The Michael Knowles Show - December 21, 2022


Ep. 1150 - 4,155 Pages Of Garbage


Episode Stats


Length

50 minutes

Words per minute

166.97475

Word count

8,431

Sentence count

615

Harmful content

Misogyny

23

sentences flagged

Hate speech

37

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On the eve of the deadline for Congress to vote on a spending bill, the $1.7 trillion Omnibus spending bill passed the House of Representatives and now the Senate must vote on it by Friday or the government will shut down.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Early yesterday morning, the Congressional Appropriations Committee has released their
00:00:04.320 spending proposal. Lawmakers will now have to read, debate, and vote on the bill by Friday
00:00:12.140 or the government will shut down. The bill is 4,155 pages long. Forget voting for a second.
00:00:20.180 Forget debating. How exactly is anyone supposed to read 4,155 pages in three days?
00:00:32.280 The Iliad is roughly 700 pages. The Divine Comedy is about 800. War and Peace, about 1,225 pages.
00:00:43.640 The Bible, roughly 1,400 pages. If between now and Friday, you somehow managed to read
00:00:53.320 the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, War and Peace, and the entire Bible, you would still not have read
00:01:01.400 as many pages as are contained in this spending bill. Now, let's say you somehow managed it. You
00:01:08.860 read all those books, and you threw in one extra book on top of that. You threw in Speechless,
00:01:14.240 Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, just to, thank you very much, just to get you over the
00:01:18.300 4,155-page mark. Do you think that you would be able to organize your thoughts about those books?
00:01:25.560 Do you think that you would be able to debate the major themes and plot points raised by
00:01:30.980 Homer, Dante, Tolstoy, Moses, Ezra, David, Isaiah, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Knowles, and 31 or
00:01:39.080 so other writers in three days, four days if you include the day of the vote, at which point you'd
00:01:47.380 decide whether or not to spend $1.7 trillion. It's very difficult for people to conceptualize what
00:01:54.520 trillion is. That is $1.7 million, million. I strongly suspect you would not be able to do that.
00:02:04.920 I don't think any of us would. I also strongly suspect you are much more intelligent than the
00:02:10.900 average congressman. But then that's the point. The lawmakers are never supposed to read these bills.
00:02:19.040 They are just supposed to rubber stamp them. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show.
00:02:24.520 Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment yesterday is from Rene Tagg, who says,
00:02:35.720 I have adult friends who don't have their driver's license, but have spent thousands of dollars on
00:02:41.300 their Squishmallow collection. It's genuinely very sad and concerning. I'm just really happy that I can
00:02:49.240 say I have no idea what a Squishmallow collection is. In my mind, what I am picturing is a mashup of
00:03:00.240 Mitt Romney, like Mitt Romney wearing the Michelin Man suit, like a big marshmallow version of Mitt
00:03:07.560 Romney and the guys at the bulwark, you know, and all the libs and the squishes. And so that sounds
00:03:17.780 kind of cute. And maybe I get that little collection too. But it is very sad when people
00:03:22.140 are spending thousands of dollars on toys and not behaving like adults. You should behave like an 0.72
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00:04:34.540 for $35 off. Good Ranchers, American meat delivered. What is in this omnibus bill? I don't know.
00:04:42.880 I didn't read the bill. It came out yesterday and it's over 4,000 pages long. So I'm not going to sit
00:04:48.220 here and pretend like I read the bill. No one has. Not one person on earth has read this entire bill.
00:04:53.520 Now, what I can gather is in the bill based on the small sections of the bill that were proposed
00:05:02.580 individually and the people who sponsored them. And based on the reporting of the handful of
00:05:09.300 trustworthy journalists that are left in America. The bill includes funding of the government through
00:05:16.460 September of next year. It boosts defense spending by $76 billion. So now total defense spending will
00:05:23.120 be $858 billion. It's got domestic spending of $773 billion. Then we've got, well, we got $45 billion
00:05:35.460 in military and economic aid for Ukraine. That's everyone's top priority, right?
00:05:40.660 We haven't given enough billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine. Got to make sure, top of the
00:05:46.580 line, we give many, many more billions. This is more money, by the way, than even Biden requested.
00:05:50.940 Biden requested $37 billion. What they're going to end up going with is $45. It includes $5 billion
00:05:56.480 in earmarks for 3,200 projects. I actually don't care about that so much. That's just how laws are
00:06:01.580 made. Laws are made by saying, okay, Congressman, can I get your vote if I send a little bit of money to
00:06:06.220 your district? Hey, all right, Congressman, what if I, I know you're holding out firm. Well, what if I
00:06:11.160 build this bridge in your district? Okay, that's fine. And they got a really bad rap in 2008. John
00:06:16.000 McCain made a big issue about how terrible earmarks are. But it was all BS. John McCain only did that
00:06:20.700 because he was a huge, big spending Republican on so many other issues. And earmarks account for such
00:06:26.500 an infinitesimally small portion of federal spending that he said, okay, I'm going to make a big
00:06:30.980 example out of earmarks and quote unquote pork barrel spending. Meanwhile, John McCain is spending
00:06:35.400 zillions of dollars on all sorts of other nonsense that he wants. So I don't mind. You can have your
00:06:41.580 $5 billion. It's a $1.7 trillion bill, $5 billion in basic politics, not as big a deal. $47 billion
00:06:48.760 for the National Institutes of Health because they've been so trustworthy and so effective in
00:06:53.120 recent years, right? What would we do without the NIH sending money overseas to the Wuhan Institute of
00:07:00.180 Virology to fund gain of function research? What would we do? Oh, goodness. What would we do
00:07:05.380 if we weren't paying the salary of Dr. Fauci? Why? Could you imagine what would happen then? We might
00:07:10.380 have a global pandemic or something. So good that we're spending $47 billion on the NIH.
00:07:14.900 A billion dollars for Puerto Rico's electrical grid, $600 million to address water issues in
00:07:20.180 Jackson, Mississippi. Josh Hawley is pushing to have a ban on TikTok on government devices
00:07:26.280 included in the omnibus. So that's a good thing, right? There are certain things in the bill that are
00:07:30.160 fine and they add in these little good things as part of what is broadly a terrible bill. And then
00:07:37.200 this is a tricky one. They've included in the spending bill something called the Electoral Count
00:07:43.040 Reform Act. And the Electoral Count Reform Act is a way to change the process for how presidential
00:07:50.140 elections are certified. And this is a terrible addition to the bill, but it's my favorite addition
00:07:57.040 to the bill. Because it proves that conservatives were right the whole time. And we've been being
00:08:02.160 gaslit by Democrats since election day 2020. The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition
00:08:09.800 Improvement Act is a bill that was co-sponsored by Susan Collins, who's a liberal Republican, 0.96
00:08:15.980 and Joe Manchin, who's a conservative Democrat. And so it's supposed to be this bipartisan bill.
00:08:20.180 And it amends our Electoral Count Act of 1887. So this is the biggest overhaul to how presidential
00:08:28.240 elections are conducted from the federal level in a very long time, about a century and a half.
00:08:32.500 And what it does is reaffirms that the vice president has only a ministerial role at the
00:08:40.780 joint session of Congress where the electoral college votes are counted. So remember last time,
00:08:45.020 January 6th, there was all this chatter about what the vice president would do when the votes came
00:08:52.000 in. There were dueling slates of electors. Some states didn't want to certify these votes.
00:08:59.120 There was a big fight. And why? Because the Democrats changed all of the election rules
00:09:02.640 right before the election. They used COVID as the excuse to do that. But the way that they changed
00:09:07.180 the election rules gave a huge advantage to Democrats. And in some cases, like in the case of
00:09:11.600 Pennsylvania, it violated the state constitution by using things like widespread mail-in ballots,
00:09:16.240 explicitly prohibited by the state constitution. So there was all this question. It wouldn't have
00:09:20.960 been the first time that this happened in the US. In the 1870s, there were also many questions about
00:09:25.800 how the election was conducted. And as a result of that, there was an electoral commission that had
00:09:29.280 been appointed. This was the option preferred by Senator Cruz in 2020. This was the option preferred by
00:09:37.760 Representative Paul Gosar, for instance, and a number of other Republicans in the Congress.
00:09:41.920 It was all shot down. Everyone knows. Then what happened the rest of the day? January 6th,
00:09:45.820 the worst day in the history of the world. Well, anyway, this electoral reform act that is being
00:09:50.600 wedged into the omnibus because the Democrats don't want to debate it on its own merits,
00:09:54.540 this would amend that whole process. And my favorite part of it is, it proves that the Democrats
00:10:02.680 were lying in 2020. In 2020, what the Democrats said is the vice president does not have the ability
00:10:11.840 to reject slates of electors. The vice president does not have the ability to send electors back
00:10:21.220 to the states to sort out who the state actually voted for. The vice president does not have the
00:10:28.240 ability not to certify the election. That's what we were told by all the Democrats and by a lot of
00:10:34.640 the libs on the Republican side. Okay, it's a complex historical political legal question. So what
00:10:42.120 do I know? Maybe there, except if all that's true, then why do you need to pass this new electoral
00:10:49.360 count reform act? If that's so clearly true that the vice president doesn't have any actual power
00:10:55.580 at the certification of presidential elections, then why do you need to change the law to take
00:11:02.420 away his power to do anything at the certification of presidential elections? It's an admission that
00:11:09.920 they were lying or at least seriously overstating their case in 2020. And so now what they're trying
00:11:15.720 to do is streamline the process anymore such that if there are any shenanigans in the states,
00:11:21.920 there are fewer ways for the people to come out and object to them. Not good stuff, but it is
00:11:28.820 something that we can come to expect. Politicians who are in power want to stay in power. And the 0.89
00:11:35.500 Democrats in particular, who have done a much better job at rigging elections historically and certainly
00:11:39.660 in recent years than Republicans have done, do not want the people to have much recourse to questioning
00:11:46.920 the results of those elections. If, for instance, many more states adopt, I guess most states at this
00:11:53.220 point have electronic voting processes. And there are some questions about that, or some questions
00:11:57.400 about the widespread mail-in ballots, or some questions about ballot harvesting, or some questions
00:12:00.740 about fraud, or some questions about the precincts being shut down and people not being allowed to
00:12:08.100 cast their ballots in an orderly way. And they have to put them in a separate box called box three,
00:12:12.900 like we just saw in Maricopa County in 2022. Then if this occurs during a presidential election,
00:12:18.360 there will be less recourse for the people to object to that. That is what they want. There is such,
00:12:26.980 so there's so much in this omnibus bill. And what the Congress is betting on, and what the Democrats
00:12:32.500 in particular are betting on, is that people don't want a government shutdown. They're going to get
00:12:38.440 everything through in this bill. It's going to probably be the only legislation that Congress
00:12:42.780 passes for the next two years at this point, because we've got a split power. We've got a
00:12:48.880 Republican House coming in. Democrats still run the Senate. Democrats have the White House. So
00:12:52.720 they're not going to actually do anything. Instead of passing bills and debating them, like instead of
00:12:57.080 just proposing the Electoral Account Reform Act and debating it and having that be an open vote,
00:13:01.160 instead of just debating more spending for Ukraine, instead of just debating more spending for the NIH,
00:13:06.300 they're just going to throw it all in there. They're going to all lump it in together.
00:13:09.620 And the Congress is going to basically say they had no choice but to vote for it.
00:13:16.420 And so we get more, more, more spending on crazier things, and the American people don't get to say
00:13:23.700 boo about it. What else is in the bill? This may be my favorite part of the bill. I know I just said
00:13:28.320 that the Electoral Account Reform Act is my favorite part. This one might even beat that.
00:13:31.840 The $1.7 trillion omnibus bill designates a part of Washington, D.C., our nation's capital,
00:13:41.020 is now going to be designated as Ukrainian Independence Park. And there are now going to
00:13:50.160 be signs around the park that include information on the importance of the independence, freedom,
00:13:58.320 and sovereignty of Ukraine, and the solidarity between the people of Ukraine and the United
00:14:04.440 States. I mean no offense to Ukraine. I'm sure Ukraine is a great place. I'd love to visit Kiev
00:14:13.080 at some point. I love the chicken dish that comes from there.
00:14:15.280 Does anybody really believe that the political status of Ukraine, whether it's a little bit more
00:14:27.280 democratic, which it basically never has been, or it's a little more oligarchic, which it pretty much
00:14:32.320 always has been, and whether the oligarchs lean more pro-Russia, which they for a very long time
00:14:38.600 have, or if they lean a little bit more pro-Western, which they sometimes have, does anyone really
00:14:44.720 believe that is a matter of existential national importance to the United States? Does anybody
00:14:52.440 believe that? No. The only people who believe that work on Capitol Hill. Not one other American
00:15:02.920 really, really believes that. The bill is being sponsored by Representative Victoria Sparks,
00:15:09.500 who is Ukrainian, and she proposed the Ukrainian Independence Park Act of 2022,
00:15:13.560 and Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, who is one of the biggest squish. He's a Republican nominally,
00:15:18.780 but he's effectively a Democrat. Huge squish. Co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus.
00:15:24.280 And all of this got me thinking, we have a Congressional Ukraine Caucus? Why do we have,
00:15:32.080 how many caucuses do we have? Why do we have a Congressional Ukraine Caucus? I think,
00:15:35.300 my family is Italian, okay? I like, I like Italy. I like the Italian people. This is no knock on Italy
00:15:44.760 or the Italian people. I don't think we need to designate a part of our nation's capital to being
00:15:49.420 Italy square about the importance of Italy to America. I don't think Italy matters all that much
00:15:55.120 to America. Italy is a very important place, really, for the whole of Western civilization and our
00:16:02.320 history and how it developed. But the political status of Italy at any given point in time right
00:16:07.700 now has absolutely no bearing on the United States. And I don't think we need to designate
00:16:13.880 part of our nation's capital to Italy. We can have a neighborhood. We can have a little Italy and you
00:16:19.440 go eat some Italian food. I don't think we need to have a federal law that sets aside part of the
00:16:24.740 nation's capital for Italy or for Ukraine or for any of this. Why do we have a Ukraine caucus? Why
00:16:32.960 is it that the American people pretty much don't care about the political status of most countries
00:16:38.820 outside the United States, including Ukraine? But on Capitol Hill, the Democrats are completely
00:16:44.520 head over heels for Ukraine. They all change their little, their Twitter and Facebook bios to include 1.00
00:16:49.920 the Ukrainian flag for some reason. Absurd, by the way. You're an American. You should have the American 1.00
00:16:54.400 flag in your bio, not the flag of any other foreign nation, no matter how sympathetic we might be
00:16:59.020 with that nation. But a lot of Republicans do, though. The whole Republican establishment is gaga over
00:17:03.580 Ukraine. Mitch McConnell, Senate minority leader, leader of the Republicans in the Senate, has said that the
00:17:11.060 top priority for Republicans is Ukraine. Making sure the Defense Department can deal
00:17:19.200 with the major threats coming from Russia and China, providing assistance for the Ukrainians to defeat the
00:17:30.120 Russians. That's the number one priority for the United States right now, according to most Republicans.
00:17:38.220 That's sort of how we see the challenges confronting the country at the moment.
00:17:44.340 That's the top issue, according to Mr. Cocaine himself. So what does this show? What it shows is
00:17:54.420 not just that those guys on Capitol Hill are totally crazy. There are a lot of things, but they're not
00:17:59.080 totally crazy. They usually have a reason for doing what they're doing. They are very rational actors,
00:18:05.720 politicians in both parties, in as much as they're very, very good at keeping themselves in power.
00:18:10.840 They have an uncanny ability for cold calculation. So what is the calculation here on Ukraine?
00:18:18.500 I think it shows you what a lot of people have suspected from the beginning, which is that all
00:18:22.900 this talk about the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine, that's a bunch of nonsense.
00:18:27.320 Ukraine is a border state, a border nation. It has been one for a long time. It is a battleground 0.85
00:18:35.040 for fights between the East and the West, between Russia and Europe and the United States. And the
00:18:42.420 reason that this war broke out in the first place is because in Ukraine 10 years ago, you had a pro-Russian
00:18:50.040 leader. And the U.S. didn't like that very much. And so Western powers put pressure on Ukraine and
00:18:55.640 helped to fund and encourage discontent in Ukraine that did already exist to, that ultimately led to
00:19:04.520 the Maidan revolution and ousted the pro-Russian leader and put in a more pro-Russian leader,
00:19:10.600 ousted that guy. It's very confusing when you're talking about Ukraine. The Maidan revolution then
00:19:16.620 led to a more pro-Western government in Ukraine. Then you started seeing a lot of talk about Ukraine
00:19:22.900 joining the European Union, Ukraine joining NATO. Russia said that that would be an unacceptable
00:19:27.420 security risk to have NATO come that close to its borders and that important a country.
00:19:31.740 And so then you saw Russia annex parts of Ukraine. This is going back now eight years.
00:19:36.860 And then you saw the major war break out earlier this year in Ukraine. And what this tells me is
00:19:43.860 Ukraine is not viewed as an independent nation, obviously by Russia or by the United States and
00:19:49.220 Europe. Ukraine is being viewed right now as a theater of empire. Russia says it openly.
00:19:58.760 The U.S. and the West say it implicitly. When we say that Ukraine is the most important issue for
00:20:06.140 Americans, what we're saying is that the American Western empire is very important. The American world
00:20:11.100 order where we are the top dog and we are governing the rules of the world is very, very important.
00:20:16.860 And I'm not even disputing that. That is the current world order that we have. And they're
00:20:21.120 saying we cannot allow Russia to encroach on Ukraine. Why? Not because Ukraine is this
00:20:26.640 absolutely sovereign, independent nation. No, because Ukraine is a part of the broader imperial
00:20:33.880 project for the U.S. and the West. And we all know that to be the case. I'm not even knocking it.
00:20:40.400 I'm not attacking that. I'd rather we run the world than the Russians run the world or China run the 0.86
00:20:45.000 world. But that's what it is. It is an imperial battle. We like to think that we're living in
00:20:49.900 the new modern times. We're so different from all those terrible old state actors in the past.
00:20:55.960 Remember when they fought wars of empire and land conquest? We're doing the exact same now.
00:21:01.540 Because that's a fact of politics. That is just how people interact in the world. And that's what
00:21:08.700 we're seeing. That's what Mitch McConnell means when he says it's the most important thing.
00:21:11.620 It's the most important thing to what? The American nation? I don't think so. I think it's the most
00:21:15.240 important thing to the American empire. Now, Rand Paul would disagree. Rand Paul, who is much more
00:21:21.660 interested in pulling back American influence abroad and focusing in on the problems that we've got here
00:21:26.820 at home. He asked the question, where do the real threats to America lie? I brought with me the Omni,
00:21:34.560 4,155 pages. When was it produced? In the dead of the night. 1.30 in the morning when it was released.
00:21:43.740 But what's the clamor? The clamor is to vote. Vote now. Let's get it done. Why are you standing in the
00:21:49.660 way of spending? Well, the real question is this. What is more dangerous? Are we at risk for being
00:21:56.120 invaded by a foreign power if we don't put $45 billion into the military? Are we more at risk by adding
00:22:02.680 to a $31 trillion debt? I think the greatest risk to our national security is our debt. The American
00:22:09.060 people don't want this. They're sick and tired of it. They're paying for it through the nose with
00:22:13.920 inflation. Adding a trillion dollars to the deficit will simply fuel the fires that are consuming our
00:22:20.320 wages and consuming our retirement plans. It's a terrible system. Someone needs to stand up. We're
00:22:26.200 standing up and we're going to say no. Preach. Preach, Rand. What's amazing about Rand's statement
00:22:34.940 here is that he actually, I believe, got the number wrong on military spending. He referred to the $45
00:22:42.840 billion number instead of the $76 billion number. I think he confused the boost to American military
00:22:49.340 spending with the boost to Ukraine spending. And it's not a knock on him. One, it's very confusing and
00:22:54.440 the reports are a little bit ambiguous. And it shows you the heart of the problem, which is that
00:23:00.280 the Dems dropped this 4,000 plus page bill. And they say, okay, you got to vote on it in three days.
00:23:06.780 Where even a United States senator doesn't get a chance to vote on that. And when you look at the
00:23:11.580 boost to military spending, you had boost to military spending for our country, boost to military spending
00:23:15.940 for other countries. And they say, without this, without the $76 billion extra that we get in American
00:23:22.440 military spending, that country is going to be at existential risk. I don't know. I think Rand Paul
00:23:27.580 is right. I think that our debt poses a far larger long-term risk than some marginal increase in
00:23:36.400 defense spending. I remember 10 years ago, Mitch Daniels, then the governor of Indiana, a lot of people
00:23:40.980 thought he was going to run for president. He said, we're facing a new red menace. This time, it's not the
00:23:45.920 commies. It's not the Soviets exactly. It's the debt. It's a red menace consisting of ink.
00:23:51.860 If we manage our own country in such an irresponsible way that we become more and more
00:23:58.500 dependent on China to pay for all of our flights of fancy, and we open up our borders, and we allow
00:24:03.780 domestic discord to tear our country apart, then Russia's going to be the least of our worries. 0.96
00:24:09.660 Guys, we've got a lot more problems a lot closer to home. Very often, when you want to improve your
00:24:16.700 position in the world, it's best not just to look out at everybody else, but it's good to look
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00:25:32.860 reading plan for free. Speaking of threats, the people of the world, and especially Germany, 0.97
00:25:40.740 can rest easy tonight, a 97-year-old woman has been arrested and convicted of the crime that 1.00
00:25:48.520 she was arrested for. What is the crime? 97-year-old woman worked in a Nazi concentration camp
00:25:56.060 back when she was 18 years old. She was not firing guns. She was not giving orders.
00:26:05.340 She was a secretary at a Nazi concentration camp at Stutthof, and she was 18 years old. Now,
00:26:13.720 because of her age, she was actually tried in juvenile court. A 97-year-old woman 1.00
00:26:23.600 was tried in juvenile court because she was a secretary at the age of 18 when her country
00:26:33.560 was in a state of total war. She was given a two-year suspended jail sentence,
00:26:40.900 and she was found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 10,505 prisoners and the attempted
00:26:49.100 murder of five other people. And this is where, when you just see the headline, you say,
00:26:55.820 this is really completely preposterous. But then when you see what she's found guilty of,
00:27:02.880 it makes it a little bit more morally complex because this woman was 18 years old working 0.90
00:27:12.080 as a secretary for people who were doing very, very bad things. 10,000 plus people killed
00:27:21.640 with her participation in that. I don't know. Part of me looks at that and says,
00:27:28.600 I guess you should be held to account. You feel bad for a 97-year-old woman. You say,
00:27:32.640 well, those 10,500 people, they didn't get a chance to live. She got to live her whole life.
00:27:37.540 Then you say, can a 97-year-old woman really be held responsible for clerical work she did at the 0.70
00:27:46.040 age of 18 when her country was in a state? That seems unfair too. That seems sort of unjust.
00:27:52.880 What are we to make of this? One, you have to ask yourself, what is the point of this at this point?
00:27:57.940 What is the point of this prosecution? She wasn't a commander. She wasn't giving orders. She wasn't 0.81
00:28:02.400 carrying out orders, really. She was just writing things on paper. She was just a clerical functionary.
00:28:09.200 What is the point of this? The point of this just to get one last ounce of justice or revenge?
00:28:17.540 What is the point to show that if you commit atrocities in war, you'll be held to account
00:28:23.400 by the victors even 80 years later? Maybe. Maybe it is. And maybe it's just. I'm not saying it isn't.
00:28:32.480 You know, if my grandpa died or grandma died in a concentration camp, I'd probably want that woman 1.00
00:28:37.340 to actually serve time in jail. She was given a suspended sentence. I'd probably, I don't care 1.00
00:28:41.000 she's 97. I'd probably want her to go to jail. I'd like to think that I would be able to have grace 1.00
00:28:46.800 and forgive her and say, no, she shouldn't. She's 97, whatever. But I don't know. I don't know what
00:28:50.800 I would feel. I love my grandparents. But it does make you think about us right now. Forget about
00:28:57.780 World War II for a second. Forget about the Holocaust. Forget about this 97-year-old woman. 0.97
00:29:01.080 Just think about where we are right now.
00:29:07.340 Every year in the United States, we kill roughly 850,000 babies. Since Roe v. Wade was passed down
00:29:15.360 from the Supreme Court, over 60 million babies have been killed in the United States. That's 10 times
00:29:24.600 the number of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. And that's what? That's five times the number
00:29:30.200 roughly of total victims of Hitler's terror. How many people will be held to account for that?
00:29:40.240 How many abortion doctors? How many people who handed down the law? Furthermore,
00:29:44.800 how many secretaries are there working right now at Planned Parenthood today who are signing off the 1.00
00:29:50.460 death warrants of all those little babies? And what's going to happen 80 years from now? I'm
00:29:55.180 quite convinced that future generations will look back on our generation with moral horror at what we
00:30:03.680 have done. 850,000 people a year, human beings, living human beings, the most innocent people among us,
00:30:14.660 snuffed out every year in their mother's womb. This is as horrific a crime as you can possibly 0.97
00:30:21.260 imagine. And it's been going on since 1973. And it will now contract a little bit because of the
00:30:27.620 Dobbs decision. That's a lot of people, 60 million plus people. How many people? Because what this woman 0.98
00:30:35.280 will say and what her defenders will say is, well, she wasn't directly involved in the atrocities.
00:30:40.300 She was indirectly involved. Okay, what about the people who were indirectly involved in the
00:30:45.840 atrocities that we're seeing today? People will look back on abortion. Future generations will look
00:30:51.380 back on it with the moral horror that we look back on slavery, that we look back on genocides,
00:30:55.860 that we look back on all of these things. And what will we say? What about the 97-year-old
00:31:02.100 secretary who worked at Planned Parenthood decades from now? What will we say about her? What should we
00:31:07.120 say about her? I don't know. I don't have an easy answer on it. I don't have an easy answer on
00:31:10.100 this 97-year-old Nazi secretary from when she was 18. But I do think that people ought to take some 0.77
00:31:17.200 stock of what they're doing right now because it's very easy to look back at the past and see the
00:31:23.780 horrors that happened. It's a lot harder to see it when you are living through it and when you,
00:31:31.700 to more direct or less direct degrees, are participating in it.
00:31:35.640 A lot of people are going to look at this. They'll say, doesn't Germany have anything
00:31:40.640 more important to do right now than to go after a 97-year-old woman? Aren't there more pressing 0.99
00:31:45.780 issues? A lot of people are looking right now at the U.S. Congress. They're saying, aren't there
00:31:49.900 more pressing issues than establishing Ukraine Independence Park in Washington, D.C.? There are
00:31:54.360 more pressing issues. Here's a pressing issue. Right now, people are struggling financially
00:32:00.540 because of Joe Biden's stupid policies on energy and spending and COVID that have caused inflation to
00:32:08.720 skyrocket. So spending power going through the roof, energy prices going through the roof,
00:32:14.240 the way that Joe Biden mismanaged the Ukraine situation. Vladimir Zelensky, who reportedly might
00:32:20.640 speak at Capitol Hill today, that remains sort of unclear as we're recording the show right now.
00:32:25.140 Vladimir Zelensky said that had Joe Biden not behaved as he had vis-a-vis Russia,
00:32:33.740 that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine. So Zelensky places blame for the Ukraine war
00:32:38.820 on Joe Biden because Joe Biden lifted sanctions on Putin's oil pipeline, because Joe Biden said
00:32:48.040 that if Putin only invaded in a minor incursion, that that wouldn't be a huge deal.
00:32:52.400 So that's what we have. And because of that cost of everything going through the roof,
00:32:56.140 people don't have a lot of money. One way that you can make a lot of money would be to not work
00:33:02.060 in at least three states, maybe more. Families of four, I've got a Daily Wire report on this right
00:33:09.020 in my hands. Families of four with neither parent working can receive welfare benefits worth in excess
00:33:14.280 of six figures per year in Washington, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, according to a study from the
00:33:20.960 Committee to Unleash Prosperity. This previous analysis from the conservative think tank found
00:33:27.820 that federal supplemental unemployment benefits, food stamp extensions, child tax credit payments,
00:33:32.540 and other benefits offered in the aftermath of the lockdowns and the whole COVID regime
00:33:38.160 could exceed $120,000 in multiple states. And then even with the expiration of those supplemental
00:33:46.900 programs, because you might say, okay, well, yeah, the government gave out a lot more money
00:33:49.580 during COVID. But then after COVID, it all kind of went away, right? No, there's a recent study
00:33:53.700 that found that unemployment insurance and the dramatic recent expansion of Obamacare subsidies
00:33:58.440 can exceed the national median income in 24 states for families with two parents and two children.
00:34:08.380 And this analysis was not just done by some random conservative think tank. It was completed by
00:34:12.440 UChicago econ professor Casey Mulligan and Heritage Foundation research fellow E.J. Antony.
00:34:17.920 Welfare benefits can exceed the median national income in roughly half the country. Not a good set of
00:34:31.840 incentives to have in your country. I am not one of these Republicans who recoils at the very thought
00:34:37.680 of the government spending any money to alleviate poverty or anything. I don't really, that doesn't
00:34:42.180 bother me. As you know very well, I'm not a libertarian. I don't have any desire to live in
00:34:47.120 some Ayn Rand, Atlas-shrugged future where we're all just industrialists and GDP is the most important
00:34:53.400 thing in the world. I have no problem with the government spending some money to help the poor.
00:34:58.920 But at a certain point, the free marketeers and the libertarians make a very good observation
00:35:05.140 that when the government creates perverse incentives, then it leads to people in misery.
00:35:11.080 If the government creates programs that will allow people to make more money by not working
00:35:18.900 than they would by working, that will be very, very bad. Not just for the country and with regard to
00:35:24.420 our terrible spending problem and our massive debt that imperils national security and our whole
00:35:29.180 American future. But it's bad for the people too. Man was made to work by the sweat of our brow.
00:35:33.600 Shall we eat our food? Okay. And so when people are put into these welfare programs,
00:35:40.080 these social safety nets can very quickly become spider webs that just entrap you. They get you
00:35:43.760 stuck in them. And that leads to the breakdown of family in many cases. It leads to the breakdown
00:35:48.760 of the human spirit. It degrades us. It degrades us individually. It degrades our families. It degrades
00:35:53.000 our whole society. While we're spending $1.7 trillion, maybe we should take a look at that
00:35:59.020 and say, we're going to help you if you're poor. We're going to help you get back on your feet.
00:36:03.120 We're going to give you direct payments. As a matter of fact, we're going to subsidize you
00:36:05.780 having more kids. I'm all for it. We have a declining population. I want people to have 0.97
00:36:10.600 more kids. But we are not going to create a system in which you'll make more money if you don't work. 0.99
00:36:19.400 That's not going to be good for anybody. Speaking of families, Amy Grant, who is apparently a 0.98
00:36:25.500 Christian music star. I've never heard any of her songs, but she's apparently a Christian music star.
00:36:30.460 She has announced that she's going to host a lesbian wedding for her niece.
00:36:37.520 She's drawn some controversy for this. But she said she's going to host this same-sex wedding 1.00
00:36:43.700 for her niece. And she said, look, Jesus told us there's two rules. Love God above all else and
00:36:50.420 love your neighbor. And so that's very simple to me. I want to love my neighbor. And so I'm going to
00:36:55.740 host my niece's same-sex wedding. And this is a total cop-out. It's taken completely out of context
00:37:01.220 of the Gospels. And it's not the right thing to do. But it shows you how difficult it can be
00:37:10.400 to resist this kind of stuff in our culture. The reason I bring up the story is not to
00:37:15.940 scold Amy Grant. I don't know who Amy Grant is. I don't really care.
00:37:20.320 But it's to show you how difficult it can be, how emotional manipulation can really, really
00:37:28.740 screw up our politics. More on that in a second. First, though, we relaunched, or we recently launched,
00:37:36.140 for the first time. A brand new biblical series by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. The series is called
00:37:41.240 Exodus. And in it, Jordan Peterson sits down with other scholars to read the book of Exodus
00:37:46.100 and discuss what it means and why it remains significant thousands of years after it was
00:37:50.420 written. Scholars at the table include Dennis Prager, Jonathan Pajot, and many more. The first
00:37:54.920 few episodes are available to stream right now on Daily Wire Plus. There are more new episodes coming
00:37:59.540 soon. Trust me, you've got to see this series. You must be a member to watch. So head on over to
00:38:03.820 dailywire.com slash Knowles to become a member and watch Exodus today.
00:38:12.680 Amy Grant, this apparently Christian music star, is going to host a lesbian quote-unquote wedding for 1.00
00:38:18.600 her niece. It's a hard case. It's a very hard case. But in doing it, in saying, look, I'm told to love
00:38:28.000 my neighbor, and so I'm going to make an exception here, and I'm going to host my niece's gay wedding,
00:38:32.600 quote-unquote. Even if I disagree with it, that's what I'm going to do. That's not an example of a
00:38:38.720 charitable, loving action and exception to one's other sorts of views on things. It undermines the
00:38:48.160 entire argument. It undermines the entire worldview. What the left is saying is that conservatives oppose
00:38:57.580 gay marriage because we hate gay people. We conservatives, we're just so hateful, and we hate 1.00
00:39:02.900 gay people, and we've never met a gay guy in our lives. We just want to throw them off of buildings, 1.00
00:39:06.100 right? That's what we want to do. No. No, the reason that conservatives oppose gay marriage
00:39:13.260 is because we recognize that marriage necessarily, intrinsically involves sexual difference.
00:39:22.680 And if you remove sexual difference, which is at the heart of marriage, then you haven't opened up
00:39:29.080 marriage to include more people. You have just destroyed the entire concept of marriage. If
00:39:34.680 marriage does not include sexual difference, it cannot mean anything at all. And so it is not a
00:39:41.020 loving or charitable act to our gay friends. Every conservative has gay friends, every single one.
00:39:46.860 It's not that we hate our gay friends. They're our friends. We love our friends.
00:39:54.900 It's that it is not possible. If you say, look, I oppose gay marriage, quote unquote gay marriage, 0.98
00:40:01.820 and I think marriage has this meaning, but I'm going to make this one exception to host my niece's
00:40:06.080 lesbian wedding, then you've just gutted your whole argument. All that tells people is that you don't
00:40:13.500 actually believe what you said you believed. What that suggests is actually that the libs were
00:40:17.360 right, that your opposition to quote unquote gay marriage is that you actually do hate lesbians
00:40:21.240 or gay people, but you like your niece. And so, okay, I'm going to make an exception here. 0.78
00:40:25.420 It's the same thing with abortion. The manipulation that you see from the libs on abortion 0.66
00:40:29.940 is this. They say, oh, you're pro-life? Yes.
00:40:34.620 Yeah, you oppose abortion? Yes.
00:40:38.100 Yeah, why do you oppose abortion? Well, because I think a person's a person no matter how small,
00:40:41.760 and if we're going to have any rights at all, the right to life has to be the most important one
00:40:45.580 because without the right to life, none of the other rights can possibly exist. And I think
00:40:49.660 human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, and we don't have a right to snuff them
00:40:54.460 out in the womb or murder them. That would be wrong. Yeah, well, what about in the case of rape?
00:41:02.640 This is the hard case. It's a very, very small percentage of abortions, far less than 1% of
00:41:10.020 abortions every year. But they always use that manipulation. They always use that hard case to 0.91
00:41:13.280 say, what about in the case of rape? And a lot of, not pro-lifers, but a lot of conservatives or
00:41:19.760 people who haven't really thought through the issue, they might say, yeah, okay, that's fine. You can get
00:41:24.360 an abortion in the case of rape. They view this as a loving, reasonable conciliation, but it's not
00:41:33.080 reasonable at all. It undermines the whole argument. If you believe all the stuff that you just said
00:41:40.820 that you believe, then you can't grant in principle an exception to rape. I guess as a practical or
00:41:48.420 prudential matter, if you were given a bill that said, we're going to get rid of 99% of abortions, 1.00
00:41:53.120 but we're going to leave this one exception for rape, then as a prudential matter, you might say,
00:41:56.740 okay, I'm going to reduce the number of abortions by 99% right now. But you can't grant it in principle.
00:42:01.400 You can't say in principle that it's okay to kill a baby if the baby was conceived through rape,
00:42:07.220 because then what that implies is the reason you opposed abortion actually is that you just
00:42:12.720 didn't like women or something like that. What that implies is that the libs were actually right 1.00
00:42:15.880 about your motivations, and that you didn't actually believe that a person's a person no
00:42:19.020 matter how small, and that man is made in the image and likeness of God, and that we don't have
00:42:22.200 the right to murder people, even if they're conceived in inconvenient circumstances,
00:42:26.360 even if they're conceived in a crime, in a heinous crime. You don't actually believe that. That's
00:42:32.460 how they get you, and so you've got to think through these things, because if you don't stand
00:42:40.220 firm on those difficult cases, you will have gutted the entire argument. That's why the libs focus on
00:42:47.920 those hard cases. That's why they try to emotionally manipulate you on all of them.
00:42:54.060 Speaking of LGBT issues, there's a great interview from the series creator of Dahmer. This would be 0.99
00:43:01.900 Ryan Murphy, and I started watching Dahmer. I thought it was a good show. Sweet little Elisa couldn't get 0.87
00:43:06.880 that into it. You know, it's a little grisly. I won't spoil the story, but Jeffrey Dahmer had a
00:43:13.780 not very pleasant life. Difficult to watch it. I think girls in particular, you know, 1.00
00:43:18.360 get a little squeamish with it. So Ryan Murphy came under fire because the Dahmer series was listed
00:43:26.380 as an LGBTQ series. They have all these tags on Netflix and the various streaming platforms.
00:43:33.940 They say, this is horror, or this is a rom-com, or this is an LGBT show. And so with Jeffrey Dahmer, 0.77
00:43:39.340 who's one of the most notorious serial killers and psychosexual sadists in human history, 0.84
00:43:44.820 it listed it as LGBT because he was a gay guy and he only attacked guys and mostly black guys
00:43:51.980 specifically. I don't think it was listed as an African-American piece of entertainment,
00:43:55.380 but it was listed as LGBT. And there was an uproar because they said, oh, how dare you lump in Jeffrey
00:44:01.320 Dahmer with LGBT? Sexual identity has everything to do with everything unless the guy does something bad.
00:44:09.080 And then it has nothing to do with it at all. So Ryan Murphy dismissed this criticism. He said,
00:44:14.980 my job as an artist is to hold up a mirror about what happened. It's ugly. It's not pretty. Do you
00:44:22.640 want to look at it? If you do, watch it. If you don't, look away. And sometimes some of this outrage
00:44:29.140 is directed at the frame of the mirror instead of the reflection. Wow. Hardcore stuff.
00:44:37.140 Does this mean that Ryan Murphy is a homophobe? He just set out to smear gay guys. And we'll know
00:44:45.740 because Ryan Murphy's a gay guy. He says, I think that it got the LGBT tag. One, because of my
00:44:53.400 involvement. I'm a gay man. So most of my stories deal with some sort of LGBTQ thing. And I do that
00:45:00.240 selfishly. When I was growing up, I had nothing to look to. My mission statement has been to talk
00:45:06.480 about those stories and those characters and unearthed buried history. So he's saying, yeah,
00:45:12.020 it's probably just because of me because I'm a gay guy. And sometimes if there's an LGBT director,
00:45:17.020 then they'll put the tag too. He says, and I am selfish as an artist in that I am interested in the
00:45:23.740 LGBT idea. And so I tell stories about that. And I don't only tell really pretty stories or it's all 0.92
00:45:32.300 will and grace. Everything about LGBT is always wonderful and fun and gay. I mean, even the word
00:45:39.220 gay became a euphemism for LGBT because gay used to mean happy. And now gay is almost never used in
00:45:46.140 that sense. Like the song, you know, I feel pretty. Oh, so pretty. I feel pretty and witty and gay.
00:45:52.340 Which I am certain is about to be clipped out for a meme. And that's fine. I don't care.
00:45:57.520 That's all right. Used to mean that. Now all it means is LGBT. Well, what he's saying is, no,
00:46:04.780 there's bad stuff that happens all throughout the world. There's no group of people that is immune
00:46:09.900 from bad stuff and bad characteristics. But that is contrary to what the culture says.
00:46:15.220 In our culture, all gay things have to be perfectly good. All traditional things have to be perfectly 1.00
00:46:25.160 bad. If they make a show or a movie about Africa, specifically about black Africa, I guess they 0.95
00:46:33.560 could make a negative movie or show about white colonization of Africa, and they've made a lot of 0.88
00:46:38.780 those. But about Africa and Africans and traditional African societies, it always has to be wonderful.
00:46:44.120 If they make a movie about the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans, it always has to be 0.99
00:46:52.640 wonderful. America, before the evil white man got here, it was all just this Pocahontas, 0.96
00:46:58.900 have you ever seen the colors of the rainbow? Then the Europeans get there and they ruin everything. 1.00
00:47:04.300 The only guy who can make a movie suggesting that indigenous societies maybe weren't all gumdrops 1.00
00:47:10.200 and roses would be Mel Gibson. That movie would be Apocalypto. It's a much more realistic view of
00:47:14.660 things. But in our culture, we have decided certain groups and certain ideas and certain societies can
00:47:23.560 only be good. Those happen to be non-Western societies. You see this breakdown everywhere. 0.98
00:47:32.620 Gay good, straight bad. Woman good, man bad. Every race of people on earth good, white people bad. 0.90
00:47:44.100 East, the Far East, the Middle East, Southeast, Africa good, the West bad. And when you transgress those
00:47:54.760 lines in either direction, if you suggest that maybe indigenous society or maybe LGBT culture or maybe
00:48:02.060 any of these things might have some problems with it, you will be written off. And if you suggest
00:48:07.280 that the Europeans ever did anything good, that maybe Christianity has something to recommend it, 0.99
00:48:11.720 you will also fall afoul of that culture as well. That's just the rule. It has nothing to do with
00:48:16.440 reality. It has nothing to do with holding up a mirror. In fact, in some cases, it's probably because
00:48:22.660 people do not like what they see in the mirror. They don't like what they see in themselves. And so
00:48:28.080 there always have to be other problems. Every bad thing that befalls anybody has to be
00:48:33.380 somebody else's fault. You can never take a look at the man in the mirror.
00:48:38.700 Now, much like the former president, I have a major announcement, okay? Yes or no, the game
00:48:47.300 is back and available for pre-order over at dailywire.com slash shop. We have this hit game show on YouTube,
00:48:54.760 YouTube, and the hit game show is called Yes or No. And it's the show where I sit down with my friends
00:49:01.440 and we drink and we, you know, respond to prompts and we try to figure out how well we know the other
00:49:08.800 person. The show really took off. We put it up in the store. I think we ordered a thousand or so games
00:49:13.960 sold out instantly. And I'm really frustrated because a lot of people have tried to order it
00:49:18.760 before Christmas and it just, it sold out way too fast. So we are restocking right now. You can pre-order
00:49:24.180 Yes or No brings the fun home and puts your knowledge of your friends and family to the test.
00:49:29.180 Play with up to nine people and discuss the most pressing issues of our time, including
00:49:32.180 the likelihood of alien existence, questions about God, life and the universe, and so much more.
00:49:36.920 You may have missed out on helping to make this the stocking stuffer of the year since it sold out
00:49:41.560 so quickly, but now is your chance to secure your copy of the best-selling game. Pre-order Yes or No
00:49:46.980 at dailywire.com slash shop. We've also got a magician coming up on the member block right now.
00:49:54.460 A magician who pulled off one of the most impressive magic tricks of the year. Go check it out.
00:49:59.140 If you're not a member, you got to join. Click the link in the description and join us.
00:50:03.600 You've got to keep us warm.
00:50:20.020 Oh! 0.60
00:50:21.020 You.
00:50:21.880 You.
00:50:22.020 You.
00:50:23.540 You.
00:50:26.380 You.
00:50:29.360 You.