Ep. 1962 - Jimmy Kimmel's Trump Jokes Prove We Need Right-Wing Cancel Culture

Right now, go to keksi.com, K-E-K-S-I.com. I'm going to make a little confession, okay? I like cookies. I do. I like, and specifically, I like keksi cookies. And for me, I had over a full cookie yesterday, two days ago. And then I had another cookie yesterday. My favorite right now is the keksi German chocolate cookie. But they're all good. Great flavors. Pistachio, also amazing stuff. Mother's Day is coming up. get your mother get your wife get that lady in your life a beautiful box of kexy cookies even if you're not going to get it for your mother or your wife or whoever just get it for yourself because they're so good they are maybe they are maybe the best cookies i've ever other than cookies made by my mother and my wife i got to exclude that so i don't get thrown out a window other than that it might be the best cookie i've ever had family aside all the ladies it is that good they're limited edition mother's day cookies come already packed in a beautiful mother's day theme box. No wrapping, no stress, beautiful presentation. They ship nationwide. It's great. Go to Keksi.com, grab a Mother's Day box while they're still available. If you want to try anything else from their site, use code Knowles for 15% off, just not on the Mother's Day box. That's Keksi, K-E-K-S-I.com, Keksi.com. Jimmy Kimmel is facing renewed calls for his firing after airing a fake White House Correspondents Dinner segment, joking about the death of President Trump. Is this right wing cancel culture? It absolutely is. And I'm here for it. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show. You can tell the Dems have learned so much since the most recent leftist shooting trying to kill Republicans. They've learned so much that they've taken to CNN like J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, a top Democrat presidential candidate, goes on TV and says, yes, I do compare Trump to Hitler. Yes, I've learned nothing. I change nothing about my rhetoric. We'll get to that and how we should respond to that in a second. First, though, I want to tell you about Cardiff. Go to cardiff.co slash Knowles. Small business is very important. I'm a small business owner myself. I have multiple businesses, but one in particular that I love very much. There are more than 36 million small businesses in America. Over 70% of them need more capital just to keep things moving each year. The irony, business is booming, revenues at record highs, and yet the big banks are clamping down harder than ever, dragging their feet with miles of paperwork and approval processes that take weeks, sometimes months. It's a perfect example of how our financial system talks big game about supporting entrepreneurs, but rarely makes it easy for them to succeed. If you want bank rates without the bank delays, you need to check out cardiff.co slash Knowles, K-N-O-L-E-S, for up to $500,000 in same-day funding. Cardiff is the largest privately held small business lender in America, having already funded more than $12 billion since 2004. Their process is fast, simple, and respectful of your time. Five minutes to apply, zero hit to your personal credit, and approval that can happen in minutes. Do you need capital today? Cardiff can get it done same day. No wonder they are voted America's favorite small business lender two years running. Banks try to lock out small businesses. Cardiff has the key. Big banks may not want to approve your business loans, but Cardiff does. If you've been in business for at least a year and are pulling in $20,000 a month in revenue, apply now for half a million bucks in same-day funding at cardiff.co.nolls. That is cardiff.co.nolls. Real growth, fast funding, Cardiff. Borrow better. so just before the white house correspondence dinner when a leftist california teacher who donated to kamala harris who's part of all sorts of left-wing groups just before he went uh with a shotgun into the washington hilton tried to kill the president and as much of the trump administration his supporters as he could just before that jimmy kimmel aired a fake white house correspondence segment in which he joked about the death of the president. Our first lady Melania is here. Look at so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow. A glow like an expected widow. Ha ha ha. And it's using footage from, I think, the State of the Union address. He's trying to piece it together to pretend as if he were addressing the White House Correspondents' Dinner. And in response to this, Melania Trump came out and said, this guy should be fired. So the first lady posts, Kimmel's hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country. His monologue about my family is not comedy. His words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America. People like Kimmel should not have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A coward, Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him. Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC's leadership enable Kimmel's atrocious behavior at the expense of our community? So this is cancel culture, right? This is right-wing cancel culture. The right spent years invading against left-wing cancel culture, but now that hypocritical right, they're calling for a cancel culture of their own, right? Right. You're going to hear a lot of conservatives twist themselves into pretzels to argue that this is not cancel culture. They'll say, no, this is different because and they'll name all sorts of extenuating circumstances. But let's just be blunt about it. Can we be honest, please? What the first lady is calling for is cancel culture. And that's good. I love it. I'm here for it. You know, I've been one of the few conservatives, maybe the only conservative, but certainly one of the few conservatives who has been calling for precisely this kind of thing, a right wing cancel culture for years now. And I think some people on the right are getting the message. This is important. Right wing cancel culture is not the same thing as left wing cancel culture. Left wing cancel culture was when you would lose your job, be kicked out of school for saying that a man can't really be a woman. That was left wing cancel culture. In other words, you would be canceled for telling the truth. In this case, the right-wing cancel culture says you're not allowed to go out, especially on public airwaves that are regulated by the government for a reason. You're not allowed to go out and encourage political violence, make light of political violence, and specifically the political violence that is occurring right now. That's the right-wing cancel culture that you see bubbling up a little bit in the First Lady's comment. President Trump followed up. He said much the same thing. And some on the right are backing it. And I think we should back the first lady on this. I think this is exactly right. And what you have to understand in order to defend these calls for Jimmy Kimmel's firing, Jimmy Kimmel should have been fired long ago. He survived his last kerfuffle and kept his show, but he should not keep his show this time. what you need to accept is that not everything can or should be debated that's the point a lot of what the right has said for the last 10 years a lot of friends of mine have said is that we need to debate everything and the answer to bad speech is more speech and that way the true ideas are going to win out in the free marketplace of ideas which is a liberal premise uh which always had guardrails on it by the way for all of american history but the left in the middle of the 20th century, took it to an extreme, twisted it. They had the free speech movement at Berkeley and associated groups, and they argued that we just need no guardrails on speech whatsoever. And conservatives got duped, and we went along with it. Now, they never really meant it on the left because the minute that they got power, they immediately inserted guardrails of their own, which were intended to exclude truth, beauty, goodness, like all the things we want in society, to punish those things and to exalt their own degeneracy. But all societies need guardrails, of course. And what we have to accept is that not everything can or should be debated. A prime example of this occurred during the state of, sorry, during the correspondence dinner. One of the worst things about what happened at the correspondence dinner, my mind went to it immediately. Even before there were any videos going around, which I'm not going to share because they should not be shared. I thought, oh, no, Erica Kirk is at the correspondence dinner. And so what must be going through her mind? Before there were any pictures of her, before, you know, I'm going to be doing an event that Erica invited me to today with Matt Walsh. It's going to be at Idaho. If you're in the neighborhood, come on out. It's going to be a great TPSA event. But my mind went to Erica immediately, and I said, this is so awful because she's experienced a major trauma, and she has to relive it because there are bullets being fired. And of course, immediately, people start attacking her. All these sort of anonymous and some not anonymous people on social media start attacking her again over the White House Correspondents' Dinner. And I said, as I've said from the beginning, that's not the sort of thing that can be debated. There's no debate there. No, actually, we shouldn't harass widows. No, actually, don't you see? No, I'm going to convince you. In the free marketplace of ideas, I'm going to convince you that it's actually not good to harass. There's no debate to be had there. There's no debate. Another example, we were talking about Hassan Piker yesterday. Hassan Piker calls for the murder of GOP senators. There's no debate to be had there. No, actually, we shouldn't murder senators. No, in the free marketplace of ideas, let me use my facts and logic to convince you that we shouldn't murder our senators or murder the president. There's no debate to be had there. You're not going to win that in the field of debate. And by engaging in debate, you're granting a legitimacy to these sorts of premises that we should torment widows or we should murder senators or we should murder the president. You're granting a legitimacy that is undue. You are elevating people who should not be elevated. You're taking ideas seriously that should not be taken seriously. The way to deal with these sorts of things is precisely what Melania Trump is calling for, what the president has backed up, and what we should all back up, which is that the way to respond to people calling for violence, making light of political violence, calling for the death of senators, what have you, the way to respond to that is to fire them. Then, when they cross the line into criminal territory, as Hassan Piker has, you need to prosecute them. Then, when they cross the line into defamation, you need to sue them. You need to wield the force of the law and the culture because even beyond the law, you can ostracize people. You can refuse to platform people. You can refuse to elevate these ideas up into fodder for debate. You need to bring the weight of taboo down upon these people to exclude certain ideas from the conversation. This is a point I've made many times over the years. It comes from a line of G.K. Chesterton, which is that there is a thought that stops thought, and that is the thought that ought to be stopped. It's a line from William F. Buckley Jr. when he was debating this very issue on Firing Line. He said he was an epistemological optimist in that he thought we can make exclusions. We don't need to debate Nazis. We don't need to debate communists. We can just exclude them and ideally prosecute them. That is the idea. That's a deeply conservative idea. It's very offensive to classical liberals, which is kind of funny because classical liberals also want – the actual classical liberals actually did want to exclude lots of bad people and bad ideas. But what passes for classical liberalism today what passes for libertarianism it doesn understand that a society needs to just say no sometimes And so the question is do we have the guts to do it Do we have the guts to fire jimmy kimmel that what this is coming down to do we have the guts to say no we don actually need to take these ideas seriously we don't need to elevate the ravings of lunatics of violent people of those who would undermine our whole political order we don't need to take that seriously We can just fire it, ostracize it, prosecute it, sue it. We can behave, in other words, as if we really do believe things, that we can come to conclusions, and therefore we can make exclusions from our society. The Kimmel issue is a great test of whether or not the American right has the intellectual architecture anymore or the courage to just do that. Do we have the courage to do that? Do we have the courage to have a cancel culture, a culture in this case that would cancel legitimately bad things that are beyond the pale, that we don't need to debate, that we don't need to have all sorts of long conversations or podcasts or network television shows about? Can we just say no? That's a two-letter word that is so beautiful on the right, and we've lost it because we've been infected by the spirit of liberalism that has tended toward libertinism. Do we have the ability to do that? because there's a cancel culture today. Even after we got rid of the woke cancel culture, there's a new cancel culture that the left has replaced it with and they're trying to cancel us with bullets. And they're being encouraged in doing so by major media figures on the left, by elected politicians on the left who say that Donald Trump and his supporters pose an existential threat to the country. That was Joe Biden who said that. Who say that we need to push back on Republicans in public. That was Maxine Waters who said that. Who said you can't be civil with Republicans. That was Hillary Clinton who said that. do we have the courage and the clarity of vision to have a real cancel culture that just says we're not platforming this stuff we're not going to take it seriously we're going to exclude it we're going to repress it we're going to put it out of mind for the common good do we have no people are going to say that's authoritarian and so that the problem will fester or we can fire kimmel we should fire kimmel the left is feeling the heat hakeem jeffries the democrat leader in the house is proving it first though i want to tell you about keksi go to keksi.com k-e-k-s-i.com mother's day is coming up folks which means it's time to think about what you're actually going to get your mom or your wife that is not always easy too many gifts end up feeling kind of generic and not heartfelt that is one reason i really love our sponsor keksi which is a family-run bakery and they've put together a limited edition mother's day cookie box that is perfect for the woman in your life the other night i'm sitting i want to tell tales out of school i'm sitting we put the kids in bed and sweet little alisa comes into the family room and she's holding something a nice gooey delicious keksi german chocolate cookie which is one of at least my five favorite cookies from keksi and i said girl you got that cooks i said where's the rest of it like there's no more sorry she just ate it all because it's very good it's other than you know i'm going to exclude the cookies that my wife my family other than those it's the best cookie i've ever had they're a Limited edition Mother's Day cookies come already packed in beautiful Mother's Day themed box. You're all good on wrapping. Go to keksi.com. Grab your Mother's Day box while they are still available. If you want to try anything else from their site, use code Knowles for 15% off, just not on the Mother's Day box. That is keksi, K-E-K-S-I at keksi.com. Hakeem Jeffries, furious, furious in particular at the White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt, who read out what the Democrats have said about political violence. in such a way as to encourage their exclusion from political society. Hakeem Jeffries, furious at what exactly? Is that the so-called White House press secretary, who's a disgrace, he's a stone-cold liar, had the nerve to stand up there and read talking points, being critical of statements, all taken out of context that Democrats have made and didn't have a word to say about anything that MAGA extremists have said or done, including providing aid and comfort to violent insurrectionists here at this Capitol on January 6th who brutally beat police officers. Wow, man, that is, it shows you how totally bankrupt the Dems are. that's the best and only example the dems can use to counter their own words what is it i can't believe the white house press secretary came up here read talking points what do you think the press secretary does do you think the white house press secretary engages in extemporary uh oratory i don't know what do you think that do you think she's giving a cooking class where you she reads talking points that's her job and these talking points she had the audacity to read our words back to us that seems more than fair buddy she's not even putting words in your mouth she's reading what you've said many many times including recently yeah she it's crazy because because you know why it's crazy because drum roll please because january 6th that's the best you got The best you got is a contrived nonsense from five years ago, a political event at which the only person who was murdered was a Trump supporter murdered by a trigger happy cop. That's the best you got. And then they said for years, the right wingers on January 6th, which was infiltrated by the FBI, probably we can't prove it yet, probably funded by the SPLC. January 6th, where they told us for years that cops were killed by the right wingers didn't have none of that was true. medical examiners contradicted all of that but even if it were true which it isn't that's the best you got is a mob from five years ago in some cases being escorted around the corn hat guy getting private door of the capital how dare how dare the press secretary read our words back to us you can tell the left is feeling the heat here and the only reason they're feeling the heat by the way is because the right is finally speaking in terms of borders and standards and exclusions and consequences because the right is saying jimmy kimmel needs to be fired hassan piker is a toxic personality who needs to be prosecuted and maybe deported back to the backwater that he was raised in saying that the democrat politicians who have associated with people like hassan piker need to be removed from office that's why he's feeling the heat he's not feeling the heat because we're just we're going to engage in the free marketplace of ideas the point that i've made for the last eight months i was making it before that but you see it especially in the last eight months since charlie was assassinated by a leftist is we tried to have a free marketplace of ideas we try no one did that more graciously and uh more charitably than charlie and the left shot him for it so you can't have a free marketplace when the bandits keep shooting up the marketplace the left is not going to stop in case you thought that the left had a sudden change of heart because of all the debates we've had. We've just had so many debates, they've changed their mind. Here is a top presidential candidate for the Democrats, governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, on CNN, asked about his extreme rhetoric against Republicans, which justifies the assassination of Republicans. Has he learned anything? Some of your critics may point to what you said in the State of the State last year when you compared to the Trump administration to the rise of Nazis. What would you say to that? Well, Manu, remember, what I was talking about was the fact that a constitutional republic was torn apart in 53 days in Germany in the 1930s, and that we need to watch out for that in this country. That is what I was talking about. And we've seen it. By the way, that speech was given in February of 25. I think over the last year, much of what I said has been proven to be true, that the institutions of this democracy are being attacked by the republicans and by donald trump excellent question from manu here says hey you know you you've been calling this guy a nazi so that justifies political violence against him so are you second guessing your rhetoric now do you take some responsibility and pritzker's response is no he's a nazi by the way if trump is a nazi that means that his supporters are nazis which means that political violence against him and his supporters is totally justified. So they're just not going to stop. The only conclusion that large swaths of the mainstream left drew from the foiled massacre attempt on Saturday night is that they need to try a little harder next time. This guy, the California schoolteacher Kamala Harris donor who tried to shoot it up, he was just incompetent. They just need to try harder because Trump's still a nazi so what are we going to do about that are we just going to debate more are we just going to try to make them see see our point of view because you know we've got the logic on our side no i'm all for debate obviously i'm all for conversations i'm all for i'm a podcast host for goodness sakes i'm a professional debater i do all the i'm all for it within its proper limits but certain things are simply beyond the pale. And when you take them seriously as subjects for a debate, you grant them a legitimacy that they do not deserve. We should not be debating Hassan Piker or Governor Pritzker on this point. We should be ostracizing people. We should be firing people. We should have cancel culture, obviously. Listen to Chuck Todd, speaking of the mainstream journalists learning nothing. Chuck Todd from NBC explaining, this is from Chris Saliza on X, explaining why he's not going to show up to events that Trump is at anymore. I'm not going to any more events where Trump's at him. I don't feel safe. Wherever Donald Trump is. Chaos follows him. Chaos follows him. And you are less safe, right? If you decide to go into his orbit, you have become less safe. He does not care about your safety. He's not going to protect you if you go into his orbit because he's always going to protect himself first. He's more likely to throw you under the bus. He's more likely to have you be the target of Iranian assassins if you're John Bolton or Mike Pompeo. And he's going to pull any sort of federal support. Right. You know, I think about when somebody using Donald Trump's words and actions targeted me and a bunch of other members of the press. You know who I didn't hear from Donald Trump. Right. So the guy doesn't care when people commit violence in his name. Oh, do they do that cares when the violence is committed against him and he does not see that he is a contributor to the atmospherics of the world we're living in. Right. Well, that's it. That's it. The three assassination attempts against the president, the successful assassination of Charlie Kirk, the countless violent actions against conservatives in public life, all of which have been encouraged by many elite liberals. it's really all about chuck todd because some unspecified rhetoric from donald trump allegedly inspired some unnamed unknowable i think right wingers to vaguely threaten chuck todd at some point that we don't know anything about that's what it's about it's all about chuck todd he's the real victim the liberals are the real victims here trump just keeps making them tried to kill him and us It like why did you make me do it Why did you make that what the domestic abuser says to his wife after he smacks her Why did you make me do it Why did you make That what this is what the domestic abuser says to his wife after he smacks her Why did you make me do that It's just something about Trump. You know, chaos follows him. Is that what we're calling it now? That chaos is chaos. The new euphemism for left wing terrorists. It's just chaos keeps following him. Chaos that donates to Democrats like the Butler assassin. chaos that donates to kamala harris like the most recent would-be assassin chaos just keeps following we just got to stop this k we need chaos control but it's not chaos the problem is not political violence generally it's left-wing violence as even the atlantic admits the problem is not chaos it's the left-wing assassins and it's not just lone wolf left-wing assassins it's assassins who to this day to this very minute are being encouraged by very prominent left-wingers who i can name it's not even just general left-wingers it's jb pritzker it's hassan piker it's hillary clinton it's joe biden it's kamala harris who bailed violent rioters out of prison out of jail during blm it's maxine waters it's we could be here all day that's the problem and chuck todd has the temer to say you know i'm not going to show up anymore these left-wing terrorists i mean sorry this chaos is too much i'm afraid for my life until they finally succeed at murdering Trump. I mean, until Trump is out of office, I'm not going to show up anymore. Yeah. Where's the chaos coming from? Chuck Todd is nervous that he might be caught with a stray bullet when one of his own followers tries to murder the president again. I don't want to wait for that. I don't want to wait for that. And I don't want Chuck Todd to be invited to follow him either. I want these people. You have to be precise about it. You have to be judicious about it. You can't exclude half the country, but you can exclude the people who go beyond the pale. You can. We've done that for most of American history. We can do it. You want to talk about chaos? Beyond the realm of speech, let's get to the realm of violence again. There's obviously a nexus between speech and violence. But if you look in New York and a lot of Democrat cities, people are suffering the consequences of the chaos that has been bred by leftists. including this bodega owner who was just killed because of crime that has been encouraged by the left the bodega owner was on television a year ago openly fearful that this sort of thing would happen we will get to totally expected consequences first though i want to tell you about tooth pillow go to toothpillow.com use code knolls we've started calling dysfunction normal even in our kids narrow faces crooked teeth receding chins mouth breathing the list goes on no one seems to Why? Here's the truth. When a child's palate doesn't grow properly, their airway cannot develop as it should. Breathing becomes a struggle. The signs are all around us. Snoring, restless sleep, poor focus, constant congestion, teeth grinding. Does that sound familiar? That's because most adults still live with it, too. That is where our sponsor, ToothPillow, is here to help. And I actually I got to vet this sponsor before they came on because Mr. Davies and his family have been using ToothPillow for years. He says this doctor-guided program made a huge difference in his kids' sleep and smiles, and it's reassuring to have their expert support without constant office visits because, obviously, I keep Mr. Davies constantly under the whip here working all the time, making a billion shows. He says the Davies family has sworn by it. Very, very exciting. Toothpillow helps kids ages 3 to 12 guide natural jaw growth, encourage proper tongue posture, restore healthy nasal breathing. Go to Toothpillow.com. Use code Knowles to get your kid assessed for free. toothpillow.com code knowles this is so heartbreaking you can't call it tragic because tragedy is when a protagonist's uh flaws the the things that make him great ultimately cause his demise that's what that's what a tragedy is in this case though the victim is not is not uh being victimized by his own flaws he is being victimized by the perfectly observable threat of left-wing governance. So here you have a bodega owner worrying openly almost exactly one year ago, May 2025, on ABC 7 in New York about the threat posed by crime in the city. Self spoke with eyewitness news a year ago, saying he worried about violence against bodega workers he'd seen on social media. People got shot, killed, sometimes got robbed and never, the police never respond to Tonight, the organization is wondering if the person who shot Abdul Salah was someone who shouldn't have been on the street. It's always the ones you most expect. And notice who the victim is here. You hear Zoran Mamdani, all of these very left-wing city politicians. They say, you know, we need to protect the immigrants. We need to protect the working class, the minorities. And well, this guy, this victim, checks all of those boxes. and he was killed by the other people that so run mamdani says that we need to protect namely the criminals because around mamdani has called for the abolition of police that he's he's called for going much lighter on crime he's called for not cleaning up the streets and so this brings us back to a concept that again much like my calls which i think now are pretty well understood by many people but getting back to my calls for cancel culture this is a related term that a lot of right-wingers are going to react against, especially from the libertarian side, but they shouldn't. It's this term, the common good. For much of my life, the common good was understood to be communist gobbledygook, a euphemism for collectivism and socialism and communism. No doubt it can be used that way by leftists, but it's not a term that was invented by the left, and it doesn't properly belong to the left. The common good is something that conservatives for virtually all of history have defended because the common good is actually rather different from what the socialists and the communists mean when zohran mamdani invokes the common good he's talking about taking from the rich and giving to the poor when he invokes the common good he's talking about taking from the disfavored factions i don't the bourgeois white people and giving to the the supposedly the now favored factions the immigrants the leftists but the common good is different the common good is that is that good which is common to all that is not diminished when one person has it one person getting a piece of the common good doesn't diminish uh what another person gets the common good is that which helps us all and so one way to advance the common good is to lock up criminals when criminals are locked up that's good for the criminal because it might help to rehabilitate him. And it's definitely good for the criminal's victims. It's good for the bodega owner. Getting crime off the street in New York would help everybody. This is something that we've known since Plato's Gorgias, great dialogue to read, in which Plato points out that it's actually harmful. It's cruel not to punish the criminal. It hurts the criminal because it degrades his soul and it will encourage him to live a bad life. And it certainly is harmful to the victims. And it's harmful to society generally because we're scandalized when justice is not enforced. So you need a true common good. That's the only response. The response to socialism and communism cannot be an atomized individualism that is indifferent to value, that is indifferent to virtue more precisely, that is indifferent to what is good and what is bad. The response constantly that you hear from the more libertarian side when you invoke the common good is, well, who decides? Who decides what's good? And the answer is somebody does. Somebody surely does. But you cannot have a society that is good without recourse to the common good, without recognizing what is good and what is bad. You can't have a self-government, certainly that way. You can't have any kind of government, really. And everyone's going to suffer, even the groups that you pretend that you're supporting. So how does this apply at the federal level. What do we actually do about it? Well, here's an example. The FCC is set to review the TV rating system for all the weird sex stuff, all the LGBT stuff that the libs are trying to cram down our throats. So Brendan Carr, the head of the FCC, says that he's going to re-examine. You've got a story in variety here. Trump's FCC wants input on whether transgender and gender non-binary TV programming is appropriate for children. The FCC is opening a new front in its anti-woke campaign, the agency is seeking feedback about whether the TV industry's voluntary rating system needs to be changed, specifically with regard to how shows with child-friendly ratings treat content with transgender and gender non-binary themes. So the way this is all framed is that this is authoritarian, it's censorship, it's cancel culture, and there's a slippery slope, and these right-wing religious fanatics want to exclude LGBT stuff from TV? Well, I don't know. I guess to some degree maybe that's true, but I guess ask yourself about all the premises here. First of all, there is a rating system, right? And the variety tries to dismiss this. They say, well, it's a voluntary rating system adopted by the TV industry. Well, that's half the story. Why did the TV industry voluntarily adopt the rating system? It says, you know, kids 14 can watch this, kids under 14 can watch this why did they voluntarily adopt that in response to a law passed by congress in the 90s so it's voluntary ish but it's not it's not this anarchist utopia where the the law is never to be wielded that's in response to the law because the law is a teacher and so you got to ask yourself this basic question do you think kids should be seeing weird transgender stuff do you think that in your heart of hearts i don't care what how hardcore libertarian you are if you're a leftist you think absolutely we need to teach we need we need transgender content for babies in the womb but if you're a reasonable person and you say well i don't want authoritarianism i don't want repression i don't hate cancel culture i hate censorship do you think do you really seriously think that little kids should be exposed to trans stuff or weird gay stuff do you do you really think that no they're going to try to get out of it they'll say well i don't think that kids should be exposed to sex sexual stuff generally okay well what do you mean by that do you think for instance that in a kid's show you can have a mommy and a daddy who are married because that's that is sexual related content right do you think that a mommy and a daddy can be married in a kid's show okay do you think kids shows according to the warning system should feature a daddy and a daddy who are supposedly married maybe you do maybe some of you think that's okay i bet some of you, though, will say, no, I don't think that's appropriate for little kids. I don't think they should have same-sex parents in Bluey. I don't want my kids to watch that stuff. Okay, but let's say some of you are okay with it. Do you think that there should be a transgender character in kids' cartoons? Do you think that's appropriate given the rating system? I think most of you would say, well, that's probably a bridge too far. But no, no, no, they're not doing any sex stuff. It's not pornography or anything. It's just going to be a guy who identifies as a woman who's wearing a dress who asked who's called by female pronouns in bluey is that okay i don think bluey is actually doing any of this i just using it the example it the most popular kids tv show do you think that would be okay they should get the totally fine for all kids rating tv why if that no okay so now you drawing a substantive distinction you are saying that it is better for a kid to have a mommy and a daddy than for a kid to have a transgender single parent or to have two daddies or two mommies maybe You're saying it's better to be straight than gay. You're saying that. And furthermore, you're saying that the government should give preference, should put its finger on the scale, should not be neutral to say, actually, we should encourage married mommy and daddy, not LGBT. And this is where a lot of people, there's going to be a disconnect. This is where there's going to be a little cognitive dissonance because a lot of people, even on the right, say, well, I don't want the government to have that much power. I don't want the government to do that. I don't want to make a decision like that. Who am I to judge? So you know what? I don't know. It's fine. Never mind. That's what a lot of people on the right are going to say. That's not what Brendan Carr is saying at the FCC. That's not what the Trump administration is saying. That's not what I'm saying. I'm willing to do it. I'm willing to say some things are good and some things are bad. And we actually can make decisions about this and conclusions, and we must. and furthermore the cowardice or the ignorance that leads one to say i will not make a distinction between mommy and daddy and daddy and daddy and transgender stepdaddy in kids programming the refusal the cowardly or ignorant or both refusal to do that in kids programming is a decision itself because at the end of the day the kids programming is going to have the weird LGBT stuff or it's not. And your answer to the question of what, if anything, the government should do, how, if at all, the government should pressure industry groups or network television or cable television, that is going to have an effect. Do you have the clarity and the courage to say what kind of society you want to live in? Because if you're tempted, if you are tempted to say, well, that's un-American. First of all, give me a break. Every single founding father would be rolling in his grave if he thought that it were a serious matter of public debate whether or not we should show LGBT, that term didn't even exist at the time, of course, whether we should show weird sex stuff to little kids. They would be rolling in their graves at the very thought of that. But if you're tempted to say it's un-American for me to impose a vision for the kind of country I want to live in on my fellow citizens the opposite is true our founding fathers gave us self-government and they did it within certain confines constitutional confines pretty pretty light confines the rest of it is up to us not just how we will live at an individual level but how we will live at a political level that's the meaning of self-government self-government is not merely self-discipline it's establishing the way that we're all going to live together there is no better way to pay homage to the founding fathers than to come to real conclusions about how we want to live to exclude really bad stuff to ostracize bad people to not take these things seriously as the the sub subjects of endless debates but to come to conclusions and move on and be a serious thriving country now speaking of debates and what's on our screens Russell Brand has gone viral for an interaction over the Bible with Piers Morgan. Tonight, Matt Walsh and I are joining TPUSA at the University of Idaho for their This is the Turning Point tour after what happens Saturday night at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. A question is not exactly subtle. How do we get the left to stop trying to kill us? Is that even possible? Are we all just supposed to keep pretending this is normal while the people who lecture us about threats to democracy keep producing the threats? We will also be taking questions from the audience live. Watch the whole thing 9.30 p.m. Eastern on DailyWire.com and in the Daily Wire app. I want to tell you my favorite comment yesterday. Now, I didn't pick this. The producers picked it. We'll see if I agree. This is from Bjergman9168, who says, and this is why we need a ballroom. Yeah, we do. We do need the ballroom. This occurred to me as the shooting was taking place. So what's the hotel that they're having the correspondence dinner at? someone said the washington hilton i said that rings a bell oh right the washington hilton is the place where president reagan was almost murdered and then president trump was almost murdered there too and i'm sure it's a fine hotel i don't think i've ever stayed at the washington hilton but you know what maybe we need to start looking at the marriott okay when two presidents are almost murdered at a single hotel maybe i don't want to weigh in this chain or that chain maybe we should stop hosting events at the washington hilton and really maybe we should start hosting these events, including and especially during our political climate, which is much more violent now, maybe we should start hosting them at a secure location. Maybe the White House can have an event space. Maybe that's not so crazy. And if some district judge wants to stop it, I flick my finger under my chin like a good Sicilian. Who cares? We should just do it. Yes, that's why we need a ballroom. Among many other reforms that we need after the shooting on Saturday. At least in the top 500, yes, the White House should have a ballroom, and we should ignore the libs who want to stop it. Now, speaking of what's on our screens, Piers Morgan has gone viral for an interaction with Russell Brand. Russell Brand, the eccentric actor and comedian who used to be very much on the left. Now he's kind of on the right. He goes to – he spoke at Turning Point, actually, right before I spoke at AmericaFest. And he's got a new book coming out with Tucker Carlson's publishing company. and so he goes on the Piers Morgan show amid very serious accusations against him one is that he dated a 16 year old and was rather rough with the 16 year old when he was 30 and a bevy of criminal complaints that he allegedly raped women some years ago uh Russell Brand now is promoting this book where he says he's become a Christian and I think the book is called how to be a Christian in seven days or something like that. And so Piers Morgan grilled him on his Christianity. You're the very one. Okay. What was your thinking of taking it into court? You were seeing, looking at some passages. What were the relevant passages for you? Alright. Thank you for asking me. Thank you. That didn't hurt, did it? But a little bit. It was What passages were you looking at? You're right, but I did say, you know, be chilled. Sometimes I lose the chill, man. It's pretty... So you're just looking for the passage. Here's Morgan sitting still as could be. It's this. They don't like that, do they, in the old gallery, but remember you just said it's a hired spot. this is from Isaiah I'm cutting out parts too long to play on the show Piers dead silent just looks up at the audience whatever you think about this interaction whether you defend Russell Brand here whether you think Russell Brand is a charlatan you've got to give it to Piers he is a generational television talent He's just a broadcast talent, I should say. Now he's on YouTube. He's just so good at this. He plays it perfectly as Brand is looking for the Bible verse that he said that he was going through his mind. Peers dead silent, looks, mugs for the camera. What's going on here? Some people insist Russell Brand is a complete degenerate and his conversion is totally fake and he's just putting on a show for everybody, trying to dupe everybody. some people insist that the prosecution is political of russell brand and he has had a genuine conversion and as is often the case i have the least comfortable position in that i'm kind of skeptical of the whole thing okay i don't i hope that russell brand has converted i hope that's true i i can pray that that is true and you know i'll always err on the side of grace in these matters i don't know yeah the timing is a little funny that the conversion happened right around the prosecution maybe look maybe that is expected too likewise with the prosecution i mentioned earlier some of the charges against him so one claim is that he dated when he was 30 years old he dated a 16 year old and he was rather rough with her i won't go into lurid details what's strange though about that claim is he isn't being prosecuted for that that apparently wasn't against the law. I guess 16 was the age of consent when he did it. And then the rape charges against Russell Brand, they all stem, by my calculation, from between 17 and 25 years ago. So it does raise this question, why are they coming up now? 17 to 25 years, the most recent ones I think were 17 years ago. And some of them go back a quarter century. Why are they coming up now? Why wasn't this investigated or prosecuted before because before when this stuff happened russell brand was firmly on the left and he was a hollywood mainstay why are they only coming up now that he seems to have switched sides politically talks about different issues that i don't know the mainstream doesn't like i'm skeptical of the whole thing i'd be curious to see where you weigh in on this but it is so it is okay to be skeptical of all of it you know i guess that's my main takeaway from it I don't really, I am unwilling to say that Russell Brand's conversion is not genuine. I don't want to say it, and I want to err on the side of grace. I don't know, maybe we should talk about it. I'm unwilling to say that. But likewise, you know, I've said this during the, I don't know, every time during the whole Me Too movement, I said I'm a little skeptical of some, not that a lot of these guys aren't total degenerates, but just why is it coming up now, decades and decades later? the only thing that i am certain of is that that was absolutely masterful tv from from piers morgan uh so much more to get to speaking of foreigners that we got a lot coming out of hungary after the uh ouster of the the most right-wing prime minister in all of europe kind of the last remaining really solid right-wing prime minister in europe he was ousted we were told that the new guy is even more right-wing than orban and we're getting a lot of news out of hungary that maybe that isn't the case they're about to launch their own LGBT network, like fully just a rainbow TV is what it's called. And I do want to get to the war in Iran. We haven't gotten an update on this. We haven't really gotten an update from the government, but we're still kind of in this war. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. The double blockade is still on. We don't know how this is going to land. I think it's going to have major political ramifications, economic ramifications, political ramifications. We'll have to get to all of that tomorrow because today is Tee Hee Tuesday. The rest of the show is continuing now. You do not want to miss it. Become a member. Use code Knowles Canada WLES at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.