Ben Shapiro dissects the left’s weaponization of legal systems—like Trump’s Manhattan trial, where Stormy Daniels’ testimony and a denied mistrial allegedly framed him as a corrupt, violent figure—while exposing funding ties (TIDES, Obama-aligned donors) behind pro-Hamas campus protests, including figures like Muhammad Abduh. He contrasts Baby Reindeer’s existential despair with Christian marriage ideals from Ephesians, arguing conservatives must reclaim cultural influence by embodying values over rigid rules or reactive opposition to leftist extremism. [Automatically generated summary]
Many people feel that the trial of Donald Trump in New York is an unethical circus orchestrated by a bent prosecutor and overseen by a dirty judge in order to hamstring a political threat to a deep state.
So oppressive it can mobilize nefarious government corruptocrats to abuse our legal system in ways that would reveal the deepest malfeasance of an illegitimate establishment.
If the media, taxed with exposing such vanality, were not itself a cesspool of anti-constitutional delusion, fueled by a raft of absurdly illogical leftist academic theories piped into the minds of the gullible until they spread throughout the chattering classes like a sexually transmitted disease, although the only people being screwed are those remaining members of the American public who yearned to be free, as our founding fathers intended.
Other people think something else.
Maybe they aren't watching the news.
Possibly they're just staring as if drugged at some mindless distraction, like the Met Gala and wondering dimly, hey, how come Emily Radikovska isn't wearing any clothes?
Doesn't she have any friends to warn her not to degrade herself by walking around naked like a third-rate Polish hooker?
Nice rack, though.
What was I talking about?
Oh, yeah.
Trump's trial in Manhattan continued this week with testimony from porn actress Stormy Daniels, who says she is absolutely outraged that she agreed to sleep with Trump, then extorted $130,000 out of him in return for keeping quiet about it, then talked about it.
Daniels testified that after her brief fling with Trump, she, quote, blacked out and felt the room spinning and found her hands shaking because she had never before had sex without getting paid and having a film crew present.
Trump's lawyers moved for a mistrial, saying Trump was not being charged with sleeping with Daniels, so the salacious testimony could serve no other purpose than to prejudice the jury.
Justice Juan Murchand retired to his chambers to consider the motion with a stack of Daniels' films and his personal role of toilet paper with the Constitution printed on it.
Ultimately, however, Merchand denied the defense motion, saying he didn't see how the jury could be prejudiced when no one knows what Trump is being charged with anyway.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, immediately published an opinion piece excoriating Trump and saying his affair with Daniels was a perfect example of me too, and that a porn actress agreed to have sex with someone in the hope of getting a guest shot on the apprentice and then pretended that was someone else's fault besides hers.
And a lot of Hollywood starlets said, me too.
The op-ed was one in a series the Times is running in which various writers try to explain what Trump is being charged with, and the first one to come up with a plausible answer wins a Pulitzer Prize and a blank piece of paper that used to have the Fifth Amendment written on it.
Meanwhile, Justice Mershand extended his gag order on Trump by ordering the defendant to stop calling him a corrupt judge.
Mershand said Trump's attacks on him were damaging his reputation with his bagman.
This is not funny, said Justice Mershand, giggling.
The former president is being charged with something or other that's very serious, like writing the words legal fees on a check to his lawyer with the purpose of interfering with the 2016 election by making people think he was a better candidate than the person he was running against.
And all the while, Trump was stepping outside his marriage to sleep with a woman.
And okay, Hillary Clinton was doing the same thing, but we will not allow homophobia to interfere with the almost utter corruption of these proceedings.
Unquote.
Journalists and other Democrats are delighted with the trial because it has provided President and venal houseplant Joe Biden with several split-screen moments that made him look almost presidential.
For instance, television viewers could see Trump sitting on one side of the screen, listening to seamy sexual testimony against him, while on the other side of the screen, President Biden was honoring Holocaust Remembrance Day by withholding weapons from Israel so the Jews could remember what the Holocaust was like.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
We are back laughing our way through the fall of the republic.
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And this week's interview was with Stephen Meyer, which I, one of my favorite interviews, really, where we talked about science and God and how science is actually pushing toward faith as opposed to away from it, which it seemed to be doing in the 19th, maybe 18th centuries.
Next week, we'll be talking to this week, I mean, we'll be talking to Jonathan Haidt on his new book, The Anxious Generation, and a lot of other stuff.
There's always all kinds of stuff I want to talk to Jonathan about.
My favorite comment from this week was from Media Medic Medic 2093.
He says, your sarcasm is hate speech.
God, I hope so.
I'm trying my best.
I really am.
Let's get to today's episode, which is the shame of baby reindeer.
We're going to give you a very different look.
You will not have heard this anywhere else at the Netflix hit about a bi guy in love with a trans girl being stalked by a fat psychopath.
And also some more about Trump and his trial and more and the surprising power behind the pro-Hamas demonstrations, who is backing that, and Lawrence Southern's trad life disaster.
Let's start with Trump.
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All right, chapter one, the Trump-shaped hole.
Now, I have to talk about Donald Trump and this trial because it's making me a little crazy.
And I get a lot of people who say to me, a lot of people write in and they say, why do you pick on the right?
Why don't you just support Trump?
Why do you always talk about your reservations about Trump?
And I want to explain this to you, why I do that, because it really does seem to me important, not just that we win, but that we are a certain kind of people, because I think that's what's going to transform the country.
It's not going to be politics.
It's going to be who we are that transforms the country.
And look at the left.
Look at what has happened to a left that wants nothing now but to win and doesn't care how they do it.
They use Trump.
They use Trump as an excuse.
He's so awful.
He's so terrible.
He's Adolf Hitler.
You know, he's almost as bad as Hamas, whom we support.
But if we didn't support him, that's how bad Trump would be.
I mean, they've turned themselves inside out doing this stuff.
And, you know, on our side, look, my problems with Trump are his personal behavior, the way he treats people, the fact that he's not a disciplined guy, the fact that he doesn't really know what he's talking about, all these things.
I think he was a good president.
I think the first three years of his presidency until the pandemic when everybody sort of made the same mistake, including him.
You know, I thought the three years of his presidency were good.
They were actually solid, and he did it pushing it upstream.
So I'm not picking on him as a president, but I think that being a president is about some of what you project into the world and some of how you maneuver through the political system.
And I didn't think he was very good about this.
But the problem I have with the never-Trumpers, guys like Jonah Goldberg, a guy I really like, a guy who's really intelligent.
But this kind of never Trump thing misses the fact that even if Trump never existed, there would be a Trump-shaped hole in our politics.
The people saw it.
The intellectuals didn't see it.
They saw that Trump could fill it.
I wish there was somebody else to fill it, but there's not, and there won't be as long as Trump is in play.
And so that is an important thing.
The people know that this is a necessary thing.
Otherwise, the Republicans are weak and they're lazy and they will float downstream with the culture which is controlled by the left, right?
So we need, and basically what's happening is you have a government that's defending the imperial imperatives of the United States.
And we do have imperial imperatives.
We can't just let enemies run free.
You know, I do understand the desires of the isolationists.
I just don't think it's grown up to think that the people who bully us will go away if we pretend we don't see them or if we don't fight back.
I just don't think that's a real thing.
But I don't think they're evil.
I understand why they want to pull out.
I just think it's just not the way reality works, in my opinion.
But we can't just have a government that cares about the empire.
It's got to care about the freedoms of the people here.
So look at the left.
Now, I want to emphasize this.
Most people, most Democrats are normal, regular people.
They are not the people that we see on our television screen.
They're not the news media.
They're not as far left as they are.
They think that these guys, they think that Biden is basically a normal guy and all this.
They're not paying the kind of attention that we're paying to the news and to the policy and to the way things really work.
And, you know, Joe Biden is really good at lying.
He comes out all the time.
Oh, yeah, the borders are closed.
Inflation is down.
It's great.
I'm supporting Israel.
He just says this stuff.
And most people are going, oh, well, it's good.
It's old Joe.
I know him, right?
But in this trial in New York, it's obscene.
They are breaking every rule.
Every constitutional guarantee is being overthrown.
And because of the way Trump behaves, because of his behavior, good liberals, nice people who are not far left are saying, well, it's Trump.
We got to throw him in jail.
And I'm appalled.
I'm appalled.
I mean, even if you don't like Trump, you should be appalled at what is happening in this courtroom.
And on top of everything else, and by the way, I'm now ready to build a statue to Trump because of the way, just because of the way they're treating him, just in reaction.
They have now turned Trump's hyperbole into understatement.
Listen to cut two.
Absolutely, no case.
It's a case that shouldn't have been brought.
The previous DA wouldn't bring it.
Bragg didn't want to bring it, and he brought it because I'm running in number one place.
This all comes out of the White House and crooked Joe Biden.
This comes from the White House, and it's all Biden, because it's an attack on his political opponents.
It hasn't happened in this country.
It does happen in third world countries, but it hasn't happened in this country.
And it's a shame.
And the trial is a very unfair trial.
It's a very, very unfair trial.
The good news is they have nothing.
He's absolutely right.
It is all absolutely true.
They have nothing.
It's an unfair trial.
The judge is dirty.
Everything he says is absolutely true.
And this Stormy Daniels testimony that's coming out, which is salacious.
The judge actually said to the defense, you should have objected more.
It's the judge's job not to let this kind of testimony in.
This is exactly why Harvey Weinstein's conviction was overturned by the appeals court in New York, because they charged him.
They brought in evidence against him for things that he wasn't charged with.
And Trump is not charged with sleeping with Stormy Daniels.
I don't know what he's charged for.
He's charged for writing legal expenses on a check that he wrote to his lawyer, who was paying off, apparently, Stormy Daniels, so she wouldn't do what she's doing now, which is talk about their alleged affair.
She's the worst witness ever.
I mean, if anybody's honest about it, she is a terrible, terrible witness.
They're cross-examining her.
She's talking about demons that are inhabiting spirits that are inhabiting her house and pushing her boyfriend into the bathtub.
Oh, no, really, it was a giant possum that did it.
I mean, she's a little bit loopy.
And what are they complaining about?
At the New York Times, a former newspaper, they're writing piece after piece.
Oh, my goodness.
Here's one.
As I sat in the packed overflow room in the criminal courthouse where Trump is being tried and listened to Daniels testify about the sexual encounter counter she has often joked about.
The whole thing sounded a lot darker and murkier than it had before.
At times, the words Daniels used to describe the encounter with Trump were reminiscent of so many of the other stories of women who have come forward to accuse him of sexual assault.
Come on.
This is a porn star, a stripper, a woman who makes porn movies, who thought she had a chance.
You know, Trump, from her own testimony, dangled a spot on the apprentice in front of her.
She went and slept with him.
You know, what was she?
A virgin?
Come on.
I mean, really.
And the other thing about this is there's nothing the New York Times feels is shameful sexually.
You know, we don't kink shame.
We don't anything shame.
They actually said that.
I, who am an ardently faithful husband to a wife I absolutely adore, do not approve of Trump's behavior.
I'm sorry, I don't think it's alpha male to be ruled by your groin.
I do not think that that is what alpha males do.
I think alpha males rule over their own desires.
Trump On Political Violence00:07:33
The first thing a man conquers is himself.
That's the boss, right?
And so I don't approve, but the New York Times does.
The New York Times is in favor of promiscuity.
Trupels, fopples, crapples, you know, whatever.
They don't care what you do.
You know, just put out cigarettes on each other as long as you have consent, as long as you have consent.
And obviously, Trump had consent.
So what are they complaining about?
I mean, it's just absolutely ridiculous.
Here's what's going on.
What is going on is all their other fake lawfare cases are falling apart.
The judge in Florida postponed the trial about the classified documents.
Why?
Because Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor, made up a legal case, and now she has to go through all the pre-trial motions to see if anything he's saying is legitimate.
So that's not going to happen.
It's held up indefinitely.
So that's not going to happen before the election.
That's what it's all about.
In D.C., the one where they Trump plotted to overturn the election.
That's gone to the Supreme Court where they're trying to decide how much immunity a president has, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to have to decide.
That's not going to come in before June.
So that could delay that trial till after the election.
In Georgia, an appeals court has agreed to review whether Fannie Wills, Philip Willis, the district attorney, should be thrown out because of her affair, which was obviously prejudicial and corrupt, and that could take up to six months.
So listen to the press.
This is MSNBC, and I admit this is a leftist press, but still, this is Stephanie Ruhl.
She is absolutely desperate because this third world banana republic strategy to throw away America by misusing our legal system to stop a political opponent, which is something you would do in Iraq.
You know, it's in Iraq.
They say they put you on trial for corruption when they don't want to run against you, is falling through.
And she's talking to Mark McKinnon, a political consultant, about this.
Listen to the desperation in her voice.
Delay, delay, delay.
In Florida, delayed indefinitely.
Now, Georgia, it has been a rough few days for Jack Smith and Fonnie Willis.
Mark, do you think we are going to see any progress here before the election and after the election?
Do you think these trials are ever going to happen?
Well, I don't know, but I mean, the key question is: is anything going to happen before the election?
And I think the answer is no.
The days of magical legal thinking are over.
The cavalry is not coming.
The legal cavalry is not coming to the rescue of Joe Biden.
The legal cavalry.
Now, McKinnon is a Republican.
You know, he's a moderate Republican.
But still, you know, this is the kind of thing they're talking about on the left.
What is happening here?
And they just accuse the judges who are holding things up.
They accuse them of being biased.
But nobody gets a trial this fast.
This is corruption.
We are watching this corruption.
And I just, I'm talking, you know, I talk to liberals who are nice people.
And, you know, I meet them in places that I frequent and I go to them.
We sit and chat.
They don't care because they just think Trump is so icky.
I was talking to a liberal the other day, really bright guy.
And I said, what has he done?
What has he done?
And it was all the stuff you and I know about, oh, he said there were nice people on both sides and the way he talks about women and the things he said about this and the things he said, you know, I mean, all this nonsense that the press feeds.
Listen to this about the press.
A guy named Frank Mueller writes it, Real Clear Politics.
I'm sorry, I don't know exactly how to pronounce his name.
It's M-I-E-L-E.
And he's an older guy, writes good pieces for Real Clear Politics.
And he took a look at this Time magazine cover story that was called If He Wins, which was an interview, a long series of interviews by Eric Cordelessa, who was a left-wing journalist, right?
And it has him looking kind of stern.
Well, he looks like Trump.
It's not a bad picture of him on the cover of Time.
And Frank Miele, in this article in Real Clear Politics, quotes some of the headlines that came out of this story.
Here's from CNN.
Trump doesn't rule out political violence if he loses and other takeaways from his Time interviews.
Trump doesn't rule out political violence if he loses.
Trump hints at another January 6th could happen if he loses the election, the new republic.
Trump says it's up to the states whether to punish monitor women for abortion.
Trump reveals terrifying plan for potential second term in Time magazine interview.
Then Mila does this, and I looked at the actual text of the interview because Time was honest enough to put out the full transcript.
You look at the actual interview.
Here are some of the questions.
And the interviewer is clearly trying to elicit from Trump scary headlines.
He says, are you comfortable if states decide to punish women who access abortions after the procedure is banned?
And Trump says, are you talking about number of weeks?
Interviewer says, yeah, let's say there's a 15-week ban.
Trump says, again, that's going to be, I don't have to be comfortable or uncomfortable.
The states are going to make that decision.
The states are going to have to be comfortable or uncomfortable, not me.
Question, do you think states should monitor women's pregnancies so they can know if they've gotten an abortion after the ban?
Trump, I think they might do that.
Again, you'll have to speak to the individual states.
He's saying that the Supreme Court has sent it back to the states.
Now, I wish Trump would at least say this is a terrible thing, but he's, you know, he plays pure politics when he does stuff like this.
He is saying that went back to the states.
That's what the Dobbs decision means.
He knows a lot of women, especially single women, are against more strictures on abortion.
So he doesn't want to offend them.
So he's saying it's back to the states.
That's all he'll say.
But that's not what they're reporting, is it?
They're reporting it as if he is somehow responsible for what happens next.
Here's another one.
Are you worried about political violence in connection with this November election?
Trump, no, I don't think political violence.
That's his answer.
And he keeps coming back.
You don't expect anything?
Trump, I think we're going to have a big victory.
And I think there will be no violence.
Now, remember the headline.
Remember the headline.
Trump hints at another January 6th can happen.
Trump doesn't rule out political violence.
What a dishonest headline that is.
He doesn't rule it out.
So, Mr. President, he comes back weeks later.
This is what he says.
In our last conversation, you said you weren't worried about political violence in connection with the November election.
You said, I think we're going to win and there won't be violence.
What if you don't win, sir?
And Trump says, well, I do think we're going to win.
We're way ahead.
I don't think they'll be able to do the things they did the last time, which were horrible, absolutely horrible.
So many, so many different things they did, which were in total violation of what was supposed to be happening.
And you know that and everybody knows that.
We can recite them, go down a list that would be an arms long, but I don't think we're going to have that.
I think we're going to win.
And if we don't win, you know, it depends.
It always depends on the fairness of the election.
I don't believe they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time.
I don't think they'll be able to get away with it.
And if that's the case, we're going to win in record-setting fashion.
The headline is, he doesn't rule out political violence.
How could he rule out political violence?
What could he do?
What could he say?
Yes, I know there will be no political.
He says it three times.
I don't think there'll be political violence.
But finally, he says, I don't think there will be.
And he doesn't rule it out.
My question is this.
If you're willing to abuse the legal system, or if you're willing to sit back and let the legal system be abused to get Trump, if you're willing to corrupt your reporting to get Trump, if you're willing to ignore the Constitution to get Trump, is Trump the problem?
Beam's Freedom Dream00:07:00
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Chapter two, The Left Behind.
Now let's look at something else that I think is unbelievable and has to do with people not following principle, not following basic principles, not having a concept of what they want.
I mean, this is the thing that gets me all the time.
That's on the right, on the left, is I hear people talking and I don't know what they want.
I don't know what they want the world to look at like.
I try to explain that every week.
I try to tell you, I believe that people should be free.
I believe that some people who are free are going to do things that I don't like.
I can live with that.
I can live with people doing things that I don't like as long as they're not stopping me from being free.
I mean, I think it's a path to misery to live a lie.
So I think transgenderism, unless you are one of that vanishing number of people who really are a woman trapped in a man's body, if that's possible, unless you're one of that vanishing number of people, I think it's a lie.
You are living a lie to pretend that you're something you're not.
I think you're living a lie anyway, even if you are one of those people.
But I can live with that.
What I can't live with is you telling me that I have to call you a woman when you're not.
That's what I can't live with.
That's my freedom.
And I believe in freedom.
I'm not a libertarian.
I live in a certain way because I believe that freedom can only be upheld by moral people.
But at least I'm telling you what I want the world to look like.
Now, these protests in the Middle East on all these campuses, right, these are not intended to do anything except destroy the state of Israel, but they're meant to do it from within.
They're aimed at Americans.
They're aimed at Americans.
Joe Biden has completely abandoned Israel.
He has left them without.
He is now basically, he came out, this is what he said.
This is cut four.
And my commitment to the safety of the Jewish people, the security of Israel, and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state is ironclad, even when we disagree.
Then he has embargoed weapons.
They're calling it a pause.
They're saying it's this.
They're saying it's only 2,000-pound bombs, so they don't go into Rotha where all the Hamas people are hiding behind civilians.
But he's also, you know, banning 500-pound bombs, joint direct attack munitions, which convert unguided bombs into smart bombs.
Politico is saying that small diameter bombs are being withheld.
The Wall Street Journal says that the Biden administration has been sitting on a deal that includes tank shells and mortar rounds.
Nothing.
They are, as my friend Mike Durand from the Hudson Institute said, they're giving them a shield, but not a sword.
They cannot go in and fight these people.
So, you know, they're not showing the October 7th videos, but they are showing pictures of the devastation in Gaza, which is war.
One was an attack.
The other is fighting back and defending yourself.
So the rapists and murderers of Hamas are hiding in there.
Okay.
So when you look at the people at these demonstrations, here is a guy, a professor, Muhammad Abduh from Columbia University.
He's a radical Islamist anarchist, right?
And he's teaching at the encampments.
Here's what he says about what he's teaching at Cut 6.
I've taught the last two classes the last two weeks at the encampment.
From what I then understand, I actually was the first professor to do that and to make that decision.
And Avatar Mayaj, maybe another professor did that, but I think I've practically been the only one to hold my classes in the encampment on queer and feminist BIPOC traditions from decolonial abolitionist perspectives.
That's what I was here to teach.
He's teaching about queer and feminist treatment to people who are supporting Hamas, who kill queers and who abuse women.
That is what they do all the time.
It's endemic in Gaza, the abuse of women.
Obviously, being gay is completely unacceptable to these radical Muslims.
You know, it's not something that Muslims like it to begin with, but Christians don't call for the killing of gay people.
They may reject homosexuality, but they do not call for the killing of gay people, which Moss does.
So what is he talking about?
Why is he talking to these people?
You know who else has a heart for the Gazans?
Nick Fuentes, who's everybody tells me, everybody says to me, oh, Nick Fuentes, he's not an anti-Semite.
He's just saying what he has to say.
Here's a clip of Nick Fuentes when he's actually saying what he really believes.
It's cut seven.
Hitler was a pedophile and kind of a pagan.
It's like, well, he was also really f ⁇ ing cool.
So, you know, time to grow up.
We're not children anymore.
Am I right?
Am I right?
Am I right, boys?
Am I right?
Let's go.
He was also really f ⁇ ing cool.
And any boy knows that.
Anybody who watches these videos where he's rolling down the street and stuff, it's like, this guy's awesome.
Yeah, Hitler often, he's pagan.
He's a pedophile.
I don't even know if Hitler's a pedophile.
I knew there was something I didn't like about that guy.
But he likes leather guys.
He likes those guys marching in leather.
So Nazi femme boys, left-wingers who love women and gays, and Islamists who kill women and gays are all on the same page.
Why We Lost Our Culture00:06:25
They're all weeping for the Gazans, basically weeping for Hamas.
So where's the money coming from?
Who's supporting Nazis and all these anti-Semites?
Well, at the tablet, right, Park McDougal has gone into this deep dive and he writes this really, really interesting piece.
He says, as in the mostly peaceful Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, outside agitators, professional radicals and organizers, black bloc Antifa thugs, Marxist, Leninist revolutionaries, and Palestinian and Islamist radicals, they're all there together, have played a central role in organizing and escalating the campus protests, just as they have organized and escalated the wider anti-Israel protest campaign that began almost immediately after October 7th.
This largely decentralized network of agitators is in turn politically and financially supported by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark money group groups, ultimately backed by big money donors aligned with the Democratic Party.
And Park McDougald at the tablet goes on to say, among these donors, there is an outside role, outsized role of an organization called TIDES.
It is a funding organization.
In funding the protests, more than any of the dark money giants on the left, TIDES has become tightly integrated with the ascendant Obama faction of the Democratic Party.
Tides board member Cheryl Alston was appointed by Obama to serve two terms on the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation.
Board member Dylan Orr worked in Obama's Department of Labor.
Tim Wang is a managing partner at the Wesley Group, a clean energy venture capital firm founded by Steve Wesley, the former California co-chair of Obama for America, whom Obama nearly appointed as energy secretary, and on and on.
Long, long list.
He says, maybe it's a coincidence that a dark money philanthropy empire tied to Obama would be bankrolling a protest movement designed to undercut American support for Israel's war on Hamas, which just happened to be the White House nickname of one Ben Rhodes, the man responsible for building the media NGO echo chamber that would initially sell the Iran deal and later be repurposed for domestic political warfare during the Trump years.
If you remember, Ben Rhodes is the guy who told, I believe it was the New York Times, oh yeah, we manipulated you guys like crazy.
We knew you didn't know anything.
We knew your reporters are 26 years old and they don't know anything.
And we manipulated you into giving support for the Iran deal that would ultimately mean that America would be realigned behind Iran.
Barack Obama, this was a major, major part of his administration, maybe one of the most major parts.
He wanted America aligned with Iran, a country that is committed to destroying this country because he's a decolonialist.
He is a decolonialist.
He hates America.
He thinks America is the problem.
So the media is focusing on Marjorie Taylor Greene is feuding with Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House.
But what we're watching is the far left wing bullying the Democrat Party into line with the Obama pro-Iran agenda.
That's what we're seeing.
That's what we're looking at.
The anti-Semitism is there, and I think it motivates a lot of it.
It obviously motivates a guy like Fuentes.
It obviously motivates a lot of Muslims who hate the Jews.
It motivates a lot of left-wingers who hate the West and therefore hate the Jews.
And as I've said, I believe that all hatred of the Jews is really hatred, really boils down to hatred of the God of the West, who is Jesus Christ.
That really is what the hatred is about.
But there is a politics behind this, right?
And it is the politics of the far left taking over the Democrat Party, while nice, regular Democrat people who just want a little bit more welfare, who just don't want to, you know, think that they think we're racist or they think we don't like black people.
They just want everything to be fair, are voting for what has become a monstrosity, an attack on the Constitution through the lawfare that is justified by trying to get Trump and what is going to bring about, what could bring about the absolute destruction of the Jewish state and the Jewish people on behalf of people who want to destroy this country.
Obama has really been one of the worst influences on this country and on this politics.
I'm sure he's a charming guy when you meet him.
I'm sure he's a smart guy when you meet him.
But he is one of the worst politicians to ever come into this country.
He hates this country.
He is trying to bring it down.
And what we are watching is the takeover of the Democrat Party by the far, far left.
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Chapter 3, The Sickness Unto Death.
Despair and Death00:15:40
Okay, Baby Reindeer.
Baby Reindeer, huge hit on Netflix.
And I want to talk about it.
You will not hear this anywhere else.
I want to talk about this in an entirely different way and in a way that I hope will help some people understand what culture does and what it is and why we've lost it, because it's the culture that has made things like this lawfare against Trump, this really damaging, constitutionally damaging attack on Donald Trump, this genuinely damaging to our place in the world, abandonment of Israel,
the Hamas protests that so many bad actors are a part of and want to be a part of.
It all comes through the culture, and we still stink at culture.
As I've said before, we have won the culture war, but we haven't taken our winnings.
They have lost the culture war, but we have not won it.
And if we don't, they will win it back.
So Baby Reindeer, it's a British black comedy created by and starring a guy named Richard God, a comedy writer, comedian.
It is a fictionalization of his real life experiences.
And here is what it's about.
The plot is a struggling comedian like God, but he calls himself Donnie Dunn.
He is groomed and sexually molested and raped by an older man in show business who makes promises to him.
And that makes him sexually confused, becomes sexually confused and desperate for approval and attention.
He invites this crazed female stalker into his life.
He goes around sleeping with everybody, trying to prove to himself whether he's gay or bi or what is he?
He doesn't know because he's been so devastated by being raped.
And this stalker comes into his life, a wonderful performance by a lady named Jessica Gunning.
She's very fat.
She's overweight and she just goes from being almost charming to furious and dangerous in a scene.
And she ruins his life, but he can't let go of her.
He's part of her stalking.
She ruins his life while he's trying to develop a relationship with a trans woman who attracts him.
That's the story, all right?
So I know what conservatives are saying.
Yeah, we don't want to say that.
All right.
Here's a little bit of the trailer cut eight.
I really don't know where it's going to end.
I think one of us is going to have to die now.
You say this woman's stalking you for like six months, maybe.
Why did it take you so long to report it?
I think she needs help.
She comes to my work, my house.
She sends me emails like all the time.
Very threatening towards you.
Yeah.
I wouldn't say that's particularly threatening.
There's a reason you're keeping her around, and maybe it's that she gives you.
Got really manly hands, haven't you?
Chiseled jawline.
Should we run away together?
So you're a comedian?
Sort of.
It's not going well.
So is that a question?
Somebody hurt you, didn't they?
Who was it?
Martha, can you let go of my hand now, please?
All right, so it goes on and on.
The usual conservative thing here is to disapprove on moral grounds.
Ah, there's gay people.
Ah, there's trans people.
Ah, there are people sleeping in sex.
Okay, the usual left-wing thing is to pretend nothing's going on.
The problem is he's being stalked.
could just stop being stalked, if he could just get over it and he could have a wonderful relationship with this trans person, then everything would be, you know, they want to pretend that this isn't the normal.
We, the conservatives, are weird for thinking anything's wrong.
I want to do something different.
I want to do something different.
A while back, I showed you two pictures.
One was Michelangelo's creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel, and the other was some squiggly mess by Jackson Pollock.
And my point in showing you this, these two things, was not that one is good and one is bad, although I hate Jackson Pollack, he means nothing to me, but that both are art because they represent the soul of the culture in that moment.
If Pollack had painted the scene on the Sistine Chapel, no one would have liked it because it would not have represented where the world was.
Some people would have liked it, but the people who control the arts, which is the clarity, the elites, they would have said, well, we don't understand what this is.
This is old-fashioned.
It's out of date.
It would be just as if someone made a Fred Astaire Ginger Rogers movie today.
It would look weirdly out of date.
What does this say to us?
This is not what's happening in our country right now.
And they would be right.
So this Netflix show is a work by a talented young guy, and it speaks to something in the culture because Netflix didn't promote it very much, and yet it led to a rush of subscriptions.
And I've watched it clean through.
I've watched the whole thing.
And I don't think it's a great work.
I thought it was compelling.
I kept coming back.
I wanted to see what happened.
And I got interested in involved in the characters.
And I thought it had some honesty to it.
It had a sense of despair.
And the creator himself didn't seem to fully understand where the despair came from.
But he did say that he himself, it was a real thing that really happened to him.
And he said he was part of this.
Let's play a little bit of an interview he did on TV.
I didn't want to do a sort of, it felt too easy to do a cup of tea.
And oh, aren't I such a victim?
It didn't feel that way.
Exactly, exactly.
It didn't feel that way in life.
I indulged it.
I was in a bad place.
I made stupid errors.
I sort of felt like I needed someone to give me attention in a way because my confidence was rock bottom.
And I wanted to get that in.
I wanted to show the nuances of the human condition, really.
I wanted to show that people are a mixture of good and bad.
And I think stalker stories usually tend to be one person is good, one person is bad.
And I wanted to kind of get away from that.
He shows you that this guy, Donnie Dunn, who is the fictionalized version of him, keeps inviting this woman back into his life.
And she's a psychopath.
He keeps inviting her back into his life because he needs the approval.
He needs her to approve of him.
So the three main characters are Donnie Dunn and Martha the Stalker and Terry the trans therapist.
And each one of them wants to overcome, establish his identity through desire, wants to find out who he wants to sleep with so he will know who he is.
Dunn wants to know, is he gay?
Is he bi?
What does he like?
The trans girl sort of solves that problem for him because it's really a man, but also a woman, a very convincing woman.
The trans woman doesn't want to be a woman, but the trans woman doesn't want to be a woman, but she, and she's depicted, I'll call her she, she's depicted as confident and content.
But the minute anybody challenges her identity as a woman, when the stalker comes in and says, you look like a man, or when Donnie Dunn can't get aroused by her, she falls apart.
She starts to realize she is a man and she hates it.
And then her hair starts to fall out and she spirals into depression.
And Martha is constantly lying and wants to believe that she's a big professional, a lawyer, and that's sexually attractive.
And whenever anybody challenges her identity, she flies into a rage.
So everyone is trying to overcome a sense of shame, a sense of phoniness, and they want to establish their personality by defining their desire, their sexual desire, right?
And the whole thing is, each one of them thinks that the shame is an imposition of the culture, that they want to break free of this false culture that is making them feel ashamed.
And Dunn keeps saying, if only I could get over my shame and sleep and have sex with this trans woman, then I would be happy and I'd be in love.
And when he actually does this, he's not happy.
He's obviously he's not happy at all.
And in fact, the show is honest enough.
And the reason I kind of respected it was it's honest enough to show him trapped, like he never really gets out of the bind that he's in.
In fact, he sort of becomes a version of the stalker in the end.
Now, all of this comes from, and this is what the New York Times sells every day, right?
It's you shouldn't be ashamed.
Shame is the problem.
If only you can get rid of shame, then you can do the thing that you want to do, sleep with the person you want to sleep with, have a thruple, have a quadriple, whatever you want to have.
You know, as long as you don't have sex in marriage, the New York Times doesn't care what you do.
This is a misreading of Sigmund Freud.
It's a natural misreading of Sigmund Freud, who was a materialist, who was an atheist, and he said that all higher human motivation is essentially sexual energy repressed.
So you repress sexual energy for social reasons, and then that means you turn to art instead.
You build bridges instead.
It's not true, but that was basically, instead of saying that you have a spirit, you just have this sexual energy coming out and you redirect it to other things.
And ultimately, although Freud didn't say this at all, people started to think, well, if I could just get rid of the shame of the repression, then my sexual desires would run free and I would at last be happy.
And we look around at the world, and of course, people are sexually free, but they're not happy at all.
The philosopher who really would have loved Baby Reindeer is Soren Kierkegaard.
He was a Danish philosopher of the 19th century, died unloved, unwept.
Nobody knew who he was.
People thought he was ridiculous.
People still have trouble reading him today because he was a Christian.
But he also understood Christianity from a deeply realistic and tragic perspective.
And he wrote a book called The Sickness Unto Death.
And the sickness unto death, it comes from the story of Lazarus, where Jesus says of Lazarus, this is not a sickness unto death.
And Kierkegaard is a tremendously difficult philosopher, and I have like five minutes to talk about him, so I'm going to really be cutting corners and simplifying everything he said.
But the sickness unto death is unbelief.
It's atheism, essentially.
It's the detachment from God, and it leads to despair.
And there are three kinds of despair in the sickness unto death.
One is not knowing that you are a spirit, that not knowing you have a self at all, a spiritual self.
You're just a body.
That's one kind of despair.
And the other kind of despair, and the second kind of despair, is feeling that yourself is out of line with the constructs of your society.
And that is what the people in Baby Reindeer think that they're suffering from.
They think they're suffering from society.
If only I could get rid of the shame, if only I could get rid of the shame and commit these acts, these sexual acts that I want to commit, then I will be myself.
I will be who I am.
But the third and worst form of despair in the sickness unto death is not understanding that yourself does not arise from yourself.
It arises from the God of love.
It arises from love, which is the creator of the world, which is the God of the Christian God.
And if you do not understand that when you lose yourself, you find yourself, because you lose yourself in that love, that love establishes who you are.
If you don't understand that, you suffering the word, or you refuse to establish yourself in God, then you lose, you are in the deepest despair of all.
That is the deepest despair of all.
And Kierkegaard says the worst despair in a way is despair that doesn't know it's despair because it's a double negative, right?
Not only is this despair bad, but the fact that you don't even know you're in despair.
And that's what's happened to the characters in Baby Reindeer.
And I think probably to the artist, the reason it's not a great work of art is because I don't think the guy has ever read Kierkegaard.
I think if he had known what he was writing about, if he understood what he was writing about, then he would have understood his characters more deeply, I believe.
It doesn't mean he would have written anything different.
It's just that the way that the characters presented themselves would have been different.
He thinks he doesn't know whether he's gay, for instance, because he was raped, if he's just working out the insecurity that arose from being raped.
Was this something that was buried inside me and this guy did it to me?
Or was it something that's imposed on?
He doesn't know.
But he thinks that that's where his identity lies.
And the show ends in a state of complete despair and entrapment.
So here is what I want you to think about, okay?
Conservatives, the first thing they do is they say, oh, you know, this is disgusting because of all the things that are in this.
Or it should have ended like this, so we got a good message.
We got a positive message.
But what I'm saying is, just like Jackson Pollock, you may not like Jackson Pollock.
I don't like Jackson Pollock, but I don't like Jackson Pollock because he accurately represents an empty culture, a dead culture, a culture that has reached the end of its creative period and is just splashing paint on a canvas.
I think that's true of Baby Reindeer too.
I think he accurately represents a culture that thinks it desperately, desperately thinks it can find its identity in sexual desire, that its body will provide the identity that it needs,
that you're only a body, and therefore your body's desires are your desires, instead of realizing that you are a spirit and the love that created you is going to supply you with the will and the desires that you need.
And then I don't know what your sex life is going to look like.
I'm not in charge of your sex life, okay?
So my question to you as conservatives, as people who are on the brink of winning the culture, but can't pull the trigger, do not know how to pull the trigger, is do you see how condemning people does not advance you in your search for yourself, your spirit, one little bit?
Not one little bit.
When Jesus said judge not, the reason I keep saying Jesus meant what he said when he said judge not is because it doesn't advance you toward the releasing of yourself into the creation of yourself, into finding yourself.
What Baby Reindeer shows you is the despair that you will come to if you try and establish yourself purely through money.
So that's capitalism for you.
Purely through fame.
So that's ambition in our celebrity culture that you're in.
Purely through sexuality, even if it's sexuality that is licit, even if it's you get married and you're faithful, that sexuality, even that is not going to reveal yourself to you because it's not who you are.
It's not the basis of who you are.
It's just a desire of your body.
You all know, love sex, big fan, but it's just a desire of your body.
It is not who you are.
When you look at baby reindeer as a work of art, a good work of art, not a great one, but a good one, the question it is asking you is, where are you looking for yourself?
It may not be what Richard God meant to say, but it is the question that it asks whether he likes it or not.
Where are you looking for yourself?
And we'll deal with that a little bit more in the final chapter.
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Rules Of Submission00:15:01
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Final chapter, Trad Life Disaster.
Now, all of this that I'm talking about points to a flaw in the way conservatives approach the culture, but also politics.
And you know, some people write to me sometimes when I talk like this and they say, Why are you picking on conservatives?
Because I want us to win.
I want us to win.
The left is gone.
The left has become what you're seeing, this Hamas-loving, Hitlerian, authoritative, constitution, authoritarian, constitution-violating garbage collection that is bringing useful idiots who sit around going, Well, I'm a Democrat, so I think that's fine.
It's dragging them along with it, but that's what they've become.
I want to defeat them everywhere in the culture, at the ballot box, in the schools, every damn place.
I want to beat them.
We can't beat them unless we're as strong as we can possibly be.
So I think we're approaching the culture and other political matters in the wrong way.
The wonderful Mary Harrington, who we interviewed a couple of weeks ago, and I just think she's the best.
She writes it unheard.
And she writes about Lauren Southern.
And you probably know Lauren Southern, a Canadian trad life influencer.
I've met her, but don't really know her.
I think Knowles knows her, you know, because Knowles.
But she found herself living the trad life in an abusive marriage.
And, you know, if you don't know her, she's kind of a descendant of Ann Coulter, not intellectually.
Anne is a brilliant woman, but she's a descendant of that I'm hot, and therefore it's really interesting what I'm saying.
With Ann Coulter, it was really interesting what she was saying.
But she got into this marriage, and now she has announced that she is divorced.
Here is just a brief video of her announcing this chapter 10.
I am no longer married and not by choice.
And I know that there will be rampant speculation about what that means, but I really don't want to hurt his career any more than I may have already by getting into the details of it.
Sorry, guys, I'm just adding this later, but I don't really know why I'm mincing my words here.
Obviously, I do not want to hurt my ex's career, but at the same time, it's pretty damn obvious.
My ex worked for the feds.
I know, enjoy the memes.
It's all absurd and weird.
He wasn't like head of right-wing investigations or anything like that.
It was more of an innocuous role.
Okay, so by the way, this happened a year ago.
So this is now the thing was after it happened, she decided to get off media, but now she's returned to social media.
And so Mary Harrington says there were warning signs with this guy from early on.
And Lauren tells Mary Harrington, if I ever disagreed with him in any capacity, he'd just disappear for days at a time.
I remember there were nights where he'd call me worthless and pathetic, then get in his car and leave.
She didn't see these signs, says Mary, thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she'd absorbed and promoted.
She told Mary, quote, as long as I put on the high heels and the lipstick when my husband comes home, as long as I cook the best meal, as long as I'm always submissive and say, yes, sir, whatever you want, things will go fantastic.
Finally, he left her because she couldn't possibly be obedient enough.
Now, obviously, this is an internet version of trad life, and it's absurd and it's fetishistic.
This is not what trad life is supposed to look like anyway, in the same way most internet versions of Christianity are not real versions of Christianity.
But it derives from something that is, I think, important in, you know, I won't call it trad life because I think that's too narrow, but things that we think are worth remembering and maintaining in the relationships between men and women.
And it's at its core, the lines from Ephesians.
I will read not the whole thing, but a substantial portion.
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, and he is the savior of the body.
Therefore, as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for it, that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that he might present to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that it should be holy and without blemish.
So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies.
He that loveth his wife loveth himself.
Now, what is that saying?
I mean, that's obviously not supposed to be saying, you know, put on your high heels, woman, and do everything I say.
It's that our bodies represent something more than ourselves.
A la Kierkegaard, they represent the grounding of ourselves in something higher than ourselves.
They are a symbol of something higher than ourselves.
When we hear that a husband should love his wife like Christ loves the church, we remember Jesus washing the feet of his disciples and saying, if I can do this for you, then you can do this for one another.
If I can do this for you, then you can do this for one another.
This is not a set of rules.
We don't sit around and wash each other's feet.
I mean, some people do as a ritual, but we don't sit around and wash each other's feet.
We understand that's a symbol.
It's a metaphor.
And why do we use them?
We use them because we're human beings, because each woman is different.
Each man is different.
Each marriage is different.
And so we're not living by a set of rules.
You have to dress this way.
You have to do this thing.
You have to say this thing.
You have to take this role in the marriage.
We're not even saying any of that.
We're saying, think of it like this way.
Think of it this way.
If a wife looks at her husband and says, what does he need?
What does my husband need?
What can I give him that he needs?
It's a little different than thinking, what do I have to do?
Most husbands do need to know how to handle their strength, how to handle their authority, how to handle their leadership capacities.
Those are things that men need.
When you give a man those things, you turn him into a man.
And I know that some people, oh, oh, what a simp thing to say.
You want your wife to turn you into a man.
Yes, indeed.
Absolutely.
I don't think there is such a thing as a man who has not got, who has not been in some ways formed by a woman who helps him become that person.
If a husband looks at his wife and says, what does my wife need?
She needs to fill something in herself.
This is the way women are built, not just physically.
I'm talking about spiritually.
And so they're meant to act out something.
We are meant to act out something.
You know, Mary, when I interviewed Mary, I asked her, was feminism a mistake?
And she said, well, here we are.
We can't change the past.
And she said, and I think it's a good thing that my daughter can be a person on her own.
And I think that that's a good thing too.
In fact, in my marriage, it's important to me that my wife thrives, that she thrives as the person she was meant to be.
So that is something I am thinking about when I am being what I, as I perceive myself to be, the head of my family.
You know, there's a line in Milton's Paradise Lost.
I'm sure I've quoted it many, many times before, but feminists hate this line.
It is Satan looking at Adam and Eve and noticing that they're built differently, and he says they are built.
He for God only, she for God in him.
And they hate that because it sounds like, oh, he gets to go right to God, but she has to go through him.
But really, what he's talking about is forms of submission that are appropriate to different kinds of people.
A form of submission that is appropriate to a man and a form of submission that is appropriate to a woman.
It's natural in us.
Nobody looks at a man who is being bossed around by a woman and thinks, oh, that's great.
You know, nothing I love to see better than a woman who's being pushed around by his wife.
Nobody likes to see a wife pushed around by her husband, but a wife who is in a marriage where a husband is a leader, it does look right to us.
It looks the way things should be, but only, only if he is submitting himself to God.
And if he's submitting himself to the God who washes the feet of his disciples, he's really acting differently toward his wife than what Laura Southern is describing.
And I think this idea that there are rules, that things have to be this way, this way, this way.
Of course there are rules.
You know, don't commit murder.
Don't commit adultery.
You know, Michael Knowles tells the story of going around asking different people for advice before he got married, and they all have that long advice, do this, do that, blah, blah, blah.
And he came to me and I said, don't sleep with anybody else, right?
Because don't commit adultery.
That's a good rule.
That is a good rule.
But in your marriage, you're going to be married.
This is a big surprise.
You're going to be married to a person.
All of us are people.
The people that you're screaming at are people.
They have their own trajectory that they have to take.
And yes, some people are bad and doing bad things and we have to stand against them.
But I do believe that there are people on the left who are worth engaging with.
I do believe this.
I do believe that there are people on the right who are not worth engaging.
I do believe the country was built by guys like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams who were very much opposed to one another, who fought each other tooth and nail and yet were friends to the end because they were both part of this country.
I do not believe that anybody is supposed to dominate our politics.
It goes back and forth and it finds a way forward.
But right now, it has gone over to the left and we have lost it.
So how do we win it back?
It's very simple.
We have to find ourselves.
We have to know who we are.
We have to know what we want.
And we have to be people that other people want to be.
Then you can make art that works.
Then you can tell stories that works that work.
Then you can sell your policies in ways that work.
When you become people that other people want to be, then you will see the culture is ours for the taking.
And now, a message from Adam Carolla.
Catch the series premiere of Mr. Bertram this Sunday, 9 o'clock, 8 Central, exclusively on Daily Wire Plus.
Episode one is streaming for free.
So no excuses, people.
Mr. Bertram is decades in the making, and now it's showtime.
Let me be clear.
Like me, Wood doesn't care about your feelings.
If you hurt Wood, Wood will hurt you fat.
Wood doesn't discriminate.
Wood's only true enemy is the donkey.
Bentley.
Can I go to the bathroom?
Be before class, donkey.
Remember, Mr. Bertram's series premiere this Sunday, 9 o'clock, 8 Central.
Stream it free only on Daily Wire Plus.
Clavin Clapbacks.
Queer and feminist BIPOC traditions from decolonial abolitionist perspectives.
Yeah!
That makes me want to say, yeah.
Clavin clapbacks, both spelled with a K, Clavinclapbacks at dailywire.com.
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Let us get to the clapbacks from Brayden.
Andrew, I want you to know I've listened to you for about eight years and read several of your books.
You sincerely have changed my life for the better.
I would love to meet you someday.
My question is in regards to what you've said in the past: that Christianity is not necessarily a set of rules, but more of a relationship with Christ.
That's what we're talking about.
I grew up in the Mormon faith, and all my life I have been basing my worthiness with God upon how well I am following certain rules.
How well I keep the Sabbath day holy, how I keep myself sexually pure, whether or not I drink alcohol or coffee, et cetera.
I struggle immensely to dissociate rulekeeping as my basis for being worthy before God, and rather basing it on how deep of a desire I have to develop a relationship with Jesus Christ.
And Heavenly Father, can you please help me understand how I might change my mindset?
Thank you.
Yes, I can.
Think about these rules, these negative rules, don't commit adultery, don't commit murder, as removing obstacles from your path, and then ask yourself what the path is.
Why do you want to be, as you put it, sexually pure?
What does that even mean to be sexually pure?
If you are in a marriage, I hope you're having sex.
That would be fun and loving and delightful.
But it's pure, right?
So what does it mean to be sexually pure?
And what are you trying to evince with your sexual purity?
I mean, it's not that you're not doing it just to do it, because I don't think that's what God cares about.
He is caring about, you know, that line in C.S. Lewis?
C.S. Lewis wrote a wonderful thing where he talked about, he talked about, he was in World War I, and he thought, what would happen if I and a German were killed simultaneously?
He said, you know, we'd probably laugh about it.
We would probably say, oh, yes, this is something you do in life, but it doesn't really matter very much.
What matters, he said, are the little things that you do that change your soul.
So that's what you're trying to do.
You're trying to shape your soul.
He said, this is what he said.
He said, what really matters is those little marks.
He's talking about being killed in a war.
He said, but what really matters is those little marks or twists in the central inside part of the soul, which are going to turn it in the long run into a heavenly or a hellish creature.
So that's always about love.
That is always about love.
So, you know, if you are demanding things from your wife that in bed or anywhere else that degrade her, right, then you're not really being sexually pure.
But if you're having a wonderful time and connecting and being loving with her and expressing that love, then you are.
And that is one of the reasons that people feel that sex should be in marriage because it contains the commitment that is love.
That doesn't mean, oh, right this minute I'm feeling romantic.
It means that I love you.
I am with you till the end.
And so that's what those rules are about.
They're about getting things out of the way so you can become the thing that you are trying to become.
And you should, that's what I think about all the time, even with other rules like, you know, not drinking too much or not eating too much.
I think, what do I want to be?
I want to be healthy.
I want to, you know, live another day.
I want to be active and not become and not destroy myself.
Those are the things that I'm trying to do.
Once again, become a member.
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