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Ron DeSantis takes a 23 point lead in a prospective 2024 GOP Presidential primary, Mitch McConnel blames Donald Trump for a lackluster GOP performance in 2022, and a woman takes a gun from a would-be carjacker and blows his head off.
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A new poll out from USA Today and Suffolk University shows Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ahead of President Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination.
And he is not just up a little bit.
The poll shows him up 23 points on the former president in a hypothetical matchup.
That's 56 to 23.
Now, I am as skeptical of polls as anybody.
I think that most of them are made up and statistics are totally fake.
But there are enough indicators at this point to show that Ron DeSantis poses a serious threat to Donald Trump's perceived hegemony over the GOP. Trump obviously thinks so.
That's why he's been attacking DeSantis and he started up real attacks just before the midterms.
And DeSantis has managed to achieve this status in a few different ways.
One, he's in office while Trump is out of office, so he can do things.
President Trump can't really do things right now because he's a Mar-a-Lago.
Two, DeSantis is on social media.
Trump is not on social media.
All he's on is the truth platform that people don't really go to other than to find his statements.
But there is a third distinction that not that many people are talking about, but that DeSantis is clearly hoping to ride all the way to taking Trump's place.
President Trump is the candidate of the COVID vaccine.
And Ron DeSantis wants to make sure that you know that he is not.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Micah Shobi, who says, tweeted, SBF didn't kill himself right after I heard the story.
I know.
It's really, really sad that those cameras outside of SBF's jail cell are about to malfunction, and the security guards that were supposed to watch him are just, they're going to accidentally take a nap.
And SBF, you know, he's really been depressed ever since that whole FTX exchange collapsed.
I mean, he probably would be, you know, if you lost $16 billion and your weird hedge fund sex cult in one day.
You legitimately would be pretty depressed.
So, too bad.
Too bad that he looks like he might get the Epstein treatment.
Another financial guru and sexual deviant, apparently, who was living down in the Caribbean.
Amazing.
History repeats itself.
First as tragedy, then as farce.
It's kind of farce both times, actually.
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This is the key that a lot of people don't talk about with DeSantis.
And I'm not saying, I am not saying that Trump deserves all of the criticism about COVID and that Ron DeSantis is absolutely 100% clean on the COVID issue.
That's not exactly what I'm saying.
What I am saying is, in the public perception...
With good reason, I think.
Trump is seen as the guy who gave Fauci a platform, who promoted the vaccine that seems to have some problems with it.
Again, I don't know that any other politician in Trump's place would have done anything any differently or would have performed any better.
I'm just saying that's what happened when Trump was in office.
And Ron DeSantis, although he was a little bit cautious about COVID at first, he reopened Florida really, really quickly, and he has been ever more so anti-COVID, anti-public health establishment, even anti-vaccine.
So DeSantis, who made the vaccines available to people who wanted it in Florida, but did not want to mandate the vaccine, he is now impaneling a grand jury To look into the abuses from the vaccine manufacturers.
Florida, you know, it is against the law to mislead and to misrepresent, particularly when you're talking about the efficacy of a drug.
We see just the other, just recently, Florida got $3.2 billion through legal action against those responsible for the opioid crisis.
And so it's not like this is something that's unprecedented.
And so today I'm announcing a petition with the Supreme Court of Florida to impanel a statewide grand jury to investigate any and all wrongdoing in Florida with respect to COVID-19 vaccines.
And we anticipate that we will get the approval for that.
That will be something that will be impaneled, most likely in the Tampa Bay area, and that will come with legal processes that will be able to get more information and to bring legal accountability for those who committed misconduct.
Ron DeSantis is a smart, smart guy.
I think this is the right thing to do, so I applaud him for doing it.
But it's also politically probably the single smartest thing that Ron DeSantis can do.
Because Donald Trump's biggest weakness in a GOP primary is not actually his mouth.
Oh, he says mean things.
No, people actually kind of get a kick out of that.
It's not his Twitter.
He's not on Twitter.
Well, he's on Twitter.
He's just not using it now, even after Elon Musk took over.
It's COVID.
That's the weakness.
That's the way that Ron DeSantis can position himself to the right of Donald Trump.
That's the way that Ron DeSantis can counter the claims that he's a squish and a moderate and a never Trump candidate and all of the criticisms that are going to come along with him by virtue of his place in the race and as the candidate who isn't Donald Trump and by virtue of the people that DeSantis is attracting.
The never-Trumpers, the liberals, and the squishes.
And he's attracting those people, through no fault of his own, because he's not Donald Trump.
And so he's got to figure out a way to tell the conservatives and the base, no, I'm with you.
I'm a conservative guy.
The COVID vaccine issue, the fact that we were lied to about safety of the vaccine, we were lied to about the efficacy of the vaccine, we were forced in most of the country to take the vaccine...
If he can really go after the people who peddled the vaccine, that's going to go a long way for DeSantis.
Speaking of those people, our old pal Dr.
Fauci is back in the news.
Dr.
Fauci appeared on Chris Wallace's CNN show.
You didn't catch it?
I'm not surprised.
Nobody did.
I assume many more people will see this clip on my show than saw it on Chris Wallace's show on CNN. But in that show...
Dr.
Fauci explained how difficult it was to work for President Trump because Trump was just such an irresponsible purveyor of medical misinformation.
What do you think of Donald Trump?
Well, I don't want to get into the politics of it, so it is irrelevant what I think of Donald Trump.
What do you think of him from a public health standpoint?
Well, you know, I had difficulty in that administration because what was happening is that it became very clear that things were being said by the president, those around him, which were just not based on any scientific fact and data.
In fact, it was contrary to what the data was showing.
And, you know, I felt very uncomfortable about having to publicly get up at the White House press room and being put on the spot to directly disagree.
I have such a great deal of respect for the office of presidency that it just made me very uncomfortable.
But I had to do it, Chris, because I couldn't stand there and be complicit in saying hydroxychloroquine works when it doesn't.
You know, bleach works.
It doesn't.
And that's how I evolved, essentially, in the public enemy number one of the far right.
That's all it is.
I heard the president say that we should use bleach to get rid of COVID-19, and I couldn't stand there and allow that to happen.
So I'm just a reasonable guy.
Except, except, that never happened.
That never happened.
I know that most people, the liberals in this country, certainly, and even many conservatives, Believe that Donald Trump once said that we should treat COVID-19 with bleach.
That did not happen.
That was just completely made up.
It's a lie made up by the media and promoted by Dr.
Fauci.
Here is what Donald Trump said.
Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light...
And I think you said that hasn't been checked, but you're going to test it.
And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do, either through the skin or in some other way.
And I think you said you're going to test that, too.
Sounds interesting.
Right.
And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute.
And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning?
Because you see it gets on the lungs and it...
There's a tremendous number, so it'd be interesting to check that, so that you're going to have to use medical doctors with.
But it sounds interesting to me.
The new headline is, Trump asks people to go outside.
That's dangerous.
Here we go.
Same old group.
Here we go.
Same old group.
Where in there did Donald Trump talk about bleach?
Donald Trump said that there's a way to use light to treat these viruses and that you can do it by injection.
And you can tell that he's sort of stumbling around for what he means by the injection.
But he comes back to then the light.
You know, I'm telling people to go outside.
I'm suggesting this UV light kind of treatment.
He never says the word bleach, even when he's talking about a disinfectant.
He's not necessarily...
I don't even know why you would jump to think that he's talking about bleach.
First of all, people always say, light is a great disinfectant, right?
That's why that's an idiom in our culture.
He's talking about all these different ways to treat COVID that were backed up by studies.
When we're talking about the light and inject, you can inject it, sort of.
It's not that you exactly inject light, but you can direct light down into your lungs to treat cancers, to treat viruses.
I mean, there's...
In fact, you can use it to treat COVID. There was a study just came out, it was published here on Cedars-Sinai Research, showing that reduced viral loads are seen in COVID-19 patients treated with UVA light, doing exactly what Donald Trump said.
Long after Donald Trump said it, this was published in 2021.
In fact, even PolitiFact admits that when Joe Biden says Donald Trump told people to drink bleach and that would make them safe from COVID, they admit that's mostly false.
They say that's not what Donald Trump was talking about.
Donald Trump did not explicitly recommend ingesting a disinfectant like bleach, of course.
And then they go and they...
Admit what Donald Trump said right there.
That's PolitiFact.
That's a left-wing organization.
The whole thing was just completely made up.
Donald Trump was advocating a very reasonable medical intervention that actually turned out to work very, very well, even as Cedars-Sinai admitted.
He had never used the word bleach, not even once.
He wasn't referring to that.
It was a total lie from the media that Dr. Fauci today is still peddling.
And he wonders why we don't believe him.
The reason I bring up that whole story One is because whenever doctors Fauci's in the news, it's a good opportunity to do my Dr.
Fauci voice.
I miss him, don't you?
No, I don't really miss him.
But two, it's got to get you thinking about other news stories, and it's got to get you thinking about other genius experts in the lab coats with the neckties.
If they can make you believe, not even just make the liberals believe, if they can make you a conservative, sort of kind of believe that Donald Trump talked about injecting bleach to treat COVID, They can get you to believe pretty much anything.
That had no basis in reality.
And even, I suspect, most conservatives believed that was true.
Remember when there was that line back in 2008 where the media said, Sarah Palin thinks that she can see Russia from her house?
That was made up.
It was a joke.
It was a joke from Saturday Night Live.
And people attributed it to Sarah Palin.
If they can get you to believe...
I'm not putting the emphasis here on what they can get you to believe.
I'm saying if they can get you to believe it, think about the sort of trance that the rest of the country is in.
Because of the lives of these very powerful actors.
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Everybody's blaming Trump.
It's Trump's fault for everything.
Mitch McConnell was just asked about why the Republicans did so poorly in the midterms.
Now that not only is election day over, but the special election, the runoff in Georgia is over.
And who does McConnell blame?
He blames Trump.
We ended up having a candidate quality time.
Anybody remember who mentioned that back in August?
Look at Arizona.
Look at New Hampshire.
And a challenging situation in Georgia as well.
We did, by we I mean the Senate Leadership Fund, did intervene in two primaries, in Alabama and in Missouri.
And I do think we have an opportunity to relearn one more time.
You have to have quality candidates to win competitive Senate races.
We went through this in 2010, 2012, Christine O'Donnell, Sharon Angle, Todd Akin, Richard Murdoch, and unfortunately revisited that situation in 2022.
Our ability to control the primary outcome was quite limited in 22 because of the support of the former president proved to be very decisive in these primaries.
Did you catch that?
No, not the blaming Trump.
No, not the candidate quality thing, which to me is quite overstated.
In a year where John Fetterman was sent to the U.S. Senate, I don't really want to hear about candidate quality.
I think there were probably some other issues at play.
They ran a man who couldn't speak and didn't show up on the campaign trail and had a radical insane record and wanted to shut down fracking in an important Rust Belt state.
I don't want to hear about candidate quality.
I think that's really overstated.
But that's not the part I'm directing your attention to.
Did you hear the part where Cocaine Mitch said that he had a little bit of trouble controlling the primary outcomes?
I thought the whole purpose of the primary was so that the people have their voice heard, and they pick their nominee, and then the nominee goes on and faces the Democrat.
Who is controlling the primary outcomes?
This is where we're at a little bit of trouble controlling the primary outcomes because of the presence of the horrible president of the race.
So it's Trump's fault.
Because he backed some of the wrong candidates, and he did not allow the GOP leadership to pick the primary outcomes.
With the GOP, the Republicans are supposed to be largely hands-off in the primaries.
You're supposed to let the Republicans at the local level decide this sort of thing.
That's not how it works.
That's not how it works at all.
They want to control the primaries.
They don't want conservatives really to have a choice.
And Mitch McConnell says, look, we want to control that so that we have good candidates who can beat the Democrats.
Yeah, fine.
I get it.
I want good candidates, too.
But I don't want just some squish.
I don't want to send some Democrat to Washington with a red tie on.
And I'm not convinced.
I'm not convinced for one second that candidate quality is the reason that the races didn't turn out well in Arizona, which was bedeviled by election shenanigans.
I'm not convinced that election, or candidate quality rather, was totally the problem elsewhere in the country either.
We need to control the party.
Okay, well, speaking of control, the conservatives now are trying to take back a little bit of control, at least in the House.
Kevin McCarthy...
He's a moderate sort of establishment type in House leadership.
He probably will be the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
But he is facing a challenge.
The challenge will come from Andy Biggs, a Republican congressman from Arizona.
He is running against Kevin McCarthy.
McCarthy won the Republican nomination to become Speaker.
They've already had that.
He beat Biggs by a vote of 188 to 31.
Biggs, though, says that he is going to run anyway in the main race.
So it could be very, very interesting to see, because the Republicans will have a razor-thin majority, it will be interesting to see if Biggs' presence will upset the numbers enough that, who knows, you could have maybe, you could have a Democrat coming together with some Republicans to try to win the speakership.
It remains to be seen, but the reason Biggs is doing this, Biggs runs the House Freedom Caucus, is he says that McCarthy's leadership as Speaker of the House would entrench the establishment uniparty in Congress, the sense that the Republicans don't really Maybe they yell and they scream and they make a big noise about what they're doing, but when push comes to shove, the really crucial matter is they squish.
That remains to be seen if bigs can convince enough people to come on over to that side.
But you are seeing right now, I think this is what a lot of the anti-Trump rhetoric is about.
The establishment squishy lib side of the GOP was cast into the outer darkness in 2016.
And they were furious and they hated that Trump was the nominee and they hated that he won the presidency in some cases.
And they were just so, so angry to be out of power.
And they now see this as their opportunity finally to get rid of Trump.
And so DeSantis is looking great right now.
And that might be the end of the story.
The end of the story might be that Trump had his moment and now he's going to fade away.
And younger politicians are going to rise up in the form of Ron DeSantis or somebody else.
That could be the end of the story.
But I suspect a lot of the lingering support for Donald Trump, and I feel it within myself, a lot of it is because...
All the right people hate Trump.
And so it's not really even about this policy or that policy.
Or this politician was better on this issue.
Or this guy was...
It's just this gut sense, which I think is justifiable, that all the right people hate Donald Trump.
And all the right people love Trump's opponents or are willing to support Trump's opponents.
And that does tell you something.
Whether that is enough to push Trump over the edge...
Not so sure.
But it does tell you something about what Trump represents in American politics.
People are trying to take things into their own hands and throw off the settled, established political establishment.
Speaking of taking things into one's own hands, an amazing story.
Just saw it today.
So a Nevada woman was attending a party.
She and a friend pull up outside the house that this party is going to take place at.
I guess they got there a little bit early.
So they're sitting in the car and as they're waiting, two men with guns come up and throw them out of the car and try to steal the car.
It's a carjacking.
So one of the men grabs this lady's shirt, pulls her out of the car, gets into the car and he puts his gun down on his lap, I guess while he's starting the car, putting it into gear.
While he does that, the woman takes the gun and runs off with it.
At this point, the man trying to steal the car starts running after her, tackles her, at which point she puts a bullet in his head and the man stops attacking her because he doesn't have a head anymore.
And I read this story, and a lot of people read that.
They say, oh, it's always nice when stories have a happy ending.
And this does have a relatively happy ending, in the sense that the innocent party was not killed.
There was justice done.
The woman defended herself.
And it's not even like she ran away and then took aim and fired at him.
He was continuing to attack her, so she was totally justified, obviously.
But it's always sad.
Crime is sad.
I feel sorry for criminals in the way I feel sorry for a sick person.
Because they're just not doing the right thing and they're harming others and themselves and their own immortal souls.
But the reason the story struck me is, why did this guy chase the woman?
This guy was lucky to get away with his life.
She ran away.
He could have just taken the car.
But no, he got out and chased her to get his gun back.
And then tackled her.
She's got a gun.
He thinks she just doesn't know how to use a gun.
And then his head gets blown off.
Why?
This guy must have felt so confident that nobody would stop him from doing bad things.
And this is what happens when the political order spirals out of control.
Much of politics is about managing social expectations.
The Second Amendment exists not because of some high-minded philosophy from the Enlightenment in America.
Not because people want to go hunting or something like that.
Not because...
That's not the primary purpose or political effect of the Second Amendment.
The primary purpose and political effect of the Second Amendment is to keep people polite.
Right?
To keep the government polite and to keep your neighbors polite and to keep you polite.
Because if you are walking around in a country where people can defend themselves, you're going to be less inclined to try to take advantage of people.
If you're walking around in a country where there's strong law and order, you're going to be less inclined to commit crimes because you know you're going to get caught and you're going to pay the price.
And what has happened is as our political order has unraveled, you've seen a complete resetting of people's expectations.
And that is tragic for everybody.
It's tragic for victims.
It's tragic for the criminals, too.
Because these criminals are emboldened to engage in this risky, insane sort of behavior.
And the end of that is going to be them getting their heads blown off.
In a lot of cases.
The end of that is going to be our society getting its head blown off if we don't get serious again, okay?
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Talk to your friends.
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Speaking of firearms, there was a major bomb at movie theaters over the weekend.
This would be a movie called To the End.
It is a documentary about climate change featuring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
This movie opened in 120 theaters.
Do you know how much money the movie brought in?
I've never seen numbers like this before.
I've been in Hollywood.
I've worked in the media for a long time.
120 theaters had the movie.
The movie brought in $9,667.
That is no money.
It brought in statistically zero money.
This was directed by a woman named Rachel Lears.
Rachel Lears' previous movie was on Netflix.
It's called Knock Down the House.
It also featured AOC. And the way you knew this movie was a real doozy is if you go to Rotten Tomatoes to look at that movie, her previous movie had a critic score of 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and an audience score of 11%.
So, especially if you're talking about political content, when a movie has a high critic score, that's usually a bad sign.
When a movie has a low audience score, that's usually a bad sign.
And when the delta between the critics and the audience score is very, very great, you know that you have got just a primo piece of Democrat propaganda.
So, for this movie, the climate change movie, to the end, the critic score is 83%.
So it's much lower than her previous AOC movie.
And as I chose you, man, even the critics couldn't totally get behind this one.
And there is no audience score.
Because no one saw it.
So there aren't enough people reviews, audience reviews, to figure that out.
There's no appetite for this stuff, which is very encouraging.
Because if you just read the New York Times and watched CNN and listened to your teachers in your liberal schools and listened to the government, you would believe that people were truly...
On the edge of their seats, waiting for the nuclear, well not nuclear, I guess, solar apocalypse.
Waiting for the environmental disaster.
The world's going to end in five years.
But no one cares.
No one believes it.
Nobody cares.
It is contrived.
It is a lie that we are being told.
It's a bill of goods that we're being told.
I'm not even saying it's a bill of goods about the environment stuff.
I mean, I don't even know what the story is about the environment.
They said that the world was cooling, and we were headed for an ice age, and all the top scientists said it, and all the media said it.
And they said it was warming, and we're going to all go extinct really soon.
And then they said it's just kind of doing stuff.
It's just changing.
That's going to kill us.
And they keep pushing forward the date of when the world is going to end.
And so I don't even know what the thesis is.
But the bill of goods that they are selling us.
This is a top issue.
This is not a top issue for anybody.
Nobody actually cares.
Don't be put in that trance.
They can convince you.
You, who watched the clip of Donald Trump, you watched him not tell people to inject themselves with bleach.
And they convinced you that he told you to inject yourself with bleach.
They put you in a trance.
It's a form of hypnosis.
Do not let them do that on these other issues.
Do not let them do that on climate change or anything else.
It's a real art, this art of deception.
Speaking of the art of deception, it's going to be one of my best transitions ever.
Daily Wire is just breaking some news now.
We've had an investigative reporter, Bree Dale, on this story for a while now.
And it's a really quirky, strange story.
One attorney is describing the story as a high-tech heist.
And the broad strokes, I encourage you to go to dailywire.com and read the story.
The broad strokes of it are that people are stealing, they seem to be stealing the priceless art from the Vatican without taking the physical art.
They're doing it, it would seem, through these corrupt kind of licensing deals such that, here's how I'll explain it.
If I were to put a book together of all that beautiful art that's owned by the Vatican right now, I would have to license the art from the Vatican.
We're from some intermediary company between me and the Vatican.
So there was a company that wanted to print some photos of the Vatican art.
They go and they see that the Vatican art was listed in this book.
And so they contradicted this company that put out the book.
It was called Scripta Moneant.
And said, oh, okay, how do we get the rights to these pictures?
And they said, okay, well, you've got to do it with this collaboration that we've got with the Vatican Museum's director, Monsignor Paolo Nicolini.
And so Scripta said, here, don't worry, here's how we'll take care of it.
Just send us $550,000 and then send a cash wire in the amount of $82,500.
Cash wire.
And then we'll be able to get you this art.
Now, what our reporters seem to uncover is that some of this money...
It looked like it was going directly to the Monsignor.
Well, that's kind of weird.
And the Vatican didn't seem to know that this was being licensed out.
Anyway, it's a whole convoluted story.
Give it a read.
I find this sort of thing very, very fascinating because something somewhere here doesn't make a lot of sense.
It would seem to be some kind of financial corruption somewhere or gross incompetence.
But people are making hundreds and thousands of dollars, probably millions of dollars, Off of art that is owned by the Vatican.
The Vatican doesn't really seem to be getting that money.
It doesn't really seem to care that it's not.
The reason I bring up that story, other than it's kind of an interesting investigative piece that Daily Wire uncovered, is to show you how the corruption works.
Use the Catholic Church as an example.
The Catholic Church scandals in recent years What are the scandals?
It's the sex scandals, of course.
And they're very scandalous.
There's no doubt about that.
But when you look into the actual abuse that the Catholic Church and members of the clergy engaged in, you will notice that the Catholic sex abuse scandal is no worse, no more widespread in terms of its numbers than sex abuse among any other religious group.
You remember the Southern Baptist Convention had a big one just a few years ago.
Big sex abuse scandal.
There have been sex abuse scandals in the Hasidic community.
Just in every religious group there are these scandals.
Furthermore, Sex abuse in the Catholic Church is much less prevalent than sex abuse in public schools.
So these edgy atheists and leftists and secularists, they always want to make snickering jokes about those pedo priests, those little child diddling priests.
Well, okay, if you're going to make those jokes, you should make those jokes much more frequently about public school teachers.
People will be very offended.
They'll say, that's a horrible thing.
No, there are plenty of great public school teachers, plenty of great priests, the vast majority of them.
It doesn't downplay the abuse.
People really have been abused by priests and teachers and everything.
But it's just so, that's what people focus on, right?
The much more widespread sorts of corruption.
These subtle little things.
A guy maybe paid off this guy and it was some cash under the table.
There was a trend I noticed in recent years of whenever anyone started to look into the Vatican Bank and some of the corruption that was going on at the Vatican Bank, Those people would always find themselves on the outs.
Maybe they'd get accused of sex abuse.
Maybe they'd be accused of something else.
But it was very hard to look into the corruption of the Vatican Bank.
That's the kind of subtle corruption that you see.
Here's a great example of this.
The New York Times.
We know New York Times is corrupt.
We know the press is corrupt.
But they're not just corrupt on the big-ticket, sensationalist, top-headline items.
It's all the little stuff.
New York Times just ran a piece on the most stylish people in the country.
And do you know who made the list?
John Fetterman.
John Fetterman, the senator-elect from Pennsylvania.
This man who is...
I don't want to be mean and sort of make fun of his appearance, but he's...
He's kind of a big...
He's an interesting looking guy.
And when we talk about his style, the man is not a Gucci model.
The guy wears big oversized hoodies and gym shorts.
And he's generally kind of unkempt and he can wear running shoes.
And he's not...
He's not Marcello Mastriani.
So why did the New York Times say that he's an icon of style?
Do you think he's very stylish?
No.
Does the New York Times think he's stylish?
No.
Does John Fetterman think that he's stylish?
No.
Nobody does.
That's why.
They are dead set on telling you That John Fetterman is stylish because they are dead set on transgressing and subverting everything that you believe, everything that you know to be true.
It's a power play.
If they can tell you, this is the end of 1984, I know it's an overused example, but too bad.
If they can tell you to say that 2 plus 2 equals 5, and they can make you say that, and they can make you even believe that in some cases, then they have total power over you.
They're not listing John Fetterman in their stylish collection of people despite his lack of style and fashion.
They're doing it because of his lack of style and fashion.
They're doing it because they know it's a lie.
They're doing it because they call good evil and evil good and truth falsehood and falsehood truth and they call beautiful...
Images and fashion and art, ugly.
And ugly images and fashion and art, beautiful.
They're so dishonest.
The Washington Post just had a similar sort of attack.
They came out...
And they were describing the Twitter files releases, which they are doing their best to downplay.
And it's why I think Elon Musk is releasing it so slowly and so consistently, so that the media can't just come out and shut the whole thing down and say, oh, it's nothing, look away, nothing to see here.
But he keeps it in the news, despite them saying it's a nothing burger, nothing to see here, move on, move on.
So, Washington Post comes out and they say...
They're talking about Yoel Roth, former head of safety and trust.
And they say, his communications with other Twitter officials have been posted in recent days as part of what Musk calls the Twitter files, a series of tweets by conservative journalists Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss.
So they're trying to downplay excellent journalism, much better journalism than anything the Washington Post has put out.
They're trying to downplay the journalism by Taibbi and Barry Weiss.
But the most insane part of that is they call them conservative journalists.
Matt Taibbi is an atheist, former contributing editor to Rolling Stone.
Barry Weiss is a lesbian, former staff editor at the op-ed page of the New York Times and a bunch of other liberal places.
I like their work.
I mean, obviously they're doing very good work on the Twitter files and I like some of their other work as well.
If those two people are conservatives, I don't know what conservative means.
They're obviously not conservatives.
All that is meant by conservative now, as the Washington Post and the Libs are using it, is just people we don't like.
They're saying the Twitter files, a series of tweets by people that we don't like, Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss.
That's all it means.
You're all conservatives now.
This is how Bill Maher and Joe Rogan and all the rest of these guys, and Elon Musk for that matter, have become conservatives.
None of these people are particularly conservative.
All of these people voted for Barack Obama.
All of these people, by any reasonable measure, would be on the left.
But because of the dishonesty of the media, Because of the dishonesty of the media, many of them have moved further to the right.
And because of the dishonesty of the media, people will refer to them as being on the right.
Now, I'm imploring you, do not miss out on our last Daily Wire backstage of the year.
That would be tonight, 7, 6 o'clock central.
From the red wave that was not, to Elon dropping the Twitter files, the rest of the gang and I will be discussing the most important stories of the day and the year.
Witness the festivities and join me, Ben, Matt, Drew, the God King Jeremy Boring, for a very merry backstage.
You do not want to miss it, so tune in tonight, 7, 6 central, dailywireplus.com.
We will see you there.
Speaking of definitions, the Cambridge Dictionary, sort of the younger stepbrother of the Oxford Dictionary.
No one ever cites the Cambridge Dictionary.
It's always the Oxford English Dictionary.
But anyway, the Cambridge Dictionary has just updated its definition of woman.
Here we go.
You know, I think we all know.
Okay, here, what's their definition?
Their definition of woman now includes, as one of those subsets, An adult who lives and identifies as female, though they have been said to have a different sex at birth.
First problem with this, who's they?
You're talking about a single individual, but now you're using they.
But the Oxford English Dictionary tells me that he is the single gender-neutral pronoun.
So already you see the transgenderism in the definition.
Before they say anything about what a woman is, it's just the use of they does that.
And they say, what's a woman?
A woman is an adult who lives and identifies as female, though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.
Merriam-Webster did something differently.
Merriam-Webster says a woman can be someone who has a gender identity that is the opposite of male.
So it could be a man, but as long as his gender identity is the opposite of male, he is a woman.
So what do we do about this?
The conservative response to date to the people changing all the definitions is what?
It's to pull out our definitions.
So, okay, according to the 2022 dictionary, a woman means a man who thinks he's a woman.
But, well, I've got my dictionary from 1992, or 2002, or even 2012.
And that dictionary says that a man is not a woman.
Or whatever.
And then we have all these debates.
But my dictionary says this.
But my dictionary says that.
And it is the recourse in argument of a child.
This is the sort of thing that you do when you're a freshman in college and you're having a bull session late at night and you're arguing over some big question and you just try to be as pedantic as possible and you pull up some line.
Well, in this textbook, who cares?
That doesn't tell me.
A woman is not a woman because it says so in the dictionary.
Dictionaries can be helpful.
They're one piece of evidence.
I've gone back and said this many times when we talk about transgenderism.
Because the other strategy we have when we talk about transgenderism is what?
We say, well, a woman is...
Whatever biology says about a woman.
A woman is two X chromosomes.
And that's a woman.
And if you don't have two X chromosomes, you're not a woman.
That's not all a woman is.
That presumes that the physical world is the fundamental grounding of reality.
And we know that that's not true.
The metaphysical world certainly has something to say about reality, too.
My soul has something to say about my reality, doesn't it?
What is a woman?
Every dictionary in the world could say that a woman is a man who thinks that he's a woman.
It still wouldn't be true.
The fact of womanhood is more fundamental than the dictionary.
The fact of womanhood cannot be changed by playing word games.
And that's what we need to say.
Do you think that if you pull out the dictionary, the old dictionary, and you show the liberals and you say, no, look right here on the dictionary, it says that a woman's not a man, that they will care?
They don't care.
They don't care.
There's no argument to be had there when you're speaking different languages, when you're using language in ways that are totally divorced from one another.
Our answer has to be, what is a woman?
A woman is a woman.
A woman is a woman.
A woman is the complement of a man.
A woman is defined by the fact that she is not a man, but that she complements a man.
A polar bear is not a man either, but a polar bear doesn't complement a man.
But woman and man are made as complementary beings.
That implies certain roles.
That implies certain duties in society.
That implies that men are actually less apt to do certain things than women are, and vice versa.
That implies a whole host of political and social and biological and theological and all these other things, realities that conservatives don't want to say.
Stop playing their game.
Stop playing their stupid little definition game.
They don't care.
They don't care about you pointing to a dictionary.
And we shouldn't care when they point to their fake dictionaries.
We just need to say, no, woman is a woman.
You're just wrong.
I'm reminded of the apocryphal legend of St.
Nicholas at the Council of Nicaea.
And Arius, the Heresiarch at Nicaea, is denying the divinity of Christ.
This is all according to the legend.
And St.
Nicholas, what does he do?
Does he raise his hand and say, actually, you know, here's my dictionary that shows you what the actual divine nature of Christ is?
No, he stands up and gives Arius a smack across the face.
And it's a corrective smack.
Now, I'm not advocating violence, okay?
But I am advocating a sort of rhetorical violence.
Or at the very least, a rhetorical bluntness.
When these libs come to us and they say, well, look at the dictionary.
Well, actually, my professor said that a man can be a woman.
Actually, there was a study that shows that the brains of the blah, blah, blah, whatever.
Just say, nah, you're wrong.
You're wrong.
A man is a man.
Well, what do you think a woman is?
I think a woman's a woman, and I think we all know what that means.
Well, how about you prove it?
How about I don't?
How about I just treat women like women and men like men?
And how about you shut up?
How about that?
I'm all for interesting intellectual scholarly discourse.
I love it.
I love it more than most people.
I'm all for debating big ideas.
But I'm not for babble and nonsense, okay?
I'm not for anarchism.
There's a great scene of Ronald Reagan.
He was giving a speech.
Ronald Reagan, as warm, open-minded a guy as you could possibly get, so polite, so chivalrous.
But there was some nagging lunatic just belching out some kind of heckling from the corner.
A whole group of these lunatic students.
The same sort of people who today would deny that a woman is a woman.
And Ronald Reagan is giving a speech.
He says, well, you know, I'm...
Oh, won't you just shut up?
That's just what you say.
There's no winning the debate by shoving different dictionaries in our faces.
A woman's a woman.
We all know it.
And people who don't understand that should just shut up.
Okay?
Simple as that.
It's just crazy.
Crazy behavior.
Reminds me why the Oxford English Dictionary chose this word of the year.
It's really not just a word, it's a phrase.
I had never heard this phrase before.
Have you heard this phrase before?
Goblin mode?
Goblin mode.
Which, according to online voters on the Oxford English Dictionary website, what this term means is, quote, A type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy.
Typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.
93% of the votes cast went to goblin mode.
The other finalists were metaverse and the hashtag I stand with.
Those are funny terms too.
But 93% voted for goblin mode and I'm here for it.
I totally agree.
I think that is the word of the year.
And it won because the voters are recognizing that that actually describes our society today.
It's a society that is unapologetically self-indulgent.
Everything is just me, me, me.
Me, me, me and my subjective reality and my absolute solipsism and my lusts and my desires only to be affirmed constantly by everybody.
Me, me, me, me, me.
It's a lazy society.
I'm not exempting myself from this.
I'm not saying I'm holier than thou.
I doom scroll on social media apps as much as the next person.
But that's lazy and it's unhealthy.
Slovenly society.
We don't dress anymore.
People just wear athleisure.
Which should be absolutely banned from society.
I mean, I've owned a pair of sweatpants, okay?
I understand this is popular.
But we do it now in such a way that's so degrading.
We put on these kind of Bertolt Brecht, you know, potato sacks.
Part of that's because of COVID. We didn't leave the home.
But it's degrading.
You're a human.
You're good-looking people, okay?
Dress nicely.
We're greedy on the left and the right.
The left is greedy in that they want to steal all your money, and the right is greedy in that they exalt, or at least in recent decades have exalted, these movies.
Wall Street, Greed is Good, all the Ayn Rand stuff, everything.
And it's in a way that rejects social norms and expectations.
Everybody's revolutionary.
Everybody's just such a hyper-individualist.
We're just going to do whatever we want, society be damned.
Our popular art says that institutions are terrible and corrupting, and we need to reject institutions, reject family, reject the social roles that are open for us.
That'll make us happy.
It doesn't make us happy.
Happiness, take this survey for what it's worth, these multiple surveys, take them with a grain of salt, but they show happiness declining.
You're seeing life expectancy decline because of deaths of despair.
None of this stuff is good.
It's because we're all going into goblin mode.
And when you go into goblin mode, you're going to look like a goblin, but you don't want to be a goblin.
You're a man.
You're a woman.
Stand up.
Look.
Look respectable.
Do respectable things.
It won't make you feel good to be a goblin.
This is a good time of year to think about it because no matter how selfish and indulgent and lazy and degenerate people are throughout the year, something about Christmastime brings it into perspective.
Because at Christmastime, we at least remember The virtues and charms of family, of doing good, of giving to other people, of selflessness, of worshipping God, of just being put together and nice and not so greedy.
You don't want to be Ebenezer Scrooge, you want to be Bob Cratchit, right?
This is especially true at funerals.
You go to funerals and all of a sudden people cry at funerals, in part for those who have died, but in part for themselves.
Does he realize, oh shoot, I'm going to die someday.
And are people going to be saying, you know, here lies Michael.
He did whatever he wanted.
Ah, yes, Michael Knowles.
We all loved Michael so because he didn't care about anybody and he did exactly what he wanted all of the time and now he's dead.
You don't want people to say that about you.
Here lies Michael.
What a goblin he was.
Ah, he was in goblin mode his whole life.
You don't want to do that.
Goblin mode is the word of the year.
Yes, it is.
It should not be the word of next year.
The rest of the show continues now.
Mr.
Davies tells me we have a magnificent movie trailer that I have to see.
I have to focus all my powers of cultural perception on this to tell you what this is about.
