Ep. 1080 - We Are All An ＂Extreme Threat to Democracy＂
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
178.45522
Summary
On the heels of calling roughly half of the country semi-fascist, the Biden administration is now somehow upping the rhetoric, referring to us all as a, quote, extreme threat to democracy. The President thinks that there is an extremist threat to our democracy.
Transcript
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On the heels of calling roughly half the country semi-fascist, the Biden administration is now
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somehow upping the rhetoric, referring to us all as a, quote, extreme threat to democracy.
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The president thinks that there is an extremist threat to our democracy.
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The president has been clear, as he can be on that particular piece, when we talk about a
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democracy, when we talk about our freedoms, the way that he sees is the MAGA Republicans are the most
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energized part of the Republican Party. This is an extreme threat to our democracy, to our freedom,
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to our rights. Notice that line was not off the cuff. That was not merely some gaffe from Corrine
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Jean-Pierre or Joe Biden. She was reading off of her written notes. She repeated the phrase,
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the White House made a conscious decision to refer to MAGA Republicans the same way that they would
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refer to ISIS. Actually, probably more harshly than they would refer to ISIS. The Libs call the leader
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of ISIS an austere religious scholar. The Libs hand Afghanistan over to the Taliban. Okay, they're
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actually pretty nice to the terrorists and to ISIS and Al Qaeda and all those people.
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They reserve the terrorist rhetoric for you, for parents, and for conservatives,
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and for MAGA Republicans, which, by the way, just means Republicans. That's it. That's all there is.
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The Never Trump movement at this point is pretty much just Bill Kristol and five or six people that
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he has over to complain about Donald Trump over tea. Okay, statistically, for all intents and purposes,
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MAGA Republicans just means Republicans, which means the President of the United States,
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the same President who keeps threatening to strafe us all with squadrons of F-15s,
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is saying that half of the country should be treated as terrorists. He's saying that the only way we can
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have government of the people, by the people, and for the people, is if we get rid of half the people.
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A bad idea in general, an especially bad idea when those half of the people are you. I'm Michael
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Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment yesterday is
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from Toby, who says, I didn't want to believe that Michael actually loves pumpkin spice lattes,
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but when he started calling them PSLs so casually, I knew he was being honest. Now I need to find a way
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to reconcile this with the cigar-smoking, only Y-chromosome image of Michael that I had before.
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I'll reconcile it for you. I know that this can be shocking. This was explained to me a little bit
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when I was in college by a pal of mine. He was a few years older, who was very, very preppy.
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And I said, he'd wear pink polo shirts all the time. And I said, hey man, I won't use his name,
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but I said, hey man, isn't it a little girly to wear pink polo shirts? And isn't it a little
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foppish and effeminate? And he told me, he said, Michael, you don't understand. It's actually the
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manliest thing of all to wear a pink polo shirt. Because, you see, the pink polo shirt, it is just a
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facade. It is in a way a kind of like a girdle or a corset to constrain the virile manliness within,
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just aching to get out. That's what the pumpkin spice latte is, okay? It is just, it is a veneer
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of civilization, okay? Of a sort of nice light, okay? This is a, but beneath the surface, just
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underneath that frothy little foam and tasty little pumpkin spice sauce on top. Oh, there's,
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it's just pure masculinity, toxic, waiting to explode. That's what's going on with my PSLs.
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And one of those things that I can do when I'm really unleashing my masculinity would be to work
00:04:11.180
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mufflers, lug nuts, or any other part you need. Rockauto.com. Write Knowles in their How Did You
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Hear About Us box so they know that we sent you. Speaking of the MAGA Republicans, we need to add
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another coin to the Donald Trump was right jar. I always try to keep the receipts here because here's
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what happens in politics. A conservative says something. The liberals say, that's crazy.
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That's stupid. You're an idiot. You don't know anything. That's wrong. That's dangerous. It's a
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horrible idea. And then, I don't know, call it six months later, sometimes even a couple of years
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later, the conservative has proven completely correct. And we say, hey, we were right the whole
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time. And then what do the libs say? No, never mind. What are you talking about? Who remembers that?
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No, forget about it. Move along, move along. And rinse and repeat. That goes on and on and on.
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Then the conservatives will observe something. They'll say, wait, hold on. No, this is what I
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think. And the libs say, no, you're completely wrong. It's stupid. They'll laugh at us. They'll
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ridicule us. Well, this is what's happening right now when it comes to energy. You might recall
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a few years ago, Donald Trump warned that Europe's energy policy right now was making Europe and Germany
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in particular extremely reliant on Russia to heat the homes and power the cars and keep Germany going.
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And at the time, all the libs, and Germany in particular, mocked Donald Trump for this
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observation. This was considered so risible that the American left-wing news outlets put out joke
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compilations of Trump making this claim. This is a clip from Now This, which is a left-wing
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news source and commentary source, mocking, from the time, mocking Trump's suggestion.
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Germany's reaction to Trump's inaccurate claim is priceless.
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...will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.
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Oh, they're laughing. Look at that. Look at those Germans. They're laughing. Oh,
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there's that idiot Trump. Trump's claim is not accurate and highly misleading, CNBC says.
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Germany imports only a fraction of its total energy from Russia.
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...we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers.
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Now this. There it is. Okay, so how's that shaping up? Well, Russia just announced that it's going to
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cut off Germany's gas supply via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline for three days. Just three days.
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Okay, well, that shouldn't matter at all, right? Nothing's going to happen. Because Trump's a big,
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dumb, stupid idiot, right? And he said that Germany is too reliant on Russian energy, and all the Germans
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laughed. Okay. Ha ha. Okay, so who cares? They're going to shut off this one pipeline for three days.
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No big deal, right? Well, here's what the German economy minister, Robert Habak, told the Financial Times.
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Apparently, this move by Russia to shut off the gas for just three days has already forced German
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companies to stop production. It's a development that he said is alarming. He said, quote,
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it's not good news because it can mean that the industries in question aren't just being restructured,
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but are experiencing a rupture, a structural rupture, one that is happening under enormous pressure.
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Oh, not laughing now, I guess. The Germans have said, what can we do with the three-day
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pause? They said, I assume that we will be able to cope with it. That was Klaus Mueller,
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the president of Germany's network regulator. That's what he told Reuters. I trust that Russia
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will return to 20% on Saturday, but no one can really say, oh, so it sounds like Trump was 100%
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correct. And all the Germans were laughing, and all the news outlets called Trump a big, stupid,
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dumb idiot, and all the conservatives who followed Trump were just stupid, idiot rubes who don't know
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anything about energy, except we were all completely right. And all of the geniuses at MSNBC and the
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financial analysts and the establishment and the think tanks, they were all completely wrong.
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That's what happened. And it's very important to point this out because it keeps happening.
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That's why I keep focusing on this when it comes to COVID. We were right about the masks. All of the
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genius authorities and experts and Fauci and all the big tech censors and all of the petty government
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officials from the local level to the international level, they were wrong. We were right about the
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masks. All of them were wrong about the masks, except for Fauci briefly when he was being honest
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about the masks, but then he reversed his position. How about the vaccines? When we said, I don't think
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the vaccines are actually going to stop you from catching COVID or spreading it. And then everyone,
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all the experts, all the authorities said the opposite. And they all called us a bunch of big,
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dumb, stupid idiots and science deniers and all the rest. We were 100% right. They were 100% wrong.
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Same thing, catching COVID, transmitting COVID, the risks of the vaccines. Initially, we were told
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there are no risks to the vaccines. We said, I think there actually are probably some pretty serious risks.
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We were 100% right. They were 100% wrong. And it's not, it wasn't just COVID that this is the case on.
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It's everything. It's everything from the COVID masks to the Russian and German energy sectors.
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Our experts are established geniuses who have the power to form public opinion and exclude certain
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opinions. They don't know anything. Okay. And Joe Schmo on the street and Joe Schmo's representative
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named Donald Trump are much, much more correct. They have a much, much better record than these people
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do. Speaking of extreme threats, there is a trailer out for a movie that in spite of myself,
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I cannot wait to see. But it's very, very disturbing. The movie is called Winnie the Pooh,
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You know, you're the first person I ever shown this place to.
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Because soon will be Christopher and Mary Robin.
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Christopher Robin from Winnie the Pooh is all grown up.
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We were friends for many years and they're out there.
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I really need to find out what's happening, okay?
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And it's turned wild and then there's demented Winnie the Pooh who starts stabbing people.
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We used to be friends. Why are you doing this? Please.
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Okay, it goes on. I think there was Piglet there. It's like attacking people.
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This seems really, really stupid and funny and I'll probably go see it. Part of the reason this movie can be made is the copyright has run out on Winnie the Pooh so now people can use the intellectual property.
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But there is something disturbing here and it's not just the fact that you got these demented characters slashing people. There have been teen slashers for a long time in movies.
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What makes this especially disturbing is it's a beloved childhood character. A character that made you feel really safe and nice and warm is now coming back and killing you.
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Why? Because Christopher Robin abandoned him, right? Abandoned him and now the animals have turned demented.
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What the movie I think is really about, certainly from the trailer what it seems, is it's a movie about a permanent loss of innocence.
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What the movie is really about, I don't think I'm reading too deeply into a teen slasher.
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What it's really about, the crux of the whole movie, why they make it all about Winnie the Pooh, is it's because it is about people who have lost their childhood and their childhood innocence.
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Who don't know how to get it back anymore in society.
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I am going to go see Winnie the Pooh, Blood and Honey.
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But I want to see it as much because it looks like a kind of fun, silly slasher movie.
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As for what it means culturally, I get letters to the mailbag all the time.
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And I got one last week and it really stuck with me.
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The question was, Michael, I got really into porn and all sorts of, a lot of questions are about porn.
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But it could be about anything that causes you to lose your innocence.
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And he says, I feel, I really miss my innocence.
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But I don't know that I can get my innocence back.
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And part of growing up is losing a little bit of your innocence.
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And now we hope that we don't just constantly degrade ourselves.
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We hope that, you know, we don't remain mired in all the problems that come along with youth and all of the temptations.
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But how do you get, how do you recover some of that?
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Well, you've got to, got to get back on the right road again.
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Okay, and that doesn't, it doesn't mean just remain in perpetual adolescence.
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I think that's something that millennials and Gen Z, but millennials in particular, have really fallen into.
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Millennials, every time they pay a bill, they post it on Instagram and they say, wow, I'm totally adulting.
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No, it shouldn't be shocking that someone in their 30s is doing things that adults do.
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They don't want to get off their parents' cell phone plan.
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These are people who are in their 30s and early 40s in some cases, but they don't want to do it.
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And so they want to go back to Disneyland alone.
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They'll just go, they'll go watch the latest superhero movie.
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But they'll go, and I don't mean to knock people for, you know, having a little bit of nostalgia for their childhood.
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But you're supposed to do those things while growing up and with your kids.
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That's how you get to relive your childhood when you're an adult.
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You get to do it through and with your own children.
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Actually, Kenny Loggins wrote a whole song about this, specifically about Winnie the Pooh.
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And the whole thing is, he wrote it when he was a high school junior or senior.
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And the whole thing was, wow, I've wandered away.
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Come on, I've got to get back to Winnie the Pooh and all of my friends, so help me if you can.
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I've got to get back to the place at Pooh Corner.
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And he realizes he can't because his childhood is over and he's growing up now and he's graduating high school.
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And he says, you know, I'm looking, I'm paraphrasing the lyrics, but he says,
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I was looking at my little kid lying in his crib.
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And I realized now I've returned to the 100-acre wood and Pooh Corner and Winnie the Pooh.
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And my little kid is there hugging my little Winnie the Pooh doll.
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And so I do get to, you know, return in some ways to the joys of childhood.
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We've kind of stopped doing the things that adults are supposed to do.
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I promise you that will be the most detailed analysis of Winnie the Pooh blood and honey trailer that you will see anywhere.
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But I do think that's what's undergirding the movie.
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I'll see it anyway, but I'll see it in the same way that I look at a car accident around our culture and say,
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gosh, we've gotten really, really decadent and weird, haven't we?
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Speaking of child abuse, doctors now, lib doctors and teachers are getting really brazen about admitting
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that they are not only violating social norms, but violating the law in some cases.
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There's a doctor right now in San Francisco, Dr. Scott Moser, who is admitting that he not only transes the kids, but he transes little kids.
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He transes kids without any minimum age to perform these kind of surgeries at all.
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The GCC, Gender Confirmation Center in San Francisco, we kind of have these like secret missions.
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Now that it's on a slide, these public secret missions, which are, one of them is that we try to live with our values 30 to 40 years in the future.
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So, and that puts us in a mindset of extreme affirmation because affirmation at that time is a foregone conclusion.
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This is a time in the future when gender is just a thing.
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People are being screened as children and adolescents for their gender journey and appropriate steps are taken to get them involved in a multidisciplinary process to get them where they need to go.
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I do not have a minimum age of any sort in my practice.
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There's no chronological age that says you don't get surgery.
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Now, having said that, I don't think I've ever done a consult on a 12-year-old yet, but we would if one came our way.
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And then we've done a number of 13-year-olds who did consults on.
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I think I've done one or two 13-year-old surgeries.
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I think I've done one or two 13-year-old surgeries.
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As I say, every time one of these stories comes out, we are accelerating down the slippery slope.
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It's not that we're going to keep going afterward.
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We're accelerating how fast we're going down the slippery slope.
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Ten years ago, the idea that there would be more than a handful of adults who had these mutilations would be a scandal and unthinkable.
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The idea that someone who was 18 years old or younger would have this done, truly, truly beyond the realm of the imagination.
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Then the idea, even a couple of years ago, that this would happen to 16-year-olds, unthinkable.
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Yesterday, the idea that this would happen to 13-year-olds or 12-year-olds.
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The day after that, it's going to be eight, six, seven.
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And of course, the logic, or the kind of logic, the kind of illogic, but it follows from the premises, is on his side.
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The minute that we grant the premise that a man who thinks he's a woman, maybe we should call him a she.
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The minute that we grant in any way the premise that the man who thinks he's a woman should maybe be able to use the girl's bathroom.
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The minute we grant the premise that an adult should have the right to lop off his own genitals and pretend to be a woman.
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I mean, these days, that's not an adult because they don't know how to do adulting because millennials don't want to grow up.
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But let's say someone chronologically an adult.
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The minute we grant the premise that anyone at any age should be able to lop off his genitals because he's really, seriously, a man in a woman's body.
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Or he's got this permanent psychological condition where he's a man in a woman's body.
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And so we have to let him lop his genitals off.
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The minute we grant that, we've given the libs the whole game.
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Because if that's really true, then certainly it's much better for people who have this totally real illness, you know, where you're a man in a woman's body or whatever.
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Because puberty is only going to set in the dysphoria.
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And then they're going to be really, really sad and depressed and have all these problems.
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In fact, we should encourage people to have it done before they're 13.
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People are starting puberty earlier and earlier because of all the weird chemicals we're pumping into the food.
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Or you have to go to that extreme if you grant the premise of the libs.
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And conservatives, and especially the libertarians, are always trying to split the baby on this.
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Well, no, okay, it's insane if you're under 18, but it's totally fine if you're over 18.
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No, it's just, we've got, if we're going to have a society, we have to agree on some basic principles of reality.
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And, okay, so then no one should be able to do that, especially the kids, but really no one.
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Speaking of abuse, Kristi Noem, who is the Republican governor of South Dakota, she just went on Fox and Friends, talk about trying to split the baby,
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to discuss the FBI's raid on Mar-a-Lago, which now it's so preposterous.
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The FBI has posted on social media a photograph of the alleged top secret documents that Trump had, the classified documents that he totally wasn't allowed to have, I guess, maybe, sort of.
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And they're so super-duper top secret that they had to raid his home in, you know, without any warning whatsoever as he's preparing to run for president in 2024.
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So super-duper top secret that we're going to post a picture of them on social media.
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So Kristi Noem, Republican governor, goes on Fox and Friends.
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And I got to tell you, this whole interview, I felt like I was in bizarro world.
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This was not, it was not an interview on MSNBC.
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It was an interview on Fox News, it's supposed to be the right-wing channel, about how terrible it was that Trump had the documents.
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He had apparently three classified documents in his desk.
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And then the stuff, as Brian detailed on the floor, it shows five yellow folders marked top secret,
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and another one that says secret SCI, which means sensitive compartmentalized information.
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Why would he, and apparently the president, former president, went through them in January.
00:25:00.980
Well, that's why I think it's important that this is transparent, and that we do have someone who's outside of the DOJ looking at this and talking to people.
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I think President Trump declassified all this information.
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Let's find out, really, what the process is, what is right, what's precedent that other presidents have followed,
00:25:26.680
Governor, I don't think any president has ever carted off that many documents to their house after they left the presidency.
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I guess what this comes from is just we disagree on the premise here.
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Because you've got Steve Doocy's really hammering this home.
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You're not allowed to have classified documents.
00:25:49.900
And Kristi Noem is, she seems kind of surprised by the commentary, too.
00:25:54.480
It's like, well, you know, this will play out, whatever.
00:26:01.980
Do you know how I know with 100% certainty that the documents were not classified?
00:26:09.800
That's all it takes is for the president to say the documents were not classified.
00:26:15.940
Because he's saying, I declassified them in the past.
00:26:18.320
Now, you might respond and say, well, who knows if Trump actually declassified them in the past?
00:26:26.840
But the documents still had a top secret classified stamp on them.
00:26:35.780
we've never been in a situation where the FBI has knocked down the doors of a former president.
00:26:39.940
And even raised an objection to a president doing this sort of thing.
00:26:43.860
Okay, but the president does not need a special stamp to declassify the documents.
00:26:50.940
He doesn't need to ask permission of some deputy director of whatever the hell at the DOJ.
00:26:55.500
He just, if the president said, if a former president says these documents were not classified,
00:27:01.640
or were declassified at some point by me, they just are.
00:27:11.240
Okay, it's like, if you begin with the false premise,
00:27:13.580
then you can end at the crazy logical conclusion of that.
00:27:22.080
If a man can really be a woman, then you end up at transing the kids.
00:27:27.300
If Donald Trump can have mishandled the classified documents,
00:27:31.220
then you end up at this place where maybe he committed a crime.
00:27:34.500
It's not, it's ontologically not possible for the president to do that.
00:27:38.460
If my aunt had testicles, she would be my uncle.
00:27:46.440
the Biden administration is pointing at Trump right now
00:27:48.760
and raiding his home and calling half the country fascist
00:27:52.940
and doing whatever distractions they can because of their completely failed record.
00:27:56.580
We know that they have a failed record on the economy.
00:27:58.280
We know they have a failed record on immigration.
00:28:00.780
We know they have an extremely failed record on foreign policy.
00:28:07.660
One area we haven't talked enough about, they have a really failed record on drugs.
00:28:18.620
It's supposed to be increasing because of all that progress that we've allegedly got going on.
00:28:22.440
But it's decreasing, and it's decreasing in large part because of deaths of despair,
00:28:29.520
So, at the White House briefing, Corrine Jean-Pierre is asked,
00:28:34.800
hey, what is the president doing about drug overdoses?
00:28:40.340
There's a big problem now that rainbow fentanyl, which is designed to target children,
00:28:48.360
What specifically is the president doing about this?
00:28:50.900
So, we just talked about the day, the overdose awareness day, that we are observing today.
00:29:00.380
I just laid out what the second gentleman and others are doing within this administration.
00:29:07.280
And, you know, we are going to continue to focus on the steps that we're taking, that we have taken.
00:29:15.960
You have the $80 million that DHS just announced today on drug prevention.
00:29:24.820
So, the only answer, they said, we're going to spend $80 million on this vague thing.
00:29:32.920
And then, the only concrete action that Corrine Jean-Pierre can say the Biden administration is doing
00:29:38.680
on this once-in-an-ever historic drug overdose problem is,
00:29:45.460
well, we're observing Drug Overdose Awareness Day.
00:29:49.320
What do you, what do you, Peter, Doocy, are you crazy?
00:30:03.980
And so, yeah, we're not, we're not doing anything about, you know,
00:30:07.260
the completely open border that all the drugs are crossing from, or crossing through.
00:30:12.160
We're not doing anything about big pharma that the rest of the drugs are coming from.
00:30:17.620
We're not doing anything about the mass nationwide legalization campaign that our own party is pushing.
00:30:24.540
We're not doing anything about the, the criminal justice reform, so-called,
00:30:31.200
that's letting all the drug peddlers out of prison.
00:30:39.460
No, yeah, you're, the, the way that the White House is raising awareness about drug overdoses is by causing them.
00:30:46.320
That's not the, that, awareness and a buck fifty used to get you a cup of coffee.
00:30:50.700
Now you'd need probably like five fifty in addition to that,
00:30:53.520
to the awareness to get a cup of coffee because of Biden inflation.
00:31:03.200
And unfortunately, a lot of Republicans are too.
00:31:07.620
some of the stupidest political commentary I'd heard in a long time.
00:31:12.980
Charlemagne the God is a left-wing broadcaster.
00:31:16.940
And he had this idea for Joe Biden, which is that, I mean,
00:31:20.680
politically it was actually probably a pretty smart idea.
00:31:22.660
As a matter of policy and the common good and the flourishing of America,
00:31:27.220
He says what Biden should do right now is just pardon every single person who is in prison
00:31:34.500
I thought it was incredibly disrespectful for Joe Biden to come out and say the sentence
00:31:40.920
that Brittany Griner received in Russia was unacceptable.
00:31:44.260
It's like, yo, we live in a country where right now, if Joe Biden wanted to,
00:31:52.200
He could literally pardon every single person that is federally jailed for a nonviolent weed offense.
00:32:02.740
It's motherfucking doing life in jail for an ounce and a half of marijuana right now.
00:32:06.880
My whole point is, man, when you live in a country where more than half of the country
00:32:10.260
has legalized weed in some way, shape, or form, whether it's for medicinal,
00:32:13.720
whether it's for recreational, to have people still locked up for marijuana in America is ridiculous.
00:32:19.060
If I'm Joe Biden, you need this for the midterms, bro.
00:32:24.040
I'm pardoning every single body that's locked up federally for a nonviolent marijuana offense.
00:32:30.540
So first of all, I think that's going to be the title of my next blank book.
00:32:34.480
That's my next magnum opus is everybody who's locked up in federal prison for a marijuana
00:32:46.360
I gave a long speech on this some months ago, six months, eight months ago, called America's
00:32:58.460
And usually, even the people who are on the books in federal prison for marijuana possession,
00:33:05.840
It's all people who were peddlers, who were pushing harder stuff, or who had more than just
00:33:12.760
And then they go to the clink for a little bit.
00:33:18.320
But second of all, for the people on the right, the Republicans and the conservatives who are
00:33:25.200
into legalizing the Haitian oregano and the California cumin and the Peruvian parsley and
00:33:29.900
all the rest of it, I just have to ask you a basic political question.
00:33:34.020
Do you think that that guy is right about politics?
00:33:41.180
Do you think that that pothead yes man that was sitting next to him on the podcast, do you
00:33:48.080
Do you think he's on the right side of politics?
00:33:50.240
Forget about pot for a second, just of all the political issues.
00:33:54.220
Do you think the people who are pushing to let the drug dealers out of prison and who are
00:33:59.060
pushing to legalize pot and put it in everybody's food, put it in, legalize it in cafes, and
00:34:09.180
you're probably going to end up with it in your breakfast cereal.
00:34:11.080
Do you think, forget pot for a second, that those guys who are really into legalizing pot,
00:34:16.640
where do they stand on abortion, on economic policy, on immigration, on marriage, on transgenderism,
00:34:28.620
on foreign policy, on every single political issue, where do they stand?
00:34:33.880
My guess is they are on the wrong side of every single political issue.
00:34:40.760
And yet, I know there is a group of right-wingers who, for some reason, have convinced themselves
00:34:50.780
Okay, don't let the wool be pulled over your eyes, my friends.
00:34:54.480
And speaking of us versus them kind of politics, before we get to the mailbag, I've got to
00:34:59.000
get to this clip, really shocking, came out from Project Veritas, a Connecticut public
00:35:03.160
schools assistant principal who was caught on camera discriminating against hiring Catholics
00:35:09.220
because he says that if you hire Catholics, then they're not going to indoctrinate the
00:35:12.460
kids well enough, and they're not going to churn out Democrat voters in the future.
00:35:15.200
I think one of the questions that we might start putting in is something about transgender
00:35:33.760
I don't think kids have enough knowledge to make decisions for something.
00:35:39.000
But if they're older, I'm not allowed to do that, but I can't tell them I'm not interviewing
00:35:49.860
you because you're older, I just don't interview them.
00:35:52.320
The times you're older you get, the more set in your ways, the more conservative you get.
00:35:56.360
It doesn't matter what they think about it, if they think about it in a logical, progressive
00:36:03.340
Like a, so you kind of like do it on to think in a more liberal way.
00:36:08.340
I believe the, I'm hoping the more progressive teachers are actually more savvy about delivering
00:36:16.200
a democratic message without really ever mentioning the politics.
00:36:22.200
We want people that are going to listen to the people, we listen to the people.
00:36:26.200
And then later down the line, you're going to vote Democrat, and you will have son and
00:36:46.680
If someone is a really well-formed Catholic, they're never going to go with the libs.
00:36:52.980
Too much Thomas Aquinas, that's not, they're not, so we can't hire them.
00:36:58.500
We'll ask them about transgenderism because they know, this is why the libs, one of the
00:37:02.080
reasons the libs focus so much on transgenderism, because it just tells you everything.
00:37:05.860
If you believe that men can secretly be women, you're a leftist.
00:37:09.500
If you don't believe that, you're one of the bad people, you might even be a Catholic, but
00:37:13.400
you're certainly, you're one of those bad conservatives, you're out.
00:37:16.120
If you're a little bit older, you might be more conservative.
00:37:19.260
We don't even need to mention explicit politics.
00:37:21.160
We are going to push this stuff on kids and churn out Democrat voters starting in kindergarten.
00:37:27.340
And you know, to this guy's, in this guy's defense, he's acknowledging one basic truth.
00:37:33.340
There is no neutrality here, especially in education.
00:37:37.000
They're either going to be trained in the conservative way or in the leftist way.
00:37:40.860
They're going to be trained in the atheist way or the Christian way or the Catholic way maybe.
00:37:49.380
And so, yeah, it's illegal for him to do what he's doing, to discriminate against Catholics
00:37:58.120
He's saying, we want a certain type of education, not another type of education.
00:38:02.160
That's, maybe conservatives need to start thinking that way too.
00:38:07.260
You know, the Adam Kinzinger's, the future former Congress lady, Liz Cheney, whose gelatinous
00:38:14.440
GOP spines, they just fall apart under the slightest pressure.
00:38:22.960
It's the kind of pressure, kind of behavior rather, that you would never dream of engaging
00:38:44.120
If you are still not shaving with a Jeremy's razor, if you are still using a razor made by
00:38:49.360
a company that says that you're toxic, you are, one, shaming yourself, and two, funding
00:38:55.920
the radical gender ideologues who wish that you would just disappear down a drain along
00:39:03.780
Switch to Jeremy's razors and get your Founder Series Shave Kit today.
00:39:12.840
Now, finally, we have gotten to my favorite time of the week when I get to hear from you
00:39:21.560
Enter promo code Knowles Podcast to get your second month for free.
00:39:30.440
I'm a 16-year-old high school student in Florida who is fortunate enough to be blessed
00:39:33.980
with the governorship of Ron DeSantis, but putting that aside, I'm taking an AP Environmental
00:39:37.840
Studies class this year, and I'm doing that for the purpose of getting my GPA up and my
00:39:43.780
But the consequence of taking an AP Environmental class is I fundamentally disagree with a lot
00:39:49.980
of the stuff the teacher says about stuff like global warming and climate change and
00:39:52.980
et cetera, and I don't want to just debate teacher class or anything or sacrifice my grades,
00:39:58.720
but I also don't want to just sit idly by as I hear what I fundamentally disagree with.
00:40:03.940
So what do you think I should do in this situation?
00:40:06.600
Really great question, and I love that little caveat.
00:40:08.860
You said, look, I'm not there to debate the teacher.
00:40:12.160
You're actually not there to debate the teacher.
00:40:15.240
When you sign up for a course, you are there to learn something.
00:40:25.380
You can learn things from very ignorant people.
00:40:28.200
You can learn something from just about anybody.
00:40:41.000
When the teacher starts spouting nonsense, okay, you're not going to learn much from
00:40:48.380
Now, if the teacher calls on you, says, what do you think about this, or asks you to write
00:40:53.140
a paper, or starts interrogating you in class, then, and this is important, then you speak
00:41:02.160
I am not of the opinion that you should lie or hide your views or pretend to be a different
00:41:07.620
person just to get a decent grade in the AP course.
00:41:12.280
And then, well, then you'll have to hide your views and lie about them and squish too.
00:41:16.100
But then the only reason you'll do that is because then you'll get a good job.
00:41:18.960
And then when you get a good job, that's when you'll, oh, well, you'll probably have to squish.
00:41:22.500
I mean, you're going to be a first year at your new job.
00:41:24.700
And so you're not going to want to offend the upper management.
00:41:28.180
Once you move up, maybe you're in middle management.
00:41:30.620
Then you can, well, you're going to have to squish too.
00:41:32.400
It's not your job to have opinions, you know, and you don't want to contradict the bosses,
00:41:37.160
Maybe someday you'll become the CEO of the company.
00:41:40.260
And then you're going to, well, you probably can't say your opinion then either.
00:41:43.300
By golly, you have responsibilities maybe to your shareholders, maybe to your investors.
00:41:50.460
And then you'll have never had integrity at all.
00:41:56.180
But you need to be wise as a serpent, innocent as a dove.
00:41:59.640
You need to express your views and stand by your views.
00:42:04.320
But you don't need to be flamboyant about it, okay?
00:42:06.180
You don't need to wear the MAGA hat to AP Environmental Studies class every single day.
00:42:20.240
I've been acting in theater for about eight years now, and I've recently secured an agent
00:42:28.140
However, I have some concerns about the increasingly profane, obscene, and sexual content that you
00:42:35.360
see in TV and movies these days, and that I may be expected to do or say things for the
00:42:41.100
camera or on stage that directly contradict my morals.
00:42:44.740
So I was wondering if there is any gray area regarding what you do as an actor, morally
00:42:51.320
Because since I'm only pretending, is it possible to do or say sinful things while remaining
00:42:58.080
Because my heart is in the right place, and my intention is merely to entertain the audience.
00:43:05.780
Basically, my question is, Jim Caviezel or Mark Wahlberg?
00:43:10.120
This is such a good question, and I was just discussing this last night with the Clavins,
00:43:18.040
And Spencer and I, we probably met for the very first time when we were doing plays and
00:43:25.040
So we've been thinking about this question for a long time.
00:43:28.080
And I think it's like the IQ bell curve meme, okay?
00:43:32.900
At the really dumb, stupid, idiot, drooling end of the spectrum, the guy's going to say,
00:43:37.460
duh, I don't know, actors are kind of liars, and they're doing bad stuff, and that's bad,
00:43:42.400
And then you get into the middle of the IQ bell curve meme, and they say, no, actually,
00:43:45.840
when you're acting a role, it's completely divorced from your own person, and you have
00:43:49.260
no culpability whatsoever for the things you're thinking and doing.
00:43:53.500
And then at the highest end of the IQ bell curve meme, I think you go back to the drooling
00:43:57.860
guy, and I think you say, no, actually, actors are kind of, you know, there's a reason
00:44:00.980
they weren't allowed in restaurants for a lot of history.
00:44:04.040
There's a reason they were lumped together with criminals and prostitutes for most of
00:44:07.800
And there's a reason that the church took a pretty hard line against acting as a profession
00:44:12.500
and the theater broadly for, you know, roughly 1,400 to 1,600 years, because it is a complicated
00:44:24.280
When you are a writer and you write a story about, I don't know, a rape and a murder and
00:44:32.600
terrorism and a serial killer, your mind is wandering in certain places.
00:44:40.320
You're sometimes indulging kind of disordered thoughts and even desires.
00:44:47.720
When you are attending a play or watching a movie, you are allowing yourself to indulge
00:44:56.080
certain desires and things that could be disordered and not great for your soul.
00:45:03.740
When you are acting uniquely, when you are acting, you are putting all of this into your
00:45:11.460
And because we're incarnate creatures, that affects us.
00:45:14.960
This is especially true after what is colloquially referred to as method acting comes about,
00:45:26.660
You have the kind of psychological revolution of the late 19th century and early 20th century.
00:45:33.100
Then in Russia, you have the Stanislavski system, which is the first kind of method acting,
00:45:37.700
where Stanislavski, the director of the Moscow Art Theater, says, we're no longer going to
00:45:42.120
have representational, stilted acting, where you're basically like a glorified mime.
00:45:46.200
No, you're going to develop the inner life of your character, and you're going to live
00:45:51.800
Out of that, then in New York, you get the group theater.
00:45:54.540
The group theater is people like Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Uda Hagen,
00:46:01.820
And they're all a bunch of communists, and they're all really into this stuff where your
00:46:05.940
inner life, it's all coming from the subconscious.
00:46:12.100
Lee Strasberg, one of the great acting teachers in New York, won't name him, but he referred
00:46:20.580
And a lot of it, when people really get into the method, or any of this, the Meisner technique
00:46:26.700
or the Adler technique, sometimes it really can mess you up.
00:46:33.580
And it really can warp your soul and your body.
00:46:37.780
So I'm not going to give you the easy answer of, hey, don't worry about it.
00:46:44.020
No, you have to be very careful about it, because it is your mind, and it is your soul,
00:46:53.100
I think that too often, the left gains ground by defining the parameters by which conservatives
00:47:00.080
One of those areas is the area of sexual orientation.
00:47:05.060
The terms homosexual and heterosexual were once used exclusively as adjectives to describe
00:47:13.180
But the left, I think, has turned them into nouns.
00:47:17.020
Now somebody can utter the sentence, I am a homosexual, and nobody blinks twice.
00:47:21.880
I believe this to be a purely ideological phenomenon that was aided by the medical community.
00:47:26.580
I don't believe there is such a thing as, quote-unquote, being straight or being gay.
00:47:32.620
I just believe there are beneficial preferences, which are to be pursued, and harmful preferences,
00:47:39.160
This dichotomy can be seen in every category of possible human desire, such as food, clothes,
00:47:45.040
music, etc., but none of these has anything to do with identity.
00:47:49.080
My question is, do you think it's time conservatives abandoned the idea that sexual preference has
00:48:02.620
Yes, really, really excellent, incisive question.
00:48:06.980
And you're absolutely right, except a little bit at the end.
00:48:10.440
Because sexual preference can have something to do with identity if you make it your identity.
00:48:16.100
Just like race can have a whole lot to do with your identity if you make it your identity.
00:48:21.500
Just like, I don't know, some interest that you have, some hobby.
00:48:28.660
That can be your identity if you make it your identity.
00:48:31.640
But when you place your identity in small, particular, contingent, sort of often material things,
00:48:41.520
You will not flourish because our identity has to be grounded in God in order for it to achieve its fullest expression.
00:49:03.920
And so when we have our identity in I am who I am, we know who we are.
00:49:09.420
When we put our identity anywhere else, we don't know who we are.
00:49:12.420
We're left with a sort of silly, pathetic question.
00:49:19.600
We're all obsessed with the sexual identity stuff.
00:49:21.800
But you're absolutely right when you say these things.
00:49:25.300
In all categories of human desire, there are better and worse things to pursue.
00:49:30.520
And so if you ground your identity in God and objective moral order,
00:49:35.240
And you won't be left with like a 13-year-old girl just saying like,
00:49:42.540
visco kind of, you know, pansexual, whatever, you know, I don't know.
00:49:49.280
But you won't be left with that kind of silly, shallow understanding of identity.
00:49:57.360
One time I heard, I was mentioning to a friend of mine
00:50:00.160
that a conservative friend of ours used all these stupid political monikers.
00:50:06.500
It's the right-wing version of gender pronouns.
00:50:08.540
You know, I am a minarchistic, libertarian, anarcho, traditional, syndicalist,
00:50:24.740
I just saw a PragerU poll that asks who you would save, your dog or a stranger.
00:50:30.820
60% of the 30,000 respondents said they would save their dog.
00:50:35.480
Is there a single greater indicator of a sick and dying society?
00:50:42.680
And the reason they would save their dogs, by the way,
00:50:45.400
is not even because they just necessarily hate people.
00:50:48.340
It's because they think their dogs are their kids.
00:50:54.500
They treat dogs as kids because people don't really have kids anymore.
00:50:58.240
And people are not even comfortable not having kids.
00:51:00.620
And they often don't have the strength and confidence and encouragement
00:51:03.920
to pursue that life, which can be very difficult
00:51:06.520
because they're not grounding their identity in anything
00:51:10.800
beyond just sort of fleeting pleasure and an eternal present.
00:51:15.440
So, yeah, they would save their dogs over the drowning person
00:51:27.280
And it's a sick society that thinks that dogs are kids.
00:51:30.520
Okay, one question that is written before we get into the member block.
00:51:35.020
We had a lot of fun stuff in the member block today.
00:51:40.120
I like to do the extended mailbag in the member block
00:51:42.140
because I only get to one old-school written-out question
00:51:50.180
Michael, been marinating on your discussion about dating apps last week
00:51:53.460
regarding Kayleigh McEnany's sister launching a dating app for conservatives.
00:51:57.120
It's a good start, but we need to stop treating singles like little islands.
00:52:01.700
I suggest we take it a step further and launch the Yenta app,
00:52:05.800
Fiddler on the Roof, where families do their job and connect loved ones.
00:52:09.080
We as individuals are not the best at understanding what we need comprehensively.
00:52:17.880
Yeah, I think it's good to have family and close friends be involved in this kind of thing.
00:52:23.100
There was that story that just came out about how young people aren't having drinks
00:52:28.640
on their first dates anymore, and one of the explanations for this
00:52:33.300
They don't want the random stranger that they're meeting up with
00:52:39.080
And now there are all of these completely misaligned expectations
00:52:45.900
and what are you going to do after the first date,
00:52:49.440
And so now people are so on guard that they go,
00:52:54.020
you know, you meet and you enjoy someone's company,
00:52:56.220
now you're on guard because you don't want them to rape you
00:53:02.440
because we have no idea who these people are now,
00:53:04.080
because we're just swiping them like commodities on our phones,
00:53:07.420
on our little portals to hell, instead of a situation where you say,
00:53:11.160
oh yeah, John, yeah, John was roommates with Billy,
00:53:16.720
And so we know, we know all these people for many years.
00:53:19.600
Oh, it's my cousin's co-worker who he's known for this.
00:53:22.420
And when you have a much more tightly knit social group,
00:53:29.240
It also makes society function a lot better as well.
00:53:31.560
Okay, the rest of the show is continuing right now,