The Michael Knowles Show - The Daily Wire Backstage: 2019 Predictions Special

Episode Date: January 4, 2019

What insanity can we look forward to in 2019? Will there be a wall? Will ISIS take over in Syria? Will millennials succeed in ridding the world of "Friends" and "Seinfeld" reruns? Join this roundtable discussion featuring Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, and Daily Wire god-king Jeremy Boreing, as they discuss the wins and losses of 2018 and what to be ready for in the coming year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everybody, this is Michael. You're about to listen to our latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage, where I joined Ben Shapiro, Andrew Plavin, and the man who will one day fire me for real, Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring, for a great conversation on politics and culture, and where we answer questions from Daily Wire subscribers. Without further ado, here is Backstage. Fake laugh in three, two, one. Oh, you welcome to the Daily Wire Backstage, 2019, Predispiece. prediction special where we will tell you with absolute certainty what will happen this year, starting with me exercising my well-known gift for clairvoyance, a prediction that I have not yet

voiced anywhere else. You will have heard it first right here. Prediction 2019, Elizabeth Warren will seek the Democratic nomination for president. No way. Uncanny. Am I right? I don't buy it. Smoke them piece pipe. What do you think your chances of winning are? Well, if I had to guess, I think I'd say it's about one 20-20th. I'm sorry, I was reading the president's Twitter feed tonight, so I just, we're allowed to laugh at it, right? The crystal doesn't think we can laugh at it. I was told I was not allowed to laugh at it.

That it's very not funny. It's not funny. Just so people know, the president tweeted our meme. Right. What's not funny about that? That's right. But it's not funny because it degrades conservatism to have a president who tweets this sort of stuff. My favorite thing that happens on Twitter now, by the way?

The best thing of 2018. You're the Donald Trump is president, right? This is my point. Somebody said to me today, they were like, okay, so if Obama had done this, you'd have been so angry. Trump did it, and you're laughing at it.

It's like, right, because they're two different humans. I have a four-year-old daughter, and I have a two-year-old son, and my two-year-old son says it's on my shoulders and then hits me on the head. And I get mildly angry. If it were my four-year-old daughter, I get a lot more angry.

They're very, very different human beings. If President Obama, who aspired to be Nelson Mandela, were tweeting out this sort of stuff in fully hypocritical fashion, I'd be a lot more angry than Donald Trump, who aspires to be in the WW Hall of Fame, and he's actually achieved his goal already. He's in the W.E. Hall of Fan, he made.

Whereas Obama was never Nelson Mandela and did say this kind of stuff on a quasi-regular basis. So we're allowed to laugh. Come on, if you can't laugh at this stuff. And the president is tweeting our memes. I mean, let's get up to the basic thing. My favorite thing, though, on Twitter now is that no one would like you let you make a joke about anything?

Yes. And one of the things that they always say is, was that some sort of attempt at a joke? There are no attempt at jokes. It may not have been a very good joke, but I fully made it. We're living in a quiet place. I said this on the show. We have to keep your voice down, because otherwise they come and get you.

You're tired of pieces, you know? Yeah, the only way to survive is it a bird box or is it a quiet place? I think a bird box is a quiet place with blindfolds or something like that. Yeah, exactly. And now, do you know this? They have the bird box challenge where they're telling people to send out videos of themselves, doing ordinary task blindfold and people are getting hurt. It's like Darwin.

Can we tell everybody to walk into traffic? It's like Darwin is still operation. You can't do that on Twitter. And it's threatening self-harm. That's right. Self-harm or the harm of others, which we learned a lot about today also. We'll get to that. But first, I'm going to continue with these scripted introductions.

I am, Jeremy, boring, known around these parts as the God King, lower-case, lower-case, G, lower-case, K. By the way, it's always important to Drew that I point out. It's God King of the Daily Watch. I'm not a general. I'm not a general guy. Not of Egypt or China. No.

I have no actual power. Also, joining me today, as per usual, these three muckety mucks right here, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Claven, Michael Knowles' hosts of the Ben Shapiro show, Andrew Claven's show, and Michael Knowles' show, respectively. Did I understand right? I think he is that right. And yet, only one of these fellas has had the honor of being Twitter band. Because of Brussels sprouts, that's right, Brussels sprouts,

and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. As always, we're graced by the lovely and talented Elisha Krauss, who not only brings the sole semblance of professionalism to the show, she also brings your burning questions to us. Hot off the internet, Elisha. In defenses of Brussels sprouts that are delicious with honey and broiled. Can we cut her, Mike? If I get fired over that, and Michael hasn't been fired over,

oh, I don't know, all the Michael things, I will hold. She has a fair point. Hey guys, it's going to be a fun night. And for everyone watching at home, if you want to send us those really interesting questions that you have, just type them in in the chat box on the DailyWire live stream over at DailyWire.com. And remember, only subscribers get to ask those questions.

So if you're not a subscriber, first of all, why not? Did somebody in your life not love you and didn't get you a subscription for Christmas? How dare they? But if you're not a subscriber and you're like, hey, I want to get myself a belated Christmas gift, head on over to DailyWire. click on the red subscribe button at the top of the page to become a subscriber tonight and then get all those questions in and i'll be tossing to the guys alicia thank you and as i uh continue down the path of smoking this delicious rocky patel who by the way sent us like an ashtray and

some delicious cigars and this actual lightsaber i mean go after Darth Vader with this thing that's great very kind of them we are uh suckers for free cigars we're out here we will not do a free ad for anything. Literally, I've had family members who write to me. And they're like, Jeremy, you know. The rents do. Come on. Oh, old Uncle Tom needs this. You know, it's not a chance. You send us a cigar. Oh, yeah. Anything. I'll wear your, tattoo your name on my face. I don't care. So we're going to be talking, doing something that we haven't done before. Typically, the show is not especially political. We get into the deeper things, the finer things, the philosophical. But we are going to do a rundown of the news. This is because the only one of us with an actually

successful podcast suggested that what people want to hear about from these political pundits is politics. We're going to test it with like 15 minutes on politics. But first, we're going to talk about policy genius who makes it possible for us to, I actually don't want to blame them for what they make it. Policy genius who provides a great provider. A wonderful service. This is exactly right. So policy genius. You know, I've been thinking a lot about death these days. One of the reasons for that is because I am deathly sick and also because I want to die having to be here an extra two hours today with these gentlemen. But the thing about death makes me think, you know, perhaps I should have life insurance. And fortunately for me, I do because I'm a foresighted, you know, rational human

being. But you should also be a foresighted rational human being. You should also have some life insurance. And that's where policy genius comes in. Getting life insurance is one of the more intimidating in parts of becoming a full-fledged adult. So if you're into adulting or other misuse of nouns as verbs, then perhaps you should go to. check out PolicyGenius right now. They have a website that makes it easy for you to compare quotes, get advice, and get covered without extra fees or commissioned sales agents.

You can apply online. The PolicyGenius advisors handle all the red tape. They negotiate your rate with the insurance company in minutes you can compare quotes from all the top insurers and find the coverage that you need at a price you can afford, all part of their best price guarantee. They don't just do life insurance. They also do disability insurance, homeowners insurance, auto insurance.

They help you with all these things. If you've been intimidated or frustrated by insurance in the past, if you're like Drew and you're close to death and you're just looking for another possible life insurance policy. It's a pre-existing condition with me. Then go check out policygenius.com right now. Again, in minutes you can compare quotes and apply. You can do the whole thing on your phone.

Write this very instant policy genius. The easy way to compare and buy life insurance. Go check out policy genius right now. And again, I'm grateful that I already have policy genius so that if I commit suicide halfway through today's show and presumably I'll have some sort of coverage. You're going to get a exemption. There can be no suicide jokes.

No suicide jokes. No, we're not a lot of make suicide jokes. So it is true. that today I was banned by Twitter for 12 hours, although it wound up being for about 45 minutes. This was for the best reason. Yeah, I was banned because DailyWire's senior editor, Emily Zanadi, made the biggest fake news tweet of 2018,

coming in right down to the wire on the 31st. She said that the best recipe for Brussels sprouts, if maybe you grow up not liking to eat vegetables, the best recipe for Brussels sprouts is something with all of the oil and butter. And honey and disgusting.

Disgusting. I retorted that an even better recipe for Brussels sprouts, a little salt, little pepper, dash of paprika, then you do a splash

of Worcestershire sauce. You brown a little bacon in a cast iron skillet, then you throw it all away and sear your face off because that would be better than eating Brussels sprouts. That sounds very to me.

I wake up this morning with an alert from Twitter saying, I'm not kidding, that there are people in this world who care about me and that I am not alone and a link to a suicide hotline because they had determined that I was a danger to myself

and was advocating people harm themselves over this tweet. I've always felt you were a danger to others, but I've never felt you're a danger to yourself. Absolutely to others. Are you kidding? Have you ever seen me in a kitchen? Fortunately, I have a friend even more famous, successful than myself,

who was able to intercede on my behalf, and the lords of Twitter decided that, in retrospect, my joke about not eating leafy green vegetables was, in fact, a joke about not eating leaky green vegetables. And not an national encouragement of suicide. You know, it's funny, but it's not,

I mean, you're funny, your part is funny, but this is not funny. This is, to me, one of the biggest stories of last year that they are on the warpath. This never happens to left-wingers, never happens to live with, Oh, no, Drew, it was just an accident.

It was a bod. The thing about it is, even though they restore you, and even though you can appeal to Jack and he puts you back, it makes you think twice about what you say, and that's the point. That is the point. It's just, you know, you cover. I had some great material about asparagus.

Lost forever. It really is, the key is that it probably was a mistake. It probably was some agent who was just an idiot who did that. But when you flip a coin 100 times and it keeps coming up heads over and over and over and over, at a certain point you think the coin is rigged. Because it is. I mean, there's no chance that if somebody on the left had been hit with a warning about this sort of thing,

that the agent would have said, you know what, I'm going to hit that suspend button for 12 hours. Clearly, this person is a threat to themselves or others. But I'm sure that the person had heard of Jeremy or heard of us. It was like, well, they're a conservative. I'm not going to give them the benefit of the doubt. And if Jeremy and I were not friends

and Jeremy were just relegated to the obscurity which he so richly deserved, the chances, the chances that Twitter ever would have gotten back him or heard about it or recanted are pretty close to zero, right? Jeremy would still be banned. I mean, I don't have a blue check mark. Right. This is an outrage. That is an outrage. You are, after all. I am my chihuahua is a blue checkmark on Twitter. You deserve a blue check mark. I am, I am certifiable, but not verifiable. But it does speak to, you know, how the left, quote-unquote, tolerates humor. I mean, obviously the most, the most high-profile example, this is what they've been doing to Louis C.K., which is just unbelievable.

By the way, that material about the shooting was funny stuff. That's hilarious. My favorite thing about that is that he told three jokes that were supposedly offensive, right? He's all the Parkland students joke, which is a very, very funny joke. And then he said this stuff about gender neutrality, which is like eh, right? And then he made an Auschwitz joke, which was probably the least funny and most offensive of the jokes. And no one cares about the Auschwitz jokes, right? That's right.

That's right. That's right. That's right. It's like, oh, well, they make fun of the Jews. It's a big scam. It didn't really happen. Right. Well, that too, but it's it.

Yeah, that's right. Well, thanks for getting us demonetized on you. Appreciate that. Jack, are you watching? Hey, everybody. So I just want to say for the record, you guys, that I don't think people should end their own lives. I don't think people should unjustly take the lives of others.

And I don't deny that the Nazis were terrible people who committed a grave of a property and attempted genocide of all the Jews of here. Too late. I mean, first of all, Louis C.K. is probably my favorite working comic of the last 20 years. His stuff is really, really funny. And it has been for years.

And the fact that he's a personal shambles is, like, number one, no excuses. He's a personal shambles. But have you seen this town? Yeah. Like, I love all these people in Hollywood. Oh, Louis C.K., his mistreatment of women. I've never heard of anything like this, except that everyone at every party you've ever been to out here. Have you ever met a comedian who's like, yes, I'm a very sane person, and everything's going to be.

Oh, I've got to be home by six for dinner. They're not neurotic and deeply happy, really fulfilled and solid citizens is what they're known for. But they couldn't even just say, listen, he's been banished. And we must relegate him to the outer darkness, right? manage him to the cornfield, and he has to stay in the cornfield. He comes back and he makes the mistake of telling some jokes that conservatives aren't going to, like, if he'd come back and start just yelling about George W. Yeah.

Or you come back and start yelling about Trump? Of course. No problem. Then it would be like, is it time to welcome Louis C. came back? Let's have an honest discussion. No, even better would be if he had come back and talked about himself, not made any punchlines. Yeah, yeah.

Right, the Hanukazbee version of humor. This is my favorite. This is my favorite. It's the Hanukazby humor, which is comedy is only comedy if you don't laugh at it. Unless you laugh at it, the better it is as comedy. We have to rewrite what we've already written, rewritten biology, because men and women don't exist.

We've already rewritten language, because pronouns are no longer biological. We've already rewritten religion, because we have to remove particular books that are too offensive to people. We've already rewritten politics because it turns out that the Senate is supposed to be popularly represented or something.

And now we're rewriting the definition of the word comedy. To me and tragedy. Right. Well, actually, just boredom. To me just absolute sheer boredom. Why was Louis C.K., why was Louis C.K. banned in the first place. He may have been a pervert, but he always asked permission first.

I mean, I don't know. By the left's own standards, he had consent, you know, can I, can I, you know, masturbate? Yes, you can, please. So, by the way, Sunny Bunch had the best take on what exactly Lucy K is going to do. I think he's totally right about this. I think that when, I would not be surprised if this was leaked and people around Louis K knew it was going to be leaked. And then what his actual comedy routine is going to be is the first half of his comedy set will be all of this kind of conservative friendly comedy. And the second half will be, look what terrible. people we all are for having laughed at all of this. And I know how terrible we are because I'm a terrible person too. And then you see, and then you see the left have to re-evaluate their

opinion of Louis C.K. And he does a full reversal in the second half of his act. I hope that's not true, but I desperately hope it's not true because, you know, also this, this whole, the new Louis C.K. is a curmudgeon. These people were praising him for his transgressive comedy. Right. That's what he did. This is exactly. He does an entire routine and is a hysterically funny routine called, of course, but maybe. Have you ever seen this routine? It is one of the great comedy routines

of the last 15 years in which he talks about all of these things that are deeply taboo. And he says, of course they're terrible, of course they're terrible. But maybe. So, for example, he says, you know, if you have a bunch of...

Of course, of course it's true that we have all these kids and they have peanut allergies. And we wouldn't want children in school to be exposed to peanuts and they die of their peanut allergies. So, of course, if you know some kid in the class

has peanut allergies, then we should ban all the people and all the peanut associated products. But maybe if we didn't, then like a generation, there wouldn't be any more. Like, is that, so like you're telling me that that's, like making fun of kids with peanut allergies dying is not off limits, but making fun of the,

not even the Parkland kids who died, which would be terrible, but making fun of the kids who survived to be on the cover of Time magazine. That's taboo. You know where he started to lose them to? Because this has been building with Louis for a while, even before the masturbation scandal or whatever. He told this joke that went viral,

where it was an of course but maybe. So, of course, abortion is nothing. It's just like using the bathroom. It doesn't matter at all. Either that or it's the killing of a human life. And it was one of these, of course, but, and it went viral and it really started this, I don't know, just a few months later,

all of a sudden, every leftist is. They're coming from Bill Burr. I'd become a bit suspicious that this, the whole Me Too movement is a way of killing off people that they are getting in their way. Like Bernie Sanders is now caught in his grip. All the women in his campaign are complaining that they were treated badly and all this.

I'm just wondering if they're just trying to get the old man out of the way so they can get to people who might actually win the president. I mean, I think there are certain people who are authentic and sincere about this. Of course, of course, of course. Of course, but maybe. There are some people who will use any political cover to club their political. The thing about the Louis C.K. fit in particular,

because you bring up that, you said it as a joke, but it's actually important. He actually had consent in every instance. And people listening at home... He was sick, but he wasn't a rape. That's right. People listening at home think, who would ever consent to letting a man masturbate in front of you? Never mind the fact that Sarah Silverman and her sister and others say that they did, like by their own admission that they consented to it every time. But the truth is it's because people don't understand that what Donald Trump said in the latter days of the election about grabbing when you're famous, women will allow you to grab them.

He wasn't advocating sexual assault. He was saying when you're famous, women will consent to things that they would not, so the average mom and Paul out in middle America listening to a story about Louis C.K. It's like, well, it's just not plausible that someone would let you do these things. Yeah. Meanwhile, Gene Simmons has had sex with 5,000 women while looking exactly like Gene Simmons. And also being Gene Simmons. One of the uncovered aspects of the Harvey Weinstein story.

I think we all probably agree that Harvey Weinstein should have that guy from No Country for Old Men with a cattle thing and hit him in the park. No question, he's a terrible, terrible person. But they're trying to keep him from releasing the emails he got from the women. He slept with or annoyed. Why? Because they were all willing

because they wanted the part in the movie. And I think that that is an untold part of this story. And you cannot, you cannot, the New York Times has tried it. You cannot come out and say, well, yeah, I did it to get the part, but it's just not fair. That's life.

Right. Well, it is amazing how the feminist movement will say that a woman who completely is as promiscuous with her body as she wants to be. If you say that that's maybe a bad decision, then this makes you a sexist and oppressive sexist. But if she does all that, and then she decides later that that was a mistake because the guy was bad, then she's, so basically she can go back in time. She's got like the Marty McFly time machine. Yeah, well, she can redefine the need consent. The New York Times, a little bit. An op-ed saying sometimes yes means no, and men have to be sensitive to that.

I thought, not me. You know, to me, you know, you speak those words. I mean, I actually agree with that on the moral level. Of course. And we all agree with that. But there's no way to enforce that. There's just no enforceable mechanism for that. No, you're asking us to be gentlemen, which I am 100% in favor of.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, all this is disturbing. Yeah, it's all very disturbing. And it leads to a world where all justice is arbitrary justice. That's the actual worst aspect of all of this. And we haven't talked enough about it, I think, about it on the right that we rightly say that the state should be constrained by like, you know, the Constitution, for example, which enumerates what rights in its original intent, enumerated what few rights the government was going to have. Federal government had, the state government had. We do that because we know that an arbitrary exercise of state power is evil.

Well, and criminal law is no different. That's still the state determining. but cultural moors wind up being exactly the same. When you take a modern cultural moment and you rewrite history to judge the people of the past by the standards of the moment that we're in now in contravention of the actual circumstances in which they live, you're committing an egregious injustice against them.

You're making the very idea of justice obsolete as just an arbitrary. And this is the same thing at the border as if Donald Trump could speak in English sentence, he would explain that when you are, are basically, I'm sorry, I pushed your imagination too far, but when you say, you know, the border should be governed according to whether I have a sad picture of a child from Mexico standing there, that is basically saying it's all about your feelings, it's all about your compassion.

But, you know, Donald Trump has a good intuition here because he's a showbiz creature, which is he knows that when you put the little sad kid at the border, you get that picture, that's very powerful. So he puts the sad mother whose kid was killed by an illegal alien. And we could talk, I mean, one thing I think the right should do. There were studies from fusion. There were studies from, it was reported in the Huffington Post, from Amnesty International. 60 to 80 percent of women and girls who cross that border illegally are raped and sexually assaulted on the journey. What about them?

Where's that image? Where's that moral case? And why isn't anybody saying, look, you know, pass a law and force the law. Instead, you have Chuck Schumer waving a pen around. I mean, one of the most shameful moments I thought in our political history is Chuck Schumer waving a pen around saying, Trump could solve this with a pen. You go like, yeah, a king could solve it with a pen. But here we have guys called senators, Chuck.

And they pass laws, and that's how we do things. And this is why I generally oppose decriminalization efforts. So I don't like the decriminalization of marijuana. I tend to have fairly libertarian leanings on this and think that marijuana should be legal. Because you're a huge pot-haired. Because I'm a huge pot-haired. But thinking that something should be legal is not the same as thinking that we should not enforce the laws against. That's right.

While we have them, because the state should not be able to arbitrarily determine who gets something enforced upon them and who doesn't. When you have that, when you have that, you basically have these banana republics where bribing the guy who makes those arbitrary decisions is actually the past. But nobody said a word when King Barack decided he was not going to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act. That was enlightened. Well, now you bring us to Donald Trump's spectacular press conference. His glorious. But before we can talk about that, we have to talk about dental hygiene.

And in particular, Quip. I love Quip. Quip's the best. It's the best. You all use Quip. I do. I'm going to confess that I'm the only person here who is not used. That's why you're missing to Moller.

That's right. Tell me on it, you guys. The way that you can tell Quip is so great is because there's a horrible picture of me in Vanity Fair. My teeth look fantastic. The teeth look just great. And that's because I use Quip twice a day. Why is Quips so good?

Well, it's an electric toothbrush, but it's not just any electric toothbrush. First of all, you don't have to use the stupid charging stand, so it goes dead on you all the time. You stick a battery in the base of it, and it's good to go until the battery dies, which is months and months and months of time. And it has these timed vibrations, so you're going to be brushing the exact right amount of time.

You're not going to be spending like 15 seconds, and you brush your teeth and you're done, and then it turns out that you end up like Jeremy, toothless and friendless. Instead, you end up with... Oh, he was friendless before he was too. Instead, you actually brush the appropriate dentist recommended amount of time. Also, when you go to quip.com and you use quip.com slash backstage,

you can also get, for a discount, new brushhead sent to you on a regular schedule, which means that you're not going to have to worry about the fact that you've been using the same brushhead for the last five years. And so that coldie had five years ago is still in danger of roaming around your mouth. I do get attached to them. I don't know what that is. Quip is one of the first electric toothbrushes accepted by the American Dental Association. I love Quip. Everybody here loves Quip. Quip starts at just $25. If you go to get quip.com slash backstage right now, you get your first refill pack for free. Again, that's first refill pack free at g-et-Q-U-I-P-P-com slash backstage. That's get-quip.com slash backstage. Go check it out right now and keep your mouth cleaner than

the show is. I'm legitimately going to get one. You have to get one. And then the next backstage, I'm going to give an honest assessment as to whether or not I like it. And I'm definitely going to like it because they sponsor our show. I actually... That's honest. You know what told me on it is we're... It's funny because we actually have conversations that I just... Well, we haven't... We have conversations. about our sponsors sometimes off camera. And just yesterday, Julia, who works here, and Michael and I were talking about how I'm the only human

who still uses like a $2 over-the-counter toothbrush. Like a gorilla. What are you doing? And Julia said that she had gotten equipped for Christmas because the guys are always promoting it and that it was terrific. And I thought, I'm kind of at this point a jerk if I don't get a quick. The question is how people can tell the difference

for you the toothbrush in Julia. Wow. Me too. This is amazing. You mean because quipped toothbrushes look so cool and sexy? Is that why? They're sleek and beautiful. Because Julia's like a fish.

If she turned sideways, she disappears. Julia is very petite. And it's a beautiful girl, and you should be ashamed of yourself. Donald Trump. Who? Donald Trump, the president of these United States, held a press conference. We're going to talk about it. But before we do, Elisha Krauss.

Oh, I love it. Who is holding a kind of press conference of her own in which she talks directly to the people, and then tells us what the people said. What are the people saying? But only the subscriber people, because we're not the United States and we don't have to talk to all the people. Speaking of talking to all the people,

my conspiracy coroner theory is not going to happen in 2019. I thought that Speaker Pelosi might not invite Donald Trump, but you mentioned our next backstage. Looks like it's going to be State of the Union on January 29th. That tweet just went out a little bit ago.

Oh, my goodness. So, Mr. Pelosi did invite the president. So Tuesday, January 29th, next backstage. If he accepts the invitation. Please tell me he doesn't. It's my least favorite spectacle in all of American politics. I actually thought it would be such a win-win

if she didn't invite him. It would be great. I was kind of betting on it. It'd be great. And he could just send a letter. He could do what George Washington used to do. Yes. You just send a letter.

And it would be a Trumpian letter. It'd be like, this is the greatest issue ever seen. It's unbelievable. It's just a pizzerous entry for terrific. But we do have questions from our subscribers. Anthony wants to know. He says that all of you all have been discussing your 2019 predictions for United States politics.

But what's a hope that you have for the Daily Wire in 2019? Well, you know mine. See, guys. He said it out loud. If you say it out loud, it can't come true. Did you know that? He says it three times, though. Did I just imply it?

Did I? Did I just imply it? I was very careful, I think. Okay, so anybody have any wishes for the Daily Wire other than the obvious? Well, I will say, at the risk of, I don't think I've ever said anything nice to you. So at the risk of flattering you,

I will say that your radio show starts on Monday. I think it's going to be huge. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. That's very nice of you. And at the risk of flattering me, my book also comes out this year. That's happening. But that's not a daily book. I'm not really annoyed about it.

You brought your book out. My book, Another Kingdom, is coming out at the same time as yours. You couldn't, like, you scheduled. I want you to give away copies of my book with your book. Everyone should just buy the audio book, though, of Another Kingdom. Are you recording? I'm doing the audio book, baby. You didn't tell me.

I am. I'm doing it next week. There you go. None of these things involve the daily, Oh, yeah, sorry. These are your personal projects. I can't believe how selfish. I don't make any money off of anything you just said.

Oh, man. Elisha, what's next? All right. Well, apparently, Jeremy wants Daily Wire to make more money in 2019, so sign up and subscribe. And how? This question from Brooke is, everyone has a price. So what do you all think that the Democrats will ask for if Trump never backs down on the wall in return for the funding of the wall? I don't think they're going to back down. I think he will, so I think it's a moot point.

You think he will back down? Yeah, I think that it'll come to a point where he just says, now there's a Democratic Congress to hell with these guys. I have to sign something. I'm the president. I think it'll be some sort of pittance where he says there's border, there's border funding provided, and I'm going to fungibly use that money for a wall. That's what I think is vague. Well, I mean, I actually, the timing of the Syria withdrawal is kind of curious because he positioned the wall as national security. He said we can build it out of the Pentagon.

And then all of a sudden, he says, we're pulling all the troops out of Syria. They've got, what is it, $15 billion allotted for the effort in Syria. He was only asking $5 billion for the wall. That only buys you, I think, a block and a half of the wall, but still, he's got 3x that. I think it'll be leverage to use that Pentagon money to build a wall. My favorite is when you think there's strategy involved in anything that's going on. I want to compliment you in the use of the word fungible, an excellent word, but I think that's exactly what's going to happen.

I think they're going to have undesignated money. So Nancy Pelosi doesn't have to lose face, but at the same time Trump can say, oh, she can say, well, if you want to waste it on a wall, go ahead. I'd use it for something else. I use it for these poor sick children, and he's just an I want a wall that's made of spikes. I want it made of children.

That was great when he tweeted out the actual pictures of the steel slats, and he had like circled the pointy. That was so great. I was just hoping that he would decorate it with the heads of his enemies. He did not use the word fungible, unfortunately. No, he did not. Is it possible? He puts the fun and fungible.

I mean, how does the president win in a world where even if he gets the $5 billion, he will legitimately be able to, as you say, build a block and a half of a wall. And that'll be in the moment of political victory. But if two years from now, the president's going into re-election, and he's saying, we started building a beautiful wall. It is 180 feet longer than it was when I became president. After all this circus, I don't think people are going to buy that. Oh, no, no, it's not going to matter. It's not going to matter one iota, because he's just going to say, I built these three inches of beautiful, gleaming golden wall. And my enemies would not have built these three inches

of beautiful gleaming golden wall. That's all. It's getting a little scary, Shapiro. I don't think there are that many conservatives who deeply care whether he does it or not. I think they care about the feeling that he wants to do it. I think that so much of politics has become about this. I think you're right.

I read something, I'm trying to remember from whom today, saying, I think it was Jonathan Chate, saying that conservatives are not transactional with President Trump, that they don't like him for transactional reasons. And I think that's half right and half wrong. He's right in the sense that if he didn't deliver half of his policy proposals, conservatives would probably be okay with that.

But the transaction that they're actually into is the feeling that he would like to do that. Meaning that if he had the power to do it, he probably would. I don't know, ask Ann Colter. I mean, ask his biggest supporter. Listen, I am, I think that Ann Coulter is the only honest transactional person with regard to President Trump. If she got the wall, she was going to be happy with him. He was not going to build the wall, then she wasn't going to be happy with it. over at Manhattan Institute wrote an article in City Journal today or yesterday saying what Trump should do is he should say,

okay, forget the wall, give me money for E-Verify, and then really put them on the spot. But he can't do that because they want to hear that word. They want to hear the wall, the wall, the wall. Plus, I disagree with E-Verify completely. But your strategic point is great. Elisha, it is my New Year's resolution. I have hereby resolved, as God King of the Daily Wire, that we will get to a third. These subscribers actually give us, you guys, their first.

hard-earned mammon every month and they get to ask us these questions. So we can serve both the God King and Mammon. That's right. This question comes from Alex. It's for Ben. He wants to know, do you think the left is going to be so fragmented in 2020 that they won't be able to pull support behind one candidate? Maybe it sounds like the GOP in 2016.

And if they can pull support behind one candidate, who do you think it'll be? So number one, I do think there's an actual possibility of the brokerate convention for the Democrats. the Democrats. I do think there's the possibility that you see such a split that it's impossible for them to put it together because remember, they got rid of the superdelegates and they rejiggered their primary process. So that means that what you actually could see is a bunch of people with a bunch of different delegates and people actually brokering at the convention if enough interesting candidates run. Now, I think if I had, it's a prediction episode, I will predict that Beto O'Rourke is the nominee. And when all is sudden done that the media mobilizes behind Beto,

Beto is out Bernie and Bernie right now. And he is, basically there are three parts of the Democratic party. There's the intersectional base. There is the kind of old school Democrat Hillary Clinton base that still exists. And there is the socialist Bernie Sanders side. And you have to have a foot in at least two of those three categories in order to have a shot at the nomination. Well, Bernie is really only in one of those. He's not in intersectionality land and he's not in Hillary land. And if you look at Biden, Biden is really in Hillary land and not very much in Bernie land and not really very much in intersectionality land. Beto is not in intersectionality land, but he is in both Bernie land and traditional Hillary land. And he's doing a pretty good job pandering to intersectionality land

as well with the help of the media. So I think that the enthusiasm is going to be behind him. I think the Bernie missed his mark in 2016. He has an Irishman who self-identifies as Hispanic. That's true. That's pretty interesting. It actually matters though. I mean, it really is. If his name were Robert O'Rourke, he would be done. That's right. But he goes by Beto and so that changes everything. He's, I think that the Democrats, once they get to the general, they'll mobilize to stop Trump, because Trump is the great unifier. We saw this in the 2018 elections. Listen, I mean, we could do right now odds-making on the 2020 election.

I'm pessimistic. I'm pessimistic just because after 2018, you have presidential levels of turnout, and Republicans show up. I mean, Republicans did show up in 2018. And we got swamped by nearly nine points in the popular vote. That is ugly. I mean, that's worse than it was in 2006. I mean, it's really, really bad.

And President Trump's popularity in places like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Those play, he'll still in Ohio, but I think he's going to have some trouble in a lot of the other swing states. All he has to do is lose like one of those states. And he's pretty much done. So, you know, if I have to put his reelection odds right now, I would say that he is like a 40% chance at being a winner versus almost any Democrat that comes out of the pack except maybe Elizabeth Warren. But because she's just terrible. By the way, I'm shocked at how terrible she is. Like, I'm shocked at it.

I thought, like, I didn't think anyone, it was possible for anyone to be as terrible. as she is. But her mechanically drinking beer on an Instagram, like Alexander Ocasia Cortez, who can act like an authentic 29-year-old because she's authentically 29. Correct.

But Elizabeth Warren being like, bring me a beer, husband. Bring me a beer. My sweetie, my darling. He's like, uh-huh. You know what was amazing, too, about her announce. When she came out and said, I'm forming the exploratory committee,

she did that press conference. And one of the first questions, reporter said, how do you answer the people who like you, they like your policies, but they worry you're not electable because you're a fraud, and she had no answer. She's had years to come up with an answer.

She still has none. I thought it was a little stranger that her exploratory committee was a scout who went up to the top of the middle. To see if the cavalry was going on. I mean, what do you guys think the odds are on re-election right now? If you have to peg it now, I'm not saying like if things change radically. If I had to peg it at 50-50,

and I know that's a little bit... Weasily. I'm not taking a weasel here. Just weasel. Just weasily. I think that's the important... Mine news resolution was to be so much nice. nicer than it was last year.

I'm not saying you're a weasel. But I think the reason is a lot of the people, the GOP, suburbanites who showed up and didn't like Trump, are not going to vote for Kamala Harris. They're not going to vote for Beto O'Rourke, and they will show up again, and they will vote for Trump in that situation. So that's what raises my hopes for him.

The guy, you know, the guy had a great first year. He really did. I mean, when you look at these achievements, he rolled on that in the second year that he had, the things that he did in the first year made the economy take off. And it just depends how crazy he gets, because I really do believe that this Russian collusion thing

where he has a point, he has a legitimate point, but I think it's driving him a little nuts. Like he's gotten, he doesn't even promote the things that he's done. He doesn't even go out like any other president would do and say, look, look what I did. You know, I did this stuff. It's all this hyperbole. Like his first tweet of the New Year,

which is the all caps, just sit back and enjoy. Sit back and whatever it was. Every new year to the haters. The only person who's going to do that is me. But the fact that it was in all caps was basically everything because the truth is, things are pretty good. Like, we all went on vacation. There was a government shutdown.

Did anyone feel like everything was terrible? Like when we all logged off Twitter for five minutes, we're like, everything's kind of great. Does it feel like the government's shut down? No, the only thing that will make you feel bad is turning on social media or looking at your retirement savings account right now. Right. Because the markets...

No, the markets have taken a severe hit, and his trade policy does have something to do with that. That's what Apple said today, and I don't think they're completely wrong. But with all of that said, it's the feeling of sheer unadulterated panic that wreaks off the man. That is really his biggest problem. He doesn't give you a feeling of quietude. What you want in a president, it really is an important thing. What you want in a president, and W. did have this. It was a feeling like, you know what, I can go to sleep at night.

It's not going to be chaos when I wake up in the morning. It's just going to be a normal day and the sun will rise in the east. Even with Obama, who is awful, who's predictably awful, he's awful in predictable ways. And what people, I think, actually want is not to be bothered. We all live at a certain level of stasis in our lives, even if our lives suck. You live at a certain level of stasis. This is why they've done all sorts of social science studies. And what they find is that people, their average level of happiness across the course of their life doesn't change all that markedly.

You'll see spikes or you'll see shocks, but it pretty much returns to normal right after the spike or the shop because we're used to a certain level of stasis in our lives. Trump upends the stasis so regularly that it makes you feel uncomfortable. It makes you feel like, like, I can't take an hour break without Jim Mattis stepping down. I can't take an hour break without Trump tweet or something. One of the things you like about him, General Mattis being fired. One of the things I like about Trump, though, one of the things I like about Trump is his war with the media who absolutely deserve it. They deserve everything he gives them. But the reason it works so well is because he is them.

He does the same thing. Whenever there's a Republican in government, the press mobilizes to create that exact sense of chaos so that when things actually do go wrong, like the hurricane in New Orleans under George W. Bush, you think it's the end of a long train of chaotic things, but it's not really. It's just the first time they could get their hands on them. They could lay a glove on it. The problem with Trump is that he hits back, but he creates the same level of chaos. Right.

And so for the gift we get of the press being slapped around, which is a joy and a delight to behold, we also get this sense that everything is kind of unnervingly awful when things are really pretty good. Yes, yes, however, I will say, because we're in this, very shallow moment of culture where politics is everything, where we elected a reality TV store, where all we do is talk politics, we don't talk culture, we don't talk movies, we don't talk religion. I think people want a little bit of excitement. And I think he brings that show business and he brings that excitement. And the one good thing about Pelosi taking over right now is he does a lot better against an adversary than he does when it's just him running the show. He does a lot

better interesting take. That's my first one. I decided it was my, I was going to have one interesting take. I do think that's true. I think that I think Trump needs an enemy and he will create enemies if he doesn't have them. He doesn't have that. Right. And he's certainly going to have that. But I do think that if they're right, if the Democrats had any brains at all, the biggest, we all know this. The biggest mistake they can make is to nominate somebody who's radical and feels like they're going to upend the system. The best thing they could do right now is we're in a war on G. starting 1920 return to normalcy campaign. Right. You know, this has all been crazy. You're not going to do that, are they? No, but this is the point of making,

and it speaks to what we're saying, which is that the American people are entertained out at this point. I really think this is. It's why if they would just run Joe Biden, I think they'd win all 57 states. Right? Because people do want to go back. People don't think in terms of policy.

Yes, this is right. So no one on our side was to go back to the policies of the Barack Obama administration. But there are millions of people who would like to go back to just the kind of feeling that even Republicans who didn't like things that were happening during the Obama era at least felt like, as you said, it was sort of like there was a method to the madness. So in a way, we even sort of resigned ourselves to being in opposition to what the Obama administration was doing. It felt like a steady pressure. Right. Well, it's what the Joker says in the dark night, right? When the Joker says, he's not wrong, right?

When the Joker says in the dark night that everybody is okay with terrible things happening so long. as long as there's a plan. But when there's no plan, everybody feels like it's chaos. And Trump is the Joker, right? He's the guy setting piles of money on fire. And even if things are pretty good, and listen, we are, everybody in this room, I think it is safe to say, wants to see Trump in a second term as opposed to any of the Democrats that we're really talking about. But, and so when we're saying all this, we're saying all this with the idea in mind that President Trump, if you were to listen to this, just stop. Like it's just, just, I know you think that this is the gal that brung you and you got to dance with the gal that brung you.

I mean, first of all, that would be a unique thing for the president to actually dance with the gal that Brockhead. I mean, he's never actually done that before. Ben, you just said he's listening. Don't say those things. Fair enough. But the fact that he thinks that what got him here was that feeling of chaos, and that's true.

But that's a different thing. The girl wants to date the bad boy until she decides to get married to him, at which point she wants him to cease riding the motorcycle and hanging around in dive bars. This speaks to Selena Zito's theory, which I think is a pretty good theory that these wave elections that we keep saying

are waves for the other side, there waves to the Democrats, are waves for the Republican, are really the country trying to get the car to the center of the road where most people live, and it's just veering right and left. Well, that's why if Obama had governed from the center, he would won 80% of the vote in 2016, in 2012.

If Obama's first time is the biggest missed opportunity in the last century. I mean, I know you and I agree that 2012 broke the country. I think 2012 destroyed the country, in so many ways. We took an honorable guy met Romney and just trashed him. And then, and it trashed Romney too. Trashed Romney.

I mean, you can see that from that out back this week. Right? No, we can get to Romney in a second. First, in a bad economy, as Daily Wire God King, the guy who's responsible for making sure you all get paid, one of the tricks that getting you all paid is a concept that I made up when I was skipping college. And I was thinking, if you want to make it in business, you want to make it economically, if you want to have more than you used to have, and this is what I came up with.

It's called buy low, sell high. This is why he's the dog. Gosh, I got to write that down. Right now, right now the market is down. Buy low. But where could you do such a thing? Robin Hood. The fact is that if you are looking to invest,

then you actually have to know something about investment. And one of the ways to get to know about investment is to actually invest your money at least a little bit and play with the market and get to learn the market. That's where Robin Hood is really great. It's an investing app that lets you buy. and sell stocks, ETFs, options and cryptos, all commission-free. They strive to make financial services work for everyone, not just the wealthy. There are a couple of people in the office who we

work with who use Robin Hood, and they've shown me how the app works. It really is beautiful and provides you all sorts of great information. It has a no-commission fee cost structure, so you're not losing all the profits on the trades that you are making. It'll give you all sorts of data as well. Easy to understand charts. Market data, you place a trade in just four caps on your smartphone. It'll aggregate groups for you. So if you're interested in things like the 100 most popular or entertainment sectors. It'll group lists for you and then give you a buy, hold, sell rating for every stock. So it's giving you all sorts of information to play with. And you learn by doing. I mean, this really is true. It's true. Every job you've ever held,

you learned by doing the same thing is true when you're trading in the market. Robin Hood right now is giving our listeners a free stock like Apple, Ford or Sprint to help build your portfolio. Sign up right now at Dailywire.com. Sorry, dailywire.com.com. That's dailywire.com.com. Go check it out right now. I've looked at the app. It really is beautifully constructed. And again, that no-commission fee structure is really spectacular. Dailywire.robinhood.com. Great way to learn to invest.

Yeah. And tell them that the God King told you to buy love. Good time to get some Apple stock, I do. This is actually one of the great benefits of Robin Hood is I'm financially illiterate. And it teaches you along the way. It has literally no skill sets. I know. He fails up.

This is why, you know, as we all know, my wife takes care of me. I'm an artist. She didn't take care of me yet. He's a captain man. In a dumpster, yeah. But I have asked them to give me this, sign me on to Robin Hood so I can learn this stuff so that I can finally get rid of the old woman, you know? So we built today's episode as the 2019 prediction.

Oh, the prediction special. So I want to talk about what we think is about to happen, but I also first want to talk about the things that did happen. We didn't have a retrospective because our Christmas episode was like, November 8th. It's so early. And much to Ben's chagrin, all we talked about was like the history and theology. It was Michael Mulls doing 15 minutes on Advent.

So should we get back now to the early or... Just get me a hot cast iron frying. Yeah, I'm not going to go right. No, good, no. So I want to talk about what you think was the greatest political moment of 2018. It's easy for me. Well, go. Yeah, I think we probably all have the same one.

It's got to be the Kavanaugh confirmation. I mean, they threw hell at us, basically. They pulled out all the stops, and not only did we win, not only was Kavanaugh confirmed, but they were revealed as being who they are. They were revealed as willing to destroy any human being, any principle of American governance to get what they want, and the people saw it, and I think it's going to reverber.

These are the things that seep into the culture. These are the things that you don't even know what the effect is until 10 years later when you look back and say, you know, from that moment, something happened. I remember feeling at this, when it happened, this is the pinnacle of the Trump administration, at least the first term. And I remember thinking, enjoy it because it's going to be very, because soon the midterms are coming and then you'll be depressed.

And that was exactly the way it turned out. I thought it was a, it was a beautiful moment because everything they did was not just wrong. It was bad. It was bad what the left did, and they stopped them. And that's a great thing. Well, Lindsay Graham 2.0 was the best thing. Every since John McCain-Rides, it was pretty bad. I mean, yeah, Lindsay Graham 2.0, which was such an improvement.

I mean, the upgrade was just tremendous. And it was a reminder that when we tell that whole story, the one name that we don't really say very much is President Trump. Well, actually did the right thing, right? He stuck with Kavanaugh. He didn't remove him. He stuck with, and he gets credit for that for sure. But it was that Trump was not in the headlines every day.

The Democrats were in the headlines every day. And so this is going to be the question going forward for 2020, who's going to be in the headlines every day? If the Democrats are in the headlines every day with impeachment and with whatever nonsensical plans they're pushing and with free education for everybody and free health care for everybody and all their garbage, then Trump has a shot at re-election. If Trump is in the headlines every day, then not.

And the case in point is that if we had had that 2018 election the day after Kavanaugh, Republicans hold the House and the Senate. I agree. And it didn't. For the next three weeks, President Trump went out there and jabbered about the caravan, and we got clock. And so, you know, all we need to do is let the Democrats just give them enough not, I know a lot of suicide today, but give them enough rope.

And they are fully capable of. I actually think this brings me to one of my 2019 predictions, which is if one of the great, possibly the greatest 2018 political moment is the Kavanaugh hearing process, I think one of the great disappointments for the right in 2019 is going to be seeing how Kavanaugh actually works as a, as a, as a jury. There are some of us who are doubtful. What we forget is that he was hand-selected by Kennedy to be Kennedy's replacement. And we all, because of this sort of partisan reactionary movement on the right that's so strong right now, he gets nominated and we immediately go, oh, he's the greatest. Trump's going to be better at the Supreme Court than anyone's ever lived.

Kennedy picked him to continue Kennedy's legacy on the court. You've got to remember, though, a lot of conservatives were pulling for other people, Amy Barrett, other people. And it was really when the Democrats came out and accused him of being a gang rapist. That was really everyone then galvanized behind him, but he might be a disappointment. The one thing I don't think he'll be a disappointment on it. It just happens to be a hobby horse of mine is Chevron. Right.

Now, this is right. He'll leave it on Chevron. That's a big one. That's a big one. For people who don't know what Chevron deference is, basically, administrative agencies all have these adjudicatory bodies where if you have a problem with the EPA, you have to then appeal the EPA's decision to the administrative body within the EPA that makes these decisions.

And there is a big question as to whether a court can then review that decision, whether an administrative agency is subject to review de novo, meaning that they can actually look at the case itself and then overrule the EPA's interpretation of its own law. And Chevron deference basically says that unless there's a plain error that was made in the reading of the statute, then you have to give the administrative agency all sorts of leeway to do this. Well, Kavanaugh, to his great credit, has said that doesn't exist if the EPA is ruling for its own benefit. And we don't have to take their word for anything. In other words, we can review each of these cases without any sort of deference. He's against Chevron deference, which is one area where he is

really good. So if we all basically agree on the number one political story of 2018, Let's argue over the number two political story of 2018. What stood out for you, Ben? I would have to say that the social media collapse has been the big one. I mean, the kind of building rage against Twitter and Facebook, and some for good reason and some for really bad reason. So I think that unsurprisingly, I think conservatives are correct to be deeply skeptical that a bunch of leftists who design algorithms in Silicon Valley

are going to be honest with them about how exactly these algorithms are then applied. So people on the leftists said, you know, Daily Wire does really well over at Facebook. You know, and we do. I mean, we have a great team. We have a great social media team. We do really well with Facebook. That's true.

But it is also true that early in 2017, Facebook decided basically to destroy the entire right on Facebook. And we were part of that. And so when Facebook or YouTube or Twitter crack down on people, they're only cracking down on people on one side of the aisle, they're not cracking down on people on the other side of the aisle. And so I think that's a legit concern because all the people in Silicon Valley really do have the sort of hoolie view of what they're supposed to

to do on Silicon Valley that don't be evil Google schtick. Then they think don't be evil means crack down on people who are on the right. It says Tim Cook of Apple said it'd be a sin if we allowed people to say hateful things on our platforms. Well, you're not God. You don't get to decide that. But he said he was basically. You said that inner voice was going to guide him.

I mean, when you use the word sin about your own judgment, then pretty much you are saying. Our friend Alan Estrin from Prager You, you were in this conversation. You may be able to recount it better than I can. his whole thing about the Apple 1984 ad. Do you remember his speech about that? Of course not. I was tuned out for the entire thing. There really is this great irony in that night.

For those who don't remember, the 1984 ad with Apple, the Mac is coming out, and they're going to, they run down the movie theater aisle, they smash the brainwashing, Big Brother, and they're going to be the new creative,

innovative disruptors. They are now Big Brother. They are now 1984. Tim Book is. But here's the, so those are, I think, legit criticisms. Here are criticisms I do not think are legit.

So I think that all of the people who are deeply, maybe you guys have screwed this, all the people who are deeply worried about the invasion of our privacy by Facebook, which is taking public data and then selling it. If you're stupid enough to put a bunch of your information on Facebook, on a free platform, what do you think they are doing with that information? Like, how did you think they were making their money? Did you think that they were just making their money

by you sitting there and not looking at ads? I think no one really cares about the privacy. I totally think it's all censorship. So I think that people care about censorship, but I think the reason that you're seeing bipartisan disapproval of Facebook and YouTube and Twitter has nothing to do with the actual reason that the left is saying, right?

So the left is saying it's all about privacy and my concerns with privacy and what all these companies are doing with my info. No, what the left is actually concerned with is controlling the censorship. And so what they are actually upset about is that Donald Trump won in 2016, and they think that if they can control the social media

by basically threatening them with legislation on the basis of privacy, then they can get all their social media friends in Silicon Valley, You turn off all the right way there's 20. Let me push back on this, and then I'll, it's important because we say that as Americans, and it's true. But the left had an agenda, sort of a universal agenda for the last century before this moment. And we're seeing it play out in Europe, and I worry that we're going to see it here, which is this whole GDPR movement in Europe.

There's basically the European Union passed a law that went into effect a few months ago about how websites that operate anywhere where a European citizen, might be able to interface with it. So it actually applies to American companies here, that the way that we store and deal with user data is now regulated by the EU and subject to fines. And the fines can be $20 million. And so you may have noticed if you go to websites over the last three or four months,

undoubtedly all of your favorite websites have started doing this thing where you have to like intellect to use cookies. Right? And that's not like the letter of the law of the GD GDPR movement, but it's a result of the, it's the reason it all happened on one day. That's the day that GDPR went into effect. It's going to cost companies like Google and Facebook billions of dollars in Europe.

But for smaller operations like the Daily Wire, it presents real challenges. It actually makes us question whether or not we should make our content available in Europe at all, because it's so onerous the restrictions on how you can use data now. And so while I agree that in the exact moment we're in, the left actually doesn't care about privacy. they only care about sort of pressuring these social media organizations to not let Donald Trump get reelected. They do have a secondary agenda, which is control everything and take everybody's money. And they are going to do that in the name of privacy. Well, see, this is why I think some of the arguments on the right are a little bit clueless.

I actually wanted you to address this because you explained it to me, and I've been explaining it to other people, and it's important. When we hear right-wingers say, well, they're private companies. They have a right to do whatever they want, essentially. That's not true. First of all, the First Amendment protects our right to free speech from the government. But our right to free speech comes from God. And so if you have essentially a monopoly on information, you have to be stopped from censoring people. You have to be stopped.

And you explain to me why that is perfectly legal and perfectly within the realm of capitalism to do that. And I think you should talk about it because most people don't understand it. Yeah, so it's based on this thing called the Communications Decency Act. And there's a section of it, Section 230, which basically, applies here. What it comes down to is a question of liability. That there's a reason that major news publications have fact checkers. There's a reason that if the New York Times, for example, were to write a story about Ben in which they say, you know, Ben is known to lure children to his house who are then never seen again. Yeah, true. I mean, that's right. That's the point. There's no

evidence. Ben would have a, he would have a legal case. against the New York Times for publishing libelous slandered defamation of character yeah because they're a publisher right and because they have editorial control over what they've published and if they're publishing things that are knowingly untrue and meant to do someone harm they open themselves up to pretty extreme legal liabilities so inter Silicon Valley enter Google enter YouTube enter Facebook enter Twitter into Instagram they in theory are not publishers They're platforms. Their argument is we don't publish anything. We open up a platform for you, the user, to publish. No one could publish Facebook. There's millions of posts. No one could publish YouTube. They're like a phone line. There's billions. They're like a phone line. Exactly. And so they say, we can't be held responsible if slanderous, libelous, defamatory things are said on our platform. If I got on the phone with Jeremy and I said something bad about Drew, you wouldn't hold the phone company responsible. You couldn't sue AT&T over your conversation. Right. Right. So the government agreed, and they said,

we won't hold you responsible for the things that are published on your platforms by users if you remain a free and open platform. Now, of course, as even with free speech, famously you can't yell fire in a crowded theater, right? That's sort of an overall, yeah. But there are some, like, very general, you know. Can threaten violence. You're not allowed to threaten violence. You're not allowed to incite violence.

But generally speaking, in the argument that was made by the, tech companies at the time was we're going to not play a political role. We're going to allow people to publish their opinions. And for that reason, they received shielding by Congress from lawsuits. Now they're saying, well, we have a responsibility. It would be a sin if we didn't. We have to execute editorial control over things that are being written to make the world a better place, to make the world a friendlier place, make the world a more generous place. And the argument is, Well, cool. If that's true, a lot of terrible things are said about us on your platform. A lot of untrue. A lot of things meant to incite harm to us.

Now you're a publisher. Now you're a publisher. Which is why if I had been Alex Jones, the asshat who was banned from Twitter and things that they're making the frogs say, if I had been Alex Jones when I was banned from Twitter, which he should not have been, I would have filed two concurrent lawsuits. In lawsuit number one, I would have sued Twitter for removing me, for removing my opportunity to publish my own views on their free and open platform. Lawsuit number two, I would have sued Twitter for all of the horribly defamatory things that were published on their platform about me in the wake of me being suspended. And I would have made Twitter defend in two separate cases in on. On the one hand, explain how you're not liable for the slanderous things that were published about me, while on the other hand saying that you have no editorial. That's exactly right.

And if they were not so clueless about this stuff, we basically just want to be on Twitter. And so when Alex Jones goes and nobody likes Alex Jones, the guy's a balloon, you know, nobody defends him. But he needs to be defended. Of course he does. I'll just defend this one point. They are turning the frickin'n't frog's gay, aren't they? They're making the Fricken Frogs gay, you guys. But it's...

But nothing's wrong with that. Yeah, but what's wrong with that? Who am I to judge? I will you to judge it? A gay frog for crime. Well, I mean, if Kevin Hart had said that, then they'd have gotten him from the Oscars. By the way, I think that the only people who are willing to host the Oscars are probably in this room in this room.

That's the way this works. No, and I think what happened to Kevin Hart, I mean, to me, this is the stuff that is absolutely terrible that's happening to the... Well, so I've coined this word that I'm definitely trying to get catch on. It's going to be fetch. I'm really trying to get this word caught. woke scold. I actually like this one. Right? I think it's pretty good. Because these people

are, they are woke scolds. This is what they do. And it can be used as a verb also in the fashion that we use all nouns as verbs. Of them are there. So this is my point. I don't think there are that many of them. So I think that there are, I think there are hundreds of thousands. I don't think it's tens of thousands. But I think that the ones who are super active and actually get this stuff done, I think you're talking about a group of

500 people. Really. I think that, and these are the people who call up Tucker Carlson's advertisers and bug them. These are the people. who decide that they're going to go after Kevin Hart on Twitter. It's basically like sleeping giants and media matters. And what they do is they sit around all day because they're bored and terrible, awful people. And then, yeah, some of them are rich.

And what they do is that they then mobilize to harass one person and ruin that person's life for a day. And then that person goes up the chain and says, my life was ruined today. And somebody says, you know, it'll just be easier for us to disassociate from this human being? And you know how I know that this is true?

Because we have used this tactic ourselves. So Jeremy and I, before we ran Daily Wire, We ran a group called Truth Revolt. Oh, right. You were there. I was there. And Truth Revolt was specifically designed as a mutually assured destruction group.

We said this openly, that we hate the tactics we're using, but the left needs to learn that they can't just bully people into silence. And so what we would do is if there was somebody who said something terrible, like Martin Bashir saying that he wanted to defecate into Sarah Palin's mouth.

Do we actually think that Martin Bashir should lose advertisers over that? Not really. I think he's a schmuck, right? I mean, I think people shouldn't watch a show, but I think advertisers should be able to advertise wherever they want. But we had a group of activists.

and we told all of our activists call this line at this advertiser and tell them you don't want to see their advertising on Bashir Show. Now, the advertiser doesn't know whether these people were actually shopping with them or getting insurance with them or any of that kind of stuff. All they know is that that day, their entire customer service team was overwhelmed with like 30 phone calls. And that was the entirety of it. It was like 30 people who would call. And then the advertiser would be asked on Twitter or publicly, are you going to keep advertising on Martin Bashir after he said, X, Y, and Z. and they would feel inconvenience for like a minute. And then they would say, okay, we're pulling our advertising. Right.

Okay, well, the reason that I'm bringing this up is not because this is a good tactic. It's not. That's the reason I'm bringing it up. Advertisers need to understand that a bad day does not mean that if you kept advertising on Martin Bichier, you would lose your entire business. And this is also true on Twitter. It's true of comedians. Like, this is why Bill Burr, God bless him, is never going to be taken down by these people.

Because if these people ever tried to take down Bill Burr by saying, like, you said X 10 years ago, he'd just say F you. FU is the single It's the single most powerful tool So what? So what? The person who used to say this to me was Andrew Breitbart, right,

who took as much flack as anybody than any of us ever known and he always used to say and it was hard for him because he's a human being, right? And I take a lot of flack too and it's hard as we all do in this room actually.

He always used to say walk towards the fire that one of the empowering things in being on the right and I think Trump has done this for a lot of people is the feeling like they're shooting the arrows

and it feels like, it feels like, you know, Boromere at the end of, the first Lord of the Rings that you're getting hit with arrow, arrow, arrow. But at a certain point, you realize the arrows actually don't hit you, but they bounce off you, that just saying, you know what, go screw yourself? Right.

Most people don't care about anything. And you know what? You know, I've actually taken a fairly big hit for my opinions. I think I can say financially, I've taken a really big hit. I lost contracts in Hollywood that were worth, I'm sorry, but they're worth millions of dollars. We'd pay you a lot more if your opinions were better. That's a lot more. But, you know, in the end, if you're an American, who wants to live afraid?

Who wants to live silent? I mean, we all go and talk to college kids, and they always come up and they ask the question, how can I say this and that? And what they really mean is, how can I say this and that without consequence? And the answer is, you can't. You can't. This is what being an American is all about. And we all carry the culture.

Every one of us carries the culture in our two hands. We have a responsibility to take some hits. I got to tell you, this is shocking. But speaking of those college kids, I'm actually more pessimistic than Ben on this, on the woke fetches, on the woke scolds, which is that I don't think it's terribly small. I think it is in the broad American population. It's very small, but it skews so young.

Well, that's true. So many of these young kids. Jerry Seinfeld said this. It gives them a feeling of power. It gives them a feeling of power. And Seinfeld said he won't play college campuses anymore because they call everything racist, they call everything sexist.

I mean, I see a lot of it. We all do. And all they have to do is make it slightly. What they, the people that the woke scolds are aiming at, are the people who are decent but kind of apathetic and don't want to be bothered. Right. Those are the actual people that are aiming at. Not at me and not at Tucker.

What they're really aiming at, and this is one of the great unspoken truths of America, they're aiming at boards of directors of corporations who are risk-averse. Right. And the unfortunate reality is that the corporate board in America has given us the left-wing agenda. Almost everything that we actually think is wrong in the culture, is being promulgated by probably people who donate to Republicans. They make a lot of money sitting on boards. They probably go to the country club.

They've all eaten at Maralaga. But they're so risk-averse in their business that they give us frivolous sexual harassment policies. They give us pulling money out of anybody who says an opinion that they agree with, but that gets any heat brought on them. They fund all the colleges. They fund all the colleges. I mean, it's too big a topic for us to go to today.

but we should on one of these in the future really talk about the danger. How can we win back? How can we give metal and spines to these board members at these companies because if they would fight the wars, we wouldn't be losing. But first we have to talk about a good corporation.

A good company. A great company. A company with company in their name. These guys are absolutely. But these guys are legitimate badasses. The folks over at Bravo Company Manufacturing. So you know that all of us here in the room our big believers in the Second Amendment,

believe in our Second Amendment rights, believe in your right to keep and bear arms to protect all of your other rights. Well, Bravo Company manufacturing was started in a garage by a Marine veteran more than two decades ago to build a professional-grade product that meets combat standards.

BCM believes the same level of protection should be provided to every American, regardless of whether they're a private citizen or a professional. BCM is not a sporting arms company. They're there to make weapons that will function properly when the time comes to use them

if your life is, God forbid, in danger. Each component of a BCM rifle is hand-assembled and tested by Americans to a life-saving standard. ECM feels a moral responsibility as Americans to provide tools that will not fail the user when it's not just a paper target. They work with all the leading instructors of marksmanship from top levels of America's special ops forces from Marine Corps Force reconnaissance to U.S. Army Special Ops Forces who can teach the skills necessary to defend yourself. To learn more about Bravo Company manufacturing, head on over to bravo company mfg.com. You can discover more about their product, special offers.

And upcoming news again, that's bravo company mfg.com. If you need more convincing, go check them out at YouTube as well. YouTube.com slash Bravo Company USA. I've talked to the founders of the company. These are guys who do not give a damn about what anybody has to say about them. All they care about is providing the best lifesaving product directly to you. Bravo CompanyMFG.com. That's Bravo CompanyMFG.com.

Go check them out right now. You know, this, though, points it to something. I agree with everything you just said about risk of reverse corporation. But we have to add into that that the shift from a manufacturing economy to an information economy is a shift from people who are good at making things like these guys, right, like Bravo Company, to people who specialize. in emotion. And they are naturally leftist. And the corporate

world has turned more to the left as we have shifted more to an information economy. And this old idea that the Republicans are the friends of corporations is no longer entirely true. I think there's truth to that. And I'm not sure about whether it's emotion, but I do think that it has

something to do with the idea that a material product on the shelf is what it is. The piece of metal that you are buying on the shelf. You got to do a good job. In the end, it's going to be judged by the quality of the product that's on the shelf, whereas technology is going to be judged by all of these other big things that you feel about the company, which is why you see all these corporations now branding the most leftist possible fashion, because they feel like the conservatives,

the thing is they do rely on the goodwill of conservatives. They rely on the fact that conservatives see a commercial that we find a little offensive, and we're not going to care enough to boycott their product. But they've reached out to this whole broad new group of people because that broad group of new people is really interested in exactly that kind of virtue signaling. You see this with Nike and Colin Kaepernick. They figured no conservative is actually going to not buy a Nike shoe. We'll just go buy whatever shoe is best because that's how we're used to purchasing products.

But everybody on the left who's deeply concerned about politics is going to be suckered into spending their hard-earned dollars with a capitalistic company that is using sweatshop labor in China because Colin Kaepernick is kneeling on a poster for them. There goes Nike as a potential advertiser. But it is true. When I said that

the apathetic person in the middle, there's a reason the left is smart. What they are doing is they are pairing away the people around the Overton window. They're gradually closing it. So they're not going directly for the center of the Overton window. They're not just saying, okay, no more Shapiro. Instead, what they're doing is they're saying, well, let's start with Alex Jones. Because everybody hates Alex Jones.

Because I'm like, yeah, you're right, he's a schmuck. But, you know, you can't throw him out because if you throw him out, then you could throw everybody on. They say, well, but if you think that he shouldn't be thrown out, that's probably because you agree with him. And then you should be thrown out alongside him. I saw this happen a couple of years ago when there was all this talk about should be able to punch a Nazi.

And the idea was that if you say that Nazis have a First Amendment right to speech, you agree with the Nazi. Or if you say there's a First Amendment right to use the N-word, that means that you're in favor of using the N-word, which is nonsensical. It's disgusting. No, and the left used to agree with us. The ACLU defended the Nazi's right to speak.

And the ACLU is the best possible sort of witness test for what has happened in the country. Or the ACLU recently came out, and they said, we are not going to defend the due process rights of Justice Kavanaugh. We're not going to defend his due process rights, because it might offend people.

Right. We can't, there's such a thing as too much due process. You're like, you're the ACLU. It's literally in your name. It's like, just take the C and the L out, right? Civil Liberties Union. But this is where it's going,

is to scare everybody into silence. And when Trump came forth, I think this was really his main pitch was more than anything else. I think his main pitch was that he was a giant pulsating middle finger to everything, including this stuff. And people were like, okay,

well, if he can say that, then I can say that. And the problem is that, and this has been the problem for President Trump historically is that it is so worthwhile to do that. It is really worthwhile to be able to say F you on topics where we have to stand on our hind legs and do that. But we do have to ourselves be careful to continue being decent human beings even as we do.

Absolutely true. We do have to take responsibility for the fact that we let the culture slide so far that only a bore like Trump would break the rules. Speak for yourself, bullshit. We just got here. But actually, but here's the thing. I actually disagree that it would take, that only a bore would do it. I just think only a bore could get away with it. Meaning that, like, I've been doing it my entire career, right?

You've been doing it too. Like, we all know people who have been deeply, politically incorrect for their entire career, but they haven't gotten away with it. The reason that Trump got away with it is because his level of fame was so high that it was impossible to destroy him. The media created him, and then they couldn't destroy the Frankenstein. And he also understood the principle of not apologizing, and never looking back of even when you say the wrong thing.

just keep on going. But it takes, you know, like I'm a tremendously polite person in real life, and it's really hard to do that. You have to be able to say, I insult you, I don't care. You know, and it takes a certain kind of person to do it. Well, and that is, but therein lies the problem is that, you know, as a good person, your first reaction to somebody saying you did something bad, and believe it or not, I try to be a good person.

I know. It's what the funny hat is for in the whole thing. We try not to tell people. I know, it's a dirty little secret. But when somebody says something you did is wrong, Your first reaction is a good person is, okay, maybe. Yeah. Let me really think about that. You heard somebody's feelings you wanted to.

Perhaps you'll even apologize. Right, exactly. And it's not terrible to apologize. So we've got this new feeling is almost too strong in the other direction. I just feel like the country's swinging wildly side to side. It was apologized for everything. And then Trump came along. He said, apologized for nothing.

And the right answer is apologize for the wrong things. When you're wrong. Right. But which if we all just kind of basically abided by the rules that we learned when we were seven, The country would be that much better. Like all those Republicans who used to lose like George Bush and George Bush and Mitt Romney. This is the thing that bothers me is that we take, there's a utility to what Trump does, even though much of what he does is wrong. Right.

That's right. So many on our side have seen the utility and they refuse to make the distinction between what's right and wrong. And so you're seeing bad behavior now from many people, even friends of ours, I won't name them. You're seeing bad behavior from many people on the right because of this new sort of FU attitude. So I was going to say a minute ago about the gospel that I often tell people that my view of the gospel is that we have basically complete forgiveness in Christ. And that because of that, that we have freedom from legal moral restrictions in our relationship with God. Doesn't mean anything about our relationship with each other or anything. But in our relationship with God, that that's been covered.

And that there's now a new way to live and the new way to live. isn't based on regulation, but it's based on sort of relationship. People always immediately respond to this by saying, so you're saying I can just kill people and cheat on my wife? And I always say, they think that they're revealing a hole in my theology. They're revealing a hole in their character. They're saying, if I had grace from God, the first thing I would do is murder people and cheat on my wife.

It's like the purge. And I worry that we're saying that a little bit on the right too, where it's like, instead of seeing that we've been freed from what was wrong with the restrictions of the Obama era. There were so many things that were true that we couldn't say. We now are embracing the Trump freedom and feel free to say the things that we should.

There's such a deep point, and by the way, I have to say, I sort of agree, as the Jew in the room, I sort of agree with the critics because I do think that human nature is to say that if you were given the capacity for running room, that you would do whatever you want it, because people historically

have basically done whatever they wanted when giving running room. And so that's why it's not enough to do away with all of the old rules that the left was trying to push on us, we do have to re-inculcate virtue. And that's where the other half of Trump is missing, right? Trump is great at knocking down rules.

And all of us cheer when the bull in the China shop breaks the China that needs to be broken. It's not just that he's breaking China that doesn't need to be broken. It's that we do need a new set of China there. I mean, there actually does need... We need to be able to serve dinner.

But it would help. It would help if George W. Bush, decent man, expanded entitlement spending had not attacked every country on earth trying to spread democracy. It would help if Mitt Romney had not put Obamacare in Massachusetts. It would help, in other words, if these guys were actually conservatives as well as being a political. But it would also help that Donald Trump didn't say that the Soviet Union was right to invade Afghanistan. I mean, there's a lot of us. No, of course. Yeah. It's time to talk to some of our daily wire.com

subscribers who paid the bills around these parts. It's time to talk to Elisha Krauss. Even better. I'm over here in Subscriber Central, which I found out it's really uncomfortable. And then someone said, no, no, no, it's not a broom closet. It's Noles's studio. Even though you can't fire him, you did give him a really crappy store. I just want everyone to know that. That was Ben's doing.

Yep. Ben actually personally designed it. This question comes from Joel J. And he wants to know why Michael Noles and other strong conservatives seem to hate vegetarians and vegans. Is it possible to truly be conservative and non-meat eating? Does this not impact how the GOP sees sub-urban voters? I don't hate vegetarians and vegans. I love vegetarians and vegans, and I want them to be happy.

And one of the ways to be happy is to eat veal. One of the most delicious meats. Fou gras is very good. The problem with veganism, not vegans. Vegans are confused, and I want them to see the light, is that veganism is morally incoherent. How many vegans do you know who are pro-life? Very few.

Maybe they exist, but there are very few. Most vegans, I know. very left wing, very in favor of abortion. Part of this is the moral incoherence here. Does anyone really believe that an oyster is more conscious than a carrot in any measurable way? I don't think so. Not really. It's a total inversion of the natural order.

We, biblically speaking, have dominion over the land and the sea. We are conscious beings. We use our reason. We are biologically built to consume meat. It is good for us. Vegans always look kind of sickly and weird. They do. And they're always imposing their will on all.

of us. It's a total inversion of the natural order. And the left, as we always say, gets everything totally wrong. They turn comedy into tragedy. They turn everything upside down. Politically correct means not correct, right? All of these various things. This is another example of them getting it wrong. And if they would stop serving the environment, as though the environment were above them, it were some god of theirs, they would learn that we are designed to serve products of the natural environment to each other on dinner. I don't agree with them. I have a theory about veganism and vegetarianism that's going to be the most unpopular thing that I've said all night. But I want us to get back together in 50 years, and we'll raise a glass to Drew.

I'm not going to be here, don't know? And talk about whether or not my prediction has borne out. I know where you're going, and I will agree with you. I think that the next frontier in human morality is toward vegetarian. Totally agree with this. And you know who else thought that? Hitler. That's it.

I've said this before. It actually raises an interesting question for me about morality versus righteousness, which is we sometimes conflate the two, and we try to make God a moral being. But the problem is that morality exists within a societal framework. But God is a righteous being, and righteousness flows from God. It's not a human-made construct. And so there's an interesting question about, can morality? actually improve across a given civilization across a given amount of time, while righteousness

within that civilization decreases. And so here's an example of this. It is the case that in Eden, man did not eat meat. But it is also the case that upon the expulsion from Eden, God killed the first animals to provide not food. Nice jackets. Yeah, to require fur, fur for the lovely ladies. Over time, however, and I know you can't, it's naive to say as we progress, we get better

because, you know, the 20th century is the most bloody century in human history. But there are aspects that become better from a sort of moral point of view, doing a way with polygamy, doing a way with child marriage. You know, the Virgin Mary was probably 14 years old when she conceived Christ, but none of us think that it's a bad thing that 14-year-olds aren't married off to 30-year-old men today. We think that that's a probably moral improvement within society. It doesn't make them immoral to have done it at the time because they didn't live in the framework of our current society. You know, they needed polygamy to build civilizations in the beginning.

They needed women to get married and have children very young when the life expectancy was very short. And so you had to create children early on. There's other things that are maybe less justifiable but still represent shifts in morality, slavery. You know, we had, slavery was ubiquitous across almost all cultures on all of the earth. And then an awakening came in our consciousness. And now, you know, I say George Washington, one of the greatest men to ever live, oversaw 300 slaves. If I oversaw just one, you would all agree that I would be right.

Because I don't live in that moral construct. And I do oversee one. You can't sell him off and get rid of him. He keeps trying to sell me off. Who would buy him is. And so there's an interesting question to me. I think the left is going to turn to vegetarianism and veganism and animal, this sort of really expansive view of animal rights over the next 50 years.

I think that's the next frontier. But my question is, is it a moral improvement? It's obviously the case that without the eating of meat, we would not have, as a race, we could have not have gotten where a human race, we could not have gotten to where we are today. But there is a question. once you live in a in a nation so rich or in a in a in an earth so rich or once you have the capacity to make protein once you can get there's growing stakes without animals see i think so i think there's a morality of killing so i don't know so here's where i think

the big distinction lies so i'm i'm actually believe it or not i'm as a big mediator i think that in a hundred years people are going to look back and think that we're all barbarians i agree and i think that and i could see myself moving toward toward this, but not on the basis of animal rights. So here's where I think that there's a big distinction. I think there's a difference between human duty and animal rights. Where the animal rights crowd is coming from is that animals are basically the same as human beings. And this is why whenever I'm asked this question, it's like, well, you care about unborn babies,

but you don't care about the slaughter of a cow. It's like, right, because a baby's a baby and a cow's a cow, and they aren't the same thing. But people in the animal rights movement are always assuming the commonalities between animals and human beings, which I completely deny and do not accept. With that said, the idea that if I have the capacity to receive nutrition, like full nutrition, let's assume, from sources other than the death or suffering of animals, that seems to me not an immoral concept. As long as I maintain that distinction between the worth of a human and the worth of an animal, I think that where we start to backslide, and this is what's been happening, is people say that humans and animals are the same, therefore don't eat me. not humans and animals are not the same therefore don't eat meat but it is possible that you can arise in a future where it is more moral not to eat meat but that doesn't mean that people who

ate meat in generations past were less moral but the part of this that I agree with is I do believe that the the mass reduction of meat has caused animals to be actually maltreated and they do share the creation with us and I think as soon as the last child on earth is well fed I'm going to start to worry about this and I think it is it is worth worrying about The other thing is, I do believe that meat is going to be produced without animals. Right. And at that point, the question. Technology will solve everything.

There is a distinction. There's a distinction to draw. I think you're right. I agree. We shouldn't be cruel to animals. I agree with C.S. Lewis. You shouldn't. The reason not to be cruel to animals is not because of the animal.

The animal doesn't have any rights, but it's because it deadens your humanity. But I do remember a certain ancient people who developed very strict rules for how to slaughter animals, you know, in a very specific way. I don't see. anything wrong with that at all. I don't see anything. You don't see anything wrong about it, but those rules were developed in a societal construct where the eating of meat was a requirement for the thriving of the civilization. I'm looking, I'm asking a moral question about an emerging future where that may not be the case. And if my theory is right, then it may, it may necessarily be the case that we eventually

in the in the end times, in whatever the final analysis is, that we might live in the most moral human society that's ever existed, but the least righteous one. Because we will have constructed a morality that reflects God, but doesn't contain him in any way. This is what's so wrong with the guys like Stephen Pinker who says everything is going great, and everything is going great. Things are getting better, but you can live in a happy, completely well-developed society that is morally atrocious. When you're awarding 50 million babies a day and everybody's happier, that's not a good thing. That's not a positive thing.

Alicia. This question... This one is for Andrew, and I love it when we do the conversation, and people always seem to ask Andrew detailed relationship questions. So Locke wants to know. Do you ever hear back from those people that you end up giving the relationship advice to?

I do, in fact, and it's been incredibly humbling to say that people... Good for you that something humbled you. I know, it's amazing, right? It hasn't had the effect of humbling me. Oh, it has been humbling, too. Exactly. We're happening to somebody else. But yes, apparently this advice had been very useful.

In a way, it's not as shocking as all that. I have been in a 40-year romance with the same woman we have had one argument in 42 years. Seriously, one fight. We haven't had one disagreement. We disagree all the time. But I think that I do understand what it is that people do that keeps them from being happy. And some of the letters I get in the mailbag, it's so clear what they're doing. Even they must know, they just need somebody to say it.

I said, I think it was at UCLA, a kid came up to me and he said, you know, you told me to man up and no one had ever said that to me before. Well, then the bar is very low, you know, because nobody's saying to these kids, be a man. This is so true. I was having this conversation with Jordan Peterson, who, of course, is doing this for a lot of young men particularly. And we were looking at each other and going, like, Jordan's main message, clean up your room is something that every father should say to every son. And he's filling up stadiums of 2,000 people to hear him say, clean up your room. That's a sad thing. Half of my schick is doing exactly the same thing that you're doing,

which is man up, take control of your own life. It's a free country. All you're guaranteed is adventure. Go make something of yourself and make a series of responsible decisions that end in a good result. And all of this is so revolutionary in a society where we expect everybody to clean up after each other. Yeah.

That it's actually drawing massive crowds, which is a hopeful thing, but also kind of a sad thing, right? I mean, stuff that was taken for granted 40 years ago is now revelatory. On a personal note, I have to say that I sometimes having found God late in life and having it been such an infusion of joy into my life, I sometimes have said to God, why did it have to take 50 years, you know, because it was like crossing the desert, you know, you could have just walked straight into Jordan and it would have taken 10 minutes, you know. And I really think the reason is I've explored every stupid idea before getting the right answer.

And that's very helpful when you're talking to people who are exploring those ideas. Alicia. All right. Chelsea says, hey, crew, I have some friends who are joining the Democratic Socialists of America and seem militant about the philosophy. Do you have any ideas on how to convince them of the errors of their ways? I do, and I don't think it has anything to do with logical arguments against socialism. This is an unpopular point of view. There are myriad logical arguments, historical, philosophical arguments against socialism.

I don't think that's actually the appeal. I think the appeal for these kids is on a much more base level. I think it has to do with intersectionality. I think it has to do with skin color. I think it has to do with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. being Jenny from the block in the Bronx, even though she grew up in Northern Westchester. I think that's really where it comes in.

And you have to make emotionally compelling narratives. We talk about this all the time out here in Hollywood. You have to tell emotionally compelling narratives about the horrors and the ravages of socialism and communism and about the wonders of free markets and capitalism. And I think if you talk about the statistics, 600 million people lifted out of poverty in 30 years,

just in China basically, because of capitalism, because they liberalized economies, the awful ravages of Cuba, you're just speaking in numbers that people are not comprehending. But if you talk about the family, the individual, if you talk about G. Song-ho, that guy who was in North Korea, lost his limb because of communism. He had to crawl across a river, ducking guards and bullets

to make it to freedom and to show the joy on his face, lifting up that walker that he's walking with. And you compare that to the ravages still in that country, that is much more compelling. And it allows people, especially young people, who have been denied moral arguments their whole lives, to really cling to something. I think that's going to stick a lot better than statistics.

I agree, and I also think the moral argument, the thing that conservatives do all the time is they talk about the fact that socialism doesn't work. And while that's true, it's also just wrong, even if it worked, it is wrong for you to go out and work hard to make money. And for me, because I got elected to something, to take that money away and say,

I know how better how to spend it. And that really is what the DSA pitch is, right? The DSA pitch basically is you're a better person because you are a socialist. And that is the chief obstacle you have to overcome when you're arguing with folks is you have to make them understand they're not a better person for being a socialist. It actually makes you a worse person because you are now espousing a philosophy that says that you deserve my stuff because you're breathing. And that's not a thing. Yeah, you're a thief. Alicia.

All right. All crats, I hope I'm saying that right. Maybe it's just a username. So sorry if I'm pronouncing it wrong. He wants to know. Should Trump have a contest for meme of the week and tweet the winner every Wednesday night? We won. Yeah, that's right.

100% he should, right? Well, you know, before we go any further, it was a big way for Michael. Next meme. I can't do the impression. Next meme. Before we go any further, I do have to, is the only time ever going to do this. I need to throw this to Michael because we have to get his Alexander Ocasio Quartz as retelling. We've gone through this entire episode without the, this is his big moment, guys. Thank you.

Thank you. This better not just be live. We better have this tape of Ben complimenting me here. This was the great, this was a Christmas gift. This happened on. Also, please explain why it matters, like why this is important? Because you're getting a lot of flack people saying, like, why are you so down on AOC? Like, explain the whole thing.

Right. So AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she sent out this tweet. Really, it was a social media intern who sent out a very stupid tweet. But it was this tweet of her congressional plaque, and it said, don't be fooled by the plaques that I got. I'm still, I'm still Alex from the Bronx. This is her appeal. She's this scrappy girl. She says it.

Trump's going to deal with this girl from the Bronx. She's not from the Bronx. She's not from the Bronx. I'm not from Brooklyn. She's not from the Bronx. We grew up in neighboring towns in affluent northern Westchester, one of the richest counties in the country. She grew up in the much richer, much less diverse town next door, Yorktown Heights. I grew up in Bedford Hills. I don't pretend to be from the, I went to the Bronx once a week as a kid to go grocery shopping, see people. Maybe she went once a week. When she got called out on this during her campaign, she then changed her tune on her campaign bio. She said, oh, my life was defined by commuting. You can't commute to a public school. She lived there her whole life. Her father was an architect. She then said, well, I grew up in two worlds.

She didn't grow up in two worlds. So I was just tweeting this out of her. I said the average household wealth in the Bronx is $400,000. The average household wealth where you grew up is three times that. The median income was this. People were getting so upset by this. It is a fraud. It is a fraud that she is perpetrating.

And this is the Liz Warren moment for Alexandria Ocasia Cortez. The way that you know, by the way, that this really hurts her, that this really matters to her, is I'm sitting on my Christmas vacation. I'm sitting there, swilling Shevley, having a grand old time, few martinis in, and she is tweeting about this for a day,

because she knows this is a big weakness for her. It is the central fraud and her appeal, which I think is emotional and intersectional and identity politics, is a total fiction. She went to a place with great public schools, it was totally affluent, she got to go to a private college.

She's politically savvy. She won that seat, but this claim that she's this scrappy upstart, up by her bootstraps, this is why we need socialism, is a total farce. We should tweet this at her every single day. We should constantly remind her of this. Awesome. And the reason the people I think were asking was because, at least I seriously got asked this by a member of the media today, well, is the right doing the right thing by pointing this out?

Because why aren't they just pointing out the fact that she's shallow and doesn't know anything, which is obviously true, right? She doesn't know any of the things. So why are they focusing on her background? And what I said is because she uses her lack of knowledge, she shields her lack of knowledge, with reference to her story. That's right. Basically, every time she's asked, how are you going to pay for stuff? She says, I'm just a girl from the Bronx.

And we'll figure it out because I'm scrappy. And it's like, well, you're going to need to do better than that, right? You're going to actually need to actually give me some logic behind your ideas. And if you're going to say that your formative experiences are what caused you'd believe these things, then the formative experience is better match up with the things that you believe in. Yeah. She is a genuinely dangerous, ignoramus. I mean, I have to say, first of all, the fact that she is, she's pretty. pretty. I said this on the show today that the combination, the combination of moral emptiness and a hot body is a bad,

dangerous combination. I know this from personal experience. True, you're not that hot. It can lead you down some pretty bad places. And I think that she has that thing that exemplifies her generation. She thinks if she speaks with passion and she moves her hands and she looks at you, that that changes the words coming out of her mouth into something true. And it doesn't. The things that she says aren't true and they're uninformed to the absolute bottom one. So let's talk to another subscriber. One thing we haven't talked enough about on today's show is how people can become subscribers.

And if you go to dailywire.com and become a subscriber for 100 bucks a year, not only do you get to ask maybe, let's be honest, we're going to get to maybe six questions. But you get to see the archives of all the shows, the full video versions of all the shows. And starting next week, you'll get to see the two-hour live video of, of the new Ben Shapiro show, National Syndicated Radio Show, what is going to launch on like 127 markets or something. That should be great. Looking forward to it.

Got nothing else. Yeah, he is looking forward to. I got to save my voice, Ben. Alicia. All right, Dana says that this question is for Ben. She wants to know why you call Jeremy, Jeremy. Yeah. It's never really occurred to me.

I mean, I didn't realize I started speaking with your Southern drawl, I guess. It was the cowboy hat that did it. Yeah. Here's the problem with being named Jeremy, Daniel, boring. Daniel, if you haven't seen it written down, it's spelled in my instance, D-A-N-I-A-L, instead of I-E-L. It's a Persian spelling. Jeremy is just a terrible name.

I'm from a town of very, very few people. In my graduating high school class, there were four Jeremy's because in 1979, it was suddenly popular to name your kid Jeremy. So I got named. My first name possessed is no hard consonants. First of all, if you're going to have sons, your options are biblical characters and kings of England. That's it. This is correct.

Those are the only options with hard continents. With hard continents. You have to have hard continents. My name is Jeremy, which is pronounced by almost everyone, including Ben Shapiro, Jeremy, which basically translates attitudinally to punch me in the face. There will never be a president, jury. So my parents may be recognizing the mistake, like as soon as they wrote. it down probably they felt shame and kind of didn't like me as soon as like but they'd already

started writing so what do you do so they said we'll give them a better middle name Daniel it's a good it's a biblical name the justice of God dan dan daniel right and uh d-an i e L being the god of the Bible but that's not what they did they wrote it d-a-n-a-l well it turns out there is a god who is not the god L and that god is Allah the god So my name now is the Justice of Allah, which they followed up with my last name, boring. So my actual Christian name, which is proof that I will never be president of the United States, is punch me in the face, the justice of Allah's dull guy. And that's the way we think of you. And we let parents name children in this country without having to register it with the state for a second.

Go Canada. Elisha, what's next? All right. This question comes from Joshua, and he wants to know what is one fundamental political topic that you all disagree on. Huh. That's a good question. Well, there was the one we had earlier. Yeah, although we sort of agreed more than we. Yeah, it was kind of vague. What is, do we all disagree with? I mean, it's hard to think of.

It's a fairly central one, though, the one that we were talking about earlier. I agree. It's somewhat nuanced, and I want to keep it short because we have a few more things we have to get to today. But there is a central question about the role of government in shaping economy, connected to the role of economy in shaping society. And that's a, it's too nuanced. Do I mean to introduce kind of where this came from? Please.

So where this sort of came from is that Tucker Carlson did a very interesting monologue last night in which he essentially suggested that the economy of the United States built on capitalism. Capitalism was built on the idea of providing the best good at the best possible price, but that did not actually fulfill the needs of human beings. The needs of human beings for jobs and for meaning. And so we ought to reconstruct the economy in such a way, that it helped provide for families and help provide jobs. This is sort of a point that both Henry Olson has made and Warren Cass has made,

that there are shortcomings to capitalism that can be cured by sort of pairing around the edges of capitalism to ensure that people have jobs that give them meaning in their lives, and these jobs then provide the foundation for families. And I was very critical of this. You can watch my interview with Tucker, in which we actually get into this a lot. And my perspective was that capitalism is not what had undermined the family. That basically what had undermined the family was a lack of religion, and that that lack of religion has destroyed the fundamental basis for capitalism,

which is why we are now sliding away from capitalism, that you actually need a virtuous society in order to maintain that sort of freedom. And I think where the debate came in is that Drew believes that the economy, my view is that virtue and economics are rarely linked. I don't think that virtue and economics really have much to do with one another. I think that's sort of a Marxist view, that if you change the economy of the situation, then you necessarily change family structure.

Drew's view is a little different. I think the thing that we were disagreeing about is I really seriously believe the conservatives find themselves in a bind. And the bind is this. We believe, I believe, that John Adams was right when he said, we've written a constitution for a religious people. And I think we are increasingly an irreligious people. And even the 70% of people who identify as Christians are not Christians as John Adams would have understood it. And a lot of the people who say that there are, have no religion, are not atheists, but they have gone off into what do thought we'd call bad religion. To me, if you are selling, who are you selling the Constitution to, if you're selling it to people who don't believe in God? Because not only does religion shape the moral view of people, it also shapes their view of what a human being is. In order to believe that you are a human being with essential dignity who has God given rights to freedom, you have to believe in a God who gives you those rights to freedom. So in other words, when I think is when you say to a 12-year-old, a poor 12-year-old whose mother is a crack addict hooker and whose father hasn't been around since he was born, you say, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, you're talking a language that that kid does not understand. And when you leave that kid to fend for himself and he joins a gang because that's the only family he'll ever get, and then you say, well, that's just bad behavior. I think the conservatives are exercising a fundamental misunderstanding of. the way people are. The man who pulls himself up by his bootstraps in that situation is an anomaly. He's an exception. He's an exceptional human being. The kid who is lost in

that situation needs help. Now, where you and I agree that is I want that help to come as close to the community as it possibly can. I mean, this we agree on. I want it to come. If it has to come from the state, I'll go with that, but I want it to come from the church instead. And that's why I support a lot of these guys who go in, the monks who go into Newark and raise kids, essentially. That's where a lot of the answers, come from, but in the meantime, you cannot leave people to die. You cannot leave a 12-year-old in that situation to fend for himself because he won't. And surely you would say that the government, there was a relationship between economics and family, in so much as government intervention

in the economy during, say, the 1960s, led to immediately a breakdown of the family. Right. So I guess the contention I would make is that government has the capacity to destroy the family, it doesn't have the capacity to recreate the family. Sure, yeah, sure. And this is, and I think that the mistake that I'm seeing from Tucker and from Warren Cass and some other folks is that it'll reinstill virtue in the economy, re-instill virtue in the people to change the economy. And I don't think that's right. I think the virtue has to predate the economy. That's where we agree.

Right, that's where we agree. But I think where we disagree is when you say things like, in the meantime, you can't just let people starve. I'm not saying nobody wants kids who are in this situation to starve. But where we disagree, I know, Jeremy, this is where you disagree, is the idea that the government providing for that doesn't have more cost than benefits, meaning that when the government comes in and says, okay, now we're going to provide a social safety net, you're creating a perverse incentive structure that encourages more creation of 12-year-olds who are going to be dependent on the

government, and the proof of that is the last 50 years of government large. I think there was a wonderful article in the Wall Street Journal. I believe it was by Phil Graham. I don't want to pin him with it if it wasn't, but I believe that's who wrote it, where he said, you know, a lot of these redistribution programs have seriously helped people economically. And at the same time, seriously created a culture of dependency. And that's the problem that we face. And I think the way into this is to attack the culture of dependency through theology and through philosophy in order to start to pair back this system that has actually had real benefits. I think there's two points of disagreement for me. One of them, I think Ben and I share. I disagree with that article. I disagree

with the assertion that these programs have fundamentally increased people's economic prosperity. I don't think that's right. I think you're wrong. The poverty rate in the country is dropping faster before the implementation of welfare than it was after the implementation of welfare. But the fact is that the people who live in poverty now live at the level of middle class people in the age. And that's because of capitalism that has nothing to do with redistribution. That's not true. It does have to do with redistribution. I mean, you've seen why. Then why were living standards better in 1950 than in 1900. There wasn't socialism redistributionism between 1900 and 1950s. There wasn't socialism or redistributionism between 90s and 1950s. Well, there was an economic standard in between that. Yes, but that was they rose between 1900 and 1920. I can pick any period of American

history in which capitalism reign. And living standards always get better. Capitalism raises people up. Capitalism is magic. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing. There's no question about it. But in order to have people who are free, they need to have a conception of themselves as people who deserve to be free. And I think we've lost that conception. If you don't start there, you're lost.

Well, so now that's the part I agree with. That's how we agree on. I think there is one other point of disagreement, though. And I won't put these words in Ben's mouth because it may be that this is my unique disagreement. Your son actually helped me understand this. You think of politics in very practical terms. I do. And I think about politics in very ideal terms.

Right. That's absolutely true. I think that you cannot achieve your practical ends if we forsake the ideal arguments. I'm not talking about idealism in the sense of that we disconnect our beliefs from the consequences of our beliefs. but I'm talking about it in an aspirational sense. What bothers me about Trump, for example, is that Trump does not even speak the language of aspiration toward the ideals on which this country was founded.

He has accomplished some practical successes for us, but in winning the battles, I worry that we're losing the war because we're not even fighting the war, we're forsaking the war. And I think part of our point of disagreement when we get into these conversations and many other things that we disagree about, is because I'm not willing to give up my aspirational views of what we should stand for. It's why I talk more about theology and you talk more about people's needs,

even in religious conversations. You talk about the struggling man and I talk about the glory of God. Because you're the God king. That's a slight overstatement, but it's just a way of thinking about our different perspectives. You know, though, what strikes me about this is I don't think any two of us have the identical view on basically any issue whatsoever. And yet on major political issues, we almost agree entirely. I mean, on almost every issue. Why is that?

It's because there is a sort of coherence to conservative thought. But unlike the left, the left is ideologically homogenous in progressivism. But the right has so many variations of it. There's neoconservatism, traditionalism, classical liberalism, libertarianism, on and on and on. And so I think various combinations and mixtures of these influences is why, None of us have exactly the same opinion. I think that's also because the hot button issues have been so skewed outside of the rational that I really believe that rational people who actually think about a lot of these hot button issues

with any sense of values are going to come to agreements on a lot of them. Because if I say abortion, the left position is on demand. Like we're all going to agree that's asinine. Right. If you were, and this is true, if I say redefining male and female and the left's view is that they don't exist. Like what else are rational people supposed to say? I'll bet you that I'll give an issue where I think that we probably do have pretty significant disagreement. I know we do, actually, is on climate change.

So on climate change, I actually see no serious reason to doubt the idea that the world is getting warmer over the course of time and that human activity is responsible for at least a majority of that warming. I don't know about a majority to some. I think at least 50%. I don't know that it's, I don't know that it's, you know, 95%, but at least 50%. But my disagreement with the left comes when they start saying, and the solution to that is to tax all of the developed countries so that all of the developing countries can continue to pollute the earth to the extent that the climate continues to warm.

I know Jeremy is not a climate change fan, right? Yeah, I'm a skeptic. You're a real skeptic. And I'm not sure where you guys are on this issue. I mean, I do believe that there are always two questions with the left. The first thing is the issue and the second thing is their solution, which is the government should take over everything. And I think that no socialist, no government solution is going to work here.

It's going to be a technological solution. I'm not against some investment in that kind of solution. but basically I think some guy in a garage will invent a battery that can contain, you know, wind-creative. And there's even another level of skepticism, which is skepticism, not of the warming or cooling or not of the, even the anthropogenic part, the man-made part, but of the catastrophic part of the lower.

That's correct also. I am skeptical. Because, you know, even the worst prediction is that it will take 10% off an economy that's going to grow something like 300, 400% in the time it will take to take 10% off. We can afford it. That's a good deal.

It's a great deal. This is the point that was made by William Nordhaus, who just won the Nobel Prize in economics. That is the worst prediction of it. And most people think it's going to be more like 5%. So, you know, I'm just very skeptical of the sky as far. If we can't, if we can't accept that over the course of the next century. Yeah. Human ingenuity has been pretty good about fixing problems.

Exactly. So if it costs us 5% of our economy in a time when the economy grows by 400% and in the meantime, some clown invents a battery that's going to solve the problem, you know, I'm just not that worked. Yep. Elisha, I want to take one more question and then there's two last things that we have to talk about before we can let people go for tonight but mostly because I made promises

you guys and like Robert Frost's point which is now in the public domain promises to keep miles to go miles to go. You know what that's about? It's about suicide. Elisha, share one last question with us from our Daily Wire subscribers. Do we have a Daily Wire suicide hotline? So when I tell you that I'm

making Brussels sprouts for dinner tonight, you don't to burn your face off. With Brussels, Brussels. All right, I guess this question is for Ben and Michael. Ben Shapiro quotes on the DailyWire's subscriber page wants to know, do Ben and Knowles have a bet on whose book will sell the most copies? And does that bet involve Knowles' maybe unemployment? So we do not have a bet.

I would not make that bet. The last bet I made with Knowles, I lost. It was about the 2016 election. He's never let me forget it. I'll tell you what. I would, I think this book, I read your book. I'm not just saying this because you could defenestrate me right now, throw me out the window.

It's very good. It's really good. I think it's going to sell a zillion copies. It's very important. It's better than all the other popular books that have come out recently. I really mean that. Oh, thank you. That's why I don't know that it's going to sell 250,000 copies, right?

But I would still be willing to bet that my book sold more or will sell more if you give me odds again. 4 to 1.1. Elisha, thank you. Thank you to our DailyWire.com subscribers for all you do to keep. our, well, to keep us employed. The last two things I want to talk about tonight, one of them is pretty important, and one of them is really just a hat tip to a loyal fan. It's New Year's.

Everyone is making resolutions. They always do. I think people like us tend to kind of roll our eyes at New Year's resolutions, on account of how most people don't keep them for very long. But there's something aspirational and beautiful about a New Year's resolution. You know, a new year, which is, after all, an arbitrary day on a calendar. nevertheless gives people a sense of reset. It gives them the opportunity to reassess to start anew.

And when people do reassess and start a new, there are some very predictable places in their lives where they try to make improvements. And so I thought it would be a fun exercise if each of us talked about one of the sort of common New Year's resolutions and shared not a gimmick, not a scheme, we're not selling anything, we're not trying to set people up for false hope,

but actually just share an actual piece of insight or piece of wisdom that you've accumulated in your life that might help a person make substantive change in those areas and not just fleeting change in those areas? So for me, my New Year's resolution, believe it or not, has been to disconnect a lot more from social media. It's driving my family up a wall.

It's driving me up a wall. When I went on vacation, it actually taught me a lesson. It was the first vacation I'd had in a couple of years where I actually did a pretty good job of disconnecting from social media, where I wasn't flipping through my phone or trying to keep up with the news. Part of that was because in the past, I've taken vacation during actual work times.

This time, it was between Christmas and New Year, so everybody was on vacation, so nothing was happening except the president telling seven-year-olds that Santa doesn't exist. So, which I did text to each and every one of you with the notation, Merry Christmas. But it's, but it is true that social media makes you miserable. You know, I want people to be on social media to the extent they keep up with the news and they're informed. But the need for information, the feeling that your brain craves information, it really isn't craving the information. It's craving the information. It's craving the feeling of scrolling your thumb. and you can get so much more done

by just leaving your phone in the other room. Like really, this is my new thing. The way that I'm dealing with it is I have a prophylactic rule. Just like with Judaism, the prophylactic rule about not working is that you don't use electricity and you don't drive,

you don't do all these things. The prophylactic rule for me is that when I get home at night, I take my phone, I plug it in in my room, it is away from me, it is not on my person. And that way, I'm not checking my phone all the time. And then I have a book at my disposal. And if nothing's happening, then I read the book.

because if all the hours that I spent on social media, I spent reading, I mean, I'm smart now. I'd all be a lot for it. I mean, come on. So, there's my New Year's resolution. That's a very good one. I have a New Year's resolution, which is to write a book with words. This is a very discreet New Year's resolution,

and it's sort of funny because I wrote... Good for you, dude. I know, I know, you know, I really felt, Ben and I never warn you that it's really counterproductive. I'm not going to make any money. I'm going to go, I know. But I, and I, the reason I bring this one up in particular, is because it is not grand, it is not open-ended.

It's actually, you know, I mean, you've written a lot more books than I haven't written. But, you know, it is a contained activity. And I think a lot of times New Year's resolutions go wrong because they're so open-ended. I'm going to get healthier. I'm going to read more. I'm going to go to the gym. I don't know. I'm going to eat better or something.

And it's really easy to lose that. But with a really discreet activity and project, you can fail. You can fail to do it or you can do it. and the clock is ticking, the movement watch is ticking, and it's never going to go backwards. And I think New Year's resolutions I've just found have always worked better when there's a time limit on them. And Dennis Prager says that the written word is the mirror of the mind, right?

That if you want to become associated with your own thoughts, organize them and write them down. That doesn't reflect very well. It's a good reason for you not to write a book. This book is going to say they're making the frogs here. They're making the frogs here. They're making the frogs here. Well, first of all, I want to say that I think New Year's resolutions get a bad, rap. I think the studies show that they actually do help people, that, you know, plenty of them

go by the boards, but plenty of them also stick. I have a very obscure New Year's resolution, but it is a real one, because I don't usually make them at all. To live. To live. To live. Yeah, that's always my resolution. Every day, that's my resolution. But, you know, last year, I read, a re-read a lot of Aristotle, who was, I was a big fan of, but I reread them as a Christian. And one of the things that Aristotle teaches is that virtue is a habit. And habits are are formed by repeated exercise of those habits. If you tried out my religion, we've been begging this for a really long time. No, I mean, I think that I want to pay a lot more attention to what one philosopher calls

the liturgies in my life, the things that you go out and do that have inherent in them an idea of what a better life is. If you go out trying to make money, for instance, then your idea is that that will give you a better life. And I'm all for making money and all this. It's not about that. But I want to make sure that there is enough habit in my life that focus me on the things that I really care about, which are two things, really. One of them is trying to tell the truth, and the other is trying to tell the truth in a beautiful way.

And I just want to make sure that those are habits that I continue to pay attention to. It's not so much about doing them. It's doing them with a conscious, zen-like mind that I'm quite good at. And I want to make sure I do it more. That's fantastic. one of the things that I've thought about over the last couple of years, and it's because I've been a beneficiary of some wisdom that was shared with me, which I'll get to.

I want to help people make more money. And I haven't cracked the code on exactly how I'm going to do it, other than I'm going to use some opportunities, for example, even on this show, to make a point of talking about it because we don't. People look in and perhaps they think that three out of four of us are successful in life. And it breeds a lot of problems in the human heart. It can breed resentment towards people who you think are being successful. It can breed a distorted view of the world where social media contributes to this

where you think people are more successful than they are. And you think that... But one thing that I discovered in my life early on and that I've seen with a lot of young people, in particular young religious people, is that while they may... espouse a belief in, say, capitalism or incentive-based economics in sort of philosophical terms. In their own lives, they have shame about success and shame about making money and a fear of allowing themselves to prosper. And I suffered greatly from that for most of my life. I worked as hard as anyone I knew I would not accept pay for my work.

and two people really spoke into my life at a very similar time about this. One of them is a friend of mine, Frank Brunner, and another one has Ben Shapiro, who came into my life around that time and said, why do you do all of these things for free? And the truth is there was a reason. I didn't understand it about myself what the reason was. I came to understand over time that it was a kind of cowardice,

that I took a lot of big risks. I mean, I moved to L.A. from a small town. I was going to be an actor, a writer, a producer, and I had opportunities to take capital from people and produce films, take capital from people and found companies' Declaration Entertainment with our friend Bill Whittle, Spiral the Arroyo, with Jonathan Hay, others. Or I had the opportunity to step in and help run this organization of conservative Hollywood's many thousands of people, and it was always on very financially tenuous footing, and so I didn't take any money for running that organization. The funny thing is, if you look back across that same period of time,

millions of dollars went through my hands, and I paid out salaries to other people. So when I was running that organization of that nonprofit of Hollywood Conservatives, I was paying staff, but I didn't pay myself. When I was running, doing the Arroyo, I was making sure that we didn't have a lot of money, but every person got their check every day. When we were running Declaration Entertainment,

I made sure that Bill Whittle was making a good living and that Jonathan Hay was making a good living. Nowhere in there was I rewarding Jeremy. And when I say not at all, I mean not at all. And I came to see, it's because I had a fear of being kind of found out that if I paid myself and the project failed, that I would sort of be revealed as some sort of fraud. But if I didn't pay myself and the project failed, no one could accuse me of having had bad motives. No one could accuse me of having, of it having failed on the basis of, you know, me having my hand in the cookie jar.

But of course, the opposite was true. Many of those companies may well have succeeded had I tied my economic future to them. Had I had skin in the game, then I would have had incentive to have worked even, and I worked hard. I don't want you to think that I was phoning it in. But I wasn't phoning it in as though my economic life depended on it because my economic life did not depend on it. And Ben used the very colorful analogy that my problem wasn't lack of urine. It was the direction in which I peed. When a good wind is blowing, you do well to turn the other way.

And of course, that was right. I had plenty of effort, but I wasn't putting my effort in the right directions. I wasn't letting these values that I espouse of free markets and incentives actually apply to my own life. that I thought that I was somehow morally above my own ideas of what would work for other people. And I talk to young Christians in particular, young conservatives, and I find that so many people have similar issues where they think they're too good for their actual worldview. And you shouldn't be, because having not had very much money and having had more money,

having more money is better. Money doesn't make you happy, money doesn't solve all of your problems. but growing up in a small town, growing up middle class, much more blessed than many of the people around me, nevertheless, knew a lot of economic struggle in my life and witnessed far more around me, economic struggle. And economic struggle does wear on the soul of a man. It sure does. You have a responsibility to yourself, to reward, to make sure that you are getting reward for your work. You have a responsibility to your family. to make sure that you're being rewarded appropriately for your work. So I want to find ways to help people see past this particular fear,

the fear of allowing themselves to succeed. It manifests in non-economic ways, too. Of course. I want people to allow themselves to have the successes in life that they should that will make their lives better, their family's lives better, their church's life better, their society's life better, and find ways to give practical advice to that, but also sort of this high-level philosophical advice.

So basically, if three of us keep our New Year's resolutions and one of us doesn't, it'll be a better world. Finally, it is the 127th birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien and our... That he's old. He is one old to do. What's his sequence? He's still working at the top of his game, though, I've got to say. Beloved by 99.999% of religious people in the West, beloved by 99.999999% of religious people in the West. beloved by 99.999% of conservative people in the West.

Especially Catholics, by the way. 99.999% of Catholics, the one exception, Michael Knowles, Michael Knowles, why you got to hate? I am, this is one of these issues where I don't like Tolkien. I've tried to read all of the books. I tried, when I was a little kid, I tried to read The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings. I said, okay, I don't like the books. I'll go to the movies. I went to the movie. I walked out of the movie. I got so bored because they were in the damn woods for like three hours and I just got me out of the woods. I can't. And yet I know, look, I know. I'm actually going to admit I know that I'm holding a wrong opinion. I know I keep every year I try to convince myself to like Tolkien. Can't do it. Ben? Level this guy. You're fired. This was the moment. Yeah. Why Tolkien? Well, I mean, if you actually read the Lord of the Rings books, he has. He, he has a lot of the has a very clear vision of good and evil that is, I think, fundamental to understanding of, number one, all fantasy literature, but also an understanding of world-building and rule-setting

that is kind of transformative in literary history, mostly the reason that conservatives, I think, are very fond of Tolkien. And I'll all admit, I'm a Rube when it comes to Tolkien. I'm not a Tolkien scholar. I'm also a, I'm so much of a Rube that I like the movies better than I like the I like The Hobbit. I think that the long passages of poetry in Lord of the Rings are nearly unreadable. And I think that the ending of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the books is significantly worse than the ending of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the movie. And I'm not talking about one of the nine endings of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in movies. But the reason is because the very idea that there is a West that is worth upholding is embodied in the nature of Tolkien's

writing and in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, particularly the idea that there is something worth fighting for that there are people who do not believe in these same principles and that there are real things that divide people. And this doesn't mean that everybody who disagrees with you is an orc or a monster, but it does mean that to pretend that there aren't people with monstrous ideas in the world who are fundamentally seduced by power itself is a great misnomer. I mean, that's the real, obviously, that's the great revelation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy is that the real bad guy doesn't exist out there.

The real bad guy exists in here. That's why the best moment in all of Lord of the Rings is, Spoiler alert for people who haven't read the books or seen the movies is when the ring actually seduces Frodo because you've actually been waiting. I remember seeing it in the theater and I deliberately held off from reading the books until I could see it in the theaters because I didn't know it was coming. And I kept myself shut off. So I didn't know what the ending was going to be. And you go for three movies, it's this entirely long journey with these huge battle sequences. And you think that you are rooting all three movies for Frodo to toss the ring in the fire.

That's what you think you're waiting for. And then Frodo doesn't, right? The ring seduces Frodo. and it's so satisfying as a viewer and as a reader because what you realize is that you haven't been waiting for him to toss the ring in the fire because that would have been anticlimactic. If you just walked in and through the ring in the fire,

then when you're waiting for him to be seduced by the ring to remind you that the ring actually is powerful, that the ring actually means something. And that notion, that power is seductive and that you're thinking that you can wield the power, then if only you had the power, then you'd be able to fix the world, that if you were given the ring

and you had the ability to be invisible and sneak around and do what you want and control of the people that you'd make a utopia out of it? No, you wouldn't. You'd be just like Sauron, right? We're deep down, we are all Sauron unless we give up the ring, really not just to, not just generally, but we give up the ring to the idea that there is a plan in the universe that is beyond any of us, and that we're going to have to let go at a certain point, because faith exists in letting go. Right. It's interesting that you bring up the orcs because the orcs are like the instruments of evil in the Lord of the Ring. But all of the truly sinister characters aren't works at all. That's right.

They're all people or elves or, you know. Humanoids. They're all people. Right. And their people have been seduced by either the power that they have or the power that they don't. And one of the things I love about the Lord of the Rings is that I kept waiting to see, because like you, I had not read the books when I first saw the films, I kept waiting for the reveal of what the power of this ring was other than me. making you invisible.

And you really never see anything. So what is the great power of the ring? It's actually a very subtle idea. And it's just that you would be hidden from man and God. It kind of goes back to our previous conversation, that you could function in this world wholly apart from judgment, wholly apart from consequence, wholly apart from the perspectives of other people.

And that really lies at the heart. It's such an insight by Tolkien of what lies at the heart of almost all true evil, even the evil within. It's the belief that we could be apart from God who sees all, who then wouldn't see you. I think one of the things that I find really fascinating is that if you watch Game of Thrones, which is a wonderful TV show, which makes no moral sense at its basis, Georgia-R-R-Martin is an atheist, and all throughout Game of Thrones,

there are religions. And the religions always turn out to be frauds or fake. But the effect of religion is always there. People come back from the dead, and he said, where were you? I was nowhere. It makes no sense whatsoever. There's no religion in Tolkien.

There's no religion in Lord of the Rings because Tolkien understood what Shakespeare understood, which is that the Christian religion or the, I'll even say the Judeo-Christian religion, it simply is the world. It is the way the world is. And so Tolkien never has to mention God. He never has to show anybody pray. It's simply the way the world works is the way the Judeo-Christian vision says it works. And Shakespeare understood exactly the same thing.

People always say, Shakespeare's a secular writer. If he is, I'll be damned. Because he's not everything that happens. There is a moral arc. You bend that moral arc. There were consequences. And Tolkien understood it, and that's what makes that book so powerful. Even though I agree with you, it's overwritten.

It's over-imagined the movie's work on a dramatic level far better. But even so, you know you are in the midst of a... vision of the world that has been handed down to this guy for 2,000 years, and he gets it. He understands it, and he sees the world in those terms, and that makes it a brilliant book. But Michael Knowles doesn't get it. You know what? This conversation is reminding me that I love essays about Tolkien. I love the talk. I can't get into the elves and all. I can't get into it. It's a long conference scenes where they talk for quickly. I mean, please. I know.

He's a sad, sad, man, Michael Mills. That's it for The Daily Wire backstage. Our first episode of 2019, we will be back on January 29th, it was actually announced in real time while we were on the show for President Donald Trump's State of the Union Address to the Joint Session of Congress. We will bring you all of our blistering rage, rage, rage. And we look forward to seeing you there. Come visit us in the meantime over at Dailywire.com. Thanks to all of our subscribers and to everybody who made it this far. Fake laugh in three, two, one. Bye!