Ep. 1248 - The Transgender Facts Liberals Don't Want To Hear
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Summary
A new study suggests that detransition rates among transgender teens and adults are much higher than the 98% to 99% that pro-trans activists and leftist groups like the Human Rights Campaign ( HRC) have claimed. Why is this happening?
Transcript
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Amid all the debate over transgenderism, one of the pro-trans crowd's favorite talking points
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is that rates of regret and detransition are low. They will often say that the rate of
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detransition is 1%, maybe 2%. But it turns out that, as with most transgender arguments,
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that talking point is not true. A new study on a sample of about 1,000 transitioners
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has found a detransition rate of nearly 30%, 3-0. Hat tip to Megan McArdle from the Washington Post
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for calling attention to this study. It is called The Continuation of Gender-Affirming Hormones Among
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Transgender Adolescents and Adults. The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology
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and Metabolism, and it found that the four-year trans hormone continuation rate was just 70.2%.
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That's a far cry from the 98%, 99% statistic that the trans activists promote. The rate of detransition
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was even higher in women. It was 35.6%. And perhaps most interesting of all, it found that people who
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started cross-sex hormones and the transition process as minors had a higher continuation rate
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as adults. Now, that fact is unsurprising in itself. Of course, people whose normal development
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was impeded by cross-sex hormones, people for whom detransition would be much more difficult,
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are much less likely to attempt it. That part is not all that interesting. What is interesting
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is that this higher rate helps to explain why leftist activist groups and the big pharma companies that
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fund them seem so hell-bent on peddling transgenderism to younger and younger children. The younger the
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victim, the more likely he is to stick with the transition, and the more money goes into the
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coffers of the people peddling the transgender madness. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show. We've got to get to the most important story, which is that an 81-year-old
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woman has made it to the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. And frankly, one,
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she looks very good, especially for her age. And two, at least it's a woman. So that's, I guess that's
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a win in the culture. I don't know. It's still not great, though. We will get to that in just a
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moment. First, though, big pharma is funding all this trans stuff. If not all the trans stuff,
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big pharma is funding a lot of the trans stuff. And this is not unique to the transgender movement.
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This is how politics often works. So a story came out yesterday. Big pharma is funding organizations,
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activist organizations, to push transgenderism into hospitals. The human rights campaign,
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that's the leftist organization that has the equal sign. They existed to redefine marriage and say that
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the marriage now also includes unions of two men and two women. And that was the equal sign bumper
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sticker. So you basically avoided the entire debate over what marriage is by simply framing the debate
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as a matter of rights. Who has the right to get married? And the HRC was very effective. And then the
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Supreme Court redefined marriage. So what was the HRC going to do? It pivoted. It became a pro-trans
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organization. The HRC is this leftist group that has something called the Healthcare Equality Index.
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And the Healthcare Equality Index measures, quote, healthcare facilities, policies, and practices
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related to the equity and inclusion of their LGBTQ plus patients, visitors, and employees.
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Now, who funds the Healthcare Equality Index? I'll give you a hint. It's Pfizer. It's Pfizer and other
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pharma companies. HRC admits this. You don't need to put on your tinfoil hat and go digging for it.
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HRC says right on their website that the Healthcare Equality Index, quote, was funded in part by grants
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from Pharma, P-H-R-M-A, and Pfizer. We all know Pfizer, gigantic pharma company that tried to inject
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us all with poison for the last three years. It's a little bit of a digression. Pfizer, very, very
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powerful pharmaceutical company. And Pharma, the Pharmaceutical Researcher and Manufacturers of
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America, is the trade organization that represents the nation's leading biopharmaceutical research
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companies. So it's big pharma broadly. I don't even mean just a single advisor. It's the whole
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industry is funding the HRC. And then HRC, the activist group only concerned with equality and
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freedom and politics, they go in and they effectively act as the salesman for the big pharma drugs.
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They go in, they say, in the name of equality and dignity, you need to give these gigantic
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pharmaceutical companies a lot more money. And then the hospitals acquiesce. It's not that this
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is all about money. But money provides a lot of the firepower for this activism. I think some people
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think that the way that the CIA operates, or the way that intelligence agencies operate, is they go down
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to their labs and they create these special half-robot humanoid-like creatures to go out there and subvert
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different political movements, be they on the left or on the right. And the only time that's ever
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happened is in the case of Pete Buttigieg, who was literally assembled by hand in Langley in a
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laboratory somewhere below the earth. But for most cases, no, that's not how these groups operate.
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Whether we're talking about the government, like the intelligence agencies, or whether we're talking
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about corporations, like these big trade organizations. Usually what happens is when these
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groups want to wield influence, they will go and they will find activists that already exist,
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people who are already inclined ideologically their way. And what they'll do is they'll just
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give them a little push. They'll give them money. They'll give them a little bit more access and a
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little bit more influence. I'm not saying that HRC only exists for the money. Clearly they like the
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money. They're a very well-funded organization. But what happened here is the big pharma companies found
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these activist groups. They juiced them with a ton of cash. Those activist groups act as the shock
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troops, the people on the ground. And then big pharma makes a lot of money. Sometimes the way that this
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works is that the pharmaceutical companies, they'll bypass that middleman salesperson, and they'll go
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straight to the doctors. And then they'll pay the doctors, they'll buy off the doctors, and then the
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doctors will sell their drugs for them, okay? That is a direct business model, not a very reputable or
00:06:55.040
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the smartest way to hire. In Oregon, the director of an Oregon pediatric gender clinic, so the places
00:08:17.960
that are transing the kids, we've just learned, has received thousands of dollars from a pharma
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company that coincidentally makes puberty blockers. Wow, what are the odds? Kara Connolly is the
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director of the gender clinic at Doran Becker Children's Hospital in Portland. She's received
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at least $3,100 from endopharmaceuticals, according to data from the U.S. government's Open Payments
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Transparency Program. Now, what does this mean? You might say, well, $3,000, that's not big money.
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First of all, $3,000 is $3,000, okay? And that's the only payment that we know about
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from this one particular pharmaceutical company. But let's say that it's just $3,000. Let's say the
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big pharma is just going around to individual doctors and paying them $3,000, $2,000, even, I don't
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know, $1,000. What does that mean? Well, according to analysis from ProPublica, they've discovered that
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quote, doctors who received payments linked to specific drugs prescribed more of those drugs.
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This isn't rocket science. This isn't gender science, okay? It doesn't have to be so complicated
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and obscured by all this jargon. Turns out that when you fund something, you get more of it. When
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you incentivize something, you get more of that behavior. And this report from ProPublica found
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out that quote, on average across all drugs, providers who received payments specifically
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tied to a drug prescribed at 58% more than providers who did not receive these payments.
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Again, that does not mean that it's all about the money. But what this tells you
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is if you want to stop certain depraved behaviors like transing the kids, one effective way to
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discourage transing the kids is going to be to go to the financial backing to cut off the source
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that is providing all this fuel for the movement. So yes, we got to go in, we got to ban this stuff.
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Obviously, we got to pass laws. We got to make this illegal. For doctors who continue to do this,
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we need to throw them in prison. We need to wield the law as best we can. But we can also try to cut
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off the funding here. We can say, pass a law, okay, big pharma, you're not allowed to fund the human
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rights campaign, quote unquote, human rights campaign. What a ridiculous title for a left-wing
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group. We can go in there, we can say, hey, big pharma companies, you're not allowed to bribe
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doctors anymore. Sorry, no more bribing doctors. Sorry. And then what are we going to see? 58%
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decrease in the likelihood that the doctors prescribe these drugs. You want to talk about
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quacks and corruption in the medical industry? This is the most disturbing story I have seen in
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a very, very long time. It seems like I say that almost every single day. This one really is it.
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It's from the Atlantic. Very long story. It's called the abortion absolutist. Warren Hearn
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has been performing late abortions for half a century. After Roe, he is as busy with patients
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as ever. You look at this guy, I'm not exaggerating. You get the impression that you are seeing the face
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of the devil himself. This is an old guy who has specialized for now upwards of half a century
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not just abortion. Can you imagine the kind of doctor who says, I'm going to go get my medical
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degree so that I can engage in the very fulfilling, gratifying task of killing babies every single
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day, multiple babies every single day. But then furthermore, the kind of abortionist who says,
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and I'm not just going to kill those really little tiny babies where it's kind of hard to make out their
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body parts. I'm going to kill late term babies. That's this guy. And he's still doing it.
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And according to the Atlantic, he's busier than ever. What do we mean by late term? We're talking
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about killing babies at 25 weeks gestation. We're talking about killing babies at 30 weeks gestation.
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To put that into perspective, this is what a baby looks like at 30 weeks gestation. I just Googled
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30 week preemie baby. These are in every single way, in every physical way, babies who just look
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exactly like babies that you see, newborn, really young babies, right when mama goes to the hospital,
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gives birth, comes out. This is exactly what they look like. They're a little bit smaller. So they're
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being treated a little bit in the NICU, but they, in every single way, are babies. Their skin looks like
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their skin. Their limbs look like their limbs. Their faces look like their faces. And this guy
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goes in and kills them multiple times a day for 50 years. He has admitted in this article to killing
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a girl just because she's a girl. Because mommy didn't want a girl. Mommy wanted a boy. So he goes
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in and kills a baby who looks something like this because she's a girl. And if she had been a boy,
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she would have lived, but she's a girl. So she's got to be murdered. Same thing. He admits to killing
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a boy for being a boy. He admits, this is an amazing work of journalism by Elaine Godfrey. He admits
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that he's killed babies with a still beating heart after he takes them out of his mother's womb,
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out of their mother's womb, rather. He admits that he's woken up in terror, that he's been haunted
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by the images of these babies and their beating heart. Like the Edgar Allen Poe story. The heart
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just beating wakes him up. And he admits that half or maybe even more than half of the women who come to
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him seeking an abortion don't have any medical argument for seeking that abortion. This is such
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a phenomenal work of journalism. Really probably deserves a Pulitzer Prize because one, this author
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from the Atlantic has gone out, found the story that basically no one had heard about. And she has
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knocked down so many of the lies of the pro-abortion movement. What does the pro-abortion movement tell
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us? The baby's not a baby. Here it is. Look at the baby. You can see that's a baby. What does the
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pro-abortion movement tell us? Oh, late-term abortions don't happen. They're so exceedingly
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rare. Oh, it never happens. What are you talking about? This guy's busier than ever. Oh, people
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don't kill their babies because of their sex. They do. Oh, no. The women who, if you seek a late-term
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abortion, it's because your life is threatened and you need to protect your life. No, this guy admits
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half the time, more than half the time, they just don't want the baby. So they're just going to go to
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this guy and kill the baby. The other reason this story is so important is because this is not just
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one guy. This is not just some extreme case. This is not just the fringe of the industry.
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The reason that we are particularly horrified, the reason why even the majority of people,
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the vast majority of people who would call themselves pro-choice would still recoil in
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horror and think that this should be banned, is because we look at the baby and bypassing
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our reason, we just have this intense, visceral, emotional response to images of vulnerable little
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babies that we, that we can immediately recognize to be babies. But there's no essential difference
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between this baby and the baby at 20 weeks or 15 weeks or 10 weeks or five weeks or the baby
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from the moment of conception, still a baby, still an individual human life being snuffed out,
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a person being murdered with the ascent of the mother at the hands of Mengele Redux over here.
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Okay? That's what abortion is. Abortion stops a beating heart. And you can't always see the
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beating heart as clearly as that doctor has sometimes outside the womb, but it stops a beating heart.
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Where abortion is undertaken for selfish reasons. It's not always as clear as, oh, I don't really
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want a girl. But it's child sacrifice at the altar of a false god. And ultimately at the altar of the
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self. Undertaken for selfish reasons by the people procuring them and undertaken for selfish reasons
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by the doctors who do it to make a lot of money. To say nothing of whatever other psychological
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problems they've got. This guy in a, in a just world, this guy would be clearly violating the law.
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And if he continued to clearly violate the law, he would be executed by the state. He would be
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convicted by a jury of his peers. He would be, he would receive capital punishment. This guy is one of,
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if not the single worst mass killer in American history. Mass killer of the most vulnerable,
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innocent people. Brilliant journalism, really good stuff. I don't know if the author intended it to
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be such brilliant journalism, but it certainly is. We need to show what abortion looks like. I know
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that's a controversial tactic of the pro-life movement. It's extraordinarily effective. We need
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to show what it looks like. There's a group that just went out, they got a boat, and they decided to go
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protest a party held by Planned Parenthood. Here's how they did it. They got signs, they got a bullhorn,
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and they got pictures of what abortion really looks like. And here's how the pro-life group interrupted
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this little nice seaside cocktail soiree of people whose raison d'etre is to murder babies.
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The organization that does this to little babies, you guys are brainwashed. Honestly,
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open your eyes. A three-year-old could see, a five-year-old could see that this is wrong.
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Shame on all of you guys. Open your eyes and look at what you're supporting.
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So let their heart beat. Let their heart beat. Let their heart beat. Let their heart beat.
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Off their bodies, for sex. Off their bodies, for sex. Off their bodies, for sex. Off their bodies,
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for sex. Activism here, right? There's no subtlety here. There's no, well, we have different views,
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but we're going to sort of have a reasonable conversation to meet in the middle. You know
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that I'm all for that. And I've had conversations with pro-abortion people and we've been very civil
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when we're just presenting arguments. I'm all for civil disagreement. I'm all for gentlemanliness.
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But different issues call for different kinds of tactics. These people are murdering little babies.
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And so that requires rhetoric that is a little bit more pointed and direct and urgent. The graphic
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photos are very effective. Imagine if you were there at this party. What would you, you would have
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two options and only two options. You could either look at the photos or you could turn away from the
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photos. And this is very effective for people who say that they're pro-abortion. If you're working
00:19:40.920
for Planned Parenthood, odds are you are a stone cold killer and you're not going to be all that moved
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by these photos. Sometimes you are. I mean, they're, they're great pro-life leaders who worked for
00:19:49.240
Planned Parenthood, who worked for the pro-abortion movement. Some of whom helped lead the pro-abortion
00:19:52.760
movement. They became huge pro-life advocates. One of the founders of the National Abortion Rights
00:19:57.260
League, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, was one of those people. But you've only got two options. If you're
00:20:02.160
that person, you're looking at those pictures. You can either look steely-eyed cold, in which case
00:20:08.780
you are clear to everyone around you, a stone cold psychopath, or you can look away.
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And the vast majority of people who are not would-be serial killers or literal serial killers
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in some cases, they would look away. They can't look at it. And the mere act of looking away is
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instructive. The act of looking away from these photos is instructive to the public broadly. Why
00:20:36.460
can't the abortion advocates stand by their belief, stand on their principles, look what they're doing
00:20:41.900
square in the face? What does that mean about what they're doing? And it's instructive to the
00:20:46.880
pro-abortion people themselves, to the people who look away. We can learn things about ourselves from
00:20:54.100
our own behavior. And very often, it's easier to change our minds than to change our behavior. And if
00:21:00.100
you have that gut, visceral reaction to, whoa, I can't look at this. This is evil. I'm looking away.
00:21:06.180
Huh. I guess I've learned something about myself. Maybe I've learned something about what the reality of
00:21:11.400
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The libs thrive by obscuring reality. That's what they do, okay? We'll get into that in one second.
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kick woke out of his bathroom. The libs thrive by obscuring reality. New slogan just dropped.
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New jargon, politically correct phrase just dropped. You remember diversity and inclusion? I mentioned
00:23:47.280
this at the end of the show yesterday. Diversity and inclusion, that's out. That's canceled. That is
00:23:53.060
passe, old man. Get with the new hip lingo. The new hip lingo is diversity and belonging.
00:24:02.340
Very different, but this is what I'm told by the New York Times. Why some companies are saying
00:24:06.020
diversity and belonging instead of diversity and inclusion. Before I read this article, I just saw
00:24:12.200
the headline. I said, I know exactly why they've done that. Because diversity and inclusion is an
00:24:20.880
an anodyne sounding euphemism for a hideous activity. And the hideous activity is the leftist
00:24:31.540
campaign to incite race hate against white people and sexual absurdity among everybody. That's all it
00:24:37.460
means. Diversity and equity and inclusion, all those policies mean in practice is discriminate against
00:24:44.960
white people and promote sexual disorder and chaos and madness and tell dudes that they're chicks and
00:24:53.460
chicks that they're dudes and people that they can be in throuples with two women, four guys and a
00:24:58.400
billy goat. How is that a throuple? I don't know. It identifies as three. That's all DEI is. And so why are
00:25:06.780
they changing the euphemism? Because they are on what Steven Pinker at Harvard calls the euphemism
00:25:13.680
treadmill. Steven Pinker is a liberal guy, but he observed this fact about language. And I talk about
00:25:17.500
it in my book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which is available wherever
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you want to. Hello, where's my bell? Okay, finally. The euphemism treadmill observes that political
00:25:29.420
activists have to change euphemisms regularly because the purpose of political euphemisms, especially when
00:25:36.520
we're talking about something like political correctness, is not to soften harsh truths, not to use
00:25:41.880
just a slightly more polite phrase, but to lie, to deceive people. If you say that an illegal alien
00:25:50.580
is an undocumented American, you're not just softening the truth a little bit, you're lying.
00:25:55.320
You're telling the opposite of whatever the illegal alien is, he's not an American. And so if you call
00:25:59.400
him an undocumented American, you're just telling a lie. But what happens is that when you lie through
00:26:04.700
the use of this language, ultimately people begin to remember and to recognize the odious underlying
00:26:13.320
reality of the thing that you're lying about. And so the odious underlying reality of that thing
00:26:18.980
starts to color the euphemism, even if it's the floweriest, nicest sounding euphemism ever.
00:26:24.160
So the euphemism takes on this stench. The euphemism takes on this nasty kind of connotation. And so the
00:26:31.020
radicals, if they want to keep up the racket, they've got to change the euphemism. So I knew
00:26:34.960
that instantly when I saw that headline. I said, okay, maybe I'm being prejudicial. Maybe I'm rushing
00:26:39.960
to judgment. And then I read the article and that's exactly what it is. The libs are realizing that
00:26:45.100
people have turned against DEI. And so instead of saying, all right, we're going to abandon this
00:26:50.300
very unpopular and unjust and hideous sort of political campaign, they say, no, you know what we're
00:26:57.560
going to do? We're just going to change the slogan to diversity and belonging instead. The thing is,
00:27:04.580
it will work for some time. Political correctness, which we now call wokeness, has worked
00:27:09.400
pretty well as a political campaign. So it will do people from some time. But the odious underlying
00:27:15.120
reality of that campaign is going to dawn on people again. Then they're going to change the words.
00:27:20.420
Again, speaking of politically incorrect terms, there is a member of parliament in the motherland,
00:27:25.520
British MP who is attacking a conservative Tory MP for referring to the ideology and the intellectual
00:27:34.740
movement of cultural Marxism. Now, speaking of that book I told you about earlier, Speechless,
00:27:41.520
Controlling Words, Controlling Minds. It's my number one bestselling book, national bestseller. You can
00:27:44.540
get there. Thank you. For the first part of that book in particular, I talk about this intellectual
00:27:49.780
movement that dominated leftist politics in the 20th century. Well, according to this left-wing MP,
00:27:59.780
quote, cultural Marxism is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory supported by neo-Nazis and groups like the
00:28:07.560
BNP. Disturbing to see another Tory MP spreading it after Suella Braverman did the same in 2019.
00:28:14.840
We can't let far-right language be normalized in politics. I don't blame cultural Marxism or neo-Marxism
00:28:24.280
or 20th century Marxism, all of which are synonymous, for everything. In fact, I think that that intellectual
00:28:31.120
movement is blamed for more than it should be blamed for. And I think the reason it's blamed for
00:28:35.760
more than it should be blamed for is because a lot of conservatives don't realize that liberalism is
00:28:41.800
bad too. That not every terrible thing in the world owes to Marxism. Actually, liberalism,
00:28:47.960
the modern kind of liberalism, the classical kind of liberalism, liberalism broadly, is also very bad
00:28:52.900
and is responsible for a lot of ills. So sometimes I think conservatives project some of the ills of
00:28:59.660
liberalism onto other intellectual movements, including cultural Marxism. But that doesn't mean
00:29:06.600
that cultural Marxism doesn't exist. It's a very well-known intellectual movement described as such
00:29:12.840
as a cultural kind of Marxism by the very prominent left-wing intellectuals at the very prominent
00:29:19.620
institutions which they taught and operated for much of the 20th century. If you look back on
00:29:26.940
Wikipedia just a few years ago, typing cultural Marxism, they'll say cultural Marxism was part of
00:29:32.660
the Marxist tradition in the West that really came to the fore in the 20th century. And it was promoted
00:29:38.360
by thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School. It actually predates the
00:29:47.680
Frankfurt School a little bit with Italian thinkers like Antonio Gramsci or Lukács over in Hungary or a
00:29:56.000
number of other people. And these guys had positions of prominence. They taught at very prominent American
00:30:01.740
universities, including Columbia University. They worked with the government. Herbert Marcuse worked
00:30:05.540
with the OSS, which was the precursor to the CIA. Herbert Marcuse then went on to become the father
00:30:10.620
of the new left. Again, I didn't give him that title. It was the leftists who gave him that title.
00:30:15.160
He remains extraordinarily influential. They're fairly interesting thinkers. They're wrong. Ultimately,
00:30:23.120
they're wrong about everything. They're wrong in the meantime about a lot of things. But they have
00:30:27.360
lots of interesting observations. I've read them extensively. And in fact, I wrote a book about
00:30:33.340
these guys. To say that that doesn't exist is simply ignorant. But this Tory MP, one, doesn't know
00:30:43.720
anything about anything. So ironically, though, she would accuse us of ignorance or dog whistling or
00:30:50.820
whatever. She has never read these people. These people whose intellectual work has laid the groundwork
00:30:57.340
for many of her views and activities, even unbeknownst to her. But furthermore, what she's
00:31:03.920
engaging in is, ironically, or maybe not, a product of cultural Marxism, a product of attaining cultural
00:31:12.260
hegemony, a war of position rather than a war of movement, to use the language of Antonio Gramsci,
00:31:17.060
whereby the libs take over the culture, and you barely even notice that they've done it.
00:31:23.980
And then what happens? Once they've attained that cultural hegemony, because they ultimately turn
00:31:27.880
away from objective truth and reality, they deny the reality of what they've done. It's really no
00:31:32.300
different from Stalin erasing people that he liquidated out of his photographs, people that he
00:31:38.260
purged. Just, oop, no, that person was never there. Because if you believe that history is
00:31:45.620
fundamentally a matter not of God's providence and not of ideas coming to their logical conclusions
00:31:51.920
and not of reason, at least. Because Marxists, to some degree, do believe that history is a
00:31:57.620
consequence of ideas coming to their logical conclusions. But it's divorced from reason.
00:32:00.680
It's divorced from objective truth. It's certainly a divorce from God. If you believe that, that it's
00:32:04.560
really just fundamentally about the will, then you can go in and say, oh, yeah, that prominent
00:32:08.960
intellectual movement, yeah, that's an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. It's so brazen. It is almost as
00:32:16.020
brazen as saying 50 years from now, oh, you keep mentioning Hillary Clinton? Who's Hillary? Hillary
00:32:22.880
Clinton never existed. What are you talking about? That's a tinfoil hat, racist, phobic, anti-Semitic
00:32:30.020
conspiracy theory. I say, well, look at all the evidence and look at all the, we have all the video
00:32:35.440
footage and we have all of the people. What are you talking about? That never happened. Two plus two
00:32:40.820
equals five. What are you talking about? Speaking of willful ignorance, conservatives are still
00:32:45.900
focusing some of their firepower on Hunter Biden. Nancy Mace, who is a liberal Republican, but she's
00:32:55.140
kind of feisty and fiery and occasionally she's on the right side of an issue. Nancy Mace is furious
00:33:01.820
that the Democrats and the DOJ are not taking the case against Hunter Biden more seriously.
00:33:08.780
Here we have a DOJ and FBI who are, who are indicting Trump on misdemeanors and then will not
00:33:15.160
investigate Biden for betraying his country. And I have to tell you, absolutely no one can accuse me
00:33:20.380
of being hyper-partisan or being in the tank for Donald Trump. But good Lord, the amount of evidence
00:33:26.000
in this case is ridiculous. They weren't hiring Hunter Biden for his brains. They weren't hiring
00:33:31.300
certainly Hunter Biden for his bra. They were hiring him to pay for access to the White House. And we
00:33:36.960
see this pattern repeat itself over and over and over again. Obviously that's true. And you can hear
00:33:43.980
Nancy Mace's exasperation. The evidence that we have against Hunter Biden is ridiculous.
00:33:51.140
That's the problem. That's one of the big problems here. It is ridiculous. It's insane. If we only had a
00:34:00.160
small amount of evidence against Hunter Biden, that would be one thing. It would actually be easier.
00:34:05.740
I would feel better about our prospects of prosecuting this guy. But because the evidence
00:34:10.980
is so overwhelming, because his crimes were so cartoonishly villainous at every level, the white
00:34:17.960
collar crimes, the payoffs, the bribery, the deception, the fraud, down to the street level crimes.
00:34:23.600
This guy's smoking crack, getting beaten up on the skid row. He's got a different hooker,
00:34:27.880
it seems every hour of the day. He's filming all of his activities with all of these people,
00:34:32.180
saying into camera, I am committing crimes. Here is all the evidence of my crimes. Then he leaves the
00:34:36.660
laptop with all the evidence at a repair shop and the DOJ does nothing about it. That's the problem.
00:34:43.320
It's so brazen. It shows you the pervasiveness and the depth of the corruption of our government.
00:34:51.520
Yeah, it's totally ridiculous. And what are you going to do about it? What are any of us going
00:34:56.740
to do about it? Even if they do indict the guy, what are they going to do? They're going to indict
00:35:00.640
him. They're going to try him on some lesser charges. Then they're going to give him like
00:35:04.660
five minutes probation. Then he's going to go right back to selling his stupid doodles for half a
00:35:08.720
million dollar a pop, which is the same racket that he's been playing the whole time. The whole time
00:35:14.620
that he's been an adult, that his father's been in politics, what's he been doing? He's been selling
00:35:18.620
influence, ultimately selling out the American government to the highest bidder. He's just
00:35:22.600
going to keep doing that. It's ridiculous. It's not just Hunter Biden's ridiculous. It's the whole
00:35:27.360
system. And the system is not going to destroy one of its own. Even if the system made a little
00:35:35.280
bit of an example out of Hunter Biden, that corruption is going to continue on. Occasionally,
00:35:40.900
the libs will admit when they are in the wrong. And I want to give them credit for it. They don't
00:35:46.300
deserve full credit for it, but they deserve a little bit of credit for it. Jake Tapper,
00:35:49.880
the other day, after the Durham report comes out, the Durham report, which shows there was no basis
00:35:53.640
for spying on Trump's campaign. There was no basis for the Russia hoax. It was completely cooked up by
00:35:58.320
the Clinton campaign. The CIA director knew that it was cooked up by the Clinton campaign. Not only the
00:36:04.080
CIA director, but the head of the FBI, the vice president, the president himself, Barack Obama,
00:36:09.060
they all knew it was a dirty trick campaign stunt nonsense by Hillary. And they proceeded with a
00:36:15.420
straight face to try to destroy Trump anyway. This all, it was spelled out clear as day in the
00:36:20.360
Durham report. Jake Tapper of CNN admits, huh, this is pretty damning. Regardless, the report is now
00:36:29.320
here. It has dropped and it might not have produced everything of what some Republicans hope for.
00:36:33.500
It is regardless devastating to the FBI and to a degree, it does exonerate Donald Trump.
00:36:42.200
So Jake Tapper goes even further than you might've expected. Not only does he admit,
00:36:46.640
okay, this is really bad for the FBI. Damning, actually. Not just a little bad, damning. But
00:36:53.560
further, and Jake Tapper can't go the whole way, but he has to throw a caveat or two in there. But
00:36:59.500
nevertheless, he says, it exonerates Trump. Yeah. And that's great. And we should remember that.
00:37:05.500
And the next time the libs try to peddle all this, the walls are closing in. It's Mueller time. He's
00:37:09.320
a Russian Putin stooge or whatever. You can say, hey, even Jake Tapper, who's a lib, who started out
00:37:14.040
his career as a Democrat political operative, who has remained a Democrat political operative,
00:37:18.800
albeit one who calls himself a newsman on TV, but he's a little bit more fair than the other guys.
00:37:23.180
He comes out and he says, yeah, okay, this exonerates Trump. And the libs will sometimes do
00:37:29.160
that once it no longer matters. The libs will sometimes, occasionally, very often they'll
00:37:35.720
keep up the lie, deny till you die. But sometimes they will admit that years later. The Russia hoax
00:37:41.700
began in 2016. It is now the year of our Lord, 2023. And finally, seven years later, the libs will say,
00:37:50.140
yeah, okay, I guess we kind of made it all up. Oopsie. That's old news now. Moving on,
00:37:57.240
moving on. My favorite comment yesterday is from Patro M. And we'll get to that in one second.
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to 35% off your order at CozyEarth.com. Okay. Wonderful comment yesterday from Petro M, who says,
00:39:31.680
it's a quote from Miller Lite. Hey, Bud Lite, hold my beer. Do you get it? I love a good one-liner.
00:39:43.280
You know, a good little Henny Youngman, all right? Like, for instance, take my wife. Please! Okay. We've
00:39:48.640
got to get to the really important stories now. That would be the 81-year-old woman gracing the cover
00:39:56.900
of Sports Illustrated. This has created some controversy, and if I got to weigh in on just
00:40:07.180
aesthetically speaking how the cover looks, Martha Stewart looks great, certainly for an 81-year-old
00:40:15.000
woman, certainly for a 71-year-old woman, certainly for a 61-year-old woman. She frankly looks great for
00:40:22.020
like a 51-year-old woman, maybe even a woman in her 40s. It is shocking how good Martha Stewart looks.
00:40:29.660
I don't only say this because Martha Stewart is a great, basically wholesome, traditional cultural
00:40:36.280
figure. By the way, it's not like she's wearing a bikini or something in this. It's a pretty tasteful
00:40:40.800
Sports Illustrated cover. But we all suspect something is kind of wrong with this.
00:40:46.800
It just feels wrong to have an 81-year-old on your swimsuit cover, right? But people are having
00:40:54.740
trouble putting their finger on exactly what's wrong about it. For one, she's a woman. That's
00:40:58.440
more than can be said of Sports Illustrated's cover in recent years. There is a transsexual,
00:41:04.180
a trans-identifying man in this issue as well. Now, part of why Sports Illustrated does this is
00:41:12.620
because Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue is an anachronism. It used to be really kind of fun
00:41:18.300
and titillating back in the 90s, even the 2000s, back before the ubiquity of hardcore internet
00:41:25.480
pornography, back when people would go down to the newsstand, back when those still existed,
00:41:29.760
and they'd buy the magazine and say, ooh, tee-hee-hee, we're going to see some pretty women wearing not
00:41:33.700
a lot of clothing. Ooh, tee-hee-hee. But now you go on the internet and you get whatever the most
00:41:38.140
depraved, disordered desire you can possibly imagine is. You can multiply it by 300 and you
00:41:43.420
can find it at the click of a button. So Sports Illustrated, in order to stay relevant, to stay in
00:41:49.100
the news, it has to create controversy. And one way to create controversy is to pretend that dudes are
00:41:55.280
chicks, which is obviously completely disgusting, but at least gets them in the news. And then a better
00:42:01.180
way for them to create controversy is to put an 81-year-old woman on the cover. So okay,
00:42:04.300
mission accomplished, they did that. But why is it wrong? Why is it wrong that even this very
00:42:11.280
good-looking woman at 81 years old is undercover? I go back to a line from St. Gregory the Great,
00:42:20.920
which has been popularized in recent years by St. Josemaria Escriva, which is that it is not good
00:42:28.080
to look at what it is not licit to desire. And I'm not going to use this line in its precision.
00:42:36.720
I just mean it as a way to sort of get at why people feel like it's a little bit wrong to have
00:42:43.660
an 81-year-old woman wearing a swimsuit on the cover of this magazine. We think it's wrong because
00:42:49.180
we know we should not be sexually desiring an 81-year-old woman. Even an 81-year-old woman who's
00:42:57.820
a beloved cultural figure who looks very, very good, especially for her age. It's just, that's not
00:43:03.460
right. It makes sense to sexually desire when you're a young man and you're single and you're
00:43:10.480
looking at a date and get married. It makes sense to desire the women around your age and then to
00:43:18.120
follow that desire by asking the girl out to get a drink or to get dinner and then to follow that
00:43:23.120
desire by dating for a period of time and then to follow that desire by getting married and to
00:43:26.980
follow that desire by doing that thing that married couples do and then to follow that desire by
00:43:30.860
creating children as a result of your physical expression of that bond of love, that love which
00:43:37.100
becomes so real that it actually becomes expressed in a new person and to allow that love to deepen and
00:43:41.860
desire in a way that changes and deepens and grows over time your spouse until both of you are 81 and
00:43:50.080
you're sitting on a porch somewhere sipping iced tea looking at all your kids and grandkids. That makes
00:43:54.460
sense. But it's kind of weird for young men who are supposedly the people who are buying the Sports
00:44:01.360
Illustrated swimsuit issue to be ogling an 81-year-old, a woman who could be their grandmother.
00:44:07.320
That's wrong. And even if Martha Stewart, I don't know if she's had any work done,
00:44:13.860
give Martha the benefit of the doubt, but let's assume like most celebrities, she's had maybe just
00:44:18.380
a little bit of work here and there or she's got personal trainers at least and good diet.
00:44:22.120
And let's assume that there's some airbrushing going on in Photoshop to kind of make the picture
00:44:27.100
look a little bit better. It's wrong to feel that desire. Even if you say the whole concept of the
00:44:36.540
swimsuit issue is a little bit wrong because it's inciting lust or something, which again,
00:44:40.140
that's a whole separate argument. But whatever it is, it's not meant for 81-year-olds. That's just
00:44:50.460
not appropriate. And radicals want to distill all of life down to three bullet points on a napkin that
00:44:59.600
they can call their political manifesto. But life is more complex than that. And one way to approach
00:45:05.640
these kinds of thoughts is with moderation and with prudence and with practical wisdom
00:45:13.020
and with recognizing that things are meant to be in their proper place. When a man behaves like a
00:45:19.800
woman, that's improper. That's womanish. When a woman behaves like a woman, that's proper. That's
00:45:25.040
womanly. They're both behaving like women. Why can't they do that? Well, because one is not proper to
00:45:30.180
their nature and one is proper to their nature. And the nature of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit
00:45:35.260
Issue is that it is not proper for an 81-year-old woman to be on the cover no matter how good she
00:45:38.900
looks. Speaking of women of a certain age, a bit older than Martha Stewart, Cleopatra not doing very
00:45:45.800
well in the ratings. We've talked about Cleopatra, which is the Netflix documentary about
00:45:52.740
a famously white woman who spoke Greek, who is an ancient ruler around the Mediterranean,
00:46:01.960
who is now being portrayed by a black woman in a way that is a little bit absurd, especially if we're
00:46:07.040
talking about it in a historical product here. Well, it turns out viewers agree with my take that
00:46:13.240
this is absurd. The docudrama has a 2% audience score. And not only that, because you might say,
00:46:20.420
well, maybe it was political activists who bombarded the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
00:46:25.200
It's only got 11% critics, too. This thing is getting absolutely panned. One audience member is
00:46:31.500
saying, this is hopelessly inaccurate and a complete failure to understand Egyptian culture
00:46:36.340
and history. No depth or atmosphere of the time. Just a poor attempt to Americanize Egyptian history
00:46:40.420
by changing it to suit American culture. Okay, that's what one of the viewers says. One of the critics
00:46:44.680
says, it's too soapy for serious history fans and not enough soap for viewers who like juicy historical
00:46:52.460
dramas. It's just not proper. I don't know who this actress is. Maybe she's a good actress,
00:47:02.020
but it's not her role. She's miscast. And even a very, very good actor in the wrong role
00:47:07.940
is not going to give you a great performance. And the work of art is going to fail.
00:47:14.960
Falsehood produces bad art. Good art is truthful. What falsehood produces is absurdity,
00:47:26.720
things out of whack. And absurdity and things being out of whack and incongruity,
00:47:31.800
that can make funny comedy. That is one of the most prominent constituent parts of funny comedy.
00:47:37.940
But it doesn't make beautiful art. It doesn't make documentaries, really. People can suss that
00:47:44.460
out. When a modern artist goes around and points to a urinal and says, that's art. Isn't it so
00:47:50.000
beautiful? Everyone knows it's not beautiful. It's not because the urinal is a bad thing. The
00:47:55.780
urinal has a proper place. It's called the bathroom. It's called the men's room. Or I guess,
00:47:59.560
as we move into our brave new world, probably the women's room, too. But we know that that's absurd.
00:48:03.900
We would laugh at that. And certainly in an art gallery, that would be absurd. Things need to be
00:48:08.900
in their proper place. And the proper place for my iPad is in front of me on this table right now.
00:48:15.380
We are heading into the member block. It is Woke Wednesday. My producer, the intrepid Ben Davies,
00:48:21.540
is sitting here. He has got a very important TikTok to teach us all about systemic racism. So we will get
00:48:30.580
to that. We will be in the chat. Head on over to dailywire.com slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. Use
00:48:35.660
promo code Knowles at checkout. Get two months free on all annual plans.