Ep. 379 - Why AOC Is Wrong About Gender, Patriarchy, And Everything Else
Summary
In this episode of The Michael Knowles Show, Michael talks about sexism, patriarchy, and the Epstein scandal. He also talks about how Jeffrey Epstein became one of the most powerful men in the world, and why the left is so obsessed with him.
Transcript
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Freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accuses fellow woman Kellyanne Conway of being sexist toward her because, quote,
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We will examine why AOC is wrong about gender, patriarchy, and everything else.
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Then, soccer star Megan Rapinoe agrees with her conservative critics about equal pay and a judge rules that President Trump can't block people on Twitter.
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Okay, before we get to the sex that I want to talk about, which is the sexism and the gender and the patriarchy,
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we have to talk about the sex that I don't want to talk about, which is this sordid saga of Jeffrey Epstein.
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Because you know how much I hate to point out that I told you so.
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Well, yesterday on the show, I mentioned that the left would be framing this as an anti-Trump issue, that this is all about Donald Trump.
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I just want to point out that the major Washington Post coverage on this today, this is the headline, quote,
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No headline about the really shady, bizarre past of Jeffrey Epstein.
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No, no, it's just all about Trump, which is the only reason they're bringing this up now.
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And I just want to, on this one point where they keep going back to this 2002 New York Magazine article where Donald Trump called Epstein a terrific guy,
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I just want to remind everybody that Donald Trump regularly calls awful people terrific guys.
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He'll, you know, if it's convenient, he'll say, Oh, yeah, him, he's terrific.
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He actually has done it about the worst guy on earth.
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Back when he started opening negotiations with North Korea, he used the exact same word to refer to Kim Jong-un.
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Chairman Kim has been really very open and terrific, frankly.
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So we know this is just the way that President Trump talks, especially when he's flattering people.
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I mean, Trump, historically, has been a flatterer.
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He'll flatter people, and then the minute they turn on him, he'll call them the worst names you can possibly imagine.
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This has been true of everybody else that he's encountered.
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I also want to point out, there is a lot of weird stuff with this Epstein story.
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It seems like every hour we're getting new information that complicates the picture.
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And there are some pretty wild theories swirling around.
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I'm not going to call them conspiracy theories, because I guess they could be true.
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But I'm not going to say that they're obvious facts, because we just really have no idea what's going on here.
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But the big question that keeps popping up is, how did Jeffrey Epstein make all his money?
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Jeffrey Epstein is really, really, really rich.
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Jeffrey Epstein, in 1992, had the largest private residence in Manhattan.
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Manhattan is the most primo real estate on earth, basically.
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And Epstein had the single largest private residence on the whole island.
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There's rich, and then there's really rich, and then there is unfathomably infinite resources rich.
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And Epstein falls into that last category, and the question you have to ask is, how?
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I guess he was at the Cooper Union, which is an art school, art and engineering.
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He then, this is kind of a weird coincidence, he was hired to teach at a private school,
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a very prestigious private school in New York, actually not far from where I grew up.
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He was hired there by Attorney General William Barr's father, Donald Barr.
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And he taught there for a little bit, and then he left.
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Then he worked at Bear Stearns, the financial firm, which went under.
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This became a big part of the financial crisis in 2007, 2008.
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And then he ostensibly became this incredibly wealthy guy.
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I know people who have worked for hedge funds and who have their own hedge funds,
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and a lot of them have made an insane amount of money.
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But it's also worth remembering, most hedge funds fail.
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It's not like, I mean, hedge fund, even that term is so vague.
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And so a lot of people at the time were wondering how, where did Epstein get his money from?
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He kept his clients to be a tightly held secret.
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We just don't really know anything about that guy.
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And it gets even weirder because now today, from the Daily Beast, there's a report in about why
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now Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, who was then a U.S. attorney,
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let Epstein off the hook with this sweetheart deal.
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Instead of sending him away for life for all of the charges against him,
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he got 13 months in a private wing of a county jail, and that's it.
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And he got to leave six days a week for 12 hours a day.
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Is the Epstein case going to be a problem for confirmation hearings, Acosta had been asked.
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Acosta had explained, breezily apparently, that back in the day, he'd had just one meeting on the Epstein case.
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He'd cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein's attorneys because he had been told, in quotes,
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to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade.
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I was told Epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone, he told his interviewers in the Trump transition,
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who evidently thought that that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta.
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The Labor Department had no comment when asked about this.
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I mean, this, except it's being reported by the Daily Beast, which occasionally is a sort of mainstream outlet.
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You know, it's not like this is one of these really fringy sites.
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As far as left-wing outlets go, Daily Beast is about as mainstream as they get.
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Now, before we jump to the conclusion that this is all some secret plot by the CIA or intelligence or whatever,
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it is possible that Acosta was just coming up with an excuse to explain why he bungled the deal with Jeffrey Epstein.
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Before we conclude that this is some crazy CIA plot to, I don't know, to have a sex ring or to entrap,
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very powerful men, it's also possible that they were using, that the intelligence community was using Jeffrey Epstein as an asset for other purposes.
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I mean, the financial crisis was happening as this deal was struck.
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Maybe he was useful to them in the collapse of Bear Stearns.
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Maybe he was useful to them for other purposes.
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Anyway, and so the theories are swirling around.
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There is one theory that the person backing Epstein isn't a person at all.
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It wasn't just this cabal of, you know, zillionaires who all happened to like 13-year-old girls or 14-year-old girls.
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One theory that Ann Coulter brought up yesterday is that he could have had a state sponsor,
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that this was a state-sponsored intelligence operation.
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But the question of how Jeffrey Epstein made his money, who was funding him in the first place,
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is going to be central to the rest of this case.
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And so obviously we'll be following this as it builds.
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Now to get to the sex that I want to talk about.
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The sex that I want to talk about is AOC accusing Kellyanne Conway of being sexist toward her.
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Now you might have heard that name, Kellyanne, that's a woman's name.
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So AOC, also a woman, is saying that Kellyanne, a woman, is sexist toward a woman.
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The reason why is that Kellyanne Conway on Fox News referred to the recent tiff between Nancy Pelosi and AOC as a catfight.
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Those four female Democrats that Nancy Pelosi is brushing back, I think they're all freshman members,
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a major meow moment, brushing back in a huge catfight, really ridiculing them.
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And they voted against the Democratic aid package.
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This was a particularly snarky battle that was going on between, especially Nancy Pelosi and to AOC.
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Meanwhile, the GOP nominated a woman for vice president in 2008.
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One of our leading future presidential candidates is Nikki Haley, former U.N. ambassador, governor of South Carolina.
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And, of course, Kellyanne Conway, the campaign manager for Donald Trump, first successful campaign, a female campaign manager in American history, and a senior advisor to the president.
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So I don't think that hit makes a whole lot of sense.
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But catfight isn't just a term used by Republicans.
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It's a term that everybody uses to describe when two women are getting angry with each other.
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I mean, you could say a fight between two men is a bunch of knuckle draggers or a couple of Neanderthals.
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And this exposes the lie of the entire gender ideology movement.
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And she gets to the actual point here that dissolves, I think, the transgender ideology.
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This is how she explains how a woman can be sexist against another woman.
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Now just as a simple point of definitions, I went to the Oxford English Dictionary.
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I thought maybe I'm wrong about the definition of patriarchy.
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But patriarchy, as defined by the OED, is, quote, a system of society or government in which the father or eldest male is head of the family and descent is reckoned through the male line.
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So on the surface, AOC's comment doesn't make any sense.
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On the surface, the gender ideology, transgender ideology movement doesn't make any sense.
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But there actually is sort of, almost, an internal logic to it.
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And conservatives totally mistake how to deal with gender ideology and transgenderism.
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We make the mistake of trying to argue this point on scientific grounds.
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We just want to talk about the science or the chromosomes or the biology or whatever.
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I know that's tempting because scientifically our points are correct.
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The way that the left is talking about gender, the way that AOC is talking about gender and patriarchy, is not scientific.
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Gender was a term that was never applied to human beings in popular culture until about the 1960s.
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Gender was a term that was applied to language.
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Really not so much in English, but in other languages.
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So, for instance, Latino has a masculine gender.
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Pizza, the Italian word pizza, it ends in an A and it's got a female gender.
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Pranzo, which is the Italian word for lunch, it ends in an O and it's got a male gender.
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The entire purpose of the left making gender into a description of people is to undermine science.
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I talk to conservatives all the time on campuses around the country, and I think even many conservatives believe this.
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They believe that there is a difference between sex and gender.
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I mean, in their defense, this is what they're taught in classrooms.
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This is what kids are now taught from kindergarten all the way through college or graduate school.
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The thing is, there is no difference between sex and gender.
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We buy the leftist premise that there's a difference between gender and sex.
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Or, if we don't, maybe we don't want to grant that premise, but we try to argue about it scientifically.
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Here is how, I've talked to so many left-wingers about this.
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They say, sex is biological, but gender is not biological.
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But, if gender is just a social construct, if it's just sort of a choice, then people should
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choose to make their gender conform to their biological sex, right?
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If you can just kind of choose your gender, and it's just a matter of your personal will,
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then if you're biologically a man, but you identify as a female, and that's just a choice,
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then you should just choose to identify as a male.
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That's much easier than going through all this awful surgery, mutilating yourself, changing
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But then what the gender ideologues will say is, it's not quite like that.
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Sex is in the body, in the chromosomes or the genitals or whatever, but gender is in the brain.
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Well, okay, except then that means that gender is biological.
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Then it's not a difference of biological and not biological, because the brain is the part
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The brain is probably the most important part of the body.
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So then you have to conclude, sex and gender are both biological.
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So how can your biology be both male and female?
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How can your biology be both you are a man and a woman?
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Except in the exceedingly rare case where there's some confusion in chromosomes or in genitals,
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which is not what transgender ideologues are talking about.
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How can it be both one thing and not that thing?
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And it's where you hear phrases like biologically female penises.
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I had a gender activist tell me once at the University of Michigan, she said, yes, of course there
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And of course there can be biologically male uteruses.
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See, because they want the language of science.
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But if that is the case, then the words male and female, the words man and woman have no
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meaning because the word male in that case can refer to either male or female.
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The word man can refer to either man or woman and vice versa.
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It's not that you're even changing the definition of the word so much as you're just getting rid
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Now, they get very confused on this and they always run away and they can't answer these
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But I actually see what they're trying to talk about.
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What the gender theory people are trying to describe is not a scientific characteristic of
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They're trying to describe the difference between my physical body and my metaphysical
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So, what the transgender ideologues say is, on the physical level, I look like a man.
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You know, I've got broad shoulders, I've got a beard, I've got everything below the waist
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But, at a more essential level, deep, deep down, somewhere that you can't see, I'm not
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There's a difference, they say, between me and my body.
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I mean, we think of transgenderism as this bizarre new idea.
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It's just a bizarre new version of a very old idea.
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This is the central question of the gender theory.
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What is the relationship between me and my body and my soul?
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And this question took on special modern significance with René Descartes, with the father of modern
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philosophy, who laid the foundation for the Enlightenment and who, consequently, gave us
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What Descartes said is that the body is not essential to a person's identity.
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So, my body, you know, I've got sort of swarthy skin, I've got a little bit of a Roman nose,
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My body exists as a machine, and then my soul, which is who I really am, exists as a ghost
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That's what Descartes thought, and that's what these gender ideologues believe.
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The traditional understanding of the body, the Christian understanding, Aristotle's understanding,
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Is that the body is essential to a person's identity.
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Now, there are a lot of weird theories that have popped up throughout history to say that
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And therefore, we should divorce ourselves from the material world.
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This has cropped up as a number of bizarre movements and heresies and things like that.
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Those ideas have always been defeated because civilization would collapse if we really believed that.
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If we really believe that everything physical is just evil and terrible and awful and has to be utterly rejected,
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But that's what the gender theory people believe.
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But they can't bring themselves to admit that because they also tend to believe that there's no such thing as a soul.
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So they're stuck in this awful place where they're arguing the extremes of two ideologies,
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I think I know how we can talk to people about the gender ideology that isn't just,
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Because I think ultimately that doesn't really go anywhere.
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We'll get to how to deal with them in a second.
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I guess it must be a chilly day in hell because I'm actually agreeing with the soccer star on one question.
00:25:07.840
Then we'll also get to why President Trump can't block people on Twitter.
00:25:14.220
It is $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
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By the way, get your mailbag questions in for tomorrow.
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And you are going to need that Leftist Tears Tumblr.
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Because as the Jeffrey Epstein case starts unveiling, exposing all of these powerful Democratic men,
00:25:45.600
perhaps including a former Democratic president,
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You're going to be flooded out and drown if you don't have the Tumblr.
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So the gender theory people are trying to describe the soul,
00:26:11.060
except they don't believe in the soul because they tend to be materialists.
00:26:14.660
They tend to think that only the physical world exists.
00:26:17.720
And all of the things that aren't physical, like love and joy and the soul,
00:26:24.660
We're just kind of flesh and that's all that we are.
00:26:27.960
So they distinguish between the physical body, sex, and the metaphysical mind, or gender.
00:26:35.120
But then they go right back and they deny the difference between the mind,
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which is not physical, and the brain, which is physical.
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Any way you slice it, gender ideology doesn't make sense.
00:26:48.600
But we are very foolish if we think that we're going to convince them of that based on science.
00:26:58.500
And at times throughout history, when people have been philosophically and religiously shallow and stupid,
00:27:07.700
The foundation for gender theory was laid by two things.
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The decay of education and the decay of religion.
00:27:19.420
Because people just don't, they have these really shallow ideas.
00:27:31.760
You can't see to the bottom of profound things.
00:27:33.600
And we have a very shallow religious and educational culture right now,
00:27:37.820
which is why these gender people are so convinced that they're correct,
00:27:40.980
even though they couldn't possibly be more confused.
00:27:43.820
You're not going to be able to just convince people that gender ideology is wrong with a simple argument.
00:27:54.680
You're going to have to raise serious religious questions,
00:28:00.060
You're going to have to rebuild the educational system.
00:28:02.220
You're going to have to start going back to church or synagogue or wherever you go.
00:28:06.420
You're going to have to start taking these things seriously.
00:28:16.120
It's about something much deeper and something that we've lost.
00:28:25.740
You can't just talk about how great religion is.
00:28:28.980
You can't just talk about how great certain education systems are.
00:28:36.060
And you have to make it a big part of your life.
00:28:38.520
So, bizarrely, I can't believe I'm saying this,
00:28:41.340
I actually sort of agree with AOC that the patriarchy has no gender.
00:28:57.140
I'm also finding myself agreeing with the U.S. women's soccer star,
00:29:08.020
and she was there to discuss her calls for equal pay
00:29:15.200
but nevertheless, she agreed with the arguments of her conservative critics.
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In the moments immediately following the final whistle,
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but equal pay, equal pay along that same cadence.
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I think fans want to know what they can do to support that fight.
00:29:32.860
Obviously, the national team games will be a hot ticket.
00:29:51.940
that's the easiest way for fans to get involved.
00:29:57.580
The issue of equal pay for the men's and women's soccer teams
00:30:01.020
is not a question of some regulation or some law
00:30:04.080
or some secret, hidden, institutional patriarchy.
00:30:10.360
Matt Walsh had a great point on this yesterday.
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It's not just that women's soccer players are underpaid
00:30:18.920
They are paid less than men as a matter of just numbers.
00:30:25.740
as a matter of the percentage of their business that they're paid,
00:30:35.900
the Men's World Cup generated $6 billion in revenue.
00:30:39.700
That was the last World Cup, $6 billion with a B.
00:30:43.360
The Women's World Cup generated, can you guess,
00:30:54.020
Not multiples, you know, an order of magnitude less.
00:30:58.460
So men, if you look at the total revenue of the World Cup,
00:31:04.440
If you look at the total revenue of the Women's World Cup,
00:31:12.920
as a percentage of their total revenue that the men got.
00:31:15.760
Now women apparently want 400% of their revenue.
00:31:23.860
The way, if you want to build up women's soccer,
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you buy popcorn and cracker jacket at the games,
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I don't know, whatever they sell at the stadium.
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Now I don't want to give the wrong impression here
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the whole ethos around this women's soccer team.
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Here is what Megan Rapinoe thinks about her win.
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who have disproportionate amounts of suffering.