As Fred Barnes reports in the Wall Street Journal that the Democratic Party may be moving slightly to the right on abortion, we will analyze. Then, Jacob Airy and his all-male panel of deplorables are on a panel of idiots to punish me. And we will discuss banana peels, Charlie Hebdo, and how cops only kill Black people.
00:04:04.840Those videos, they are almost cartoonishly evil.
00:04:08.400Yeah, they're really just to the core evil.
00:04:11.620It's amazing that some Hollywood screenwriter, if a Hollywood screenwriter had written that and turned it in, well, forget the politics of Hollywood.
00:04:18.700But if he had turned it in for a movie about this, it would be thrown out for being too on the nose that a woman is going to sell body parts and haggle over the price so that they could make more of a profit.
00:04:29.380It did. Actually, it sounds like a horror film.
00:04:31.600And so in May, Nancy Pelosi came out and suggested that the Democratic Party would support candidates who weren't strictly in favor of abortion.
00:04:40.500If there were some candidate who's a Democrat in all the other ways but is pro-life, they would consider giving them money.
00:04:47.060Pelosi wants that big tent, as they call it.
00:04:49.420Chuck Schumer came out and said that he's in favor of that big tent.
00:04:52.320Even Governor Moonbeam, our own governor here in California, the once and future Governor Jerry Brown, he came out in favor of supporting pro-life candidates.
00:05:00.440But the former DNC chairman and failed presidential candidate had a less favorable view of that.
00:05:06.880Let's cut to Howard Dean for his reaction.
00:05:11.240Not happy he did not support that move at all.
00:05:14.160He said that he would not donate to candidates who were pro-life.
00:05:17.260He would not support those candidates.
00:05:19.100He wants to keep the Democratic Party pretty small.
00:05:22.240Now, Planned Parenthood's CEO, Cecile Richards, along with NARAL and all of the other pro-life advocacy organizations, were predictably infuriated.
00:07:08.800So Democrat men are more likely to be pro-life than women.
00:07:12.980As Democrats are more educated, that number actually decreases, though, for pro-life.
00:07:18.920And 29% of white Democrats are pro-life, but 39% of black Democrats are pro-life.
00:07:25.300So the minority vote that Democrats are always sucking up to and pandering to actually opposes their rigidity on the issue of abortion.
00:07:34.420Now, this presents a real problem for Democrats because a lot of their issue in the last election was that they came across as elitist, out of touch with the regular American.
00:07:46.380They seemed to toss the issues of the middle class and the lower classes completely out the window to suck up to Hollywood celebrities and to suck up to the latte-sipping limousine liberals.
00:07:57.260It did not play well for them, particularly in those five states.
00:08:01.160So the March for Life has been getting larger every year.
00:08:04.520Things have been moving in the direction of pro-life anyway.
00:08:16.460If the Democrats are supporting pro-life candidates, that means that we'll probably get more pro-life politicians, politicians who are less likely to be extremists on the issue of abortion.
00:08:25.240On the political issue, though, it will split Democrats.
00:08:29.420So if we can wedge an issue in there with them, then Republicans are more likely to win those elections.
00:08:34.760And Republicans generally are more pro-life anyway.
00:09:06.460Who deserves all of the glory for making the Democrats give up or move slightly to the right of their currently sacramental view of abortion?
00:09:16.840I honestly think it's actually pro-life Democrats who deserve some credit for this.
00:10:37.040The Democrats pretty much adopted abortion into their platforms in 1976 and 1980.
00:10:44.140And, of course, Mondale was pro-abortion and so was Dukakis.
00:10:47.900Jimmy Carter actually, however, expressed several times, even long after his presidency, that he regretted enforcing Roe v. Wade.
00:10:56.560So there was a climate of kind of that big tent pro-life Democrats are allowed in the party.
00:11:02.720And it wasn't really until 1992 at the Democratic Convention when the Clintons disinvited Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey from speaking at the convention.
00:11:21.300And Robert Casey was a big-time pro-life Democrat, and he was a big-time member of the party.
00:11:27.380He was—his name, Casey, was the Casey in the famous Supreme Court decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
00:11:35.000So by having him get disinvited, that was really when the new trend of the abortion litmus test set into the party.
00:11:57.680We have to move on to much more important issues than the sanctity of life and human dignity.
00:12:01.860A Greek life retreat at Ole Miss was canceled this weekend after a banana peel was found in a tree.
00:12:08.540A student tossed the perfectly compostable banana peel because he couldn't find a garbage can.
00:12:14.300Now, according to the director of Greek life, quote,
00:12:16.940quote, many members of our community were hurt, frightened, and upset by what occurred—a banana peel being tossed into a tree—and felt it was imperative to provide space immediately to students affected by this incident.
00:12:49.720It's the only way you're not going to offend somebody.
00:12:51.960I mean, really, I typically, on all of these triggering cases, these microaggressions, I find them ridiculous, but I can at least somewhat see the point or the flow of logic that they're making.
00:13:28.260How do we make students stronger and smarter and less out of their minds?
00:13:34.040I think the solution should be we should teach Western culture from a literary perspective.
00:13:40.640I mean, if you read a lot of, like, Charles Dickens, the masculine and the feminine characters are all very strong.
00:13:49.120But because these faculties placate to these snowflakes, they're like, oh, well, Dickens, Shakespeare, on and on and on.
00:13:58.780They must be racist because they were written by straight white men or whatever.
00:14:02.360And so I think my dad's about Dickens, but you're gone.
00:14:04.800But I'm just saying if we go back to teaching, oh, this is how, if we go back to teaching that literature, we represent to them good, moral, strong characters, I think that they can be strong again.
00:14:18.360It should go back to teaching what their Western culture is all about.
00:15:47.180Muslim terrorists murdered much of the Charlie Hebdo staff.
00:15:50.060The United States is leading the global fight against radical Islam, but these children over there, these rude people, have decided to attack us.
00:16:00.260They've decided to attack regular Americans.
00:16:04.080And is there any satirical merit to making fun of hurricane victims?
00:16:09.140Well, the reason why they won't give us a break, Michael, is because they're leftists at heart.
00:16:12.760I mean, I know we want to give them credit, and they were attacked, and that was a horrible, horrible thing, and we all rightly stood alongside them.
00:16:21.160And they were brave enough to criticize Islam when everybody is running away from that issue.
00:16:27.040But it doesn't change the fact that they've just been nothing but cruel and merciless towards Christianity and particularly Catholicism and the way they've painted it on their magazine.
00:16:37.320And on the issue of whether or not, you know, you can do satire on hurricane victims, look, you can do satire on anything so long as it's tactful and it's funny.
00:16:48.960I mean, even that stupid political cartoon that was making fun of the hurricane victims at least had a little bit of tact in there.
00:18:31.840There is one more great story we have to cover.
00:18:33.960Body cam footage has just surfaced of an incident last year in an Atlanta suburb when a woman pulled over for drunk driving told the officer that she didn't want to get out of her car because she'd seen so many videos of cops killing people.
00:18:46.920The officer responded, but you're not black.
00:19:21.300I think some people on the internet are saying that it's an admission that he's making.
00:19:25.200Yeah, I could see that, though—I mean, if I'm a black person and I hear an officer saying, like, we only shoot black people, yeah, I could understand the initial outrage.
00:19:36.080Do I think the guy should lose his job?
00:19:37.580No, but I'm going to cut some people having outrage, a little bit of slack on this one.
00:19:54.140He's joking about the narrative that is being pushed.
00:19:57.000There have been study after study that has come out that has explained away most of the disparities between black people and black suspects being killed by cops and suspects of other ethnicities.
00:20:08.880And I think the narrative here is that there is a nationwide epidemic of racist cops looking for the next black person to kill, which is just simply untrue.
00:20:19.000And if the joke is about that, I kind of cut him some slack on it.
00:20:22.900It seems to me that cops have been under a lot of attack over the last few years.
00:20:27.280Nevertheless, not the sort of thing that one should say professionally and especially not when you're in a position of enforcing violence and coercion.
00:20:36.160Jacob, the officer was placed on administrative leave.
00:20:40.000Is that too harsh for a joke or does that punishment fit the crime?
00:20:44.040I think in this case, the punishment does fit the crime.
00:22:45.180If you're able to get Cuban cigars, if you're traveling to Cuba or you're traveling abroad, there are a number of great Cubans under 50 bucks.
00:24:42.120I'm not sure if you saw in the news recently that Iceland is on the path to completely eliminating Down syndrome from its population through prenatal screening and abortion.
00:24:50.380I think we actually mentioned this on the show a little bit.
00:25:02.140How would you argue with someone who thinks this is a good thing?
00:25:05.020I would ask them specifically, who would you kill?
00:25:07.600Of the people who are alive right now, who have injuries, who are maimed, who have been amputated, who have mental retardation of any variety.
00:25:17.640I would ask them, which of those people would you kill?
00:25:21.240For whom would it be better to be dead than to be alive?
00:25:24.180I think that will shut them up and make them realize the flaw in this argument because in Iceland and for other eugenicist arguments here, what they center their arguments around is abortion because of the fiction that if you kill a baby in the womb, it hasn't really lived yet and you're not killing it.
00:25:44.640You're just preventing it from ever having life.
00:25:46.760But the reason we know that that little baby has Down syndrome in the womb is because it's a little baby that is living that we can run tests on and figure out what their life will look like to some degree after they're born.
00:25:58.840So I would make it very clear that you are ending a life and if we go down this path, if we say, well, people with Down syndrome, they shouldn't live, their life is so poor, which is not true, by the way, but they'll say their life is so poor, it's not worth living for them.
00:26:15.480Then you have to ask, well, where do we draw that line?
00:26:18.740Do we say that people who are born with missing limbs, their quality of life will be too poor, people who are born with autism, their quality of life will be too poor, people who are born with a predilection for the common cold, is that will their life be too poor?
00:26:32.480When we determine who has the right to live and who ought to live based on how beautiful they are, how smart they are, or how tall and athletically strong they are, we're going down a really bad path that will end in oblivion and despair.
00:26:49.100From Hendrick, in California, I unfortunately overheard two men discussing the killing of trees, which leads me to the following questions.
00:26:57.740If they are distressed about the murder of trees, what do they eat for breakfast?
00:27:01.880Do they commit abortion by eating eggs or do they commit infanticide by eating alfalfa sprouts?
00:27:08.600I got this a lot with my blank book because environmentalists would yell at me for wasting all of this paper.
00:27:14.520You must remind them, paper is an organic, renewable resource.
00:27:18.140We should use it, we should print out these emails, and that way the tree farms won't just become big parking lots in the middle of Washington State.
00:27:25.920This does call to mind my favorite group of political activists.
00:27:29.840They are the people who are vegan, they're crunchy, they're vegetarian, but they support abortion.
00:27:35.140Those are two things that cannot go together.
00:27:38.460They're people who won't eat an egg because chicken life is sacred, but they will kill a second or third trimester human baby because human life is not sacred.
00:27:46.860It does not make a whole lot of sense.
00:27:48.740Perhaps you should bring that up to them.
00:27:53.580Here in Australia, we're having this same-sex marriage debate, and I was wondering, what are the best secular arguments for and against gay marriage?
00:28:00.840P.S., would you ever like to visit Australia?
00:28:44.000It's a question that has always had basically one answer for the history of civilization, which is that marriage is a union between one man and women, at least women.
00:28:54.380There has been polygamy at various points in our history, but for the vast majority of that history, it's been between one man and one woman.
00:29:02.260And so the secular question that you can ask, the philosophic question is, what is marriage?
00:29:08.120Why is marriage, why do we think of it as between a man and women or a man and one woman?
00:29:13.020Is there something about the complementarity of the sexes that defines marriage?
00:29:17.540Is the sexual difference inherent in what marriage is?
00:29:21.020Does marriage involve the possibility, the potential to create a family, the atomic unit of society?
00:29:27.260If marriage is not about that, if marriage is simply about sexual attraction or emotional attraction, then why on earth would we prevent polygamous couples from being married, polyamorous couples from being married?
00:29:39.560Why would we prevent marriages that involve more than 50 people if it's simply about attraction and living together and visiting people in hospitals and any other order of things that could be accomplished simply through contract law?
00:29:53.260If the sexes are different, if there are inherent sexual differences, and if those inherent sexual differences play some part in our nature and in our society, then the question of redefining marriage is a perilous one
00:30:07.880and should be taken very cautiously and not oversimplified as it has been at all levels right up to Anthony Kennedy giving one of the stupidest decisions in the history of the Supreme Court and saying that the only reason to oppose gay marriage is irrational hatred of gays.
00:30:22.960It's slanderous and absolutely absurd.
00:30:29.160Hey, Michael, you often joke about your Catholic guilt and seem to be ripping into Joel Osteen for his focus on mental positivity.
00:30:35.560I hadn't heard of Osteen aside from the time he was on Jimmy Fallon's show, but at first glance, I would say his self-talk style of preaching has both scientific and biblical foundations.
00:30:46.840A perhaps cliche but obvious example being Philippians 4.8.
00:30:49.580Do you think Christians are supposed to live ashamed?
00:30:53.720What's your take on Romans 8.1 and Galatians 5.1?
00:30:58.660I actually don't mean to rip into Joel Osteen as a figure in the culture or as a book writer or as a TV host.
00:31:05.300I do rip into him a little bit as the leader of the largest church in America, but as a figure, I don't think he's necessarily doing anything particularly wrong.
00:31:14.320Let's go through those Bible verses that you brought up.
00:31:18.500Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things.
00:32:00.280You see saints who suffer all the time, but they don't seem to be frowning too much because they're filled with joy, even when they're grieving or if they're a little sad.
00:33:19.760Your freedom was purchased miraculously at a great cost.
00:33:24.120It was purchased at the cost of God the Son being incarnate and dying on the cross, being tortured infinitely, literally dying, and then coming back up three days later.
00:33:33.460Now, when you think about why he died and the reason for what he died, which is the sin of mankind, I guess that's negative.
00:33:40.980That's probably not the most positive thing to think about.
00:33:43.400But when you think about it in that way, then the miracle of redemption is much more awesome.
00:33:48.600It fills you with greater awe, and it fills you with a deeper and truer joy.
00:33:52.600So I think we ought to view the world in exactly that way.
00:33:55.580We ought to smile just as much as Joel Osteen if that's how the spirit moves us.
00:33:59.440But it shouldn't be one that's based on saccharine or sentimentality.
00:34:02.600Because, as C.S. Lewis points out in The Weight of Glory, if you look for truth, you might find comfort.
00:34:07.980But if you look for comfort, you'll find neither truth nor comfort, only soft soap and wishful thinking and, in the end, despair.
00:34:14.700So ground it in something real and look toward Christ for that rather than toward yourself.
00:34:19.860And now the final question from Greg Michael, the Clavenade.