Ep. 290 dissects healthcare’s collapse, blaming Trump’s unpredictability and Ryan’s rushed reforms for squandering a chance to weaken Obamacare, while Michael Knowles exposes transgender athletes exploiting women’s sports—citing Laurel Hubbard’s dominance and Joanna Harper’s flawed study—revealing leftist hypocrisy on gender. The episode pivots to Elle, praising Verhoeven’s unflinching artistry even as it mocks "post-feminist" narratives, before teasing Trump’s political pivot, framing chaos as the new normal. [Automatically generated summary]
The murderous perpetrator of last week's London terror attack has now been identified in the press as a man born in England.
The BBC, ABC, Reuters, and the New York Times, a former newspaper, all headlined the fact that the terrorist was a native of the UK.
The Kent-born UK native Englishman is named Khalid Massoud, an old Anglo-Saxon name meaning Allah will destroy every unbeliever.
Which is what they used to say back in Anglo-Saxon times.
The savage act of violence by this British-born British man from Britain raises some questions.
Are the British naturally violent?
And what was it in particular that moved this English Englishman from England to commit such a brutal act on his fellow English Englishmen?
Was it something in the fish and chips that set off a bizarre chemical reaction in Mr. Massoud's brain and caused him to turn away from watching football on the telly in order to murder his fellow Westerners in the name of Allah?
Was he just sick and tired of wearing a derby and carrying an umbrella all the time or saying silly-sounding British things like what ho or dash-it-all or alhulaqbar?
Or was he inspired to violence by some particularly triggering episode of Downton Abbey or the latest BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice?
In fact, we may never know this UK-born British Englishman's peculiarly Anglican motive for this British act of English savagery.
Now, I don't want to stir up any anti-English feeling here for all the violence committed by UK-born British Englishmen like Mr. Massoud.
I'm sure there are practically dozens of peaceful, hard-wit-working English men and women who simply want to raise their families and do their jobs and attend their houses of worship to pray to the God of love or possibly the hate-filled warrior god who commands us to destroy everyone who doesn't believe in him.
I always get those two gods confused.
I think it would be a shame if this isolated act of terrorism by a lone wolf English-born Englishman should cause an uptick in incidents of anglophobia or cause anyone to view a UK-born Briton with suspicion when he's simply sitting harmlessly in the local pub, enjoying a pint and reading the Quran while strapped with dynamite.
Now, you may say, well, if we can't examine what turns so many Englishmen into terrorists, how will we ever stop them from committing their English acts of terror?
Shouldn't we be asking, what is it about reading Shakespeare, Milton, Charles Dickens, and Harry Potter that has created that peculiarly English outlook on life that leads to poverty, oppression, brutality, and terror everywhere it arises?
If we just turn a blind eye to English terror, won't we all ultimately be conquered by England and forced to live under Magna Carta while speaking in funny, sort of gay-sounding accents?
But I say, let's try and coexist.
Let's reach out to our English neighbors in friendship and understanding.
Just steer clear of the Islamist ones, because those guys will kill you.
Obamacare And Political Blame00:14:40
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is to give you boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Shipshape, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bibby-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we've got a little terrorism comedy there.
We have our best-selling cultural correspondent, Michael Knowles, is here to talk to us about one of the weirdest battles in the gender wars.
And of course, we're going to be talking about the failure of the healthcare reform.
But first, we have to welcome a brand new sponsor.
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So, I mean, the reason I use it is because I just can't stop in the middle of the day and drive to the post office, much as I love them, can't drive to the post office, and wait on that line with the guy who's actually, you know, like a schizophrenic talking to himself and is suddenly going to turn and hurt everybody around him.
So instead, stamps.com, you have to stay home at your desk, you do it.
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All right.
All right.
So here's what I wrote on Friday when the healthcare bill failed, writing at PJ Media, where I have my Claven on the Culture column.
I fear that conservatives may have erred.
The president has never shown himself to be a reliable, philosophical conservative.
He often seems guided to go where he is loved and work with those who are nice to him.
He clearly is committed to the concept of winning.
If the president now finds himself humiliated by the conservative leadership, unable to work with Republicans on the Hill, many conservatives may find they have paved the way toward an essentially left-wing presidency.
I fear this may be the end result of the failure of the health care bill, a Washington in which Donald Trump can find more love on the left than on the right, more chance of winning through leftism than through conservatism.
That was Friday.
Here's the Wall Street Journal headline today: White House opens door to Democrats in wake of health bill failure.
Move signals Trump administration is fed up with many factions in House Republican conference.
And Trump is also tweeting against the Freedom Caucus, the conservatives who basically shot down the bill.
So I know what you're saying.
How does Clavin do that?
How does he say the guy's like a prophet?
He's like, you know, he's like that kid in the sixth sense who sees dead people, except he just looks into the future and sees things that aren't going to happen.
So the reason is, is that I'm just a practical realist.
My attitude is different.
My attitude is admittedly different to those who want to live and die on the Hill of Principle and the Hill of Righteousness.
I love my country.
I want to do the best thing for my country at any given moment.
That's what love looks like to me.
Sometimes love tastes like a crap sandwich, okay?
You could make a little mug that says that.
Sometimes love tastes like a crap sandwich.
I didn't love voting for Donald Trump.
I did not love voting for Donald Trump.
There were exactly two choices.
One was Hillary Clinton, who I thought actually was wicked and would have marked the end of the American experiment.
One was Donald Trump, who is unreliable if you're a conservative, right?
Some people aren't conservatives and like Trump.
They're populists.
They want to keep all the entitlements and all that stuff.
Great.
Then he's a perfect candidate.
For me, the guy is to the left of me, and he's not a reliable conservative, a lifelong Democrat.
So, how do you then deal with it for a moment there, for a moment, because Trump goes where he's loved, and because all this love was coming from the conservative side, for a moment we had a chance to get that agenda going.
And it's still, this chance is not totally destroyed.
But I think on this first big thing, the first big thing that was his legislative accomplishment, you don't just give him everything he wants all day long for the rest of his term, but on the first big thing, I would have given him a win.
I would not have stood on my righteousness.
I would have given him the win and hoped the Senate made it into a better bill.
It wasn't a great bill.
It was not a great bill.
Everybody knew it wasn't.
But so let's take a look.
Here's Trump right in the aftermath, and he puts it on the Democrats that we're stuck with Obamacare, which is what he's going to sell.
We were very close.
It was a very, very tight margin.
We had no Democrat support.
We had no votes from the Democrats.
They weren't going to give us a single vote, so it's a very difficult thing to do.
I've been saying for the last year and a half that the best thing we can do, politically speaking, is let Obamacare explode.
It is exploding right now.
Many states have big problems.
Almost all states have big problems.
I was in Tennessee the other day, and they've lost half of their state in terms of an insurer.
They had no insurer.
And that's happening to many other places.
I was in Kentucky the other day, and similar things are happening.
So Obamacare is exploding with no Democrat support.
We couldn't quite get there.
We're just a very small number of votes short in terms of getting our bill passed.
A lot of people don't realize how good our bill was because they were viewing phase one.
But when you add phase two, which was mostly the signings of Secretary Price, who's behind them, and you add phase three, which I think we would have gotten, it became a great bill.
See, I agree that he would have gotten phase two because obviously that was stuff that just needed a pen on a phone and not even a phone, actually.
But I don't think they would have ever gotten to stage three.
Now, so first he slaps the Democrats around, right?
First, he says, you know, you stuck us with this bill, all your fault.
You wouldn't help us change it.
And then he reaches out to them.
Here's the second cut.
Again, I think what will happen is Obamacare unfortunately will explode.
It's going to have a very bad year.
Last year you had over 100% increases in various places.
In Arizona, I understand it's going up very rapidly again, like it did last year.
Last year was 116%.
Many places, 50%, 60%, 70%.
I guess it averaged, whatever the average was, very, very high.
And this year should be much worse for Obamacare.
So what would be really good with no Democrat support, if the Democrats, when it explodes, which it will soon, if they got together with us and got a real health care bill, I'd be totally open to it.
And I think that's going to happen.
I think the losers are Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, because now they own Obamacare.
They own it.
100% own it.
So basically, he's trying to scare.
The one thing, by the way, the good news here is it's not just the Freedom Caucus who's going to stand on their principles.
The Democrats are too stupid to respond to this.
I mean, Chuck Schumer has built his fortress.
He's not coming around.
I don't think there's anything there.
I think Trump is based, and Trump knows it.
I think he's basically scaring, trying to scare the conservatives straight, basically.
He's trying to say, you work with me, you're going to have to work with me, or else I reach out to the Democrats, which I'm not sure is an actual possibility.
All right, so who's to blame?
There's blame to go around.
I think there's blame to go around.
I mean, first of all, I think Trump didn't care about this, and he pushed Ryan to just get something done, because he wants to get to tax reform.
And by the way, this is another problem with this.
This bill did cut $1.2 trillion in government spending, which makes tax reform a doddle, right?
I mean, then you can do tax reform any way you want, right?
Because you've got all this money that's not being spent.
So that's all the money that you can take out of the tax system until maybe the tax cuts cause there to be more money coming in.
Now you don't have that ceilings.
And now, you know, the guys like Paul Ryan, they want a neutral tax cut, an income-neutral tax cut, makes it a lot harder to do.
It's a lot harder to find that kind of money just lying around in the sofa in Washington.
That's one thing.
So Trump pushed Ryan.
Ryan moved too quickly.
I mean, there is just no question that Ryan moved too quickly.
But basically, he did this in secret.
He didn't bring everybody together.
He didn't get the consensus first.
That would have taken too much time.
He let Trump rush him.
After all, it's Ryan's, you know, one of the things, you know, I'm an actual fan of Ryan, but I think he screwed the pooch.
I mean, I think that's basically it.
I think Ryan did screw the pooch on this.
And I think that he basically thought that Trump would bring the guys around.
He thought Trump would do his deal-making thing, but I don't think Trump cared enough to do it.
And he just didn't get the consensus he needed because it would have taken too long.
It would have taken too long to get everybody together.
So that was a problem.
Here's Ryan afterwards.
He just looks like basically he's been hit by a bowling ball.
I will not sugarcoat this.
This is a disappointing day for us.
Doing big things is hard.
All of us.
All of us, myself included.
We will need time to reflect on how we got to this moment, what we could have done to do it better.
But ultimately, this all kind of comes down to a choice.
Are all of us willing to give a little to get something done?
Are we willing to say yes to the good, to the very good, even if it's not the perfect?
Because if we're willing to do that, we still have such an incredible opportunity in front of us.
There remains so much that we can do to help improve people's lives, and we will.
Because that's, I got to tell you, that's why I'm here.
And I know it's why every member of this conference is here to make this a better country.
We want American families to feel more confident in their lot in life.
We want the next generation to know that, yes, the best days of this country are still ahead of us.
I'm really proud of the bill that we produced.
It would make a dramatic improvement in our health care system and provide relief by people hurting under Obamacare.
And what's probably most troubling is the worst is yet to come with Obamacare.
You know, one kind word for Ryan.
I always feel that, you know, conservatives always hate the Speaker of the House.
They hate the Speaker of the House because he's wrangling cats.
You know, you forget that a lot of the people in the House are moderates.
You know, this is a center-right country, right?
It's not a far-right country.
And so a lot of the people that he's dealing with are moderates.
And as he made compromises with the Freedom Caucus for conservatives, he was losing the moderates.
He was losing, you know, he was bookended in.
So conservatives always hate the Speaker of the House because he's a wrangler, you know, and that's not what we want.
We want people of principle to stand up and shake their fist and all that stuff.
Totally understandable.
But I will say on his behalf that he was dealing with a president who promised everyone would be covered, right?
Because the president has Democrat tendencies this way.
He was dealing with moderates, and he was dealing with an absolutely intransigent freedom caucus who I do think has to take some of the blame.
And we'll talk about that in a minute, but we've got to cut away from Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over to thedailywire.com to hear the best-selling cultural correspondent Michael Knowles discuss really weird gender stuff, which is just something he does.
It's kind of strange.
And also, if you come over, if you just come over and subscribe, you know, you don't have to do this.
You can watch the whole show on the site itself.
And if you subscribe for, are we still giving away Knowles' book?
For annual subscriber.
For an annual subscriber, it's a lousy eight bucks a month, and you still get Knowles' completely blank book with no words in it.
So not only do you get a book, it's easy to read.
All right, so here is Jim Jordan of the Freedom Caucus.
And Chris Wallace says to him, well, aren't you to blame for the fact that Obamacare is still in place?
And here's Jordan's reply.
Let's give him his opportunity to defend himself.
Instead of doing the blame game, let's get to work.
Let's do the responsible thing.
Let's get back to work and do what we told the voters we were going to do.
Remember this bill?
17% of the country approved this bill.
Maybe the fact that we opposed it, we did the country a favor because this bill didn't repeal Obamacare.
This bill didn't do what we told the American people we were going to do.
So let's be responsible.
Let's get back to work and do what we told the American people we were going to accomplish, which is repeal Obamacare and replace it with a patient-centered health care program.
See, my problem with this argument is not that I agree with him.
I agree with Jordan.
I want the bill repealed.
The problem is you play the cards, you're dealt.
And if you love your country, you do the best you can for it under the circumstances.
The president is who the president is.
We knew, look, we talked about this.
Everybody at the Daily Wire talked about this come into, during the primary phase, when we were dealing with these guys, that he wasn't really a conservative.
Trump wasn't really a conservative.
He's been a Democrat all his life.
He believes in single-payer health care.
He said so again and again.
If you know that, if you know that's the situation you're in, you know, you eat the crap sandwich.
You do.
You know, parents know this stuff.
I mean, parents know this stuff.
People who have children understand that love is about sacrifice, not principle.
Love is not about righteousness.
Hitler's Legacy00:05:04
It's about sacrifice.
I mean, you know, we had this conversation the other day with someone who said to us, I don't believe it's rational to believe in a loving God.
And the same person said, I said he's a brilliant guy who can stand up for himself.
And these were words that he was speaking in public.
It was Dennis Prager.
He's a brilliant guy, very deep, really almost a rabbi, the way he talks about stuff.
And he said, I don't think it's rational to believe in a loving God.
And he said, I believe you earn heaven.
I believe you have to be good enough to get to heaven.
That is his philosophy.
And it's a very Jewish point of view.
But I think that that means that love, you can't believe in a loving God if you think love looks like righteousness and kindness and cuddliness and all this.
Love looks like sacrifice.
And this is a moment when you sacrifice getting everything you want for getting some good things, and hopefully the Senate would have made it even better.
I have to just deal a little bit with the comedy of the whole thing because there was one story that came out.
This is one of my favorite stories.
One story that came out that Steve Bannon, the congressman, came in and Steve Bannon looked at them and said, listen, this is not a debate.
I just thought you're talking to the House of Representatives.
What the hell do you think it is?
I think Steve, if that story is true, and I can't say it's true, but if the story is true, I think Steve failed the evil genius test there.
I mean, I know that, you know, there's some people who, there's some people, by the way, who have this very gamed-out thing that Bannon wanted the bill to fail because now he wants to destroy Ryan and all this stuff.
I don't buy it.
I don't buy it.
I think he wanted to win for his boss.
I think he wanted to win for his boss.
But to say, it's like that old joke, no fighting in here from Dr. Strangelove, no fighting in here.
This is the war room.
It's like you can't debate in here.
This is the House of Representatives.
That was one.
The other was this thing with Trump.
Afterwards, he said, watch Judge Janine at 9 p.m., right, Judge Janine on Fox.
And Judge Janine came on and called for Ryan's resignation.
But as she's calling for Ryan's resignation, she said this.
I want to be clear.
This is not on President Trump.
No one expected a businessman to completely understand the nuances, the complicated ins and outs of Washington and its legislative process.
How would he know which individuals upon whom he would be able to rely?
Many of them friends and establishment colleagues of Speaker Ryan.
You, on the other hand.
It's like Trump saying, yeah, wait, she said, you can't blame me.
I'm completely unqualified for this job.
But Ryan Spriever says, no, it was not, it was just a coincidence.
He's just a pal and he wanted people to watch her show.
And he wasn't suggesting Ryan resign.
I want to get to Knowles, so let me just end with this one thing from Scott Adams.
Scott Adams is the cartoonist who does Dilbert.
And he's been brilliant about this because he observes it not from the point of view, he observes it from the point of view of business, not from politics.
He doesn't know a lot about the congressional ins and outs and all this stuff.
He predicted Trump would win.
He knew Trump was going to win right away.
And he ultimately sided with Trump because he just felt that Hillary Clinton was, like I did, he felt that she was wicked.
He writes this thing, so he's been right a lot.
He writes, today we are witnessing one of the most important events in political history.
But you probably can't see it because the news is talking about health care and how Ryan and Trump totally failed to get enough votes.
But this is something the country needs more than health care.
It was until yesterday perceived as the biggest problem in the United States, if not the entire world, and that problem almost totally went away yesterday.
The smell might linger, but the problem has ended.
He says, you know what problem just got solved?
The problem is the problem of Trump is Hitler just got solved.
Trump has now moved from being Hitler to being incompetent.
Trump had one of the best days any president ever had.
He got promoted from Hitler to incompetent.
Now, Scott doesn't, Adams doesn't think Trump is incompetent.
He doesn't think he's incompetent.
He just thinks that this was a big problem.
What he believes is that people were so invested in the idea that Trump is Hitler that they had to invent in their imaginations.
And I have seen this.
I believe this is true.
They had to invent in their imaginations that everything he was doing was evil and everything about him was evil.
And they just got more and more wound up about it.
Oh my God, it's evil.
It's evil.
It's evil.
Because they couldn't admit that, no, he's actually been doing a competent, straightforward job.
So he's saying that now he's been promoted to incompetent.
In other words, he's becoming normalized.
And now, when it turns out that he actually is competent, the Hitler thing will be gone.
Now, the only reason I disagree with that is I think if the bill had passed, he also would have been normalized as competent.
But we'll see.
Otherwise, things are going fairly well.
This is a major setback.
There's no, you know, for Trump, Trump, everybody involved, I think, gets some blame for it.
But the president is going to survive.
The presidency is going to survive.
We're still going to get some good things.
But he is going to shift left, I think, ultimately.
That was probably always in the cards.
I mean, that's what you get with the guy.
He's a populist.
A lot of populism exists on the left.
But we will get some good things, and we'll certainly get better things than we would have gotten with Hillary Clinton.
Competing Identities00:08:05
All right.
Michael Knowles, best-selling cultural correspondent.
What's the name of this book again?
Oh, it's Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide.
And it's still on the bestseller list, isn't it?
It is, yeah.
We were in the top 10.
So we were in the top one spot for over, I think it was 11 days.
Then we were in top 10 for three weeks.
And we're still in like the top 20 or something like that.
And you said on Twitter that you were going to make an announcement.
Have you made that?
I don't want to give it away.
I am actually contractually unable to say the next level of this joke at the moment, but I promise you, it is so funny and absurd.
I can't wait.
Stay tuned.
All right.
I can't wait.
We were not worthy to be in the room with a troll of your level.
I mean, you have actually, I want you to come in next time with your hair orange, pulled up like a.
All right, so you are talking today about something that drove me crazy last week, was a transgender male.
I don't even know if he's a transgender.
He's a male who thinks he's a woman and has had some surgery and stuff.
Won a weightlifting competition for women.
And this drives me insane.
So you tell me, I mean, is it fair for this to happen?
This has been building for a while, but I think last week's event has brought a lot of focus onto it.
It's a transgender weightlifter, Laurel Hubbard, who is a man who has undergone certain hormone therapies and is on his way to legally becoming a woman.
And so he won the Australian International Women's Competition by lifting 590 pounds, which was over 40 pounds higher than the second place.
And the reaction to this, a sensible reaction, would say, well, of course, the man lifted more weight than the woman.
Men are physically stronger.
They have better muscle mass.
They're larger.
Their bones are more dense.
Here has been the reaction by some of the press in New Zealand and Australia.
Do we have that?
She is completely entitled, I believe, completely entitled to compete.
And anybody who says otherwise is either being, I think, very prejudiced, which is the main thing I would imagine, or just jealous of the fact that maybe this woman has come along and she's better than the female competitors.
She's better by a long way.
By a long way.
You can cut it there.
Better by a long way.
By a long way.
If you think that men should not be able to compete in women's sports and win because they're more athletic, you are prejudiced.
You're a bigot.
It's amazing to me.
And this is obviously not the first example.
Transgender cyclist Jillian Bearden, who's 36 years old and is a man transitioning to become a woman, won the women's division of the El Tour de Tucson with a record time in November.
A high school runner, Nataphon Wang Yat, who's 18, a man who's now transitioning to become a woman, placed in the Alaska State running meet.
He or she came in third?
That's right, Katie.
She's like 62 or something.
Well, and this created a big issue because a lot of these girls are competing to win college scholarships.
Yeah.
For some, it's really their only shot to go to a good college and to get a free education.
And this guy is beating them.
And then, of course, the biggest example of all of this was the transgender MMA UFC athlete Fallon Fox, who's born a man, and he gave his female opponent a concussion and actually broke her eye socket two years ago.
Oh, Lord.
So here is, so Tamika Brentz was the person whose eye socket was damaged.
And she said afterward, I fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night.
I can't answer whether it's because she was born a man or not.
I'm not a doctor.
I can only say I've never felt so overpowered ever in my life.
And I'm an abnormally strong female in my own right, of course.
Here's Ronda Rousey, the great UFC champion.
This is Ronda Rousey's reaction.
I actually really tried to research it a lot.
And I feel like if you already go through puberty as a man, that's something that you can't really reverse.
But there are people that are, they're identified as being like a male-identified woman or a woman-identified man early on, and they're often put on homosexual therapy until they're of legal age, and then they can make the decision to get that sex change later.
And I think that would be acceptable.
That would be fine because they would have already developed the bone structure of a man, the muscular structure.
You know, you can't just.
You curved it there.
She's saying if you do it at a certain time.
Yeah, if you do it before you've gone through puberty, you haven't.
Well, what's the research on this?
Well, there's not a lot.
If you read the mainstream media, the science is settled, as it always seems to science.
It always seems to be settled because otherwise you're just prejudiced.
That's right.
But, well, I think Fallon Fox, you know, the man who competed, he sums up what the New York Times and the Washington Post and everybody says.
This is what he thinks about the medical consensus.
You hear the critics that say being born male, Fallon, gives you a physical advantage over a female competitor.
It's so confusing.
So that's, in your opinion, is not true.
Yeah, it's not just my opinion.
That's the medical community's opinion.
That's the medical community's opinion.
Of course.
So we can cut it there.
It's apparently so much so the medical community's opinion that the International Olympics Committee has now removed the requirement that transgender athletes male to female have undergone surgery.
So they can still have male gonads, they can still have testicles and compete as women in the Olympics.
This was a decision made last year.
So what's the science?
Think Progress says, no, allowing trans athletes to compete won't destroy women's sports.
The New York Times, the New York Times, a former newspaper says female transgender Olympic athletes have no advantage over cisgender female athletes.
And cisgender is a sort of made-up term to mean a person who thinks they are the biological sex that they are.
So this is the New York Times from that article.
A first-of-its-kind study published last year shows that there is apparently no reason for athletes to worry about a playing field that's not level.
But the science hasn't quieted the critics.
And that in turn has not created an atmosphere where the two reported transgender athletes competing in 2016 have felt comfortable coming out.
So what is that study?
I clicked on that study.
I had a little time this weekend.
And it's a study of eight transgender runners, which was done by a transgender athlete himself named Joanna Harper from the Portland Medical Center in Oregon.
And it was in the Journal of Sporting Cultures and Identities.
According to this study of eight runners, and by the way, the data was collected online.
A good portion of the data was collected anonymously.
Only half of half of the data were able to be verified independently.
And seven of the eight people that this researcher talked to experienced reductions in running times after taking.
So this is like one of those studies like where Sean Hannity says, should Obama be tarred and feathered?
And 97% call in and say yes, is that what it is?
That is much more scientifically valid and accurate, by the way, but and there are very few studies on this there's one study from 2004 sometimes people are citing, but here's the conclusion.
The conclusion is that, quote, androgen deprivation in male to female increases the overlap in muscle mass with women, but does not reverse it statistically.
And the real conclusion is this, the question of whether reassigned male to female can compete fairly with women depends on what degree of arbitrariness one wishes to accept the.
The scientific consensus, as often seems to be the case uh, doesn't exist, and so has there ever been an example of a transgender male to female athlete who didn't at least place?
Not that we've seen the uh, you know, I don't think ever.
Why Movies Spark Conversations00:07:40
And really the.
The examples that we're seeing are uh men who are competing as women, beating by uh leaps and bounds right right, um.
It really, it really does stink.
I mean, it's amazing how the left achieves the opposite of everything they set out to achieve every single thing, not just not just different than what they said.
It's not like they missed the target.
It's always 180 degrees off that.
Here you have women.
They've done all this stuff with title IX, which I think is an unfair rule, to make sure there's women's sports in every school, right?
And they force all these women, they force all these schools to have women's sports.
So now you have women who are girls who are interested in sports, and it's good, clean, healthy fun.
It's how they get scholarships.
It's how they socialize and all this stuff.
And they work so hard.
I mean, I know girls, you know, people's daughters who've really been good athletes.
They work so hard, and these guys just come and take it away from them to make a point.
Well, it's because they begin with premises that are absurd, so they end up at conclusions that rebut their own premises and their own goals.
And this is the central paradox of the transgender phenomenon and movement, which is that the left is asserting on the one hand that gender and sex are such essential qualities of a person that one must undergo mutilation and surgery to better get in line what one thinks one is with one's own body.
And on the other hand, gender and sex are totally socially constructed our own whim.
All right, Michael Knowles, best-selling cultural correspondent, great, great job.
That was a really good report.
And just, it makes me crazy.
It makes me crazy.
They steal these girls' achievements away to make for these rare cases of guys who want to be girls.
And it's like, I feel for them.
It's not that I don't, it's not that I hate on them.
It's just, you know, you got to keep, you got to live in reality.
All right, stuff I like.
Over the weekend, I watched a lot of movies.
So I was catching up on all these movies that weren't quite good enough to get me to go to the theater, you know, weren't quite interesting.
But one of them I watched was a movie called Elle, a French film by Paul Verhoeven.
And you know Paul Verhoeven because he had this, he started out, he's a Dutch filmmaker, and then he came to America and had this huge career.
He did RoboCop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers, Basic Instinct.
And now he's made a French movie called Elle, starring Isabelle Huper, or Hubbard, depending on how you want to say it.
And here's, I want to talk about this for a minute.
The vision of the world that this film presents is an honest vision, or it wouldn't be a fine piece of movie making that it is.
It's also a vision that I hate, because I feel it doesn't include a lot of things that are also part of the world.
Paul Verhoeven, if he doesn't hate and fear women, he is doing a very good impression of it.
I cannot think that so many of his films include femme fatales.
I mean, Basic Instinct, obviously, the famous one, Total Recall, Fourth Man, which was his original hit, a really good Dutch thriller.
You know, the women are always dangerous in his movies.
And in this movie, you have this woman who's a very powerful Huper plays this woman who is a very powerful video game maker.
She makes games that include lots of violence against women and all this stuff.
And she has had this really interesting backstory.
And now she lives in a world in which all the men are weak.
And the first scene in this film, the first scene, it comes in in the middle of her being raped.
That is the first scene in the movie.
It comes in the middle of her being raped.
The rapist leaves, and it's a tough rape, too.
It's hard to watch.
The rapist leaves, and she just goes about her business.
She doesn't tell anybody.
She does eventually tell people, but she just goes about her business.
And it is developed like a Hitchcockian revenge drama, but it's not.
It's so well made.
And basically, here's, let's listen to Isabel Hubert talking about the vision of the film and where women and men come out in it.
What I would call almost like a post-feminist character building her own behavior and space, somewhere between the vict, I mean, she doesn't want to be a victim, that's for sure, but she doesn't either fall into the caricature of the revenge avenger girl taking a gun and the James Von type and shooting the guy.
She's somewhere else.
She's also the result of kind of men's failure.
I think the movie is, you can call it a woman's film, but you can also call it a men's film by default, where all men figures are failed, being either mediocre or the husband writer is a bad writer.
I mean, all the men's figures are quite weak and sort of coming up from their pedestal.
What I would call it.
You know, so here is a powerful woman in a world of weak men.
So it's a post-feminist world.
And she's nasty.
She's not, you know, like all these brave, all these feminists are always proud of being called a nasty woman because Trump called Hillary that.
She is a nasty woman.
She's not somebody nice.
She sabotages people.
She belittles men and all this stuff.
The only person who basically dominates her is this rapist.
And her relationship to that rapist is very, very complex.
As she says, it's not a revenge.
She doesn't go out looking for revenge.
And I won't give too much of a way, although it's been written about endlessly.
The thing about it is, it is, when it was over, I felt like, oh, God, if that is actually all there is to the world, I don't want to be there.
But it's an honest vision.
It's an honest vision of the world by an honest artist who really knows how to make movies.
So here's what I wanted to say about this.
The idea that movies are good or bad because you agree with the vision of them, or any work of art is good or bad because you agree with the vision of them, is actually misguided.
And the reason I love to, I love the arts and I love stories and I love a great story well told.
And the reason I like a movie, even though it makes me feel like, ah, you know, that's a vision of the world I don't want to see, is because it brings out, it's like a wonderful conversation with somebody you disagree with but who doesn't call you names.
You know, it's suddenly you take in this guy's vision and you compare it to your vision and you say, well, how is, if his vision is honest, because a movie can't work unless it's got some honesty in it, and this is filled with an honest vision of the world, an honest vision of a post-feminist world, how do you deal with that vision being legitimate when your vision contradicts it?
And if you don't do that, then you're simply living inside your own head.
You're not challenging your way of life against other people's way of life.
And this is one of the things I love about the arts is that people that I thoroughly disagree with can present totally honest views of the world that I then have to include in my vision.
I have to expand my vision to include their vision because it's honest.
Elle, it's a really good movie.
And for the rest of the week on stuff I like, we'll take a look at some of Paul Verhoeven's other films because he's a really, really interesting filmmaker who went, had a fascinating career.
It was not the career you would have expected from a guy like him.
He really is a very serious artist and yet he has made all these American blockbusters.
All right, the week begins.
We will now see where Donald Trump and the Republicans go.
It's not going to be as bad as everybody says it is, but it's going to be interesting.