Ep. 1790 - South Park Lights Up Right-Wing Podcaster
South Park takes on right-wing podcasters, Trump ends another war, and a taxpayer-funded "safe injection site" leads people to fornicate in the streets.
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Ep.1790
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you you you Thank you.
South Park is lighting up right-wing influencers from Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro to Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones.
No one on the right seems to know how to react.
Should they own it and laugh and change their social media avatars?
Or should they be offended and yell at Trey Parker and Matt Stone and call it leftist propaganda?
No one knows how to respond.
And the reason is that they don't understand what South Park is actually making fun of, which is South Park.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Is President Trump about to end the war in Ukraine?
Putin has made an offer.
They're going to meet on American soil.
Where is Trump's Nobel Peace Prize?
We'll see if he gets it.
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I finally watched the new season of South Park.
I don't watch South Park regularly.
I don't watch any TV regularly, but when I was a kid, I watched South Park all the time.
I started watching South Park the second airing.
They used to air it twice a week back in the olden days when people would watch television on linear cable.
I saw the second airing of the first episode and I watched it obsessively for years and years.
It's been on forever now, but I watched it a lot.
So I think I have a decent sense of South Park's humor.
And I was told in this new season of South Park, they're making fun of Trump and Vance and Christy Noam.
But in particular, I was told they're making fun of right-wing podcasters and influencers and streamers.
And I said, all right, well, I guess I got to watch it.
And I saw these people alternately embracing it, saying, this is great.
I'm being parodied in South Park.
This is awesome.
We're going to own it.
We're going to be in on the joke.
And then other people saying, South Park took money from Paramount and they're just attacking Trump and they don't attack Biden and their hacks and their leftists and whatever, whatever.
So I said, I got to watch it for myself.
So the first thing, going into it, I was told that Cartman is Charlie Kirk, which I said, man, good on Charlie.
That is a great, what an honor.
But it's not quite what's going on.
Here's the very first part of the episode.
The stuff he's saying about Jews is out of control.
Bro, you just got to ignore him.
Bro, it's pretty hard to ignore when he's saying it all on a podcast.
Hey, guys, who are you talking about?
Clyde.
Clyde?
Hey, here he comes.
Let everybody guys.
Trails Day Rob.
Trail Day Rob.
You don't know a thing about the Jewish people.
Yeah, and shut up about girls' bodies.
Well, that sounds like a very female-ed Jew thing to say.
If you guys don't like it, why don't you come to bait me on my podcast?
What?
What's going on?
So right off the top, you recognize, hold on, Cartman isn't Charlie Kirk or anyone else on the right.
Cartman is Cartman.
He gets so excited when they say, you know, this guy is saying all these terrible things about Jews and women and blacks and this and that.
And he says, oh, who are you talking about?
You're talking about me, right?
I've been doing this since the 90s.
I've been doing this since 1998 or whenever South Park opened.
And they say, no, we're talking about Clyde.
And he says, wait, what are you talking about?
Clyde.
That's my shtick.
Clyde is taking my shtick.
And then Clyde walks in, this other kid, this non-Cartman kid, he walks in and he starts doing everything.
He says, prove me wrong.
That's a reference to Charlie Kirk.
He starts calling women whores.
I think that's a reference to Andrew Tate.
He starts going off on the Jews.
That's obviously the Nick Fuentes thing.
He's going off on all these people.
He's just an amalgam of all of these voices on the right.
And the drama of it is Cartman's saying, wait, hold on.
That's my, why are you, he stole my shtick.
So why did he do it?
Next scene, Clyde, the avatar of all the right-wing talkers, is sitting talking to the counselor.
Why is it that he's going off on all of all of these groups?
Is it because he really wants to dominate women?
He really hates the Jews.
He really hates whoever.
No.
He's doing it because it's cynical and it plays and it's going to make him a lot of money.
The other students are very upset at this podcast.
And what makes you think you got to say all this stuff, Clyde?
Hey, I'm just trying to make my nut, man.
You know, kids have it tough these days.
We got Xbox subscriptions, PS5, Steve subscriptions.
So, you know, as a kid, if you could do a podcast, say some really divisive shit that you could make your nut.
I'm just trying to make my nut.
And this is a double entendre.
I'm trying to make my nut, meaning I'm trying to get some money and I'm trying to be titillated.
I'm trying to, this is, this kind of gets me off.
That's the, not to be too crass about it, but that's what he's saying here.
And it plays on both levels.
So this to me is great news for the American right because South Park's parody here, South Park's satire is, is pointing out that young people increasingly are right-wing.
And they're saying there's a cynical motive here.
Everyone's an influencer.
Everyone's an e-girl.
Everyone's a podcast bro.
Every white guy under the age of 57, I think, has a podcast at this point.
It's a federal statute that we all must have podcasts.
They say, look, increasingly, these people are right-wing and there's a market for it.
And that's how it can be lucrative.
And that's why we're seeing this explosion in right-wing influencers.
You know, South Park always goes after the regime.
That's it.
It's totally unfair to say South Park attacks the right more than the left.
That's not true.
If anything, I think it attacks the left more than the right.
But the reason it's done so in my lifetime is because the left has been in charge for most of my lifetime.
The fact that South Park is going after the right now means that the right is the regime, which means we won.
I mean, that's great news.
If you're on the right, I'm thrilled that South Park's going after us.
It means that we matter.
South Park used to go after Obama a little bit.
South Park's gone after Clinton.
But South Park didn't really go after Biden that much because Biden wasn't really the president.
Nobody really believed that he was the president.
He didn't feel like the regime.
He's saying now it's the right that's in charge in the government, but also in the culture.
So then we get a glimpse into what the Clyde podcast actually looks like.
Welcome to the channel of truth, guys.
You can't trust Jews.
White people are the underprivileged and women belong at home.
I'd like to welcome our first guest to the debate, Eric Cartman.
What the hell do you think you're doing, Clyde?
We're here speaking the truth about the Jews or the other privileged white class.
That's my stick.
Knock it out, Clyde.
You stole my idea.
I don't know about stealing ideas, but I do know about some amazing supplement powders that are an absolute steal.
Be sure to get some and also be sure to hashtag respect Clyde's authority.
What?
Okay, so that bit there at the end, that shows you exactly the thesis of the episode, because if you're a longtime South Park fan, like I certainly was as a kid, you'll know that that line, respect my authority, comes from the, I think, in the first season of South Park.
That was a Cartman line.
It became a kind of catchphrase.
And Clyde, 20 years later, or 25 years later, whatever it is now, is ripping it off.
And who is he?
It's hard to tell.
He's going after the Jews very hard.
So that's obviously the Nick Fuentes reference.
But he's also hawking supplements.
That's more of an Alex Jones reference.
But it's an interview podcast.
So that might be more, I don't know, is that more of like a Tucker reference?
It's just all the right-wing bros together.
Now, final point on this is what all of this is about.
Why is it that the right is stealing South Park shtick?
What does it mean?
Why is it working?
Why all of a sudden, this is what people on the left are asking, why all of a sudden is it okay to go after women and Jews and blacks and all these groups that you weren't allowed to go at under political correctness, under the left's regime rule?
Why is that?
South Park answers it in a very funny way, in a very accurate way.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Welcome to the table.
What it all comes down to, the reason that there's been this big shift in culture and politics and the explosion of right-wing podcasts.
And it comes down to, in the eyes of South Park, master debating.
Yes, Jeremiah 1.5 says, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, but it's just morality that demands we protect the most vulnerable.
So let me ask you, when do you think life begins?
Eric, are you all right in there?
Yeah, I'm fine, mom.
I'm just in here master debating.
Look, Eric, that's enough.
Let's get out of the bathroom.
I can't, mom.
I'm master debating to these young college girls.
That's very naughty, Eric.
Stop it.
Mom, I finally got sponsored by a protein powder, so I got a master debate for a couple more hours.
LaVitiga's 9, 1 through 8.
Let me alone.
So he's master debating.
He's locked the bathroom door.
He's master debating.
And his mother says, you got to get out of there.
Don't do even this is this brilliant observation of an inversion here.
Used to be back in the olden days that if a boy were, I don't know, that's the family show.
How do I clean it up?
If a boy were looking at naughty images, maybe spending a little too much time alone, that would be transgressive and wrong.
And his parents would yell at him over it.
Don't you do that?
But these days, pornography and the sexual revolution, that's totally mainstream.
That's normal.
That's encouraged.
That's called healthy.
That's supposed to conduce to your flourishing.
No, no, no, that's fine.
No parent would ever tell their kid not to do that now.
What is subversive and transgressive and supposedly bad for you and awful for your health is debating political issues, is going after the left, is owning the libs.
That's what's transgressive.
That's what's kind of cool.
That's what the kids are doing that the parents don't want them to do.
Great observation.
Now, a scene, we don't have time to go through the whole episode.
There's one scene, though, that shows you what South Park's doing really clearly.
And it's the Charlie Kirk Awards for owning the libs or whatever, Charlie Kirk Awards for master debating.
So right there, it tells you, Cartman is not Charlie Kirk.
None of these guys are any of the individuals, you know, as I mentioned, I think there are very, very clear references at the beginning to Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes and Charlie Kirk.
I think there are also, there's a wink at Ben where it says, you know, Lib owned, whatever.
I think that's a wink at Ben Shapiro.
I even think, maybe I flatter myself, I think there might have been a little wink at my CPAC speech during the Charlie Kirk Master Debater Awards when Clyde is receiving the award.
He says, you know, okay, and in conclusion, lesbians are an abomination from God.
I wonder, you know, that was a little wink at the very least at the religious right and the anti-LGBT, but lesbian abomination might have been a little wink at trans eradication.
In any case, it's just everyone all together.
And Cartman saying, you, you stole this from me.
And this gets to a point that Dre Parker and Matt Stone had made many years ago.
He said, when we made Cartman, who is the most lovable character on the show, we made Cartman because we asked ourselves, what would happen if you had Archie Bunker, the old character from All in the Family, 1970s?
What if you had Archie Bunker, the kind of bigoted, ornery, sexist guy, racist, anti-Semitic, but you put him in the body of an eight-year-old boy?
And this is an observation about TV and culture, which is that these comments, these anti-black and Jew and woman and this and that, it's funny.
It's lovable.
It's endearing if it's said through the voice of a clown, if it's said through the voice of a comedian.
If this were just a video of some actual skinhead or neo-Nazi going out and burning a cross or something on someone's lawn or, you know, beating a woman or something like that, it would not be funny.
That person would be the most villainous character in the show.
But because it's said through the mouth of a clown, because it's politically ineffective, unthreatening, it's the most lovable behavior.
It's the most endearing.
Because there's always racial tension.
There's always religious tension.
There's always sexual tension.
And you got to let it out somewhere.
Society needs a way to let that out.
And if you can let it out through the voice of a clown, all the better.
The clown gets to make fun of the king and it's okay.
If a serious person did that, that would not be okay.
And so the characters, I mean, just from the top of it, the fact that you have Alex Jones being parodied.
Alex Jones said that a bunch of kids who were murdered in a shooting didn't actually get murdered.
But Alex Jones is still a really sympathetic, lovable character.
Why?
Because he's big and funny and he's a comedian and he makes you laugh and he's kind of clownish in his behavior.
A lot of these other guys, not everyone on the right, but a lot of the other guys who do these streams and these podcasts, how do they do it?
Do they do it in a really serious way and they're just presenting the information to you really sober?
No, they're laughing and they're making jokes all the time and they're using really crass, vulgar language.
And it's because that is a sign that you're not a big political threat.
It's a sign I'm just being a clown.
I'm just a clown.
And so because it doesn't actually pose any threat to the system, these are guys who say, I'm not going to vote for Trump.
I'm not going to vote for anyone.
I'm not going to participate in the political system.
I'm just here telling jokes.
That becomes very, very lovable.
And that is what South Park did.
That was the point.
That was actually explicitly, intentionally the point of South Park and Cartman.
That's the point of Archie Bunker on All in the Family.
For the kids in the audience who probably haven't seen All in the Family, that's the point of that character.
He's the most lovable character.
He's the most racist, anti-Semitic, sexist character in the show, but he's lovable because he's the clowns.
He's not coming from a place of hatred, but he's saying all of these things in a way that really doesn't threaten anything, doesn't threaten the system.
The point of this season, as I can see, is that we're all in South Park now.
We're all in South Park now.
And young people love it and it's hip and it's cool and it's fun and it's transgressive, but it's all we're all South Park now.
I think it's brilliant.
I think it's great.
I think the right should embrace it.
Okay, speaking of naughty language, there's a commencement speaker at some college.
It's really unclear where, who's gone viral for concluding her speech with F ICE and F, the Trump administration.
excuse my language but to that i say ice and the trump administration So brave.
So brave.
This has just started going viral.
Obviously, this commencement happened a month or two ago, but it's just started going viral, making the rounds.
And you see the faculty behind her, the administration behind her, yes, nodding in their magisterial academic robes.
And she says, like she's speaking truth to power, F, ICE, immigration enforcement, F, the Trump administration.
Yes.
And she's nodding along, the people behind her, all the establishment, nodding along, nodding along, nodding along.
This is really cringe, really lame.
Strikes me as very millennial-coded.
It's a very millennial thing.
I don't know.
It doesn't strike me as Zoomer-coded.
It seems millennial to me.
You use a naughty word.
You think saying a naughty word is transgressive gets us right back to South Park.
In 1998, saying naughty words on cable was extremely transgressive.
It did not happen.
Today, what's transgressive?
Today, what's transgressive is not saying naughty words.
Today, being wholesome is transgressive.
Today, getting married and going to church and acknowledging a moral order and trying to live up to it, that's what's seen as transgressive today.
It's a different world.
It's a different, the culture has kind of stolen South Park shtick.
And now, so now to be transgressive has to be a little bit different.
This is the safe thing.
You know that this commencement speech is the safe thing because the professors behind her are nodding along with approval.
Commencement speakers, valedictorians, the top of the class is always playing it safe, almost always.
That's how that's how they get to the top of the class.
And that's the safe thing now.
That's the millennial.
That's not the transgressive thing.
That's not the future.
It's just lame, super lame.
Now, the people who don't hate the Trump administration are noticing that actually this administration is doing some pretty great things.
Like, this was announced right on Friday, I think.
Trump has apparently ended the 35-year conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
President of the United States, the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia will now sign the joint declaration on the outcomes of the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity Summit.
Thank you.
This is really important stuff.
It's a topic that's pretty close to my heart because Armenia is the oldest Christian country in the world.
Armenia became Christian as a country before the Edict of Milan, before Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire.
It was a long time.
Was it 310 or something?
It became Christian.
Azerbaijan is a Muslim country.
Azerbaijan has been fighting with Armenia.
One particular expression of this was the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict over some disputed territory.
And it gets even more bizarre because in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict, America was indirectly attacking Armenia, the Christian country, and helping Azerbaijan, the Muslim country.
Why?
Through Israel, which makes it even weirder because it means that the Jewish country was helping the Muslim country against the Christian country because the Christian country, Armenia, had allied with the Muslim country, Iran, and Russia, Iran, and Russia, both geopolitical foes of the United States for a very, very long time.
And so it was just this complete mess.
It was a complete mess.
And it threatens some of the oldest Christian sites in the world.
35 years, this has been going on.
This has been going on since the end of the Cold War.
Trump resolves it.
How did he resolve it?
It's going to create a major transit corridor.
It's going to be the Trump route for international peace and prosperity.
It'll help these two countries.
It'll help global trade.
It'll connect Azerbaijan with one of its autonomous exclaves, which is in Armenian territory.
And this is not the only global conflict Trump has resolved.
I'm beginning to think I would go so far as to say Trump might be the best geopolitics president, the best president for global peace in my lifetime.
We'll get to those in just one second.
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What conflicts has Trump resolved?
Do you remember when India and Pakistan were almost about to go to war?
India and Pakistan, two nuclear nations that hate each other more than just about any two countries on earth?
Yeah.
What happened?
They walked back from the brink.
Why?
Well, according to the prime minister of Pakistan, largely thanks to Trump's leadership.
You don't need to take Trump's word for it.
Trump claims credit for a lot of things.
The Pakistan PM thanked Trump for his leadership in resolving that conflict.
Israel and Iran, I thought we were on the brink of World War III.
Remember all the Panicans were saying we're going to get dragged into World War III.
It was going to be a nuclear war.
Trump was not putting American interests first.
He was screwing up everything.
And then what?
Bunker buster missile blows up a nuclear site.
No escalation.
Negotiates a ceasefire.
Both sides basically break the ceasefire or start to position themselves to break the ceasefire.
Trump nevertheless insists that the ceasefire remains.
Very, very impressive.
No big deal.
Ends that war.
Rwanda and the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
It's a 30-year conflict.
Trump resolved it.
There was a conflict that looked like it was about to break out between Serbia and Kosovo.
It's a little unclear.
It's a little unfalsifiable because the conflict did not break out.
But Trump is claiming credit for it.
And Kosovo agrees.
Kosovo agrees there was about to be a war and Trump stopped it.
So Serbia kind of denies it, but Kosovo acknowledges it.
There's another conflict Trump ended.
Cambodia and Thailand.
There was four days of fighting back in July.
Trump negotiated a ceasefire, ceasefire.
This is very impressive stuff.
The only president of my lifetime who could claim a better record, maybe, maybe, or even close to a rival record on foreign policy would be George H.W. Bush because he successfully managed the Gulf War and the dismantling of the Soviet Union.
So I guess you'd say, though the way the Gulf War was fought, it did kind of set the stage for the second Gulf War in Iraq, which most people think was a disaster.
So I don't know.
I think probably Trump is an even better geopolitics president than George H.W. Bush.
Who comes close?
Clinton?
No chance.
Bill Clinton set the stage for 9-11.
Bill Clinton, he was a good short-term geopolitics president, but long-term, even Clinton, I think, would acknowledge he kind of blew it.
George W. Bush, not quite.
Man had good intentions, but probably not quite.
Obama, give me a break.
Biden?
No, I think it goes to Trump.
I think Trump is the greatest geopolitics president of my lifetime.
And we might get the resolution to another war because according to reports, Vladimir Putin is offering to end the war in Ukraine.
And the way he's offered to end the war is in exchange for the regions he's conquered.
So before Trump won, back in the Obama administration, Putin took Crimea.
Putin came in and took Crimea.
Actually, let's go back to the George W. Bush administration.
George W. Bush, on his watch, Putin takes Georgia.
Just goes in, not the peaches, but the one in Eastern Europe.
He goes in and takes Georgia.
Then Obama's in charge and Putin takes Crimea, an important strategic location that has belonged to Russia at very points in his history, but previously belonged to Ukraine.
Then Trump is president.
Putin stops.
No more.
Then Biden becomes president and Putin invades Ukraine and takes a lot of territory.
So the territory, thanks to a little handy chart here from the BBC, takes all these regions in eastern Ukraine.
Luhansk, Donetsk, I'm certainly going to mispronounce Zaporizhizha and Kherson takes all of those regions and still holds Crimea.
So now Putin reportedly is going to say, okay, I'll agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine.
I'm not going to go take over Kiev.
I'm not going to even go take Kharkiv.
I'm not going to take all of these other territories that I've threatened over the years.
I'm not even going to insist that Zelensky be kicked out, but I'm going to keep all of those regions that I conquered.
Now, Trump is in a very tough spot here because if he allows Putin to do this, he's rewarding Putin's aggression.
He's imperiling places like Poland, the Baltics.
He's imperiling a lot of places.
It makes America look weak because this is not, contrary to nationalist self-flattery, this is not just a war between individual nations.
This is a great power struggle between empires.
The broader, the entity formerly known as the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, which is trying to reconquer territory that it's lost, and the American Empire, which is the global hegemon.
And China's waiting in the wings there as well with its own imperial ambitions.
So the BBC also gives us another little handy chart.
Shows you Ukraine's natural resources by the concentration.
So you've got the kind of lighter colored regions.
If you're watching this, if you're listening, you'll have to just have me describe it to you.
Lighter colored regions with relatively few resources and the darker colored regions with a lot.
You can see in the Donbass region, there's a lot of coal and iron, a lot of natural resources.
So those first two that Putin went into, pretty heavy.
As you move into the other regions, it's a little less heavy on natural resources.
So the Zaporizhizha, I got to work on my Ukrainian pronunciation, and Kherson, and down there, it's a little less.
Crimea still has a lot of resources.
So one thing that the Trump administration could do is say, okay, you're not going to get all of the territory that you've conquered, Putin.
You're going to have to pull out of some of the eastern regions, but we'll let you keep Crimea, which is historically part of Russia and which is strategically very important for Russia and which is disconnected from the other eastern regions if you lose the bottom two, but you're still connected to Russia.
So you get to keep Crimea and you get to keep Luhansk and Donetsk, but you don't get to keep the latter two regions.
So you're going to cede that back to Ukraine.
And then it looks like kind of a win-win.
But this has been, what, three years of war now?
You have to give both sides the ability to claim a win because there are going to be some hawks in America who say, well, let's just go in and kick him all the way out.
You know, he's some two-bit jerk.
He has got a country that's really just a, it's really just a gas station with a country attached, like John McCain used to say.
And they're not nearly as strong as the United States.
We can go in and blow them out of the, out of the hemisphere.
I guess that's true, but Trump is constrained by this paradox.
Americans do not want to be in this war, and Americans do not want to lose this war.
That's the way it goes.
They don't want to be in this war.
They don't want to lose this war.
That's it.
A similar dynamic playing out in Israel, Gaza.
But that's the problem.
So if you're Trump, it's not so easy.
It's not so easy.
Americans don't want another war in the Middle East.
We also don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons.
Oh, there's a tension there.
So what's he going to do?
I think Trump has to claw back some of that territory as a win.
But if Putin is able to keep the more strategic and resource-rich areas, that's a big win for Putin.
He can take that home to the Russian people.
It's a win-win.
And Ukraine maybe should just return to being a buffer state, which it was before we got a little big for our britches in that region and screwed things up and gave Putin the opportunity to go in and actually invade.
Okay, speaking of taking over territory, you know this story, the supposed federal takeover of Washington, D.C. That's the claim.
Donald Trump wants to commence with a federal takeover of Washington, D.C., which is in principle a completely bogus story because the federal government already controls Washington, D.C. Going all the way back to the Constitution.
Article 1, was it Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17, if I'm not mistaken, says that the Congress controls the federal district in all cases whatsoever.
The federal government directly controlled Washington, D.C. from 1800, 1800, 1801, whenever D.C. was incorporated, until 1973 with the Home Rule Act.
Not only was it Congress that was controlling D.C., it was also the executive branch, because for a little over 100 years from 1871 to 1973, the president would appoint mayors and governors to exert control over Washington, D.C., which was still being run by the federal government.
Now, because a lot of bad things happened in the 70s, now D.C. has home rule and it's a disaster.
And Democrats are getting carjacked and Secret Service trucks are getting carjacked and firing off shots in Georgetown, nice part of town.
And it's just, it's a disaster.
Okay.
So Trump is saying, we need the nation's capital to be beautiful and safe and we're going to take it back over.
That's probably a good idea.
But there's one rebuttal to that.
The one rejoinder that the libs are lobbying is, hey, crime is coming down in D.C. Crime had been manageable.
It had come down a little bit in the 90s.
Then it spiked like crazy up till 2023.
But now over the last 12 months or so, it started to come down.
That's the line.
And so they say, if it's coming down, if the trend line's in the right direction, why are you trying to federalize D.C.?
And this is a hard line to argue against.
You could say, well, look, there's maybe been a tiny blip that was diminishing, but the broader trend line is that crime's been going up.
But it's still, it's a hard one to argue against.
In fact, I was on TMZ Live the other day and Harvey on TMZ said, hey, well, come on, crime's going down now.
So why now?
Why you want to?
And it's tricky to answer until you realize crime is probably not going down in D.C. The only reason people think that crime is going down in D.C. is that the D.C. cops have been lying about it.
So you'd have no reason to know, to be able to argue that crime is not actually going down in D.C. But here's a little report from just a few weeks ago.
D.C. police commander suspended, accused of changing crime statistics.
By the way, this is being reported by a local NBC affiliate.
This is not from some right-wing news sources from NBC.
D.C. police commander suspended, accused of changing crime statistics.
Police unions' directive to change offense classifications comes from the command staff.
So they cook in the books.
That's why.
And I spend a lot of time in D.C., especially since the boys are back in town since this January.
Republican Congress takes over.
The Republicans come back to the White House.
I've been in D.C. a lot.
It does not appear to me that crime is going down in D.C. or that homelessness is going to, D.C. is rough, even in the nice areas.
I've been hanging out with, I was with a U.S. Senator once in a nice part of D.C. His car got robbed in a smashing grab.
They stole his briefcase close to the White House.
Henry Queller, our Democrat congressman, was carjacked at gunpoint by Capitol Hill, by the U.S. Capitol, like a year and a half ago.
Okay, crime is not going down.
The one good argument the Democrats had, the one even plausible argument against the federal government asserting its rights in D.C., apparently totally bogus.
Mr. President, take back the federal district and also erase that stupid BLM square and all the dumb pride flags that are all over the place.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
Okay, now speaking of cities falling to pot, there's a safe injection site, a taxpayer-funded safe injection site in New York City up in Harlem.
You're not going to believe what this safe injection.
Well, you will believe it, but it's shocking and gross.
You're not going to believe what this has led to.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Hardboiled Entertainment who says, caller, no offense, Michael, some taken.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that was the caller who said, hey, Michael, you and I are very, very similar in the way we view the world, in our dress, in our religious practices, but I'm a little bit more physically fit than you.
I'm a little more toned, but no offense.
Some taken.
I took that personally.
You know, I took that personally.
East Harlem has a headquarters for a safe injection site on points safe injection site.
And the New York Post is reporting that around this safe injection site, it has not blossomed into a beautiful liberal utopia where all these junkies are just, you know, shooting up their drugs in a safe and orderly way.
No, people are fornicating on the streets, on the sidewalk, as people walk by.
Junkies are they're going to their safe injection sites, they're doing a bunch of drugs, and then they are fornicating like gorillas, like wild animals in the streets.
And the other Harlem residents are just walking by, and this is New York, so they're not even, they're kind of non-plussed about it.
This is not conducive to public flourishing.
So the city said, according to the city, 6,000 junkies took illegal drugs 38,000 times at the two on-point safe injection sites last year.
And so OnPoint is saying that that fact, the fact that they said, hey, junkies, come here and do a bunch of poison 38,000 times in a year.
They say that prevented 1,800 overdose deaths.
1,800 people are alive today because this liberal nonprofit gave them a bunch of poisonous drugs to do and impelled them to fornicate outside of their headquarters.
That statistic is not true.
It's not, I mean, maybe it, maybe there's a partial truth to it.
It might well be the case that 1,800 people last year did not overdose at the moment that they were expected to overdose.
But not one person was saved by the safe injection site.
The reason the safe injection sites don't work is not that they're not getting enough funding.
They're getting plenty of taxpayer funding.
It's not that the junkies don't have a really safe place to shoot up.
It's not that the safe injection sites are being run inefficiently.
It's that there's no such thing as safely injecting poison into your veins.
That's the issue.
The issue is reality.
The reality is junkies do a lot of disordered things, like loaf around and attack people and fornicate on the streets and kill themselves.
That's what they do.
That's what being a junkie leads to.
And the only way to stop those bad outcomes is to stop people from being junkies.
But the liberals don't want to do that because, one, they fear, in principle, any political program that says no.
They say, oh, it doesn't work.
Being harsh, it doesn't work.
We need to.
And they just disagree at a fundamental level with constricting people's private autonomy.
At a deeper level, they say, well, no, freedom is doing whatever you want whenever you want to do it.
And the real causes of harm in society are repression and circumscribing desires.
And so if you just let people do whatever they want to do, magically, it's all going to work out.
It's kind of the same magical thinking on the social level that you have with the so-called fiscal conservatives on the economic level, when the fiscal conservatives don't just respect markets for being an efficient way to allocate resources, but which really create idols out of the free market that even give it a kind of idolatrous shape, the invisible hand, all hail the invisible hand.
And some of the real ideologues on the right, they say, well, if we just allow the invisible hand, peace be upon him, to do his magnificent, glorious work, his divinity, the invisible hand, will create a utopia, an absolute paradise on earth.
All hail the invisible hand.
That's the same kind of magical thinking that you get with the libs on these social issues.
If we just legalize all the drugs, if we legalize all the drugs and all the gross behaviors and all the weird sex and all the disorder desires, if we just legalize all of it magically, in the short run, it'll look like things are getting worse, but then magically one day it'll all be better and they'll all be cured and there won't be any junkies anymore.
We'll go from everyone's going to become a junkie to suddenly no one's a junkie.
And it's not real.
The problem is the reality.
If you want a junkie to clean up, you would do much better to throw him in prison and take away his drugs and let him sweat out a brutal withdrawal for a week than you would to give him a safe injection site where the actual consequences we can expect are not the flourishing of health and a beautiful Garden of Eden springing up in East Harlem.
What you'll actually get is a bunch of junkies shooting up dope into their veins and attacking people and fornicating on the streets and killing themselves eventually.
That's the reality.
They don't want to face it.
New York City residents see it, though.
You can, you know, the libs in their high-rises maybe can ignore it.
The people who are on the streets in Harlem, they're seeing it.
Speaking of health threats, this is a story I wanted to get to last week.
We have to cover it.
CNN is really worried about the resurgence of a terrible health threat.
Conversion therapy.
Have you heard of conversion therapy?
This is the headline from CNN.
God, please fix me inside the dangerous resurgence of ex-gay conversion therapy.
What is conversion therapy?
It's when a guy goes to a therapist and he says, hey, I have these sexual desires and behaviors and habits and impulses that are causing me distress.
And I'd like to find ways to manage that and maybe try to mitigate some of these bad impulses I have.
And the therapist says, okay, well, let's work on a few things.
And anyway, you're not allowed to do that.
Notice you are allowed to do that for any other psychological affliction.
In fact, that is the definition of therapy.
The definition of therapy is conversion from one way of thinking to another way of thinking, from one set of behaviors to another set of behaviors.
The whole point of therapy, at least in principle, if not in practice, is to change yourself because what you're presently doing and thinking is causing you distress.
And so you're allowed to do that for any impulsive behavior, any kind of psychological affliction other than this particular sexual ideology.
Why is that?
Because this issue cuts to not a scientific question, you know, sexual desire or orientation or inclination, or that's not really about that.
It's not about public health.
It's not about private health.
It's not about science.
It gets to that deeper premise, axiom of the liberal regime.
It's actually the same thing we're talking about with the junkie safe injection sites, which is liberalism says it's always bad to constrict individual autonomy, especially on the social issues, especially when it comes to sex.
So the reason that people are concerned about conversion therapy has nothing to do with science or, I mean, that's just what therapy is, is conversion.
What it has to do with is transgressing the bedrock political premise that individual autonomy and especially pertaining to sex, because sex is so important to human nature, that that is just a no-go.
You're not allowed to do it.
It's totally verboten.
So they make up all this kind of nonsense.
They say, well, conversion therapy, it's abusive.
It's unscientific.
It's this, it's that.
They're going to hook kids up to electrodes.
No one wants to hook kids up to electrodes.
But if a guy, by the way, what it says here, God, please fix me, that's not hooking a kid up to an electrode.
That's not a parent forcing some poor little kid into a psychological program.
That's a person saying, this desire is causing me trouble.
Please help me manage it.
If you can do it with any other psychological affliction, why not?
Why is this the dangerous one?
Because this is a part of the public liturgy.
The pride parades are part of the public liturgy.
The coming out day is part of a public sacrament.
And the individual autonomy is the essential part of the liberal anthropology.
And it's all just wrong.
We need to convert away from that.
Forget about the sex stuff or whatever.
We need to convert away from that understanding of politics because it's bogus and it's passe and it is clearly failed.
