A new study out of the UK shows that queer identity is in freefall among young people. For reaction, we turn now to the official Michael Knowles Show correspondent, Gen Z correspondent, August Pflueger (I m Not Gay Anymore).
00:02:51.480The transgender share among university students peaked in 2023 and has almost halved since, from nearly 7% to under 4%.
00:03:01.860Some of us have been suggesting that maybe the transgender identity is a social contagion and it's not some deeply rooted essential or biological aspect of identity.
00:03:15.280You know, the libs have always said, no, no, no.
00:03:16.320Now, the reason that the number of trans-identifying students keeps increasing is because people now feel liberated to come out of the closet and express their true selves.
00:03:27.560And some of us have said, I'm kind of skeptical of that.
00:03:31.080I think it's just like a lot of people never even thought that this was a thing and then they're introduced to this idea and then some of them go along with it because of mimesis, because of the fact that we imitate each other and we're social creatures and that's how social contagions take hold.
00:03:48.580Looks like the data are now backing that up.
00:03:50.980The study finds the share of students identifying as not heterosexual fell by around 10 points in the same period.
00:03:58.820And not heterosexual is a weird category.
00:04:00.600I actually had a friend in college who, I remember this, this guy would, he would pick up chicks.
00:04:07.680You know, he was, he was, other than some of his fashion choices by all, all signs was a straight guy, but he identified as non-heterosexual.
00:04:18.120And to my knowledge, he never did any weird stuff with dudes or anything, but he identified as not heterosexual because, I don't know, in the late 2000s and 20 teens, that was cool.
00:04:30.680It was kind of, it was square to be straight.
00:04:33.440You know, weirdly, I don't know, maybe he thought it would help him pick up chicks or something, but it's very hard to pin down what that means.
00:04:39.800In any case, that identity has dropped precipitously.
00:04:45.600The decline in the non-heterosexual share is concentrated in the queer or other sexual categories and, to a lesser extent, bisexuality.
00:04:56.200Okay, so you're seeing a decline in all those groups.
00:04:58.540Today's freshmen are less BTQ+, so not the L, forget about the LG.
00:05:06.600The lesbians and gays are basically flat, but the bisexual, trans, and queer+, all the rest of the alphabet, the freshmen are much less likely to be that than the seniors are, suggesting that the decline will continue.
00:05:20.940Probably you're going to see more of a decline.
00:05:22.620The decline in BTQ+, identification does not appear to be connected to lower social media use, religious revival, a shift to the political right, or lower support for woke ideology.
00:05:34.080So it's not just that more kids coming into school are Catholic.
00:05:40.100It's not just that more kids coming into school are, you know, hardline, rock-ribbed Southern Baptists, or MAGA people, or that they've put the Instagram away.
00:05:52.060And it's that TikTok that's, in fact, it doesn't appear to be correlated with any of that.
00:05:56.460It seems to be a broader social trend that the Lavender Mafia, at least the BTQ+, part of it, is just declining generally.
00:06:06.880Finally, there is evidence that improved mental health has reduced BTQ+, identification, which is kind of redundant.
00:06:16.040I don't know if you're allowed to say it, even today on social media.
00:06:18.560But, yeah, if you're a guy who thinks you're a chick, you have mental issues by definition.
00:06:25.020So if you are more mentally stable, if you have better mental health, then you're much less likely to deal with all of those social pathologies.
00:06:34.020Now, if you dig into this study of all the charts and everything here, the real focus is not on the L or the G, or even on the T.
00:06:44.180It's more on the Q, on the Q part, queer, which is that catch-all, specifically non-binary.
00:06:50.100If you look here, and they compile numbers from Andover, from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, Brown, a couple of other organizations.
00:07:01.680And you're seeing it broadly across these organizations.
00:07:04.820Share not identifying as male or female per FIRE.
00:07:08.520You know, various sexual orientation, gender identity.
00:07:13.440Even here, let's just look at FIRE's numbers.
00:07:52.180Because the non-binary, genderqueer, queer generally identity, is the least sensual of the sexual gender identities that have become fashionable in the last 10 years.
00:08:05.320The other ones, if you're gay, if you're lesbian, if you're bisexual, if you're transsexual, trans whatever, those are all much more physical.
00:09:03.720The ideology that says that your physical body has nothing to do with your true self and your true self has nothing to do with how you ought to comport yourself.
00:10:38.520This is going to make you feel the conservative consolation.
00:10:43.320In this world that is always shooting arrows at us, this is a great consolation.
00:10:47.700As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the gods of the marketplace.
00:10:54.720Peering through reverent fingers, I watch them flourish and fall, and the gods of the copy book headings, I notice, outlast them all.
00:11:01.140The gods of the copy book headings, those maxims that we just hold to be true throughout all ages, throughout cultures, they just keep coming back.
00:11:09.320You know, the old wisdom of old women, say.
00:11:12.300Then the gods, skip down a few stanzas.
00:11:14.360Then the gods of the market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew.
00:11:20.320And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true, that all is not gold that glitters, and two and two make four.
00:11:28.900And the gods of the copy book headings limped up to explain it once more.
00:11:34.000Those smooth-tongued wizards feeding the marketplace, you know, of fashions and fads, they were found wanting.
00:11:43.560And the gods of the copy book headings had to explain to people that two plus two equals four again.
00:11:47.300And, you know, actually, men and women are different.
00:11:52.480And those things that are always true everywhere, they're still true.
00:11:55.680And no matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise, no matter what force, sheer tyranny of will you impose upon us to make us say it, it won't be true.
00:12:05.920And on a long enough time scale, you're going to lose.
00:12:07.840In this case, it took about five years.
00:12:09.620Now, speaking of medical issues, Cheryl Hines, the wife of Bobby Kennedy Jr., just completely destroyed the ladies of The View.
00:22:02.720Then it's all of a sudden, this is getting really, really dark.
00:22:08.160Now we're harvesting the organs from these people.
00:22:10.600Now, and we've had conversations on this show about the organ donation market for a long time.
00:22:19.360Lots of dubious ethics in the medical donation because it's reliant upon this scientific concept of brain,
00:22:27.360not even, it's an ideological concept of brain death, which really doesn't come about until the 1960s or so.
00:22:32.480And brain death is dubious because often what happens in the case of medical harvesting of organs is it's not that the person dies and then you harvest the organs and you donate them to someone else.
00:22:41.760It's that the harvesting of the organs is what literally kills the person, which creates a lot of ethical problems.
00:22:48.860In any case, an American man just received a heart from a 38-year-old Canadian who killed himself.
00:22:57.740Is this the kind of market that we want to be encouraging?
00:23:04.140I make jokes about Canada being America's evil top hat all the time.
00:23:07.620I don't actually want to kill them all and harvest their organs.
00:23:23.300This man had a disease and he made the choice to kill himself and because the only moral criterion of liberalism is consent, then he has the right to do that because liberalism presumes the idea of self-ownership, the idea that we own ourselves, which is not true.
00:23:46.960I think more people though, the conservatives and the moderates are going to say, hey, suicide is bad and we shouldn't encourage it and we definitely shouldn't be profiting from it.
00:23:59.500And we shouldn't open up markets in the organs of the people we've encouraged through the law to kill themselves in other countries.
00:24:07.560You see how this could go wrong real fast?
00:24:09.340But it started with such good intentions.
00:24:13.360I'm speaking to the kind of moderate conservative or liberal who said, ah, you know, grandpa really was having a hard go of it at the end there and maybe it's okay to have a medical assistance in dying, also known as suicide.
00:24:39.340We were always in this place where if you make the Faustian bargain, if you compromise on moral issues, even for good intentions, this was inevitable.
00:24:56.600MAID in Canada has existed for like five minutes so far.
00:24:59.560We're already harvesting the suicide, suicide's organs.
00:25:19.720It is a scandal that more people have not heard of YAF's National Journalism Center.
00:25:23.940There is not a more consequential and important pipeline from college into conservative media than NJC.
00:25:28.800It boasts a 12-week internship training program that is fully paid and gives you access to the best reporters and personalities in the business.
00:25:35.760It also sticks you right in a working newsroom in the first week.
00:25:39.280You want to be at the center of the nation's biggest political stories?
00:25:44.480We've had reporters here at The Daily Wire who have attended NJC and launched their professional careers immediately.
00:25:49.500Our NJC alumni have pursued stories relentlessly, like taking pictures from a helicopter to exposing a dodgy Texas community development marketed exclusively to illegal immigrants.
00:25:59.920Their reporting was featured on Ben Shapiro's podcast, but more importantly, it was featured on my podcast.
00:26:04.820As well as Fox News and a host of other prominent media outlets, this reporting from Daily Wire's NJC alum has created real tangible change and put concrete wins on the board for American patriots.
00:26:14.620It all traces back to NJC's internship journalism boot camp, which covers everything you need to break into media, whether you're interested in podcasting, video production, print reporting, or independent journalism.
00:26:24.740More important, if you are tired of the fake news in the lib media and you want to win, get off the sidelines and get into the game.
00:26:31.160Submit your application to the National Journalism Center today.
00:26:34.820I am very pleased to be joined right now by Congressman August Pflueger from the great state of Texas, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, here to remind us, one, that the government is in fact shut down, and to get to what some of the consequences of that shutdown could be, notably on military readiness.
00:26:53.860Congressman Pflueger, thank you for coming on the show.
00:26:57.740Michael, thanks for having me, and thanks for highlighting these issues.
00:27:01.000Unfortunately, we have to do that now.
00:27:02.460So, Congressman, I know the conventional wisdom is Republicans get blamed for shutdowns.
00:27:08.540Maybe that will happen in the long run, but of all the shutdowns that have happened in my lifetime, this one, I think, is most clearly owned by the Democrats.
00:27:16.760The Republicans have unified government.
00:27:18.900The Republicans offered a clean, continuing resolution just to keep the government going as other issues are ironed out.
00:27:25.220This is exclusively a Democrat shutdown.
00:27:29.320Now, Chuck Schumer believes that the longer the shutdown goes on, the better it is for Democrats.
00:28:11.600And now Senate Democrats, under Chuck Schumer's distasteful leadership, have voted eight times to not fund the government, to not fund the military.
00:28:28.960They hurt your ability to focus on the threat, on the missions, because now commanders are having to worry about where their troops, their young enlisted and young officers, how they're going to put food on the table and take care of their families.
00:28:42.400I mean, think about the soldier who's deployed right now with a young family, maybe a baby at home.
00:28:48.320You know, a lot of our troops are on food stamps and they're worried about that.
00:28:52.900They're not worried about doing the mission.
00:28:54.080They're worried about taking care of their family and rightfully so.
00:28:56.100So absolutely, it hurts mission readiness.
00:28:58.840It hurts our focus and it hurts our national security.
00:29:01.440The fact that troops are on food stamps is a national disgrace, frankly, that that needs to be addressed in a in a different way.
00:29:08.240But on the point of of the paychecks, there is reporting out now that the military might miss a paycheck.
00:29:16.860These military families who even, you know, even if they're not totally destitute, you know, they they they need those paychecks.
00:29:29.980And what are the Democrats have to say about it?
00:29:33.280Well, we've seen recently where President Trump stepped up, did the right thing, told Secretary Higgs to find the money and to make sure that they get paid on the 15th of this month.
00:29:42.620So, you know, that's that's a big deal that they did that because that has not happened in the past.
00:29:48.540But they're taking money out of other pots, out of, you know, other sources where, you know, probably for operations and readiness and mission type money.
00:30:08.840If Democrats keep up this theater, which it is, make no mistake, this is political theater at its very worst, then they will miss a paycheck eventually.
00:30:17.560I'd like to know where my Democrat colleagues are, those that served the veterans on the Democrat side.
00:30:45.560Are Democrats going to object to the Republicans who are trying to find money, you know, borrowing from Peter to pay Paul to make sure that the military actually are paid?
00:30:53.420Are Democrats going to try to impede that?
00:30:56.080I mean, can you imagine, you know, Chuck Schumer leading the charge saying that's illegal?
00:31:46.460If Chuck Schumer sincerely believes that the longer it goes on, the better it is for Democrats, then is it is the government going to reopen next week, the week after two months from now?
00:31:56.420And whenever it does reopen, what's the deal going to be?
00:32:01.320Well, first off, I think Mike Johnson is doing a great job.
00:32:09.560This was a Joe Biden signed budget or an auto pen signed budget.
00:32:13.720You know, so this is a budget that Democrats already voted on.
00:32:17.660So how do they now come to us and say, well, we can't vote on it now because, well, no, you actually this was this was Biden's budget.
00:32:23.800So I think there's probably one of a couple of ways.
00:32:26.740Number one, Senate Democrats need to get over their theater and just do the right thing.
00:32:32.720And assuming that happens, the stalemate.
00:32:35.960OK, so assuming that doesn't happen, they're conflating several things and they're putting these ACA premium subsidies in there.
00:32:42.340They want us to fund illegal immigrants into health care, which we've said absolutely not.
00:32:46.480I mean, these are hundreds of billions of dollars in waste.
00:32:48.540So I think probably what ends up happening is President Trump will probably have to save the day and bring people together like he's done and make some sort of deal.
00:33:00.060But let's make one thing clear that the prize for Democrats opening the government is not going to be ACA subsidies.
00:33:08.480We will negotiate on things like that when we get the government open, but they're not going to hold us hostage like this and and laugh at the American people and say,
00:33:18.640look, we just you know, we just did this political stunt and now we we get something out of it.
00:33:23.860No, I'm sorry. But the American public is tired.
00:33:27.060My district especially is just tired of the lies and tired of the games.
00:33:30.400They want us to go to Washington and do what we said we were going to do, which is what has happened.
00:33:35.280And I think this is the Democrats only shot to stop Donald Trump because he is the only president who has done everything he said he would do.
00:33:43.300Yeah, there's this problem for the Dems, which is they keep saying the people are on our side and, you know, we're going to we're the resistance, the voice of the people.
00:33:50.880But of course, the people voted for Trump and it wasn't it wasn't just that he won the Electoral College, which is ultimately all that matters.
00:33:55.820He won the popular vote and the Republicans have the House and the Senate and the presidency.
00:34:01.140And because they keep winning the presidency, they have the Supreme Court.
00:34:03.540And just at a certain point, the Democrats probably need to get the message that most of the people are not on your side.
00:34:10.540And I agree this is this is pretty desperate.
00:34:12.880I also agree that you can't give in to the Democrats, especially on the on the health care stuff, because it just rewards them.
00:34:21.040It gives them an incentive to do this kind of thing again.
00:42:45.760If you look on the back of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, it says Charles James Kirk,
00:42:52.900and there's a cross engraved on the back, which I think is the first time ever that a Medal of Freedom has come with a cross engraved on it.
00:44:04.520I think increasingly conservatives are coming to that.
00:44:06.840He wasn't the only one, you know, who'd come to that conclusion.
00:44:09.400Increasingly we're coming to that conclusion.
00:44:11.200That's how we used to understand it in American history.
00:44:13.260Then we went through a fever in the late 20th century where we started to think freedom meant, you know, doing weird sex stuff and doing a bunch of drugs and letting criminals roam the streets.