Ep. 1157 - The Squishes Cave To The Demands Of The Based
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Conservatives score major victories as Kevin McCarthy finally wins his House Speaker battle, Ashli Babbitt’s mother is arrested trying to lay flowers for her daughter on January 6, and House Democrats leak top Republicans’ social security numbers.
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After 14 unsuccessful attempts over the course of last week, Kevin McCarthy has finally been elected Speaker of the House of Representatives, but not before caving to pretty much all of the conservative holdouts demands, including, just to name a handful, a Southern Border Protection including, just to name a handful, a Southern Border Protection Plan, a budget that stops an increase in the debt ceiling, an end to all COVID mandates and funding, a select committee to investigate the weaponization of the FBI and other agencies, a term limit vote, a minimum 72-hour reading period
a term limit vote, a minimum 72-hour reading period before bills are brought to a vote, permission for single-subject bills, an increased voice for the Freedom Caucus conservatives on the most important committees, and most consequentially, probably the biggest sticking point for both McCarthy and the holdouts, a return to the former probably the biggest sticking point for both McCarthy and the holdouts, a return to the former congressional norm of allowing any member to call a vote to boot the Speaker from his spot.
Despite all the rancor and all the turmoil and all the gnashing of teeth from the establishment about those evil conservative holdouts, the outcome of this little fight has been as good as anyone could ask for, especially at a time when Democrats control the White the outcome of this little fight has been as good as anyone could ask McCarthy gets his coveted title, and the hardline conservatives get pretty much everything else.
I'm Michael Knowles.
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One of the big conservative holdouts...
On the McCarthy Speakership was Chip Roy, who is one of my absolute favorite members of Congress.
Here is Chip Roy on CNN articulating what the conservatives got.
Well, first of all, let's remember that a little temporary conflict is necessary in this town in order to stop this town from rolling over the American people.
I don't think anybody on either side of the aisle could say with a straight face that they think that Washington is doing good work for the American people on a regular basis and isn't broken.
We have to work to fix this place.
And look, some of the tensions you saw on display when you saw some of the interactions there between Mike Rogers and Matt Gaetz, some of that is we need a little of that.
We need a little of this sort of breaking the glass in order to get us to the table, in order to fight for the American people, and to change the way this place is dysfunctional.
So this all started going back last summer.
We wanted rules to open this place up.
We wanted more transparency.
We wanted more openness, more ability to add amendments to the floor.
So for example, you ask, what else did we get?
We got amendments to be able to, I'm sorry, we got the ability to offer amendments on the floor of the House during appropriations that will open it up again.
We haven't done that.
So since I've been in Congress, I've not been able to offer an amendment on the floor.
Just one example, one really great point.
He says, look, there was this congressional norm, then it went away.
The whole time I've been in Congress, we haven't been able to do this really basic thing.
It takes power away from the representatives, which means it takes power away from the people.
The whole point of the House of Representatives is to give the people power.
And so this was a real improvement.
This is what I was saying from the beginning.
I felt the most absurd argument from the GOP establishment was...
These conservatives, they don't even know what they're asking for.
That was the line that you heard from the establishment that was trying to put McCarthy into power as quickly as possible and quash the conservatives.
They don't even have demands.
We don't even know what they want.
Yes, we do.
Chip Roy articulated just one point that they wanted.
I laid out from Representative Scott Perry a whole list of things in my introduction that they not only wanted and asked for, but ended up getting.
And then last week I had Lauren Boebert on the show.
And the reason I had my friend Lauren Boebert on the show is because I saw that she and some of her other conservative holdout comrades were going on the TV shows, but then the hosts wouldn't let them talk.
So the conservatives would go on the TV shows, and those would say, well, what do you want?
See, they say, well, I think actually it would be nice.
Yeah, you don't know what you want.
You can't articulate anything.
You guys just need to go and vote for McCarthy.
Well, actually, if you just let me speak, I think.
Ah, come on, you people, what do you want?
What are you actually going to get?
And so I said, okay, Lauren, come on the show.
Tell us what's going on here.
What's the background?
What do you want?
And surprise, surprise, when you let the conservatives speak, they're actually pretty articulate.
They're actually pretty reasonable.
They actually do kind of have a plan, and the plan in this case largely worked.
They did not stop McCarthy from becoming Speaker.
One of the big reasons that they were not able to do that is that nobody else wanted the job because it's kind of a terrible job.
And it messes up people's political career trajectories if they want to go in a different direction.
So Jim Jordan, for instance, was put up as a name.
Jim Jordan said emphatically, I will not take this job.
Jim Jordan said what Paul Ryan probably should have said when they came to him on this issue.
The last time that this came up, 2015, John Boehner steps down.
Kevin McCarthy was the heir apparent.
The conservatives didn't want McCarthy.
He said, okay, we need a compromise candidate.
How about Paul Ryan?
Paul Ryan accepted it.
It destroyed his political career.
Now he's in no man's land.
He's persona non grata.
So Jim Jordan and some other names who were floated, they said, no, I'm not taking that.
I'm going to keep on doing exactly what I'm doing.
I'm going to keep on fighting on the Judiciary Committee or on this committee or on that committee.
And so there was not a great alternative to McCarthy who could get those kinds of votes.
So the second best option was they get all of the demands that they asked from McCarthy.
And that is what happened.
So where do we go from here?
Again, not to say I told you so.
You know I hate to say I told you so.
But while the establishment was telling us that this was the end of the GOP, oh, we're so embarrassed, we're so humiliated, we're all infighting, we can't get anything done, this is the greatest collapse, why are we clutching defeat from the jaws of victory?
I said, guys, it'll be okay.
They're big boys.
This is a political fight in Congress.
That's what they do in Congress.
And yes, the rhetoric gets a little bit heated.
And yes, you hear the conservatives calling Kevin McCarthy the biggest squish sellout rhino that you ever heard in the world.
And from the team that was pro-McCarthy, you heard some pretty heated rhetoric as well.
In fact, my friend Dan Crenshaw referred to the conservatives as terrorists last week.
And now, now that the negotiation is over, now that the fight is over, Dan also went on CNN, like Ship Roy did, and said, okay, the terrorist thing, all right, maybe I went a little bit far.
You opened up with the whole terrorist comments.
I do have to address that, right?
Please.
But things get heated and things get said.
Obviously, to the people who took offense by that, it's pretty obvious that it's meant as a turn of phrase.
It's a metaphor.
It's in the context of intransient negotiations.
Look, I've got pretty thick skin.
I'm called awful, vile things by the very same wing of the party that I was fighting at that moment.
So I was a little taken aback by...
Sensitivity?
Yeah, by the sensitivity of it.
But to the extent that I had colleagues that were offended by it, I sincerely apologize to them.
I don't want them to think I actually believe they're terrorists.
It's clearly a turn of phrase that you use in what is an intransient negotiation.
There you go.
As far as politicians go, that was about the most direct apology you're ever going to get.
And good on Dan for apologizing.
I agree.
I think that rhetoric was a little bit overheated.
It happens.
It's a political fight.
That's Washington, D.C. The sky is not going to fall in if the conservatives hold out for a few days and get some more concessions out of the Speaker.
The sky, it's okay.
These are big boys.
Dan Crenshaw said it right there.
He said, look, I got thick skin.
Obviously, the guy's an ABCL. All these other members of Congress, they've got thick skin.
Kevin McCarthy, he's got thick skin.
It's okay.
That's what we send them there to do.
And the first test of a speaker is, can you get the votes?
Eventually he could, and the only way he was able to do it was by going back on his previous bet.
McCarthy's previous bet was he didn't need the conservatives from the Freedom Caucus to win his speakership.
Because of the way the election turned out in November, he ended up needing those conservatives.
And he paid a price for his bad bet, and that price has been to the benefit of the conservatives and of the Republican Party and of the American people.
Good stuff.
Now we can all kiss, make up, move along, gummy up the system for the Democrats, put forward some conservative proposals, investigate the Dems, expose the corruption in the executive agencies, which was a big conservative win in this whole negotiation.
Absolutely great stuff.
We had another big win from the appeals court.
A federal appeals court on Friday just struck down the ban on bump stocks.
Do you remember the bump stock ban?
The bump stock ban actually occurred under Trump.
I love Donald Trump, best president of my lifetime, but he had a few big missteps.
This was one of the big missteps where President Trump basically asked the ATF to ban bump stocks.
Didn't go through a normal legislative channel.
And what is a bump stock?
A bump stock is this little addition you put onto your gun that allows you to fire the gun somewhat more quickly.
At the time, the ATF argued that this turned semi-automatic weapons, one pull of the trigger, one bullet comes out, into machine guns, pull the trigger once, and a spray of bullets come out.
If you have ever shot a bump stock, you know that's not actually how that works.
In fact...
You can replicate a bump stock even without any additional technology on your gun.
If you hold it in a certain way and you have your finger in a certain way, you can replicate the motion, which is that you use the recoil of the gun to fire the trigger multiple times.
But it was always preposterous.
And the appeals court, not in a particularly close decision, this was 13-3, just struck down that ban.
So this is a major win for the Second Amendment.
I hope A good sign as we move into the first time in a couple of years where we've had any Republican control of the legislative or executive branches of the government.
This is something that gives me a little bit of peace.
But when I want true peace, I pray.
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We got some good news from the courts on striking down the bump stock ban.
We've got some bad news from the courts.
A grand jury has just declined to indict a man who attacked Ted Cruz.
You might remember this.
You might not remember this.
Ted Cruz was going through some kind of rally or parade, and a guy threw, I believe, a white claw can at Cruz's face.
So, this was a 33-year-old guy, Joseph Holm, Archie Diacono.
That's too bad.
I guess he's Italian.
Very frustrating.
He was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, then was instead no-billed, according to court documents.
The grand jury, quote, now asks the court to discharge and release this defendant from custody, according to a filing from the District Court of Harris County.
What does this mean?
The only reason I mention this, I did not think they were going to throw this guy in prison.
I did not think they would go after him really at all.
And now, those of us who doubted that stuff would happen have been proven right.
Why?
Because the government has been encouraging the public to attack prominent conservatives for years.
That's why.
That's how we knew that this was going to happen.
Because Maxine Waters goes out and says, You get Chuck Schumer outside the Supreme Court saying, we're coming for you, Kavanaugh, we're coming for you, Gorsuch.
Then you get a would-be assassin who takes a bus from California and tries to murder Brett Kavanaugh and possibly his family.
This is what you see.
You see mobs pushing up on Mitch McConnell in public.
You see mobs pushing up on Ted Cruz in public.
Again and again.
On Mitch McConnell, on Elaine Chao, on all of these prominent conservatives.
And it's done with the encouragement of the Democrats.
Hillary Clinton at the time said, you can't be civil with people who want to destroy your political agenda.
Okay, you can't be civil, so I guess you've got to be uncivil.
You have to be violent with them, is what she was saying.
This Ties in, I think, with another story that we'll try to get to a little bit later today.
Ashley Babbitt.
We just came up on the anniversary of Ashley Babbitt's death.
Ashley Babbitt was a Trump supporter who showed up to the Capitol on January 6th.
And I guess was going into an area that she should not have been going into.
And obviously, there was a lot of unruly, riotous behavior that day.
And a trigger-happy Capitol Hill cop shot her.
Shot her dead.
Ashley Babbitt was unarmed.
There was no real threat from this young woman.
The cop did not face any consequences whatsoever.
Was not fired.
Was not charged.
I don't even think he got a slap on the wrist.
Not a peep.
People say, oh, that's a wonderful thing.
Someone throws a beer can at Ted Cruz or a White Claw can at Ted Cruz.
No big deal.
It's nothing.
Let the guy completely off the hook.
Does anybody really believe if any conservative...
No, of course not.
Of course not.
You would have nationwide protests.
You would have George Floyd 2.0.
Consider the case of George Floyd.
a career criminal was committing a crime and resisting arrest and had a lethal dose of drugs in his system and then died in the process of resisting arrest.
Eight months of protests, mostly peaceful, where they burned down cities across the country.
It's not to lament the unfairness here.
It's just to point out we have two systems of justice in this country.
If you attack a Democrat, they are going to throw you in the can.
They might kill you for even threatening to maybe sort of get in a position to attack a Democrat.
If you attack a Republican, they'll giggle about it and they'll let you off the hook.
Gun rights are very, very important.
There's a story out of Houston.
An armed customer at a Houston taqueria just killed a gun-wielding robber.
And we actually have the footage of it.
So the would-be robber comes into the taqueria and he starts robbing people at gunpoint.
So not just the owner of the taqueria.
He's going around the tables.
He's picking up money off the table.
Brandishing this weapon everywhere, pointing it at all the people, reaching out, forcing them to empty their wallets.
And then you can see a guy, this older-looking ball guy, and he reaches into his pocket, and the minute that the robber turns, he pulls out his gun, perfect form, shoots the robber dead.
Then this guy goes up to the robber, takes the money out of his hand, and returns the money to all the people that he had just robbed.
And then this guy...
Takes his gun out, walks out of this restaurant looking like Clint Eastwood, gets back in an old Clint Eastwood looking like Gran Torino kind of truck from, I don't know, the 50s, and drives out of there.
So of course the authorities are looking for this man to question him.
They haven't identified him.
They want to bring him in for questioning.
Even though it was all caught on camera, this guy was completely justified.
That's the way the system works these days.
Because you can be let off the hook if you rob people and if you threaten people with a gun and you threaten their lives.
There we have to feel great pity for you.
You're probably just a result of a broken system.
And oh, you know how society failed this guy.
But then if you defend yourself against the gun-wielding threat, that is a far greater problem.
Put that aside for a second.
Why do I even mention this story?
I mention it because it illustrates a very important rule in life.
And that is the F around and find out rule.
This is a very, very important rule.
People don't follow it as much as they should.
Because the saddest part of this story, according to the Houston police, is that the now dead suspect, who was the one brandishing the gun everywhere, was actually brandishing a plastic pistol, possibly an airsoft or maybe a little BB gun type pistol.
That's according to KHOU. Wasn't even a real gun.
Little pellet gun.
So what happened?
The guy busts into this restaurant to rob people.
But he doesn't want to get arrested for carrying this deadly weapon.
Doesn't want to get arrested for threatening people with this deadly weapon.
Doesn't want to kill people.
He clearly doesn't want to kill people.
If this guy were really willing to kill people, he would have brought a real gun.
But he wasn't.
He just wanted to scare people enough that they would give him their money, and then he could get away and not actually have to do it.
But if you're that Clint Eastwood bald guy over there, and you're seeing this person waving a gun that looks really, really real at your head, maybe he's saying I'm going to kill you.
He's at least implicitly saying I'm going to kill you.
You have got to react to that.
To defend your life and the other people in the restaurant, you've got to react as if that's a real gun.
If you are going to threaten people, you need to be totally willing to make good on that threat.
If you are not, then you are putting yourself in greater danger.
It's a lot of the way we talk in this country.
It's a lot of the way we behave.
We behave...
As though we will face no consequences for our actions.
So we think there's no worry.
We do this even on the right when we talk about civil war.
Well, we're in the midst of a civil war in this country.
It's a cold civil war.
It's a cultural civil war.
Are you really ready to be in a civil war?
Whenever people ask me, do you think, Michael, the conservative states should secede?
Do you think we should get a little more aggressive in our civil war that we're in in this country?
I think, look, maybe you're eager for war.
I'm not.
I don't support conservative states seceding because no part of a country has ever seceded from another part of the country in a totally peaceful way.
So if you're game for that, you say, okay, we're leading the secession.
Okay, fine.
Are you willing to shoot your cousins?
Are you willing to shoot your neighbors or the people you know in other states?
I don't know.
I'm not.
I'm not there yet.
And I don't think that we ought to be wielding airsoft guns and BB guns in these sort of situations.
If you're going to F around, you're going to find out, okay?
So if you're going to take decisive, aggressive political action, you've got to be 100% serious about it.
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I mentioned a little bit earlier about the anniversary of the death of Ashley Babbitt and how the comparison here really shows you the two-tiered system of justice.
Well, it goes right to the heart of the Ashley Babbitt story.
Ashley Babbitt's mother was just arrested.
Ashley Babbitt's mother was in Washington, D.C. for the anniversary of her daughter's death at the hands of a trigger-happy Capitol Hill cop.
And Ashley Babbitt's mother wanted to lay down some flowers for her daughter.
And she was arrested.
It was our plan to go lay flowers on the steps of the Capitol for the four people, unarmed American citizens, that lost their lives that day.
That would be my daughter, Ashley Babbitt, Roseanne Boylan, who was beaten by a Metropolitan Police Officer, Leela Morris, Kevin Greeson, and Benjamin Phillips all lost their lives that day as unarmed American patriots.
So we wanted to lay flowers on the steps of the Capitol.
They were letting people in.
They had it all barricaded off.
They were letting people in, but they would not let us in with our signs and And our flags.
And so we opted to walk down the street that was already closed off.
So we laid flowers on the east side.
I'm not sure which side.
And then when we went to go turn the corner, there was no sidewalk for us to walk on.
There were other citizens walking on that sidewalk.
We were not allowed to because we had American flags at the United States Capitol.
So we walked down the road because we had no sidewalk to walk on, and our option was to cross four lanes of traffic and walk on the other side, where I also would not have been able to honor my daughter by laying a rose for her around the Capitol building.
And so we walked down the road, and I was arrested aggressively by one, that man right there, yeah, the one right there, the tall, bald man.
What was this woman arrested for?
Jaywalking?
Basically for jaywalking.
I think the actual charge was that she was arrested for blocking and obstructing roadways because she walked into some areas where they had some impediments set up and she wasn't supposed to be walking there.
Blocking and obstructing roadways.
Black Lives Matter shut down highways in LA, Seattle, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., all over the country.
I was in multiple places during the BLM madness.
As the BLM movement shut down those freeways and highways.
For hours in some cases, totally blocking traffic.
Nobody did anything about it.
And this woman, grieving the killing of her daughter, wants to lay a rose at the people's house at the Capitol.
And she's not allowed to.
She gets arrested for doing that.
She says that the cops, they knew this was a bad group of people.
Why?
Because they were waving American flags.
Had the group been waving pride flags, BLM flags, any of those other anarchist flags, Che Guevara flags, you know the cops would not have done a damn thing to obstruct them.
Because those people, they would have been left-wingers, they would have been on the same side as our current regime.
But because Ashley Babbitt's mother and the protesters were waving an American flag, the cops saw that.
They said, oh, this is a threat.
Can you imagine how far has our country fallen that these cops, they see an American flag, they say, that's a symbol of a threat.
We've got to go arrest this woman.
She shouldn't be laying down a rose for her daughter at the Capitol.
Our regime affords greater protection to people who burn the American flag than it does to people who wave the American flag.
That's not hyperbole.
We all know that that is the case.
If you burn the American flag, well you're probably just an aggrieved victim of this terrible, awful society, this traditional American country that we're doing our best to get rid of as quickly as possible.
But if you wave the American flag, Why, you're probably one of those far-right extremists.
We live under a regime today.
When I say regime, it's unusual language because we usually only refer to political systems in other places as regimes.
We never refer to our own country as a regime.
It's only those other places where they have governments that we don't like.
That's always the regime.
But a regime just means a political order.
And so our political order obviously has transformed pretty significantly over the last 50, 60 years.
Certainly over the last 200 years.
We are not living in the political order of the founding fathers and the framers.
Our system of government does not work like the bill up on Capitol Hill in Schoolhouse Rock.
Right?
We live in a very different one.
And we live in one today where...
The Department of Justice refers to parents who don't want their kids to have their genitals chopped off and have their kids be told that they're evil because they're white.
It refers to those parents as domestic terrorists.
That's the system that we're living in.
We're living under a regime where we are told that people who burn down courthouses, or people who murder dozens of people over the course of months, or people who threaten to assassinate top conservative public officials, they're all referred to as mostly peaceful protesters.
But the guy in the horn hat and the smiley Florida guy who took a picture posing with Nancy Pelosi's lectern, those are insurrectionist terrorists, the greatest threat to our country.
That's the regime we're living in.
And I'm not whining about it.
I'm not screaming and crying.
I'm just telling you that's how it is.
And so when these court decisions come down, and if you throw a can at Ted Cruz's head, basically the liberal establishment just laughs it off.
Where a mother grieving the loss of her daughter wants to lay a rose at the Capitol and the cops arrest her for it.
No, you're one of the bad ones.
You're one of those conservative ones.
We're going to throw you in the squad car.
Why?
I don't know.
We don't like the cut of your jib.
You looked at us funny.
You get in the car.
Just don't be surprised.
That's the way that it is.
And it ties right back to the top of what we're talking about.
When a handful of conservatives, those intransigent conservatives...
Say, hey, we need a little bit more change in Washington, D.C. than just getting another tax cut bill through.
When a group of conservatives say, we need structural, serious change to the way power is wielded in this country and the way that we view good and bad and true and false and the things that we exalt and the things that we discourage, we need to kind of change that because it's gotten a little bit askew.
I don't think that those conservatives are the bad guys.
I think they are doing...
The most that they can do and the very bare minimum of what needs to be done.
And I don't think that anyone should attack them for it.
Because it took us three more days to get Kevin McCarthy into the speaker suite.
Which he already moved into in the first place, by the way.
He already moved in there before he even won the vote.
Okay?
Speaking of January 6th and the attack on conservatives, this is a perfect example of this, actually.
The January 6th committee, I'm sorry, I didn't pronounce that correctly.
The January 6th committee, the worst day in the history of the world.
And the January 6th committee has now been disbanded.
They were created by Nancy Pelosi as a purely left-wing partisan attack dog group.
They had two fake Republicans on the committee.
Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both out of the Congress right now.
And they existed to get Trump, to get the conservatives, and to prove that the right-wingers are insurrectionists, and to throw everybody in prison.
And it didn't work.
It didn't work.
They had nothing.
It was a complete joke.
They accomplished zero.
And so on their way out, do you know what they did?
They leaked the social security numbers of top Trump officials.
They did.
I was going to say they doxed the top Trump officials.
It's much worse than that.
To leak someone's social security number is worse than leaking some of their personal contact information.
When you leak someone's social security number, you are inviting identity thieves to go in, steal their identities, destroy possibly their credit, destroy their entire digital, financial, possibly professional life.
The January 6th committee did this to hundreds of Americans, including at least three members of Trump's cabinet.
We're not just talking about kind of anonymous low-level staffers.
We're talking about Ben Carson here.
They leaked Ben Carson's social security number.
Why did they do that?
Was there a legal purpose that was fulfilled in leaking their social security numbers?
No.
Was there an investigative purpose that was fulfilled in leaking their social security numbers?
No.
The January 6th committee leaked the top conservative social security numbers to punish them as vengeance for these conservatives having had the audacity to challenge the dominant liberal regime.
This was the wielding by Democrats using the executive agencies, wielding the government to try to destroy the people that they view as their enemies.
That's all that is.
An official attack by Congress on their political enemies.
But we're told Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz and Chip Roy and Scott Perry, they're the problem.
They're the ones who are upsetting the norms of our Congress.
Oh, they're the ones.
If only we didn't have those incivil, absolutely barbaric norms.
Immature conservatives there.
Last I checked, Lauren Boebert and Chip Roy haven't leaked their political enemies' social security numbers.
It's just so absurd.
Anything that the libs and the squishes want to accuse the conservatives of doing to upset the standards and norms of our country, the Democrats have done, to a degree, orders of magnitude more egregious.
Of course.
We're talking about standards and norms.
The entire project of the left over the last 60 years has been to upset, pervert, frankly, invert the standards and norms of our country.
That is why we now call good evil and evil good, and we call falsehood truth and truth falsehood.
That's the attack that they have made.
And so, how are we going to fight back?
There is some good news coming out of Kentucky.
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Join Editor-in-Chief John Bickley with co-host Georgia Howe Speaking of fighting back against the enemy, great story out of Kentucky.
Kentucky State Treasurer Allison Ball has published a list of financial institutions currently boycotting energy companies We're good to go.
Here's a list of the ESG people who are wielding the trillions of dollars in assets that they manage to force the companies that they invest in to push a woke agenda.
Well, Kentucky's not going to be a part of that.
We've seen this happen elsewhere.
We saw this happen in Texas.
We saw this happen in Missouri.
We saw this happen in Louisiana.
We saw this happen in Florida.
Idaho has a bill on this coming up.
Other states are going to follow suit because it's a perfect issue for conservatives.
And the only objection to it...
On the right, at least, is going to come from the squishes and a certain breed of self-styled libertarians who say, well, this is terrible.
This is the state bullying a private company, that poor little private company, BlackRock.
That little mom-and-pop shop, Vanguard and State Street, the largest asset managers in the world, managing trillions of dollars in assets.
All these guys, they're being bullied by that mean old Alison Ball in Kentucky, or by mean old Ron DeSantis, or by mean old Greg Abbott, or their treasurers, or the conservatives elsewhere.
This undermines the American Republic, because we have a thriving free market here.
Why is it Why is it not an interference in the free market when a handful of woke asset managers push their fringe radical agenda on every company in the country against the will of the American people?
But it is an infringement on the free market when a duly elected public official does the same thing.
Or when a duly elected public official does something far more modest, which is to say, okay, if you're going to do that, we're not going to invest our money with you, BlackRock.
Why is that?
I like free markets.
I do.
Free markets are a wonderful thing in their proper place as a means to the end of a good and flourishing society.
That's what it's for.
We're not having the tail wag the dog here, folks.
We're not putting the cart before the horse, all right?
The political community does not exist to serve the market.
The market exists for the good of the political community.
And even if you're the biggest, staunchest defender of free markets in the world, how is this a free market?
When three asset managers get to redefine essentially the entire national culture, By pushing their crazy views on every company in the country.
That doesn't seem very free to me.
And if it were, then I wouldn't care for it.
Because I think that self-government means that we get to say no to this kind of stuff.
This is not an undermining of the American Republic when we tell the woke investment people to knock it off.
That is an expression of self-government.
That is justice.
Now speaking of justice, there's a group of people I'm not talking about the white men.
I'm not talking about the straight people or the Christians.
Obviously, the straight white Christian men, that is the most maligned group in all of society.
But other people are maligned sometimes as well.
One of which groups was Nepo babies.
There's been some chatter recently and lots of think pieces about the Nepo babies.
These children who are the sons and daughters of Hollywood celebrities who then magically get careers themselves.
And Tom Hanks has just come out to defend the Nepo babies.
Look, this is the family business.
This is what we've been doing forever.
It's what all of our kids grew up in.
We have four kids.
They're all very creative.
They're all involved in some brand of storytelling.
And if we were a plumbing supply business, or if we ran, you know, the florist shop down the street, the whole family would be putting in time at some point, even if it was just, you know, inventory at the end of the year.
The thing that doesn't change no matter what happens, no matter what your last name is, is whether it works or not.
I mean, that's the issue anytime any of us go off and try to tell a fresh story or create something that has a beginning and a middle of an end.
It doesn't matter what our last names are.
I know Tom Hanks is a huge lib.
I know that he's best friends with Barack Obama.
I know that no one has any sympathy for the Nepo babies or for really anybody else in Hollywood.
But I gotta say, I gotta call it like I see it, I think Tom Hanks is right.
I think actually the principle that Tom Hanks is articulating here is not only right, it's right-wing.
Those two frequently overlap.
It's actually a deeply conservative principle.
He's saying, yeah, of course the children of Hollywood stars have a leg up in show business.
It's a family business.
And it's not just Hollywood that operates this way.
It's every business.
If I were a plumber, my kid would probably know a little bit more about plumbing than the average kid who grew up in Hollywood, let's say.
If I were a plumber, my kid would probably have more opportunities to break into the plumbing trade than someone who is the son of a banker or someone who's the son of a schoolteacher.
Of course, we pass on wisdom and practical knowledge to our children.
And we help our families out, too.
There's nothing wrong with that.
There's nothing wrong with showing some degree of preferential treatment for your family and for your local community.
That is perfectly natural.
That's perfectly right.
That's perfectly just.
Conservatives used to know that.
I think we still basically get that.
We are not just all random individuals born into the ether.
With no particular ties to our own parents over anybody else's parents or to our own country over anybody else's country.
We're not just atomized citizens of the world.
We're born into particular places, into particular traditions, and it's totally fine to pass on your trade to your kids.
And Tom Hanks says, he says, you know, listen, my kids have done alright and they're telling stories to some degree, but if you don't put out a good product, you're not going to last very long.
That's true in any business.
How many family businesses get destroyed He's one generation, two generations, three generations down the line.
The kids are screw-ups and they can't run the business.
Happens all the time.
But merely passing on a tradition to your family, that's a great thing.
It's a great thing.
I hate to defend Tom Hanks, but I have to do it.
Now, on the topic of people that I don't have to defend, and on the topic of nepotism, and on the topic of would-be Hollywood stars, Prince Harry.
Prince Harry in his new tell-all memoir book by the man who just wants to be left alone, the man who only wants privacy, and that's why he's writing books and doing Netflix movies and going on TV to any channel that will have him.
Prince Harry has just admitted that he has done a lot of drugs.
Shocking, I know.
He's done a lot of drugs, and the worst part of that is he says that those drugs have helped him see the truth.
And Prince Harry's life and all the poor decisions he's making, it's all starting to make sense to me.
Harry says that while cocaine made him feel different, it did not make him notably happier.
But mushrooms did.
When he took magic mushrooms in California while drinking a lot of tequila, that had a profound impact.
And here's this amazing experience he had.
He says he saw a bathroom trash can that looked like it was staring back at him.
And growing a head.
And then the toilet turned into a head and began talking to him.
And he says this was the experience of a lifetime, man, you know?
Because when you really want to understand the truth, it's not that you should pray to God for clarity and meditate on the eternal things.
And it's not that you should read a lot of books, say, by wise writers.
No, it's that you should eat poisonous mushrooms and stare into the toilet.
That's going to teach you the truth, man, because it's going to grow ahead or whatever.
And then apparently two years after this experience, what happened?
Harry married Meghan Markle.
Okay, starting to make sense now.
Harry said he was able to see another world.
And it left him with the impression that this other world is just as real and twice as beautiful as the one that we're all living in, which is not all there is.
And Harry said, when he saw this world, only the truth existed.
So first of all, Prince Harry admitting to doing all these drugs, especially in the United States, could screw up his visa application.
This actually could be a good excuse for the United States to boot him out, because it means he almost certainly lied on his immigration papers.
And if he did not lie and he told the truth and he was using these illicit drugs, that also would be a reason to boot him out.
But beyond that hopeful thought for a second, just to the point that Harry is making...
I've seen it happen before.
I have friends who have done this, who have taken mushrooms or acid, more often acid, or one of these even more intense kind of psychedelic drugs.
Shrooms too, though.
And they'll say, you know, man, I just saw, and it gave me peace, because I saw all the other beings, and they showed me, and I'm not joking, I've had friends tell me.
And I realized, man, there's no devil, there's no hell, there's no sin.
They said, what?
Yeah, man, I just realized, like, we're all one, you know?
We're all one.
And I saw these little kind of beings popping out, and I said, you saw, like, you're saying you saw incorporeal spiritual beings that told you there's no sense of sin, and you don't need to fear hell.
I think you were talking to a demon.
I'm pretty sure.
No, man.
Well, then what was it?
Were you just imagining it?
No, man.
It was totally real.
Okay, so you're saying it wasn't just some figment of your imagination.
You were talking to a real, not physical, this is a purely spiritual being that is telling you don't worry about going to hell and don't worry about committing sins.
That's a demon.
That's what demons are.
That's how demons behave, man.
And the proof of the pudding is in the tasting.
The proof of the Yorkshire pudding is in the tasting here from Prince Harry.
Because it does not seem that his life has improved when he has done these things.
Even searching for deeper meaning.
You are not going to find deeper meaning by eating poisonous mushrooms.
I remember my friends would ask me, I'd say, Michael, don't you want to open up your mind, man, and see, experience the truth?
And I thought, well, I try to do that.
Like, for instance, when I go sit outside at night and read a book.
When I read a really wise, deep, profound book, That also changes the pathways in my brain.
That also allows me to see things that I previously couldn't see before.
But it does so without poisoning the most important organ in my body.
And it does so without opening me up to an experience that you describe as being a perfect description of talking to demons.
It just allows me to sit out And think and get smarter and grow in wisdom.
If only Harry had done that, he would be in a much better spot.
If only our culture valued that sort of thing, instead of poisoning ourselves, we would probably be in a better spot too.
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