Ep. 1145 - The Trump V DeSantis Fight Heats Up
Summary
A new poll shows Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ahead of President Trump in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. But is this a good or bad thing? And what does it mean for the future of the country?
Transcript
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A new poll out from USA Today and Suffolk University shows Florida Governor Ron DeSantis
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ahead of President Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination. And he is not just up a little bit.
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The poll shows him up 23 points on the former president in a hypothetical matchup. That's 56
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to 23. Now, I am as skeptical of polls as anybody. I think that most of them are made up and
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statistics are totally fake. But there are enough indicators at this point to show that Ron DeSantis
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poses a serious threat to Donald Trump's perceived hegemony over the GOP. Trump obviously thinks so.
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That's why he's been attacking DeSantis. And he started up real attacks just before the midterms.
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And DeSantis has managed to achieve this status in a few different ways. One, he's in office while
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Trump is out of office. So he can do things. President Trump can't really do things right now
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because he's in Mar-a-Lago. Two, DeSantis is on social media. Trump is not on social media. All
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he's on is the truth platform that people don't really go to other than to find his statements.
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But there is a third distinction that not that many people are talking about,
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but that DeSantis is clearly hoping to ride all the way to taking Trump's place.
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President Trump is the candidate of the COVID vaccine. And Ron DeSantis wants to make sure
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that you know that he is not. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment yesterday is from Micah Shobi, who says,
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tweeted, SBF didn't kill himself right after I heard the story. I know. It's really, really sad
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that those cameras outside of SBF's jail cell are about to malfunction. And the security guards
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that were supposed to watch him are just, they're going to accidentally take a nap. And SBF, you know,
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he's really been depressed ever since that whole FTX exchange collapsed. I mean, he probably would be,
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you know, if you lost $16 billion and your weird hedge fund sex cult in one day, you probably,
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legitimately would be pretty depressed. So too bad. Too bad that he looks like he might get the Epstein
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treatment. Another financial guru and sexual deviant, apparently, who was living down in the
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Caribbean. Amazing. History repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. It's kind of farce both
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ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. This is the key that a lot of people don't talk about with
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DeSantis. And I'm not saying, I am not saying that Trump deserves all of the criticism about
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COVID and that Ron DeSantis is absolutely 100% clean on the COVID issue. That's not exactly what
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I'm saying. What I am saying is in the public perception, with good reason, I think, Trump is
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seen as the guy who gave Fauci a platform, who promoted the vaccine that seems to have some
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problems with it. Again, I don't know that any other politician in Trump's place would have done
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anything any differently or would have performed any better. I'm just saying that's what happened
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when Trump was in office. And Ron DeSantis, although he was a little bit cautious about COVID at first,
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he reopened Florida really, really quickly. And he has been ever more so anti-COVID, anti-public
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health establishment, even anti-vaccine. So DeSantis, who made the vaccines available to people
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who wanted it in Florida, but did not want to mandate the vaccine, he is now impaneling a grand
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jury to look into the abuses from the vaccine manufacturers. Florida, you know, it is against
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the law to mislead and to misrepresent, particularly when you're talking about the efficacy of a drug.
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We see just the other, just recently, Florida got $3.2 billion through legal action against those
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responsible for the opioid crisis. And so it's not like this is something that's unprecedented. So
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today, I'm announcing a petition with the Supreme Court of Florida to impanel a statewide grand jury
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to investigate any and all wrongdoing in Florida with respect to COVID-19 vaccines. And we anticipate
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that we will get the approval for that. That will be something that will be impaneled, most likely in
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the Tampa Bay area. And that will come with legal processes that will be able to get more information
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and to bring legal accountability for those who committed misconduct.
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Ron DeSantis is a smart, smart guy. I think this is the right thing to do. So I applaud him for doing it.
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But it's also politically probably the single smartest thing that Ron DeSantis can do.
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Because Donald Trump's biggest weakness in a GOP primary is not actually his mouth. Oh,
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he says mean things. No, people actually kind of get a kick out of that. It's not his Twitter. He's
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not on Twitter. Well, he's on Twitter. He's just not using it now, even after Elon Musk took over.
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It's COVID. That's the weakness. That's the way that Ron DeSantis can position himself to the right
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of Donald Trump. That's the way that Ron DeSantis can counter the claims that he's a squish and a
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moderate and a never Trump candidate and all of the criticisms that are going to come along with him
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by virtue of his place in the race and as the candidate who isn't Donald Trump and by virtue of
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the people that DeSantis is attracting, the never Trumpers, the liberals and the squishes. And he's
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attracting those people and through no fault of his own because he's not Donald Trump. And so he's
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got to figure out a way to tell the conservatives and the base, no, I'm with you. I'm a conservative
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guy. The COVID vaccine issue, the fact that we were lied to about safety of the vaccine,
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we were lied to about the efficacy of the vaccine, we were forced in most of the country to take the
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vaccine. If he can really go after the people who peddled the vaccine, that's going to go a long
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way for DeSantis. Speaking of those people, our old pal, Dr. Fauci is back in the news. Dr. Fauci
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appeared on Chris Wallace's CNN show. You didn't catch it? I'm not surprised. Nobody did. I assume
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many more people will see this clip on my show than saw it on Chris Wallace's show on CNN. But in that
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show, Dr. Fauci explained how difficult it was to work for President Trump because Trump was just such
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an irresponsible purveyor of medical misinformation. What do you think of Donald Trump?
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Well, I don't want to get into the politics of it. So it is irrelevant what I think of Donald Trump.
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But what do you think of him from a public health standpoint? Well, as you know, I had difficulty in
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that administration because what was happening is that it became very clear that things were being
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said by the president, those around him, which were just not based on any scientific fact and data. In
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fact, it was contrary to what the data was showing. And I, you know, I felt very uncomfortable about having
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to publicly get up at the White House press room and being put on the spot to directly disagree
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with the president. I have such a great deal of respect for the office of pregnant presidency that
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it just made me very uncomfortable. But I had to do it, Chris, because I couldn't stand there
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and be complicit in saying hydroxychloroquine works when it doesn't. You know, bleach works. It doesn't.
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And that's how I evolved essentially in the, you know, public enemy number one of the far right.
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That's all it is. I heard the president say that we should use bleach to get rid of COVID-19. And I
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couldn't stand there and allow that to happen. So I'm just a reasonable guy. Except, except.
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That never happened. That never happened. I know that most people, the liberals in this country,
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certainly, and even many conservatives, believe that Donald Trump once said that we should treat
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COVID-19 with bleach. That did not happen. That was just completely made up. It's a lie
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made up by the media and promoted by Dr. Fauci. Here is what Donald Trump said.
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Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light.
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And I think you said that hasn't been checked, but you're going to test it.
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And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through
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the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you're going to test that too. Sounds
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interesting. Right. And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute,
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one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or, or almost a
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cleaning? Because you see, it gets on the lungs and it does a tremendous number of the lungs. So
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it'd be interesting to check that so that you're going to have to use medical doctors with, but it
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sounds, it sounds interesting to me. The new headline is Trump asked people to go outside. That's dangerous.
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Here we go. Same old group. Here we go. Same old group. Where in there did Donald Trump talk about
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bleach? Donald Trump said that there's a way to use light to treat these viruses and that you can do
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it by injection or, and you can tell that he's sort of stumbling around for, for what he means by the
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injection. But he, he comes back to then the light, you know, I'm telling people to go outside. I'm
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suggesting this UV light kind of treatment. He never says the word bleach. Even when he's talking
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about a disinfectant, he's not necessarily, I don't even know why you would jump to
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think that he's talking about bleach. First of all, people always say light is a great
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disinfectant, right? That's why that's an idiom in our culture. He's talking about all these
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different ways to treat COVID that were backed up by studies. When we're talking about the light
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and inject, you can inject it sort of, it's not that you exactly inject light, but you can direct
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light down into your lungs to treat cancers, to treat viruses. I mean, there's, in fact, you can use
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it to treat COVID. There was a study just came out, it was published here on Cedars-Sinai
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research showing that reduced viral loads are seen in COVID-19 patients treated with UVA light,
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doing exactly what Donald Trump said. Long after Donald Trump said it, this was published in 2021.
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In fact, even PolitiFact admits that when Joe Biden says Donald Trump told people to drink bleach and
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that would make them safe from COVID, that they admit that's mostly false. They said that's not what
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Donald Trump was talking about. Donald Trump was, did not explicitly recommend ingesting a
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disinfectant like bleach, of course. And then they go and they admit what Donald Trump said
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right there. That's PolitiFact. That's a left-wing organization. The whole thing was just completely
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made up. Donald Trump was advocating a very reasonable medical intervention that actually
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turned out to work very, very well, even as Cedars-Sinai admitted. He had never used the word
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bleach, not even once. He wasn't referring to that. It was a total lie from the media that Dr. Fauci
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today is still peddling. And he wonders why we don't believe him. The reason I bring up that whole
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story, one, is because whenever Dr. Fauci's in the news, it's a good opportunity to do my Dr. Fauci
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voice. I miss him, don't you? No, I don't really miss him. But two, it's got to get you thinking
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about other news stories. And it's got to get you thinking about other genius experts in the lab
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coats with the neckties. If they can make you believe, not even just make the liberals believe,
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if they can make you a conservative sort of kind of believe that Donald Trump talked about injecting
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bleach to treat COVID, they can get you to believe pretty much anything. That had no basis in reality.
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And even I suspect most conservatives believed that was true. Remember when there was that line back in
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2008, where the media said, Sarah Palin thinks that she can see Russia from her house. That was
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made up. It was a joke. It was a joke from Saturday Night Live. And people attributed it
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to Sarah Palin. If they can get you to believe, if they can get, I'm not putting the emphasis here on
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what they can get you to believe. I'm saying if they can get you to believe it, think about the sort
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of trance that the rest of the country is in because of the lives of these very powerful actors.
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Don't forget to tell them Michael sent you. Everybody's blaming Trump. It's Trump's fault for
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everything. Mitch McConnell was just asked about why the Republicans did so poorly in the midterms.
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Now that not only is election day over, but the special election, the runoff in Georgia is over.
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We ended up having a candidate quality time. Anybody remember who mentioned that back in
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August? Look at Arizona. Look at New Hampshire and the challenging situation in Georgia as well.
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We did, by we, I mean the Senate Leadership Fund, did intervene in two primaries in Alabama and in
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Missouri. And I do think we had an opportunity to relearn one more time. You have to have quality
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candidates to win competitive center races. We went through this in 2010, 2012. Christine O'Donnell,
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Sharon Angle, Todd Aiken, Richard Murdoch, and unfortunately revisited that situation in 2022.
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Our ability to control the primary outcome was quite limited in 2022 because of the support of the
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former president proved to be very decisive in these primaries. Did you catch that? No, not the blaming
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Trump. No, not the candidate quality thing, which to me is quite overstated. In a year where John
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Federman was sent to the U.S. Senate, I don't really want to hear about candidate quality. I think
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there were probably some other issues at play. They ran a man who couldn't speak and didn't show
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up on the campaign trail and had a radical insane record and wanted to shut down fracking in an
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important Rust Belt state and who wanted to let the murderers out of prison as his first priority.
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So I don't want to hear about candidate quality. Okay, I think that's really overstated.
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But that's not the part I'm directing your attention to. Did you hear the part
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where Cocaine Mitch said that he had a little bit of trouble controlling the primary outcomes?
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I thought the whole purpose of the primary was so that the people have their voice heard
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and they pick their nominee and then the nominee goes on and faces the Democrat.
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Who is controlling the primary outcomes? He says, we're out of a little bit of trouble
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controlling the primary outcomes because of the presence of the horrible president in the race.
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So it's Trump's fault because he backed some of the wrong candidates and he did not allow
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the GOP leadership to pick the primary outcomes. But the GOP, the Republicans are supposed to be
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largely hands-off in the primaries. You're supposed to let the Republicans at the local level decide
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this sort of thing. That's not how it works. That's not how it works at all.
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They want to control the primaries. They don't want conservatives really to have a choice.
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And Mitch McConnell says, logo, we want to control that so that we have good candidates who can be
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the Democrats. Yeah, fine. I get it. I want good candidates too. But I don't want just some squish.
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I don't want to send some Democrat to Washington with a red tie on. And I'm not convinced. I'm not
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convinced for one second that candidate quality is the reason that the races didn't turn out well
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in Arizona, which was bedeviled by election shenanigans. I'm not convinced that election or
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candidate quality rather was totally the problem elsewhere in the country either. We need to control
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the party. Okay. Well, speaking of control, the conservatives now are trying to take back a
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little bit of control, at least in the House. Kevin McCarthy is a moderate sort of establishment type
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in House leadership. He probably will be the Speaker of the House of Representatives. But he is facing
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a challenge. The challenge will come from Andy Biggs, a Republican congressman from Arizona. He is
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running against Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy won the Republican nomination to become Speaker. So they've
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already had that. He beat Biggs by a vote of 188 to 31. Biggs, though, says that he is going to run
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anyway in the main race. So it could be very, very interesting to see, because the Republicans will have
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a razor-thin majority. It will be interesting to see if Biggs' presence will upset the numbers enough
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that, who knows, you could have maybe a Democrat coming together with some Republicans to try to win
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the Speakership. It remains to be seen. But the reason Biggs is doing this, Biggs runs the House
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Freedom Caucus, is he says that McCarthy's leadership as Speaker of the House would entrench
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the establishment uniparty in Congress, the sense that the Republicans don't really
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do very much at all. Maybe they yell and they scream and they make a big noise about what they're
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doing. But when push comes to shove, the really crucial matter is they squish. That remains to
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be seen if Biggs can convince enough people to come on over to that side. But you are seeing right
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now, I think this is what a lot of the anti-Trump rhetoric is about. The establishment squishy
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lib side of the GOP was cast into the outer darkness in 2016. And they were furious and they hated that
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Trump was the nominee and they hated that he won the presidency in some cases. And they were just so,
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so angry to be out of power. And they now see this as their opportunity finally to get rid of Trump.
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And so DeSantis is looking great right now. And that might be the end of the story. The end of the
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story might be that Trump had his moment and now he's going to fade away and younger politicians are
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going to rise up in the form of Ron DeSantis or somebody else. That could be the end of the story.
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But I suspect a lot of the lingering support for Donald Trump, and I feel it within myself,
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a lot of it is because all the right people hate Trump. And so it's not really even about
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this policy or that policy, or this politician was better on this issue, or this guy was,
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it's not, it's just, it's just this gut sense, which I think is justifiable that all the right
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people hate Donald Trump and all the right people love Trump's opponents or willing to support
00:21:14.480
Trump's opponents. And that, that does tell you something, whether that is enough to push Trump
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over the edge, not so sure. But it does tell you something about what Trump represents in American
00:21:25.860
politics. People are, are trying to take things into their own hands and throw off the settled,
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established political establishment. Speaking of taking things into one's own hands,
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amazing story. Just saw it today. A Nevada woman was attending a party. She and a friend pull up
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outside the house that this party is going to take place at. I guess they got there a little bit
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early. So they're sitting in the car and as they're waiting, two men with guns come up and throw them
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out of the car and, and try to steal the car. It's, it's a carjacking. So one of the men grabs this
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lady's shirt, pulls her out of the car, gets into the car and he puts his gun down on his lap. I guess
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while he's starting the car, putting it into gear. While he does that, the woman takes the gun and
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runs off with it. At this point, the man trying to steal the car starts running after her, tackles
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her, at which point she puts a bullet in his head and the man stops attacking her because he doesn't
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have a head anymore. And I read this story and a lot of people read that. They say, oh, it's always nice
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when stories have a happy ending. And this does have a relatively happy ending in the sense that
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the innocent party was not killed. There was justice done. The woman defended herself and it's
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not even like she ran away and then took aim and fired at him. He was continuing to attack her. So
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she was totally justified, obviously, but it's always sad. Crime is sad. I feel sorry for criminals
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in the way I feel sorry for a sick person is it's just, they're just not doing the right thing and
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they're harming others and themselves and their own immortal souls. But the reason the story
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struck me is, why did this guy chase the woman? This guy was lucky to get away with his life.
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She ran away. He could have just taken the car. But no, he got out and chased her to get his gun back
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and then tackled her. She's got a gun. He thinks she just doesn't know how to use a gun and then his
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head gets blown off because the woman's got a gun. Why? This guy must have felt so confident that
00:23:26.060
nobody would stop him from doing bad things. And this is what happens when the political order spirals
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out of control. Much of politics is about managing social expectations. The Second Amendment exists
00:23:41.180
not because of some high-minded philosophy from the Enlightenment in America, not because people want
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to go hunting or something like that. Not because, that's not the primary purpose or political effect
00:23:58.520
of the Second Amendment. The primary purpose and political effect of the Second Amendment is to keep
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people polite. To keep the government polite and to keep your neighbors polite and to keep you polite.
00:24:08.960
Because if you are walking around in a country where people can defend themselves, you're going to be
00:24:14.180
less inclined to try to take advantage of people. Okay, if you're walking around in a country where there's
00:24:19.020
strong law and order, you're going to be less inclined to commit crimes because you know you're
00:24:22.000
going to get caught and you're going to pay the price. And what has happened is as our political
00:24:25.720
order has unraveled, you've seen a complete resetting of people's expectations. And that is
00:24:32.400
tragic for everybody. It's tragic for victims. It's tragic for the criminals too. Because these criminals
00:24:37.640
are emboldened to engage in this risky, insane sort of behavior. And the end of that is going to be
00:24:42.420
them getting their heads blown off in a lot of cases. The end of that is going to be our society
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getting its head blown off if we don't get serious again. Okay, so call your friends,
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right now. Promo code Knowles, 50% off your first month at puretalk.com. Speaking of firearms,
00:26:06.340
there was a major bomb at movie theaters over the weekend. This would be a movie called To the
00:26:12.140
End. It is a documentary about climate change featuring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This movie
00:26:21.040
opened in 120 theaters. Do you know how much money the movie brought in? The movie, I've never seen
00:26:30.280
numbers like this before. I've been in Hollywood. I've worked in the media for a long time. 120
00:26:35.880
theaters had the movie. The movie brought in $9,667. That is no money. It brought in statistically
00:26:50.880
zero money. This was directed by a woman named Rachel Lears. Rachel Lears' previous movie was on
00:26:58.400
Netflix. It's called Knock Down the House. It also featured AOC. The way you knew this movie was a
00:27:04.680
real doozy is if you go to Rotten Tomatoes to look at that movie, her previous movie had a critic score
00:27:10.100
of 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and an audience score of 11%. So especially if you're talking about political
00:27:21.200
content, when a movie has a high critic score, that's usually a bad sign. When a movie has a low
00:27:26.140
audience score, that's usually a bad sign. And when the delta between the critics and the audience score
00:27:30.460
is very, very great, you know that you have got just a primo piece of Democrat propaganda.
00:27:35.820
So for this movie, the climate change movie, to the end, the critic score is 83%. So it's much lower
00:27:42.080
than her previous AOC movie. And as I chose you, man, even the critics couldn't totally get behind
00:27:46.600
this one. And there is no audience score because no one saw it. So there aren't enough people reviews,
00:27:54.380
audience reviews, to figure that out. There's no appetite for this stuff, which is very encouraging.
00:28:00.460
Because if you just read the New York Times and watched CNN and listened to your teachers
00:28:04.300
in your liberal schools and listened to the government, you would believe that people were
00:28:10.940
truly on the edge of their seats, waiting for the nuclear, well, not nuclear, I guess,
00:28:17.860
solar apocalypse, waiting for the environmental disaster. The world's going to end in five years,
00:28:23.080
but no one cares. No one believes it. Nobody cares. It is contrived. It is a lie that we are being
00:28:29.920
told. It's a bill of goods that we are being told. I'm not even saying it's a bill of goods
00:28:34.000
about the environment stuff. I mean, I don't even know what the story is about the environment.
00:28:37.700
They said that the world was cooling and we were headed for an ice age and all the top scientists
00:28:41.780
said it and all the media said it. And they said it was warming and we're going to all go extinct
00:28:46.080
really soon. And then they said, it's just kind of doing stuff. It's just, it's changing.
00:28:51.260
That's going to kill us. And they keep pushing forward the date of when the world is going to end.
00:28:55.020
And so I don't even know what the thesis is, but the bill of goods that they are selling us
00:28:59.500
is that this is a top issue. This is not a top issue for anybody. Nobody actually cares. Don't be
00:29:07.180
put in that trance, okay? They can convince you, you who watched the clip of Donald Trump,
00:29:12.660
you watched him not tell people to inject themselves with bleach. And they convinced you
00:29:17.620
that he told you to inject yourself with bleach. They put you in a trance. It's a form of hypnosis.
00:29:23.820
Do not let them do that on these other issues. Do not let them do that on climate change
00:29:28.000
or anything else. It's a real, it's a real art, this art of deception. Speaking of the art of
00:29:35.380
deception, it's going to be one of my best transitions ever. Daily Wire is just breaking
00:29:40.240
some news now. We've had an investigator, investigative reporter, Bree Dale on this story
00:29:45.840
for a while now. And it's a really quirky, strange story. One attorney is describing the story
00:29:53.020
is a high-tech heist. And the broad strokes, I encourage you to go to dailywire.com and read
00:29:58.080
the story. The broad strokes of it are that people are stealing, they seem to be stealing
00:30:04.960
the priceless art from the Vatican without taking the physical art. They're doing it,
00:30:10.880
it would seem, through these corrupt kind of licensing deals such that, here's how I'll explain it.
00:30:19.460
If I were to put a book together of all that beautiful art that's owned by the Vatican right
00:30:23.820
now, I would have to license the art from the Vatican or from some intermediary company
00:30:29.980
between me and the Vatican. So there was a company that wanted to print some photos of the Vatican art.
00:30:37.300
They go and they see that the Vatican art was listed in this book. And so they contracted this
00:30:44.960
company that put out the book. It was called Scripta Moneant. And said, oh, okay, how do we
00:30:50.400
get the rights to these pictures? And they said, okay, well, you've got to do it with this collaboration
00:30:54.740
that we've got with the Vatican Museum's director, Monsignor Paolo Nicolini. And so Scripta said,
00:31:00.640
here, don't worry, here's how we'll take care of it. Just send us $550,000 and then send a cash
00:31:08.120
wire in the amount of $82,500 cash wire. And then we'll be able to get you this art.
00:31:15.660
Now, what our reporters seem to uncover is that some of this money looked like it was going directly
00:31:22.720
to the Monsignor. Well, that's kind of weird. And the Vatican didn't seem to know that this was being
00:31:29.300
licensed out. And so anyway, it's a whole convoluted story. Give it a read. I find this sort of thing
00:31:33.140
very, very fascinating because something somewhere here doesn't make a lot of sense. It would seem to
00:31:39.120
be some kind of financial corruption somewhere or gross incompetence. But people are making
00:31:46.500
hundreds and thousands of dollars, probably millions of dollars off of art that is owned
00:31:52.160
by the Vatican. And the Vatican doesn't really seem to be getting that money. It doesn't really seem to
00:31:57.540
care that it's not. And it just, the reason I bring up that story other than it's kind of an
00:32:02.500
interesting investigative piece that Daily Wire uncovered, is to show you how the corruption
00:32:08.760
works. Corruption, use the Catholic Church as an example. The Catholic Church scandals in recent years.
00:32:19.140
What are the scandals? It's the sex scandals, of course. And they're very scandalous. There's no
00:32:23.720
doubt about that. But when you look into the actual abuse that the Catholic Church and members of
00:32:32.440
the clergy engaged in, you will notice that the Catholic sex abuse scandal is no worse,
00:32:39.280
no more widespread in terms of its numbers than sex abuse among any other religious group.
00:32:48.880
And so you remember the Southern Baptist Convention had a big one just a few years ago,
00:32:52.420
big sex abuse scandal. There have been sex abuse scandals in the Hasidic community. There have been
00:32:57.020
just in every religious group through these scandals. Furthermore, sex abuse in the Catholic Church is
00:33:03.720
much less prevalent than sex abuse in public schools. So these edgy atheists and leftists and
00:33:11.240
secularists, they always want to make snickering jokes about those pedo priests, those little child
00:33:17.200
diddling priests. Well, okay, if you're going to make those jokes, you should make those jokes much more
00:33:23.460
frequently about public school teachers. People will be very offended. They'll say, that's a horrible
00:33:28.980
thing. There's another plenty of great public school teachers, plenty of great priests, the vast majority
00:33:33.220
of them. It doesn't downplay the abuse. People really have been abused by priests and teachers and
00:33:38.000
everything. But it's just so, that's what people focus on, right? The much more widespread sorts of
00:33:44.920
corruption. These subtle little things. A guy maybe paid off this guy and it was some cash under the
00:33:50.780
table and you better, there was a trend I noticed in recent years of whenever anyone started to look
00:33:58.160
into the Vatican Bank and some of the corruption that was going on at the Vatican Bank, those people
00:34:03.480
would always find themselves on the outs. Maybe they'd get accused of sex abuse, maybe they'd be
00:34:06.880
accused of something else, but it was very hard to look into the corruption at the Vatican Bank.
00:34:11.720
That's the kind of subtle corruption that you see. Here's a great example of this.
00:34:17.320
The New York Times. We know the New York Times is corrupt. We know the press is corrupt. But they're
00:34:21.460
not just corrupt on the big ticket sensationalist top headline items. It's all the little stuff.
00:34:27.300
New York Times just ran a piece on the most stylish people in the country. And do you know who made the
00:34:33.300
list? John Fetterman. John Fetterman, the senator elect from Pennsylvania, this man who is not, I don't
00:34:43.820
want to be mean and sort of make fun of his appearance, but he's, you know, he's a, he's kind
00:34:49.020
of a big, he's an interesting looking guy. And when we talk about his style, the man, you know,
00:34:56.060
he's not a Gucci model. Okay. The guy wears big oversized hoodies and gym shorts and he's generally
00:35:03.900
kind of unkempt and he can wear running shoes and he's not, he's not Marcello Mastroianni. Okay.
00:35:11.840
So why did the New York Times say that he's an icon of style? Do you think he's very stylish? No.
00:35:16.720
Does the New York Times think he's stylish? No. Does John Fetterman think that he's stylish? No.
00:35:22.380
Nobody does. That's why. They are dead set on telling you that John Fetterman is stylish because
00:35:36.380
they are dead set on transgressing and subverting everything that you believe, everything that you
00:35:41.860
know to be true. It's a power play. If they can tell you, this is the end of 1984. I know it's an
00:35:47.640
overused example, but too bad. If they can tell you to say that two plus two equals five and they
00:35:53.280
can make you say that and they can make you even believe that in some cases, then they have total
00:35:58.880
power over you. They're not listing John Fetterman in their stylish collection of people despite his
00:36:09.000
lack of style and fashion. They're doing it because of his lack of style and fashion. They're doing it
00:36:14.160
because they know it's a lie. They're doing it because they call good evil and evil good and
00:36:17.940
truth falsehood and falsehood truth. They call beautiful images and fashion and art ugly and
00:36:27.140
ugly images and fashion and art. Beautiful. They're so dishonest. The Washington Post just had a similar
00:36:34.660
sort of attack. They came out and they were describing the Twitter files releases, which they are doing their
00:36:40.660
best to downplay. And it's why I think Elon Musk is releasing it so slowly and so consistently is so
00:36:47.540
that they can't, that the media can't just come out and shut the whole thing down and say, oh, it's
00:36:52.180
nothing. Look away, nothing to see here. But he keeps it in the news despite them saying it's a nothing
00:36:57.600
burger, nothing to see here, move on, move on. So Washington Post comes out and they say,
00:37:02.440
they're talking about Yoel Roth, former head of safety and trust. And they say, his communications with
00:37:07.980
other Twitter officials have been posted in recent days as part of what Musk calls the Twitter files,
00:37:11.820
a series of tweets by conservative journalists, Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss. So they're trying to
00:37:19.240
downplay excellent journalism, much better journalism than anything the Washington Post has put out.
00:37:23.620
They're trying to downplay the journalism by Taibbi and Barry Weiss. But the most insane part of that is
00:37:30.100
they call them conservative journalists. Matt Taibbi is an atheist, former contributing editor
00:37:38.460
to Rolling Stone. Barry Weiss is a lesbian, former staff editor at the op-ed page of the New York Times
00:37:45.900
and a bunch of other liberal places. I like their work. I mean, obviously they're doing very good work
00:37:50.880
on the Twitter files and I like some of their other work as well. If those two people are conservatives,
00:37:55.980
I don't know what conservative means. They're obviously not conservatives. All that is meant
00:38:02.860
by conservative now, as the Washington Post and the Libs are using it, is just people we don't like.
00:38:08.440
They're saying the Twitter files, a series of tweets by people that we don't like, Matt Taibbi and
00:38:13.980
Barry Weiss. That's all it means. You're all conservatives now. This is how Bill Maher and Joe Rogan
00:38:20.720
and all the rest of these guys, and Elon Musk for that matter, have become conservatives.
00:38:25.400
None of these people are particularly conservative. All of these people voted for Barack Obama.
00:38:30.480
All of these people, by any reasonable measure, would be on the left.
00:38:36.380
But because of the dishonesty of the media, many of them have moved further to the right.
00:38:44.900
And because of the dishonesty of the media, people will refer to them as being on the right.
00:38:49.440
Now, I'm imploring you, do not miss out on our last Daily Wire backstage of the year.
00:38:54.120
That would be tonight, 7, 6 o'clock central. From the red wave that was not, to Elon dropping the
00:39:01.880
Twitter files, the rest of the gang and I will be discussing the most important stories of the day
00:39:07.680
and the year. Witness the festivities and join me, Ben, Matt, Drew, the God King Jeremy Boring,
00:39:13.720
for a very merry backstage. You do not want to miss it. So tune in tonight, 7, 6 central,
00:39:24.980
Speaking of definitions, the Cambridge Dictionary, sort of the younger stepbrother of the Oxford
00:39:33.800
Dictionary. No one ever cites the Cambridge Dictionary. It's always the Oxford English
00:39:37.000
Dictionary. But anyway, the Cambridge Dictionary has just updated its definition of woman.
00:39:40.960
Here we go. You know, I think we all know. Okay, here, what's their definition? Their definition
00:39:49.120
of woman now includes, as one of those subsets, an adult who lives and identifies as female,
00:39:56.420
though they have been said to have a different sex at birth. First problem with this, who's they?
00:40:03.920
You're talking about a single individual, but now you're using they. But the Oxford English
00:40:09.440
Dictionary tells me that he is the single gender-neutral pronoun. So already you see the
00:40:16.120
transgenderism in the definition. Before they say anything about what a woman, it's just the use of
00:40:20.560
they does that. And they say, what's a woman? A woman is an adult who lives and identifies as female,
00:40:27.620
though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth. Merriam-Webster did something
00:40:33.880
differently. Merriam-Webster says a woman can be someone who has a gender identity that is the
00:40:40.960
opposite of male. So it could be a man, but as long as his gender identity is the opposite of male,
00:40:46.240
he is a woman. So what do we do about this? The conservative response to date to the people
00:40:53.660
changing all the definitions is what? It's to pull out our definitions. So, okay, according to the
00:41:01.040
2022 Dictionary, a woman means a man who thinks he's a woman. But, well, I've got my dictionary
00:41:07.440
from 1992 or 2002 or even 2012. And that dictionary says that a man is not a woman or whatever. And then
00:41:16.380
we have all these debates. But my dictionary says this. Well, but my dictionary says that. And it is
00:41:21.520
the recourse in argument of a child. This is the sort of thing that you do when you're a freshman in
00:41:29.260
college. And you're having a bull session late at night. And you're arguing over some big question.
00:41:35.420
And you just try to be as pedantic as possible. And you pull up some line. Well, in this textbook,
00:41:40.760
it's, who cares? That doesn't tell me. A woman is not a woman because it says so in the dictionary.
00:41:47.460
Dictionaries can be helpful. They're one piece of evidence to, but that's not, I mean, I've gone back
00:41:52.300
and said this many times when we talk about transgenderism. Because the other strategy we have when we talk
00:41:57.740
about transgenderism is what? We say, well, a woman is, whatever biology says about a woman.
00:42:03.220
A woman is two X chromosomes. And that's a woman. And if you don't have two X chromosomes, you're not
00:42:07.380
a woman. That's not all a woman is. That presumes that the physical world is the fundamental grounding
00:42:16.040
of reality. And we know that that's not true. The metaphysical world certainly has something to say
00:42:20.340
about reality too. My soul has something to say about my reality, doesn't it? What is a woman?
00:42:25.080
Every dictionary in the world could say that a woman is a man who thinks that he's a woman.
00:42:29.100
It still wouldn't be true. The fact of womanhood is more fundamental than the dictionary.
00:42:36.820
The fact of womanhood cannot be changed by playing word games. And that's what we need to say.
00:42:44.340
Do you think that if you pull out the dictionary, the old dictionary, and you show the liberals,
00:42:48.980
and you say, no, look right here on the dictionary, it says that a woman's not a man,
00:42:52.640
that they will care? They don't care. They don't care. There's no argument to be had there when
00:42:59.800
you're speaking different languages, when you're using language in ways that are totally divorced
00:43:04.660
from one another. Our answer has to be, what is a woman? A woman is a woman. A woman is a woman.
00:43:11.200
A woman is the complement of a man. A woman is defined by the fact that she is not a man,
00:43:17.580
but that she complements a man. A polar bear is not a man either, but a polar bear doesn't
00:43:21.380
complement a man. But woman and man are made as complementary beings. And it implies certain
00:43:25.940
roles. That implies certain duties in society. And it implies that men are actually less apt to do
00:43:32.140
certain things than women are, and vice versa. That implies a whole host of political and social
00:43:39.900
and biological and theological and all these other things, realities that conservatives don't want to
00:43:47.040
say, stop playing their game. Stop playing their stupid little definition game. They don't care.
00:43:52.400
They don't care about you pointing to a dictionary. We shouldn't care when they point to their fake
00:43:56.240
dictionaries. We just need to say, no, a woman is a woman. You're just wrong. Okay, I'm reminded of
00:44:01.940
the apocryphal legend of St. Nicholas at the Council of Nicaea. And Arius, the Heresiarch at Nicaea,
00:44:12.240
is denying the divinity of Christ. This all according to the legend. And St. Nicholas,
00:44:16.400
what does he do? Does he raise his hand and say, actually, you know, here's my dictionary that shows
00:44:22.560
you what the actual divine nature of Christ is. No, he stands up and gives Arius a smack across the
00:44:28.660
face. And it's a corrective smack. Now, I'm not advocating violence, okay? But I am advocating a
00:44:35.620
sort of rhetorical violence, or at the very least, a rhetorical bluntness. When these libs come to us
00:44:43.560
and they say, well, look at the dictionary. Well, actually, my professor said that a man can be a
00:44:47.460
woman. Actually, you don't know. Actually, there was a study that shows that the brains of the blah,
00:44:51.320
blah, blah, whatever. Just say, nah, you're wrong. You're wrong. A man is a man. Well, what do you think
00:44:56.960
a woman is? I think a woman's a woman. And I think we all know what that means. Well, well, how about you
00:45:02.080
prove it? How about I don't? How about I just treat women like women and men like men? And how
00:45:06.080
about you shut up? How about that? You know, I'm all for interesting intellectual scholarly discourse.
00:45:13.400
I love it. I love it more than most people. I'm all for debating big ideas. But I'm not for babble
00:45:20.120
and nonsense, okay? I'm not for anarchism. There's a great scene of Ronald Reagan. He was giving a
00:45:26.280
speech. Ronald Reagan, as warm, open-minded a guy as you could possibly get, so polite,
00:45:31.800
so chivalrous. But there was some nagging lunatic just belching out some kind of heckling from the
00:45:39.200
corner, a whole group of these lunatic students, the same sort of people who today would deny that
00:45:44.920
a woman is a woman. And Ronald Reagan is giving a speech. He says, well, you know, I'm, oh, won't
00:45:50.220
you just shut up? That's just what you say. There's no winning the debate by shoving different
00:45:58.160
dictionaries in our faces. A woman's a woman. We all know it. And people who don't understand that
00:46:02.940
should just shut up, okay? Simple as that. It's just crazy, crazy behavior. Reminds me why
00:46:11.280
the Oxford English Dictionary chose this word of the year. It's really not just a word, it's a phrase.
00:46:17.220
I had never heard this phrase before. Have you heard this phrase before? Goblin mode?
00:46:21.420
Goblin mode. Goblin mode. Which, according to online voters on the Oxford English Dictionary
00:46:29.600
website, what this term means is, quote, a type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent,
00:46:39.200
lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.
00:46:45.020
Greens. 93% of the votes cast went to goblin mode. The other finalists were metaverse and
00:46:54.280
the hashtag, I stand with. Those are funny terms too. But 93% voted for goblin mode and
00:46:59.920
I'm here for it. I totally agree. I think that is the word of the year. And it won because
00:47:05.580
the voters are recognizing that that actually describes our society today. It's a society that
00:47:11.900
is unapologetically self-indulgent. Everything is just me, me, me. Me, me, me and my subjective
00:47:19.180
reality and my absolute solipsism and my lusts and my desires only to be affirmed constantly by
00:47:26.180
everybody. Me, me, me, me, me. It's a lazy society. I'm not exempting myself from this. I'm not saying
00:47:31.100
I'm holier than thou. I doom scroll on social media apps as much as the next person. But that's lazy and
00:47:36.080
unhealthy. Slovenly society, we don't dress anymore. People just wear athleisure, which should
00:47:43.520
be absolutely banned from society. I mean, I've owned a pair of sweatpants, okay? I understand
00:47:49.200
this is popular. But we do it now in such a way that's so degrading. We put on these kind of
00:47:53.200
Bertolt Brecht potato sacks. Part of that's because of COVID. We didn't leave the home. But it's
00:47:57.480
degrading. You're a human. You're good looking people, okay? Dress nicely. We're greedy on the left
00:48:03.340
and the right. The left is greedy in that they want to steal all your money. And the right is
00:48:07.880
greedy in that they exalt, or at least in recent decades have exalted, these movies. Wall Street,
00:48:14.740
the greed is good, all the Ayn Rand stuff, everything. And it's in a way that rejects
00:48:18.960
social norms and expectations. Everybody's revolutionary. Everybody's just such a hyper
00:48:22.480
individualist. We're just going to do whatever we want. Society be damned. Our popular art says that
00:48:27.680
institutions are terrible and corrupting. And we need to reject institutions, reject family,
00:48:33.940
reject the social roles that are open for us. That'll make us happy. It doesn't make us happy.
00:48:39.020
Happiness, take this survey for what it's worth, these multiple surveys, take them with a grain of
00:48:44.140
salt, but they show happiness declining. You're seeing life expectancy decline because of deaths
00:48:48.960
of despair. None of this stuff is good. It's because we're all going into goblin mode. And when you're
00:48:54.560
going to goblin mode, you're going to look like a goblin, but you don't want to be a goblin. You're a man.
00:48:58.500
You're a woman. Stand up. Look respectable. Do respectable things. It won't make you feel good
00:49:08.200
to be a goblin. And this is a good time of year to think about it because no matter how selfish and
00:49:13.100
indulgent and lazy and degenerate people are throughout the year, something about Christmastime
00:49:19.400
brings it into perspective. Because at Christmastime, we at least remember the virtues and charms of
00:49:30.700
family, of doing good, of giving to other people, of selflessness, of worshiping God, of just being
00:49:40.500
put together and nice and not so greedy. You don't want to be Ebenezer Scrooge. You want to be Bob
00:49:44.680
Cratchit, right? And this is especially true at funerals. You go to funerals and all of a sudden
00:49:49.840
people cry at funerals, in part for those who have died, but in part for themselves.
00:49:55.760
As they realize, oh shoot, I'm going to die someday. And are people going to be saying,
00:49:59.940
you know, here lies Michael. He did whatever he wanted. Ah, yes, Michael Knowles. We all loved
00:50:06.480
Michael so because he didn't care about anybody and he did exactly what he wanted all of the time and
00:50:10.040
now he's dead. You don't want people to say that about you. Here lies Michael. What a goblin he was.
00:50:17.160
Ah, he was in goblin mode his whole life. No, you don't want to do that. Goblin mode is the word of
00:50:23.320
the year. Yes, it is. It should not be the word of next year. The rest of the show continues now.
00:50:29.600
Mr. Davies tells me we have a magnificent movie trailer that I have to see. I have to focus all my
00:50:35.540
powers of cultural perception on this to tell you what this is about. You don't want to miss it.
00:50:41.240
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