Ep. 1340 - 2nd Republican Debate Goes Off The Rails
The non-Trump candidates square off in a debate at the Reagan Library, Buttigieg warns that all cars are going electric, and a judge tries to shut down all of Trump’s businesses.
Ep.1340
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Last night's cacophonous and chaotic Republican presidential primary debate ended with one of the wildest questions ever posed in any presidential debate.
None of you have indicated that you're dropping out.
So, which one of you on stage tonight should be voted off the island?
Please use your marker to write your choice on the notepad in front of you.
15 seconds, starting now.
Of the people on the stage, who should be- I'm absolutely serious.
With all due respect, I mean, we're here, like, you know, we're happy to debate, but I think that that's disrespectful to my fellow competitors.
Nobody wants to participate.
Let's do some questions.
Let's talk about the future of the country.
It was a good answer from DeSantis.
That was the smart way to play it.
What's funny is Christie then went along and he said, yeah, we don't want to participate.
But he was the first one when she said it.
He just starts writing down on his board.
But OK, then they said, no, we don't want to participate at all.
It's a terrible, terrible question.
And everyone now is attacking Dana Perino for that game show question.
I, however, thought the question was basically appropriate.
It's not appropriate for a presidential debate, but it is appropriate for whatever last night was.
Because last night was not a presidential primary debate, because nobody on that stage is likely to be the Republican nominee for president.
The frontrunner, the far and away frontrunner, the frontrunner by 40, maybe 50 points, was absent.
And so the entire debate was a little bit more than a mildly entertaining sideshow.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
AOC is fired up.
I'm here in our nation's capital.
I spent some time with some members of Congress yesterday and one of those members of Congress was not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
She was too busy being fired up on immigration.
We'll get to that in one second.
First though, I'm going to give you The entire summary of what has been called a debate by some people in about 60 seconds.
I was on Tim Pool's show last night.
We actually all had forgotten that the debate was even on.
So when I get there, he said, hey man, we got to change the order of this show because we got to react to the debate, I guess.
So we watched it together.
And I did find it mildly entertaining, and I did find some of the answers pretty good.
I thought DeSantis did very, very well.
DeSantis was the winner of the debate.
He did better than he did at the first debate.
It was good.
Vivek was the most under fire.
Everybody was attacking Vivek.
He did very, very well, not unexpectedly.
You know, he's a sharp guy.
He's able to think and speak very clearly, but he was extremely Under attack last night.
And he did pretty well.
Nikki Haley, I felt, hurt herself.
She started out the debate pretty strong and then she became angry.
She seemed angry and even somewhat insulting later on into the debate, so I think she sort of hurt herself.
In fact, one of the defining features of the debate was Nikki and Vivek just attacking each other.
This is infuriating because TikTok is one of the most dangerous social media apps that we could have.
And what you've got, I honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.
Because I can't believe that here you've got a TikTok situation.
What they're doing is these 150 million people are on TikTok.
That means they can get your contacts, they can get your financial information, they can get your emails, they can get your text messages, they can get all of these things.
This is very important for our party.
This is very important for our party and I'm going to say it.
You've gone and you've helped China make medicines in China, not America.
You're now wanting kids to go and get on the social media that's dangerous for all of us.
You and you were in business with the Chinese that gave Hunter Biden $5 million.
We can't trust you.
We can't trust you.
We can't have TikTok and all that.
That was pretty much it.
That was basically the whole debate.
And I think Nikki believed that she looked good at the last debate when she went after Vivek.
That was her best part of the last debate performance.
This I felt was too much though, and it was cacophonous, and some of the attacks there she seemed to suggest that Vivek was involved in paying off Hunter Biden or something.
I don't think that's the point she meant to make, but that's kind of what it sounded like.
And it just didn't look good for either of them, but it really didn't look good for Nikki.
But other candidates were interrupting too.
Tim Scott interrupted throughout basically the entire debate.
Yeah.
Anytime anyone was asked a question on that stage, Tim Scott would try to respond.
So much so that they cut his microphone and you could only hear Tim on everyone else's microphone through the ambient noise.
These are good people who are tainted by a broken system, and it's not the fault of anybody who's involved.
Thank you for speaking while I'm interrupting.
- You can't be on both sides.
- Gentlemen, you'll have your turn. - One of the challenges we should have a vote.
We should have a debate between the big companies.
Let's focus on holding Joe Biden accountable.
That's what we need to be focusing on.
I learned so much.
You know, that really showed me a new side of all of the candidates.
I think that's really going to affect my vote, don't you?
No.
No, that was it.
And Tim Scott was frustrated because he felt he wasn't getting enough questions, but Tim Scott's not polling very high.
So when he kept trying to When he kept trying to interject, it just seemed desperate.
And the debate seemed desperate for basically everybody.
And the reason for that is because the guy who has had the commanding lead for the entirety of the primary, going back 14 months now, didn't even bother to show up.
That's how inconsequential he felt the debate to be.
And some voters, especially if you don't like Trump, might say, well, that was wrong of him not to show up.
And he owes us the respect of showing up.
If you believe any of the polls, certainly if you believe all of the polls taken together, which haven't really changed very much, Trump didn't have to do that.
And nothing has moved the needle, and I'm skeptical that anything is going to move the needle now.
The one answer of the night that I felt did land a real blow on Trump was given by Ron DeSantis, and it was in response to Trump's attacks on Ron DeSantis' pro-life policies.
How are you going to win over independent pro-choice voters in Arizona?
Same way we did in Florida.
We won the greatest Republican victory in a governor's race in the history of the state, over 1.5 million votes.
We were winning places like Miami-Dade County, Palm Beach, that nobody thought was possible because we were leading with purpose and conviction.
I reject this idea that pro-lifers are to blame for midterm defeats.
I think there's other reasons for that.
The former president, he's missing in action tonight.
He's had a lot to say about that.
He should be here explaining his comments.
To try to say that pro-life protections are somehow a terrible thing.
I want him to look into the eyes and tell people who've been fighting this fight for a long time, we're better off when everybody counts.
And I think we should stand for what we believe in.
I think we should hold the Democrats accountable for their extremism, supporting abortion all the way up until the moment of birth.
That is infanticide and that is wrong.
This was basically a flawless answer.
And it was a flawless answer because he rejected the premise of the question.
The premise being that pro-life policies and pro-life advocacy turn off moderate, centrist, liberal voters.
And he says, I don't think that's true.
I think that we persuade people when we lead with courage and conviction.
So, actually, if you've got a pro-life policy that is consistent and coherent, and you can explain your reasoning for it, that's going to persuade more people than some middle-of-the-ground, literally split-the-baby kind of policy, where you say, okay, we're going to kill babies who are this old, but we're not going to kill babies who are that old.
So, I thought that was good, and then he pivoted off of it, and then he got his attack on Trump in, which is the point of these debates, is to Articulate your view and be persuasive and then attack your opponents.
I thought he did that pretty effectively.
And then he pivoted it to Democrat extremism so he didn't just leave himself at the very early part of the abortion debate, which is harder to win.
He brought it all to the end and he said these Democrats want to kill babies at the moment of birth or later.
And that's completely insane and that's out of step with voters.
And so we're going to keep articulating pro-life.
It was a really good answer.
Even that answer I don't think moves the needle.
And the reason is because Trump has already served as president.
This is why Trump sees no need to go to the debate.
I think he has no need to go to the debate.
This is why his poll numbers don't really seem to move after the debates.
Because Trump has a track record.
So what Trump can do is if people don't like what he said about pro-life and don't like him attacking Ron DeSantis' pro-life policies, Even if he was probably only doing that because he's attacking everything about Ron DeSantis, and sometimes because DeSantis can sound to the right of him on certain issues, he's going to attack him.
Trump is going to attack DeSantis from the left, and that's going to irritate conservatives.
But even then, Trump can just point to his record and say, I got Roe v. Wade overruled.
And that is going to be persuasive for most people, I think.
And my proof of that is, his polls haven't moved.
According to any of them.
And now I know some people are saying, well, Michael, did you believe the polls in 2016 when it showed Hillary Clinton was leading Trump?
When it showed that Hillary had a 99% chance of winning the election?
And we have to remember what actually happened in The polls showed Hillary was consistently up over Trump, but that 99% number was a meta-analysis of some wonk sitting in an ivory tower somewhere, saying, well, given all of the data here, I just think the likelihood that Hillary wins, not the percentage of people who are going to vote for her, but the likelihood that Hillary wins is 95%, 97%, 99%.
And then Trump outperformed the polls, and Hillary underperformed.
But we're talking about, in this case, Literally every poll that shows Trump up at least 20 points.
And every poll in all these battleground states where Trump has a significant advantage.
So the conspiracy, the pro-Trump conspiracy among pollsters and political scientists would have to be so pronounced that they've created a 30 or 40 or more than 40 point mirage of support for Donald Trump.
What is more likely?
Or that Trump has many of the advantages of an incumbent because he's running sort of practically as an incumbent.
I think probably the latter.
The most surprising candidate, I think the one candidate who might actually really have helped himself in the debate last night, was North Dakota governor.
Doug Burgum.
I think that the liberal left seems to be just completely bent on prosecuting law-abiding citizens that are gun owners, because every solution they have to this is take away the Second Amendment rights of Americans, and somehow that's going to solve the problem.
But all these cities that we're talking about that showed the videos of tonight, they have some of the strictest gun laws in the country.
So we know that that's not what's working.
What we have to do is get back to the core issues about the family.
We have to get back to behavioral health and mental health.
We've got to get back to actually enforcing the laws these people talked about.
And like we've done in North Dakota, where we've got the goal and we're on the track to being the most military-friendly state in the nation.
We've got the most military and the most support of what we're doing in terms of law enforcement because The morale is down because we've been defunding the police, because they've been attacked in the press.
The police have become the bad guys when they're the one.
There's all these jobs available in America.
Why would you be a policeman if people don't even respect them?
Every time I see a policeman, the first thing I say is thank you.
And so does everybody else in my family and most of the people in our state because they know we have to respect the people that are out there defending us every single day.
Doug Burgum.
Are you feeling the Burgum Momentum?
Burgumentum?
Are you feeling it?
Are you a Burgomaniac?
Burgum probably not going to be the nominee.
Burgum is pretty liberal on the social issues.
But his numbers might improve because I think he's somewhere around 1%.
So he might double or triple or quadruple.
He actually did pretty well introducing himself to the people last night.
So how did it end?
It ended with the vague being bold and taking bold stances.
He came out against birthright citizenship.
I thought that was very cool.
Vivek takes a lot of bold stances and he's pursuing something similar to the Trump path in 2016 in terms of ways to stand out.
Maybe it will benefit him.
He was so severely attacked last night at the debate, I'm not sure which way it goes or if his numbers move at all.
DeSantis, he did a great job doing the DeSantis performance, which is to seem very disciplined, very competent, have a clear political vision, and just not be that sexy.
Being Trump with perhaps more discipline and less sexiness, which to some people sounds great, but to a lot of people it doesn't do very much.
Nikki, I think, probably hurt herself.
Tim, I think, probably hurt herself a little bit.
Was there anyone else on stage?
Oh, Chris Christie!
Chris Christie did not have a good performance, did not look good, tried a few zingers out at Trump, they didn't quite land.
So, where does that leave us?
In basically the exact same place that we were before the debate.
Happened, okay?
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Now there's another debate that's going to take place, not with the primary contestants yet.
That one will be in a little bit.
The next debate coming up is going to be between the California governor, Patrick Bateman, Doing business as Gavin Newsom and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
And Newsom is already trash-talking DeSantis a month out from the debate.
Why are you doing that and what is your strategy?
Well, I don't know if that's the right question.
Why is he doing it is the right question.
He's running, I think, I'm not sure after tonight, but currently he's running for President of the United States.
Do you think he's still going to be a candidate on November 30th?
That's an open-ended question.
Part of me wonders if, you know, the fact that he took this debate, the fact that he took the bait in relationship to this debate, shows that he's completely unqualified to be President of the United States.
That's my humble first.
Why is that?
You're baiting him with the debate offer?
Of course.
I mean, why is he debating a guy who's not even running for president when he's running for president?
He's showing up at the Reagan Library, hallowed ground, and he puts out an ad today, not for his presidential campaign, to promote a debate against the governor of California?
I mean, this guy's distracted.
So I don't know that he has it in his heart.
I think, here's my personal opinion about Ron DeSantis, he regrets running for president.
He made a huge mistake.
So he keeps going on like this, just taunting DeSantis, and it reminds me of a WWE match.
Or even in an actual sport that isn't just show business, like a boxing match, when they're trash talking before boxing.
This guy, I'm gonna wipe the floor with him.
This guy, he's a complete joke.
I think he regrets running.
He's unfocused.
He's undisciplined.
And you're just mocking him relentlessly.
This, too, is a sideshow.
I mean, unfortunately, that's the point that Gavin Newsom is right about, is that this debate probably will not determine the 2024 presidential race.
The thing that he's being dishonest about here is that he's not running for president.
Gavin Newsom is obviously trying to run for president.
He's not willing to put himself up against Joe Biden because he thinks that then Biden would grind him up in the way that Donald Trump is attacking Ron DeSantis right now.
But he obviously wants to run for president, and this DeSantis versus Newsom debate is the undercard debate.
If Joe Biden's marionette strings collapse and he falls to the ground, or if Donald Trump is sent to Elba or St.
Helena, or he's taken out with the Hillary special, then there will be an opening and DeSantis perhaps could fill that gap.
But as of now, even that.
And I think that could be a substantive debate about two different visions for America.
Do you want America to be like California?
Do you want America to be like Florida?
Which way are the U-Haul trucks moving?
I think it could be a great substantive debate.
But once again, don't shoot the messenger here, folks.
I'm just the one who has to see things clearly past the event through to the election.
I don't see how this moves.
The needle.
Speaking of Republicans engaging with corrupt Democrat politicians, Bob Menendez, still under fire.
A lot of people calling on him to resign, but oddly enough, not very many Republicans calling on Menendez to resign.
And Mediaite has this headline, Mediaite says, why are no Senate Republicans calling for Menendez to resign?
Senate Republicans.
Democrats have all attacked him, called on him to step down, but the Republicans won't do it.
What's that about?
Why won't they do it?
Two reasons.
One, because the DOJ is corrupt.
And the corrupt DOJ has been weaponized against Republicans in recent years, so we are just generally more willing to give the accused the benefit of the doubt than Democrats are when it comes to the DOJ.
But, that said, Menendez is obviously corrupt and we've all known it for a decade.
Why?
Why won't the Republicans call on him to resign?
The simple answer is because the longer this drags out, the longer Menendez holds onto that seat, the better chance a Republican has of replacing Menendez once the seat eventually and inevitably opens up.
So Menendez is holding on because he wants to get a sweetheart deal so he doesn't spend the rest of his life in prison.
Democrats are clamoring for him to resign because they don't want this continued scandal and they don't want to lose the seat.
And Republicans, we're just going to sit back and watch the show.
I guess that's the moment of politics that we're in right now, is just sort of sitting back and watching the show because there's not very much that we can do to alter the course of events in politics.
I don't think there's very much that we can do in the 2024 presidential primary.
I think it just is what it is, and it has been for 14 months.
And I don't think there's much we can do with Menendez.
He's gonna resign or he's not gonna resign.
But if we at least don't push him to resign, then this scandal's gonna drag on, and Republicans can win in New Jersey.
We have one in New Jersey.
Even Chris Christie managed to get himself elected.
And we might be looking at a Republican senator.
So keep it up!
Mr. Menendez, you are innocent until proven guilty.
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I tell you all the time.
I'll say it again, even though I hate to say it.
And it pains me.
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Speaking of Hispanic Democrats, AOC has a brutal accusation for Republicans, which is that we run our mouths about the immigration problem all the time, but we don't have any solutions.
I didn't hear in your testimony the alternative sites you've advocated for.
Could you remind me of which those are?
In the conversation, as we know, as we... I'm sorry, I only have 18 seconds.
Which are the sites that you propose as an alternative?
I don't have a proposal... So you don't have a proposal alternative?
No proposed alternative?
No solutions here.
No ideas here.
But Democrats, we're authorizing 500,000 work permits so people can get on their feet and support themselves.
Democrats, we're talking about saying let's reassess our foreign policies so that people aren't fleeing, you know, making sure that we aren't participating.
In the destabilization of what's happening abroad.
And all I'm hearing right now is that we're not being met in the middle.
No support, no path to citizenship, no identified alternatives, just grievances.
We need to get it together and make sure that we're getting on the right page.
And if the ideas being presented here in this committee are being being disagreed with, I'd like to see some actual functional alternatives that center and preserve the dignity of both people who are coming here to fulfill an American dream and the American citizens here who want to support them.
That was a whole lot of words without any particular solutions that I heard from AOC either.
So this is her clip.
AOC, she's taken a page out of the Daily Wire Facts and Logic clips where she got the fast cuts and it goes onto the speaker and onto the questioner and then she gets the nice 60 second zinger out there pioneered by Young America's Foundation and other right-wing groups and she's flipping it.
She said, you have no solutions!
You have no solutions!
And then she babbles and blathers for 60 seconds without offering any solutions herself.
The accusation isn't even legitimate.
Republicans have very clear solutions.
Here is my solution.
I got two of them for immigration.
We should restrict immigration and we should expand deportations.
I solved it!
Do I get a prize from AOC?
I did it!
We should restrict it.
We should restrict all immigration.
Obviously, illegal immigration, but also legal immigration, because we have way too many people coming into the country.
And it's no knock on the people, but the movement of foreigners into the United States over the last 65 years is the largest movement of human beings ever in recorded history.
And it's led to social breakdown, because there's no longer a coherent, cohesive society.
So we gotta slow that down drastically.
I'm not saying we totally seal up the border and don't let a single human being in, I don't think that's practicable, but we could drastically reduce all immigration, illegal and legal immigration.
We could do it pretty easily.
We've done it before in American history.
And then what about deportations?
Am I saying we're going to deport every single illegal that's in the United States?
No, I don't think it's practical.
I don't think most people would want it.
It's not going to happen.
But we could drastically expand deportations.
You've got criminals now who go around, who kill people, who sell drugs, who sell flesh, who are pimps, who are working for the cartels, and then they get arrested and they get let off the hook.
So we could just reduce the threshold for which someone is deported drastically, that would drastically increase the deportations, while not going after, you know, the really sweet, innocent little person who's just following his or her lights, who doesn't commit all that many crimes other than the crime of entering the country illegally, and the kind of person who most Americans don't want to see deported, okay, they're going to be at the bottom of the deportation list, so it's probably not going to happen.
Why can't we do that?
Why can't we just directionally enforce laws that are already on the books and drastically restrict immigration and drastically expand deportation?
That seems simple.
That's my solution.
Yet they won't do it.
The AOC is not going to do that.
She wants to open the border completely and flood the country with foreigners.
But the Republicans don't want to do it either.
The Chamber of Commerce Republicans don't want to do it.
But don't tell me we don't have solutions.
I got a simple solution.
We've used it many times in American history and it worked out great.
And now that we're not following my solution, things are not working out so great.
Now speaking of transporting people, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, he decided to do his job for a little bit.
He took a break from the breastfeeding and the paternity leave, and Mr. Buttigieg It's gone on TV to say that we have got to shift to electric cars because the electric cars are coming.
It's going to happen.
Whether you want it or not, whether we do anything or not, cars are going to become electric, so get on board.
That concern in terms of the transition and who would suffer during that transition, what's your response to that?
Well, it's absolutely right.
Look, I come from South Bend, Indiana.
It's the home of UAW Local 5 and UAW Local 9.
I saw how the past generation of union auto jobs helped build the middle class and build communities like the one that I grew up in.
I also saw what happened when those factories closed.
What the UAW is trying to do right now is to make sure that this next chapter of the auto industry, which let's be very clear, these cars are going electric with or without us.
Look, they're going electric, and so the union workers who are protesting because all these mandates, mostly climate change BS mandates from the Biden administration to stop building normal cars and shift everything, often with government subsidies, to this electric stuff that many people don't really want.
It's just going to happen.
It's just happening, okay?
So you've got to just get on board with it.
I don't really care about Pete Buttigieg or the cars or what's going on in the strike here.
This story to me is about all of the progressive technocrat project.
Progressive technocrats thrive on depoliticizing human beings.
What they thrive on is, oh look, it's going to happen.
It's just going to happen.
You have no say over it.
You have no say over your own life.
You can do, you can cry, and you can whine, and you can vote, and you can organize politically, but it doesn't matter.
It's happening.
Because progress demands it.
Progress with a capital P demands My very, very specific political program that the Biden administration is spending a lot of money and power to enforce.
It's obviously not true.
If it were true, the Biden administration wouldn't need to mandate all this stuff.
If it's just going to happen naturally, they wouldn't need to spend so much political capital and actual capital money to push this.
Electric vehicles are spreading now because of a particular government focus.
And because that's what they want.
And okay, but maybe some of us don't want that.
Maybe some striking workers don't want that.
Maybe some ordinary citizens don't want that.
And maybe we're going to voice our opinion, and even if Pete Buttigieg insists that history and progress of the Capital H and the Capital P demand that we get rid of our gas guzzling cars, maybe we want to keep them.
And so what?
What are we going to do then?
Well, what the progressives do then, what the liberals do then, is they say, well, you don't have a right to say that.
You don't have a right.
And what we respond is, well, this is government of the people, by the people, for the people.
What do you mean I can't set my own environmental standards and my own manufacturing standards?
They say, no, no.
This is a liberal democracy.
Meaning, We're going to do liberalism, and when the democracy goes along with that, we're going to celebrate, and when the democracy opposes liberalism, we're going to tell that democracy to shut up.
It's a constant process of depoliticization.
Even beyond what Buttigieg is talking about here, you see this in the constant pointing to science.
When the liberals and the progressives and the technocrats, they say, no, the science says that we have to do this, this and that.
It's not me.
It's not my political desire.
It's not people debating how to live together, coming from perhaps different first principles and different chains of thought.
No, no.
It's just the science says that.
The history says that.
The textbook says that.
The computer says that.
The progress says that.
So you got to do it.
And you lose your political rights.
Now speaking of depoliticizing, this is my favorite.
We'll have to refer back to the debate for just one brief second.
The New York Times was fact-checking the debate.
And they fact-checked a statement from Vivek Ramaswamy.
Am I allowed to quote Vivek from the debate on a certain social media platform that doesn't like when you say true things?
Okay, well I'll just do it.
Vivek said, transgenderism, especially in kids, is a mental health disorder.
Obviously true.
And then the New York Times, this woman, Azeen Grayson, a part of it got cut off, says, this is her fact check of it.
She says, this is false.
This is false.
Transgenderism, especially in kids, is a mental health disorder.
No, it's not.
Boom.
Fact check.
Roasted.
17 Pinocchios.
Science.
Fact.
Fact check.
That's not my opinion.
It's a fact check.
And the fact says, Transgenderism is not a mental health disorder.
It's totally normal and healthy when you think you're the opposite sex and chop your body up and lower your life expectancy.
Totally normal.
Which reminds me of something that I've known for many years now, and you have probably known for many years, but people who are not very political, who don't pay close attention, are beginning to realize, which is these fact checks are just deceptive left-wing opinion columns.
That's all they've ever been.
The fact checks is just a way of saying, it's just the progressive, liberal way of ramming their opinion, often completely insane opinions like this lady at the New York Times' opinion, down our throats without having to take ownership of their opinions.
They'll say, no, this is just a fact.
A lot of people don't understand the distinction between a fact and an opinion.
Because a lot of people don't understand the distinction between an opinion and a preference.
So they'll say, well look, everyone's entitled to his own opinion, but he's not entitled to his own facts.
But an opinion is a statement of fact from your perspective.
An opinion is not like a preference where you'd say, well, do you prefer vanilla ice cream or chocolate ice cream?
Oh, I prefer vanilla, but that's just my opinion.
No, that's your preference.
You could say, I think that vanilla is objectively a better ice cream than chocolate, and that is my opinion.
And that would be you stating a fact from your perspective, a fact that is controversial, with which people might disagree.
But you're still making a statement of fact.
And so what they do here with the liberal fact checks, so-called, is they just aren't honest about what an opinion is.
They probably don't even know what an opinion is.
And what's especially ironic about the liberal fact checks is that the opinions that they express are almost always wrong.
They're doing this today, even on the most obvious issues, like can a man become a woman?
Can a little boy become a little girl?
Speaking of scandalizing kids, Federal judge in Texas.
In Texas!
What the hell is going on in Texas?
A federal judge has blocked the implementation of a Texas law banning sexually oriented performances in front of minors.
This is Judge David Hittner of the Southern District of Texas said that the law violated the First Amendment and chilled free speech in the state.
And this rule, we've seen similar rulings.
This blocks a law signed by Greg Abbott and the Republicans.
And the judge says, not all people will like or condone certain performances.
This is no different than a person's opinion on certain comedy or genres of music.
But that alone does not strip First Amendment protection.
However, in addition to the pure entertainment value, there are often political, social, and cultural messages involved in drag performances which strengthen the plaintiff's position.
So this judge was appointed by Ronald Reagan.
And you know I love Reagan.
I'm as big a Reagan fan as there can be.
But the Reagan era wasn't totally perfect.
You know, Reagan addressed his problems of his day in the way that he thought was best.
But there have been some issues with that.
One of which is a focus in order to win the Cold War on maximizing individual autonomy and individual choice and a skepticism, if not even a neutrality, in the face of good and evil or true and false, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly.
And so this judge says that drag shows, including ones that little kids can walk up to, those are protected speech.
That has never been the case in the history of the United States until maybe 50 years ago.
And this is the issue.
This is what I was talking about a couple years ago when I wrote my book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, which had a thesis at the time somewhat controversial, I think now less controversial, which is that, thank you, which is that We like free speech in practice.
We like the American tradition of free speech, but there is a risk of people making an idol out of free speech.
And if they make an idol out of free speech, they're going to take it out of its historical context, out of all semblance of prudence or the traditional American way of life, and we're going to end up with judges saying that James Madison enshrined the sacred right of perverts to twerk around in front of little kids, and that this was the purpose of the First Amendment, which it obviously never was.
What's so smart about what the judge did here The judge said, he didn't just say, look, it's kind of entertaining, and I really like drag shows, so everyone should be allowed to see them.
He said, no, this speech could be political speech.
So he's acknowledging that the purpose of the First Amendment is to protect political speech, not appeals to the prurient interest, not appeals to obscene content.
He's saying, no, it's obviously about political stuff, but there are often political, social, and cultural messages involved in drag performances.
Sure, but by that standard, then you could say that any speech is political speech.
By that standard, you could say that any performance, any expression, any pornography is political speech.
If the political speech intended is that bans on pornography are bad, You could have the most disgusting, degenerate pornography, which is similar to what happens in a lot of these drag shows.
And it could be obviously only about appealing to people's lusts and the prurient interest and spreading obscenity.
But then the moment that it's under attack, the people behind the drag shows and the porn can very easily make the claim, well no, the very act of putting the porn out there into the world is a political act, because my political The point is that we shouldn't have bans on these things.
So now we've got two options.
We either get rid of all limitations on obscenity and gross stuff and public indecency, even in front of little kids, or we return to the just and prudent and normal limits that have surrounded the First Amendment and our understanding of political speech for all of American history and all of the history of our civilization.
But it's going to be one of those two things.
And right now, conservatives want to sound like absolutists on the First Amendment, but they obviously want to live in a world where we're not having indecent, disgusting performances in front of little kids.
Well, what I'm saying is, and what I've said for a few years now is, I hate to say it, I told you so, you've got to pick one.
Now, everyone Everyone is talking about convicting a murderer and how it has completely blown up making a murderer's narrative of Stephen Avery being falsely convicted for the murder of Teresa Halbach.
There are already so many people from around the country commenting about how they've changed their minds about Stephen Avery after watching Convicting a Murderer.
Take a look at the series.
Coming up on Convicting a Murderer... The Key was the biggest piece of evidence that viewers, to this day, believe was planted.
It was a story that was really tailor-made for Hollywood.
It was on TV constantly, saying, it's Manitowoc County, they're framing me.
There's gotta be a setup.
Because if I didn't do it, they had a plan to stop me.
It seemed like almost everyone believes these filmmakers.
What do we want?
Justice!
When do we want it?
Now!
His body language comes across as very suspicious.
It looked like he was caught.
And that is exactly what the filmmakers led you to believe.
Why are you editing my courtroom testimony?
You should be still faithful to the facts.
I started to realize more and more that this was an entertainment piece.
This wasn't a piece of journalism like I thought it was going to be.
New episodes of Convicting a Murderer are released every Thursday exclusively on Daily Wire.
Plus, if you're not a member, head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe to sign up for access to this groundbreaking series and the rest of Daily Wire's content.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Dirkatwork33, who says, why is it that only Democrats hear these racist dog whistles?
Very good question.
What is it?
What does it say about you if you're the one who hears the dog whistles?
The biggest story of the day I'm just getting to now, which is that a judge in New York Has ordered Trump's businesses to completely shut down.
They tried to lock Trump up for rape or something, because of this imagined fantasy of this woman in Bergdorf Goodman or whatever.
They tried to lock him up for donating to his own campaign in the Stormy Daniels case.
They tried to lock him up for, as president, calling the Georgia Secretary of State and asking what was going on in the election.
They tried to lock him up for this, that, and everything else.
Insurrection.
Now they're trying to take away all of his property.
This judge ruled that Trump had inflated the value of his properties and thereby gotten sweetheart bank loans and he said this constitutes fraud and so Trump's going to have to forfeit all of his companies.
Which sounds completely insane, just in general, but then when you zoom in on what the judge is even talking about, you see that the details are crazy too.
This judge said that Mar-a-Lago, this is Trump's Palm Beach resort, is worth $18 million.
Mar-a-Lago brings in $25 million a year.
So, the judge says that the entire Mar-a-Lago business is worth significantly less than one year's revenue from Mar-a-Lago.
But then it gets even crazier, because that's not taking into account the real estate, which, where Mar-a-Lago is situated, is some of the most expensive real estate in the entire country, in the world.
Mar-a-Lago stretches from water to water.
There's water on both sides of it because it stretches across the entire island and the island is extremely valuable and it's in one of the most valuable parts of the island.
If you look on Google Maps, I was doing this with Tim Pool last night, if you look at the tiny little property just north of Mar-a-Lago, which obviously only has access to the water on one side and it's much smaller, it's probably a quarter of the size, that property was worth Between 50 and 100 million dollars, okay?
It's just completely... So, hold on, you're telling me... So, the property that's very tiny and north and not nearly as built up and not nearly as cool and storied and the buildings are not as nice, you're telling me that is worth double, more than double, what Mar-a-Lago is worth?
It's nuts.
Mar-a-Lago is probably worth hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.
One expert, put the value of Mar-a-Lago at over $1 billion, which is reasonable, actually.
That's not out of the realm of possibility.
Trump's own estimate of the market value is $612 million, which I think is perhaps even conservative.
So it doesn't make sense.
But we got to stop trying to make this make sense.
We got to stop.
They want to get him.
In the In the olden days, when a political leader was a threat to another political faction, that political leader would be ostracized, would be physically removed, he could be assassinated, would be sent to a prison island somewhere, would be kicked out of the polity for 10 years, and they would just get rid of him.
Now we don't do that, because we pretend that we live in this totally normal, neutral political order where it's all fine.
But that's not what this is about.
None of these cases are about Trump raping a woman in Bergdorf Goodman's.
That obviously never happened.
None of these cases are about Trump paying off Stormy Daniels and making an in-kind campaign contribution to his own campaign, which he's allowed to do.
None of these cases are about a President of the United States calling the Secretary of State of Georgia.
None of these, none of it is about any of that.
None of it's about Mar-a-Lago being worth $50.
None of it's about Mar-a-Lago being worth less than some apartments in New York City.
This is about getting Trump and it will never stop.
It will never ever stop.
He is literally Hitler, and they will stop at nothing to prevent him from being president again.
This is an argument both for and against Trump in 2024.
The people who prefer other candidates in 2024 are saying, the GOP is suicidal by picking Trump because the Democrats will never let him win again.
They'll lock him up, they'll kill him, they'll rig the vote, they won't let him win.
And the pro-Trump people are saying, Yeah, because he's right over the target.
Because he's obviously a threat to the Democrat political order in a way that previous Republican presidents and presidential candidates have not been.
And furthermore, are we just going to let the Democrats now pick our candidates?
Because they say, no, that one's unacceptable, so you can't have him.
So we're going to say, OK, fine.
Yeah, they might lock him up.
They might take his property.
So, no, sorry.
It's an argument from both sides or for both sides.
But all of this still redounds to my point.
I, who I guess I'm the last conservative in America who really likes Donald Trump and really likes Ron DeSantis and likes Vivek and likes a lot of these other candidates, and I'm not endorsing in the primary.
But my observation from that is regardless if you love him or hate him, Trump is sui generis.
Trump is unique.
He is an American original.
There's no comparison.
There's nobody like him today.
There's probably been nobody like him in American history.
And so, if you're trying to impose him on the ordinary rules of politics, it ain't gonna work.
