CNN chief Jeff Zucker gets caught on camera telling his “journalists” to push impeachment, and the mainstream media lose their minds over a meme. Then Beto adds honesty to our discourse, and Kanye West adds family values. Finally, a preview of tonight’s debate. Date: 10-15-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| CNN chief Jeff Zucker gets caught on camera telling his journalists to stop associating with Republicans and to start pushing impeachment. | |
| The mainstream media lose their collective minds over a meme depicting violence against journalists while they ignore real-world violence against conservatives. | |
| And then a story you certainly will not hear about in the mainstream media, transgender regret. | |
| We speak with Peter Benjamin, Who had the transgender surgery, lived as a woman, came to regret it, is now identifying again as a male and has some serious warnings about the spread of transgender ideology throughout the culture. | |
| We will get to all of that. | |
| I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles show. | |
| Breaking news. | |
| CNN is a bunch of dishonest hacks. | |
| I know, that's not exactly a man bites dog story. | |
| That's more of a dog bites man story because we already knew that from the very beginning. | |
| But now, we have audio confirmation of this. | |
| Because an actual journalist, James O'Keefe, went in there, went into CNN, and was able to catch bits of information from sources and from audio and from phone calls where... | |
| CNN chief Jeff Zucker actually admits that he is using his alleged news network to push for the partisan political goal of impeaching president Trump. | |
| I don't care about the MSMBC event. | |
| Okay. | |
| I don't care about them. | |
| Let's just stay very focused on impeachment. | |
| My name is Kerry Portch. | |
| I'm a satellite uplink technician. | |
| I'm a contractor at the CNN Washington D.C. Bureau. | |
| But Jeff Zucker, yeah, basically president of CNN, has a personal vendetta against Trump. | |
| It's not going to be positive for Trump. | |
| He hates him. | |
| He's going to be negative. | |
| I decided to wear a hidden camera. | |
| I decided to secretly record the 9am rundown call meetings and it's basically run by Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN. When | |
| I came to work at CNN, I mean it was my dream job. | |
| And that dream actually just turned into a nightmare. | |
| Okay, so the very first voice you heard, that is Jeff Zucker. | |
| Then he goes in and the source talks to media coordinators, floor directors, various people at CNN who are all backing up what we just heard from Jeff Zucker, which is Jeff Zucker has a personal vendetta against Trump. | |
| He is directing the network's news coverage to focus on and to actually push impeachment. | |
| Now, look, news outlets can have their own editorial positions. | |
| It's a little dishonest of CNN because CNN pretends to only be facts first and they're not admitting that their news programming is really opinion programming. | |
| But okay, that's all even sort of understandable. | |
| The footage gets even more specific though because you then hear Jeff Zucker telling his team to stop palling around with prominent Republicans. | |
| Why? | |
| Because they're not objective journalists covering the news. | |
| They are partisans pushing a narrative for the left and for the Democratic Party. | |
| I know that there's a lot of people at CNN that are friendly with Lindsey Graham. | |
| Time to knock that off. | |
| And it's time to call him out. | |
| I think what's going on in America now is really fundamentally the result of years of fake news, conspiracy nonsense from Fox News. | |
| Okay, so he says, I know a lot of you guys are friendly with Lindsey Graham. | |
| Cut that out. | |
| Time to knock that off. | |
| No more being friends with Lindsey Graham. | |
| We need to go after Lindsey Graham. | |
| Every single Republican we need to go after. | |
| And then he has the audacity and the just obliviousness, the unselfawareness to say, this is a result of years and years of fake news from Fox, which is the more conservative network. | |
| Not years and years of fake news from us, even though on this call I am admitting we are fake news. | |
| We are not a news network. | |
| We are partisans pushing a partisan political objective on behalf of Democrats. | |
| It's Fox News' fault. | |
| Say whatever you want about Fox News. | |
| You're Jeff Zucker. | |
| You're CNN. You're the guy doing this right now. | |
| How about some self-awareness? | |
| They can't muster it. | |
| And you see this in a lot of major fake news stories, from accusing the president of violence when it's the left calling for violence themselves, to absolutely abhorrent fake news over Syria and the Turkish invasion of Syria, all the way down. | |
| We'll get to that in a second. | |
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| So, CNN is more or less admitting, I mean, we've now heard it on tape, that they're pushing impeachment. | |
| They don't want their hosts to pal around with Lindsey Graham. | |
| But it's not just CNN. I don't want to only beat up on CNN. The whole mainstream media are like this. | |
| CNN just got caught doing it. | |
| CNN got a little too sloppy. | |
| Saw this in a big story that came out yesterday. | |
| Big, huge story. | |
| Now, it's not a big event. | |
| It's not an event that really matters at all. | |
| But the story in the mainstream media was so big. | |
| According to the mainstream media, if you were reading the news yesterday, Twitter, President Trump participated in a video that showed him murdering members of the mainstream media with a gun, with a pistol, flipping them over, shooting them, killing them. | |
| It was a Trump video, a violent Trump video, and Trump has to apologize. | |
| This, according to the mainstream media, CNN, or rather NBC's, So hard. | |
| They're basically all the same network, so it's hard to keep them straight. | |
| NBC's Lester Holt has the story. | |
| Tonight, the White House is trying to distance the president from a disturbing video showing a likeness of him violently attacking his political opponents and the news media. | |
| It was apparently played at a conference at one of the president's Florida resorts. | |
| Hallie Jackson has that story. | |
| They're trying to distance, the White House trying to distance President Trump from a violent, disturbing video. | |
| And they obviously would only have to distance him if President Trump had something to do with the video, which of course we here at NBC are going to insinuate, even though that isn't true at all. | |
| There's no evidence of that whatsoever, and it has no basis in reality. | |
| What's the actual video? | |
| The actual video is a meme. | |
| It's a meme. | |
| It's an internet meme where it's a scene from the 2014 movie The Kingsman and it's a scene in which a guy walks in and shoots up a whole church and the guy walking in in this scene is President Trump. | |
| They have Trump's face kind of pasted on the guy and then on all the people in the congregation they have different Outlets, different news outlets. | |
| Not so many people. | |
| I mean, one or two, but it's mostly, you know, like the CNBC logo or the ABC logo or the Politico logo. | |
| And Trump walks in and just commits acts of violence on every single one of these outlets. | |
| Here's just a little taste. | |
| How dare you separate them from their parents? | |
| We're gonna rip your son from his mother's arms and throw him in a cage full of pedophiles and let them have him. | |
| Okay, it goes on like that for a while and then Trump just blows it goes on like that for a while and then Trump just blows up the whole group of | |
| It's a meme. | |
| It looks like a meme. | |
| It's obviously very poor quality because it's just still images pasted onto moving bodies. | |
| But that's it. | |
| That's it. | |
| So the real headline is somebody made a meme. | |
| And then, and then what actually happened was at a pro-Trump conference, not organized by Trump, not really that closely affiliated with Trump, but an organization that supports Trump, American Priority, had a conference and it was played there. | |
| Now it wasn't played on the big screen. | |
| It wasn't the center of the conference. | |
| This conference had... | |
| It's a meme. | |
| It looks like a meme. | |
| For memes. | |
| So they put out a call for memes. | |
| People submitted their memes. | |
| This was one of the memes, and it was shown in a side room on a small TV with not that many people watching. | |
| There were probably, I don't know, 10 or 15 people watching in the room. | |
| And then it became a big news story because the mainstream media saw it, and they played it for millions of people. | |
| Now, the meme, as I said, comes from this 2014 movie, The Kingsman. | |
| There is a little irony here in that there was no outrage whatsoever when the movie came out and the movie depicted a guy shooting up an entire church full of people. | |
| That, no outrage, but a meme that very few people saw of Trump shooting logos of NBC, that was the end of the world. | |
| The event organizers totally disavowed the video. | |
| They said the video was not approved, seen or sanctioned. | |
| AMPF Fest. | |
| Condemns all violence in the strongest terms and only wants to unite Americans. | |
| So what do I think of the meme? | |
| I don't really care. | |
| I mean, I guess it's a funny meme in that memes are funny and they're disrespectful and that's what they are. | |
| If President Trump had tweeted this out, I would say that's a very bad thing. | |
| If some really prominent person in Trump's orbit tweeted this out, I would say that's a really, really bad thing. | |
| You don't want that sort of stuff out there. | |
| You don't want to incite violence against Americans. | |
| Of course, you couldn't say this is unprecedented in our political rhetoric. | |
| I mean, let's not forget when we think back of the halcyon days of our republic in the early founding days, say, for instance, 1804, when the sitting vice president literally murdered the former treasury secretary with a real pistol in a real duel. | |
| You know, there is some precedent for these kind of things. | |
| If I have to choose between Aaron Burr, the sitting vice president, killing Alexander Hamilton or some guy making a meme, I'm certainly going to take some guy making a meme. | |
| But, okay, it's not good. | |
| The organizer apologizes. | |
| Fine. | |
| Good enough. | |
| The White House even condemned it. | |
| The White House said, we haven't seen the meme, but we've heard it's no good. | |
| So, okay, we condemn it. | |
| But that's not good enough for the mainstream media. | |
| Here's Brooke Baldwin on CNN. Mr. | |
| President. | |
| Why is it taking you so long to condemn this video? | |
| You tweet all the time. | |
| I don't want to hear from your press secretary who says you strongly condemned the video. | |
| I want to hear from you. | |
| The video I'm referring to is obtained by the New York Times. | |
| It is extremely violent. | |
| It is disturbing. | |
| And CNN has confirmed it was shown at a pro-Trump political conference. | |
| And in case you have not seen it, it depicts a killing spree. | |
| Inside of a church, a scene cut from a 2014 film. | |
| Okay, excuse me just once. | |
| I just need to take one quick break. | |
| Give me a break. | |
| I love this. | |
| She goes, when is the president going to condemn this? | |
| Hey, Brooke, he already condemned it. | |
| Well, yeah, but he only condemned it through his spokesman, and I don't want to hear it from his spokesman who speaks for him. | |
| I want him to do it. | |
| I want what I want. | |
| I want President Trump to take responsibility for something that he had nothing to do with whatsoever that he's already condemned through a spokesman. | |
| Okay, that's fine. | |
| Meanwhile, so that's a meme. | |
| Here's the story. | |
| A guy made a meme. | |
| Meanwhile, outside of a Trump rally in Minneapolis, some leftist thug smacked a woman in the face because she was walking with a guy who was wearing a Make America Great Again sweatshirt. | |
| She went! | |
| Yeah, so that actual violence against conservatives, against a woman, too. | |
| No reporting. | |
| You're not going to see that on the mainstream media. | |
| Oh, but hey, Michael, that was just one event, right? | |
| That was just one fringy moment where some random person smacked somebody. | |
| Come on, that doesn't seem like it's part of a pattern of leftist violence, except for all of the open public calls for leftist violence against conservatives. | |
| From Hollywood, from politicians, and from, you guessed it, the news media. | |
| Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House. | |
| And if you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. | |
| Yeah! | |
| And you push back on them! | |
| And you tell them they're not welcome! | |
| New details today on the incident that left Senator Rand Paul with six broken ribs. | |
| This might be one of my favorite stories, although, of course, we don't. | |
| Clearly, Senator Paul is still struggling. | |
| President Walker, how do you resist the temptation to run up and wring her neck? | |
| You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about. | |
| That's why I believe if we are fortunate enough To win back the House and or the Senate, that's when civility can start again. | |
| But I like that you're all a part of it. | |
| When was the last time an actor assassinated a president? | |
| Okay, well, but a meme. | |
| A guy made a meme and it was shown in a little room somewhere. | |
| So Trump needs to condemn that. | |
| Brooke Baldwin, I want to hear from you! | |
| I don't want to hear, well, actually, as far as I can tell, nobody on the left has apologized for these open calls for violence or the violence itself. | |
| But I want to hear from you, Brooke Baldwin, not from one of your spokesmen. | |
| I want you to condemn this kind of violence, the calls for violence from the politicians, from the celebrities, and from the mainstream media. | |
| I think someone tells me I'm going to be waiting a long time for that. | |
| That is the anatomy of a fake news story. | |
| Trump needs to distance himself from a disturbing video. | |
| Trump needs to apologize for something he has nothing to do with. | |
| Meanwhile, the left actually calling for violence, actually committing violence at the highest and most public levels. | |
| No accountability at all. | |
| Not whatsoever. | |
| Okay, that's fine. | |
| Speaking of violence and speaking of fake news, ABC News just got caught in a huge fake news story. | |
| So you've seen a lot of the coverage in Syria. | |
| The United States moved some troops from northern Syria, 50 to 150 special operators. | |
| This was condemned widely by people in the Pentagon and in the national security establishment and the more interventionist Republicans and the convenient left. | |
| The left would have been thrilled if Obama had done this, but now they're pretending they hate it because Trump did it. | |
| And the controversy was that we were leaving our Kurdish allies To basically meet a lot of gunfire from the invading Turkish forces. | |
| My big, strong, hardline take on Syria was, hey, close your eyes and pick out Syria on a map. | |
| Do you know where it is? | |
| Hey, close your eyes and can you name any of the countries around Syria? | |
| Okay, I'll give you one, Turkey. | |
| Can you name where Turkey is around Syria? | |
| No, probably not. | |
| The situation is much, much more complicated than both sides are pretending that it is. | |
| And so that's my big, strong take. | |
| The mainstream media, though, obviously taking the side against President Trump here. | |
| They played a video on ABC of the crisis in Syria. | |
| It's what it says. | |
| New developments, crisis in Syria. | |
| ISIS prisoners escape as death toll rises. | |
| And they run a report of this really horrific looking footage allegedly showing the Kurds being shelled like hellfire raining down from heaven by the Turkish forces. | |
| Here's the report. | |
| There's just one little problem with the report, but here's the report. | |
| This video, obtained by ABC News, appears to show the fury of the Turkish attack on the border town of Tel Aviv, a border town bombarded by Turkey's military. | |
| This video right here appearing to show Turkey's military bombing Kurd civilians in a Syrian border town, the Kurds who fought alongside the U.S. against ISIS. Now, horrific reports of atrocities committed by Turkish-backed fighters on those very allies. | |
| That looks pretty bad, right? | |
| Yeah, it does look really, really bad. | |
| Only problem is, that video was not taken of that Kurdish town. | |
| That video is not from Syria at all. | |
| That video is not from this year. | |
| That video is not from that continent. | |
| That video was taken... | |
| From a Kentucky gun show in 2017. | |
| Those images you're seeing, that's Kentucky and it's people shooting a bunch of guns and firearms at a random field in Kentucky. | |
| Only right-wingers called this out. | |
| They said, you know, this doesn't look right. | |
| ABC finally acknowledged it. | |
| Did they acknowledge it in a big on-air report on ABC News and primetime? | |
| No. | |
| No, no. | |
| They sent out a statement. | |
| They posted a statement. | |
| They said, quote, We've taken down video that aired on World News Tonight Sunday and Good Morning America this morning that appeared to be from the Syrian border immediately after questions were raised about its accuracy. | |
| ABC News regrets the error. | |
| What do you mean it appeared to be from the Syrian border? | |
| You don't know. | |
| You've got video of guns being shot. | |
| That's what you got. | |
| And after questions were raised, it's not after questions were raised. | |
| We know. | |
| We have the video. | |
| The video is from a Kentucky gun show. | |
| So, hey, we ran a fake news report and we're not actually going to apologize for it or retract the report because we're fake news. | |
| This is what they do. | |
| They run the fake story on page one. | |
| They run the correction on page 375. | |
| They run the fake story on television and then they post the retraction in a tweet. | |
| Maybe, maybe we should question what the mainstream media tell us about foreign affairs, about domestic policy, maybe even about the President of the United States. | |
| Ironically, I can't believe I'm saying this. | |
| I'm giving him so much credit. | |
| The most honest person in politics right now, I think, is Beto O'Rourke. | |
| Certainly nobody in the news. | |
| It's not a news person. | |
| It's not a Hollywood celebrity. | |
| It's not a real politician. | |
| It's an out-of-work politician named Beto O'Rourke. | |
| Beto O'Rourke is saying a lot of stupid things. | |
| He's making a lot of untrue statements. | |
| But he's honest because he is actually showing the logical conclusions of leftist policies. | |
| So he was called out. | |
| He raised some firestorm because he was too honest during the LGBTQ town hall on CNN. During that town hall, he was asked, would you take away tax-exempt status from churches that don't go along with leftist ideology? | |
| And he said, yeah, absolutely. | |
| If you don't go along with leftist ideology and whatever the new definition of marriage is today and whatever the new version of gender ideology is today, then we're going to take away your tax exemption. | |
| We're going to try to bankrupt you. | |
| We'll make you face consequences. | |
| So this caught flack not because people disagreed with him. | |
| I mean, most of the candidates at that CNN debate It's because he put it too honestly, put it too bluntly. | |
| It was in too stark terms. | |
| So Beto O'Rourke was asked about this on MSNBC. MSNBC basically saying, Beto, Beto, cut it out, man. | |
| Don't let, don't tell them what we're really up to. | |
| And Beto O'Rourke, to his credit, doubles down. | |
| To be clear, you are free to believe anything that you want to in this country, to associate with whom you please, to practice your faith as you best see fit, but you are not allowed to discriminate against people in this country, to violate their civil rights or their human rights. | |
| I love the but. | |
| Look, you're allowed to practice your religion, but, and it's that but, makes him a butthead, but you're not really allowed to. | |
| You're not allowed to discriminate. | |
| What does that word mean in the context of religion? | |
| You're not allowed to discriminate. | |
| I mean, ideas discriminate. | |
| If you hold one idea, you are necessarily discriminating against other ideas. | |
| If you believe in one God, you are discriminating against other gods. | |
| So, if you, let's say you got a church, and you don't worship Allah, and you don't invite people in who worship Allah, because you're a Methodist, so you worship the Methodist conception of God. | |
| I guess that's discrimination. | |
| Are you going to be shut down? | |
| Let's use the gender or the sex example. | |
| In the Catholic Church, there are priests. | |
| There have always been priests. | |
| There have never been priestesses. | |
| Women can't be priests. | |
| They can be nuns. | |
| They can do a lot of things. | |
| They can't be priests. | |
| Well, that's discrimination. | |
| So is Beto O'Rourke going to shut down the Catholic Church? | |
| Yeah, it sounds like he would. | |
| He would try to. | |
| I don't think he'd win. | |
| Catholic Church has endured a little bit longer than could be taken down by a one-term congressman, or more than a one-term congressman, but now an ex-congressman. | |
| I think the Church would probably win out. | |
| Some people are calling on Beto O'Rourke to change his tune. | |
| I don't want him to change his tune. | |
| I'm glad he's telling us what he really thinks. | |
| He's telling us what the left really thinks. | |
| And he's telling us what the left thinks, not just about this issue of gender ideology. | |
| He's telling us what they think about religion. | |
| Because here's the key, here's the key specific. | |
| Beto O'Rourke says people are free to practice their religion within their churches. | |
| Once you go outside the church, though, all bets are off. | |
| There's a lot of concern that a policy like that, even people of good conscience who agree with you on the underlying point, that conservative black churches, mosques, Islamic organizations, Orthodox Jewish communities, a number of religiously affiliated HBCUs, they could all lose their tax-exempt status under such a plan. | |
| To be specific, the way that you practice your religion or your faith within that mosque or that temple or synagogue or church, that is your business and not the government's business. | |
| But when you are providing services in the public sphere, say higher education or healthcare or adoption services, and you discriminate or deny equal treatment under the law based on someone's Skin color or ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation, then we have a problem. | |
| So Beto O'Rourke has really, really confused thinking here. | |
| He hasn't really thought through these things at all. | |
| But I give him credit because the line is that, look, the left always knocks on the churches, but they're usually pretty quiet about the mosques. | |
| So they'll accuse Christians of all sorts of terrible bigotry and awful, terrible things. | |
| They usually lay off the Muslims who are, you know, frankly, a little more hardcore on some of these issues. | |
| Beto goes for it. | |
| He says, yeah. | |
| Mosques, historically black churches, any socially conservative institution, we're going after all of them. | |
| Now, he says you're free to practice your religion as you want within your church. | |
| That contradicts what he just previously said, which is if the church is discriminating, then you can't practice it. | |
| You know, I mean, if the church isn't going to officiate gay weddings, same-sex weddings, then they're going to lose their tax exemption. | |
| Well, same-sex weddings take place inside the church. | |
| So, he's contradicting himself there. | |
| But then he says again, look, whatever you do inside the church is fine, but whatever you do inside the public sphere, that's not fine. | |
| The church is the public sphere. | |
| The church is not private. | |
| Most people don't have private chapels in their homes, and even if they do, you have to bring in people from the outside because the church is about community. | |
| That is public. | |
| But according to Beto O'Rourke, the government controls everything that is public. | |
| And the private sphere is just this tiny little thing. | |
| This is in no way what the Founding Fathers thought about religion. | |
| The founding fathers did not believe that freedom of religion meant you could go inside a building once a week and think what you wanted to think, but the minute you left, you didn't have that freedom. | |
| Religious practice is not just going to church every so often. | |
| Religious practice is a 24-7 thing. | |
| We lose sight of that these days because religion has declined dramatically in America. | |
| Religious practice isn't just from 10am to 11am on Sunday. | |
| It's all week long. | |
| It is how you live your life. | |
| We have religious liberty to allow people not to have a nice alternative to brunch on Sunday. | |
| We have religious liberty because people want to live their lives according to their consciences and according to their God. | |
| The left doesn't understand that. | |
| Beto O'Rourke doesn't understand that. | |
| He doesn't understand a lot of things, but at least he's honest about his thoughts. | |
| We have got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube. | |
| We have got an incredible guest coming up, though. | |
| Peter Benjamin. | |
| Peter Benjamin is a man who lived with gender confusion for much of his life. | |
| He got involved in cross-dressing for many years. | |
| He ultimately was told by doctors that he had gender dysphoria, he was transgender, he went through the surgery, the cost of £10,000, so around $15,000 to the UK government. | |
| It didn't solve his problems. | |
| In some ways it made it worse. | |
| Seven years later he decided to get out of that and detransition. | |
| It's a story you won't see in the mainstream media, but we will bring it to you as the left embraces this radical gender ideology du jour. | |
| We will show you the other side from people who actually know something about it. | |
| That's going to be after the break. | |
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| My guest right now is Peter Benjamin. | |
| You know, I don't do guests a lot on the show, but I just had to bring Peter on because his story is so incredible and what he's gone through is so harrowing and his story is not being told by the mainstream media. | |
| In fact, it's being completely covered up. | |
| I spoke to Peter yesterday when I was filling in On Ben's radio show, and unfortunately, we got cut off. | |
| We can only speak for a short amount of time, so I wanted to bring him back on my show today. | |
| Peter is now 60. | |
| He served in the British Army from the age of 16 to 20, and he went through the Transgender Surgery In September of 2015 at a private hospital in London, this was after years of beginning the process of transitioning, and he is now in the process of detransitioning out of that. | |
| Peter, thank you so much for being here. | |
| Hello, Michael. | |
| Good afternoon. | |
| How are you? | |
| I'm doing very well. | |
| I was so sorry that we got cut off yesterday on the radio. | |
| I know my audience would love to hear your story because they're not seeing it in a lot of other places. | |
| Just in a nutshell, I know it's hard to sum up that many decades of life. | |
| How did you find yourself pulled into this kind of gender ideology, and what made you go through with the surgery, and how did you get out of it? | |
| I am cross-dressed for many years, which meant weekends or evenings, I'd put on women's clothes and go out. | |
| I was married, but I started in the 80s cross-dressing, and this carried on for many years, and in 2011, my wife died and I was still cross-dressing and then there was this surge of people changing gender and it was on social media, | |
| it was in the press, it was online, on Google and I was reading all this stuff and I was suffering with depression, anxiety, I had suicidal thoughts and I went to my GP and I said to her, I want to change gender and It came across, you know, I thought, I need to change gender. | |
| I was living on my own. | |
| I was also drinking heavily, drinking lots of alcohol. | |
| And I made that decision to change gender. | |
| So she went away and told me to go and live the real life test for a month, which I did. | |
| And then I was sent to a local registrar psychiatrist who, cut a long story short, said I had no underlying mental health problems. | |
| Well, I did. | |
| My wife hadn't long died. | |
| I was on hormone disease. | |
| Medication. | |
| I'm not hormones. | |
| I was on antidepressants. | |
| I was on all sorts of medication and I was drinking heavily. | |
| So I had underlying medical problems, anxiety being one of them and depression. | |
| He referred me on to the Gender Identity Clinic in London, but I couldn't wait because the alcohol, an alcoholic can't wait and they become addictive. | |
| I've got an addictive personality. | |
| So I paid for private consultation. | |
| And it cost me a lot of money. | |
| Then I was referred under the NHS, the Gender Identity Clinic. | |
| I saw the same doctor I'd saw privately twice. | |
| And then I saw another doctor and he said, I'm referring you forward to surgery. | |
| But in between, I'd been to a transgender, I was having transgender counselling for a local support group. | |
| And my counsellor never once told me I'm doing the wrong thing. | |
| As a matter of fact, he said, you're doing the right thing. | |
| You're going down the road. | |
| You're doing the right thing. | |
| This transgender support group gets money from the lottery funding. | |
| It gets money from the police and crime commissioner to run. | |
| Now, a lot of people there have underlying mental health conditions or mental health conditions, but they're still encouraged to go forward for surgery. | |
| I had my surgery in 2015. | |
| I saw my surgeon. | |
| I was referred to the surgery. | |
| And I had to go on to a private waiting list because the NHS waiting list was full up. | |
| And if they breached, they would have been fined a lot of money. | |
| I saw my surgeon once. | |
| He explained what the operation was going to be. | |
| And then I was booked in for December the 15th, 2015. | |
| I went for my surgery. | |
| Afterwards, I lived in a flat on my own. | |
| I wasn't happy about it. | |
| I didn't feel happy about having my surgery. | |
| But I carried on my life. | |
| Now, part of my, I say why I had the surgery, part of it was that I thought I could mingle in with other women, go out to ladies that do lunch, go out, you know, socially and stuff like that. | |
| That never happened. | |
| That did not happen. | |
| I didn't have a circle of friends, of female friends. | |
| It just didn't happen. | |
| And I lived a lonely life of my own. | |
| I moved to where I lived in the first place. | |
| But again, that circle of friends that I had before my surgery, they didn't want to know me. | |
| And I was living a life on my own. | |
| So I do what I enjoy these days, walking, swimming, cycling, stuff like that. | |
| So this was 2015. | |
| I moved to where I live now in 2017. | |
| On Good Friday this year, I met a lady when I was out in my local shopping centre. | |
| I was out evangelising, telling people about Jesus. | |
| And she came up to me and said, who is Pete? | |
| I said, that used to be me. | |
| Now, I was going to church, but I barely knew this lady. | |
| And she said, you know, God doesn't want you to be Victoria. | |
| And I said, yes, he's been telling me the same, but I wasn't listening. | |
| I just wasn't listening. | |
| And I knew God had been telling me this clearly. | |
| So I came home, sat down, thought about it. | |
| I thought, she's right. | |
| I can't disobey God's word, voice, anymore. | |
| So I packed everything away. | |
| I literally packed all my female clothes away. | |
| But I had no men's clothes. | |
| So I had to go out to charity shops and buy what I needed and everything else. | |
| And I had no men's shoes. | |
| I had trainers, so I wore them, and gradually built up my male wardrobes. | |
| I had to go into work to tell them that I'd be transitioned back to male, and this is my name. | |
| So I went all through that. | |
| But I also had changed churches since I saw that lady. | |
| And there was two ladies at my new church, who I barely knew, who said that they'd been praying for me to come back to be Pete. | |
| My pastor also said, someone in this church has got wolves on their back. | |
| He was speaking to me. | |
| It was like a bolt in my heart. | |
| So I went and did all that. | |
| But I also found that I went to a house of prayer, not in my local area, In another area. | |
| I also found out this church and the House of Prayer had been praying for me as well. | |
| So I had all these people praying for me and I didn't know. | |
| And it was really powerful. | |
| And I came to churches, Pete, and I was... | |
| But all the time I was... | |
| As Victoria, I was loved. | |
| As Pete, I am loved by my church. | |
| And it's fantastic. | |
| And I just feel so much better now. | |
| It's like a big... | |
| Weight has been lifted off me. | |
| It's gone. | |
| It's completely gone. | |
| The medication has had side effects on me from being on the female hormones. | |
| But I'm not on antidepressants anymore. | |
| I'm not on anxiety tablets anymore. | |
| They've all gone. | |
| Completely gone. | |
| And I was told I need to go back to the gender identity clinic to sort out the dysphoria. | |
| There is no dysphoria. | |
| My mind has been renewed. | |
| It's completely gone. | |
| It's completely vanished. | |
| That's an incredible journey. | |
| I'm so sorry to hear all the things you had to go through, and I'm very glad to hear that it seems to have worked out in the end. | |
| In terms of that... | |
| That moment that you came back. | |
| I mean, I guess there are two moments I want to ask you about. | |
| The moment where you have the surgery and you kind of go all the way through to appear like a woman and to identify then as a woman. | |
| Yes. | |
| Did it meet your expectations in terms of how you felt in your own body? | |
| Obviously, it didn't meet your social expectations, but did you feel like a woman after the surgery or no? | |
| No. | |
| No, I didn't feel like a woman at all. | |
| I just felt like I always had done as Pete, except I hadn't had my male genitalia, but I did not feel like a woman one bit. | |
| As a matter of fact, it caused more problems. | |
| Now I can walk out my front door and do what I want to do, but then it would take me an hour, maybe half an hour, to get out that door. | |
| I was so anxious, so nervous going to face the simple thing like going to the shops. | |
| I could not do it. | |
| And it just ends up, and I was on all these tablets as well for the anxiety. | |
| But no, I didn't feel like a woman at all. | |
| I felt like, you know, there was no difference in me. | |
| It was a chore at the end of the day to put the clothes on. | |
| It was a routine that I had, but it was more of a chore. | |
| There was no feelings whatsoever. | |
| And my doctor, She said to me, when I went and told her I've reverted my gender or changed back to man, she said it was a sexual thing. | |
| It was lust. | |
| I said, yes, it was. | |
| It was sexual. | |
| It was lust. | |
| And she was right. | |
| Yeah, she hit the nail on the head. | |
| I think what some people would say, the people who are still pushing this transgender surgery and transgender movement for everybody, is they would say, well, you know, this is just evidence that society needs to be better at... | |
| Considering people who have had this gender surgery to really be the gender that they are now identifying as. | |
| Do you think that's the issue or do you think the issue is really deeper down? | |
| That deep down you knew that you were Pete and you weren't really Victoria and that's why you feel better about it? | |
| No, it wasn't that. | |
| Before the surgery, I felt like Victoria. | |
| I felt... | |
| I felt as a woman. | |
| When I used to cross-dress, I felt as a woman. | |
| But how does a woman feel? | |
| I can't explain how a woman feels. | |
| I can't explain that because my DNA hasn't been changed. | |
| I've always been a man inside. | |
| But how does a woman feel? | |
| I couldn't feel that sort of thing inside. | |
| Yeah, it's nice putting on the nice dresses and looking nice and smart. | |
| And I did have some nice clothes, but... | |
| How does a woman feel? | |
| I don't know, because I wasn't born a woman, so... | |
| Right, right. | |
| I mean, this... | |
| What... | |
| I'm so glad that you have now found peace in all of this, having had to go through hell, basically, and come back out the other side. | |
| Although, when we're talking about these gender identity issues, it seems to me we know basically nothing about it. | |
| And people are now pushing this ideology on not just adult men and encouraging them to get the surgery and encouraging them to identify as the opposite sex, They're also now pushing this on children. | |
| I mean, children in the single digits. | |
| Where does this come from? | |
| And do you have any warning, any message for the doctors and the parents and the children who might be going through this? | |
| Yes, a lot of warnings. | |
| I don't know where the children idea came from, but the internet doesn't help. | |
| And the children are watching programs. | |
| Like, if I go on my phone and I've got an app For my television programmes, the first thing I see is something like RuPaul's Drag Race on there. | |
| Children are watching programmes like that. | |
| There's loads of programmes on English television about transgender and children are watching it and they're getting glamorised by it. | |
| And children are doing harm to themselves. | |
| The medication that they're on, when the girls get older they'll have hysterectomies. | |
| When they become 18 or whatever, boys will be impudent. | |
| They won't be able to maintain an erection. | |
| There's all the problems of blood clots, cardiac problems. | |
| I'm not a doctor, but this is liver problems, kidney problems. | |
| There's going to be all sorts of problems as they grow older. | |
| Why can't they just let children be who they are and grow up? | |
| Yeah, I went in the dressing up box and I put on my old dad's army uniforms. | |
| But I don't go around wearing army uniform all the time. | |
| But why can't they let children grow up? | |
| And parents should watch out what they're letting their children watch. | |
| It's the World Wide Web. | |
| I was taken in by what I saw on the websites, on things like that. | |
| I was ill at the time, and I was taken in by all this. | |
| And this is what's happening to children and other transgender people. | |
| It split my marriage up. | |
| My children were affected by it because of what I did. | |
| I was really selfish for what I did. | |
| And I live to regret it now. | |
| Well, obviously, people have all sorts of regrets. | |
| It sounds, though, like you've come to a place that is one of peace and being a little more accepting of who you are and your identity. | |
| I am, Michael. | |
| I'm so much at peace now with myself. | |
| I feel so much better in myself. | |
| It's just amazing. | |
| It's just amazing what's happened. | |
| Well, it's amazing. | |
| Really, it's an amazing story. | |
| And as sorry as I am to hear that you had to suffer so much along the way, physically and emotionally, there is... | |
| I suppose I hope that your suffering could show people and give people a warning and shed some light on this issue, which is really being twisted, and you're really only seeing one side of it in the mainstream media, and it's having real effects, not just on adults, but on children. | |
| Peter, thank you so much. | |
| I'll let you go. | |
| I've taken up much of your time already. | |
| Thank you so much, and best of luck, and God bless, my friend. | |
| God bless. | |
| Thank you, Michael. | |
| All right. | |
| All the best. | |
| See you again. | |
| Bye. | |
| Bye. | |
| That is Peter Benjamin. | |
| Incredible, incredible story. | |
| And there are, you know, on the Candace Owens show, she just interviewed Walt Heyer, who is another guy who identified as the opposite sex for about the same period of time, I think about eight years, and regretted it. | |
| And it actually, I believe it made his depression and anxiety. | |
| Suicidal thoughts worse and now he's out of it and he feels much more at peace. | |
| That's the other side of the story that you won't hear in the mainstream media because that's the difference between truth and fake news. | |
| We've got a lot more to get to. | |
| We'll have to do it tomorrow. | |
| In the meantime, I am Michael Knowles. | |
| This is The Michael Knowles Show. | |
| So see you then. | |
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| The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner. | |
| Executive producer, Jeremy Boring. | |
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| edited by Danny D'Amico. | |
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| The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production. | |
| Copyright Daily Wire 2019. | |
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