Ep. 1445 - Right-Winger Imprisoned For Memes In Group Chats
A right-wing former member of Parliament in Belgium has been imprisoned over spicy memes that he sent to a private group chat, the UK has started to stop trans-ing the kids, and the 2024 race in America might come down to TikTok.
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Ep.1445
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A right-wing activist and former Member of Parliament has been sentenced to prison in Belgium for posting racist memes to a group chat.
The right-winger's name is Dries van Langenhove.
He will serve a year in prison, in addition to being deprived of certain civil rights for a decade, during which time he cannot hold or even run for public office.
He also has to pay a €16,000 fine, and he received an additional 10-month suspended prison sentence.
Van Langenhove, I'm sure I'm pronouncing his name incorrectly, is not just some random right-winger.
He is a former MP and a member of the Vlaams Belang party, which according to Politico's poll of polls is the quote biggest political force in Belgium.
Going to prison for some spicy memes sent to a private group chat.
Lots of complacent conservatives in America will make excuses for this kind of thing.
Some will say, well, that one, he really is a racist Nazi.
Okay.
Some will say, well, you know, his party really is far right.
Biggest political force in Belgium, but sure, oh, it's really far, far right.
Some will say, look, it's Belgium.
That sort of thing could never happen here.
Except it already is happening.
The Biden administration is currently, right now, imprisoning a random right-winger, not a former member of parliament, not a leader of a party, a random right-winger for posting memes on social media.
Douglas Mackey is serving a seven-month prison sentence after having been threatened with 10 years in jail.
For posting memes, not even far-right racist memes, just like memes, just kind of funny memes.
The Democrats already call the Republican Party far-right, and they call the leader of the Republican Party a racist and a Nazi.
I wish I could say, today it's happening in Belgium, tomorrow it might be us.
Unfortunately, things are a bit further along than that.
It's already happening here.
The only question is how much worse we will allow things to get.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
show.
Welcome back to the show.
Whoopi Goldberg is threatening to jail Trump if he touches Social Security and Medicare.
Social Security and Medicare became something of a non-troversy yesterday on the internet.
We'll get to that in a moment.
I hope that I will see you all later tonight.
I'm going to UW-Madison.
I think I'm still invited?
I was invited, then I was disinvited, then the student group was able to get me back in and beat the administration.
So in any case, I'll be there.
I was asked to speak on abortion.
We will cover all of that.
We will cover broadly the case against murder, which is a great time to do so because all throughout the West, people are really confused about the morality of murder.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who's been president there for quite some time and is kind of a
Center liberal by French standards is now supporting assisted suicide Which even five ten years ago would have been considered a far radical left idea now It's even the kind of mainstream liberals are supporting it Macron has announced new legislation to legalize quote aid in dying that will allow adults who are facing end-of-life Illnesses, so I always say it's very limited cases.
It's always just the the most extreme Fringe cases of people who only have days or weeks to live, they can now kill themselves by poisoning themselves.
In an interview with the French newspaper La Roi, not to be confused with the bubbly flavored seltzer water, and with Libération, Macron has said that the new bill will be restricted to adults suffering from an incurable illness.
And it's only for the adults who are expected to die in the short or middle term.
Now, hold on.
Wait, what?
Already?
This is what always happens with the assisted suicide legislation.
They always say, oh, it's the most extreme case is people who are 110 years old, who are going to die within hours.
They get to just take a pill and kill themselves.
That's it, though.
There's no slippery slope, it's never going to extend to people who are a little younger, people who are in less dire straits, and then already in the legislation, they're saying it's people who are expected to die in the short term, or the middle term, or the middle term, or I don't know, maybe the long term, or whatever, if you want to kill yourself, please do it.
And we've seen this everywhere this takes hold, in Belgium in particular, in the Netherlands, for goodness sakes, in the United States.
Younger and younger people for flimsier and flimsier reasons, some of whom do not even have terminal illnesses, are then afforded the opportunity to kill themselves.
People who say they just have depression.
People, in fact, there's one very famous case of a woman who signed away her right to life and she said, yeah, at some point when I get a little more senile, just kill me.
But then, as that date approached, she didn't want to die and she refused the poison and actually her family and a doctor held her down and gave her the poison and she died.
Younger people, people who don't have, you know, an imminent fatal illness like a cancer or something, they just have depression.
They'll say, well, I'm depressed, so I'm gonna kill myself.
It just expands to the point now where you have countries in the West talking about and even administering assisted suicide to minors, okay?
Really, really scary stuff.
Macron says the law will offer, quote, a possible path in a determined situation with precise criteria where the medical decision is playing the role.
Uh-huh, right.
Good luck with that.
It'll never happen.
It would be evil in all circumstances.
He knows this.
The liberal politicians know this.
This is why they're trying to circumscribe it, and it never actually works that way.
And it shouldn't exist in the first place.
It is always wrong to commit murder, and it is always wrong to kill yourself.
It is contrary to natural law.
It has all sorts of moral hazards in public life.
And the only silver lining of this terrible story I can see is that it will provide ample fodder for our story tonight.
Our speech at UW-Madison, because we are living in a culture of death.
Do you ever notice that all of the liberal plans always seem to redound to fewer human beings?
We notice that we have too many people, so we need abortion and contraception.
Women want to go work in the widget factory, so they need to be able to kill their kids through abortion.
Granny is feeling a little ill today, so we got to go kill Granny.
Oh, actually, you know, your depressed friend over there, he, you know, he's not so happy.
He needs to be able to kill himself, too.
Oh, you know, the global warming is gonna get us all, that's why you need to have fewer children.
You know, we just need fewer and fewer and fewer people.
Almost demonic, you would say.
Anyway, we'll be discussing that tonight.
This is a great way, this policy, even beyond the morality of it, this is a great way to kill your country.
We have dying populations throughout the West, there's no Western country that's been spared from it, and only one country has even begun to turn the birthrate problem around, that would be Hungary, under Viktor Orban.
But this is a great way to do it.
If you want to kill your country, you want to kill your civilization, you can open up the borders, you can wreck the economy, you can shake up the political order.
But the most direct way to do it is just to actually kill your citizens, which is what they're doing and what they will probably continue to do.
Now, there is some good news coming from overseas.
The United Kingdom has just announced that their National Health Service will stop transing the kids.
Let's just bring you a bit of breaking news which may be of interest to some of you.
It's about puberty blockers.
Now, these are drugs that are used to delay the changes of puberty in transgender youngsters.
In terms of how they are prescribed by the NHS, there has been a lot of controversy over the last few years about this.
At the moment, they are only prescribed to children attending gender identity services as part of clinical research.
And they are not routinely offered to children at gender identity clinics, but they are still offered.
Well, the government, NHS England, has just confirmed that children will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at gender identity clinics.
This is coming from NHS England.
It just broke in the last few moments.
Notice this woman, this news presenter, can't even catch up to the new euphemisms they're all using.
She goes, you know, there have been these puberty blockers prescribed to transgender youngsters.
Transgender youngsters?
There's no such thing as a transgender youngster, which everyone knows.
Most people know there's no such thing as a transgender person because it's not possible for a man to secretly be a woman or vice versa.
It's just nonsense.
But even more people than understand that understand that there's no such thing as a transgender child.
What are you talking about?
That's crazy.
But she's still using the old language until she's reading in real time that the NHS is now phasing out the transing of the kids.
Well, hold on.
If we're no longer going to give puberty blockers, which is the first step of the transing the kids process, to the kids, what does that say about the transgender kids?
It says that the health service in the UK, which is part of the government, it's a political institution, they have now made the decision, okay, no more trans kids.
There are no trans kids.
They'll still probably say there are trans adults and trans teenagers or whatever, but trans kids, that one's out.
So, ten years ago there was no such thing as trans kids.
Starting, I don't know, five years ago, they pretended there were trans kids.
Now we're back to there's no such thing as trans kids.
And the liberal news presenters and the pundits and the politicians, it's going to take them a little while to catch up, but they will catch up.
And they are going to memory hole this thing so hard.
Many of us on the right have said from the beginning, the transgender transition is the modern day lobotomy.
The transgender transition is quack witch doctor pseudoscience that leaves people much worse off than they started, that attempts to deal with a semi-real problem.
The semi-real problem is that some people are confused about their sex.
They're not actually the wrong sex, but they are confused about it.
And they attempt to treat that by castrating people, by giving them bone diseases, by shortening their life expectancy, by chopping them up, by cutting flesh off their arms and their legs, and creating these grotesque Frankenstein phalli.
It's just so hideous what these people are doing.
And it'd be bad enough that they're doing it to adults, but they're doing it to little kids as well, who obviously don't have the ability to consent to anything, certainly not to these permanent sexual changes.
And so they've been doing it for a few years now, they realize increasingly it's ghastly, it doesn't play with the public, and so they're gonna phase it out.
And they're probably at some point going to deny that they ever did it, and they'll move on to some new kooky thing.
But really good news.
I'll take the win while I can get it, even if the libs are having trouble keeping up and they're contradicting themselves in real time.
This is good news.
This means that we are winning.
This is a winning issue for conservatives, not even just in America, even in the UK, throughout the West.
Reality still has a say and it still has currency with the public.
There's so much more to say.
First, though, go to puretalk.com.
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Speaking of weird sex stuff, George Stephanopoulos just grilled Republican Congresslady Nancy Mace over how to square her endorsement of Donald Trump with the fact that she has spoken publicly about being a victim of rape.
Here's Nancy Mace's answer.
You've endorsed Donald Trump for president.
Judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape.
How do you square your endorsement of Donald Trump with the testimony we just saw?
Well, I will tell you, I was raped at the age of 16.
And any rape victim will tell you, I've lived for 30 years with an incredible amount of shame over being raped.
I didn't come forward because of that judgment and shame that I felt.
It's a shame that you will never feel, George, and I'm not going to sit here on your show and be asked a question meant to shame me about another potential rape victim.
I'm not going to do that.
It's actually not about shaming you.
It's a question about Donald Trump.
No, you are shaming me.
You've endorsed Donald Trump for president.
Donald Trump has been found liable for rape by a jury.
Donald Trump has been found liable for defaming the victim of that rape by a jury.
It's been affirmed by a judge.
It's not a criminal court case, number one.
Number two, I live with shame, and you're asking me a question about my political choices, trying to shame me as a rape victim, and I find it disgusting.
And quite frankly, E. Jean Carroll's comments, when she did get the judgment, joking about what she was going to buy, it makes it harder for women to come forward when they make a mockery out of rape, when they joke about it.
I don't even like Nancy Mace all that much.
I think she's a big lib as far as Republicans go.
She is 100% correct here.
And what George Stephanopoulos is doing is not only egregious in itself, but it's especially egregious when you remember who George Stephanopoulos is.
George Stephanopoulos was the communications director, the White House communications director for Bill Clinton.
George Stephanopoulos was the leader of the Clinton war room.
This guy's job was to attack Bill Clinton's female victims, not just jilted lovers and paramours.
Bill Clinton is much more credibly accused of rape than Donald Trump ever has been.
And George Stephanopoulos' job, the thing he got paid to do, was to attack those people, including the relatively credible rape accuser of Bill Clinton.
And he has the audacity, the gall, to sit across from Nancy Mace and say, how could you possibly, you are a victim of rape, how could you possibly Endorse Donald Trump, who was accused of rape by a complete lunatic who changed his story a thousand times.
When I say that the Clinton accuser is much more credible than the accuser of Donald Trump, let's not forget this clip, also from a liberal news channel, which has been memory hold because it didn't quite fit the narrative.
This is Trump's accuser on what allegedly happened 30 years ago in a Bergdorf Goodman's dressing room.
You don't feel like a victim?
I was not thrown on the ground and ravished.
The word rape carries so many sexual connotations.
This was not sexual.
It hurt.
I think most people think of rape as a violent assault.
I think most people think of rape as being sexy.
Let's take a short break.
Think of the fantasies.
We're going to take a quick break.
If you can stick around, we'll talk more on the other side.
You're fascinating to talk to.
Anderson Cooper.
You know who's more fascinating to talk to?
E. Jean Carroll, who speaks openly about her rape fantasies and Might lead one to conclude that this story that, you know, Trump showed up in a Bergdorf Goodman to, you know, ravish Eugene Carroll might have a little element of fantasy to it as well.
Maybe, just maybe, compared to other accusations.
And George Stephanopoulos has the gall to sit across from Nancy Mace, this guy whose job it was to smear rape victims, relatively credible rape victims, It tells you one thing about politics today in 2024.
The libs are never engaging in good faith debates when it comes to high stakes politics.
When they accuse you, I'm talking about not in private conversations or you know when you're talking to your friend who's been brainwashed by CNN or whatever.
When you're talking to the real players, people like George Stephanopoulos, people like Biden and the campaign, people on CNN.
When they call you a racist, it is never in good faith.
That term, I don't think it's ever really thrown around in good faith, but it's certainly not in those... When they call you a racist, or a rapist, or a fascist, or... Do you remember?
This is what Kara Swisher, the liberal journalist, suggested the Biden campaign just hammer.
Those three words, call him a racist, call him a rapist, call him a fascist.
They never use those terms in good faith.
One theoretically could use those terms in good faith, And I think conservatives often hear those terms and they say, well, am I a racist?
I don't know.
Some of my best friends are black or whatever.
You know, am I, I don't think I'm a fascist.
I actually want to shrink the government and I don't want it.
Guys, it's just fake.
Okay.
It's just not.
These people are acting in a very cynical way.
They always are, and all of their questions basically amount to, do you still beat your wife?
Okay, there's no good answer.
They're not seeking truth here.
Just forget about it.
Forget about these people.
Stephanopoulos, the fact that Bill Clinton's a tack dog, Pretends to be a journalist on network TV.
Tells you everything you need to know.
Speaking of practical politics, Whoopi Goldberg and network TV.
Whoopi Goldberg on The View has just threatened to jail President Trump.
How she's going to do that, I'm not quite sure.
She's threatened to jail him if he even thinks about touching entitlement programs.
The bad management of entitlements.
Tremendous bad management of entitlements.
There's tremendous amounts of things, numbers of things you can do.
"Yeah, we could put you in jail." For all of your entitlements, you know?
Social Security is not an entitlement.
We paid for that.
Every time you get a check, you paid it.
This is your money.
So does he have some supporters so obsessed with the idea of beating Democrats that they're not focused on what this man is saying?
A little bit of a non sequitur here from Whoopi, as is often the case on The View.
Yeah, listen, our entitlement programs are actually kind of financially out of whack here and they have been for several years.
Yeah, we're going to put you in jail!
What?
You're already trying to put him in jail for like 900 years or something.
Okay, now you're going to put him in jail for suggesting that maybe we need to tweak aspects of the federal budget.
Okay.
She brings up a point, though.
That is an actual controversy in politics and has been for decades.
And it's a point that has split the right, splits the Republican Party.
It's a big point of change when Trump took over the Republican Party from the party as it had been in the decade prior.
And it's a controversy that has rocked the Daily Wire.
There's so much more to say.
First, though, go to TNUSA.com slash Knowles.
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Should Republicans reform entitlements?
Reform entitlements?
You're going to take away my Social Security?
You're going to take away my Medicare?
You're going to throw granny off a cliff?
Like Barack Obama once accused Paul Ryan of trying to do?
No, I don't think so.
But there is a big split here.
Ben and Matt both got in trouble for saying that we need to raise the retirement age and reform entitlements yesterday.
And some Republicans, some conservatives attacked them for saying this, some defended them.
So what's it all about?
Ten years ago.
I guess more than that, maybe a dozen years ago, during the height of the Tea Party movement, entitlement reform was a big issue that Republicans wanted to take on because it had always been a third rail in American politics.
You even suggest touching Social Security, Medicare, you are getting thrown out of office, you are dead on the campaign trail.
But people like Paul Ryan started to do it.
And they got creamed for it.
And the Democrats and Obama really hammered them for it.
But the Republicans kept it up.
They said, look, entitlements make up most of the federal budget.
When we say entitlement programs, by the way, we're not saying that it's quite like a welfare program.
I mean, Whoopi Goldberg makes a point here, which is you pay into Social Security.
You pay into Medicare.
So it's not like you're on the dole or something.
This is money you've paid into.
And so you want to get the money back.
Except it's not money that It's not actually your money in the sense that the government already spent your money.
And so the entitlement reform people were always saying, well, look, it's just we're running out of money.
We have to raise the retirement age.
It's not going to be solving, you know, and this is just a fiscal reality that we have to deal with.
And then along came Donald Trump.
And along came, or along returned, more populist elements of the GOP, and they said, you know what?
We've got other areas that we can cut.
Even though entitlements make up the bulk of the federal budget, we are not going to go after entitlements.
We're not going to try to raise the retirement age or skimp on Granny's Social Security check.
We're going to grow and we're going to find money elsewhere, but we're not touching that sort of thing.
So who's right?
This seems like it's a major battle.
Within the Republican Party.
Both sides are going to demand that they're right.
As a purely political matter, Paul Ryan was wrong, Donald Trump was right.
I remember those days.
I'm not denying the fiscal problem.
Ben and Matt, and Paul Ryan for that matter, all are right as a financial matter.
The entitlement programs have ballooned so much, the politicians have been so irresponsible with, you know, the so-called Social Security Fund, which isn't really a fund, they just spend all the money.
Yeah, the only way to get the budget in any way in line is to deal with the majority of the federal budget.
So, as a financial matter, they're right.
As a political matter, that's not the correct view.
The premise, back in the height of the Tea Party was, We need to stop focusing on the social issues and we need to focus on the economic issues.
Mitch Daniels, who I love, I thought he was a great governor in Indiana, he suggested a social truce so that we could get our fiscal house in order and deal with the new red menace, this red menace not Soviet communism, this red menace consisting of ink on a ledger because we were in the red.
Didn't work.
Didn't work.
We pulled back on the social issues a little bit.
Did we fix the fiscal problem?
No.
The fiscal problems only got worse.
Because the miscalculation of the Tea Party and the entitlement reformers and all of those eggheads was that You could fix the fiscal problems and then fix the social problems.
That's not how it works.
You have to fix the social problems first.
This is something that Trump, I'm not saying it was conscious, maybe it's pure instinct, it's purely unwitting, but whatever it is, Trump and the more populist wings of the GOP realized, you're not going to fix your accounting problems until you fix your social problems.
We're talking about politics here, folks.
We're talking about society.
The social problems are everything.
The way our books balance out is a consequence of how our society actually functions.
So if you don't have functional borders, if you don't have strong families, if you don't have a decent education system, if you don't have a sound economy, you're just... The economy is both a fiscal matter but obviously a social matter too.
We're talking about people working and producing and buying things.
If you don't have that all squared away, you're not gonna balance the The ledger.
You're not going to fix the debt.
It's just simply not going to happen.
Okay, so I sympathize with people who look at the federal budget.
They say there's only really one way to make a dent into the federal budget.
Right, but the only way to even start to do that is to fix the social problems.
You have to make America great again before you can fix the debt.
Between those two slogans, We tried it.
I'm not even just surmising here what might possibly work hypothetically.
We tried it.
We did the Tea Party.
It didn't work.
It's not that we gave up the social issues and we won on the fiscal issues.
We just lost everything.
And then we decided we're going to start running a little bit more on the social issues, on the border, on Not, you know, castrating our children on strong American families, on American national identity, and we started to win a little bit more.
We started to put together a more coherent political coalition, rather than trying to advocate some, you know, abstract form of libertarian economics that appeals precisely to no one other than the donor class, which, unfortunately, no matter how much money they pour into the campaigns, those campaigns are not going to appeal to most Americans.
Now, speaking of the left's campaign strategy, It has now come out, Joe Biden had a strategy for the State of the Union, and it's a strategy for his broader 2024 campaign, and that is to find social media influencers to show up, go to a private, you know, screening of the State of the Union, and then tweet and Insta and TikTok about it.
Here are some influencers talking about it.
Joe Biden invited 70 influencers to view his State of the Union address in order to- I was one of the 70 influencers that was invited, so let me spill all the tea with you.
So, I got this message, I want to say, on Monday night.
So I got an email from an agency, and I saw the people that were CC'd on, and I didn't recognize any of the other email addresses that were CC'd onto this invite.
So essentially, they were like, we'd love to have you at this, like, watch party, blah blah blah, but they just said it was like a watch party for the State of- Union address, blah, blah, whatever it's called.
24 hours before the State of the Union address is when Biden, which is what this original creator was talking about, was when Biden was like, yo, if TikTok is going to get banned, I would totally sign on that.
Hard stop, right?
I was like, oh, no, absolutely not.
After Biden has used TikTok to campaign certain things recently anyway, so I was like, you're full of crap.
So I don't go, right?
And I just kind of leave it unread.
And then right at that time, too, the agency was like, here's all the concept briefs of your posting.
And so that's something that we do as influencers.
When we have brand deals and we have sponsorships, we have these things called concept briefs.
And it's all these approved talking points that we can make videos about afterwards.
I didn't know that posting was, like, asked.
It wasn't asked in the original invite.
Felt really gross about it.
Felt really gross about it, but you know, the Biden campaign is trying to hire the influencers.
Okay, I think this is probably a good idea.
I was not asked to do- I was at the State of the Union, as I may have mentioned on this show, and I don't know, I didn't get paid by any political parties to influence about it.
The Republicans don't really focus on this.
The influencers.
The Democrats do, because they tend to be a little more avant-garde in the culture, and so what are they seeing?
They're seeing that influencers are the new movie stars.
And the new news anchors.
They're actually both of them.
Because your eyeballs are much more likely to be on your phone now than they are to be on your TV or certainly on your movie screen.
So, if you want to use cultural figures to push your political agenda, Maybe you go to Brad Pitt.
Maybe.
Sure.
Movies are still sort of a thing.
Maybe you go to George Stephanopoulos.
I mean, that's why the Democrats installed him there in the network news after he left the Clinton White House.
More consistently, you're gonna go to the social media influencers.
Those are the people to talk to.
This helps to explain why the Oscar ratings this year were terrible.
If you read any headlines about it, you'll see the headlines saying, the Oscar ratings this year were pretty good.
They weren't pretty good.
The Oscar ratings this year were the fourth lowest ratings ever in Oscars history.
They only had 19.5 million viewers.
So it's a four-year high.
It's a 4% increase compared to last year.
Last year, it was 18.8 million.
But think about what it was 10 years ago.
10 years ago, the Oscars drew 43.7 million viewers.
More than double the number of viewers that they drew this week.
Five years ago, 30 million people tuned in.
That's not even 10 years ago.
That's five years ago.
The numbers are plummeting.
There's maybe a little tick up this year over that year, but generally the numbers are just plummeting.
Why is that?
People will say, it's not because the movies are losing their prestige, it's because people are cutting the cable.
They're consuming media in other ways.
Yeah, but that's all to say the same thing.
Right.
People are not watching TV as much anymore, so the TV stars are losing their influence.
People are also not watching the movies as much anymore, so the movie stores are losing their influence, and it's going elsewhere.
Where is it going?
It's going to the influencers.
What a job!
What a job!
I guess I'm sort of an influencer, aren't I?
I'm not like hot enough, and I don't understand TikTok enough to really be an influencer.
You know, I gotta be like a hot 22-year-old workout chick or something.
That's how I could really maximize my influencing abilities.
And then the Democrats would pay me a lot of money, and they would be smart to do it.
That is where the eyeballs are going.
Joe Biden obviously doesn't know anything about this, but the Democrats are pretty wise.
They always know how to push the levers of pop culture.
And movies are not where the culture is made today.
And TV is not where the culture is made.
The culture is made, for better or worse, on TikTok.
Now, we do have one influencer in the Republican Party.
This was a weird one.
This came out yesterday.
The governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, posted a TikTok-style Influencer product review to her social media.
I'm not going to do it justice.
Take a listen.
Well, hi, I'm Christine Noem.
I'm the governor of South Dakota and had the opportunity to come to Smile, Texas to fix my teeth, which has been absolutely amazing.
For years, I have needed to have an adjustment to my teeth from a biking accident and they have been Absolutely phenomenal.
Years ago, I was out bike riding with all of my kids when they were little and had a biking accident and knocked out all of my front teeth.
And so several years ago, I did a consultation here at Smile Texas and did it by Zoom, but could never quite find the time.
And recently, got the chance to work with Dr. Davis.
Dr. Dooley has always been fantastic to me too, but the team here was remarkable and finally gave me a smile that I can be proud of.
and confident in.
What?
And that really is a gift that I think is going to be incredibly special to have.
You know, I think that I chose the team here at Smile Texas because they're the best.
What?
You know, I hate to admit this, but I'm just kind of stumped by this one.
It's my job to, whenever I see something in politics, I have to have a really pithy take on it, you know, and I have to relate it to some other thing in politics, explain the motivations behind what these people are doing, maybe relate it to philosophy or something.
I, I have no idea what this is.
This is the weirdest thing maybe I have ever seen in politics.
A sitting governor doing an infomercial with like cheesy Elevator music underneath it for a dentist in Texas, in a different state.
In fact, a state very far away from the state in which she is governor.
I got nothing.
I'm sorry, I just had to show you that, but I have nothing really to add.
That's just really, really weird behavior from the governor of South Dakota.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from 68Hoodoo who says, I am excited to see you in Madison tomorrow night.
So excited.
I'm excited to see you!
I can't wait.
I don't know if any tickets are still available.
One thing that sometimes happens is that the libs, and we were already threatened with a lot of protests from Ordinary sort of students and also from the administration at UW-Madison.
Sometimes what they'll do is they'll go in and reserve tickets with either no intention of going or with the intention of going and then just leaving abruptly and disrupting the event.
So we try to have a standby line if tickets are sold out.
I would encourage you to Try to show up anyway, you know, I have no guarantee that you can get in, but, you know, it'd be good, you know, you'd at least have a shot if you can do that.
So I'll see you tonight in Madison.
As I was doing that last commercial, I was formulating some thoughts of what Kristi Noem is doing when she does her dentistry commercial, and the only two I can come up with are Christy Noem wants to fix her teeth and needs some political excuse to do it, some explanation as to why she looks different now.
And so she went out and did this whole big display and she wants to fix her teeth because she wants to be vice president or something like that.
That's one explanation.
It's a little far-fetched, but I could sort of see it.
You know, okay, if she's going to change her appearance in order to get a bigger political job, she's going to take the voters along with it, so it doesn't seem quite so obvious.
Maybe?
Maybe?
The only other one I can figure out is that Kristi Noem is looking at the end of her term as the governor of South Dakota, and she says, all right, well, I guess I'm going to be an influencer.
You know, I mean, that's the only thing for any of us to do in politics anymore, so I'm going to try out my... I'm going to do my audition for being an influencer, and I'm not going to get the really high-level, you know, products yet.
I'm not going to be shilling gold or something like that, but Texas Dentistry, that's going to be my first stop, and then pretty soon I'm going to move on from that to hawking all sorts of products.
Maybe.
Maybe.
I don't.
Again, that's it.
That's all I know.
Now, speaking of these social media platforms and these influencers, there's a bill out to potentially ban TikTok.
And the bill is being pushed by House Republicans, and it's also being opposed by House Republicans.
You know that the GOP can never agree on anything.
We don't need Democrats.
We can just fight each other.
We will have plenty of fun fighting each other forever while the Democrats are united and winning the culture.
This TikTok ban, according to Thomas Massey, who's quite right wing, I have a lot of respect for the guy, he says the TikTok ban is a Trojan horse.
That the president will be given the power to ban websites, not just apps like TikTok.
A person breaking the new law is deemed to be the U.S.
or offshore internet hosting service or app store.
So it's not just about focusing on foreign adversaries, and I've got the language of the bill right here, even the language that Congressman Massey tweeted about.
It's not just about stopping, you know, Red China from poisoning our kids' brains with TikTok.
It's really about controlling the internet, and that's what the libs are after.
So, I don't know.
I've got the portions of the bill that Massey has focused on.
It says foreign adversary controlled application.
The term foreign adversary controlled application means a website, desktop application, mobile app, or augmented or immersive tech.
So, and here, Congressman Massey highlights a website.
But to me, this seems kind of obvious.
I mean, I...
When I use Twitter, now X, I mostly, I think, use it on the website.
I just have a tab open on the website.
You can use Instagram on a website.
I don't know if you can use TikTok on a website.
I sort of avoid TikTok.
But, you know, of course, if you're going to use these services, they also have a website component.
So if you don't block the website component, you're not effectively blocking the service.
So that doesn't do a lot.
It doesn't really convince me very much.
And then they say it's a prohibition of foreign adversary-controlled applications that include Things like providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled applications.
Providing internet hosting services to enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of these services.
So again, it's basically saying if the government can't effectively go after the applications, they can go after the ISPs or whatever services are even hosting those applications.
I don't really see a problem with that either.
In principle.
I agree with Congressman Massey that laws can always be abused, and so maybe you've got to be really specific about the language of the laws.
But I don't really think this bill is doing what he's worried that it does.
And especially when I learn that it is conservative Republicans in the House who are pushing this bill.
It's not just the Democrats pushing it or something like that.
I'm a little skeptical.
So what is this all coming down to?
To me, what a bill like this Comes down to what it shows is the distinction between the libertarians and the nationalists.
The libertarians are saying, get your hands off my internet.
I don't want the government regulating anything.
Even TikTok might be bad, but I don't want the government's hands in it because the government's going to get a little grab happy and they're going to take other things that I like.
The nationalists are saying, hey libertarians, shut up.
You're telling me that we can't even stop a foreign adversary from pushing their propaganda and their addictive technology to melt the brains of not only Americans, but America's youth?
You're telling me we are powerless?
We have no right whatsoever as Americans to stop China from an obvious psychological operation to brainwash our kids?
What are you talking about?
And it's just going to be those two groups pitted against each other here.
That's the real debate over the TikTok ban.
The libertarians versus the nationalists.
Which side are you on?
You might say, I'm neither a libertarian nor a nationalist.
Okay, well, you're picking a side here on this battle at least.
What is it?
And for me, I'm not exactly a libertarian, and I support the American nation, and I think we need stronger borders, and I think we need to assert our political rights a little more.
Not just our individual rights, which are important, but our political rights as well, to have community standards, and to have a flourishing, functioning society.
That's how we're all going to live together.
That's ultimately what our politics kind of comes down to, is how we all live together in this particular place.
So I'm, at least from what I've read of the bill, I'm for it.
TikTok is bad.
It's not good.
And by the way, on top of that, the Democrats are using it to try to influence the 2024 election.
So that's the cherry on top of why we might consider banning a psychological operation by a major foreign adversary aimed at our children.
But there's no such thing as a free lunch, and that will come with some risk to some of our individual liberties, perhaps.
Maybe.
Maybe.
I don't know.
But allowing this to continue also is going to risk our individual liberties, because you're brainwashing a generation of kids, and you forfeit your liberty to oppose our biggest geopolitical adversary.
So which is it?
No such thing as a free lunch.
No such thing as a simple, you know, five-bullet-point political ideology that's going to encompass all of politics.
Not going to happen.
Now speaking of nationalism...
President Biden got in a lot of trouble recently because he first refused to name Lakin Riley, who is the young girl, Georgia student, who was murdered, allegedly, by an illegal alien.
He didn't want to mention her during the State of the Union.
The Republican congressman, notably my congressman Andy Ogles and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Brow beat him into finally saying her name.
And he tried to, but he didn't get her name right, so he ended up naming the USC football coach.
And he said, this student was killed by an illegal.
And then he had to go apologize and say, oh, I shouldn't have said illegal.
He wasn't going to apologize for not wanting to mention the girl's name and then getting the name wrong and allowing this to happen in the first place because he's opened up our southern border and encouraged an invasion of foreign nationals.
No, no, no.
And discouraged the arrest of criminals.
This guy was arrested three times previously.
Had this alleged murderer actually been detained and deported on any of those arrests, that girl would still be alive today.
No, no, no.
He apologized for calling the illegal alien murderer, allegedly.
During your response to her heckling of you, you used the word illegal when talking about the man who allegedly killed Lakin Riley.
about this.
She said, I want to be really clear about something.
The president absolutely did not apologize.
There was no apology anywhere in that conversation.
Roll the tape.
During your response to her heckling of you, you used the word illegal when talking about the man who allegedly killed Lakin Riley.
An undocumented person.
And I shouldn't have used illegal.
I should have, it's undocumented.
And look, when I spoke about the difference between Trump and me, one of the things I talked about on the border was that his, the way he talks about vermin, the way he talks about these people polluting the blood.
I talked about what I'm not going to do, what I won't do.
I'm not going to treat any, any, any of these people with disrespect.
Look, they built the country.
The reason our economy is growing.
Murderers built the country, right.
Did that sound like an apology to you?
He said, yeah, I shouldn't have said.
Shouldn't have said illegal.
It's undocumented.
I shouldn't have said it.
Sounds like an apology to me.
But I said, maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe I don't know what an apology is.
I googled it.
I said, what's an apology?
Google definition of apology.
Google says an apology is a regretful acknowledgement of an offense or failure.
I shouldn't have said it.
I shouldn't have said it.
Undocumented.
Not illegal.
I said a big difference between me and Trump.
I don't want to treat these people with disrespect.
I shouldn't have said it.
Sounds to me like the Google definition of an apology.
Then I said maybe Google's wrong.
Google's wrong about a lot of things.
I look up the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
An apology is, quote, the act of declaring one's regret, remorse, or sorrow for having insulted, failed, injured, harmed, or wronged another.
Seems to me Biden expresses regret.
Shouldn't have said it.
For having insulted.
I wouldn't disrespect someone.
Even in The Illegal Alien Murderer.
Obviously it's an apology, but the libs do this all the time.
It's an extreme form of nominalism.
What do you mean an apology?
What is an apology anyway?
What is a man?
What is a woman?
What is a baby?
What is America?
What is a nation?
No, what are you talking about?
And they use words like Humpty Dumpty.
As I mention in my book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, you're going to see a, hello, thank you, you're going to see an ever more extreme form of this, of this nominalism.
That is to say, the words, you know, big categories, whatever, things like apology, man, woman, they don't really refer to anything.
All that matters is the particular.
All that matters is this particular moment, this particular interest, this particular action, this particular thing that I want to do that is not accountable to principle or scrutiny.
We will do what we want, we will say what we want, it will mean exactly what we want it to mean, and then the moment that's inconvenient, we'll say it means something else, and we'll deny that we did it, and these are not the droids you're looking for.
That's the kind of bare-knuckle irrational politics that you can look forward to.
It's happening already, and it's going to ramp up as we approach November.
There's no member block today, I'm afraid to say.
Even though I'm asking you to become a member now using code Knowles at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.
There's no member block because I have got to hightail it immediately to the airplane so that I can catch my flight to Wisconsin so I can see you all at Madison.
And if I don't see you at Madison, I will see you all.
You can watch the speech at the YAF, Y-A-F, YouTube channel.
And then if I don't see you there, I will see you tomorrow.
