Ep. 690 - The Constitutional Stress Test
Episode Stats
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Summary
On this 322nd day of 15 days to slow the spread of the Ebola virus, we have a new proclamation from On-High declaring that although some people are wearing two masks at the same time, which looks very funny, and I would therefore encourage people to continue doing it.
Transcript
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On this 322nd day of 15 days to slow the spread, we have a new proclamation from on high.
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Science has declared through science's chosen priest, the exalted Dr. Fauci,
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that although some people are currently wearing two masks at the same time, which looks very,
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very funny, and I would therefore encourage people to continue doing it, Dr. Fauci now says
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There are many people who feel, you know, if you really want to have an extra little bit of protection,
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There's nothing wrong with that, but there's no data that indicates that that is going to make
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And that's the reason why the CDC has not changed the recommendation.
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So absolutely no evidence whatsoever that wearing two masks does anything at all.
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If you want to put the two masks on your face, you can put a donut on your head too.
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But it's no evidence at all that that would in any way help stop the spread of the virus.
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This just days after Dr. Fauci says it is common sense that two masks would help to stop the spread
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A lot of folks are hearing now about double masking, wearing two masks or trying to get one of those
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Do you believe that that's advisable and makes a difference?
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You know, it likely does, because, I mean, this is a physical covering to prevent droplets
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So if you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on, it just makes
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common sense that it likely would be more effective.
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And that's the reason why you see people either double masking or doing a version of an N95.
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And so proclaims Dr. Fauci, who you may recall about seven or eight months ago, declared
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from, from on high, channeling the spirit of science through his exalted genius brain
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that you absolutely should not wear any masks whatsoever.
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Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.
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Because people are listening really closely to this.
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Right now, people should not be walking, there's no reason to be walking around with a mask.
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When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit
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But it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.
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With geniuses like this making our public policy, is it any surprise that our country is coming
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Well, my favorite comment from Friday is from Bryn Muir, who says, when Robin Hood starts
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working for the corrupt elite, he ceases to be Robin Hood.
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And we have an update on that, by the way, because you've now got two camps on the Robin
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Hood issue and it doesn't cut evenly across partisan lines.
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But either way, there is some lie being told here.
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Either way, the app is not being honest, which we will get to in a second.
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I know, you know, if those hedge funds manage to make it out of this Robin Hood fiasco without
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losing everything in their major short positions, they'll have really avoided a very close shave.
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Justice Sam Alito, a really solid conservative justice.
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Sam Alito just gave a speech to the Federalist Society where he described the coronavirus
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lockdowns as a sort of constitutional stress test.
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This is causing lots of consternation and lots of people are very angry at Alito for saying
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He pointed out that this constitutional stress test is placing restrictions on liberty that
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He says, we have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive, and prolonged.
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This is true with regard to individual liberty.
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This is true with regard to many political liberties that we even have in common.
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You know, the right of churches to remain open.
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The head shop in California can stay open and sell dime bags because that's an essential
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And you're seeing this different individual rights and group rights being taken away from
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This is part of why I'm not letting the BLM people off the hook for their riots.
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I'm not letting the Capitol Hill rioters off the hook for storming into the Capitol with
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I'm not letting anybody off the hook for their bad behavior during all of this.
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However, just as a descriptive matter, is it any surprise that when you lock people up
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for months and months and months and months and you throw a whole lot of people out of
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work and you upend the economy in many ways and you, even beyond all of those questions,
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upend society by shutting down all the kind of normal social interactions that we have,
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canceling Thanksgiving and Christmas, for goodness sakes, is it any wonder that the country
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Particularly when all of this is being done at the behest of technocratic idiots like Dr.
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Fauci, who contradict themselves within several days of the guidance that they're giving.
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They have mandates for other people, but they don't follow the mandates themselves.
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Be it on the masking, be it on going out to dinner like Gavin Newsom at the Michelin rated
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restaurant, the French laundry, be it Chris Cuomo, who's hanging out in the Hamptons, pretending
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And I think this is the broader context in which you have to understand what happened
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These Redditors are driving up the price of physical silver right now.
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We know that this began because these people on Reddit saw a massive short position from
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GameStop in itself doesn't seem like a very valuable growth company, right?
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It's kind of going the way of Blockbuster and all these other companies.
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The Redditors know that, but they, they want to take advantage of this short position, cause
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a short squeeze, force the hedge fund guys to buy up the stock that through these kind
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of complex systems they had already sold and then drive the price up and then these Redditors
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But the Redditors know they might lose all their money because this is so volatile and
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This is the furthest thing from a sure investment you could possibly make.
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But what they were saying is we would rather lose money to send a message than keep dealing
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They were kicked off of various other social media platforms.
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They bought a digital billboard in Times Square, 54th and Broadway, that said dollar sign GME.
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That's the, the stock name, the ticker name for, for GameStop.
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Uh, GME go burr, which is meme language, right?
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It's the sort of internet jokes that you see about like the money printer going burr.
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This idea that we're just going to print money and money and money.
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And you see B-R-R-R is the way to describe that.
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Well, same thing with GME, because they're saying it's going to go all the way up to
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These guys know that they could lose money and they very likely will lose money.
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I don't know, but whoever paid for it, definitely going to lose some money.
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I want to be as fair to Robinhood as I possibly can.
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And I want to be as fair to the financial services industry as we possibly can.
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Some of my best friends are hedge fund analysts.
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Some of my best friends have worked for hedge funds and still work for hedge funds.
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But I also don't want to just take this kind of old GOP line where the GOP just like shills
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for the financial services industry and says they can do no wrong.
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The argument that is being made right now that Robinhood is positioning themselves to
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make, they published an op-ed in USA Today and they published a blog post on their own
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website, this from Vlad Tenev, the head of Robinhood.
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He says that the reason that all of this happened is because it's, you know, they want to put
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It's because they needed to put up a lot of money as a mandated deposit on the investment.
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Our clearinghouse mandated deposit requirements related to stocks increased tenfold in a matter
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So when these guys, when you go and you buy stocks on Robinhood, you, the Robinhood then
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has to go to the clearinghouse and put deposits down.
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So if the, if the deposits go way, way, way up and the investments go way, way, way up,
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then their deposit requirements are going to go way up.
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They are what led us to put temporary buying restrictions in place on a small number of
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securities that the clearinghouses had raised their deposit requirements on.
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It was not because we wanted to stop people from buying these or any stocks.
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We built Robinhood to provide access to investing for all.
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He says, yeah, we, we basically just didn't have the cash to, to cover up all of these,
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these investments with our clearinghouse to put the deposits down to make sure everything
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However, this guy seemed to contradict himself when all of this was going down on CNBC.
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When he was asked explicitly, is this a liquidity problem?
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Is this because you don't have the cash to cover these investments?
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It sounds to me, though, that you're suggesting that there was a liquidity problem inside the
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And my question about that then raises all sorts of new questions about whether there's a systemic
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issue underneath the system and underneath the company unto itself.
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So we did this proactively and thousands of other securities remain tradable on the platform.
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Customers that held these positions were able to sell them.
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And we're doing what we can to allow buying and to remove these restrictions in the morning.
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So maybe this guy just isn't making himself clear enough.
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Maybe I just don't understand the intricacies of this aspect of financial services.
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But it would seem to me this guy is contradicting himself.
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It would seem to me on the one hand, he's saying, yeah, we didn't have the cash to cover
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all these positions, so we had to shut it down.
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And then on the other hand, he's saying, no, we have plenty of cash.
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And either way, whatever side you come down on, I can see arguments for,
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I can sort of see arguments for defending Robinhood.
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Absolutely, the baseline take that you need to have on this is,
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we need to investigate what happened here because we're getting conflicting information,
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in this case, from the same guy, talking about all of these securities.
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At this point, all of these little seemingly disparate political incidents,
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I think, cannot be separated from the feeling that people have across the parties,
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actually, in this country, certainly across the political spectrum,
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that there is a gap between the people and the elite,
00:15:40.320
and there's nothing that we can do or say about it.
00:15:43.640
And it's being upended for months and months and a year now, I guess,
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And there's very little that we can do about it.
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anything that conservatives or Republicans do about it is called evil,
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illiberal, authoritarian, Nazi, fascist, whatever.
00:16:09.340
And then when Democrats undertake the same sort of procedures,
00:16:13.620
that is wonderful, that's perfectly acceptable,
00:16:18.660
Even when the form of the politics looks the same,
00:16:25.840
When Trump was signing executive orders, this was evil, this was awful,
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And it is worth pointing out that when Obama was signing executive orders,
00:16:38.540
and saying it was not just complaining about the substance of the executive orders,
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but they were also complaining about the very fact of signing executive orders,
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saying that governance through executive orders is somehow not legitimate.
00:16:51.680
Now, I've taken a slightly different approach to this issue,
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which is, I agree, I wish that our laws were being passed by the legislature,
00:17:00.160
Most of the laws that we actually live under in this country
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are being written by bureaucrats in the executive agencies.
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the best way to attack them is through executive orders, right?
00:17:11.020
That's the way you direct the executive agencies.
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But the approach to this on the left and the right,
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Biden has signed 42 executive actions since taking office.
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Now, one thing you might notice about this is it's not wailing and gnashing their teeth
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and saying these are terrible executive actions,
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Which is what you would see if Trump had done it.
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but it's bubbling up a lot now under the Biden administration.
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You see, when Trump would sign these very same things,
00:18:01.560
they were executive orders telling you what to do,
00:18:03.840
forcing it down your, that's order, awful, bad.
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Because Joe Biden, we all know, is so full of energy, right?
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Now, Biden, to his credit, is not using this kind of rhetorical sleight of hand.
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He's coming out and saying, yeah, I'm signing a whole lot of executive orders,
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But today I'm about to sign two executive orders,
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and restoring the Medicaid to the way it was before Trump became president,
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which by fiat he changed, made more inaccessible,
00:18:56.120
more expensive, and more difficult for people to qualify
00:19:13.720
the president, what the former president has done,
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just talking about that train wreck of an announcement
00:19:37.460
an apparent Freudian slip where Biden referred to Trump as the president.
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What does that tell you about Joe Biden's mental state
00:19:45.200
and what he thinks about the state of the country?
00:19:48.860
Then he goes and says that we've got to help women's health,
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And that's just a politically correct euphemism that means abortion.
00:20:00.720
he's going to restore some of the funding for abortion
00:20:04.660
and some of the access to abortion that Trump took away.
00:20:08.360
Meanwhile, framed right behind Biden is a photo of him meeting the Pope.
00:20:18.340
sitting right next to a very intentionally placed photo of him meeting the Pope,
00:20:22.920
talks about how he's going to restore the butcher of innocent babies around the country.
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So one of, one of the most genuinely wicked things I've seen a president do,
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and, and earlier even, you know, even, even looking back through history.
00:20:38.880
Okay. Then Biden attacks Donald Trump for all of these changes he had made by fiat.
00:20:46.140
He said, Trump did it by fiat. So I'm going to, I'm going to restore it.
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Biden is also restoring it by fiat. It's doing the same thing.
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They're both, they both were signing executive orders.
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wreaking these changes through executive order is illegitimate compared to Biden.
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And when Biden does it through executive order, totally hunky dory. It's not even a change.
00:21:09.340
What Biden begins by saying is he says, look, I'm not, there's nothing new here.
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Nothing new here, folks. I'm just returning this all back to normal.
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You see, I, I had instituted, I, with Barack Obama had instituted the liberal policy,
00:21:22.920
which is obviously what we should have. That's normal in this country.
00:21:26.180
And then Trump, this guy had the audacity to get elected and use the, his constitutionally
00:21:32.740
prescribed executive orders. And you know, the very thing that I'm using right now,
00:21:39.020
he had the audacity to do that and that's wrong and abnormal. And so now when I switch that back,
00:21:45.120
it's just a return to normalcy. Nothing new here. Of course it is new. When you change the policy of
00:21:51.720
the previous administration, that is something new, but he's saying no. What he's, what he's very
00:21:57.860
subtly saying here is liberal policy is permissible. Conservative policy is not legitimate. You used to
00:22:08.380
hear people would talk about the alt-right, you know, look, we like conservatives, but the alt-right,
00:22:14.360
they're the, they're the bad ones. And I guess for a while there was a distinction. The whole reason
00:22:19.940
that there was the term alt-right is because some people were saying we are an alternative to
00:22:24.180
more mainstream conservative thought. But now very quickly, that term just painted over all
00:22:30.960
right-wingers and now it's, it's disappeared entirely. You don't hear the term anymore because
00:22:35.260
what the left is doing is delegitimizing the entire right. Even the duly elected center-right
00:22:44.400
president, Donald Trump, who Joe Biden seems to think is still the president. Maybe a lot of
00:22:50.960
people think he's still the president. If Joe Biden said it, you come on, kick him off Twitter.
00:22:56.840
Joe Biden is not just signing those executive orders. He also is signing an executive order
00:23:01.400
to increase the number of refugees allowed into the United States by tens of thousands. And very often
00:23:06.420
these refugees are not exactly refugees. It's just, this is just another mechanism to increase
00:23:12.060
immigration beyond its already historically unprecedented levels. You know, the, the movement
00:23:19.220
into the United States over the last 60 years is the largest movement of human beings ever in the
00:23:23.580
history of the world. And it's certainly the most open immigration policy that any, any nation on
00:23:30.420
earth has right now. Most people, according to a Harvard Harris poll not too long ago, want to reduce
00:23:35.960
that level of immigration dramatically. But Biden through executive action, through his executive
00:23:42.660
orders is going to increase that. And he's probably going to try to do it, uh, through legislation as
00:23:48.020
well. All of which raises this question. And, and I think people who look at the Trump phenomenon,
00:23:54.340
you know, how many people showed up to those rallies, how many people show up to defend this guy,
00:23:57.700
who look at the Robin Hood phenomenon, how do all the people get together and beat this hedge fund
00:24:02.980
at, at, at, at their short position? When they look at the popular opposition to so many of Biden's
00:24:08.620
policies, why can't conservatives effectively counter Joe Biden and the left? Why? Why is it we,
00:24:20.960
I think we've got generally the people on our side, if not in raw numbers, then at least in terms of
00:24:26.560
people who actually go out there and are active and, and vote and protest and maybe not with mail-in
00:24:34.780
ballots, which makes it easier. And maybe not with dead people voting in Philadelphia, or maybe not
00:24:39.820
with, uh, election officials, uh, undermining the, uh, state constitution of Pennsylvania. But generally
00:24:45.800
speaking, I think, look, we've got, we've at least got roughly half the country. Why can't we ever fight
00:24:50.860
the left at all? The reason is because the left is more or less completely unified behind the
00:24:59.820
progressive ideology. Some are more progressive, some are less progressive, but they're all basically
00:25:04.980
on the same team. On the right, that is not true. On the right, conservatives, just as a matter of our
00:25:11.360
natural disposition, we love to bicker with each other and pick fights and all divide all the time
00:25:15.980
and say, it'd be very nitpicky. But also there are just genuine, massive differences of opinion and
00:25:24.020
purpose on the right. And we're so divided, we cannot unite. And some of the more subversive
00:25:31.380
elements on the right have just been caught with their pants down. So we might, we might have to
00:25:36.320
divide a little bit more before we can unite, but we'll get to that in one second. You know,
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The right has always been somewhat splintered. When William F. Buckley Jr. helped to form the,
00:26:48.020
in many ways founded the post-war conservative movement, he united three groups, the traditional
00:26:54.400
conservatives and the, and the religious right. Also, they're not, they're not identical, but
00:26:59.060
it's got sort of similar. The economic libertarians and the foreign policy hawks,
00:27:05.080
many of whom were Democrats. And those three groups didn't have a whole lot in common,
00:27:09.620
but they all opposed the Soviet Union. The traditional and religious conservatives opposed
00:27:13.800
the Soviet Union because of the state mandated atheism. The economic libertarians opposed the Soviet
00:27:21.720
Union because of the economic collectivism and the foreign policy hawks opposed the Soviet Union
00:27:27.480
because of their imperial ambitions. And they all came together. They had this common enemy and it was
00:27:31.780
actually quite effective. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, this movement stopped being totally
00:27:37.600
coherent. The right didn't exactly know what it was fighting for. You had kind of the confusion of
00:27:41.540
the 1990s and the 2000s. What are we about? What are we for? Some people on the right are these
00:27:46.440
Wilsonian internationalists in foreign policy who want to adventure all around the globe and never
00:27:51.280
saw a Middle Eastern country they didn't want to bomb. Some people are sort of isolationists. You
00:27:56.500
think of the Ron Paul wing of the right. They don't want to go to war basically for any reason
00:28:01.280
whatsoever. How on earth are those two groups on the same side? You had these kind of libertarians
00:28:06.360
and I actually don't even think that phrase is fair to libertarians. You had kind of a more
00:28:10.280
libertine element of the right. P.J. O'Rourke joked about this group in a very famous essay called
00:28:16.020
Republican Party reptile. How to drive fast on drugs while getting your wing-wang squeezed and
00:28:21.240
not spill your drink. I believe that was the title of the essay. Kind of joking about this actual
00:28:26.580
phenomenon on the right. This kind of wolf of Wall Street, you know, go out there and totally
00:28:31.700
violate the moral order but we're all about making money and, you know, keeping the GDP going up or
00:28:35.760
something, right? So you had that element and then you have the traditional guys on the right who,
00:28:39.620
you know, show up to Latin mass with their 13 children and they're all buttoned up and they're all
00:28:44.160
very proper. How do those two elements work together? You have the neoconservatives who were
00:28:49.260
kind of liberals who got mugged by reality. I think that was the word of, of Irving Kristol.
00:28:53.860
You had, now you have the populists. You have all these different groups. The most, most loathsome
00:28:59.260
among any group that even pretends to call itself right-wing is the Lincoln Project. You know,
00:29:05.600
the Lincoln Project are these guys who are funded by left-wing billionaires and their whole purpose is to
00:29:10.760
go out and say, we're conservatives and Republicans, but we hate Trump, you know, and we also hate Senate
00:29:16.340
Republicans and we also hate House Republicans and we only work for Democrats now. And they milk
00:29:21.560
Democratic donors for money and they get themselves fancy houses and pay off their debts. Well, they,
00:29:26.940
they have just hit a snag. And I, I wasn't going to bring up this story because it involves someone
00:29:34.960
named John Weaver. John Weaver is a former McCain top strategist, a former top strategist to John
00:29:42.940
Kasich. He's been around GOP politics for a while. He worked for Democrats for a little bit too. And
00:29:47.740
now he's obviously working for Democrats again, but, but generally he's known as a sort of liberal
00:29:52.760
Republican. I wasn't going to mention this story when it first broke before it had really been
00:29:59.600
thoroughly investigated in public because I coincidentally happened to have briefly been
00:30:05.960
on a campaign with John Weaver. I don't know him very well and it's not like we were bosom buddies
00:30:11.000
or anything, but I just felt, okay, you know, I'm, I'm not going to start taking snipes even at former
00:30:16.440
Republicans until the story is really fleshed out. Now the story is fleshed out and we got to talk about
00:30:21.260
it. Ryan Jerdusky broke this story. Great, uh, very tough minded, young conservative journalist.
00:30:28.260
And, uh, and thinker and writer. Jerdusky breaks the story that John Weaver had been
00:30:34.640
messaging young boys and young men, but even people as young as like 14 years old on the internet and
00:30:43.440
sort of grooming them and things were becoming sexually explicit. And he, uh, was kind of dangling,
00:30:51.200
poor choice of verb. He was offering kind of political opportunities, uh, in exchange for
00:30:56.920
sexual activity. 21 men have since come out and said that Weaver did this to them.
00:31:07.800
Nobody wanted to cover this story. Jerdusky basically single-handedly forced the story on
00:31:12.440
people. When he started to break the story, all the news outlets kind of played defense for Weaver.
00:31:18.940
The Lincoln project remained completely mum about it. They were just hoping the thing would blow over.
00:31:23.580
John Weaver came out and made the, the Kevin Spacey defense. He came out and said, look,
00:31:28.520
I'm a deeply closeted gay man, but I'm now I'm a, I'm a gay guy. And please don't look into any of
00:31:34.000
the details about what, what just happened. The Lincoln project styles itself, the principled
00:31:39.980
conservatives. They are so much more principled than Donald Trump, who's unprincipled and all the
00:31:44.940
conservatives who support him, they're unprincipled, fascist, terrible, authoritarian,
00:31:48.600
illiberal, whatever, you know. Nobody is less principled than the Lincoln project.
00:31:55.020
They finally have to acknowledge this when the New York times picked up the story after Ryan had
00:32:00.940
done all of this good work. Finally, the New York times picks it up. And now the Lincoln project
00:32:04.540
pretends to just learn about it. They have this, put out this press release because they're so,
00:32:09.280
they're so disloyal. Even they don't even have the integrity to defend their guy whose actions it
00:32:15.120
would seem they knew about for quite some time. They don't even have that integrity. They say he's,
00:32:18.940
it's deplorable what he did. It's awful. He's odious. He lived a double life. People knew that
00:32:23.180
these rumors were going on about Weaver for a long time. They, they worked with him. They obviously
00:32:28.520
knew about it. Steve Schmidt, who's another ex-Republican, one of these guys whose whole job
00:32:33.600
is to go on liberal outlets and talk about how terrible Republicans are. He made his whole career
00:32:38.160
and all of his money off of Republicans. And then the minute that dried up, he goes and dances for the
00:32:43.220
liberals. According to the New York times, Steve Schmidt, co-founder of the group said its leaders
00:32:47.340
had learned last summer from social media posts that Mr. Weaver, who has a wife and two children
00:32:51.540
might be involved in relationships with men, but emphasized there was no awareness or insinuations
00:32:56.780
of any type of inappropriate behavior when we became aware of the chatter at the time.
00:33:02.320
Pause. Hold on for a second there. Steve Schmidt is saying that his close business partner,
00:33:09.340
someone he's known for a very long time, John Weaver, who has a wife and two children,
00:33:13.220
was cheating on his wife with dudes. But that was not inappropriate behavior. He's saying,
00:33:21.040
look, yeah, we knew he was cheating on his wife with dudes all the time, but we didn't,
00:33:24.820
we didn't think he was doing anything inappropriate. What does that say about your
00:33:28.040
moral compass, Steve Schmidt? What does that say about your moral compass, Project Lincoln?
00:33:34.960
Obviously, obviously, it's just a bunch of preening and nonsense. These are the sort of guys who say
00:33:40.500
country over party, another meaningless phrase. You join a political party because you think it'll
00:33:45.300
help your country. To say there's some dichotomy between country and party, it doesn't make any
00:33:49.840
sense. It's just sanctimony. It is a grift. I try not to use that word because it's overused in
00:33:55.640
politics. This thing is a grift. Rick Wilson, one of the founders of the Lincoln Project,
00:34:01.520
is as, is as foul-mouthed and vicious as anybody, far more so. He makes Trump look like a Boy Scout.
00:34:07.600
And he's got photos of himself waving the Confederate flag around. He's not holding it up.
00:34:12.540
I think the Confederate flag is on his cooler while he's tossing back brewskis. Now he's going to say,
00:34:17.380
oh, the illiberal, awful conservatives, they've abandoned their principles.
00:34:22.860
These guys are, are essentially the least principled people in politics.
00:34:30.380
It's funny because I, I didn't want to mention the Weaver story because it's just,
00:34:33.380
it's very sad. It's very sad for his family. I, I, you know, if it's already out there,
00:34:37.560
I didn't feel I needed to pile on. In many ways, I feel I'm sort of defending Weaver against the rest
00:34:42.500
of the Lincoln Project here. Because Weaver, whatever he did, Weaver has done some really,
00:34:47.100
really, really shady things in politics. Some things that I learned out actually that he'd even done
00:34:52.200
to groups that I was involved with after the fact. But these guys are no better. Steve Schmidt,
00:35:00.580
Rick Wilson, these guys are no better. If we are going to have a united, the other reason I bring
00:35:06.540
this up, not just to dunk on the Lincoln Project, which is a fun thing to do, not just to go after
00:35:10.680
squishy Republicans who dance for liberals for a living, but it's because the reason we can't fight
00:35:16.840
the Biden administration right now is because we're not united. But the reason we're not united is
00:35:22.120
because, in large part, of people like this. In part, it's because conservatives have this
00:35:27.940
disposition to nitpick and be contrarian. But in part, it's because there are genuinely subversive
00:35:32.140
elements that have absolutely nothing to do with the conservative movement broadly, which do not
00:35:37.800
share our aims, which do not share our vision of the country. And they need to be excised from
00:35:43.020
the conservative movement or from the American right. Very few people would consider the Lincoln
00:35:50.060
project to be right wing, at least among conservatives today. But among liberals,
00:35:55.740
it is considered right wing. And some of us, I think, cotton to that sort of thing. We give quarter
00:36:02.900
to it. We shouldn't. There's more infighting even among elected officials. Right now, Matt Gaetz,
00:36:09.100
who is generally speaking quite a talented congressman. Matt Gaetz is going after Liz Cheney. Liz Cheney is
00:36:17.360
the chairman of the Republican caucus. It's technically a leadership position in the House,
00:36:22.880
but it's not a very important one. Liz Cheney, though, voted to impeach Donald Trump. Liz Cheney
00:36:28.040
supports the impeachment of Trump very much at odds with her caucus, very much at odds with her party.
00:36:33.180
And Matt Gaetz flew to Wyoming to attack Liz Cheney. Take a listen.
00:36:37.720
I love Wyoming. I think if Liz Cheney had a rally with all of her supporters,
00:36:47.840
they could likely meet inside one of the elevators in the Capitol and still have plenty of room for
00:36:54.820
social distancing. I want to thank Representative Ocean Andrew. His first day as a state representative
00:37:04.800
was yesterday and he invited me to be here with all of you today. I'd say that's a pretty good
00:37:10.660
start for the young man. I'll confess to you, this is my first time in Wyoming. I've been here for
00:37:22.080
about an hour and I feel like I already know the place a lot better than your misguided representative,
00:37:28.040
Liz Cheney. Pretty rough attacks. Now, I know that a lot of people in Washington,
00:37:34.800
a lot of Washington Republicans, they say, come on, stop it. Stop the infighting. Stop the
00:37:39.320
infighting. And this is, this is where conservatives need to be very focused. We need to be very precise.
00:37:47.140
Do we really want to kick out of the party, Liz Cheney and people like Liz Cheney, people who maybe
00:37:54.640
they're more like Bush Republicans. Maybe they're more like Cheney Republicans. I don't know. Maybe
00:37:58.560
they're more kind of more foreign policy hawks. I don't know. More liberal Republicans, generally
00:38:03.940
speaking. Do we want to completely kick them out of the party? I think that would be crazy.
00:38:08.460
You wouldn't, you wouldn't have enough people. You wouldn't, you'd, you'd lose more people than I
00:38:13.420
think those of us on the conservative side would be willing to admit. Now, many people on the liberal
00:38:20.160
side want to kick out people like Matt Gaetz or they want to kick out people like Josh Hawley or they
00:38:25.040
want to kick out people like Ted Cruz or they want to get, who don't even all agree with one another,
00:38:28.340
but they all represent sort of less liberal elements. Do we want to kick those out? No,
00:38:34.220
we can't do it. If we, do we want a new Patriot party? That was another suggestion. Should there
00:38:38.080
be a new third party? No. If we had a Patriot party, you just give all the elections to Democrats.
00:38:43.100
However, you can't let this kind of division just fester and fester and fester. So it would seem to me
00:38:48.100
perfectly reasonable that Liz Cheney should not serve in Republican leadership.
00:38:54.700
I don't think she should be kicked out of the House of Representatives. I don't think
00:38:57.500
she should be kicked out of the Republican party, but her position on a very, very important issue,
00:39:02.940
the historic, unprecedented second impeachment of the ex-president, her position on that is,
00:39:11.260
it's too serious. It's too, it's too at odds with the party. She cannot make a credible claim to be
00:39:18.920
leading the party. So she should return to be rank and file and maybe, and, and she should still have
00:39:27.440
her rights to, you know, be exercised within the caucus and within the party. But the conservatives
00:39:33.740
are not going to effectively counter the Biden administration. If we have leadership that opposes
00:39:40.540
the conservative base, it's just not going to happen. You know, Matt Gaetz talked about,
00:39:47.220
in this same speech, he, he talked about something I'd never heard about before,
00:39:51.340
but it's an interesting lens through which to view all of this stuff, the opposition to Fauci,
00:39:57.080
the Robin Hood stuff, the infighting on the GOP. He called it prairie populism.
00:40:02.000
My grandfather was a small town mayor in not too distant North Dakota. He passed before his time,
00:40:09.380
but not before passing into legend. And he passed along a little wisdom to my dad. My old man calls it
00:40:17.500
prairie populism. Do right by your people. Never sell out. Fight their dislikes. And never,
00:40:27.000
never let the powerful run over the weak. Inspire people through courage and tell the truth.
00:40:35.960
The truth is that the establishment in both political parties have teamed up to screw our
00:40:44.340
fellow Americans for generations. I know that there are many Republicans and conservatives.
00:40:50.920
They get, they get shivers when they hear this word populism. This is happening. This is something
00:41:00.800
that the American people are sensing and they are sensing it for good reason. They're sensing that
00:41:06.400
there is something very corrupt about this establishment. Are we really to believe that
00:41:10.100
the educational establishment is totally corrupt? The administrative state is totally corrupt.
00:41:13.600
Hollywood is totally corrupt. But the big tech, totally corrupt. But the financial
00:41:21.140
establishment is like totally fine, 100% totally fine? No. Foreign policy establishment, totally. No,
00:41:27.480
of course not. There is something happening here. Senator Cruz talks about this as the Republican Party
00:41:34.180
becoming the party of Pittsburgh and the Democrats becoming the party of Paris. It's a very nice
00:41:38.700
political formulation of that. For most of my life, Republicans have appeared to be the party of
00:41:42.760
plutocrats. Now they are the party of the people. Some people are not adjusting well to that. If the
00:41:48.040
Republican Party is to have an effective governing coalition, an elective coalition moving forward,
00:41:52.940
they have to be able to make that claim. It's why the left is so focused on burying these guys who
00:41:58.620
dare question the establishment and who dare invoke the language of populism.
00:42:04.100
Speaking of Republican division, President Trump's legal team has collapsed. So his lawyers have left.
00:42:14.420
We are now being told that it is a mutual separation. The lawyers wanted to leave and Trump wanted them to
00:42:19.260
leave too. This ahead of his impeachment trial. You know, earlier I said that Trump was impeached after,
00:42:25.680
after he left office. And that's not, not quite right. I mean, that's not, that's not precise in
00:42:34.040
that he was impeached while he was in office, but then he left because they impeached him days before
00:42:38.060
he was leaving office. Now the trial is going to be of an ex-president. So is it an impeachment of a
00:42:42.280
president or impeachment of an ex-president? It would seem if the, if the question of conviction is going
00:42:45.780
to be after he's left office, it's the impeachment of, of an ex-president, which is constitutionally
00:42:50.100
absurd. Chief justice not presiding. So it's probably by the, by the letter of the constitution,
00:42:55.800
not even an actual impeachment trial. And this is why I'm not too worried about Trump losing his
00:43:02.240
lawyers. You know, he'll get new lawyers. It, I think he already has new lawyers. It, it might upset
00:43:11.200
whatever arguments the other guys were presenting. It might have been a missed opportunity, but the
00:43:16.420
impeachment itself is a joke. You have on the record enough senators saying this is completely absurd
00:43:24.320
that barring some totally unforeseen event, Trump wouldn't be convicted. So who cares? They could go
00:43:32.800
there, the Trump legal team could go there and read, read Dr. Seuss. Probably wouldn't change anybody's
00:43:38.920
views. Certainly not enough people to convict the president. Even that though, even the, the continued
00:43:46.140
fighting over Donald Trump and the person of Donald Trump, I guess it has to do with these divisions
00:43:51.100
that are going on within the GOP. We need to be very, very careful here in this moment. We need to,
00:43:57.360
we need to avoid papering over differences that are substantive, right? And just pretending that we
00:44:04.700
can all go along to get along and the only thing we can agree on is cutting taxes, but that's fine.
00:44:09.440
We'll put the other stuff for another day. That has not served us very well for the past 20 years.
00:44:13.500
Likewise, we can't be so vicious that we, we just divide ourselves so that we're, we're each simply
00:44:23.000
a party of one and we can't get together and do anything in politics. I remember, I forget who told
00:44:28.060
me this, but there was, he was describing the difference between Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.
00:44:33.460
This was years ago. They said, Bill Clinton is the kind of politician who could go into a room
00:44:37.940
with a hundred people who disagree with him and each other, and he could find the one point of
00:44:45.520
agreement with each of them. Yeah, you like cigars, me too, huh? You know, he could, maybe not that,
00:44:51.640
maybe even more substantive than that. Rudy Giuliani is the opposite kind of politician. He could go into
00:44:57.080
a room with a hundred people who agree with him and each other, and he would find the one area of
00:45:01.060
disagreement. And I think this gets to the difference between the liberal and the conservative
00:45:04.980
disposition. Conservatives, especially in this culture, we're just by nature sort of contrarian.
00:45:11.220
And we, all we want to do is talk about our differences, the differences between the
00:45:14.400
libertarians and the traditional conservatives and the neocons and the this and the that and the
00:45:18.500
this and the that. We can't do anything together in politics if we refuse to ally with one another.
00:45:25.800
Now, I think one key aspect to uniting conservatives moving forward is we've got to just stop focusing
00:45:35.340
on, rather, we've got to stop focusing on the formal aspect of politics to the exclusion of the
00:45:41.840
substance. And what I mean by that is we've got to stop putting a hundred percent of our focus
00:45:47.160
on free speech, you know, bumper sticker or slogan, free speech. And we've got to start talking about
00:45:53.380
what we want to say. We've got to stop talking about a hundred percent of the time, bumper sticker
00:45:58.940
slogan, religious liberty. We've got to start talking about what we believe. There was an
00:46:03.740
excellent, excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today by Ryan T. Anderson, who was for a long time
00:46:09.480
at Heritage Foundation. Now he's leading the Ethics and Public Policy Institute. It's called
00:46:13.840
Religious Liberty Isn't Enough. Religious Liberty Isn't Enough. Cultural conservatives also need to
00:46:20.540
defend our views, which are scientifically sound and popular. I've talked about this before. I think
00:46:28.360
conservatives, really only the last 15 or 20 years, have started to believe these shallow bumper
00:46:35.020
sticker slogans, which in the past conservatives did not believe. So we believe that free speech in
00:46:40.200
the American tradition means you can say absolutely whatever you want to say at all times and we should
00:46:44.560
encourage all manner of speech. Conservatives have never believed that. First of all, it's never been
00:46:49.960
true. There have always been broad swaths of speech that are not permitted, namely threats, sedition,
00:46:56.400
fighting words, fraud, obscenity, all these sorts of things. Conservatives were never the ones saying we
00:47:02.600
need to get rid of all barriers to speech because we know that standards must exist. This is a limited
00:47:08.760
world. We have limited language. If we do have a certain speech regime, we're not going to have a
00:47:14.440
different one. This is even clearer with religious liberty. Right now in public schools in New York,
00:47:20.260
in certain public schools, students are taught that boys and girls can choose their own gender
00:47:27.320
and there's no such thing as immutable biological sex. Four and five-year-olds are being taught this.
00:47:33.720
The trouble with that, if you want to protect that view under, I guess, religious liberty because that
00:47:38.500
religion is called Gnostic dualism. If you want to protect that view, you are necessarily excluding
00:47:45.020
the traditional view, the Christian view, the Jewish view, the Muslim view, that there is such a thing
00:47:49.720
as men and women and men can't become women and women can't become men. You can't simultaneously
00:47:54.800
protect both views. You have to choose one. If a little child in school is going to get in trouble
00:48:04.060
for saying that Sally can't become Steve, then he can't practice Christianity openly or Judaism
00:48:10.480
or Islam. We need to, we need to come out and defend certain views. That requires doing the work that
00:48:21.900
we've basically been putting off since the end of the Cold War. And really, maybe you could say been
00:48:26.300
putting off for much longer before that, which is figuring out what we stand for. From 1945 until
00:48:34.400
the fall of the Berlin Wall, we stood for opposing communism, right? And various sort of political
00:48:40.460
ideas fell downstream from that. Afterward, what did we stand for? It just was totally unclear in the
00:48:46.320
nineties and the two thousands. Now that Trump has really accelerated that debate because he does
00:48:51.260
stand for certain things, right? He's willing to go out on a limb and say, no, we need less immigration.
00:48:55.920
Now we need to protect American industry. We need, it was really ripping up some of the old kind of
00:49:01.360
orthodoxies that had ossified over time. What do we stand for? We can't just bury our heads in the
00:49:10.000
sand. The country will continue to rip apart at the seams if we do that. We've got to answer that.
00:49:14.120
That takes courage, which is the prerequisite for all the other virtues. We have to acknowledge that
00:49:18.280
there is such a thing as virtue. Can we do it or are we just destined to descend into more and more
00:49:24.460
decadence? I guess we'll find out. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. See you
00:49:33.020
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe. And if you want to help spread the
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00:50:17.500
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00:50:21.760
A prominent abortionist declares that unborn babies are zombies. CNN is pushing for more
00:50:27.260
censorship of conservative opinions. BLM gets a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. And the Lincoln
00:50:31.460
Project tries to distance itself from one of its founders. All of that and much more today