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The Matt Walsh Show
Ep. 1652 - A Comedian Was Jailed In The UK For JOKES. Is Britain Now North Korea?
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Today my Wall Show A comedian is arrested in the UK for making fun of trans people on Twitter. At what point do we start treating the UK like North Korea or any other totalitarian state? Also, another potential BLM martyr is sabotaged by body cams, a black comedian does a viral skit in white face and a senator says that only Iranian theocrats think that human rights come from God. I can think of a few other people who held that view. Thomas Jefferson for one. Talk about all that and more today in the Matt Walsh this episode is brought to you by Prize Picks. You and I make decisions every day, but on Prize Picks Being right can get you paid. Don't miss any of the excitement this season on Prize Picks where it's good to be right. I'm excited to see how some of these teams match up this year and I love how Prize Picks has all their player projections so I can watch the games and keep track of how well the players do versus how much they, you know, suck. 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But download the app today and use Code Walsh to get $50 in lineups after you play your first five dollar lineup. That's code Walsh to get $50 in lineups after you play two your first $5 lineup prize picks it's good to be right. Well, it's too early to write any kind of definitive assessment about the America first movement, but one observation that we can make, and it's very welcome change, is that foreign affairs don't matter as much to Americans as they once did. The internal dysfunction of other nations thousands of miles away from our borders simply isn't that relevant to most people anymore. It was never relevant, but now millions of people realize that. Take the recent attacks on the right to freedom of speech, for example. We discussed how Australia outlaw certain forms of prayer, saying it's akin to conversion therapy. Meanwhile, the UK sentenced a mother named Lucy Connelly to 30 months in prison because of a mean tweet that she wrote about so called asylum seekers, which she deleted after three hours. Connolly's arrest, according to British journalists, was one of about 30 arrests concerning online speech that take place every day. Yes, every day in the uk. We talked about all these cases when they were in the news. These are important stories because they illustrate the decline of Western nations, which we share some history with, obviously. But at the same time, it's hard for most Americans to get too worked up over any of those incidents because our own country has similar problems. And simply by virtue of the fact that these problems are taking place within our borders, these problems are then vastly more important. Just a few days ago, a mother in Minnesota was charged for saying a racial slur, something that isn't a crime, was never a crime under our Constitution. But the Constitution isn't operative anymore in the state of Minnesota. And that's an infinitely bigger issue than anything that's happening in Australia or the UK or Canada or anywhere else outside of our borders. Now, that being said, there are some stories that although they originate overseas, they do implicate the free speech rights of Americans in a very direct and unprecedented way. And the recent arrest of a comedy writer named Graham Linehan is one of those cases. This is a case that's so egregious and so obviously threatening to American interests and our constitutional rights that it should result in immediate sanctions against every senior official in the UK Government as well as the elimination of diplomatic relations between our two nations. The United States should treat the UK no differently than, say, Iran or North Korea for the indefinite future. And the State Department should make it very clear that American citizens should avoid traveling to the UK for their own safety. So here's the basic factual background before we get into the broader implications for Americans. 57 year old Graham Linehan is an Irish citizen. He's best known for his work on the 1990s comedy series Father Ted. And on Monday he was in Arizona preparing to board a flight to London's Heathrow Airport. The reason he was going back to London is that on Thursday he was supposed to stand trial on charges of, quote, harassing an 18 year old campaigner for transgender rights, whatever that means. Exactly. Now, at the gate, he was told that for some unknown reason, he needed to be re ticketed and assigned a new seat. That was a potential sign that his reservation had been flagged in the ticketing system by the authorities. And indeed, upon landing at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting for Graham Linehan. The moment he got off the plane, the officers escorted Graham to a private room at the airport, at which point they informed him that he was being arrested for posting three inflammatory tweets on X. And then, by his account, Linehan openly began laughing at the officers because the whole thing was just too absurd. But it wasn't a joke. The officers explained that indeed they were arresting this man because of three posts that he had made on X and they only released him from jail and bail on the condition that he doesn't post any more messages on X for any reason. So he's barred from communicating on this particular social media platform for the foreseeable future. To restate on his way to stand trial for offending trans activists in the uk. The police in the UK arrested Graham Linehan on a separate charge for offending trans activists. Once again, through his online posts, they're now silencing him completely because these three tweets are just so awful and intolerable. Now, at the risk of being arrested myself the next time I travel to the uk, a country that's already promised to punish people who retweet offensive content, I'm going to. I'm going to show you each of these three offending tweets right now. So batten down the hatches, grab onto something stable. This could get a little dicey. Here's the first offending post. Quote, if a trans identified male is in a female only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act, make a scene, call the cops, and if all else fails, punch him in the balls. Close quote. Yes, that's the first offending tweet which led to the arrest of the comedian who wrote it after he landed following a 10 hour flight. Now this shouldn't need to be explained, but this is not incitement to violence or whatever they claim. Now yes, it's true that if you take the comedian, he's a comedian literally, he tweeted about an act of violence against a certain subset of people. He said that those people should be punched in the balls. But his post was not intended obviously to produce any imminent criminal action and his post was not likely to produce any imminent criminal action either, and therefore it's not criminal. You know, he didn't say, at 8 o' clock tonight everyone should go out and find this particular trans identifying male and punch him in the balls and then post like the home address of the target. Now if you do that just to anybody, then yes, that would be unlawful. That is incitement to violence. What Graham did by contrast, was to assert that men who invade the private spaces of women, as a general matter, are a physical threat and should be punched to the balls. It's a general comment that in context is intended to be somewhat humorous. The writer is, after all, a comedian. He was not inciting any lawless action, he wasn't targeting any particular individual. He was pointing out to comedic effect that so called trans women, quote, unquote, have testicles. Like, that's, that's the fact. To explain this to the cops in the uk, that was the point. This is a distinction that might require some nuance to understand, but it is a very, very important distinction. I mean, it doesn't, it's not hard to understand if you have a IQ above 70, but. So it really shouldn't be hard. But if you erase this distinction, as the left is intent on doing, then free speech disappears as well. That's because, as we all know, it's extremely, extremely easy for activists to claim that that certain speech is supposedly threatening. If you remove the requirement that unlawful speech must contain an imminent threat and that this threat must be likely to produce imminent unlawful action, then pretty much all right wing speech will become illegal overnight. They'll be able to label every right wing policy as a threat to commit trans genocide and so on. And of course that's their goal. They want to imprison every single conservative for hate speech as soon as they possibly can. Now, for what it's worth, not many people saw this particular tweet from this comedian, at least not before the UK government blew it up. It had something like a hundred thousand views in total, which is not many on, on the social media platform. But. But even if 50 million people saw it, everything that he wrote would be completely reasonable. In a free society, you're allowed to make comments like that. But the UK is not a free society and it hasn't been for quite some time. Now, to be fair to the government in the uk, there were two other allegedly offending tweets that this comedian wrote. Here's one of them. It shows a photo of some kind of trans rights rally. And as a caption to the photo, the comedian wrote, quote, a photo you can smell. Now, I've thought about this for some time. Admittedly, I can't come up with any argument for why this would be illegal or even remotely controversial. It's a straightforward observation, like the kind of thing you might hear, you know, David Attenborough make if he ever had the misfortune of narrating a rally full of trans activists. The rally obviously smelled terrible. None of these people demonstrate any interest in personal hygiene. Everyone knows that. It's very obvious he's pointing that out, so what's the big deal? In fact, I would even argue that technically he doesn't say that. It's. He says it's a photo you could smell. He doesn't say it smells bad. Maybe he meant to say that it looks like it smells like roses in there. I can't imagine anyone having that visceral reaction to the photo. But who knows? Now, as best I can tell, the real issue here maybe is the follow up tweet. Again, this one refers to the trans activists in the photo. And here's what the comedian wrote, quote, I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes f them. So apparently this is the issue. He wrote some nasty words about these people. I guess there's no, there's nothing that you could even, even if you were bending over backwards, there's nothing in that that you could view as an incitement to violence or a threat of violence. He just insults them, says, I hate these people and they're misogynist and homophobes. Apparently it's illegal in the UK to refer to trans activists as misogynists and homophobes and to direct swear words at them. Or maybe you can't say you hate these people now, it's fine for them to say, you know, f terfs and to call you Nazis and to say they Hate you and to call you a misogynist and homophobe, get you fired from your job, celebrate the deaths of Catholic children who are praying in church, all that kind of thing. But the one thing you can't do under any circumstances is say you hate them. They could say it to you. You can't say it to them. At the moment, the UK government does seem to realize how terrible all this looks. The Health Secretary has just come out and suggested that the UK's hate speech laws need to be addressed to make sure they're applied in a legitimate way. The Met Police Commissioner has said that the government needs to clarify its hate speech laws. Of course, the only actual solution is to abolish hate speech laws entirely. There's no middle ground here. As long as you have hate speech laws on the books, political dissidents will be rounded up and imprisoned for offending the regime. That's why hate speech laws exist. But the middle ground approach is what they're going with in the UK at the moment. Here's how a Green Party leader addressed the arrest, for example, watch. According to Graham Linehan. Because the only thing the police have said is that they've acknowledged a man was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence. That's why the police say they turned up. What's your view, Mr. Polanski? These are totally unacceptable tweets and I accept that people who are in politics, we get lots of abuse, but let's also face we shouldn't get abuse. And I certainly recognize that women get more abuse than I do. For instance, I get a lot of anti Semitic abuse. I'm one of a few Jewish leaders that have been in British politics today. A Muslim man was elected as my deputy leader. Motto Ali. I've seen the amount of Islamophobia he gets. We also know that for all of those groups, trans people have been in the sights of the nastiness and the toxicity for a long time now. I accept proportionality of police response is a conversation we need to have. But what do you think this was proportionate? I think it was proportionate to arrest the him. I think there's a pattern here. Five armed police officers turning up. Well, that's for bit that. I don't understand why they were armed. And again, I'd need to hear about the police. Why there were five, presumably for sure. So he's fine with the fact that this guy was arrested for his tweets. His only quibble apparently is that there were five armed police officers. It would have been totally fine if they had sent, say, two unarmed, maybe non binary officers plus a social worker in order to haul this comedian to prison. In that case, justice would have been served. This is where to bring things back to the beginning of this segment. The arrest of Graham Linehan becomes an international incident that's relevant to all Americans. Everyone in authority in the UK from the Prime Minister on down, is ignoring one of these central issues in this case, which is this. Graham Linehan published these offending tweets when he was in America. And because of his lawful actions on American soil, he's being imprisoned in a foreign country, a country that's supposedly our ally. In essence, the UK is exerting sovereignty over America. They are directly threatening the freedoms of every American who might, for one reason or another, end up in the uk. This cannot be allowed to stand. It was just a few weeks ago that the Prime Minister of the UK sat in the Oval Office and lied to the President and the Vice President about the right of freedom of speech in his country. Watch I said what I said, which is that we do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the UK and also with some of our European allies, but we also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British, of course, what the British do in their own country is up to them, but also affect American technology companies and by extension, American citizens. So that is something that we'll talk about today at lunch. We've had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time. Well, no, I mean, certainly we wouldn't want to reach across US citizens, and we don't. And that's absolutely right. But in relation to free speech in the uk, I'm very proud of our history there. Yeah, none of that was true. The right of free speech does not exist in the uk. Every American, along with everyone else who's considering traveling to UK needs to realize that, and our government should respond accordingly. Less than a year ago, in response to free speech abuses in the country of Georgia, the State Department took punitive measures against the political figures who were responsible for. And the same exact punishment should be handed out to leaders in the uk, starting with their Prime Minister. He shouldn't be allowed to travel here. If he sets foot in this country, he should be arrested for human rights abuses. All of his assets should be frozen to the extent that we have any access to them. And his country should be isolated from the civilized world. Now, that seems harsh. Here's what the Prime Minister of the UK has been posting about all of as all this has been going on. This is something that he wrote on Wednesday, quote, I won't shy away from decisions to protect kids, even if there, if there are predictable cries of nanny state. We're stopping shops from selling high caffeine energy drinks to under 16s so they can turn up to school ready to learn. So that's what the Prime Minister of the UK is focused on at the moment. As their country is overrun with migrant rapists and as comedians are thrown in prison for a couple of tweets that offend trans activists, the Prime Minister is deeply concerned about high caffeine energy drinks. Meanwhile, his government is cooking up fake justifications to arrest people based on their speech in America. Now, the more you look into this arrest, the worse it gets. This is a report from the Telegraph the other day, quote, after being arrested by five armed police, Linehan was held by the police for over 16 hours. During which time, during which time his blood pressure became so high that he was rushed to the hospital. According to him, police used trans activist language when interviewing him. Now, before we continue with this Telegraph article, this part needs to be explained. This is a quote from Linehan substack describing his arrest. Quote, the police interrogator mentioned trans people. I asked him what he meant by that. Quote, people who feel their gender is different than that that was assigned at birth. I said, assigned at birth. Our sex isn't assigned. He called it semantics. I told him he was using activist language. Eventually a nurse came to check on me and found my blood pressure was over 200 stroke. Over 200 stroke territory already. This is kind of extraordinary, at least by American standards. How many police interrogators in this country would use the phrase gender assigned at birth? If you had, I mean, if you had to guess, how many would say that. It's the kind of thing that if you know any police officers, doesn't seem like something they'd say. But in the UK it's not exactly unheard of. They have hard boiled detectives raging about CIS men and gender fluidity as part of their standard interrogation practices. Pathetic does not begin to describe this. Let's continue with this Telegraph article because again, things get worse from here. Quote, the Metropolitan Police initially claimed Linehan had been arrested on suspicion of inciting violence, before clarifying they'd actually been arrested on the offense of intentionally stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation. It was hard to understand how Graham's tweets could possibly meet this definition. Male trans activists are normally quick to reject suggestions that their desire to present as women is autogynephilia a sexual preference, but the 2010 law under which he was arrested makes no mention of trans identities now. In other words, the authorities went out of their way to twist an existing law, a law which has nothing to do with transgenderism, into a pretext to arrest a comedian for his tweets. Every aspect of this case is a betrayal of the Anglo Saxon tradition of the rule of law, of the commitments that the British have made to the US as our alleged allies. No one in this country, whether they're American citizens or not, can rely on the British government to defend the freedom of speech or to honor the legal traditions that laid the groundwork for our Constitution. With the arrest of Grand Linehan, the UK has made it abundantly clear that the US cannot ignore the broader eradication of free speech rights in the West. Yes, it's happening outside of our borders in many cases, but increasingly foreign governments are making it clear that in their view they can bring criminal cases against individuals based on their lawful conduct in the United States. This is a massive escalation in the war against the freedom of speech. And until the UK can demonstrate some daylight between their legal system and North Korea's, no one in this country, including our elected officials, has any reason to trust these people or take them seriously ever again. Now let's get to our five headlines. If your mattress has the supportive qualities of wet cardboard and you wake up each morning feeling like you need an on call chiropractor, well then it's time to check out Helix Sleep. Improve your nights and start genuinely sleeping well so you can wake up each morning and feeling like you actually got some rest and you're ready to take on whatever the day has in store. I never realized how badly I needed a new mattress until I finally got one. I've had my Helix mattress now for a while. Couldn't be happier. I travel a lot too. 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Go to helixleep.comwalsh to get 27% off site wide. That's helixleep.comwalsh for 27% off site wide, make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. Go now helixsleep.com Walsh History, economics, literature, the Constitution. Did you actually study these in school? Probably not. Or you got some watered down version that missed the point entirely. Time and technology have changed a lot of things, but they have not changed basic fundamental truths about the world, our country and our place in it. That's why I want to share something I think you'd find valuable. Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses that cover everything from C.S. lewis and Genesis to the Roman Republic and early Christian history. I've been really enjoying their Constitution 101 course, which dives deep into design and purpose of our Constitution, the challenges it faced during the Civil War and how it's been undermined over the past century by progressive and liberal ideologies. The course is completely self paced with 12 lectures, so you can start whenever works for you. Honestly, I believe our country desperately needs more Americans who truly understand the Constitution and can stand up to our freedoms and freedoms against an increasingly large and unaccountable government. If you care about preserving what makes America great, I'd encourage you to check out this free Constitution 101 course. It's a great eye opener to how much we've drifted from our founding principles. Go right now to Hillsdale. Edu Walsh to enroll. There's no cost. It's easy to get started. That's Hillsdale. Edu Walsh to enroll for free Hillsdale. Edu Walsh There was an officer involved shooting in Florida a few days ago. A woman named Tequila Walker was shot multiple times. Actually survived apparently, and now she's arrested. And I want to talk about this, although this is not a big national news story, but there's a reason for that and we'll discuss it. And, and really the reason, once again is, is is that there's a body cam, that there's there is footage of this event. It's, it's interesting that police shootings are the one kind of story where it's less likely to be a national story if there is a video of it. What does that tell you now? I'm not sure how much of this we can actually show on YouTube. I suspect not very much. But here is the footage. Watch. Suspects down. She got a taser. We did Taser. Who shot? She came at me with a knife. What the hell did you expect me to do? Okay, so you won't be able to see some of that or all of it, I don't know. But to kill a Walker was surrounded by police. She got out of her car, she charged at an officer with the knife that she was holding, and that's when she was shot. They tried hitting her with the taser, but it had no effect because she was a very large obese woman. So the taser probably just bounced off her and her blubber. You know, her. Her large. Her fat is probably. Probably also the reason why she's alive today. You know, sometimes obesity saves lives, apparently, and it did in the case of Killa Walker. So that's interesting. But notice the bystander. So there's somebody standing off to the side Monday morning, quarter quarterbacking it, which is always. I guess you're very used to that as a police officer, but that's how you're in a high pressure situation, life or death struggle, and you've got somebody off on the side. No, I don't think. I wouldn't have done it that way. That's not how I would have done it. So she says, why. Why didn't you tase her? You didn't have to shoot her. And the cop points out that we did taser. We did. And she still charged at us with a knife. What are we supposed to do? Just let her stab us? What do you want me to do now? I think the officer shouldn't have bothered getting into a back and forth with that woman. But it was a good question. What do we. What are you. What are we supposed to do? What do you want. What do you want us to do, just get stabbed? Or you want me to get into hand to hand combat with this enormous woman who outweighs me by £400, probably. And now this is where, if not for body cams, this is where the BLM propaganda campaign would begin. It's very interesting to see this stuff now because you could. There's like this alternative in this parallel universe, right? If we imagine some sci fi scenario where there's constantly branching parallel universes, every choice, you know, you make is like, there's another universe where you made the different choice. So we're living in the universe where they started putting body cameras on all the police officers a few years ago, but in a different universe where that never happened and this exact scenario plays out. We know exactly. There'd be riots in the street right now to kill a Walker, say her name, say Tequila Walker's name. Because all you need is one person standing around, one witness. This is what they had in the Michael go all the way back to Michael Brown. They had. And there was no body cams, and they had one or two witnesses. And so this is all you need. You knew. One person runs to the media and says, I saw the whole thing. They didn't even try to tase her. They. They just shot her. And she was unarmed. I heard they had a knife. She had a knife. No, she was unarmed. She. She was unarmed, carrying a child. She was unarmed, carrying a child. And. And she. She was. She was rescuing a kitten from a tree when this happened. She wasn't even doing anything wrong. This. This poor woman, she was carrying her child. She was unarmed. She was trying to climb a tree to rescue a kitten. It was a kitten with leukemia. The kitten had leukemia, was stuck in a tree. So she was trying to climb the tree to get the kitten out and. And. And give it cancer treatments. And then they just ran up and shot her for no reason. The officer ran up and screamed, I hate black people, and shot her. I saw the whole thing. I thought. I'll tell you right now. I saw the whole thing. That's what happened. And. And so that. So you would have had someone to run to the media saying all that, and the media would just report it. They would. They'd be taking notes. Oh, she was climbing. She was right. Oh, the kitten had leukemia. Oh, and it's. They could have. The bullet could have hit the. The kitten with Luke. Oh. Oh, she. She. The officer shot the kitten, too. Well, all right, we got to write that down. I don't know why I'm imagining, like, reporters from the 1950s that have their notepads and they're taking notes, but that's the way it would have went. And it's the way that it went for years until BLM demanded that all the cops wear body cams, which, as I've said before, has proven to be one of the great political miscalculations of all time. It has been. I can't think of another example quite like this where you have a movement, the BLM movement that has. Is. Is calling for one specific thing. Right. They want other things too, but the, the big thing was like body cams. And they get the body cams and it kills the movement. I can't think of it. You get what you want and it kills your movement. It destroys it overnight. Because now with body cams, we can see clearly that basically every officer involved shooting is not only justified, like extremely, absurdly justified. That's, that's what you learn for body cams. You watch body cams and, and you go, oh, so. So every single time the cop shoots someone, it's justified almost every time. It's, it's not even like a close call. And it does help to see it. I, I remember, you know, you go back again to 2015 when the, the cop in Ferguson said that Michael Brown charged at him. And, and you know, that was the. After we got the ridiculous. He had his. He was on the ground with his hands up, yelling, don't shoot. And he got shot. Completely made up. I mean, the scenario I just painted of the cat in the tree with leukemia, that is not more absurd than what they actually claimed in Ferguson that he had, he was giving himself up. Right? It's like the scene in Platoon. He's on his knees, hands in the air, right up to the heavens, and the cop just comes up, randomly executes him in the street for no reason. But after we got that lie, then we finally heard the version of the correct version events from police. The police officer. And that version was that Michael Brown, after he just committed a strong armed robbery of the, of the, the convenience store that he charged at the police. And at the time, every leftist in the country said that the cop must be lying, that it can't possibly be true, because nobody would just go charge at a police officer who was pointing a gun at them. I can remember distinctly having this conversation with multiple people. And this was always the answer is, oh, do you really expect me to believe what he. What is this, a movie or something? You're telling me that this officer was pointing a gun at him and he charged at him? Oh, come on, that's ridiculous. And I remember at the time, I was totally on the officer's side the entire time. I was completely opposed to the BLM narrative in Ferguson from day one. I didn't buy the false narrative at all for even a second. But it was hard to sort of imagine a person charging full speed at someone who's pointing a gun at them because I believed. I mean, that's what the forensic showed. That was that the counter narrative to that was totally Fantastical and incredible in the literal sense. It was incredible, but still, it was hard because I'd never seen that. Like, I. Except in movies. I'd never actually seen a kid. It's like you. Why. Who would do that? Unless you are actually completely insane to the point where you don't even function. You're. You, You're. You don't. You can't function. You're in an insane asylum. But anybody else charging at a police office and point a guy who would ever do that, it's hard to imagine as a normal, sane person. You. You can't. You can't picture that. Well, now we have the body cams, and like, every other month, there's footage of someone doing exactly that we've seen. Now, this is not one time. This is multiple cases of ex. Like. Like a bad guy in a movie, knife over the head, screaming, running right into gunfire. And what we learn is that, no, this. This actually happens. Like, these are the kinds of people that cops deal with every day. They're dealing with the kinds of people who would do that. Or that's a. That's a real. That's like a thing that will happen. You have to. You have to. You have to. You have to worry about that. And that's why BLM is dead. Okay, here's something going viral. It's a skit by the black comedian Drew Ski. And I mentioned that he's black because the fact that he's black is. Is relevant to the story, as we'll see. He has a million, you know, viral comedy skits that you see circulating on social media constantly. And some of his stuff is pretty funny, I think. But in this case, the premise of the skit, the caption that Drew Ski put on it, says, that guy who's just proud to be American. And then in the skit, he's wearing not just white face, but white body. He's painted his whole body to look white. He's even a mat. He's even managed to make his body look white and sunburned. So in some ways, the. The makeup effects in this skit, I will say, are kind of impressive. But. So this is supposed to be an impression of a white guy, you know, replete with the white body paint. And here it is. Watch. Here's the love. Here's the owner. If you can't. Owner. Yeah. Born in the U.S.A. hey, Suanna. Suanna. She's not listening. Hey, come on. You need to listen to your nana. Go ahead, baby. Hey, big mom. How you doing, baby? All right. Then Mama. Hey. You lost both? No, I'm going to the race. What race? NASCAR race. You going to nascar? Yes, sir. A little bit. You ain't lost Decision? No, I'm good. I'm going to the right side. Sure about that? Yes, sir. Find something safe to do, boy. Okay. So not Druski's best work, I'll say that. And before we get to the white phase, the impression isn't funny. It's just. It's not a funny bit. I'm not saying that because I'm offended or whatever. It's. It's just not very funny. And it isn't funny because it isn't well observed. It isn't accurate. Okay, he's trying to do redneck, but he's obviously never been around rednecks. I mean, he thinks that, you know, rednecks are Bruce Springsteen fans, for one thing. Not. I tell you, Drew, not a lot of redneck Springsteen fans out there in the year 2025. I. I gotta tell you, you walk in with a bunch of. Of around a bunch of rednecks and say, hey, how about that Bruce Springsteen, huh? What do you guys think? Not. Not a lot of Bruce Springsteen fans. And. But that's his. He thinks rednecks are Springsteen fans. He thinks they're vulgar and racist. So that's the entirety of the impression. Rednecks are vulgar, racist Springsteen fans. That's all he's got. And it couldn't be more off base. And that's not a huge surprise that. I mean, this is a black guy from Columbia, Maryland, so he doesn't have a great read on white country folk, but this was lame, even with those low expectations. And I say this again as someone who generally finds his stuff amusing. One thing about doing an impression, this is something that I think Norm MacDonald talked about, is that to do an impression, well, you have to not only have familiarity with the subject of your impression, but also you have to have some affection for the subject or the type of person that you're impersonating. There has to be some warmth, some affection in the impression, or else it's just kind of low effort mimicry, right? The worst impressions are angry. You can tell the person hates whoever they're doing the impression of. This is why Alec Baldwin's Trump impression, I think, goes down in history as the worst impression of all time. Certainly the worst in the history of snl. And there have been some really bad ones. So that's saying something. But Baldwin just hated Trump, and you could tell that he was seething. It was like this seething, dark, angry impression. And it wasn't funny. It was just. It was uncomfortable. It was really uncomfortable watching it. And not in a funny, awkward way, but just in a. Like, I want to turn this off. This is. This is like this person's working through something, and I don't want to see it. Okay. And you get the same feeling watching this skit that Drew Ski just doesn't like these people. And that's really what is coming through, and so it makes it less funny. As for the white face look, it's been said now by many people, but I will add my voice to the mix. Yes. If this is okay, if it's okay for a black guy to do whiteface, then it's absolutely okay for a white guy to do blackface. Absolutely. Okay. And the next. And if any white comedian comes along and. And. And does that, he shouldn't be condemned. It should just be like, okay, yeah, sure, this is fine now, because we're done with the double standards. We're. We're done with two different sets of rules. We're done with hiding behind historical trauma or whatever to justify a double standard. You know, I know I'll be told that blackface is worse because of the history behind it, but we are done with that also. You don't get to make a different set of rules for yourself as some childish, arbitrary way of balancing out some historical wrong that never even affected you in the first place. No Black person in 2025 was alive at a point when blackface was socially acceptable. The last minstrel show in America was when. Okay, it wasn't 1998, I can tell you that. The last One was what, 100 years ago? I don't know. It's been a very long time. So you don't get to use that as an excuse. The past is the past. We can't change it. Get over it. Just get over it. Today is today, and today it's either acceptable to paint your face to look like another race in order to make fun of them and do a comedy bit, or it isn't. It's either acceptable or it isn't. And this thing where we say, well, depends on the race. No, no, it doesn't depend on the race for anything. When we're talking about, you know, it's offensive to say certain words or jokes, or it depends on the. No, it doesn't depend on the race. Either it's offensive or it's not. And either it's acceptable or it's not. Either it's the kind of thing that should destroy somebody's career or it shouldn't. And based on the fact that Drew Ski's career is not destroyed, then okay, then, you know, floodgate is wide open and that's all there is to it. Which, by the way, is is. I think the is is the correct answer. It's the correct answer. Like if you want to do a comedy bit that involves presenting yourself as another race, yeah, sure, go ahead and do. Should be judged entirely based on whether it was funny. I mean, the only real sin that you can commit in comedy is it wasn't funny. If it's funny, it's funny. Funny is funny. And there are certainly ways to do that that are funny. I mean, I think this was just not funny because, as I said, it was not a well observed impression. But, but now it could be. So give it a shot. All right, real quickly, I want to mention this Democratic. This is a report from Daily Wire. Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota socialist, has seen an astronomical increase in her wealth over the past year as a recent disclosure revealed her net worth could be as high as $30 million. A May disclosure reveals that Omar is worth between 6 and 6 and 30 million, an increase of about 3,500% compared to 2023. Omar's member of Congress earned $174,000 in salary each year. How did she gain all this wealth? Well, then it goes into some deep, you can read the report, but basically has to do with her husband and whose wealth has also skyrocketed mysteriously and now she's a lot richer. So Ilhana Marzi, yet another lawmaker who came into office as a humble working class champion only to transform almost instantly into a multimillionaire. And this, by the way, is why I've never agreed with the idea that we need to have fewer rich people running for office. You know, this idea that we just want, like, you know, you want, it's better to have, we don't want the rich people. We want people who are more middle income. Well, I, I would rather that someone be rich coming into office than that they get rich while they're in office, because those really are unfortunately the only two options, with rare exceptions. But generally speaking, either someone gets rich while they're in office or they're already rich when they run. I prefer the latter, really, if I had to choose. Now, of course, rich people often get richer while they're in office. So you have this problem no matter what. Donald Trump is the only guy whose net worth dropped as a consequence of achieving political power. That almost never happens. That happened with Trump. But it would be very easy to clean this up. You know, you could pass all kinds of laws limiting the ability of lawmakers to enrich themselves in office. You could have radical transparency, disclosures and so on. You could require the lawmakers, you could, you could require, you could pass a law that requires that lawmakers stand up in Congress once a year and announce how much their net worth has increased or decreased over the previous year. Right. We could require that once a year. It's, you got to I'm Representative Ilhan Omar and my net worth has increased by 3,000% over the past 12 months. You could require that. That alone would be enough to put a stop to a lot of this nonsense. The political cost of having to publicly acknowledge your financial gain would not be worth the financial gain itself in many cases. So you could do all of that. But the problem, of course, is that it would require the lawmakers themselves to put those laws and policies in place, which is never going to happen. So the moral of the story is we're screwed. Are you drowning a credit card in loan debt? Well, you're not alone. But here's something most people don't know. September is actually the best time to negotiate with your lenders. Why September? Well, credit card companies and lenders are doing year end accounting and desperately need to clear problem accounts from their books before audits begin. This creates a narrow window where they're far more willing to cut deals than any other time of year done with debt has cracked the code on this timing advantage. 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Then next Wednesday night, the main event, Friendly Fire. All of us getting together to do what friends do, argue, debate, and probably smoke a few Mayflower cigars. Don't miss the premiere, because inside Friendly Fire is where we're going to be dropping the good stuff. New series, new projects, huge announcements, surprises we've been holding back until now. This is the start of our next decade and you don't want to miss a single moment. Join us now@dailywire.com now let's get to our daily cancellation. Today, for our daily cancellation, we have Senator Tim Kane. Now, you may remember Tim Kane. Actually, you probably don't remember him. The most memorable thing about Tim Kane is that he is not memorable at all. He is a generic white male Democrat, which is why Hillary Clinton chose him as a running mate in 2016, because she was looking for a generic white male Democrat. His job was to be completely unremarkable and forgettable, and that is one task that he was able to accomplish exceptionally well. Tim's great political skill is making everyone forget that he exists. He's been a senator for 12 years. He was a governor of Virginia before that, vice presidential nominee in the middle, and yet nobody knows who he is. His own wife looks at him every morning and says, wait, who is this guy again? Now, I wouldn't call Tim a chameleon, exactly. That makes him sound far too cool. He's more like IKEA furniture, something so bland and generic that you hardly notice its presence in the room. He's like an IKEA side table that you put next to the bed in your guest room and then forget that it's there. That's how Tim Kaine has survived politically. Everyone just forgets that he's there. This is why it was such a grave mistake this week when Tim decided to open his mouth and speak. Not only did he speak, but he said something truly incredible, so incredible that it may even make you remember Tim Kaine. Or at least it will become the new reference point for him. So six years from now, when he briefly flickers on the radar screen again, you'll say, tim Kaine. Who is that? Oh, yeah, he's the guy who said that thing, isn't he? During a hearing, Senator Kaine got into a brief debate about the concept of rights. And this subject came up because this was a nomination hearing for Riley Barnes, who has been nominated to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, human rights and labor, whatever that is. And during his opening remarks, Barnes made mention of the fact that human Rights, which are now part of his job title, apparently come to us from our Creator, from God. Tim Kaine took exception to that idea, and here's what he said. The notion that rights don't come from laws and don't come from the government, but come from the Creator. That's what the Iranian government believes. It's a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia law and targets Sunnis, Baha', Is, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So the statement that our rights do not come from, from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling. Extremely troubling, says Tim Kaine. He's troubled by the idea that our rights come from God, our Creator. He says that this is what the Iranian regime believes. And he's right, of course. I mean, who can forget that? That famous line from the founding document of the Iranian government, that line that said, quote, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I believe it was. Who was it Ayatollah Kameni who, Who wrote those words? Actually, wait a second, it was. No, that doesn't sound right. My, my grade school education is kicking in here. I seem to remember that. That Thomas Jefferson was the author. That doesn't make sense because. Was Thomas Jefferson Iranian? Did he serve as the Supreme Leader of Iran at some point? This is very confusing. Oh, wait, no, no. Now it's all coming back to me. Yes, Thomas Jefferson did write that. He wrote in the Declaration of Independence, which is the founding document of the country. Of our country of the United States, not Iran. Yes. The idea that our rights come from the Creator is literally the core foundational principle that our nation was built on. Our entire system of government, the country itself rests on, fundamentally on the idea that our rights come from God. It is the reason our country exists in the first place. Tim Kaine, a United States Senator, has declared himself extremely troubled by the founding principle of the nation that he was elected to serve. He is extremely troubled by an idea that every single one of our Founding Fathers affirmed. Indeed, they not only affirmed it and built our nation upon it, but found it to be so incredibly obvious as to be, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, self evident. And now Tim is extremely troubled by this self evident, foundational truth. Now, it goes without saying that this man should be immediately removed from office. Anyone who rejects our nation's core Principles is not fit to serve in the United States Senate or in any other capacity. He swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, and yet he is extremely troubled by the philosophy upon which it was based. And that means he cannot possibly fulfill his oath. He's disqualified himself. That should be the end of a career that produced exactly one memorable moment, which is this one. And yet it should be said that Tim Kaine has only made the mistake of saying out loud what everybody in his party already believes. They're all godless heathens who, whether they are explicit about it or not, reject the idea that our rights come from God. They all reject our nation's founding principle, just like Tim Kaine does. Because Tim Kaine was right about one thing. Rights are a religious and theological concept. They are a spiritual doctrine. They have no meaning outside of that framework. A godless worldview can't account for rights. Rights in that case are just whatever the guy in power says they are. There's no higher power or inherent right to appeal to. So whenever somebody talks about rights, they're making a religious claim, whether they know it or not. Our nation is founded on this explicitly religious claim, endowed by the Creator, etc. This is what makes most of our political debates in this country so pointless and fruitless. Most of the people running around, or many of them crying about their rights have never once actually considered what a right even is, or how they know they have them, or from where or whom these rights come. We have an entire political party that rejects the existence of God, but still claims the rights that originate from him. And rights can only originate from Him. The government can should recognize and protect these rights, but they do not create the rights. The government is supposed to be a steward of our rights, not their author. Tim, here's the problem with saying that rights come from the government. You are correct that if rights don't come from the government, the government. If rights don't come from God, then the government is the only other place they could come from. But if they come from the government, then our rights are whatever the government says they are. If the government came, came along tomorrow and said that we no longer have the right to free speech, well then we would no longer have the right to free speech. It's just that simple. Rights come from the government. If the government takes them away, that's it, they don't exist. You wouldn't be able to say, oh, you're infringing on my rights. Well, what do you mean they? The right doesn't. How can they infringe on something that doesn't exist, you cannot appeal to any authority higher than them. That's the end of the line, according to you. And as a member of the government yourself, I can see why you would find that idea so appealing. But this is how you. This is how you get Iranian style tyranny, through the notion that the government originates rights. Now, I know that you understand this at some level, Tim, and I can prove that. Let's just try this thought experiment. So imagine that the Supreme Court announced next week that they were overturning Obergefell. And now imagine that, empowered by that decision, Congress passed and Donald Trump signed a law banning gay marriage nationwide. How would you react, Tim? What would you say? Now, if you're consistent, if you actually believe what you just said about rights coming from the government, then you would have no choice but to simply accept this sequence of events. The right to gay marriage no longer exists. And if somebody said, I have a right to get married, you would say, well, no, you don't. The government said, you don't have it, so you don't have it. Rights come from the government. The government took them away. The right is gone. That's it. You certainly couldn't go around screaming that Trump is infringing on the rights of gay people. How could he? How could he do that? The right is gone. He can't infringe on a right that doesn't exist. All you could do is accept the decision. Now, sure, you could call for the government to once again create the right to gay marriage, but you could not claim that the right had been infringed or was being trampled or that gay people are not getting something they have the right to. Well, they don't have the right to it. The government said they don't. It's impossible for the government to infringe on or trample rights. If they are the authors of the rights, they decide who has them and what the rights are. And yet we both know that you would not respond to that turn of events with that kind of fatalistic acceptance. You would scream to the heavens that Trump and the Republicans are oppressing gay people by infringing on the rights. You would appeal. You would appeal, therefore, to an authority higher than the government. You would declare implicitly at least or explicitly, that the right to gay marriage exists in a realm above and beyond the government and that they have. That they, the government, have no right to take that right away. Now, of course, the trouble with this thought experiment is that the right to gay marriage really, in fact, does not exist. It certainly is not a God given right. This is in fact a right that the government just created out of thin air. They did so not in accordance with the will of God and our own inherent human nature, but in defiance of both. The right to gay marriage doesn't really exist. But my point is that you think it does. You think the right to gay marriage exists not just as a legal concept, but as an. As a fact of human nature. And you believe that it exists at a higher level than the government which codified it into law now. And, and by the way, saying that, oh well, rights are in human nature, they're not from God. Like that's, that's. You can't get around it that way either because how did the right. What do you mean? Rights are part of human nature. Like without. If you take God out of the equation and we are all just Darwinian products of Darwinian evolution, there's no right. What the hell do you mean? Evolution doesn't care about your rights. You don't. There's, there's no evolutionary benefit to a right. A right is totally invisible. You can't look inside a person and find their rights. It's not there. In a godless Darwinian view of the world, there are no rights at all. The only right is just do what you can to survive. And if I'm stronger than you, I can oppress you and do whatever I want so that I survive. And that's the. That's that. That is it. That's the, that's the ultimate right. So saying that there's some spiritual reality in human nature again requires a spiritual authority of some kind. You're talking now in a spiritual realm. This is a spiritual concept which requires a realm of spirits, does it not? Now you believe the same about the right to an abortion. In fact, on our we on your website right now you have an entire section titled Protecting reproductive rights. And the first paragraph says this right now women are facing threats to reproductive freedom around the country with new draconian abortion restrictions and extremist legislators plotting to rip away even more reproductive rights following Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. After an extreme majority on the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade, Tim got to work to protect reproductive rights and introduce the Reproductive Freedom for All Act. But wait a second Tim. You're claiming that Republicans want to rip away even more reproductive rights. But Republicans run the government. How could they rip away rights? Rights only exist if they say that they do. That's what you just claimed. Rights come from the government. If the party in control of the government decides that a certain right doesn't exist anymore, that it doesn't exist, nothing's being ripped away, nothing's being infringed or flouted or defiled or defied. The right to an abortion, reproductive rights originates with the people in power. According to you, if the people in power change their mind, then the right no longer exists. They've taken it away. It just simply doesn't exist anymore. Now, once again, in reality, there is no right to an abortion. God does not endow women with the right to kill their children. In fact, he does exactly the opposite. He endows women and men with the inextricable responsibility to care for and love their children. But my point, again, is that you think the right to abortion exists at a level higher than the government. You say you are troubled by the concept of God given rights, and yet you in fact do think that God gives women the right to kill their babies and men the right to marry other men. You and your ideological cohorts reject the idea of inherent human rights only to go and invent a whole series of new inherent human rights. And those rights are all perverse and horrifying because you, Tim, are a perverse and horrifying person, even if you are also boring and forgettable. And that is why Tim Kaine is today canceled. That'll do it for the show today and this week. Talk to you on Monday. Have a great weekend. Godspeed. Don't just get the news. Understand what the news means. On the Michael Knowles Show, I will take you beneath the surface of daily political events to see their historical, philosophical, even religious roots. Catch it Monday through Friday at 9:30 30aM Eastern on the Daily Wire.