Ep. 1404 - Transgenderism Is Social Disease According To New Poll
Gender Dysphoria diagnoses go up in every single state except for one, the Iowa caucuses are upon us, and President Trump finally turns on Vivek Ramaswamy.
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Ep.1404
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Gender dysphoria diagnoses have spiked in 49 out of 50 states between 2018 and 2022.
The only state that did not see a jump in boys thinking they're girls and girls thinking they're boys was South Dakota, which actually saw a 23% decrease in gender dysphoria diagnoses.
So what gives?
Is there something in the water in 47 out of the lower 48 plus Alaska and Hawaii?
Is there something special in the water in South Dakota?
Or is transgenderism not actually a medical reality, but rather an ideology and social contagion?
There is no evidence of any major differences in the water between South Dakota and the rest of the country, but there is a difference in the laws.
South Dakota has not gotten on board with trans ideology.
In fact, last year, the state formally restricted trans medical mutilations for children.
A number of other states have issued similar bans, but unfortunately leftist activists on the courts and elsewhere have prevented the bans from being enacted in most of them.
This is great news for the people of South Dakota.
Gender dysphoria, gender confusion, is a terrible condition that leads to all sorts of psychological problems.
And the supposed treatments are even worse.
Not only do the supposed gender-affirming treatments not resolve the psychological problems, depression, anxiety, suicidality, but they add to them a whole host of physical problems that can leave patients sterile, crippled, and at risk of early death.
The story is bad news for the alternately misguided and perverted people peddling trans ideology.
But the story is also bad news for the well-meaning lowercase l liberals who believe that politics is exclusively and eternally downstream of culture.
In this case, it isn't.
South Dakota refused to pass laws to encourage transgenderism, and actively passed laws to discourage it.
And what do you know?
South Dakota is seeing less of this dangerous ideology.
That's because the law is a teacher, and conservatives all across the country should learn the lesson.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Welcome to my home.
You know I broadcast from here every now and again.
It's kind of nice when the rest of the team at The Daily Wire wants to play hooky and they shut down my studio.
It's snowy here in Nashville, but it's Caucus Day.
We're not missing a show.
This is Iowa Caucus Day.
The first votes in the 2024 presidential race will be cast today.
Very, very exciting.
I think we probably know what the answer is going to be.
But anyway, very, very exciting.
Also, the other reason we couldn't take the show off today, we had to broadcast, is because a Zoomer girl has gone viral whining about getting fired from her job.
And so that's the sort of news that you've got to, you cannot miss it, okay?
It actually does Tell you something about the culture that somehow no one is talking about.
So we'll get to all of that.
First though, the final Iowa caucus polls.
Have Trump with the biggest lead that he has had yet?
Remember, the DeSantis campaign has staked the whole campaign on Iowa at this point.
Initially, they were running a nationwide race when things were looking quite good, and DeSantis was the clear number two, at least.
Maybe he was able to challenge Trump.
The polls just didn't move.
It's not that DeSantis is a bad candidate.
It's not that he's a bad governor.
He's a great governor.
I really admire the guy.
I think he's great.
I think the campaign has made some missteps, but even if it were the greatest campaign ever, I just didn't think it was in the cards as I observed from the beginning.
And I hate to say I told you so.
So because of that, they put all of their resources in Iowa and it does not appear to have paid off.
This latest poll has come out, Trump at 48%, Haley at 20%.
So Trump's got a 28% lead, 28 point lead over his next nearest rival, Haley.
Haley at 20 over DeSantis at 16 is pretty shocking.
I'm somewhat skeptical of that, that Haley is actually going to outperform DeSantis in Iowa.
I guess it could happen.
Vivek at 8%, which is considerably lower.
I still think pretty good numbers.
For a guy that no one had ever heard of a year ago, I think he's done a very good job in this campaign.
And he's been able to not have himself be totally marginalized, like an Andrew Yang-type candidate, or like even a Ron Paul-type of candidate.
He's avoided that.
He's a very sharp guy, he's very disciplined, and he might outperform even this poll.
Asa Hutchinson's still in it, 1%.
I didn't realize he was still in the race, but I guess he is.
And then there's a guy named Binkley.
He showed up on the poll.
I've never heard of Binkley, but Binkley's in it, and who knows?
Maybe he'll outperform and get a point and a half.
Who knows?
There could be a surprise.
It seems unlikely, but we'll find out.
The votes will be cast right now.
Now, in the meantime, speaking of Trump and Vivek, the knock on Vivek for a lot of this campaign is that Vivek has been nothing but a stalking horse for Trump.
Vivek, he's been coordinating with the Trump campaign.
I never believed that, by the way.
In part, because I know the guy, and I know that he's pretty serious and principled, and I know that he's very ambitious, and I just didn't think he would run a race to carry water for some other guy.
And it turns out that Trump doesn't think that either, because Trump just came out and turned on Vivek.
He posted to his social media network, Truth Social, he said, Vivek started his campaign as a great supporter, the best president in generations, etc.
Unfortunately, now all he does is disguise his support in the form of deceitful campaign tricks.
Very sly, but a vote for Vivek is a vote for the other side.
Don't get duped by this.
Vote for Trump.
Don't waste your vote.
Vivek is not MAGA.
The Biden indictments against his political opponent will never be allowed in this country.
They're already beginning to fall.
MAGA!
Three exclamation points.
Vivek then responded to this in a way that was probably wise.
He didn't go for the jugular on Trump.
He seemed shocked, almost.
He opens up, he says, I don't think friendly fire is helpful right now.
And then he says, I've stood up against the persecutions against Trump and I've defended him at every step.
I showed up at the Miami courthouse in solidarity following his first federal indictment.
I filed a FOIA demand to the Biden DOJ.
I submitted an amicus brief this week with the US Supreme Court calling to overturn Colorado's ruling to put Trump off the ballot.
I pledged to remove myself from Maine's and Colorado's primary ballots if they remove Trump, calling on DeSantis and Haley to do the same.
You can hear it in Vivek's tweet.
What gives, man?
I've been good to you.
I've been nice the whole time.
Yes, I'm running my own presidential campaign, but why are you attacking me?
And it is déjà vu all over again.
This is exactly what happened to Senator Cruz in 2016.
What happened in 2016, you'll recall, all the never Trumpers and the libs and the whiny people, they spent all their energy complaining about Trump.
And Trump picked them off one by one, very easily.
The one candidate who did not really go after Trump, or who went after him in a fairly moderate way, in part probably because he agreed with a lot of Trump's newly articulated conservative positions, was Senator Cruz.
When it got down to the end and Cruz looked like he was maybe a real threat to Trump, Trump went for the jugular at Cruz.
He wasn't going to give Cruz a pass just because Cruz had been nice to him.
And the same thing is happening here with Vivek.
There is no evidence, no evidence, that Trump ever goes easy on people who challenge him in any way.
A lot of people thought it might happen.
Remember, Mitt Romney thought he was going to get Secretary of State under Trump, and there was that infamous photo where they're having dinner, and Romney just looks so uncomfortable and embarrassed, and there's Trump eating his steak like just a complete animal, you know, just loving every minute of it.
Even Christie, you know, Christie ran against Trump, and then Trump brought Christie into the administration, but he discarded him relatively quickly.
I think the same thing is happening to Vivek here.
Vivek has run a campaign that is pretty well aligned with Trump issues.
And he has been very nice to Trump and he could be a very strong ally of Trump.
But Trump plays to win all the time.
It's not.
If you ever criticize the man, if you ever challenge him, even in a fairly moderate way, 8% in Iowa versus 48%, even that, he's gonna hit you eventually.
And I think that's what's happening here.
Vivek is playing it as well as he possibly could, but this was always gonna happen.
Donald Trump has one objective at all times and it is to win.
The man will survive.
He is a blunt force object and he's demonstrating that yet again in Iowa.
Now we'll see if the voters respond to that.
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Meanwhile, the Democrats seem confident with Trump as the nominee.
Now, Nancy Pelosi just came out and she said it is impossible, not unlikely, not crazy to think about, impossible for Trump to be president again.
This is a neck and neck race and no one feels very comfortable on the Democratic side of things that Donald Trump isn't going to be the next president.
Well, I don't think that nobody feels.
I think many of us know that it is impossible for him to be the president again with what he is proposing.
Why do you say that?
Well, because when you're talking about what he's talking about now is more tax cuts for corporate America, taking them down so low to the detriment of our budget and meeting the needs of people.
But people have to know, I have said over and over again, President Lincoln said public sentiment is everything.
With it, you can accomplish almost anything.
Without it, practically nothing.
But public sentiment has to be informed.
People have to know.
You can see the backtrack happening in real time.
I can't tell if it's an intentional wink.
Or if she said the quiet part out loud and then she had to backtrack.
But she contradicts herself there, doesn't she?
She opens up, she says, some of us in the political elite, we know it's impossible for Trump to be president again.
Impossible?
How is it impossible?
He already got elected president once.
Is impossible?
Well, no, it's impossible because of public sentiment is everything.
Yeah, yeah.
He's the most popular guy in the race.
He's not even the most popular guy in the Republican field, which he is by a long shot, according to every single poll.
He's more popular than Biden, according to most polls.
And way more popular than Bobby Kennedy Jr.
and Cornel West and Jill Stein.
And so what are you talking about?
If public sentiment matters, then you should say it's impossible that Trump won't be president again if he's the nominee against Joe Biden.
Well, no, it's because all this stuff he's talking about with corporate tax cuts.
What are you, what?
She's just reverting to the old Democrat talking points from 20 years ago.
Is Donald Trump even talking about corporate tax cuts?
Maybe tangentially.
I haven't even heard that on the campaign trail.
He's talking about, we're going to build a border wall.
I'm going to get retribution against my enemies.
We're going to end all these stupid wars overseas.
We're going to fire 40,000 bureaucrats.
What do you mean?
Corporate tax cuts?
That's just a total reversion to the generic Democrat talking point against the generic Republican.
We know what she means when she says it's impossible for Trump to win again.
Those of us in the know, we know it's impossible.
What she's saying is we're going to prosecute him and throw him into jail.
And we're going to kick him off the ballot because he's too popular.
Because we can't beat him at the ballot.
It's going to be impossible because we will not allow the people to vote for him again.
That's what she's saying.
That's been my hesitation on the Trump nomination this whole time.
I don't endorse in the races.
As a general rule, you know I really like Donald Trump.
I like other guys in this race, too.
I'm friends with some of the other guys in this race.
That's why I've stayed out of it.
One hesitation that I have had is that they might just not let him win again.
They might just Kick him off the ballot, or indict him, or I don't know, they might assassinate him.
That'll be the last thing left to do.
And that's what she's saying.
If we want to give the woman credit, she's a very crafty politician, that's what she's saying.
She goes, don't worry, the guy's not going to be president.
Why's that?
Oh, oh, because of his, his wild rhetoric.
No, that's not what you're talking about at all, lady.
Or she just blurted it out.
Don't worry, we got this thing in the bag.
Don't worry, we're going to change the voting rules again.
Don't worry, the courts are on our side.
Don't worry, we're not going to let the people have a say.
Because we care so much about public opinion that we're not going to respect the public opinion in the race.
Okay.
Now, speaking of vampires, much more important news story than who's going to be the next president.
Christian Stewart has come out to say that Twilight is, quote, such a gay movie.
I never saw Twilight.
I'm vaguely familiar with the plot.
The plot is that a lady falls in love with a guy.
And he's a vampire.
And then she falls in love with another guy.
And then she has a kid by the guys and she only ever engages in heterosexual relations.
But it's such a gay movie.
What's she saying?
I can only see it now, she says.
I don't think it necessarily started off that way, but I think that the fact that I was there at all, it was percolating.
It's such a gay movie.
I mean, Taylor Lautner and Robert Pattinson and me.
And it's so hidden and not okay.
I mean, a Mormon woman wrote this book.
It's all about oppression, about wanting what's going to destroy you.
That's very gothic, gay inclination that I love.
Whoa, hold on.
Is this woman a right-wing Republican?
Is this woman a social conservative now?
She's saying the reason that this movie is gay is because it's about desiring something that will destroy you.
That's right out of the Middle Ages.
She's saying the quiet part out loud, though.
She's saying that is the essence of what it means to be gay or for a work of art to be gay, is that it has to be self-destructive.
That is a more aggressive and condemnatory statement about gay rights or LGBT than anything anyone has said on the right.
She goes on though, she goes, it's not that I wasn't scared about coming out and saying, apparently she's bisexual, which just means she's a liberal woman in 2024.
She says, It was just that there was no other way to live.
Every single woman that I've ever met in my whole life who ever kissed a girl in college is like, yeah, I mean, me too.
I'm constantly joking with my girlfriend.
I'll be sitting there and be like, she's gay too.
Everyone's gay.
Everyone's gay.
They all think everyone's gay.
Okay.
I think she's right about Twilight.
Even though...
As an exoteric message, as the actual plot of the story, from what I gather, never saw the movie, every single romantic relationship is heterosexual, I agree that the story itself is gay.
It gets to, actually something that she talks about directly, but it gets to why sodomy is condemned traditionally in all the theistic religions and throughout our entire civilization.
I think today people think it's because people are just prejudiced or bigoted or we think the gays are icky or something like that, but that's actually not why.
The reason why is because it is contrary to nature.
That's why.
That's what St.
Thomas Aquinas said.
That's what the scholastics believed.
That's what Christians and Jews and Muslims have believed.
That's what Dante believes.
You know, Dante, I always reference Dante.
I've got a little statue of Dante right there.
Dante in Hell, in the Inferno, puts the sodomites in the seventh circle.
And it's the circle of the violent.
And people don't really know why that is.
And it's not just that he puts them in the circle of the violent, he puts them lower than the murderers and the suicides.
Dante says that sodomy, gay stuff, what we now call LGBT pride, is worse than murder and suicide, which is a little harsh, you know, I mean, but what's his reasoning?
His reasoning is not that he hates gay guys or something.
In fact, the example he uses in the Circle of the Sodomites is his beloved teacher, Brunetto Latini.
And it's not even just about physical sex stuff.
It's also about art.
It's also about Brunetto Latini's poetry, his writing.
It's about an entire ethic, a way of viewing man's place in the world.
The reason, Dante says, is because murder is violence against your neighbor.
Right?
You go, you kill some guy.
The reason suicide is worse than that is because it's violence against yourself, which is even more contrary to nature than killing your neighbor.
And the reason Dante puts even his beloved teacher, Brunetto Latini, who he says is a sodomite, lower than that is because that is more contrary to nature still.
And it's more contrary to nature because it totally divorces the sexual act from the telos of the sexual, the end of the sexual act.
It's totally sterile.
This is why in Dante the punishment is these guys have to, well they all walk around like a bunch of naked dudes walking around, which is probably not a punishment in the minds of a lot of these guys, but where they're walking is on this burning hot surface, like the hottest desert surface you can possibly imagine, which is a symbol of the sterility of the act.
It's not a fruitful act.
And so, if you were to put Dante aside for a second and you think of the way that Christians thought about this through the height of our civilization, you would take it even further.
You would say that the act being so contrary to nature would mean that maybe the worst sexual thing you could do Is when it's not even between two people, is when it's even, you know, that thing that people do individually when they look at their computers and look at porn.
This is why the pornography epidemic is ultimately so terrible.
It's so contrary to nature.
And so, getting back to Twilight, I think the reason why Kristen Stewart is making this point, I mean, she's making a point every bit as condemnatory of an identity that she holds for herself as St.
Thomas Aquinas or Dante would.
Is for that very reason.
I mean, it's a vampire story.
What is a vampire story?
A vampire story is older people feeding on the young.
That is totally contrary to nature.
The way it's supposed to work is that the young feed on the old.
You know, a little baby feeds from his mother.
The elderly nourish and cultivate and expend their effort to bring up the young generation.
And then that goes on throughout the generations.
What a vampire story does is totally flip that.
That is what vampire stories are about, and that's why they're so perverse.
It's an actual inversion of reality, totally contrary to nature.
And it has all sorts of bad political effects, too, because if people are not fruitful and multiplying, then the political community dies.
Then people just aren't replacing themselves.
This, you know, I don't want to even go as far as Kristen Stewart is going here in her condemnation of the LGBT community.
Because the real way of taking this sexual ethic, which today seems so crazy, but was the sexual ethic that informed our civilization for 2,000 years, actually even longer than that.
The way to take it to its logical conclusion is to point out that the real extreme of it is The guy's just looking at porn, completely divorcing the ends of sex from sex itself.
A form of violence, not just against your neighbor, not just against yourself, but against nature, and against art, and against God.
Let all who have ears to hear, let them hear.
It's going to be me and Kristen Stewart.
And Dante, making this point.
And modern culture probably will not want to hear it.
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Speaking of liberal women, Jill Biden has come out to attack all those nasty, mean, terrible Republicans.
She's She says what we writ large are doing to poor Hunter.
You know, holding him accountable for his many, many crimes, which are personal and drug-related and sex-related, sure, but more importantly, involve corruption, involve selling American influence, involve taking millions and millions of dollars from corrupt oligarchs around the world with implicit, maybe explicit promises of American state support as a result of this.
Just total corruption.
She says it's cruel.
How have you been coping personally with the onslaught of accusations against your husband and your family, including and especially Hunter?
It's the focus of a House Oversight Committee hearing.
Holding him in contempt, obsessing over him, showing pictures of him during vulnerable moments in his battle with addiction on the floor of the House.
This would crush any family.
Mika, I think what they are doing to Hunter is cruel.
And I'm really proud of how Hunter has rebuilt his life after addiction.
You know, I love my son, and it's hurt my grandchildren.
And that's what I'm so concerned about, that it's affecting their lives as well.
That's it.
That's it.
I'm just so concerned, you know.
Sure, I would be concerned if I were a Biden.
Because it wasn't just Hunter.
It was Hunter's uncle, Joe's brother.
It was Hunter's other uncle, Joe's other brother.
It was the whole rest of the family.
Hunter was the bag man.
Hunter made payments to other members of the family.
So did Joe's brothers.
And these guys made payments to Joe, and we have the receipts.
And Hunter wrote in his laptop and in text messages, yeah, I'm giving 10% to the big guy.
At one point he suggests that he had to give 50% of the money he made to the big guy, the big guy being Joe Biden, as Joe Biden's brother pointed out.
What is Jill doing here?
She's playing her part in the PR strategy.
There obviously is a very formal crisis communications campaign underway to rehabilitate Hunter, to make him less of an issue for Joe in 2024.
That's why Hunter showed up to the Capitol.
He wouldn't go testify before Congress in the closed-door session, as he was called to do by the Congress of the United States.
He gave a press conference on the steps of the Capitol and talked about, you know, how he's He's just a poor guy who had a run of bad luck and he deserves sympathy from everyone and everyone's being so mean and cruel to him.
And then what did he do?
He finally shows up, but he makes a big show of himself in a public hearing.
He won't go to the private hearing to answer basic questions about his business.
And then Joe comes out and she does the same thing.
It's a very well laid out, very particular PR strategy.
I just don't think it works in this age that we're living in where everyone films everything.
Hunter Biden didn't just commit the crimes with some receipts where we kind of heard about it, where we have good evidence that he did it.
He filmed himself doing it.
All the personal, kind of just dodgy crimes of passion and incontinence, he filmed all of it.
We all saw way more of that than anybody wanted to see.
And he sent all the texts, and we got the emails, and we got... We can actually see it all happening in real time.
I don't think it's going to work.
Hunter Biden, had he not taken a ton of money from crook oligarchs overseas, had he not been conducting business with the Chinese Communist Party, maybe they'd let it go.
But you can't overlook that.
So speaking of doing business with communists, the Holy Father has raised some eyebrows because Pope Francis has welcomed a group of Marxists and talked about How wonderful it is to have dialogue between Christians and Marxists.
It is not in my job description to criticize the Holy Father.
I might raise some questions though.
Here's what the Pope said.
I'm pleased to welcome you, the representatives of Dialop, who for many years have been committed to promoting the common good through dialogue between socialists slash Marxists and Christians.
A fine program!
I would like to commend you Commend to you three attitudes that I consider helpful to your efforts.
First, have the courage to break the mold, to be open in dialogue to new ways.
Instead of rigid approaches that divide, let us cultivate with open hearts, discussion, and listening, and not exclude anyone at the political, social, or religious level.
Second, concern for the less fortunate.
Sure, that's great.
Finally, the rule of law.
Dear friends, I thank you for your commitment to dialogue.
Okay, I'm a little confused here because many, many popes for Nearly a hundred years now, coming up on it, have in no uncertain terms condemned Communism and Socialism and said that Christianity can have nothing to do with Socialism and Marxism.
Blessed Pope Pius IX in Cui Pluribus in 1846, all the way back, said Communism as it is called is a doctrine most opposed to the very natural law.
Speaking of natural law.
Well, you might say that's just one Pope, right?
No, no, it's not just one Pope.
of everyone's laws, government, property, and even to human society itself would follow.
Well, you might say, that's just one pope, right?
No, no, it's not just one pope.
Pope Leo XIII in 1901 says, a harvest of misery is before our eyes, and the dreadful projects of the most disastrous national upheavals are threatening us from the growing power of the socialistic movement.
Okay?
Pope Benedict XV, 1914.
It is not our intention here to repeat the arguments which clearly expose the errors of socialism and of similar doctrines.
Our predecessor, Leo XIII, most wisely did so in truly memorable encyclicals.
And you, venerable brethren, will take the greatest care that those grave precepts are never to be forgotten.
Not even in 2024, when people forget a lot of things.
Pope Pius XI, no one can at the same time be a good Catholic and a true socialist.
He goes on, he lambasts socialism.
Pope Pius XI, too few have been able to grasp the nature of communism.
The majority instead succumb to its deception, skillfully concealed by the most extravagant promises.
Pope Pius XII says the same thing.
Pope John XXIII, who is a liberal pope.
At least that's how he's considered.
Says no Catholic could subscribe even to moderate socialism.
Pope Paul VI, considered a liberal pope, said much the same thing.
Pope John Paul II constantly invade against socialism and communism.
I mean, the man is considered an anti-communist hero of the 20th century.
Pope Benedict XVI, who was the most recent pope, What is going on here?
For Francis said, the state which would provide everything, absorb everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy and capable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person, every person needs, namely loving personal concern.
He says, we don't need this.
We don't need any of that.
Okay.
What is going on here?
Pope Francis's comments are very confusing.
I've made no bones about the fact that I'm a mackerel-snapping papist myself.
I'm I find it very confusing.
And I find it confusing because the Church's teaching on Communism and Socialism is not at all confusing.
Not at all.
I just quoted a handful.
I could fill up many shows talking about what the Catholic Church has said about condemning Marxism and Socialism.
So what's really going on here?
In charity, and to give Pope Francis the benefit of the doubt, I suspect that he's drawn in to this kind of a dialogue in the way that a lot of good people are drawn in to want to have a dialogue with Marxism and Communism.
Because you actually do have a care for the common good, and you care for the poor, as Pope Francis said, and you care for those who have been left out, and you want rule of law, and you don't want the predations of a totally untethered A liberal, liberalized regime of laissez-faire capitalism where no one cares at all about anyone else and everyone's just avaricious and trying to pursue his own personal interests to the exclusion of a common good.
I get that.
And they think that Marxism does that.
But it doesn't.
And the left misunderstands that.
The good ones on the left misunderstand that.
The bad ones on the left are fine with it, they just, you know, they're deceptive and duplicitous.
The thing is, a lot of people on the right misunderstand this too.
I was talking to a friend of mine years ago who suggested, he was very deeply read in Marx, and he said, if Karl Marx were alive today, he would not be on the left.
Or he would be on the left, but he wouldn't be a Democrat.
If Karl Marx were alive today, he would be in the Tea Party.
Karl Marx is a radical libertarian.
And I've had other anarchist friends and libertarian friends who have made that point.
Very few people have actually read Marx.
Everyone talks about Marx, but very few people have actually read Marx.
From what I have read of Marx, which is probably more than most people, though I have nowhere near the man's total corpus, I agree with them.
I think what Marx was after was total liberation.
That's the utopia at the end of Marxism, is a world of total freedom.
Freedom not in the traditional sense of order and responsibility toward the natural order and natural hierarchies and man's natural ends and doing what you ought to do.
No, no, no.
The modern kind of freedom where you just do whatever the hell you want all the time.
That's what Marx was after.
The utopia at the end of the Marxist program is where you get to do just whatever the hell you want all the time.
That is the libertarian view of freedom.
It's a hard saying.
The libertarians would say, no, we're the opposite of the Marxists.
They're the collectivists.
We're the individualists.
Karl Marx would probably call himself a radical individualist.
Because they're two sides of the same coin.
Because the actual Opposition to communism, to Marxism, to collectivism is not radical individualism, it's the family, it's structure, it's order, it's hierarchy, it's tradition, it's inertia, it's the weight of history.
Radical collectivism and radical individualism are both revolutionary programs that pour acid on all of the institutions of society that are both equally opposed to the family and to tradition and to everything that has come before us.
That's the issue.
And so, ironically, what I think all those past popes were warning about was that.
In Catholic social teaching, there's plenty of concern about laissez-faire capitalism going too far, about individualism going too far, which is why you need protections of the common good, which is different than collectivism.
You know, the collectivism that the left talks about is this kind of bizarre, modern, clinical utilitarianism.
Where we determine the common good by figuring out, I don't know, the most pleasure for the greatest number of people.
Where we ignore individual rights.
Where we say, well, you know, if 50% plus one benefit from something, then screw the minority.
That's not truly the common good.
The true common good is everyone's individual good as well.
And it presupposes that we can know our own good.
That our own good is not just whatever you wake up desiring that morning, but that the good of man can be known objectively through the use of reason.
We were talking earlier about the natural law.
That's what that's about.
Things have a purpose.
The Leftist Tears Tumblr has a purpose.
It gives me my delicious leftist tears.
The microphone on my lapel has a purpose.
It transmits my mellifluous voice to your ears.
Man has a purpose.
Some of our organs have purposes.
The eye has the purpose, which is to perceive the visual world and allow us to interact with it in a reliable way, we hope.
Other organs have purposes.
Man has a purpose, an ultimate end to.
We can know it, and we can all flourish.
This is what the trans debate is about.
This is why I got in trouble for my eradication speech at CPAC.
I have my next CPAC speech coming up in, I don't know, just a few weeks or so.
I can't even imagine what we'll talk about this year.
But that was the problem because what the left and some libertarians objected to in my speech Was that understanding of the common good, which is totally opposed to Marxism, but also totally opposed to radical individualism.
I said that we can know for a fact that a man can't become a woman.
And so because of that, allowing a man who thinks he's a woman to chop himself up and to call himself Sally and to use the little girl's room is not only bad for society, it's also bad for him because it's contrary to his good, which we can know.
And it is contrary to nature.
We don't want an overweening state with all sorts of crazy revolutionary theories to just force its will on everybody.
But we can learn from tradition.
We can use our reason.
We can look to the wisdom of the ages.
We can use our own eyes and see that a man is not a woman.
And we can know that sometimes people have defects of reason that we can't indulge.
Because it isn't good for anyone.
That's a good kind of common good, and that's the only way that you can actually protect true, legitimate, individual rights.
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My favorite comment.
Yesterday.
Not yesterday.
I guess it was on Friday.
It was from Thought Heretic who says, My favorite part was that Michael knows that the proper word is normality and not normalcy.
Thank you.
I'm glad you saw that.
People use this word normalcy and it's a fake word.
It's a made up word.
All words in a way are made up, but some are more made up than others.
Some are just mistakes that people made that become common, and others, you know, derive out of an organic process of etymological change.
And normalcy is in the former category.
Warren Harding, who I kind of defend a little bit, but he was not the brightest bulb that we ever had in the White House.
He used that.
The return to normalcy was his motto for his presidential campaign.
And it's fake.
The word is normality.
And as we increasingly talk about norms and standards, we should get that word right too.
That's a norm that we should also respect.
Now, I have a question about the most important issue of our day.
And it's about this Zoomer or maybe millennial girl whining about getting fired.
And I'll hold my question until... I assume you've seen it.
It went totally viral.
But I'll hold my question until after she makes her display.
Hi, Brittany.
Hi.
Thanks for meeting with me and Rosie.
So she's writing on here.
She's an account exec at CloudFlare.
Some company.
She writes her name here.
She goes, I want to stand up for myself.
What do I have to lose?
Yeah, I'm going to stop you right there.
Sure.
So I started August 25th.
I've been on a three-month ramp.
And then it was three weeks of... Enjoy the trauma, she writes.
And then a week of Christmas.
Her trauma, I guess, is what she's talking about.
And then here we are.
She's writing these things on the TikTok that she posts.
I have had the highest activity amongst my team since I've started.
I have had three contracts out, done a really great job managing my deals up until the very end that decided not to close last minute.
Um, so I don't think that that makes a lot of sense for me and my Cloudflare journey here so far.
Wow, it goes on and on and on.
Everyone's talking about how she's an entitled young woman.
She doesn't get it.
You kidding me?
You buttercup, you little snowflake.
Get with the program.
That's one take.
Then the other take is, yeah, corporate America, there's something really screwy about it.
And she's probably right.
And it's crazy how clinical her firing was.
And that is wrong.
And she, yeah, our economy is kind of messed up.
And fair enough.
My take is not either of those.
My question is, Why does everyone film everything now?
Why?
It's kind of ironic, I guess, because I'm filming a thing right now.
I'm saying my thoughts on a camera to you.
But one, that's my job.
And two, you know, it's a I'm not filming, you know, every traumatic event in my life.
I don't think I'm filming any traumatic events in my life.
I don't want to.
I don't want to expose that.
I'm not even filming when I go make pasta.
I'm not.
Some of you have asked me to do that, but I don't really do that.
I'm not.
The only time I really film in my house, if we're not snowed in, is when I'm making little ukulele videos.
Why is everyone filming?
Your first instinct.
You see someone getting beaten up on the street.
You say, oh, I've got to film this.
Get fired from your job.
You know you're about to get fired.
You know it's gonna be a traumatic experience.
You actually write in the comment, enjoy the trauma, and you say, yeah, you know what I gotta do?
I gotta stream my firing, my humiliation.
What has gone wrong with people that they do that?
It's a total obliteration of private life.
To what she's actually doing here, it's a huge mistake.
She might be in the right.
Maybe the company just made a mistake or they're just laying her off.
They don't really care.
They shouldn't have hired her in the first place.
She was doing a fine job.
Maybe that's the case she's making.
Or maybe she's a huge problem, which would seem to be the case because of look what she's doing here.
This woman's never going to get a job again.
She'll probably have a better life because of that.
I actually don't think that working in the widget factory is the most wonderful and joyful way of life.
And I think that feminists duped a lot of women into thinking it is.
And now we have an economy where women feel that they have to work.
And in some cases, they would face real financial problems if they didn't work.
And those are all legitimate problems.
She's certainly never going to get a job again, though, once people Google her name that she put out there.
But why?
Why would you?
Why would you obliterate your private life like that?
Well, you know, actually, just occurs to me, it gets back to what we were talking about earlier with Twilight and Kristen Stewart saying all those homophobic things even though she's, I guess, kind of a lesbian.
It's a total upending of the natural order.
Part of the reason that Dante puts his teacher, Brunetto Latini, in the circle of the sodomites, I don't know what the guy did in his private life, it's not even really necessarily about that.
It's because Brunetto Latini was a very famous poet who sought immortality in fame and who Whose poetry, Dante seems to accuse, was disconnected from true ends.
It was totally self-indulgent and sterile and not fruitful.
And we do that today.
We do that.
You know why this lady is filming herself?
Because we don't have kids anymore, I think.
That's probably why.
Not just because she's working and that, you know, when women are working it makes them less likely to have kids.
Because we want to be immortal and the devil tricks us into thinking the best way to become immortal is to become a big celebrity or to, I don't know, write a really great book and that's how your name is going to live forever.
That's not actually how we become.
The natural way to have immortality is to pass on your genes.
It's to pass on your genes literally, biologically, or at the very least spiritually, to be a spiritual father and a mentor.
In fact, that can be more important.
But it's not to get your name in lights.
I get it's kind of ironic, I've got a big light here and I'm filming myself and I have a public career, but it's not the most important thing that I do, not even close to it.
That all has to be in service of something else, and it was in our society for a while.
And even when people would do all sorts of sins for all of history, it's a fallen world.
But we at least had the right sense of that.
We had the right sense that the natural way to have immortality is to have a family.
And the supernatural way given to us by supernatural grace to have immortality is to follow God and follow the only begotten son of God who is incarnate and who is crucified and is resurrected on the third day and redeems us of our sins and if we have faith in him we might not perish but have everlasting life.
That's how you actually get immortality on the natural and supernatural level.
But we get distracted all along the way Oh, I know how I'll get it.
I'll write a pretty poem.
I know how I'll get it.
I'll become an Instagram influencer.
I was talking to sweet little Alisa.
She was telling me, because she scrolls a little bit more on that stuff than I do.
My scrolling is Twitter, her scrolling is more like Insta and that kind of stuff.
She said there are people who, they'll post really humiliating videos of themselves.
You know, looking ugly and, you know, like eating gross things, and in this case, you know, experiencing the trauma of being fired.
But they'll say, wow, I'm so pleased that I'm an influencer.
Wow, that's something else.
You're right, you get that 15 minutes of fame, but it's 15 minutes.
Even if you're the most famous guy in the world, it's 15 minutes, you know, and then it's gone.
There is a more enduring way to have everlasting life.
Now, I want to get to so much more.
You know, I'm a tease.
Governor DeSantis, I think probably seeing that his campaign is not doing as well as people had hoped.
He's turning on the conservative media.
We'll get to that.
Rand Paul has just made a kind of endorsement in the presidential race.
We'll get to that.
Mike Lee has just made an endorsement in the presidential race.
But I'm not going to tell you anything about any of that today.
That's going to have to be for tomorrow.
We will not have a member bloc because Professor Jacob, who's been sitting patiently, Right there.
He's not even sitting on it.
I have a nice little couch in my office.
He's not.
He's sitting on the floor.
That's too hierarchical, actually.
The man should be sitting on a chair or something.
But he did not bring me my iPad, so maybe he should sit on the floor.
