Queer identity plummets among Gen Z, Americans steal hearts from suicidal Canadians, and Charlie Kirk is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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A new study out of the UK shows that queer identity is in free fall among young people.
For reaction, we turn now to the official Michael Knowles show Gen Z correspondent.
I'm not gay no more.
Really surprising turn of events for the Libs who believed the relentless lavender propaganda of the last decade about men becoming women and gender affirmation and non-binary identities.
They're really surprised by this.
But it's an even more surprising turn of events for skittish conservatives who seem to have forgotten the essential consolation of conservative political philosophy, which is that on a long enough time scale, reality eventually reasserts itself every time.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
You know the government's shutdown?
Did you do you remember that?
I know I they they shut the government down, the Democrats, Chuck Schumer, they shut it down, and then we all just kind of forgot.
And now Schumer's saying it could be the longest government shutdown ever.
Well, now it might be impacting our military.
So we will have Congressman August Pfluger on the show coming up.
So do not go anywhere.
We will get the update, especially as it pertains to the military.
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This study is just a delight.
This is out of the University of Buckingham.
Eric Kaufman is the author.
Here's the executive summary.
We got all sorts of charts and graphs and numbers, but here's the executive summary summary.
After surging in the 20 teens and 20s, trans and queer identities are in decline among young Americans.
For a while there, they were just skyrocketing.
Every time you open the news, it was 5%, 10%, 25%, 30% of Gen Z identifies as LGBTQ.
And now, after that massive surge, you know, it went from one in four, maybe more to one in three, maybe me.
It now it seems to be declining.
The transgender share among university students peaked in 2023 and has almost halved since, from nearly 7% to under 4%.
Some of us have been suggesting that maybe the transgender identity is a social contagion and it's not some deeply rooted uh essential or biological aspect of identity.
You know, the libs have always said, no, no, no, the reason that the number of trans identifying students keeps increasing is because people now feel liberated to come out of the closet and express their true selves.
And some of us have said, I don't know, I'm kind of skeptical of that.
I think it's just like a lot of people never even thought that this was a thing, and then they're introduced to this idea, and then some of them go along with it because of uh mycesis, because of the fact that we imitate each other and we're social creatures, and that's how social contagions take hold.
That's that's kind of what we thought.
Looks like the data are now backing that up.
The study finds the share of students identifying as not heterosexual fell by around 10 points in the same period.
And not heterosexual is a weird category.
I actually had a friend in college who I remember this.
This guy would he would pick up chicks.
You know, he was he was other than some of his fashion choices, by all signs was a straight guy.
But he identified as non-heterosexual.
And to my knowledge, he never did any weird stuff with dudes or anything, but he identified as not heterosexual because I don't know, in the late 2000s and 20 teens, that was cool.
That was fashionable.
It was kind of, it was square to be straight.
You know, you didn't weirdly, I don't know.
I maybe he thought it would help him pick up chicks or something.
But it's very hard to pin down what that means.
In any case, that identity has dropped precipitously.
10 points, same period.
The decline in the non-heterosexual share is concentrated in the queer or other sexual categories and to a lesser extent, bisexuality.
Okay, so you're seeing a decline in all those groups.
Today's freshmen are less BTQ plus.
So not the L, forget about the LG.
The lesbians and gays are basically flat, but the bisexual, trans and queer plus, all the rest of the alphabet, the freshmen are much less likely to be that than the seniors are, suggesting that the decline will continue.
Who knows next year's freshman?
Who knows the freshman after that?
Probably you're going to see more of a decline.
The decline in BTQ plus identification does not appear to be connected to lower social media use, religious revival, a shift to the political right, or lower support for woke ideology.
So it's not just that more kids coming into school are Catholic or something.
It's not just that more kids coming into school are uh, you know, hardline, rock ribs Southern Baptists or MAGA people or that they've put the Instagram away and that it's that TikTok that's in fact, it's uh it doesn't appear to be correlated with any of that.
It seems to be a broader social trend that the lavender mafia, the at least the BTQ plus part of it is just declining generally.
Finally, there is evidence that improved mental health has reduced BTQ plus identification, which is kind of redundant.
Yes.
Uh I don't know if you're allowed to say it even today on social media, but yeah, if you're a guy who thinks you're a chick, you have mental issues by definition.
So if you are more mentally stable, if you if you have better mental health, then you're much less likely to deal with all of all of those social pathologies.
Okay.
Uh now, if you if you dig into this study of all the charts and everything here, the the real focus is not on L the L or the G or even on the T. It's it's more on the Q, on the Q part, queer, which is that catch all, specifically non-binary.
The the, if you look here, and and they compile numbers from Andover from FIRE or the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, Brown, uh, other couple of other organizations.
And you're seeing it broadly across these organizations.
Share not identifying as male or female per fire, you know, uh various sexual orientation, gender identity.
Even here, let's just look at Fire's numbers.
For straight, it's pretty flat.
Straight back in 2020 was 80, 80 plus percent.
Then it dipped a little bit during the apotheosis, and then it kind of came back up in 2025.
People are straight again.
And if you look at a bisexual, it's pretty much flat, up a little bit and down.
Gay, lesbian, pretty much flat.
If you look at queer, that's the one that was lower, it peaked, and then it declined.
Queer, non-binary.
Why is that one in particular seeming to lead the way?
I'll tell you exactly why.
Because the non-binary gender queer, queer generally identity is the least sensual of the uh sexual gender identities that have become fashionable in the last 10 years.
The other ones, uh, if you're gay, if you're lesbian, if you're bisexual, if you're transsexual, trans whatever, those are all much more physical.
Uh what does it mean to be gay?
It means you're a dude who likes doing certain things with other guys.
If you're a lesbian, it means you're a lady who likes Birkin stocks and Subaru cars.
Now, it means that you, you know, in ostensibly like doing physical things with other women.
If you're transgender, you you like the idea of your body as being the opposite sex.
It's it's very sense-based, you know, it's very sensual, it's very physical.
It's it corresponds more to physical desire.
The non-binary ideology is just an abstraction.
What does that mean?
It's it, you're you're totally abstracting away from desire, from physical activity, from sex.
You're just you're basically saying I'm androgynous.
I'm, I'm a like a big gray blob or Whatever.
So it's all the same ideology.
The ideology that says that your physical body has nothing to do with your true self and your true self has nothing to do with how you ought to comport yourself.
It's all the same ideology.
But I'm not at all surprised that the more abstract version is leading the way in the freefall, and that the trans and the queer and the L and the G are lagging a little bit behind, even if they're going to go in the same direction.
Of course, the idea is bankrupt.
Sometimes people just develop physical habits or physical addictions, even or physical inclinations that uh that are tougher to break.
But the idea, the ideology, the abstraction, totally in free fall.
I'm also, just to put a final point on it, I'm not surprised that this is that this is collapsing, that the trans is basically over.
I predicted it on at CPAC in 2023, 2022, 2023.
I said, look, this there's no compromising with this.
It's either true or it's false, and it happens to be false.
And so the ideology has to be eradicated from public life entirely for the good of everyone, for the good of society, also, especially for the good of the people who've fallen prey to this confusion because it's really bad for them.
It's fake, it's false, and we just have to acknowledge that and move on.
That is what has happened.
That has happened because the gods of the copybook headings rear their heads again.
Do you are you familiar with this poem?
You know Rudyard Kipling, he's great.
He's the one who wrote the poem about how much he loves cigars, and he said a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.
He's a great, wonderful poet, British poet, and is a very famous poem he wrote.
I'm gonna read you two stances.
This is gonna make you this is this is gonna make you feel the conservative consolation in this world that is always shooting arrows at us.
This is a great consolation.
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the gods of the marketplace, peering through reverent fingers, I watch them flourish and fall, and the gods of the copybook headings I notice outlast them all.
The gods of the copybook headings, those those maxims that we just hold to be true throughout all ages, throughout cultures.
They just keep coming back.
You know, the old wisdom of old women say.
Then the god skip down a few stances, then the gods of the market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew.
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true, that all is not gold that glitters, and two and two make four.
And the gods of the copybook headings limped up to explain it once more.
Those smooth-tongued wizards feeding the marketplace, you know, of fashions and fads, they were found wanting.
And the gods of the copybook headings had to explain to people that two plus two equals four again.
And, you know, actually, men and women are different, and you a man can't become a woman.
And those things that are always true everywhere, they're still true.
And no matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise, no matter what force, sheer tyranny of will you impose upon us to make us say it, it won't be true.
And on a long enough time scale, you're gonna lose.
In this case, it took about five years.
Now, speaking of medical issues, Cheryl Hines, the wife of Bobby Kennedy Jr. just completely destroyed the ladies of the view.
We'll get to that in one moment.
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Cheryl Hines.
Better known even than she is as Bobby Kennedy's wife.
She's better known as Larry David's wife on Kerbier Enthusiasm.
And Larry David, who is to the left of Lenin is just absolutely furious at any any Republican over the last decade at least.
Cheryl Hines goes on the view with all of her old gal pals from the Hollywood circles, and they're furious at her because her husband, who used to be very popular in Hollywood circles, Democrat Bobby Kennedy is supporting the evil orange man who keeps making our country better and bringing about world peace.
And they they hate her for it.
And so they really're gonna put the screws to her.
And that one of their biggest issues is that Bobby Kennedy Jr. is sticking his nose in where it doesn't belong, and he is uh compromising our precious big pharma.
Even baby formula, now we we're finding out there's arsenic, there's lead.
So the question is who is running HHS when they allowed lead and arsenic in a baby formula?
How is that person not?
Two wrongs don't make a right.
No!
Well, I'm saying Bobby is the one getting this out for him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Can we scream one thing before you go?
Yes.
Okay.
So Joy Behar, that's not even the best clip from the show.
Joy Behar.
It's like, you know, the two wrongs don't make a right.
That's her answer to Cheryl Hines saying, hey, Bobby Kennedy got into this job, and he's noticing that there's a bunch of poison in our food and in our medicine and stuff that really shouldn't be there.
And so she goes, yep, yeah, but two wrongs don't make it right.
Cheryl Hines goes, what are you talking about?
Two wrongs.
He's he's getting the poison out.
And Joy Behara goes, Yeah, yeah, well, good for him.
She doesn't know what to say.
On this issue in particular, on all issues pertaining to science, the left really doesn't know what to say when you challenge them on it.
Because they take it as a maxim as an axiom that uh the science is on their side, and any time a conservative or a Republican or even a lifelong Democrat who happens to be working for a Republican, Bobby Kennedy, any time they intervene in any way in medical science, that they have to be wrong.
Right?
That's but, and this is part of the party's, you know, switching, the coalitions kind of moving about here, is it used to be that the anti-big pharma people were all on the left.
Now they happen to be on the right.
Used to be that the big corporate chills were all on the right.
Now they happen to be on the left.
And this is confusing people like Joy Behar.
So Bayar goes, yeah, well, your husband is just doing stuff in Pharma, and that has to be bad.
And Cheryl Hines goes, well, he's getting arsenic out of baby food.
She goes, Yeah, well, okay, I mean, yeah, good for him.
That's fine.
She doesn't know how to handle that.
That's it's true on any medical issue, the trans thing, obviously, as we were just discussing.
But really, all of them, they this is a real blind spot for the left.
Is they they believe their own press releases, they really think that the right wingers are complete idiots, just totally ignorant when it comes to matters of science.
They think people who are politically conservative, especially religious, are just total dolts.
And that, you know, it's the atheists and the secularists and the liberals who have really led the way.
And that isn't true.
It's really funny when you point out you say, you know, um, like the Catholics, for instance, have discovered like every single thing that's ever been discovered.
You know, like even you're you, you guys like the big bang, for instance.
You're yeah, that was a Catholic priest who theorized the big bang.
You're like um modern genetics, uh, Mendel, actually, you know, is the father of modern genetics.
You uh Copernicus was, I think we think he was in a third order of a religious order.
Uh, like the list goes on and on and on.
What are you people talking about?
And so she doesn't know.
She's really weak on this.
Then when they can't, when they can't argue on the substance, they have to go back to credentialism.
And uh, this is where Cheryl Hines really knocks it out of the park.
They, they, the libs think they have her.
They say, well, your husband, who's the Secretary of Health and Human Services, doesn't have a doctorate.
I just I do want to say, you know, he's not a doctor, and he's not a professional.
Yes.
And oftentimes when he's talking, oftentimes when he's Speaking, he is speaking not with the best information that we can get, because you know, give you pause and are you able to say, you know, that might not actually be so.
Because I've got my experience and I've done lived with this, and I'm still here.
So are you able to have those conversations with her?
I am able to have those conversations.
And just to be clear, uh 90% of secretaries of HHS have not been doctors.
But they've had a science.
Yeah.
No, to be honest, what one of Obama's secretaries of HHS was an economist.
Well, most the majority of them that haven't had medical backgrounds have science backgrounds.
Don't do anything else.
Don't say anything else yet.
Because I do want to have to take a break.
Oh, wait, wait, wait.
Don't say anything else.
Don't say anything else because you just totally smack down my point.
Yeah, well, look, your husband might be right.
And okay, fine.
It's like, I guess it's good to take arsenic out of baby food.
But like he doesn't have his PhD.
Yeah.
Basically no secretaries of HHS have ever had a doctorate.
Huh.
And then what was it?
Sonny Haustin there was kind of prepared for that pushback a little bit and said, yes, but they've all had, you know, some kind of medical uh expertise.
And first of all, Bobby Kennedy, as being a medical and environmental lawyer, actually does have some expertise there.
But then Cheryl Hines comes back, she goes, one of Obama's was an economist.
Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
We gotta, we gotta cut this off.
We're gonna go, we're gonna go to commercial right now.
Absolutely uh bodying.
Great stuff.
Great, great stuff.
Cheryl Hines just bodied those ladies on the view.
Now, speaking of HHS and bioethics, a disturbing story that I've been meaning to get to for a few days now, and the time the time is now.
Uh, let's see.
Here we are.
National Post, story out of Canada.
American man gets heart from 38-year-old Ontario ALS patient who died by MAID, medical assistance in dying, also known as assisted suicide.
So Canada legalizes assisted suicide.
And people who have even a slightly functioning sense of morality immediately said, Well, this is really bad.
Assisted suicide is really, really bad.
Uh it violates the Hippocratic Oath, first of all.
Hippocratic oath begins first, do no harm.
Uh assisted suicide harms, just immediately harms because it kills people.
And uh also it's gonna lead to all of these terrible outcomes.
It's going to pressure old people who many, many old people feel like a burden on their families and they are more prone to depression and to despair.
It's going to encourage a lot of them to kill themselves when they should not kill themselves.
They should be loved and cherished in their old age and have a sense of dignity and not be permitted, or not certainly not encouraged to fall into despair.
But it's not just old people.
It's gonna be people who have serious illnesses.
They're not going to persevere.
They're not going to, even as they suffer, you know, recognize that suffering is a part of the human condition and uh be an example of how to suffer.
And we I believe at least suffering is sanctifying.
But at the very least, uh I think we have to acknowledge suffering is is an inescapable part of the human condition.
And if we seek to eliminate suffering, ultimately we're gonna eliminate human life.
And you're you have seen this because it's not just people who have some terribly painful degenerative illness who, you know, you can say with nearly 100% certainty uh will, you know, will never recover and will be in excruciating pain toward the end, even though we have good palliative care now.
But all of a sudden it starts to creep back.
Now it's adults who don't have, say, Lugaric's disease, it's adults with depression.
Adults with, I don't know, an eating disorder say, who they say, I'm gonna kill myself.
And the Canadian government says that's okay.
Then it's teenagers in certain parts of the world.
Then it's the mentally handicapped.
Then it's all of a sudden this is getting really, really dark.
Now we're harvesting the organs from these people.
Now, and we've had conversations on this show about the organ donation market for a long time.
Lots of dubious ethics in the medical donation, because uh it's reliant upon this scientific concept of brain, not even it's an ideological concept of brain death, Which really doesn't come about until the 1960s or so.
And brain death is dubious because often what happens in the case of medical harvesting of organs is it's not that the person dies and then you harvest the organs and you donate them to someone else.
It's that the harvesting of the organs is what literally kills the person, uh, which creates a lot of ethical problems.
In any case, an American man just received a heart from a 38-year-old Canadian who killed himself.
Is this the kind of market that we want to be encouraging?
I make jokes about Canada being America's evil top hat all the time.
I don't actually want to kill them all and harvest their organs.
That's a bridge too far.
That's taking the joke a little bit too far, wouldn't you say?
Okay.
If most people I guess they're gonna be liberals who say, no, it's fine.
It's good.
This man had a disease and he made the choice to kill himself.
And because the only moral criterion of liberalism is consent, then he has the right to do that because liberalism presumes a uh the idea of self-ownership, the idea that we own ourselves, which is not true, not true at all.
Uh because of all of that, they're gonna say, well, this is fine.
What's wrong with it?
Now an American man gets a heart out of it.
I don't know.
I think more people, though, the conservatives and the moderates are going to say, hey, um, suicide is bad, and we shouldn't encourage it, and we definitely shouldn't be profiting from it.
And we shouldn't open up markets in the organs of the people we've encouraged through the law to kill themselves in other countries.
You see how this could go wrong real fast.
But it started with such good intentions.
That's I'm speaking to the kind of moderate conservative or liberal who said, ah, you know, grandpa really was having a hard go of it at the end there, and maybe it's okay to have a medical assistance in dying, also known as suicide.
Maybe suicide's okay in some cases.
We just don't want to let it get too far.
We don't want to let the slippery slope, you know, slip down too far.
This was always there.
This was inevitable.
We we were always in this place where if you uh if you make the Faustian bargain, if you compromise on moral issues, even for good intentions.
This was inevitable.
MIA MAID in Canada has existed for like five minutes so far.
We're already harvesting the suicide suicideese organs.
Not good.
I think we need to do something about that here.
Okay.
Now, you know how the government's shutdown.
I yeah, a lot of people had forgotten.
Now we're starting to feel a little pain of it.
We are going to speak with uh the chairman of the Republican Study Committee momentarily.
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I am very pleased to be joined right now by Congressman August Pfluger from the great state of Texas, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, here to remind us one that the government is in fact shut down, and to get to what some of the consequences of that shutdown could be, uh, notably on military readiness.
Congressman Fluger, thank you for coming on the show.
Michael, thanks for having me, and thanks for highlighting these uh These issues.
Unfortunately, we have to do that now.
So, Congressman, I know the conventional wisdom is Republicans get blamed for shutdowns.
Maybe that will happen in the long run.
But he of all the shutdowns that have happened in my lifetime, this one I think is most clearly owned by the Democrats.
The Republicans have unified government.
The Repu Republicans offered a clean continuing resolution just to keep the government going as other issues are ironed out.
This is exclusively a Democrat shutdown.
Now, Chuck Schumer believes that the longer the shutdown goes on, the better the better it is for Democrats.
He's said that.
It's been been reported now for days.
And I think a lot of people would say this is a good opportunity to fire some people and maybe shrink the government.
Okay.
Now, however, it seems to be impacting military readiness.
Tell us about that.
Well, you're right.
And I'll get to the military readiness.
Just to answer your question, though.
I mean, you you heard a senior Democrat aide say, until planes fall out of the sky, we're not going to open the government back up.
So that they're owning it 100%.
And how disgusting of a comment that was.
We had a clean CR, we did our job in the House, and now Senate Democrats, under Chuck Schumer's uh distasteful leadership, have voted eight times to not fund the government, to not fund the military.
And I'm a veteran.
I flew combat missions in Iraq and Syria.
Um, you know, I was on active duty during several shutdowns.
They hurt readiness.
They hurt your ability to focus on the threat on the missions, because now commanders are having to worry about where their troops, their young enlisted and young officers, uh, how they're gonna put food on the table and take care of their families.
I mean, think about the the soldier who's deployed right now with a young family, maybe a baby at home.
Um, you know, a lot of our troops are on uh food stamps, and they're worried about that.
They're not worried about doing the mission, they're worried about taking care of their family, and rightfully so.
So absolutely it hurts mission readiness, it hurts our focus, and it hurts our national security.
The fact that troops are on food stamps is a national disgrace, frankly.
That that needs to be addressed uh in a in a different way.
But on the point of the paychecks, there is reporting out now that uh the military might miss a paycheck.
Uh these military families who, even, you know, if even if they're not uh totally destitute, you know, they they they need those paychecks.
Is that going to happen?
What is the administration and Republicans in Congress?
What are they doing to prevent that?
And what are the Democrats have to say about it?
Well, we've seen recently where President Trump stepped up, did the right thing, told Secretary Higgs to find the money and to make sure that they get paid on the 15th of this month.
So, you know, that that's that's a big deal that they did that, because that has not happened in the past.
But they're taking money out of other pots, out of, you know, other uh sources where you know, probably for operations and readiness and and mission type money.
So it's not gonna last forever.
Um, you know, most of our military personnel get paid on the 15th and at the you know the end of the month.
So this isn't gonna last forever.
If Democrats keep up this theater, which it is, make no mistake, this is political theater at its very worst.
Um, then they will miss a paycheck eventually.
I'd like to know where my Democrat colleagues are, uh, those that served the veterans on the Democrat side, where are they?
What why are they not stepping up right now and rising above the noise and doing the right thing?
Because guess what?
When when Nancy Pelosi was speaker and when Joe Biden was president, Republicans didn't shut the government down.
And where are they?
Where are they right now?
Why are they not doing the right thing?
I'm I'm so disappointed in them.
Are Democrats going to object to the Republicans who are trying to find money, you know, bar borrowing from Peter to PayPal to make sure that the military actually are paid?
Are Democrats going to try to impede that?
I mean, can you imagine?
You know, Chuck Schumer leading the charge saying that's illegal, you can't pay the troops.
I mean, what what kind of idiot would do that?
But yeah, I mean, I would not put it past them.
I mean, that this is exactly what Democrats do.
They you fix a problem and then they find another way to lie about it, to have deceit about it, to do something completely um, well, I was gonna say another word, but to do something that doesn't make any sense at all.
You know, listen, it's a family show.
We try to keep it clean.
And sometimes I'm tempted to, though.
So before I let you go, Congressman, uh, how long is this gonna go on for?
I I mean, You know, the Republicans open up with we're gonna have a clean CR, so we're not trying to cram our stuff into this uh continuing resolution.
But Democrats wanted to cram their stuff in, notably Republicans highlighted healthcare for illegal aliens.
Uh but okay, fine, you know, they're we're in this fight now.
What is the end of this fight?
If Chuck Schumer sincerely believes that the longer it goes on, the better it is for Democrats.
Then is it is the government gonna reopen next week, the week after, two months from now, and whenever it does reopen, what's the deal gonna be?
Well, first off, I think Mike Johnson is doing a great job.
We've done our job.
We've voted to fund the government.
It's a it's the simplest thing.
This was a Joe Biden signed budget or or an auto pen signed budget, you know.
So th this is a budget that Democrats already voted on.
So how do they now come to us and say, well, we can't vote on it now?
Because, well, no, you actually, this was this was Biden's budget.
So I I think there's probably one of a couple of ways.
Number one, Senate Democrats need to get over their theater and just do the right thing.
Um, and not that happens the stale.
Okay, so assuming that doesn't happen, they're conflating several things, and and they're putting these ACA premium subsidies in there that want us to fund illegal immigrants uh into health care, which we've said absolutely not.
I mean, there's a hundreds of billions of dollars in waste.
So I I think probably what what ends up happening is is President Trump will probably have to save the day um and bring people together like he's done and and make some sort of deal.
But let's make one thing clear.
Um the the prize for Democrats opening the government uh is not going to be ACA subsidies.
We we will negotiate on things like that when we get the government open, but they're not gonna hold us hostage like this and and laugh at at the American people and say, look, we just you know, we just did this political stunt and and now we we get something out of it.
No, I'm I'm sorry, but the American public is tired.
My district especially is just tired of the lies and tired of the games.
They want us to go to Washington and do what we said we were gonna do, which is what has happened.
And I think this is the Democrats' only shot to stop Donald Trump because he is the only president who has done everything he said he would do.
Yeah, there's this problem for the Dems, which is they keep saying the people are on our side, and you know, we're gonna we're the the resistance, the voice of the people.
But of course, the people voted for Trump, and it wasn't it wasn't just that he won the electoral college, which is ultimately all that matters.
He he won the popular vote, and the Republicans have the House and the Senate and the presidency.
And because they keep winning the presidency, they have the Supreme Court.
And just at a certain point, the Democrats probably need to get the message that uh most of the people are not on your side.
And I I agree, this is this is pretty desperate.
I also agree that you can't give in to the Democrats, especially on the on the healthcare stuff, because uh it it just rewards them.
It gives them an incentive to do this kind of thing again.
It's a real thorny issue, and I I I suspect you're right that the White House is gonna have to step in and uh twist some arms and make some carrots and sticks.
Congressman Fluger, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
God bless.
All right, we'll see.
Maybe I'll have Congressman Fluger back on two months when this government is still shut down.
Okay, much more to say about assisted suicide, actually, even on the American side of it.
On a wonderful ceremony yesterday at the White House when my friend Charlie Kirk received the uh presidential medal of freedom.
On there's even more poetry coming up.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Martha C. 8529 who says, I find it funny when Trump says stuff like, I was being a little cute, lol.
It's such an unassuming way of talking.
Yeah, I I I like it.
Uh the people even on the right have hated that since 2016, since he started running.
And I that stuff doesn't bother me at all.
It's very familiar because it's it's not uh high-minded, it's not abstract, doesn't require multiple degrees to know what Trump is doing.
He just talks like a New Yorker.
That's how New Yorkers talk.
And I think if uh more of the Republican establishment had just been familiar with that In 2016, it would have saved us a lot of rancor.
Okay.
Turning to electoral politics on this issue of assisted suicide.
Here is Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat member of Congress who's now running for a governor of Virginia.
Here is her take on assisted suicide.
I support and I would support legislation that legalizes the right to die with dignity of a person's choosing.
And that would include allowing for medical providers to provide prescriptions for life-ending prescriptions.
in the cases of someone who's deemed medically competent to make that decision, mentally competent to make that decision, I oppose the ability of religious institutions to put their religious-based ideas on individuals and their health care choices and options.
I believe that we should trust people to have relationships with their healthcare providers that lead them to make strong decisions based on their medical practices.
And I do not believe that people should have the option to allow their own personal beliefs to dictate the type of medical care that they are providing their patients.
What?
What was that last part?
I don't believe that doctors should let their beliefs uh impact their the medical care they're providing.
What do you go to a doctor for?
You go to a doctor for his judgment, for his wisdom, because he is the expert because he knows something that you don't know.
What do you what is that?
What does that mean?
It's just some stupid liberal bromide.
I don't think that doctors should let their beliefs and thoughts impact what they do.
Well, then what the hell are you hiring them for?
Well, I want them to advance my beliefs and thoughts.
Oh, okay, got it.
So it's not that you you uh, you know, advance some kind of neutral, objective, liberated order.
You just think that your evil ideas should supersede the uh medical views of medical professionals and the ethical views of medical professionals.
This is sick stuff.
This woman is a sick person, Abigail Spanberger.
She continues to endorse Jay Jones for attorney general.
I mean, they're essentially running on a ticket, and Jay Jones is the one who was discovered to have been wishing for the murder of his Republican opponent and the opponent's kids, and said that the birth of those children was breeding little fascists.
This woman supports that.
So at least she's consistent.
She supports killing babies in the womb.
She supports killing Republican babies outside of the womb, and she she supports killing grandma and people who are mentally ill and people who are sick and people who are depressed.
So, okay.
I guess she's consistent.
She wants to kill like everybody.
And this is the moderate.
That that's what makes it interesting to me.
Not that the Democrats have evil views.
It's that she's the moderate.
Abigail Spanberger, when the Democrats were talking about abolishing police, Abigail Spanberger said, no, I don't think we should abolish police.
When when the Democrats were trying to stop Republicans from reducing crime in D.C., Abigail Spanberger said, no, we we shouldn't reduce punishments for the criminals in D.C. During COVID, when the Libs were locking down the whole world.
Abigail Spanberger was one of those who voted to end the COVID national emergency.
There were not that many Democrats who did that.
When the Democrats were saying everything Trump does is evil, Abigail Spanberger was one of the people who supported Trump's uh rewriting of NAFTA, the US MCA trade deal.
She is relative to the Democrats, a moderate.
And still, she supports government promoted, government-protected doctor-encouraged suicide, and the murder of Republicans and our children.
Not to mention killing babies in the womb and all the rest of it.
The most moderate Democrat in the country today is like a communist compared to the Democrat Party of even 20 years ago.
That's not to say that the Republican Party has not in some ways moved to the right.
It has.
Let's say this is the right.
This is the left.
I'll describe this for you if you're only listening.
Over time, yes, the right has moved a little bit to the right.
The left has moved so so far to the left that they would minimize, excuse, and even celebrate the murder of the assassination of a right-wing political debater, and they would refuse to withdraw endorsements from a would-be law enforcement top official, a attorney general of Virginia, who wishes for the murder of Republicans and our kids.
Assisted suicides, or you know, killing, killing the vulnerable.
That is totally kosher with these guys.
Okay.
Speaking of Charlie, speaking of Charlie Kirk, yesterday, beautiful uh ceremony at the White House, Charlie was awarded the presidential medal of freedom, and his widow, Erica, uh, showed up to receive the award.
And there was this great moment of levity as uh Erica was, you know, mustering an incredible amount of strength to be able to.
Can you imagine?
Can you imagine uh a widow, especially of a young husband with little kids, speaking at anything at a luncheon this shortly uh after her husband's murder?
And she gets up at the White House speaking to the entire world, and she manages to find a moment of levity with the president.
God when it was costly, but that's what we're called to do.
Surprisingly enough, he did pray for his enemies.
Which is very hard, but he did.
He did.
I he did.
For those who can't see it, Trump laughs.
I mean, I saw that.
And he throws his hands in the room.
See, great when he's laughing, he's really he also loved people when it was in convenience.
You can tell he's really getting a kick out of it.
And it's really this was a a great little line from from Erica, but it also shows Trump's humility and also I think vindicates my view of of when Trump said, Charlie said pray for his enemies.
He loved he wanted the best for his enemies.
I hate my enemies and I don't want what's best for them.
Then you had all these pearl-clutching Christians who said, he doesn't understand the true gospel and he's he doesn't understand.
I said, he's making a joke, guys.
It's a joke.
It's a nice little moment of levity.
He's saying, Charlie, even if he, even if he legitimately struggles with willing the best for his enemies, which might be the case, he's saying, Charlie did that.
He is better than me.
He's in heaven looking down angrily at me right now.
He's saying, I'm not worthy.
Lord have mercy on me, uh sinner.
That's good.
And he's laughing here when Erica makes this joke.
It's really nice.
The even more beautiful aspect of the award, which was well deserved, was on the back of it.
Do we have a clip of it?
Yeah, so on if you look on the back of the presidential medal of freedom, it says uh Charles James Kirk, and there's a cross engraved on the back, which I think is the first time ever that a medal of freedom has come with a cross engraved on it.
That's really beautiful.
And you know, if you try to see the silver lining in the storm cloud of Charlie's murder, that's it.
Right?
There are there are a handful of of good reactions amid a lot of horrible reactions.
But but the the real silver lining is this return to church.
I I've seen it personally, you know, multiple times, uh, as have a lot of people.
This increased uh concern for religious truth, and and also I think a deeper understanding of freedom.
When when the story of this is all written, uh, it will be significant that Charlie was wearing a shirt that said freedom.
He was wearing a shirt that said freedom, and that word is so abused that we tend to kind of laugh at it today.
So, oh, here we go, another, another platitude about freedom in the abstract.
But uh that's not really how Charlie viewed freedom.
Um, Charlie, coming from a Christian perspective, understood that freedom is not just doing whatever you want.
Uh that that freedom has discipline to it, freedom, freedom is grounded in the truth.
Uh I think increasingly conservatives are coming to that.
He wasn't the only one, you know, who had come to that conclusion.
Increasingly, we're coming to that conclusion.
That's how we used to understand it in American history.
Then we went through a fever uh in the late 20th century where we started to think freedom meant, you know, doing weird sex stuff and doing a bunch of drugs and letting criminals roam the streets, and we thought that was freedom.
It's not.
It's not.
And the the gods of the copybook headings come back again to to educate us.
And uh true freedom, you know, is found in Christ.
Perfect freedom is found in Christ.
Christ says, you know, the truth will set you free.
He says, take up my my uh, you know, take my yoke upon you, but my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
You know, if you would follow me, you know, pick up your cross.
That paradoxically, that's the kind of freedom.
That because the truth sets you free, lies enslave you.
The wages of sin is is death.
All sin is a kind of a slavery.
We're coming to recognize that again, that it's this this kind of shallow negative view of liberty, where it's just freedom from interference so that we can go, you know, engage in whatever deviant, aberrant desires we want and behaviors that we want, that That that's kind of silly.
One, because you can you can never be totally free from interference because we live in society.
The only true kind of freedom involves substantive goods.
You know, it involved and ultimately it's perfected in Christ.
And uh the truth will set us free.
This is why people are ditching the false ideologies, especially the sexual ideologies, is it's a lie and it enslaves people.
That connection, this is the first time ever in the history of the Presidential Medal of Freedom that you see a connection between this word freedom and the perfection of freedom, what freedom really means.
That's when when this when this story is written, that's gonna that's gonna be very significant.
That's gonna be that's that the author of this story did a really good job pointing pointing that out.
Okay, there's a story I really, really want to get to because it's an excuse to read another poem.
It comes from the Washington Post.
That people once again are terrified of dying alone.
It's another one of those uh God's the copybook headings coming back, saying, you know, we we we went into this hyper-individualism that said we all just we don't need anybody, we should get divorced, we should live on our own, we should ignore our families, we should ignore our friends, we should just do whatever we want, you do you, just focus on me, self-care, look out for number one.
And and now people are returning to an age-old fear of dying alone.
But I think I think everyone is missing the point on this, and I'll leave you on that cliffhanger because maybe we'll get to it tomorrow.
