Earlier this week, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer joined “The Chad Prather Show” on BlazeTV for a wide-ranging (and oftentimes humorous) discussion with the eponymous host and Blaze Media resident cowboy, Chad Prather. The conversation ran the gamut of topics, covering such diverse terrain as impeachment, recent rumors and revelations pertaining to former National Security Advisor John Bolton, the debate over transgender pronouns, and … Chad’s traveling crew getting kicked out of a bar in Bakersfield, California.
The conversation kicked off around impeachment, with Prather asking Hammer why Republicans seem so opposed to calling witnesses in the current Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. Hammer said he wasn’t sure why Republicans are so opposed — a skepticism that the podcast host shared:
I don’t really understand why Republicans and the president are so opposed to witnesses. I mean, look, in theory, here’s how this is supposed to work. Okay, the House and Senate are supposed to … actually do what they’re … supposed to do and write bills and pass laws and all that stuff that the Constitution talks about.
It ain’t gonna happen this year because it’s very simple: The Democrats control the House, Republicans control the Senate, [and] it’s also an election year, everyone’s risk-averse, no one’s trying to stick his or her neck out, put their foot on the line. So in that context, I don’t really understand this Republican resistance to calling witnesses. Drag this thing out. How is Hunter Biden getting up there not going to help with the president and Republicans come November? I don’t see it.
The conversation quickly shifted to the news surrounding Bolton, with Hammer offering his take on what we know so far:
So the worst part is … The New York Times got a copy of his book before anyone in the administration did. You know, I’m not gonna say John Bolton had anything to do with that, but it’s pretty unforeseeable that John Bolton had nothing to do with that. That’s just not a good look.
And like you, I’m a longtime defender of John Bolton’s. … He’s a lifelong conservative, he really is. I mean, he went to Yale for both undergrad and law school. At Yale undergrad, he was a member of what the nerds of Yale call the Yale Political Union’s Party of the Right, which in their kind of nerdy political club is the most right-wing party possible. So he’s a lifelong Barry Goldwater-, Ronald Reagan-like conservative, so it’s a little weird to see what’s happening now.
Later in the conversation, the topic shifted to transgender pronouns in the federal courts — a topic that Hammer, a former judicial law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, wrote about earlier this week for National Review. Hammer explained the three reasons why he thinks conservatives must not cave on this issue:
There are … three reasons why I think we really should care. One is the truth, inherently, is worth defending. Truth should be defended for the sake of truth. I mean, that’s kind of historically speaking, the entire purpose of debate in the academy, going back to Socrates, Aristotle, going back to all the ancients. They literally engaged in this Socratic dialogue in order to reach the truth. So if we feel like we have the truth, then it’s worth defending for its own sake.
Second, language cannot change this much, and this drastically, and remain viable. Now, some words can change meaning over time, of course. And plenty of words do change meaning over time. Like, for example, “decimate” — the word “decimate” — back in the day, the letters “dec” mean 10, so it was literally to take out one out of ten of the opposing military. Today, it just means more generally to kind of wipe out. So words can change their meaning, but words as basic as pronouns, the building blocks of distinguishing, as you quite aptly put it, between male and female genitalia — that cannot change. Words like that just cannot change for the English language to be viable.
Third, and probably the most important reason … is because there are actually really bad side effects to the transgender movement. We saw it here in Texas with James Younger. We are encouraging the premature, preteen sexualization of children. We are encouraging children to choose their own gender and engaging in oftentimes-irreversible hormonal tampering — chemical castration, frankly, is really what’s going on here. There are really corrosive, actual real-life effects of this.
The whole lengthy conversation is available on YouTube.
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RELATED: Hammer At ‘National Review’: The Fifth Circuit Rejects The Lie Of Transgender Pronouns