The Matt Walsh Show - September 04, 2025


Ep. 1652 - A Comedian Was Jailed In The UK For JOKES. Is Britain Now North Korea?


Episode Stats

Length

59 minutes

Words per Minute

178.2467

Word Count

10,632

Sentence Count

753

Misogynist Sentences

24

Hate Speech Sentences

23


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Today on the Matt Wall Show, a comedian is arrested in the UK for making fun of trans people on
00:00:03.900 Twitter. At what point do we start treating the UK like North Korea or any other totalitarian
00:00:08.420 state? Also, another potential BLM martyr is sabotaged by body cams. A black comedian does
00:00:14.040 a viral skit in whiteface, and a senator says that only Iranian theocrats think that human
00:00:19.340 rights come from God. I can think of a few other people who held that view, Thomas Jefferson for
00:00:24.020 one. We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
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00:02:16.780 it's good to be right. Well, it's too early to write any kind of definitive assessment about the
00:02:22.100 America First movement. But one observation that we can make, and it's a very welcome change, is that
00:02:27.680 foreign affairs don't matter as much to Americans as they once did. The internal dysfunction of other
00:02:32.660 nations thousands of miles away from our borders simply isn't that relevant to most people anymore.
00:02:38.840 It was never relevant, but now millions of people realize that. Take the recent attacks on the right to
00:02:43.380 freedom of speech, for example. We discussed how Australia outlawed certain forms of prayer,
00:02:48.660 saying it's akin to conversion therapy. Meanwhile, the UK sentenced a mother named Lucy Connolly to 30
00:02:54.160 months in prison because of a mean tweet that she wrote about so-called asylum seekers, which she
00:03:00.220 deleted after three hours. Connolly's arrest, according to British journalists, was one of about 30 arrests
00:03:05.460 concerning online speech that take place every day. Yes, every day in the UK.
00:03:11.980 We talked about all these cases when they were in the news. These are important stories because they
00:03:17.700 illustrate the decline of Western nations, which we share some history with, obviously. But at the same
00:03:23.400 time, it's hard for most Americans to get too worked up over any of those incidents because our own country has
00:03:28.800 similar problems. And simply by virtue of the fact that these problems are taking place within our borders, these
00:03:34.380 problems are then vastly more important. Just a few days ago, a mother in Minnesota was charged for saying a racial
00:03:40.840 slur, something that isn't a crime, was never a crime under our Constitution. But the Constitution isn't
00:03:46.800 operative anymore in the state of Minnesota. And that's an infinitely bigger issue than anything that's
00:03:52.340 happening in Australia or the UK or Canada or anywhere else outside of our borders. Now, that being said,
00:03:59.240 there are some stories that, although they originate overseas, they do implicate the free speech rights of
00:04:04.500 Americans in a very direct and unprecedented way. And the recent arrest of a comedy writer named Graham
00:04:11.140 Linehan is one of those cases. This is a case that's so egregious and so obviously threatening to
00:04:18.200 American interests and our constitutional rights that it should result in immediate sanctions against
00:04:23.120 every senior official in the UK government, as well as the elimination of diplomatic relations between
00:04:28.820 our two nations. The United States should treat the UK no differently than, say, Iran or North Korea
00:04:35.020 for the indefinite future. And the State Department should make it very clear that American citizens
00:04:40.480 should avoid traveling to the UK for their own safety. So here's the basic factual background before
00:04:46.280 we get into the broader implications for Americans. 57-year-old Graham Linehan is an Irish citizen. He's best
00:04:51.620 known for his work on the 1990s comedy series Father Ted. And on Monday, he was in Arizona preparing to
00:04:57.900 border flight to London's Heathrow Airport. The reason he was going back to London is that on Thursday, he was
00:05:04.120 supposed to stand trial on charges of, quote, harassing an 18-year-old campaigner for transgender rights,
00:05:10.540 whatever that means exactly. Now, at the gate, he was told that for some unknown reason, he needed to be
00:05:16.520 reticketed and assigned a new seat. That was a potential sign that his reservation had been flagged in the
00:05:21.820 ticketing system by the authorities. And indeed, upon landing at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting for
00:05:27.380 Graham Linehan the moment he got off the plane. The officers escorted Graham to a private room at the airport, at which
00:05:35.040 point they informed him that he was being arrested for posting three inflammatory tweets on X. And then by his account,
00:05:43.380 Linehan openly began laughing at the officers because the whole thing was just too absurd. But it wasn't a joke. The officers
00:05:50.320 explained that indeed, they were arresting this man because of three posts that he had made on X. And they only
00:05:57.900 released him from jail on bail on the condition that he doesn't post any more messages on X for any reason. So he's
00:06:03.100 barred from communicating on this particular social media platform for the foreseeable future. To restate, on his way to
00:06:10.100 stand trial for offending trans activists in the UK, the police in the UK arrested Graham Linehan on a separate
00:06:16.460 charge for offending trans activists once again through his online posts. They're now silencing him
00:06:23.400 completely because these three tweets are just so awful and intolerable. Now, at the risk of being arrested
00:06:29.000 myself the next time I travel to the UK, a country that's already promised to punish people who retweet
00:06:34.660 offensive content. Um, I'm going to, I'm going to show you each of these three offending tweets right
00:06:40.120 now. So batten down the hatches, grab onto something stable. Um, this could get a little dicey. Here's
00:06:46.660 the first offending post quote. If a trans identified male is in a female only space, he is committing a
00:06:52.220 violent abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops. And if all else fails, punch him in the balls. Close
00:06:59.340 quote. Yes, that's the first offending tweet, which led to the arrest of the comedian who wrote it.
00:07:04.980 After he landed following a 10 hour flight. Now this shouldn't need to be explained, but, um,
00:07:10.920 uh, this is not an incitement to violence or whatever they claim. Now, yes, it's true that
00:07:16.320 if you take the comedian, he's a comedian, literally he tweeted about an act of violence
00:07:22.500 against a certain subset of people. He said that those people should be punched in the balls, but
00:07:25.960 his post was not intended obviously to produce any imminent criminal action. And his post was not
00:07:31.460 likely to produce, uh, any imminent criminal action either. And therefore it's not criminal.
00:07:36.980 You know, he didn't say at eight o'clock tonight, everyone should go out and find this particular
00:07:41.660 trans identifying male and punch him in the balls. And then post like the home address of the target.
00:07:49.120 Now, if you do that just to anybody, then yes, that would be unlawful. That is incitement to violence.
00:07:53.640 What Graham did by contrast was to assert that men who invade the private spaces of women as a general
00:07:59.820 matter are a physical threat and should be punched in the balls. It's a general comment that in context
00:08:05.920 is intended to be somewhat humorous. The writer is after all, a comedian. He was not inciting any
00:08:11.260 lawless action. He wasn't targeting any particular individual. He was pointing out to comedic effect
00:08:17.840 that so-called trans women, quote unquote, have testicles. Like that's, that's the fact to explain
00:08:23.080 this to the cops in the UK. That was the point. This is a distinction that might require some
00:08:28.660 nuance to understand, but it is a very, very important distinction. Uh, I mean, it doesn't,
00:08:32.800 it's not hard to understand if you have an IQ above 70, but, um, so it's really shouldn't be hard.
00:08:38.780 But if you erase this distinction as the left is intent on doing, then free speech disappears as well.
00:08:43.760 And that's because as we all know, it's extremely, extremely easy for activists to claim
00:08:48.000 that certain speech is supposedly threatening. If you remove the requirement that unlawful speech
00:08:53.260 must contain an imminent threat and that this threat must be likely to produce imminent unlawful
00:08:58.720 action, then pretty much all right-wing speech will become illegal overnight. They'll be able to
00:09:04.720 label every right-wing policy as a threat to commit transgenocide and so on. And of course,
00:09:10.680 that's their goal. They want to imprison every single conservative for hate speech as soon as
00:09:14.360 they possibly can. Now, for what it's worth, not many people saw this particular tweet from
00:09:19.560 this comedian, at least not before the UK government blew it up. It had something like a hundred thousand
00:09:23.860 views in total, uh, which is not many on, on the social media platform. But, but even if 50 million
00:09:28.580 people saw it, everything that he wrote would be completely reasonable in a free society. You're
00:09:33.140 allowed to make comments like that, but the UK is not a free society and it hasn't been
00:09:38.100 for quite some time. Now, to be fair to the government in the UK, they, there were two other
00:09:43.200 allegedly offending tweets that this comedian wrote. Uh, here's one of them. It shows a photo
00:09:48.200 of some kind of trans rights rally. And as a caption to the photo, the comedian wrote, quote,
00:09:52.320 a photo you can smell. Now I've thought about this for some time in Italy. I can't come up with any
00:09:59.160 argument for why this would be illegal or even remotely controversial. It's a straightforward
00:10:03.120 observation, like the kind of thing you might hear, you know, uh, David Attenborough make if he
00:10:07.760 ever had the misfortune of narrating a rally full of trans activists. The rally obviously smelled
00:10:13.440 terrible. None of these people demonstrate any interest in personal hygiene. Everyone knows that
00:10:17.660 it's very obvious. He's pointing that out. So what's the big deal? In fact, I would even argue
00:10:23.420 that technically he doesn't say that it's, he says it's a photo you could smell. He doesn't say it
00:10:26.700 smells bad. Maybe he meant to say that it looks like it smells like roses in there. I can't imagine
00:10:33.360 anyone having that visceral reaction to the photo, but who knows? Now as best I can tell, the real
00:10:39.140 issue here maybe is the follow-up tweet. Again, this one refers to the trans activists in the photo.
00:10:44.120 And here's what the comedian wrote, quote, I hate them, misogynists and homophobes, F them.
00:10:49.580 So apparently this is the issue. He wrote some nasty words, uh, about these people, I guess. Um,
00:10:58.220 there's no, there's nothing that you could even, uh, even if you were bending over backwards, there's
00:11:04.500 nothing in that that you could view as an incitement to violence or a threat of violence. He just
00:11:10.460 insults them, says, I hate these people and they're misogynists and homophobes. Apparently it's illegal in
00:11:16.660 the UK to refer to trans activists as misogynists and homophobes and to direct swear words at them.
00:11:22.960 Or maybe you can't say you hate these people. Now it's fine for them to say, you know, F turfs and
00:11:29.100 to call you Nazis and to say they hate you and to call you a misogynist and homophobe, get you fired
00:11:34.860 from your job, celebrate the deaths of Catholic children who were praying in church, uh, all that
00:11:39.720 kind of thing. But the one thing you can't do under any circumstances is say you hate them. They can say
00:11:44.000 it to you. You can't say it to them at the moment. The UK government does seem to realize how terrible
00:11:49.980 all this looks. The health secretary has just come out and suggested that the UK's hate speech laws
00:11:55.780 need to be addressed to make sure they're applied in a legitimate way. The Met police commissioner has
00:12:01.600 said that the government needs to clarify its hate speech laws. Of course, the only actual solution is
00:12:05.940 to abolish hate speech laws entirely. There's no middle ground here. As long as you have hate speech
00:12:10.540 laws on the books, political dissidents will be rounded up and imprisoned for offending the regime.
00:12:14.800 That's why hate speech laws exist. But the middle ground approach is what they're going with in the
00:12:19.820 UK at the moment. Here's how a Green Party leader addressed the arrest. For example, watch.
00:12:26.220 According to Graham Linehan, because the only thing the police have said is that they've acknowledged
00:12:30.460 a man was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence. That's why the police say they turned up.
00:12:37.700 What's your view, Mr. Polanski? These are totally unacceptable tweets. And I accept that people
00:12:43.140 who are in politics, we get lots of abuse. But let's also face, we shouldn't get abuse.
00:12:46.940 And I certainly recognise that women get more abuse than I do, for instance. I get a lot of
00:12:51.180 anti-Semitic abuse. I'm one of the few Jewish leaders that have been in British politics.
00:12:55.180 Today, a Muslim man was elected as my deputy leader, Moten Ali. I've seen the amount of Islamophobia
00:13:00.320 he gets. We also know that for all of those groups, trans people have been in the sights
00:13:05.960 of the nastiness and the toxicity for a long time. Now, I accept proportionality of police
00:13:11.280 response is a conversation we need to have. Well, do you think this was proportionate?
00:13:15.320 I think it was proportionate to arrest him. I think there's a pattern here.
00:13:18.000 Five armed police officers turning up. Well, that's the bit that I don't understand why
00:13:21.420 they were armed. And again, I'd need to hear about the police response.
00:13:23.600 And why there were five, presumably. For sure.
00:13:26.220 So he's fine with the fact that this guy was arrested for his tweets. His only quibble,
00:13:29.740 apparently, is that there were five armed police officers.
00:13:32.380 It would have been totally fine if they had sent, say, two unarmed, maybe non-binary officers
00:13:39.780 plus a social worker in order to haul this comedian to prison. In that case, justice would
00:13:45.120 have been served. This is where, to bring things back to the beginning of this segment,
00:13:49.340 the arrest of Graham Linehan becomes an international incident that's relevant to all Americans.
00:13:54.360 Everyone in authority in the UK, from the prime minister on down, is ignoring one of the
00:13:58.400 central issues in this case, which is this. Graham Linehan published these offending tweets
00:14:03.620 when he was in America. And because of his lawful actions on American soil, he's being imprisoned
00:14:09.540 in a foreign country, a country that's supposedly our ally. In essence, the UK is exerting sovereignty
00:14:15.520 over America. They are directly threatening the freedoms of every American who might, for one reason
00:14:20.860 or another, end up in the UK. This cannot be allowed to stand. It was just a few weeks ago that
00:14:26.300 the prime minister of the UK sat in the Oval Office and lied to the president and the vice president
00:14:30.600 about the right of freedom of speech in his country. Watch.
00:14:34.120 I said what I said, which is that we do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends
00:14:39.280 in the UK and also with some of our European allies. But we also know that there have been
00:14:43.740 infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British, of course, what the British
00:14:49.800 do in their own country is up to them, but also affect American technology companies and by
00:14:54.600 extension American citizens. So that is something that we'll talk about today at lunch.
00:14:58.540 We've had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom and it will last for a very,
00:15:04.520 very long time. Well, no, I mean, certainly we wouldn't want to reach across US citizens and we
00:15:09.980 don't. And that's absolutely right. But in relation to free speech in the UK, I'm very proud of our
00:15:14.660 history there. Yeah, none of that was true. The right of free speech does not exist in the UK.
00:15:19.960 Every American, along with everyone else who's considering traveling to UK, needs to realize that.
00:15:24.600 And our government should respond accordingly. Less than a year ago, in response to free speech
00:15:30.160 abuses in the country of Georgia, the State Department took punitive measures against the
00:15:33.900 political figures who were responsible. And the same exact punishment should be handed out
00:15:38.580 to leaders in the UK, starting with their prime minister. He shouldn't be allowed to travel here.
00:15:43.840 If he sets foot in this country, he should be arrested for human rights abuses. All of his assets
00:15:50.160 should be frozen to the extent that we have any access to them. And his country should be isolated
00:15:55.600 from the civilized world. Now, if that seems harsh, here's what the prime minister of the UK
00:16:00.440 has been posting about all of, as all this has been going on. This is something that he wrote on
00:16:05.400 Wednesday, quote, I won't shy away from decisions to protect kids, even if there are predictable cries
00:16:10.680 of nanny state. We're stopping shops from selling high caffeine energy drinks to under 16s so they
00:16:16.580 can turn up to school ready to learn. So that's what the prime minister of the UK is focused on
00:16:21.920 at the moment. As their country is overrun with migrant rapists and as comedians are thrown in
00:16:26.480 prison for a couple of tweets that offend trans activists, the prime minister is deeply concerned
00:16:30.760 about high caffeine energy drinks. Meanwhile, his government is cooking up fake justifications
00:16:36.600 to arrest people based on their speech in America. And the more you look into this arrest,
00:16:41.540 the worse it gets. This is a report from the Telegraph the other day, quote,
00:16:45.020 after being arrested by five armed police, Linehan was held by the police for over 16 hours,
00:16:50.000 during which time, during which time his blood pressure became so high that he was rushed to
00:16:54.000 the hospital. According to him, police use trans activist language when interviewing him.
00:17:00.080 And before we continue with this Telegraph article, this part needs to be explained.
00:17:02.960 Um, this is a quote from Linehan Substack, uh, describing his arrest, quote,
00:17:08.220 the police interrogator mentioned trans people. I asked him what he meant by that,
00:17:12.000 uh, quote, people who feel their gender is different than that that was assigned at birth.
00:17:18.320 I said assigned at birth, our sex isn't assigned. He called it semantics. I told him he was using
00:17:23.400 activist language. Eventually a nurse came to check on me and found my blood pressure was over 200 stroke,
00:17:28.940 uh, over 200 stroke territory. Already. This is a kind of extraordinary, at least by American
00:17:35.220 standards. How many police interrogators in this country would use the phrase gender assigned at
00:17:39.260 birth? If you had, I mean, if you had to guess how many would say that it's the kind of thing that
00:17:43.720 if you know, any police officers doesn't seem like something they'd say, but in the UK,
00:17:48.200 it's not exactly unheard of. They have hard boiled detectives raging about cis men
00:17:52.540 and gender fluidity as part of their standard interrogation practices.
00:17:59.140 Pathetic does not begin to describe this. Let's continue with this telegraph article because
00:18:04.280 again, things get worse from here. Quote, the metropolitan police initially claimed Linehan
00:18:08.840 had been arrested on suspicion of inciting violence before clarifying that he'd actually
00:18:12.880 been arrested on the offense of intentionally stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation.
00:18:18.620 It was hard to understand how Graham's tweets could possibly meet this definition,
00:18:22.040 male trans activists are normally quick to reject suggestions that their desire to present as
00:18:26.460 women is autogynephilia, a sexual preference, but the 2010 law under which he was arrested makes no
00:18:32.040 mention of trans identities. Now, in other words, the authorities went out of their way to twist an
00:18:37.660 existing law, a law which has nothing to do with transgenderism, into a pretext to arrest a comedian
00:18:42.740 for his tweets. Every aspect of this case is a betrayal of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, of the rule of law,
00:18:49.780 of the commitments that the British have made to the U.S. as our alleged allies.
00:18:55.200 No one in this country, whether they're American citizens or not, can rely on the British government
00:18:58.820 to defend the freedom of speech or to honor the legal traditions that laid the groundwork for our
00:19:03.680 constitution. With the arrest of Graham Linehan, the U.K. has made it abundantly clear that
00:19:08.200 the U.S. cannot ignore the broader eradication of free speech rights in the West.
00:19:13.060 Yes, it's happening outside of our borders in many cases, but increasingly, foreign governments are
00:19:18.560 making it clear that, in their view, they can bring criminal cases against individuals based on
00:19:23.400 their lawful conduct in the United States. This is a massive escalation in the war against the
00:19:31.320 freedom of speech. And until the U.K. can demonstrate some daylight between their legal system and North
00:19:37.120 Koreas, no one in this country, including our elected officials, has any reason to trust these
00:19:43.200 people or take them seriously ever again. Now let's get to our five headlines.
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00:21:15.340 we sent you. Go now, helixsleep.com slash Walsh. History, economics, literature, the constitution.
00:21:22.300 Did you actually study these in school? Probably not, or you got some watered-down version that missed
00:21:26.500 the point entirely. Time and technology have changed a lot of things, but they have not
00:21:30.560 changed basic fundamental truths about the world, our country, and our place in it. That's why I
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00:22:26.220 slash walsh to enroll for free. Hillsdale.edu slash walsh. There was an officer involved shooting in
00:22:34.300 Florida a few days ago. A woman named Tequila Walker was shot multiple times, actually survived
00:22:40.920 apparently, and now she's arrested. And I want to talk about this, although this is not a big national
00:22:47.980 news story. But there's a reason for that, and we'll discuss it. And really, the reason, once again,
00:22:56.640 is that there's a body cam. There is footage of this event. It's interesting that police shootings
00:23:07.920 are the one kind of story where it's less likely to be a national story if there is a video of it.
00:23:14.380 What does that tell you? Now, I'm not sure how much of this we can actually show on YouTube. I suspect
00:23:19.860 not very much, but here is the footage. Watch.
00:23:23.340 Watch the knife now! Stop it!
00:23:30.700 Watch the knife down!
00:23:33.480 I don't kill my child!
00:23:36.280 Oh, God, that first y'all had to shoot up a taser!
00:23:39.780 Y'all could have tased her! Y'all had to shoot up a taser!
00:23:41.400 Suspect sound.
00:23:43.560 She got a taser! We did taser!
00:23:46.540 Well, who shot?
00:23:47.800 She came at me with a knife!
00:23:50.520 What the hell did you expect me to do?
00:23:53.340 Somebody's not out of here!
00:23:53.940 Cover me! Cover me!
00:23:55.180 That's over here!
00:23:55.980 Now!
00:23:56.360 That's my guy!
00:23:56.740 Y'all had to kill the child!
00:23:58.800 I'm not dead!
00:23:59.700 I'm not dead!
00:24:04.740 Okay, so you won't be able to see some of that or all of it. I don't know.
00:24:08.060 But Tequila Walker was surrounded by police.
00:24:12.200 She got out of her car.
00:24:14.800 She charged at an officer with the knife that she was holding.
00:24:19.980 And that's when she was shot.
00:24:21.480 They tried hitting her with the taser, but it had no effect because she was a very large, obese woman.
00:24:26.940 So the taser probably just bounced off her.
00:24:29.760 And her blubber, her large, her fat is probably also the reason why she's alive today.
00:24:35.220 You know, sometimes obesity saves lives, apparently.
00:24:39.680 And it did in the case of Tequila Walker.
00:24:41.500 So that's interesting.
00:24:43.280 But notice the bystander.
00:24:46.520 So there's somebody standing off to the side, Monday morning quarterbacking it, which is always, I guess you're very used to that as a police officer.
00:24:54.440 But that's how you're in a high-pressure situation, life or death struggle, and you've got somebody off on the side.
00:25:00.900 No, I don't think I wouldn't have done it that way.
00:25:03.140 That's not how I would have done it.
00:25:06.160 So she says, why didn't you taser?
00:25:09.500 You didn't have to shoot her.
00:25:12.160 And the cop points out that we did taser.
00:25:15.400 We did.
00:25:17.140 And she still charged at us with a knife.
00:25:19.420 What are we supposed to do?
00:25:20.400 Just let her stab us?
00:25:23.360 What do you want me to do?
00:25:25.100 Now, I think the officer shouldn't have bothered getting into a back and forth with that woman.
00:25:28.900 But it was a good question.
00:25:32.260 What are we supposed to do?
00:25:34.360 What do you want us to do?
00:25:36.320 Just get stabbed?
00:25:39.300 Or you want me to get into hand-to-hand combat with this enormous woman?
00:25:42.780 Who outweighs me by 400 pounds, probably?
00:25:48.360 And now this is where, if not for body cams, this is where the BLM propaganda campaign would begin.
00:25:56.360 It's very interesting to see this stuff now because there's like this alternative in this parallel universe.
00:26:03.420 Right?
00:26:04.040 If we imagine some sci-fi scenario where there's constantly branching parallel universes.
00:26:08.480 Every choice, you know, you make is like there's another universe where you made a different choice.
00:26:13.380 So we're living in the universe where they started putting body cameras on all the police officers a few years ago.
00:26:19.940 But in a different universe where that never happened, and this exact scenario plays out,
00:26:26.740 we know exactly, there'd be riots in the street right now.
00:26:30.160 To kill a walker.
00:26:31.160 Say her name.
00:26:32.340 Say to kill a walker's name.
00:26:33.720 Because all you need is one person standing around, one witness.
00:26:42.220 This is what they had in the Michael, we'll go all the way back to Michael Brown.
00:26:44.580 They had, and there was no body cams, and they had one or two witnesses.
00:26:48.800 And so this is all you need.
00:26:49.880 You know, one person runs to the media and says, I saw the whole thing.
00:26:54.440 They didn't even try to tase her.
00:26:56.540 They just shot her.
00:26:58.140 And she was unarmed.
00:26:59.240 Well, I heard they had a knife.
00:27:02.200 She had a knife.
00:27:02.880 No, she was unarmed.
00:27:05.520 She was unarmed carrying a child.
00:27:08.640 She was unarmed carrying a child.
00:27:10.720 And she was rescuing a kitten from a tree when this happened.
00:27:14.900 She wasn't even doing anything wrong.
00:27:18.000 This poor woman, she was carrying her child.
00:27:20.280 She was unarmed.
00:27:21.320 She was trying to climb a tree to rescue a kitten.
00:27:25.520 It was a kitten with leukemia.
00:27:26.920 The kitten had leukemia.
00:27:28.120 It was stuck in a tree.
00:27:30.180 So she was trying to climb the tree to get the kitten out and give it cancer treatments.
00:27:37.240 And then they just ran up and shot her for no reason.
00:27:41.280 The officer ran up and screamed, I hate black people, and shot her.
00:27:45.480 I saw the whole thing.
00:27:46.660 I'll tell you right now, I saw the whole thing.
00:27:48.780 That's what happened.
00:27:51.640 And so you would have had someone run to the media saying all that.
00:27:54.420 And the media would just report it.
00:27:56.980 They'd be taking notes.
00:27:58.000 Oh, she was climbing.
00:27:59.040 Oh, the kitten had leukemia.
00:28:02.080 Oh, and it's, they could have, the bullet could have hit the kitten with leukemia.
00:28:07.260 Oh, oh, she, she, the officer shot the kitten too?
00:28:11.040 Well, all right.
00:28:11.720 We got to write that down.
00:28:12.600 Um, I don't know why I'm imagining like reporters from the 1950s that have their notepads and they're taking notes, but that's the way it would have went.
00:28:23.300 And it's the way that it went for years until BLM demanded that all the cops wear body cams, which as I've said before, has proven to be one of the great political miscalculations of all time.
00:28:38.620 It has been, I can't think of another example quite like this, where you have a movement, the BLM movement, um, that has, is calling for one specific thing, right?
00:28:53.860 They wanted other things too, but the, the big thing was like, uh, body cams and they get the body cams and it kills the movement.
00:29:03.220 I can't think of a, you get what you want and it kills your movement.
00:29:05.660 It destroys it overnight.
00:29:09.580 Uh, because now with body cams, we can see clearly that basically every officer involved shooting is not only justified, but like extremely absurdly justified.
00:29:19.620 That's, that's what you learn for body cams.
00:29:21.940 You watch body cams and you go, oh, so, so every single time the cop shoots someone, it's justified almost every time.
00:29:31.460 It's, it's not even like a close call.
00:29:35.660 Um, and it does help to see it.
00:29:37.620 I remember, you know, you go back again to 2015 when the cop in Ferguson said that Michael Brown charged at him.
00:29:45.820 And, um, and that, you know, that was the, after we got the ridiculous, he had his, he was on the ground with his hands up yelling, don't shoot.
00:29:55.300 And he got shot, um, completely made up.
00:29:59.100 I mean, the scenario I just painted of the cat in the tree with leukemia, that is not more absurd than what they did.
00:30:05.660 They actually claimed in Ferguson that he had, he was giving himself up, right?
00:30:10.500 It's like the scene in platoon.
00:30:11.660 He's on his knees, hands in the air, right up to the heavens.
00:30:15.820 And the cop just comes up randomly and executes him in the street for no reason.
00:30:21.080 Um, but after we got that lie, then we finally heard the version of the correct version of events from police, the police officer.
00:30:29.320 And that version was that Michael Brown, um, after he just committed a strong armed robbery of the, of the, uh, convenience store that he charged at the police.
00:30:41.820 And at the time, every leftist in the country said that the cop must be lying, that it can't possibly be true because nobody would just go charge at a police officer who was pointing a gun at them.
00:30:54.900 And I can remember distinctly having this conversation with multiple people.
00:30:59.180 And this was always the answer is, Oh, do you really expect me to believe what he did?
00:31:03.940 What is this a movie or something?
00:31:06.160 You're, you're telling me that this officer was pointing a gun at him and he charged at him.
00:31:11.100 Oh, come on.
00:31:12.180 That's ridiculous.
00:31:13.160 And I remember at the time I was totally on the officer side the entire time I was completely opposed to the BLM narrative in Ferguson from day one.
00:31:24.140 I didn't, I didn't buy the, the, the false narrative at all for even a second, but it was hard to sort of imagine a person charging full speed at someone who's pointing a gun at them because I believe that I mean, that's what the forensic showed.
00:31:36.940 That was that the, the counter narrative to that was totally fantastical and incredible in the literal sense.
00:31:42.020 It was incredible, but still it was hard because I'd never seen that.
00:31:45.160 Like I, except, except in movies, I'd never actually seen a kid.
00:31:47.880 It's like, you, why, who would do that?
00:31:51.900 Unless you are actually completely insane, insane to the point where you're, you don't even function.
00:31:57.160 You're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you don't, you can't function.
00:32:00.080 You're in an insane asylum, but anybody else charging at a police officer at the point, I got you, who would ever do that?
00:32:06.940 It's hard to imagine as a normal, sane person.
00:32:10.140 You, you can't, you can't picture that.
00:32:14.640 Well, now we have the body cams and like every other month, there's footage of someone doing exactly that.
00:32:23.720 We've seen now, this is not one time.
00:32:26.340 This is multiple cases of like, like a bad guy in a movie, knife over the head, screaming, running right into gunfire.
00:32:37.680 And what we learn is that, uh, no, this, this actually happens.
00:32:41.400 Like these are the kinds of people that cops deal with every day.
00:32:46.140 They're dealing with the kinds of people who would do that.
00:32:51.340 Or that's a, that's a real, that's like a thing that will happen.
00:32:54.320 You have to, you have to, you have to, you have to worry about that.
00:32:57.760 Um, and that's why BLM is dead.
00:33:02.960 Okay.
00:33:03.400 Here's something going viral.
00:33:04.820 It's a skit by the black comedian Drewski.
00:33:08.600 And I mentioned that he's black because the fact that he's black is, is, is relevant to the story.
00:33:12.360 As we'll see, he has a million, you know, viral comedy skits that you see circulating on social media constantly.
00:33:19.100 And, uh, some of his stuff is pretty funny, I think, but in this case, the premise of the skit, um, the caption that Drewski put on it says that guy, who's just proud to be American.
00:33:31.080 And then in the skit, he's wearing not just white face, but white body.
00:33:36.740 He's painted his whole body to look white.
00:33:40.260 He's even a mat.
00:33:41.260 He's even managed to make his body look white and sunburned.
00:33:45.760 So in some ways the, the makeup effects in this skit, I will say are kind of impressive.
00:33:51.140 But, um, so this is supposed to be an impression of a white guy, you know, replete with the white body paint.
00:33:57.740 And, uh, here it is.
00:33:59.140 Watch.
00:34:01.080 Here's the love.
00:34:08.640 Here's the honor.
00:34:09.800 If you can't.
00:34:14.300 Yeah.
00:34:14.820 Yeah.
00:34:16.140 Born in the USA.
00:34:19.680 Woo.
00:34:23.940 Born in the USA.
00:34:27.660 Hey, Sue Anna.
00:34:29.660 Sue Anna.
00:34:30.180 She's not listening.
00:34:31.840 He come up.
00:34:32.400 You need to listen to your Nana.
00:34:34.440 Go ahead, baby.
00:34:35.200 Six slides at once.
00:34:37.460 You're on.
00:34:39.440 Where are you crazy tonight?
00:34:40.900 Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
00:34:42.400 Ha, ha, ha.
00:34:43.020 Ha, ha, ha, ha.
00:34:43.640 Ha, ha, ha, ha.
00:34:45.480 Hey, grandma.
00:34:54.540 How you doing, baby?
00:34:56.820 How you doing, baby?
00:34:58.620 How you doing, baby?
00:34:59.820 He's doing it.
00:35:00.780 He's good.
00:35:01.040 All right, man.
00:35:01.660 Hey, you lost, boss?
00:35:17.020 No, I'm going to the race.
00:35:18.420 What race?
00:35:19.400 NASCAR race.
00:35:20.620 You're going to NASCAR?
00:35:22.520 Yes, sir.
00:35:23.160 A little bit.
00:35:26.520 You ain't lost, is it?
00:35:28.080 No, I'm good.
00:35:28.620 I'm going to a race, sir.
00:35:29.580 You sure about that?
00:35:30.380 Yes, sir.
00:35:31.660 I'm going to find something safe to do, boy.
00:35:37.280 Okay, so not Drewski's best work, I'll say that.
00:35:40.540 And before we get to the white face, the impression isn't funny.
00:35:44.440 It's not a funny bit.
00:35:46.640 I'm not saying that because I'm offended or whatever.
00:35:49.080 It's just not very funny.
00:35:51.140 And it isn't funny because it isn't well observed.
00:35:53.840 It isn't accurate.
00:35:55.140 Okay, he's trying to do redneck, but he's obviously never been around rednecks.
00:35:58.520 I mean, he thinks that rednecks are Bruce Springsteen fans, for one thing.
00:36:06.340 I'll tell you, Drewski, not a lot of redneck Springsteen fans out there in the year 2025.
00:36:10.840 I got to tell you.
00:36:12.080 You walk in with a bunch of rednecks and say, hey, how about that Bruce Springsteen, huh?
00:36:17.640 What do you guys think?
00:36:20.060 Not a lot of Bruce Springsteen fans.
00:36:23.040 But that's his, he thinks rednecks are Springsteen fans.
00:36:25.900 He thinks they're vulgar and racist.
00:36:27.640 So that's the entirety of the impression.
00:36:32.080 Rednecks are vulgar, racist Springsteen fans.
00:36:35.660 That's all he's got.
00:36:37.320 And it couldn't be more off-base.
00:36:38.900 And that's not a huge surprise that, I mean, this is a black guy from Columbia, Maryland,
00:36:43.240 so he doesn't have a great read on white country folk.
00:36:47.880 But this was lame, even with those low expectations.
00:36:51.080 And I say this again as someone who generally finds his stuff amusing.
00:36:54.420 One thing about doing an impression, this is something that I think Norm MacDonald talked
00:36:59.380 about, is that to do an impression well, you have to not only have familiarity with the
00:37:06.160 subject of your impression, but also you have to have some affection for the subject or the
00:37:11.640 type of person that you're impersonating.
00:37:13.480 There has to be some warmth, some affection in the impression, or else it's just kind of low-effort
00:37:19.260 mimicry, right?
00:37:21.320 The worst impressions are angry.
00:37:24.140 You can tell the person hates whoever they're doing the impression of.
00:37:27.760 This is why Alec Baldwin's Trump impression, I think, goes down in history as the worst impression
00:37:33.240 of all time.
00:37:34.460 Certainly the worst in the history of SNL, and there have been some really bad ones, so
00:37:39.000 that's saying something.
00:37:41.140 But Baldwin just hated Trump, and you could tell that he was seething.
00:37:45.360 It was like this seething, dark, angry impression, and it wasn't funny.
00:37:52.200 It was just, it was uncomfortable.
00:37:53.900 It was really uncomfortable watching it, and not in a funny, awkward way, but just in a, like,
00:37:58.380 I want to turn this off.
00:37:59.440 This is, this is like this person's working through something, and I don't want to see it,
00:38:03.620 okay, and you get the same feeling watching this skit that Drewski just doesn't like these
00:38:10.160 people, and that's really what is coming through, and so it makes it less funny.
00:38:15.360 As for the whiteface, look, it's been said now by many people, but I will add my voice
00:38:20.780 to the mix.
00:38:22.640 Yes, if this is okay, if it's okay for a black guy to do whiteface, then it's absolutely okay
00:38:28.320 for a white guy to do blackface.
00:38:31.360 Absolutely okay.
00:38:33.620 And the next, and if any white comedian comes along and does that, he shouldn't be condemned.
00:38:42.500 It should just be like, okay, yeah, sure, this is fine now.
00:38:46.720 Because we're done with the double standards.
00:38:48.660 We're done with two different sets of rules.
00:38:51.360 We're done with hiding behind historical trauma or whatever to justify a double standard.
00:38:56.300 You know, I know I'll be told that blackface is worse because of the history behind it,
00:39:01.180 but we are done with that also.
00:39:04.960 You don't get to make a different set of rules for yourself as some childish, arbitrary way
00:39:09.980 of balancing out some historical wrong that never even affected you in the first place.
00:39:14.860 No black person in 2025 was alive at a point when blackface was socially acceptable.
00:39:21.580 The last minstrel show in America was when?
00:39:26.800 Okay, it wasn't 1998.
00:39:28.460 I can tell you that.
00:39:29.360 The last one was, what, 100 years ago?
00:39:31.080 I don't know.
00:39:32.040 It's been a very long time.
00:39:34.720 So you don't get to use that as an excuse.
00:39:39.500 The past is the past.
00:39:40.600 We can't change it.
00:39:41.500 But get over it.
00:39:45.040 Just get over it.
00:39:46.660 Today is today.
00:39:47.640 And today it's either acceptable to paint your face to look like another race in order
00:39:52.880 to make fun of them and do a comedy bit, or it isn't.
00:39:56.200 It's either acceptable or it isn't.
00:39:59.740 And this thing where we say, well, depends on the race.
00:40:03.420 No.
00:40:05.300 No.
00:40:06.140 It doesn't depend on the race for anything.
00:40:07.680 When we're talking about, you know, it's offensive to say certain words or jokes or,
00:40:14.260 it depends on the, no, it doesn't depend on the race.
00:40:16.800 Either it's offensive or it's not.
00:40:19.480 And either it's acceptable or it's not.
00:40:22.120 Either it's the kind of thing that should destroy somebody's career or it shouldn't.
00:40:26.920 And based on the fact that Drewski's career is not destroyed, then, okay.
00:40:35.700 Then, you know, floodgate is wide open.
00:40:37.960 And that's all there is to it.
00:40:40.860 Which, by the way, is, I think, is the correct answer.
00:40:45.920 It's the correct answer.
00:40:47.300 Like, if you want to do a comedy bit that involves presenting yourself as another race,
00:40:52.860 yeah, sure.
00:40:53.840 Go ahead and do it.
00:40:54.560 It should be judged entirely based on whether it was funny.
00:40:58.540 I mean, the only real sin that you can commit in comedy is it wasn't funny.
00:41:03.040 If it's funny, it's funny.
00:41:04.020 Funny is funny.
00:41:05.940 And there are certainly ways to do that that are funny.
00:41:07.940 I mean, I think this was just not funny because, as I said, it was not a well-observed impression.
00:41:11.560 But, you know, it could be.
00:41:17.280 So, give it a shot.
00:41:23.800 All right.
00:41:24.560 Real quickly, I want to mention this.
00:41:27.400 Democratic, this is a report from Daily Wire.
00:41:29.700 Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota socialist, has seen an astronomical increase in her wealth over the past year.
00:41:35.460 As a recent disclosure revealed, her net worth could be as high as $30 million.
00:41:40.280 A May disclosure reveals that Omar is worth between $6 and $30 million, an increase of about 3,500% compared to 2023.
00:41:48.600 Omar is a member of Congress, earned $174,000 in salary each year.
00:41:54.200 How did she gain all this wealth?
00:41:55.340 Well, then it goes into something.
00:41:56.500 You can read the report.
00:41:57.120 But basically, it has to do with her husband and whose wealth has also skyrocketed mysteriously.
00:42:06.500 And now she's a lot richer.
00:42:08.380 So, Ilhan Omar is yet another lawmaker who came into office as a humble working class champion, only to transform almost instantly into a multimillionaire.
00:42:16.980 And this, by the way, is why I've never agreed with the idea that we need to have fewer rich people running for office.
00:42:22.620 You know, this idea that we just want, like, you know, you want, it's better to have, we don't want the rich people.
00:42:29.200 We want people who are more middle income.
00:42:32.680 Well, I would rather that someone be rich coming into office than that they get rich while they're in office.
00:42:42.900 Because those really are, unfortunately, the only two options, with rare exceptions.
00:42:46.960 But generally speaking, either someone gets rich while they're in office or they're already rich when they run.
00:42:53.920 I prefer the latter, really, if I had to choose.
00:42:57.900 Now, of course, rich people often get richer while they're in office.
00:43:01.040 So, you have this problem no matter what.
00:43:03.100 Donald Trump is the only guy whose net worth dropped as a consequence of achieving political power.
00:43:08.100 That almost never happens.
00:43:09.160 It happened with Trump.
00:43:10.300 But it would be very easy to clean this up.
00:43:12.420 You know, you could pass all kinds of laws limiting the ability of lawmakers to enrich themselves in office.
00:43:18.240 You could have radical transparency, disclosures, and so on.
00:43:21.340 You could require that lawmakers, you could require, you could pass a law that requires that lawmakers stand up in Congress once a year
00:43:30.360 and announce how much their net worth has increased or decreased over the previous year.
00:43:36.580 Right, we could require that once a year, you've got to, I'm Representative Ilhan Omar and my net worth has increased by 3,000% over the past 12 months.
00:43:48.900 You could require that.
00:43:51.420 That alone would be enough to put a stop to a lot of this nonsense.
00:43:54.540 The political cost of having to publicly acknowledge your financial gain would not be worth the financial gain itself in many cases.
00:44:02.200 So, you could do all of that, but the problem, of course, is that it would require the lawmakers themselves to put those laws and policies in place, which is never going to happen.
00:44:17.220 So, the moral of the story is, we're screwed.
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00:45:22.280 As you know, this year we're celebrating a decade of the Daily Wire, not by looking back, but by launching what's next.
00:45:28.520 First up, Monday, for the first time in years, we're bringing in brand new Daily Wire talent with the premiere of the Isabel Brown Show.
00:45:34.460 Then next Wednesday night, the main event, Friendly Fire.
00:45:36.900 All of us getting together to do what friends do, argue, debate, and probably smoke a few Mayflower cigars.
00:45:41.600 Don't miss the premiere because inside Friendly Fire is where we're going to be dropping the good stuff.
00:45:45.880 New series, new projects, huge announcements, surprises we've been holding back until now.
00:45:49.480 This is the start of our next decade, and you don't want to miss a single moment.
00:45:53.120 Join us now at dailywire.com.
00:45:55.240 Now, let's get to our daily cancellation.
00:46:02.840 Today for our daily cancellation, we have Senator Tim Kaine.
00:46:06.160 Now, you may remember Tim Kaine.
00:46:08.320 Actually, you probably don't remember him.
00:46:09.680 The most memorable thing about Tim Kaine is that he is not memorable at all.
00:46:12.980 He is a generic white male Democrat, which is why Hillary Clinton chose him as a running mate in 2016, because she was looking for a generic white male Democrat.
00:46:21.780 His job was to be completely unremarkable and forgettable, and that is one task that he was able to accomplish exceptionally well.
00:46:29.480 Tim's great political skill is making everyone forget that he exists.
00:46:32.740 He's been a senator for 12 years.
00:46:34.400 He was a governor of Virginia before that, vice presidential nominee in the middle.
00:46:38.240 And yet nobody knows who he is.
00:46:39.300 His own wife looks at him every morning and says, wait, who is this guy again?
00:46:43.840 Now, I wouldn't call Tim a chameleon exactly.
00:46:45.820 That makes him sound far too cool.
00:46:47.100 He's more like Ikea furniture, something so bland and generic that you hardly notice its presence in the room.
00:46:53.640 He's like an Ikea side table that you put next to the bed in your guest room and then forget that it's there.
00:46:58.260 That's how Tim Kaine has survived politically.
00:47:00.580 Everyone just forgets that he's there.
00:47:02.780 This is why it was such a grave mistake this week when Tim decided to open his mouth and speak.
00:47:08.000 Not only did he speak, but he said something truly incredible, so incredible that it may even make you remember Tim Kaine, or at least it will become the new reference point for him.
00:47:19.160 So six years from now, when he briefly flickers on the radar screen again, you'll say, Tim Kaine, who's oh, yeah, he's the guy who said that thing, isn't he?
00:47:26.340 During a hearing, Senator Kaine got into a brief debate about the concept of rights.
00:47:32.360 And this subject came up because this was a nomination hearing for Riley Barnes, who has been nominated to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.
00:47:41.860 Whatever that is.
00:47:42.720 And during his opening remarks, Barnes made mention of the fact that human rights, which are now part of his job title, apparently, come to us from our creator, from God.
00:47:52.880 Tim Kaine took exception to that idea.
00:47:55.420 And here's what he said.
00:47:56.380 The notion that rights don't come from laws and don't come from the government, but come from the creator, that's what the Iranian government believes.
00:48:06.320 It's a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia law and targets Sunnis, Baha'is, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities.
00:48:17.200 And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their creator.
00:48:23.480 So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.
00:48:32.220 Extremely troubling, says Tim Kaine.
00:48:34.600 He's troubled by the idea that our rights come from God, our creator.
00:48:39.060 He says that this is what the Iranian regime believes.
00:48:42.360 And he's right, of course.
00:48:43.540 I mean, who can forget that famous line from the founding document of the Iranian government, that line that said, quote,
00:48:50.800 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
00:48:59.040 I believe it was Ayatollah Khamenei who wrote those words.
00:49:04.900 Actually, wait a second.
00:49:05.960 It was, no, that doesn't sound right.
00:49:07.400 My grade school education is kicking in here.
00:49:09.960 I seem to remember that Thomas Jefferson was the author.
00:49:14.200 That doesn't make sense because was Thomas Jefferson Iranian?
00:49:19.120 Did he serve as the supreme leader of Iran at some point?
00:49:23.220 This is very confusing.
00:49:26.340 Oh, wait, no, no, no.
00:49:26.960 Now it's all coming back to me.
00:49:28.080 Yes, Thomas Jefferson did write that.
00:49:29.900 He wrote in the Declaration of Independence, which is the founding document of the country, of our country, of the United States, not Iran.
00:49:37.320 Yes, the idea that our rights come from the creator is literally the core foundational principle that our nation was built on.
00:49:45.300 Our entire system of government, the country itself, rests fundamentally on the idea that our rights come from God.
00:49:51.720 It is the reason our country exists in the first place.
00:49:55.720 Tim Kaine, a United States senator, has declared himself extremely troubled by the founding principle of the nation that he was elected to serve.
00:50:03.760 He is extremely troubled by an idea that every single one of our founding fathers affirmed.
00:50:08.240 Indeed, they not only affirmed it and built our nation upon it, but found it to be so incredibly obvious as to be, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, self-evident.
00:50:17.080 And now Tim is extremely troubled by this self-evident foundational truth.
00:50:21.840 Now, it goes without saying that this man should be immediately removed from office.
00:50:27.120 Anyone who rejects our nation's core principles is not fit to serve in the United States Senate or in any other capacity.
00:50:32.560 He swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, and yet he is extremely troubled by the philosophy upon which it was based.
00:50:37.660 And that means he cannot possibly fulfill his oath.
00:50:40.520 He's disqualified himself.
00:50:42.660 That should be the end of a career that produced exactly one memorable moment, which is this one.
00:50:47.420 And yet it should be said that Tim Kaine has only made the mistake of saying out loud what everybody in his party already believes.
00:50:55.960 They're all godless heathens who, whether they are explicit about it or not, reject the idea that our rights come from God.
00:51:04.360 They all reject our nation's founding principle, just like Tim Kaine does.
00:51:08.480 Because Tim Kaine was right about one thing.
00:51:11.160 Rights are a religious and theological concept.
00:51:17.420 They are a spiritual doctrine.
00:51:21.120 They have no meaning outside of that framework.
00:51:24.580 A godless worldview can't account for rights.
00:51:27.480 Rights, in that case, are just whatever the God and power says they are.
00:51:30.480 There's no higher power or inherent right to appeal to.
00:51:33.980 So whenever somebody talks about rights, they're making a religious claim, whether they know it or not.
00:51:39.260 Our nation is founded on this explicitly religious claim, endowed by the Creator, etc.
00:51:44.640 This is what makes most of our political debates in this country so pointless and fruitless.
00:51:49.540 Most of the people running around, or many of them crying about their rights, have never once actually considered what a right even is, or how they know they have them, or from where or whom these rights come.
00:52:00.120 We have an entire political party that rejects the existence of God, but still claims the rights that originate from him.
00:52:07.680 And rights can only originate from him.
00:52:09.660 The government can, should, recognize and protect these rights, but they do not create the rights.
00:52:16.120 The government is supposed to be a steward of our rights, not their author.
00:52:20.020 Tim, here's the problem with saying that rights come from the government.
00:52:26.440 You are correct that if rights don't come from the government, the government, if rights don't come from God, then the government is the only other place they could come from.
00:52:34.160 But if they come from the government, then our rights are whatever the government says they are.
00:52:38.980 If the government came along tomorrow and said that we no longer have the right to free speech, well, then we would no longer have the right to free speech.
00:52:45.480 It's just that simple. Rights come from the government. If the government takes them away, that's it. They don't exist.
00:52:52.280 You wouldn't be able to say, oh, you're infringing on my rights. Well, what do you mean?
00:52:56.080 How could they infringe on something that doesn't exist? You cannot appeal to any authority higher than them.
00:53:01.940 That's the end of the line, according to you. And as a member of the government yourself, I can see why you would find that idea so appealing.
00:53:07.180 But this is how you get Iranian-style tyranny, through the notion that the government originates rights.
00:53:15.480 Now, I know that you understand this at some level, Tim, and I can prove that.
00:53:20.920 Let's just try this thought experiment.
00:53:23.620 So imagine that the Supreme Court announced next week that they were overturning Obergefell.
00:53:29.860 And now imagine that, empowered by that decision, Congress passed and Donald Trump signed a law banning gay marriage nationwide.
00:53:39.220 How would you react, Tim? What would you say?
00:53:42.500 Now, if you're consistent, if you actually believe what you just said about rights coming from the government,
00:53:46.920 then you would have no choice but to simply accept this sequence of events.
00:53:51.200 The right to gay marriage no longer exists.
00:53:53.920 And if somebody said, I have a right to get married, you would say, well, no, you don't.
00:53:58.180 The government said you don't have it, so you don't have it.
00:54:01.840 Rights come from the government.
00:54:03.300 The government took them away. The right is gone. That's it.
00:54:06.580 You certainly couldn't go around screaming that Trump is infringing on the rights of gay people.
00:54:10.360 How could he do that? The right is gone.
00:54:13.200 He can't infringe on a right that doesn't exist.
00:54:16.260 All you could do is accept the decision.
00:54:18.060 Now, sure, you could call for the government to once again create the right to gay marriage,
00:54:23.020 but you could not claim that the right had been infringed or was being trampled
00:54:28.100 or that gay people are not getting something they have the right to.
00:54:33.920 They don't have the right to it. The government said they don't.
00:54:36.140 It's impossible for the government to infringe on or trample rights.
00:54:40.080 If they are the authors of the rights, they decide who has them and what the rights are.
00:54:47.560 And yet we both know that you would not respond to that turn of events with that kind of fatalistic acceptance.
00:54:53.240 You would scream to the heavens that Trump and the Republicans are oppressing gay people by infringing on the rights.
00:54:57.700 You would appeal, you would appeal, therefore, to an authority higher than the government.
00:55:02.080 You would declare implicitly, at least, or explicitly, that the right to gay marriage exists in a realm above and beyond the government.
00:55:10.700 And that they have, that they, the government, have no right to take that right away.
00:55:15.640 Now, of course, the trouble with this thought experiment is that the right to gay marriage really, in fact, does not exist.
00:55:24.220 It certainly is not a God-given right.
00:55:27.440 This is, in fact, a right that the government just created out of thin air.
00:55:30.980 They did so not in accordance with the will of God and our own inherent human nature, but in defiance of both.
00:55:36.740 The right to gay marriage doesn't really exist.
00:55:39.600 But my point is that you think it does.
00:55:41.940 You think the right to gay marriage exists not just as a legal concept, but as a fact of human nature.
00:55:50.520 And you believe that it exists at a higher level than the government, which codified it into law.
00:55:58.980 Now, and by the way, saying that, oh, well, rights are in human nature.
00:56:01.720 They're not from God.
00:56:02.640 Like, that's, that's, you can't get around it that way either.
00:56:07.040 Because how did the right, what do you mean rights are part of human nature?
00:56:09.720 Like, without, if you take God out of the equation and we are all just Darwinian products of Darwinian evolution, there's no right.
00:56:19.000 What the hell do you mean?
00:56:20.460 Evolution doesn't care about your rights.
00:56:22.960 You don't, there's, there's no evolutionary benefit to a right.
00:56:27.780 A right is totally invisible.
00:56:28.900 You can't look inside a person and find their rights.
00:56:31.380 It's, it's not there.
00:56:34.360 In a godless Darwinian view of the world, there are no rights at all.
00:56:38.220 The only right is, uh, just do what you can to survive.
00:56:41.540 And if I'm stronger than you, I can oppress you and do whatever I want so that I survive.
00:56:45.500 And that's the, that's, that, that is it.
00:56:46.960 That's the, that's the ultimate right.
00:56:48.200 Um, so saying that there's some spiritual reality in human nature, again, requires a spiritual author of some kind.
00:56:58.240 You're talking now in a spiritual realm.
00:57:00.880 This is a spiritual concept.
00:57:04.000 Which requires a realm of spirits.
00:57:06.200 Does it not?
00:57:06.760 Now you believe the same about the right to an abortion.
00:57:10.780 In fact, on our website, on your website right now, you have an entire section entitled protecting reproductive rights.
00:57:17.700 And the first paragraph says this right now, women are facing threats to reproductive freedom around the country with new draconian abortion restrictions and extremist legislators plotting to rip away even more reproductive rights following the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
00:57:29.640 After an extreme majority on the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, Tim got to work to protect reproductive rights and introduce the Reproductive Freedom for All Act.
00:57:39.260 But wait a second, Tim.
00:57:40.740 You're claiming that Republicans want to rip away even more reproductive rights.
00:57:44.520 But Republicans run the government.
00:57:46.500 How could they rip away rights?
00:57:48.080 Rights only exist if they say that they do.
00:57:51.680 That's what you just claimed.
00:57:53.480 Rights come from the government.
00:57:54.360 If the party in control of the government decides that a certain right doesn't exist anymore, then it doesn't exist.
00:57:58.660 Nothing's being ripped away.
00:57:59.720 Nothing's being infringed or flouted or defiled or defied.
00:58:03.960 The right to an abortion, reproductive rights, originates with the people in power, according to you.
00:58:08.040 If the people in power change their mind, then the right no longer exists.
00:58:11.400 They've taken it away.
00:58:12.740 It just simply doesn't exist anymore.
00:58:15.880 Now, once again, in reality, there is no right to an abortion.
00:58:18.380 God does not endow women with the right to kill their children.
00:58:20.940 In fact, he does exactly the opposite.
00:58:22.100 He endows women and men with the inextricable responsibility to care for and love their children.
00:58:27.160 But my point, again, is that you think the right to abortion exists at a level higher than the government.
00:58:34.600 You say you are troubled by the concept of God-given rights.
00:58:37.700 And yet you, in fact, do think that God gives women the right to kill their babies and men the right to marry other men.
00:58:43.980 You and your ideological cohorts reject the idea of inherent human rights, only to go and invent a whole series of new inherent human rights.
00:58:52.920 And those rights are all perverse and horrifying.
00:58:56.340 Because you, Tim, are a perverse and horrifying person.
00:59:00.140 Even if you are also boring and forgettable.
00:59:04.020 And that is why Tim Kaine is today canceled.
00:59:07.920 That'll do it for the show today and this week.
00:59:10.380 Talk to you on Monday.
00:59:12.240 Have a great weekend.
00:59:12.740 Godspeed.
00:59:19.760 Don't just get the news.
00:59:21.880 Understand what the news means on The Michael Knowles Show.
00:59:25.300 I will take you beneath the surface of daily political events to see their historical, philosophical, even religious roots.
00:59:34.740 Catch it Monday through Friday at 9.30 a.m. Eastern on The Daily Wire.