Ep. 1486 - The Embarrassing Hillary Clinton Musical Sums Up The Democrat Party
Hillary Clinton's Broadway musical bombs at the box office, Stormy Daniels blows up the Trump trial, and gender theorist Judith Butler calls me a fascist in her new book.
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Ep.1486
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Picture the most off-putting live performance you could possibly imagine.
The most grating genre on the most tedious topics, woven into a narrative played by the most politically correct cast, backed by the most odious people in the country.
Whatever you are imagining is still not as awful as Hillary Clinton's new Broadway musical, Suffs.
A nearly three-hour musical about the suffragettes performed by an entirely female or gender non-binary cast.
President, hear our cries!
We, the women of the country!
We demand to be heard!
We demand to be seen.
We demand equality.
And nothing in between.
Quality.
We demand to be heard.
We demand to be known.
We demand a voice of our own.
OK, that's enough.
That's fine.
We got the picture.
We get what Suffs is about.
You will not be surprised to discover the musical is not doing very well.
Despite a concerted promotional effort by the establishment media, the show filled just 81% of its seats last week, which was only a marginal improvement over the 78% capacity that it played to the week before.
To put those numbers in perspective, The new Broadway musical Lempicka decided to close down completely after playing to an 83% capacity house just last week.
And the 81 and 78% numbers for Suffs don't even tell the whole story because Broadway now employs a dynamic pricing system which will often slash prices of unpopular shows below the point of even breaking even Just so that the performers don't have to play to an empty house.
So we have no idea if this musical has even made, you know, five dollars in its run.
It is a perfect picture of the Democrat Party.
Tedious political lessons funded and told by unpopular performers to uninterested people that nevertheless will continue to run because the showrunners aren't accountable to their audience.
They own the theater, they got money to burn, and they are going to push their message on you whether you want to hear it or not.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
I have just received a great honor, or rather I have been made aware of a great honor that I received about a month ago.
Judith Butler, perhaps the most prominent feminist and gender theorist in the world, Has devoted a couple paragraphs of her new book to accusing me of being a fascist.
I'm legitimately honored by this.
This woman, she is a pioneering lunatic.
And so we will examine the charge and her arguments for it and see if they withstand scrutiny.
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I want to turn very briefly from the crazy liberal show on Broadway in New York to the crazy liberal show going on in that courtroom in New York, the trial of Donald Trump.
Jonathan Turley, great legal scholar and analyst who kind of distills what's going on in these courtrooms and has for some years now for the general public.
His big takeaway from the Trump trial last week was that, or even in the first couple of days of this week, is that the judge has lost control of his courtroom.
You know, the statement of the judge that he's surprised there isn't a higher number of objections from the defense is baffling.
The defense objected to putting her on the stand.
They then objected to the scope of the questioning.
And now the judge sounds like Claude Raine saying, I'm shocked, shocked, there's a porn star in my courtroom.
Well, you know, if you give a lot of scope to testimony, what did you expect?
And the problem with what the judge has done here is that this is an entirely unnecessary witness.
It is uncontested that there's an NDA.
Whether what happened in their relationship, if there was one, is immaterial to how those payments were denoted by the Trump campaign.
And it happened because the judge lost control of his courtroom.
Okay, I agree with everything that Turley just said until that last line there.
I agree with him.
This is a clown show.
I agree with him that whatever Stormy Daniels knows is actually immaterial to the charge.
Because don't forget, we talked about this on the show a little bit yesterday.
There is the supposed affair that took place between Stormy Daniels and Trump.
Then there is the NDA that took place that she signed, the so-called hush money, according to the prosecutors.
And then there is the crime that Trump is being accused of.
The crime is not that Trump had an affair with Stormy Daniels, whether he did or he didn't.
No one is even alleging that's the crime.
The crime is not that Stormy Daniels signed an NDA and potentially received money for it.
The crime is that Trump made an in-kind contribution to his own campaign and tried to hide it.
Didn't report it accurately to the Federal Election Commission.
That's the crime.
So Stormy Daniels Does not and cannot possibly know anything about the actual crime.
So her testimony is legally irrelevant.
It's just really saucy and sexy and spicy and meant to embarrass Donald Trump.
So I agree with Turley on all these points until he gets that last one.
He says the judge lost control of his classroom.
His classroom.
It feels like an elementary school classroom.
His courtroom.
No, he didn't.
The judge got exactly what he wanted.
The judge knew what he was signing up for when he brought the porn star in, whose testimony was immaterial.
It's not that the judge lost control of his courtroom, it's that the liberals are losing control of the narrative.
The narrative for the liberals was supposed to be Donald Trump is being charged with seven zillion felonies, and he is on trial in four different criminal cases, and we're gonna get this guy in an orange jumpsuit and justice will be served.
And all of these trials are gonna take place before November, and now what?
Now what are we getting?
We're finding out that the big trial, the big federal trial where they've got him, the one that they feel most confident about, that's going to be pushed until after the election.
That's the classified documents case where Biden's DOJ has been building their big federal case.
That's going to be pushed until after the election.
So that's not going to matter for 2024.
So now you got these three other cases.
They're starting with this New York case, this saucy, sexy case about really what it just comes down to is making an in-kind contribution to your own, or making a direct contribution, I suppose, in a way, to your own campaign.
You're signing the check, though it's going to this other woman that will then indirectly help the campaign.
It's the weakest case.
It's not even the sort of case that New York should be trying, because it's a federal crime, so why is some New York Attorney General trying it?
Even the liberal judge is admitting here, man, this is a clown show.
What are you prosecutors doing?
It's not even just the liberal judge.
CNN is analyzing this day of testimony, and even CNN admits that the cross-examination of Stormy Daniels was totally devastating.
This is a devastating cross-examination.
They've gotten Stormy Daniels to concede she hates Trump, that she has said that she would dance if he went to jail.
They have pointed to the fact that she has said she will never pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars that she owes him.
They've effectively undercut her credibility by getting her to talk about conversations she had, then impeaching her with her own book.
I mean, this has been devastating for Stormy Daniels' credibility.
Totally, and so who cares about Stormy Daniels' credibility?
She's an attention whore, to use a little double entendre there, and she obviously just wants to get as much camera time as possible to rejuvenate whatever kind of career she's got so she can go sell some books and hopefully not have her lawyer Michael Avenatti steal all her money this time.
And so she can keep going on TV and she can keep being the face of opposition to Trump, Trump whom she says she hates.
That's not good.
If you're trying to present yourself as some meek and mild lady who's been wronged by Donald Trump, I don't even know how she can semi-plausibly make that claim, then you don't want it to seem like you've got this major axe to grind.
You don't want to admit that you're never going to pay him the money that you owe him from a prior legal judgment against you.
And you don't want this whole thing to look like the circus that it is, but that is exactly what we're getting, and even CNN is admitting that.
The cross-examination here was devastating.
Her testimony is irrelevant.
She has no credibility.
Let's not forget, she already signed a document stating she was not given a hush money payment for this affair.
It didn't happen.
Not at all.
Then she totally flipped her story.
And then she comes out and says, I'm not going to abide by the court's order for me to pay Trump.
And also, I hate his guts and I'll dance if he goes to jail.
The testimony of Stormy Daniels could not have gone worse for the Democrats at a time when the very trial itself seemed to be collapsing in the public imagination.
Not a good start to the four criminal trials that are supposed to put Trump in prison.
Also because if they started out with their strongest case and they got him, maybe they would have gotten him on the later ones.
If they start off with the weakest sauce, eventually people are just gonna tune out, right?
If they haven't already, they're gonna say, okay, they're indicting Trump again.
Seems to me I've heard that song before.
There's so much more to say.
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Speaking of strange crime stories, this is a real weird one, and it's been going all around the internet, and so I have thoughts.
There's this Protestant pastor, his name is John Paul Miller.
John Paul Miller, he has some congregation, and he was given his sermon, his exegesis, riffing on the Bible, and then at the end of his sermon he mentioned, oh by the way, my wife killed herself last night.
You see, 300 years ago, your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents We're listening to this tall, charming, humble pastor, and he told them that if they'll give their life to Christ, that God won't just take care of them, He'll take care of the ones that come after them.
I'm taking a little bit of a break, and I don't want to have to worry about the church.
My break may be a few days, a few weeks, I don't know.
I got a call late last night.
My wife has passed away.
It was self-induced and it was up in North Carolina.
We're going to have a funeral for her next Sunday here at 3 p.m.
I'm just kind of going on adrenaline right now.
Y'all pray for me and my kids and everybody.
Y'all knew that she wasn't well mentally and that she needed her medicine that was hard to get to her.
I'm sure there will be more details to come.
But just keep our family in your prayers.
And I'm going to let Pastor Randall, a bishop, he can pray.
I'll get a microphone.
He'll pray out.
And if you have anything you want to share as well, I appreciate it.
So, yes, we should all pray for the repose of her soul.
But what?
Hold on, what?
Because obviously that was a very truncated clip.
This pastor had just gone on a pretty full sermon and he's laughing and he's joking and he said, oh, you know, I'm tall and handsome and very humble too.
Also, my wife died last night.
She killed herself.
So anyway, I'll see you next time.
That is... I know that people behave kind of strangely sometimes when they encounter death and they...
That's real strange, that's not the way you would ever expect any husband to behave hours after his wife supposedly killed herself.
A lot of the friends here don't believe that the wife killed herself, in part because, and this is just anecdotal at least, I think it probably is backed up by broader data, but you don't often hear about women killing themselves with guns.
You hear about, I'm thinking of that old Dorothy Parker poem about all the different ways to kill yourself.
You hear about men killing themselves that way.
You don't really hear about women killing themselves that way.
It's a little bit strange and suspicious, and a lot of this woman's friends do not believe that she actually killed herself.
I'm not going to judge my gut feeling.
I just, I don't agree.
The young lady was energetic.
She was making plans.
It just doesn't sound like someone committing suicide.
It sounds like someone is getting ready to live life again, really starting her life over.
And just going off what we've seen, what I witnessed, In an affidavit in the probate court, Micah's family just filed trying to take control of this.
I just don't believe it for a minute.
In an affidavit in the probate court, Micah's family just filed trying to take control of this.
Her sister wrote that Micah said to her, if I end up with a bullet in my head, it was not by me.
It was JP.
That is in court documents.
So that's like she's almost speaking from the grave, actually.
It's kind of chilling.
Yeah, it's more than kind of chilling.
That's very, very chilling.
It's not just the woman's own words.
You now hear from a number of people around her, yeah, I don't believe she was going to kill herself.
Apparently this was a second marriage.
For these two, and this pastor had met this woman, the dead woman.
When she was very young, and then they got married later on, and they were having a tough marriage, and maybe they were gonna split up, and she says, if I end up with a bullet in my head, know that it wasn't me, it was JP, it was my husband.
So this seems like proof positive, right?
The pastor's strange behavior, the testimony of the friends and family, and then this woman's own words that if exactly what happened happens, it was the husband, it wasn't her.
So now all these people, Are saying it was a murder, except that because we live in a surveillance society now, we actually have footage and we have audio.
The woman apparently made a 9-11 call, 9-1-1 dispatch.
She was talking to her saying, I'm going to kill myself and I'm, here's how I'm going to do it.
And then even if you think that could have been under duress, we have video footage of this woman going out, buying the gun and going to the place where her body was found.
Robinson County 9-1-1, what's the address of your emergency?
Hi, are you able to trace the location of my phone?
You don't know where you're at?
At National Park.
Are you at the Lumber River State Park?
Yeah, that's where I am.
So you can see her on store footage going out and buying a gun.
I'm about to kill myself and I just want my family to know where to find me.
So this is awful.
And then the dispatcher is just kind of talking to her.
Okay, ma'am.
Well, this and that, you know, just kind of cold about the whole thing.
I don't know.
Maybe that's how they're trained.
You'd like to think that if you're on that side of the phone, you'd say, uh, don't do that, ma'am.
Don't, but, and maybe there's some 5D chess going on here.
And actually it was all a really grandiose and brilliant sort of setup, but, If you got the woman in her own words saying, I'm about to kill myself, here's where to find me, then you have footage of her leaving her house, going to a gun store.
I think she bought the gun a little bit earlier, but you've got the footage of her going, buying the gun, going out, driving, going to the place where her body was found.
I don't think you need to be Sherlock Holmes to say the most likely scenario is she did kill herself.
So why do I even bring up this story?
It's weird, it's going viral, it's terribly sad, it's very fascinating, but I have a political reason for bringing up this story, which has nothing to do with murder or intrigue or this particular church or anything like that.
Any reasonable person, having heard all the lead-up until the dispatch call and the videos, would have said, ain't no way that woman killed herself, She was murdered by her husband or by a hitman or by this person or that person.
She even said it from beyond the grave.
And then what do we find out?
The audio, the video, I mean you basically have everything other than a live camera while the woman actually committed the act.
Just seems like she killed herself.
Actually, the simplest answer was what happened.
And we're living in an age where we no longer accept the simplest answer.
And there's a good reason for that.
The good reason being that our institutions that run our society have failed us and are unaccountable to us and have lied to us a number of times.
I think a lot of people were radicalized, especially during COVID when the authorities lied or just got things wrong honestly, were honestly incompetent.
But a lot of times actually lied too, they were actually deceptive.
And so we don't believe that anymore.
And so we're given to, we're much more inclined to engage in kind of conspiracy thinking.
And there are conspiracies.
Every business is a conspiracy.
Every political campaign is a conspiracy in a certain sense.
You know, you've got a goal.
You're working through sometimes surreptitious means to achieve that goal.
But also sometimes the simplest answer is the true answer.
That can still happen.
And even when you are 100% positive, there's no way the simplest answer could possibly be the truth.
That guy, that pastor's guilty as sin.
The sister said so.
The friend said so.
The woman from beyond the grave said so.
They got him, booked that guy, sent him to jail.
And then your expectations are totally subverted.
And the simplest, plainest answer the whole time is the real one.
How many times do we fall into that mistake when there isn't a dispatch call and there isn't Video footage.
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I just have to take a pause from our run of show right now to point out, my voice sounds very, very sexy today.
I sound, have you noticed this Mr. Davies?
As the control room, I sound like Barry Weiss.
Not Barry Weiss.
Barry Weiss is the center-left journalist.
I meant to say Barry White, the most famous soul musician of the last 30 years.
I think you're turning into Dennis Prager.
Maybe I'm turning... I did see Dennis when I was in LA, my cigar buddy out there, for the premiere of Mr. Bircham.
But I can't tell.
Initially, I thought this was because of allergies.
Now, I don't know.
Maybe I have bird flu.
I saw bird flu was at the top of drudge yesterday.
Maybe I've got that.
But whatever it is, if I can just suppress the coughs, I think this sounds... Maybe we should make this a permanent feature.
I think this sounds good, man.
I feel... I might not feel good, but I do.
I sound... I sound soulful and sexy, man.
I feel like a real man.
Now, speaking of men, There's some sad news with regard to men's behavior.
Men are opting out of work.
I teased this story a little bit yesterday.
Men are opting out of work.
According to Newsweek, it's not an issue of not being able to find a job.
Men have opted out altogether.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 89% of working-age men have a job or are actively looking for work.
So it's not just a matter of that the economy is not good, it's hard to find a gig.
No.
There are 11% of working-age men not even looking for a job and don't have one.
To compare that to past eras, 1950, 97% of working-age men were working or looking for work.
So, in the early 50s, if you zero in on ages 25 to 54, 96% of working-age men between those ages were working full or part-time jobs.
That number has now moved to just 86%.
Why is that?
A few explanations that are typically offered by the scholars and the geniuses and the eggheads.
One is women's increasing education.
So, sure, back in the 50s fewer women went to college, fewer women were qualified for a lot of jobs, so men were a little bit more in demand.
Now women make up the majority of college students and graduates, so men are no longer complementary with women and there's no longer the public economy and the private economy, the home economy, all that.
No, no, now we're all competing in a labor market.
Okay, maybe that's part of it.
It's not even women's increasing education because we're all a lot dumber than we were 70 years ago.
That's part of it.
Women's increase.
It's not even women's increasing education because we're all a lot dumber than we were 70 years ago.
It's just women's increasing participation in the formal educational structures.
Another one kind of related is a decline in relative wages, which is caused not just by women entering the workforce.
It's caused by a lot of other economic factors that have really taken off since the 1970s.
Costs of goods have increased dramatically since the 70s.
Wages have stagnated.
There was a little bit of real wage growth during the Trump era.
That was pretty much it for a long time.
And now we're back to no real wage growth.
Decline of relative wages, maybe that is discouraging men from getting into the workforce.
They're just dispirited.
They feel like they're not enjoying the fruits of their labor, and so they're checking out.
Another one, and this is related to relative wages.
Over the time span of 1980 to 2019, non-college educated men's median weekly earnings not only stagnated, they actually declined after inflation.
So they went down by 17%.
If you don't have a college degree, you're a man.
Your weekly earnings declined 17% over that 40-year period.
College-educated men saw their earnings rise by 20%.
So by almost exactly, actually by even a little bit more than the non-college-educated men's wages decreased, the college-educated men's wages increased.
So, the Boston Fed, the Federal Reserve, suggested that one reason that men not only aren't getting jobs, but aren't even looking for jobs anymore, is a deteriorating social status.
Men just aren't what they once were, they're not valued as they once were, and that we're not even just talking about social value or perceived value, we're talking about value that is expressed in wages, it's just declining.
Now, I have one other thought out of my head that might help to explain why men are no longer even looking for work, and it's one that contradicts a lot of the prevailing narrative.
The prevailing narrative is, millennials, we have it really tough.
You know, we graduated high school during the financial crisis, and it's just been a disaster ever since.
And, you know, we didn't get to enjoy the fruits of the Post-war era, really, we didn't get to totally enjoy the fruits of the post-Cold War era.
In the 1990s, we were still kind of kids, and then 9-11 happened, then the financial crisis, and we just...
We've had a rough financial go of it.
Yeah, sure.
That's all true.
Also, millennials are about to become super duper rich because we're about to inherit all the money from the boomers and the boomers are the richest generation ever.
And now we're about to become the richest generation ever because of that transfer of wealth.
So it might just be that people are getting a little bit of inheritance and they're not having as many kids, so they don't have as many expenses and they're just the men aren't inclined to work as much.
Because they can just pay their way.
I don't see a lot of people starving in the streets.
I don't see an epidemic of emaciated millennials, right?
If anything, millennials are too fat.
So that might be an explanation too.
But whatever the explanations are, and I'm sure there are a dozen others we could list, whatever the cause, this is very bad.
This is very, very bad.
Even if it's my suggestion that actually millennials are getting richer.
It's because we're inheriting some money now and it's because, I don't know, because the welfare state is growing such that we get to stay on our parents' health insurance until we're 26 and we get this and we get that and we just don't need to work as much.
It's really, really bad.
We tend to view work as a punishment.
Even in a secular sense, when you say, ah, gotta go out there, gotta go earn my living, or I can't pay my rent, I hate that I have to go work a job.
If I didn't have to work my job to get my wages, or certainly to get my health insurance, why, I could be a poet.
You know me, I would be an artist.
I would be, oh, what a life I could live.
This was Nancy Pelosi's defense of Obamacare, now over 10 years ago.
She said, we need to decouple health insurance from employment because then we can free up the creative potential of all these ne'er-do-wells who would really be great poets.
Oh yes, we're going to have a new Lord Byron.
Think of all the writers, the novelists, a new Manzoni is going, is just begging, waiting to write his great magnum opus.
It's just that he's got to work a job.
To have his health insurance, that's what's keeping him from it.
That's not true.
Most people are terrible poets.
Statistically, 100% of people are terrible poets.
But even more to the point, the people who won't write a poem because they need to work a job to have their health insurance, they're never going to write a poem.
The real people who make it in business, in the arts, in politics, who succeed at anything, are not the kind of people who are deterred by work, okay?
They're people who are fanatical about their work, who will work a lot, who are indefatigable.
Those are the kind of people.
Because work is not a punishment.
We think of this even in a religious way.
You know, Adam and Eve sin, they disobey God in the Garden of Eden, and now the punishment is that you gotta go out, and by the sweat of your brow, you're gonna earn your food, and you're gonna have to work.
That's a punishment.
No, it's not.
God doesn't just punish us.
Because God loves us, and God is love, God is charity, and God, in his providence, orders all of history, sees all of history, and orders all of history, ultimately, to his own ends.
So, in a shallow way, work is a punishment for the fallen condition of the world, which was entered into, if you're Christian, you believe is entered into by the free choice of man to disobey God.
But, at a deeper level, Work is a remedy for the fallen nature of the world.
Because idle hands are the devil's playground.
Most people, if they have some free time, they're not going to write I Promessi Sposi by Manzoni, right?
They're not going to write some great new work.
They're going to be the new Charles Dickens.
No.
They're going to do drugs and play video games and look at porn and loaf around on the couch and watch TV.
That's what they're going to do.
They're going to get fat and lazy and depressed and they're not going to do anything, they're not going to contribute to society and they're going to become anxious and suicidal.
That's what's going to really happen for most people if they don't work.
The work is a remedy.
You have to find work that ideally that you enjoy, at least work that you find gratifying in that you can kiss it up in service to your family and to your community and ultimately in service to God.
That's what you got to do.
Whatever the cause of men dropping out of society is bad.
Fix it, not only for the good of society, but also for their own good.
Speaking of punishments, this is a story I meant to get to last week, but it's relevant now as the state of Israel is preparing this final offense on Rafa in Gaza.
The International Criminal Court is threatening to indict the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Here's Netanyahu's response.
The International Criminal Court in The Hague is contemplating issuing arrest warrants against senior Israeli government and military officials as war criminals.
This would be an outrage of historic proportions.
International bodies like the ICC arose in the wake of the Holocaust committed against the Jewish people.
They were set up to prevent such horrors, to prevent future genocides.
Yet now, the international court is trying to put Israel in the dock.
It's trying to put us in the dock as we defend ourselves against genocidal terrorists and regimes, Iran of course, that openly works to destroy the one and only Jewish state.
Branding Israel's leaders and soldiers as war criminals will pour jet fuel on the fires of anti-Semitism, those fires that are already raging on the campuses of America and across capitals around the world.
It will also be the first time that a democratic country fighting for its life according to the rules of war is itself accused of war crimes.
Okay, so Netanyahu, clear as day, how dare you, ICC, accuse us of war crimes.
This is an outrage.
What he's not saying here is what is actually relevant to this threat from the International Criminal Court.
Israel does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.
In order for a court to have power, in order for a court's actions to actually have teeth, people need to recognize the jurisdiction of that court.
Israel doesn't.
So it's a bad look, it's bad PR if the ICC goes after Israeli officials up to and including potentially Netanyahu.
But it doesn't really matter because Israel doesn't recognize the ICC's jurisdiction.
Furthermore, much more relevant than that, because Israel is just some tiny little country in the middle of the Middle East.
More important is, the United States does not recognize the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction.
The United States does not recognize a lot when it comes to international bodies trying to meddle in our affairs.
John Bolton, I know he's sort of fallen out of favor among conservatives in recent years, but John Bolton articulated this principle very, very well some decades ago before the United Nations.
The point that I want to leave with you in this very brief presentation is where I started.
There is no United Nations.
There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that's the United States, when it suits our interests and when we can get others to go along.
The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories.
If you lost 10 stories today, it would make a bit of difference.
This kind of mindless Show me the lie.
nations as something different than what it's in the united states interest to do isn't going to sell here or anywhere else the united states makes the u.n work when it wants it to work and that is exactly the way it should be because the only question the only question for the united states is what's in our national interest and if you don't like that i'm sorry but that is the fact show me the lie show me the lie in what john bolton just said you might say well michael
there is a such such a thing as international law at least in principle Yeah, yeah, I guess in principle that's true.
There's the natural law, and then we get the civil law derived from the natural law, and that's true.
It is just wrong to do certain things, and it's right to do other things, and that's not dependent on national interest.
But practically, this is what John Bolton's talking about.
He says, practically, there's no United Nations.
Practically, we could extend that here.
Practically, there's no international criminal court.
There is power.
There are potentially powers in the world, and practically there's really only one power in the world, even still today, and that's the United States.
So when the United States wants to make the UN work, when the United States wants to do something with the international community, if we can garner enough support, we'll do it.
But that's it.
And practically speaking, we're going to think of that From our own national interest.
We're going to weigh the pros and the cons.
We're going to be lobbied from all sides.
And then we're basically going to do what we want to do.
And so this creates a major political problem for Joe Biden.
Because the UN is a joke.
The International Criminal Court is a joke.
Pretty much all of these bodies are a joke.
There is power.
America is the global hegemon.
And so, Part of the reason why there's a major divide, a schism on the American left right now is, if Joe Biden wants the war in Gaza to end, it ends.
Because we fund the Israeli military.
And Biden's saber-rattling a little bit, but not enough to actually make much of a difference.
If America wants Iran to defeat Israel, We can make that happen.
If America wants Israel to defeat Iran, or at the very least defeat Hamas in Gaza, we can make that happen.
We're the global hegemon, we can do it!
Which means that ultimately the buck stops with Joe Biden.
And you can't blame it on the UN, and you can't blame it on the ICC, and you can't blame it on any of these people.
Biden's got to answer for it.
And the Democrat Party right now wants opposite things.
The base wants to defeat Israel, and the establishment class still broadly supports Israel.
And what's Biden going to do?
He's going to try to point figures everywhere else while the buck stops with him.
And now, a message from our friend, Megyn Kelly.
Ladies and gentlemen, the anticipation is finally over.
The moment we have all been waiting for is almost upon us.
This Sunday, exclusively on Daily Wire Plus, my new show with Adam Carolla, Mr. Bircham, will make its grand premiere.
In this show, I have the pleasure of playing Bircham's wife, Wendy.
It feels pretty great doing something for the community, right?
Now let me give you a sneak peek into Wendy's character.
Wendy is a force to be reckoned with.
She's a top-tier real estate agent, a supermom, and a bit more left-leaning than I am.
But believe me, it's a necessary balance to Bircham's old-fashioned caveman approach.
Check out the trailer for our new series, Mr. Bircham.
Yes!
Headshot!
Dad, my teammates can see your junk.
You're welcome, ladies.
First day of school means the bet is on.
First one of us to get in some... You suck, Mr. Buttchum!
Ah, deal got it.
Rule number one, no phones in the woodshop.
Fish it out after class.
I found some really great school uniform options to avoid misgendering.
Ooh, what about their allergies?
Maybe those theys could be lactose intolerant.
No, we can't say intolerance.
We have a zero tolerance policy for mentioning intolerance.
When I was a kid, men were men.
Now everyone's wrapped up in feelings.
Real men stuff feelings down with red meat, cigarettes, and violence.
My name is Mr. Wolf.
I solve problems.
You know what it takes?
Balls!
Eyeballs!
Who's gonna say that?
We're too young.
Well, actually, I was gonna say you're too fat.
Keep my wife's name out of your damn mouth!
You and the geriatric Girl Scouts will be passed out in an hour!
Pass mommy the wine.
The bottle.
Don't make this a prison, honey.
Richard Bircham.
Bircham?
Bircham.
Mr. Bircham.
Hey, Bircham!
Bircham.
Bircham!
Bircham!
Watch Mr. Bircham, an all-new animated series from Daily Wire Plus.
Let the record show I'm a dick.
Premieres May 12th.
Watch the series premiere of Mr. Bircham for free only on DailyWire+.
Mark your calendars for this Sunday night, May 12th.
You're gonna love it.
This show is fabulous.
I was just out there with Megan and Adam and Roseanne and all sorts of other people who were in the cast at the premiere a couple of nights ago in LA.
It was a lot of fun.
One of the few good reasons to go to LA.
My favorite comment.
On, oh, I guess it was yesterday.
The days are all confused because I'm floating in this morass of allergies and sickness and my sexy voice and going between L.A.
and Nashville.
But my favorite coming yesterday is from Hard Boiled Entertainment.
Says Kathy Hochul, governor of New York.
Black kids don't know what computers are.
MIT.
Well, in that case, great observation.
Great observation.
MIT has just banned diversity statements.
And one of the reasons why you might not demand that all of the applicants to come work at your school prove that they're the most racially and ethnically aggrieved and interesting is if at the same time your side is saying that black people don't know what computers are.
And probably they're not going to do great at MIT if the Democrats are right about that.
Speaking of really exciting new releases, Judith Butler, who is probably the most prominent feminist and gender theorist in the world today, has devoted a couple of paragraphs of her new book to accusing me of being a fascist.
Judith Butler is the figure behind so much of the gobbledygook, you know, social construct, gender language that permeates all of society today.
Chris Ruffo, who Judith Butler also attacks in her new book, Chris Ruffo has an excellent piece on Judith Butler and all of the awful social developments for which she is responsible in City Journal.
I recommend that you go check that out.
But here, I feel I should respond, if I'm being called a fascist by the most prominent feminist and gender theorist, I should probably have an opportunity to examine her charges and respond to them.
She writes, and this is only the freebie, I only saw this because they published a little portion of her book for free.
I haven't actually read the thing, so who knows, there might be more of it.
But here's the relevant part.
We may think that anti-gender ideology movement is wrong, but why maintain that it is fascist as well?
As I insisted at the outset of this book, fascism names the passions, but authoritarianism the emerging, if not accomplished, political reality.
On the Michael Knowles Show online, which attracts hundreds of thousands of listeners, Knowles, a right-wing commentator and featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the United States, stated the following, and then she has my line from CPAC, If transgenderism is false as it is, we shouldn't indulge it, because it takes away people's rights, and so for the good of society, and especially for the good of the poor people who fall prey to this confusion, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely, the whole preposterous ideology at every level.
She goes on.
The language of eradication belongs to fascism, and today it is directed not only against trans people, but against all those who have been clustered under the signs of gender and critical race theory and wokeism.
The ready definitions for fascism tend to rely on the study of its 20th century form, so new vocabularies are required to understand new iterations of fascism that have emerged in the last decades.
Okay, hold on.
Put a pause there.
Do you see what she's doing?
She's saying, because Knowles doesn't think that a boy can really become a girl, And because Knowles also believes that we should live according to the truth rather than according to lies.
Major premise, minor premise.
Conclusion is transgenderism should be eradicated from public life entirely.
The whole ideology at every level.
Because it's false and false falsehood doesn't help anybody.
So we should we should enshrine true things not false things in our in our public life.
She recognizes that most people are not going to think that's fascist.
Most people are going to think that's common sense and something that we all agreed to until about five minutes ago.
So she says, yeah, yeah, no, but you're just thinking of fascism in its 20th century form.
We need new vocabularies to understand the new iterations of fascism.
Yeah, Michael Knowles, he might not look like that mustachioed Austrian painter or, you know, Mussolini or any of the other people we call fascist.
But she says contemporary authoritarians, they may not consider themselves fascists, but they rely on fascist technique and stoking fascist passions to stay in power.
The new authoritarians rail against social movements, including feminism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQIA plus rights and freedoms, against civil rights and the protection of the rights of migrants and refugees, All of which are cast as internal enemies, threatening the nation, or as external ones, about to break down the door and threaten the phantasmatic purity of the nation.
So you see, right in that very end part, where she's talking about borders and migrants, she's saying, if you support national borders, you're a fascist.
If you think a country, citizens have a right to determine who comes into the country, yeah, you're a fascist too.
It's not just Knowles.
It's also anyone who supports any kind of national border.
All of the contemporary authoritarians promise a liberation from a leftist superego that would affirm trans lives, woke culture, feminist anti-racist struggles.
Okay, here's my question for Judith Butler.
She says that, you know, we got to stop being hung up on what fascism actually meant when there was a fascist movement.
When you just think of it today as being opposed to feminism, multiculturalism, LGBTQIA rights and freedoms.
Was Bill Clinton a fascist?
Is Bill Clinton a fascist?
Bill Clinton certainly opposed gay marriage.
Bill Clinton opposed homosexuals serving openly in the military.
Bill Clinton opposed abortion, at least in principle, even though he supported legal abortion.
So according to Judith Butler's definition, Bill Clinton's a fascist, right?
What about Hillary Clinton, for that matter?
Hillary ran for president saying that marriage is a sacred union between a man and a woman.
What about Barack Obama?
Barack Obama ran for president saying the same thing.
Joe Biden said the same thing on TV.
In fact, beyond marriage and beyond questions of feminism and this and that, where they all have at some point basically agreed with me, on the issue of transgenderism, they all Everyone agreed with me.
Until about 2015.
Until Obama started to enshrine protections for transgenderism in public life.
Before there was a bathroom bill in North Carolina saying dudes can use the women's bathroom.
Everybody agreed with me on that point.
There was essentially no one in the world who disagreed with the point that I was making at CPAC.
So according to Judith Butler, does that mean everyone was a fascist?
Except for her, and maybe even including her.
When she was a young woman, I bet she also thought transgenderism was crazy, as pretty much everyone has forever.
This means that the definition of fascism has to change to whatever the liberals oppose now.
Opposed five minutes ago, or supported five minutes ago, but now, it's just now, it's always changing, and it's, for Judith Butler, it's just not being a progressive leftist.
Now, she leaves with a final point that's pretty good.
She's somewhat intelligent, albeit totally nuts.
She says, it makes no sense for gender-critical feminists, that is the TERFs, you know, the feminists who oppose transgenderism, to ally with reactionary powers in targeting trans, non-binary, and genderqueer people.
Okay.
On this part, I think she's sort of right.
It doesn't really ultimately make sense for the TERFs and the disillusioned leftists to side with the conservatives.
We have different starting points.
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Okay.
On this part, I think she's sort of right.
It doesn't really ultimately make sense for the TERFs and the disillusioned leftists to side with the conservatives.
We have different starting points.
We have different premises.
But the very fact that the JK Rowlings of the world, the so-called TERFs, the anti-trans feminists, the classical liberals who oppose this kind of crazy leftism, the fact that they're inclined to side with conservatives, say the left has gone too far.
And it, and At a deeper level, I think it does make sense for them to side with us.
They just need to side with us more.
They need to go further.
What those guys want to do is they want to have all the leftism and the feminism and the liberalism and all of it up until about 1997, and then they want it to stop.
That's not how ideas work.
Ideas build upon themselves and they follow to their own logical conclusions.
So if these ideas, if these premises are leading you to really crazy conclusions, like a man can be a woman, like we should castrate children or something, You gotta not just try to rewind the tape a little.
You gotta check your premises.
And if your premises are wrong, then you gotta take other premises.
Which means, ultimately, you probably need to leave that feminism and the liberalism and the leftism behind and side with the conservatives, who have been proven right again and again.
The rest of the show continues now.
We have a very exciting interview coming up.
You don't want to miss it.
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