Stacey Abrams (20:50)

I led a program called Vitalizing DeSoto. We worked in a tiny town in South Georgia to demonstrate that by replacing energy inefficient appliances with efficient appliances, you can lower your cost. And in fact, we accomplished that for 75% of the community. They got appliances that are lowering their bills. A coalition of organizations, famous organizations came together and said to the epa, if we can do this here, we can do this for millions more Americans. Let us invest the money of America in lowering the cost for Americans. And the EPA said, okay, great, go for it.

Michael Knowles (21:32)

Okay. So you see Chris Hayes there, He had a couple interjections, but I cut it out for time. You see, he's just nodding along. You can almost read his mind. He's saying, this is the best you can do. According to her own explanation, this program that Trump called out in front of Congress is Dems in government giving Dems in the political operative sphere $2 billion to dole out on household appliances for whomever they see fit. The Democrats in government give $2 billion of your taxpayer money to extreme left wing operatives to just dole out buying goodies, household goodies for anyone they want to buy votes. Notably in Georgia, where the program began. Georgia, an important swing state. That's the best defense of the program that Stacey Abrams, intimately involved in the program, can come up with. You remember during the Obama administration, people pointed to a government program where Democrats would just buy cell phones for people to buy their votes. And they called them Obama phones. Now we've got Obama toasters. Now it's Abrams toasters. I don't know Democrat. Democrats are buying toasters and refrigerators and, I don't know, new blenders for people to buy their votes. The issue is not the waste, though. There's obviously a lot of waste there. The issue is the corruption. That's the issue. Okay. There are libertarians and conservatives in the right wing tent and we oppose the same things for different reasons. The libertarians oppose these kind of programs because they're so wasteful and inefficient and that money would be better spent in the private sector of the free market. And my problem with it is not so much the spending. Big nations have robust governments and robust governments spend some money. My issue isn't that the government is spending money, it's that it's the graft, it's the corruption. If you gotta spend the money, spend it on something good and useful and not obviously in furtherance of the self interest of the Democrat party, which is exactly what it is. There's so much more to say. First though, go to simplerhaircolor.com knowles for those of you who have not been blessed with the genes requisite for dark, luxurious, supple Italian hair like mine, there is still hope for you to keep the grays away. I'm gonna tell you about Simpler Hair Color if you're tired of all those science experiments just to cover your grays. Simpler Hair color gets it done without the mess or the mixing. Just gentler ingredients that work and make covering grays simple. Simpler Hair Color was created by Snehal Patel and Mitch Brown. Two guys were fed up with messy dye kits and expensive salon trips. They made something far better and it is specifically formulated for men. One can does it all hair, beard and touch ups giving you the same coverage as four boxes of drugstore dye. It is proudly made in the USA with over 9,500 five star reviews. Real guys created this for real guys. It shows Simpler Hair Color has a full variety of shades to match any guy's hair and beard. So someday, you know, when the time comes. Right now I'm basically okay though my kids are writing grays every single day. Someday I can grab a can of full coverage brown black dye and you can get yours today. Say goodbye to grays with simpler Hair color. Go to simplerhaircolor.com knowles Get 10% off your order simplerhaircolor.com knowles 10% off your order. Use promo code Knowles so they know that I sent you. I just sat down for an episode of the Greatest Game show on the Internet and the Greatest Card Game on the Internet, which you can also order@dailywire.com shop I sat down with my friend Mary Morgan. Check out this teaser are men who refuse to physically work out their bodies by definition lazy buttersoft lives. I feel like a lot of the men who are really into working out are pretty gay. Ben Davies has referred to me as butter soft in what, two to five yes or no questions at this point. But that adjective in particular, butter soft, I don't like that. But it's a very evocative and it does paint a picture. The all new yes or no dating and relationships expansion pack is now available. Go to DailyWire.com shop today. Watch the full commercial free and uncensored episode of yes or no with Mary Morgan exclusively on Daily Wire. Plus, speaking of these stupid government programs and the different reasons that the libertarians and the conservatives oppose them, Doge, run by a very famous libertarian, Elon Musk, has just canceled a government program to trans animals. Doge has announced that the NIH canceled seven grants for transgender experiments on animals, including over half a million dollars to, quote, use a mouse model to investigate the effects of cross sex testosterone treatment and $33,000 to test feminizing hormone therapy in the male ratio. You could look at that and say that's not a lot of money. All in just a little over half a million dollars. And off the federal budget, that's just a drop of a drop of a fraction of an iota of a drop of the bucket. Yeah, sure, but first of all, you got to start somewhere. And two, to me, it's not really about the amount of money, it's what they're doing. So you see this, sometimes conservatives and libertarians will publish these lists of the dumbest government spending. You know, they put shrimp on treadmills and measured how fast they could run. What a waste of your taxpayer dollars. And yes, this seems wasteful, I guess, to it, except not really in the sense that the purpose of testing drugs and medical treatments on animals is to see how they would work in humans. That's what it's for. So I'm in favor of testing things on animals inasmuch as I want to make sure that these sorts of treatments are safe for human beings and human beings are rational. Souls are rational creatures with souls proper to human beings, and animals are not. Animals have souls proper to their own nature, but they're not rational. They don't possess rights in the sense that we think of human rights. And so I actually think it's fine to do experiments circumscribed by notions of justice on animals. And so if they were testing cancer drugs on these animals, I'd say, well, that's good. Even if it's not so nice to the animals, I'd say it's good. You gotta test the cancer drugs so that we can treat human beings. Who have greater dignity. The issue here is that we should not be attempting these trans procedures even on humans. That's the issue. Why are we transing mice? Well, the real answer, what the liberals would tell you, is we're transing mice to see that it's safe to trans human beings, or that we can continue to monitor the health effects of transient human beings and try to adapt to the ways in which trans human beings is not good for their health, and so on and so forth. The problem is we shouldn't be transient human beings. The issue is not quantitative, but qualitative. The issue is not the amount of money we're spending. The issue is we should be able to make value judgments about the substantive good of these kinds of policies and say, no, we're not going to trans human beings. So then there should be no need to trans the little mice, so there should be no need to spend the half million dollars. And that kind of decision can't be made purely on the basis of efficiency, which is the charge of doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. We also need a Department of Substantive Goods, which I guess is just the president and the legislators. And the way that we arrive at who is in charge of that, which is always the next question, who decides what's good? Well, we have elections in this country, and the power of the voting public is circumscribed by the Constitution, circumscribed by certain rights. But broadly speaking, we get to decide what is good at the federal level and at the state level and at the local level. And we have principles of subsidiarity that also govern which decisions are made where. But that's what we need to have. Department of Government Efficiency. Great. Love that. We also need to recognize a Department of Substantive Goods. What is. Should we trans people in the first place? I don't think we should. Should we kill babies in the womb? Should we sell babies on an open market through the fertility industry, through specifically IVF and surrogacy? Should we? Should we? Should we? Those are questions that have to be answered not according to the sophistry of economists and calculators, but according to serious moral philosophy. We didn't actually need to take these particular questions all that seriously even 25 years ago, because everyone knew we shouldn't chop up people and pretend that they're the opposite sex. But now we're morally confused and we're living in a world after virtue, so. So we need to invest some resources in those calculations as well. Okay, now, speaking of the trans stuff, which dominates the news every single day. Even though, even though I'm so sick of talking about it, the libs are not sick of pushing it. So we conservatives need to respond to it to make sure that the cancer of their preposterous anti human ideologies don't spread too much. Democrat representative Jennifer McClelland has just come out. She was on Leland Vitter's show on News Nation and she made the claim that the only way to put into effect President Trump's plan to get men out of women's sports, the only way that we could possibly do that is to pull down the pants of the athletes and check for ourselves.

Leland Vitter (31:52)

I don't think that the American people want school professionals pulling their children's pants down to determine. No, how do you enforce.

Michael Knowles (32:06)

Come on.

Leland Vitter (32:06)

If you read the bill, if you read the bill, how do you enforce it? How do you enforce it?

Michael Knowles (32:12)

Come on, you know what people, you, you know what sex is on someone's birth certificate and you say if it's on your birth certificate, if you're a boy, you can't play in girls sports. It's pretty simple. It's a completely false talking point. Come on.

Leland Vitter (32:26)

It is not a false talking point. You don't want to accept it, we can move on to something else. But the only way to enforce that bill, in many cases it allowed people in schools to pull children's hands down to determine.

Michael Knowles (32:41)

Okay, great response here from Leland, who by the way is not like the most red meat bomb throwing right wing Republican or anything like that. He's a pretty fair news guy. And he comes out and this Democrat rep says what these Republicans want to do is pull down kids pants and that's the only way. And he just goes, give me a break, lady. You pass a law that says that men can't play in women's sports, women's sports, which by definition exclude men until the social engineers now want to blur the distinction between men and women. So there was already a legal right for women to have their own sports leagues. There was already some way that we were able to tell the difference between men and women so that the men wouldn't play in the women's sports league. That was true until five minutes ago. So what, were we pulling everyone's pants down in schools before? I don't think so. We were obviously able to tell somehow. Now this woman is being obtuse and she's saying there's no way to tell. And Leland points out, he says, you know, we have birth certificates, but in fairness, the Democrats have also tried to compromise birth certificates. They've tried to allow people to change their birth certificate to pretend that they're the opposite sex. So in fairness, birth certificates are not totally reliable these days. But we also have genetic testing. If it really comes down to it, you can just, you know, you have to take all sorts of medical tests to go to public school in this country anyway. You have to take all sorts of vaccinations, undergo all sorts of medical exams. So I don't think it would be that hard just check someone's blood and say, oh no, yeah, it's a dude, that's a chick in a real margin case. But also it's not gonna really take it that far because one, we live in a society where people are not lying all the time. So, you know, probably like the parents will fess up. Probably. People live in communities so they remember, they say like, hey, you know Jane over there, she was Jack until like a week ago, you know, so I can remember that. But also. So you can usually tell. You can usually tell, right? I'm not saying that there has never been a transvestite. That's a little bit confusing. It's a confusing culture. But 99 times out of 100, you can tell they're not fooling anybody. Actually it's ma'am. No. Yeah, I don't think it is. And you don't need to pull someone's pants down to know that either. You can tell. If we have so lost our prudence that we need to pretend now that you have to examine someone's genitals to know if they're a man or a woman, then I guess we're not capable of self government. Right? But I think we can. I think we can tell. And this woman's point is well taken. The one good point that she's making is we live in a culture right now that is so intentionally confusing that we can't trust typical long standing markers of truth like birth certificates. That's not an argument to further the confusion. That's an argument to clear up the confusion that the libs have recently put into place. That's an argument to not let people change the sex on their birth certificates to align with fantasy rather than reality. This is the same argument people make about marriage. When I say, you know, marriage is good and it's meant the same thing everywhere for all of human history until about five minutes ago. So we don't hate anybody, we're not phobic. When we say that two fellows can't marry each Other, we're just saying that that is not within the definition of marriage. Like, it's not phobic or irrationally hostile and antagonistic to say that a circle can't be a square. It just isn't that it's not square a phobic. It's just that's not what it is. The left will respond to that and they'll say, well, you know, even the squishy, right, they'll say, you know, marriage has been so degraded in recent years through things like no fault divorce and through things like radical feminism that diminishes the role of the husband and the wife. And it's been so degraded over the years that really, what's the difference? Why wouldn't we redefine it to include two fellas? And I say you're right, marriage has been degraded, especially by the liberalization of divorce. That's not an argument for further weakening or even abolishing marriage in our law. That's an argument for strengthening marriage. If you're telling me that an institution has been greatly degraded previously, then we should strengthen that institution. We shouldn't totally abolish it. Well, you know, we can't even really trust the birth certificates anymore to tell us who's a boy and a girl. Okay, let's fix the birth certificates then, shall we? It's not. Not further confuse people. That's crazy. But the media, they're crazy. The media want you to believe that President Trump is a criminal, that Elon Musk is unhinged and the world is spiraling into chaos. Here's the truth, though. We're winning the libs. Lies are unraveling. The narrative is crumbling. Their tears are falling. That is why the Daily Wire is here, to cut through the noise and bring you the facts that others won't. Uncensored ad free. Daily shows, investigative journalism, live chats, breaking news first. No filter, no corporate leash, no nonsense. The Daily Wire is where the real story lives. Go to DailyWire.com subscribe and join the fight today. My favorite comment on Friday is from Ric Flair of Astra, who says, why the heck does a governor have a podcast? He should be working. This is in reference to Gavin Newsom, the Patrick Bateman of politicians. I actually don't think it's a bad thing that he has a podcast. As someone who hosted a podcast for two or three years with a sitting politician, I don't think that's necessarily bad. FDR had his fireside chats. Politicians spend most of their time giving speeches and sitting on the Phone raising money. So they talk. That's the job of a politician. 97% of the time is just to talk and communicate. So I'm not opposed to that. That's a part of public service. The better question to me is why specifically does Gavin Newsom specifically have a podcast specifically right now? And the obvious answer, why was his first guest Charlie Kirk? The obvious answer is he recognizes there's a big problem with the Democrat Party. If they keep going down the open borders, trans the kids kind of madness, they're gonna never win an election again. Newsom wants to be the nominee in 2028, he wants to be the president in 2029. And so he's gonna tack to the center. That was a very calculated move. I don't really trust him. He even on issues of weird sex stuff, he was one of the most left wing politicians in America in 2004 when he was mayor of San Francisco. So I don't trust a word that the guy says. He's a noted liar who tried to make himself the face of COVID and the lockdowns and sacrifice, and then they caught him breaking his own Covid rules at the French Laundry. I think he is dishonest as the day is long, but I think he's a clever politician and he recognizes that's the only hope that Democrats have in 2028. And why podcasts? Cuz that's the way that people communicate now. Trust the New York Times, trust the Washington Post. It was the podcast election. Now, speaking of turning from Congress, Lady Jennifer McClellan. But also still speaking of sad and bizarre medical stories, did you read about the death of Gene Hackman? The great actor Gene Hackman? This was, this was spooky, man. The story, for those of you who have not followed it all that closely, Gene Hackman was found dead in his home. Now, he was quite old and he had been suffering from Alzheimer's, so it's not all that surprising. What was weird was Gene Hackman and his much younger wife were both found dead in their home at the same time. To add further to the oddity of the story, their dog was also found dead at the same time. So people had two theories that were floated right away. They said either it was carbon monoxide. The silent killer just kills, kills people. You don't even know what's happening. We've heard those stories before. Or was it some kind of suicide or something? People were just wildly speculating without any basis. Now we found out what happened. According to Heather Jarrell, New Mexico's chief medical examiner. Apparently, Gene Hackman's much younger wife died from hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. It's this respiratory virus illness caused by a virus transmitted by rodents. So who knows? Maybe she was bit by a mouse in her garden, we don't know. But she was infected by a rodent. Her exact time of death is unknown. She was last seen on February 11th. Gene Hackman died of hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. According to information from his pacemaker, he likely died seven days after his wife was last seen. So that means that Gene Hackman's wife died and he lived in the home with her body in it for up to a week. Now, why did their dog die? Their dog had been in a crate because he was recovering from some veterinary procedure a day before the wife was last seen. So the dog was locked up in a crate. It's just really gruesome. The fact that Gene Hackman had advanced Alzheimer's means he might not have even known that his wife was dead. She was taking care of him. So he might have just not. He wasn't given his medicine, probably wasn't given food, probably wasn't given water. Now, he might not have even been out of bed. We don't know. But if you have ever had a loved one suffer Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia, this story is pretty believable. I was talking to a buddy of mine and he said, I just don't believe the story. Something doesn't seem right. Said, I don't know. Having had a loved one who died of dementia and possibly Alzheimer's, I actually don't know what the specific dementia was. We never had it checked. I believe it. This could have. If our loved one had been left in the home like this, I could totally have seen this happening. And so then the question was, well, why were they in the home together? Why wasn't someone checking in for a week? Gene Hackman had three kids. I don't know. I don't know the relationship of the kids to Gene Hackman. I don't know why someone didn't check on him. I don't know. Sometimes people in advanced illness like that, they kind of pull away from people. They don't want to talk on the phone, they don't want people to come over. I don't know. What I do know, zooming out from the story is this kind of story is the consequence of a society that increasingly refuses to confront death. We do not want to think about death. Say what you will about ancient and medieval society, it Took death pretty seriously. It looked at death head on, maybe because it was more accustomed to seeing death. Now everyone still dies. The death rate is exactly the same today as it was in the Middle Ages, and it's actually just slightly higher than it was in antiquity. Because we have one case of someone surviving death from antiquity, none recently. So why can't we confront death? Well, because we have no, it's not a medical issue. Medically, we're better at dealing with death than we ever have been. But ethically, philosophically, theologically, we have no idea how to confront death. Even anthropologically, you've got people now, all these futurists talking about how they're going to conquer death, they're going to end death. Death is over. So we don't know how to deal with it. We try to. When people are really close to death, we just try to shove people off into homes and hospices and just ignore them. Older people live alone much longer than they should because they don't want to confront the reality of death. Their kids don't want to confront the reality. We just don't. We've lost. We don't have intergenerational living anymore. We have a highly individualist society that refuses to acknowledge that we have obligations between the generations to our loved ones. And even our aging loved ones have obligations to the rest of their family to accept their help. That's been shattered and it's been shattered by the individual, the hyper individualism of the left and the right. But that's what's going on here. Now. Speaking of death story I talked about at the top, there are these reports that Christians and other religious minorities are being slaughtered in Syria. There's a report here from. This is from the Associated Press. Take it for what it's worth. Two days of clashes and revenge killings in Syria leave more than a thousand people dead. There were initially reports that Christians were among those who were being targeted, along with Alawites and Druze, other religious minorities. Then there were reports coming out that Christians aren't really being targeted. And it's rather unclear, actually, because there's a lot of propaganda around that region from all of the sides. On the one side you have Turkey, Israel, the Al Qaeda, isis, general, Islamist terrorists who took over Syria. On the other side you have Iran and Russia, which had been backing Bashar Assad, who was the erstwhile leader of Syria. And then when he fell, all hell broke loose. Conflicting reports, conclusions. However, though, as I predicted at the time, though it was not popular ousting Bashar Assad was probably a terrible thing because Bashar Assad, for all his sins, generally took care of religious minorities. Okay, my other take on this story. Well, obviously pray for these people, the Alawites and the Druze and the Christians, even though it's disputed if the Christians are being. Christians have been persecuted in Syria for a long time. I'm sure they're still being persecuted now. Also, when there is a tectonic political shift going on, as there is now some eras, there aren't huge shifts going on. The mid-90s, there weren't huge political shifts. The big political shift had occurred in the early 90s with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then things were kind of the same until 9 11. Right now, there are tectonic political shifts going on. You see this especially in the conflict in Ukraine, also in the conflict in Gaza, also in President Trump talking about acquiring Greenland and adding Canada to the country, retaking the Panama Canal. There is a tectonic shift that is even reflected in the election of President Trump. We talked earlier about mimesis and our leaders reflecting the body politic. And something has changed. We came to the end of something with the first election of Trump, and now we're really seeing that come to fruition. And when those shifts take place, the propaganda backed by organizations, backed by states gets very, very intense. So it's another reason not to believe everything that you read on the Internet and to try to do some of that research for yourself and of course, to pray for these people, because there's no doubt in my mind that Alawites, Druze, and even Christians are being seriously persecuted there. And there's no doubt in my mind that greater changes are even to come. Okay, it's Music Monday. The rest of the show continues now. You do not want to miss it. Become a member. Use Code Knowles at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

Leland Vitter (47:54)

SA.