A top Senate Democrat is indicted on corruption charges, Ukraine’s Zelensky hires a witch to be his ambassador, and three-quarters of homosexuals approve of “open marriage.”
Ep.1337
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Democrat Senator Bob Menendez has been indicted on federal corruption charges.
According to the Department of Justice, the senator took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from a handful of New Jersey businessmen.
The bribes, according to the indictment, included, quote, cash, gold payments toward a home mortgage, Compensation for a low or no show job, a luxury vehicle, and other things of value.
And federal investigators have pretty good evidence for the charges since they reportedly found gold bars and cash stuffed throughout the senator's home and hidden in his clothing.
The purpose of the bribes was not only to enrich these three businessmen, but also, apparently, to benefit Egypt.
Which makes sense, since Menendez was, until just a couple days ago, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The same position that, coincidentally, Joe Biden held until he became vice president.
It also makes sense that the DOJ would go after Menendez now, not because his crimes are particularly new or urgent.
Prosecutors have known about them since at least 2015, when Menendez was first prosecuted for this sort of thing, though that case ended in a mistrial.
And in fact, Menendez's corruption has been widely known and even a Washington punchline for many years.
The man is obviously corrupt, but So is the DOJ, which is prosecuting Menendez now to take the heat off of Joe Biden, who committed the exact same crimes on a much larger scale.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
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Ukraine President Vladimir Zelensky has just hired a witch, an actual witch, to be an ambassador.
We'll get to that in one second.
First, though, I gotta stick to the corruption in Washington for just a moment.
A friend pointed out about the Menendez indictment that He almost didn't believe the charges because that is how low up an opinion he has of the Department of Justice.
The DOJ is just so corrupt.
I almost think Menendez might be innocent, but it's not an either or.
Menendez is obviously corrupt, and we have all known this for a decade at least.
And the DOJ is also corrupt.
We've known this for at least seven, eight years now.
And it is clear as day to me that where those two corrupt entities meet and why we're seeing this explode right now is because of Biden.
Because Joe Biden did exactly the same thing that Menendez did at a much larger scale.
He took bribes, Hunter was shaken down, foreign entities, governments, and Semi-private actors all around the world while Joe was in a very serious position of power.
Hunter was flying on Air Force Two to do it some of the time.
Joe was involved on the phone calls, writing emails under pseudonyms sometimes, handwritten notes to Hunter's crooked associates.
And what was the endgame?
The endgame was selling American influence because he was in a position of power.
In the case of Menendez, he was just a senator on the Foreign Relations Committee.
In the case of Biden, he had been on the Foreign Relations Committee and then was the vice president in charge of Ukraine affairs.
Menendez was getting hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The Bidens were raking in millions.
So why does Menendez get pinched now?
Well, it's because there's a ton of heat on Joe.
We've got terabytes worth of evidence that he did this, and so we've got to have a little distraction.
There's virtually no news story that comes out of Washington that was not intentionally placed there.
Doesn't mean that everything's fake, doesn't mean that everything is a conspiracy theory, but it means that the editors, the leakers from within the government, the political actors who are making the news, They do so with multiple purposes in mind.
Nothing is merely accidental and very few things are caused merely by circumstance.
There's even more evidence of Joe Biden's corruption.
We have an IRS agent now who's come out and said on the record that the Department of Justice blocked Prosecutor David Weiss from charging Hunter Biden.
David Weiss is now the special counsel who's going after Hunter.
Previously, though, he was just running the DOJ investigation into it.
And you now have an IRS whistleblower who is saying that Weiss was stopped by the DOJ from charging Hunter.
This contradicts Joe Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Garland said he was given, he, David Weiss, was given complete authority to make all decisions on his own.
We've now got multiple whistleblowers saying that was not the case.
Which means that what we now need is an investigation of the investigations into Hunter Biden, which is what we had previously.
We had an investigation into the investigations of Donald Trump.
That was what John Durham was up to, investigating how the investigations took place.
And what the ruling class is banking on here is this is just going to be so complicated.
It's going to go on for so long that people are going to stop caring.
And that's probably true.
So the thing to look for now is we've got whistleblowing on the investigation into the corruption because the investigation wasn't allowed to actually do its job.
What you can expect now is a lot more distractions, a la Bob Menendez.
We're still a year out.
We're still more than a year out from the 2024 presidential election.
There are going to be so many more little butterflies sent out to distract us.
Now, some government actions, unlike the Hunter investigation, are not being stymied and blocked.
Some government operations are continuing without impediment, one of which, of course, is the funding of the war in Ukraine.
The Pentagon has just come out.
DOD spokesman Chris Sherwood has come out and said, Operation Atlantic Resolve is an accepted activity under a government lapse in appropriations.
Of course.
The funding of the war in Ukraine has basically nothing to do with Congress.
Congress is still pretending that Congress still has the power of the purse strings.
Congress is still pretending that that would be the House of Representatives.
The Senate is still pretending that it has the power to ratify treaties and make war.
But that's not really true in practice.
In practice, the House can whine and cry all at once.
The Senate can whine and cry all at once.
The Pentagon, the executive branch, is still going to continue to conduct this war in Ukraine.
And they're going to keep funding it.
Don't forget, back just a few months ago, we had that news story.
Six billion dollars discovered.
It must have been lost under a couch cushion.
It was meant for Ukraine, but they never got it, so we're just going to give them this six billion right now.
And what was that story?
They didn't discover it under a couch cushion.
What they did was ex post facto, they changed the prices of the arms that we had sent to Ukraine, because they didn't want to go through the full political process of getting more money allocated to Ukraine.
So they said, oh no, actually, we're going to go back and do some magical accounting, all the guns and bullets and everything else we sent over there.
Actually, it was cheaper than we said it was.
And because we'd already allocated X amount of money for Ukraine, that means that we got 6 billion left over.
Okay, better send that over to them.
What are they going to do?
Even if they were stymied from sending any new amounts of money over there, they would just go back and change the prices again, and they'd use some magical accounting, and no matter what happens, if that government is completely shut down, I promise you, The war funding will continue because a government shutdown doesn't actually shut down the government.
Because the people and the people's representatives have significantly less control over the government than many of them flatter themselves as having.
Speaking of our leaders in Washington and this war funding, Rand Paul, the obstinate Republican senator, has said that he is going to hold up funding over the Ukraine war.
Rand Paul says he will move to hold up any spending bill that provides any more money to Ukraine as the deadline approaches.
So you've already got the Pentagon saying, doesn't matter, Rand Paul can stop whatever he wants.
We're still going to fund the war in Ukraine.
I hope that Republicans sign on to what Rand Paul is suggesting here.
Rand Paul is often the lone voice in the Senate, and in part this is owing to his libertarian purity.
He doesn't want to give his assent to lots of things that contradict his very specific political ideology.
In this case, though, I think that's a wonderful thing.
In large part because what it will reveal is that foreign policy is not conducted by the Senate.
It will just reveal the political reality that people who have been paying attention know, but people who think that the government is just what you learned in fifth grade civics class and the bill up on Capitol Hill, they don't realize.
Which is that, no.
The foreign policy, a lot of domestic policy too, but the foreign policy in particular is conducted by people who are far less accountable to you than your senators.
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Speaking of Ukraine, before I move off of Ukraine, I think Zelensky is just trolling us at this point.
I think that Vladimir Zelensky, at this point, is just trying to get Americans to root for Vladimir Putin.
Something that would have been unthinkable a few years ago, but I think he's trying.
Zelensky, hot on the heels of hiring a radical transvestite American spokesman who, as the military spokesman for Ukraine, was threatening to kill American journalists.
Hot on the heels of that, Zelensky has hired an actual witch to be his ambassador.
You might say, Michael, witches aren't real.
First of all, witches are real.
But second of all, even if witches weren't real, this is a woman who does very explicit occult activities of witches.
Even if you don't think witches are real, this woman does think witches are real.
And Zelensky just hired her to be an ambassador, to be a face of the country.
It's not even like hiring her to be the cook.
Though she's very good at spirit cooking.
It's not even like hiring her to go do some back office accounting or something.
When you are an ambassador, your entire job is to be the face of your country, to represent your country around the world or around various sectors.
And he's hired a witch.
Her name is Marina Abramovich.
You've probably heard that name because of the WikiLeaks emails.
From the Podesta brothers.
Remember Tony Podesta, very powerful lobbyist and art collector and all around creep if you look into the kind of art he collects and affairs that he's involved in.
And John Podesta was running Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016 and there was a WikiLeaks email inviting John by Tony to a spirit cooking dinner led by Abramovich.
And spirit cooking is just an occult satanic ritual.
At the time, the official fact-checkers, debunkers on the left, they came out and said, this is not a satanic ritual.
We know what it looks like.
It looks occult and witchy and weird, but it's not.
Marina Abramovich is an artist and this is merely a performance art piece that happens to resemble and depict an occult or satanic ritual.
But Marina Abramovich actually contradicted that herself.
I have it pulled up right here.
The quote from Marina Abramovich.
She said in a 2013 Reddit Q&A, Whether her occult contemporary art is merely art, or if it's an actual occult ritual.
And what she said was, everything depends on which context you are doing what you are doing.
If you are doing the occult magic in the context of art, or in a gallery, then it is art.
If you are doing it in a different context, in spiritual circles, or private house, or on TV shows, it is not art.
The intention, the context for what is made, and where it is made, defines what art is or not.
That's only half true.
I don't actually think that you can worship Satan ironically, and I do think that when we engage in art that is occult and satanic, that actually does endanger our souls.
But put that spiritual point aside for a second.
Let's just take her at her words.
The spirit cooking that involved the Podestas, the people running the Hillary Clinton campaign, was to take place in a private apartment.
So even by Abramovich's own standards, they were engaging in witchcraft.
They were engaging in an occult satanic ritual that was not merely art.
Which tells you everything that you already knew about Hillary Clinton and her circle of friends.
But it also tells you a lot about Zelensky.
What the hell is this guy thinking?
Why is he trying to get us to root for Vladimir Putin?
I don't want to root for Putin, but this guy's making it really hard not to.
And I can think of only two explanations here.
Zelensky is involved in this stuff.
Either Zelensky looks with a kind eye on occult satanic rituals, or, and this might be even more distressing, Zelensky knows that the American conservatives don't want to give him another penny.
The only people who want to keep funding his war, or his, I mean to say it charitably, his defense of the Russians, which seems like a doomed endeavor anyway, so the question as far as I'm concerned is just how much longer is this thing going to drag on.
But regardless, Zelensky knows that his bread is only going to be buttered by the Democrats, and he thinks that the way to appeal to Democrats is to hire witches to be his ambassadors.
And I guess that's worse.
I guess the cynical read is even worse.
He thinks, well, you know, the only way to get the American Democrats to support us is to worship Satan and to get witches to be the face of our country.
That's that's a very sad thing.
Says even more about us than it says about Zelensky.
Speaking of weird stuff.
Hard pivot for a second.
There's a survey out that shows that three quarters of homosexuals believe that open marriages, quote-unquote, are acceptable.
Now, an open marriage, of course, is a contradiction in terms.
A marriage is a lifelong union.
Marriage, properly understood, is the union of one man and one woman Who joined together in a lifelong commitment before God, before the political community, for the good of the spouses, yes, and ordered toward the creation of children.
That's what marriage is.
An open marriage totally contradicts marriage, but that's still a phrase that people use and it's one that three quarters of homosexuals apparently agree with.
According to a new Pew Research Center survey, 75% of gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans find open marriages acceptable.
Straight people oppose open marriages.
Most of them do, at least.
54% do.
Only 29% approve.
29% is still way too high among so-called straight couples, also known as normal marriages.
But at least the vast majority of people, or the clear majority of people who identify as straight Oppose such a thing.
So why is there such a big gap here?
Because don't forget, among the so-called straight people, that includes a ton of Democrats, that includes a ton of liberals, that includes a ton of people who have no problem with so-called gay marriage.
You know, it's not just like radical, traditional, orthodox kind of people.
And still a clear majority say this is unacceptable.
Whereas the vast majority of homosexuals say that open marriage is fine.
Why is there a chasm here?
It's almost as if we're talking about two completely different views of marriage owing to two completely different views of anthropology.
It's almost as if the radical redefinition of marriage by the Supreme Court in the Obergefell decision was not merely the expansion of the institution, but the abolition, the beginning of the end for the institution.
Because the institution has a definition, and when you attempt to expand it, You reach an impossibility that does nothing more but then destroy the institution.
That is obviously what took place.
I grew up in New York.
I went to the gayest university in the United States.
I lived in Hollywood.
A disproportionate number of my friends have, let's say, alternative sexual views.
Little light in the loafers, okay?
And I'd like to make clear I have no phobias of any kind.
Love everybody.
Fair, I'm a very Loving, open-minded person.
But it is simply a fact that the union of two men and the union of two women is not and can never be the same thing as the union of a man and a woman in holy matrimony.
It's just not possible.
And according to this survey, everybody knows it!
The gays know it more than the straights!
Because they're saying, yeah, I don't actually want like a...
Monogamous, normal.
That's not how it works.
What are some of the reasons for this?
One of the reasons given in this article about Pew is that, well, men have more testosterone, and so, you know, men have red blood.
Men, generally, when they're married, don't cheat on their wives, and certainly endeavor not to cheat on their wives, but that's a restraining of their lower impulses.
When you've got two guys, though, you both have those impulses.
Unlike a man and a woman, where men and women just have different views of sex.
It cannot be the same thing.
And the redefinition of marriage, which was sold to us as just, you know, being intolerant and inclusive and nice, and why won't you just be open-minded, you bigot?
Well, no, we're just saying there's a point at which you're so open-minded that your brain falls out.
You have to acknowledge limits at certain points.
If a country doesn't have limits around it, if it doesn't have a border, then it's not a country.
If a concept doesn't have limits around it, it's not a concept.
It's undefined.
And marriage, certainly, if it doesn't have limits, it ceases to be marriage, as increasingly would appear to be the case.
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As you know, the spooky season is rapidly approaching.
There will be demons out on the prowl.
I guess there always are, but we'll be more conscious of it on Halloween.
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Turning our attention to the presidential race and actually, I guess, keeping our attention on marriage and what happens as a result of marriage.
You know, that usually creates children.
Well, the abortion issue is front and center and Nikki Haley has offered what I think she views as an alternative between the stark take on abortion that you see from the left and the Democrats and from the right wing and the conservatives.
Here's Nikki's take.
We haven't had 60 Republican Senators in over 100 years.
We might have 45 pro-life Senators.
So no Republican President can ban abortions any more than a Democrat President can ban these state laws.
So why don't we just find consensus?
Can't we agree that we don't want late-term abortions?
Can't we agree that we should encourage adoptions and better quality adoptions?
Can't we agree that doctors and nurses who don't believe in abortion shouldn't have to perform them?
Can't we agree that contraception should be accessible?
And can't we agree that no state law should say that any woman who's had an abortion can go to jail or get the death penalty?
Let's just start there.
We have to humanize this issue.
I am not going to be part of demonizing this issue.
It's too personal to everyone.
And the fellas have done that for too long, no offense, but it is time that we start treating it like the sensitive topic that it is.
Okay, some of what Nikki said there is correct, some of it is not correct, some of it I agree with, some of it I don't agree with.
The part I really don't agree with is when she says we need to stop demonizing this issue.
They're murdering babies.
They're murdering little babies, hundreds of thousands, upwards of a million per year.
If we're not going to demonize this issue, then I guess we're just denying demons.
This is as demonic as it gets.
It's the sacrifice of innocent little babies to Moloch, okay?
That is as demonic as any issue can get on planet Earth.
But while I think that she is wrong directionally on that point, I think Nikki is probably right tactically on this point, because what she's saying is, especially that first part, she goes, We've never had more than 45 pro-life senators, actually hard, strong pro-life senators.
So it's just not going to happen, guys.
You're going to pursue a national law to outlaw all abortions, and it's not going to go anywhere.
And you might feel really good about yourselves by saying, well, I stood firm for the cause of life, but the effect of it is not going to be anything.
Because you're never going to get that passed.
And there, I think she's totally right.
And it's something that the conservatives and maybe the pro-life movement aren't going to want to hear, but it's just a fact.
It seems to me pretty clear that federal law is most likely a dead end here.
You could still have some kind of federal rule on abortion, but that would come from the Supreme Court.
That's not going to come from anywhere else.
And it could come from the Supreme Court.
I was just, I flew out to L.A.
just for a night a couple days ago to the Live Action Gala.
Live Action, one of the greatest pro-life organizations in the country, run by Lila Rose.
And Live Action, in the wake of the Dobbs decision overruling Roe v. Wade, has said that the new North Star is 14th Amendment jurisprudence.
To say that not only, as some textualists and originalists have said in recent years, not only is abortion not in the Constitution, not only should it be returned to the states, but one could make a 14th Amendment argument and say the 14th Amendment provides equal protection under the laws.
And I know that there are going to be some people who say, well, the 14th Amendment was too broad.
It was intended to address this problem of slavery and what we do after slavery is abolished.
But it was so broad that it created certain problems within the Constitution.
And I don't agree in principle.
And it harmed the cause of federalism and the cause of subsidiarity.
And you can make all of those arguments, and I don't really even intend to dispute them.
But it is a fact that the 14th Amendment has Shaped the entirety of our jurisprudence since then, and the Libs use the 14th Amendment all the time to very bad ends, so here we could cite the 14th Amendment for a very good end, which would be saving little babies.
And there have been serious legal theorists, people like John Finnis, people like Robbie George, the philosopher at Princeton, who have made this argument, made it in an amicus brief on the Dobbs case, that the Supreme Court should go even further and ban abortion By reading the equal protection of the laws into the 14th Amendment.
That maybe could go somewhere.
I'm still somewhat skeptical of that, too.
That maybe could go somewhere, but federal law is just not going to happen.
Now, speaking of presidential candidates, there is a shocking new poll out of Washington Post and ABC, which shows that not only is Donald Trump leading the pack in the Republican primary, he's also leading Joe Biden by a lot.
And this poll is shocking According to the reaction to it and according to some of the headlines.
But it shouldn't be all that shocking if you've been following the Washington Post-ABC poll for the past number of months.
So, head to head, right now in a hypothetical 2024 matchup, Trump has 51% support to Joe Biden's 42% support.
That's pretty big, up 9 points on Biden.
That this is good for Trump because he's now up three points since the last ABC Washington Post poll in February, and Biden is down by two points.
But those shifts, taken individually for the candidates, are actually not statistically significant.
And even back in February, Trump was leading Biden, according to this poll, from a liberal outlet.
There's even less change since May.
The ABC Post did the poll in May, and in May, they had the race at 49-42, Trump over Biden.
So everyone is so shocked now But, this is the way it's been for a long time.
Just to put a button on it, in terms of the primary right now, Trump has 54% of Republicans and Republican-leading independents, compared to DeSantis' 15%.
So he actually has taken a pretty big hit.
The last time the poll was done in May, DeSantis had 25%.
Now he's down 10 points to 15%, and all the other candidates.
DeSantis is the only one with any even semblance of a shot, according to The Post and ABC.
Every other candidate is in single digits.
What do we conclude from this?
We conclude, I think, that one argument made by Trump's critics on the right is an absurd argument.
And that is the argument that he can't win the general.
We hear this all the time from Trump's critics on the right.
They say, well, if we nominate him, he cannot win the general.
And so we are guaranteed to lose to Joe Biden or whoever the Democrat nominee is.
The people making this argument made the same argument in 2016, which is why I find the argument so absurd.
We know for a fact that Donald Trump can win the general because he did it at least once.
I say at least, we'll leave it at that.
We know that he can do that.
Now, does this mean that I'm going to say he is going to beat Joe Biden again this time?
No, I'm not saying that.
In fact, I'm not even saying I think it's likely that Donald Trump would beat Joe Biden this time.
My reason being, they rigged the election in 2020.
They very clearly rigged it, even if you don't think that the rigging resulted in Trump's loss.
Even if you think Biden would have won anyway.
It is simply a fact they changed A huge portion of the election rules, right before the election, to favor Joe Biden.
That's just a fact.
And so, if we can't unrig that sort of thing, then Trump very likely might lose again.
But, if that's your conclusion, then there is no reason to believe that they wouldn't rig it against any of the other Republicans.
Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, any of them.
Chris Christie, of course, the Chrisissants.
So, that's not really an argument against Trump.
That's an argument against Our democracy as it presently stands, but you can't use that as a primary argument because that would be an argument from the structure of how the elections are held.
And by the way, if your argument is simultaneously that the Democrats really fear Ron DeSantis or some other candidate more than Donald Trump, then you've got even less of a point here because then there's no reason to believe the Democrats wouldn't rig the election any less hard against the other guys.
Now, is the election hopelessly rigged?
I mean, do you really believe that Republicans have no shot whatsoever?
I'm not willing to say that.
We've done a good job, certain Republican governors, including Ron DeSantis actually, have done a good job of undoing some of the rigging within their own states.
So I am cautiously hopeful that 2024 will be less rigged than 2020.
Cautiously hopeful about that.
And also the Trump campaign is showing that it's getting a little bit more serious about working in the nitty gritty details of these election rules itself.
We're seeing this in the primary.
One of the reasons that Trump is doing so well in the 2024 primary is not merely that he's good at appealing to people and the broad surveys say people generally like him.
One of the other reasons, this just came out really good report on this a few days ago, Is that the Trump campaign is going in to the individual state parties and fixing the rules to give him an advantage.
One GOP observer says parties are extremely keen on being more important in the primary.
That's why we're seeing more winner-take-all rules and seeing more early primaries or caucuses when they have the opportunity.
What that amounts to is a front-runner set of rules Something that benefits the frontrunner and delegates being allocated quickly.
Josh Putnam, who's a political scientist, says the Trump team was unusually active in nudging state parties toward changes for 2020 that, one, made it easier for Trump to gobble up delegates as the nominating process moved through the calendar of contests, and two, made it much more difficult for multiple candidates to win delegates.
Another Republican lawyer, Ben Ginsberg, says the Trump campaign succeeded in changing rules, quote, in part Because they knew what they were doing and in part because everyone else is asleep at the switch.
So I don't think this is exactly favorable about Trump.
I think the point of the article was to say they're rigging it and they're not giving the other candidates a chance.
This actually makes me feel much better about a potential Trump nomination, which right now seems quite likely.
The numbers, in as much as they're moving at all, are moving in Trump's favor and away from his opponents.
So if he is the nominee, the question is can he win?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I wouldn't bet a lot of money that Trump beats Biden, but hearing things like this, I'm beginning to think, oh, maybe he will have a better shot.
Maybe his campaign is actually doing the nitty gritty things on the ground to make sure that they don't steal the election.
In elections, campaigns, and especially the Democrats, are always trying to steal things.
I've seen this, I've worked on campaigns.
This is why we have poll watchers.
The whole reason that poll watchers exist is because we know that people try to steal elections.
And they bus in voters from out of district, and they try to loosen voter ID rules, and they try to bribe people, and they do all the things that you heard about Boss Tweed and the old Tammany Hall political machines doing.
All the things that you've heard in democracies for all of human history.
They try to do them here every election.
Sometimes it's easier and sometimes it's harder.
And in 2020, it was much, much easier because we turned election day into election month, and we had widespread mail-in ballots, and we had ballot drop boxes that were often illegally far away from where they were supposed to be, and we had the infusion of Zuckbox, and you had the government answering to private entities.
That had a very liberal agenda and you had pipes bursting in Georgia and you had days and weeks, weeks of ballot counting in some cases.
A pausing of the vote when it looked too good for Donald Trump.
There was just so much rigging and I am hoping that the Trump campaign realizes that the election is going to be won or lost There, okay?
Yes, you need a good campaign.
Yes, you need to persuade people.
But look at the polls.
Biden is very unpopular right now.
And Biden would appear to be much less popular than Donald Trump.
So I think the popular support is kind of there already.
The question is, will the popular sentiment really matter in terms of the final election?
No, that election is going to be determined underneath bursting pipes.
Can the Trump campaign patch up those bursting pipes in order to make sure that the count matches public sentiment?
My favorite comment on Friday is from Dominic Zelenak, who says, I can name three branches of government.
Black Rock, State Street, and Vanguard.
Very perceptive.
Very, that was a perspicacious sort of thing to say.
Speaking of our elected officials, before we go, this is a story I meant to get to on Friday, we'll get to it now.
John Fetterman, the senator from Pennsylvania, who is now dressing like a plumber on the floor of the United States Senate, and actually had Chuck Schumer change the rules for him, John Fetterman broke down crying on the floor of the Senate.
Because I live in a political environment, I was ridiculed and made fun of because I wasn't able to process things sometimes or say things.
I'm so sorry that I'm sure many of you had to go through this kind of thing.
I was lucky to go through my life, the vast majority of that, without this kind of disability that I have.
Again, I can't imagine and how the challenges, and I admire everyone that has to kind of live with these kind of struggles and prevail over them.
I have a great deal of sympathy for John Fetterman.
I'm not going to join the chorus of people just making fun of him for crying.
I'm sure he's in a great deal of pain.
I have no doubt that he sincerely was depressed when he was checked in for depression at that medical center, and I bet he's going through a lot.
It's very difficult.
He is not fit to be a U.S.
Senator, and he's in this role, and that is not conducive to flourishing, personally for him or nationally for us.
I'm not making fun of him.
I'm not calling him all sorts of names.
It pains me greatly when people feel bullied and insulted and low about themselves.
It pains me.
I hate that.
I hate seeing that.
I really feel for the guy.
I sincerely feel for the guy.
The solution to that is for him to resign.
He is not fit for the job.
If he can't figure out how to put on a jacket, if he can't conduct the basic business of the Senate, this is not the place for him.
And he got himself elected Senator, and that's great, and that's an accomplishment, but The circumstances of his life are such that he is not fit for this job, if the job of senator still matters at all.
I guess this is what ties in with the first part that we were talking about today, which is, does the Senate ratify treaties?
Does the Senate conduct war?
Does the Senate, or declare war rather, does the Senate really do the business of government?
Or is the Senate just kind of a facade?
Is it a little bit of a club that He works around the margins and approves judges and has some modicum of power, but is the business of government really conducted more in these agencies by unaccountable, faceless bureaucrats who don't really need to worry about government shutdowns, who don't really need to worry about elections?
Is the Senate just kind of a joke?
The longer that John Fetterman remains in the U.S.
Senate, even with the pressure to do what little power the Senate has, To wield what little power the Senate has is going to be very hard on him and he's probably going to cry more and he's probably going to break down more and that's a sad thing.
But also the longer he remains in the Senate in this condition, the clearer and clearer it is that the Senate is not what we once thought it was.
It's the government happens elsewhere.
Speaking of broken institutions, There's a leaked video out of the Veterans Affairs Department.
It promotes abortion and it says that pregnancy is not limited to women.
Person who is pregnant is more inclusive language.
However, many of the studies that exist to date Hello, my name is Emily Ashbaugh.
My pronouns are she, her, and hers, and I'm really glad to be with you today.
Some patients may be fearful, distrustful, or have preconceived beliefs related to reproductive health care, which may impact their decision-making based on their own experiences and the long history of reproductive injustice in this country.
Language has a profound impact on what people hear and learn.
When discussing abortion, please use these examples of clinically accurate language.
There are many ways the VA can provide abortions, including on-site with providers, ordering prescription medications, or performing abortion procedures in outpatient clinics and operating rooms where available.
If you were only listening on the radio or on podcast, You didn't see even the craziest parts.
It just writes out, right in this VA PowerPoint, not everyone who gets pregnant is a woman.
Don't use the kind of language baby or unborn child.
You have to say embryo or fetus.
Don't say chemical abortion.
Don't say medication abortion.
Yes, that's what we want.
Don't say womb.
Don't say womb.
Say uterus.
Don't say mother.
Say veteran or person.
Don't deal with the reality of this.
A related story back to the Senate is that Senator Tommy Tuberville right now is holding up the appointment of various people to the higher echelons of the military because of this crap.
Because the military is now pushing funding for abortions and to allow service members to travel out of wherever they are to go get abortions and contradicting state laws that are pro-life and saying, no, no, no, we're going to make sure that if our employees are in your state, they're going to be able to kill their kids.
And Tommy Tuberville, Senator Tuberville pointed out, this is not helping the fighting force of the United States.
This is not important to the mission of the US military.
And I'm not going to allow any of these people to get their new appointments until you cut this out.
And he's being lambasted for it.
And this guy is a hero, man.
Tommy Tuberville is a hero and deserves all of our support.
And I recognize here that the Pentagon and the VA are distinct.
They're pretty clearly related, and they clearly share the same infanticidal, insane ideology.
And we absolutely need to grind this to a halt until they stop this.
I want our U.S.
military to kill our enemies.
I don't want the U.S.
military to kill our own children.
That's a terrible thing.
And anybody who's complicit in this in the military needs to be thrown out.
And anyone who wants a new higher appointment in the military needs to say, no, we're not going to do this anymore.
This is a major cultural problem.
This cuts to the very core of who we are as a country, and what our country is fighting for.
And I think Tommy Tuberville is doing great, and I think every other Republican senator, and any Democrat senator with a conscience, should join him in this.
This is a much deeper problem than oopsie-daisy, some little regulation passed through the Pentagon, but don't hold up our appointments for it.
No, no.
This is A clearly essential view, a sacramental priority of our present ruling class that has infected now the military, and we've got to cut out that infection before moving on and allowing the military to address other challenges.
