876 is such a tragedy, right? And it does suggest that giving up principle

for temporary power is never. never a very good solution. No. Right? Because in that election, for those who aren't familiar with presidential history, basically the Republicans

in order to maintain the presidency decided that they would give up on reconstruction, and reconstruction would be over, and in return, they would get the presidency because their boy had lost the electoral college vote

while winning the popular vote. Also, of course, the lessons, you just don't get that many Lincoln's, you know? Get a few, and they're important. They matter. But this is actually one of the things

about the American system of government that people seem to neglect. And that is the American government was built for bad presidents. It was built for people who were going to suck at their jobs. This is why when people are like, oh, the government's so frustrating, we can't get anything done. It was like, right. Because the founders knew.

They're all right. It drives me up a wall when people are like, who are the great American presidents? There'd be like seven of them. No, they've been three. Very few. I mean, the number of ex. Name 20 presidents. I'm neck.

Maybe you. Yeah. I can name 20. I can. I mean, I wrote a book on them. But the number of good presidents, when people say, name the best presidents, you get to like six and you're like, I got nothing. Right? You go like Washington and Lincoln, you got Reagan, maybe Coolidge.

I don't put TR in that list, count like T.R. as a president? Chester Arthur, obviously. Chester Arthur is a fascinating story. He was only put on the ticket as a sop to the New York insiders. And then he ends up as president and didn't want to be president. And then he ends up shutting the door on the New York insiders. He's really an interesting story. I actually love Chester Arthur. I also have a secret reason to love Chester Arthur, which is that in 1880 on the presidential ticket of James Garfield and Chester Arthur,

it was the first blank book in American history, which was called the statesmanship and achievements and political achievements of General Hancock regular Democratic nominee for president. He said one day this genre will make Michael Moller. So thank you, President Garfield. But it is true that between basically Martin Van Buren, maybe Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, there's nobody.

Right, like the number of good presidents between maybe, maybe, and that's even if you like the the Texas war, which is very questionable. I mean, Lincoln opposed it because he thought it was an expansion of slave states. Yeah, no, that's right. And then between the Civil War and basically Calvin Coolidge and Warren G. Harding, it is a pantheon of nobody's end or progressives and the country did great. And the country did great. Like, the whole system was designed for people to be terrible at their jobs.

And that's why now it is super irritating when you see, like, this drove me nuts. Did you see that video of Trump at the, at the FEMA headquarters? It's not about, this isn't about Trump. I had the same exact reaction to Bush and the same exact reaction to Obama. And it's like, there's Trump and he's out there with his FEMA hat on. And it's like, what's he going to do? Like, really, what's he going to do? We have an entire department of government that is specifically designed for disaster response.

You think that Trump is sitting there with like his little Strygo board, figuring out exactly where all of the resources are deployed or that Obama was doing that during Hurricane Sandy? That's why it drove me nuts when you had Chris Christie hugging Obama like, wow, you've come here, Mr. President, he's not the dictator of Earth, he's not the king of Earth, He's not the Emperor of Earth. He's a slub with a job with delegated powers and the picture of the president as the problem solver in chief who's going to fix all of our problems.

It's the reason you get these idiocy's like Kamala Harris saying, in our first hundred days, if they don't do what I want to do, I'm going to ban all the guns. And it's like, no, you know what you're not going to do any of that? Because Kamala Harris is not going to be the president. I want to check in and hear from some of our dailywired.com subscribers. We've got Elisha beaming in live from the Ben Shapiro show broom closet. But Alicia, are you with us?

I sure am. And don't forget, I know you're so used to saying that. That only subscribers get to ask the questions, but tonight, everyone gets to ask the questions. So head on over to the Daily Wire YouTube channel, or, which you should be subscribing to, by the way. Or be sure to head over to the Daily Wire Facebook page where we are pulling these questions from. By the way, if I don't say somebody's name, it's because their name is, I love Ben Shapiro for president 2020 something, something. There's even some people with like, what are the odds? Yeah. So it's just really difficult, but if you want your name included, be sure to include it in your comment and your question of the guys.

Jessica did such, and she says that she is a closet conservative living in the New York area. So all of her friends are liberal, obviously, because she's in a liberal mecca, and she doesn't want to lose her friends. Do you think it's common to be a closet conservative today? Oh. Yes. Oh, yes. Not only is it common to be a closet conservative. You know, in the most liberal areas.

Okay, we all work in Hollywood. How many prominent people in Hollywood have been through this office? Oh my gosh. A lot. Like a lot. Okay. And I have said on my show, I will never, ever say the names of the people who have been here because it would ruin their careers and they would get excoriated by the left.

I've met with a lot of prominent people in positions of power who are conservative and who will never, ever say so. Now, Jessica, I do have an issue. You're wrong. You need to get new friends. If your friends can't tolerate the fact that you differ from them on tax rates or on traditional marriage or on the value of an unborn human life, they're not your friends. They're jerks. I mean, the fact is that I have friends who disagree with me on all of those things.

And you know what? Fine. That's called America. If your friends can't tolerate the fact that you have a difference of opinion, they're not your friends, their acquaintances who hang out with you because you have nothing better to do at night. It's so true. And by the way, a lot of people say things on Facebook that they wouldn't say to your face. And sometimes if you look at them in the eye and say, this is what I believe and this is why I believe it. You can get further than you can on Facebook where they wish you did. To Jessica's point, I do have a little bit of sympathy because it's not only that many, many prominent conservatives come through our office.

I'm sorry, Hollywood actors or filmmakers come through and are conservative. Many come through who are not conservative. And they're just open-minded. They wouldn't have an actual discussion. Did you guys see our friend Glenn Beck was in town this week and he took a picture with Jason Bloom, the CEO of Bloom House, the horror film studio?

The guy's getting his face melted off. He's being excoriated on social media right now. I don't even think he agree. I don't think he's conservative at all of Jason Bloom. He's just a guy. Did you see what happened to Andy Lassner? Andy Lassner is a producer for Alan. Really nice dude.

And I can say really nice dude because he's given me permission to say really nice dude. And Andy Lassner corresponds with a lot of people online. He had this conversation about gun control. And Dana Lash replied to him with a bunch of ideas on what could be done to stop gun violence. And he was like, those are good ideas. And Aaron Rupar, the quote unquote journalist, right? So much journalisming over Vox. The repository of all things stupid.

And Aaron Rupar tweeted out, you should never have a conversation. with a paid shill like Dana Lash. And it's like he literally just had a human conversation with a human. That's how it works with these thoughts. You saw the Deborah Messing and Eric McCormick attack. They're having a fundraiser for Trump in Beverly Hills. And Eric McCormick says, publish to the Hollywood reporter, publish the names of the people going so I know who I don't want to work with.

And then he said, well, I didn't mean a blacklist. That is a blacklist. I just want you to publish the name so that they don't work anymore. I developed a project with Eric McCormick once. The one thing I just want to add to this is Deborah Meadow. and said, well, I would be proud to say who I support. Yeah, because you would get more awards and more parts, you know. Yeah, there's no consequences for supporting what you're for.

I did a project with Eric McCormick once, and he's a generous, likable, intelligent guy. It's just proof politics makes you insane. Yeah, it makes you stupid. I guarantee you if we knew Eric McCormick and Deborah Messing and all these guys, and we had an honest heart-to-heart conversation with them, They actually want most of the things that we want. That's right. You know, they want people to be better off tomorrow than they were yesterday.

They want to be free broadly. They may not agree with gun freedoms, but they largely want to be left alone. They largely want to do their own thing. They want to be free to raise their children. They want to be free to make their way and make their living. They think they're on the side of the angels. They think that they're on the side of being tolerant. They don't understand that they are the thing that they fear.

They are the actual acquisition. I so agree with this. They do not know. They don't see themselves. They don't see themselves truly. They really... They need to make another movie about 1950s McCarthyism in which McCarthyism is the worst thing that ever happened to humanity

and the communists were never a threat in Hollywood. Well, communism wasn't as bad as lower taxes and deregulation, though. That's right. There is a portion to this too, though, where you've got to, at a certain point, have some dignity, which is, I... Look, many of my friends are liberal. I don't know if it's most of my friends,

but it's a lot of my friends who are liberals. I am perfectly willing to make a lot of jokes about my political views and be perfectly self-effacing and take a bunch of punches. And I'm totally willing to do that. To a point. But I am not going to hide my opinions. To my friends. I mean, maybe if you're working in some corporate environment,

maybe to keep your job, I don't know, there's some argument. To your friends, you're not going to say who you are. There are no friends at all. And they obviously don't respect you. Or maybe they don't even know what you really believe. You've got to have a little bit of dignity. And look, we all know all the secret concerns. all around Hollywood. There's a lot of them. I know a lot of them in New York, too. There are many

people who have come up to me in New York. They'll say, Michael, I really love the show, but I can't be seen talking to you. That actually happened to me once in an event. There are more registered Republicans in L.A. County than in any other county in America. Is that true? When Michael Knowles is telling you to have more dignity, I think you need to have more dignity. That's the end of the discussion. And it's 100% true. Anytime someone comes up to me and says, I lost a friend when they found out about my politics, I always say, no, you didn't. Yeah, that's right. Alicia, what else do you have for us?

Somebody wants to know, is it actually possible that we could lose the electoral college? Yeah, of course. Yeah. Well, in which way? Do you mean, is it possible that Donald Trump could not carry the electoral college? No, I think they mean, like, will Democrats win by abolishing the electoral college? Yeah, yeah, 100%. What do we know, the running tally on states that have passed these anti-electoral college bills?

It ain't that high. I think it's harder to get rid of the electoral college than it would be to stack the Supreme Court. I think they can stack the Supreme Court a lot easier than they can get everybody. At least 10 states have passed these bills where they say our electoral votes will go to the popular vote winner in the national election, not to whoever won. But none of them are swing states. They're all like heavy blue states. It's like Massachusetts. It is a question whether that becomes, you know, that can be, is that constitutional?

Can they get away with that? Yeah, you can do that. Sure. The states get to select their electors. So yes, they can, but none of that makes, I mean, you require a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral. That's why it's so much harder. And honestly, it's always amusing to me when the left's like, well, that's not representative, the electoral college. Like, why don't you take a look at this thing we have?

It's called the United States Senate, where a place called Montana with three people. Like, they have fewer people in Montana than they have in this room. Right, this is right. Montana has more senators than they have Congress people because the population of Montana is so low. It's harder to be a congressperson in Montana than it is to be a senator in Montana, which is hysterical. And they have the same number of votes in the Senate, which is a pretty powerful body. that the state of California does, which has 50 million people.

And you never hear the left being like, you know, the U.S. Senate, we should abolish the U.S. Senate because they realize how ridiculous that would be. But I don't want to get rid of the electoral college. I actually want to get rid of the popular vote for president. I don't think that we should have popular votes in the states to elect our senators.

The 17th Amendment is an abomination. That the states, the state government should choose the electors that go to the electoral college. I don't think that it should be a popular vote for president. Yeah, I don't think so. He's saying that people should vote for their state legislatures, and the state legislatures vote for the electorate. See, I think we should have,

I think we should go back to when senators were appointed. I like that. Certainly, yeah. We should abolish the 17th Amendment. Abolish the 17th Amendment. It's a disaster. But what the 17th Amendment does and what the popular vote for president does is that erodes the concept of the state as a sovereign entity,

which really destroys federalism. And once you get there, the entire American experiment is basically over. What's so funny about the electoral college is it's actually mediating between giving the state's power in the Senate, as it was originally constructed, and giving the people power through the House of Representatives, because as it was initially apportioned, you had the representatives in the House, plus the two senators, there you have your electors. Of course, that is all lost on the left. My greater fear is the Chris Hayes fear, which is the line he said the other day, he said, if the electoral college weren't explicitly articulated in the

Constitution, it would be unconstitutional. I say, well, of course, that's true. I fear these ridiculous arguments and leftist jurisprudence doing more harm to the electoral college. The leftist jurisprudence is really dangerous because the judiciary made the Supreme Court ruled back in the 70s, I believe, the one-man-one vote rule. And it abolished all sorts of state regulations about how exactly people would be elected and gerrymandering and all the rest of us. And the dissent pointed out, you know, we have some problems with the one-man-one vote rule in the United States Senate, right? Where certain votes count more than other votes, obviously. And it's so funny, the left, which has now become purely majoritarian, right?

Suddenly the left is purely majoritarian. After years of arguing correctly, that minority rights were actually in danger because of pure majoritarianism. The pure majoritarianism is explicitly directed at a minority, right? The minority of voters. And the people who have largely been damaged throughout the course of American history were minorities in states where they did not hold the majority, right? Namely, black people in the Jim Crow South.

Suddenly, the left is like, well, I want a pure majoritarian system right now. Well, they're only going to want that until they lose, right? I mean, this is obviously a moment of convenience. By the way, they only won it around issues of Democrat and Republican. If you get into other demographic considerations, they will panic at the idea of majoritarian rule. By the way, it's 15 states. 15 states have already passed laws. You know, this is what makes the federalist papers kind of tragic reading at this point,

because they are always arguing in the federalist papers that the central government will not take over, will not take away the powers of the states, and they explain why very carefully, but they just didn't imagine television. They didn't imagine a communication network that would make us all feel that we and Arkansas are somehow one country. I mean, I think obviously the erosion of state authority

and the growth of the federal government some people attributed to the Civil War, but it really isn't even about that. It really grew in the aftermath of the progressive era and then through FDR. Wickergey Philburn happens in 1942. But it did. But communication and travel,

actually change the concept of where you are. And I think this happened when nationalism was created, got so powerful after the railroads came in, and the telegraph and all this that made you feel like you were a nation. Russell Kirk, the great conservative writer, he called the automobile the mobile Jacobin. He's the most radical thing in the world. Yeah, and I think television has had this major, major effect.

Communications, let's call it, let's call it electronic communications, where now suddenly we're sitting around talking about the crisis of shootings in America. But are there that many shootings in Ohio? Are there that many shootings in Arkansas? Are we conceiving of ourselves too much as this gigantic country and not enough in the states? I think we are. And I don't think the federalists saw that coming.

Well, I mean, I think that the federalist does talk about the capacity. They think that over time people will start to identify more as Americans and less as state citizens. I mean, that is something they talk about in the federalist papers. But with that said, what's really happened, and this is the great divide between rural and urban, is that urban people, and I'm not, that is not, that is certainly not meant to mean black people. I mean literally people who live in urban areas. Right. Right.

People who live in urban areas see each other as citizens of the Republic. And people who are living in rural areas see themselves as citizens of their local communities. Right. Which makes perfect sense. Because if you're living in an urban area, life in Austin is much more like life in L.A. And life in Austin is like life in Slayton. And you know more people in Slaten. And you know more people, if you're in L.

Slighton. You know your neighbors a lot better than I do in my own apartment building in Los Angeles. Elisha. I'm just glad that you guys didn't want to abolish the 19th Amendment because I've heard that's all Republican men want to do. Well, we haven't gone to that question. Just the 17th. I'm okay with it. Republican men passed the 19th Amendment. What are you talking about? Those idiots. Those fools. Not according to Deborah Messing. Gosh, Jeremy. That's a joke by Andrew Claven, by the way. For media matters, he doesn't actually want to abolish the female vote. That's Media Matters explainter for this evening.

All right. Zach is a Daily Wire subscriber. I hope you love your leftist-tears tumbler, Zach. And he wants to let y'all know that he's a conservative living in Boston, Massachusetts. What are your opinions on the straight pride parade, the Antifa protests, and the media demonization of all those involved? I think it's great. I think the pride parade is hilarious. I think it's so good.

One, it's not a straight pride parade. It was a pro-Trump, pro-America parade. that one of the main photos from the parade is of a transgender woman that is a man who identifies as a woman wearing a dress holding a big trans flag that had Trump 2020 on it. It was obviously just trolling the left

and trolling the whole idea of pride parades which is a terrible idea because pride is the deadliest of the seven deadly sins and we shouldn't celebrate pride. I think it was great. There were 200 marchers they were by all accounts very well behaved. There were thousands of protesters, some of whom were

Antifa protesters who were attacking police officers. I think what it really comes down to is using humor to mock a very corrupt corrosive ideology, which is this leftist embrace of pride. And I think it's great to use you to do it. I actually think that's fair because really when you look at what the leftist selling is they're selling racism. They're selling racism. They think that ours is good racism because we're the racists for the people who had racism used against them. But of course, it's all racism.

Racism is racism. And I just, and I hate it. When I watch the New York Times selling this 16-19 project where everything in America comes out of slavery, that's the kind of logic, seriously, that some toothless clansman in the back room of a pool hall would come up with. It's that level of stupidity, that level of simplicity. And the only way to get it back is to mock them, is to point out the contradiction in terms. I don't believe in straight pride. I don't believe in gay pride.

I believe in people, you know, having rights and being individuals. I don't really like pride. and doing basically what they want to do if they don't destroy the polity. You know, and I think that you're absolutely right as long as we keep our sense of humor about it and as long as we don't actually subscribe to this nonsense.

Which is ridiculous. Yeah. I mean, frankly, I didn't completely under, I feel like I'm missing something. The massive amount of blowback to the straight pride parade, I find confusing because I don't feel like the straight pride parade was really fighting anything.

Like, what exactly is it fighting other than the media attention to the gay pride movement? And that's just kind of trollery. So was like, was anybody afraid that the straight Pride marchers were going to march down to city hall and just start ripping up marital documents? Like, what exactly were they so pissed about? I mean, they're not Klansmen.

They are not. No, no one's right, though. It's a joke. Of course, it's a joke. And it worked, obviously. Yeah. I also disagree with the question suggested that the media is making everyone involved look foolish. I don't think that's true.

The media is making everybody involved on one side look foolish. They deny the existence of anti-examination. Tifa, essentially. Yeah. Antifa is a bunch of disparate groups. That's just a label that was created by the riot. By the way, 36 of them were arrested for attacking people and attacking cops. And as perfect trolls do, immediately this got the future of the Democratic Party, according

to the DNC chairman, AOC and Diana Presley raising money to spring these thugs, these criminals, out of jail, these people who attack innocent civilians and who attack cops. within one day they were begging to raise money. That shows you a big divide. Although the judge was great. The judge said, I told you not to come and, you know, we're going to send you away for 90 days. You shouldn't have been here. I thought he was on top of it. Helicia. How dare Michael Knowles use that descriptive in racist word to describe Antifa. Do you know that you're not allowed to use that word thug? Right, right. It's wrong. Gosh, Michael. Get the memo.

I know. I'm terrible. Here comes a question from somebody watching on Facebook. they want to know what do you think young conservative should or could do in order to help fix the huge divide between the right and the left in America today? See, here's where I think that speaking out in a polite way to your friends is important and something everyone can do. I think that the problem with hiding is the time for hiding is actually passed. And I agree that we all have to protect our jobs and I don't want people to get arrested. I don't want people to lose their work and their way of making a living. but if you keep your mouth shut, and if you don't say, you know, this is why I think what I think,

you never move anybody. You never move anybody. And if you're constantly hiding away, and if you're constantly afraid, that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to make you afraid. They're trying to make you silent. And I think that the individual, you know, people ask this all the time because they don't have your microphone. They don't have our platform that we use to speak out. But if you don't say, speak for yourself as an individual, then how are individuals, you know, individual rights going to survive. If you don't say to your professor, you know, it's not fair what you're doing because this is why I believe what I believe. If you don't stand up in class, if you don't stand up for what you believe, I don't understand how we win. We lose in silence.

You know, when the Washington Post says democracy, dies in darkness, which I think should be democracy, dies in sanctimonious self-congratulation. But I think that there is a point to that. It dies in the silence of individuals, too afraid to speak up. And I know they make it tough. and I know they put a price on it. I'm not saying it's easy, but I think you have to speak at least politely and say, I'm on the other side. I think there are a couple of other tips.

I mean, obviously, I agree with all of that. But I think there are a couple of other things. One is that trollery is fun, but it's not actually the way to convince people. Meaning that, sorry, Nolz. It just ruined his old career. But the fact is, trollery is important because it gives some people

the capacity to speak up in ways that they, wouldn't have otherwise, right? It makes them feel emboldened like, okay, this guy's doing a funny thing and I can do a funny thing too. And some of that's good, some that's good. But trolling is inherently dehumanizing to the people who you're very often trying to talk to. And you don't actually end up drawing. Sincerity, I actually think, is the left's main draw. They're sincere in their wrong beliefs. And that sincerity is very convincing to a lot of people, even if it's faux sincerity. It's all about how much they care. It's all about how sincere they are in their beliefs. And you'll even hear people on the left admit this, right? They'll say things like, I may not,

I mean, AOC said this, right? I basically don't know what I'm talking about, but I'm morally correct, right? Her sincerity is the selling point. Biden actually said that, too. Right, Biden said that too. So I think that trollery is the preferred methodology of people online, but in real life, it's actually extraordinarily off-putting when you're trying to convince people. And I think that's important.

The second thing is that simultaneously, you cannot go into battles negative. You do want to be upbeat. It's unattractive to be negative all the time. It's the reason why the left, I really believe there is going to be a backlash against the left because they're so damned annoying. I mean, they're intensely humorless and annoying. Like, if the future looks like Hannah Gadsby, kiss your future goodbye, gang. I mean, no one is going to vote for Hannah Gadsby. That's not a thing.

You know, trying to redefine humor to say that, well, you know when you weren't laughing and you felt like actually taking a drill bit and putting it directly between your eyebrows and just that. That was the funny part. Right. And when you felt like that, that's what humor feels like. What humor feels like is that feeling of a drill bit going directly into your prefrontal cortex, which is a Hannah Gadsby special. When we're going to redefine humor to do all of that, it's annoying to everybody. The woke-schooled left is alienating an enormous number of young people.

It's why you get people, this is amusing to me, this I do love, is you get people like Harris Swisher over a recode, who's a wild leftist. And she's saying to Susan Wedgicki, the head of YouTube, she's like, I think I've lost my son. He's watching Ben Shapiro videos. Well, lady, did it ever occur to you? Maybe the reason that your son is watching my videos is some more amusing? than you, is because you're so irritating all the time. I don't mean to rip on your mom, dude.

But like, she's very irritating in the way that she approaches these issues because the original suggestion is, if you disagree with me or a moron, we can't have a conversation in all of us. So conservatives have a tendency because the culture is against us, because Hollywood is against us, and the universities are against us, and the media are against us. It's very easy to fall into this feeling of,

I'm beaten down by the world that anger is our best solution out. That if I just channel my anger, and my anger will free us all. My righteous rage will free us all. The truth is that if you actually want to win, it is, yes, battling. But battling with happiness and demonstrating that you're happy in your life

because unhappiness is unattracting. I mean, I hate to use that word. You're right, Jeremy. Eric McCormick and Deborah Messing aren't going to move to the USSR no matter how many tweets you give them saying that they should. Those guys are our neighbors.

Those guys are our fellow citizens. Those guys are our... We've got to find some way to win the policy arguments, win the political arguments. But aren't we sort of saying the same thing? It seems to me the thing we're all identifying with the left that's so annoying and so off-putting to the public is that they're so damned self-serious all the time and they're constantly scolding us. And it seems to me, and the reason that that kid likes your show and the reason that Donald Trump got elected president is because conservatives can take themselves lightly every so often. Not to say we take

the world lightly, but we can take ourselves a little bit lightly. Chester didn't have that line. He said, the angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. I think the more we bog ourselves down, when I think of the anger and the fury and all this stuff, I think of the left. I don't really think of the right. I want to give one really specific piece of advice, though, because we've talked in pretty general terms. The question was, what can young people, what can millennials do to help win the debate between left and right? And the answer is, Subscribe to the Daily Wire. Subscribe to the Daily Wire.

The answer is, get married and have children as soon as possible. That is the honest to goodness answer. You are, if you're listening and asking this question, you are the caretaker of a set of values that until now in this country we have taken for granted that those values will automatically be pushed forward. They will only be pushed forward if you push them forward. And there will only be someone to push them forward to if you create that someone to push them forward to. You can't, the political fight is ultimately a cultural fight.

The cultural fight is ultimately a fight for the soul of every individual to actually put legs to their values. I've told this story before. I was a huge proponent for free markets. I was a huge proponent for human freedom. I was a huge proponent of human accomplishment. I pride myself a little bit. I'm for most of my friends. I was like a little bit of, even when they would disagree with me, maybe I was still the guru of these ideas.

is in our friend community. I was at least the guy you would argue with, you know. I didn't make any money. I didn't make any money for 15 years of being a proponent for these things, because I wouldn't apply them to myself. I'm a huge proponent for people having children. I don't have any children. I'm a huge proponent for people getting married young.

I got married at 30 because I didn't apply any of my values to myself. I thought that it was a battle of ideas, and it isn't. It's a battle for your life. And I don't mean you're fighting for your life. I mean, you're fighting to live your life. It's only worth something if you do live it. If you read the books, if you do the thing. I cannot tell you how much I agree with this because I think that it is an amazing thing.

The left is selling something kind of easy. Don't have kids because it's a terrible world. You don't have to get married. Whatever your sexuality is, that's your identity, which is nonsense to begin with. To live the life that you say you're supposed to live is everything. And by the way, I also think it's the definition of, manhood. To live the life that you say you want to live is the definition of manhood.

You know, I'm reading these wonderful books that I wish you would read. I think you would love them. Anthony Trollope was the great was the conservative Dickens. And he wrote these two books that are the best books I've ever read about politics, aside from the power broker, which one is called Phineas Finn and the other is called Phineas redux, which is about this politician in Parliament. And at one point, he asked, what's manhood? And he said, manhood is being who you seem to be, is being who you appear to be.

He said, a woman can be fake without compromising her womanhood. It may not be right for her womanhood, but it won't compromise her womanhood because there's a little bit of show to womanhood, not to manhood. To be a man, you really have to live the life. You say you're going to live. And I can't tell you how much of the stuff in the mailbag is guys who have the right ideas, but they're not living out that life. And you know what? If you didn't live it yesterday, live it today. You know, you only have today.

You cannot make up for the past. Live it today. Start living it now. And I just think it's everything. And your life isn't about the things that you're, it isn't about the people outside of you who you think mean you harm. That's right. Like your life isn't about owning the libs and your life isn't about winning, getting Donald Trump reelected president, your life isn't about making the best meme on the internet.

Those are things that you think and those are things that your life is about yourself, your community, your family, your, the work that you do, you know, God isn't served by human hands. though he needed anything. And yet the same guy who said that, one city later says he's God's servant. There's no contradiction because what he's saying is, God doesn't need us. We are nevertheless his instruments. We're not contributing to him as though he were in need, but he does use us to accomplish things on earth. And if you're fighting against that mission, who cares if Donald Trump gets forward? And I really do this, to think this is a fundamental distinction between right and left, is that when we talk about ideas and living out your ideas, the dominant position of the left

is that you never have to live out your ideas. You can say all of these wonderful things about all the things you're going to do for other people, but all it really requires is for me to say that I want to do them, and now I'm a good person. It's all virtue signaling or taking money out of somebody else's pocket. I can talk about the value of helping the poor. What I really mean by that is that I'm going to use the government

to point a gun at a bunch of people who aren't me and force them to help the poor or I'm going to take their money. I mean, the fact is that the best proof of what, I mean, we all agree on this, but the best proof of what everybody in the room is saying is that when you die, the ideas are basically going to be gone, but all of the stuff that you did is not going to be gone,

particularly if you had kids. If you belt up an institution, if you had children, if you have a community and a family, when you die, no one's going to realize what your intentions were because it's going to be gone. Everybody's going to forget about that. The only thing that's going to matter is the works that continue on through a ripple effect into the world.

You know, what's funny is it works the other way, too, is that the left is constantly talking about, oh, everybody should do everything sexual or they want to do. but they live, so many of the leftists I know, live these conservative lives. And, you know, what was that wonderful line in Charles, what's his name? Charles Marie. Yeah, where he says they don't preach what they practice.

Right. And I think it does work the other way that a lot of them are living lives that we would admire and then saying things that we think are completely ridiculous. By the way, one reason we should have a flat tax that I'd never thought about. I mean, I've always wanted us to have a flat tax because it's the only moral, if any tax is moral, the only moral version of it is that we all pay the same as a percentage, right? If you pay... Percentages mean that I still pay more if I make more money.

That's right. I make more a lot more. In fact, I pay my fair share, which is the share of what I... But the other reason to have a flat tax is because if you have a flat tax, then every time that the left tries to self-congratulate themselves on the basis of the things that they believe, it would be their money that they're spending. So people on the left will actually say, I don't need to give charity. I'm for the government taking care of it.

There was a New York Times article, and it was specifically about the differentials and charitable giving between red states and blue states. And, of course, red states give enormously more charity than blue states and religious believers in America give enormously more charity than non-religious believers. There's one telling line. And it said, well, that's true. But if you take into account local tax rates, then the left gives a lot of money. And it's like, yes, but the people they're taxing are also the same red, red county Republicans. A lot of those people are paying twice, right? I give a lot of charity and I pay enormous amounts of taxes in the state of California.

And if you think, well, in order to bite carbon change, we need a carbon tax, and I'm going to have to pay part of that carbon tax out of my own pocket instead of just the evil Coke brothers having to pay for the whole thing. Suddenly now you have to think, do I give a shit about carbon tax? I not care that much about these hurricanes. I had a funny experience over the weekend. My wife and I went to see this movie called Don't Let Go. It's a little police movie. But it has a thing...

Did they like a... No, they don't like. But it has a... It's funny because it has a time travel thing, and I always joke about time travel is you can't make it make sense because you can't travel in time. And they solved the problem by God,

because with God, all things are possible. I thought, well, that was actually a good plot point, a good way to introduce faith. Next day, that's Saturday night, Sunday morning I'm in church, and I look over classic Hollywood experience, I think that looks just like the guy who started in that movie.

It's the guy who started praying, and I thought, well, that's how he solved the problem. Alicia, we're going to do a rapid fire round. Let's go through 10 questions, highly targeted. We're going to do our absolute best for just the person to whom the question is addressed. We'll answer the question. We will not succeed, but we're going to do our level best. All right, this one is for Michael, and he was talking about the squad earlier.

This listener or viewer wants to know, why isn't there a Democratic presidential candidate who's combating the squad and making it known to America's voters that the moderates in the Democratic Party won't stand for the Democratic Party being hijacked? Because that candidate would lose. There's that poll out from IBD-T-IPP today. Shows really good news for Democrats. Joe Biden is up 12 points on Donald Trump. See, the election's over. Bad news is Liz Warren is surging. She's up seven points in just the month of August. She's within three points, right within striking distance of Joe Biden. Bad news for poor Joe because the Democratic Party does not want that moderate candidate. They are moving to the left. If they would moderate, the election very, very likely could be theirs. But they just don't want it. And so the candidates who are a little squishy. Corey Booker, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, for that matter, who's now running as fast to the left as he can, realize there is no future in that for them, and so they're moving to the line. I understand that it's supposed to be one thing, but I just have to say one quick thing about Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren is the proof

positive of this. Elizabeth Warren in 2003 wrote a book called The Two Income Trap. Yes, I read your piece about this. It was excellent. Okay, the Two Income Trap is a really interesting book. It's actually a really interesting book on a variety of levels. So basically her premise is that two income families actually have it harder when it comes to bankruptcy than one income families. Why? Because let's say I'm working and my wife is not. And then I get laid off. Well, we've been spending to keep up with my income level. But I get laid off. Now there are two possible workers in the household who can make up that income. If my wife and I are both working and then I lose my job, well, there's only one possible worker who can make up that income and that's

me. So we actually dropped further into the hole than we would if my wife, who isn't working, suddenly entered the workforce and now we've doubled our chances of getting a job. So what she comes up with is she says, well, you know, the reason that so many of these families are going bankrupt is because they're all moving out to the suburbs, because education in cities sucks. So they're moving out to the suburbs. And so here's a couple things we need to do. We need school choice. It's Elizabeth Warren in 2003. And she, she sounds like Betsy DeBos, right? She's saying, we need school choice. And then she says, you know what we really don't need? We don't need college tuition subsidized by the state. So we shouldn't have any sort of loan

forgiveness. And we shouldn't have additional taxpayer money spent on colleges. We shouldn't have any of that. We should cap tuition. I mean, we should cap the amount of money that can be charged by public universities. And then it would force them to cut out a lot of the crap that they're spending money on, and they would have to compete. And then she says, we're not looking for socialist redistribution, we're not looking for regulatory restructuring, we're not looking to be radical. She writes this whole book, and it's really interesting. There's a bunch of stuff in there also about how credit card companies suck, and that stuff

is all overwrought, but it's actually somebody you'd want to have a conversation with. Elizabeth Warren in 2007-2008 becomes a darling of the left because she's going to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is this supposed watchdog that's going to protect you as the consumer. It doesn't really do that. It's basically a democratic dictatorship that's going to dictate to independent of the president that is going to dictate to companies how they ought to operate. She thinks she's going to be the next head. The Republicans stop her from being the next head. She goes and runs for Senate. She wins and now she's running for president. And she has completely

abandoned everything that ever made her mildly interesting. Elizabeth Warren circa 2019. We look at Elizabeth Warren in circa 2003 and she would think, you cuck, right? How could you possibly think all these things. Anything that possibly could make Elizabeth Warren interesting and a possible victor in a general election, she has abdicated specifically so she can run hard to the left and maybe win the prime is in the Ngo, credit card. Nine. All right, this question goes to the God King himself. What would you suggest others do to create a truly impartial and unbiased news organization? What would I do to ensure a truly impartial and unbiased news organization? I wouldn't. I don't believe that that has ever existed. And I don't believe that it's to be.

be desired. I believe that there was a consensus after the Second World War where America came together as America. America celebrated itself as America. The space race in the early Cold War I think solidified that notion for a generation that America was this monolith, that we were all in it together. And it created this moment in time where it seemed like everyone was pulling in the same direction. And in only that window, did the idea of objective journalism, the way that we've come to understand it exists. Up until that time, you had the actual newspaper wars

that dominated this country for the first, whatever that is, for the first almost 200 years of the history of the nation. This is why newspapers have names like the Tennessee Democrat, because Democrats ran the newspaper. It's why Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, when they engaged in the second presidential election, or the third presidential election, I guess, technically,

they didn't have campaigns the way that we think of it. They didn't buy ads. They didn't directly campaign because it was still seen as sort of vulgar to do that. Instead, half the newspapers supported Jefferson and half the newspapers supported Adams, and they warred with each other. And I call it wars because if you take the Spanish-American War as an example, I'm pretty sure newspapers actually just created that. Newspapers plus Teddy Roosevelt just created that war.

But you knew where you stood. When you read the Tennessee Democrat, you knew who they supported. The editorial board of the Tennessee Democrat were Democrats. The reporters at the Tennessee Democrat were also Democrats. There were smaller oppositional newspapers in Tennessee. And if you wanted to read oppositional points of view, that's where you went. In other words, everyone had to own their biases. Now, this doesn't mean that I don't believe that there is fair journalism.

Doesn't mean that I don't believe that fair reporting is to be desired. I think that the role of the journalist should be to own their bias, but present fair looks at situations from the point of view of their biases. And that's, I know, a very difficult concept to comprehend, but I like the world that we live in, as much as there's trouble with it. I like the world of the daily caller and the daily wire and the Blaze and Breitbart and Drudge Report and the Huffington Post and the Daily Coz and Vox and vice. That's a better world as long as everybody owns what they are.

The thing that causes us problems is when you keep your head down for 20 years between Vietnam, between the Second World War and Vietnam, and you think that Walter Cronkite is the voice of us all. You think that Walter Cronkite represents truth, objective truth. He represents fact, objective fact. There is no bias. And then you look up one day and one guy decides whether or not we win or lose a war. Spoiler alert, he always had a point of view. He always had a bias.

They just fed us alive for 20 years. And then somehow, even after the Kronkite Vietnam story, we didn't learn this lesson throughout the sort of big anchor, big chair. Listen, I have an affinity for those. Tom Brokaw in particular and Peter Jennings, I thought, was a lot of fun. Sam Donaldson. It's not that there wasn't a charm to the era, but what there wasn't was objectivity during that era.

They were pretending to be that which they were not. Far better, own what you are. Don't lie. I think that it's fair to say don't lie. If you lie, you're not a journalist. If you lie, you're just an opinion slinger. You're just a propagandist. But if you own your bias

and try to be as fair as you can from the point of view of your bias, I think that that's a better way to go. I actually trust people, especially in the age of the internet, they're going to get more than one newspaper. They're going to be able to read the daily wire and read the Huffington Post and make their own assessments as to what's right and what's wrong.

That's my view of it. You just destroyed the New York Times business model. Don't lie, I don't know This question is for Ben And I actually have a theory on this But I want to know what he thinks Does a straw have one hole or two? Oh

Wow Deep thoughts here You don't I mean I actually would argue That a straw doesn't have a hole Because doesn't a hole Always have a bottom? This is mine

You're gonna offend half the country Whatever you say You've got to be very careful Is a straw a tunnel? I was actually Right I was actually going to go with you because basically it is a flat plane

that is just connected on itself. That's very two-dimensional. Does Swiss cheese not have holes? I'll make one. Swiss cheese has holes, right? See, you can make one just like this. It's amazing, right? Did I just create a hole?

I don't think so talented. I know, look at that. Paying your salaries and making straws out of paper. That's the only gun of straw you're allowed to have anymore, by the list. I insist that we move on to question number six. That's a horrible question. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. All right. Nate from Texas says that he is a proud supporter of the Daily Wire and a subscriber.

Thank you so much for that. Nate, this Oakee will allow it. Then this question is for Andrew Claven. Andrew, Nate wants to know what do you think of the new Dave Chappelle special? Oh, I liked it. I don't think it's as funny as some of the guys that I really like, like Bill Burr and Ricky Gervase. But I thought it was daring. I thought that the whole idea that we have to judge every joke on its political correctness, on its righteousness is absurd. There is a relationship between humor and evil.

There's a relationship between humor and evil because there's a relationship between masculinity and evil. Humor is a masculine trait that we developed in order to charm women. I think it is. That's what it is. That's why men are funny or they're women. And so I think that when we have a guy, when we have a, a comedian, his job is to break the boundaries, to say the thing that nobody says, to say the thing that we're kind of thinking, but we're not really thinking. Human evil is funny. Human evil is funny. Human evil is funny because of the fall of man. Human evil is funny because we're supposed to be

one thing, but we're another thing in what we look like as a guy in a tuxedo falling in a mud puddle. Right, exactly. This is Walter Kerr's take on the distinction between tragedy and comedy. The tragedy is that we are these mortal beings who are bound to these bodies, but we have dreams of the stars and can understand all this beyond ourselves. And comedy is, we have, we have a lot of the stars. We have all these dreams of ourselves beyond the stars, but we fart. And the thing, the funny thing about Chappelle is I thought the ugliest, meanest, most terrible thing he said was about Michael Jackson, and it made me laugh out loud. You know, humor like horror, like the horror genre, is a vacation. It's a vacation from the real world. It's a vacation from the world in which we try to do what's right.

We try to say what's right. We try to be kind and polite. It's a place where we go to let that stuff out. So I thought it was a good show. I wish to have been a little, like Bill Burr does this stuff, and he makes me laugh till I cry. Chappelle made me chuckle, and then on the Michael Jackson stuff, I got a big laugh. But anyway, I thought it was a good show. We're gonna own the comedy space, by the way.

The left has no sense of humor. No, no sense. They're losing it. Sarah Silverman was like, I can't deal with the woke school. Sarah Silverman. I know. Well, Seinfelds.

Did you see his Insari's latest special on Netflix? He does the exact same thing. Uses Insari. He starts off and he does what he has to do. He does the apologetic. I feel bad that I ever made a woman feel this way, even though she obviously was just being a terrible person who went back to his apartment

and acted like a horrible person. bad and decided to ruin his career, and he had to go and do the Miochalpa thing. And then the rest of his special was about how, like, everybody's a jerk, and we should all just lighten up and how annoying the progressive woke scolds are. That was his entire special. The world of comedy cannot abide. The level of satical. Yeah, puritanical self-satisfaction of the left.

And you know, the guy I miss most of all was Louis C.K. Agree. And Louis C.K., first of all, was... He was, unbelievably good. Unbelievably funny. But one of his routines is about the things we think when we're driving in cars. And those of us who live in Los Angeles know this very well. You wish people dead when you're living in your course.

And my wife has a very funny routine where I'll curse and she'll say, you know, he is a child of God. And I'll say, I'm killed. And he just captures the fact that we are not who we want to be. And I think that by letting that out a little bit, you know, what Stephen King called Walking the Dog, you walk the Big Dog, you take the monster out, and you take him for a walk around the block, and you put him away again. And I think that that's a wonderful thing that humor goes. It's interesting that you say that comedy is inherently masculine.

because it is true, and Norm MacDonald makes this great observation that whenever you were a kid and you'd hear a group of kids laughing, and you'd run over there. He says there'd never be a broad standing in the middle of the... And it's true, because men... And when you think about the funniest women, Sarah Silverman, who is legitimately hilarious, especially in her early career, but she was emulating a man. Like what she was... Roseanne Barr was emulating a shock dirty humor. It's not that no woman is funny. It's not that no woman...

Christopher Hitchens has a theory on this. I'll skip it. Of course it's not that no woman is funny. It's that humor is inherently masculine. Listen, there are plenty of things that are inherently feminine and men can do them. That's not the question. Because men purport to be invulnerable and then humor is about vulnerability, which is why my wife laughs her ass off every time I clock my head on the stove.

Whereas if she clocked her head on the stove, I wouldn't laugh for a second. I'd be like, are you okay? That's a great example. It's a great example. All right, what's next? All right, Ben, if you could go back in time, which past U.S. president do you think would be the best possible president for right now? I mean, the ones who are already gray, right?

Washington and Lincoln would be the best possible because they understood the job the best. But the one who's never mentioned, but Reagan would have mentioned it is Calvin Coolidge. What you need is a minimalist president whose job it is to reduce government to the idea that you don't have to care about the government anymore.

It was the most charming thing. I've heard in presidential politics in the last 15 years, when Rick Perry in 2012 said, my job is to make it to that Washington, D.C. is not important in your life, is unimportant in your life. And I thought to myself,

that sounds so great. That sounds so fantastic. I don't want a godlike leader like Barack Obama who's going to lead me with his vision and every picture of him is staring off into the distance slightly backlit, but chin upturned. I don't want that.

I don't want Donald Trump to make America great again with sheer power and force of hair. I don't need that. What I need is a guy who goes there and does his delegated powers and fires two million people from the executive branch and leaves me the, that's what I want. What I want is to be left alone.

And Calvin Coolidge was the, I'm going to leave you alone. I'm not even going to talk to you, right? There's so many great Coolidge stories. There was a very famous story of Coolidge was at some cocktail party, and he was famously tasked attorney, famously didn't talk at all. Like, you could not get, you wouldn't engage him in a conversation. Silent cow. Right, exactly.

And by the way, unbelievably articulate. If you ever read his July 4th address, his Independence Day address from like 1924, it's phenomenal. It might be 26. It's just terrific. But there's this famous story where he's at a cocktail party, and some guy walks up to him and says, you know, I just made a bet with my buddy over here,

that I can get you to say three words. And Koolage looks him and goes, you lose. That sounds great. Can you imagine? Like if that were the presidency, by the way, if that were Donald Trump and he were doing all the things he's doing right now, he'd win 90% of the vote.

Yeah, that's a good point. Right? If Donald Trump were just like doing all the good stuff and then like every time you run up to him, be like, me not interested. It'd be so good. Four more, Alicia. Four in rapid succession.

All right. I'm just, can't get over the image of Obama chin upturned and backlit because that's what I aim for in every Instagram. This question is for the God King. It comes from Johnny. He says, as we approach the end of the 2010s, which I think you'll agree was the weakest decade in cinematic history,

I was wondering what you consider to be the best movie of this decade. Ooh, that's a tough question. We were actually just talking about the pictures before we went live today. What is the best movie of the 20 teens? I will say that I think, because I had said this before, I think that the best acting, the best acting that appeared in film in the 20 teens was the film master. I think that... The master, right?

The master, thank you. I think that Philip Seymour Hoffman gave what may be the greatest performance of the last 20 years on camera if Joaquin Phoenix's performance in the same film hadn't existed. And I think it was a Brando-esque performance from Joaquin Phoenix. Who's excited about Joker, by the way? Oh, man. It looks great. Because I think Joaquin Phoenix is...

It's just like when you watch early Brando, you were watching someone do something wholly on a transcendent plane from what everyone else in the film was doing even though everybody else in the film gave amazing performances. Is the master the greatest film of the 20 teens? No, I mean, I wouldn't say that. But I do think it was the great performances.

I think, I'm going to allow us to break the rule. Three of you, what do you think, the greatest movie of the last decade? Hail Caesar. By the Cohen brothers. I go, Death of Stalin. Since 2010. Because there are a lot of movies that were made just before 2010 that are also really good, right?

Yeah, no, I would actually go with Knowles. I think Hale Seusser is like the best film I've seen in a long time. That's a great movie. I'm a little bit more user-friendly than you guys. I'd go with Logan. Logan's terrific. Logan's a terrific film. Yeah, no, those are a great film.

Those are a terrific film. It is the era of television, though. Yeah, for sure. There's more good stuff on television than in the theaters. Oh, so much good stuff on television. I'm currently addicted to Yellowstone, and I'm really bummed that it's over. I hear that's good. Oh, such a good show.

All right, Michelle wants to know from Michael Knowles, how do you overcome a Biden-Warrant, or Biden-Harris ticket, and she is very worried about either of those outcomes. Oh, I think it's easily overcome. I think Joe Biden is going to slur his words one too many times, and he's going to fall apart. I know that he's really up in the polls right now, and I don't discount that. I think Trump has a lot of vulnerabilities. The big vulnerabilities are the economy and the wall.

The New York Times economist came out, and he said he doesn't think we're heading into a recession. And on the wall, we just got $3.6 billion for more wall, in addition to $2.5 billion that we got a month ago so that you're looking at Trump at least could say he's got an additional 244 miles of new wall being built in addition to 650 you've got almost half the entire border if not more because of previous funding so I think those vulnerabilities he's doing very well on at this moment Joe Biden is worse the more he's on television he had that big lie about the war story the other day he lies about everything since the 1980s and he's got really really disturbing lies about the death of his family he lies about the death of his family and people don't know this

In 1972, tragically, his wife and daughter were killed. The driver was found innocent of anything. The driver dies in 1999. Biden immediately begins smearing him baselessly as a drunk. The Atlantic, even the left-wing Atlantic, coals him out for this. It's really, really disturbing. I think he wears thin. I think it's why he failed to win the presidency in 88.

It's why he failed in 2008. I think he would fail again if he were the nominee. I think Warren probably would have a better chance against Trump. but if she keeps going, as you pointed out earlier, Ben, if she keeps moving so radically to the left. I think the other way around, by the way. I think that what you're not counting on is that right now is the moment

when the media want to take Biden out. Once he has passed the primaries, then you get the glowing media coverage from there to the election. With Warren, it's sort of the opposite in the sense that you're going to get everything glowing that is possible on her from now to the actual end of the primaries,

at which point Trump sinks his teeth into her and start shaking her like a rag doll. Because that is his specialty, is taking people and dragging them down into the mud just tromping all over. And it's much harder for him to bring down, I think it'll be much harder for him to bring down Biden.

I agree. Because Biden represents in the minds of everyone who, you know, politics is a little bit about wish fulfillment and projection, and people will want to see Biden as a return to normal. But Elizabeth Warren is sort of a nothing in the public imagination. About the only thing that the average American knows about her is that she is definitely not Native American. And Donald Trump will get to define her.

And she has zero percent black support, which is very tougher. I don't think Biden's going to make it, you guys. I think Warren, right now, I would guess Warren is going to be done. Biden may not make it through the primary. If he makes it through the primary, he has to fair shot. Yeah, I think we all agree on this. Warren is climbing and he's lying. Two questions. Elisha. All right, Drew, this question is for you. What do you think historians in the future will say about this era of Trump? What I genuinely think historians will say in the future is that this is the era of unbridled abortion. I think that when we talk,

about this era, I think they won't care about our technology. They won't care about our, you know, our inventions. They won't care about our economy. They will care about the fact that we slaughtered children like they were, you know, I don't know, cannon fodder. So that's where I think, I think a lot of statues are going to be taken down that supported abortion. And I think that we're going to be treated the way they treated the slave generation. We're not far off, dude. I don't think that's a century away. Have you seen the quality of ultrasounds now? No, I know. It's insane. Not right. Not just, and I'm not just talking. about the 40 ultrasounds at 20 weeks. I'm talking about ultrasound ultrasounds at like 10, 11 weeks.

And I think it's kind of wonderful to watch these people attack the slave holding generation. Yeah, exactly. Without understanding how completely you get swept away in the narrative of your time, the narrative of our time is somehow it was all right to do this. It is not all right to do this. I do think Trump, listen, I feel about Trump that he is a symptom of something that's going on. I think the thing that is going on that he represents is a good thing. It is a return. to the idea that the individual matters, that the guy out there with his checked shirt and his rifle and his family matters,

and the middle of the country matters, and the people who do the job of building the country matter. It's unfortunate he is not a, you know, he's not a perfect instrument. He's a big guy with big flaws. But as Christopher Caldwell points out in this Brexit piece, it's hard to find people who oppose the elites, who have the power to stand up to the elites,

who are not elites. And so he's kind of all we had. If we're lucky, maybe he'll be seen as a political purgative. Yeah, I think so. I'm hoping, my best, you know, it's funny, you and I had this conversation. I keep bringing this up on my show. You and I had a conversation at the spot in Dallas where Kennedy was shot, where you said to me, what is your best scenario of Donald Trump's presidency?

And I actually outlined almost everything that happened. So he's been the best version of himself. It was not like, oh, it's going to be great. Here are the things that are going to be bad, but this will be the best thing we get. And it's been that. He cut taxes. He made the economy work. And then he did a lot of things that drive us all.

all crazy, which is, I said to him, he's going to drive us nuts, and he has, but he also has got this great economy. And then I think, you know, it is possible that we will return to normal in a better way than Joe Biden, that I think it's important for Trump to win. I hope he does win. But I think after that, we really have to get to a point, you know, Jim Mattis is the guy who's saying it, and everybody's trying to get him to attack Trump, and he's saying, you know, the problem is not Trump. The problem is us. The problem is what we're doing to one another. And you keep saying this, and I agree with both of you. I think that we need to get to a place, and it has to do with the media balancing out.

It has to do with media either becoming your European version of it or returning to some idea that we can have a moderate media somewhere in between that represents all of us so that we're not screaming at each other all the time because it just doesn't work. It just is not the way the country should be. I mean, look, democracy is messy, democracy is loud, but I think that this is a period of intense, a violation of the norms of human interaction, By the way, I really, I really do wonder if there is a single left podcast where they sit around lamenting the death of conversation.

I really don't think so. I mean, I really don't think so. I think that on the left, they lament that there are people on the other side who want to have a conversation. There was that full editorial in the Washington Post that was literally about this, basically saying all these right-wingerers who keep saying they want conversations. You know who else said that? I was like, are you insane? I'm fairly certain that the problem with the slaveholders was the slaveholding. Not the conversation.

Not the conversations. Also, don't wear check shirts. Alicia. The final question. All right. So I'm no Sam Ponder and I don't get sports analogy. So I hope I'm using this right.

I'm going to call an audible and say that everyone needs to answer this final question because it's too gay. You did it right. That's good. Oh, sweet. Yay. All right.

Ryan wants to know, on a scale from John Kasich to Hillary Clinton, how will Joe Walsh's campaign end up? Well, as Maserati does 185. Yeah, that's true. You know, life's very. been good to him so far. So I assume he'll be, I forgot he was

running until you reminded me, and that's, I think, about how his campaign is doing. I'm reminded of the joke of the guy who jumps off the Empire State Building, and as he's passing the 60th floor, somebody says, how are the thing's going? He says, all right, so far. I think that's Joe Walsh's campaign. I think the problem that Joe Walsh has is that Joe Walsh

is not an alternative to Trump. Like, Joe Walsh is a very Trumpian figure who... He's more Trump than Trump in many ways. He's more Trump than Trump in many ways. It's funny to see, and listen, Ben probably has to be nicer than I do, but when I see a guy like Bill Crystal pretending to be happy about Joe Walsh, it's the most egregious, narcissistic, self-satisfied bull crap that you've ever seen in politics since Barack Obama.

Because Bill Crystal would hate Joe Walsh as much as he hates Donald Trump. He just is so deranged by his hate. of Trump, that he's happy to see anything that could pull off one, two, three votes from Donald Trump. It's all he cares about. But don't let anybody fool you into thinking that Joe Walsh is some sort of reasonable conservative alternative to Donald Trump. It's just nonsense. First of all, he was a great coach of the San Francisco president. But in his post-playing career, in his post-coaching career, you know, look, I think that what Joe Walsh suffered from, it's not interesting to me what happens to Joe Walsh, because the answer is the same

that everybody knows, right? Which is this is going nowhere. But what's fascinating to me is what went through Joe's head when he was like, you know what, I'm doing this thing, it's on. Like, what sort of thought process was happening there? Good question. And I do think that that is interesting. And I think that the answer is that there is this belief on the right that strange new

respect is real. Yeah. Right? And this is a bigger problem with a lot of folks on the right. And listen, as the beneficiary of occasional strange new respect, I can tell you, it's very, you should explain what that is. Okay, so what this means is there. comes a point where somebody in your own party does something and you don't like it.

So in 2016, I didn't like a lot of things Trump was saying. And I would say, listen, I don't like what he's saying. I think this is bad. I think what Breitbart is doing with the All-Right is bad. And suddenly, I had an editorial in the Washington Post. And suddenly, there were people in the mainstream media who were giving me the time of day. And suddenly it was, oh, you know, he's considered issues in a way I never thought he'd considered issues before.

I have a strange new respect for Ben Shapiro. I have strange new respect for Ben Shapiro. And then, of course, the election happens. And literally the day after they go, oh, that guy's a conservative. He's the worst. That guy's garbage. He's the all right. The alt-right that I had derided in the pages of the Washington Post,

I was suddenly aligned with in the titles of economist articles, right? And it was that fast because it turns out that the strange and respect only lasts as long as they can use you as a tool. Now, I didn't say any of this stuff because I wanted to be used as a tool by the left. I say it because I believe it, and I've been perfectly consistent in criticizing Trump when I think that he's wrong all the way through now. Right? I mean, so that has not changed.

But there is this feeling on the right that, well, if we were just nice, to the folks at MSNBC. If we just gave them what they want, then they will love us. We forget John McCain's actual 2008 campaign. This is exactly right. We believe that we've bought into too many people on the right because, in the words of Rodney Dangerfield,

we don't get no respect. There is this belief that the minute we get any level of respect, then that is worth something. In fact, I think it's one of the reasons why Trump is president, frankly. I think that a lot of people in the Republican Party were so tired of being pissed on by the entirety of Hollywood, and when somebody from Hollywood, a big celebrity, looked at conservatives and said, I get you guys.

you guys. We're like, oh my God, this is unbelievable. And you see it consistently when any celebrity issues even like the most remote sense of sympathy for people on the right. We're all like, oh, God, that's so wonderful. In any case, the stranger is, so I think what happened to Joe Walsh is he figured, here's what's going to happen. I'm going to declare that I'm running. The media hate Trump. I hate Trump. So the media are going to give me the strange and respect. I'm going to jump in. And they're going to be like, this guy's great. They're going to ignore all the stuff I said in the past. I'll just go on. I'll do a mea copa. It'll be fine. They'll treat me great. And suddenly I'll be built up. And worse that happens is I'm the bearer of the sort of true conservative banner in the

eyes of the media. And I've upped my career and I'm more prominent and I've pushed my ideals and they've treated me well. And that's an important thing. I think that's what went through his head. I think what he neglected is a couple things. One, the strange and respect that he expected would come will never apply while Trump is president. And the reason for that is because the goal of the left is to lump the entire right in with Donald Trump. They want everything that is bad about Trump lumped together with the entire right. And they want everything bad about the white supremacists lumped in with Trump. Right. It's all transit of property garbage. It's all the white supremacists like the alt-right. And the alt-right, Trump winked and nodded at them. And Trump is bad. And you're bad.

And people who know you are bad. And everybody's ever had a conversation with you is bad. I mean, that's literally the chain of thinking. And so Walsh went on TV and he was like, okay, here it comes. Strange in respect. Come and get me, guys. And he was not, did you watch any of his appearances on MSNBC? Oh, yeah. he got clocked right in the face. I mean, they came right at him because the truth is they don't want anybody

who is conservative not to be quote unquote Trumpian. That's right. They want everybody to be the devil on the right. And Joe Walsh, so they would actually prefer Donald Trump not only to be the nominee,

but to be the face of the Republican Party forever, right? That is now their goal. Plus, there's an effective way for the anti-Trump conservatives to get their ideas across and there is an ineffective way. And to your point on Bill Crystal,

I personally really like Bill Crystal and he is doing both of the, those ways right now, the good way and the bad way. The good way is, if you think conservatives need to read more Aristotle and get back in touch with founding ideals and the liberal education that creates good citizens, do that. Bill Crystal has a podcast. I was listening to it this morning, where he does all of that. It's a good platform to do that. The bad way to do that is to run Joe Walsh for president. Joe Walsh is the antithesis of everything that you would seem to be talking about. He's going nowhere. It is a waste of time. It's a waste of energy. It makes one seem to be

bitter, it makes one seem really divorced from reality. And look, there are plenty of reasons to criticize the president, and I get all the arguments against him. Tell people to read Aristotle, have conversations, go into the media, get your ideas out there, but don't run these ridiculous campaigns that are only going to hurt your own side. You know, there's a philosopher, Roger Scruton, has talked about the fact that there's always a kind of reactionary quality to conservatism in the sense that we are always fighting somebody who's trying to take our freedoms away. So during the Reagan era, it was the Soviet Union. And one of the reasons that Reagan doesn't resonate the way he used to is because he won.

He destroyed the Soviet Union. And I think that what we're fighting now is an administrative state, a way of governing that is not representative, a way of governing that delegates the power that we delegate to our representatives to somebody else, to these incredible organizations. Trump represented that. He represented our desire to have our governance, not global, but national. He represented our desire to have our governance, representative, not administrative. And I think that the mistake that guys like Crystal made, the mistake that all these never Trumpers made is to not say, stop for a minute and say, well, wait a minute, I may not like Trump personally. Who could? But what did he mean?

What were people saying? And how can we get that in a new way? I'm also just bewildered by the characterization of people, the self-characterization of people is never Trump now. Right? Because never Trump was in aggregate. Like now the media uses it completely improper. Never Trump was just a bunch of people in 2016 who said, I'm not voting for Trump. Right.

Okay? So I was never Trump in 2016. And then Trump was president. Okay, I don't define my philosophy by Donald Trump. He's not my load star. I'm not sitting around going, oh, what does Donald Trump think about the issues? This would presume that Donald Trump has thoughts. Okay, Donald Trump has a lot of positions, and I like a lot of his positions, actually.

He and I are in agreement on a lot of his positions. But my entire system of thought has literally nothing to do with Donald Trump. So if you're defining yourself either in opposition to Trump or in complete support, support of Trump, let me suggest that you're doing philosophy and ideas wrong because who does that? It's bizarre. But I do think conservatives are responsible to individual freedom. We are responsible to that. And when the individuals speak up and say, hey, you know what? We've been forgotten. We've been destroyed. Our communities, our lives, our jobs have been destroyed. I think we need to answer. I think we need to say, you know what, fighting the Soviet Union isn't going to work anymore.

We need to fight this new idea, this administrative state. And yeah, again, You know, God, I know Trump is a flawed vehicle for this, but we have to understand that, as they say in politics, you can't beat someone with no one. He's the guy we've got right now, and I hope we can move on to better people. But the ideas that he's representing, I think, matter. I think those ideas matter,

and I think we have to hook into those and develop them. I disagree with you somewhat on that, but it's a topic for another day because... We're done. We're done. Thanks to everybody who sent in questions. Elisha, thank you for being a great host of the questions for us this evening.

And thank you guys for, eh. Yeah.