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Europe makes its citizens eat bugs, Penn State bans Michael from speaking on campus, more classified documents turn up in politicians’ homes, and facebook lets a Nazi back on their platform.
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For months, years at this point, some of us on the right have warned that liberal elites want to make us all eat bugs.
The World Economic Forum in particular has pushed this agenda.
Eat the bugs, live in the pod, all nothing and be happy.
But lots of other people have done it too.
Public health figures, celebrities, the establishment media.
And many people laughed this off as some sort of crazy conspiracy.
Well, what do you know?
Europe is now officially eating ze bugs.
The European Union has officially enacted a statute allowing food producers to incorporate cricket powder into flour-based products.
Bread, crackers, cereal bars, biscuits, beer-like beverages, chocolate, soups, sauces, a bunch of other items.
They just grind up the crickets, guts and excrement and all, and then pack them into your food.
Now, it is not exactly mandatory.
But it kind of is.
Because many, if not most people, are going to end up eating ze bugs without even knowing it.
Think about all the bizarre junk that is already packed into your food, seed oils, preservatives, polysyllabic chemicals that most people can't even pronounce, let alone identify.
Well, now they're adding ground-up crickets, and there isn't much most people can do about it.
And not only are the crickets gross, but some people might be allergic to them.
Some people might be extremely allergic to them.
Evidence on allergic reactions has been inconclusive, according to the studies, but the political elites don't care.
They're going to go ahead with the plan anyway.
No surprise there.
These are the same sort of people who spent 22 years pumping little kids full of puberty blockers before thinking that maybe it might be a good idea to test those chemicals on animals.
That's what we discussed yesterday on the show.
These are the same people who pumped over 5.5 billion people with an experimental drug on the promise that it was safe and effective at stopping COVID, neither of which claim was true.
Now they insist that everybody eat bugs because the bugs are allegedly more nutritionally efficient than grains and meats and normal stuff.
They claim it's better for the environment.
We've got to do it.
But of course, food is about more than efficiency, because human beings are more than just meat sacks in need of calories.
Food is about taste, tradition.
Ritual.
Family.
Food is one of the most basic aspects of culture, which is precisely the reason the libs are so eager to change it.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Rustman, who says, Someone should let Stephen King know that the Bible is banned in schools, so he can let all the kids know to run out and read it.
It's true.
They always want you to read the banned books, but only the gay porn stuff.
Only the really bad banned books.
Whenever you point out that some good books are banned in very important places, like public schools, then they say, Oh, no, never mind.
Forget about that.
No, don't read that.
That's bad.
You've got to read the gay porn.
It's very, very important.
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People have misunderstood the bugs push from the beginning.
A lot of people didn't believe the bugs thing would happen because bugs are gross and nobody wants to eat them.
But one, they're not going to just serve you bugs right away.
They're going to grind them up into little powder and just put them into your cookies and your breads and not even probably tell you about it.
Or if they'll list it on the ingredients list on the back in the tiny font, you're not going to know about it in many cases.
But then the other reason they said that a lot of people have resisted this idea that we're going to eat the bugs is they say, well, I don't know.
The bugs are such a taboo in our culture.
Sure, other cultures around the world eat bugs, but we in the West, we don't do it.
And so what?
The libs, they think it's more nutritionally efficient, they think it's better for the environment, so they're going to try to make us eat bugs despite how much eating bugs would violate our taboos.
That misses the point, too.
The Libs are not trying to get us to eat the bugs despite the fact that that violates our taboos.
They're trying to get us to eat the bugs precisely because it violates our taboos.
They're doing it because taboos and standards and norms define culture.
And the Libs project is to completely upend our culture.
And so the most direct way to upend our culture is to reorder the taboos.
And one of the most basic aspects of culture is food.
They're doing it because it's gross.
They're doing it because it's gross, and they're going to wield power over you, and they're going to change the very definition of the culture that you hold dear that they don't like.
Speaking of food, a conservative commentator, Jono Caldwell, was just booted out of a restaurant.
Now, Jono happens to be black.
Was he booted out because he's black?
No.
This isn't the Woolworths lunch counter.
This isn't the 1950s or 60s.
No.
Was he booted out because he's a man?
I don't think so.
Now, these days, men can go anywhere.
They can go to the women's locker room.
They can go to the girls' bathroom.
No, you know why he was booted out.
He was booted out because he's conservative.
Yesterday, as we were having breakfast at this particular location, which I had never been to, it was the suggestion to them to visit this particular place.
One of the owners came over to the table and told us she had been listening to our conversation.
We were not welcome there.
And I said to her, I said, did I say something that was triggering to you?
She said, no.
She said, our politics aren't aligned.
I'm one of the owners.
I'm an owner here.
I don't feel comfortable.
You have to leave.
So then I stood up, I walked out, and so did the rest of my group.
She told me that I needed to get out of her establishment.
If this was not the Jim Crow South, I couldn't tell much of a difference.
Ron DeSantis said in Florida, discrimination is not allowed, and I hope that they're going to look closely to what happened here at this restaurant.
So he's booted out because he's conservative.
A lot of people are asking, how is this legal?
Well, the reason it's legal is there is no civil rights protection for political point of view.
You can't go to a court and say, I was discriminated against on the basis of my political views.
It's not protected.
Race is protected.
Religion is protected.
Sex is protected.
Sexual orientation and gender identity in the wake of the Bostock decision.
Thank you, Neil Gorsuch.
That is protected.
But political views are not.
This is a reminder that one of the big stories about the Civil Rights Revolution is not true.
The big line about the Civil Rights Revolution, and you might consider this a positive, you might consider this a negative.
You might say, well, it had some good effects, but it actually had some bad effects too, is that it gets rid of freedom of association as an essential part of the American political order.
Prior to the Civil Rights Revolution, if you didn't want to let somebody into your store, if you didn't want to let somebody into your hotel, if you didn't want to let somebody to your lunch counter, you didn't have to do it.
And in the 1960s, people looked at that and said, oh, that's kind of ugly because some people are keeping black people out of the lunch counters, and that doesn't seem right, so we're going to get rid of that.
And most people said, okay, that's a good thing.
But there's a cost to everything in this world, and so when you get rid of freedom of association...
Maybe you're improving certain social situations, but you might be eroding some of the principles that all Americans hold very dear.
And you might not even be totally getting rid of freedom of association.
Right now, a black guy can't be kicked out of a lunch counter.
That's a good thing.
But a black guy who's a conservative can.
A conservative of any stripe can be kicked out of a lunch counter.
A... A white male could be kicked out of a public accommodation.
It has been known to happen.
You saw this especially during BLM and all the George Floyd riots.
People saying this is a black space.
White people not allowed here.
You're seeing this crop up on universities.
Black-only dorms.
Black-only spaces.
White people not allowed.
How's that legal?
Well, it's not legal by the letter of the law, but nobody's going to enforce it.
If any restaurant kicked out a lib, you know there would be a major lawsuit and the litigant would probably win.
And the way that they would win is they would pretend that they were being booted out for some other reason.
Be some lib, you know, with purple hair and crazy piercings and an Antifa shirt screaming about burning down the establishment.
You say, hey, lib, can you please get out of here?
You're creating a nuisance.
And you know what the lib would say.
The lib would say, well, you're only doing this because I'm...
Trans, or I'm a lesbian, or I'm this color, or I'm that race, or I'm whatever.
And you know that they would win, because the system is set up that way, where there are just two tracks here.
If you attack anything that is conservative, traditional, pushing back against the cultural revolution, you can and usually will be punished.
If you're the one pushing that revolution, you're good.
You're safe.
We talked about this yesterday when Stephen King was invading against banning books.
Everyone seems to think that they're against banning books.
That's not true.
We ban books in this culture.
We ban the most important book.
We ban the Bible in public schools.
Well, that's different.
We kick people out of our lunch counters if they're conservative.
The Daily Wire.
We were booted out of a restaurant.
We had put a deposit down on this restaurant to have a dinner before our company Christmas party.
And then they found out who we were and they said, you're not welcome here.
Because you're conservative.
You're not allowed into the restaurant.
And our protest, our big standing up against the man was Jeremy and Ben and Drew.
I forget if Candace was there.
Spencer.
A number of us went in afterward and just had a drink.
They were too cowardly to actually kick us out.
But this happens, okay?
This sort of thing happens.
This reordering of the political order, it didn't create justice for all.
It just created an opportunity to attack conservatives of any race, of any geography, of any kind of background.
If they oppose the revolution, they're going down.
The revolution has been televised.
And the revolution can be communicated across all various media, including phone to phone.
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Speaking of bans, I have been banned by another university.
You know, every year I speak at a number of college campuses.
I do this with Young America's Foundation.
I've done this for years at this point.
And if I got a little more time, sometimes I'll do, I don't know, I could do up to 10 schools a semester.
I've got more work here at DW.
They don't want to let me out.
I'll do, I'll at least do four or five schools a semester.
Well, I guess I'm doing one fewer this year because Penn State says that I'm not coming.
Even though the students invited me, they submitted their proposal to the school, I actually didn't know that I had been invited to Penn State until after they told me that I couldn't come.
This is Penn State University, Harrisburg.
They claim that they have the exclusive right to deny a campus lecture from me.
Yours truly...
They say any event considered potentially harmful to the public image of Penn State Harrisburg will be rejected.
Me!
They want to ban me, whom everybody loves so.
Can you imagine that?
Shocking.
Absolutely shocking.
This is illegal.
Penn State is a public university.
They have no right to do this.
The students do have a right at this public university to invite me to the school.
And what they wanted me to speak on is my book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which is, there we go, thank you, number one national bestseller, very mainstream book.
It's a book on the history and meaning of language.
Not exactly a bomb-throwing kind of topic, is it?
If anything, it's a little bit dry.
They said, no, it's too much.
This could harm the image of the university.
Okay, so does Penn State have any speakers come?
They do.
Who are some of the other speakers that have come on campus recently that have not harmed the public image of the university?
Well, let's see.
We've got Drag Bingo.
The Student Engagement Office and Student Government hosted Drag Bingo.
They hosted an LGBTQ panel hosted by Mix, not Mr.
or Mrs.
or Miss, Mix Jacob Kelly, who is a queer-inclusive sex educator, That didn't harm the public image of the university.
It's not even that they won't have explicitly political events.
There was a lecture by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, which is a far-left TV and radio program.
That was totally fine.
So I think I've figured out what we're going to do.
I'm going to, we're going to have to reapply.
I mean, I didn't apply at all.
It was the students who applied on my behalf.
So if they're listening right now, what I want you to do, I want you to just, you change my pronouns in the application.
You can, instead of Mr.
Michael Knowles, you say mix, mix, Michaela, Michelle Knowles.
And then I'll just show up there and I'll wear some stilettos and I'll say, this is an inclusive event.
And then I can give my lecture on the history of language.
And I think then everybody will, it'll totally work out, right?
Sounds great to me.
They're still keeping this up.
That's a public university.
Last year, a Catholic university banned me.
I had been invited to St.
Thomas University in Minnesota.
They banned me because I espouse Catholic dogma.
I'm not joking.
Because I don't think that boys can become girls, because I hold to unchangeable Catholic beliefs on a basic question of human nature, they said I'm not welcome at the Catholic University.
Not only are we booted out of the weird liberal private schools, we're booted out of the nominally Catholic and conservative schools, and we're booted out of public accommodations.
Expect more of that.
If you haven't already, expect to be in John O. Caldwell's position or the Daily Wire's position soon enough.
Freedom of association for them, but not for us.
That's That's how it's going to go.
And they are going to ostracize us as much as they can.
And until conservatives recognize that it's probably a little pastime for us to wield political power through the same sort of processes that the left wield political power, albeit we should do so in a just and moral way, until we recognize that, as long as we just keep saying, well, you know...
Come on.
This isn't fair.
Look at this double standard.
This is hypocrisy.
Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot.
As long as we keep doing that, we're going to lose.
And we're not going to get to go to universities, which might be a blessing in disguise.
And we're not going to get to go to restaurants.
And we're going to be forced to eat the bugs.
And things are not going to turn out very well at all.
Speaking of education...
Perfect timing on this story.
This story is so delightful to me.
I mentioned yesterday that ChatGPT, which is a very mainstream AI, artificial intelligence program, was able to get a pretty good grade on a Wharton Business School exam.
this is an exam from probably the top business school in the country, and ChatGPT was able to get a B or a B- on the exams.
So ChatGPT took some other exams.
They took a medical license exam and the bar exam to become a lawyer, and ChatGPT passed.
Got a passing score or a very close to passing score on both tests.
That was true on all three components of the United States medical licensing exam, which is a test that physicians holding doctor of medicine degrees must pass for medical licensure.
The app passed it without, quote, any specialized training or reinforcement.
It also passed multiple bar exams for different states.
Humans with seven years of post-secondary education and bar exam-specific training We're able to get 68% of questions right on these bar exams.
ChatGPT, which is just a computer with no specific training, got 50.3% of the questions right.
And then if you looked at the top two or three choices that the model selected for these questions, they were right 71 to 88% of the time.
Which, what that tells you is that it's not just that the machine was randomly guessing, because 71 and 88% far surpasses the baseline guessing rate.
I love this.
I love this because it contradicts the whole World Economic Forum elite Davos line, which is that in the future, all you useless people, you poor people, you manufacturers, you service people, you're going to be useless.
We'll give you drugs and video games.
You won't.
You don't.
Just go away.
We'll pay you to go away.
Robots are going to do it.
Uh-uh.
It's not the waiters who are going to get replaced by the robots.
It's you.
It's the accountants.
It's the CFOs.
It's the lawyers in many cases.
It's the white-collar workers.
It's the middle managers.
Those are the people who will in many cases be replaced.
But not in all cases.
And this is the other takeaway, I think, from this.
And it's a really important takeaway as we think about artificial intelligence, which has proven itself much more impressive than even I thought it would be.
The way that artificial intelligence can render art, can render paintings and drawings and images.
On some of the public programs, it's not extremely impressive.
On the In private programs, it's unbelievable.
Some of my friends work in artificial intelligence.
They've shown me some of what they're working on.
The way that a computer now can write a poem, can paint a picture, it is shocking.
And so it's been very impressive.
But that doesn't mean it's the end of the line for human beings.
And in fact, the advances of AI, I think, show us something really important about what it means to be human.
Because are you going to hire...
A robot to be your lawyer or to be your doctor?
In some cases maybe you would.
If you've just got to write up a basic legal document, maybe you would get a robot to do that.
If you just need a kind of basic checkup or some really simple aspect of medicine, maybe you would have a robot do that.
But when it comes to, I don't know, a negotiation, contract negotiations have been in the news recently.
When it comes to a contract negotiation, when it comes to establishing a legal framework for your business, when it comes to deciding between one course of action for your business or another, or for a lawsuit or for another, when it comes to sophisticated medical decisions that require real ethical consideration, end of life decisions, Maybe decisions for children.
Do you get vaccinated?
Do you not get vaccinated?
Do you have this procedure?
You probably don't want a robot making those decisions.
And the reason for that is that law and medicine are not just about facts and science.
The libs want us to believe that That everything is just about facts.
Facts and science and statistics and the whole world.
If we just got to plug the whole world into a computer, it'll make all our decisions for us and then we can just lie back and do nothing.
But no, there is more to life than facts.
There is more to life, much more to life than science.
You hear me say it on the show a lot, statistics are fake.
At least 175% of statistics are completely made up and ridiculous and pointless.
Even when it comes to the law, conservatives have fallen into this facts-only, science-only, scientific view of the world.
But it's a mistake.
You see this in the obsession with textualism and originalism in law.
All of which derive from legal positivism.
This obsession with just the ink on the paper of a statute.
But that's not all there is to the law.
There is the lex of the law.
There is the statute as it's written and the constitution as it's written.
But then there is the use, to use the Latin.
Then there is the...
The background principles of the law.
Then there is the natural law.
Then there is our moral intuition.
Then there is the fact that judges are judges precisely for their judgment, to apply prudence and wisdom.
That doctors are supposed to have a bedside manner and are supposed to use their judgment and they have to take ethics courses.
They don't take nearly enough ethics courses.
That there is a human component here that...
Necessarily is missing from a computer.
You can't just plug life into a computer and expect a perfect outcome at the end.
Life is too chaotic and complex and transcendent of merely physical, scientistic considerations.
There's more to life than just atoms and facts.
Speaking of transcending scientism, Middle-aged white guys are killing themselves at a very high rate.
At an increasingly high rate.
We've talked about this for years.
This has led in large part to the decline in the American life expectancy.
We've had several years in recent memory where the life expectancy has decreased.
This really just started for the first time.
Not that long ago.
Why?
Because of deaths of despair...
Among middle-aged white Americans.
Well, now there's a study.
It's a new study, and so you know when there's a study, then we can finally believe it.
There's a study out that shows that a major driver of these deaths of despair for middle-aged white guys is loss of religion.
In other words, there's now a scientific study To prove what normal people have intuited the whole time.
What anybody with two brain cells and any even iota of common sense has known from the very beginning.
When you lose hope, you despair.
Because despair means a loss of hope.
Shocking, but stop the presses.
This paper was just circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the increase in deaths of despair among middle-aged white Americans, which started in the early 90s, was the aftermath of a declining religiosity in the United States, specifically by the same group.
It's true that religion in general has declined, but especially for these now middle-aged white guys.
They left the church in very large numbers.
You might be able to think of your own memories, depending on how you were raised, of...
Maybe you went to church as a kid, maybe you didn't.
And even if you did, did Daddy always go to church?
I bet in a lot of cases it was just Mommy took the kids to church and Daddy stayed home and watched football.
That phenomenon exploded over the last 30 years.
Why did this happen?
Why did this group leave the church?
I think in large part that group left the church because of supposed reforms of the churches that went on during the 1960s.
You certainly saw this in the mainline Protestant churches, which at this point are basically like LGBT far-left morning tea hour.
Think of the poor Episcopalians or the Methodists who have gone completely...
Certain shades of Presbyterians have gone completely over the edge.
You saw this in the Catholic Church too, even with the weight of 2,000 years of inertia in the magisterium and divine institution, certainly in my view.
Even then, you saw, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, liturgical deformations that made even the Holy Mass kind of effeminate and shallow.
Much more shallow than the tradition.
You completely change the orientation of the Mass.
You now have the priest facing away from the altar, facing the people, frequently telling jokes, as a priest friend of mine once described, telling jokes like a ham actor in a dying vaudeville show who would do well to limit his repertoire to the little barbs that Saint John told the Blessed Mother while her son bled on the cross.
I think it drives the point home pretty well.
You replaced beautiful singing and serious chanting and elevating music with a bunch of mariachi bands and these lame, insipid ditties from the 1970s that weren't even cool 50 years ago.
And then you expect a man to go there, a man who had previously been singing good old proper hymns, good old English hymns.
Or older chanting.
And then he goes there and he's got to sing these 70s songs.
I will raise you up on eagle's wings.
And it's just so lame.
And the only people that that kind of defamation appeals to are squishes and libs and women.
know, and only a specific subset of women who do not speak to a traditional and certainly not to a masculine culture.
So for these reasons and more, men leave the church and now they're depressed and killing themselves.
There's a political aspect to this as well, though.
This group of economists looked at the impact of blue laws across the country and how the increased repeal of blue laws are followed by a loss in church attendance and an increased secularization.
So So we all agree, even if you're an atheist or an agnostic, you don't go to church.
It's very easy for people to see how a change in the culture of the church can lead people to leave the church.
What's a little harder for people to accept is how political changes, changes in the government and the political order, even outside of the church, Can drive this sort of thing.
But it does.
As I have tried to make clear for years.
Politics is downstream of culture.
Sure, that's true.
Movies and songs and rituals and things certainly affect the kind of laws that we're going to pass.
But I do find that phrase to be a little bit of a libertarian cope and an excuse not to engage in the political order and not to wield just political power on the happy occasions that people give it to us.
Because politics...
Though downstream of culture in some ways, politics can also lead the culture.
Culture can be downstream of politics as well.
East Germany is atheist today.
West Germany is mostly religious, though of a kind of confused religiosity.
Nevertheless, more than half of West Germans would call themselves religious.
Why is that?
Is that because of regional variations in bratwurst?
No.
It's because godless communism was the dominant regime in East Germany for much of the last century.
And even after the Berlin Wall falls down, there are after effects of that from the political order onto the culture.
So what do we do about it?
I think we've got to take on both issues.
Yes, well, at a personal level, yes, we should work on our own inner spiritual life.
Of course, I don't mean to diminish that.
And then from the cultural level, cults referring even at a deep level to religion, we need to reform the churches so that they are more serious and reverent and conducive to men going to church.
And we've got to change the political order such that the incentives in our political order are to go to church, are to have belief, are to have hope, are to be good citizens, are to perform acts of charity for one another, are oriented toward the common good.
There's no neutrality here.
The government is always going to be creating incentives and disincentives to different actions.
For all of American history, we had incentives toward all of those good things.
And disincentives toward the opposite.
We had blue laws.
We had laws against adultery.
We had blasphemy laws, for goodness sakes.
So don't tell me that it's out of the American tradition to take these kinds of issues seriously.
That is the American tradition.
But now what do we have?
We don't have a neutral political order.
Now we've just got incentives for all the opposite stuff.
We've got incentives for people to leave their families.
We've got incentives for people to do a bunch of drugs and get involved in weird sex stuff and ignore the common good and only pursue their own selfish interests.
We've got incentives for that on the left and the right.
We've got it throughout the whole culture.
During the COVID lockdowns, we shut down the churches.
We keep the pot dispensaries open in California.
Those are completely skewed incentives and disincentives.
It's having real effects.
I know that a lot of people who are a little more skeptical of religion, religion's not their thing.
They say, oh, Michael, come on, who cares?
We've got bigger issues to talk about.
Do you think there's a bigger political issue than Americans dying, than the average life expectancy decreasing, that a huge group of Americans, middle-aged white guys, just killing themselves and ODing on drugs because of a loss of hope?
Is there any bigger political issue than the loss of hope?
And the loss of faith and the loss of charity, love, philia, central to any political order?
I don't think there's anything.
I don't think tax rates are a bigger issue than that.
I don't think deregulation is a bigger issue than that.
I don't think immigration is a bigger issue.
Immigration is a big issue.
The loss of faith, hope, and charity, that's kind of the whole game.
And I think we ought to pay a little bit more attention to it.
Speaking of middle-aged white men, a couple of middle-aged white men just lost their jobs, and that's a good thing.
Generally, it's bad when middle-aged white guys lose their jobs in America, but this time it's pretty good.
Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell just lost their jobs on the House Intelligence Committee.
This because the Republicans took over the House.
Kevin McCarthy is the Speaker of the House.
Kevin McCarthy said, listen, jerks, both of you guys are off the Intel Committee.
You shouldn't have security clearances.
You shouldn't be around any kind of sensitive information.
Schiff, you're a liar who has mishandled classified information for For the entire Trump presidency.
And Swalwell, you were doing weird stuff with a Chinese spy.
So neither of you guys can be trusted.
Hakeem Jeffries, who's the Democrat minority leader in the House, he came out, he said, this is a shocking upsetting of precedent.
You can't do this.
The tradition, the precedent in the House is that the minority party gets to name the people that it wants to the committees.
And then the Speaker of the House is supposed to accept that.
This is awful.
He says, it's my understanding that you intend to break with the long-standing House tradition of deference to the minority party.
You should honor past practice.
I'm glad to hear Hakeem Jeffries and the Libs mention honoring past practice for once in their entire lives.
This rings so hollow.
Do the Libs honor anything about the past?
The Libs hate the past.
The Libs spend all their time tearing down statues of the past and talking about how evil the past was and how anything that is traditional or conservative is just terrible and we need to upend the whole thing.
Except for this.
Except for Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell staying on the Intel Committee.
That's the one historical precedent that we need to keep.
I don't think so.
I think this is chickens coming home to roost, is what I think this is.
And I think that when the Democrats, when Pelosi set up the preposterous January 6th committee to investigate the worst thing that ever happened in American history, and the Republicans said, okay, we're going to send some Republicans to this committee then.
We're going to name Jim Jordan.
I forget who the other Republican congressman who was going to go to that committee were.
The House said, nope.
Pelosi said, no, you're not going to do that.
We're not going to let you have any actual Republicans.
We're going to name the Republicans.
It's going to be Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who aren't real Republicans, who are, for all intents and purposes, Democrats.
Oh, but now this is the great upsetting of, oh no, this is terrible.
Okay, well, I guess Hakeem Jeffries just made a slight progressive out of me, because I think that's one historical tradition that's gone.
And even if it was a good tradition, the Democrats are the ones who blew it up, and now I don't want to hear them whining about the chickens coming home to roost.
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Speaking of committees...
Republican Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene is set to get new committee positions.
This is a big comeback for MTG because she had previously been kicked off of the committees.
Now the GOP House Steering Committee voted to give Marjorie a seat on the House Homeland Security Committee.
This is a minor personnel issue, so I don't want to spend too much time on it.
But It's an important one because it shows you how politics works.
The nitty-gritty nuts and bolts of politics.
The reason that Marjorie made a comeback is because she backed Kevin McCarthy.
And she backed Kevin McCarthy in that House fight over her fellow conservatives in the Freedom Caucus who were opposing McCarthy.
And it was a real tough fight here.
And a lot of people wondered, they said, why is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is one of the more conservative members of the House, certainly one of the more outspoken conservatives, why is she backing a guy who's being called establishment?
This is why.
Because it was the only way that she could get any even marginal power back in the House of Representatives.
And some people have attacked her for it and said, well, that's unprincipled.
But I don't know that it's totally unprincipled.
Kevin McCarthy was likely going to win anyway.
She realized this was her only path back.
Now she's on a committee.
I'm almost certain Kevin McCarthy said the only way that you were getting on a committee ever again is by backing me and whipping some votes for me.
And it brings me back to a principle that old cocaine Mitch McConnell, love him or hate him, he made a very good point.
He said, the way politics works is, the winners go and make laws, and the losers go home.
Say hello to my little friend.
That's what he said.
He said, at least the first part is what he said.
And that's true.
That's how politics works.
Now Marjorie Greene, she's got a little bit of power back.
Hope she uses it well.
I trust that she will use it well.
Speaking of inclusion...
Facebook has decided to lift a ban that it had had for some years now on the Azov Regiment.
The Azov Regiment is a military regiment in Ukraine that has a bunch of Nazis in it.
When I say it has a bunch of Nazis in it, I'm using that term in at least a slightly more precise way than the Libs do when they call all of us Nazis.
It's a battalion that uses Nazi symbols and signs and wears Nazi symbols on their uniforms.
And so because of this, they had been kicked off of Facebook.
In fact, the Azov Regiment is one of the justifications that Putin made in his initial speech outlining the reason for the war in Ukraine.
He said, we're going to go in and denazify Ukraine.
And in the Western press, they reported this and said, this is a completely baseless charge.
No, there is a basis for this charge.
The basis is the Azov Regiment, which does use Nazi-like symbols and signs.
And Facebook had kicked the Azov Regiment off because of this Nazi association, but now they've lifted that ban because Facebook supports Ukraine against Russia, and so all of a sudden the Nazis aren't so Nazi anymore, and they get to go onto Facebook.
All of which I mention, not to say anything about the war in Ukraine, not to say anything about Russia or Zelensky or the American side, because we are essentially fighting this war with Russia and we're just using Ukraine as a proxy.
I mention it because it shows you that political alliances are circumstantial, not eternal.
Let's not forget, in the Second World War, we teamed up with The communists.
We teamed up with Stalin, one of the worst communists ever.
A truly evil, evil empire.
And we created an alliance with them to defeat Hitler and Nazi Germany.
And then immediately after the war, then we fight a decades-long war with the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
I mention this to show that even the meaning of a word like Nazi...
is constantly in flux.
Three days ago, the Azov Regiment was a bunch of Nazis.
Today, oh, they're not Nazis at all.
That's propaganda.
You're a Putin apologist if you say that.
Well, but hold on.
Five days ago, you were the ones telling me that they were Nazis.
Yeah, no, forget that.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
These are not the droids you're looking for.
They're not Nazis.
You're a Nazi.
No, you're a Nazi.
No, you're a Nazi.
The word Nazi is in flux because there are no Nazis anymore.
The Nazis are over.
Nazis refer to a specific political movement in a specific place at a specific time in the 20th century in Europe.
Even at the same time, if you were to call Italians Nazis, followers of Mussolini Nazis, that is not true.
They were not Nazis.
They were fascists, but they weren't Nazis.
If you call the followers of Francisco Franco Nazis, that's not true.
They were not Nazis.
They were right-wing, they were authoritarian, but they were not Nazis.
That refers to a specific thing.
And the fact that the Nazis are gone, and there are no Nazis anymore, and there cannot be Nazis anymore, is the reason that this word can be in flux.
Because now that the specific referent is gone, it can mean anything at all.
And it will mean all manner of things.
Yes, they call you a Nazi today.
They call Ben a Nazi.
They call it Shapiro, a man who wears a yarmulke every day of his life.
They call him a Nazi.
They call all sorts of people Nazis because it is just a word that is in flux.
The Azov Regiment used to be Nazis.
Today, they're not Nazis.
They will be Nazis again at some point.
Mark my words.
Speaking of warfare, the Libs are trying to ban our guns.
They specifically are trying to ban AR-15s.
You're seeing a big move among the House Democrats to ban the AR-15, one of the most popular guns in the country.
And their arguments are not totally persuasive.
Nina Turner, who is some lady from the Young Turks, she typified a left-wing argument against the AR-15.
She said, if you need an AR-15 to hunt, you're probably not a great hunter.
I promise you this is a woman who has never handled an AR-15.
She's probably never seen an AR-15 in person.
She has no idea how the gun works, what kind of caliber round it takes.
She doesn't know anything about it.
As is true of almost all of the libs, including the libs who are writing the laws on guns.
For starters, you can hunt with an AR-15, but an AR-15 would not be a wise choice for lots of hunting.
If you're hunting small deer or you're hunting rabbits, AR-15, fine choice.
If you're hunting a bear, if you're hunting a lion, hunting an elephant, I would not recommend the AR-15.
I don't think that is going to end very well for you.
But this argument is not really even an argument.
It's a moving of the goalposts in the way that the libs always move the goalposts.
Nina Turner and the Libs are not making this argument.
The AR-15 is the worst, most lethal, most powerful gun ever made.
It's not.
It's obviously not.
That's why, sure, you can hunt some deer with the AR-15, but you would want a much more powerful weapon to hunt something like a bear or a bigger animal.
So they're not making that argument.
They can't make the argument that the AR-15 is totally, completely different from any other bolt-action.223 rifle.
Or...
Or even a semi-automatic rifle that is not an AR-15.
They can't make these distinctions.
So what do they say?
It's this kind of snide remark.
Oh, you know, you're probably just not a good hunter.
They did this with torture.
Do you remember, during the debates on torture and enhanced interrogation during the Bush years, the libs said, torture is terrible.
It's cruel and unusual punishment.
The argument against that would be, well, no, it's not...
It's not all that unusual, and it's not punishment.
Torture here in the American experience of the war in Iraq was to get information out of people.
Antonin Scalia made this point.
He said, when you're torturing someone to get information out of them, you're not punishing that person.
It probably doesn't feel that great, but you're not actually punishing them.
They say, well, but torture, it's torturing foreign combatants.
It's against the law by the Geneva Conventions.
No, not really.
Not when you're talking about terrorists.
The whole point of the Geneva Convention protections is to protect civilians in times of war.
So if a If you extend Geneva Convention protections to terrorists who specifically target civilians, you undermine the entire Geneva Convention.
Okay, well, no, but the, well, you know what, I say torture just doesn't work.
It doesn't, it's evil and terrible and it doesn't even work.
Well, hold on.
That's just a separate point.
So which is it?
Is the problem that it doesn't work, or is the problem that it's evil and cruel and unusual punishment?
They don't have an answer to it, so they're just trying to throw spaghetti at the wall.
Speaking of the wall, you remember during the controversy over the wall during Trump, they said, my problem with the Trump wall is that it's evil and it's inhumane and it doesn't work.
If it's evil and inhumane, presumably that is because it works.
Because it's evil and inhumane to keep the illegal aliens out, or it's evil and inhumane to make them try to crawl up a wall and that's very dangerous.
Or it doesn't work.
But if it doesn't work, it's not evil and inhumane because it doesn't do anything.
You just get right across it.
That's what they're doing on the guns.
It shows you how little argument they have.
They might still ban them anyway.
They're going to do their best to ban them anyway.
But they're not going to ban them by persuading you.
They're going to ban them in the same way they're going to get you to eat the bugs.
They're just going to do it outside of the realm of public debate.
They're just going to do it because they have the power and they're willing to wield it.
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