The Daily Wire gang — Ben Shapiro, Jeremy Boreing, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, and Candace Owens — appeared live on stage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville Tuesday night for the latest episode of The Daily Wire: Backstage.
The gang covered the hottest topics of politics and sports of the day: COVID-19 lockdowns, former Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden’s emails, President Joe Biden’s failing policies, the 2022 midterms, and more. The show also featured major announcements about the future of the company.
Later in the show, comedian Adam Carolla joined Boreing and Shapiro on stage to announce that Carolla is partnering with The Daily Wire to put on several comedy shows.
“We are going to call it ‘Adam Carolla: Truth Yeller’ because I tend to get fired up on stage,” Carolla said. The show itself will consist of three segments: a standup routine by Carolla, an interview segment with his guest, and an improv segment where Carolla comes up with a set based on a single word submitted by members of the audience.
At the Ryman, The Daily Wire premiered the trailer for its upcoming movie with Gina Carano. The movie, named “Terror on the Prairie,” is expected to come out March or April of 2022. The Daily Wire also premiered the trailer of another upcoming film, a thriller named “Shut In.”
The event started with an electric atmosphere as the crowd, roughly 2,800 people, broke out into chants of “Let’s go, Brandon,” essentially a less vulgar expression of opposition to Biden that has broken out at sporting events across the country in 2021. The Backstage opened with a standing ovation from the audience as Shapiro, Boreing, Klavan, Knowles, Walsh, and Owens walked on stage.
Let’s Go, Brandon! @realDailyWire at #BackstageLive pic.twitter.com/k3KVMQrXxD
— Emily Zanotti (@emzanotti) October 13, 2021
Standing ovation for the @realDailyWire crew. Live at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. #BackstageAtTheRyman pic.twitter.com/i676Dfi7ZA
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) October 13, 2021
To open up Backstage, The Daily Wire hosts and Boreing began with a discussion on COVID lockdowns and Biden’s recent orders mandating vaccines for federal workers and threatening large businesses with fines unless they vaccinate or test weekly all their employees for COVID-19.
The gang discussed the ongoing crisis at Southwest Airlines. The company has canceled thousands of flights in recent days amid speculation that the airline’s employees are protesting the company’s decision to abide by Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal contractors.
“Look, I’m really glad that Southwest is coming out now and saying ‘No, please, we hate mandates; we hate Joe Biden; don’t yell at us.’ The fact is, Joe Biden actually did not make them do that,” Knowles said. “Joe Biden, he came out there, he said, ‘I’m going to have the Occupational Safety and Health Administration force this thing on the companies.’ But you know what the companies can do? You know what they can say? ‘Let’s go Brandon.’ They can say ‘Let’s go Brandon.’”
The Daily Wire crew moved on to sports and the release of Gruden’s emails. The former Raiders head coach resigned from the team Monday after leaked emails from roughly a decade ago sparked allegations of racism and homophobia. The ex-coach took heat from sports commentators and NFL players alike for his comments.
“There is something else that I think is deeply disturbing and frankly evil for the way that we approach how we treat other humans and that is the complete conflation of private and public,” Shapiro remarked. “It used to be in private spaces you would say things that are impolitic, you would say things that maybe you were thinking, but that didn’t belong in the public space. And there was just this acknowledgment that private and public were not exactly the same place.”
“Then it came to be seen that private was the more authentic you, right? The less authentic you were who you are in public. The more authentic you is the person you were in private, and so if we could uncover somehow who you were in private, then we would know the deep secret you, then we would know who you really are,” he continued. “And that’s a lie. Because who you are in private is typically lizard brain you.”
“Who you are in private is the person who is unconstrained, who doesn’t think about what they’re doing,” Shapiro said. “It’s the person who is actually the least authentic version of you because when you’re in public, you actually have to balance the lizard brain part of you with your prefrontal cortex, the part that says ‘Hey, maybe that’s a really bad idea and you shouldn’t do it.’ And that part is much more genuine in how you treat people.”
The gang moved back into politics, with Shapiro predicting that 2022 will be a “disaster for the Democrats” and that there will be a good chance that the disaster will follow the Democratic Party into the 2024 presidential election.
Walsh announced the death of public education in the U.S. Walsh, who has been an outspoken opponent of mask mandates and progressive curriculum in schools, said that the public education system is so far broken to be past the point of repair.
“When I show up to a school board meeting, I consider it like trying to patch a dam that is going to fail eventually. And there’s a real value in that because you are giving people time to get out from the flood zone, and that’s what I’m trying to do, but the school system itself is totally run by the system, and it’s a left-wing system,” Walsh said. “What that means is the ultimate solution is for us to take control of our kids’ education ourselves.”
“There’s an awakening where people are realizing, wait a second, I’m sending my kid to a government building for seven hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year for 12 or 13 years of their formative years.’ That’s what I’m doing and that means the government has an enormous amount of control over it, not just what my kids are taught but the kinds of people they become,” he continued. “And I don’t think there is any time in the foreseeable future when we can actually trust the government to form and shape our kids, which means that the ultimate solution is that we take control as parents of our kids’ education.”