Ep. 1138 – Can The West Be Won? dissects the Supreme Court’s rulings—mocking Democratic threats to justices like Roberts and framing 303 Creative as a free-speech victory—while tying U.S. unrest to cultural decay, not police brutality, citing France’s riots and Houellebecq’s Submission. Judge Doughty’s censorship block exposes government targeting of conservative speech, paralleling COVID-era lockdowns blamed on Fauci’s policies, which worsened youth mental health despite economic harm. PragerU’s Dennis Prager counters "wokeness" by reinterpreting King David as a flawed warlord and Abraham’s trials through Christian lens, sparking debates over biblical literalism. The episode culminates in a call to reject systemic hypocrisy—from media complicity to academic deconstruction of Shakespeare—as Western decline stems from moral relativism, not just policy failures. [Automatically generated summary]
In the light of recent Supreme Court decisions upholding the Constitution, Democrats are seeking ways to get the court to stop doing that.
The controversy began after the court issued rulings forbidding racism in college admissions, allowing people to express opinions of which the state disapproves, and denying Joe Biden the right to steal our money to pay for college loans we didn't take out.
The Democrat Party feels these decisions are unfair because without racism, censorship, and stealing people's money, there would be no Democrat Party.
Then Democrats would no longer be able to help people.
They'd lose their jobs, and they'd be forced to live on the streets with all the people they've helped.
Young people especially are pressuring the Biden administration to take measures to stop the court from enforcing the Constitution.
The young people argue that some stupid 18th century document written on weird, crinkly brown paper in a font that isn't even on their cell phones should not outweigh the uninformed opinions of a bunch of self-certain Cretans who have enough time on their hands to create elaborately produced TikTok videos about purple grimace milkshakes and then wonder why they can't pay back their student loans.
One Democrat suggestion on how to fix the court's upholding the Constitution problem involves expanding the court from nine justices to nine justices, three Barack Obama bobblehead dolls, and one Bose Soundlink playing don't feel right at full volume to distract from Democrats' racism, censorship, and stealing our money.
Another suggestion is that Congress should pass a new code of ethics for the court so they can impeach any justices who have ethics.
Still yet another idea came from Alexandria Ecasio-Cortez, who delivered an impassioned speech in Congress while the men in the chamber attempted to click on her, hoping to see more pictures of women with large breasts, only to be disappointed by some boring slideshow of black and white photographs of Turn of the Century New York.
Ms. Ecasio-Cortez said, quote, I have some very serious thoughts about how to curtail the power of the court, and I believe, but then everyone stopped listening to her because really, who cares about Turn of the Century New York.
Another suggestion came from Rhode Island senator and thuggish low-life Sheldon Whitehouse, who wrote a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts saying, quote, As the Supreme Court is an essential part of our democracy, it would be a shame if it was sprayed with machine gun bullets tomorrow unless the court delivers the correct decisions to my office before noon in an unmarked brown paper bag, unquote.
In a statement released to the press, Senator Ted Cruz criticized White House, saying his letter constituted a subtle threat against the court.
Senator Whitehouse responded to the statement by sending the press a pair of Cruz's pants wrapped around a dead fish.
Amazingly, the news media has reiterated the Democrat Party's ideas without the Democrats moving their lips even once.
In fact, NPR smeared Clarence Thomas for fake ethics violations even while Nancy Pelosi was drinking a glass of water.
MSNBC host Joy Reed protested the Supreme Court's anti-racism decision by saying she could never have gotten into Harvard if it weren't for affirmative action, as if anyone had ever thought for even a moment that Joy Reed could have gotten into Harvard without affirmative action.
The Washington Post, where democracy dies in darkness after the Washington Post pushes it down a flight of stairs into darkness, has repeatedly tried to sell the narrative that Joe Biden will lose the votes of young people if he doesn't destroy the freedom of the court.
Although it might also help if Biden stopped firing buckshot at young people and screaming, get off my lawn.
Meanwhile, the court is facing another session of important cases that will decide, for instance, whether states can require you to show proof of age before pretending to listen to Alexandria Eccasio-Cortez, whether the Second Amendment guarantees the right of Supreme Court justices to bear arms while exchanging gunfire with Sheldon White House, and whether the First Amendment protects the right of the Washington Post to say democracy dies in darkness, or if coming from the Washington Post, that's actually kind of a threat.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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This is the last show before my vacation next week.
It's my birthday next week.
I will be old as the hills, I think, and I'm going to take the week off in order to decay in peace.
To get you through the Clavenless Abyss, however, I'm going to leave you with this thought to consider while I'm away.
If the Secret Service found a suspicious white powder in the White House, and if the powder turned out to be cocaine, does that mean that Hunter Biden has accidentally been sniffing anthrax?
So send your answers to Christopher Wray and then hire an attorney.
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It says, loving the new intro, you say you don't like to advertise yourself, but my old man always says to me, tell me when that guy that Stephen King likes writes another book.
All right, I will not tell you again to pre-order the House of Love and Death.
I just won't mention it.
But we will get right into today's episode.
Can the West be won?
Name that movie.
All right, I hope you all had a wonderful 4th of July.
Not everyone celebrates the 4th of July, apparently.
A Fox News poll has showed that for the first time, fewer than half of voters think America's best days are ahead of us.
43% think our best days are ahead of us.
The rest think they're behind.
That's a nine-point drop from two years ago, a 19-point decrease since 2017, down 20 points since 2012.
So our best days are behind us.
A majority thinks overall, 64%.
It's not a majority, a plurality thinks that, I believe.
Overall, 64% of voters say the U.S. is the best country in the world to live in.
That's down from 69% in 2021 and a high of 84% in 2011.
And everyone obviously thinks the country is heading in the wrong direction, except for Joe Biden, who said it was heading in the right direction and then banged into a wall, bounced backwards and fell over the sofa, reeled into the Rose Garden and started walking west to Delaware, even though he was in Washington, D.C.
So maybe he's not the best person to ask if we're heading in the right direction.
What's the problem?
And what can we do about it besides shaking our fists at the clouds?
I'm in favor of leaving angry remarks in comment sections saying, we're done, it's over, it's finished.
But is there any other idea that might help?
Today, we're going to start talking about France, where thugs spent last week burning the place to the ground.
Not because we give a rat's ass about France, let's face it, but because it tells us something about America, where something similar happened when George Floyd was killed.
Then we're going to take a look at what the left had to say about recent court decisions.
And then I will show you one simple trick for saving Western civilization that you can do at home.
All right.
Chapter one, Paris is burning.
All right, move on.
Nothing to see here.
Please disperse.
Nothing to see here, please.
One of the best novels of the last few years that I've read is called Submission by Michel Huilebeck.
He's a terrific French novelist, a kind of a provocateur.
I have been, several reviewers have compared him to me, but I'm much, much better looking.
But if you want to find out, you might want to pre-order House of Love and Death.
But in the novel Submission, there's a political crisis in France.
The left is desperate to stop Maureen Le Pen from winning an election.
They don't want the far right to take over the presidency, so the left teams up with an Islamic party and they elect as president this kind of charming Muslim man, and he transforms France into a Muslim country.
And one of the ways he does this, first he fires anybody from influence positions or from the Sorbonne, for instance, who won't accept Islam.
But then to tempt people, especially men, obviously, to support Islam, he gets rid of gender equality, so there are no women teachers anymore, and he offers men two young submissive wives.
As the narrator says, the one thing you can say about patriarchy is that it works.
And so the guys say, yeah, we'll take the deal.
And they begin to accept a couple of wives and they begin to preach Islam from the Sorbonne.
And the president then moves on to take over the EU, to get the EU to bring Muslim countries in.
So he's really going for a Muslim takeover of the world.
Like all of Huillebeck's novels, they aren't so much about the submission is not so much about evil Muslims and the Muslims are villains, not at all, really.
It's about the emptiness of Western culture.
It is about the fact that all Western people do, especially French people, is have sex and take drugs.
And then they wonder why the Muslims move into this empty cultural space that they have left there.
The protagonist of submission is a literary literature professor.
He tries toward the end to recover his Christian faith, but he just can't.
He's not connected to Christianity anymore.
And at the end of the book, as he's considering whether he maybe should accept the two submissive wives and start preaching Islam, he says, this is the last line of the book.
He says, I'd be given another chance, and it would be the chance at a second life with very little connection to the old one, I would have nothing to mourn.
In other words, the West is not being destroyed by evil Muslims.
The West is empty.
It is dead, and Muslims being Muslims are just moving into an empty space.
Where faith is gone, a new faith will come in, just like it did in ancient Rome.
So when I look at these riots, I see something very much like this.
Not evil Muslims, but I see an empty space that they're moving in.
And France, these have been some of the worst riots in French history since the revolution.
45,000 cops deployed, cities around the country burning.
The country's Ministry of the Inferior, if it's the inferior, of the interior says roughly 1,105 buildings, including police stations, town halls, and schools, have been assaulted since riots began.
French economy minister Bruno Le Maire told a CNN affiliate that more than a thousand businesses have been vandalized, attackers set on fire, damages over a billion dollars, and just old people terrorized and people attacked.
Now, the instigating incident, we have some clip of it, was a 17-year-old French-born kid of Moroccan and Algerian descent.
And really, I think it's fair to identify these kids as coming from Islamic cultures.
He's too young to drive.
The police stop him.
He's driving a stolen car with Polish plates.
And that's important because apparently this is stolen German cars with Polish plates are used by drug dealers.
And this kid had a lot of arrests.
He had no convictions, but he was known to be part of the drug world.
And the cops, one of the cops positioned himself on the hood of his car, and the kids stepped on the gas to get away.
And the cop fired and he killed him.
He says he wanted to wound him, but the cops have had it with these people.
The country's top two police unions, the Alliance Police Nationale, and you have to forgive my terrible French accent, and UNSA police said in a statement, today police officers are at the front line because we are at war, faced with these savage hordes.
It's these savage hordes, he's calling them.
It's no longer enough to call for calm.
Calm must be imposed.
Now is not the time for industrial action, but for fighting against these vermins.
So that's, you know, that's civil war talk.
They think they are really in for a long fight.
Now, interestingly, as I was trying to find out what exactly was happening, I started with American papers, and every single paper and every single American, I shouldn't call them papers anymore, every single American news site developed a discussion, just like with George Floyd, about whether the police officer did the right thing or not, and talking about this poor kid's sad life and the poor life that people live in these suburbs, banlieu, they're called.
But that's not the story at all.
The cop doesn't matter.
I'm not the first person to point this out.
There have been hellish crimes committed by illegal immigrants and by unassimilated immigrants in France.
The one is this most often cited is Lola Daviette, who was sexually assaulted, tortured, mutilated, and murdered last year by a woman illegal from Algiers.
There have been other crimes like that, lots of rapes.
There have been no riots in response, just like there are no riots.
There are riots for George Floyd when he gets killed by a cop, but there are no riots over the children who are being killed in Chicago every single damn weekend by black criminals.
So that's so blaming the police is a narrative.
Even discussing the police and discussing this is a narrative.
It is not what is happening.
It's not what's going on.
We know they're bad cops.
We know the life in the slums is tough.
And I'm not saying these things shouldn't be addressed.
But to make the police the story is suspicious, right?
Because the police are the last guys on the policy totem pole.
People make policy.
Politicians make policy.
Those policies have an effect.
They either cause crime to go down or they cause crime to go up.
And the last guy dealing with that crime is the cop on the beat.
He's got to do something to stop the crime because most of the people are not criminals.
They're the victims, right, of all colors.
And this is true.
You know, it's not the cops' fault that they are unassimilated Muslims in France who are angry with the culture.
It's not the cops' fault that black people commit so much of the crime in America.
It doesn't call them racists because they're the guys who get caught picking up the policy decisions, making up for the policy decisions of the people in Washington and in the capitals of the states.
It's just, it's a dodge.
Any journalist who does this is an idiot.
Any reporter who sticks a microphone in a cop's face and says, well, you know, what's going on here?
The cop doesn't know.
He just knows he's supposed to stop the crime.
It's the policymakers who make the conditions that cause that crime.
Policymakers and Assimilation00:03:16
As I said this last week, it's a leftist trope to start to deal with problems at the end instead of at the beginning because the beginning is them and their policies and their philosophies.
And they don't want to deal with that, obviously.
So they blame the cop.
So they abort the child.
So they have affirmative action and say instead of saying, oh, maybe we should kick the teachers' unions in the butt and get some education for kids in K through 12.
No, no, no, we'll just play unfair, racist games at the college level.
They never want to go back to the beginning.
It's the policymakers and the policies that are the problem.
And here, a major policy, both in America and in France and in Europe, is unfettered immigration without assimilation.
You can call this racist, but if you transported all of Italy to Britain and all of Britain, all the British people in Britain to Italy, Italy would no longer be Italy and Britain would no longer be Britain.
There would still be the Big Ben and there'd still be the Coliseum, but the countries would change because the people would be different.
They would be developed by a different culture.
If you are going to invite people in, then you've got to get them to assimilate.
And here's the question.
Why don't we?
Why do we not insist?
Why do we not work round the clock to make sure people, if we're going to let them in, you know, obviously I think there should be border security.
I think there should be limits how many people come in.
But if we're going to let them in, why don't we insist on them learning our rules, playing by our rules, doing the things that you have to do in America or in France to become successful?
Instead, we blame this country that everyone's trying to get to.
You know, I was watching Douglas Murray, great guy, really good writer.
He was on Piers Morgan's show, I believe it was, and he was talking about something else.
He was talking about reparation, but he made this point cut forward.
It's always the countries that people want to come to who are put through this struggle session.
Britain, like America and France, are the most desired destinations for migrants worldwide and have been for centuries.
Why is that?
It's not because we're racist.
It's because we're better.
It's because we're good.
It's because when we see racism, we actually call it out and recognize it as a sin.
Try finding that across Africa.
Try finding that across the Middle East or in China.
Nobody would hear.
So what we have is a situation where the more virtuous countries are presented as the worst countries.
It's sick and most of us are tired of it.
It's a brilliant point.
You only have to look at individuals that you know.
Good people feel guilty.
Bad people don't.
My wife loses sleep if she feels she may have hurt somebody's feelings.
I sleep like a baby because I couldn't care.
It's the good people who worry and the left then tells us that those worries mean we're bad instead of the truth that we're in fact good.
They call us hypocrites because we don't live up to our ideals, but we have the ideals because we're good and we're tearing ourselves up over our flaws without pausing to celebrate the decency so we don't take time to basically say, first we have something worth protecting, so we should protect our borders.
And second, if you're going to come in, you're going to have to become one of us.
I don't know about where you are or I am.
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Colorful Opinions and Mythology00:07:16
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All right, chapter two, the quiet part out loud.
I want to express the...
Don't speak, but don't.
Just a few things that I want to tell you.
When we first met, don't speak.
Please, don't speak.
Please.
Now, the fact is, we had a great Fourth of July week.
Those Supreme Court decisions, some of them were coming in as I was doing my show.
I didn't really get a chance to talk about them.
They were great decisions, and they could really change the landscape.
And there have been a couple of great federal court decisions coming down.
Really interesting and positive stuff that could start to restore the idea of what America is supposed to be.
And I want to look at the arguments against those decisions because it tells us something about why people are losing faith in America.
Let's take this wonderful decision about the 303 Creative case out of Colorado.
This is the case where the woman wanted, Lori Smith was her name.
She wanted to expand her graphic design business, 303 Creative, to include services for couples who want wedding websites.
You've seen all these wedding websites.
But she worried that the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act would compel her to create websites celebrating marriages.
She doesn't endorse gay weddings, right?
She doesn't want to do that.
And she wanted to notify people that she doesn't want to do that.
So she brought a lawsuit because she didn't want to spend the money knowing that she was going to get in a fight.
And a lot of people on the left, the left never cares about process when they win, but when they lose, suddenly, oh, this was terrible because she wasn't even under the gun.
But she had every reason to expect Colorado was coming after her because she could look out of her mirror and see the cupcake maker, Jack Phillips, hanging from a tree outside her window.
So she knew that Colorado is oppressive and they were going to come after her.
Now, she serves gay people.
No sign in her window saying no gays allowed.
She just believes that God's story about marriage is that it is for a man and a woman.
This is what she says.
So Judge Gorsuch, Justice Gorsuch, wrote the opinion and said what seems to me obvious, that this is agreeing with a lower court saying this is expressive speech.
This is speech that is expressing her opinion when she makes these websites.
He said, if any business can be compelled to express these things, then a Muslim movie maker could be forced to make a Zionist movie.
In my mind, too, he didn't give this, Gorsuch didn't give this example, but I thought, like, if I'm a photographer, I may photograph a picture of you holding up a sign.
This is God bless America, but not a sign of another guy holding up a sign that says, kill all the Jews.
Or I don't want to have a sign of a guy holding up a sign that says, God bless America, dressed in a Nazi uniform.
That becomes an expression of my work, and I don't want that to be the expression of my work.
But what I'm interested in here is the dissent from Soto Sodomaire.
And it's an incredible mess.
I mean, it gets the facts wrong.
I don't have time to go into the whole thing.
It gets the facts wrong.
It gets the logic wrong.
It gets the court's previous decision wrong.
It's all emotion and mythology.
The emotion is sad victims.
Jackie Robinson can't stay at a hotel with the rest of his team.
A gay couple can't find a funeral home and one of them dies.
Definitely sad and definitely wrong, in my opinion.
But there's no broader sense that these things are taking place on the field of American values.
Listen, you've heard me say this before.
I believe with all my heart racism is an offense against Almighty God.
We are made in his image.
And if you don't like the fact that he put his image into the body and face of a person who looks different than you, send God your complaints and good luck to you.
But I do think you have the right to express that wrong opinion.
You have the right to express that wrong opinion.
And it is in the context of that that you have to judge each of these cases.
The second is that the dissent is filled with mythology.
And this is so typical of left-wing argumentation.
The mythology that can't be challenged or else you're racist.
And the emotion that cuts out everything around it is just focusing on this one person, the victim.
Here we have this whole detail that Sonia Sotomayer goes into about how inclusion and civil rights have been expanding.
They expand.
And now they've expanded to include the gays, as if there were no difference, for instance, between a gay person, between including a gay person and including a black person.
It's just civil rights.
It's just inclusion.
It's all one blurry, wonderful pink thing.
And then she starts to give examples because she's got to get the emotion.
Who could forget the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard?
Matthew was targeted by two men, tortured, tied to a buck fence, and left to die for who he was, namely a gay person.
This is just not true.
I mean, Stephen Jimenez, who's an award-winning gay journalist, wrote a book called The Book of Matt.
It talks about the fact that these guys were drug dealers.
There was a rumor that the killers knew that Matthew Shepard had access to a shipment of crystal meth with a street value of $10,000.
Matthew had known one of the killers prior to the attack.
All of these things were never explored in court, and he's become a sort of martyr of the gay movement, but he very probably was not.
Just like the angelic life of George Floyd, the mythology requires silence.
You have to censor people if they say, hey, that guy had enough drugs in his system to kill a horse.
Maybe it wasn't the cop.
No, that's all racism.
This wasn't the only instance of this in the way in these dissents.
Katanji Brown Jackson had a thing where she said we need to have affirmative action because for high-risk black newborns, having a black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live and not die.
This is absolutely absurd, but it's a leftist mythology.
Black infants have a 99.6% survival rate with black doctors and a 99.8% survival rate with white doctors.
Racial Myths Debunked00:03:05
It may be the other way around.
I think they have a slightly tiny higher survival rate with black doctors, but that may well be because there are more white doctors and intensive care units for babies where they're more likely to die.
So it really is not a very interesting statistic at all.
And in the 303 case, Jackson said, with let them eat cake obliviousness today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces color blindness for all by legal fiat, but deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.
I'm sorry, that was the affirmative action case.
Anyway, racism is not irrelevant in life.
It should be irrelevant in law.
That's exactly right.
It should be irrelevant in law.
So all of these things, you know, freedom includes the right for people to do bad things, and that is tough and it's bad, and we should speak out against the bad.
We should boycott, you know, businesses that exclude our fellow citizens and all these things.
But the right to do those things is still open for argument.
What it just seems to me is the lower court said, and even some of the people involved in this 303 lawsuit stipulated that the thing that Lori Smith wanted to do was expressive speech, that the state was trying to shut it down, and they were trying to shut it down because they wanted certain ideas to disappear from public discourse.
And for Sonia Sotomayor and all the left-wing, all three of the left-wing judges on the court, that's okay because they know better.
She's a wise Latina and she knows better.
And she looks down upon the people who disagree.
She quotes with, I thought, a tone of derision, Lori Smith's feeling that she wanted to do what God wanted her to do and she wanted to represent what God wanted her to represent.
They deride this because they think they know what's right and wrong.
And that's what makes the next case I want to look at so important.
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Silencing the Deplorables00:13:54
All right, that brings us to Chapter 3, Silencing the Deplorables.
The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.
A slight difference between the up with people point of view and the Democrat Party.
They think, they do think that we're deplorable.
They think that they have got this.
They're the wise Latinas.
They're the wise black people.
They have lived experience.
They know what's what.
You can't speak.
If you don't have a womb, you can't talk about abortion.
If you don't have a black face, you can't talk about oppression.
If you don't have their opinions, you can't talk.
And that is because they despise you.
They despise you.
But that means that they think that they're pretty good.
And that's what makes this next case.
This is not a Supreme Court case.
This is a case in a Louisiana federal court, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.
There's a lawsuit called Missouri et al. versus Biden.
They have alleged that through both public and private messages and meetings, White House officials coerced social media platforms to suppress protected free speech.
The complaint alleges that on some occasions, executive branch officials threaten social media companies with antitrust legal actions or even eliminating Section 230, the law that protects platforms from liability for users' posts.
So this suit is just beginning, but Judge Terry Doughty, who everybody keeps pointing out, especially the left keeps pointing out as a Trump-appointed judge, he said that he was going to bar these government officials from contacting social media to stop them from intimidating people, people from the Department of Health and Human Services, Federal Bureau of Investigation, DOJ, they can't talk to social media companies for, quote, the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression,
or reduction of content containing protected free speech.
There are a couple, I believe, of Supreme Court decisions saying that is violation of the First Amendment for the government to try and get private industry to silence speech for them.
So Judge Doughty said the agencies could not flag specific posts to the social media platforms.
They couldn't request reports about their efforts.
The ruling said that the government could still notify the platforms about posts detailing crimes, national security threats, or foreign attempts to influence elections.
He said the government's efforts to push back against disinformation campaigns related to COVID-19 were arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history, in which it almost exclusively targeted conservative speech and blatantly ignored free speech rights.
He compared it to 1984, the Ministry of Truth.
The press, and this is genuinely disappointing, so we know that the government was trying to silence, intimidate into silence and trick even into silence the social media companies and get them to ban speech.
And what is the most depressing thing about this is that this is obviously the right thing to do.
The DOJ is going to appeal.
Maybe they'll get a judge.
Maybe they'll get it overturned.
But the terrible thing is that the press agrees with this.
The press agrees that the government should have the right to silence speech.
These are the people who are supposed to be speaking truth to power with the Hunter's cocaine in the White House.
They're not even speaking truth to powder, but they're supposed to be speaking truth to power.
And instead, they think, oh my gosh, these crazy, deplorable conspiracy theorists are trying to get people to listen to their conspiracies.
Here's just as an example, NBC News' national security guy, David Rhodes, cut eight.
Look, there were mistakes made by public health officials in the beginning of the pandemic, but there wasn't a vast plot to sort of miss, you know, to trick the American people into taking a vaccine that would harm them.
And so you have a kind of talking point, a political talking point, turning into a court ruling.
And that's what's so different about this.
It's sort of reinforcing these theories about what the government did and now restricting them.
So should FEMA not warn people about a hurricane?
I mean, this was a public health emergency.
It's sort of a basic thing about the government trying to counter disinformation.
And then the second thing is I've talked to current government officials who are very concerned about foreign interference or just deep fakes in the 2024 election.
Yeah, so he's talking about COVID-19.
Let's forget all the leaks about Trump-Russian collusion.
That was the FBI spreading a dirty trick by Hillary Clinton.
That was what that was.
That was intelligence officers and the FBI going to the press anonymously and spreading a dirty trick by Hillary Clinton to overturn, to stop Trump's election.
Let's forget about Hunter Biden's laptop as Russian disinformation, which was the press spreading a lie by Joe Biden's team and former spies.
Let's forget about you're not allowed to question the election's validity or you're not allowed to question whether transgenderism refers to anything other than a bizarre fantasy.
If you say transgenderism is a bizarre fantasy, they take you off YouTube.
Let's forget about all that censorship because it really does seem to me that the government is not trying to stop misinformation.
It's trying to stop competing misinformation.
They want their misinformation to be the only misinformation.
But since he's talking about COVID-19, and that is the center of this lawsuit, let's just take a look.
Our friends from Grabian compile these collections of things.
Let's look at Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was the main spokesman.
Remember, they were writing songs to him.
They were lighting candles to him.
They were doing 60-minutes tributes to him.
What a wonderful guy he was.
We were interviewing his children.
Oh, yes, my father.
Some people just think of him as a stiff kind of science nerd, but he's really so much fun.
And, you know, all of that stuff that the press does because they're such dishonest corporate hacks.
Just take a look at him.
Here's a little bit of his speaking about the lockdown's effect on kids during the pandemic, CUT 12.
Particularly for kids who couldn't go to school except remotely, that it's forever damaged them.
Well, I don't think it's forever irreparably damaged anyone.
The U.S. Surgeon General has called it an urgent public health crisis, a devastating decline in the mental health of kids across the country.
According to the CDC, the rates of suicide, self-harm, anxiety, and depression are up among adolescents.
So let's look at whether Fauci recommended a lockdown.
This is cut 13.
The record will show, Neil, that we didn't recommend shutting everything down.
First of all, I didn't recommend locking anything down.
I recommended to the president that we shut the country down.
And that was a very difficult decision because I knew it would have serious economic consequences, which it did.
Yeah.
Because if you look at the people that are politicizing me, there's somebody that all the way over on one level.
But there are a lot of other people who look upon me the way they should.
As a non-political person that I am, they're not doing it because they say they don't want to do it.
They're Republicans.
They don't like to be told what to do.
And we've got to break that.
So that's your government at work.
You have to remember this.
This is really important.
Every single time you read a news story or hear one on wherever you listen to your news stories or see one on TV, where they say this happened because of the pandemic.
You have to remember it didn't happen because of the pandemic.
One thing happened because of the pandemic.
People got sick and died.
That was a real thing.
People actually got the disease.
People actually did die.
It was not a very large percentage of people and it was people who had comorbidities, but it was a dangerous, terrible thing, and it did kill people and they did die.
Everything else was bad, stupid, and dishonest decisions by the government, including Trump's administration, who let Fauci have his head, and then the Biden administration, who just made it worse and worse and worse.
And certainly in these states where they never changed their mind, they never stepped back.
I could understand them panicking in the first month, but after that, they never stepped back in all of those states where their results weren't any better than in Florida, where he did change his mind and did step back.
All of that was officials doing something stupid, doing something wrong, and then insisting that anyone who stood against them was Republicans.
They're just conservatives.
They're just deplorables.
So let's put those two things together.
What we were talking about in the last chapter was the fact that they despise you because they think they really know the answer.
And two, the fact that they don't know anything.
They don't know Jack Diddely Squat because they're a bunch of incompetents who have stumbled their way into the privilege of governing the country and haven't got the first clue how to do it.
They are incompetent buffoons.
So imagine this just for a moment, okay?
Imagine we have a president and just you can name him anything you want.
He can be Trump.
He can be DeSantis.
He can be Mr. X. Doesn't matter.
Imagine we had officials, the governor of your state, the mayor of your city, who came out and said, here's this disease that's coming.
Here's what we know.
Here's what might happen.
These are the things that we think are dangerous.
Last week we said this, but now we have found out this.
We're changing our mind on that.
We're not going to lie to you to get you to affect your behavior.
We're not going to do what Fauci did and say, masks don't work because we want to keep the masks.
We're going to tell you we're holding the masks back because we need them for first responders, but they might help what we don't know.
We're going to tell you what we don't know.
When somebody like Jay Bhattachaya from Stanford comes out and says we're doing the wrong thing, you know what we're going to do?
We're going to call them to the White House or we're going to have a debate on TV between Fauci and Jay, and that's how we're going to figure that out.
We're going to let the information flow into you.
Then when some clown comes on who just has a Twitter medical degree and says, you know, if you even look at the vaccine, your face will turn to mud.
You don't listen to him because you're hearing from all the experts and you can trust your government to tell you what they know.
We know that the government, and nobody always knows the truth.
Science is like this.
It moves, things move quickly, more quickly than we can figure out the information.
If they had said to us, we didn't test this vaccine, but we think it's going to work, you decide, you know, we don't know what's going to happen.
These are the things that might happen, but we think it's going to be better to take the vaccine.
I think people would have taken it.
More people would have taken it without protesting.
Instead, it was all coercion.
It was all force and it was all disdain.
This disdain permeates everything they do.
What are you talking about?
God.
There's no God.
There's only gay people.
What are you talking about?
You want to express yourself.
You don't want to say what the state says.
It's the state.
What do you mean that you think the vaccine, you don't want to take the vaccine?
What do you mean that you're a young person, so maybe the vaccine is more dangerous for you than COVID is?
We don't care.
We're going to shut you down.
When they talk like that, when they despise you, and then on top of their despising you, they're clearly buffoons.
They're incompetent buffoons.
They don't know what they're doing.
What are you supposed to do?
Why wouldn't you listen to a conspiracy theorist when the conspiracy theorist isn't right more often than they are?
You know, I hate some of these conspiracy things.
I really do.
Some of them are genuinely dangerous, genuinely stupid, genuinely constructed out of whole cloth, out of nothing.
But still, it's still, when you're dealing with people in power who despise you, why should you not despise them back?
It just doesn't make any sense.
They behave badly because of their philosophy, which is that you are behaving badly and they know best, both of which happen to be incorrect.
There are people in the public who behave badly, people who behave well.
There are people in the government who behave badly, period.
That's it.
These guys really do not know what they're doing and they hate you and think they're better than you, two things that are simply in conflict.
Now, obviously, we have to fight back.
And this is the thing.
There are ways, there are big ways of fighting back.
You should get out and vote.
You shouldn't listen to people, like Donald Trump at one point said, who was telling you not to vote because it's all rigged.
You shouldn't despair.
You shouldn't let conspiracy theories keep you away from the voting booth.
You know, you shouldn't let people tell you, oh, it doesn't matter what you do because they've all got it rigged because that's not true and you should really get out and do this.
Obviously, we fight back here all the time.
We try to be brave.
We try not to worry about losing friends, about being attacked.
We try not to worry about getting thrown off YouTube, even though it costs money.
We do all kinds of things here.
You support us.
That's huge.
But you know, there's something about the culture that is so important.
I've been talking about the culture now for at least 20 years, more than 20 years, almost 25 years.
And when I start out, I'd make speeches about it and people would say, well, what can we do?
And what they meant was, can we give you money?
And I always say, I want money.
I want to create art and sell it to people and make my money that way.
I want to do what I do and make my money that way.
But everything people do is culture.
Your life is the culture.
Everyone's life together is the culture.
You call your wife an idiot.
That's the culture.
You open the door for her when she gets into the car.
That's the culture too.
The way you behave is part of the culture.
So what I want to do is take a look at some of the ways that we, all of us, not you, but me too, all of us, have been sucked into a culture created by people who hate everything we are and participate in that culture and make it worse.
When you are running a business, your employees can create all kinds of interesting situations.
Shocking the Middle Classes00:16:13
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K-L-A-V-A-N.
All right, final chapter, Thou Hypocrites.
So we started off in France.
I hope you remembered everything.
There is going to be a quiz, but we will bring it all together.
We're going to weave it all together.
We started in France.
We're going to finish in France.
Toward the end of the 19th century, in a kind of a reaction against stuffy Victorian middle-class values, there arose what was a movement that had a lot of gay people in it, interestingly enough, and other sexual outsiders.
That was called the decadent movement.
In England, there was Oscar Wilde and Algernon Swinburne.
And in France, there were poets called that, they called themselves the decadents, Baudelaire and Rambeau.
They were into drugs, sexual deviance, homosexuality, and a kind of over-aesthetic appreciation for art, art for art's sake without values.
In France, the byword of the decadence was épaté la bourgeoisie.
And again, forgive me my poor French accent, but it meant shock the middle classes, shock the middle classes.
So what is it about the middle classes?
Hating the middle classes is a sport, especially on the left.
Artists all hate the middle classes.
The suburbs, the suburbs, remember Pete Seeger when the suburbs became a big thing.
He sang that song about ticky-tack.
All your houses look alike and they're made of ticky-tack.
Well, it turned out he was a Soviet spy.
I mean, Karl Marx, he was, Pete Seeger, was a Soviet spy.
Karl Marx, because those houses were better than working class and middle class people had ever had in the history of the world.
But yes, they all did look alike.
That's how mass production worked.
Now, Karl Marx gave some credit to the bourgeoisie.
He said they modernized an industrialized society, but he said they hoarded all the resulting wealth and they would be destroyed in the workers' revolution.
So as our government got more leftist, as it got more Marxist, right, the government and the artists have come together.
The people who used to be against the government, the artists, are now part of the government.
Hollywood is just an arm of the government.
all those Hollywood actors who get up when they're winning awards and wearing their glamorous costumes and tell you you're deplorable because you voted for Donald Trump.
They're now just part of the power structure because the power structure is left against the middle classes out to shock the middle classes.
So when you saw it begin in our country, it kind of began or had its heyday in the 60s.
You got this thing like this routine by George Carlin that people on our side are quoting all the time.
And I've referred to it a number of times because it's so powerful.
This is cut 14.
What are these words that I'm talking about?
They're just words that we've decided, sort of decided not to use all the time.
That's about the only thing you can really say about them for sure.
That they're just some words, not many either, just a few, that we've decided, well, we won't use them all the time.
Sometimes, well, hell yeah.
Sometimes it's okay, but not all the time.
And they're the only words that seem to have that restriction.
I mean, there are a lot of words you can say whenever you want, you know, pneumonia.
Nobody gives you a lot of.
All right, you can't yell at the hospital a great deal, but what the hell?
There are words that you can say, no problem.
Topography!
No one has ever gone to jail for screaming topography, but there are some words that you can go to jail for.
And then the rest of the routine, you all probably have heard this routine, is very famous.
He just starts to speak all these curse words, the seven words you can't say on TV, and he repeats them again and again until they seem to become meaningless.
And so what he's saying is shock the middle classes.
The middle class is stuffy.
They don't say these words, but you can say them sometimes.
You can say them when you're killing a Vietnamese person, but you can't say them when you're in good society.
And people love this.
People on our side love this.
The libertarians say, yeah, this is great.
And if you notice, everybody curses now.
No one, if you watch a comedian, he basically cannot get through a sentence without using four-letter words.
Now, this routine is funny.
George Carlin was funny.
And it does point out something that feels kind of irrational.
And I know I've said this before, but it's worth repeating.
It's also wrong.
It's wrong as philosophy.
It's wrong as an idea.
Why?
Because words communicate things.
This is the entire thesis of the left, is that words don't really communicate things.
They have no fixed meaning.
Woman has no fixed meaning.
That's why they were caught off guard when somebody asked them to define it.
Because in college, you learned words have no fixed meaning.
Ideas have no truth.
There is no truth.
The story is everything.
The narrative is everything.
And that's basically what George Carlin is discovering here.
But it's not true.
If I say oak tree, yeah, it's not an oak tree.
It's a rude tool for conveying oak tree.
But if you've ever seen an oak tree and I say oak tree, you know pretty well what I'm talking about.
So when I use a four-letter word for sex, you know not only what I'm referring to in terms of an action, but you know that I'm referring to it in a degraded and completely physical way.
One of my old-fashioned ideas, and I admit it's old-fashioned, but I will not break it, is I don't curse in front of women.
Why?
Because their role in sex is kind of more spiritual and much more costly than a man's role in sex.
And so when you talk about it with using a four-letter word, you're degrading them.
And I think when women talk like that, they degrade themselves.
These words have meaning.
See, this is what the left tries to tell you, that they don't have meaning, but they do.
And so there is a reason we say don't say those words on the air.
We're saying be polite about these things that are private and that are difficult and that are spiritual as well as physical.
Don't just make them physical because that's offensive really to everybody, to every human being, but to women, I think especially.
Now, along with this came a movement to say that we don't want the middle classes and we don't like the upper classes because they're the tofts.
What we want are basically the working classes and they were raised up by rock and roll.
You remember the Beatles saying it's been a hard day's night.
So instead of Fred Astaire saying, I wear top hat and tails, I'm putting on the writs, you had him saying, you know, I've worked all night, I'm working a night shift, but I can still express my love for you.
And that's kind of that Beatles song.
Now, in America, class and race are very much intertwined.
And that is why Marxists on the left, like Barack Obama, use race because we feel, we always used to feel, I don't know how much we still do, but we used to feel that you could move your class, that you could become a rich person, and then the class wouldn't matter.
But you can't change your race.
And that's why the Marxists focus on race.
But still, class and race are kind of intertwined.
This was the point of JD Vance when he wrote his Hillbilly elegy, that really, in a poor white community, the values are not that different from in a poor black community, and the dysfunctions are not that different from in a poor black community.
And that is why, and the values are not that different.
The value is supposed to be to get out, to get out and make money and to have all the good things in life that the rich people have.
And so black and white culture really came together in the person of Donald Trump.
You know, one of the things that Donald Trump did was he noticed that white working class people were being screwed in this country by globalization, and he brought them together.
These were the guys who were called the Reagan Democrats because they believed in Ronald Reagan.
They felt they had been screwed by the left.
And so they voted Republican with Ronald Reagan.
And they voted Republican again with Donald Trump because he spoke for them.
And he spoke in their tone.
He spoke in their angry voice.
He used bad words.
He called people names.
He still does it.
And blacks, before he became a political figure, loved him.
They were always including him in their rap songs.
Here's just a version of that called Money is My Bitch, meaning I love money.
He's cut 16.
So we're the best couple since Trump and Marla Mabel.
There's over 300 rap songs that mention Trump because his values and their values are very much the same.
You're a loser if you don't have money.
If you have money, you have women.
If you have women, you know, they'll let you grab them because you have the money.
And I'm not going to stick around.
You know, there's a very funny bit by a comedian named Dimitri Martin who talks about the fact that when they started, remember when they started like in blurred lines, they would have a song and then in the middle of the song, there would be a rap song?
So he said, what would happen if you transferred that to literature?
Here's that clip.
I heard this R ⁇ B song.
It came on the radio.
I was in a rental car.
I turned the radio on.
The song comes on.
This guy's like kind of telling a story.
He's like kind of whining, but okay, I'm listening.
All of a sudden, in the middle of the song, a rapper shows up.
I guess these guys are friends or something.
He shows up.
He does a whole rap, just his own thing.
Finishes up.
He takes off.
We never hear from him again.
He's gone.
First guy comes back and he finishes the story and then the song's over.
I just thought that was hilarious because I've never seen that in any other art form.
Not like in literature, you're reading a book.
What'd you think of that novel?
Pretty good.
You know, I like, I got into the story, the first seven chapters.
Then the middle, there was a really angry first-person essay.
This other writer, I guess, I don't know, they're friends or something, but this guy is a big t ⁇ .
He's going to sleep with all these women.
It's a whole thing.
And he's not going to buy him stuff, though.
He made that clear.
He'll sleep with them, but he's not, you know, not looking to get tied down.
All caps.
Very, very confident.
A lot of it rhymed, and then the essay was over, and then I went back to the story.
Yeah, it was all right.
Well, the joke, of course, is that literature is for the middle classes.
Literature is for educated people.
for people who are civilized and want to rise up in society and be part of the upper classes.
And you don't stick a rap song in there because it comes from a different class of people.
So shock the middle classes, shock the middle classes, and we all participate in this.
We all think it's not cool to be part of the middle classes.
And it is cool to spew foul language, to imitate the rappers, to go with the values, if not the values, then the behaviors, to go and watch, you know, there's a sex comedy out called No Hard Feelings, and all the right people are saying yes.
Well, it's filled with curse words and nudity and all this stuff, but it has the right ideas.
But obviously the part of the medium is the message, where the way those ideas are conveyed is part of the message.
What's wrong with the middle class?
The middle class is stuffy.
They believe in marriage.
They believe in good manners.
They believe in hard work.
They believe in religion, putting on ties.
And they're hypocrites because they believe in marriage, but they cheat.
And they look at porn.
They say rude things in the locker room while they're pretending when they're in church.
They pretend they're better than they are.
They talk about Jesus, but then they go out and hate people.
They're hypocrites.
And their values therefore are to be destroyed.
You can also look at it a slightly different way and say, the thing about the middle class is that they came up, at least within a generation, out of the lower class.
And they realized that marriage, church, good manners, hard work, those things elevate you and they're scared.
They don't want to fall back.
So they cling to those things and they look down on those things.
But they fail in embodying those things and sometimes they're hypocritical.
So the other day, I've been sick off and on these last two weeks and I haven't been able to get to church on Sunday because I've just been on my back, you know.
So I went out to a mass on Wednesday and the reading was the reading that I love so much that everybody is always yelling at me about, judge not, that ye be not judged, for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye meet, it shall be measured to you again.
And why beholdest thou the moat in your brother's eye, but consider not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Oh, how wilt thou say to thy brother, let me pull out the moat out of thine eye, and behold, a beam is in thine own eye, thou hypocrite.
The priest got up, terrific priest.
He gave this very beautiful homily, and he pointed out two things.
One, Jesus is talking to his disciples.
So it's not them.
He's talking to us.
He's talking about his friends.
It's not the bad guys.
He's talking to the good guys.
And the word hypocrite comes from a Greek word meaning stage actor, somebody who is pretending to be something that he is not.
And that's how it comes to be hypocrite.
So go back to the Douglas Murray clip.
I told you this is going to be a quiz and his point that good people feel guilty about racism, not bad people.
Good people are hypocrites, not bad people.
In other words, they're trying to be something and they fail.
Now, obviously, a real hypocrite is somebody who's pretending to be something and isn't that person.
But all of us are pretending to be something better than we are.
All of us, when we go to church, we know we're not saints.
We're in there pretending to be saints.
We are acting like saints.
We all know that we may want to look at porn, but when we don't look at porn, when we in fact save our erotic energy for our spouse, we are pretending to be something better than we are in our hearts.
And what Jesus is saying to people is we are all, not him, but the rest of us, are all playing a role.
We are embodying a value that is better than who we are.
We are lifting ourselves to pretend to be something that we know in our hearts we're not.
So we have no basis to make fun of somebody else who's doing that and failing because we have to look at the way we are failing so we can become more of the thing that we pretend to be.
What would you be like if you did what Jesus said instead of writing, saying, no, we're supposed to judge people, we must judge people all the time.
If instead of doing that, you lived, you acted out that life.
You spoke without using the words that mean these grotesque and degraded things.
What if you did, in fact, treat your wife like the queen you tell her she is sometimes, or you say in the paper she is?
What if you did all of those things?
You went, showed up at church, you worked hard, you did the things that you're supposed to do without judging other people, without condemning other people, without being on Twitter and on the comment section screaming at other people.
What would you be now?
What would you be now?
You would be a beautiful, beautiful example of what it is that you want the culture to be.
You would be the living power of the country.
So you think, then you'd be an advertisement for the country.
Then the people who get up and they say, this country is no good.
This country, you shouldn't assimilate because this country sucks.
This country is racist.
So you shouldn't assimilate.
You know, you don't have to assimilate.
You don't have to speak politely.
You don't have to stop committing crimes.
You shouldn't be punished for your crimes because this country is so bad.
They deserve the crimes.
Those people, they own the communications industry.
They own the government.
They own the corporations.
They own everything.
They've taken over all the cultural high places.
The only thing, they own Hollywood.
The only thing you have left is you, yourself, your life every day, every minute, all the time, the way you behave, the way you speak.
And, you know, that's the culture.
That is the culture.
So when somebody says to, you know, the black guy or the immigrant, this country stinks, and he looks around and he sees you, he thinks, I don't know, I'd rather be that guy.
Check Your Fertility00:06:24
I would rather be that guy.
You know, everybody says to me all the time, you create culture, so you should do this, you should say this, you should, you know, tell people that.
I get that.
I'm doing the best I can.
But all of you, all of it, your life is a flame that you are carrying in your hand.
It will go out.
If you keep it, if you make it into the thing it is supposed to be, even though you know you're a hypocrite, even though you know you're only playing that thing, even though you know you're only acting that thing, you become a weapon.
They really do have so much power, but you can fight back with the most powerful weapon you have, which is yourself, your life.
Whether it's changing the definition of words or trying to convince you that two plus two actually equals five, it sometimes feels like the current culture is doing its best to make you stupid.
It is.
When wokeness is permeating every aspect of your life, it's hard to know where to turn for guidance.
I will give you the answer.
Turn to our good friend Dennis Prager.
He is back with additional episodes of PragerU Masters program.
We released the first five episodes earlier this year.
Audience loved it.
It sparked a ton of conversation online.
Dennis offers useful advice on marriage, happiness, how to be a good person, plus so much more.
He even dares to explain the differences between men and women.
What?
In a world that wants to make you woke, Dennis Prager is on a mission to make you wise.
Our latest episode picks up by sharing more of the differences between the left and the right.
A few of them might just surprise you.
It's available now for Daily Wire Plus members with new episodes coming out every week.
Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe to become a member and watch PragerU Masters program along with so much more content.
That's dailywire.com slash subscribe today.
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All right, name that movie.
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All right, from Michael Copeland referring to King David as a horrible Iron Age warlord, and your description of Abraham's thoughts when commanded to offer Isaac as a sacrifice, which is pure speculation on your part, betrays your utter lack of knowledge of things Jewish.
There's a vast Jewish literature on these subjects, among many others, which would be very interesting to you.
First of all, the kind of ironic thing about that is the part about Abraham's thoughts is actually part of the Talmud.
It's part of the discussion, which is all speculation on what people were thinking and doing.
That's what it is.
And so I was actually borrowing from that.
It is true that my feeling about King David is not widely shared.
But when I read, I've read how many times, a zillion times have I read the story of King David.
He does seem to me a horrible Iron Age warlord.
And of course, the story of David and Bathsheba is, you know, it's a pretty bad story.
I must confess to you that I feel that the Jews, or Jews, some Jews, read David wrong, that in other words, when God said that his kingdom would continue forever, they thought he would return to establish Jewish hegemony on earth.
But I think that God was referring to Jesus.
So obviously, I disagree with that.
The Jesus who came was in fact a king, but he was a king who suffered and who sacrificed.
And that sacrifice that God made is not the same as a human sacrifice.
It is his sacrifice of himself for all people so that people, and you'll notice after that, there are no sacrifices.
After that, very quickly, sacrifice goes out of the world.
From Cody, Professor Clavin, a while ago, you talked about the deconstruction of Shakespeare's work by the modern academy.
I don't quite understand what that means.
It's kind of what I was talking about before.
That's part of postmodernism, the idea that there's no truth and no stories refer to truth, but the stories are all there is.
And what you get with that, when you deconstruct it, you find out Shakespeare's prejudices, you find out what he's saying that's ridiculous, where his power, with sense of power, is the only real thing is power.
And so you find out where Shakespeare's privilege is and his powers, and you deconstruct it to understand what you can find out about Shakespeare, because what you find out about Shakespeare tells you how power is abused and what it means.
The idea, this shocking idea that there's a distance between language and meaning, his powers, the entire postmodern movement, so that if, for instance, there's a difference between woman and a woman, then woman has no meaning.
It just means whatever we want it to mean.
It's a social construct.
You deconstruct that social construct in order to regain power.
From Kristen, I'm writing in response to your interview with the lovely Peachy Keenan asking about birth control.
What should it look like to not do birth control?
She says, I was on hormonal birth control from the ages of 18 to 23.
I used it to avoid pregnancy with my boyfriend, my now husband.
Now we've been trying to get pregnant.
It's been 18 months, and the only evidence is our early miscarriage.
I'm sorry about that.
I feel like I squandered my hormonal health and fertility, and now God is disciplining me for my sin by making us wait to have a child.
Do you have any advice for a woman who's trying to be content with Jesus alone and the blessed life I already have?
From Kristen, there are no ease in Kristen.
Yeah, Kristen, go to a doctor.
Go to a doctor.
Your husband should go to a doctor.
You should check your fertility.
You should check out whether there's any blockage.
There are things that they can help you with, things that they can help you with, things that they can do that you don't want to do because they're not moral.
But you should have all the information you need.
I don't think God is disciplining you.
I think this is a physical thing, and you should find out what it is, because it may be, you know, it may be that there's something wrong that can be fixed.
And I've seen that a lot of times.
So you should check it out.
And don't just say, oh, this is God's punishment.
Go, you know, God also provides us with doctors and science and things that we can use to make our lives better.
All right.
As I say, my vacation is coming up, but we will have a best of next Friday.