The Michael Knowles Show


Ep. 1363 - The Trans-Heuser Busch Boycott May Have Killed Bud Light


Summary

Transgenderism is a winning political issue for conservatives. Is it because it's aesthetic or because it s a moral and political issue? And why is it so hard for liberals to make sense of it? To me, it s obvious that transgenderism works best as a political issue.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 It has now been seven months since Transheiser Bush flipped the bird to its customer base
00:00:04.640 and then doubled and tripled down on the insult in the expectation that the boycott would eventually
00:00:10.220 collapse and the customers would just forget and move on. And I am pleased to report that none of
00:00:16.260 that has happened. AB InBev, better known as Transheiser Bush, is the world's largest brewer.
00:00:23.460 It saw its revenue climb 5% in the July to September period, in line with Wall Street
00:00:29.220 predictions. But AB InBev's revenue in the United States did not grow. It fell. It fell by 13.5%.
00:00:39.420 U.S. sales of Bud Light were down a full 29% over the four weeks ending on October 21st,
00:00:46.280 compared to that same period last year. Which means the boycott has not let up at all. Which means,
00:00:54.160 and this is what matters for us, that transgender ideology is a winning issue for conservatives.
00:01:00.940 When the squishes beg us to lay off the so-called social issues, including and especially LGBT issues,
00:01:09.460 show them these numbers. Remind them that social issues are a pretty important part of society.
00:01:15.920 And point out that no other issue, perhaps in my lifetime, has been a clearer or more reliable
00:01:22.760 winner for persuading people to side with conservatives. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:01:28.080 Welcome back to the show. The reason that this issue is sticky, the reason that the transgender
00:01:53.640 issue keeps cropping up as a winner for conservatives, I think is as much aesthetic as anything else,
00:02:00.800 which we'll get to in one second. This episode that was brought to you by Good Ranchers.
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00:02:13.220 The reason transgenderism works as a political issue for conservatives is, I think, largely aesthetic.
00:02:23.840 The conservative argument on transgenderism from the moral perspective, from the political perspective,
00:02:28.800 from the anthropological perspective, those are all true too. But I think it's aesthetics that is so
00:02:33.300 persuasive. Here's a good example. Here's a trans activist who has gone viral, hat tip to libs of
00:02:39.380 TikTok, as always. A trans activist who has gone viral for saying that not giving kids puberty
00:02:46.300 blockers is tantamount to mutilation. The thing that gets me about the anti-trans
00:02:52.180 conservative rhetoric around puberty blockers for trans kids is that if they really did care
00:02:57.620 about making sure children weren't being mutilated or weren't being coerced, they would be the number
00:03:03.380 one advocates for puberty blockers, not only because they're empirically supported and because they were
00:03:08.000 developed for cisgender people, but because they would realize that forcing somebody to go through a puberty
00:03:13.660 with a dominant hormone that is misaligned with your actual gender, that would be, by their terms,
00:03:20.120 mutilation. Because imagine if we sat a bunch of 13-year-old cisgender boys around and we were like,
00:03:25.100 hey boys, we know that you're boys. And we know that you've been boys as long as you've been alive, and it's very
00:03:29.960 clear to us that you are boys. But we just want to be so sure. So we're actually going to make you go through
00:03:34.900 estrogen-based puberty instead. So that way, like, when you get to the end of that road and you're 18, you can
00:03:40.560 decide if you still wanted to be that boy that you, you know, always showed signs that you were.
00:03:45.060 Can you imagine if we did that? That would be f***ed up. But that's literally what you are doing to trans kids.
00:03:49.900 Because forcing somebody to go through a puberty with a dominant hormone that is misaligned with your actual
00:03:55.400 gender is a forced mutilation by conservative standards. So you would think that they would be the number one advocates
00:04:01.940 for blockers and go, oh my gosh, yeah, why don't we, like, put a pause on this so that way you can decide
00:04:06.880 and, like, in a couple years see how you feel. Like, I just wish they would shut up.
00:04:13.000 Forget about his argument. Obviously the argument is crazy.
00:04:17.320 Would you ever leave your child with that person? Ever? Under any circumstances? No, of course not.
00:04:23.500 He looks deranged and is deranged and his argument is deranged. But it's, people can hear terrible
00:04:32.920 arguments. But when terrible arguments are made by people who seem glamorous, say, or sophisticated,
00:04:39.620 say, or intellectual, say, then those arguments sometimes catch fire. I think of someone like
00:04:46.340 Angela Davis. Angela Davis was a black power activist, an avowed communist, a terrorist, someone who
00:04:52.940 was complicit in murder and terrorism and political assassination. But a lot of people liked her. A lot
00:05:01.180 of people still like her today. A lot of prominent liberals will quote her because she seems intellectual
00:05:05.540 and she seems somewhat sophisticated, glamorous in a radical kind of way. This guy doesn't. The trans
00:05:13.700 activists don't. They look especially off. And we should not run away from that.
00:05:22.940 We should recognize, a friend of mine says that facts don't care about your feelings,
00:05:27.220 which is true, but politics largely cares about your feelings. And your feelings are largely informed
00:05:32.960 by what you see. It's informed by aesthetics. I think of the architect and architectural theorist
00:05:37.700 Christopher Alexander, who said that any space you're in is going to slightly elevate or slightly
00:05:41.900 lower your spirits. We are very, very susceptible to our aesthetic sense. This is really good.
00:05:48.500 So what is it? Why wouldn't you leave your kid with this crazy looking guy? Out of prejudice. You
00:05:56.580 have a prejudice. You look at a guy with five o'clock shadow who's wearing a dress, who's shrieking and
00:06:02.520 shouting and doesn't look put together. And your prejudice kicks in and says, yeah, this is not a great
00:06:08.340 idea. Some ideologues will be so radically pro-leftist that they will reject their prejudices.
00:06:14.820 They will reject their gut instinct that says, probably not a good idea to leave my kid with
00:06:18.600 this person. And that's very imprudent. So much of liberalism is just a rejection of prudence.
00:06:26.000 It occurs to me. You know, prejudice can be bad if we discriminate unjustly against people. That can
00:06:33.280 be very bad. But prejudice broadly is a very good thing. It's something that Edmund Burke, one of the
00:06:37.600 great conservative philosophers, exalted. Russell Kirk, a more recent conservative philosopher,
00:06:42.780 exalted. It's a good thing. It's called prudence. And prudence for Aristotle and every wise statesman
00:06:47.880 since is the paramount political virtue. Now, speaking of aesthetics and politics, I debated
00:06:53.140 even bringing this story up because it's a mean and nasty story. And so I'm not going to play the
00:06:59.580 clip. There was a clip of the podcaster, Patrick Bette David, making fun of Ron DeSantis. And
00:07:07.540 Governor DeSantis is on the podcast and people have been making fun of the governor for wearing boots
00:07:12.340 that seem like they have a little lift in the heel because Donald Trump is very tall.
00:07:18.380 Ron DeSantis, he's not short. He's just a sort of averaged height guy. And, but in presidential
00:07:24.140 elections, usually the taller candidate wins. So some have suggested that the governor, like many
00:07:29.980 politicians before him, is wearing some kind of lift in his shoes. The governor and his team have
00:07:35.480 denied this. And so this podcaster, Patrick Bette David, decided to make fun of him and said,
00:07:40.060 hey man, what's the deal with the shoes? These shoes are weird. You're wearing lifts. Here,
00:07:43.840 I'm going to buy you a pair of Ferragamos. And Governor DeSantis said, I can't accept gifts.
00:07:48.980 You know, shut it down as quickly as he could. Why do the shoes matter? Why do people care
00:07:55.620 that Governor Ron DeSantis, the greatest governor in America right now, maybe the greatest governor
00:08:01.100 in my lifetime? Very serious man who's accomplished a lot. Why do they care if he puts lifts in his
00:08:08.700 shoes? Because people crave confidence. This is always true. And if you put lifts in your shoes,
00:08:16.180 it speaks to a sort of insecurity. Even if it's a well-calculated insecurity, it still shows an
00:08:22.000 insecurity. And so people don't like that. There's nothing new about that. People are always attracted
00:08:25.920 to confident people. But I think they're especially attracted to confident people now.
00:08:31.460 And the reason that they're especially attracted to confident people now is because we live in a
00:08:36.480 time that is pervaded by skepticism. Where we're told that we can't really know anything for certain.
00:08:43.260 We're told that long-established facts, well, that's just your opinion, man. We're taught that
00:08:50.240 basic philosophical premises. Or just, you know, that's just what you think. You can't prove that.
00:08:56.660 How do you know? You don't know. It's just your belief, dude. Come on, man. It's the Big Lebowski.
00:09:02.160 It's, well, that's just your opinion, man. So in this extremely skeptical age, especially in this
00:09:07.460 extremely skeptical age, any show of confidence is very attractive. I think this helped Donald Trump,
00:09:13.600 who may have been wrong a handful of times in his life, but he's never been in doubt.
00:09:17.620 I think that's why people are attracted to Trump. I think it's why people are attracted to AOC.
00:09:21.760 AOC is wrong about almost everything. But she's always so confident about it. And someone simply
00:09:27.040 stating a fact in a time of skepticism is really attractive. And someone who appears to have
00:09:33.860 insecurities, even from the aesthetic perspective, is not going to do as well. And podcasters are going
00:09:40.740 to make fun of him, like Patrick David. Speaking of political confidence, Xi Jinping over in China
00:09:46.120 has reportedly purged 500,000 CCP officials in just the year 2023. And this is being reported
00:09:56.260 as a horrible thing. But it should be clear, when they say he purged these officials, they're not
00:10:02.460 talking entirely about Stalin-esque mass executions. There have been some party members who've gone
00:10:08.760 missing, at least for periods of time. But when they're talking about 500,000 people purged from
00:10:13.880 the Communist Party. They're talking about people who were fired and brought up on charges and punished
00:10:19.360 for corruption. This is... Call me crazy. I don't want to seem like I'm a Xi apologist here or like
00:10:27.800 I'm... But isn't that good? Isn't it good to get rid of and punish? Not like get rid of, but you know,
00:10:36.380 like fire and punish the corrupt people in your government? Shouldn't we be doing that? Wouldn't
00:10:42.700 that be good if we also did that? We never do that. No one who engages in corruption in our
00:10:47.360 government gets in trouble. Republicans get in trouble for not engaging in corruption. Democrats
00:10:51.560 engage in widespread corruption. The President of the United States, along with his son and his
00:10:56.380 brother, shook down leaders around the world for millions and millions of dollars. We have copies of
00:11:02.320 the checks of the payments from the bag men to the big guy up top, the Oval Office occupant,
00:11:08.560 Joe Biden himself, and it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whatsoever. And forget about the
00:11:13.920 electeds for a second. What about all the bureaucrats? We always are complaining about
00:11:16.920 the deep state, the administrative state. Well, what we need to do is purge the deep state and the
00:11:21.700 administrative state. Not in the Stalin way, but not totally dissimilar from the Xi Jinping way. We need
00:11:27.900 to fire them, get them out of their positions of power. And if they've committed crimes, we need to
00:11:32.020 try them for those crimes. The federal bureaucracy is hundreds of, it's millions of people, actually.
00:11:38.100 Depends on exactly how you count it, but it could be up to 2 million people. Most presidents who come
00:11:42.400 into office are able to swap out 4,000 to 5,000 people in the bureaucracy. In order to have anything
00:11:50.560 even resembling meaningful change, you would have to swap out 40,000 to 50,000, at least. So I look at Xi
00:11:57.360 here, and I think, well, I don't like communism. I'm not rooting for America's adversary over America.
00:12:02.520 I'd like America to be really strong, too. But one way to be strong is when we see our adversaries do
00:12:07.000 things that are effective and that are helping their countries, maybe we ought to learn that lesson, too.
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00:13:37.960 use code Knolls, K-N-W-L-E-S. Speaking of purges, Democrats for years now have been talking
00:13:45.340 about packing the Supreme Court, and they want to pack the Supreme Court because the court has
00:13:50.540 generally ruled in favor of conservatives on at least a handful of important cases.
00:13:57.760 Not all the important cases. The Supreme Court, with the support of allegedly conservative Justice
00:14:03.100 Gorsuch, enshrined transgenderism into civil rights law. That's not very conservative. The
00:14:08.140 Supreme Court redefined marriage. Now, of course, that was before all of the Trump nominees got there.
00:14:15.340 But still, there were conservatives on the court. They redefined marriage in Obergefell.
00:14:20.040 They ratified Obamacare, which was completely unconstitutional. They've done all sorts of
00:14:24.580 things, but they've also overruled Roe v. Wade. They've also ruled in favor of the Second Amendment.
00:14:31.160 So they've done things that Democrats don't like, and Democrats have said, okay, we're going to pack
00:14:34.360 the Supreme Court. But that's politically unpopular because it seems as though Democrats are upending
00:14:40.000 our system of government. And the moderate Democrats and the independents and the kind of just fashionable
00:14:46.180 liberals, they don't like that. That doesn't pull very well or play well in Peoria. So the Democrats have
00:14:51.020 a new strategy. They're going to do reverse court packing. I've got to thank Ken Klukowski over at
00:14:57.460 Breitbart for that phrase. In a recent write-up yesterday or the day before, he pointed out that reverse
00:15:04.920 court packing will have much the same effect as regular court packing, but it will be more
00:15:09.340 acceptable to the public. And what is reverse court packing? Reverse court packing is when
00:15:14.520 the Democrats go in and try to get the conservative judges to recuse themselves from a bunch of cases
00:15:19.700 or ideally to resign. And how are they going to do that? They're going to say that Clarence Thomas
00:15:25.740 went on vacation once and he didn't pick up his breakfast tab. The host of a conference picked up
00:15:31.660 the breakfast tab. And so that's a bribe. And even if Clarence Thomas has never ruled on any cases that
00:15:37.880 really pertain to these people, it's just, it's bribery. It's corruption. Joe Biden is meanwhile,
00:15:45.120 just collecting checks hand over fist, millions of dollars from China, from Ukraine, from all over
00:15:49.720 the world. No, no, no, that's not, forget about that. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
00:15:53.560 Clarence Thomas, he went to a summer camp once. And so he's got to resign from the Supreme Court.
00:15:59.960 They're doing it to Alito too. And how are they going to go after him? They're going to go after
00:16:04.280 Leonard Leo. So Leonard Lear is the head of the Federalist Society, Federalist Society, very
00:16:08.800 important conservative legal organization, which provided a lot of good judges during the Trump
00:16:14.920 administration. And it's, it's important to the conservative legal ecosystem. So Senate Democrats,
00:16:22.920 Dems on the Senate Judiciary Committee have decided to subpoena Leonard Leo and others,
00:16:29.120 even though Leo's attorneys are saying, you have no right to subpoena me. I'm a private citizen.
00:16:33.620 You're not charging me with a crime. You have, there's no reason for you to subpoena me,
00:16:38.020 a private citizen. And you certainly have no right to subpoena Clarence Thomas or, or Sam Alito.
00:16:45.480 Because to do so, to say that the, the U.S. Congress has some ultimate oversight rights over the
00:16:54.320 Supreme Court is to say that the Supreme Court is subservient to the Congress, which is not true.
00:16:59.200 We have three branches of government and we have a separation of powers. We have checks and balances.
00:17:03.040 So it's just completely preposterous. But what else are they going to do? This is Dick Durbin and
00:17:08.040 Sheldon Whitehouse, the two Democrats who are demanding all of these records. Cause they think
00:17:12.460 if they can get Leo, then Leo will probably go to some of these conferences and different
00:17:17.300 nefarious back rooms, smoke-filled room kind of things with, with conservative judges. And then
00:17:23.380 they'll be able to force them to resign, which will be more effective at tilting the court in favor of
00:17:28.780 Democrats than packing it, which is unpopular. So there's more than one way to skin a cat.
00:17:34.480 Democrats are very clever at these kinds of tactics. Unfortunately, if it starts to look like
00:17:39.420 this is going to work, we're going to have to do the same thing to them. I don't want to.
00:17:44.880 I don't want to go digging through Elena Kagan's trash can. I don't want to go hire a private eye
00:17:51.300 to follow Sonia Sotomayor around. I don't want to have Republicans in Congress subpoena private
00:17:56.780 citizens who one time had lunch with any of the liberal judges, but we will have to do that
00:18:03.120 because such a thing would not be immoral. It would be somewhat reckless to our political system
00:18:10.640 when the Democrats initiate this kind of action, but it wouldn't be immoral. It would be perfectly
00:18:15.580 just. It just wouldn't, wouldn't really have a place in our system. But, but that kind of
00:18:22.000 retaliation would be just and not to retaliate in that way would be to concede the political order
00:18:26.880 to the libs, which would be very, very unjust. So they want to go down this road. It looks like
00:18:31.740 they've come to their senses on actually packing the Supreme Court for, positively packing the
00:18:37.220 Supreme Court. So now they're going to try to negatively pack the Supreme Court and we're
00:18:40.460 going to have to hit them if they do it to us. There's, there's no way out of that. The only way
00:18:44.600 out is through. Speaking of the Supreme Court and speaking of the court generally ruling with
00:18:50.320 conservatives on some big cases, even on what has been hailed a conservative win, some conservatives
00:18:55.400 are saying actually constitutes a loss. And Senator Josh Hawley wants to reverse a Supreme
00:19:02.720 Court decision, largely hailed as a Republican victory. And that is the Citizens United decision.
00:19:08.620 So the Citizens United decision is what, 10 years old now, maybe more. And it says that corporations
00:19:14.000 are people. And that is the famous line from Mitt Romney during 2012. One of the real hits
00:19:21.040 from that doomed campaign where he said, ha ha, corporations are people, my friend.
00:19:24.700 Ha ha ha. And there's some truth to that. A corporation is not just a building. A corporation
00:19:29.820 is not, but a corporation is also not an individual. A corporation is a group of people
00:19:34.100 with certain rights and certain restrictions on it. And what Citizens United did, according to Barack
00:19:41.700 Obama and the liberals, is it allowed corporations to spend whatever they wanted on politics and
00:19:46.460 political campaigns. Now, Sam Alito, the conservative judge, said that's not true. In fact,
00:19:50.960 when Obama was haranguing the court for that during the State of the Union, Alito visibly
00:19:55.800 said, not true. But now Josh Hawley has come out and basically sided with Obama. And his
00:20:03.140 reasoning is pretty interesting here. He says, politically connected corporations, quote,
00:20:07.560 have been in favor of almost everything that has been devastating for us beyond economics. He says,
00:20:12.460 what's new in the last two or three years is that those corporations now want to dictate
00:20:16.520 voting laws in the states. They now want to dictate rules on biological men playing women's
00:20:23.260 sports. So the old knock, the old left knock on corporations and politics is, well, they're just
00:20:31.300 going to spend money to buy politicians so that the politicians write the laws so the corporations
00:20:36.200 make more money. That would be bad enough. That happens all the time in politics. That would be bad
00:20:40.400 enough. But what Hawley is saying is, no, no, no, this is even worse. The corporations now want to
00:20:44.800 rewrite the voting laws. Corporations want to rewrite anthropology. They want to rewrite what
00:20:49.080 girls' sports means. They want to upend all of our values and our beliefs. And that's a bridge too
00:20:54.000 far. So then, and this is my favorite answer, someone asks Hawley, is he only going after the
00:21:00.660 corporations now because they're liberal? And I love his answer was, well, actions do have consequences.
00:21:09.340 I love that. He doesn't even try to hide it. He says, yeah. Of course, if the corporations were
00:21:15.380 just being normal and saying men are men and women are women, and we should all live in a normal,
00:21:18.620 flourishing way, I wouldn't really have a problem with it. But if the corporations are going to come
00:21:22.860 in and wield their immense power in this country, especially after many decades of deregulation,
00:21:28.720 largely heralded, largely, largely propelled by conservatives, then we're going to have to rein that in.
00:21:36.320 This is a big difference here between a libertarian and a conservative. Libertarians oppose big
00:21:43.920 government. Conservatives oppose outsize everything, all kind of outsized power.
00:21:54.000 The libertarians, they focus their eye on the state and the statists and the government. And yeah,
00:21:58.540 that's what you don't want the government or the state to have an outsized degree of power. But
00:22:03.260 big corporations can wield power unjustly and can threaten our rights and our way of life
00:22:08.520 just as well as the government. In some cases, the corporations can do it in a more effective way
00:22:13.500 because they're even less accountable very often than the government is. I don't want some bureaucrat
00:22:20.260 in D.C. stomping out my rights and my way of life. I also don't want some weirdo at Google doing the
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00:23:32.040 That is BulletproofEveryone.com, promo code Knolls. Speaking of dubious political speech,
00:23:39.400 there was a threat made, multiple threats made to Jewish students at Cornell. And I'm going to
00:23:46.560 Cornell on Monday, so this interested me even more than the usual threats made on campuses.
00:23:51.160 So I look at it. I said, okay, I think this is a legit threat. Meaning, I don't think it's a hoax.
00:23:58.940 I don't think it's the Jewish students sending it to themselves. Students have done that. Usually
00:24:04.360 not Jewish students. But black students have done that many times, which I outline in my book,
00:24:09.720 Speechless. I'm on the road right now, so there's no, there's no bell, sadly. You've seen this on
00:24:16.600 sexual hoaxes. Women claiming to have been raped on college campuses, and then evidence comes out
00:24:22.840 that it just wasn't true. Meanwhile, the men's lives have been ruined by some kangaroo court of
00:24:26.580 professors and diversity deans. But usually Jewish students don't do that. So I said, I think this one
00:24:34.280 is probably legit. It turns out that it is legit. A student from upstate New York has been arrested
00:24:41.040 for making these threats. And the student is ethnically Asian. That's not supposed to be how it works.
00:24:50.900 Hold on. The student, the threat was made against the Jewish students. So the person who made the
00:24:57.660 threat has to be a neo-Nazi white supremacist. So the student has to be white. Ideally for the liberal
00:25:02.900 media, this threat would have been made by a white student. And then we could have had weeks and weeks
00:25:07.100 of a national conversation about white supremacy and how white men with their toxic masculinity and
00:25:15.400 their evil pallid whiteness, they need to be run out of society. So that would have been ideal for the
00:25:21.760 liberals. Second to that, the student was supposed to be Arab. Arabs were considered white for statistical
00:25:30.480 purposes in the US for a long time until it became clear that being white was a disadvantage
00:25:35.180 in politics. So then all of a sudden that kind of went away. And there was a new group, the MENA,
00:25:42.540 the Middle East North Africa group. There were some Arab and Middle Eastern political activists who
00:25:49.300 said, we want a separate category because we're so oppressed. And you think, hold on, wait a second.
00:25:53.380 If you're being oppressed by the evil white man and you're currently being classified as white,
00:25:59.040 shouldn't you want to just keep being classified? Wouldn't that, that would lessen your oppression if
00:26:02.820 what you were saying were true? But it's not. Actually, the opposite is true. So at least the
00:26:07.680 guy was supposed to be Arab and he was supposed to be a Hamas sympathizer, but he's not. He's Asian.
00:26:15.300 What do we do with that? I imagine what we're going to do is that the story is going to disappear
00:26:21.620 because these stories do not make it to the news because of the stories themselves. The stories make
00:26:31.840 it to the news because of the narratives that already existed. And the stories are selected
00:26:37.240 according to the narratives. If they fit the narrative, the stories get selected and you hear
00:26:42.940 about them and they become a cause celeb. And we now think of George Floyd as some kind of secular
00:26:47.820 saint. Even though black men are killed in violent ways every day in the United States and criminals
00:26:56.840 are killed in violent ways every day in the United States and drug addicts who take lethal doses of
00:27:01.620 drugs overdose on those drugs every day in the United States. And people aren't killed by the police
00:27:07.940 quite so constantly as the left says, but policing is a dangerous job and you're dealing with criminals
00:27:12.520 and there are officer-involved shootings. The reason George Floyd made it, of course, is because
00:27:16.760 his story fit the narrative. And all the other stories that don't fit the narrative, you just
00:27:20.660 never hear of. Same is true here. I doubt we're going to hear very much more about this fellow at
00:27:25.600 Cornell. Maybe I'll hear about it though when I go up to Cornell on Monday. Speaking of people
00:27:30.080 threatening to kill the Jews, the Houthis, the Houthis, it sounds like a 50s doo-wop band or something,
00:27:38.160 but it's an Iranian-backed Yemeni terror group has just declared war on Israel. So now we got,
00:27:45.740 we have the state of Israel was attacked by Hamas. Hamas runs the Gaza Strip. Gaza is one of the
00:27:54.600 Palestinian territories. Hamas is funded by Iran. Hezbollah, just north of Israel, runs the south
00:28:03.920 of Lebanon. Hezbollah then gets in on the action pretty quickly. Then you have other terror groups
00:28:09.920 attack U.S. bases because U.S. is allied with Israel in Syria and Iraq. So now then Israel
00:28:17.420 bombs an airport in Syria. So now we got, we got Syria pretty well involved. Now we go down the
00:28:25.720 Arabian Peninsula, we seem to have Yemen involved. And Yemen already was in the midst of a sort of civil
00:28:32.300 war and was already getting bombed by the Saudis. So now they're sending missiles to the Israelis,
00:28:36.700 but their missiles aren't that good. So anyway, I say all of this to underline a point that I've
00:28:43.380 made from the beginning of this war, which is this thing could and very likely will spiral out of
00:28:51.060 control very, very quickly. And different nations have different interests here. The interest of Iran
00:28:58.840 is to obliterate Israel from the face of the earth. The interest of Israel is to prevent Palestinian
00:29:06.840 statehood at the very least and almost certainly to annex Gaza or render Gaza politically neutral and
00:29:12.740 send all the Gazans to Egypt, which the Egyptians don't want to have happen. And another desire of
00:29:20.460 Israel will be to have regime change in Iran. And this person has this wish and this person has that
00:29:27.400 wish and this person has this wish. And the interest of the United States is to contain the war. That's
00:29:33.500 our interest. That's our strategic vital interest is containing this war before it spins out of
00:29:40.040 control. And that's a different national interest than Iran, certainly. It's different national
00:29:45.200 interest than Israel. It's different national interest than the Palestine liberation movement.
00:29:50.500 It's different. Different peoples have different interests. That one is ours. Contain the war
00:29:54.800 because it continues to spin out of control. Containing the war means wrapping it up as quickly as
00:30:03.760 possible without risking that it will erupt again too soon. It's going to erupt again. This kind of a
00:30:11.220 conflict has been going on in this way for well over 100 years. And it's been going on more broadly
00:30:16.760 for millennia. It's not going to end. There's not going to be any final end to this war.
00:30:21.220 So you could say, all right, we want to wrap the war up. So let's just have a ceasefire immediately.
00:30:28.340 Well, is that going to solve the problem? If Hamas continues to rule in Gaza,
00:30:31.780 then Israel can't feel safe in any way. And the war is just going to erupt again in two seconds.
00:30:37.900 So you cannot allow Hamas to continue ruling in Gaza. But then what do you do?
00:30:42.060 Do you then just totally glass Gaza and genocide all the Palestinians or send them to Egypt,
00:30:47.620 which Egypt's not going to take them?
00:30:48.700 No, I don't think that's going to work. I don't see Iran or any of the other Arab states around
00:30:54.360 that were just rolling over for that. What do you do? It's very tricky. If I had the answer,
00:31:00.620 I would, well, I said I would win a Nobel Prize, but they don't give Nobel Prizes to conservatives
00:31:04.940 or people who fix things. They only give Nobel Prizes to people who make things worse and to liberals.
00:31:10.180 But I repeat myself. So if I had the answer, though, I would be the wisest statesman of the last
00:31:17.540 hundred years. So I'll let you know when I come up with it. Speaking of allies, there is a Minnesota
00:31:24.340 school board candidate who is insistent on giving kids, little kids, a way to identify allies to talk
00:31:35.360 about sex without telling their parents. When my wife and I were looking at schools
00:31:41.480 and everything, where we wanted to move, we wanted a place that was affordable. And we wanted a place
00:31:45.740 where we knew they could grow up to be whoever they grew up to be, whoever they loved. And that's why
00:31:50.880 we're in Minnesota, because we knew that whoever our boys would grow up to be, they were growing up in
00:31:56.500 a safe space. And we need to make sure that that happens in our buildings as well. I don't think we
00:32:04.420 can ignore our kids' feelings and just focus on the task at hand. I don't think we can just put our
00:32:09.860 heads down and pretend the world is all about academics when our kids are wrestling with real
00:32:15.240 issues about mental health tied to the changes that they're going through in puberty and who they
00:32:21.200 might be attracted to. We need to ensure that our schools are safe places where our kids can
00:32:27.680 identify allies that they can talk to if they're having a tough time, have conversations they may
00:32:33.220 not be able to have at home, have safe spaces where they can be themselves and know that they're
00:32:39.660 accepted and truly belong. No, no, we don't. We don't need that. We don't need you, Mr. Groomer
00:32:48.400 candidate, talking to any of our children ever about sex. You freak. You pervert. We don't need
00:32:56.000 that. We need a hard drive check at your home immediately. And then we need to kick you out of
00:33:01.580 the race. And we need to have you repent of your wicked and perverse ways or be ostracized from polite
00:33:09.560 society. That's what we need. That would make us all a lot safer. That would be our safe space.
00:33:14.000 What planet are these people living on where they have the temerity to get up in public?
00:33:24.520 I don't know what this man's sexual proclivities are. I don't really want to know. I don't know what
00:33:28.820 his supposed family structure is like. I don't want to know. But for this man to get up there and say,
00:33:35.360 so listen, actually what we need to do is we need little kids to talk about sex with us
00:33:43.480 all the time. And not just normal sex, weird sex. We need the kids in our schools. We need to use
00:33:52.220 the parents' taxpayer dollars to make clubs in the schools where we adults can go there and just chat
00:34:01.460 about really, really weird sex with people who are not our kids. But they're still kids, but not
00:34:08.240 ours. And specifically, we're going to talk about weird sex that they're not going to talk about
00:34:12.560 with their parents. How does that sound? Vote for me. Vote for you. In a sane society, that man would
00:34:21.820 have been tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail by the entire community.
00:34:26.940 That's the age that we're living in. And people are going to hear it. And they're going to hear
00:34:35.120 those words. I mean, look, his aesthetics aren't great either. The way he's dressing in a way that
00:34:39.040 is a little off-putting, I think, to normal-minded people. But it's not quite as bad as the trans
00:34:44.380 activists. So maybe he'll get away with it. But if he dressed even 10% more normal, and if his affect
00:34:50.620 were even 10% or 15% more normal, and he said just those same words, you know, look, we just need to
00:34:55.800 be allies. We need to support kids so that they can be open and inclusive and equitable and diverse
00:35:01.160 and to be supportive of them and allies and support and openness. It would mean the same thing. They
00:35:09.440 would be talking about the exact same thing, but a lot of people would hear it. And they'd say, okay,
00:35:14.220 that's fine. If Joe Biden said that, people would say, oh, that's fine. There's Joe. Joe's normal.
00:35:18.160 He's a normal guy. The chief reason, I think, that we conservatives are now finally winning on the
00:35:25.380 social issues, which we'd been losing on for so long, because that made us look like a bunch of
00:35:29.640 old fuddy-duddies who didn't get with the program. We weren't hip and cool. Well, now that's shifted.
00:35:34.400 It has shifted, I think, largely because the radicals now look like their ideas really are,
00:35:43.260 which is disordered. Now, speaking of crime, Convicting a Murderer, the new 10-part docuseries
00:35:51.820 by Candace Owens and Daily Wire Plus has done an excellent job at convincing even the strongest
00:35:56.020 of Stephen Avery supporters that he is guilty. If you have not seen the full series, all episodes
00:36:00.300 are now available exclusively on Daily Wire Plus. The final episode reveals who the real villains of
00:36:06.020 the story are. Stephen Avery, his family, and the filmmakers who portrayed him as innocent
00:36:10.340 and fooled millions of viewers. Here is a teaser of the series.
00:36:16.180 I'm going to direct your attention specifically to October 31st of 2005.
00:36:24.200 You need to tell us about it so we know you're telling us the truth.
00:36:27.700 So Steve stabs her first, and then you cut her next.
00:36:31.760 We sat at her house and waited for the garage door to open, hoping that she's coming back.
00:36:37.360 The garage door never opened.
00:36:38.540 It's almost as if she was murdered, and then murdered again by these two documentary makers.
00:36:49.000 I love my sisters, and I hope I love them, of course.
00:36:56.380 You can binge all 10 episodes now, but only if you're a Daily Wire Plus member. So sign up today
00:37:04.800 at dailywire.com slash subscribe to watch the entire series.
00:37:08.800 My favorite comment yesterday, this is actually not even from yesterday's episode. This is from
00:37:14.040 my interview, my spooky Halloween interview with a former witch. You can get that now on YouTube.
00:37:20.080 The name is Seeking Truth in God. The comment is, I was into witchcraft for three decades. I'm now
00:37:26.340 Christian, in part because of the men of the Daily Wire. Thank you. I'm very glad to hear that.
00:37:30.480 That's really terrific. I'm glad that we could be part of that journey of yours. And if you haven't
00:37:36.280 seen the interview, go check it out. It's available now. You can watch it even after Halloween.
00:37:40.600 Now, speaking of leading kids astray, you remember Boston Children's Hospital got caught
00:37:45.480 transing the kids, and then the libs denied that Boston Children's Hospital was transing the kids?
00:37:51.480 Well, now we know not only were they transing the kids, but they got millions of dollars
00:37:55.880 in public funding to do it. The state of Massachusetts gave a one and a half almost,
00:38:02.180 $1.4 million reimbursement to Boston Children's Hospital for providing sex change procedures
00:38:10.220 to minors. This is according to reporting and records obtained by the Daily Caller.
00:38:14.840 The hospital performed 204 gender-affirming surgeries on minors from 2017 to 2020.
00:38:25.560 That included 65 chest surgeries. That's lopping off the healthy breasts of young teenage girls.
00:38:32.280 The youngest patient here was 15 years old. Better than 13, I guess, but a 15-year-old.
00:38:40.220 And it wasn't just one or two. 204 in the span of three or four years.
00:38:47.680 How many doctors are doing this at Boston Children's Hospital? Must be really busy.
00:38:53.060 Well, it's a big moneymaker. That's one of the reasons why they do it. Obviously,
00:38:55.720 they're getting these reimbursements to the tune of $1.5 million.
00:38:57.840 But then you're hooking a patient for life on these drugs and probably more procedures that are going
00:39:07.300 to cost more and more and more. And it brings a lot of money in for big pharma, even as it ruins
00:39:10.500 people's lives and often leads them to kill themselves. It's happening, folks. It's actually
00:39:14.580 happening. And the libs are still going to gaslight. If Joe Biden can get a check for $200,000 from his
00:39:20.860 brother who closes a shady business deal that very day for $200,000. And that's just a little
00:39:28.320 taste for Joe. You know Joe has raked in a lot more than that. In fact, we know that because of
00:39:33.540 Hunter Biden's laptop. If you can do that, if you're going to look at the check and still Democrats
00:39:38.460 will say, oh no, Joe's not corrupt. Then of course, you're going to look at the check. That's
00:39:42.280 $1.4 million. And they're going to look and say, no, Boston Children's Hospital. They're not doing that.
00:39:46.360 They're not doing that. Gets to what we've been talking about from the top of the show.
00:39:52.800 This is why a lot of the House oversight investigations don't really go very far.
00:39:57.800 Because spreadsheets and checks and documents and subpoenas and testimony in Congress is
00:40:05.080 freaking boring. It's boring and it doesn't persuade anybody. And no one watches it. And even if people
00:40:10.540 are forced to watch it, most people don't even know what it means. Most people don't know the first
00:40:14.840 thing about a spreadsheet or how financials work. Most people aren't going to listen to some
00:40:20.000 apparatchik drone in congressional testimony. What is persuasive is blunt language and aesthetics when
00:40:32.260 you can see it. Gets Glenn Youngkin elected in Virginia. Gets Ron DeSantis re-elected in Florida.
00:40:39.460 Maybe it gets Republicans elected in 2024. Speaking of troubled children and speaking of all that
00:40:44.220 boring House oversight. The stuff they're uncovering is good stuff. It's good stuff. Even if it's not
00:40:50.040 going to persuade your average voter on a suite. It will certainly persuade the high information
00:40:56.480 voters who are listening to this particular program. But they got him. You've been hearing
00:41:02.100 from Joe Biden from the beginning. Well, where's the money? Show me the money. Show me where the
00:41:05.940 graft is. Here's where the graft is. In July of 2019, this is according to the House Oversight Committee,
00:41:10.320 this is three months after Joe Biden announced he was running for president. Hunter gets a quarter
00:41:14.780 million dollar loan from a Chinese business associate. This is the wire that goes to Hunter
00:41:20.840 that used Joe Biden's Delaware home as the beneficiary address. So it's, I guess the consolation is
00:41:29.860 they're crooks, but, and they're pretty good at it, but they make elementary mistakes like that.
00:41:35.140 Joe Biden's address is on, listed as the beneficiary address. Well, now we know neither Hunter nor Joe
00:41:43.200 Biden paid back that loan. Instead, Democrat donor and Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris acquired Hunter
00:41:51.020 Biden's stake in Bow High Harvest RST, which is one of these sketchy China deals. And then this guy
00:41:58.220 just assumed the debt for Hunter. He just assumed the quarter million dollars.
00:42:04.480 Why? Why did he do that? Because they were longstanding friends, childhood friends, and he
00:42:10.200 just felt bad for poor old Hunter who, he was struggling with drugs and had a, no, they actually
00:42:16.120 only met in 2019 at a political fundraiser, at a political fundraiser for Joe Biden's campaign.
00:42:23.500 So they meet at this political fundraiser. They say, oh, hey, you're a Joe Biden's son, right?
00:42:30.280 Cool. How can I bribe you? Okay. Oh, cool. I can assume this loan that was never going to be paid
00:42:35.640 back anyway from your crooked counterparts in China. Okay, great. So House Oversight asks,
00:42:41.740 why is a Democrat donor taking in Hunter's China debt? Raises serious ethical questions. Yeah, of course.
00:42:46.580 I love this stuff. I encourage James Comer and the House Oversight Committee to keep digging it up.
00:42:51.220 I like to be able to have proof when people make silly claims, like there's no evidence that Joe
00:42:56.780 Biden took bribes or anything like that. I like to be able to refute that. It's not going to matter.
00:43:04.420 People know Joe Biden. Just like people know Donald Trump, people know Joe Biden. They know that he is
00:43:08.820 a simpering, back-slapping, empty suit of a politician. They know he's dirty. They know he takes
00:43:15.220 bribes. They know it. It doesn't matter. Just like people know Donald Trump. He can be nasty
00:43:23.200 sometimes. He says mean things. He is loose with his language. He's unpredictable politically. Yeah.
00:43:31.820 Yeah, we all know that. This is why it's not going to work. The candidates who are running against Trump
00:43:37.980 in the primary, and they keep pointing out all the problems with Trump that his opponents pointed out
00:43:46.060 in 2016. But we know him. He's one of the most famous men in the world, okay? The guy's been famous
00:43:50.580 since the 80s. And he was the president of the United States. He was the star of a major network
00:43:55.480 TV show for 12 years or something, or more. And he was the president. Yeah, we know. We know him,
00:44:00.440 and we know Joe Biden, and none of this is going to make a difference. When I see these weak attacks
00:44:06.960 on Trump, this, did you see Donald Trump misspoke? This man, he's not the same man as 20. What are you
00:44:13.980 talking? He is exactly the same man. He also misspoke in 2016, and no one cares. Or some people
00:44:19.280 care, but they already don't like him. Did you see Joe Biden took a bribe? Yeah. Uh-huh. I did. I did
00:44:28.320 see that. That's not going to matter. That's not what's going to move the needle. What's really
00:44:31.720 going to move the needle in this election, as far as I'm concerned, is how voter ID, ballot harvesting,
00:44:37.160 and mail-in ballots are orchestrated in the crucial swing states. I think that's going to be the big
00:44:42.700 difference. And I think the candidates are basically already set. Speaking of government payoffs,
00:44:50.340 there is, I'm going to have to tease this. I'm not, I want to, you know me, I'm a tease. I want to get
00:44:56.780 into this story, but it's this trucker who absolutely destroys the liberal argument for why
00:45:04.460 we all need to be driving electrical vehicles in about two seconds. He knocks it down. And the reason
00:45:11.400 I'm teasing this is not just because I think the electric vehicle fad is silly. And, you know, if the
00:45:18.040 technology is going to come about, it can come about over time. But the idea that the government
00:45:21.820 is forcing us all to convert our normal cars into these electrical monstrosities is so,
00:45:27.160 so ridiculous. To what? To stop us from being burned to death by the sun monster in 12, what did
00:45:32.660 AOC said 12 years? How many years ago was that? We'll see. We'll see when the time runs out. But the
00:45:37.680 reason I look forward to playing this clip for you, either tomorrow or sometime the next week, is
00:45:44.700 it reminds us of two things that are really missing in our government and our politics right now.
00:45:50.080 And that would be knowledge and competence. All right. On that note, that's our show. I'm
00:45:55.160 Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show. See you tomorrow.