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Congressional Democrats try to ram through a nearly two-trillion-dollar, 4,155-page spending bill days before Christmas; Mitch McConnell says Republicans’ top priority is Ukraine; and a German juvenile court convicts a 97-year-old woman of having worked as a secretary for the Nazis at the age of 18.
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Early yesterday morning, the Congressional Appropriations Committee has released their spending proposal.
Lawmakers will now have to read, debate, and vote on the bill by Friday or the government will shut down.
The bill is 4,155 pages long.
Forget voting for a second.
Forget debating.
How exactly is anyone supposed to read 4,155 pages in three days?
The Iliad is roughly 700 pages.
The Divine Comedy is about 800.
War and Peace, about 1225 pages.
The Bible, roughly 1400 pages.
If between now and Friday.
You somehow managed to read the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, War and Peace, and the entire Bible.
You would still not have read as many pages as are contained in this spending bill.
Now let's say you somehow managed it.
You read all those books, and you threw in one extra book on top of that.
You threw in Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, just to get you over the 4,155 page mark.
Do you think that you would be able to organize your thoughts about those books?
Do you think that you would be able to debate the major themes and plot points raised by Homer, Dante, Tolstoy, Moses, Ezra, David, Isaiah, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Knowles, and 31 or so other writers in three days, four days if you include the day of the vote?
At which point, you decide whether or not to spend $1.7 trillion.
It's very difficult for people to conceptualize what trillion is.
That is $1.7 million.
I strongly suspect you would not be able to do that.
I don't think any of us would.
I also strongly suspect you are much more intelligent than the average congressman.
But then that's the point.
The lawmakers are never supposed to read these bills.
They are just supposed to rubber stamp them.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show, Mike.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Rene Tagg, who says, I have adult friends who don't have their driver's license, but have spent thousands of dollars on their Squishmallow collection.
It's genuinely very sad and concerning.
I'm just really happy that I can say I have no idea what a Squishmallow collection is.
In my mind, what I am picturing is a mashup of Mitt Romney, like Mitt Romney wearing the Michelin Man suit.
Like a big marshmallow version of Mitt Romney and the guys at the bulwark, you know, and...
All the libs and the squishes.
And so that sounds kind of cute, and maybe I get that little collection too.
But it is very sad when people are spending thousands of dollars on toys and not behaving like adults.
You should behave like an adult, okay?
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What is in this omnibus bill?
I don't know.
I didn't read the bill.
It came out yesterday and it's over 4,000 pages long.
So I'm not going to sit here and pretend like I read the bill.
No one has.
Not one person on earth has read this entire bill.
Now, what I can gather is in the bill based on the small sections of the bill that were proposed individually and the people who sponsored them, and based on the reporting of the handful of trustworthy journalists that are left in America.
The bill includes funding of the government through September of next year.
It boosts defense spending by $76 billion, so now total defense spending will be $858 billion, brings domestic spending...
It's got domestic spending of $773 billion.
Then we've got, well, we've got $45 billion in military and economic aid for Ukraine.
That's everyone's top priority, right?
We haven't given enough billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine.
Got to make sure, top of the line, we give many, many more billions.
This is more money, by the way, than even Biden requested.
Biden requested $37 billion.
What they're going to end up going with is $45 billion.
It includes $5 billion in earmarks for 3,200 projects.
I actually don't care about that so much.
That's just how laws are made.
Laws are made by saying, okay, Congressman, can I get your vote if I send a little bit of money to your district?
Hey, all right, Congressman, what if I—I know you're holding out firm.
Well, what if I build this bridge in your district?
Okay, that's fine.
And they got a really bad rap in 2008.
John McCain made a big issue about how terrible earmarks are.
But it was all BS.
John McCain only did that because he was a huge, big spending Republican on so many other issues.
And earmarks account for such an infinitesimally small portion of federal spending that he said, okay, I'm gonna make a big example out of earmarks and quote unquote pork barrel spending.
Meanwhile, John McCain is spending zillions of dollars on all sorts of other nonsense that he wants.
So I don't mind.
You can have your $5 billion.
It's a $1.7 trillion bill, $5 billion in basic politics, not as big a deal.
$47 billion for the National Institutes of Health because they've been so trustworthy and so effective in recent years, right?
What would we do without the NIH sending money overseas to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to fund gain-of-function research?
What would we do?
Oh, goodness.
What would we do if we weren't paying the salary of Dr.
Fauci?
Could you imagine what would happen then?
We might have a global pandemic or something.
So good that we're spending $47 billion on the NIH. A billion dollars for Puerto Rico's electrical grid.
$600 million to address water issues in Jackson, Mississippi.
Josh Hawley is pushing to have a ban on TikTok on government devices included in the omnibus, so that's a good thing, right?
There are certain things in the bill that are fine, and they add in these little good things as part of what is broadly a terrible bill.
And then, this is a tricky one, they've included in the spending bill something called the Electoral Count Reform Act, The Electoral Count Reform Act is a way to change the process for how presidential elections are certified.
And this is a terrible addition to the bill, but it's my favorite addition to the bill.
Because it proves that conservatives were right the whole time.
And we've been being gaslit by Democrats since Election Day 2020.
The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act...
It's a bill that was co-sponsored by Susan Collins, who's a liberal Republican, and Joe Manchin, who's a conservative Democrat.
And so it's supposed to be this bipartisan bill, and it amends our Electoral Count Act of 1887.
So this is the biggest overhaul to how presidential elections are conducted from the federal level in a very long time, about a century and a half.
And what it does is reaffirms that the vice president has only a ministerial role At the joint session of Congress where the Electoral College votes are counted.
So remember, last time, January 6th, there was all this chatter about what the vice president would do when the votes came in.
There were dueling slates of electors.
Some states didn't want to certify these votes.
There was a big fight.
And why?
Because the Democrats changed all of the election rules right before the election.
They used COVID as the excuse to do that.
But the way that they changed the election rules gave a huge advantage to Democrats.
And in some cases, like in the case of Pennsylvania, it violated the state constitution by using things like widespread mail-in ballots explicitly prohibited by the state constitution.
So there was all this question.
It wouldn't have been the first time that this happened in the U.S.
In the 1870s, there were also many questions about how the election was conducted.
And as a result of that, there was an electoral commission that had been appointed that...
This was the option preferred by Senator Cruz in 2020.
This was the option preferred by Representative Paul Gosar, for instance, and a number of other Republicans in the Congress.
It was all shot down.
Everyone knows then what happened the rest of the day.
January 6th, the worst day in the history of the world.
Well, anyway, this electoral reform act that is being wedged into the omnibus because the Democrats don't want to debate it on its own merits, this would amend that whole process.
And my favorite part of it is it proves that the Democrats were lying in 2020.
In 2020, what the Democrats said is the vice president does not have the ability to reject slates of electors.
The vice president does not have the ability to send electors back to the states to sort out who the state actually voted for.
The vice president does not have the ability not to certify the election.
That's what we were told by all the Democrats and by a lot of the libs on the Republican side.
Okay, it's a complex, historical, political, legal question, so what do I know?
Maybe there, except if all that's true...
Then why do you need to pass this new Electoral Account Reform Act?
If that's so clearly true that the Vice President doesn't have any actual power at the certification of presidential elections, then why do you need to change the law to take away his power to do anything at the certification of presidential elections?
It's an admission that they were lying or at least seriously overstating their case in 2020.
And so now what they're trying to do is streamline the process anymore such that if there are any shenanigans in the states, there are fewer ways for the people to come out and object to them.
Not good stuff, but it is something that we can come to expect.
Politicians who are in power want to stay in power.
And the Democrats in particular, who have done a much better job at rigging elections historically and certainly in recent years than Republicans have done, do not want the people to have much recourse to questioning the results of those elections.
If, for instance, many more states adopt, I guess most states at this point have electronic voting processes, and there are some questions about that, or some questions about the widespread mail-in ballots, or some questions about ballot harvesting, or some questions about fraud, or some questions about...
The precincts being shut down and people not being allowed to cast their ballots in an orderly way, and they have to put them in a separate box called Box 3 like we just saw in Maricopa County in 2022, then if this occurs during a presidential election, there will be less recourse for the people to object to that.
That is what they want.
There is such...
So there's so much in this omnibus bill.
And what the Congress is betting on, and what the Democrats in particular are betting on, is that people don't want a government shutdown They're going to get everything through in this bill.
It's going to probably be the only legislation that Congress passes for the next two years at this point.
Because we've got split power.
We've got a Republican House coming in.
Democrats still run the Senate.
Democrats have the White House.
So they're not going to actually do anything.
Instead of passing bills and debating them, like instead of just proposing the Electoral Count Reform Act and debating it and having that be an open vote, instead of just debating...
More spending for Ukraine instead of just debating more spending for the NIH. They're just going to throw it all in there.
They're going to all lump it in together.
And the Congress is going to basically say they had no choice but to vote for it.
And so we get more, more, more spending on crazier things.
And the American people don't get to say boo about it.
What else is in the bill?
This may be my favorite part of the bill.
I know I just said that the Electoral Account Reform Act is my favorite part.
This one might even beat that.
The $1.7 trillion omnibus bill designates a part of Washington, D.C., our nation's capital, is now going to be designated as Ukrainian Independence Park.
And there are now going to be signs around the park that include information on the importance of the independence, freedom, and sovereignty of Ukraine.
And the solidarity between the people of Ukraine and the United States.
I mean no offense to Ukraine.
I'm sure Ukraine is a great place.
I'd love to visit Kiev at some point.
I love the chicken dish that comes from there.
Does anybody really believe that the political status of Ukraine, whether it's a little bit more democratic, which it basically never has been, or it's a little more oligarchic, which it pretty much always has been, and whether the oligarchs lean more pro-Russia, which they for a very long time have, or if they lean a little bit more pro-Western, which they sometimes have, does anyone really believe that is a...
Matter of existential national importance to the United States.
Does anybody believe that?
No.
The only people who believe that work on Capitol Hill.
Not one other American really, really believes that.
The bill is being sponsored by...
Representative Victoria Sparks, who is Ukrainian, and she proposed the Ukrainian Independence Park Act of 2022.
And Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, who is one of the biggest squishies.
He's a Republican nominally, but he's effectively a Democrat.
Huge squish.
Co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus.
And all of this got me thinking.
We have a Congressional Ukraine Caucus?
How many caucuses do we have?
Why do we have a Congressional Ukraine Caucus?
I think my family is Italian.
I like Italy.
I like the Italian people.
This is no knock on Italy or the Italian people.
I don't think we need to designate a part of our nation's capital to being Italy square about the importance of Italy to America.
I don't think Italy matters all that much to America.
Italy is a very important place, really, for the whole of Western civilization and our history and how it developed.
But the political status of Italy at any given point in time right now has absolutely no bearing on the United States.
And I don't think we need to designate part of our nation's capital to Italy.
We can have a neighborhood.
We can have Little Italy and you go eat some Italian food.
I don't think we need to have a federal law that sets aside part of the nation's capital for Italy or for Ukraine or for any of this.
Why do we have a Ukraine caucus?
Why is it that the American people pretty much don't care about the political status of most countries outside the United States, including Ukraine?
But on Capitol Hill, the Democrats are completely head over heels for Ukraine.
They all change their Twitter and Facebook bios to include the Ukrainian flag for some reason.
Absurd, by the way.
You should have the American flag in your bio, not the flag of any other foreign nation, no matter how sympathetic we might be with that nation.
But a lot of Republicans do, though.
The whole Republican establishment is gaga over Ukraine.
Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader, leader of the Republicans in the Senate, has said that the top priority for Republicans is Ukraine.
Making sure the Defense Department can deal with the major threats coming from Russia and China.
Providing assistance for the Ukrainians to defeat the Russians.
That's the number one priority for the United States right now, according to most Republicans.
That's sort of how we see the challenges confronting the country at the moment.
That's the top issue, according to Mr.
Cocaine himself.
So what does this show?
What it shows is not just that those guys on Capitol Hill are totally crazy.
There are a lot of things, but they're not totally crazy.
They usually have a reason for doing what they're doing.
They are very rational actors, politicians in both parties, inasmuch as they're very, very good at keeping themselves in power.
They have an uncanny ability for cold calculation.
So what is the calculation here on Ukraine?
Ukraine?
I think it shows you what a lot of people have suspected from the beginning, which is that all this talk about the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine, that's a bunch of nonsense.
Ukraine is a border state, a border nation.
It has been one for a long time.
It is a battleground for fights between the East and the West, between Russia and Europe and the United States.
And the reason that this war broke out in the first place...
Is because in Ukraine, 10 years ago, you had a pro-Russian leader, and the U.S. didn't like that very much, and so Western powers put pressure on Ukraine and helped to fund and encourage discontent in Ukraine that did already exist.
That ultimately led to the Maidan Revolution and ousted the pro-Russian leader and put in a more pro-Russian leader, ousted that guy.
It's very confusing when you're talking about Ukraine.
The Maidan revolution then led to a more pro-Western government in Ukraine.
Then you started seeing a lot of talk about Ukraine joining the European Union, Ukraine joining NATO. Russia said that that would be an unacceptable security risk to have NATO come that close to its borders in that important a country.
And so then you saw Russia annex parts of Ukraine.
This is going back now eight years.
And then you saw The major war breakout earlier this year in Ukraine.
And what this tells me is Ukraine is not viewed as an independent nation, obviously by Russia, or by the United States and Europe.
Ukraine is being viewed right now as a theater of empire.
Russia says it openly.
The U.S. and the West say it implicitly.
When we say that Ukraine is the most important issue for Americans, what we're saying is that the American Western Empire is very important.
The American world order, where we are the top dog and we are governing the rules of the world, is very, very important.
And I'm not even disputing that.
That is the current world order that we have.
And they're saying we cannot allow Russia to encroach on Ukraine.
Why?
Not because Ukraine is this absolutely sovereign, independent nation.
Because...
Ukraine is a part of the broader imperial project for the U.S. and the West.
And we all know that to be the case.
I'm not even knocking it.
I'm not attacking that.
I'd rather we run the world than the Russians run the world or China run the world.
But that's what it is.
It is an imperial battle.
We like to think that we're living in the new modern times.
We're so different from all those terrible old state actors in the past.
Remember when they fought wars of empire and land conquest?
We're doing the exact same now.
Because that's a fact of politics.
That is just how people interact in the world.
And that's what we're seeing.
That's what Mitch McConnell means when he says it's the most important thing.
It's the most important thing to what?
The American nation?
I don't think so.
I think it's the most important thing to the American empire.
Now, Rand Paul would disagree.
Rand Paul, who is much more interested in pulling back American influence abroad and focusing in on the problems that we've got here at home.
He asks the question, where...
Do the real threats to America lie?
I brought with me the Omni.
4,155 pages.
When was it produced?
In the dead of the night.
1.30 in the morning when it was released.
But what's the clamor?
The clamor is to vote.
Vote now.
Let's get it done.
Why are you standing in the way of spending?
Well, the real question is this.
What is more dangerous?
Are we at risk for being invaded by a foreign power if we don't put $45 billion into the military?
Or are we more at risk by adding to a $31 trillion debt?
I think the greatest risk to our national security is our debt.
The American people don't want this.
They're sick and tired of it.
They're paying for it through the nose with inflation.
Adding a trillion dollars to the deficit will simply fuel the fires that are consuming our wages and consuming our retirement plans.
It's a terrible system.
Someone needs to stand up.
We're standing up and we're going to say no.
Preach!
Preach Rand!
What's amazing about Rand's statement here is that he actually, I believe, got the number wrong on military spending.
He referred to the $45 billion number instead of the $76 billion number.
I think he confused the boost to American military spending with the boost to Ukraine spending.
And it's not a knock on him.
One, it's very confusing and the reports are a little bit ambiguous.
And it shows you the heart of the problem, which is that The Dems drop this 4,000 plus page bill, and they say, okay, you've got to vote on it in three days, where even a United States senator doesn't get a chance to vote on that.
And when you look at the boost to military spending, you've got boost to military spending for our country, boost to military spending for other countries, and they say, without this, without the 76 billion extra dollars that we get in American military spending, that country is going to be at existential risk.
I don't know.
I think Rand Paul is right.
I think that our debt...
poses a far larger long-term risk than some marginal increase in defense spending.
I remember 10 years ago, Mitch Daniels, then the governor of Indiana, a lot of people thought he was going to run for president.
He said, we're facing a new red menace.
This time it's not the commies, it's not the Soviets exactly, it's the debt.
It's a red menace consisting of ink.
If we manage our own country in such an irresponsible way that we become more and more dependent on China to pay for all of our flights of fancy, and we open up our borders, and we allow domestic discord to tear our country apart, then Russia's going to be the least of our worries, guys.
We've got a lot more problems a lot closer to home.
Very often when you want to improve your position in the world, it's best not just to look out at everybody else, but it's good to look inward and see how you can improve yourself.
One great way to take account of your spiritual life would be to check out Bible in the Air with Fr.
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Speaking of threats, the people of the world, and especially Germany, can rest easy tonight.
A 97-year-old woman has been arrested and convicted of the crime.
That she was arrested for.
What is the crime?
A 97-year-old woman worked in a Nazi concentration camp back when she was 18 years old.
She was not firing guns.
She was not giving orders.
She was a secretary at a Nazi concentration camp at Stutthof, and she was 18 years old.
Now, because of her age...
She was actually tried in juvenile court.
A 97-year-old woman was tried in juvenile court because she was a secretary at the age of 18 when her country was in a state of total war.
She was given a two-year suspended jail sentence And she was found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 10,505 prisoners and the attempted murder of five other people.
And this is where, when you just see the headline, you say, this is really completely preposterous.
But then when you see what she's found guilty of, it makes it a little bit more morally complex.
Because...
This woman was 18 years old, working as a secretary for people who were doing very, very bad things.
10,000 plus people killed with her participation in that?
I don't know.
Part of me looks at that and says, I guess you should be held to account.
You feel bad for a 97-year-old woman, but you say, well, those 10,500 people, they didn't get a chance to live.
She got to live her whole life.
Then you say, can a 97-year-old woman really be held responsible for clerical work she did at the age of 18 when her country was in a state?
That seems unfair, too.
That seems sort of unjust.
What are we to make of this?
One, you have to ask yourself, what is the point of this?
At this point, what is the point of this prosecution?
She wasn't a commander.
She wasn't giving orders.
She wasn't carrying out orders, really.
She was just writing things on paper.
She was just a clerical functionary.
What is the point of this?
The point of this just to get one last ounce of justice or revenge?
What is the point to show that if you commit atrocities in war you'll be held to account by the victors even 80 years later?
Maybe.
Maybe it is.
And maybe it's just.
I'm not saying it isn't.
You know, if my grandpa died or grandma died in a concentration camp, I'd probably want that woman to actually serve time in jail.
She was given a suspended sentence.
I'd probably...
I don't care if she's 97.
I'd probably want her to go to jail.
I'd like to think that I would be able to have grace and forgive her and say, no, she shouldn't.
She's 97, whatever.
But I don't know.
I don't know what I would feel.
I love my grandparents.
But it does make you think...
About us right now.
Forget about World War II for a second.
Forget about the Holocaust.
Forget about this 97-year-old woman.
Just think about where we are right now.
Every year in the United States, we kill roughly 850,000 babies.
Since Roe v.
Wade was passed down from the Supreme Court, over 60 million babies were Have been killed in the United States.
That's ten times the number of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.
And that's what?
That's five times the number roughly of total victims of Hitler's terror.
How many people will be held to account for that?
How many abortion doctors?
How many people who handed down the law?
Furthermore, how many secretaries are there working right now at Planned Parenthood today?
Who are signing off the death warrants of all those little babies.
And what's going to happen 80 years from now?
I'm quite convinced that future generations will look back on our generation with moral horror at what we have done.
850,000 people a year, human beings, living human beings, the most innocent people among us, snuffed out every year in their mother's womb.
This is as horrific a crime as you can possibly imagine, and it's been going on since 1973, and it will now contract a little bit because of the Dobbs decision.
That's a lot of people, 60 million plus people.
How many people?
Because what this woman will say, and what her defenders will say is, well, she wasn't directly involved in the atrocities.
She was indirectly involved.
Okay, what about the people who were indirectly involved in the atrocities that we're seeing today?
People will look back on abortion.
Future generations will look back on it with the moral horror that we look back on slavery, that we look back on genocides, that we look back on all of these things.
What about the 97-year-old secretary who worked at Planned Parenthood decades from now?
What will we say about her?
What should we say about her?
I don't know.
I don't have an easy answer on it.
I don't have an easy answer on this 97-year-old Nazi secretary from when she was 18.
But I do think that people ought to take some stock of what they're doing right now because it's very easy to look back at the past and see the horrors that happened.
It's a lot harder to see it when you are living through it and when you, to more direct or less direct degrees, are participating in it.
A lot of people are going to look at this.
They'll say, doesn't Germany have anything more important to do right now than to go after a 97-year-old woman?
Aren't there more pressing issues?
A lot of people are looking right now at the U.S. Congress.
They're saying, aren't there more pressing issues than establishing Ukraine Independence Park in Washington, D.C.? There are more pressing issues.
Here's a pressing issue.
Right now, people are struggling financially because of Joe Biden's stupid policies.
On energy and spending and COVID that have caused inflation to skyrocket.
So spending power going through the roof, energy prices going through the roof.
The way that Joe Biden mismanaged the Ukraine situation.
Vladimir Zelensky, who reportedly might speak at Capitol Hill today, that remains sort of unclear as we're recording the show right now.
Vladimir Zelensky said that had Joe Biden not behaved as he had vis-a-vis Russia, that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine.
So Zelensky places blame for the Ukraine war on Joe Biden.
Because Joe Biden lifted sanctions on Putin's oil pipeline.
Because Joe Biden said that if Putin only invaded in a minor incursion, that that wouldn't be a huge deal.
So that's what we have.
And because of the cost of everything going through the roof, people don't have a lot of money.
One way that you can make a lot of money would be to not work in at least three states, maybe more.
Families of four, I've got a Daily Wire report on this right in my hands, families of four with neither parent working can receive welfare benefits worth in excess of six figures per year in Washington, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, according to a study from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
This previous analysis from the conservative think tank found that federal supplemental unemployment benefits, food stamp extensions, child tax credit payments, and other benefits offered in the aftermath of the lockdowns and the whole COVID regime could exceed $120,000 in multiple states.
And then even with the expiration of those supplemental programs, because you might say, okay, well, yeah, the government gave out a lot more money during COVID, but then after COVID, it all kind of went away, right?
No, there's a recent study that found that unemployment insurance and the dramatic recent expansion of Obamacare subsidies can exceed the national median income in 24 states for families with two parents and two children.
And this analysis was not just done by some random conservative think tank.
It was completed by UChicago econ professor Casey Mulligan and Heritage Foundation research fellow E.J. Antony.
Welfare benefits can exceed the median national income in roughly half the country.
Not a good set of incentives to have in your country.
I am not one of these Republicans who recoils at the very thought of the government spending any money to alleviate poverty or anything.
That doesn't bother me.
As you know very well, I'm not a libertarian.
I don't have any desire to live in some Ayn Rand, Atlas-shrugged future where we're all just industrialists and GDP is the most important thing in the world.
I have no problem with the government spending some money to help the poor.
But at a certain point, the free marketeers and the libertarians make a very good observation that when the government creates perverse incentives, then it leads to people in misery.
If the government...
Creates programs that will allow people to make more money by not working than they would by working.
That will be very, very bad.
Not just for the country, with regard to our terrible spending problem and our massive debt that imperils national security and our whole American future.
But it's bad for the people, too.
Man was made to work.
By the sweat of our brow, shall we eat our food?
And so when people are put into these welfare programs, these social safety nets can very quickly become spider webs that just entrap you, that get you stuck in them.
And that leads to the breakdown of family, in many cases, leads to the breakdown of the human spirit.
It degrades us.
It degrades us individually.
It degrades our families.
It degrades our whole society.
While we're spending $1.7 trillion, maybe we should take a look at that and say, we're going to help you if you're poor.
We're going to help you get back on your feet.
We're going to give you direct payments, as a matter of fact.
We're going to subsidize you having more kids.
I'm all for it.
We have a declining population.
I want people to have more kids.
But we are not going to create a system in which you make more money if you don't work.
That's not going to be good for anybody.
Speaking of families, Amy Grant...
Who is apparently a Christian music star.
I've never heard any of her songs, but she's apparently a Christian music star.
She has announced that she's going to host a lesbian wedding for her niece.
She's drawn some controversy for this.
But she said she's going to host this same-sex wedding for her niece.
And she said, look, Jesus told us there's two rules.
Love God above all else and love your neighbor.
And so it's very simple to me.
I want to love my neighbor and so I'm going to host my niece's same-sex wedding.
And this is a total cop-out.
It's taken completely out of context of the Gospels.
And it's not the right thing to do.
But it shows you how difficult it can be to resist this kind of stuff in our culture.
The reason I bring up the story is not to scold Amy Grant.
I don't know who Amy Grant is.
I don't really care.
It's to show you how difficult it can be.
How emotional manipulation can really, really screw up our politics.
More on that in a second.
First, though, we relaunched, or we recently launched for the first time, a brand new biblical series by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.
The series is called Exodus.
And in it, Jordan Peterson sits down with other scholars to read the book of Exodus and discuss what it means and why it remains significant thousands of years after it was written.
Scholars at the table include Dennis Prager, Jonathan Pajot, and many more.
The first few episodes are available to stream right now on Daily Wire+.
There are more new episodes coming soon.
Trust me, you've got to see this series.
You must be a member to watch, so head on over to dailywire.com slash Knowles to become a member and watch Exodus today.
Amy Grant, this apparently Christian music star, is going to host a lesbian quote-unquote wedding for her niece.
It's a hard case.
It's a very hard case.
But in doing it, In saying, look, I'm told to love my neighbor, and so I'm going to make an exception here, and I'm going to host my niece's gay wedding, quote-unquote.
Even if I disagree with it, that's what I'm going to do.
That's not an example of a charitable, loving action and exception to one's other sorts of views on things.
It undermines the entire argument.
It undermines the entire worldview.
What the left is saying is that conservatives oppose gay marriage because we hate gay people.
We conservatives, we're just so hateful and we hate gay people.
We've never met a gay guy in our lives.
We just want to throw him off of buildings, right?
That's what we want to do.
No.
No, the reason that conservatives oppose gay marriage is because we recognize that marriage is This necessarily, intrinsically involves sexual difference.
And if you remove sexual difference, which is at the heart of marriage, then you haven't opened up marriage to include more people.
You have just destroyed the entire concept of marriage.
If marriage does not include sexual difference, it cannot mean anything at all.
And so it is not a loving or charitable act to our gay friends, who every conservative has gay friends, every single one, It's not that we hate our gay friends.
They're our friends.
We love our friends.
It's that it is not possible.
If you say, look, I oppose gay marriage, quote unquote gay marriage, and I think marriage has this meaning, but I'm going to make this one exception to host my niece's lesbian wedding, then you've just gutted your whole argument.
All that tells people is that you don't actually believe what you said you believed.
What that suggests is actually that the libs were right, that your opposition to quote unquote gay marriage is that you actually do hate lesbians or gay people, but you like your niece.
And so, okay, I'm going to make an exception here.
It's the same thing with abortion.
The manipulation that you see from the libs on abortion is this.
They say, oh, you're pro-life?
Yes.
Yeah, you oppose abortion?
Yes.
Why do you oppose abortion?
Because I think a person's a person no matter how small.
And if we're going to have any rights at all, the right to life has to be the most important one.
Because without the right to life, none of the other rights can possibly exist.
And I think human beings are made in the image and likeness of God.
And we don't have a right to snuff them out in the womb or murder them.
That would be wrong.
Yeah, well, what about in the case of rape?
This is the hard case.
It's a very, very small percentage of abortions, far less than 1% of abortions every year, but they always use that manipulation.
They always use that hard case to say, what about in the case of rape?
And a lot of, not pro-lifers, but a lot of conservatives, people who haven't really thought through the issue, they might say, yeah, okay, that's fine.
You can get an abortion in the case of rape.
They view this as a loving, reasonable conciliation, but it's not reasonable at all.
It undermines the whole argument.
If you believe all the stuff that you just said that you believe, then you can't grant in principle an exception to rape.
I guess as a practical or prudential matter, if you were given a bill that said we're going to get rid of 99% of abortions, but we're going to leave this one exception for rape, then as a prudential matter, you might say, okay, I'm going to reduce the number of abortions by 99% right now.
But you can't grant it in principle.
You can't say in principle that it's okay to kill a baby if the baby was conceived through rape.
Because then what that implies is the reason you opposed abortion...
Actually is that you just didn't like women or something like that.
What that implies is that the libs were actually right about your motivations.
And that you didn't actually believe that a person is a person no matter how small.
And that man is made in the image and likeness of God.
And that we don't have the right to murder people.
Even if they're conceived in inconvenient circumstances.
Even if they're conceived in a crime, in a heinous crime.
You don't actually believe that.
That's how they get you.
And so you've got to think through these things.
Because if you don't stand firm on those difficult cases, you will have gutted the entire argument.
That's why the libs focus on those hard cases.
That's why they try to emotionally manipulate you on all of them.
Speaking of LGBT issues...
It was a great interview from the series creator of Dahmer.
This would be Ryan Murphy.
And I started watching Dahmer.
I thought it was a good show.
Sweet little Elisa couldn't get that into it.
You know, it's a little grisly.
I won't spoil the story, but Jeffrey Dahmer had a not very pleasant life.
Difficult to watch it.
I think girls in particular, you know, get a little squeamish with it.
So Ryan Murphy came under fire because the Dahmer series was listed as an LGBTQ series.
They have all these tags on Netflix and the various streaming platforms.
They say, this is horror, or this is a rom-com, or this is an LGBT show.
And so with Jeffrey Dahmer, who's one of the most notorious serial killers and psychosexual sadists in human history, it listed it as LGBT because he was a gay guy and he only attacked guys.
and mostly black guys specifically.
I don't think it was listed as an African-American piece of entertainment, but it was listed as LGBT. And there was an uproar because they said, oh, how dare you lump in Jeffrey Dahmer with LGBT? Sexual identity has everything to do with everything.
Unless the guy does something bad, and then it has nothing to do with it at all.
So, Ryan Murphy dismissed this criticism.
He said, My job as an artist is to hold up a mirror about what happened.
It's ugly.
It's not pretty.
Do you want to look at it?
If you do, watch it.
If you don't, look away.
And sometimes, some of this outrage is directed at the frame of the mirror instead of the reflection.
Wow.
Hardcore stuff.
Does this mean that Ryan Murphy is a homophobe?
He just set out to smear gay guys?
Well, no, because Ryan Murphy's a gay guy.
He says, I think that it got the LGBT tag.
One, because of my involvement.
I'm a gay man, so most of my stories deal with some sort of LGBTQ thing, and I do that selfishly.
When I was growing up, I had nothing to look to.
My mission statement has been to talk about those stories and those characters and unearthed, buried history.
So he's saying, yeah, it's probably just because of me, because I'm a gay guy, and sometimes if there's an LGBT director, then they'll put the tag too.
He says, and I am selfish as an artist in that I am interested in the LGBT... And so I tell stories about that.
And I don't only tell really pretty stories.
It's all will and grace, you know?
Everything about LGBT is always wonderful and fun and gay.
I mean, even the word gay became a euphemism for LGBT. Because gay used to mean happy.
And now gay is almost never used in that sense.
Like the song, you know, I feel pretty.
I'm so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
Which I am certain is about to be clipped out for a meme.
And that's fine.
I don't care.
That's alright.
Used to mean that.
Now all it means is LGBT. Well, what he's saying is, no, there's bad stuff that happens all throughout the world.
There's no group of people that is immune from bad stuff and bad characteristics.
But that is contrary to what the culture says.
In our culture, all gay things have to be perfectly good.
All traditional things have to be perfectly bad.
If they make a show or a movie about Africa, specifically about black Africa, I guess they could make a negative movie or show about...
White colonization of Africa, and they've made a lot of those, but about Africa and Africans and traditional African societies.
It always has to be wonderful.
If they make a movie about the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans, it always has to be wonderful.
America, before the evil white man got here, it was all just this Pocahontas, have you ever seen the colors of the rainbow?
Then the Europeans get there and they ruin everything.
The only guy who can make a movie suggesting that indigenous societies maybe weren't all gumdrops and roses would be Mel Gibson.
That movie would be Apocalypto.
It's a much more realistic view of things.
But in our culture, we have decided certain groups and certain ideas and certain societies can only be good.
Those happen to be non-Western societies.
You see this breakdown everywhere.
Gay, good.
Straight, bad.
Woman, good.
Man, bad.
Every race of people on earth, good.
White people, bad.
East, The Far East, the Middle East, Southeast, Africa, good.
The West, bad.
And when you transgress those lines in either direction, if you suggest that maybe indigenous society or maybe LGBT culture or maybe any of these things might have some problems with it, you will be...
Written off.
And if you suggest that the Europeans ever did anything good, that maybe Christianity has something to recommend, you will also fall afoul of that culture as well.
That's just the rule.
It has nothing to do with reality.
It has nothing to do with holding up a mirror.
In fact, in some cases, it's probably because people do not like what they see in the mirror.
They don't like what they see in themselves.
And so there always have to be other problems.
Every bad thing that befalls anybody has to be Somebody else's fault.
You can never take a look at the man in the mirror.
Now, much like the former president, I have a major announcement, okay?
Yes or no, the game is back and available for pre-order over at dailywire.com slash shop.
We have this hit game show on YouTube, and the hit game show is called Yes or No.
And it's the show where I sit down with my friends and we drink and we respond to prompts and we try to figure out how well we know the other person.
The show really took off.
We put it up in the store.
I think we ordered a thousand or so games, sold out instantly.
And I'm really frustrated because a lot of people have tried to order it before Christmas, and it just sold out way too fast.
So we are restocking right now.
You can pre-order Yes or No brings the fun home and puts your knowledge of your friends and family to the test.
Play with up to nine people and discuss the most pressing issues of our time, including the likelihood of alien existence, questions about God, life, and the universe, and so much more.
You may have missed out on helping to make this the stocking stuffer of the year since it sold out so quickly, but now is your chance to secure your copy automatically.
We've also got a magician coming up on the member block right now.
A magician who pulled off one of the most impressive magic tricks of the year.
