Ep. 343 mocks leftist protesters like Hooligan von Dungberger (iPhone 7-wielding "anti-fascist") and Francois Nazi Face, who ties gender transition treatments to political agendas, while El Useless Stupido admits rioting for clout. Contrasting Hamburg’s anarchist arson with Trump’s Poland speech—dismissed as racist by leftists—the episode critiques media fixation on Trump Jr.’s 2016 meeting with Veselnitskaya over his G20 "America First" stance, which clashed with European trade and climate policies. The Charlie Gard case becomes a flashpoint: guest Michael Knowles frames the UK’s denial of experimental U.S. treatment as a "culture of death," warning of state overreach in life-and-death decisions, while tying it to fears of U.S. single-payer "death panels." Film criticism pivots from Baby Driver’s hollow stylistics to Heat’s moral depth, reinforcing a theme of decay in modern institutions—political, medical, and artistic—where individual agency is eroded by systemic control. [Automatically generated summary]
Huge mobs of left-wingers took to the streets of Hamburg, Germany during the G20 conference over the weekend, starting violent riots that injured hundreds of people and destroyed the livelihood of the locals as part of the left's ceaseless attempt to bring peace and economic justice to the world.
The leftists were protesting something, something, something, in the hopes of establishing something else or perhaps raising awareness of something and somehow making the world a better place by wearing masks and hitting people with sticks before setting fire to their stores.
The rioters describe themselves as anti-fascists, the word fascist here meaning someone who oppresses people with violence and the word anti meaning absolutely nothing.
Left-wing anarchist Hooligan von Dungberger was kind enough to take time off from beating a woman into the pavement to answer our questions about his motives.
Von Dungberger said, quote, unbridled capitalism has elevated many nations to untold wealth and freedom, lifting people around the world out of poverty and leading to advances in technology, farming, and education never before seen in history.
This must stop and be replaced by socialism, which makes everything mediocre and miserable.
Then at last, everyone will be as unhappy as I am because my mother never loved me and I'm overweight, unquote.
Mr. Von Dungberger then took a picture of himself protesting capitalism with his iPhone 7 and returned to beating up innocent people for the greater good.
Another protester, Francois Nazi Face, said he was burning stores and driving hardworking locals into poverty in order to give voice to the complaints of marginalized sexual perverts.
Mr. Nazi Face said, quote, here in the West, we must have serious discussions about men who pretend they're women, as if that were some kind of a thing instead of a mental illness that had been turned into a political issue because we have no real problems.
If a child who has been designated as a boy plays with a doll, his body must be mutilated and injected with destructive hormones so that he grows up psychotic enough to believe that gender is mutable before killing himself.
Only then will there be sexual justice in the world, unquote.
Yet another rioter we interviewed was Fernando Fernando Gonzalez-Riviera Diego Fernando, nicknamed El Useless Stupido, who rested from throwing rocks at the police long enough to tell us why he was rioting.
El Stupido said, quote, basically, I am a criminal who enjoys hurting people and destroying things, and so I became a leftist because leftism offered me the best opportunities for travel and promotion, unquote.
And a final rioter we spoke to was New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who left his city during a vigil for a murdered police officer in order to join the Hamburg protests against something, something, something, and to establish a better something somewhere other than the city he's supposed to be running.
De Blasio's Solidarity Song00:16:35
De Blasio said, quote, I am here in solidarity with these rioters, thugs, and criminals because I am an idiotic lowlife and a leftist.
But I repeat myself, unquote.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
The birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity-doom.
Ship-shaped topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
And here we are in our beautiful new set.
And I promised you there would be naked dancing girls and chocolate fountains and elephants.
And they're all here, but it's a family show, so we have to keep them behind the camera.
But let me tell you, they are gorgeous.
I mean, it is a beautiful, beautiful thing to see.
And the rest of it, it looks pretty nice as well.
And if our technology works, which is an open question, we've been having a little problem.
The naked dancing girls kept slipping in the chocolate and it was upsetting the elephants.
But if we can get our tech working, we have Michael Grassy Knowles will be here later from Washington, D.C., all the way from Washington, D.C.
I call him this because we were in Dallas and we went to see the spot where John F. Kennedy was shot, obviously a history-making spot.
And Knowles picked some grass off the hill and tweeted out a picture of himself as the Grassy Knowles, to which somebody on Twitter responded, too soon, Knowles, too soon.
So while I'm talking, I should say Knowles is going to come on after the break, the Facebook and YouTube break, where we lose you and cast you into the exterior darkness.
So if you want to see the entire show in one place, come to thedailywire.com, subscribe.
The prices just went up.
I warned you and warned you.
Did you do anything?
No.
But now it's cost $9.99 a month.
Still pretty good.
It's only really a lousy $10 a month, basically.
And it costs $99.99 for the year.
And then, my friend, you get the leftist tears mug, the official leftist tears mug out of which I'm drinking actual leftist tears.
That's how it works.
And you will get that for an annual subscription.
Plus, you get to be in the mailbag, ask all your questions.
While I'm plugging things, go over to City Journal and read my new short story, The End of the Working Day.
You will be glad you did.
You will read it and say you are happy that you read this.
So this week, this last week, I just feel like the left is in flames.
I mean, we had two things going on.
On the one hand, I know they kind of suppressed a lot of these images in the mainstream media, but Hamburg was on fire.
I mean, it was hundreds of people were injured, flames, and these anarchists and socialists and all these people, nobody even knows what they're protesting.
Nobody even knows what they want.
Do they want to be less free or less rich or something?
And meanwhile, I don't want to make too big a thing out of this, but I really have to bring this up about Donald Trump and the Marines' hat.
I mean, I'm sure most of you saw this, but just in case, here's CNN, and you can just hear, I'm not sure who this is, it sounds a little like Allison Camarota or whatever her name is, but you can just hear the pain at having to report something that obviously makes Donald Trump look good.
Watch Trump as he picks up the hat of a Marine after it blows off the Marines' head.
The president has returned to the U.S.
This from just moments ago.
You've got to come and watch this.
This was actually a light moment.
We just wanted to play it for you.
Provide a little relief as we are covering all this serious news.
You see a Marine alongside Marine 1 lost his cap.
The president goes to help put it back in.
It falls off again as he pats him on the side.
He goes and he grabs it again.
So windy, obviously, from the helicopter.
He's trying to write the ship here and help out the Marine who's standing alongside.
Apparently, he cannot move from his current position.
And then the president boards.
Obviously, the chopper blades were blowing and it blows off the Marine's hat and he's not allowed to leave his position.
Like the guards outside Buckingham Palace, he has to stand there at attention.
But it really was a moment.
You know, they keep saying, oh, Trump with his mean tweets, he degrades the office of the presidency.
In this moment, he elevated the office of the presidency, especially in light of the last president.
Who's his name?
Orama?
Osama.
Osama Villa.
Yeah, no, Osama was the other guy.
No, that was the guy we killed.
Okay, so this is Bahama, something.
You know, it's easy to forget his name because his legacy is now kind of like a groundhog that tried to cross the interstate while the big rigs were running past and it gets run over and it's not even like a shape of a dead groundhog anymore.
It's just kind of dark stain on the highway where Orama's legacy used to be.
So it's easy to forget his name.
Do you remember this moment when it started to rain and Oma asked the Marines, basically ordered the Marines, he's the commander-in-chief, to hold an umbrella over his head while he lied about the IRS?
Take a look at that.
I am going to go ahead and ask folks, why don't we get a couple of Marines?
They're going to look good next to us, just because I've got to change his suits, but I don't know about our Prime Minister.
There we go.
That's good.
You guys, I'm sorry about it.
But let me make sure that I answer a specific question.
I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the IG report before the IG report had been leaked through press, through the press.
So the Marine has to hold, you can't see this, we are on video if you're watching on Facebook or on the DailyWide.com, but if you're just listening to it, the Marine has to stand with his arm extended outward, is directly out holding the umbrella over Obama's head while Obama lies about the fact that he jiggered the IRS against conservatives.
okay?
So the Marine has to stand, try this.
I mean, try them on.
It is not easy to hold your arm out like that for any extended period of time.
It's just a little different in attitude.
You know, one of the things about Trump that sometimes can be upsetting is he can be petty, he can be gruff, he can say things about people that maybe are unkind.
But part of it is because he actually conceives of himself as an ordinary person.
He doesn't see himself as better than that Marine.
He, in fact, understands that that Marine is a pretty noble character serving the country.
And so when his hat blows off, remember, Donald Trump, most powerful man in the entire world, stoops to pick up the hat, brings it back, it blows off again.
He chases after it and does it again.
I'm sorry, but that says something really positive about the man, just as it seems to me that Obama had been practicing to be king of America since he was a little kid and basically regarded those Marines as his servants.
You know, it's just part of the vision.
The optics, as they say now, of this last week.
And the optics were the left was burning down Hamburg while Donald Trump made a beautiful, beautiful speech defending Western civilization in Poland.
The left then reacted to this saying, oh my gosh, Western civilization is a dog whistle for racism.
He's just being racist and Nazi.
Western civilization mustn't talk about Western civilization.
When leftist activist and leader of the women's marches, Linda Sarcer calls for jihad and everybody says, oh, well, jihad.
Jihad means, you know, we all know that this is a spiritual jihad, you know, so they understand.
So here they are basically damning Western culture and celebrating jihad, you know.
And meanwhile, it's very hard to tell what exactly happened in Trump's meeting with Vladimir Putin, but it seemed to go pretty well.
They got this Syrian ceasefire for as long as it lasts out of it.
There was some kind of controversy about whether Trump conceded, Putin basically said, Putin's people basically said that Trump believed Putin when he denied meddling with the election.
That is not what Donald Trump says happened.
Trump apparently really gave it to Putin for a good 45 minutes over this question.
It really went on and on, and he was really putting it to him.
Later, Trump sent out a kind of silly tweet saying they were going to have some joint cybersecurity thing, which is ridiculous.
We're not sharing.
I wouldn't share my password with the Russians, and I got nothing on my computer that they want to see.
But Trump later said that's not going to happen.
It would be a nice thing if it could, but it can't.
So it just seemed that it was basically a two-hour meeting where they were exchanging ideas and trying to come together.
And then, kind of, Rex Tillerson sort of blew it a little bit by he was describing it to reporters, and he sort of put it that they were talking about Syria as if we were, Russia and America were actual full allies.
Listen.
We spent a very, very lengthy period on Syria with a great amount of detail exchanged on the agreement we had concluded today that was announced, but also where we go and trying to get much greater clarity around how we see this playing out and how Russia sees it playing out.
And where do we share a common view and where do we have a difference?
And do we have the same objectives in mind?
And I would tell you that, by and large, our objectives are exactly the same.
How we get there, we each have a view, but there's a lot more commonality to that than there are differences.
So we want to build on the commonality, and we spend a lot of time talking about next steps.
And then where there's differences, we have more work to get together and understand maybe they've got the right approach and we've got the wrong approach.
So there was a substantial amount of time spent on Syria.
So we can cut Tillerson a break.
He's trying to be diplomatic.
He's a chief diplomat, trying to be diplomatic, but it's nonsense.
I mean, our objectives and the Russian objectives in Syria are completely different.
Their objectives, Russia's objectives, are to build a lot of bases in Syria and keep their monster Assad in power.
And our objectives are, of course, to make it a better country, bring a little peace to the region and keep Russia's influence to a minimum.
So we do not have the same objectives.
John McCain, with his usual restraint and good nature and quiet calm, reacted to Tillerson's comments.
Do the Russians have the right of me to make that up?
You can't.
These are the same people that use precision-guided weapons to strike hospitals in Aleppo where sick and wounded people are.
This is just, you know, I'm preparing myself mentally to be on this show.
I said, John, you're not going to get upset.
You're not going to get emotional.
But I've met the White Hats.
I know what the slaughter has been.
I know that the Russians knew that Bashra Assad was going to use chemical weapons.
And to say that maybe we've got the wrong approach.
Look, I agonized over voting for or against Tillerson for Secretary of State.
Not that I didn't admire his success and all the great things he's done, but the things that he'd said in the past, he has divorced a fundamental of American democracy.
The reason why we are the shining city on the hill, as Ronald Reagan used to say, is because they look up to us because of our principles and our beliefs and our advocacy of freedom, for freedom.
That's what America is supposed to be all about, not whether they're right and we're wrong.
So I don't know.
I actually agree with McCain here.
I mean, I agree.
You know, we have no connection to what the Russians are doing to people.
We have no connection.
We bombed them.
Trump bombed them in answer to their use of Syria's use of chemical weapons.
He shot down a plane that was bombing allies.
We shot down a plane that was bombing our allies in the field, and the Russians threatened to retaliate.
In our actions, we have shown that we are still standing up for ourselves and for our principles.
What would it have cost McCain, I wonder, to just say, you know, Tillerson is still a neophyte.
He made a mistake here.
Instead of basically accusing him of burning down the American ideal, just like take a drink, John, like cool it.
All right, we got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, which means you will not get to see this amazing set.
And at any moment, one of the people may actually straggle out in front of the camera.
You never know what will happen.
But if you come over to thedailywire.com, you can watch the whole thing there.
And while you're there, subscribe.
It's a lousy $10 a month.
If you do it for a year, it's $100.
And you get the drink liberal tears mug.
So come on over.
Yes.
All right, we're going to get to Michael.
Have we got Knowles around?
I'm not sure yet.
All right, we're going to get to what's that?
We'll get him on.
We'll get him on, but we'll get to Michael Knowles in a little while.
Meanwhile, this trip, this trip to the G20, which is 19 countries and the European Union, was, I think, pretty successful.
The Wall Street Journal has a piece saying Trump's America First Policy proves to be an immovable object, a G20.
The doctrine that underpins the president's foreign policy is more durable than some of his European counterparts had hoped.
Through marathon meetings and dinners at the Group of 20 summit, various world leaders sought to coax America's new president to accept core tenets of the internationalist order they embrace, including commitment to free trade and tough environmental regulation.
He barely budged in his second foreign trip.
President Donald Trump largely held firm to the nationalist principles that were central to his campaign identity, suggesting that the America First doctrine that underpins his foreign policy is more durable than some of his European counterparts had hoped.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking Saturday at the close of the summit, said the ideological gulf has proved tough to bridge.
Talking about the back and forth with the Trump administration over the summit's joint statement, the German Chancellor said the negotiations on the climate issue reflected dissent, everyone, against the United States of America.
Still bristling over Mr. Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, one French official said that an aim in drafting the joint statement was to ensure that the U.S. is clearly identified as being alone.
But if anything, Mr. Trump's two forays overseas have shown that some leaders are bending toward his position, not the reverse.
The statement, for example, carried language about America helping other countries use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently.
A European Union official, listen to this, conceded the reference to these kinds of energy sources.
He said, these kinds of energy sources is not something we like.
To reference these kinds of energy sources, namely fossil fuels.
Well, they may not like them, but they are enslaved to Putin because of them, because they're buying all their energy from Vladimir Putin.
So basically, what they're saying is the free world should stop making the energy we all need so we can continue to kowtow to Vladimir Putin whatever he does, saying, well, we have to because we need the oil, all right?
So Trump really has stood up for the things he stood up for.
And what has the here?
Here's the left's reaction.
The Russians are coming!
The Russians are coming!
It's all they got.
This is all they got.
The New York Times are in the stupid beast that still thought this is the lead going to be the lead piece for a week.
Partly it's because it's the summer, not that much is happening.
But Donald Trump Jr. met with some woman, a Russian lawyer, during the campaign because the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, says, she does sound like a Russian spy.
I gotta say, that should have been a giveaway right there.
But he met with her because she said she had some damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
Serious Stories and Health Care00:15:09
They sat down.
She basically started to lobby Trump Jr.
The Magnitsky Act, which was Magnitsky was a banker, I think, who was investigating Putin for corruption or Russian officials for corruption, and they put him in prison and killed him.
That's what Putin does to his enemies.
So they put him in prison, kill him, and in reaction, a bipartisan Congress and Obama passed the Magnitsky Act, which places sanctions on them.
It makes it more difficult for them to use our banks, which is what the Russians are all about.
They're all about laundering their money in Western banks because they want to enjoy Western lifestyles while oppressing the people back at home.
And so the Magnitsky Act, a good thing, and Trump Jr. realized he had been drawn into something and tossed them out.
And they keep, I mean, this point is so stupid.
Kellyanne Conway went on Chris Cuomo show and basically bounced him up and down like a basketball.
I mean, you want to see Kellyanne Conway having the time of her life, just taking Chris Cuomo and just like, you know, dribbling him downfield.
Listen to this.
Whether or not it was good information, Kellyanne, doesn't mean that it was a smart move to take a meeting with a Russian-connected person who is going to give you negative information about your opponent.
That could create huge legal issues.
You know that.
I admire your moxie sitting there with the CNN chiron right near you talking about credibility issues a couple weeks ago.
I could not be more proud to have that CNN chiron.
I could not be more proud to have that.
I could not be more proud here representing the White House on this.
I'm glad you are.
I want you here because of that.
It's not supposed to be an argument.
I'm saying this question started with: why did the president change his position about working with Russia?
You spun it over to this.
That was my original question.
Wait, the president's answer to it.
The president.
What do you mean, the president changed his story?
The president had nothing to do with this meeting.
No, I didn't.
I understand that.
I'm saying I asked you originally.
You wanted to produce something because you're invested in months now as a network in something that simply doesn't exist.
You know, there's all kinds of things that you can point to that went wrong in the conference and all this stuff.
But the optics here, I'm just talking about the overall impression was Trump doing a good job while the left screams the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming over and over and over again, a story that nobody cares about because it's not real.
You know, it just simply doesn't exist in any meaningful way.
That's all they've got.
And Trump looks good.
You know, he's talking about Western civilization.
They're attacking Western civilization and supporting Jihad.
I mean, come on.
I think, I'm sorry, but I really do think we have to give Trump the happiness montage.
Hit it.
We're going to win so much.
We're going to win at every level.
We're going to win economically.
We're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with the military.
We're going to win with health care and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
You say, please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
I feel pretty.
Oh, so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
doing that.
All right, where is Knowles?
Bring him in here.
Have we got, let's see, our amazing new tech all the way from Washington, D.C. Let's see, have we got him?
Michael.
Knowles.
Are we here?
That there is.
Hey.
Michael Knowles.
How are you doing?
You're in our nation's capital.
I'm coming to you live from some dungeon somewhere here in D.C., the meeting room of my hotel.
I assume you went, traveled to Washington to deliver a copy of your book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats personally to the President of the United States.
I did.
I was so upset, though.
The one time I'm in D.C. for probably a year, and my pal, the president, is out of town.
Oh, man.
Come on.
He's attending the G20.
Well, what can you do?
He isn't the man who tweeted out your book and he just blow, you come to town and he blows down.
Maybe he was busy.
Who knows?
That's right.
You know, I actually did on the 4th of July.
I did mail him a copy to 1600 Pennsylvania.
Dear President Trump, thanks for helping to make America great again.
Really brought that over to us.
He's probably now in his library.
Who knows?
It's like if they ever recover our civilization from like the volcano that destroys us, that's what they're going to find in the Oval Office is your book, your blank book.
You're not going to believe this.
Last night I ate Chinese food.
This is no joke.
My fortune and my fortune cookie said, you are a lover of words.
Someday you will write a book.
Well, it's true, but those two things are completely unrelated.
You are a lover of words.
You have written a book, but they had nothing to do with one another.
So usually we like to talk about the culture, fairly lighthearted stuff.
But this time, this is a serious story.
I wanted to talk about baby guard because really it's the most important cultural thing that is happening.
This is this child in England whose life is on the line and basically the courts are trying to decide.
I want you to tell the story.
One of the things that always bothers me about these stories is people react.
It's so emotional.
People react to headlines and they start throwing words like evil around and all this stuff just because somebody's trying to kill a baby.
I mean, you know, I do that most weekends.
But no, you know, people immediately take sides and all.
So lay out the facts.
What exactly has happened?
There is only one thing that you need to know about the case of little Charlie Gard.
There are very few things on which President Donald Trump and Pope Francis agree.
One of those things, perhaps the only one of those things, is that Charlie Gard ought to have a chance at life by receiving experimental treatment in the United States.
Just a little bit of background on him.
Charlie Garde is a British baby.
He was born last August.
He was 11 months old.
He was born with a rare disease.
It's called infantile onset encephalomyopathic mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome.
And in short, what that means is that the structure that provides energy to his cells does not function, does not function very well.
And so typically this causes sell down and cell death.
And in some rare cases, people with varieties of this disease have lived into their teenage years and even some into adulthood.
The British courts ruled that he should be taken off of life support because there was a chance that he's suffering and there's not a great chance that he could recover, certainly not with any treatments available to him in the United Kingdom.
The Court of Appeals upheld this.
The UK Supreme Court will be hearing this today.
The parents have been fighting ceaselessly to bring their son into the United States where an experimental treatment might offer him as high as a 10% chance of survival.
One in 10 chances is pretty good for experimental medicine.
They created a petition online.
It received 370,000 signatures.
They've received $1.7 million in donations, crowdfunded, to bring him to the United States for this treatment.
And they've received the support of the President of the United States and Pope Francis, who is not known for his conservative American politics at all.
But they both tweeted about this.
Donald Trump said, if we can help little Charlie Guard, as for our friends in the UK and the Pope, we would be delighted to do so.
And Francis said, contradicting his own council of bishops in England and Wales, to defend human life, above all when it is wounded by illness, is a duty of love that God entrusts to all.
That's a little background on Charlie Guard.
The hospital has said he has severe brain damage.
It's irreversible.
There's little chance that this treatment in the United States would do very much for him.
And it's too late in any case, in part because they've dragged their feet for 11 months now.
The Catholic bishops that Pope Francis disagreed with here, or apparently disagreed with here, I think it's very important to understand what they said about this, because it shows a disturbing pivot in our culture, even among those who have been so dedicated to life, toward something resembling a culture of death and a culture that exalts physical pleasantness and physical pleasure over the sanctity of life.
They said, we do sometimes, however, have to recognize the limitations of what can be done while always acting humanely in the service of the sick person until the time of natural death occurs.
You know, what bothers me about this, okay, is there's two issues here that are being conflated.
One is the issue of life and the sanctity of life.
The other is the issue of whose baby is this?
You know, does this baby belong to England or is it the parent's baby?
You know, I could understand a parent, if these parents said this baby has no chance and we're taking him off life support and letting him go, you know, I would find that heartbreaking, but I would not find that necessarily a sin.
You know, I mean, even the Catholic Church acknowledges that there are times when you are taking extensive actions beyond what should be taken.
But how does that become?
How does that become the court's decision?
How does that become Britain's decision?
Those are the two questions that are in play here.
Do we want to live in a culture of life or a culture of death is, I think, the primary question.
But the other is, what sort of society do we want to live in?
One, where parents, and good parents, by the way, there might be a role for the state to intervene when parents are drug addicted or abusive or what have you or negligent, but these parents are anything but that.
And do we want to live in a society where child rearing is primarily the responsibility of the child's parents or of the government and that the government can overrule what those parents would do?
I think there's an important distinction too to be had here.
This brings up some memories of the Terry Shaivo case a decade ago when there was a court battle between a woman's husband and her parents over she was in a persistent vegetative state, whether to take her off of life.
This is different.
In that case, it was a matter of prolonging the inevitable and without any hope of really getting any better, but simply maintaining feeding tubes and respiratory systems.
In this case, there is a real chance of something approaching a cure.
There's, by some measures, a 10% chance that this baby could live into his teens or even into adulthood.
That author of hope, I think, complicates it quite a lot.
And there's no disagreement here between family members.
There's simply a disagreement between the parents of the boy and their own government.
How much of this has to do, I mean, you know, keeping the kid alive into his teens is no small thing, not only because of the life itself, but also because the way science and medicine progress now, by the time he gets to his teens, there may be new things they can do.
There may be new stopgaps that they can pull out of their hats.
But what I want to know is how much of this has to do with the fact that Britain has its vaunted national health, as has this single-payer health care that the left has been trying to impose on everybody because they know that once they control your health care, they basically control your entire life.
How much of it is about this, or could this happen in the U.S. as well?
That's precisely it.
You know, Conservatives in the United States were slandered by our friends on the left and mocked because we used the term death panels to describe the independent payment advisory board, the group of bureaucrats who would decide which treatments were reasonable for the government to pay for, which stages of life.
We're watching death panels play out in real time in the United Kingdom because the government in the United Kingdom holds the keys to life and death.
And the culture there is one that is also distressing.
The hospital said it must follow from the unanimous professional and expert evidence, which appears not to be quite so unanimous when you ask specialists in the United States, that to move Charlie to America and expose him to treatment over there would be likely to expose him to continued pain, suffering, and distress.
And this is a real central issue in the teleology of medicine.
It's a central issue over how we view life in the West today, and in this case, particularly in Britain.
Is no amount of suffering or pain acceptable?
Are we living simply to maximize pleasure and to minimize suffering?
Or is suffering a part of the human condition?
And is hope and the hope of life something that we ought to pursue, even if there's a possibility that it causes additional suffering?
These are fundamental social questions.
And in debates that we have over, in particular, this heartbreaking and emotional case, but also debates over euthanasia and abortion and so on and so forth, there are questions that unfortunately in the West don't seem to trend in the right direction.
It really is.
I mean, this is wrong all over because even if you believe, even if you believe in euthanasia, even if you believe in letting go, and in this case, it wouldn't really be euthanasia, just be taking him off life support, which is different.
Even if you believe in that, it's not for the government to decide.
It cannot be.
We do not belong to the government.
There's nothing, there is nothing in natural law, nothing in logic, nothing in any kind of philosophical outlook on life that is decent, that gives our lives over to the state.
They should be.
That's precisely right.
That's right.
And this actually calls to mind an ancient Greek myth about the origins of medicine.
The myth is that Athena gave vials of Medusa's blood to the founder of modern medicine, sleepy beasts.
One of the vials taken from one side of her would help man and help him to recover, and the other vial would destroy.
And they both came out of Medusa's veins.
And the question that it raises is, is medicine ethically neutral or is medicine always oriented to do the good and to help and to save life?
That question and that myth can now be extended to the hand of government.
At what point does the government have the right to force parents to watch their child die?
Yeah.
Knowles, thank you very much for joining us.
Come back and say let's be funnier next week.
This is so depressing.
Absolutely, absolutely.
It's a tough one, but we're talking about the culture and it is what's happening in the culture and it is, it's such a central question, who lives and who dies.
Why Baby Driver Stuns00:07:54
All right.
I will see you in a day or two.
I'll give your regards to President Mag.
You know, there's an old tough guy novel, a noir novel, by Horace McCoy called They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
They made it into a Jane Fonda film.
And basically, the title comes from the woman who is in despair, who is planning to blow her head off.
And she says, well, they shoot horses, don't they?
And that essentially is the attitude they are taking in the UK toward this baby.
And I know it's a complicated case, but the question isn't the complications.
The question is who works out the complications, the government or the parents?
And it obviously I think should be the parents.
That is always the big question with leftism: who decides when they start hitting you about compassion.
You know, isn't this a big problem?
It's who decides.
Who decides where your money goes?
Who decides what services you give to whom?
Who decides what you believe?
Who decides what you say?
It should be you, each of us, not the government.
Moving into stuff I like, an actual smooth transition stuff I like, talking about noir.
I saw this movie Baby Driver over the weekend.
And it's, you know, it's not the stuff I like.
It is not the stuff I like, but it leads me into what I want to talk about, which is heist movies and heist stories.
And this is a story, first of all, based on, and I don't know if it's inspired by, but it's named after that famous Simon and Garfunkel tune.
And when I brought that up here, Austin, you didn't know, you'd never heard that song, right?
No.
You'd never, yeah, no, it's a great Simon and Garfunkel song.
They call me Baby Driver, and Once Upon a Pair of Wheels, I hit the road and I'm gone.
It was great stuff, and they played at the end of the movie.
But this guy, the kid is named Baby, he's got a baby face, and he's got titanitis from an accident in his youth.
And so to drown out the titanitis, he constantly has his earbuds plugged in and he's constantly listening to music as he drives the getaway car for these gangs of thieves, some of whom were played by Jamie Foxx and John Hamm.
Kevin Spacey is the big gangster who runs the whole thing.
And it got great reviews.
It's got something like a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Did you see him?
Yeah, it's amazing.
You loved it.
You loved it.
You know, here's what I thought.
First of all, it's so stylish and so beautifully shot.
The first 45 minutes are just stunning.
And there's a scene in the opening where the kid goes out and buys a cup of coffee while listening to music.
And the entire city, where are they, in Atlanta?
Yeah.
I think it's Atlanta, yeah.
The entire city is kind of transformed so that as he walks by the graffiti, the graffiti shows the lyrics of the song he's listening to.
It has one great thing where he poses with a saxophone in a window.
And it's just a beautiful, beautiful scene.
There's a scene in a laundromat where all the clothes are different colors in each machine.
It's so beautiful and so stylish that it took me about 45 minutes to notice that the plot kind of sucks, you know?
I mean, the plot, Kevin Spacey's character makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
He's basically a plot device.
I mean, Spacey, always a great actor, delivers a terrific presence and performance and all this stuff.
But his character makes no sense.
He's just a plot device to come along and do the thing that the writer needs him to do at any given moment.
Makes no sense.
And then the whole thing is he's having, he has this love affair with Lily James, who plays a waitress.
Lily James must be one of the most beautiful actresses in the movies today.
She was in Downton Abbey.
She was in that live-action Cinderella and those posters, I mean, those posters, I almost got in traffic accidents because on Sunset Boulevard, there was like this huge poster of her, and she was so stunningly beautiful.
Here's the scene where she meets Baby in this, who's played by Ansel Elgort.
She meets Baby in her diner where she works.
So you're just starting your day, or did you just get off?
I don't know if I ever get off.
They call I go, you know.
So what is it you do?
I'm a driver.
Oh, like a chauffeur.
You drive around important people.
I guess I do.
Anyone I'd know?
I hope not.
Aren't you mysterious?
Maybe.
Maybe.
So when was the last time you hit the road just for fun?
Yesterday.
I'm jealous.
Sometimes all I want to do is head west on 20 in a car I can't afford with a plan I don't have.
Just me, my music, and the road.
I'd like that too.
You know, it's an essentially shallow relationship, but the real problem with the movie is moral.
And I'm not one of these people who doesn't like a movie if it doesn't have good morals.
But I simply think that because there is an actual moral universe, that stories have to play into that.
So there are things that people do in stories, which if they get away with them, they become bad guys.
And if the movie insists on their being the good guy, it's very hard to sympathize.
And by the end of this film, I felt that the moral universe had been so skewed and so screwed up that it had lost all its sense of reality.
And I just really found it all very unsatisfying.
By the time, I know people love it, so go see it and enjoy it.
It's got, like I said, it's got a great, great couple of scenes in it, and it really is stylish.
But by the time I got to my car after watching the movie, I'd forgotten it.
That's how forgettable I felt it was.
So what I want to talk about is heist movies and crime movies and how they work in this moral world.
Let me just take two very famous ones.
One is called They Live by Night, and this has been made a number of times.
It's based on a novel by Edward Anderson called Thieves Like Us.
And I think who's the Altman made it as Thieves Like Us, which is also a good version, but it was one of the original, it was the original movie by Nicholas Ray, who became a very popular, very successful director of very off-beat films back in the 40s.
And the novel was by a guy named Edward Anderson, and some producer bought it the rights off him for $500.
He kind of got taken.
And this producer then wrote the script, They Live by Night, that Thieves Like Us he turned into They Live by Night, but he couldn't get it made.
And the script is brilliant.
It's one of the best scripts of the 40s.
And ultimately, he sold it for like 10 grand, so he made a profit off it.
And they made it into a film with Farley Granger and Kathy O'Donnell.
Now, Kathy O'Donnell, she died very young.
One of the most beautiful actresses, another one like Lily James, just a fantastically beautiful actress with this innocence and appeal and womanliness that just light up the screen.
And people don't know her anymore.
But here's just their scene from this excellent, excellent 1948 picture, They Live by Night.
Yeah.
Don't shut yourself up cold like this.
I don't know what to do.
No?
No, I don't.
You do just what you're doing now.
Just tell me I'm doing the wrong thing.
I'll step back.
All right.
$20 weddings.
What a way to get married.
If you want me to.
I want you to.
Get jumps off the bus.
They're both on the run because he is a criminal who escaped from prison and has been pulling off a number of heists, hoping to hire a lawyer.
But let me play you what I think is the greatest heist movie ever made.
It's certainly the most watchable heist movie ever made.
Greatest Heist Movie Ever Made00:02:10
It is up there with the best, if not the best.
It's Heat from 1995, Michael Mann, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino.
Pacino is the cop hunting De Niro, the master criminal, down.
It is from Pacino's screaming phase, where every part was just played at the absolute top of his lungs, but it's still got some great, great stuff in it.
It's one of those movies like The Godfather.
If you're channel surfing and you hit it, you will just watch the whole thing.
Here's the great scene where the cop, Pacino, and the criminal, Robert De Niro, meet each other in a diner.
You know, we're sitting here.
You and I like a couple of regular fellas.
I mean, you do what you do.
I do what I gotta do.
And now that we've been face to face, if I'm there and I gotta put you away, I won't like it.
But I'll tell you: if it's between you and some poor bastard whose wife you're gonna turn into a widow, brother, you are going down.
There's a flip side to that coin.
What if you do got me boxed in?
And I gotta put you down.
Because no matter what, you will not get in my way.
We've been face to face, yeah.
But I will not hesitate.
Not for a second.
All right.
We gotta go.
We're still having tech difficulties with the new set and the new equipment.
We will work them out.
Meanwhile, you can subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month.
And if you do it annually, you get this leftist tears mug, which has kept my coffee hot this entire time, I have to say.