I m actually in Rome today and I met the Pope, so I ll tell you all about that pretty amazing experience. Also, the latest from the Middle East, President Trump sounding off about the situation regarding Iran, and a major Supreme Court decision in favor of reason and against the trans agenda.
00:00:00.000All righty, folks, an insane amount coming up on today's show.
00:00:02.000I'm actually in Rome today, and I met the Pope, so I'll tell you all about that pretty amazing experience.
00:00:08.000Also, the latest from the Middle East, President Trump sounding off about the situation regarding Iran and a major Supreme Court decision in favor of reason and against the trans agenda.
00:00:18.000And yes, folks here at Daily Wire are implicated in that decision.
00:00:21.000First, The Daily Wire is not just an ad-free show platform or premium entertainment, though yeah, we have all that stuff.
00:00:27.000The Daily Wire is a place for people who are done being lied to, canceled, shouted down, told to sit quietly while the left burns down the country.
00:00:32.000We fight back with stories, with truth, and with action.
00:01:31.000It's a reminder that godly biblical values are the guiding force for billions of people around the world.
00:01:38.000The world seems like a very dark place from time to time, but the reality is that if you stick to eternal values, Actually, what the Pope said was quite beautiful, not surprisingly.
00:01:49.000Pope Leo, I'll have my comments about him personally in a moment, but what he actually had to say, he quoted from the book of John the story about the pool of Bethesda, which is the story in the book of John where Jesus goes to the pool of Bethesda and there are people who are ill and people who are paralyzed, people who are sick and infirm.
00:02:06.000There's a man there who's been sick and infirm for 38 years and Jesus goes to that man and he tells him that he ought to get up and walk, take his mat with him and walk.
00:02:16.000And what the Pope said is that We should all reflect on Jesus' statement at that moment when we feel stuck and trapped in a dead end, that instead of allowing that to become an excuse for others to take care of us, instead, we should not allow this to become some sort of justification to, as he said, avoid making decisions about our lives.
00:02:34.000Instead, we should get away from fatalism and we should embrace personal responsibility.
00:02:37.000Again, it's those sorts of messages that are implicit in the biblical narrative that the Pope is spreading, and that is a wonderful thing for the civilization.
00:02:47.000I don't have a dog in the fight when it comes to internal battles over doctrine and Catholicism, except to the extent that the Catholic Church remains a lodestone for Western civilization, a great spreader of biblical values to humanity, in the same way there are Protestant churches that do the same.
00:03:04.000People of God, people of the book, people of the Bible are spreading eternal values, and it is worth acknowledging that and honoring that.
00:03:12.000That's actually what I said to the Pope when I had an opportunity to meet him.
00:03:15.000So afterward, After the general audience, the Pope meets a bunch of people who are there.
00:03:21.000There are a bunch of bishops who went up and met him, and then there was a small group of people who were able to go up and meet him.
00:03:25.000And so I handed him a letter asking for an interview, of course.
00:03:29.000I introduced myself, and you're supposed to bring the Pope a gift.
00:04:13.000And I told him that while he is Catholic and I am Jewish, one of the miracles that we can agree on is the 2005 White Sox winning the World Series.
00:04:21.000And I brought with me from my personal collection a 2005 World Series White Sox signed baseball by the entire team.
00:04:39.000So it was really a terrific experience.
00:04:42.000Honestly, the entire event was amazing.
00:04:44.000My impressions of him are, you know, you have to form your impressions of famous people that you meet for a short period of time in that short period of time.
00:04:52.000I will say that from the people who I've spoken to, and I want to say thank you, by the way, to the ambassador of Hungary, to the Vatican, who helped guide us through the process here and who knew Pope Francis well and who also knows Pope Leo a little, that Pope Leo...
00:05:12.000What the ambassador suggested is that Pope Francis was Pope Francis before he was Pope, and then he was Pope Francis after he was Pope, and he was essentially the same person.
00:05:22.000He said that Pope Liot is by nature more reserved, but that he has essentially taken his personality and subsumed it in the role of being Pope, which I think is quite apparent actually when you meet the Pope.
00:05:49.000I think that humility and joy would be the two sort of descriptors I would use for Pope Leo.
00:05:54.000So I want to share that with you because, you know, in the political, there's a lot of moments that are not uplifting.
00:05:59.000In the political, there are a lot of moments that are fraught.
00:06:01.000There are a lot of moments where it feels as though darkness is encroaching.
00:06:06.000And so there does need to be a meeting of the minds between all of us who believe in biblical values, that those biblical values ought to be pervaded.
00:06:15.000It's one of the reasons why on the show I have encouraged people who are Catholic to go to church, people who are Protestant to go to church.
00:06:20.000So I encourage Jews to go to synagogue and relearn their traditions and engage with those traditions.
00:06:27.000I'm very much in favor of the strengthening.
00:06:32.000I'm very much in favor of people re-engaging with the values that made the West what it is in the first place.
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00:09:31.000Watching tens of thousands of people congregate in St. Peter's Square just to hear from Pope Leo, it's an amazing thing.
00:09:37.000Yeah, so the Pope traditionally holds a Wednesday audience where Mass will be celebrated and he'll give an address.
00:09:44.000Sometimes he'll celebrate the Angelus.
00:09:46.000And it's a wonderful opportunity for people to be able to come and hear from the Pope.
00:09:52.000That really, starting in the 20th century, a lot of popes made themselves more available.
00:09:57.000I mean, for much of church history, the pope was a monarch, and he still is, but he was someone that was just in the Vatican, away from most people, not as accessible.
00:10:08.000But we started seeing with Pope Paul VI and the 20th century popes, this greater availability, and of course, with Pope St. John Paul II traveling all over the world, followed by Pope Benedict and Pope Francis, this ability to be able to...
00:10:22.000I was able to meet Pope Francis myself at a Wednesday audience in 2013 after his election.
00:10:27.000My wife and I had just gotten married, and there's a tradition called Sposi Novelli where if you've just been married in the Catholic Church and you attend a Wednesday audience, you have the opportunity to meet the Pope.
00:11:02.000I mean, that was just the impression that I took away from him as a human being very quickly.
00:11:06.000I mean this is somebody who appears to really be his office, significantly less perhaps than Pope Francis who in some ways seemed to be – I was told this by folks who had dealt with Pope Francis pretty closely, who seemed to be the same when he was a cardinal and when he was the pope.
00:11:35.000Now, I haven't had a chance to meet Pope Leo yet, but I did meet Pope Francis and obviously followed his entire pontificate.
00:11:42.000I do notice a difference, and other commenters have said that Pope Leo, he was a friend of Pope Francis.
00:11:47.000He served on the dicastery of bishops.
00:11:49.000Francis appointed him a cardinal in 2023 and entrusted him with the task of selecting to help consult and select bishops all over the world.
00:11:58.000So he had a very good relationship with Pope Francis, though commenters have said he's a bit more shy and reserved than Pope Francis was.
00:12:05.000And I think seeing the way you might meet him, so when my wife and I met Pope Francis, we brought him a gift.
00:12:11.000We brought a papal zucchetto to give to him as a gift to swap, to have his zucchetto.
00:12:16.000And he made a joke and took my wife's tiara, her wedding tiara, and said, maybe I take this instead.
00:12:22.000And he would make jokes and shoot from the hip.
00:12:25.000And Pope Francis even said once for his papal motto, you know, I'm going to make a mess.
00:12:29.000He would speak from the hip often and for many good pastoral reasons to reach out to people on the margins.
00:12:34.000But what we see with Pope Leo XIV, I would say, is really a return to form.
00:12:39.000So Pope Francis selected a very new papal name.
00:12:42.000He was the first ever Francis, for example.
00:12:44.000And Pope Leo has selected Leo XIV, and he did that very intentionally.
00:12:50.000So Pope Leo XIII was pope at the end of the 19th century, and he wrote an encyclical, Rerum Novarum, talking about how...
00:12:59.000Literally, the encyclical is called On New Things.
00:13:02.000You have the industrial revolution, major changes in society, dealing with factory life, demographic changes, and the Pope wanted to be there for people during these massive changes.
00:13:12.000And Pope Leo XIV is saying the Pope needs to be there for people in the changes in the information revolution.
00:13:18.000And in his inaugural address, for example, he said artificial intelligence is one of the major things that people have to watch out for and guard human dignity against.
00:13:26.000So you see his use of the papal garbs, his traditional residency's chosen.
00:13:31.000It's sort of a return to form, if you will.
00:13:33.000I did have a very nice moment with, with the Pope in which I, But then I also said to him, I'm a lifelong White Sox fan.
00:13:48.000He happens to be a Chicago White Sox fan because, of course, he's American.
00:14:35.000I mean, obviously, the church has been so embroiled in controversy over the course of the last 25 years that a return to sort of stability and a return to, again, I think humility and joy would be the things that, again, I'm speaking as somebody who doesn't have a dog in the fight other than as a religious person.
00:14:51.000I want more people to go to church, and I want more people to return to the traditions of their ancestors.
00:14:56.000It seems to me from the outside that's exactly what the church might need.
00:14:59.000Well, I think that Pope Leo XIV is going to continue many of the important things that Pope Francis discussed, like reaching people on the peripheries.
00:15:06.000So when I was watching the announcement of who the pope was, I did not expect this selection.
00:15:17.000And when they said, they were speaking in Latin, of course, and they said, Robert Provost.
00:15:20.000And they go on and I was like, and my wife said, oh, is that the Pope?
00:15:23.000It's got to be the guy announcing the Pope.
00:16:01.000So he's a very careful—and I love that he studied mathematics for college.
00:16:05.000So he's a rigorous, analytical thinker.
00:16:07.000He's a careful thinker, something we really need in a pope.
00:16:10.000But he served as a missionary priest in Peru through the 80s and 90s.
00:16:15.000And so when Cardinal Dolan from New York, who is really lobbying for Provost as someone to be a peacemaker in the church, pointed out, yeah, you may not like having an American pope.
00:16:24.000He was born in Chicago, but he's not just some spoiled American.
00:16:37.000But he's able, though, to bring that American influence.
00:16:40.000That one thing the Vatican really needs, people might, you know, But we're good at getting things done and having, you know, orderly things and getting down to business.
00:16:49.000Like, Europeans always make fun of us for quote-unquote working too much.
00:16:52.000Then again, we have the greatest economy in the world compared to them.
00:16:55.000So I think he'll bring that spirit to the Vatican to overhaul the bureaucracy, help the Vatican with its financial problems.
00:17:02.000I think it's a lot of good on the horizon with him.
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00:19:12.000The pursuit to serve others, that is yours.
00:20:50.000Like when I go to someone's house, and I'm a guest, then I will do everything I can.
00:20:55.000Keep things clean and to make my bed and to do everything that is the right thing to do rather than committing a crime or being abusive or something like that.
00:21:04.000So that doesn't really work in this country.
00:21:06.000So I think the important thing is when you become an immigrant, to think about, okay, I go to America because I want to use America for the great opportunities that America has in education, in jobs, creating a family, all of those kind of things.
00:21:22.000Then you have to think about, okay, If I get all of those things from America, then I have to give something back.
00:21:28.000You have a responsibility as an immigrant to give back to America and to pay back to America and to go and do something for your community for no money whatsoever.
00:21:37.000Give something back to after-school programs, Special Olympics, or whatever it is.
00:21:49.000And people start clapping for it because it's obviously true.
00:21:51.000And the other is that about halfway through this clip, Sonny Hostin reaches over and tries to stop Arnold from saying what he's saying.
00:21:58.000And so, you know, what's happening here is the sort of Sonny Hostin position in trying to stop Arnold Schwarzenegger from saying what he is saying, that is mirrored by a lot of the domestic-born Americans who are trying to help out people who really don't like the country very much.
00:22:12.000And both of these things are quite important because the truth is that the West has, in fact, imported An extraordinary number of people who hate our civilization, who do not like our values, who do not like biblical values or Western values or anything like it.
00:22:24.000One of those people currently sits in Congress.
00:22:26.000This will be Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota.
00:22:29.000So I was curious about the difference between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ilhan Omar in terms of when...
00:22:37.000So, of course, I went to our sponsors and my friends over perplexity and I asked, when did Schwarzenegger immigrate to America and when did Ilhan Omar immigrate to America?
00:22:43.000Schwarzenegger immigrated to the United States in October 1968 at the age of 21. He moved from Austria to pursue opportunities in bodybuilding, arriving in the U.S. with limited English skills and quickly establishing himself in the bodybuilding community in L.A. It's a difference in era.
00:23:00.000To the United States in 1995 after fleeing the civil war in Somalia and then spending four years in a refugee camp in Kenya.
00:23:08.000In 1968, if you came to the United States, you were expected, like you had been for the vast majority of American history, to actually assimilate to American values.
00:23:15.000It doesn't mean give up your home religion or your home foods.
00:23:18.000It does mean that you had to take in, imbibe from the well of American constitutional values, Anglo-American values.
00:23:27.000These were things that you were supposed to engage with.
00:23:29.000And then something changed in America, and it turned out that if you came here, you could be an ungrateful heriton, which is precisely what Ilhan Omar is.
00:23:37.000She comes to the United States as a refugee from one of the worst places on Earth, simply to explain to the Americans about how we are, in fact, becoming the worst place on Earth.
00:23:45.000So here's Representative Ilhan Omar, who is yet to identify an Islamist terror group that she does not have some sympathy for, talking about how America is actually the worst place on Earth, or one of them.
00:23:56.000To be coming out of our country, I mean, I grew up in a dictatorship.
00:24:03.000And I don't even remember ever witnessing anything like that.
00:24:07.000To have a democracy, a pecan of hope for the world to now be turned into one of the worst.
00:24:18.000countries where the military are in our streets without any regard for people's constitutional rights, while our president is spending millions of dollars prompting himself up like a failed dictator with a military parade.
00:24:36.000Okay, so, we're becoming one of the worst places on earth, according to a woman who came from Somalia, because President Trump had a military parade.
00:24:42.000But this goes deeper than that for Ilhan Omar.
00:24:44.000Of course, there's not much about traditional American values that she does like.
00:24:47.000She is constantly sounding off about the evils of American colonialism, American capitalism.
00:24:53.000A group of people have been brought to our shores over the course of the last 50-60 years who really despise the country.
00:25:02.000Not immigrants like Arnold Schwarzenegger who came here to, as he says, become part of the civilization to enjoy the fruits of it and to give something back.
00:25:11.000But who came here in order to complain about how terrible our civilization is and to change it from within.
00:25:16.000That is one half of one of the big problems with the United States right now.
00:25:19.000And the other part of this is people like Sonny Hostin sitting next to Arnold Schwarzenegger and telling him not to say the unsayable.
00:25:25.000And also legislators like Sonny Hostin, people like Brad Lander.
00:25:54.000Well, he went to an immigration courthouse in Lower Manhattan as he tried to escort a migrant whom agents were seeking to arrest.
00:26:03.000So he was observing proceedings at a city's main immigration courthouse.
00:26:07.000And a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said Lander had assaulted and impeded a law enforcement officer.
00:26:14.000Apparently, Lander was standing by a migrant man in a hallway on the 12th floor when several men in plainclothes, who appear to be law enforcement officers, some wearing masks, pushed past a crowd in the hallway to arrest the migrant.
00:26:24.000Lander asks the agents whether they have a judicial warrant and then refuses to let go of the migrant as the agents seek to shepherd the man toward the elevators.
00:26:32.000And Lander continues to grab the migrant.
00:26:35.000He says you don't have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens.
00:26:37.000But apparently this person is not, in fact, a U.S. citizen.
00:26:53.000Agents don't actually need judicial warrants to make arrests in immigration courts because those are public spaces, according to immigration lawyers.
00:27:00.000Lander was then arrested for several hours, and then he was released publicly.
00:27:10.000And again, it goes to this attitude in the United States by many on the left that we ought to be actively facilitating the law-breaking of people who come here and don't respect our laws.
00:27:58.000Another one, of course, is Senator Alex Padilla.
00:28:01.000He is the California senator who is so anonymous that he walked into a press conference with Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, demanding that she answer his questions and trying to muscle past FBI agents.
00:28:12.000And then he was forced out of the room and briefly detained before being released.
00:28:16.000And now he considers himself a human rights hero of some sort.
00:28:20.000So he, of course, took to the well of the Senate to explain that Donald Trump is a tyrant because of that one time that he tried to bust into a press conference as a sort of rando.
00:29:10.000Illegally immigrating to the United States?
00:29:12.000Or maybe the fundamental right is randomly breaking into other people's press conferences without announcing who you are beforehand and getting clearance.
00:29:29.000Meanwhile, speaking of people who facilitate lawbreaking in order to make a point, the Joy Behar's of elected politics, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, he was asked about violence at these anti-ICE rallies, and he just refused to comment on it.
00:29:44.000Senator, do you denounce the violence you're seeing at the ICE protests in Los Angeles?
00:30:23.000That is the only explanation I can find for the fact that New York City is now considering the election of State Assemblyman Zoran Mamdani to mayor of the city.
00:30:34.000The polls are currently suggesting, according to the Washington Post, a squeaky tight race for the Democratic nomination between former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and State Assemblyman Zoran Mamdani.
00:30:44.000Okay, now, Cuomo obviously has his own problems.
00:30:47.000He's the former governor of the state of New York.
00:30:51.000This sort of heritage and family name, but he was ousted as the governor over a grabbing-ass scandal that followed hard on a scandal in which he essentially stashed all the old people who had COVID together, and many of them died.
00:31:07.000Well, now he's running for mayor again, and he has somehow become the moderate candidate and the voice of reason in this race, somehow, as opposed to Mamdani, who's a full-scale socialist.
00:31:17.000As we talked about last week on the show, Mamdani is now running almost dead even with Cuomo in the Democratic primaries.
00:31:22.000Those are scheduled to take place next week.
00:31:24.000And according to this Washington Post columnist, the momentum is with the 33-year-old Mamdani, partly thanks to his viral videos, but also reflecting the exhaustion engendered by the idea of a Cuomo restoration.
00:31:36.000So, again, there's a bunch of candidates in this race.
00:31:40.000It is ranked choice voting, which makes it a little bit more complicated, for sure.
00:31:43.000The New York Times is freaking out so much about the fact that Mamdani might win, and they dislike Cuomo so much, they decline to endorse a candidate.
00:31:51.000That's how bad things are in the city of New York.
00:31:55.000Nonetheless, this speaks to the radicalism of the Democratic Party, truly a radical Democratic Party, that is thinking of taking a full-scale communist and making that guy mayor.
00:32:27.000Other cultures are taught to never forget.
00:32:31.000We need to be reminded as blacks here in Chicago and America, remembering our past and working towards a more just future, investing in black.
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00:34:13.000Alrighty, meanwhile, a major decision against radicalism by the Supreme Court coming down in the United States versus Scrametti.
00:34:20.000This particular decision, which came out today, concerns a law in Tennessee banning certain medical care for transgender minors, meaning hormone treatments, sterilization surgeries, and all of the rest.
00:34:32.000The claim was this violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, which is totally insane.
00:34:37.000Obviously, the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment was not meant to ensure that a 12-year-old girl could be shot filled with testosterone and then have her breasts hacked off at a particular age.
00:34:45.000That was not what the founders of the 14th Amendment were.
00:34:48.000Now, Matt Walsh, obviously, a major host here, was involved.
00:35:00.000Our company has been deeply involved in this issue for a long time, including Matt's uncovering of the use of transgender hormone treatment at places like Vanderbilt University.
00:35:17.000The decision was written by Chief Justice Roberts.
00:35:20.000And what Chief Justice Roberts found is that, again, the Tennessee law did not, in fact, violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
00:35:32.000Essentially, he says that SB 1, the first in the Senate Bill 1, bans the use of certain medical procedures for treating transgender minors, in particular.
00:35:41.000The law prohibits a healthcare provider from surgically removing, modifying, altering, or entering into tissues, cavities, or organs of a human being, or prescribing, administering, or dispensing any puberty blocker or hormone for the purpose of 1. Enabling a minor to identify with or live as a purported identity inconsistent with the minor sex, or 2. Treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor sex and asserted identity.
00:36:05.000First, it does not restrict the administration of puberty blockers or hormones to individuals 18 and over, so it's for minors.
00:36:11.000Which means that, again, you're not going to enter into a sort of more heightened scrutiny from the Supreme Court.
00:36:16.000Second, SB1 does not ban fully the administration of such drugs to minors.
00:36:21.000A healthcare provider may administer puberty blockers or hormones to treat a minor's congenital defect, precocious puberty, disease, or physical injury.
00:36:30.000So, does this violate the Equal Protection Clause?
00:36:34.000Says Chief Justice Roberts, no, it does not.
00:36:37.000The Fourteenth Amendment's command that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws must coexist with the practical necessity that most legislation classifies for one purpose or another, with resulting disadvantage to various groups or persons.
00:36:50.000We have reconciled the principle of equal protection with the reality of legislative classification by holding that, quote, if a law neither burdens a fundamental right nor targets a suspect class, we will uphold the legislative classification so long as it bears a rational relation to some legitimate end.
00:37:05.000There are certain legislative classifications that prompt heightened review, so that would be any classification on the basis of race, alienage, national origin.
00:37:15.000Sex-based classifications also warn heightened scrutiny.
00:37:19.000However, that does not apply to transgenderism.
00:37:22.000It does not classify on any basis that warrant heightened review.
00:37:26.000As Chief Justice Roberts says, he says, So again, mere reference to sex is not sufficient to trigger heightened scrutiny.
00:37:45.000So again, this is the broad decision by the court here.
00:37:48.000Now, what's fascinating about this is Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who's been ripped up and down by some members of the right...
00:37:57.000Again, that's typically not how constitutional law works.
00:37:59.000There are certain justices who just turn to the left and stay to the left.
00:38:04.000They start off on the right, supposedly, and then they turn to the left and they stay there.
00:38:07.000That would be, for example, Justice Souter, appointed by George H.W. Bush.
00:38:10.000And Justice Souter ends up flipping all the way over to the left and just staying on the left.
00:38:17.000He moved to the left on left-wing issues, on social issues, and sort of stayed there.
00:38:21.000On procedural issues, he ended up in a more moderate place, but on left-wing social issues, he ended up on the left.
00:38:27.000That is not the case with Amy Coney Barrett.
00:38:28.000So Amy Coney Barrett wrote a concurrence in this case with Justice Thomas, who is, again, the most conservative justice on the court, also the best justice on the court, never gets his due, absolutely tremendous.
00:38:41.000So the concurrence says, because the court concludes that Tennessee's Senate Bill 1 does not classify on the basis of transgender status, It does not resolve whether transgender status constitutes a suspect class.
00:38:51.000I write separately to explain why, in my view, it does not.
00:38:54.000So the court doesn't actually say whether transgender status would mean that you have a classification that is protected by, for example, the Civil Rights Act.
00:39:08.000Says Justice Barrett, joined by Justice Thomas, as a practical necessity, most legislation classifies for one purpose or another.
00:39:15.000Laws distribute benefits that advantage particular groups like in-state tuition for residents, draw lines that might seem arbitrary like income thresholds for means tested benefits and set rules for specific categories of people like a particular person.
00:40:13.000To determine whether a group constitutes a suspect class akin to race or sex, a test is applied, derived from a famous footnote in United States v.
00:40:27.000Incredibly famous in constitutional law circuits.
00:40:30.000Basically, that case suggests that prejudice against what are called discrete and insular minorities might be barred by the Constitution, or at the very least, That would lead to a suspicion that would violate the Equal Protection Clause.
00:40:42.000So, in determining whether there is a discrete and insular minority here, says Justice Barrett, we consider whether members of the group in question, quote, exhibit obvious, immutable, or distinguishing characteristics that define them as a discrete group, whether the group has, quote, as a historical matter, been subjected to discrimination, and whether the group is a minority or politically powerless.
00:41:00.000The test is strict, as evidenced by the failure of even vulnerable groups to satisfy it.
00:41:05.000We've held the mentally disabled, the elderly, and the poor are not in fact suspect classes.
00:41:09.000In fact, as Coney Barrett says, as far as I can tell, we have never embraced a new suspect class under this test.
00:41:16.000Our restraint reflects a principle that when social or economic legislation is at issue, the Equal Protection Clause allows the state's wide latitude.
00:41:25.000The Sixth Circuit has already found that transgender individuals don't constitute a suspect class, and it was right to do so.
00:41:31.000First of all, transgender status is not marked by obvious immutable or distinguishing characteristics.
00:41:36.000Because people can switch back and forth.
00:41:38.000You can say you're transgender today and not be transgender tomorrow with exactly the same body.
00:41:44.000Nor is the transgender population a discrete group.
00:41:47.000The category of transgender individuals is large, diverse, and amorphous.
00:41:52.000Finally, holding that transgender people constitute a suspect class would require courts to oversee all manner of policy choices normally committed to legislative discretion, says, The concurrence here from Coney Barrett and Thomas.
00:42:03.000The parties agree the states have a legitimate interest in regulating health care.
00:42:06.000They also agree that transgender status implicates physical and mental health.
00:42:11.000The question of how to regulate a medical condition like gender dysphoria involves a host of policy judgments that legislatures, not courts, are best equipped to make.
00:42:18.000Like, what are the relevant risks and benefits to children of puberty blockers and hormone treatments?
00:42:22.000What is the age where these treatments become appropriate?
00:42:26.000Expert disagreements highlight the difficulty of such choices, and the idea that a court is supposed to do it is wrong.
00:42:33.000So this is a shot across the bow of the entire trans movement, not just in the judgment, but also in the concurrence here that basically says, stop saying that you are a protected class.
00:42:42.000You are not, in fact, a protected class.
00:42:46.000Justice Alito also has a concurrence in this case.
00:42:49.000He says, I would assume for the sake of argument the law classifies based on transgender status.
00:42:55.000Because such a classification does not warrant heightened scrutiny.
00:42:59.000He also suggests that the reasoning employed in Bostock v.
00:43:03.000Clayton County, that of course the 2020 case in which Justice Gorsuch bizarrely decided that classifications based on sex under the Civil Rights Act also include transgenderism as a possibility for discrimination.
00:43:43.000If Donald Trump had never been president of the United States, we would have ended up with a left-wing court suggesting That's how close we were on this one.
00:44:01.000That line in electoral politics is incredibly thin.
00:44:04.000And elections have serious consequences.
00:44:07.000This is one of the best consequences of President Trump's first term.
00:44:10.000I assume that in his second term, he will also appoint, if there are new openings, excellent judges to the federal courts or to the Supreme Court.
00:44:18.000Joining me on the line is my friend Matt Walsh.
00:44:20.000Of course, you know him from his extraordinarily popular and successful documentaries, Am I Racist?
00:44:26.000He also has been, perhaps, America's leader in the fight against the radical trans agenda, particularly the attempts to surgically and hormonally mutilate children.
00:44:36.000Today, of course, the Supreme Court came down with a 6-3 ruling in the United States v.
00:44:39.000Scrimetti that said a Tennessee law was pushed by Matt that bars all of these pseudo-healthcare providers from providing this sort of mutilation of children.
00:44:52.000It's a pretty good birthday gift from the Supreme Court.
00:44:54.000Yeah, you know, most people know I'm skeptical of birthdays.
00:44:57.000I'm not big on birthdays, so I feel like a hypocrite saying this.
00:45:02.000But it does feel like a wonderful birthday present.
00:45:04.000More importantly, of course, it's a great gift and win for all the kids in this state and states across the country that will now be protected from this kind of butchery.
00:45:17.000You know, I think all the way back to, I guess, three years ago now when we launched our investigation into the child butchering practices of Vanderbilt and followed that up with the big rally on the state and the state capitol.
00:45:30.000And then our lawmakers in the state followed that with their law banning the practices.
00:45:34.000And, you know, dozens of other states have followed suit since then.
00:45:38.000were a couple of states that already had laws like this on the books before us.
00:45:41.000And it's kind of funny, because for the last couple of years, I've been hearing from trans activists who don't, don't don't want to don't want to acknowledge There are many realities they don't want to acknowledge, and they certainly don't want to acknowledge what time it is right now and what the scorecard is.
00:45:59.000And so they've been very confident that, well, it's not going to survive the courts.
00:46:05.000So you guys have fun with all your little laws, but the courts will save us, because of course left-wing activists have grown accustomed to that, that the courts always do save them.
00:46:18.000And because it's, look, you don't have to be conservative to get this one right.
00:46:26.000And the Supreme Court, their decision was not that, you know, it was not a decision saying that we have to ban these practices across the country.
00:46:36.000Although I think that decision would have been perfectly justified.
00:46:39.000Because it does violate the human rights of children to do this.
00:46:42.000But the decision was just, no, well, of course states have the right to regulate these, to make laws dealing with these kinds of practices.
00:46:52.000And so that means that, of course, not just Tennessee, but these dozens of other states that have these laws, it will be upheld for them.
00:46:59.000And that also means that after we're done popping the champagne and celebrating the victory, which we should do, it's a good thing to celebrate victories.
00:47:06.000But as soon as we're done doing that, have one glass of champagne, put it down, and then let's get to work on the next step, which is banning it federally, banning it nationwide.
00:47:15.000Matt, I'm not sure how much time you had to actually read the decision.
00:47:19.000If you include all of the concurrences and the dissents, it's something like 118 pages.
00:47:23.000But the chief, his opinion, avoids, as usual, Chief Justice Roberts avoids one of the bottom line questions here by trying to find a way around it, which is whether, in fact, In a concurrence,
00:47:51.000Justices Barrett and Thomas both say that this is not a protected class.
00:47:55.000There is no such thing as a class of transgenders because that is a mutable class.
00:47:58.000It is not an immutable characteristic.
00:48:00.000People can be trans one day and not trans the next.
00:48:02.000It's a shifting, moving definition, a case that you've made really persuasively.
00:48:06.000Obviously, I think the concurrence is right.
00:48:09.000I think there are a lot of people on the right who have been disappointed so far with Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
00:48:13.000They've been characterizing her as a liberal.
00:48:16.000That is not the way courts work typically.
00:48:18.000There are certain justices who move to the left and stay to the left.
00:48:21.000But it's actually fairly rare, especially Trump appointees.
00:48:26.000Even the ones you disagree with some of the time, you end up agreeing with 85 percent of the time.
00:48:30.000This kind of labeling of Justice Amy Coney Barrett is a wild leftist.
00:48:32.000It's hard to say that after you read the concurrence with Justice Thomas, the most consistently conservative member of the Supreme Court.
00:48:38.000Yeah, I think, look, I obviously don't agree with every decision that she's made or the Supreme Court has made.
00:48:44.000But I will say that it says something about this Supreme Court that I – The idea that they would find that Tennessee doesn't have the right to pass this kind of law was just, I found to be.
00:49:05.000I'm worried about a lot of things, and I'm pretty pessimistic, as I know you could be as well.
00:49:09.000But on this one, I was pretty confident, very confident, in fact, the entire time, which I think should tell you something.
00:49:19.000So, Matt, you've mentioned the possibility of other states doing this.
00:49:22.000And then there's another possibility, which is Republicans do control the Congress.
00:49:26.000They do control the Congress of the United States.
00:49:28.000And so, while it would have to presumably overcome a filibuster, it seems absolutely worthwhile to me to have Republicans push this in the House and Senate.
00:49:35.000Force people on record defending child mutilation tactics.
00:49:38.000If you're a Democrat and you want to filibuster that, man, go ahead.
00:49:55.000This is, I mean, you talk about an 80-20 issue.
00:49:58.000This is probably a 95-5 issue, if not more than that.
00:50:01.000Because, you know, when you look at the polls, it's, But then there's even a small minority of people who will say to the pollster that, yes, I'm in favor of castrating children.
00:50:15.000But even a lot of people that will say that, they're only saying that because they think that they have to say it.
00:50:19.000How many people actually think it's a good idea to chemically castrate a child?
00:50:23.000I think that number is very, very, very, very small.
00:51:06.000So they are hoping they are hoping that Republicans just for whatever reason back off and take the Supreme Court victory as like the final.
00:51:19.000The last thing they want is to actually have to stand up there and argue in favor of this butchery.
00:52:10.000The only controversial question in the Republican Party is one that no one is asking, which is, should the United States be involved in full-scale nation-building in Iran?
00:52:17.000And the answer to that question is no.
00:52:19.000The United States should not be involved in full-scale nation-building in Iran.
00:52:24.000So all the people who are telling you that folks like me are saying there should be full-scale nation-building in Iran by the United States, the answer is no.
00:52:36.000It is ending the Iranian nuclear program as it currently stands.
00:52:39.000If the United States drops a couple of bunker busters on Fordow, thus ending the Iranian nuclear program for good, that's the extent of it.
00:52:49.000I'm not interested in American boots on the ground.
00:52:51.000I'm not interested in American regime change and regime building.
00:52:54.000If the Iranian regime falls, it's up to the Iranian people to fix it.
00:52:57.000I never bought the sort of Colin Powell, you break it, you bought it model.
00:53:02.000This bizarre notion that what anyone is calling for here, aside from perhaps Lindsey Graham, Is a full-scale nation-building campaign?
00:53:11.000And if the position here is, should the United States follow President Trump and drop a couple of bunker busters, a couple of Moabs, on Fordow to thus end the Iranian nuclear program, by polling data, that is a highly popular position with Trump voters.
00:53:26.000There's a poll from Greyhouse among Trump 2024 voters.
00:53:30.000These are people who 95% to 5% approve of President Trump as president.
00:53:36.000And they've been asked a series of questions about America, Iran, Israel.
00:53:40.000Do you support or oppose Israel's recent military strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities and military targets?
00:55:23.000Is that something that you want or not?
00:55:25.000Okay, so, by the way, the answer there was 64% say that Iran's developing nukes is an existential threat that must be stopped.
00:55:31.000Only 28% say that it's concerning but not worth risking American lives or getting involved in another Middle East war.
00:55:37.000And again, what we're talking about in terms of involvement here, by pretty much all available accounts, is, in the grand scheme of things, more akin to the killing of Qasem Soleimani than the invasion of Iraq.
00:55:48.000Which of the following statements comes closer to your view about dealing with Iran's nuclear program?
00:55:54.000Do you believe the United States should provide military support to help Israel defend against Iranian attacks?
00:56:51.000Do you support or oppose the United States taking its own direct military action if necessary to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons?
00:58:14.000This is good TV for the president of the United States.
00:58:16.000And by the way, it also happens to be good policy.
00:58:18.000He's playing his very strong hand incredibly well.
00:58:21.000Israel has done an extraordinary amount of work over the course of the last few days.
00:58:25.000This is a graphic of the number of missile strikes that have been sent by Iran, or missiles that have been sent by Iran over the course of the last few weeks.
01:00:42.000And if you did, you wouldn't have much of a country because they would use it on us and they'd use it on other people and they'd be a terror all over the world.
01:00:50.000So I may have some people that are a little bit unhappy now.
01:00:53.000But I have some people that are very happy, and I have people outside of the base that can't believe that this is happening.
01:02:50.000There's a point made by State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce.
01:02:52.000She said that the goal here is to come to the end of what has been a 40-odd-year war against the West by Ayatollah Khomeini and then Ayatollah Khomeini.
01:03:01.000And she says that the way to end this forever war might be an airstrike or it might be Iran capitulating, but the goal is to get to the end, not to have a whole other round of nation building or anything like that.
01:03:27.000And he wants these things, as he said, about a number of situations.
01:03:32.000Not for a month or six months, but durable ends to this nature of forever wars.
01:03:39.000And that has been his posture, and that's his posture now.
01:03:43.000Again, there will be excellent impact from President Trump making Iran stop its nuclear program, whether it is through negotiations at this point in ultimatum being offered and accepted by the Iranians, or whether it is the Israelis themselves destroying Fordow, or whether it is the United States doing it.
01:03:58.000That would be good, because if you wish to prevent China from, for example, attacking Taiwan, people have to know that your threats are credible.
01:04:12.000This is the point of the Wall Street Journal editorial board today.
01:04:16.000They say the isolationists say bombing Iran would be another nation-building exercise, but no one is talking about sending American ground troops.
01:04:21.000An Israeli ground incursion is more likely if the U.S. does not bomb Fordow, meaning Israel will send some sort of strike team, which is probably accurate.
01:04:28.000Destroying the nuclear sites could end the war sooner and at less cost in lives on both sides.
01:04:33.000The Biden precedent is instructive here, and not merely on Afghanistan.
01:04:36.000As Russia invaded Ukraine and Iran's Houthi proxies attacked U.S. ships, Biden's strategists shrank from a robust response because they feared quote-unquote escalation.
01:04:44.000In practice, that meant Russia and Iran controlled when and how to escalate.
01:04:50.000If the U.S. won't help one of its strongest and most loyal allies finish the job of eliminating Iran's nuclear threat in uncontested airspace, the message to Iran will be that there is no chance the United States will defend Taiwan.
01:06:06.000I would like to suggest that statistically speaking, it is they who are out of touch.
01:06:11.000Candace Owens is one of the people who suggested that President Trump was completely out of touch.
01:06:14.000I'd like to just say, I do not think that her perspective on this particular issue is in keeping with the generalized GOP perspective.
01:06:21.000Here is what she wrote about her take on this issue.
01:06:24.000And you tell me if you think this is a mainstream position inside the GOP or inside MAGA or from the Trump White House or anyone inside the Trump White House.
01:06:34.000They tried to redefine anti-Semitism, criminalize criticism of Israel on college campuses, and most crucially, cede the idea that the declaration of Christ as our king amounted to hatred against Jews.
01:06:46.000All of this was done in preparation for the greater Israel agenda, regarding which they attempted to emotionally manipulate Americans to accept.
01:06:54.000I'm not sure who's articulating the greater Israel agenda, but again, okay.
01:06:57.000The conspiracy theorists were right again.
01:06:59.000It was always about a planned war with Iran and a doomed heretical belief that mass slaughter of women and children is messianic.
01:07:06.000Again, Israel is engaging in targeted strikes in Iran, despite complete ownership of the Iranian airspace.
01:07:13.000She continues, if you believe the Polish, Benjamin Milikowski, that's what she calls Benjamin Netanyahu, is chosen by God to impart murder, starvation, I mean, it is worth noting here that Vladimir Lenin was not actually Jewish.
01:07:39.000The most Jewish he was is that he had apparently a maternal great-grandfather who converted, actually, to Russian Orthodoxy in 1844.
01:07:47.000If this is in some way representative of the...
01:07:52.000I'd love to see the statistical proof of that position.
01:07:55.000Alrighty, folks, the show is continuing for our members right now.
01:07:57.000Caitlin Clark keeps getting roughed up in the WNBA, and the WNBA kind of keeps letting it happen.