Ep. 1648 - Newsom & Bass Share Blame For FIRE DISASTER—Here’s Why
President Trump blames Newsom for the California fires, the EU tells the US to back off Greenland, and a Canadian MP wants to annex U.S. states.
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Ep.1648
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As Los Angeles burns to the ground, at least 1,000 buildings destroyed, at least five people dead so far, this is the message that Governor Gavin Newsom had for his constituents.
What is the situation with the water?
Obviously, Palisades ran out last night in the hydrants.
I was trying to fire a firefighter in this block.
They left because there was no water in the hydrant here.
Local folks are trying to figure that out.
I mean, just when you have a system that's not dissimilar to what we've seen in other extraordinarily large-scale fires, whether it be pipe, electricity, or whether it just be the complete overwhelm of the system.
I mean, those hydrants are typical for two or three fires, maybe one fire.
You have something at this scale, but again, that's got to be determined by the local.
One week ago, that man thought that he was going to be the next president of the United States.
Now he's the governor whose most populous city is burning to the ground and whose only response is that the locals will have to figure it out.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show, D.
The European Union is getting real nervous that the U.S. is going to send in the F-35s to Greenland, liberate the Greenlanders from their Danish tyrants.
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President Trump is blaming Gavin Newsom for the fires in Los Angeles.
Trump writes, Governor Gavin Newsom refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water from excess rain and snow melt from the north to flow daily into parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.
He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt by giving it less water.
Didn't work, but didn't care about the people of California.
Now the ultimate price is being paid.
I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to flow into California.
He's to blame for this.
On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, no firefighting planes.
A true disaster.
Okay, Gavin Newsom is furious about this.
Newsom was asked about President Trump's response, and here is Newsom's dismay.
We're in the public safety phase.
I hate to even ask this question, but the president-elect chose to attack you, blame you for this.
One can't even respond to it.
People are literally fleeing.
People have lost their lives.
Kids lost their schools.
Families completely torn asunder.
Churches burned down.
This guy wanted to politicize it.
I have a lot of thoughts, and I know what I want to say.
I won't.
I stood next to a president of the United States of America today, and I was proud to be with Joe Biden.
And he had the backs of every single person in this community.
He didn't play politics, didn't try to divide any of us.
Trump is politicizing the fire.
Now, that is not quite true.
Trump is not now politicizing the fires.
Trump politicized the fires six years ago.
Trump politicized the fires in 2018 and 2019 and even earlier this year or last year, 2024, when he warned Gavin Newsom repeatedly, sometimes to his face in person, that these fires would happen if Newsom didn't that these fires would happen if Newsom didn't change his policies.
And Newsom did nothing.
That's why Newsom's getting the blame here.
It would be one thing if no one could see this coming.
It would be one thing if no one had suggested.
It would be one thing if no one had predicted this, or if people had predicted these fires but didn't have any solutions for it.
But that's not what happened here.
Trump, going back to 2019. Here's President Trump, 2019, talking to Gavin Newsom about this very problem.
It's cleaned out and protected.
We've got to take care of the floors.
You know, the floors of the forest.
Very important.
You look at other countries where they do it differently, and it's a whole different story.
I was with the president of Finland, and he said, we have...
Much different.
We're a forest nation.
He called it a forest nation.
And they spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don't have any problem.
And when it is, it's a very small problem.
So I know everybody's looking to that end, and it's going to work out.
Later on in 2019, President Trump said...
Billions of dollars are sent to the state of California for forest fires that, with proper forest management, would never happen.
Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I've ordered FEMA to send no more money.
It's a disgraceful situation in lives and money.
Even earlier than that, in 2018, President Trump said, There is no reason for these massive, deadly, and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor.
Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests.
Remedy now are no more Fed payments.
Time and time, again, for years, President Trump was pointing this out.
Then, clear as day, also 2019 on Twitter, November 3rd, 2019, on Twitter.
Then Twitter, before it was X. The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, has done a terrible job of forest management.
I told him from the first day we met that he must clean his forest floors, regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists demand of him, must also do burns and cut fire stoppers.
Suggestion, suggestion, suggestion.
New aspect of a suggestion.
New aspect.
Every year as the fires range and California burns, it's the same thing, and then he comes to the federal government for money.
Get your act together, Governor.
You don't see close to the level of burn in other states, but our teams are working well together, and so on.
Even as recently as this election season, President Trump goes on Joe Rogan, and he explains this problem.
It's not just that President Trump occasionally Water.
You know, in Los Angeles, you can't get proper amounts of water.
Right.
And it's unbelievably expensive.
And you might have a house in Beverly Hills, and they're actually thinking about rationing water.
Can you believe it?
And I was in the farm court country with some of the congressmen who were driving up a highway, and I say, how come all this land is so barren?
It's farmland, and it looked terrible.
It was just brown and bad.
I said, but there's always that little corner that's so green and beautiful.
They said, we have no water.
I said, do you have a drought?
No, we don't have a drought.
I said, why don't you have no water?
Because the water isn't allowed to flow down.
It's got a natural flow from Canada all the way up north.
More water than they could ever use.
And in order to protect a tiny little fish, the water up north gets routed into the Pacific Ocean.
Millions and millions of gallons of water.
Sometimes they say with Trump that there's a tweet for everything.
That this guy has a bizarre prescience?
The years prior to some event kicking off in politics, he'll have made a tweet about it?
Well, in this case, it's what?
Half a dozen tweets, a dozen tweets, and repeated TV interviews over the course of many years.
Newsom didn't listen to it.
Forget about it.
We haven't even gotten into the local politicians in Los Angeles, one of whom wasn't even on this continent while the fires were raging.
We'll get to that in a minute.
But here, there is no question.
Trump called it.
Trump wears a hat now that says Trump was right about everything.
He was at the very least right about this.
Two political observations here.
One, people are treating Trump as the president.
This is true when it comes to foreign affairs.
This is true when it comes to inflation.
People are already treating Trump as the president.
He is not the president.
He is not in charge.
He's not going to be inaugurated until what day is it?
All right, we're getting pretty close.
A little over a week.
But he's not the president yet.
And they're treating Trump as the president.
Because Biden is a non-entity.
No one really thinks Biden is running the country.
It seems like no one's running the country.
It seems like no one's running the state of California.
All of these suggestions, Newsom does nothing.
All of these suggestions, the mayor of Los Angeles goes to Africa.
No one's in charge.
That's the first political observation.
Second political observation, Gavin Newsom's presidential bid.
It's not quite dead.
But it's on life support.
The only reason I say it's not quite dead is because Democrats are nuts and political memories are short.
And there is a world in which four years from now, people forget about the most devastating fire in the history of Los Angeles.
But I doubt it.
This is a colossal, historic failure for the chief executive of this state.
The most populous city burns to the ground because of his policy failures, in large part.
One week ago, one week ago, that man thought he was going to be the President of the United States.
I thought he was the strongest candidate in the Democrat field.
In fact, I still think he was the strongest candidate in the Democrat field.
But reality reasserts itself at some point.
The bill comes due at some point.
And the bill for Gavin Newsom's terrible policies just came due in a tragic, horrific way.
And that means that...
From a political standpoint, 2028 is wide open on the Democrat side.
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Democrats don't want to accept any blame for the many policies articulated clearly by the top Republican politicians for years that led to these totally predictable fires.
They instead want to blame climate change.
Bernie Sanders says 80,000 people told to evacuate blazes, zero percent contained eight months since the area has seen rain.
The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable.
Climate change is real, not a hoax.
Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis.
It is.
First of all, there you have it.
Senator Bernie Sanders, socialist from Vermont, seems to think President Trump is the current president.
He's not.
Donald Trump must treat this like the crisis it is.
What about Joe Biden?
Democrat governance for the last four years.
In fact, I thought we've had Democrat governance for 12 out of the last 16 years.
Why haven't you treated climate change like the existential crisis that it is?
Or if you have, why are there fires in California?
Historic fires burning the city to the ground.
You guys have been in control three quarters of the time for the last 16 years.
What gives?
This is like when the Democrats complain about healthcare.
When they exalt and celebrate.
The kid who murdered the healthcare CEO. They say, well, it's because healthcare is just so awful in America.
I thought you guys fixed that.
I thought that was the whole point of Obamacare.
Joe Biden stands there next to Obama and says, this is a big effing deal, man.
We fixed healthcare for once and for all in America.
That's what they sold it as.
This is the fix, finally, for healthcare.
Healthcare is in a sorrier state than it was before Obamacare.
Democrats have been running the show for 12 of the last 16 years.
You didn't do anything about...
Climate change?
You have to treat this like an existential crisis?
Okay, well, hey man, show me some results.
But they haven't produced any results on the environment, and obviously the sun monster is not to blame for the fires in California.
Climate change is the leftist version of the dog ate my homework.
Climate change is the leftist version of that guy at your company.
You know that guy at your company who's got an excuse for everything?
Hey, why didn't this thing happen?
Hey, how come that thing that you're responsible for, why didn't that happen?
And he's got a million different excuses.
Oh, well, no, actually, you don't understand.
I was going to get that done, but then actually the power went out on this computer, and then there was a solar eclipse, and then my dog ate it, and it goes on and on and on.
That's what climate change fulfills in politics.
It can't be the forest management failures.
It can't be the defunding of the fire departments.
It can't be rerouting the water.
It can't be the total neglect by local politicians.
It can't be letting homeless people camp out in dry brush.
It can't be any of that.
It can't be any of the obvious answers.
No, no.
It's got to be the sun monster.
Zeus throwing down lightning from Mount Olympus.
That's what set off the fires in California.
Certainly has nothing to do with the policies enacted by the politicians who've been running that state for our entire lifetimes.
How about the mayor of LA? How about the local politicians?
Karen Bass, who is a communist.
Karen Bass, who was an actual member of a communist organization as a young adult.
Not even all that young adult.
Karen Bass, who...
She was a member of Congress who then became mayor of LA. She hasn't been around LA during these fires because she decided to go take a little vacation in Ghana.
So she goes over to Africa, taxpayer subsidized to go for the inauguration of a Ghanaian politician, neglects her constituents.
These historic fires break out.
She's just hanging out in Africa.
She makes a phone call or two, but finally, this is so cataclysmic, she had to fly back.
And here's the help that she is offering the residents of Los Angeles.
Don't worry, the mayor is back in charge, and if you're worried about your property and your life and your family and your whole community, don't worry.
Here's Karen Bass's advice.
Right now, if you need help, emergency information, resources, and shelter is available.
All of this can be found at URL. Together is how we will get through this.
Through the heroicism of our firefighters.
If you need help, if you need any support in Los Angeles, go to URL. It can all be found at URL. And she moves on.
Okay.
Good luck.
Good luck going to URL. The speechwriter couldn't even put the website in there.
Not that anyone can go to the websites.
They don't have power.
They don't have homes anymore.
But Karen Bass, she showed up a few days late.
You know, a thousand homes have burned so far, about a thousand buildings.
But, hey, don't worry.
I'm here to give you this really important advice.
Go to URL. The cavalry ain't coming, Angelenos.
That's the message.
That's the message from Karen Bass.
That's the message from Gavin Newsom.
That's the message from Bernie Sanders.
Trying to blame these fires on everything but what actually caused them.
The cavalry ain't coming.
No, that's actually not fair.
The cavalry has come.
The firefighters who are doing their very best, doing heroic work.
The first responders who are doing their very best, doing heroic work.
But guess what?
The firefighters can't work if there's no water.
And the firefighters are not responsible for there being water.
The politicians are.
Gavin Newsom is.
Karen Bass is responsible for the city working.
And they ain't showing up.
They're out to lunch.
They're having whatever people eat in Ghana.
That's what they're up to right now.
And if they have to be bothered to come back to the cities that they run while the cities burn to the ground, they're not even going to give you a website to go to.
They're not even going to read their remarks before they give them.
Yeah, hey, alright, I'm back.
What's going on?
There's some smoke or something?
Yeah, okay, whatever.
Open up your computers.
Figure it out.
The locals will figure it out.
Alright, bye.
I'm going to go back on vacation.
That's it.
The liberal establishment, which has had the privilege of ruling our country for decades, and that has been ruling these left-wing cities for even longer, the liberal establishment is just checked out.
They're just not fulfilling the basic functions of their jobs.
They don't feel any need to answer for their failures.
They don't care.
They're dispirited.
They're done.
They're complacent.
Figure it out, locals, and go to URL. Meanwhile, CNN, the liberal establishment in TV, is still insisting that the problem is Trump, the threat to the country is Trump, and that the GOP, the Republican Party itself, should have rejected Trump.
I mean, shouldn't your party have just rejected him?
Just flat out rejected him?
From Kevin McCarthy to Mitch McConnell to the whole lot of them.
How could your party let him be the nominee again?
I love this.
I love this from Jim Acosta.
This is just a few days ago.
How could you?
Why didn't you guys?
Your job, GOP establishment, you were supposed to stop Trump.
Why would you nominate the guy who won you the popular vote for the first time in 20 years?
Why would you nominate the guy who won the election in an electoral landslide?
You were supposed to nominate Mitt Romney.
You were supposed to nominate John McCain.
You weren't supposed to nominate a winner.
Why did you let this happen?
That's what he's saying.
What was the GOP supposed to do?
Reject Trump.
Why were they supposed to?
Reject Trump.
Because he's popular?
Because he's a winner?
Because he advocates what people want?
Because his campaign is so attractive that it pulls over one in five black voters and most women 45 and older and most married women and 40% of women even under 30 and almost half of Hispanics and huge and the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt and everybody?
I thought the Democrats were supposed to champion democracy and power to the people.
And no, but you can't.
The GOP is not allowed to have popular politicians.
Come on.
Republican establishment.
You guys are supposed to be the gatekeepers.
You're supposed to be the junior partner in the governing project of America, which is led by Democrats.
It's led by the liberals.
And neither the leading party, the Democrats, nor the junior partner, the squish Republicans, are ever supposed to give the people what they want.
We're supposed to agree.
As a uniparty, to just keep moving along with the liberal status quo, which now is literally burning parts of our country to the ground.
And it's not just LA. It's not just the fire with the Santa Ana winds.
The liberal establishment burned Minnesota to the ground during George Floyd and a lot of other places in the country to the ground.
It's not just forest management.
It's crime management.
It's border management.
It's economic management.
And all the left can say right now, all the liberal establishment can say right now is, wait, what?
You guys don't...
We don't have the power anymore?
Wait, what?
Wait, hold on.
But we...
Alright, whatever.
You guys figure it out.
Let the locals figure it out.
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Speaking of President Trump's proposals, President Trump wants Greenland.
And the libs are pretending that he's really kooky and eccentric, that this proposal to annex Greenland is out of left field.
In fact, the U.S. State Department has been trying to acquire Greenland for 150 years now or more.
We tried in the 19th century.
We tried after World War II. President Truman tried.
This has come up again and again and again.
President Trump suggested it in the first term.
He seems to be pushing it even harder now.
And Europe is really upset.
The European Union, actually French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barreau, told a radio station just yesterday that he considers Greenland to be a territory of the European Union.
He said that the French government's position is that it is, quote, out of the question that the European Union could let other nations of the world, whoever they may be, attack its sovereign borders.
And this is a really funny response to Trump's proposal.
Because it's not Greenland coming out and saying, hey, we have our independence.
We're not selling to Donald Trump.
It's Europe saying, hey, America, get your hands off our territory.
Greenland's not part of Europe.
Greenland's much closer to America than it is to Europe.
But Greenland is ruled by Denmark, by this tiny little country in Europe.
So the whole argument is, Greenland, in our enlightened liberal age, full of independence and autonomy, Greenland is not allowed to go on its own.
Greenland is certainly not going to be taken over by the United States.
Why, that would be imperialism.
That would be expansionism.
No, no, no.
Greenland is going to be ruled by us.
That's our territory.
I don't think that's a persuasive argument.
I don't think Denmark has a particularly strong case.
I think Greenland is a strategic territory.
It's much closer to the United States.
The people of Greenland don't want to be ruled by the European Union or Denmark.
Greenland is rich in resources.
Greenland is in a very strategic location.
And if we want it, I think it's pretty well within our sphere of influence to exert a little bit of control over Greenland.
And you know what I think about the EU? Not very much.
The EU's argument is, you can't have Greenland.
Greenland is ours.
Greenland belongs to us.
Okay, fine.
Greenland right now belongs to you, Europe.
That's fine.
But you belong to us.
If you want to play that game, if you want to make that argument, well then, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Greenland belongs to you.
That's fine.
You belong to us.
Europe doesn't exist today without the United States.
Europe doesn't have a military.
For all intents and purposes, Europe doesn't have a military.
The European military is America's military.
When the European militaries do anything, they do it at the direction of the United States.
Now, the United States wants it that way.
It's not purely an act of charity.
After the Second World War, we said, look, we're going to provide all of your military's defense, just about, and you're not going to have military so that your continent doesn't erupt in war again.
But you're going to basically just be vassals of the United States.
That's what Europe has been since the Second World War.
So now you're going to get a little big for your britches.
You're going to say, hey America, you don't get to do what you want to do.
We're Europe.
You're going to stand up to us with what?
Your military?
You're going to stand up to us with what?
Your global hegemony?
You're going to stand up to us with what?
We protect you.
You work for us, okay?
You might say this is a bad system of world order.
You might say that this is wrong or this is contrary to your interests.
Maybe all that's true.
But that's how the world order works.
It reminds me of comments that John Bolton made many years ago, decades ago, at the United Nations.
I know that John Bolton is not as popular today as he used to be, but here is Ambassador Bolton not even so much advocating a particular world order.
As describing the way the world order works.
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 creation of the United 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.
That is the fact.
Prove me wrong.
You might not even like John Bolton anymore, but he's pretty clear there and I think pretty persuasive.
Even if you think there ought to be a more robust kind of United Nations, or even if you think that Europe ought to provide its own military defense or whatever, what he's describing, certainly when he was describing it, is just true.
Now we have rising threats from China and other powers, but that's just a fact.
So please spare me, France.
If the United States does not acquire Greenland, it will not be because the French foreign minister whines about it.
The French foreign minister and...
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Some countries are not merely complaining about Trump's proposals, but they're countering President Trump's proposals.
President Trump suggested that Canada should be the 51st state, as Monsieur Trudeau was ending his political career.
Well, a member of parliament in Canada has just proposed countering what Trump wants, with Canada's acquiring California and Oregon.
In Washington.
Hey, Donald, have we got a deal for you?
You think we want to be the 51st state?
Nah, but maybe California would like to be the 11th province.
How about it?
California?
Oregon?
Washington?
I think I saw her in an insurance commercial.
How about that, Donald?
That woman is Elizabeth May.
She is a Green Party member of Parliament.
Seems a little kooky, of course, but I actually really like her commentary there because she's dropping the facade that we so often see with liberalism and globalism and the liberal world order.
She's dropping the pretense that borders are permanently fixed.
That nations don't have interests, that the interests of nations and nations themselves don't change over time, that history has come to an end, liberalism has won, and will remain in the Elysian fields of 1994 forever.
She's dropping that pretense.
Even in her little joke, she goes, you want to take Canada?
You don't get Canada, but maybe we're going to go in and take California.
It would be fitting given the policies that have governed California, the failed liberal policies much like we've seen in Canada.
Maybe we're going to take Oregon.
Maybe we're going to take Washington State.
To which, of course, America would respond, okay, lady, sure, lead your troops to conquer California.
See how that goes for you.
Because the beneficiaries of the pretense that the history has ended and borders are permanently fixed are the weak countries.
But that's not really how it works.
That's not an argument for countries to go in and invade their neighbors.
That's not a defense of someone like Vladimir Putin.
But the observation that borders are never permanently fixed is just an observation about how politics works.
Nations rise and fall.
They get stronger, they get weaker.
They grow in population.
They die when they don't have any kids.
And as that happens, borders are going to change.
People move.
The very fact that people move.
The very fact that people migrate shows you why borders necessarily are going to change.
We're not all just permanently fixed.
The comments from this wacky Canadian MP serve as an acceleration of a return to normal geopolitics, which is what you're seeing.
After the Second World War, we had all sorts of fictions.
We pretended that there's this thing called the United Nations, which John Bolton was just making fun of.
We pretended...
That we were going to outlaw war.
We pretended that liberalism had won and there would be no more ideological struggles.
We pretended that history and culture and ethnic conflict no longer exists.
We're going to pretend that that's not real.
We pretended a lot of things that just haven't been proven true.
And now, as the mists of that post-war consensus begin to evaporate, We're returning to normal.
We're returning to a politics where strength matters.
A politics where we at least acknowledge that strength matters, which is why you need to have a strong country, which is why you need to make sure you make your country great again.
Now, speaking of a return to normal politics, Elon Musk has gotten into a lot of trouble because he's reinstating standards on Twitter.
There were all these leftist standards on Twitter, and then Elon Musk buys Twitter.
Largely because the Babylon Bee was kicked off.
He buys Twitter.
He says, we're going to have free speech.
I'm a free speech absolutist.
And then he comes in and he says, hey, algorithm tweak coming soon to promote more informational, entertaining content.
We will publish the changes to X. Our goal is to maximize unregretted user seconds.
Too much negativity is being pushed that technically grows user time, but not unregretted user time.
We're also looking on ways for you to adjust the content feed dynamically so you can have what you want at any given moment.
Some people, on the right in particular, are furious at this change.
Here's Steve Bannon inveighing against Elon Musk in pretty brutal terms.
The danger of the guy, this is the CCP, this is a social credit score.
This is where he's gone to.
He's got a glass jaw.
He can't take, because of the, I don't know, the autism or where he's on the spectrum, he's clearly not.
He's got the maturity of an 11-year-old, you can tell that.
But it's obvious.
Okay.
I agree with Steve Bannon on a whole lot of things, but I think he's dead wrong here.
When he says what Elon is doing is a Chinese social credit score.
No, it's not.
It's a conservative social credit score, or it's a libertarian social credit score, or it's an American social credit score.
It procedurally bears some resemblance to things that not just the Chinese have done, but that every country in the world has done, including America, because we've had plenty of speech standards for our whole history.
What differs is the substance.
In China, you have to tow the party line of the CCP. But the standards on X are going to be rather different from the party line of the CCP. Just like the standards in your school, or your company, or your social club, or your home, or the bowling alley, or the restaurant are all going to differ.
But there will be standards.
Elon says, look, we're going to try to make this Twitter a nice place to be.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's just normal.
That's just how it works.
Elon Musk, though he's getting all of this hate right now, Elon Musk understands free speech better than his critics do.
Because Elon Musk understands that there is no such thing as...
And Elon Musk recognizes that the battle over speech is not a battle between free speech and censorship.
It's a battle between competing sets of standards and norms.
There will always be speech that is off-limits.
That's always been true in America.
That's been true as a matter of law.
That's been true as a matter of culture.
Always.
Both of them at all times.
America has always, at least in principle, held that there's no right to obscenity or fraud or threats or...
Libel or any other number of forms of speech.
And then at a cultural level, we've always discouraged impoliteness.
And every culture does that to some degree.
The question is over what?
The first precept of the natural law is good is to be pursued and evil avoided.
The left says evil is to be pursued and good is to be avoided.
Those are not the same.
Some people say those are the same because you're pursuing some things and avoiding others.
They're not the same.
Because good and evil are different.
What matters are the substantive differences here.
And so the question for Elon is, what is going to give us a positive experience on Twitter?
The question for conservative politicians is, what is going to give us a positive experience in our country?
What is going to, to use a more classical phrase, advance the common good?
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My favorite comment yesterday is from JoeBiden915.
He's not like the other 914 Joe Biden.
He's not the real one.
If Tony can be called Tina, the Gulf of Mexico can be called the Gulf of America.
Certainly.
The Gulf of Mexico can be called the Gulf of America, even if Tony can't be called Tina.
Speaking of standards, this is a story up in New York.
A Metro North rider, this is the commuter train there, Has been stabbed in the chest after complaining about loud music on a guy's phone.
So there's this guy, Abdul Malik Little, 46 years old.
Not a little kid.
We're talking about a 45-year-old, 46-year-old.
Was playing music on his phone.
Not into his earbuds, just on his phone.
And he took exception when a 31-year-old fellow rider complained about the noise.
So 31-year-old comes up.
This is all according to authorities.
It's all alleged.
It's all, you know, he has the right to his day in court.
But we've all had this experience.
If you've been in New York, if you've ridden the subway, or in this case, this is a commuter train.
These are supposed to be nicer.
There's going to be a guy who's sitting there, who's dressed inappropriately, who looks like he's got problems, who starts playing music really, really loudly on his phone.
Just begging for attention.
Just waiting for someone to say anything about it.
Very uncivilized people who should not be permitted into polite society.
But they're doing this.
And usually people ignore it because the cops are not allowed to do their jobs in New York.
And if you ever stand up to any of the bad guys on the trains, you could find yourself like Daniel Penny fighting to stay out of jail for the rest of your life or worse.
So most people just ignore it and our cities and our country are degraded.
But this guy, he politely asks, Abdul Malik Little, allegedly, to turn his music down.
So, this guy, allegedly, stabs him in the chest.
Now, happily, there are cameras, and this guy didn't die instantly, the victim.
So, as he's stumbling off the train, he identifies the guy to the police.
They arrest this guy.
Now he'll have his day in court.
This is not the subway in Bed-Stuy.
This is not some place far-flung out in Brooklyn or Queens in some bad neighborhood.
This is the commuter train in Grand Central, what is supposed to be the safest, most mainstream touristy part of New York City, just about.
Think of everything that had to go wrong for that to happen.
A lot of people who aren't as familiar with New York, they're going to say, oh, New York, there's crime in New York.
Uh-uh.
There's New York and there's New York.
If you're walking around some dodgy part of Brooklyn at 2 o'clock in the morning wearing a pink polo shirt with your collar popped, wearing a big gold Rolex, and you get mugged, okay, that's to be expected.
But you're riding a commuter train at Grand Central, Midtown East, really nice part of town, and some degenerate is playing music loudly on his phone.
You say, excuse me, sir, would you mind?
And you get stabbed in the chest.
That's a whole other level.
Think of all the things that had to go wrong.
Criminals and psychos had to be allowed on the streets.
The conductors on the trains had to not enforce standards that existed.
Understandably so, because they don't want to get stabbed.
They know the cops are not allowed to do their jobs to have their backs.
And if they interfere too much, they might be called racists and have their lives ruined and go to jail.
And then the tough bystanders, the ones who are manly, who are willing to put these people in their place, had to be convinced not to intervene because they don't want to end up like Daniel Penny.
So many things had to go wrong.
To say nothing of, this guy, the alleged perpetrator here, had to be raised terribly, had to be permitted to get away with brutal animalistic behavior for most of his life that would convince him that it's okay to behave this way.
So many things had to go wrong.
But I made the point yesterday on the show with regard to the fires in Los Angeles.
It's in the little things that the rot begins.
Lots of little rot will take place over years, maybe over decades.
And then it takes one spark.
And the city can burn.
Speaking of society spinning out of control, and speaking of Hollywood, John Cryer, who is one of the stars of Two and a Half Men, John Cryer, who was just on the Bill Maher show, even today, in the year of our Lord, 2024, 2025, defending transing the kids.
But don't pretend there isn't also a default setting.
And you can't rewrite the world so that every baby is just a jump ball.
Oh, it could be anything.
No, if it's got a dick, it's probably a boy.
And if it's not, we'll deal with that in a compassionate way.
Christ almighty.
I mean, the idea that I would, as a child, would have had to have dealt with something like this?
Well, again, the people that go through it don't say, this is the life I want.
No parent wants to be in the midst of those choices.
It's terrifying.
Some kids these days actually just do want to be trans.
I don't agree.
It's a cooler job.
I don't agree.
Nope.
Oh, come on.
I don't agree with Bill Maher.
That's the name of the show tonight.
Well, your eyes are not open to that, I think.
There are some kids, why is it so much more prevalent here than Indiana?
Are they suppressing it there?
Maybe a little.
Yeah, there's a societal suppression, but it's like left-handedism.
Being left-handed was suppressed.
For, you know, for thousands of years amongst human beings.
But once they, it was, you know, apparently in the 30s, scientists basically said, there's no, left-handedness doesn't actually do anything bad.
Left-handedness shot up.
People just stopped training themselves to be right-handed.
And this is a, you know, this has happened societally before, and that's the closest analog that I can think of.
Chopping your kid's genitals off, it's kind of like letting a left-handed kid.
Swing the bat from the right side of the plate.
That's John Cryer's argument.
Left-handedness.
Now this is too much even for Bill Maher.
Bill Maher, who is a liberal, he says, look, I don't know, it just seems to me, come on, in some cases even maybe someone's not male or female.
He's even going far enough to, he's going halfway to the trans ideology, but that's not enough for John Cryer, who says, no, no, no, we just disagree, Bill.
We just disagree, and sometimes you need to castrate little kids.
You need to turn little kids into eunuchs so that you can post pictures of it on social media and get likes from other perverts and weirdos.
And why do I bring this up?
I mentioned a few days ago, I'm sick of the trans story.
It's enough.
We've had enough transgenderism.
People have rejected transgenderism.
It's totally absurd.
We are well on our way to eradicating transgenderism from public life entirely, which will be for the good of society and especially for the good of the poor people who fall prey to that confusion.
If we never have to talk about transgenderism again, it will be too soon.
Okay?
Enough.
We've had enough.
And yet here we are talking about transgenderism.
Not to talk about the issue itself.
I think it's been resolved.
I think the 2024 election proved that it's over.
The Libs lost on that.
I guess it's really, the only reason I want to talk about this story is because it shows That the left has given up.
The left really has nothing.
They've learned nothing.
They've not developed in any way.
They've not matured in any way.
They're just playing the hits.
They're playing the same old song that has been rejected by new audiences.
An ancillary point here, just something, but it's worth taking note of.
It's interesting that Bill Maher takes the Lord's name in vain.
Bill Maher is an atheist Jew.
He is a member of two groups who you would expect not to use the Lord's name in any way.
But he takes the Lord's name in vain.
And that's bad.
It is bad always to take the Lord's name in vain.
But there is a silver lining in that storm cloud, which is it shows that Bill Maher is viewing the world at least in some way through a Christian lens.
He might say he's an atheist.
He is Jewish, at least ethnically Jewish, but he's viewing the world, because we all kind of view the world through a Christian lens.
Certainly in the West.
Even if we want to deny it, even if we want to say, I reject that.
No, it's actually the very language we use.
Certainly the culture we inhabit is Christian.
And it turns out that the new atheists, you know, a few viral clips of Christopher Hitchens in the mid-2000s is not sufficient to destroy.
Our civilization and the bedrock of civilization and, frankly, the bedrock of all creation.
Now, I'm very excited to have a guest on this show that I wanted to have on two days ago, but the technological problems of the universe prevented us from doing that.
So we have her on now.
That is Aaron Hawley to discuss one of the most important issues that President Trump will face.
In his first hundred days and that our whole country is facing right now, our legislature and our judiciary, a really, really important win that is right before us if we can only seize it.
We'll get to that in a moment.
The rest of the show continues now.
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I've often said that gender affirming care is health care.
It is mental health care, and it can actually be suicide prevention care. - Oh!
I think I'm gonna take some medicine so I can kind of, like, transform into a boy, get surgery.
After the surgery, I didn't really feel any better.
When it stopped being a thing for adults and it started to be a let's teach this to kids.
Total lie.
Manipulation.
It's gaslighting.
Please stop.
He's a boy, not a girl.
How could she do this to my son?
What they're talking about is hormonal therapy or sex reassignment surgery on children.
I thought fixing me externally would fix me internally.
But of course I was wrong.
The fact that the state thinks that they're more important and have a better say in what happens to your child over the actual parent's opinion is egregious.
Puberty blockers, surgeries, big money makers for hospitals, for physicians.
All I want to do is hold my son.
Are you asking me to lie to parents?
And he said yes.
This is a weaponized use of a parent's sympathy and caring and concern by the left to destroy your child.
Let's tell kids that maybe they can be the opposite sex.
Maybe they actually are the opposite sex.
It is an evil thing to tell children that happiness lies on the other side of puberty blockers or double mastectomies.
