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June 5, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
45:15
Ep. 360 - Washed-Up Psychos

President Trump spends his waning hours with the Queen mean-tweeting Bette, Biden plagiarizes again, and Crowder wins his censorship fight with YouTube—for now. Then, a 17 year old girl in the Netherlands commits suicide with the the blessing of her government. Date: 6-05-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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President Trump spends his waning hours with the Queen mean-tweeting a washed-up singer from the 70s.
Joe Biden does the one thing he wasn't supposed to do, and Steven Crowder wins his censorship fight with YouTube for now.
Then, a 17-year-old girl in the Netherlands commits suicide with the blessing of the Dutch government and her family.
We examine the limits of individual liberty.
That and much more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
This suicide story, this question of euthanasia, where the limits of individual liberty are and where the government should step in, where family should step in, what life means in where the limits of individual liberty are and where the government This is the biggest story of the day, but it's certainly not the most enjoyable story.
So we will begin with maybe my favorite tweet the president has ever sent.
Definitely in the top five.
We'll get to that in a second.
But first...
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This tweet that came out yesterday.
Donald Trump is in the United Kingdom.
It is 1.30 in the morning.
He's on this royal visit.
He's with the queen.
And he sent out one of these tweets that makes his entire presidency worth it, completely worth it.
It's been a good presidency.
You know, I mean, there have been great victories, some of the judges, some of the legislation, but every so often, President Trump loses me on some aspect of policy.
You know, when he talks about how we need way, way more immigration, we need to increase legal immigration.
You think, well, most of the country actually opposes that.
Or when the wall doesn't get built as it's supposed to get built.
Or when they focus on some crime bill like they did in December to try to empty out all the prisons.
There's sometimes, I'm saying, as much as I enjoy this administration, sometimes he loses me on policy.
And then I read tweets like this.
And I am basically ready to dissolve the Congress, amend the Constitution, and make him president for life.
If we can get this kind of high-quality content into the foreseeable future, he needs to remain president forever.
This is what he tweets.
While he's hanging out with the Queen, 1.30 in the United Kingdom.
Quote, washed up psycho Bette Midler was forced to apologize for a statement she attributed to me that turned out to be totally fabricated by her in order to make your great president, that's in quotes for some reason, look really bad.
She got caught just like the fake news media gets caught, a sick scammer.
So from now on, I'm only calling my opponents washed-up psychos.
Great line.
This is why we are here.
Are we not entertained?
Is this not why we have come?
What happened here?
Bette Midler, who many people might not even know who she is anymore.
She was a very famous singer in the 70s and 80s.
And she actually is pretty washed up at this point, to give Trump credit.
She has been ranting about the president for years now, well before he ever ran for office.
And she shared this meme of him, which is one of these stupid memes that goes around the internet.
And there's a picture of Trump and it had this quote beneath it, which said, if I were to run for president, I'd run as a Republican because their voters are completely stupid and they believe whatever Fox News tells them.
Something like that.
This is ironic, of course, because Bette Midler is sharing a meme that That is not true because she believes whatever fake left-wing websites tell her.
So she's actually kind of embodying the criticism.
She's lobbying at Republicans here.
So she tweets this out.
And...
Donald Trump just eviscerates her.
He clearly had too much propriety while he was in the UK. He was wearing that silly white tie and tails and he'd been, you know, keeping his manners up very nicely with the Queen.
So he just needed some of those good New Yorker mean tweets at night.
And he tweets this out and she loses it.
She then responds and says, quote, He actually looks better here.
Maybe someone in his camp can gently give him a shiv.
I mean a shove.
It's a picture of Trump.
She's saying someone should give him a shiv, like something to stab him with.
Oh, I mean a shove.
So what's funny about this little interaction, you're talking about three tweets, right?
She sends out her fake meme, then he calls her a washed-up psycho, and then she says that someone should stab him.
And it proves, again, that Donald Trump is the king of branding people, because she is behaving like a psycho.
She is washed up in the sense that she's just not as popular as she was many decades ago.
And she's behaving like a psycho.
She sends out a fake tweet.
He makes fun of her.
She says that we need to murder the president.
Either he's got a real keen insight into who people are, or he's just got this magical power where he forces people to behave in the way that he wants them to behave.
The big political takeaway from all of this, though, does not have to do with Bette Midler or 1970s Broadway stars or any of that.
What it has to do with is eternally true political advice.
The best defense is a good offense.
These days, we're seeing a lot of candidates who are getting this backwards.
They think we're going to play it safe.
Just don't rock the boat too much.
This is kind of the idea of the Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaign.
He said, we're not going to go on offense ever.
We're just going to play it really safe.
The economy under Obama is so bad, and we're going to win the presidency by default.
And what happened?
He lost.
It's what happens.
The John McCain 2008 campaign.
He suspended his campaign.
He wanted to seem like the really nice, peaceable elder statesman, so he actually, during the financial crisis, stopped campaigning.
He stopped going on the offensive.
Obama went on the offensive the whole time.
Obama won the election.
President Trump understands this.
He understands that you always have to be on the attack.
When political campaigns try to hold back, when they try to be circumspect, when they try to be too clever by half, they lose.
And when you are attacking all the time, you win.
You tend to win.
Some conservatives say that this sort of behavior is unpresidential, calling 1970s singers washed up psychos, is unpresidential.
I get why people think that.
I get why people have that reaction.
But it just isn't true.
It is not borne out in history.
John Adams, back in the good old civilized old-timey days in the 19th century, John Adams referred to Alexander Hamilton, a member of his own political party, a fellow Federalist.
He referred to him as the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler.
For whom there were not enough whores in Philadelphia to contain his secretions.
That's way worse than anything Trump just said about Bette Midler.
That is way more disgusting and mean and crass and cruel.
And that was said by a founding father of our country about another founding father of our country.
John Quincy Adams, John Adams' son and another president, said of Thomas Jefferson, another president, founding father, author of the Declaration, quote, that Jefferson was a slur upon the moral government of the world.
Also worse than calling someone a washed up psycho.
In another case, a little later on, U.S. Senator William E. Jenner said of the New York governor, W. Avril Harriman, very famous governor, he's thin, boys.
He's thin as, I'll clean up the language a little.
He's thin as urine on a hot rock.
Okay.
Harry Truman, former president, said of Richard Nixon, future president, he's a no good lying bastard.
Secretary of State Dean Acheson on future president Lyndon Baines Johnson, he's a real centaur, part man, part horse's ass.
Andrew Jackson, Andrew Jackson, another very famous president, he's the man on the $20 bill, he said, quote, I have only two regrets.
I didn't shoot Henry Clay and I didn't hang John C. Calhoun.
By the way, John C. Calhoun was his own vice president.
That's pretty bad.
That's not only worse than what Donald Trump said about Bette Midler, that's worse than what Bette Midler said about Donald Trump, which is that she wanted someone to shiv him.
He's saying he wanted to shoot and reclaim and hang John C. Calhoun.
President Trump is rhetorically relatively tame compared to these two guys.
What does it tell us?
It tells us you don't win elections by being timid.
You don't win elections by being a really nice guy.
You don't win elections by holding back and being strategic and playing it safe.
It doesn't happen.
And this is what Joe Biden is hoping to do.
Joe Biden, unsurprisingly, has learned every wrong lesson of history.
Not the brightest bulb in the shed, well-known plagiarist.
He's lied about his academic transcripts, graduated toward the bottom of his law school class.
Joe Biden thinks that he's going to become president by hiding.
So then he'll become president by default.
He'll get the nomination by default, and then he's basically trying to do the Mitt Romney strategy.
What did he do?
He didn't show up to campaign events on Memorial Day.
Memorial Day is a major campaign event, or campaign events all over the country.
He didn't show up to the California Democrat Convention.
14 other Democrat candidates spoke at that convention.
A 15th candidate showed up, though she didn't get a speaking spot.
And yet, Joe Biden is still at 32% in the polls.
So he still has this commanding lead over all the other candidates.
Number two, a far distant second, is Bernie Sanders, who's now crept up to 18%.
Everyone else is down there at 7%, 5%, 3%.
Okay, so this is good news for Biden.
Doug Schoen, the pollster and political consultant, he was writing at Fox News that this is proof that the Biden strategy is working.
I don't think it's proof that it's working.
Because if you compare Joe Biden's very solid poll numbers today to where they were when he announced his campaign just in April, they're way down.
He's lost seven percentage points since then.
We haven't even gotten to the first democratic debate yet.
He can't afford to keep hemorrhaging all of those points.
He's laying low.
He's trying to do the Rudy Giuliani strategy.
We will show the problem, the pickle that Joe Biden is in.
Then we will get to many more stories.
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So Joe Biden, Joe Biden, he would never think to protect any of his information.
Don't be like Joe Biden.
You know, Joe Biden wouldn't think about this.
He's making the exact same mistakes that he made in 1988 when he ran.
1988, 98, 2008, 2018.
We're talking about over three decades later, he makes the same exact mistake.
So he's currently laying low.
He's doing the Rudy Giuliani thing.
Don't forget, in early 2008 campaign, Rudy Giuliani was the frontrunner.
He had a commanding lead over the distant number two choice, which was John McCain.
And then what happened?
Rudy Giuliani didn't show up.
He was going to skip certain states.
He wasn't going to.
And what happened?
Rudy Giuliani certainly never became president.
Joe Biden risks that, too.
So he knows that he's got to go out there.
He knows that he's got to do something.
The trouble is, whenever he does anything, he puts his foot right in his mouth.
So he missed a number of campaign events over the last two weeks.
He finally comes out with his climate change platform proposal.
And he blew it.
He could not have bungled this any worse.
For those of you who don't remember, Biden was chased out of the 1988 presidential campaign because he plagiarized speeches.
He was caught plagiarizing speeches, particularly from the UK Labor Party politician, Neil Kinnick.
Here is a Neil Kinnick speech and compare that to Joe Biden giving a speech in 1988.
Why am I the first clinic in a thousand generations to be able to get the university?
Why is Glennis the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get the university?
Was it because all our predecessors were thick?
Did they lack talent?
Those people who could sing and play and recite and write poetry.
And I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?
Why is it that my wife, who's sitting out there in the audience, is the first in her family to ever go to college?
Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright?
Is it because I'm the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?
Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse?
Is it because they didn't work hard?
My ancestors who worked in the coal mines in northeast Pennsylvania don't come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours?
So, obviously it's exactly plagiarized from Neil Kinnick.
You might ask yourself, what kind of an idiot would steal, almost word for word, certainly point for point, a speech given by a major UK political leader?
What you've got to remember is this was the 80s and they didn't have the internet.
So now, no one would do this because you'd find it in two seconds.
You'd Google it and you'd say, oh, there's the clip.
Back then, they didn't have Google.
They didn't have YouTube.
They didn't have the internet.
So if some guy gives a speech in England, there's no way that anyone is going to find out about that in the United States.
So they obviously stole it.
They thought they could get away with it, and they didn't.
Joe Biden also lifted lines from JFK, his brother RFK, from the 1968 Democrat candidate.
Hubert Humphrey, and he gets chased out of the race for that.
Okay, so here's Joe Biden's plan for climate change.
This is the Biden plan just released yesterday.
Quote, Carbon capture use and storage, CCUS, is a rapidly growing technology that has the potential to create economic benefits for multiple industries while significantly reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Okay, now let me read to you the Blue-Green Alliance brief that was sent to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2017.
Carbon capture use and storage, CCUS, is a rapidly growing technology that has the potential to create economic benefits for multiple industries while significantly reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Word for word.
Joe Biden's plan on making CCUS available, quote, Biden's goal is to make CCUS a widely available, cost-effective, and rapidly scalable solution to reduce carbon emissions to meet mid-century climate goals.
Now, here is the Carbon Capture Coalition statement on this on the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions website.
Its goal is to make CCUS a widely available, cost-effective, and rapidly scalable solution to reduce carbon emissions to meet mid-century climate goals.
Word for word.
They just take out the word Bidens and substitute its.
History repeats itself.
This is the one thing this guy was not supposed to do, was plagiarize.
Two things.
I guess the other one is sniff women's hair.
He was supposed to not sniff women's hair and don't plagiarize.
It sunk his first major presidential race.
And one of the first things that Joe Biden does is plagiarize in 2019 for the 2020 race.
Why?
Because Joe Biden can't help himself.
He can't help but be Joe Biden.
This is who he is.
He's a plagiarizing doofus who hasn't accomplished anything in his political career.
The closest thing he has to an accomplishment, actually is a sort of legitimate accomplishment, is this 1994 crime bill.
It was a very tough crime bill that I think there's good evidence did actually reduce crime in the country.
And he actually can't run on that.
Because now the Democrat Party hates law enforcement.
They want to abolish lots of law enforcement.
So he can't even run on that.
He's damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.
He's hiding right now because he knows that when he speaks, he embarrasses himself.
But if he keeps hiding, he's going to hide himself away and lose the nomination.
Whoever dug this up, whoever figured out, whoever went to the Google machine and figured out that he had plagiarized this environmental thing, Is brilliant.
This was a terrific hit.
I know it doesn't seem like much that he copied and pasted from some climate website.
It's a huge hit because it reminds us of so many things.
It reminds voters, Joe Biden is really, really old.
Because he did this in 1988, before many of us were even born.
It reminds voters that he's a plagiarist.
It reminds voters that he's an empty suit.
He doesn't have any ideas of his own.
He just has to steal other people's ideas.
It reminds voters that he is totally unmoored.
He's unprincipled.
He'll just say whatever is going to help him get elected.
It reminds us that he's a has-been.
He's an old joke.
A really great hit.
Really, really tough open for Joe Biden.
And it shows that I think he's pretty vulnerable in 2020.
Let's get to the biggest story of the day.
This Dutch teen, Noah Pothoven.
Noah Pothoven is a 17-year-old girl.
The story has lit social media on fire, and there's been a lot of, not quite misinformation, but a lot of confusion out there.
So initially, what was reported by the news outlets is that this 17-year-old girl was euthanized.
This word is important.
Was euthanized And what is euthanasia?
Euthanasia is a ridiculous nonsense term, which means good death.
EU, the prefix EU, means good, and so when it's added to in Asia, you get euthanasia, which is the good death.
It's obviously the opposite of a good death.
It's suicide.
But this is the term, the euphemism.
Actually, euphemism, right, is EU. It's like a good word to refer to something that is awful.
It's a soft word that covers up a harsh reality.
And so euthanasia is a euphemism to cover up assisted suicide.
And after these reports lit the world on fire, there were then other reports to correct them, which said, no, this wasn't euthanasia.
Go in and help her kill herself.
So it's not euthanasia.
Now that's also quibbling with the word.
What actually happened?
What actually happened is that there was this girl who was sexually assaulted when she was 11, 12 years old.
She wrote a memoir about this.
It gave her depression.
It gave her severe anxiety and anorexia.
At age 16, she requested euthanasia.
She requested for a doctor to kill her at a clinic in the Netherlands.
For the past 10 years, the Netherlands has decriminalized doctor-assisted suicide, and the practice has exploded.
So the clinic said no.
They wouldn't do it because she was too young at age 16 to request that, and her parents didn't go along with it.
Her parents didn't know about it when she made the request.
The next year, When she's 17, she decided to stop eating and die.
Now, how did she do that, you might wonder?
Didn't her parents stop her?
Didn't the government stop her?
No, they didn't.
So what a lot of people are trying to say now is this wasn't euthanasia.
The government didn't help kill her.
Her family didn't help kill her.
Well, sure, but they didn't stop her.
They permitted her to kill herself.
The family actually bought a hospital bed to have in the home so that she could more comfortably kill herself.
Actually, the day before she killed herself, a member of parliament in the Netherlands came and visited her.
So, okay, they didn't give active support.
Well, actually, in a way, they did because they bought the hospital bed.
They made her comfortable.
At the very least, they permitted this young teenage girl to kill herself because she was depressed.
They gave her tacit support.
A member of parliament came and visited her to comfort her as she killed herself.
I guess technically this is not assisted suicide or euthanasia or whatever you want to call it.
But practically it is.
It's the same thing.
Of course it is.
This is the culture of death taken to its logical conclusion.
And it's not just her.
Since...
The Netherlands decriminalized euthanasia, doctor-assisted suicide.
The practice has exploded In 2017, 6,600 people in the Netherlands were killed through assisted suicide.
Another 1,900 people killed themselves through regular old-fashioned suicide.
And another 32,000 people killed themselves through a process called palliative sedation, which is just when you have enough sedatives and palliative medicine pumped into your body that eventually you die from it.
It's a slow version of euthanasia and assisted suicide.
When you add all of those up, that means that well over a quarter of Of the deaths in the Netherlands are induced.
They are not natural deaths.
They're suicides.
When the Netherlands first legalized assisted suicide, we were told it was only for the extreme cases.
It's death with dignity.
It's a mercy killing for those handful of people who were in such immense pain.
You would be so evil if you said that the government can't help them meet a good end, have a good death.
Okay, that's how we were sold, this culture of death.
Then what happened?
It moved from those extreme cases to the terminally ill.
That's a distinction.
Terminally ill, maybe you're in some pain, maybe you're not, but you're not going to recover from your illness most likely, so okay, then those people can be killed too.
Then it moved from the terminally ill to the chronically ill.
So this is not people who can see the end of the tunnel right there.
It's people who are just chronically ill.
They're in discomfort and pain, and so they'd just rather not live like that, so they'd rather kill themselves.
Then it moved on from the chronically ill to people with disabilities, people who were crippled, who have physical disabilities or mental disabilities.
Then it moved on to the elderly, people who are just kind of tired of living.
They don't want to live anymore.
Then it moved on to people with dementia.
Then it moved on to people with mental illnesses.
83 people in 2017 were killed or put down in the Netherlands because they were deemed to be mentally deficient.
And then, of course, it moved on to babies.
There was a case a year or two ago in the Netherlands where a woman in her 70s asked to be killed.
She said, I am requesting euthanasia.
But she had dementia, so she'd go in and out of lucidity.
When they came in to do it, she was lying in her bed, and the doctor gave her a cup of poison, and she said, I don't want to drink the poison.
The doctor said, you have to drink the poison.
She said, no.
She pushed it away.
Doctor said, you have to do it.
She said, no, don't give me the poison.
Her family then held her down and the doctor killed her while the family held her down.
That's the logical conclusion of euthanasia, a nonsense word.
So let's say that the Dutch government didn't give formal approval for this 17-year-old girl to be killed.
They certainly gave their silent approval.
They certainly gave their tacit approval.
They probably did give their explicit approval, too, by the way, when the member of parliament came to visit.
So what should have happened here?
What role does the government have in suicide?
What role does the government have in a culture of life and a culture of death?
It ties into the debate we've been having for a week or two now on individual liberty and the true end of government.
We'll get to it in a second.
Then we'll get to how Crowder, for now, won his battle with YouTube over censorship.
And if there's any time, we'll get to straight Pride Parade.
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There's going to be a straight Pride Parade.
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We'll be right back.
So when the girl's 16, the clinic won't kill her.
Thank you.
But she says she wants to die and she's going to stop eating.
What should the parents have done?
What should the government have done?
The parents should have force-fed her.
What if the parents didn't want to force-feed her?
Obviously they didn't.
They were going to let her kill herself.
They got her a hospital bed and made her comfortable in the apartment or in the house.
What should the government have done?
The government should have force-fed her.
The government should have gone in and force-fed this suicidal, depressed, mentally ill girl.
This is...
It takes us back to the title of the show.
This is a washed-up psycho culture that would allow a depressed 17-year-old girl to kill herself.
Obviously, this girl experienced trauma.
She was sexually assaulted when she was 12 years old.
Awful.
Really terrible.
That does not justify killing yourself when you're a teenager.
And by the way, teenagers who have faced all sorts of traumas and sufferings, everything from experiencing physical assault, sexual assault, death of a loved one, abuse, all the way to just being a teenager, all teenagers go through some mental anguish.
That's the definition of being a teenager.
That does not justify killing yourself.
Suicide as they say is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
It is not acceptable to kill yourself in any circumstance.
That's the bottom line.
It is a washed-up psychoculture that thinks that it's okay to kill yourself, that thinks it's okay for a 17-year-old girl to kill yourself.
And this ties into the debate over individual liberty that we've been having for the last couple weeks.
You know, there's this debate on the right that opened up because Saurabh Amari, the writer at First Things, said that we need to stop only talking about individual liberty.
Maximizing individual autonomy.
We have to start talking about what that liberty is for, what the purpose of that liberty is, and whether society should be oriented toward the good, toward something beyond just letting people do whatever they want.
And on the other side of that, you have the forces of liberalism, classical liberalism, modern liberalism, whatever, which say that liberty, however you define it, is the maximum, number one, chief goal of society and government, if not the only purpose of government.
Okay, so let me ask you something.
If you believe that, if you think that individual liberty, that is it, that's the be-all and end-all of government, then why is this wrong?
If individual liberty is the be all and end all of government, the beginning and the end, why is it wrong that the government allowed this 17-year-old girl to kill herself?
Is it wrong?
I don't know.
I asked this question on Twitter and some libertarians like Nick Gillespie over at reason.com, he sort of rejected my premise.
He didn't quite answer the question, but he seemed to say, no, it's not really, it's wrong.
Maybe it's wrong that she did it, but it's not wrong for the government to allow her to do it.
Now, maybe you would say, okay, it's wrong because she's 17.
And when you're 17, you can't make any decisions and you shouldn't have individual liberty.
But when you're 18, for some reason, then you get to have individual liberty.
Then, Then you get to make your own decisions.
Then it's totally different.
When you're 17 years old and 11 months and 10 days, then you should not be able to make your own decisions about ending your life.
But 20 days later, you should be able to make your own decisions about ending your life.
Okay, I don't think that makes a whole lot of sense, but let's say we accept that.
You take her being a minor out of this.
Let's say the girl was 18 and she was depressed and she suffered a trauma and she wants to kill herself.
Why is it wrong that the government basically encouraged her to do it?
Came over, visited her, said, yeah, it's okay.
Why is it wrong?
Why is it wrong to allow elderly people to kill themselves?
You've got some old person, a senior citizen, maybe doesn't have a lot of family left, doesn't talk to a lot of people, gets depressed, feels a little lonely, or maybe does have family left and this elderly person feels that he's a burden on his family.
He's wasting all of their money and inheritance on medical care and he's just going to kill himself.
It'll be better off for everybody.
And he's decided.
He's going to do it.
He's come to this decision on his own.
He's not mentally ill.
That's his decision.
Should the government let that man do it?
Is there something wrong about that?
Is it possible that the government shouldn't let that man do it?
If the government should come in and say, no, you shouldn't kill yourself, why?
Why is it wrong?
Why should we restrict his individual liberty?
When that elderly woman asked to be killed, the one who had dementia, she asked to be killed, then they tried to kill her and she said no.
Which is her choice?
Which is the liberty?
The time she said she wants to be killed or the time she said, please don't kill me, please don't make me drink the poison?
Which is it?
When was she exercising her maximum individual liberty?
Does it even matter?
If all that matters is individual liberty, why is suicide wrong?
So, some of my libertarian friends I've been talking about this with over the last few days, they say that suicide should not be illegal.
Does anybody really believe that, though?
I've heard many of my libertarian friends say this.
Yeah, suicide is wrong, but it shouldn't be illegal.
The government should just stay out of it.
If some guy wants to kill himself, let him kill himself.
No business of mine.
It's easy to say that, but do you really believe it?
Let's say that there's a cop.
Cop is doing his nightly shift, and he drives up to a bridge, and he sees a suicidal man, a suicidal 18-year-old girl, standing on that bridge about to kill herself.
Does anybody really believe that the cop should not intervene?
Because if suicide is illegal, as it is in much of the United States and in the civilized world, what the cop would do is say, don't jump, don't jump, and he would do everything he could to come and grab her and pull her back from the edge.
And then what he would do is get her the help that she needs, get her into a mental institution, get her into psychiatric counseling.
It's not like we're going to throw people in jail because they're attempting suicide.
But But when there is a law in suicide, it allows the government to intervene.
So that's what would happen if there's a law in suicide.
If there's no law in suicide, if it's perfectly fine to kill yourself, then when that cop pulls up on his nightly shift and sees the 18-year-old girl at the top of the bridge, he can't say, don't kill yourself.
How dare he?
He's infringing on her individual liberty.
There's no law against it.
How dare the government presume to come in and tell that 18-year-old girl what she's going to do with her body?
Her body, her choice.
In that case, it would be profoundly wrong of the cop to try to stop her.
If anything, he should applaud her decision.
Oh, how wonderful, 18-year-old girl, that you are exercising your liberty to kill yourself.
He's the government.
He's the face of the government.
Nobody really believes that.
Nobody.
We all know on some basic level that suicide is profoundly wrong and that if the government showed up, if the face of the government, some cop showed up and some young girl was going to kill herself, he should do everything he could do to stop her.
This is not to say that individual liberty is a bad thing.
Individual liberty is a great thing.
Individual liberty is perhaps the most important instrument that we have in society.
Under normal operating conditions, it is terrific.
But that's not the be-all and end-all of government.
We must also be able to say that certain things are simply wrong, intrinsically evil, contrary to civilization, contrary to society, contrary to law, contrary to liberty itself.
Even if you just look at the argument from natural rights, we have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
You can't pursue happiness without liberty, and you can't have any liberty without life.
Because if you take away life, you take away liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Suicide is wrong.
This is not a complicated discussion.
It reminds me, the left always does this.
They try to complicate happiness.
Simple moral statements.
They really try to make that so, for instance, they'll say, well, the suicide debate assisted, so it's really complicated.
Some people are suffering.
Right, everybody suffers.
That's not a justification for killing yourself.
Well, but it's complicated.
No, it's not.
Suicide is wrong.
Illegal immigration, it's so complicated.
No, it's not.
Illegal immigration is illegal.
Illegal is right there in the word.
It's not complicated.
It's actually the simplest issue that there is.
Don't do it and stop it from happening.
Same thing with suicide.
It is simply wrong.
A healthy and vibrant culture knows that suicide is wrong.
A washed-up psychoculture can't explain why suicide is wrong and why that despicable member of parliament who visited that suicidal girl just before she died, he should have stopped her, he should have grabbed her, he should have dragged her to a psychiatric clinic and gotten her the help that she needed.
That would be a healthy culture.
Speaking of washed-up psychos, though, that Vox.com journalist Carlos Maza lost his fight for now.
For YouTube to censor Stephen Crowder.
You know the guy.
He was ranting and raving.
He was all upset that Stephen Crowder called him a lispy queer, even though this guy, Carlos Maza, refers to himself as a queer.
So he asked YouTube to launch an investigation.
YouTube goes and launches the investigation, and they write to him, quote, Thanks again for taking the time to share all of this information with us.
We take allegations of harassment very seriously.
We know this is important and impacts a lot of people.
Our team spent the last few days conducting an in-depth review of the videos flagged to us, and while we found the language that was clearly hurtful, the videos as posted don't violate our policies.
Duh.
They go on.
We've included more info below to explain this decision.
As an open platform, it's crucial for us to allow everyone from creators to journalists to late night TV hosts to express their opinions within the scope of our policies.
Opinions can be deeply offensive, but if they don't violate our policies, they'll remain on our site.
Even if a video remains on our site...
Doesn't mean we endorse and support that viewpoint.
There are other aspects of the channel that we're still evaluating.
We'll be in touch with any further updates.
So they basically side with Crowder.
This kid, Carlos Maza, has a meltdown over this.
He says, YouTube hates gay people because they won't kick off the people that Carlos doesn't like.
Good for YouTube.
That's really great.
I'm glad they stood up for that.
YouTube deserves some credit for it.
Now the other shoe is dropping.
So the New York Times is reporting this headline, YouTube to remove thousands of videos pushing extreme views.
How do you define extreme views?
Good question.
They cited Stephen Crowder as a reason for this move.
So what the New York Times wrote was, in the videos, that creator Stephen Crowder, a conservative commentator with nearly 4 million YouTube subscribers, repeatedly insulted Carlos Maza, a journalist from Vox.
So, notice what they left out there.
They left out that Crowder is a comedian.
Comedians say offensive things.
If William F. Buckley Jr.
were on the firing line discussing some economic treatise, and he called someone a lispy queer—actually, he did it!
He had a debate with Gore Vidal.
William F. Buckley Jr.
actually did say, listen, you queer, stop calling me a Nazi or I'll punch you in your damn face— He actually did it once.
They didn't take him off the air for it.
But certainly, if Buckley can get away with it, comedians should get away with it, too.
And they leave that out because they don't want to admit that conservatives get to have fun, that they get to make jokes, and so they're using this as a chance to take away other videos.
And this is why I can't yet give YouTube total credit here.
I think YouTube probably felt that they couldn't take down Crowder because he's too big.
I mean, he's a huge...
Publisher on YouTube.
Almost 4 million subscribers.
So now they're announcing a policy that they're going to go through and just remove extreme videos, which sounds to me like death through a thousand cuts.
And this is all about 2020.
That's what this really comes down to.
Activists are ramping up to stop Trump.
They want to stop Trump.
They want to stop Republicans.
Why are they doing it on social media?
Why are they deplatforming conservatives, trying to kick off extreme conservatives?
It's because Donald Trump won the election on social media.
He credits social media with his presidential election.
Obviously with the tweets, obviously with the way he personally uses it, but also his campaign dominated on social media.
I've talked to people who have worked at YouTube and other platforms.
And the Trump campaign was just much more sophisticated at using advertising on those platforms to reach people.
The Clinton campaign was stuck in the past.
Trump was built for the social media era.
And so the social media companies are now going after Republicans and conservatives.
That is what we're going to see coming into 2020.
So while we celebrate Crowder still being on there, keep an eye out because I think the other shoe is about to drop.
By the way, I don't have a date for you yet, but you have to get your feather boas out.
Or I guess maybe not, maybe the opposite of your feather boas.
While there are gay pride parades around the country, or I guess now it's LGBTQ, LMNOP, it's fat pride, skinny pride, every single kind of pride in the whole world.
It's way beyond sex at this point.
There is now going to be in Boston a straight pride parade.
Boston officials are saying that there is a group which will hold a straight pride parade in the city over the summer, that they have not yet been granted a permit, but that they are likely to be granted a permit, and that there will be floats, and it's going to be a very big, fun deal.
The group that's hosting it is called Super Happy Fun America, and And the VP of it, Mark Sahady, said that they're going to go all out.
Quote, if you would like to come as an individual, march as a group, or bring a float or vehicle, get in touch.
This is our chance to have a patriotic parade in Boston as we celebrate straight pride.
This is great.
This is a terrific thing.
It's not great if it were actually a straight pride parade, but that's not what it is.
it is.
You can see in the comment there, it says, we're going to have a patriotic parade by celebrating straight pride.
It's a troll is what it is.
It's conservatives using comedy to expose the absurdity of the left.
And conservatives should do this all the time.
So why are gay pride parades so bad?
It's not exactly the gay, it's the pride.
That's why fat pride and skinny pride and all the slut pride, whatever kind of pride you want to use.
Pride is awful.
And if conservatives can expose how absurd pride is to celebrate the queen of all sins by having a straight pride parade, I think that's hilarious.
Go for it.
Conservatives need to use comedy.
That is how you expose a washed-up psychoculture.
That is how you expose an absurd culture.
That is how you expose absurd politicians and absurd policies, is you laugh at them.
You don't need to get riled up and angry and scream all the time.
Just laugh at them.
Kill them with laughter.
And obviously President Trump has done this To remarkable success.
Conservative comedians have done this.
A lot of people in the culture have done it.
We need to keep it up for 2020 and get your floats ready.
Go get your floats and your Boas ready because it looks like the conservative laughs are not going to let up anytime soon.
That's our show.
Get your mailbag questions in for Thursday.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Danny D'Amico.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, is a culture of death being promoted by the left?
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