Ep. 1640 - Squishy Republican Spending Bill Get Destroyed By Trump
House GOP leadership tries to give Democrats a bunch of goodies, the University of Illinois accuses me of creating an "unsafe campus" for the LGBTQ people, and a sinful flesh-selling website prepares to shut down operations in Florida.
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Ep.1640
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Republican leadership in Congress just tried to pull a fast one on conservatives.
They tried to bully and extort Republican legislators into passing a 1,500-page, $110 billion continuing resolution full of liberal nonsense that most Americans hate, or else to miss out on disaster funding for their districts and Christmas dinner with their families.
Happily, the plan did not work, and we'll get into why not.
But the fact that they even tried this is so outrageous and also par for the course.
Republicans just won a landslide victory in November.
They won unified government, House, Senate, and Presidency alongside the Supreme Court, which they already had.
They won huge swaths of groups that have been Democrat for decades.
And the first thing they tried to do after they won was give the Democrats whatever they wanted.
These people refuse to win.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Great news!
The biggest porn company in the world is closing up shop in Florida.
And the reason why is really scandalous and tells you everything you need to know about the porn industry.
There's so much more to say.
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What is this continuing resolution?
The continuing resolution pushed by Republicans along with Democrats, pushed by leadership, the firm it's sometimes called, the firm of the GOP and the Democrats getting together to disregard the will of the American people and to undermine conservatives.
They had this plan.
To continue funding the government, to avert a government shutdown, to allow the members of Congress to go home for Christmas because, you know, the deadline was December 20th, and do you want to be the one responsible for making all these members of Congress skip out on their families?
They don't get to see their kids open presents on Christmas.
Daddy won't be home to slice the Christmas ham.
No, no, let's just keep funding the government, and let's give Democrats whatever they want.
Until...
Elon Musk came out and he said, hey, any Republicans who vote for this should be primaried in two years.
And then you already had a groundswell of grassroots activism, especially you saw this on X, owned by Elon Musk.
Then you had President Trump come out and say, no, cut it out.
J.D. Vance posted this statement from President Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.
I'll read it in its entirety.
If you're trying to figure out who wrote this, was it Trump or was it Vance?
I think the diction will tell you the story.
It says, the most foolish and inept thing ever done by congressional Republicans was allowing our country to hit the debt ceiling in 2025.
It was a mistake and is now something that must be addressed.
Meanwhile, Congress is considering a spending bill that would give sweetheart provisions for government censors and for Liz Cheney.
The bill would make it easier to hide the records of the corrupt January 6th committee, which accomplished nothing for the American people and hid security failures that happened that day.
This bill would also give Congress a pay increase while many Americans are struggling this Christmas.
Increasing the debt ceiling is not great, but we'd rather do it on Biden's watch.
So already there, you see Trump is saying, look, there's this awful stuff because of the policies that last three years, really policies last three decades, but make Biden hold the ball for that.
But all this other stuff is crazy.
If Democrats won't cooperate on the debt ceiling now, what makes anyone think they would do it in June during our administration?
Let's have this debate now.
We should pass a streamlined spending bill that doesn't give Chuck Schumer and the Dems everything they want.
Republicans want to support our farmers, pay for disaster relief, set up our country for success in 2025.
The only way to do it is with a temporary funding bill and then in all caps, without Democrat giveaways.
And we'll get into some of those Democrat giveaways combined with an increase in the Anything else is a betrayal of our country.
Republicans have to get smart and tough.
If Democrats threaten to shut down the government unless we give them whatever they want, call their bluff.
Democrats say, look, you don't get to go home for Christmas?
All right.
I guess we're not going home for Christmas.
It is Schumer and Biden who are holding up aid to our farmers and disaster relief.
This chaos would not be happening if we had a real president, which we will in 32 days.
Okay.
Trump said it better than anything I could possibly add to it.
What do we mean by Democrat giveaways?
There's money for all sorts of nonsense.
The Democrats are pretending, even the establishment media, they're saying, this bill is all about funding the government.
And it's really about disaster relief.
These nasty Republicans don't want to give out disaster relief.
I promise you, Republicans are happy with disaster relief.
We want to give as much disaster relief as you want.
What we don't want is all the little pork for all the little Democrat projects.
What we don't want is to continue funding a huge bloated government.
The American people voted in large part in November to have Elon Musk and Doge come in and gut a lot of the government bloat.
So we don't want to increase the government bloat.
And then there's even ideological giveaways to Democrats like this one.
This one blew me away.
I have to give a hat tip to Benny Johnson who found it before I did.
The continuing resolution wants to start redefining all sorts of terms, adding new euphemisms into the U.S. Code like this one.
Right now in the U.S. Code there's this term offender to refer to criminals.
Well, this continuing resolution, the purpose of which ostensibly is just to fund the government, give out some disaster relief, this continuing resolution would change Section 3 of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, 29 U.S. Code 3102, to get rid of the word offender and replace it with justice-involved individual.
It seems like a minor thing, but it's not a minor thing, because as I've mentioned for years, the Democrats control the culture in large part because they control people's minds, and they control people's minds because they control the words.
That's why Democrats are so insistent on euphemisms, on politically correct woke language, is by changing the words, you change people's perception.
This example...
is one that I cited on page two of my book, Speechless, as a particularly egregious example of leftist euphemisms.
Where is my bell?
I said the word, and my bell is not there.
This is very unusual, and I don't like it.
Whatever, we move on.
Thank you.
I'm glad that our control room is asleep right now.
I guess they've started their Christmas vacation early.
Justice-involved individual is one of the most absurd euphemisms the left has used because...
A criminal, whatever you want to say about a criminal, is by definition someone who is involved in injustice.
He's the opposite of a justice-involved individual.
They want to put that in there.
There are other euphemisms.
The continuing resolution wants to strike the phrase homeless individuals and replace it with individuals experiencing homelessness.
It seems like a minor point, but why are we having this fight over the funding of the government, a battle potentially that will lead to the shutdown of the government right before Christmas?
We're fighting over the left's temper tantrum to include all of this gobbledygook nonsense euphemism?
Out-of-school youth is to be amended in the U.S. Code to opportunity youth.
I guess you do.
If you're out of school, if you're a dropout, if you're playing hooky, I guess you do have a lot of opportunity.
You have the opportunity to go do drugs.
You have the opportunity to go commit crimes.
You have the opportunity to go back to school.
I don't know.
This is what they want.
They're so, say what you will about the left, these guys do not give up.
They lost in a landslide in November, an electoral college landslide at the level of the presidency.
They lost the popular vote for the presidency.
They lost the whole government.
And they still have the audacity to go up, just before Trump takes office, and say, hey, Republicans, give us everything we want.
And the crazy part is, the freaking Republicans want to do it!
These people can't win for losing.
They have to be bullied into saying no to the Democrats.
Republicans hold all the cards.
We have not held this many cards in 20 years.
And the Democrats say, hey, even though you hold all the cards, you're about to take over the whole government, give us everything we want.
And they say, okay, yes, sir.
Yes, sir.
What else can we give you?
Can I shine your shoes while we do it?
So pathetic.
Speaking of crime, speaking of justice-involved individuals, there's an article that That I have to direct your attention to in The College Fix.
It's about little old me.
Headline, Michael Knowles creates unsafe campus for LGBTQ students, University of Illinois complaint says.
It's a wild story.
I actually have to apologize to The College Fix.
They had reached out to me for comment, and I'd forgotten about it.
And this happened so long ago that, I don't know, it just totally escaped my mind.
But the left doesn't give up.
I spoke at the University of Illinois like eight months ago or something.
I don't even remember when I spoke there.
And the leftists at that school are still salty about it, are still trying to use my speech as an excuse to ban conservatives from campus.
Here's what they say.
This should not be allowed, the unknown reporter told the University of Illinois campus belonging team.
If you pay taxes in Illinois, certainly if you send your kid to the University of Illinois, you're paying for something called the campus belonging team.
This should not be allowed, the reporter said, referencing Knowles' hate-filled rhetoric around LGBTQ plus people.
Notice the unknown reporter is not citing any particular examples of rhetoric.
I don't know what my hate-filled rhetoric is.
I guess the one example they sometimes point to is when I, at CPAC, I said that for the good of society, and especially for the good of the poor people who fall on prey to this confusion, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely, the whole preposterous ideology at every level.
It's popped up in the news so much I've memorized that portion of the speech.
But you couldn't say that's hate-filled.
I said it's for their own good.
I said this is a false ideology.
It hurts especially the people who fall and pray to it.
So you can't say that's hate-filled.
You might say it's wrong.
It's not.
It's correct.
But even if you think it's wrong, you couldn't say it's hate-filled.
The impetus for the rhetoric is charity.
And clarity.
And clarity is charity, as far as I'm concerned.
The article goes on the event.
A speech titled, Abortion is not healthcare, occurred in mid-April.
But the fix recently obtained the complaint as part of a public records request for bias team reports from the university.
So I love this part because the speech wasn't on LGBTQ. This is something, I think, the members of the LGBT LMNOP community need to get through their heads.
There's a lot of confusion in that community, but they need to get this one thing through.
Not everything's about you.
I love this.
I could speak on any topic.
On abortion.
I could speak on Christopher Columbus.
I gave a speech on the Crusades.
And the LGBT LMNOP activists come out and they say, this is an attack on me.
Ladies and gentlemen, not everything is about you, believe it or not.
I know you think it's all about you, and you've turned this day of celebration you had into a month of celebrating you.
Now it's two months of celebrating you.
Now there have to be whole offices at every university and company to celebrate you, and there has to be a flag.
But it's actually not all about you.
And if you have aberrant desires or fantasies about your own identity, that's unfortunate and perhaps that will be rectified at some point.
But in the meantime, believe it or not, it's not all about you.
The article goes on.
Allowing him to speak on campus creates unsafe environments for LGBTQ plus students, faculty and staff.
Another person alluded to the Knowles event in a complaint to the university saying the Daily Wire speaker has a known history of discriminating against trans people.
How can that?
I don't even know what that means.
They discriminate against trans people?
How do I discriminate?
Do I have trans identifying people on my staff?
Maybe I do.
I don't know.
I haven't asked them.
What does that even mean?
No, it's because I think that men and women are different.
That's it.
That's why they want to boot me off campus.
That's why they want to whine about it.
That's why a publicly funded, taxpayer-funded university is trying to enshrine transgenderism as the religion that guides the vision of the whole campus.
And so I would like to make an addendum to my view that transgenderism should be eradicated from society, which is that just from the perspective of the university, People who believe in transgenderism probably should not be in college because transgenderism is an absurd ideology that contradicts physical science and also the most basic aspects of philosophy and anthropology.
If you believe in transgenderism, you probably shouldn't be in college.
You probably need to go back to remedial biology, philosophy 101, which you probably didn't even get in your school, basic anthropology, and I'm not saying you should never go to college, at some point it's perfectly fine to be educated, but you're probably not ready for college if you don't know the difference between a man and a woman.
Just like you're probably not ready for a college writing course if you don't know what a noun and a verb are.
Certainly, if you believe in transgenderism, you should not be teaching at a college.
I think the basic job of a teacher at a university is to know some things and to be able to instruct students in those things.
If you don't understand the most basic aspects of the world, you shouldn't be teaching.
You shouldn't be an administrator and...
We, the people, whether we're talking about the trustees of private universities or whether we're talking about the taxpayer funders of public universities, ought to begin to insist upon that.
This is basic stuff.
The university has become a farce.
I give a speech on why it's wrong to murder babies and the LGBT LMNOP try to shut it all down.
That's a farce.
That is a disgrace to universities.
and we, the people who fund those universities, privately or publicly, we need to correct that.
That's a responsibility that we have.
There's so much more to say first, though.
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Speaking of weird sex stuff, great news coming out of Florida.
Pornhub, the biggest porn company in the world, the parent company of that company keeps changing its name because of the euphemism treadmill, because what they do is intrinsically disgraceful and disreputable and harmful.
So they have to just keep changing the name so people can't catch up with what they're actually doing.
But they're pulling out of the state of Florida.
They're pulling out of the state of Florida because the state of Florida says, we don't think kids should be accessing pornography, and so we're going to institute just a really basic age verification law.
If you want to use this smut, you've got to just prove that you're not a child.
We've had those laws on the books.
For every other kind of pornography for many, many decades now, you want to go buy a Playboy at the magazine stand if those still exist, but you've got to show an ID. So they say, certainly for this really hardcore extreme video stuff on the internet, you've got to show an ID and then I guess you can look at it.
It's not good for you.
We probably should restrict that too, but okay, you can look at it.
You've just got to make sure you're not a kid.
And Pornhub said, we're out.
No thanks.
We're out.
We're done.
And now this follows Pornhub's pulling out of a number of other states.
Because there have been many states that have passed these laws recently.
This is not extreme, far-right, social conservatism, while Francisco Franco took over America.
This is basic stuff.
We already had these laws on the books for my whole life until the internet came about.
Then both Republicans and Democrats tried to pass similar laws, even at the federal level, in the 1990s and early 2000s.
That would be the Communications Decency Act, the Child Online Protection Act.
Those laws got gutted by liberal activist judges But this is what people want, and this is what we've had, and this is obviously common sense.
And there are two great political takeaways here.
One is a reminder.
We can do things to improve our lot.
We can do things to better our society.
If you've got a society where everyone's doing heroin all the time, you can just ban heroin.
Or at the very least, you can say you have to be 18 to do heroin.
If you've got a society full of drunks, this is a better example.
You've got all society full of drunks, you can do things to restrict who has access to alcohol.
We already do that.
We do it for tobacco.
We do it.
It's weird.
Now we're restricting tobacco, but we're liberalizing pot and other sorts of hard drugs.
That's a whole other separate issue.
But you can do that stuff.
And certainly with pornography, which is very damaging to people, you can pass some laws and you say, look, all right, adults want to look at pornography.
We're not going to restrict that for whatever reason.
But for kids, we can all agree, right?
A five-year-old shouldn't be looking at this stuff.
Okay, good.
We're going to restrict it.
Now, the second big takeaway is it is very telling that the pornography companies would rather stop doing business in a state Then enforce an age verification law.
That's very telling.
It is very telling that these absolute devils, these litigious devils too, whenever you try to criticize these companies, these people threaten to sue you.
But they're devils.
That's easy enough.
I would happily, if I were subpoenaed to explain how these people are devils, I could give a long lecture on that.
It's very telling that these litigious devils would rather stop doing business in these states than accede to a basic age verification law.
Now, their argument, the porn companies say, no, no, it's not that we want kids to look at porn.
We just don't want to invade people's privacy by making them prove who they are to look at all this very damaging smut.
But that's telling, too.
Even if you don't want to go so far as to say the porn companies are happy to have kids look at their stuff, let's take the porn companies at their word.
Let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
They don't want kids to look at their stuff.
The very fact that they say, we don't want even adults to have to submit this proof of age and identification, tells you something about the product.
It's a shameful product.
People don't want to admit that they look at it.
That in itself is a good reason to seriously circumscribe how people can use it.
Tells you everything you need to know.
And some Republicans, it's Republicans who push these laws, some people in politics have the courage to restrict the use of this stuff and to protect kids and to just better society.
There are a lot of legislators who listen to this show.
I'm happy to report.
Do you have the courage to do that, too?
Well, get on the stick, kid.
There's 16 states that have already done it.
Come on, let's go.
You're late to the party.
I want this in every state controlled by Republicans, and frankly, I want these basic common-sense laws that have already existed in many forms in every state in the country.
There's so much more to say.
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Speaking of young people, story out from the Daily Beast. said Says...
Here we are.
There's so many stories.
I have Pornhub's long explanation of begging, please don't make us verify your age.
But there's also this story about young adults.
Young Americans have never been richer, but they face unprecedented problems.
Daily Beast says, young Americans are richer than ever.
We're talking about Americans between the ages of 25 and 39, but they face increasing economic fragility.
Young adults, I'll just read the first paragraph or two.
Young adults, richer than ever before, but according to the Treasury Department, they still feel an increasing sense of economic fragility.
Research released by the department Wednesday showed the real median wealth for Americans between 25 and 39 climbed to $80,500 in 2022. That's just money in the bank.
That's impressive.
That's an increase from $23,750 in 2010 as measured in 2023 dollars.
So young Americans are much richer than they were 15 years ago.
And yet, a recent poll...
I just found that Zoomers think they need to earn almost $600,000 per year to consider themselves financially successful.
$600,000 per year is an amount of money that statistically no one has ever earned in the history of the world.
There are people who make that money today in certain places, mostly in America.
But it's taken with the population of the world as it is today, certainly taken with the population of the world as it has been in history.
That's like no one.
No one makes that much money.
And Zoomers think they need to earn that to be considered financially successful.
What a paradox, the LAB seems to say.
The richer these young people get, the more worried they are about money.
How could that happen?
This has happened to almost every rich person that I know.
And I know a fair number of rich people.
And I know people who didn't have money and then they became rich.
I used to not have money, and now I have a fair bit of money because I'm good at writing blank books.
I've seen it even in myself.
When I didn't have money, I didn't worry about money that much.
I didn't think about money that much.
Money was actually a worry when I was a kid, but it wasn't at these crucial moments.
It would be a real stressor.
But one didn't think about money all the time.
Certainly when I was a bachelor, I didn't think about money very much at all, even though I didn't have much of it.
The more money I've earned, the more I start thinking about money, investments, where I put this, what happens if this gets cut out, will I make as much next year?
Well, that just happens to people.
And so you have to be on guard with that.
You know, the love of money is the root of all evil.
So sayeth the scripture.
It's not that money is the root of all evil.
Money can be a good thing.
We have to take care of our material needs, but it's the love of money, the obsession with money.
That is really bad.
That's really evil.
But it comes from a good place.
The reason that people desire money is because they want peace.
That's what it is.
They want security and they want peace.
It's not really about the Lamborghini.
It's not really about the super fancy house.
It's that you want money, especially if you've ever experienced the scarcity of money.
It can be a stressor.
It can be really tough.
You've got to make hard choices.
You've got to hang up the phone when the debt collectors call.
It can be really tough.
So what you're aiming at is you want security.
But what people find is there's really ultimately no security in this world.
So the more money you get, paradoxically, the more you worry about it.
It's almost as though the Daily Beast and the Libs are discovering money does not buy happiness.
You hear so much about the Zoomers as being stressed out, anxious, depressed, lonely, all the rest of it.
And so you say, well, if only they had a little bit more money, then they'd be happy, right?
No, that's not how it works.
That's not how it works at all.
If you aim at the legitimate good of security, it's ultimately going to have to aim at something beyond this world, beyond lucre that will not do it for you.
And if you don't have that, if you don't have a strong grounding of faith and understanding that this world points to something beyond this world, then the more money you get, the more worried you're going to be.
Speaking of money, Congress wants a raise.
Congress currently has a salary of $174,000 per year.
Congress used to get automatic raises to keep up with cost of living adjustments.
In 2009, Congress voted to cut that off.
So the current salary for a member of Congress or a U.S. Senator is $174,000 per year.
Part of this continuing resolution would allow automatic pay raises to come back in.
Which could give legislators a $6,600 raise next year, according to the Congressional Research Service.
I have my absolute least popular take of the day, maybe of the year.
We're closing out the year with maybe my least popular take.
I don't care in principle if congressmen get a raise.
There's actually a strong argument to give congressmen a raise.
I'm not saying they should, but I don't bat an eyelash.
I don't lose one second sleep about this.
There are so many problems in that continuing resolution.
Congressmen giving themselves more money is number 999,999 on the list.
Because, look, there's an argument to pay congressmen very little, and there's an argument to pay them a lot.
If you pay congressmen very little, Then the people who you are going to attract are going to be people who are independently wealthy.
President Trump doesn't take a salary to be president.
What does he get paid?
A dollar a year or something like that?
He's not doing that job for the money.
When Mike Bloomberg became mayor of New York, he took a dollar a year.
These are very wealthy people.
And so if you don't need the money, okay, pay them peanuts.
Then you're going to attract rich people.
But then don't complain to me when the government is run by rich people.
You wanted that because you don't want to pay your legislators any money.
On the flip side, if you pay a lot of money to your legislators, you will attract better talent that is not extremely wealthy.
Look, there are members of Congress who couldn't get a job standing with a sandwich board on the side of the road.
There are some people who are a little deficient in the IQ and hard skills category.
But there are members of Congress who are talented, intelligent people with strong resumes.
There are members of Congress who could easily make 10 or 20 times their current congressional salary in the private sector.
Thank you.
There are some people who maybe would want to run for public life, but who say, look, I can't justify taking such a huge pay cut for my family.
Especially for people who aren't super wealthy, but also aren't poor, the people who are kind of in the middle.
If you want people who are in the middle class to be running your government, there's a strong argument to pay members of Congress more.
Think about the fact that we pay the President of the United States $400,000 per year or whatever it is.
That is crazy.
This is, in principle, the most important job in the whole world.
You've got Zoomers saying that unless they make 50% more than that at their widget job, they're not financially successful.
That's kind of crazy.
There's a good argument to pay the president millions and millions of dollars.
Now, you don't want it to be so high that it becomes kind of a kleptocracy, and you have mediocrities who don't deserve the money, who are not publicly minded, just doing it so that they can enrich themselves.
My whole point, I know it's going to be unpopular, is...
This is a question for prudence and nuance.
And if you're going to argue about anything in that continuing resolution, make it something real.
Make it the redefining of terms.
Make it the handouts to Democrat pet projects that are contrary to our way of life and our rights.
But giving members of Congress some money to keep up with expenses?
For goodness sakes, Joe Biden has given us 23% inflation over three years.
I don't know.
That to me, I know no one ever wants to stick up for the poor congressman, but that one is easy.
Now, there are seriously dodgy things going on in the House.
The House Ethics Committee is signaling that it might release its ethics report on Matt Gaetz, even though Matt Gaetz resigned the House when President Trump put him up for Attorney General before Matt Gaetz withdrew for Attorney General.
Dizzying.
What happened?
Matt Gaetz is accused of doing all sorts of weird sex stuff and financial stuff, and he's accused of having a little bit of a dodgy past.
And the House Ethics Committee looks into this.
The DOJ declined to press charges.
So Gates comes out and says, look, I was exonerated by the DOJ under Joe Biden, okay?
I don't care what my colleagues in the House want to say about it, many of whom don't like me, even on the Republican side.
DOJ said, I'm all clear.
But the House Ethics Committee looks into it.
Gates resigns two days before the Ethics Committee report comes out.
That should be the end of it.
Why is the Ethics Committee going to release a report on a former member of Congress?
Well, they want to do it anyway because they hate Matt Gates.
Okay.
It means two things.
One, the Congress is being really petty here and they don't like Matt Gaetz and they want to ruin whatever future career he can have in the private or public sectors.
Two, this means some Republicans knifed Gaetz because the Republicans have the majority in the House.
The Republicans have the Ethics Committee.
The fact that now a majority of members on the Ethics Committee...
Are signaling to CNN and other outlets that they might release that report means that you need at least a couple Republicans, one or two, to come out there and knife Gates in the back.
So, what is Gates doing?
Is he going to take this lying down?
No.
This is some real nice chess move.
Matt Gates, who quit Congress, was about to launch a TV show on OAN. He said...
This was suggested to him.
His exact words.
Someone suggested the following plan to me.
One, show up on January 3rd to Congress.
Two, participate in the Speaker election.
I was elected to the 119th Congress after all.
Don't forget.
Congress is elected every two years.
Gates resigned from this Congress.
He was re-elected to the next Congress.
He has previously said he doesn't want to serve in the next Congress, but he could.
If he wanted to, he could serve in the next Congress.
So he's saying, I'm going to show up, I'm going to participate in the speaker's race, because I think he suspects leadership is trying to knife him.
Then he's going to take the oath.
They said, then, maybe I'll file a privileged motion to expose every MeToo settlement paid using public funds, even of former members of Congress.
Five, resign and start my OAN program at 9 p.m.
Eastern on January 6th.
January 6th.
Brilliant stuff.
And it seems fair.
If Congress is now in the business of airing the dirty laundry of former members, then it seems only right to apply that same standard to all of them.
I have it on good authority.
I have a number of friends who are members of Congress in both houses, or both chambers, rather.
And I have it on good authority that many, if not half, of members are actively engaging in untoward activities, whether it be with members of their staff, whether it be with lobbyists, but they're doing naughty things that they shouldn't be doing.
Matt Gaetz is saying there have been Me Too settlements paid out using public funds.
Okay.
You want to air Gaetz's dirty laundry as a former member of Congress?
Maybe he's going to come in there and file a motion to air out all that dirty laundry, and then we'll see who votes no on that.
Pretty brilliant stuff.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Autumn Endings, who says, the really mind-blowing thing in regard to the murder of Brian Thompson is that a young liberal I know who is against the death penalty regards Thompson's murder as justified.
Yeah, of course.
The left is against the death penalty unless it's outside of the judicial system.
They don't support legal killings.
They support extralegal killings.
They oppose the death penalty unless it's for innocent people who have not been convicted of capital offenses or babies.
They support the death penalty for innocent little babies and civilians in the name of advancing a political ideology and anyone they don't like.
But actual criminals who have been convicted of capital offenses by the civil authority, which does not bear the sword in vain, that's the only group that cannot be executed.
Now, speaking of the Ethics Committee, one last point on the Ethics Committee.
Jordan Conradson, who is the chairman of the Ethics Committee, was just confronted by the journalist Jordan Conradson.
And he was asked a series of questions about this move, maybe to release the ethics report on Gates.
The final question that he asks him is the kicker.
Jordan Conradson with the Gateway Pundit.
So, I wanted to ask you, why did the Ethics Committee vote in secret to release the Matt Gaetz report?
As you know, I'm bound by confidentiality.
I can't talk about anything that happened within the confines of ethics.
I can neither confirm nor deny anything.
What about Susan Wild?
I mean, she's leaking details.
Is that acceptable?
Again, I can't talk about anything as it relates to...
How about this?
In your opinion, what is ethics?
What does ethics mean?
Is it ethical to target political opponents?
I love that final question.
So, you know, the chairman of the committee, I don't want to talk about anything, I don't know anything, see you later.
Of course he's going to brush off a journalist.
The final question to me is the kicker.
He says, in your opinion, what is ethics?
And what's his answer?
He doesn't have an answer.
He walks away.
And it occurred to me the libs and the squishes don't have an answer to that.
Because ethics has a definition.
Ethics is the science of the moral rectitude of human acts in accordance with the first principles of natural reason.
To bring that down to earth, it is the science of human action, the morality of human action, In accordance with the natural law.
The things that we just all know intuitively to be true that are written on our hearts no matter where you are in time or space.
That's what it is.
The libs and the squishes don't believe in the natural law.
They think that they don't really even believe in natures.
They think that human nature is constantly evolving and changing.
They don't think that there are any universal moral truths that we just know intuitively because they're inscribed on our hearts.
They don't believe in that.
Many of them don't believe in morality, objective morality.
They think morality is just some kind of consensus that we've all come to because we're either stupid or selfish.
And it just kind of works for us, but it's not really grounded in anything real.
Some of them don't even believe in human action.
They believe that everything is deterministic.
We don't even really possess free will.
So they don't really believe in ethics.
They don't believe in virtue.
So the question, what is ethics to these people?
Probably stumps them.
Ironic.
Ironic to be judged by an ethics committee that doesn't know what ethics is.
Now, speaking of ethics, speaking of the law, Pennsylvania, I've got to give a hat tip to end wokeness here, Pennsylvania I'm really excited for not just our membership, but the region and the Commonwealth as a whole.
I think that these resources and the new programming and the grant funding is going to really help organizations such as the nonprofits that are doing the work in the trenches, helping these small businesses really thrive.
But I'm really excited also The fact that there's going to be some dedicated resources to helping would-be entrepreneurs figure it out, it's a tough lift to figure out what you want to get into and how you can help your community thrive.
And so I think that these resources going into these organizations are going to work with these individuals to help them figure it out.
It's going to create a ripple effect.
That ripple effect is going to help them get started, lift them up, but also it's going to create jobs, much-needed jobs in these communities.
It's going to help these communities thrive with the disposable income that these jobs are going to create.
Okay, it all sounds great.
The chyron there, it says, new grant program to help minority-owned businesses with startup and expansion.
But of course, if the grant program exists to help minority-owned businesses, and what are they talking about?
They're talking about black people, Hispanic people, non-white people.
Then that means, by definition, that the new grant program does not help white-owned businesses.
That the grant program is designed to disadvantage white-owned businesses and to advantage non-white-owned businesses.
Even the notion of white-owned or black-owned or woman-owned is kind of silly because often businesses are owned by multiple people who have, to use the language of the left, intersectional identities, lots of overlap.
So what does that even mean?
It's unclear.
The purpose of it, though, is to say white people are bad, and we should not offer them particular help.
And all the other people are good, and we should give them an advantage over the white people.
Now, if one has a broad political imagination, one actually could see a case for discrimination in favor of certain races.
In principle, I'm not saying you do, but in principle, the left's argument, you say black people have been kept down for hundreds of years and they've been discriminated against, and as a matter of restorative justice, we need to discriminate in their favor, which means necessarily you're discriminating against other races.
But that is the case that is made, at least in moments of candor, by the left.
Is that it is moral, it is good to discriminate against certain races in favor of others.
But no one in public life, no one in the political class, really makes that argument.
Because in America, that argument is considered distasteful and unpopular.
And on paper, it's unconstitutional, even though it happens all the time.
On the one hand, they have to say, we don't discriminate against anyone on the basis of their race.
We support Dr. King who says, I have a dream that one day it won't matter if you're black, white, or brown.
But what they really want to do is discriminate against white people or discriminate against men or discriminate against whomever in favor of other races.
So you've got this conflict.
You've got a contradiction between the uppercase C Constitution and the lowercase C Constitution that actually embodies the way in which we live.
You have two opposing views of morality, of ethics, and they don't make sense together.
Which means that, getting back to the point on ethics, you don't really have a moral or ethical standard.
You just have private interest.
You have unreasonable political action, usually for selfish interest rather than for the common good.
But it's masquerading as some kind of highfalutin moral philosophy.
Now...
There's a story I mentioned yesterday, and I really want to get to it before we go, especially around this time of year, because people get a little sad and lonely around Christmas.
It's just part of it.
Now, Christmas is also one of the happiest times of the year, as we await the coming of our Lord.
We celebrate the central event in the history of the world.
But people, they miss their grandma, or they miss happy memories of childhood.
They miss even unhappy memories of childhood.
So people get a little sad, a little bit lonely, and this is especially true today.
When people broadly are sad and lonely, they're getting more depressed, they're getting more socially isolated.
That's especially true for people over the age of 50. But there's a new poll and some research out from the University of Michigan showing that friendship after the age of 50 can be a matter of life and death.
According to this study, 75% of older adults say they have enough close friends, so that's good.
But those who say that they are in poor mental or physical health are significantly less likely to maintain social connections.
Among the individuals reporting fair or poor mental health, 20% say they have no close friends at all, which is double the rate overall.
The people who are sick are much, much more likely not to have friends.
18% of those with poor or fair physical health report having no close friends, suggesting that health challenges significantly impact social connections.
Our culture is particularly at risk because we are so individualistic.
We have...
For a long time, but especially in recent decades, taken up an ideology of individualism.
I'm going to do me.
You know, I'm not going to surround myself with bad people.
I'm going to focus on me.
It's going to be about me in the future.
I'm going to focus on my business and my wants and my comfort and me, me, me all through the night.
I mean, mine, I mean, mine, I mean, mine.
That's in the ideology of the popular culture now.
And it's killing people.
It's in the ideology on the left.
It's in the ideology on the right.
We need a fundamental shift in how we understand politics, society, and the human person, away from the liberal idea that we're essentially individuals, toward the classical idea that we're a social creature.
That is no longer a matter merely of abstract political philosophy.
That can be a matter of life and death.
Today is Theology Thursday.
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