Ep. 1969 - LA Mayor Race Goes Viral After $250 Billion Left-Wing Fire Accusation

Who answers America's call for more energy? Our people do. They've helped boost Chevron's U.S. energy production by nearly 60% in the past three years, helping fuel national energy security, and drives down the open roads that make America. Learn more about what our people do at chevron.com. Hey, do you remember the Palisades fire last year? The one that caused some $250 billion in damage and burned over 23,000 acres and killed a dozen people? You remember how we were told at the time that that was caused by climate change? Well, we now have court documents. Turns out it was just another example of left-wing terrorism. Then, speaking of, an Austrian woman swings herself half naked upside down inside a city bell to protest climate change, of course. We will examine why leftist women love stripping in public. And Marco Rubio takes over the White House press briefing and goes viral for his description of America that I'm not sure people quite understand. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show, a really scary report from Forbes showing that for every one illegal who is arrested by ICE, six illegals drop out of the workforce. And this is a problem for some reason. I don't know. It's kind of weird when it really doesn't seem like a good start. If you ask me, we will get to what the Trump arrests mean because they are being completely underappreciated, including on the right. First, though, I want to tell you about Armra. Go to Armra.com slash Knowles. Self-reliance begins with taking control of your health. Our sponsor, Armra Colostrum, harnesses nature's original blueprint for resilience, packed with over 400 bioactive nutrients. Colostrum fortifies your gut, strengthens your immune system from the cellular level up. When you invest in your health, you invest in your ability to show up fully. You stay in control no matter what comes your way. 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That's a-r-m-r-a.com.k-n-o-w-l-e-s. Alright, folks. Yes, I am on the road yet again, but I will be back in the studio tomorrow. This has been a quick little jaunt. I was up a couple nights ago at Dartmouth, and I was debating Mehdi Hassan up there with the Dartmouth Political Union. It was a lot of fun. We were not able to stream the debate on our YouTube channels. I don't think Mehdi was able to stream it on his either. You can find it at the Dartmouth Political Union channel, I think it is. And it was a lot of fun, mostly because I won. That was the main part that I really enjoyed. It was good. We were debating whether or not President Trump has upheld the Constitution. The Dartmouth kids did a great job because it was a moderated debate. It was a formal debate. A lot of times what we call debate is just a bunch of people screaming at each other on the Internet, and then everyone declares victory and it's really loud and annoying. It's kind of a circus. But what they did at Dartmouth was really good, and I think we should implement this, frankly, more across the political media, is there were rules to it. So you weren't supposed to talk over each other. You weren't supposed to just get little jabs in and change subjects. And it was really focused. They did a good job. And most importantly, in the Monk Debate format, the audience has polled before the debate to figure out how they feel about the issue with their prejudices. Obviously, Dartmouth is a very liberal campus, Ivy League. So, we go in there. The left side has a huge advantage in public opinion. And then you measure public opinion at the end of the debate, and so you actually can just figure out who won. So, not to spike the football too much, but we're very glad to say that not only was I able to win over my amiable debate opponent, Mehdi Hassan, but more importantly, the subject prevailed. A lot of people went in there with the prejudice that Trump is somehow abusing the Constitution, violating the Constitution. And then when the facts were presented, even to the very liberal audience, when the facts were presented in a moderate way with rules, so you couldn't try to cheat and speak over each other in filibuster, when the facts were presented, even the very liberal audience came over to my side and recognized that Trump has, of course, upheld the Constitution. Other funny little bit about that debate was that, I didn't know this going in, apparently Mehdi Hassan, my debate opponent, wrote a book called How to Win Every Argument. I don't like win debates or something. So anyway, there's going to have to be a new addition to that book. There will be a little asterisk on there, how to win every debate, except against Michael Knowles. But it was a lot of fun. Mehdi and I had a nice dinner after with the students. So if you can find the debate, it's good to go watch. But in any case, another win for Trump, and we will get to what that means for the admin. First, though, we turn back to California. You remember the Palisades fire was last January? The left said it was caused by climate change. Then the right pointed out the reason the fire was so extreme in its burn was because of the failures of Democrat government. Gavin Newsom knew. Trump warned him. He knew that he had this deforestation problem. He knew that he had all this brush that he hadn't cleared away, and so that was just kindling for the fire. They were dumping a ton of water into the ocean because they wanted to protect the Delta smelter or something, so they didn't have water to put the fire out. It was a complete disaster. That's why it was so devastating. And then there were even some hints that the guy who started the fire might be a leftist. But now we know he's in court, the alleged arsonist, Jonathan Rindernacht. Thirty years old, he was, according to documents presented in court, obsessed with Luigi Mangione, the guy who murdered the United Healthcare CEO in cold blood. He routinely searched for free Luigi Mangione. He repeatedly searched for let's take down all the billionaires online. According to the documents, he started the fire out of a resentment of the rich. Every time. And what's so crazy and conservatives need to keep beating this drum is that today, even the liberal outlets like The Atlantic will admit that political violence is mostly a phenomenon on the left, not on the right. For years and years, they always told us political violence is mostly on the right. And they would cook their statistics a little bit and they would count, you know, Muslims as far right political violence. There's not a lot that a far right American conservative has to do with Islamic terror, but they would lump all this stuff in. But then the crucial part is they would not count left-wing violence. They would say BLM wasn't left-wing violence. They would say Antifa, blowing up my speech, wasn't left-wing violence. They would say that the trans-shooting at Covenant School wasn't left-wing violence. The shooting at the church in Minnesota wasn't left-wing violence. They could try to argue that the assassination of Charlie Kirk was not left-wing violence. And this too. This is not going to turn up in registers of left-wing violence. This fire in the Palisades caused a quarter of a trillion dollars in damage and killed a dozen people. And this guy, allegedly, was as explicitly leftist, ideologically motivated as it is possible to be. So, we stick around California because two nights ago we had the governor's debate. Maybe we'll get to a little bit of that. It was a total clown show. And ever since they took out Eric Swalwell, almost certainly a Democrat will win that governor's race. Then, focusing in on where that fire was, the L.A. Mayer debate. That was last night. And here we have a Republican who was absolutely incredible. This is Spencer Pratt. He's a reality TV star. Here is Spencer Pratt smacking down the utopian nonsense of the socialist candidate, Nithya Raman. Treatment first. I will go below the Harbor Freeway tomorrow with her. And we can find some of these people she's going to offer treatment for. She's going to get stabbed in the neck. These people do not want a bed. They want fentanyl or super meth. These ideas cost us over $400 million to house for $670 million. What did he say? 3,000 people for $400 million? This is absolute failure for both of them. They're a team. Great line. He says these people, they don't... They're defining features not that they lack homes. That's how the left wants to present it. This is why the left changed the language, by the way. We used to call these guys bums, vagrants, indigents. Then we started calling them homeless. But the defining feature of these people is not that they're homeless or unhoused. That's the new euphemism. I was unhoused for a lot of my life because I was apartmented. I was not... Happily, I've never had to live on the street. But I was... My defining feature was not that I lacked a house, or I had an apartment, or I lived in a condo or whatever. And the defining feature of these guys on the street is not that they do not have four walls and a roof over their heads. The defining feature is that they're mentally ill and drug addicts and often criminals. So he says, you want to go down and you care so much about the homeless, go down there, tell them you're going to bring them to a home. They're going to stab you. That's what they're going to do. Because their defining feature, the reason that they're in the condition that they're in, the reason that we're talking about them in a mayor debate, is because they're drug addicts. They don't want a home. They want meth. They want fentanyl. You're going to give them that? No. So if that's the problem, it's just totally shifting the focus. If that's the actual problem that brought them to the state that they're in, then you've got to solve that. And how are you going to solve that? The way the Libs want to solve that is give them drugs. The way the Libs want to solve that is safe injection sites, which just cause them more crime and which encourage people in their addictions. You're going to go do that? And then the test, of course, is, hey, go down there. Go talk to these people. Go tell them you're going to bring them to a home. What's going to happen? You and I both know you're going to get stabbed. Then Spencer Pratt goes on. He lays into less of a zinger and more of a substantive take on the matter when he takes on not only Nithya Raman, the socialist city council candidate for mayor, but also Karen Bass, who was a communist, an actual card-carrying communist. That's one of the reasons why Joe Biden couldn't pick her when he boxed himself in and said, I'm going to pick a black woman to be my VP is because Karen Bass is as radical as they come. He takes both of them on, on the more substantive matter of being mayor. Well, the good news is when I enforce the law and clear the street of the drug addicts that have taken over 40 blocks of downtown LA, abandoned buildings that have drug addicts just lighting them on fire every other day. I will have potentially 20,000 units available to build. And thankfully, I spent a lot of time in a town that has a lot of builders and I see all the new 3D printing and the potential of how fast we can do it. And with this ED-1 that Mayor Bass is talking about, I met with a developer this week, Carlos, and he said, yes, she did initiative where she fast-tracked at six months. It's been two and a half years and he hasn't been able to get his permits. The best part is some of these developers that are taking over tax money are charging $750 a square foot for stuff that should be costing $250. And Councilwoman Rahman, this plan that she's going to build all these years, guess what? She's going to sue all the people that actually rents to the tenants and then they're not going to even want to rent to anybody because she wants people to squat in there for a year and not pay. So I don't know how her plan is going to work. I love this little bit in the debate because we do this sometimes. We Republicans. We go into races that we're probably going to lose and we just run some shock jock. We run a guy who really should be on talk radio or podcasts and we run him as if he's a politician. He gets some good zinger lines in, but no one really thinks that he can get his hands into the nitty-gritty of government. This is a broader complaint about the right, unfortunately. I was discussing this last night. I was at an event here in Tampa, Florida, and I said one of the structural issues for the right is that everyone on the right doesn't want to be a politician, doesn't want to go make laws, doesn't want to go be an activist and an organizer. The people on the right want to be broadcasters. They want to have a podcast. You can look, elected officials, after they win their seat, they will start podcasts, appointed officials, same thing. It seems as if people on the right run for office in order to get on TV. And people on the left, they like the limelight a little bit too, but their podcasts aren't as good and they never succeeded at talk radio. Their cable channels always flop because it's the opposite for the left. The left goes on TV in order to affect political change. The right gets into politics in order to get on TV. And so the thing I love about this answer here from Spencer Pratt is it's showing he actually has a keen awareness of the nitty gritty of the government. He says, yeah, look, we're developing at this price per square foot, but really, we're getting these crazy contracts for double that price per square foot. And here are the number of buildings and here are the buildings that are vacant and here's what's going to happen when these guys take over the buildings. And here's how the buildings relate to the government. It's the nitty gritty of politics, which I love. It's not as sexy. That's not the clip that's going to go viral. But what that signals to me is this guy kind of has it all. He's got that reality TV charisma. He got the Riz. He's got the right opinion after left wing incompetence and terrorism has destroyed LA, Gamora by the sea, I guess better than it being destroyed like the other Gamora was. But nevertheless, it's in a really sorry state. So if the voters are ever going to be primed for Republican, now would be the moment. And he's demonstrated that he actually could run the city. There was another clip of him at a political event at Canvassing and they said, well, what do you say to people who point out that you don't have any experience in politics? He says, look at what experience got us. It burned the whole city down and now we have crackheads running the streets and you can't go anywhere at night. Look at what experience got us. Here's what I will do and he gets into the details. I love it. Again, LA is probably so far gone that it ain't going to happen. But this is a really good start and I have not seen an LA mayor candidate this good at both sides of it. There have actually been pretty decent LA Republican mayor candidates, but this good at the charisma part and the substantive part in quite a while. So fingers crossed, fingers crossed. I wouldn't bet the farm on it though. Now, speaking of the farm, we look to the illegal immigration problem. There is a huge white pill out on the deportations. I know a lot of conservatives, myself included, we want to see more deportations. We have something like 20 million illegals in this country. President Trump formally deported about 700,000 in the first year and then there were, we heard about a million, million and a half self deportations. And that, I think it's really well substantiated in the studies, but that seems a little more nebulous, right? What do we mean by self deportations? What do you mean, what, is there an effect to the Trump crackdowns beyond just the people that they're formally removing? That's the big question, beyond just the viral social media clips. When Trump deport 700,000, are we only deporting 700,000 or is there more to it? And Forbes has a great report on this. We'll get to it momentarily. And then we'll get to the big Marco Rubio question that is taking over the Internet. Marco Rubio just stood in for the press briefing at the White House, took over for Caroline Levitt for a day. He did a really phenomenal job. He's getting really great reviews and he gave one answer on what is America? The question of America 250. What is America? And he gave an answer that everybody loves that I don't love. This might be my most contrarian take. I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of angry comments about it. By the way, if you haven't commented, comment now and subscribe. Make sure you ring that bell. We'll get to both those things. First though, I want to tell you about Helix. Go to helixsleep.com. You cannot go out and save Western civilization if you spent the whole night losing a wrestling match with your mattress. Now, I've had some, I've had good mattresses in my life. I've had bad mattresses in my life. You know what mattress I love? My Helix mattresses, multiple Helix mattresses. And I'm about to get another one, by the way, because I think we're going to, I'm going to get another guest room and I think we're going to get another. Anyway, they're so, so good. And all the mattresses are different because you take their sleep quiz. They match you to the perfect mattress for you, whether you like it a little firmer, a little softer, whether you sleep hot sometimes, it's supportive, it's comfortable. It is just absolutely phenomenal. There's a reason that's got all those great reviews. It's got free shipping, 129 sleep trial, limited lifetime warranty. It is the most awarded mattress brand reviewed by real experts. So right now, go to helixsleep.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. You'll get 27% off. Helixsleep.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S, 27% off. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so that they know that we sent you. Head on over to what you're doing right now. Put a pause, stop, pull the car over, pull out the phone, go to helixsleep.com slash Knowles. Great report out of Forbes showing something that I don't know that they intended to show. ICE immigration enforcement has harmed U.S. workers' research shows. New research finds that immigration and customs enforcement activity has harmed U.S. born workers. Well, how's that? The findings contradict a central policy justification for ICE raids and arrest quotas last year. Earlier this year, they go on blah, blah, blah, ICE agents killed two Americans in Minneapolis who were like driving their cars into ICE agents, blah, blah, blah, blah. Immigration enforcement search did not help U.S. born workers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, why is this bad? Well, it's because, according to Forbes, for every, according to the research in the average area, approximately six undocumented immigrants dropped out of the labor force for every one ICE arrest. Now, why does that not help U.S. born workers? I agree. One thing that does do is cause disruptions to the labor force. That causes disruptions to American business. Yeah, it does all that stuff. American business, big business, loved illegal immigration. Don't forget it. It wasn't just the left. The left loved illegal immigration because they thought it would give them a permanent electoral majority. Maybe it will. The right, some parts of the right, loved illegal immigration because it helped big business to pay slave wages. So immigration enforcement here is not just pulling the illegal aliens that they arrest out of the workforce. It's causing approximately six illegal aliens to drop out of the labor force for every one ICE arrest. Not only is that not a bad thing, not only is that bad news for U.S. workers in the labor market, that is a great start. This is the cascading effect of immigration enforcement. Some people criticize Trump because they said he's doing all these really flamboyant raids and they're really glossy videos at DHS showing the raids in these different cities and pulling the illegals off the street. And, you know, all they're really doing is riling up the base, but they're not deporting enough illegals. And what people failed to understand is that those videos, that kind of propaganda, has an effect on deportations. When an illegal alien sees the cops go raid the company down the street, he is less likely to show up to work the next day. And that's good. We don't want him to show up to work the next day because we don't want him to be in the country because we... he's violating our laws and we want him to go home. And if he wants to immigrate, he can apply for immigration and we can have a debate over legal immigration. We'll get to that a little bit in the Marco Rubio comments. But we want that. I remember when the illegal immigration debate really began to surge again 10, 15 years ago, Ann Coulter wrote a great book called, Audio of Samarica. She was doing a tour about immigration and someone said, well, we can't just let these people, these then 11 million illegal aliens, we can't just let them live in the shadows. What are we going to... we have to give them amnesty. We have to because otherwise we're going to let them live in the shadows and we can't do that. And Ann Coulter said, yes, we can. Certainly it would be much better to let them live in the shadows than it would be to give them amnesty, which is a total violation of our law, total violation of the desires of voters, total violation of basic national sovereignty. But two, when people are living in the shadows, especially when there's immigration enforcement, especially when they're iced out of financial institutions, which is one of the proposals from the Trump White House, to force the banks to report on the citizenship status of their customers. And when they're concerned that if they show up to work, they're going to be raided, so they drop out of labor force. When that happens, that creates pressure from all sorts of angles to get these people to deport themselves. And that did happen. We had over a million self deportations last year. We are not going to deport 20 million people. Period. We're not going to deport 20 million people. But we're, even if we really wanted to, even if we had the political will, we are not going to deport 20 million people on airplanes with ice agents plucking them off the street. It's not possible. There is not enough time, certainly in one presidential term, probably not in three presidential terms. So the only way that you're going to do this is by throwing everything at the problem. You're going to pay illegal aliens a thousand bucks to download the app and use the geolocation and check in when they get back to their country of origin. You pay them a thousand bucks. It's a lot cheaper than arresting them. You're going to obviously enforce the border. You're going to raid the workplaces. You're going to squeeze them on their financial institutions. You're going to go on down the line. That's the only way it's going to work. This is great, great news, and it shows you that a lot is being done here. You have to get kind of creative for the deportation problem. But six workers dropping out for every one illegal that's arrested, that's a good start. Now, this brings me to the viral clip. The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, takes over the press briefing, gets rave reviews from everybody, and he was charming. He was risen up, the reporters. He was quoting old school rap. He really did great. I mean, he is a really, really good politician. And so I don't want my ensuing comments to be misconstrued as some knock on Rubio. I think he's doing a very good job. But the answer that is going viral, Elon posted it, everyone's posting it. Marco Rubio posted it as maybe a sign that he does in fact want to run for president, even though he's previously said he wouldn't run if the vice president runs. These comments to me, I think I'm the one man in America who didn't like these comments. We'll get to that momentarily. First, though, I want to tell you about Brickhouse Nutrition. 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Get started with 20% off and free rush shipping so you can add lean to your healthy diet and exercise plan. Go to takelean.com, enter code NOLS, Canada WLS, for your discount. That is promo code NOLS, Canada WLS at takelean.com. The Rubio press briefing answer that broke the internet. What is America? America is a place where you can overcome challenges and achieve your full potential. I think that should be the goal of every country in the world, but I think in the US we're not perfect. Our history is not one of perfection, but it's still better than anybody else's history. And ours is a story of perpetual improvement. Each generation has left the next generation of Americans freer, more prosperous, safer. And that is our goal as well. And as we come upon this 250 year anniversary, I think we have a lot to learn and be proud of in our history. It is one of perpetual and continuous improvement where each generation has done its part to bring us closer to fulfilling the vision that the founders of this country had upon its founding. Okay, everybody loves it. And you can see Rubio there. Look, he's putting this out himself. He's comparing himself to Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. So the signs are beginning to show that maybe Mr. Rubio does in fact want to run for president, contrary to his predestinations before. Anyway, we'll see. We'll see about that. The answer though, I don't love it. And I know you say, how could you not love it? It's so hopeful. It's so wonderful. It's the kind of thing Ronald Reagan could have said in 1980. Yeah, that's the problem. That's kind of the problem, I think, because it's not 1980 anymore. And it's not that I have any problem with 90% of the individual lines that the Secretary of State said here. Yeah, we don't want people to be discriminated against by their race or their poverty or wealth when they were born or this, that or the other thing. But it's all taken together. One, he says here at the end, you know, and we're every generation is getting better and we're just always flowering and becoming what our founding fathers wanted us to become. So that in itself is a progressive view of history. Even though Marco Rubio is a conservative and he's a Republican and he's doing a great job in the Trump administration, the view of history that he is articulating is a very progressive view. That America is always getting better and we're always improving and every generation is building upon the successes of the last one. And that isn't true. That isn't true. Things are not better today than they were 70 years ago by most measures. Here's the most basic measure. We don't have kids anymore. We don't get married and have kids, which means that our country is on an existential decline. We don't have social solidarity anymore. We don't have fiscal responsibility anymore. We have a debt to GDP ratio around 100% and we are teetering on the brink of insolvency. We are not the unchallenged global hegemon anymore. We are now being challenged by countries like China. We are no longer a morally cohesive nation. We don't really even have a strong moral vision. We've done our very best to route God out of the public square. That's not an improvement. That's a degradation. In crucial ways, in some of the most basic ways, things have gotten worse and people know it. This is why when Ronald Reagan would say this in 1980, when he was restoring hope to America, it rang a little different than it does in 2026. Then my bigger problem with the comment is it presents a vision of America that is limitless. America is the place where you can be whatever you want to be. That is a very liberal view of politics. That's a very liberal view of America. We like the idea. I didn't come for money. I didn't come for money. My family was not a big political family or anything like that. It's really great that in other societies, maybe I would have just been limited to the circumstances of whatever geographic area I was born in, I wouldn't be able to move. Maybe I would be limited by educational opportunities or whatever. In America, there's much more freedom there. That's all great. I love that. But is America the place where you can be anything you want to be, where anyone can be anything he wants to be? How about an illegal alien wanting to be an American citizen? Can we do that? That's being anything you want to be. And there are a lot of people in America who very much think that the promise of America, the vision of the founders, not as they understood it, but properly fulfilled, is that illegal aliens get to become Americans. There are a lot of people who voted for amnesty, who tried to push amnesty before. A lot of Republicans too, aren't there? I don't want that. I want there to be a limit. I don't want illegal aliens to become American citizens. Can a boy become a girl? Can a boy become a girl? You think that's a silly comparison? I don't think it's so silly. There are a lot of people in America, even some Republicans, who have argued in recent years before we eradicated transgenderism from public life entirely, there are a lot of people who argued, well, yes, the freedom means the ability to be whatever you want for a man to identify as a woman. That's the true vision of the founders, not as they understood it, but as it has flowered and progressed over history through endless improvement. I don't think so. I think a man has to be a man and should not be a woman. Can marriage be anything other than a union between a man and a woman? Many people think so, including many Republicans. Indeed, Justice Kennedy, when he was rewriting marriage in the Obergefell decision, he said that we have the right to pursue intimacy, as however we like. And he was building upon his own jurisprudence from another case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, where he included the sweet mystery of life passage. He says we have a right to define the mystery of life. Do we have a right to define what life is and redefine what life is? Are we Humpty Dumpty, where words just mean whatever we say they mean, nothing more, nothing less? No, no. I'm afraid that the limitless version of America, the truly limitless version, is really at the heart of our national problem right now, because we don't know what America is. We no longer, many of our politicians won't even say that America is a people. We'll say no, America is just an idea. But then you press them on it, you say, okay, well, what's the idea? And they say the idea is not having any limits. The idea is any idea. The idea is contradictory ideas. They can't even give an answer on what the idea is. That's the perversity of the limitless liberal version of America. Coupled with the manifest falsehood of the progressive vision of America, the things are just always going to get better. They're not getting better. Part of the reason Trump was elected is because things were not getting better. They were getting worse. I don't, I don't like that answer. I'm being very harsh on the Secretary of State here, and I don't mean to, because I really don't want this to be misinterpreted. He has done, in his actual job, in the things he's doing, he has done an exceptional job as the Secretary of State. But this stuff, this warmed over and acronistic pseudo-Raganism, no. I like the real re, I like Ronald Reagan as president. I think he did a good job for his time. But this idea that we're just going to take Reaganism, we're going to infuse it with even more liberalism, even more progressivism. And then we're going to displace it in history, and we're saying America is just where anything, anyone can be anything. I don't, I think that's missing the moment. I feel, I understand why that's very popular. Because it feels good, it feels nostalgic, and it's, it's, it's appealing to a more liberal base of the country, lower case L, liberal base of the country. But I don't like that. I don't like that. I don't like that that went viral. I like many other answers from the Secretary of State much more than I like that one. Ironic that that's the one that's probably gotten the most plot. It's, okay, speaking of the future of the Republican Party, this is a big question. Is Trump still controlling the GOP, or has he lost his mojo? The election results are in, just like I talked about at the top of the show. In certain debates, you don't have to wonder, it's not just subjective. I think he won, I think he won. Certain debates, you get to the end and say, well, we're going to take a vote. And one of you is actually going to win. Well, that's what happened just this week when President Trump was put to the test. Would the GOP candidates that he ran against, who crossed him on some of his initiatives, would they win their elections or would they lose their elections? Big question, as President Trump is looking at the end of his term-limited, second term, to the future of the GOP, what are we going to believe in, what are we going for? Folks, all week I've been talking about Luke Rosiak's groundbreaking report in the Daily Wire on the fraud in Ohio, $1.2 billion in Medicaid fraud. This is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot more coming out on this, and there's a lot more premium reporting. We're investing very, very heavily in premium, serious investigative journalism. The place to get it is on the Daily Wire app. So download it in the App Store, iOS, it's for Android, it's everywhere. Make sure you get it. This is mission-driven stuff. This is changing the conversation, looking ahead to the midterms toward 2028 and so on. Got to really get the word out there. A little bit of that strong investigative work can carry a lot of weight politically. So head on over to dailywire.com right now. My favorite comment yesterday, once again from the Drummer's Workshop, Norm's Music. I think we just need to change, we're just going to change my favorite comment of the day. I'm just going to assume that every day, we get zillions of comments, and every day, like, it's crazy. I don't do this intentionally, I just read the comment and seven days out of ten, it's Drummer's Workshop, Norm's Music. Who says, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed black quadriplegic trans woman with cerebral palsy is king, and also queen? So true. In the land of the Met Gala, looking at the future of the GOP, here we have from Politico. With Indiana, Trump asserts his grip on the GOP. The president successfully ousted a majority of the Republican state senators who blocked his redistricting effort last year. You know how much I hate to say, I told you so. MAGA is Trump. MAGA is not what some podcaster says, myself included. MAGA is not what some live streamer says. MAGA is not what some pundit or philosopher or governor or senator says. MAGA is Trump. It's his movement. And MAGA and the GOP, at least today, remain basically synonymous. Trump said, here's what I want to do for redistricting. There are a bunch of state senators in Indiana who said, whatever, Trump's on his way out, we don't need to worry about the old man anymore, he's unpopular now, we don't forget about him. We're going to do our own thing. He says, okay, you do your own thing, I'm going to primary you. I'm going to get rid of you. That was the showdown. It's the vote at the end of the debate. Who won? Trump won. Trump won. A reminder, once again, that there is, in fact, a chasm between Twitter and real life. And I'm not surprised by this result at all. Not surprised at all. Because politics is not done in the limitless realm of the ideas and the forums floating in outer space. Politics is done by real men, raising real money, going into real towns, beating up real candidates on TV and radio and ads, and Trump won. And he's still winning. And people should come to terms with that. Okay, now we turn from the GOP to the other party. Amazing video. Kamala Harris has stepped out. Do you remember her? She was like a model, but she kind of looked a little bit like an androgynous, hipster, classic, lib lady. And she has gone viral now because, put aside public policy or whatever, Kamala Harris' stepdaughter, like statistically every single young leftist woman, is on depression drugs, specifically SSRIs. And some of us conservatives have been throwing out the warning signs on SSRIs for a long time. It is weird that something like, I think it's 15% today of all American women are on these drugs, these depression drugs that mess up your brain and make you think and feel differently. And when you include the other anti-depression drugs, it gets closer to one in five. And then when you look at certain demographics, older women, women, 50 or 60 plus, you're looking at one in four of these women or just hopped up on these drugs all the time. And finally, even a liberal, a leftist, Kamala Harris is a stepdaughter, comes out and says, hey, maybe? Drugging all these women with these heavy psych drugs forever? Maybe that's not a good thing. Calling out the lack of research on long-term use of these things, they were calling out the lack of information that doctors give about coming off of these meds and kind of the psychological effects they can have. And it really got me thinking how little I've thought about that naively, obviously, but I've noticed that every time I've gone off of it for a week or missed it or for whatever reason, like it has been really hard for me and I've had a really hard time. And I guess this is just something I was wondering if you guys have thought about or relate to or kind of consider when you're thinking about going on meds like that. Because I don't know if this is something that I feel like is being talked about enough because I feel like so many of us are on these meds and this is like actually happening, like people get off of them and they kind of break down and it could be really bad. So yeah, I guess I just want your general thoughts. Love that. I already got her general thoughts. That's all I need to know because this woman has been on the drugs for over 10 years. How old is she? I don't know. I probably should have looked this up before the show. How old is she? 30? Maybe younger. She's been on these drugs for a third of her life or more. And she's not unusual, by the way. The prescription of SSRIs to teenage girls has skyrocketed in recent years. And we think that's just like fine. It's so funny how we treat some drugs like their drugs and other drugs like their magic with no side effects whatsoever. The first question to ask when you have all these women, especially young women, but what one in five women almost on these heavy psych depression drugs is why are the women so depressed? Why are the women so depressed? We can measure female happiness. There was a famous study that came out of Yale which showed that female depression directly correlated with the rise of feminism. Miracle incidents? I don't know. Not only did women's happiness decrease along with men's happiness decreasing, but it decreased much more. So instead of, next question you have to ask, why is it mostly the liberal women on these drugs? Do you meet a lot of conservative women on SSRIs? You meet some. There are some, for sure. And maybe in acute mental breaks, an SSRI is a way to get someone past a really dangerous moment. But the women who have been on this for years, 10 years, why is it always the liberal women? Why is it always the leftist women? Is it because they just suffer so much more in this world? Or is it maybe the reverse? Is it maybe that these women having a false view of the world and our place in the world, having unrealistic expectations of the world, limitless expectations of the world, notably among liberals, is it that their expectations budding up against reality causes them to become sad? And so rather than deal with their mental and behavioral problems, they decide to just ply themselves with drugs. What do these drugs do? We did a Michael and on this. Michael and the Good Doctor with Dr. Joseph, which you can get on the Michael Laws YouTube channel right now. Just search them. Michael and the Good Doctor, Michael and Dr. Joseph. We talked about this very, very issue some months ago. What do the drugs do? Do the drugs make you happier? No. The way that they work is by emotional blunting. So they just make you feel less of everything. They make you less empathetic. They are turning one in five American women into sociopaths. But they're like really bluntly. And we see this. We see this. I mean this really relates even to the top on the left wing terror issue. How many of these leftists, how many of these shooters, how many of these wackos are on all sorts of weird psych drugs? So we just ply these women with all of these drugs. We turn them into drug addicts. If this woman were doing cocaine, we'd call her what she is, a drug addict. But because a doctor in a lab coat prescribed her these heavy, heavy psych meds that blunt her emotions and that take away her empathy, we say that, oh no, she's just taking her medicine. No. We've turned these women into drug addict sociopaths trying to put a bandaid over the problem, which is that they were told their whole lives and they insist upon living in a way that is contrary to reality. And rather than telling them to like, hey lady, get with the program. Sorry. A man can't become a woman and marriage is between a man and a woman and women are physically not as strong as men. And men usually relate a little bit better in the workplace and women by the way are a little more nurturing and having babies is good. And just the gods of the copy book headings, the old common sense that everybody knew for all of history until five seconds ago, rather than just telling them that they need to put limits on their utopian, idenic fantasies about what life is, the kind of lies that the serpent told Eve in the Garden of Eden, you shall be his gods, rather than telling them like, hey, those are lies, don't do it. We just tell them, hey, no, you can keep believing all that stuff and we're just going to blunt all your emotions and make you a sociopath. And then by the way, if you ever try to get off the drugs, you're going to have horrific withdrawal for years. Doesn't seem like a good idea. And it's not just the conservatives noticing it. It's the Libs. It's the women who are on these drugs. And so then the question becomes, all right, if you've recognized the problem that we've all been calling out for 10 years or longer, now what are we going to do about it? Are you liberal women willing to make the changes in your mind and in your behavior that will get you off the drugs or allow you to get off the drugs? Or are you going to avoid the drugs? Or no, you're going to keep putting the bandaid over it. Speaking of crazy women, women's gone very viral in Austria because she tied herself to a bell, like the inside of the bell. She is the little, you know, the thing swinging back and forth in the bell. And she tied herself up by her feet and she took off all her clothes first, then she tied herself up by her feet and then she's swinging naked back and forth in the bell, ringing the bell with her body while her, I think, the technical term of the day, the technical term is bazoombas or just swinging all around in the Austrian public square. And I guess she's doing this to protest climate change, of course. I can't help but notice though, have you noticed this? Left wing women will find any excuse to get naked in public. Have you noticed this phenomenon? I can't help, doesn't matter the issue, sometimes it's climate change. You saw this, the Extinction Rebellion in the House of Commons, this was a few years ago. A bunch of these liberal women walked in and just stripped down and got naked in the House of Commons to protest climate change. But then sometimes it's to protest gender inequality. So there was the Argentinian topless movement where these liberal women show up and they just take their clothes off because they wanted to take their clothes off on the beach because, not because they wanted to show off their bodies, offensively, but because they wanted to have equality with men. Because, you know, men get to take their shirts off on the beach, so women, obviously, who are exactly the same as men, obviously, they wanted to take their tops off too. But then you even see this, they're the slut walks, protesting, suppose it double standards, but just really just a standard, recognizing that men and women are different. They'll just walk down Santa Monica, walk down the street marching nude and I can't, I tell you exactly why they're doing this. They say they're doing this for gender equality or the climate or whatever political reason. I suspect not to dabble too much into psycho babble. Since the first woman walked out of the cave to attract the first man, women have known that their bodies look nice, especially the good looking women. They know that their bodies look nice and they know that this has a power to them. And they like to show themselves, oh, there we go, they're finally playing the clip of this crazy woman. Okay, here we are. So, they know this. And they know that their bodies look nice and that has a certain power to it. And in the old normal society, when we knew that men and women are different, viv la différence, you know. In the old society, when women knew that a lot of their power lay in their sex, this is the premise of Lysistrata by Aristophanes, the idea that women want the men to stop going to war so they're just going to deprive them of sex and that's going to stop all the wars in the world and we recognize this over the years. And so women would go out and they'd show off their bodies to men, they'd wear a nice dress, you know, I don't know, they'd wear a shorter skirt or something. They were working it. But now you're not allowed to do that because that's very paternalistic, patriarchal, sexist, outdated, anti-feminist. So now women need to march and protest it, but they're doing the same thing because they know that their bodies look nice and they know that their bodies give them power over men. So they're doing the same thing. It's just previously they would kind of smile and wink while they did it and now they're frowning and looking a little crazier while they do it. But it's the same thing. It's just women who want to show off their hot bodies. That's all it is. They're like a boy crazed girl, but they need layers and layers of political nonsense on top of it. So they're swinging from the bell and the only reason it's going viral, well, it's going viral and it has nothing to do with the climate. Let's put it that way. Now speaking of women, I'm sorry, there's a story I have to get to. I'm sorry, I know you want me to go. There's a story I have to get to. Hunter Schaefer. Do you know Hunter Schaefer? Hunter Schaefer is a man. I don't know his real name. Maybe it's Hunter, but he identifies as a woman and he is an actor of some sort. And MTV from the Met Gala just posted this clip says, the prettiest girl in the world, Hunter Schaefer is the prettiest girl in the world. And you would think this is kind of offensive to women. Of all the girls, of all the women. You say women, you can't even be pretty. The prettiest woman is actually a man. All you other fat, ugly women, you're nothing compared to this man in a dress. The prettiest girl in the world. And it got me thinking about Hunter Schaefer because there was a really spooky post that Hunter Schaefer once made to social media. I think he deleted it. But it was a manifesto of sorts. A manifesto on his own gender identity. And it looks like the manifesto of a school shooter. It's eerily similar to actual manifestos of actual trans school shooters that we've seen before. And in it, he explains that his gender identity does not flow out of the strange quirk that he was born in the wrong body, but he really wants to be his true feminine self because he recognizes the beauty of femininity. And no. He says that he thinks he's a woman because he has a sexual fetish and perversion specifically to be abused by men. In other words, his transgenderism does not come from a place of true identity, obviously. And it does not even come from a place of an adulation for women. It comes from a place of misogyny, a hatred of women. Here he says, to be consumed, my sexual orientation was not gay, it was not straight or pan. It was an attraction. And there's kind of all weird little bubbles and stuff. His words, not mine. It was an attraction to misogyny. Why did I need or want to be a woman? My gender was so influenced by a need to be used by men. So it was a sexual fetish that comes from an exaltation of masculinity and the worst kind of masculinity to hate and punish women. And then he gives this list of the varying degrees of identity. Straight boy to bi. So maybe you started out straight. Straight boy to bi, to gay boy, to straight woman, to gay woman, to queer person, and finally to death. And it is a kind of death. In the transgender identity, the big ritual, the right, the sacrament, is the coming out and away from the dead name. You say my old identity is dead. I have now suffered a death, but I'm this new, like phoenix rising from the ashes. I'm this new person. And then it goes even into this weird kind of cannibalistic thing, the act of eating, consumption. The term of being eaten used to abuse me is this misogyny, this idea. And this really reminds me of C.S. Lewis, of the screw tape letters. Where screw tape is describing two kinds of love. Like I love you. I desire you. There's one kind of love where you say, I desire my wife. I desire my wife. I want to join together with my wife in such a way that does not take away from either of us. But actually is so real that it creates another person. That's the love of a man for a woman. It is a love that grows, that produces, that makes more of itself. Then there's the love I have for my hoagie. The love I have for my hoagie. I'm not making a weird Michael Hoagie hybrid here. I love the hoagie. I want the hoagie in a very different way than I want my wife. I want the hoagie so that I can consume it and destroy it and take it into myself. And what Hunter Schaefer is saying here is, my desire, my identity, my sense of gender is not one of love, of consummation, of apotheosis. My sense of gender is one of destruction. It's directly cannibalistic and it comes from misogyny. Prettiest girl in the world. Prettiest girl in the world. Maybe this is a person who could at least briefly use the SSRIs, but then hopefully get off the SSRIs. This is to tie it all the way back. This is the consequence of a limitless vision of society. It's a vision that ignores reality and we pretend, like we're Alice in Wonderland, we pretend like we're listening to the serpent in the Garden of Eden, that all limits are really bad because they oppress us, because they keep us down, they stop us from exercising our freedom. And there are unjust limits, but the limits of reality are good. And it is only within the limits of reality that we can exercise our freedom. It is only within the limits of a poem, of meter, perhaps rhyme, of words on a page, that we can actually have poetry. And furthermore, it's only within good, just natural limits that we can have a flourishing society. Okay, rest of the show continues now. You do not want to miss it. 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