The Daily Wire caught up with policy analyst and author Carrie Sheffield to talk with her about her new book &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Motorhome-Prophecies-Journey-Healing-Forgiveness/dp/1546004386/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1MCPY1LY9G6BK&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.U6jLnuG0UcJjuJ69YTShvcQr6Ezo_ux8egpxy3_tX0obBqozBXOQNMUa7_8fEazolWcS-NOWXGIsih85r2eeNz9V1jGTrnR4mSUZ_fIVhexCclFVtHgIjULyOD7pCboqgN_6orCmPsl-M5S082BZjA.v0WeUS8vwaUdtnuSzFCJH91q6PUV9wLYp4UlOmSaUR0&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=motorhome+prophecies&amp;qid=1713538529&amp;sprefix=motorhome%2Caps%2C93&amp;sr=8-2" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness,</a>&#8221; (CenterStreet/Hachette Book Group).
DW: Let’s start with politics. You’ve served as a policy analyst and columnist for several years now, both in New York and in Washington. Which issues are paramount in your mind as we head into the 2024 presidential election season?
Sheffield: Certainly the economy and immigration are top of mind for many voters, including me. The fact that inflation has ravaged household wages is an ongoing and pervasive problem. The fact that average monthly mortgage payments under Biden have skyrocketed means real pain and the dream of home ownership moves out of reach for more American families. Seeing our border towns and cities like New York and Chicago overrun with sanitation issues and safety problems due to Biden’s failed immigration policies is discouraging and must be stopped.
DW: Speaking of presidents, in “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Motorhome-Prophecies-Journey-Healing-Forgiveness/dp/1546004386/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1MCPY1LY9G6BK&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.U6jLnuG0UcJjuJ69YTShvcQr6Ezo_ux8egpxy3_tX0obBqozBXOQNMUa7_8fEazolWcS-NOWXGIsih85r2eeNz9V1jGTrnR4mSUZ_fIVhexCclFVtHgIjULyOD7pCboqgN_6orCmPsl-M5S082BZjA.v0WeUS8vwaUdtnuSzFCJH91q6PUV9wLYp4UlOmSaUR0&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=motorhome+prophecies&amp;qid=1713538529&amp;sprefix=motorhome%2Caps%2C93&amp;sr=8-2" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Motorhome Prophecies</a>” you write that your father was convinced he was a Mormon prophet destined to become president of the United States. Looking back, how did that influence the way your family lived?
Sheffield: Yes, my dad claimed that he’d be U.S. president one day. He also made some unproven claims, like President Reagan designating MLK Jr. Day because of my dad’s work supporting Dr. King’s messages and that his political essays influenced then-Speaker Newt Gingrich to impeach Bill Clinton.
Politics was in my dad’s blood because his father had been a successful Utah state lawmaker. He was also former chairman of the Salt Lake City Zoning and Planning Commission for 25 years. That his firstborn son would follow him into politics wasn’t too far-fetched.
My dad’s beliefs about his destiny absolutely motivated our nationwide travels in a street musical orchestra attracting listeners and then passing out patriotic and religious brochures. But the proselytizing came at an expensive price — his kids’ mental health and happiness. Multiple siblings have attempted suicide, two developed schizophrenia (it’s well documented that schizophrenia’s onset is exacerbated by childhood trauma), and I struggled with periodic suicidal ideation, depression, PTSD, and anxiety because of our dad’s zealotry.
Despite the negative aspects, dad gave me a deep love of our exceptional country, of intellectual inquiry, and beautiful music. Though we’ve had many disagreements, I know in his heart he has a deep desire to serve others through his work. I think his love of country in some ways blinded him to his personal life’s failures. That is a common fatal flaw for public servants. Children of politicians often experience abandonment problems as adults. Each generation must recognize and heal our own hurts.
<div id="attachment_726119" style="width: 391px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-726119" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-726119" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/9781546004387-381x576.webp" alt="CenterStreet/Hachette book Group" width="381" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/9781546004387-381x576.webp 381w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/9781546004387-199x300.webp 199w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/9781546004387-768x1160.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/9781546004387-1017x1536.webp 1017w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/9781546004387-1356x2048.webp 1356w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/9781546004387-scaled.webp 1695w" sizes="(max-width: 381px) 100vw, 381px" />CenterStreet/Hachette book Group</div>
DW: “Motorhome Prophecies” is written in the vein of famous memoirs like “Hillbilly Elegy” by J.D. Vance, “The Glass Castle” by Jeanette Walls, and “Educated” by Tara Westover, all stories of young Americans growing up in very broken families. Yet each author is somehow able to escape and overcome their childhood trauma and find success as an adult. What were some factors that helped you overcome your childhood?
Sheffield: Necessity is the mother of invention. I knew that if I wanted a better life than the dark, dangerous one around me I needed to be resourceful, pragmatic and humble enough to ask for help. The bravest thing I&#8217;ve done took place when I was 18. In terms of the initial departure, here&#8217;s a passage from the book, it was actually my schizophrenic brother&#8217;s sexual assault and attempted rape that spurred me to start the process of leaving:
<blockquote>It would prove a long winding path, but Peter’s assault eventually became a catalyst for me to scrutinize my faith, to pray for God’s protection and guidance, and, eventually, to reject Ralph’s false prophecies and run away from home. I’m the fifth oldest sibling, but I was the first to escape the clutches of The Mission. That harrowing night back in 2000 taught me a lesson that would be reinforced time and again: life’s most wrenching crucibles can propel us to our greatest moments of growth and freedom.</blockquote>
I pushed myself to achieve in my career and work in public policy because I wanted a better life for myself than remaining trapped in a violent and impoverished environment. Also, as a woman, I wanted to bask in the freedoms denied my mother and myself as the first girl with four older brothers.
Early on, I also felt a sense of jaded insecurity that fueled my ambition. I wanted to prove my dad wrong. He prophesied that I&#8217;d be raped and murdered if I left the cult. I decided I&#8217;d soar to career heights surpassing his own. It’s a toxic, unstable motivation, to prove someone wrong, and it eventually comes crashing down.
Another reason I left was that I&#8217;d undertaken a long-term investigation into my dad and found his handwritten prophecies were in direct opposition to the teachings of the official LDS Church&#8217;s hierarchy.
For many years I struggled. I would paint myself in these absolutist black and white terms, that my dad was evil and that I was a hero for escaping. Today, though, I know I am not the hero of this book, but I am also not the villain. God is the hero, and though I thought my father was the villain, I now see he was crushed by severe religious zealotry sparked by mental illness after suffering sexual assault as a toddler. He also suffered through the death of his childhood best friend which led to enduring isolation. He’s just as deserving of God’s mercy and compassion as I am. I love my father and am sorry I waited so long to forgive him. I believe forgiving him earlier would have stopped me from some toxic self-sabotaging that I did to cope with the trauma.
<div id="attachment_726171" style="width: 490px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-726171" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-726171" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/Carrie-Sheffield-1-scaled-1-480x576.jpg" alt="Credit: Carrie Sheffield." width="480" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/Carrie-Sheffield-1-scaled-1-480x576.jpg 480w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/Carrie-Sheffield-1-scaled-1-250x300.jpg 250w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/Carrie-Sheffield-1-scaled-1-768x921.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/Carrie-Sheffield-1-scaled-1-1280x1536.jpg 1280w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/Carrie-Sheffield-1-scaled-1-1707x2048.jpg 1707w" sizes="(max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px" />Credit: Carrie Sheffield.</div>
DW: Your book deals a lot with mental illness. Authors like Abigail Shrier and Jonathan Haidt have also written books this year on young people struggling with mental illness. It seems to be a growing problem. Why do you think it&#8217;s a common thread and what are the broader takeaways found in &#8220;Motorhome Prophecies”?
Sheffield: Certainly depression and suicide are rising, and this is troubling. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention late last year released <a href="https://thedispatch.acemlna.com/lt.php?s=b497b0dace4b29102719b273346a3dbb&amp;i=2147A2461A1A75103" target="_blank" rel="noopener">provisional data</a> showing nearly 50,000 people committed suicide in the United States in 2022. This nearly 3% increase from 2021 is the highest number ever recorded and the highest rate since 1941 — the aftershocks of the Great Depression. It’s nearly 17 times the number of people killed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Gen Z is far more secular than their parents were when they were young, and I think it’s no coincidence Gen Z is also suffering far greater isolation and mental illness. This is a trend we can and must reverse. People who attend religious services at least weekly are significantly less likely to die “deaths of despair”— suicide, drug overdose, or alcohol poisoning, <a href="https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/regularly-attending-religious-services-associated-with-lower-risk-of-deaths-of-despair/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">according to 2020 research</a> from Harvard University’s School of Public Health. A literature review appearing in Psychiatric Times <a href="https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/religion-spirituality-and-mental-health">reported</a>: “Of 93 observational studies, two-thirds found lower rates of depressive disorder with fewer depressive symptoms in persons who were more religious. … a review of 134 studies that examined the relationships between religious involvement and substance abuse [concluded that] 90% found less substance abuse among the more religious.”
Ironically, research from the <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-50618-001">Psychology of Religion and Spirituality</a> found atheism correlates with <a href="https://www.psypost.org/new-psychological-research-links-atheism-to-emotional-suppression/">emotional suppression</a>. Psychology professors (along with biologists) are least likely among all disciplines to believe in God, <a href="https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2007/07/faculty-faith-html#:~:text=A%20professor's%20field%20of%20research,%2C%20economists%2C%20and%20political%20scientists.">Harvard reported.</a> The journal Sociology of Religion <a href="https://www.patheos.com/blogs/epiphenom/2009/05/psychologists-are-least-religious-of.html">similarly found</a> that psychologists are the least religious of American professors. This is a troubling combination. The same trained experts ordained to heal mental disorders are sometimes the very ones who are skeptical of rescuing balm.
A recovered agnostic, I experienced the power of faith to heal my own mental health, as I recount in my book. The biggest hurdle I needed to overcome was comprehending the difference between man-made abuse and healthy faith in God.
DW: Eventually you went to college and ended up at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. How did your worldview change while in Cambridge?
Sheffield: I became more aware of the narratives around “privilege” being crafted at places like Harvard. I gained a sense of understanding perhaps their altruistic impulse — indeed, our country had sexism, slavery, and Jim Crow as stains in our history. But eventually, I came to realize that good intentions do not equal good outcomes.
At Harvard, I also became more entrenched as an agnostic, which is sad because Harvard was founded to help clergy grow their intellectual capacity to teach the mind of God. Around 7 years after I graduated, during my Christian conversion process, the more I studied science, including metaphysics, history, anthropology, and other disciplines, the more my faith in God and my confidence in Christianity grew. Studying Christianity felt like uncovering buried treasure discarded by intellectuals at places like Harvard who had discounted its scientific and philosophical heft.
DW: You’ve written many articles over the years for various periodicals, but this is your first time writing a full-length book. What was the process like for you?
Sheffield: Writing a 90,000 word book is indeed a far heavier lift than a news article. I tell people who ask advice for writing a memoir to begin a journal today if they don’t already. This memoir genre was made far easier for me because I’ve got a stack of journals to assist. I’ve kept a journal since age 8 because journaling is strongly encouraged in the LDS Church and Mormon diaspora community due to strong cultural appreciation of genealogy and family history — the LDS Church has more than 2 billion records in its genealogy database. Also, as a newer faith, we know many things about its early origins due to contemporaneous journals. As a journalist, the personal journals made the process far easier for accuracy — I didn’t have to make up what I was thinking, I knew directly.

Camper Touring the American Southwest Monument Valley

Author Carrie Sheffield Recounts Harrowing Childhood In New Book ‘Motorhome Prophecies’

Author Carrie Sheffield Recounts Harrowing Childhood In New Book 'Motorhome Prophecies'

Books

family

Harvard

interview

Mental Illness

Mormonism

Psychology

Readers Pass

Sexual Assault

Academics have a bone to pick with the authors of &#8220;White Rural Rage: The Threat To American Democracy,&#8221; a best-selling book that argues rural voters — many of whom have <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/01/28/rural-voters-favor-trump/72337833007/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">rallied behind</a> former President Donald Trump — pose a danger to the United States.
Journalist Paul Waldman and professor Tom Schaller are being accused of negligence by some of the very same researchers they cited in their book, which publisher Penguin Random House <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/734507/white-rural-rage-by-tom-schaller-and-paul-waldman/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">says</a> is about how &#8220;rural Whites&#8221; have become the &#8220;most likely group to abandon democratic norms and traditions&#8221; with the encouragement of GOP politicians and conservative media.
<div id="attachment_720427" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-720427" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-720427" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/9780593729144.jpeg" alt="Penguin Random House. February 2024." width="300" height="450" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/9780593729144.jpeg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/04/9780593729144-200x300.jpeg 200w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Penguin Random House. February, 2024.</div>
Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist from Colby College, said in an <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/05/white-rural-rage-myth-00150395" target="_blank" rel="noopener">op-ed published by POLITICO</a> Magazine on Friday that his research and the work of others are &#8220;being misinterpreted and misunderstood.&#8221; The authors made &#8220;two persistent types of errors&#8221; when examining the data on rural Americans, he explained.
The first, Jacobs said, is they &#8220;routinely fall victim to the logical fallacy of composition when they attribute group characteristics to individuals.&#8221; He cited as examples attempts to suggest rural voters who support Trump are more likely to be authoritarian, claim their communities are beset by Christian nationalism, and ignore the smaller numbers who back Democrats.
The second &#8220;persistent error,&#8221; Jacobs said, is the authors &#8220;cite polling data with little attention to issues of quality, which less sloppy scholars would question to make sure their conclusions were valid,&#8221; including on race and immigration as well as the &#8220;birther&#8221; claim regarding former President Barack Obama and whether he was born in the United States.
&#8220;This shoddy analysis and faux expertise does real damage,&#8221; Jacobs wrote, dismissing the central focus of the book. &#8220;It is clear that the overwhelming portrayal of rural America as angry and irrational feeds into and amplifies the divisions between rural and urban Americans, overshadowing the shared challenges and aspirations that cut across these geographic lines.&#8221;
Jacobs also joined with B. Kal Munis to write in a post published on <a href="https://reason.com/2024/03/07/the-truth-about-rural-rage/#:~:text=The%20overarching%20argument%20of%20White,rural%20communities%20than%20within%20them." target="_blank" rel="noopener">Reason.com</a>, saying they were two of the scholars whose work the authors of &#8220;White Rural Rage&#8221; got wrong, going as far as to accuse Waldman and Schaller of &#8220;academic malpractice&#8221; in their book.
&#8220;Schaller and Waldman favorably cite our research showing that there is a modest correlation between rural resentment and racial resentment, a commonly used attitudinal measure of negative racial stereotyping,&#8221; the pair <a href="https://reason.com/2024/03/07/the-truth-about-rural-rage/#:~:text=The%20overarching%20argument%20of%20White,rural%20communities%20than%20within%20them." target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> in their op-ed from March. &#8220;What they fail to note is the only statistically and intellectually sound conclusion that could be drawn from our data: While this slight correlation exists, rural resentment is an attitude distinct from racial prejudice.&#8221;
In response to the criticism, Schaller and Waldman spoke with The New Republic editor Michael Tomasky in a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTdo5eAW1Ws" target="_blank" rel="noopener">recent interview</a> and touched on the veracity of their work. The book &#8220;is right, right now,&#8221; said Schaller, who then quipped about hoping that in 10 to 15 years they will have to &#8220;retract a lot of it because white, rural Americans&#8221; will have returned to their roots and support a &#8220;secular, pluralist constitutional democracy.&#8221;
Waldman said they have &#8220;taken a lot of criticism even from people who say, &#8216;This book is why rural people are resentful.&#8217; That it&#8217;s the &#8230; condescension of the snooty Eastern elitists and that&#8217;s the end of the story and you don&#8217;t have to interrogate really where that belief comes form, but we&#8217;ve also heard from a lot of people in rural American of all kinds just ordinary people — journalists, activists — &#8230; who have said, &#8216;This is an accurate reflection of what&#8217;s going on in my community. This is a real problem and we have to address it.'&#8221;
The criticism, however, keeps coming.
Kristen Luna Trujillo, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/white-rural-rage-cites-my-research-it-gets-everything-about-rural-america-wrong-opinion-1877917" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a> for Newsweek that the authors cited but did not misrepresent her work, yet she chastises them for how they &#8220;do criticize rural Americans for their anti-intellectualism, building on tired tropes of rural people being backward, dumb, violent, and ignorant, while pushing a narrative that worsens such distrust in the first place.&#8221;
Another assistant professor, Tyler Austin Harper of Bates College, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240406214424/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/white-rural-rage-criticism/677967/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a> for The Atlantic that he spoke with 20 scholars in the &#8220;tight-knit rural-studies community&#8221; and most of whom are cited in &#8220;White Rural Rage&#8221; or thanked in the acknowledgments. He said these academics &#8220;left me convinced that the book is poorly researched and intellectually dishonest.&#8221;
Harper said he found a pattern after fact-checking many of the book&#8217;s claims and citations that showed most of &#8220;the problems occur in sections of the book that try to prove that white rural Americans are especially likely to commit or express support for political violence.&#8221;
Claiming the authors are &#8220;bending the facts to fit their chosen scapegoat,&#8221; Harper wrote they &#8220;mislead the public about the all-too-real threats to our democracy today. As serious scholarship has shown—including some of the very scholarship Schaller and Waldman cite, only to contort it — the right-wing rage we need to worry about is not coming from deep-red rural areas. It is coming from cities and suburbs.&#8221;

A Trump 2020 re-election sign and an American flag are

‘White Rural Rage’ Book Enrages Same Academics It Cites

'White Rural Rage' Book Enrages Same Academics It Cites

2024 Election

Democracy

Donald Trump

Racism

U.S.

Actress <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/rebel-wilson">Rebel Wilson</a> has revealed the name of a fellow <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/celebrities">celebrity</a> who she claims tried to block press about the publication of her memoir.
The 44-year-old Australian <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/entertainment">star</a> had previously referenced a “massive a**hole” she worked with in the past. She accused the as-yet-unidentified individual of trying to intimidate her as she worked on her memoir, per <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/rebel-wilson-sacha-baron-cohen-memoir-1235859389/">The Hollywood Reporter</a>.
Wilson previously said in Instagram stories, “Now the a**hole is trying to threaten me. He’s hired a crisis PR manager and lawyers. He’s trying to stop press coming out about my new book. But the book WILL come out and you will all know the truth.”
Now, Wilson is saying that person is <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/sacha-baron-cohen">Sacha Baron Cohen</a>. 
The “Pitch Perfect” star shared an update on March 25: &#8220;I will not be bullied or silenced with high priced lawyer or PR crisis managers. The ‘a**hole’ that I am talking about in ONE CHAPTER of my book is Sasha Baron Cohen.”
Wilson has been referencing Cohen for several weeks now. On March 15, she <a href="https://www.instagram.com/rebelwilson/reel/C4ikheULuRA/">said</a> on social media, “When I first came to Hollywood, people were like, yeah, ‘I have a no a**hole policy, means like, yeah, I don’t work with a**holes.’ I was like, ‘Oh yeah. I mean, that sounds sensible or logical. But then it really sunk in because I worked with a massive a**hole and yeah, now I definitely have a no a**holes policy.”
Wilson and Baron Cohen worked together in the 2016 spy action comedy “The Brothers Grimsby.” Wilson played the girlfriend of Baron Cohen’s character Nobby, an English football player who becomes a spy.
The actress discussed her experience working with her colleague in 2014 on the radio show “Kyle and Jackie O.” 
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“Sacha is so outrageous,” the actress said at the time, per THR. “Every single day [Baron Cohen’s] like, ‘Rebel, can you just go naked in this scene?’ And I’m like, ‘No!’ Sacha and I have the same agent in America and I’m like, ‘Sacha, I’m going to call our agent Sharon and tell her how much you are harassing me.”
She added, “Every day he’s like, ‘Just go naked, it will be funny. Remember in ‘Borat’ when I did that naked scene? It was hilarious.’ On the last day I thought I’d obviously won the argument, and he got a body double to do the naked scene.”
“Then in the last scene…he was like, ‘Rebel can you just stick your finger up my butt?’ And I went, ‘What do you mean Sacha? That’s not in the script,’” Wilson said. “And he’s like, ‘Look, I’ll just pull down my pants, you just stick your finger up my butt, it’ll be a really funny bit.&#8217;”
Wilson’s book, “Rebel Rising,” is scheduled for a global release on April 2.

Rebel Wilson

Rebel Wilson Reveals Which ‘A**Hole’ Celeb Tried To ‘Threaten’ Her Over Memoir Release: ‘I Will Not Be Bullied’

Celebrities

Entertainment

Hollywood

Sacha Baron Cohen

World

The following is an edited transcript of a recent interview between Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley and investigative journalist Peter Schweizer on a special <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/morning-wire/blood-money-china-s-covert-assault-on-america-sunday-extra" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sunday Edition of Morning Wire</a>. They discuss Schweizer’s new book “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Money-Powerful-Blind-Americans/dp/0063061198/ref=sr_1_1?crid=29T170ZKWKBNZ&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ziXJAoc3va71UZCFZRlCYX5AXdPIM1nnKqNHXd4XM6L8PUTaeTgvubWS_xjtztu5DgRuO2Yc5vvKpxTMuta0aKyb8blYLIeiU3FXBORZ3FNkLCcTiZDE3I9RKjUI75X1Yqnr99t3tnwQ7FXe3OGm85PTWg9e7FAFNV1OOCyuklSz03DqeL2b-cDpG1PEzyLCgT_LhQaW3DTbBrrdX6FV9beIxyWAI6cQrwBgyFqywRc.9nGJcU4tJM4HGuMVAO9CB3BPYaxsO8kvX6PR9AOTytc&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=blood+money&amp;qid=1709932850&amp;sprefix=blood+money%2Caps%2C87&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Blood Money</a>” and China&#8217;s covert strategy of &#8220;disintegration warfare&#8221; against the United States.
JOHN: Joining us now to discuss his new investigative book “Blood Money,” which shines an alarming light on China’s attempt to engage in what they call “disintegration warfare” against the U.S., is bestselling author Peter Schweizer. Peter, thank you for coming on.
PETER: Absolutely. Great to be with you.
JOHN: Now what you lay out in “Blood Money” is clearly sending some shockwaves through many circles. Let’s start with the big picture, with the premise of the book. What did your research about China’s relationship to the U.S. lead you to conclude?
PETER: I think there are two stages to the story, John. It’s best demonstrated by a picture. The picture is America on fire and China holding an empty can of gasoline. Some of our leaders are aware of it but they&#8217;re not saying anything. So it&#8217;s really about two things. Number one, China has a strategy called “disintegration warfare,” which is designed to literally disintegrate the United States — get us to turn on each other, social division, social chaos, death, et cetera. The second part of the equation is that our political class in Washington really has not talked about it and will not confront China on these points. Those, I think, are the two important elements to this story.
JOHN: You make a point of emphasizing that every claim in your book is backed up by verifiable documentation and sources – and indeed the footnotes run some 100 pages. You’re famous for digging up information no one else was able to find. What were some key materials you unearthed for this book?
PETER: We made use of a lot of leaked documents from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and the Department of Justice. We also made use of documents that were hacked, not by us, but were hacked by other parties and were released by journalists in Mexico. These are internal communications from the Mexican police. What we find is that these materials can be very valuable, especially if you know what you&#8217;re looking for. A lot of times when hacked or leaked materials are released they can be thousands of pages, so people are looking for low hanging fruit. We find it much better, and you can be more successful, by actually going in knowing what you&#8217;re looking for, knowing that you&#8217;re panning for gold. So you know where to look for the gold. Those were very, very important tools.
The third component were materials and documents from China itself. We were able to get access to — not classified by any means — but restricted Chinese military documents and government documents from the ministry of propaganda. We got access to those by essentially spoofing a domestic account with a domestic Chinese phone number to gain access to documents that gave us very interesting insights into what they are saying about TikTok. And it&#8217;s quite different, obviously, than the debate we&#8217;re having in the United States.
<div id="attachment_707969" style="width: 391px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-707969" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-707969 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/81JL3vN6voL._SL1500_-1-381x576.jpg" alt="Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans, by Peter Schweizer. (Harper) Hardcover – February 27, 2024." width="381" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/81JL3vN6voL._SL1500_-1-381x576.jpg 381w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/81JL3vN6voL._SL1500_-1-199x300.jpg 199w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/81JL3vN6voL._SL1500_-1-768x1160.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/81JL3vN6voL._SL1500_-1.jpg 993w" sizes="(max-width: 381px) 100vw, 381px" />Courtesy: Harper</div>
JOHN: I found it really striking in the introduction to the book, where you lay out some of these influential documents from the Chinese military that lay out a strategy and talk about this disintegration of warfare. Can you unpack some of the information you learned from those documents?
PETER: Disintegration warfare, is predicated on the idea that the best way to defeat your enemy is by not fighting them. In other words, you are the supreme strategist, as Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese scholar, would have said. The supreme strategist is the one who defeats his enemy without actually firing a shot. And that&#8217;s the strategy. You know, we focus on aircraft carriers and missiles with regards to the military balance with China and I&#8217;m not saying we should neglect that, but that&#8217;s not their play. Their play is to look at our weaknesses, what they call our soft underbelly – which are the divisions we have in this country – and to exploit them, to turn American against American, and to play off of our decadence. And I would say the strategy is working quite successfully.
If you just look at fentanyl, for example, it is now the <a href="https://www.getsmartaboutdrugs.gov/media/dea-administrator-record-fentanyl-overdose-deaths" target="_blank" rel="noopener">leading cause of death</a> for people under the age of 45 in the United States. The vast majority of people dying don&#8217;t even know they&#8217;re taking fentanyl. And this is a Chinese operation. People want to talk about the Mexican cartels, but they&#8217;re really the junior partners in this. The Chinese are running this along every link in the chain. And yet, this is a strategy they call a “murder with a borrowed knife.” In other words, try to kill somebody, but use somebody else&#8217;s knife to do it. So while our focus is on Mexico and the drug cartels, this is actually a Chinese operation designed to undermine us. It&#8217;s a great example of disintegration warfare.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/morning-wire/blood-money-china-s-covert-assault-on-america-sunday-extra" target="_blank" rel="noopener">LISTEN: Hear the full interview with Peter Schweizer on Morning Wire</a></h3>
JOHN: In “Blood Money” you track how China controls every chain in the production, delivery and the money laundering involved with fentanyl. Can you describe some of that process?
PETER: Fentanyl starts with precursors in China. A lot of people know that China provides the vast majority of the precursors the cartels use to make fentanyl. But what people probably don&#8217;t know is that those precursors are shipped – 90% of them – to a port in Mexico called Manzanillo. And people wonder why can&#8217;t they stop shipments in this port? Well, the problem is the international terminal in Manzanillo is actually run by a Chinese company that&#8217;s close to the Chinese military.
The precursors come in from China, they&#8217;re then shipped to a small city in northern Mexico, where, according to our federal government, there are 2,000 Chinese nationals who just happen to live in this Mexican city who basically create the fentanyl out of these precursors. They do it for the cartels. Now that the cartels have the fentanyl, they need to put them into pill form. Because, again, people who are dying from fentanyl overdoses, they think they&#8217;re taking a Vicodin or an Adderall when they&#8217;re actually taking a look-alike pill that is laced with fentanyl.
Plus, they need pill presses. Where do the cartels get the pill presses? Well, they are imported from China, and according to the Department of Homeland Security, the Chinese are selling them to the drug cartels at cost. Meaning they&#8217;re not trying to make a boatload of money. They&#8217;re selling it to the cartels at cost. They have little molds that make them look exactly like the real pills, even though they&#8217;re fake pills.
Now that they have the pills, John, they need to distribute them in the United States. If you&#8217;re a drug cartel, you need secure communications. So what do the Mexican cartels use? They use Chinese apps and Chinese communication devices. They&#8217;re encrypted in China and they know that the Chinese will not share those with you and U.S. law enforcement.
Then the final component is, if you are a drug cartel like the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, and you&#8217;ve made all this money, you have to launder the money. Now, in the old days of cocaine, you would have laundered the money in Latin American banks. Today, the cartels are laundering their money in Chinese state-owned banks. And, again, according to our federal government, they are oftentimes using Chinese students in the United States on education visas to do so. So again, the cartels are the junior partners here. This is a Chinese operation.
JOHN: Unbelievable. Peter, thank you so much for coming on and good luck with this book.
PETER: Thanks, John.
To listen to the full interview with John Bickley and Peter Schweizer, tune in to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/morning-wire/blood-money-china-s-covert-assault-on-america-sunday-extra" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Morning Wire</a>.

flags of USA and China painted on cracked wall

Peter Schweizer On China’s Covert Assault On America

Peter Schweizer On China's Covert Assault On America

China

Drugs

Fentanyl

Mexico

Morning Wire

An online <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/books">bookstore</a> that advertised itself as being committed to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/free-speech">sharing ideas</a>, even those which are deemed controversial, has removed titles from conservative authors amid backlash.
Television host and activist RuPaul is a co-founder of the “all-inclusive” online bookstore Allstora, according to <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/news/rupauls-all-inclusive-anti-censorship-book-store-immediately-removes-right-wing-titles/">National Review</a>. He started the online store with <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/lgbtq">LGBTQ</a> advocate and author Eric Cervini and drag performer Adam Powell.
The site advertised that they would carry titles from authors of all points of view, and books for sale on the site initially ranged from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” to the graphic, controversial coming-of-age book “Gender Queer.”
“We’re a marketplace for all books and all stories, with a focus on elevating marginalized voices,” the site originally touted, according to NR. “You may find books you disagree with,” a pop up ad warned, while the FAQ page said, “Allstora has made the decision to carry all books” and “censorship of any book, perspective, or story is incompatible with the survival of democracy.”
“Banning books is never the answer,” the site&#8217;s messaging, which has since been deleted, said, according to <a href="https://www.themarysue.com/rupauls-online-bookstore-controversy-explained/">The Mary Sue</a>. “We cannot fight the ideologies of hate if we lack the ability to study, understand, and react to them. We do that by reading books.”
However, left-wing activists were outraged that Allstora offered titles by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Matt Walsh, Riley Gaines, and Libs of TikTok founder Chaya Raichik, among others. At first, the website&#8217;s founders attempted to diffuse tension by promising to create “a community-led flagging system for titles that are contrary to our core values” and subsequently “donating all proceeds from these titles to fight book bans,” National Review noted.
But that wasn’t enough. After three days of critics railing against Allstora for selling “homophobic,” “transphobic,” “anti-woke,” and “Nazi” books, the founders relented and removed all free speech messaging from the page, according to National Review. Many works by conservative authors were removed from the page, while some other titles remained available.
The drama comes on the heels of RuPaul announcing a “Rainbow Book Bus” that seeks to distribute “diverse books to communities facing book bans and censorship, especially in LGBTQ+ communities.” The bus will embark on a cross country tour later this year, the “Drag Race” host told <a href="https://people.com/rupaul-launches-new-online-book-marketplace-and-book-club-8603704">People</a> during an interview this month.
<a href="https://onelink.to/dwapp" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" aria-describedby="sk-tooltip-9096" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://onelink.to/dwapp&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1710003561508000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0D6t8_i4QXTuHRYfguE6Bl">CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP</a>
“I started reading books at a very early age, and they were a lifeline to the rest of the world for me,” RuPaul told the outlet. “I loved the idea of knowledge is power, and knowledge is a way to transport yourself to wherever you wanna be.”

RuPaul

‘All-Inclusive’ Bookstore Co-Founded By RuPaul Yanks Conservative Titles Following Backlash

RuPaul's 'All-Inclusive' Bookstore Yanks Conservative Titles Following Backlash

Censorship

LGBTQ

RuPaul’s Drag Race

In his tear-filled <a href="https://www.philadelphiaeagles.com/news/jason-kelce-retirement-speech-transcript" target="_blank" rel="noopener">farewell speech</a>, Jason Kelce brought his 13-year NFL career <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/greatest-gift-jason-kelce-celebrates-being-a-father-in-retirement-announcement" target="_blank" rel="noopener">to a close</a> by underlining what really mattered in life: marriage and family. The longtime Philadelphia Eagles player, who made the NFL Pro Bowl in each of the last five seasons after getting married to his wife, Kylie, in 2018, said in his retirement speech: 
<blockquote>It’s no coincidence I have enjoyed my best years with Kylie by my side. She has brought the best out of me through love, devotion, support, honesty, intelligence, and a swift kick in the ass — from time to time. She has also given me three beautiful girls and a life that increasingly brings me more fulfillment off the field than it does on.</blockquote>
He went on to say that he has seen his job as a father as of paramount importance:
<blockquote>I think one of the best things a person can be in this world is a father. A father who is present, devoted, and loving is the greatest gift a child could ask for in our society.</blockquote>
In the emotional retirement speech, Kelce acknowledged that the family he built was one of the most important things in his life. Kylie Kelce was his saving grace. Being a father brought renewed purpose to Kelce’s life. Kelce learned from his two married parents. 
 
Today, our culture tells us two myths. The first myth is that the path to happiness runs away from family, rather than towards it. Controversial cultural figures, like Andrew Tate or Pearl Davis, view marriage as a bad deal for men and are broadly skeptical of, in their eyes, selfish women. In a <a href="https://twitter.com/pearlythingz/status/1716646554801426626" target="_blank" rel="noopener">recent post</a> on X, Davis said, “I am anti-marriage as it is today. I think it’s silly to think marriage is a good deal for most men today.” Tate agrees, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0X9YoorKh0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">saying</a> “I don’t think many men actually benefit from marriages or relationships anymore.”
The second myth is that father-present homes are of no great importance to our kids. Harvard University’s Christina Cross in The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/opinion/two-parent-family.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">argues</a> that “&#8230;living apart from a biological parent does not carry the same cost for black youths as for their white peers.” Pamela Braboy Jackson in The Atlantic <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/09/how-build-three-parent-family-david-jay/616421/">contends</a> that “it’s the quality of the relationship that matters, and the handling of communication and conflict, and the number of people in the household is not really the key” for children.
Jason Kelce readily dispatched both of these myths in his retirement speech, and he’s right. 
 
The data tell us that no group of men are happier than married fathers. Based on data from the 2022 General Social Survey, 35% of prime-aged, married men with children report being “very happy.” Barely 14% of prime-aged, unmarried men without children could report the same. The happiness premium for married fathers is significant and worth promoting. Luckily, Kelce did just that in his retirement speech.
<div id="attachment_707043" style="width: 335px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-707043" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-707043 size-full" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/image002.png" alt="General Social Survey, 2022. Institute for Family Studies. Men's Happiness by Marital Status and Children, Ages 18-15. https://ifstudies.org/blog/who-is-happiest-married-mothers-and-fathers-per-the-latest-general-social-survey#:~:text=Indeed%2C%20the%202022%20General%20Social,who%20do%20not%20have%20children." width="325" height="198" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/image002.png 325w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/image002-300x183.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 325px) 100vw, 325px" />Institute for Family Studies. General Social Survey, 2022.</div>
The data from my new book, &#8220;<a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/get-married-brad-wilcox?variant=41546330636322">Get Married</a>,&#8221; also shows that children who grow up in intact families are much more likely to graduate from college and steer clear of trouble. In fact, 38% of young men from intact families graduate from college compared to 15% of their peers in households headed by a single mother. A greater share of women in intact families (49%) graduate from college, compared to 24% of women from households headed by a single mother. The data are clear: children raised in intact families have a far greater likelihood of graduating from college.
<div id="attachment_707047" style="width: 353px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-707047" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-707047 size-full" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/image003.png" alt="Source: National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. Prison or College Graduation for Young Men and Woman, by Family Structure." width="343" height="271" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/image003.png 343w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/image003-300x237.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 343px) 100vw, 343px" />Source: National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997.</div>
Jason Kelce’s story dovetails perfectly with the data. He is a happily married father in his prime, albeit out of his sporting prime, raising his daughters in a stable two-parent home – exemplifying the benefits of marriage and family. In other words, a good family man.
  * * *
Brad Wilcox is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Future of Freedom Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, author of &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Get-Married-Americans-Families-Civilization/dp/0063210851/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3SPI0PRSVLJYF&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.sIBLtVf9xLb7r8TITnP4vQXSThzFuVWwjNtyFI89s-ua-IcoR2v_4RB-hohzoVBZ3AtqZahRyDxRCclII6iP2J2e82102xQbp5X_FzWDaVD8QpPuOHJknS6-IuyGHbmhfoq8zNoxb3NJ93bBrHjhhICtRhdc7kNUa2IbD2yIgENdluYn9YpwGV0edbpvyDX6VNsrZ6Adup6jxTQ1pa7yvKXV_2Hv-WVtWwfSSPrfpSU.9LvfWxUMAu91Nyn2eqUxyD0hcVrgUFogTMcZWDuenB4&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=brad+wilcox+get+married&amp;qid=1709585997&amp;sprefix=%2Caps%2C59&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization</a>.&#8221; Follow him: @BradWilcoxIFS
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Jason Kelce Announces Retirement from the NFL

Jason Kelce, Family Man

Marriage

Opinion

Philadelphia Eagles

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s conversation with <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-andrew-klavan-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Andrew Klavan</a> on how coming to know God over time develops an experiential relationship and why the journey toward the self you were made to be is a joyful journey. You can <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast/tbd-klavan" target="_blank" rel="noopener">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/tbd-klavan" target="_blank" rel="noopener">watch</a> the full podcast episode on DailyWire+.
Start time: 1:28:08
Andrew Klavan: This is one of the problems I&#8217;ve always had with the postmodernists: They talk about the meaninglessness of language, but I understand what they&#8217;re saying. And so obviously — except with Derrida, who had the integrity to write absolute gibberish — they actually are disproving their own point. And they talk about, basically, the fact that we can&#8217;t know anything, but we can. We can know if I go north, I get to Canada; if I go south, I get to Mexico.
Jordan B. Peterson: Right. We cannot know anything purely by words.
Andrew Klavan: Yes, that&#8217;s right. And so I really did have some kind of trust in myself. I simply could not break through my milieu, which was so default at least agnostic and really atheistic. The other thing about this, too, by the way, is being a bit of a tough guy, I thought that, in my misery when I cracked up, to embrace God, even though it was logical, was a crutch. How would I know whether I had embraced him in reality or just because I wanted to get out of this incredible pain I was in? And so I couldn&#8217;t do it.
When, years later, I was now a very happy person, my career took off, everything started to go right, I still had that logic and something else was true as well, which was that I had been a real Freudian. I had grown up in that real core Freudian world where all the art stank because everybody&#8217;s trying to prove your mother was to blame for everything and all that. And I didn&#8217;t come to feel that what Freud said was utter nonsense; I came to feel that the details of what he said were utter nonsense, that the structure of the relationship between a therapist or a mentor and a client or a son or a friend or whatever, I thought he got a lot of that quite right — the idea of transference and all this — which made me feel that all of the insights I had had in therapy that I thought were salvific had not been. 
What had been salvific was the loving relationship I had had with this older man who had taken the place of a father who had not been very helpful and it was actually the love that had saved me, and I began to believe in psychology.
Jordan B. Peterson: Well, that is that relationship again.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/tbd-klavan" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast on DailyWire+</a></h4>
Andrew Klavan: Yes. And it made me feel that psychology is a story, that stories give us the ability to take the ineffable and move it around a little bit. And so you split up things that are actually unified into pieces that you can move. And that brought me back to God.
And ultimately, it comes back to fiction again and how much I love fiction. I was reading. I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve ever read the Patrick O&#8217;Brien novels? They&#8217;re just wonderful seafaring adventure stories about the Napoleonic wars. They&#8217;re absolutely brilliant.
Jordan B. Peterson: No, no. I do not know of them.
Andrew Klavan: In them, there&#8217;s a very intellectual character named Maturin who&#8217;s an ugly little man but very brilliant and kind of a spy. I kind of admired him and identified with him a little bit. He&#8217;s a Catholic, and there&#8217;s a scene where he was falling asleep, and the line is: He said a prayer and went to sleep. And I was reading in bed and I thought, well, if Maturin can say a prayer before he goes to sleep, so can I.
And I just thanked God for the journey I had come out of — this horrible darkness that I thought was the end. I thought I was going to kill myself. Instead, I had come out, and here I was now. I had two children. My career was great. I was so happy to be with my beloved wife. I was living in a wonderful place. And I thanked God, and it changed my life. I woke up the next morning, and everything was brighter. Everything was clearer — the details of life. I christened it the joy of my joy.
Jordan B. Peterson: That is the definition of gratitude.
Andrew Klavan: Yes.
Jordan B. Peterson: So you pointed to three things there that we should take apart. Maybe we can close with this.
The first is, one of the primary Freudian accusations — and Marx did this too — was that religion was just a shield against death-anxiety or a sop for the victimized poor. That would be Marx. But Freud was a little bit more trenchant, saying it is a shield of meaning the weak use to protect themselves against the ultimate reality of pointless death. People like Ernest Becker made much of that in his “Denial of Death,” which is actually really a great book, even though it is fundamentally wrong. It is a great book.
But there is something really unwise about that perspective. So here are three arguments against that from someone who really admires Freud, by the way. First of all, if that was the case, why bother with hell? Because medieval people were as scared as hell of hell as modern people are of death. The evidence for that is clear. And you might say, “Well, hell was just a convenient place to put your enemies.” But that is not a good analysis. So, if it is just a death-anxiety shield, then why decorate it with this terrible moral obligation and the reality of hell? So that is a big problem for that theory.
Then you have two other problems, which is that you are supposed to hoist your cross as a Christian believer, and there literally is not anything worse than that by definition because it means you have to stand up to the mob, even if they are your brothers; that you have to forsake your family in pursuit of ethical truths; that you have to suffer torment — physical and metaphysical; and that you have to face the reality of hell itself.
So, sorry, that is not a defense against death-anxiety, not least because I think you can make a very powerful case that confronting malevolence is worse than confronting death.
Andrew Klavan: Yes.
Jordan B. Peterson: We know this because people are rarely traumatized by a brush with death, and they are routinely traumatized by a brush with malevolence. So even on those grounds, you can see that the reality of evil is more trenchant and salient than the reality of death. So that Freudian argument? It is just not right. He got that wrong.
Andrew Klavan: This is where Freud indulges in quackery a little bit. He&#8217;s interviewing, you know, 20 hysterical Victorian Viennese, and he decides that God is a projection of the father. And he says it very definitively, and you think: Hey, you&#8217;re welcome to your opinion. But really, what you&#8217;re talking about to me is like saying that you believe in bread to forestall the fear of hunger.
You know, C.S. Lewis points out that we don&#8217;t have any desires that don&#8217;t have an answer. All our desires have an answer, in fact, in the world; everything that we hunger for is actually there. And this is one of my problems with the evolutionary biologists who think that they can trace the creation of morality. My point about that is it&#8217;s like saying that because I have eyes, that I&#8217;ve invented light, you know. I&#8217;ve invented the human experience of light, perhaps, but not light itself.
And it&#8217;s the same thing with the moral sense that we have. You can say it&#8217;s a result of evolution. That&#8217;s fine. But it&#8217;s a result of evolution like the eye in relationship to something that exists, which is the moral order. And I think that these arguments really do fall apart once you begin to have a realistic view of God and not the sort of happy, you know, yellow face with a smile on it. I have to tell you that weeks after my baptism, my wife, who now knows me to my footsoles turned to me and said, you are such a different person; you are just filled with joy and relaxation. Knowing God has been joy on joy for me. I have to tell you.
This is one of the least quoted lines in the Gospel, but Jesus said, I&#8217;m telling you things so that my joy will be in you and your joy will be complete. Somehow religion manages to turn this into this tormented struggle with your sexual desires or whatever. But no, I actually do think this journey toward the self that you were made to be is a very joyful journey. And every time you take a step on it. And by “joy,” I don&#8217;t mean happiness. I don&#8217;t mean, again, that smiley face. I mean a vitality of life.
The only evidence for love is over time. Experience over time is the evidence for love. I think that&#8217;s true of God, too, ultimately. There&#8217;s no proof of God. There&#8217;s only experience over time as you get to know him, and it develops in your life — and I highly recommend that. That&#8217;s all I can say.
* * *
To continue, listen or watch more content with Dr. Jordan Peterson on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch" target="_blank" rel="noopener">DailyWire+</a>. 
<a href="https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast" target="_blank" rel="noopener">listen to</a> or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch/jordan-peterson" target="_blank" rel="noopener">watch</a> his popular lectures on DailyWire+.
Andrew Klavan is the host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” at The Daily Wire. He is the bestselling author of the Cameron Winter Mystery series. The third installment, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/House-Death-Cameron-Winter-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B0BW1ZTVP9?ref_=ast_author_dp" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The House of Love and Death</a>,” is now available. Follow him on X: @andrewklavan

MixCollage-06-Mar-2024-12-42-PM-8195

Andrew Klavan On Finding ‘The Joy Of My Joy’ After A ‘Horrible Darkness’

Andrew Klavan On Finding 'The Joy Of My Joy' After A 'Horrible Darkness'

Christianity

Jordan Peterson

Novel

Sigmund Freud

I just saw “Dune: Part Two.” I have many thoughts.
Let&#8217;s begin with the fact that “Dune: Part One” and “Dune: Part Two” — which encompass the whole of Frank Herbert’s original “Dune” — these two movies constitute the single greatest science fiction epic movie achievement of all time. It looks absolutely phenomenal.
The acting is top notch, the score is great, and it has probably the best visual effects I&#8217;ve ever seen on film because you don’t sense the CGI. Normally when you have this much CGI, you can really sense it. In this film, however, you really do not sense it. Throughout “Dune: Part Two,” they&#8217;re on multiple planets and they all have different color schemes, different color palettes and different looks. It&#8217;s really pretty phenomenal.
<div id="attachment_704623" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-704623" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-704623" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/zDune-Worm-1024x540.jpg" alt="Dune: Part Two. Courtesy of Warner Media - copyright Warner Media. 2024." width="1024" height="540" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/zDune-Worm-1024x540.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/zDune-Worm-300x158.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/zDune-Worm-768x405.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/zDune-Worm-1536x810.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/zDune-Worm-2048x1080.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Dune: Part Two. Courtesy of Warner Media &#8211; copyright Warner Media. 2024.</div>
So let&#8217;s start from the beginning.
Spoiler alert — there will be lots of spoilers.
“Dune: Part One” ended with Paul Atreides heading off into the desert. The Harkonnen have killed his father. He and his mom, who is a member of the Bene Gesserit, end up going off into the desert to accompany the Fremen. And this is all the predicate to Timothee Chalamet’s Paul Atreides becoming the prophet foretold by both Bene Gesserit lore and, as it turns out, the lore created for the Fremen by the Bene Gesserit. 
So in the Fremen lore, there&#8217;s supposed to be this figure called the Lisan al Gaib. The Lisan al Gaib is supposed to be a figure who is going to make the planet bloom again. Apparently, sometime in the distant past it actually was a blooming paradise but now it&#8217;s all just a desert planet.
<div id="attachment_704613" style="width: 1010px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-704613" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-704613 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/Dune-2-wide--1000x576.jpg" alt="Timothée Chalamet, Dune: Part Two. Photo by Courtesy of Warner Media - copyright Warner Media. 2024." width="1000" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/Dune-2-wide--1000x576.jpg 1000w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/Dune-2-wide--300x173.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/Dune-2-wide--768x442.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/Dune-2-wide--1536x884.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/Dune-2-wide--2048x1179.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />Photo courtesy of Warner Media &#8211; copyright Warner Media. 2024.</div>
In the Bene Gesserit lore, there&#8217;s something called the Kwisatz Haderach, who is a foretold prophet who&#8217;s going to come and rule over all the known universe in the ways that the Bene Gesserit would like. That&#8217;s the basic religious plotline.
So when we start “Dune: Part Two,” Paul Atreides is with the Fremen. It&#8217;s unclear whether he and his mom are going to be accepted by the Fremen, but the movie actually opens in a different place, which is really smart. You see the same sort of thing in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. In “The Return of the King” the movie opens with a back story about Smeagol and the idea is to set you in the universe again.
Well, the same thing happens here. Here you have Florence Pugh&#8217;s Princess Irulan reading from her diary, explaining what just happened in the last movie for those who missed it. So the idea was that the Emperor was afraid of the Atreides family, so he gave the Harkonnen family the ability to kill off all of the Atreides. But they missed Lady Jessica and they missed Paul Atreides, and now Paul is running around making trouble for the Harkonnen family and by proxy for the Emperor.
The first third of the movie is dedicated to Paul becoming Fremen, being accepted and learning the ways of the Fremen. It&#8217;s “Dances with Wolves” — he&#8217;s becoming fully engaged in the Fremen culture, everything from how to properly sand walk to how to ride a Sandworm. He&#8217;s not a Mary Sue. He&#8217;s been trained in actual combat by the top commanders in his civilization and he goes and learns combat from the Fremen as well.
<div id="attachment_704637" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-704637" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-704637 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/Dune-Part-Two-99-864x576.jpg" alt="Timothée Chalamet, Josh Brolin. Dune: Part Two. Photo by Courtesy of Warner Media - copyright Warner Media. 2024." width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/Dune-Part-Two-99-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/Dune-Part-Two-99-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/Dune-Part-Two-99-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/Dune-Part-Two-99-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/Dune-Part-Two-99-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/Dune-Part-Two-99-1800x1200.jpg 1800w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/03/Dune-Part-Two-99-1200x800.jpg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Courtesy of Warner Media &#8211; copyright Warner Media. 2024.</div>
He also makes not-stupid decisions.
By the end of the film he&#8217;s in love with Chani, but he doesn&#8217;t stay with Chani. He understands that his only shot at becoming Kwisatz Haderach is to marry the daughter of the Emperor. Paul actually understands the strategy, and he understands that his political ambitions are going to have to come before Chani. So they get taken in and the Fremen decide that Lady Jessica is going to become the Reverend Mother of their tribe, which really helps a lot since it allows her to spread the propaganda that her son is in fact the long awaited one.
Meanwhile, Paul Atreides is really split internally as to whether he should take up the mantle of Kwisatz Haderach or whether he should basically just fight alongside the Fremen. The reason for this is he&#8217;s been having all these visions and he sees that if he becomes the leader, if he becomes Kwisatz Haderach, or if he becomes Lisan al Gaib, that he is going to cause untold suffering.
There&#8217;s one performance in the movie that the movie really relies on in a heavy way, and that is Feyd-Rautha. Feyd-Rautha is the Harkonnen nephew who is supposed to be the “big baddie” in this movie. So the second part of the film is the introduction of the big baddie. And then the third part of the film is the culmination of the battle.
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&nbsp;
I only have a couple of problems with the film.
Christopher Walken as the Emperor is weird. His appearance takes you out of it — like, Oh, hey, what are you doing here? You couldn&#8217;t find anyone else old in Hollywood? No one?
Aside from that, the only other problem with the film is that when we finally get to the final battle, it&#8217;s so unbelievably easy for Paul Atreides and his forces to just wipe out the Emperor and all of the Harkonnen forces. You wonder why they didn&#8217;t do it earlier. And this is actually projected earlier on in the film. You see Paul, who&#8217;s spending an awful lot of time with the Fremen, attacking various spice machines. And I just kept thinking to myself, the attacking weaponry is so much better than the defending weaponry, I don&#8217;t even understand why this war is a competition.
So the ease with which the last battle is fought makes it somewhat anticlimactic and so you&#8217;re wondering, how did the Harkonnens take over this entire planet? Aside from that, the movie looks spectacular.
Now, because they&#8217;re trying to play up the conflict within Paul Atreides about whether to become this prophetic figure or not, that gets turned into a broader conversation about whether religion is itself a myth or whether religion is a manipulative tool or whether religion is a reality.
Another political thing they don&#8217;t even know they&#8217;re doing — which happens a lot with Denis Villeneuve — his movies turn out to be shockingly Pro-Life. In this movie, Lady Jessica is pregnant and she is talking to the fetus during the entire movie. They show the baby in utero, like it’s not a cluster of cells but an actual character in the film.
In any case, everything is being set up for Part Three. Apparently, there is still going to be a two-to-three year delay between this movie and the next movie. So in that way it&#8217;s very much like “The Lord of the Rings.” They&#8217;re going to wait to see how this one does. It&#8217;s going to make all the money.
The best thing about Denis Villeneuve or Christopher Nolan — the best working directors today — is that they put all the money on the screen. This film cost about $190 million to make, and every dollar of it is on the screen. This movie demands to be seen in IMAX. You need the rumbling of the ships; you need the big sound; you need the deafening sound of this opera. You need all of the elements of the film. As a piece of world-building — it&#8217;s the best world-building I&#8217;ve seen since “The Lord of the Rings.” The acting is universally good.
I had a lot of critiques of Timothee Chalamet in “Dune: Part One.” Here they are somewhat alleviated. Again, I think that the biggest problem with Timothee Chalamet is that he&#8217;s just very skinny. It’s weird to say that, but if he&#8217;s supposed to be this prophetic, fiery figure, then him being this incredible fighter and weighing maybe 92 lbs soaking wet is sort of a strange thing. But does he play it well? Yes. I think he upped his game for “Dune: Part Two.”
Overall, I give it five out of five stars. This is a really good movie, very interesting.
And even if they don&#8217;t end up making “Dune: Part Three,” it will live on its own as a fulsome film experience.

Dune 2 wide

Ben Shapiro Reviews ‘Dune: Part Two’

Ben Shapiro Reviews 'Dune: Part Two'

Ben Shapiro

Dune

Hollwyood

Movies

Review

The following is an excerpt taken from the new book “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fight-Good-Alliance-Reason-Culture/dp/1684515521/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1GFMCFEDYOQP2&amp;keywords=fight+the+good+fight+jay+richard&amp;qid=1707772698&amp;sprefix=fight+the+good+fight+jay+richard%2Caps%2C67&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War</a>,” by Jay Richards &amp; James Robison (Regnery/Skyhorse Publishing).
When God created the heavens and the earth, He ended Day Six by speaking to Himself:
<blockquote>&#8220;&#8216;Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.&#8217; So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, &#8216;Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.'&#8221; (Genesis 1:26–28)</blockquote>
<h4>Male And Female He Created Them</h4>
God creates each of us in His image. Yet we can’t fulfill His command to multiply and fill the earth without the difference of male and female. Why? Because it takes one fertile male and one fertile female to reproduce after our kind. It’s not just that males and females are different; it’s that we’re complements. When we come together in the right way, we’re much greater than the sum of our parts. One man and one woman can give rise to the entire human race.
Even without special revelation, everyone knows the following:
<ol>
<li> There are men and women.</li>
<li> Men aren’t women.</li>
<li> Women aren’t men.</li>
<li> Men can’t become women.</li>
<li> Women can’t become men.</li>
<li> It’s not possible to be a man but have a woman’s body or to be a woman with a man’s body.</li>
</ol>
Until recently, these six claims would have seemed trite. But we live at the shocking moment when our cultural elites deny them all and seek to silence those who resist. In what seems like a flash, “gender ideology” has overrun our schools, our media, our laws, the HR and C-suites of most corporations, the United Nations, and even many churches and synagogues. This ideology has deep roots going back centuries, but it has really picked up steam in the academy in the last few decades.
In 2015, so-called transgender people, such as Caitlyn (formerly the Olympic decathlete known as Bruce) Jenner, suddenly appeared on dozens of magazine covers. A few years later, a collegiate male swimmer, “Lia” Thomas — a male who “identifies” as a woman — won the women’s 500-yard freestyle in the NCAA Division I national championship.
A twenty-six-year-old man, Dylan Mulvaney, started acting like a parody of a 1950s teenage girl and instantly rose to fame with his picture emblazoned on cans of Bud Light. A male sex offender “identifying as a woman” was sent to a women’s prison, where he then raped a female prisoner. Meanwhile, the acronyms kept growing: LBGT morphed into LBGTQIA with a + added to keep the options open. 
What produced the backlash from normal people was the assault on kids: Children have been bombarded with sexual content. Schools stock shelves with explicit porn, such as the notorious &#8220;Gender Queer.&#8221; Activists are teaching young kids to “queer” (that is, blur the boundaries of) reality at drag queen story hours at libraries nationwide. The popular Twitter feed, Libs of TikTok, contains videos of young children twerking and gyrating at drag shows in ways once reserved for dark adult bars.
And amidst it all, teachers and social media influencers are telling children they might have been born in the wrong body. Doctors are “treating” troubled minors with sterilizing drugs and surgeries. When word of this first got out, activists tried to pretend it wasn’t really happening. When that became implausible, they pivoted. Sure, it’s happening, they conceded. In fact, it’s great, and how dare you object, bigot!
Twenty years ago, everyone — left, right, and center — would have denounced such scenes. But overnight, approval became the litmus test for tolerance and taste. These are the worst ideas of our time—the mutant spawn of some nameless demon set free to roam the earth and devour our children.
<div id="attachment_695547" style="width: 392px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-695547" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-695547" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/9159oO4tANL._SL1500_-382x576.jpg" alt="Cover image: Regnery/Skyhorse Publishing" width="382" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/9159oO4tANL._SL1500_-382x576.jpg 382w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/9159oO4tANL._SL1500_-199x300.jpg 199w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/9159oO4tANL._SL1500_-768x1159.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/02/9159oO4tANL._SL1500_.jpg 994w" sizes="(max-width: 382px) 100vw, 382px" />Cover image: Regnery/Skyhorse Publishing</div>
<h4>What Can We Do?</h4>
To escape this freak show, Christians, Jews, and everyone else on #TeamReality need to offer a better view of the human person — one that captures human beings in their fullness, body and soul. That means that, among other things, we must also defend basic biology. This battle will define our politics for the next decade at least. As we write this, one political party fully promotes gender ideology, while the other, with fits and starts, opposes it. The Biden administration has turned the federal government into the globe’s most powerful mission effort of the gender cult. Until that changes, we’ll play defense in Washington.
The red states can be safe zones, but we must fight in every nook and cranny — at school board meetings, in the workplace, with our investments and shopping choices. Every red state should protect kids from these medical procedures. They should also define “male” and “female” in state law, prohibit secret social transitioning in schools, purge gender ideology from school curricula, protect teachers and others from being forced to use fake names and pronouns, and reverse laws that allow people to change the sex on their birth certificate based simply on how they “identify.” Well-crafted parents’ rights bills can help here, and red states have passed several in the last few years.
We suspect the gender clinics will be sued into oblivion as more of their young victims come of age. But we can’t wait for that to happen. We need to fight gender madness as if our children’s lives depend on it. And even when the clinics close their doors, that will be but one victory in a larger battle to defeat a fanatical force that makes twentieth-century communism look tame.
Gender ideology attacks who and what we are. But it also marks an inflection point. We’re being offered a glimpse of the deadly path ahead. Either our culture will see it for what it is and reverse course — or it will suffer costs we can’t begin to imagine.
* * *
This excerpt is taken from the new book “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fight-Good-Alliance-Reason-Culture/dp/1684515521/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1GFMCFEDYOQP2&amp;keywords=fight+the+good+fight+jay+richard&amp;qid=1707772698&amp;sprefix=fight+the+good+fight+jay+richard%2Caps%2C67&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War</a>,” by Jay Richards &amp; James Robison (Regnery/Skyhorse Publishing). Copyright © 2024 Jay Richards &amp; James Robison. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Jay W. Richards, Ph.D., is director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and executive editor of The Stream.
James Robison is the founder and president of LIFE Outreach International, a worldwide Christian relief organization, and the founder and publisher of The Stream.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Daily Wire.

All Gender Restroom

New Book Explains Why We Must Defend Basic Biology And Fight Leftist Lunacy

Biden Administration

Gender

gender ideology

Leftists

Schools

Transgender

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) posted a thread on X Monday he titled &#8220;The Amazon Files,” revealing emails he said show the tech company caved to pressure from the Biden administration &#8220;to censor books.&#8221;
The emails sent from the Biden administration to Amazon and internal messages from the company showed that on the same day that Amazon met with the White House in March 2021, the company “enabl[ed] Do Not Promote” for books that expressed hesitancy about the COVID vaccines, Jordan said.
According to emails the White House sent to Amazon nearly three years ago, then-senior White House advisor Andy Slavitt — who at the same time was <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-biden-admin-praised-youtubes-censorship-used-it-to-pressure-facebook-to-intensify-suppression-of-vaccine-stories" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pressuring Facebook</a> to suppress vaccine-related stories — asked who he could talk to at “the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation” at Amazon. Slavitt added in his email that a search for “vaccines” under books on Amazon yielded “concerning” results.
“How did the Biden White House conclude that there was ‘propaganda and misinformation’ in books sold in Amazon’s bookstore? The White House ran keyword searches for controversial topics, such as ‘vaccine,’ and emailed Amazon when it didn’t like how the search results appeared,” Jordan <a href="https://twitter.com/Jim_Jordan/status/1754637211469766809" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a>.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
THE AMAZON FILES – “feeling pressure from the White House”
Internal docs subpoenaed by <a href="https://twitter.com/JudiciaryGOP?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@JudiciaryGOP</a> &amp; <a href="https://twitter.com/Weaponization?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Weaponization</a> indicate that <a href="https://twitter.com/amazon?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@amazon</a> bowed down to Biden White House pressure to censor BOOKS.
🧵 Thread:
&mdash; Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) <a href="https://twitter.com/Jim_Jordan/status/1754637204146581783?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 5, 2024</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
In response to the Biden administration’s request, Amazon appeared to discuss taking action but held off on “doing a manual intervention” because the company’s PR team was afraid such a move would be “too visible” and would be picked up by news outlets, such as Fox News.
“Why was the Biden White House so upset with Amazon?” Jordan <a href="https://twitter.com/Jim_Jordan/status/1754637215223746874" target="_blank" rel="noopener">asked</a>. “Because Amazon believed ‘retailers are different than social media communities’ &amp; provided their ‘customers with access to a variety of viewpoints.’ For the Biden Admin, letting Americans think for themselves was unacceptable.”
Jordan wrote that on March 9, 2021, a week after the initial email, the White House met with Amazon. Internal documents <a href="https://twitter.com/Jim_Jordan/status/1754637216876208628" target="_blank" rel="noopener">revealed</a> that one of Amazon’s main questions for the administration was, “Is the Admin asking us to remove books, or are they more concerned about search results/order (both)?” In the internal documents revealed by Jordan, Amazon also admitted that it was “feeling pressure from the White House” as the company also anticipated a “negative story” published by <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/amazon-covid-conspiracy-books" target="_blank" rel="noopener">BuzzFeed</a> on books sold on Amazon “related to vaccine misinformation.”
On the same day as its meeting with the White House, Amazon said in internal discussions that it enabled its “Do Not Promote” for books that questioned the efficacy of the COVID vaccines, and the tech giant “also considered other ways ‘to reduce the visibility’ of certain books that the Biden White House disliked,” Jordan said.
<a href="https://onelink.to/dwapp" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" aria-describedby="sk-tooltip-9096" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://onelink.to/dwapp&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1700760801843000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2PQrVSrJfhxNb4LcARqniG">CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP</a>
“That’s right. Amazon caved to the pressure from the Biden White House to censor speech,” the judiciary committee chairman added.
Jordan concluded the thread by saying that the Judiciary Committee and the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government are investigating the Biden administration’s effort to pressure Amazon to enforce more censorship.
The congressman’s findings add yet another company to the list of tech giants pressured by the Biden administration to censor vaccine-related information. Last summer, Jordan began releasing what he called the “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/jim-jordan-releases-new-facebook-files-highlights-how-biden-admin-sought-to-suppress-daily-wire-content" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Facebook Files</a>,” saying the Biden administration pressured Facebook to stifle speech the White House didn’t like, including limiting The Daily Wire’s reach on the platform. Then in December, The Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-biden-admin-praised-youtubes-censorship-used-it-to-pressure-facebook-to-intensify-suppression-of-vaccine-stories" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a> that YouTube went along with the White House’s censorship requests before Facebook was pressured to follow suit, according to documents shared with Jordan.

Joe Biden

‘Amazon Caved’: Jim Jordan Posts Evidence WH Pressured Amazon ‘To Censor Books,’ Amazon Complied

Amazon

Business

COVID-19 Vaccine

Jim Jordan

Technology

White House

Legislators in West Virginia are considering a bill that would permit libraries to be prosecuted for carrying books deemed obscene.
House bill 4654, which the West Virginia House Judiciary Committee was scheduled to consider Monday afternoon, was instead put before a public hearing on Wednesday. It would <a href="https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bill_Status/bills_history.cfm?year=2024&amp;sessiontype=RS&amp;input=4654" target="_blank" rel="noopener">remove</a> the exclusions that had previously applied to schools, public libraries, and museums as to whether they could be prosecuted for displaying obscene matter to a minor even when the child was accompanied by a parent/guardian.
“State Code defines obscene matter as anything an average person believes depicts or describes sexually explicit conduct, nudity, sex or certain bodily functions; or anything a reasonable person would find lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value,” the Parkersburg News and Sentinel <a href="https://www.newsandsentinel.com/news/local-news/2024/01/a-war-over-words-west-virginia-schools-libraries-could-face-charges-for-books-deemed-controversial/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a>. “According to State Code 61-8A-2, any adult who knowingly and intentionally displays obscene matter to a minor could be charged with a felony, fined up to $25,000 and face up to five years in prison if convicted.”
On Wednesday, supporters of the bill read excerpts from books they considered obscene, including “Let’s Talk About It” and &#8220;Me, Earl and the Dying Girl.”
The sponsor of the bill, Brandon Steele, R-Raleigh, <a href="https://wchstv.com/news/local/public-weighs-in-on-bill-that-would-criminally-charge-libraries-for-obscene-material" target="_blank" rel="noopener">argued</a>, “Quit creating the safe haven that allows our children to be presented material that would be unlawful felonious conduct outside of the walls of that library or school.” He said he wanted to move the bill through the House rapidly so it could be considered by the Senate.
Carol Miley, a retired Kanawha County librarian, added, “I urge you to pass this bill. This is not about banning books. It’s about protecting our minor students from being abused. I call it mind rape or word pornography.”
“We have a responsibility to protect our children; a God-given responsibility,” Minister Daniel Curry of the Camden Avenue Church of Christ in Parkersburg <a href="https://www.newsandsentinel.com/news/local-news/2024/01/a-war-over-words-west-virginia-schools-libraries-could-face-charges-for-books-deemed-controversial/">stated</a>. “I would ask what is the need for obscene matter in schools and libraries?”

C-Level Stack Of Books At Eisenhower Library

West Virginia Considering Bill Allowing Prosecution Of Libraries For Obscene Books

Library

Obscenity

West Virginia

When Ron DeSantis abruptly canceled his media appearances over the weekend, it led to a lot of speculation that he&#8217;d be ending his presidential campaign. On Sunday, that&#8217;s exactly what happened. Facing the prospect of a distant third-place finish in the New Hampshire primary, DeSantis bowed out and endorsed Donald Trump.
On one hand, the disappointment from DeSantis&#8217; supporters is understandable. He&#8217;s a fantastic governor who&#8217;s more effective at advancing conservative policies than any other politician alive today. There&#8217;s no doubting that.
At the same time, there&#8217;s also no question that it&#8217;s a good thing the primary effectively ended this weekend, as opposed to an even more protracted war of infighting among conservatives. Millions more dollars won&#8217;t be wasted on pointless attack ads. Donald Trump will be the party&#8217;s nominee, no matter how often Nikki Haley reminds us that she&#8217;s a woman and a &#8220;person of color&#8221; who was bullied just for being brown on the mean streets of Bamberg, South Carolina.
This thing is over — and that means that the Right can unite against its real enemies — powerful forces in society who hate this country, despise its people, and who seek to destroy our families and corrupt our children.
One of the clearest examples of this effort is the sheer scale and dishonesty of the Left&#8217;s fraudulent war against what they call &#8220;book bans.&#8221; As City Journal has noted, politicians at every level of government — from Governor Chris Sununu in New Hampshire to former representative Liz Cheney in Wyoming — have <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-left-twists-the-meaning-of-book-ban" target="_blank" rel="noopener">claimed</a> that schools are censoring classic reading materials, particularly in school libraries, at the behest of the Republican Party. Joe Biden has even <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/06/08/1180941627/biden-pride-month-book-bans" target="_blank" rel="noopener">appointed</a> a &#8220;book ban coordinator&#8221; to pursue civil rights cases against libraries that offend the LGBTQ cult with their censorship. Biden also launched his re-election bid eight months ago with a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChjibtX0UzU" target="_blank" rel="noopener">video</a> falsely implying that Florida had banned the book &#8220;To Kill a Mockingbird.&#8221; That simply wasn&#8217;t true, as even the Associated Press later <a href="https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-florida-schools-to-kill-a-mockingbird-201081596097" target="_blank" rel="noopener">admitted</a>.
The truth is that this campaign against &#8220;book bans&#8221; is nothing more than a crusade to put pornography in schools. That&#8217;s been clear for a while now. We&#8217;ve all seen the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z146klZXeOw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">footage</a> of parents repeatedly getting thrown out of school board meetings, just for reading passages from the pornographic books in their child&#8217;s school libraries. There&#8217;s dozens of those videos out there at this point. This is about exposing children to smut. Everyone sees that.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1298-it-s-time-to-unite-against-the-real-enemy-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h4>
What&#8217;s changed is that now, with the election rapidly approaching, the forces pushing this degeneracy are emboldened. They&#8217;re dropping the pretense that they&#8217;re worried about &#8220;discrimination&#8221; or &#8220;teaching history&#8221; or whatever. They are at this point all but coming right out and saying that they want to expose children to pornographic materials. And they&#8217;re doing it with the express support of the largest media conglomerates on the planet.
If you doubt that, watch this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GtGRPls40o" target="_blank" rel="noopener">remarkable footage</a> from MSNBC the other day. This is from Joy Reid&#8217;s show. It remains one of the great marvels of the world that Joy Reid, despite being viscerally unpleasant to listen to or look at, and despite having nothing important to say, and having never offered an even mildly interesting insight into any topic ever in her entire life, still has a show — that, for yet another week, has not been canceled. But then again, this is MSNBC. They specialize in giving extraordinarily annoying and unappealing and stupid people TV shows. Al Sharpton still has a show on that network, after all, last I checked.
Anyway, back to Joy Reid. She was interviewing the co-founder of the group &#8220;Moms for Liberty,&#8221; a woman named Tiffany Justice. Before we get to the clip, here&#8217;s the backstory: What&#8217;s bothering MSNBC is that Moms for Liberty doesn&#8217;t want a book called &#8220;All Boys Aren&#8217;t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto,&#8221; written by LGBTQ activist George Johnson, to be available for children to check out from school libraries. This is a book that includes <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-left-twists-the-meaning-of-book-ban" target="_blank" rel="noopener">descriptions</a> of anal rape and incest which are too graphic for me to share with you. This is the disadvantage we find ourselves in when it comes to this issue. You really need to hear specifically what’s in these books to fully appreciate just how deranged these people are for wanting to put these books in schools. But the material is so objectionable and disgusting that I simply will not share it. So you can go look it up for yourself and see. Suffice it to say that the book contains very, very detailed accounts of rape, sodomy, and other things.
There are hundreds of thousands of books in circulation that do not have any of that sort of content. There is no reason why this book, especially, of all books, needs to be in a school library.
This is a book that, according to local <a href="https://www.alreporter.com/2024/01/08/moms-for-liberty-sends-letter-to-lawmakers-urging-action-on-libraries/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reports</a>, is available in the young adult nonfiction section of two libraries in Huntsville, Alabama. These sections are for children between the ages of 12 and 18, which is roughly in line with the publisher&#8217;s age recommendation for this book. According to Moms for Liberty, there are records of a child as young as 9-years-old checking out &#8220;All Boys Aren&#8217;t Blue&#8221; from the library.
What&#8217;s incredible is that, in this interview, Joy Reid doesn&#8217;t dispute anything about the content of the book, or how obscene it is. She doesn&#8217;t concede that maybe 9-year-old children shouldn&#8217;t be reading this. Instead she goes out of her way to defend the book.
Joy Reid begins by complaining that parents are going online and sharing passages from the book that she says are somehow &#8220;taken out of context.&#8221; 
Then she makes a very familiar argument. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="008 Moms For Liberty Expertise" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uVtAnC786bE?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
&#8220;You&#8217;re not an expert, unlike whoever gave this pornographic book an award. Therefore, shut up; you don&#8217;t get to have an opinion.&#8221; That&#8217;s what she&#8217;s saying. 
You may have noticed that it&#8217;s become a common rhetorical tactic on the Left, whether they&#8217;re talking about climate change or transgenderism or &#8220;book bans&#8221; or pretty much anything. In the absence of any guiding moral principles, they&#8217;re now fully reliant on the expert class, to the point that they can&#8217;t think for themselves anymore — and they don&#8217;t want you to think for yourself, either. We&#8217;re at the point where they don&#8217;t want you to object to pornography in the children’s section without first getting an expert&#8217;s approval. Just think about this for a moment. Joy Reid is claiming that you cannot object to children being exposed to books about anal rape unless you are an expert. Which raises the question: expert in what? What the hell kind of expert do you need to be to understand the simple common sense fact that 12-year-olds don’t need to be reading graphic sexual content? How long until they tell you that you&#8217;re not allowed to object to full-on child pornography or pedophilia unless you’re an “expert”? Based on their logic, at this rate, it probably won&#8217;t be long. In fact, that’s basically where we are, right now.
Of course, in that clip, Joy takes this approach to a new level of absurdity, when she demands that Tiffany Justice name the author of the book &#8220;All Boys Aren&#8217;t Blue.&#8221; And I guess, because Justice couldn&#8217;t provide the guy&#8217;s full name quickly enough, we&#8217;re supposed to conclude that she&#8217;s not an &#8220;expert&#8221; in the book. And therefore, she&#8217;s excluded from having any opinion on the topic. Because, you know, you can’t object to children being exposed to sexual content unless you can give the full name of the person who created the sexual content. Makes total sense, if you have brain damage.
Speaking of brain damage, what follows from Joy Reid next, as you probably could&#8217;ve guessed, is the usual disingenuous &#8220;parental rights&#8221; argument.
The idea is that parents should be able to expose their children to whatever they want, and reasonable people shouldn&#8217;t be allowed to step in and prevent that. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="009 No Ones Right To Ban This Book" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5WGSSSXubho?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
So to recap, the conversation began with Joy suggesting that the &#8220;context&#8221; of the book makes it acceptable somehow. But she never explained what &#8220;context&#8221; would justify showing a child a graphic description of anal rape and incest. Now she circles back to her original point, in a roundabout way. She implies that some children could benefit from reading this story because they&#8217;d feel &#8220;seen&#8221; and represented in the pages. And if parents want to encourage that, then we&#8217;re supposed to go along with it.
She actually says that. Again, just to be clear, this is not a book that encourages kids to take up sports, or solve mysteries, or learn about space flight. This book is exposing children as young as 9-years-old to graphic scenes of anal rape. According to the corporate press, children should read books like this and see themselves in them. As Tiffany Justice pointed out, the implications of that are pretty dark, to say the least. This gets to the heart of what this whole debate is about, which is the Left&#8217;s attempt to legitimize deviant sexual contact with children. It&#8217;s not hard to conclude that the reason they want to show children these books about graphic underage sex is that they see no problem with children engaging in this kind of behavior.
That could be why — throughout this whole interview — Joy never once condemns the contents of this book. She doesn&#8217;t say that some children probably shouldn&#8217;t read it. Instead, she falls back on this idea that parental rights are absolute, and we should never be able to dictate what other parents can and can&#8217;t do.
Notice the incoherence of this argument. First, Joy says that no one can have an opinion about this book unless they&#8217;re an expert, and they&#8217;ve read it cover-to-cover and can name the author&#8217;s full name and give his date of birth and social security number. Then, a few minutes later, Joy says that every parent should have the right to show their kid this book, and their decision must be respected no matter what.
This is what&#8217;s called a contradiction, and people who understand basic principles of logic can spot it right away. But people like Joy, and the rest of the corporate press, are too concerned with ideology to bother with principles. That&#8217;s why, rather than present any kind of argument for why children need to read about anal sex, Joy concludes the interview by launching into bizarre personal attacks on Moms for Liberty. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="010 Why These Few Ban Books" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7zpWB3SfN2w?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
I have no idea if any of these allegations are true. From what Tiffany Justice says, they seem shaky, but honestly it doesn&#8217;t matter. They&#8217;re a painfully transparent attempt to distract from the issue that this whole interview was about. Even if all of that is true — even if Moms for Liberty is full of the worst people on the planet — even if they’re all serial killers and Nazis and super villains — does that suddenly make it appropriate to supply children with reading material about anal rape? It makes no sense. But this is all Joy Reid can do. She doesn&#8217;t want to talk about the books, or why she wants children to read them. Instead, she just wants to attack the people who are pointing out what&#8217;s in these books.
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It&#8217;s hard to put into words the depth of evil that&#8217;s on display here. This isn&#8217;t just one race hustler on MSNBC talking like this. It&#8217;s pretty much all of the corporate press, along with the Biden administration, who are committed to pushing this smut in schools. It&#8217;s going to take an equally forceful, concerted effort to stop them from succeeding.
In fact, this month lawmakers in Florida <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/florida-gop-lawmakers-seek-ban-rainbow-flags-schools-saying-re-bad-stu-rcna134475" target="_blank" rel="noopener">introduced</a> a bill that represents a very good start. The legislation would ban teachers and government employees from displaying the so-called &#8220;pride&#8221; rainbow flag, or associated lapel pins, in public buildings and schools, for obvious reasons: the flag is a symbol of a radical religious cult that&#8217;s specifically used to target children and indoctrinate them into an ideology that seeks, at every turn, to sexualize and corrupt them. Soon, if the bill passes, the symbol — which became omnipresent sometime in the past decade — will be gone.
It&#8217;s simple and effective proposals like this that have made Florida under Ron DeSantis an attractive state for conservative families to live in. He&#8217;s not campaigning for president anymore, but he&#8217;s still going to be a leader in this fight, which could not be more urgent at this point.
What&#8217;s needed now — especially as the primary effectively comes to a close — is for every conservative to unite and join in.

Drag Story-Time Event Held In Austin, Texas, Week Ahead Of Restrictive Bill Going Into Effect

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