Ep. 431 - Can Bernie Win？
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Summary
Sen. Bernie Sanders is on his way to becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, and conservatives are gleeful, giddy, because they figure a geriatric socialist who has repeatedly publicly fantasized about turning the United States into Soviet Russia will be easy to beat. Well, maybe he will be, but I have a word of caution. Also, the left's campaign to sexualize children never ceases. And I have 5 other news stories worth knowing about, including why Clint Eastwood is officially canceled.
Transcript
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Oh, hi. Sorry, you caught me reading my book, Church of Cowards, which comes out tomorrow.
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Very embarrassing that you caught me in this organic, unstaged moment where I just happened
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to be reading this on camera. It is, as I said, does come out tomorrow, Church of Cowards,
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and you can still pre-order it, though. Go to Amazon and get that pre-ordered.
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Now, today, let me set that up there. Today, we're going to talk about a few things. We're
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going to talk, first of all, about the 650-year-old communist who is about to be the Democratic
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nominee, and conservatives are gleeful about it, giddy, because they figure that a geriatric
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socialist who has repeatedly publicly fantasized about turning the United States into Soviet
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Russia will be very easy to beat. And maybe he will be, but I have a word of caution that
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I'd like to share with conservatives. Also, the left's campaign to sexualize children
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never ceases. And today, we're going to talk about one of the creepiest examples we've yet
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seen, this one courtesy of Pete Buttigieg. And I have five other news stories worth knowing
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about. Plus, I'll explain why Clint Eastwood is officially canceled. All of that coming up.
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Now, first, Bernie Sanders. Sanders won the Nevada caucus, which, after Iowa and New Hampshire,
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puts him pretty much in the driver's seat for the nomination. With the support he has in the
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ground game, the infrastructure, it's hard to see him losing the nomination at this point,
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unless a number of the other candidates drop out before Super Tuesday so that the anti-Bernie vote
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can coalesce around somebody like Buttigieg. But that's probably not going to happen because these
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are all power-obsessed narcissists, and they're going to stay until the bitter end. So we see
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the echoes of 2016 with Trump, with the anti-Trump vote in the primary being split between several
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people, allowing Trump to coast to victory. Speaking of 2016, as I said, I want to offer a word of
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caution to conservatives because I am seeing this excitement and confidence as people on the right
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are seemingly quite sure that Bernie will lose in a landslide to Trump. And I've seen people saying
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he's going to lose 40 states or 45 states or whatever. And I understand that feeling. I have felt it
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myself. I have myself said that there's just no way, you know, there's no way most Americans are
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going to vote for a communist. No way. It just isn't going to happen. I have said, a lot of people
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are saying. But there are many things, you know, that I thought Americans would never do and yet have
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done in recent years. And here we are as a culture because of it. I'm not saying that I think Bernie will
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beat Trump. I think the smart money is against him. But I am saying that he could win. And I think
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that his chances are probably better than we want to think. And in fact, you can make the argument
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that he's Trump's toughest opponent. So let's think about this. How did Trump win in 2016?
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What happened? Because according to everything we thought we knew about American elections,
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he should not have won. The people who were predicting that he would lose, myself included,
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it's not like it was irrational. Based on everything we thought we knew, he was utterly
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despised by a large number of Americans. He had no governing experience whatsoever. He was a reality
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TV show host. There was even a tape of him talking about grabbing women by the genitals that came out
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just a few weeks before the election. Now, that kind of stuff is supposed to bury a candidate.
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Candidates have been buried under scandals and things much less dramatic than that.
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But it didn't bury Trump. Why is that? Well, I think there are three reasons. Number one,
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he had a core of extremely motivated and loyal supporters who were very excited about him. And
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as far as those supporters were concerned, it really didn't matter what came out about him or what he did
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or what he said. Number two, he was running against a widely despised opponent. Number three,
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he seized on the moral outrage that people felt in society. Blue collar workers against the elite
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and people feeling, you know, the swamp in D.C., people feeling taken advantage of and so on.
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Well, what do you know? Bernie Sanders has a core of extremely motivated and loyal supporters.
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And as far as they're concerned, it doesn't matter. You know, we talk about all the dirt and the oppo and
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so on that's going to come out about Bernie Sanders in the next few months. Yeah, I'm sure it will come
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out. But as far as the people that go to the Bernie rallies and are practically in tears of adulation,
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doesn't matter. There's nothing that could come out about him that's going to dissuade them.
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Also, Bernie Sanders will be running against a widely despised opponent in Donald Trump. And
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Bernie Sanders is all about moral outrage. So Bernie has these ingredients as well and he has
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them authentically. And what I mean is it's not like he's trying to rip off Trump. He's not borrowing
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from Trump's playbook like somebody like Bloomberg is futilely. This is who he is and what he's been
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doing for decades. Do I think he's going to win? Again, no. But I have, you know, I really have no
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idea. And neither do you. Neither does anyone. Recent history has shown us that you can't really
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predict what's going to happen when you throw a person like Bernie Sanders or like Donald Trump
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into the mix. And that's why conservatives who dismiss him, I think, are making a mistake.
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And I say that as somebody who has dismissed him as well. Because it's hard to put to the side
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all the things we thought we knew about the way politics are supposed to work. And it's also hard
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to put to the side the fact that this guy's a communist. And so he really should not win.
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It would be crazy for him to win. But just because he shouldn't and it's crazy doesn't mean it won't
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happen. Now, I want to focus on this third point about Bernie, the moral outrage. This is the most
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important thing, I think, to understand about Bernie Sanders and about leftism generally.
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lifelock.com slash Walsh for 25% off. Okay, so Bernie Sanders, and this is the thing that I think we
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need to understand about someone like Bernie, and as I said, leftists in general. He's making a moral
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argument, okay? And that's what resonates. Yes, the unemployment rate is down. The stock market's doing
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fine. And so when we hear all these things from conservatives, oh, the economy's great,
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so Trump's fine. Yeah, the traditional economic indicators are good news for Trump. But that stuff
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doesn't really matter, because there's still an enormous amount of anger and dissatisfaction out
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there and a deep feeling of unfairness. Now, whether we think that should exist or people should feel
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that way, it doesn't matter. They do. And that's why Bernie Sanders is resonating. And that's why
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the biggest star in politics. There's a reason for this.
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Bernie Sanders is pointing to a generation that is starting adult life deep in debt from student loans.
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And he's pointing to the health care industry and the fact that even people with insurance are
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finding themselves bankrupted if they actually have to, you know, go out and get medical care.
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And he's pointing to income inequality and the billionaires in their yachts and so on and so
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forth. And he's saying this is morally wrong. This isn't right. That's his argument. It's not an
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economic argument. It's just a moral one. That's all he ever talks about. Now, yes, I believe that his
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prescriptions to fix these problems are wrong. But that's not the point. The point is that the problems
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exist and people feel them and people are affected by them. And that's what's going to send them to
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the voting booth. And when they're at the voting booth, these are the things they're thinking about.
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Now, I think conservatives need to have a response to this that is more than just,
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oh, shut up, you whiners, you losers, you snowflakes, your entitlement mentality.
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If that's our response, we lose. Okay. And we deserve to. I think our response needs to begin
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by recognizing the fundamental legitimacy of the moral outrage that people feel about this stuff.
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Because, you know, they're right. It is completely unjust and ridiculous for banks to be giving out
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massive loans to kids who don't understand what they're doing, have no income, have no assets,
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and you're going to go and let them sign up for a lifetime of debt. It's crazy. It's unjust. It's
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wrong. And it's unjust and ridiculous that, you know, I have insurance, health insurance, but we had
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flu going through the house. And so we needed to go and get flu medicine for our kids, including an infant
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who could die from it. And it was a hundred dollars per bottle with insurance. I got four kids.
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And that's just one anecdote. People go through this stuff all the time and you find, you know,
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it's, it's, you think, well, what's the point of the freaking insurance? What am I paying all this
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money for? Uh, and it's wrong. You know, it is. People are being taken advantage of.
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We have to acknowledge that. If we don't, we lose. And worse than, than losing, we're also just
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wrong. We've put ourselves in, in, in the position of being wrong. So, you know, I've been saying this
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for years. Liberals make moral arguments. What conservatives so often do is they counter with
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practical arguments. And guess which ideology has won the culture and won my generation and thus
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already won the future. It's not the side that always tries to speak to your wallet.
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It's the side that speaks to your heart and to your conscience.
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This idea that people vote based on their wallets. I don't know who came up with this
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originally, but they're wrong. They're flat out wrong. They don't understand how people work,
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which is interesting because we're all people. So we know, we know what actually motivates us on
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the most basic and fundamental level. It's not money. It's deeper than that.
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Um, and if people feel like there's injustice and there's things happening in the world that are
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wrong, you know, that's, what's going to motivate them the most. And they're going to be willing to
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make. So, so even if you, if you come and say, well, yeah, but if you, if, you know, if you do this,
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if you, if you try to solve the problem this way, um, it's, it's, it's, it's not the best economic.
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It's going to be, there are all these economic problems. People are going to respond to that and say,
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so what? It's kind of the same thing that pro-lifers say, you know, when we're talking
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about the fact that we shouldn't be killing babies and you hear the response sometimes from
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people saying, well, but if we don't, if we don't have abortions, then you're going to have all
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these unwanted pregnancies and you're going to, you're going to have all these poor children.
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They're going to add to the welfare roles and eventually they're going to add to the
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unemployment rate and so on and so forth. Are those counter arguments convincing to pro-lifers?
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No, because what do we say? We say, so what? That's not the point. Even if you're right about that,
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So yes, leftism's moral arguments are bad. That's true. But the answer, um, I don't think
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is to refuse to engage on a moral level. It's to counter with better moral arguments.
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You know, I don't know if you've noticed this, but, um, this, uh, refrain that you always hear
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about, you can't, you can't legislate morality. Ah, no, we can't talk about morality on a public
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policy level because you can't legislate morality. Who, who are the people saying that?
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Liberals don't say that. No, this is, these are, these are, this is, this, this kind of weak sauce
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is what you get from conservatives. Now the left, they used to say that because they tricked
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conservatives. You know, this is what the left used to always say. Oh, I can't legislate morality.
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Can't legislate morality. And they tricked dumb conservatives into believing that. And so now while
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the left is off legislating morality, conservatives are standing back and say, oh, you can't, can't,
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no, no, no. We don't legislate morality. Well, we don't, right? That's what the left told us. We
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don't, we can't think for ourselves, but of course we do legislate. Every piece of legislation is
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legislating morality. Every law that has ever been written anywhere in the world, in any country,
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under any government, including ours is legislating morality. Every single one,
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because we make laws based on what is right, what we think is the right thing to do.
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Everything that is illegal is illegal primarily because we believe it's wrong.
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And you might say, well, no, it's, it's illegal. We only make things illegal if it hurts people.
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That's why it's wrong to kill people. Okay. But, but, but why should it be illegal to hurt people?
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Because it's wrong to hurt people because it's immoral. So at the bottom, there's always morality.
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Student loans, as I said, is perhaps maybe the most important example of this as far as the left
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goes. Bernie's success so far, like it or not, is due largely to this issue. Disaffected
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young people who are drowning in debt, feel taken advantage of, they feel lied to. And in Bernie,
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they see someone who not only promises to take the debt away, but also just takes their situation
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seriously. Um, whereas what they get from the right mostly is shut up your whiners.
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The problem with, with, uh, with, with Bernie solution though, just like his solution to everything
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else is that it is itself immoral and it will only make the problem he's trying to solve worse.
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Bernie wants to wave a magic wand and forgive all the debt. First of all, uh, that isn't just a bailout
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of college grads. You're bailing out the universities who take advantage of, of young people by charging
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them these exorbitant rates. You're bailing out the politicians, the government, which backs the
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irresponsible loans given to, to kids right out of high school. And in the meantime, uh, you're taking
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money from people who don't have the debt and you're forcing them to pay other people's debt.
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And then everyone who didn't go to college in the first place, because they were trying to make
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wise financial decisions. And so they sacrificed the college education because they knew they
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couldn't afford it and they didn't want to have all that debt and they weren't going to take that on.
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Now you're making them into suckers. You're making them into losers.
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So this solution isn't just impractical. It's not just economically infeasible. It's that,
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you know, it's, it's wrong. It's, it's immoral. It's unjust. It's unfair.
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And I think that's the language we need to be using. That's the point we need to be making.
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But then what is the solution? Well, this is something I want to get into more deeply tomorrow.
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There are a few ideas that have been proposed to address the student loan crisis and the whole
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issue of higher education. A few ideas that are much better, more moral, fairer, and more
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financially sound than what the socialists are suggesting. As I say, I want to talk about that
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tomorrow because it's a larger conversation. But for now, suffice it to say that I think we need
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to be addressing not just the past, not just the people who already have taken out the loans,
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but the future also. We need to find a way to stop the bleeding. We need to talk about
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how to put an end to this entire absurd, unsustainable program of pushing kids into
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these four-year institutions to get degrees that most of them won't ever use and won't need in the
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first place. So I have some ideas on that score as we continue the conversation this week, but I'll
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talk about that tomorrow. All right, coming up, I want to talk about Pete Buttigieg's extremely creepy
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sexualization of a child, which is something that happened right on stage at one of his rallies
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over the weekend. But before we get into that, I want to run through five other news stories worth
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knowing about in a new segment that I'm going to call News. Took me a long time to come up with that
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name. This is why I'm known as a creative genius. Number one, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is being
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criticized for wearing a designer dress on The View on Friday. Some conservatives on Twitter have
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pointed out that her dress supposedly cost $500. $500, if you can believe it. Look, there
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are a lot of very good reasons, very good reasons to criticize Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I mean,
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pretty much everything she says provides you a reason. But let's not be a bunch of losers and get
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bent out of shape because a woman who does a lot of TV appearances spent a few bucks on a dress. I
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think there's a general rule here. When you're attacking somebody for what they're wearing,
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rather than for the ideas they're presenting, you're losing. Number two, the Commandant of the Marine
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Corps on Friday announced the most important issues that Marines need to address in the coming year
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and beyond, according to him. Those issues include parental leave for adoptive same-sex parents,
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obviously a huge priority for the Marines, you know, really important stuff. And also,
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this is the most important thing. He wants to get more women in the ranks. So we have to increase the
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number of women in the Marines. He says he wants at least 10% of the ranks to be comprised of women.
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Now, let me ask you this. Can anyone argue, I mean, can anyone with a straight face argue
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that increasing the number of women in the Marines will help the Marines be a more effective and lethal
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fighting force? And if you can't argue that, if nobody can argue that, then what's the point
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of increasing the number of women? What's the point of making any changes to the Marines that
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are not in the service of helping it become better at the one thing that we need it to do?
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Well, I understand the point. Of course, for the left, the fundamental purpose of every institution
00:20:00.160
in America is to advance cultural leftism. That's, no institution can have any purpose higher than that.
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Number three, a sad story here. A daredevil who goes by the name Mad Mike Hughes died on Saturday
00:20:13.440
after shooting himself into the air in a homemade rocket to prove that the earth is flat. And I'm not
00:20:20.920
sure exactly what the plan was. I guess the idea was to get really high up in the air and take a
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picture of the earth to show that it's flat. You know, you could take a plane probably and do the
00:20:35.480
same thing. But he crash landed and died. You know, I'm not going to make any jokes about a man's death,
00:20:41.160
as a lot of people have been doing online, as you can imagine. But I do continue to find it
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remarkable that flat eartherism exists. Remarkable until I remember that the human capacity for
00:20:55.000
self-deception is basically limitless. We can convince ourselves to believe anything really.
00:21:01.040
And we're also storytellers. You know, we're very good as human beings. One of the best,
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one of the things we're best at is, is telling stories, which is a very important part of this
00:21:10.540
because flat eartherism is not a theory. It's a story. So flat earthers have this whole story.
00:21:17.660
They tell this myth they've constructed about global conspiracy. Well, not global conspiracies,
00:21:22.460
but you know, uh, conspiracies anyway. And, uh, they, they made up this story and they tell it to each
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other. And because they find the story interesting and compelling, they figure it must be true.
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Number four, Mike Bloomberg has been getting criticized for, um, having a bunch of women
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under NDAs, non-disclosure agreements. Now, these are women who have sued Bloomberg's company for
00:21:46.020
harassment and those sorts of things, but now they can't talk about their experiences because they
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were made to sign a contract binding them to silence. Well, Bloomberg now says he will release,
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uh, three women from their NDAs if they ask just three. So this whole thing is starting to
00:22:03.580
really have the feel of a hostage negotiation. In fact, I heard that Bloomberg will release two
00:22:11.040
more women if the cop cars moved back another 500 feet. And, uh, five, finally the biggest news of the
00:22:17.460
week, of course, of the year, really of the century is, uh, I don't know if I mentioned this,
00:22:20.820
but my book Church of Cowards officially goes on sale tomorrow, uh, but you can pre-order it now
00:22:26.140
on Amazon. Otherwise you can find it tomorrow, wherever books are sold, uh, or online, of course.
00:22:31.660
Okay. Now, uh, speaking as we were before of making the moral argument,
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I believe the left's sexual exploitation of children is one of the great moral issues of our time,
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which is why I point to it and highlight it quite frequently. And I think this is one thing that
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as conservatives, we should be talking about and exposing. And this is the kind of thing that
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motivates voters. People will go to the polls to put a stop to this. It's, it's the kind of thing
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that makes people angry. Um, and they're going to care more about this than about the unemployment rate.
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And more importantly, putting politics aside, we have a moral duty to protect children.
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So let's take a look at the latest example of this exploitation, courtesy of Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
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Um, at a campaign rally over the weekend, Buttigieg decided to pull a nine-year-old on stage
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so that the nine-year-old could talk about his sexuality. And, uh, it's the kind of thing you
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have to see to believe. Watch this. He says, thank you for being so brave. Would you help
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me tell the world I'm gay too? I want to be brave like you. Well, I don't think you need a lot of
00:23:45.820
advice from me on bravery. You seem pretty strong. To see you, it took me a long time to figure out
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how to tell even my best friend that I was gay, let alone to go out there and tell the world. And
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to see you willing to come to terms with who you are in a room full of a thousand people,
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thousands of people you've never met. That's, that's really something.
00:24:14.880
So let me tell you, let me tell you a couple of things that might be useful.
00:24:19.420
The first thing is that it won't always be easy, but that's okay because you know who you are.
00:24:26.480
And that's really important because when you know who you are, uh, you have a center of gravity that
00:24:35.420
can hold you together when all kinds of chaos is happening around you. That's the first thing I
00:24:40.440
want you to know. The second thing I want you to know is that you will never know who's taking their
00:24:48.320
lead from you. Who's watching you and deciding that they can be a little braver because you have
00:24:57.340
been brave. Nine years old, nine years old, uh, children at nine years old haven't gone through
00:25:04.520
puberty yet. They don't know who they are or how they feel. They don't have sexual desires yet.
00:25:11.260
They don't know anything about sex. A nine-year-old doesn't have a sexual orientation.
00:25:18.320
So if a nine-year-old tell you, tells you that he's gay, you know, we can, we can talk about the
00:25:25.680
best way to handle that. But I'm, I'm, I'm very certain that, uh, the best way to handle it is not
00:25:32.100
to pull him on stage in front of an audience on camera and have him announce it to the world
00:25:39.780
that you don't do. Um, there is no good reason to do it. And when I say no good reason, good as in
00:25:46.560
no morally or ethically good reason, it's not going to help the child. There is no way that it
00:25:53.300
could possibly benefit the child for him at the age of nine to publicly announce his sexuality.
00:25:59.740
There's nothing good that comes of it for him. But of course, it's not about the child. In this case,
00:26:06.340
it's mainly about Pete, uh, creepy Pete, who has no compunction about exploiting a child's emotional
00:26:12.260
confusion for the sake of winning a few Brownie points with the media and with voters. Uh, and
00:26:16.640
it's also about, as always trying to reshape our, our fundamental understanding of childhood as a
00:26:22.860
culture, the forces of evil in our culture. They want us to see children as people who have the
00:26:29.900
emotional and psychological capacity to make profoundly important and life altering decisions
00:26:34.900
for themselves. That's how they want us to see kids decisions, like declaring a sexual orientation,
00:26:42.940
even if they haven't gone through puberty yet decisions, like choosing a quote, gender identity.
00:26:50.040
So in the area of sex and gender, at least the left wants us to see children as people who possess
00:26:56.180
all the competence and self-knowledge of, um, of, of adults. Now, where do we think this goes?
00:27:05.900
I mean, do we think it stops here? Do we think they say, yeah, toddlers can choose their gender and,
00:27:14.200
and third graders can declare a sexual orientation in front of the entire world, but that's it. That's
00:27:19.460
as far as it goes. No more, no further. No, of course not. One thing we've, we've learned about
00:27:25.240
progressivism is that there's a reason it's called progressivism. It progresses,
00:27:29.640
progresses in the sense so that that cancer progresses, it keeps going, it keeps moving,
00:27:34.840
it keeps eating away. Um, and in this case, it's not a far leap to go from here, from very young
00:27:41.960
children and being able to decide a gender and a sexual orientation to arguing that children have
00:27:48.060
the capacity to consent sexually. Um, now I don't think your average leftist right now today necessarily
00:27:58.760
in his mind wants to legalize pedophilia. I don't think that, I don't think he's thought it through that
00:28:06.840
much, but I can say, I can predict that nearly every leftist who today is arguing that three-year-olds
00:28:15.980
can choose their gender. Nearly all of them, 10 years from now, or even five years from now,
00:28:21.820
will be arguing in favor of, of legalizing pedophilia. It is without question, the logical
00:28:28.240
conclusion, the end point, the last stop on this particular train. And, and we will get there
00:28:36.260
unless of course the sane and decent among us rise up finally in defense of our children
00:28:42.160
and put a stop to this madness. You know, unless those of us who, who know better can, can actually,
00:28:50.500
uh, respond. We talk about moral outrage. We should, you know, we need to respond with the
00:28:58.140
appropriate amount of moral outrage. We should be pissed, furious when we see this kind of thing.
00:29:04.980
When we see what Pete Buttigieg did, when we see the, you know, these kids being taken advantage of
00:29:11.540
by their parents and three-year-old, three-year-old boys being told, oh, you could be a girl.
00:29:17.700
You know, our response should not simply be, oh, uh, we disagree with that.
00:29:23.980
We should be blind with anger because that's how exploitative and evil and crazy this stuff is.
00:29:40.080
You know, it's all about normalization. So they keep shoving in our face over and over and over
00:29:45.500
again. And eventually, um, even if we, that what the hope, the hope is that even if we don't agree
00:29:51.820
with it, we become desensitized to it. And so we throw up our hands and say, hey, I don't like this,
00:29:58.540
but it's just the way it is now. Moving on. We can't, uh, we can't allow that to happen.
00:30:07.540
All right. Finally today, um, debuting another new segment on the show. And, uh, in this segment,
00:30:16.100
each day I will be canceling something or someone, you know, a lot of people are critics of cancel
00:30:21.840
culture, but I personally am a huge fan of it. Uh, I'm, I, you know, I, I love the idea anyway.
00:30:27.780
My only problem with all the canceling is that other people are doing it. I think that I should
00:30:33.400
be the one deciding what's what gets canceled. I have a lot of experience hating things. And so
00:30:38.600
I feel that I'm uniquely qualified to make these decisions. So today, um, we'll start off by canceling
00:30:44.840
Clint Eastwood. Now in an interview over the weekend, Clint came out in support of Mike Bloomberg
00:30:50.520
for president, uh, throwing president Trump overboard, basically. In fact, Eastwood said
00:30:54.980
that, uh, that he's a, he's a little fed up with Trump and he wishes that Trump would act quote
00:30:58.860
in a more genteel way without tweeting and calling people names. He said, quote, is a real quote.
00:31:05.660
The best thing we could do is just get Mike Bloomberg in there, which marks, I believe the
00:31:11.020
first time in history that anyone has ever uttered that sentence. The best thing we could do is get
00:31:16.260
Mike Bloomberg in there. But, but that is not why Clint Eastwood is canceled. I want to be clear.
00:31:23.160
Um, personally, I couldn't care less who anyone in Hollywood supports for president makes no
00:31:28.440
difference to me. Eastwood is canceled finally for being the most overrated director in Hollywood.
00:31:33.780
This is a long time coming. And the only reason I'm canceling him now is that I'm hoping that,
00:31:37.880
uh, he, now that he's dumped Trump and gone to Bloomberg, that conservatives will stop pretending that,
00:31:42.540
that, you know, his films are good because I, I, I believe that's what's been going on here.
00:31:47.600
We've all been pretending to like his movies because we have the idea that he's conservative
00:31:53.240
or Republican or whatever. Now we can finally, now we can, we can finally be honest.
00:31:59.640
If you go down Eastwood's list of films that he's directed, now there are a few bright spots in there,
00:32:04.300
but most of his filmography is mediocre and sometimes bad. And in one case, literally the
00:32:11.200
worst that film, by the way, is, uh, is the movie, the 1517 to Paris that came out a couple of years
00:32:16.480
ago. Eastwood film directed it. It's about the four guys who stopped the terrorist attack in 2015 on a
00:32:23.960
train and a very heroic moment, you know, uh, and, and, but also a moment that took about 30 seconds.
00:32:30.880
And so Eastwood tried to turn 30 seconds into a whole movie and he actually hired the guys
00:32:36.840
themselves, the actual real life heroes. He hired them to play themselves in the movie. Now, the
00:32:41.960
problem is that they're not actors. And as it turns out, um, it, it does actually take some skill to
00:32:48.040
act, even to act as yourself. You, it takes talent, which unfortunately these guys didn't have. So it's
00:32:53.960
the worst acting in a major Hollywood film that I've ever seen in my life to go along with some of the
00:32:58.420
worst writing and some of the worst pacing that you'll ever see a monumentally bad film. But this
00:33:03.340
has been Eastwood's MO of late. You know, he takes a real life dramatic moment and he tries to turn it
00:33:08.320
into a whole movie, even if there's not enough of a story there. Sully, he made a, he made a movie
00:33:12.740
called Sully about Sully Sullenberg landing the plane in the Hudson a few years ago. Now, another very
00:33:18.640
dramatic moment that took about two minutes in real life, which leaves you with another about 100
00:33:24.780
minutes to fill. Unfortunately, there's just not a movie there. Million Dollar Baby, uh, another bad
00:33:31.720
movie where at the end, Clint Eastwood's character heroically kills Hillary Swank because she's
00:33:38.440
disabled. That's the end. It's supposed to be heartwarming. Him performing a mercy killing on a
00:33:45.480
disabled woman is the end of the movie. And, and, and people are supposed to leave, you know, in tears of,
00:33:50.760
of, of, of joy at this, at this, uh, beautiful ending. American Sniper takes a fascinating story
00:33:56.900
of Chris Kyle, the most prolific sniper, sniper in history, somehow manages to make a dull, repetitive,
00:34:03.600
bland movie out of it that barely scratches the psychological or emotional surface of the man at
00:34:09.060
the center of it. Even Eastwood's good movies are problematic, mainly because Eastwood has all the
00:34:15.360
subtlety of a, of a bag of, of hammers falling out of the sky. So you take Richard Jewell, for example,
00:34:20.420
I watched that movie, pretty good movie, important story, but he wants to make the point that the
00:34:25.360
media is irresponsible and reckless, which is a good point. So he takes a real life reporter,
00:34:32.200
Kathy Scruggs, and he turns her into a cartoon avatar of an unscrupulous ambulance chaser.
00:34:38.380
She's a, she's portrayed as essentially a sociopath with no morals whatsoever. Who's happy when people
00:34:45.000
die, openly happy when people die and when tragedies happen, because it will make for a good story.
00:34:50.000
And it may be true that the news media operates that way, but, you know, these are actual human
00:34:57.420
beings in the news media and human beings are, are rarely so explicitly evil and callous because
00:35:03.980
humans have a deep need to at least convince themselves that they're decent, virtuous people.
00:35:11.280
Yet the bad guys in this movie are just bad all the way through. No shades of gray, nothing human in
00:35:17.580
them. No nuance to their personalities until the reporter who is, you know, through the entire
00:35:23.720
movie, again, a sociopath, a psychopath, absurdly cartoonishly evil, the entire movie. And then out
00:35:30.020
of nowhere, in the span of about 45 seconds, she has a change of heart, not explained. How did it
00:35:35.260
happen? I don't know. Just out of nowhere, she becomes, uh, she goes from a literal psychopath to a
00:35:40.080
compassionate humanitarian. And at the end of the movie, she's, she's, she's crying, uh, because
00:35:45.360
she's, she's so remorseful about how she's been acting. This is what Clint Eastwood does. His
00:35:49.500
characters are almost always lazily drawn, one dimensional, just there to sort of do their job
00:35:54.340
for the story. You know, Hey, I'm the bad guy, yada, yada, evil stuff. And, uh, it's just not good.
00:36:01.720
And that's why Clint Eastwood is canceled. I'm sorry to do it, but it had to be done.
00:36:07.180
And that's it for, uh, for today. I don't know if I mentioned this, but my book, Church of Cowards
00:36:11.180
goes on sale tomorrow. So, uh, go order that to all of you who do buy the book. Uh, thank you.
00:36:17.600
And I hope you have a great day to those of you who do not buy the book.
00:36:21.080
You bring shame on yourself and your family. How dare you? And to everyone, Godspeed.
00:36:26.880
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe. And if you want to help spread the
00:36:33.320
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00:36:42.080
the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro show, Michael Knowles show, and the Andrew
00:36:46.340
Klavan show. Thanks for listening. The Matt Walsh show is produced by Sean Hampton, executive producer,
00:36:51.600
Jeremy Boring, supervising producer, Mathis Glover, supervising producer, Robert Sterling,
00:36:56.320
technical producer, Austin Stevens, editor, Danny D'Amico, audio mixer, Robin Fenderson.
00:37:02.520
The Matt Walsh show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2020.
00:37:06.920
As Bernie Sanders racks up victories all around the country, conservatives struggle with whether
00:37:11.840
to root for the radical socialists. So Trump can sweep all 57 states plus Greenland in November,
00:37:16.920
or whether it would be better to root for one of the also-rans on the off chance Bernie
00:37:21.620
could somehow win in November. We will examine the conservative case for Bernie. Then Pete Buttigieg
00:37:27.580
has a prepubescent boy come out on stage at a campaign rally. AOC likes luxury for herself,
00:37:33.580
but not for anyone else. And so much more. Check it out on the Michael Knowles show.