Ep. 350 - The SAT Now Tests For Victimhood
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Summary
The College Board has announced that its revised SAT test will now give students a victimhood score. We will examine how grievance became the left s most prized currency, and why the new SAT is bad news for everybody. Then, a 23rd confirmed candidate enters the 2020 Democratic race, and this one may be the worst of them all. Then I respond to abortion law criticisms from right-wingers directed at me personally. And finally, the mailbag.
Transcript
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The college board has announced that its revised SAT test will now give students a victimhood score.
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We will examine how grievance became the left's most prized currency
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Then, a 23rd confirmed candidate enters the 2020 Democrat race for president,
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Then, I will respond to abortion law criticisms from right-wingers.
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Obviously, we've been covering abortion all week because of these laws.
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Missouri's state senate has just passed a highly restrictive abortion law, a heartbeat bill.
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I told you that was going to happen after I met with the Missouri state senators last week.
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The governor of Alabama, who is a woman, just signed that heartbeat law.
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As Ernest Hemingway described going bankrupt, things happen gradually and then suddenly.
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I want to talk about this SAT scandal because the college cheating scandal has gone mainstream.
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Not just because of all the great news we've had this week.
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The college cheating scandal is going mainstream.
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You remember a few months ago, Aunt Becky and a few other celebrities were caught cheating their kids' way into college.
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They would cheat by pretending they were student athletes.
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They would bribe coaches, and they would also cheat on the SAT.
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They would cheat on the standardized test score to try to get their kids into college.
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Now, the college board itself, the organization that administers the SAT, is setting up a system to cheat on the SAT.
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The big takeaway is here the left is trying to turn victimhood, a grievance, suffering, into an objective, measurable currency.
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You know they've been talking about victimhood now increasingly for at least the last 10 years in major parts of their conversation and their political advocacy.
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Now, this is intersectionality going mainstream.
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And frankly, if this goes through, if this is accepted by colleges and by society broadly, I don't know how we come back from this.
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And then the question is, what does it actually do?
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So what the college board is going to do is assign an adversity score to every student to try to capture their socioeconomic background.
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They say don't take into account affirmative action.
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Don't take into account race or sex or something like that.
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And the college board now wants to make this part of the SAT.
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So it will include the crime rate and poverty levels from a student's high school and neighborhood.
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There are already other ways for the colleges to get that sort of information.
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The students will not be told their scores, but the colleges will see the scores.
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There obviously seems to be some room for abuse there.
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What if a student gets a score that he disagrees with?
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He doesn't know what the college board is doing.
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And the college board won't say how it calculates the score.
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There are a number of amazing students who have scored less on the SAT but have accomplished more.
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We can't sit on our hands and ignore the disparities of wealth reflected in the SAT.
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But they score less on the SAT, and so now it's up to the SAT to fix it.
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The students might score lower on the SAT, but actually accomplish more in their lives.
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The question is, why would you then factor that into their score on the SAT?
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And the colleges roundly rejected that in the 90s.
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This is a very different time in 2019 than in 1999.
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Culture is very different, and we have this obsession with victimhood.
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So I don't think the colleges are going to stop it now.
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The worst people at these colleges are the administrators.
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The students don't protest Andrew Klavan at Stanford University.
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It's the administrators who smear me as some kind of bigot because I say men aren't women
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It wasn't the students organizing some massive protest.
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Some students, but it's the administrators who were doing it.
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So just a little personal anecdote on this because this really bothers me.
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People get the question of college admissions so wrong.
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Elite people just do not understand what it's like to grow up with relatively not that much money.
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And they think they do, and they're very condescending about it, and they're very elitist,
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and they just don't get it, and they make a whole slew of assumptions.
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I grew up in more modest socioeconomic circumstances than, I think, all of my friends.
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I also scored higher on the SAT than all of my friends.
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And I'm very glad that I didn't have an adversity score on my SAT to help me out.
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I don't know what I would have gotten on the grievance score.
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But I'm very pleased that I didn't because the adversity score puts a little asterisk on your college admissions.
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It would have diminished the accomplishment of getting into college,
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and also it would destroy the academic confidence of any students who rely on it.
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I mean, this is the problem with affirmative action.
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Clarence Thomas, one of the most brilliant guys in the country,
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he's on the Supreme Court, he's maybe the best jurist on the Supreme Court.
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He got into the best law school in the country.
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he realized that the employers assumed he only got in because of affirmative action.
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He didn't get in because of affirmative action.
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He got in because he's extraordinarily intelligent and hardworking.
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But that little asterisk destroyed his achievement,
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So this score, this adversity score, it's going to be out of 100, 50 is going to be the average.
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And if you get higher than 50, you are a victim.
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And if you get lower than 50, you're privileged.
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You don't know how you're going to come up with that.
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So I'm not saying that the question of socioeconomic difficulty is not a serious question.
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There is a problem that this is trying to address.
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The problem this is trying to address is, generally speaking, rich kids have an advantage in life.
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I mean, they have an advantage in most things, and this includes getting into colleges.
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So, okay, if that's a problem, you want to equalize things, and you want to level everybody,
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okay, what are the current solutions that we have?
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So people who come from more modest socioeconomic circumstances
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can go to school for not very much money or for free.
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I had to pay very little money to go to college, and I'm very grateful for that.
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You don't need an adversity score on your SAT for that to happen.
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One way that they try to solve it is race-based affirmative action.
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I mean, the assumption with race-based affirmative action is that black people are at a disadvantage,
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I guess there's systematic racism that is claimed by the left,
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but also it's just a matter of black people as a demographic group have less money than white people as a demographic group.
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So when they talk about race-based affirmative action,
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what they're really trying to talk about often is socioeconomic circumstances.
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So, okay, now you're trying to get more specific with this new program.
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And fair enough, the race-based affirmative action often doesn't work because it doesn't factor in wealth.
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So a lot of times you'll have people getting into good schools or jobs or whatever who are actually just immigrants from Africa
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They're not the descendants of American slaves.
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The purpose of affirmative action, ostensibly, is to get rid of the legacy of slavery in the United States.
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But if that's the case, why would you then give that preference to a recent immigrant from a wealthy part of an African nation?
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We have programs at the school level, right, at the universities.
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It's not like the universities are unaware of socioeconomic disparities.
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Universities all have programs to go into other states, to go into certain neighborhoods, to go into certain towns,
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to go into certain schools that are disadvantaged.
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The admissions offices already take all of that into account.
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That's why schools send admissions officers to all sorts of different states.
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If they just wanted to get the highest SAT scores, they wouldn't have to send students into all of those states.
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And they then would get students from disproportionately small pockets of wealth in the country.
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Okay, so you've already taken that into account.
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The reason this is so awful is the entire purpose of standardized testing is that it's standardized.
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If you take standardized testing and you stop standardizing it, there's no purpose.
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But, Michael, you might say, surely things matter beyond the SAT.
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Schools take into account athletes, and athletes get preferential treatment.
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Children of big donors get preferential treatment.
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Favored racial groups, favored racial minorities get preferential treatment.
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Yes, we already take a lot of people who get grades, right?
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Your grades, your GPA, is not standardized across every school in the country.
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I don't know how they do that, but because some schools give extra credit or something.
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Okay, so that's not—you already have all of that.
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You already take into account socioeconomic status a lot of the time.
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Also, there is a standardized measurement that different schools take into account to different degrees.
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And what this would do is get rid of that standardized movement altogether.
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It wants to take away standardized measurement.
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Now, the last standardized measurement that we have is becoming arbitrary.
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And the reason that this is so pointless and actually damaging is you can't measure suffering.
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There are a lot of poor kids who grew up with both of their parents and who were told to study all the time
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and who then worked their way into good high schools and good colleges.
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This is obviously the case among recent Asian immigrants and the children of Asian immigrants in New York City in particular.
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They say there are too many Asians at the magnet high schools.
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They come from very modest socioeconomic circumstances.
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Let's say you have a rich kid, right, and he comes from very high up socioeconomic circumstances.
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And he's got to work through that in high school.
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And he works through that and he takes the SAT.
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And then he's dinged because he hasn't gone through adversity.
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I think that kid's gone through a lot of adversity.
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He's gone through more adversity than most kids are going to face.
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How about even if you took your stereotypical rich kid, your stereotypical, you know, he gets a brand new car when he's 16 and he never has to get a summer job and he's just a total rich kid, right?
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He works hard by the time he's 17, 18, and he's ready to go to college.
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That guy certainly overcame a lot of adversity.
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He made some bad choices when he was a young teenager.
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That kid went through more adversity than the poor kid who grew up in a good household with two parents and he always made the right choices.
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You can't measure adversity in that way because all people suffer.
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The left wants to convince you that only certain people suffer.
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Only their favored groups suffer and everybody else doesn't suffer at all.
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The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.
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Now, not everybody talks about their suffering because it's unseemly to talk about your suffering all the time.
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This whole measure victimhood thing doesn't make any sense.
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Think about why we're even talking about victimhood in the first place.
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Why has the left focused on grievance and victimhood for the last 20 years?
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The main reason, I think, is because you can't measure it.
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So the right comes out and we say, look, there are these objective measurements and this guy's getting what he deserves and you're getting what you deserve.
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And what the left comes out and they says, you don't know my pain.
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Stop trying to use your oppressive logic and your oppressive facts to erase my experience of the world.
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I am suffering and the only reality that I know is my suffering and you can't know that because it's subjective.
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Also, now it's objective and you can measure it when it's convenient for me.
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Either suffering is subjective and I can't know your experience and so we are where we are.
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Or it is objective and I can tell you, no, you're not actually suffering that much.
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No, you actually haven't gone through that much adversity.
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The left wants to have it both ways right now and I think we just need to point out to them.
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I mean, this is, there's a great line in a play by, I think it's by Tennessee Williams called Orpheus Descending.
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And it's, anyway, it's this guy, this kind of vagabond.
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He's walking around and he, he wants to stay at a lady's house for the night.
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He's trying to sweet talk her and say, come on, let me stay at your house.
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And she says, everybody's got a problem and that's yours.
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But if we start trying to measure this, if we make this the be all and end all of society,
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first of all, we're going to get into a very ugly culture because we'll just, all we'll
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be doing is talking about suffering and complaining and everything's wrong all the time.
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It's going to incentivize people to suffer more.
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And it's, and it is going to deny the very real suffering of certain people.
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And it's perfectly to be expected with what the left has given us for the last 20 years.
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On some brighter news, we are in the pro-life moment right now.
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Pro-life, since Roe v. Wade, the pro-life movement has proceeded gradually.
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Missouri just passed a major abortion law that will restrict, will outlaw abortion after
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So it's actually not even reliant on a doctor detecting it.
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We know that at eight weeks, the heartbeat does exist.
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Um, there's a law in Louisiana that is about to go into effect.
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We had the governor, female governor of Alabama yesterday, sign that law.
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And yet some longtime right-wingers are not happy about it.
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I think this moment, this pro-life moment is, it's, it's finally real.
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You know, it's very easy for everybody to talk and say, oh, I'm pro-life.
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And so it's going to separate the pro-life wheat from the pro-life chaff.
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And here is even, I mean, just to, just to show you how widespread this is, even Pat
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Robertson, about as hardcore as it gets, about as pro-life as it gets, about as conservative
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as it gets, he's getting this wrong and he's questioning these laws.
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They've passed a law that would give a 99 year prison sentence to people who can commit
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It's an extreme law and they want to challenge Roe versus Wade.
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But my humble view is that this is not the case we want to bring to the Supreme Court
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Pat Robertson, Pat Robertson, about as hardcore as it gets.
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The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women.
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It is about a socialist anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their
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husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.
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He's not the only one who's saying it's too extreme.
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The publisher of the new reboot of Human Events, Human Events is an old conservative magazine.
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It went out of business and then this year a couple guys restarted it, rebooted it.
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The publisher of that new reboot criticized specifically me and Matt Walsh for defending
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these laws, not just defending them, for celebrating these laws.
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And I think a lot of conservatives are having these ideas.
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I don't think they really quite have arguments here, but they do have feelings.
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And so I think we should address those feelings because I get it.
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I just don't think they hold up to the rigor of logic.
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So let's take a look at their arguments and see if they've got any point.
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Like, I normally do not like sticking my finger in the eye of the pro-life movement, which
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The things that Michael J. Knowles and Matt Walsh are justifying today appall me, like
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Like, the things, the way they're deciding to argue this position strikes me as so unbelievably
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flippant and incoherent and ridiculous that it just needs to be called out.
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Like, in general, there's a way to be pro-life without making arguments that are just disgusting.
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And I'll try and explain why, why I think they're so flippant and they're so dismissive
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of concerns about bodily autonomy and, and essentially any sort of idea that you have
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They're so, so flippant that they just appall me.
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You'll notice he's talking and he's saying it's disgusting and it's awful and he's terrible.
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And you'll notice he's not making any arguments.
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You'll notice too, at the beginning, he says the arguments he's making, the things he's
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saying, the, the content of what Knowles is arguing is awful and disgusting.
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And the way in which he's arguing them is awful.
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I'm saying we shouldn't kill babies before they're born.
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That's my, that's the beginning and the end of my argument.
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And then he's saying the way in which he's arguing it is also disgusting.
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And so on that latter point, he might, he's saying I'm being flippant or glib or something.
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I actually don't think I have been, I certainly can be, but I don't think I have been on this
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He doesn't give an example, obviously in that part of the rant.
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But he's also saying that the argument that we shouldn't kill babies in the womb is appalling
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But why does he, does he go on and say, this thing goes on for half an hour.
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I listened to, I haven't even listened to the whole end of it because I didn't have
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that much time, but I did listen to the parts where I at least found that he was addressing
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So here's what he takes issue with specifically.
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So Michael Knowles basically has been trying to defend the law in which imposes these enormous
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punishments on doctors who commits abortion and, but do not punish the women who are, who
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It says, and this is one tweet quote, abortionists in Alabama face potentially harsher punishments
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than rapists because murder is considered a more serious crime than even than rape.
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And it says also that Alabama has tough rape laws.
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And then he says, and then, then somebody asked him, it's like, okay, but if that's true,
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he says, if it's murder, why shouldn't the woman be punished?
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If at least it's a conspiracy to commit premeditated murder.
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And Knowles says, quote, and this, this blows my mind because conservatives, why ego or justice
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are compassionate and conscious of human frailty.
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I'm sorry, you just said abortion was worse than rape.
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We don't look at whether or not our compassion and consciousness of human frailty does not
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There are a few factual things wrong with what he said.
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I actually didn't say that murder is worse than rape.
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I said that murder is considered by our society, by every one of our states and the whole country
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and the whole civilization, murder is considered worse than rape.
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And therefore it follows that people who commit murder will be punished more harshly than people
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I then also point out that Alabama has some of the toughest rape laws in the country.
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Coincidentally, I'm all for making the rape laws much worse.
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I'm, I'm perfectly fine with capital punishment for rapists.
00:26:08.680
I, I totally, I, I mean, I, I would support that if I were the king, I would kill rapists.
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I understand why our laws don't do that, but those are totally separate issues.
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The crime of rape and the crime of, of murder, the crime of abortion.
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Now he goes on to say, he, he acknowledges my, my answer to the question, well, if abortion
00:26:34.200
is, is morally equivalent to murder, why don't we punish the women?
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And the reason we don't punish the women is because conservatives, while eager for justice,
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are compassionate and we are conscious of human frailty.
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So he says, ha ha, I've got you there because if abortion is murder, then you should punish
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Abortion is different than killing somebody out on the street.
00:27:02.140
It is morally similar, if not morally equivalent, but it is circumstantially quite different,
00:27:10.560
And, and the, the motivations that would compel a woman to try to procure an abortion, the
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personal motivations, the cultural motivations, and because the Supreme Court invented a fictitious
00:27:21.320
right to abortion, what we now consider the legal conditions that would lead her to do that are
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And so, because we are taking all of those circumstances into account, we recognize that we probably
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There is, there is a difference in the motivation to commit that crime.
00:27:38.240
There is probably not, however, a moral difference in the crime itself.
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If I kill a baby at one day old, does anyone really believe that's morally different than
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This guy, Will Chamberlain, the, the editor of the, or the publisher of the new human events,
00:28:06.180
You're a baby with unique DNA who is its own person.
00:28:11.360
The, the fact of killing that innocent human being is not different.
00:28:15.420
However, there are different circumstances that lead to that crime.
00:28:18.900
I acknowledge those historical, cultural, and today legal differences.
00:28:24.180
And so it seems much, uh, it seems perfectly defensible to punish the doctor who is a, a, an
00:28:33.420
outside force who is committed, who is actually committing the act, who is actually killing
00:28:38.500
the baby, who does, is not compelled by all of those various circumstances.
00:28:43.120
And it makes perfect sense to punish him according to the law, but to not punish the woman.
00:28:49.460
I don't see any reason, uh, why that, uh, why that shouldn't be the case.
00:28:55.140
It's not, it, it doesn't have that perfect ideological clarity, right?
00:29:00.840
And, and, uh, Will Chamberlain acknowledges, as I do, that the circumstances that lead one
00:29:07.140
to shoot some guy in the street and that lead a, a woman to get an abortion are different.
00:29:11.680
And so I'm saying we can treat those people differently according to the law, perfectly
00:29:15.580
fine, while still defending the victims of those crimes who are the victims of exactly
00:29:23.100
They're innocent and they're being wrongly killed.
00:29:25.360
Now, Will gives up the whole story in, in his last bit, he explains the, the real issue
00:29:35.820
And I think it shows you why these squishy pro-lifers, the, the people who are pro-life,
00:29:40.820
but don't, but don't want to actually have real pro-life laws, why they go wrong.
00:29:46.700
But first, remember to tune in today for my latest episode of The Conversation at 7 p.m.
00:29:50.440
Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, where I'll be answering all of your burning questions.
00:29:54.800
The episode is free to watch on Facebook and YouTube, but only subscribers can ask the
00:30:05.820
We have to talk about the 23rd Democrat in the race.
00:30:11.800
10 bucks a month, $100 for an annual membership.
00:30:14.020
You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Matt
00:30:17.440
You get the conversation, and you get to ask questions in that, you get to ask questions
00:30:21.160
backstage, you get another kingdom, you get so much stuff.
00:30:23.480
You get the Leftist Tears Tumblr, Sea to Shining Sea, we're protecting the unborn, and the
00:30:42.420
So before we get to the 23rd Democrat in the race, and before we get to the mailbag, I just
00:30:46.980
want to finish up this point because Will Chamberlain, the publisher of the new Human
00:30:51.360
Events, he does explain his big issue, and this I think is the central question of pro-life.
00:30:59.380
Here is what I think is essentially why he's so upset and offended and appalled by the
00:31:05.080
arguments that Matt Walsh and I and other pro-lifers are making.
00:31:08.140
The issue I have with the way that Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh try and think about
00:31:12.660
the ethical questions with regard to abortion is they're extremely deontological, meaning
00:31:17.780
that they are entirely trying to logically reason their way through semantic arguments
00:31:23.300
to the idea that it is never okay under any circumstances to allow abortion to be legal,
00:31:33.800
So deontology, for those who are not familiar with that word, is the moral concept of considering
00:31:40.400
a moral act in and of itself, not considering the consequences of some act, not saying, well,
00:31:46.060
this act is right or wrong because of what it will lead to, which is called consequentialism,
00:31:51.340
but saying this act is right or wrong in and of itself.
00:31:58.580
That's making that claim to him is taking, uh, is, is being too deontological.
00:32:04.780
He says what, what Knowles is doing is he's starting with the premise that it's, it's wrong
00:32:11.260
And then he's semantically, by the way, the word semantics means meaning.
00:32:17.260
So in the meaning of what that is, he's following it logically to the conclusion that we should
00:32:29.520
Then I am following it logically to its conclusion.
00:32:32.940
And I'm saying we should not have legal abortion, right?
00:32:36.240
And what he's saying is stop thinking so logically about this.
00:32:41.840
It's bad to make women give birth to the babies they have.
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It's bad not to let people kill babies in the womb.
00:32:50.260
That's not an argument, but I do, I do see the, uh, impulse for that.
00:33:07.000
Two thirds of Americans don't want to overturn Roe v.
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And so with these guys, the kind of the moderate guys, the incrementalist guys, the gradualist
00:33:17.120
guys, what they say is we shouldn't follow the logic of abortion to its logical conclusion,
00:33:22.300
which by the way, the, the people who are seriously thinking about this now on both sides
00:33:26.600
of it are following abortion to its logical conclusion.
00:33:29.520
New York's governor, Andrew Cuomo, Virginia's governor, Ralph Northam, they are following
00:33:35.480
If it's okay to kill innocent babies, then we shouldn't not be able to kill them after
00:33:40.500
26 weeks, we should be able to kill them as they're being born or right after they're
00:33:46.500
Yeah, that's, that is the logical conclusion of abortion.
00:33:49.040
If you support abortion, the logical conclusion of abortion, if you don't is a baby's a baby.
00:33:56.160
So therefore you shouldn't kill them at 26 weeks.
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You shouldn't kill them because they're babies.
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Doesn't matter who the mother is, who the father is.
00:34:10.700
And there are hard cases that come out of that.
00:34:14.760
Fortunately, the hard cases that everybody is citing right now, cases of a baby being
00:34:20.320
conceived because of rape or incest or that pose a threat to the life of the mother, that
00:34:27.760
So it's, it's very disingenuous for people to bring that up.
00:34:30.560
Also, these laws make an exception when the life of the mother is at risk.
00:34:34.480
So even the argument that Will is making on that point just is, is not the case.
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I get that the people want a middle way here politically.
00:34:44.820
If you want a middle way, there are two options.
00:34:48.900
You can either pick some arbitrary point and pretend that the constitution allows you to
00:34:52.720
kill babies before a certain point, but not after a certain point.
00:34:55.620
And I don't know, you're going to have to look really deep into the constitution to
00:35:02.240
The other version is let the states make their own abortion laws.
00:35:12.940
So New Yorkers can live the way they want to live.
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Alabamans can live the way that they want to live.
00:35:17.420
And hopefully, as has been happening over the last 50 years, people will see the moral
00:35:22.180
reality of abortion, and then they will change their laws because they're not hamstrung by
00:35:25.860
some ridiculous Supreme Court decision that invents a right to abortion.
00:35:30.740
They can actually change as their moral clarity changes, which will change in New York.
00:35:37.220
Some conservatives are disapproving of these laws because they go too far.
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Oh, I don't know if the Supreme Court will go for it.
00:35:51.860
If you're not going to fight the fight, what are you doing?
00:35:55.520
Well, maybe we should pass laws that won't try to overturn Roe v. Wade, but they'll just
00:36:03.480
We actually, when I got to meet Antonin Scalia twice before he died, and one time that I was
00:36:08.440
meeting him, some of us asked, what about story decisis?
00:36:13.320
What about, story decisis is the legal principle that gives weight to precedent.
00:36:22.860
Then we've got Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992.
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I think what these conservatives are saying is, think about the precedent.
00:36:43.380
Some decisions are so egregious that they simply have to be overturned.
00:36:48.880
Dred Scott decided that black people couldn't be U.S. citizens.
00:36:54.880
There's no way to chip away and change it gradually over time.
00:36:58.920
Either black people can be citizens or they can't be citizens.
00:37:04.120
Either the Constitution gives you a right to kill babies or it doesn't give you a right
00:37:14.260
Before we get to the mailbag, we have a 23rd Democrat running for president now.
00:37:18.360
And because he's my old mayor, Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York, we've got to talk about
00:37:23.020
it because Bill de Blasio is launching his campaign on a pro-theft agenda.
00:37:37.300
Here in New York City, a place that is legendarily tough and big and complicated.
00:37:45.220
Good thing about New Yorkers is they look the same whether they're really pissed off at
00:37:50.400
We built an agenda that puts working families first.
00:37:54.120
We had to fight all over the city, all over the state, to make sure that people got a
00:38:07.920
Waitresses and dishwashers and store clerks and people who work in small manufacturing firms,
00:38:15.240
You will have the legal guarantee for the first time of paid sick leave.
00:38:19.120
This has never existed anywhere else in this country.
00:38:27.440
My wife, Shirlane, and I believe health care is a human right.
00:38:33.180
It has to be affordable and it has to include mental health services.
00:38:40.700
First of all, the only guy who needs mental health services in this entire video is Bill de
00:38:44.960
I just would like to point out, being a New Yorker myself, I'm in New York all the time.
00:38:52.260
Bill de Blasio is a terrible mayor and he's extremely unpopular, not just among conservatives.
00:38:57.140
There are only about 20 conservatives in New York anyway, but among liberals too.
00:39:07.960
The homeless problem has gotten out of control.
00:39:12.180
The Democrats were going to try to challenge him last election.
00:39:14.920
They weren't able to get their stuff together, but he's not popular in New York.
00:39:18.160
So I think he's thinking, I got to get out of New York.
00:39:21.800
Now's my shot because there's no clear front runner.
00:39:24.060
The other thing we know from this is just as the whole election is shaping up, this is
00:39:31.000
All he's talking about is giving stuff away for free, except he's taking it to a little
00:39:38.080
If we don't like you or we like you, we have the same look on our face, which is basically
00:39:42.160
And so he's taking the, the free stuff primary to that tougher level.
00:39:45.860
And he's saying, we're going to steal stuff from people.
00:39:47.960
He's actually turning it not just into the free stuff primary.
00:39:58.320
He's saying your money is in your hands and therefore it's in the wrong hands.
00:40:04.900
The money you've earned is in your hands, but it's in the wrong hands.
00:40:07.700
Therefore, well, who's, whose hands does my money belong in?
00:40:13.460
De Blasio says my money belongs in somebody else's hands.
00:40:16.880
I want Bill de Blasio to tell me whose hands my money belongs in.
00:40:20.440
He's not going to speak in those kinds of terms.
00:40:22.480
I also want to point out, he's not a real New Yorker.
00:40:25.040
He's a Boston Red Sox fan and he's got an Italian last name, but he's not Italian.
00:40:28.740
I think it was a stepfather's name or something like that.
00:40:30.580
So we just, I just, as a New Yorker, as an, as a descendant of Italian heritage, I just
00:40:42.940
The reason we're going to cut the mailbag a little short today, because we got the conversation
00:40:45.660
later on, but let's get to as many questions as we can.
00:40:50.420
Michael, with respect to Alabama's and Georgia's new abortion laws, I haven't seen any coverage
00:40:56.260
My understanding of IVF is that many eggs are harvested and fertilized at once, and
00:41:00.920
at times, many embryos are implanted in the uterus, some of which are removed.
00:41:06.740
How should laws be crafted with respect to aspects of IVF?
00:41:11.820
Thanks for taking my question last year regarding coping with my wife's multiple miscarriages.
00:41:16.840
As an update, we kept open to the possibility of new life in our marriage and are happily
00:41:31.080
And now IVF is coming up because the left is throwing this in the pro-life movement's
00:41:37.880
You're saying that it's a murder to kill an unborn baby.
00:41:42.040
But IVF can very frequently creates many fertilized embryos.
00:41:50.520
And then it freezes them away or it implants them in the uterus.
00:41:54.160
And then if you don't want to carry all those kids, it takes them away.
00:42:02.920
IVF, in the way that it is usually practiced, fertilizing multiple embryos and then freezing
00:42:13.580
This is something the pro-life movement doesn't talk about because there's some disagreement
00:42:21.680
I mean, from a prudent political matter, right now we're talking about abortion laws and
00:42:28.780
So I think we need to keep pushing until that goes to the Supreme Court and overturns Roe
00:42:33.600
However, it's also the case that IVF, as it is usually practiced, is not defensible from
00:42:43.280
The claim that making abortion illegal will only decrease the number of safe abortions rather
00:42:46.980
than abortion in general is all over social media.
00:42:49.320
Can you please speak to any evidence that supports or negates this?
00:42:54.300
Before Roe versus Wade in 1970, there were 52 abortions in the United States per 1,000
00:43:01.060
After Roe versus Wade, the year after that, 1974, that number jumped up to 242 abortions
00:43:10.660
By the 80s, it reached its high of 364 abortions per 1,000 live births.
00:43:16.420
Roe versus Wade caused the abortion rate in the United States to skyrocket, not just the
00:43:22.160
legal abortion rate, the total abortion rate to skyrocket in the United States.
00:43:27.160
And as we discussed before, the year before Roe versus Wade was decided, 39 women died from
00:43:36.920
And when you factor in the legality of abortion throughout the United States, you find out that
00:43:42.740
proportionally, it was just as dangerous to have an illegal abortion at that time as it
00:43:51.700
We, we, you can look at the statistics from the CDC.
00:43:59.740
Dear Mr. Knowles, I'm a Christian and recently started a wedding DJ business.
00:44:03.660
And I had the thought, what should I do if I'm asked to perform at a same-sex wedding?
00:44:12.420
I know that certain Christian denominations or, or sects now approve of, of same-sex marriage
00:44:21.220
So if you're in one of those, I guess it doesn't prove a problem to your faith.
00:44:25.300
If, however, you say that marriage has a meaning and that meaning does not include monogamous
00:44:31.560
same-sex unions, but it does, or any other version of that, that marriage is between a man
00:44:39.680
If you believe in the traditional definition of marriage, yeah, I guess it would be pretty
00:44:47.260
If it's a gay couple that is not getting, having a marriage, they're just having a party
00:44:54.640
I mean, I have many gay friends who do not agree with the logic of redefining marriage.
00:45:01.200
They say, no, marriage has a meaning and I have a life partner or I have a special friend
00:45:08.280
or I have a whatever, but that is not the same thing as marriage.
00:45:12.500
So if they're having a party, which they explicitly say, this is not a marriage, this is not a
00:45:16.300
wedding, that, I guess that gives you some leeway, but this is a very difficult question
00:45:20.360
that is changing daily because marriage continues to be redefined every single day.
00:45:24.960
If you had talked eight, eight years ago, people had civil unions.
00:45:32.460
It would people refer, the New York Times said when they were talking about etiquette
00:45:37.080
on how to refer to a gay, a gay man's gay husband, how do you call him husband or this?
00:45:46.740
Probably now you're politically correct, supposed to say husband or something.
00:45:51.560
It's changing every day and you will have to answer that question as regards your faith.
00:45:56.800
If, however, you believe that marriage has a meaning and if the clients are saying this
00:46:03.280
is a gay wedding, this is a marriage, this is a wedding, and you don't want to participate
00:46:11.020
From Evan, dear Michael, the man who loads European football, that's me, it's called soccer.
00:46:16.960
Last night on Ladder with Crowder, Stephen said he once considered creating a company baseball
00:46:21.340
He implied that Ladder with Crowder would play against the Daily Wire.
00:46:26.660
Would the Daily Wire accept if the challenge was ever made?
00:46:41.360
Actually, I should point out, I didn't hit the ball very much, but I did lean into pitches
00:46:48.320
But no, also, by the way, virtually everybody in the political media is like 5'10", 5'9",
00:47:01.820
All right, we have a lot more questions, but unfortunately, we do not have time to get
00:47:05.960
We'll get to them on the conversation today, so be sure to watch it live and ask your
00:47:14.100
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
00:47:45.540
Today on The Ben Shapiro Show, controversy continues to swirl around Alabama's new abortion laws.