Before I begin today’s show, I would just like to congratulate the Writers Guild of America for securing an excellent new contract. Now that the writers’ strike is over, I’d like to welcome my imaginary team of imaginary writers back to my imaginary writers’ room. To be honest, without my writers, I’ve felt as flat and uninspired as Stephen Colbert with his writers. So I’d also like to congratulate Stephen on having his 19 real writers back so they can come up with such wild and original ideas as comparing Donald Trump to Hitler and herpes, because if that’s not comedy, then comedy is comedy, which is just confusing.
But it’s great to have my imaginary writers back so let me introduce them. There’s Lola Vavoom, the shapely and ambitious creative who writes all my female sword-fighting scenes. Between such bouts of steely realism, she enjoys wiggling her way to the snack table in her spandex leggings to fetch me a cup of coffee so she can linger behind me while I drink it, giving me a gentle shoulder massage and explaining once again that what my wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Which isn’t strictly true, since my wife doesn’t know how to use the chair-lift and keeps falling downstairs. But hey, this is my imagination so I get whatever imaginary writers I want.
There’s also Vivek Swamymommy from India who can’t speak English but at least he has darkish skin so we can pretend to have filled our hiring quota for black writers without actually hiring any black writers. Thus we strike a blow against the dreadful systemic American racism revealed by the fact that George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose while resisting arrest — which was a terrible act of racist police brutality because this is all imaginary.
And finally, there’s Joe Stern, the neurotic little Jewish guy who completely rewrites all our episodes so no one finds out our women and minority hires have no talent, after which Joe Stern goes home to smoke dope and watch porn all night while posting on X about how social conservatives are evil. Joe Stern is also imaginary, but at least he could be real.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-andrew-klavan-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Andrew Klavan Show</a></h4>
Thanks to the WGA, these dedicated imaginary writers have a great new contract. For instance, the studios have agreed not to create scripts with AI as long as the writers agree to produce repetitive and formulaic stories bizarrely out of keeping with all human experience, values, and aspirations so at least it seems like they were created by AI. There’ll also now be a guaranteed number of writers in each writers’ room to ensure that there’ll be some really lively group conversations while Joe Stern is writing the script. And every writer who creates a streaming series with a large audience will receive a substantial bonus with which she can hire a lawyer to get Steven Avery out of prison so he can rape and kill again.
So now at last, Hollywood writers can get back to the important work of filling our entertainment with that radical spirit of resistance that’s officially approved by every major corporation, government body, intelligence agency and intellectually stagnant university in the country. Once again, you’ll be able to set your children down in front of a television screen and trust that when you come back from smoking reefer in your bedroom, they’ll be suicidally confused about their sexuality. Once again, you’ll be able to go to the movies and see black actors so talented they can almost make you believe they’re oppressed. And once again you’ll be able to watch tough, muscular WASP-faced heroes conquer the monsters of distant galaxies while weirdly voicing the opinions of Joe Stern — who’ll be busy at home smoking dope, watching porn and posting on X.
Yes, all across Los Angeles, real writers are taking off their pajamas and putting on their clean pajamas in order to get back to work creating an imaginary world in which the values and ideas that have destroyed America save America — while here in Nashville, imaginary writers will be creating a real world in which the values and ideas that made America great make America great… again.
Wait — Make America Great Again — that’s good! Guys, write that down!
Andrew Klavan is the host of “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-andrew-klavan-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Andrew Klavan Show</a>” at The Daily Wire. He is an award-winning novelist, Hollywood screenwriter, and popular satirist. Klavan is the author of “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/When-Christmas-Comes-Andrew-Klavan/dp/1613162405/ref=pd_bxgy_sccl_2/132-9473875-2662038?pd_rd_w=x29DZ&amp;content-id=amzn1.sym.26a5c67f-1a30-486b-bb90-b523ad38d5a0&amp;pf_rd_p=26a5c67f-1a30-486b-bb90-b523ad38d5a0&amp;pf_rd_r=X7J7YCZYPAH29407AXTY&amp;pd_rd_wg=M65Ef&amp;pd_rd_r=c2bb5bb5-dd27-434d-9ca1-f2098f486a81&amp;pd_rd_i=1613162405&amp;psc=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">When Christmas Comes</a>” and “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Strange-Habit-Mind-Cameron-Mysteries/dp/1613163517/ref=pd_bxgy_sccl_1/132-9473875-2662038?pd_rd_w=lnVGk&amp;content-id=amzn1.sym.26a5c67f-1a30-486b-bb90-b523ad38d5a0&amp;pf_rd_p=26a5c67f-1a30-486b-bb90-b523ad38d5a0&amp;pf_rd_r=13RV0285EXYKN2D57RST&amp;pd_rd_wg=jW34u&amp;pd_rd_r=e0bb3c70-62ea-4448-8be5-a7cf1bba3f5e&amp;pd_rd_i=1613163517&amp;psc=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Strange Habit of Mind,</a>” the first two novels in the USA Today best-selling 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>,” releases on October 31, 2023, and is now available for <a href="https://www.amazon.com/House-Death-Cameron-Winter-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B0BW1ZTVP9?ref_=ast_author_dp" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Pre-order</a>.
Follow Klavan on Twitter: @andrewklavan
This excerpt is taken from the opening satirical monologue of “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1150-pearl-davis-has-a-point-about-marriage">The Andrew Klavan Show</a>.”
The views expressed in this satirical article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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Now That The Writer’s Strike Is Over, I Can Welcome Back My Imaginary Writers

Hollywood

Movies

Readers Pass

Satire

Stephen Colbert

Television

This excerpt is taken from <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Catholic-History-Updated-Expanded/dp/1684514924/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church</a> by H. W. Crocker III. (Regnery History, 2023)
<h4>The Era Of Pope John Paul II</h4>
In October 1978, the College of Cardinals chose a remarkable man. The newly elevated Pope John Paul II was the first non-Italian pope in more than 450 years. He was a Pole who had lived through World War II, witnessing both Nazi terror and Communist persecution. He was a scholar, philosopher, and linguist, but also a poet, playwright, and actor, as well as an athlete. Before becoming a priest he had had a girlfriend, considered a secular career, and worked as a manual laborer. It is to the great benefit of the Church that he felt called to a priestly vocation and pursued it — as was necessary — like a secret agent, studying surreptitiously and eluding Nazi death squads that marked every young Pole of military age for death. He served a suffering Church in Soviet-occupied Poland. When he was elevated to the papacy, Soviet KGB chief, and later head of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov immediately recognized a threat to the Soviet regime.
But the new pope was also a symbol to the West. Young, vibrant, brimming with élan vital, self-evident goodness, philosophical clarity, and strength, he could appeal to the media-drenched Western mind and its demand for charisma. He could also speak to it in terms of authority. When the pope issued challenges to respect human dignity even the commercialized West had to pay attention to this man who spoke having personally stood witness to the greatest Hell-bent ideologies of the twentieth century, a man who had come through that inferno not only with the wisdom that comes from suffering and the confrontation with evil, but with a love of life and the joy of Christ manifest in his face and spirit.
He was the first pope to actually turn the Second Vatican Council to good use. The Council’s documents became a means to sharpen St. Peter’s sword against the Communists who occupied his country. He had participated in every one of the Council’s sessions and had been keenly involved in the Council’s declaration of religious freedom as a fundamental right. He saw that the old altar-and-throne model of Catholicism had died with the Habsburg Empire after World War I, though the Church had never conceded this. What was needed now was a new banner of religious freedom to challenge the primary threat to the faith — Communist totalitarianism. When the Council decided to put the liturgy into the vernacular, the future pope, who understood the primacy of culture, saw springs of popular renewal. When the Council called for greater lay participation, it was apparent that what John Paul II envisioned were movements like Opus Dei — which he ardently supported — a Catholic “personal prelature” that seeks to sanctify work and everyday life. Opus Dei adopts the medieval idea that to work is to pray. It is an idea that also motivated the Polish labor union Solidarity, which, with the Church, was the vanguard of Polish resistance to the Communists. Pope John Paul II’s greatest triumph was in seeing the totalitarian menace collapse, seeing his fellow Poles chanting, “We want God!,” seeing the red tide of Communism ebbing away, evaporating, a nightmare struck by daylight.
He was committed to being an active pope and was, indeed, the greatest globe-trotter in the papacy’s 2,000-year history. He also proved a prolific writer of encyclicals and other papal documents applying the deposit of faith to issues of the contemporary world. As a priest, he had taken a particular interest in advising married couples, and he strongly supported Humanae vitae, which had drawn on his own book Love and Responsibility. He reaffirmed Humanae vitae in his own Veritatis splendor in 1993, and two years later condemned abortion in Evangelium vitae, as one of the most terrible manifestations of a “culture of death” that kept the world in its talons.
In 1994, he ruled out further discussion of the priestly ordination of women, saying that such consideration was denied to the Church on the basis of Christ’s clear example. That would seem an inarguable proposition, but this, too, proved controversial because it denied two great modern heresies: that sex is a form of class struggle, and that all principles and facts are soluble to modern ideas of equality, self-fulfillment, and human wishes.
Another, somewhat similar, heresy that the pope dispensed with was liberation theology, which viewed Third World Communist revolutions on behalf of the poor as the logical working out of the “social gospel.” In Nicaragua, Pope John Paul II stood on the runway and admonished Father Ernesto Cardenal, who served the Communist Sandinista regime, “Regularize your position with the Church.” The picture snapped of the event gave the clear impression, from the pope’s gestures, that he was delivering a papal rebuke to a wayward priest. In any event, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, these revolutionary regimes lost their patron, and liberation theology became a footnote in Church history.
The pope did not, however, neglect the Church’s mission to the poor. His writings on economics underscored the Church’s hostility, not only to Communism, but to economic liberalism if it considers man as a mere cog in a machine, or if it does not recognize the need to pay a man a living wage so that he can support his family, or if the rich neglect their obligation to help the poor. Equally condemned, in wealthy Western nations, is materialism that degrades the human mind and spirit—that can, in fact, in an age of mass marketing and communications, actually subvert the human mind and spirit.
At the level of ecumenism, the pope’s greatest wish was to heal the rift with the Eastern Orthodox churches. Their departure, he said, had left the universal Church, in his words, breathing “through only one lung.” But his hopes were disappointed, if not crushed, by the East’s lack of enthusiasm. With the Anglicans, the ordination of women widened the schism and also sent a small platoon of Anglican priests and worshippers into the Catholic Church. There were overtures to the Lutherans and cooperation with Evangelicals, who share the Church’s opposition to abortion, but there seemed little real hope that the separated Christian churches would restore themselves to Catholic unity.
The pope was interested in non-Christian religions, especially Judaism. It was under his pontificate that the Holy See finally extended formal recognition to the state of Israel; and as a Pole, he felt a special kinship with the sufferings of Jews in the Holocaust, though this did not shield him from occasional verbal attacks when he marked the graves of Catholic martyrs of the Second World War. He was the first pope to pray in a mosque. And if his repeated apologies for any conceivable Catholic historical offense grated on those of us who wish the Sack of Byzantium to be a feast day of the Church, it would seem churlish to deny the benign intent that motivated them — or the strength that lay behind the apologetic words, for the pope’s billion-strong Church does not suffer from what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences” that afflicts the Eastern Orthodox or the hydra-headed schisms of the Protestants.
All the globe-trotting, all the encyclicals and papal letters, all the political activity should not for a moment obscure the deeply powerful personal faith of Pope John Paul II, a faith that made him not a modern man — though his charm could make him seem that way to the news media — but a man whose faith was as old as St. Peter and linked to eternity. When he was struck by an assassin’s bullet, he credited his recovery to the Blessed Virgin Mother and prayed at her shrine in Fatima to express his devotion and gratitude. He promoted the Rosary, proclaiming a “Year of the Rosary” (October 2002 to October 2003), and adding five, optional, “luminous mysteries” to the prayer, building on a decades-long popular addition, covering Jesus’s ministry, to be said on Thursdays.
His hours of prayer were intense. His Catholic belief defined his every thought, utterance, and action, and he clearly sought to follow the apostolic path of being a missionary for the faith. He did as much as any pope could possibly do. He recognized, as with the early Apostles, that there remained a world to be won, and he reminded the world of where salvation, purpose, and meaning lay, with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, an extraordinary summary document, accessible to all, published in 1992.
For a man who ascended to the papacy as physically vigorous as any, his end was marked by a sad physical decline. A survivor of two assassination attempts that wounded him, and the inevitable erosions and calamities of age, his final years could sometimes be painful to observe, though his endurance in the midst of physical suffering was its own testament to his faith. That visible frailty had, however, perhaps a different message for the man who would succeed him to the throne of St. Peter.
* * *
Harry W. Crocker III is vice president and executive editor of Regnery Publishing and former speech writer for Governor Pete Wilson of California. A former editorial writer for the San Diego Union, he has written for many outlets, including National Review, the American Spectator, the Washington Times, and the National Catholic Register, and is the author of half a dozen books, including the Custer of the West series, bestselling Robert E. Lee on Leadership and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, as well as the award-winning novel The Old Limey.
This excerpt is taken from<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Catholic-History-Updated-Expanded/dp/1684514924/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church,</a> by H. W. Crocker III. Copyright 2001/2023 by H. W. Crocker III. Reprinted by permission from Regnery History, an imprint of Regnery Publishing. (A division of Salem Media Group)
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Pope John Paul II Celebrates Easter

The Enduring Legacy Of Pope John Paul II

Books

Catholic

Catholic Church

Communism

Pope John Paul II

Last night marked the single most crushing legal defeat that trans activists, corrupt &#8220;civil liberties&#8221; organizations, big law firms, and Big Pharma have suffered in years. Less than 24 hours ago, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals — which has jurisdiction over Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee — issued a point-by-point <a href="https://wp.api.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/CA6-Opinion.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">refutation</a> of every substantive argument that proponents of transgenderism have made over the past decade. This was not a ruling on technicalities. This was a well-articulated takedown of their claims in every dimension: medical, legal, and logical. And given the makeup of the Supreme Court, we can be pretty confident that this ruling is going to cause major problems for trans activists for the indefinite future. The upshot is that the bans on child gender transitions in both Tennessee and Kentucky will stand. Both can go into effect. When our ban was passed in Tennessee, trans activists gloated that they would easily get it overturned in court. But they failed. We beat them.
In a moment I&#8217;m going to get into specific detail about this ruling, what exactly it says, and the context for it. But one of the first takeaways is this: No matter how often you&#8217;re smeared as a bigot, no matter how often you&#8217;re told to believe a lie and to &#8220;trust the experts,&#8221; you need to maintain your convictions. If you do that, eventually you will win. And the lives of millions of children will be better off because of it.
You might remember that it was just about a year ago that we ran a series of video clips from Vanderbilt Medical Center in Tennessee. These clips showed that medical professionals at Vanderbilt were pushing experimental operations on young people, including children, who claimed they were transgender and born in the wrong body. In one case that we uncovered, a physician at Vanderbilt admitted that operations like this were a big money maker for the hospital.
This footage, and many other clips and news reports along these lines, spurred lawmakers in Tennessee to take action. In March of this year, the state of Tennessee enacted a, &#8220;Prohibition on Medical Procedures Performed on Minors Related to Sexual Identity.&#8221; This law banned healthcare providers from “administering or offering to administer” any “medical procedure” to a minor “for the purpose of either “[e]nabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or “[t]reating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.” Basically, this bans cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers.
Among the procedures that were outlawed in Tennessee were operations that involved “[s]urgically removing, modifying, altering, or entering into tissues, cavities, or organs” and “[p]rescribing, administering, dispensing any puberty blocker or hormone.” In effect, this was a total ban on what the media loves to call &#8220;gender-affirming care for minors,&#8221; which is really a form of castration and mutilation. Kentucky passed a similar law.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1233-team-sanity-wins-a-major-victory-over-the-gender-ideology-cult" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h4>
Shortly after this bill was signed into law in Tennessee, a judge by the name of Eli Richardson — appointed by Donald Trump — blocked it. Richardson held that the voters of Tennessee don&#8217;t have a right to overrule the &#8220;medical experts&#8221; who say that minors need cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers. There is a constitutional right, Richardson ruled, for parents to dictate the medical &#8220;treatment&#8221; of children, as long as major medical associations concur that the treatment is necessary.
This was a bizarre decision, as I <a href="https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1674908142813970432" target="_blank" rel="noopener">outlined on Twitter</a> at the time. There were a lot of obvious holes in Richardon&#8217;s reasoning. He cited cases that didn&#8217;t support his argument, for example. And he put a lot of faith in activist doctors and quacks, like the ghouls working at WPATH, who constantly change their minds about the so-called &#8220;standards of care&#8221; of trans patients. But the end result was that Richardson issued an injunction against the state of Tennessee. He prevented the law prohibiting childhood castration, which was passed by democratically elected politicians, from taking effect.
Within days, in an extraordinary move, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals put out a preliminary opinion that rejected Richardson&#8217;s opinion and overturned his injunction. The Sixth Circuit allowed the Tennessee law to go into effect, and promised to issue a final ruling on the injunction by September. Last night, that ruling arrived. And it&#8217;s everything that parents — and anyone else who cares about children — could have possibly hoped for. It goes far beyond the tepid, wishy-washy down-the-middle approach that we see so often in so many courts. 
For one thing, the Sixth Circuit completely rejects the argument from the ACLU and trans activists that &#8220;experts,&#8221; &#8220;medical associations,&#8221; and Big Pharma should be able to overrule the will of the people. You hear this argument often from these activists. They tell you to ignore common sense, and celebrate the butchery of children because the &#8220;experts know best.&#8221; But last night, the appellate court ruled that if a majority of voters in Tennessee — or any state — think that kids shouldn&#8217;t be castrated, then their judgment is what matters. That&#8217;s the whole point of living in a democracy, after all. As the decision states: &#8220;As long as it acts reasonably, a state may ban even longstanding and non-experimental treatments for children.&#8221; In other words, unless voters are doing something that&#8217;s clearly going to kill children, then they get to override the &#8220;experts.&#8221; 
But the Sixth Circuit didn&#8217;t stop there. They noted that the &#8220;experts&#8221; haven&#8217;t even come close to proving that these &#8220;gender-affirming&#8221; treatments do anything productive. Again, from the decision: &#8220;European countries that pioneered these treatments now express caution about them and have pulled back on their use. How in this setting can one maintain that long-term studies support their use—and that the Constitution requires it? Until more time has passed, it is difficult to gauge the risks to children.&#8221;
The court continues: &#8220;The relevant medical and regulatory authorities are not of one mind about the cost-benefit tradeoffs of this care. Consider the work of the Food and Drug Administration, an agency whose existence is premised on a form of medical expertise of its own.  &#8230; Gender-transitioning procedures often employ FDA-approved drugs for non-approved, off-label uses.&#8221;
The court was particularly harsh on the quacks at WPATH — the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. This is the group that creates the &#8220;standards of care&#8221; for trans-identifying patients that pretty much every major hospital relies on. The court noted that WPATH first said puberty blockers and hormones should be used on children about a decade ago. Before that, the court noted, &#8220;its guidance documents from 1979 to 2000 generally disfavored using puberty blockers or hormones for minors, and only in 2012 did it abandon age limits for cross-sex hormones.&#8221; Even now, the court observed, WPATH concedes that data on the long-term consequences of these hormones are &#8220;limited.&#8221;
Indeed, just before this ruling from the Sixth Circuit came out, we learned that a lot of the key data on puberty blockers — which has been cited by trans activists and doctors for years — is extremely misleading to the point that it&#8217;s useless. First, some background. For many years, trans activists and medical associations have said that these puberty blockers are completely harmless. They say they&#8217;re a &#8220;pause button&#8221; on puberty. Here&#8217;s one propaganda video on YouTube from one activist group that targets kids, for instance:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Puberty and Transgender Youth" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/f7VyJKVBt7g?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Typical trans propaganda. Which is to say, deceptive and absurdly misleading. There’s no discussion in that clip of the potential harms that puberty blockers might cause. Those harms are immense and widespread. And among the harms, is the psychological damage they can cause. Data on this point has been out there for more than a decade, but scientists and researchers didn&#8217;t disclose it. Here&#8217;s what happened. Back in 2011, researchers in Britain <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0243894" target="_blank" rel="noopener">published a highly influential study</a> claiming that, &#8220;Overall patient experience of changes on [puberty blocker] treatment was positive. We identified no changes in psychological function.&#8221;
Those findings, and similar reports, became gospel among trans activists. The idea was that, on average, puberty blockers either help kids or at least don&#8217;t harm them. No peer-reviewed paper was allowed to contest those findings or the data they referenced. But a couple of weeks ago, a retired scientist by the name of Susan McPherson decided to double check that data. She <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.30.23290763v3.full" target="_blank" rel="noopener">uploaded her research</a> to a &#8220;pre-print&#8221; website, which doesn&#8217;t require peer review and therefore wasn&#8217;t censored. McPherson found that the original research from the U.K. was highly misleading. 
Specifically, McPherson determined the research methodology obscured the fact that the mental health of many children on puberty blockers had deteriorated in just 12 months. By relying on group averages, instead of individual data, the researchers in the U.K. had managed to hide this fact.
Essentially McPherson estimated that in reality, the number of children who suffered adverse mental health responses to puberty blockers could have been as high as <a href="https://news.yahoo.com/tavistock-accused-hiding-evidence-puberty-050000205.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">one-third of children who were on these blockers</a>. And of course, that number would have likely grown, if the researchers had continued monitoring these children past one year. 
Think about that. A third of children on these puberty blockers suffered from deteriorating mental health — in the first year. A failure rate of over 30%in the first year is astonishingly high, and it doesn’t even tell anything close to the whole story. The whole point of drugging the kids after, and altering the natural development of their bodies, was allegedly to improve their mental health. This is supposedly the reason doctors were reducing the bone density of young children, giving many of them early-onset osteoporosis. And yet for roughly a third of these children, it failed. It didn&#8217;t just fail to help; it made their mental state worse. And the researchers failed to mention that. They chose to use a method of data analysis which allowed them to simply claim that, overall, the treatments were helpful.
This proves, once again, that there&#8217;s no data that actually justifies giving children puberty blockers, much less cross-sex hormones or administering surgeries. It also proves that doctors and &#8220;experts&#8221; have been lying about the data, as well. Thanks to the Sixth Circuit&#8217;s ruling, these experts can say what they want, and it really doesn&#8217;t matter anymore. None of their half-baked studies provide any legal justification to overturn the will of the voters, as the court ruled. And if the Sixth Circuit had stopped here, that would be a major win for children. 
But the appellate court didn&#8217;t simply reject the bunk science behind puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. They also went after other common arguments from trans activists, including this idea that they&#8217;re a &#8220;marginalized&#8221; group that deserves special legal protections. Here&#8217;s how the court responded to that claim: &#8220;The President of the United States and the Department of Justice support the plaintiffs &#8230;. The major medical organizations support the plaintiffs. And the only large law firms to make an appearance in the case all entered the controversy in support of the plaintiffs. These are not the hallmarks of a skewed or unfair political process.&#8221;
In other words, when every lawyer, medical organization, and government agency is on your side, you&#8217;re not marginalized. This is an obvious point to make, but as far as we can tell, this is the first time that any appeals court in this country has made it. Trans activists and politicians get a lot of mileage out of their false claims of victimhood, while they&#8217;re busy punching everyone else in the face. They&#8217;ve been using that tactic in the courts, too. Now it&#8217;s been rejected.
For good measure, the Sixth Circuit went on to reject the argument from trans activists that we should always defer to what parents want. You often hear trans activists and many Democrats trot this line out. Half the time they&#8217;re saying kids should be able to hide their alleged &#8220;sexuality&#8221; from their parents, and the other half of the time they&#8217;re saying parents know best and we should always defer to their judgment, even if they want to castrate their kids. Here&#8217;s how the court responded to that latter argument: &#8220;Parents usually do know what’s best for their children and in most matters (where to live, how to live, what to eat, how to learn, when to be exposed to mature subject matter) their decisions govern until the child reaches 18. But becoming a parent does not create a right to reject democratically enacted laws.&#8221;
So trans activists, the ACLU, and the politicians need to go back to the drawing board at this point. There&#8217;s going to be more litigation in this case, and in many other cases like it around the country. But every single one of their major arguments has just been forcefully rejected in a federal appellate court. For a long time now, courts have been cowed by the lies of &#8220;experts&#8221; and the false claims of victimhood by these activists. Finally, an appellate court has stepped up and said that none of their claims matter. Principles of self-governance matter. Protecting children matters. What voters want matters — not what Big Pharma wants.
Trans activists and the ghouls who profit from butchering children will regroup. But what happened last night is the clearest sign yet that they will not win. Last night, Americans who believe in self-representation and the well-being of children prevailed over demagogues pushing oligarchy and child butchery. This is a win that trans activists didn&#8217;t see coming. It&#8217;s a win that many on the Right didn&#8217;t see coming. And many more victories like this are on the way. 
As the Sixth Circuit noted in its decision last night, 19 states have passed similar laws. What we need now is for appellate courts in those states to uphold all of those laws. And if they don&#8217;t, we need to take it to the Supreme Court. The Sixth Circuit&#8217;s ruling is a clear sign — maybe the best sign yet — that our work is paying off. All that&#8217;s left to do is to take this work to its conclusion and ban this barbarism nationwide. 
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Matt Walsh

Team Sanity Wins A Major Victory Over The Gender Ideology Cult

Court

minors

Puberty blockers

Tennessee

Transgender

transgender surgery

This is a portion of a speech delivered by <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-michael-knowles-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Michael Knowles</a> at Georgetown University on Tuesday, September 26, 2023.
There is a crucial fact about liberty, a fact at odds with our mistaken, modern, liberal notions of what liberty is. Modern liberal culture tells us that liberty is the right to choose. This is how most people today — even conservatives — think about liberty. But this is not the way our forebears thought about liberty. This is not the way our civilization has understood liberty for most of history. From the ancient pagan Greeks all the way up through the medieval and Renaissance Christians right up until just a few hundred years ago, liberty was understood quite differently. 
Even Lord Acton, an ardent liberal and favorite of libertarians, famously admitted that liberty is not the ability to do what we wish but rather the right to do what we ought. The nineteenth-century Spanish writer Donoso Cortes put it even more clearly. He said: 
<blockquote>“When man came from the hands of God, he understood the good; and because he understood, he willed it; and because he willed, he executed it; and by executing the good his will desired and his intellect understood, he was free. That this is the Christian signification of liberty is clear from the following words of the Gospel: —‘You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.’ (John 8:32).”</blockquote>
We know that liberty cannot merely be the absence of external constraint when we consider the case of the heroin addict. According to the modern, liberal conception, the freest man is the one with the fewest external constraints. So, according to that definition, the freest man in America is the heroin addict in San Francisco. As long as he’s got a few bucks in his pocket — no matter how dubiously he acquired them — that man can shoot up dope in a filthy alleyway, and no cop is going to stop him. He can loiter, he can defecate in the streets, and he can sleep on the sidewalk until he freezes and dies of exposure. Man, isn’t he free? I don’t think so. He’s a slave — a slave to his appetites, his passions, his lower will. And he knows it. He probably wishes to break his addiction — he almost certainly does — but his appetites cloud his intellect, and his defective will succumbs to temptation until it destroys him.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-michael-knowles-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Michael Knowles Show</a></h4>
Anyone who’s ever had a bad habit — or a good habit, for that matter — knows that the more you do something, the easier it is to do, and the harder it is to do the opposite. The more you do drugs, the easier it is to do more drugs, and the harder it is to stop doing drugs. The more you learn, the easier it is to know things, and the harder it is to fall into error. This fact of human nature reveals a second error with the liberal definition of liberty: namely, that the better we become — or the worse we become — the less free we should be.
It’s an unfamiliar thought today. What I mean is: so long as we have no habits, tastes, or inclinations — so long as we’re perfectly neutral — then we are perfectly free, according to the liberals, because we are perfectly disposed to choose between alternatives. But the moment we begin to develop habits and tastes and inclinations — which of course happens to all of us all the time, whether we want it to or not — then suddenly we are less free to choose between alternatives. The moment we start shooting heroin, the less able we are to choose not to shoot heroin. The moment we start learning, the less able we are to err.
Taken to its logical conclusion, we see the absurdity of the liberal definition of liberty in the case of God. Because according to the liberal definition, God himself is not free. Because God cannot sin. His very being precludes him from evil. And yet does anyone seriously believe that God, the creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible, is not free? Even an atheist must admit that the very concept of God demands that he be not only free but perfectly free. So how can this be?
It&#8217;s for the same reason that we all know intuitively that the heroin addict is not free. Because freedom is not impartiality between good and evil, right and wrong, truth and falsehood. Freedom is not synonymous with choice. On the contrary, choice is a defect of our liberty, which actually consists of willing and understanding. Human beings, uniquely among the animals, possess intellect and will. That’s what distinguishes us from the other animals. Other animals possess instinct. A chihuahua can sometimes figure out where we keep the dog food and eat it. But a chihuahua cannot write a poem or contemplate justice.
And as a consequence, neither chihuahuas nor any other non-human animal is free. We put human beings on trial for committing crimes because we are expected to know better and act better. Crimes are an abuse of our liberty. We do not put chihuahuas on trial — even if the little chihuahua bites a kid at the park — because chihuahuas can’t abuse their liberty, because they don’t have liberty, because they don’t have intellect or will.
Liberty, therefore, is not the maximization of choice but the perfection of our understanding and of our will. And since God alone understands and wills perfectly, God alone is perfectly free. And we will be free only inasmuch as we align our wills and our intellects with God.
I know that all of this probably sounds strange in an age when Reddit-tier atheism reigns supreme in politics, but this is how the wisest men of history have understood the defining feature of human nature. 
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5Knowles_2020_headshot (1) copy

Freedom Isn’t Choice

Bible

Conservatives

Freedom

Liberals

Michael Knowles

One of the many joys of watching sports these days is that you get warmed over, ham-handed leftist politics thrown in your face all the time. The NFL has printed the words &#8220;End Racism&#8221; in the end zones for several years now, for example. It apparently hasn&#8217;t worked yet because the message is still there. Or maybe racism is solved and they just forgot to remove it. In any event, the NFL isn&#8217;t alone. The U.S. Open just plastered &#8220;Equal Pay&#8221; propaganda all over the court. Major League Baseball even had &#8220;BLM&#8221; stenciled on the mound for a while there. And so on.
It&#8217;s so pervasive, and so on-the-nose, that it&#8217;s enough to make you give up on professional sports entirely. On Saturdays you might find yourself taking a hard look at, say, third-rate Division III college football games instead. You might think: Surely all the social engineering won&#8217;t be on display there, right? How much of this insanity could have possibly filtered down into a game no one&#8217;s watching, like the matchup between, oh I don&#8217;t know, Shenandoah University and Juniata College from last weekend?
If you&#8217;ve ever found yourself thinking along those lines, unfortunately we have some bad news. Even the D-list football games — including the game between Shenandoah and that other school — have become yet another opportunity for corporate media to tell you that two-plus-two equals seven. They are more grist for the leftist ideology mill that has its tentacles everywhere. 
Here&#8217;s the &#8220;Today&#8221; show to explain the significance of Shenandoah&#8217;s recent, highly anticipated game:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Haley Van Voorhis on being first female non-kicker in NCAA football" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Rg1M8hitsPM?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
It&#8217;s important to note a couple of things. First of all, they got the facts wrong. Haley Van Voorhis was not, in fact, the first female non-kicker or punter to play in an NCAA game. That honor went to cornerback Taylor Crout, who played a game for Fitchburg State earlier this year. Nobody remembers that because Crout managed to make one &#8220;assisted tackle&#8221; before leaving the game. But as long as facts matter, which they clearly don&#8217;t because the point of this segment is to advance a fraudulent narrative anyway, we&#8217;ll throw that out there.
But more to the point, there&#8217;s another unanswered question, which is: How does NBC News know that Haley was in fact the first female playing in a non-kicking role? If a female is anyone who thinks they&#8217;re a female — and that&#8217;s the standard we must accept, or else we&#8217;re transphobes — then how do we know that dozens of other brave females aren&#8217;t playing college football right now? How do we know that women haven&#8217;t already been inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame? Has anyone checked with Dick Butkus or Ray Lewis to see if they still identify as men?
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/230928me" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h4>
When the Left talks about homosexuality in contexts like this, they use the term &#8220;openly gay.&#8221; They&#8217;ll say that so-and-so was the first &#8220;openly homosexual&#8221; person to play football, or whatever. But in this case, they&#8217;re not using that terminology. They&#8217;re not talking about &#8220;openly female&#8221; or &#8220;openly women&#8221; players here. They&#8217;re not saying that Haley is the first &#8220;openly female&#8221; non-kicking player. They&#8217;re flat-out declaring that she&#8217;s the first female player and the first woman. It&#8217;s almost as if the Left knows that those words have meaning, and every now and then, they accidentally admit it. 
But back to this &#8220;history-making&#8221; game. Let&#8217;s take another look at why everyone is pretending to celebrate why Haley did. Here&#8217;s the sum total of her contribution to the game:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Haley Van Voorhis on being first female non-kicker in NCAA football" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Rg1M8hitsPM?start=60&#038;feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Notice she doesn&#8217;t answer the question there. &#8220;Did that quarterback know what or who had hit him?&#8221; Her response was: &#8220;Uh, I&#8217;ve had people come up to me and tell me they didn&#8217;t know I was a girl.&#8221;
This is just speculation of course, but maybe she&#8217;s dodging the question because the quarterback knew exactly what had happened there. And maybe he let her know about it. This woman just ran at him, totally unblocked, and then for some reason, decided to cling onto him long after he threw the ball to his receiver. Eventually, after a couple of seconds, she drags him to the turf, almost like it&#8217;s happening in slow motion. In any other context, that’s a roughing the passer penalty worth 15 yards. It’s so clear that, if it was a man making the play, a ref standing in the end zone 80 yards away would throw that flag. There would be flags falling out of the sky everywhere. 
But none of the refs wanted to interrupt the girl power moment here, and neither did anyone else watching this. So everyone just pretended they had seen something really impressive. Here&#8217;s how the Washington Post described the footage you just saw: &#8220;She got through and managed to hit Juniata quarterback Calvin German an instant after he had released the ball on what became an incomplete pass.&#8221;
An instant, several seconds, what&#8217;s the difference really? And she “managed to get through” by simply running straight at the guy, unblocked. For his part, sports journalist Dov Kleiman said this was a &#8220;groundbreaking&#8221; moment in college football history. He said, &#8220;Haley Van Voorhis entered the game during the first quarter, immediately leaving her mark with a QB hurry on a crucial third-down play.&#8221; 
To be clear, her team was up 26 to nothing at the time of this &#8220;crucial third-down play&#8221; in the first quarter. They ultimately won this game, 48 to 7. There are no crucial plays in a game that ends 48 to 7, especially not in the first quarter. But who’s counting? In fact, there would not have been a camera crew from ESPN watching this game at all, if they didn&#8217;t think this gender angle might come into play.
But she was put in the game, as ESPN expected. And so now we&#8217;re all supposed to imagine that this was a really momentous, movie-like moment. Here&#8217;s how the &#8220;Today&#8221; show played up Haley&#8217;s &#8220;tackle&#8221; — not a QB rush, but a &#8220;tackle,&#8221; in their words:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Haley Van Voorhis on being first female non-kicker in NCAA football" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Rg1M8hitsPM?start=222&#038;feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Here&#8217;s where they lay the propaganda on a little too thick. And they introduce an idea that isn&#8217;t just stupid, but also very dangerous: &#8220;Women can play the game at whatever level,&#8221; Haley says. The NBC anchorwoman agrees, and says Haley is overcoming &#8220;stereotypes&#8221; held by troglodytes who don&#8217;t &#8220;think women can play at this level.&#8221;
Before I get into the implications of that — which could very soon lead to a lot of dead women on football fields — it&#8217;s important to understand the scope of the problem here. This is not a one-off incident. College football teams are increasingly promoting the idea that women and men can play at the same level. 
Also last weekend, a woman named Leilani Armenta was handling kicking duties for Jackson State. There were a couple of injuries, so the coaches put her in. This is for their matchup against the powerhouse players for &#8220;Bethune-Cookman.&#8221; Here&#8217;s how her kickoff went:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Things we love to see 🔥<a href="https://twitter.com/GoJSUTigersSOC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@GoJSUTigersSOC</a>&#39;s Leilani Armenta is filling in at kicker tonight for <a href="https://twitter.com/gojsutigersfb?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@gojsutigersfb</a> 👏 <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ThatsaW?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#ThatsaW</a> <a href="https://t.co/xs3d4qpmpl">pic.twitter.com/xs3d4qpmpl</a>
&mdash; espnW (@espnW) <a href="https://twitter.com/espnW/status/1705726308611747985?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 23, 2023</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
It goes 25 whole yards. It&#8217;s the kind of kicking you see on a bad high school JV team. A lot of people went on social media to suggest that maybe it was a bad idea to have a woman attempt this kick, because it&#8217;s kind of an obvious point to make. So, again, sports journalists — maybe the dumbest and least original form of &#8220;journalist&#8221; on the planet — jumped into action. Here&#8217;s how one local reporter named Bradley Davis responded to all the haters online who had an issue with that objectively terrible kickoff. Watch:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Addressing the hateful comments in response to Jackson State football using a woman at kicker in its home opener.<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/TheeILove?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#TheeILove</a> <a href="https://t.co/NJLp1eNFNs">pic.twitter.com/NJLp1eNFNs</a>
&mdash; Bradley Davis WAPT (@DdavisBradley) <a href="https://twitter.com/DdavisBradley/status/1706322918320554157?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 25, 2023</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
This is not to pick on Bradley Davis. He&#8217;s obviously a smug guy, out there saying what he has to say if he ever wants to advance in the industry of sports journalism. This was his ESPN audition tape. But it’s worth nothing that he&#8217;s presenting an embarrassingly bad argument that&#8217;s typical on the Left.
First of all, there&#8217;s no reason for Bradley Davis to be talking about this woman&#8217;s extra point attempts in high school. She wasn&#8217;t kicking extra points in the clip we just showed you, she was attempting a kickoff, which requires more leg strength than an extra point to pull off. And she completely failed and humiliated herself in the process of attempting that kickoff. This is a pretty significant fact that Bradley Davis somehow forgot to mention.
But let&#8217;s just ignore that for a second. The thrust of this smug reporter&#8217;s &#8220;argument&#8221; is that, first of all, people are only criticizing her terrible kick because she’s a woman. But if you’ve spent even five seconds around any football fan, anywhere, you know that they will viciously criticize any player who screws up that badly. A male kicker who only manages to send the ball 25 yards will certainly be mocked ruthlessly for it. So if you want women to be treated like men, accepted into the boy’s club and all of that, then it means they will also be ruthlessly criticized for their failures, because that’s what it means to be treated like a man. That’s how we men operate. 
The reporter also says that unless you can kick extra points as well as this woman, then you should shut up. You’re not allowed to have any kind of opinion on this topic whatsoever. What&#8217;s impressive about this line of argument is what a massive, absurd strawman it is. No one is saying that any random guy off the street could beat this woman in an impromptu extra-point competition. She&#8217;s been kicking extra points for years, and most people have never even tried to kick an extra point. The point is that the best women football players, at all positions, are nowhere near as good as the best male football players at that position — or even the tenth best male football players, or 50th best. We know that because there has never been a female player — this woman most certainly included — who can outperform men at a high level of play. We also know it because biology is real, and men have dramatically more upper and lower-body strength than women. 
This is why, literally every time they trot out a woman substitute for a male player in football, it&#8217;s a catastrophe. Remember Sarah Fuller? She &#8220;made history&#8221; as a female college football kicker a few years ago. She kicked it something like 30 yards and the media lied after the fact to claim that it was a planned &#8220;squib kick&#8221; — even though it was a situation where no team would intentionally squib the ball. In case you&#8217;ve forgotten that historic kick, it&#8217;s worth revisiting it — including the build-up beforehand — because it&#8217;s truly a modern classic. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Vanderbilt Girl Kicker Sarah Fuller Kicks Off against Missouri" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bP8OUMW_C58?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Notice how the crowd is really excited and loud, and then they see the kick and go completely silent. Meanwhile the announcers continue to read their prepared lines, like they just witnessed the moon landing. “What a day in college football,” they declare, after witnessing the worst kick anyone would see until the next time a woman kicked the ball. 
It’s impossible not to notice just how patronizing all of this is. Jackie Robinson is remembered and celebrated not just because he broke the color line, but because he was a truly great player. When we talk about Jackie Robinson we’re not saying “Wow look at that black player trying his best! Isn’t it cute?” No, he actually earned the respect he gets for his play. He’s one of the all time greats. But as the media desperately tries to find their female Jackie Robinson, it never works like this. The girls are laughably awful and everyone can tell they don’t deserve to be on the field. It turns out that unlike the color line, the gender line exists for a very legitimate reason.
Sarah Fuller&#8217;s historically awful kick was only a few years ago. Now we&#8217;ve already gotten to the point where a college football team is putting a 5&#8217;6&#8243; blond chick on the field to play defense. Fortunately for her, the other team didn&#8217;t pull a guard over to make a block with a head of steam, knocking her into next week. When women are on the field, the players so far have been playing along and letting her have her Rudy moment. But it&#8217;s not going to stay like that forever. 
Eventually one of these guys will treat one of these girls like a football player, and it&#8217;s quite possible that we&#8217;ll see a death on the field because of it. Then the male player will be demonized and have to live with the trauma the rest of his life, when really it&#8217;s the fault of the school and the media that valued girl power over the safety of the players. This will happen. Even in this modern woke era, the football field is still a place where very big and fast men violently clash. You keep throwing women into that mix and it won’t be long before something very bad happens. Which is why, in a sane society, women would be banned from competing against men in violent sports like this. In the past, no such rule was necessary because nobody was crazy enough to actually put a woman on the field. Now people are that crazy, and so we need policies that reflect that reality. 
But nationally, everyone is ignoring the reality. Colleges and corporate media are insisting, with a straight face, that women should be playing football with men. If you ask any questions about this, sports reporters will lecture you and call you a bigot. This was always the inevitable end result of the theatrical game of make-believe that we&#8217;re all supposed to take part in. The underlying message, as always, is that men and women are exactly the same. But everyone knows that isn&#8217;t true. And one thing we’ve learned time and time again is that eventually, one way or another, reality always reasserts itself. Especially on the football field. And when it does, you’re not going to like the result. 
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Media Celebrates Absurd Charade Of Women Playing Football Against Men

College Football

Football

Leftists

Sports

Women

We are now not supposed to judge people as fully-fledged human beings, which is the natural outcome of a hedonistic society in which the only thing that matters is sex.
The way we used to date is that you didn’t take your clothes off until you were married. When that was the case, you had to fully appreciate the person sitting across the table from you as a fully-fledged human being with thoughts, values, and ideas. You only got to sex after marriage. Now, you get to the sex first and everything else is lost by the wayside. Some people are making the argument that marriage is bad because women are initiating most divorces due to no-fault divorce, which means it’s risky for men to get married.
My answer to that is: Not if you marry the right woman. The way you know you’re marrying the right woman is if you date in the right way. This is why it’s very important when you are dating to avoid what has become current: jumping in bed with each other and then seeing how it goes from there. Instead, it should be precisely as it was in terms of actually appreciating the other human being as a potential life partner. Here’s one reason why: Everything is going to droop and bag as you get older anyway, so you should marry somebody who shares your values.
Modern masculinity does have a problem. More men than ever are committing suicide, more men than ever are addicted to opioids, and more men than ever are not going to college. And there’s a lot of depression. The real reason for that is, men have been deprived of their traditional roles or have deprived themselves of their traditional roles. The original roles of a male were to provide for and protect a family, which meant get married, have kids, protect, defend, provide. That’s what men did. And it gave them purpose and meaning.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-ben-shapiro-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h4>
Then we built an entire society around the idea that this was actively bad, that there was a serious problem with doing this. And thus society has fallen apart. Feminism argued in order for men to fulfill their traditional roles, women had to be tertiary or secondary or be treated as slaves, etc. But that was an idiotic assumption. Marriage was always good for women.
The New York Times has an entire article titled: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/24/magazine/caitlin-moran-interview.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Modern Masculinity Is Broken. She Knows How to Fix It.</a> It is an interview with an author who is married with a couple of kids. She is a self-described feminist. The New York Times describes her as “one of her generation’s funniest and most fearless feminist voices.” I always love when people use the word “fearless,” because it usually just means they’re repeating nostrums the Left really, really likes. That’s what makes you “fearless.”
She implies men should just ditch masculinity, writing:
<blockquote>I can walk around leafy liberal North London and see boys in dresses with nail polish who are using mixed pronouns and go, “Look at the progress here.” On the other hand, as soon as I go back to my hometown, I am not seeing boys walking around in sarongs and using mixed pronouns. In those places you would be going straight in at the deep end by starting a conversation about masculinity by going, “Maybe gender shouldn’t exist.” </blockquote>
She’s wrong. The real solution for men is to live virtuously. The real solution for women is also to live virtuously.
Why are men so depressed? Because you’ve said that the only way they can be a real man is to not be a man at all.
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Ben Shapiro Editorial Series 09

NYT ‘Fearless’ Writer Advises Men To Ditch Masculinity. But That’s Why So Many Men Are Depressed.

NYT 'Fearless' Writer Advises Men To Ditch Masculinity. But That’s Why So Many Men Are Depressed.

Ben Shapiro

Marriage

New York Times

Relationships

In March 2023, Bud Light had been the number 1 beer in the United States for over 20 years, dominating other well-known brands like Miller and Coors. Anheuser-Busch, which owns Bud Light along with a host of other popular beer brands, sold $2.73 billion worth of beer in the second quarter of 2022 alone.
Then, the iconic brand decided to partner with trans-identifying activist Dylan Mulvaney.
The social media influencer, infamous for a series of videos chronicling his transition called &#8220;Days of Girlhood,&#8221; showed off a can of the light beer with his face on it on April 1. A few days later, Bud Light confirmed that it had indeed signed a brand partnership deal with Mulvaney in an effort to “authentically connect with audiences.”
Bud Light tried to excuse the partnership as just one of dozens it maintains with influencers around the world and noted that the Mulvaney-themed can was not for sale to the general public, but the firestorm had already been unleashed.
Almost overnight, a beer brand widely regarded as a blue-collar American beverage became anathema among conservatives. Conservative music stars led the charge, with Kid Rock using Bud Light cans for target practice and John Rich barring the beverage from his bar. Soon, calls to boycott the light beer caught like wildfire on social media.
In the first week of the controversy, Bud Light sales <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/bud-light-sales-decline-dylan-mulvaney-transgender-boycott-1796451" target="_blank" rel="noopener">decreased</a> 11%, and its stock <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2023/05/31/anheuser-busch-stock-enters-bear-territory-amid-anti-trans-bud-light-backlash/?sh=11c6283e1bfe" target="_blank" rel="noopener">plunged</a> 20% by the beginning of June, losing Anheuser-Busch billions in market value. Sales drops only became more dramatic as summer began, with the company practically <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/06/27/bud-light-offers-fourth-of-july-rebate-beer-boycott-sales/70360008007/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">giving away</a> cases of Bud for the 4th of July weekend. Anheuser-Busch&#8217;s overall U.S. revenue was down 10.5% in the second quarter of 2023 (April to June) compared to the same period in 2022, and the company&#8217;s sales to U.S. retailers fell 14% by <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12369087/Anheuser-Busch-lost-staggering-395-MILLION-sales-plunged-14-year-Bud-Lights-partnership-transgender-influencer-Dylan-Mulvaney.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">early August</a>.
As the backlash grew, Mulvaney high-tailed it out of the country in mid-July, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/dylan-mulvaney-flies-to-peru-to-feel-safe-participate-in-shaman-ceremonies-amid-bud-light-backlash" target="_blank" rel="noopener">taking a trip</a> to Peru in order to, according to him, &#8220;feel safe.&#8221;
“I’ve seen a lot of llamas. The people here are so kind. I feel very safe here,” Mulvaney said on TikTok. “It’s a little sad that I had to leave my country to feel safe but that will get better eventually.”
In June, Bud Light <a href="https://thehill.com/business/4050296-bud-light-falls-from-no-1-us-sales-spot-for-first-time-in-more-than-20-years/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lost</a> its place as America&#8217;s best-selling beer to the Mexican beer brand Modelo. Anheuser-Busch&#8217;s parent company, AB InBev, also owns Modelo, but the U.S. distribution rights are owned by the Chicago-based Constellation Brands as a result of an antitrust lawsuit in 2013.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/convicting-a-murderer#" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: Candace Owens&#8217; new documentary &#8216;Convicting a Murderer&#8217;</a></h4>
While AB InBev still controls 7 of the top 10 best-selling beers in the country, their flagship brand took a massive hit to its reputation and the company&#8217;s bottom line. It <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/19/dylan-mulvaney-bud-light-boycott">suffered a revenue loss</a> in its North American market of almost $400 million, and in July Anheuser-Busch announced it would lay off 2% of its American staff — about 350 people.
Trying to court back conservative buyers, Anheuser-Busch quickly tried to distance itself from contentious social issues.
Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth tried to downplay the controversy by assuring customers that “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” and that “We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer” in a mid-April statement. Whitworth added that he spends a lot of time “listening to and learning from our customers, distributors, and others.” No hint of Dylan Mulvaney, transgenderism, or an apology to offended customers could be found in the statement.
On the day of Whitworth’s statement on the controversy, Budweiser <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/budweiser-patriotic-advert-bud-light-backlash-dylan-mulvaney-boycott-1794700" target="_blank" rel="noopener">released</a> a new ad titled “Heart of America” that was chocked full of patriotic imagery, including famous landmarks like the Lincoln Memorial and the Grand Canyon. The narrator of the ad was sure to emphasize the company’s American roots and homespun character.
“Let me tell you a story about a beer rooted in the heart of America, found in a community where a handshake is a sure contract; brewed for those who found opportunity in challenge, and hope in tomorrow; raised by generations willing to sip, share, risk, remember. This is a story bigger than beer; this is the story of the American spirit.”
The company also released camo- and Harley Davidson-themed <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/bud-light-budweiser-release-camo-harley-davidson-limited-edition-cans-as-sales-continue-to-plummet" target="_blank" rel="noopener">cans</a>, to little effect.
The boycott is still going strong. Modelo still edges out Bud Light for the title of American&#8217;s favorite beer. Anheuser-Busch&#8217;s stock may have <a href="https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/bud-light-market-share-stabilizing-after-transgender-saga-says-ab-inbev/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">stabilized</a> — largely due to sales from its other brands — but Bud Light sales were down 27% for the four-week period ending in early September, <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/09/15/bud-light-could-lose-retail-shelf-space-as-dylan-mulvaney-boycott-persists/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">according</a> to Bump Williams Consulting. Even worse, industry sources <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Business/bud-light-set-lose-shelf-space-major-retailers/story?id=103165753" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told</a> ABC News that the brand is set to lose shelf space at major retailers like Walmart and 7-Eleven. Former Anheuser-Busch InBev executive Anson Frericks told the outlet that shelf space represents “the single largest determinant of sales in a store” and warned that the move could result in a &#8220;dramatic shift.&#8221;
The Bud Light boycott inspired similar boycotts over the summer, most notably one against Target after the retail giant unveiled a Pride Month collection that included LGBT-themed clothes and swimwear for kids.
Target&#8217;s second quarter sales for 2023 <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/target-sales-sink-after-pride-backlash" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sank</a> 5.4% compared to the previous year — its first quarterly sales decline in six years — and the company lost billions in market value as its stock plunged. Unlike Anheuser-Busch, Target&#8217;s stock has not stabilized and is down roughly 30% since the backlash began.
The Bud Light controversy was not the first time that conservatives had tried to boycott a company over its attempts to push a Left-wing narrative in its advertising, but the sheer number of people who participated and how dramatically Bud Light&#8217;s sales plummeted make it unique. Additionally, the fact that such an iconic brand as Bud Light became entangled in one of the most hot-button issues in the country certainly contributed to how extensive the boycott became.
Bud Light&#8217;s sales are still floundering and its reputation is ruined among a large portion of the American people. While Bud Light suffered a massive hit, AB InBev&#8217;s overall losses are so relatively low because it <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/if-you-want-to-boycott-anheuser-busch-over-dylan-mulvaney-add-these-brands-to-your-no-buy-list" target="_blank" rel="noopener">owns so many</a> other beer brands, unbeknownst to the general public.
Anheuser-Busch&#8217;s pivot toward more patriotic ads in the wake of the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco could indicate that it will back off from social justice virtue signaling. Whether this whole affair will introduce a chilling effect to other companies and cause them to think twice about wading into the culture wars is yet to be seen. But in an environment where more and more giant corporations are weighing in on political issues (almost always in favor of the Left), conservatives should be encouraged by the results of their battle against America&#8217;s former favorite brew.
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Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light

How Conservatives Pulled Off One Of The Most Successful Boycotts In U.S. History

Anheuser-Busch

Bud Light

Dylan Mulvaney

Social Issues

U.S.

I have never been a Swifty, and I never will be. Taylor Swift has the maturity of a 15-year-old girl. Despite the fact that she’s about to turn 34 in December (my age), she acts like she is 15. Yet the media continue to applaud her bad behavior. As she ages, she has become more and more vicious. Swift is being used by the Left — and she is going to continue to be used by the Left.
Despite being nearly 34 years old, Taylor Swift is still vicious toward her exes. It doesn’t even matter which one of them it is. She always has some ax to grind. One of the best examples of such an ax is an ex-boyfriend from a very long time ago. In 2008, Joe Jonas (Joe of the Jonas Brothers) broke up with Swift in a 27-second call — and she still has not let it go. Jonas, who is now 31 and a fully grown adult, is now in the middle of a very messy public divorce. His soon-to-be ex and mother of his children is Sophie Turner, who acted in “Game of Thrones.” They are a real couple. They have real children. And in the middle of this divorce, they are feuding over where their children are going to live: in America, where Jonas lives, or in the U.K., where Turner is from. This has gotten nasty in the press.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/why-i-ll-never-be-a-swifty-member-exclusive-3" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: Candace Owens</a></h4>
Enter, Taylor Swift. Out of nowhere, Swift and Turner become besties overnight amidst Turner’s divorce. From Turner’s perspective, if you want to get back at your soon-to-be ex-husband, you might just reach back out to one of his exes who you know will engage in petty public behavior. From Swift’s perspective, if you want to get back at one of your ex-boyfriends who burned you when you were a teenager, what better way to do it than to hang out with his almost ex-wife who he is separated from and going through a messy divorce. How unbelievably petty.
The two were spotted leaving New York City’s Hotel Barrière Fouquet&#8217;s New York last week, willingly getting photographed. They openly walked out of the restaurant together. After all, Swift isn’t seen unless she wants to be seen. But this is the petty sort of behavior Swift engages in. I do not understand why people don’t say this is wrong.
<div id="attachment_627227" style="width: 522px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-627227" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-627227 size-full" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/Swift-Turner-nyc.png" alt="" width="512" height="343" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/Swift-Turner-nyc.png 512w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/Swift-Turner-nyc-300x201.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 512px) 100vw, 512px" />© ROKA/BACKGRID</div>
This is a marriage. There are children involved. Not to mention this has been over 15 years. She should move on from her bad break-up from Joe Jonas. When your agent calls and asks if you want to hang out with Sophie Turner,  you should say no because she is in the middle of a divorce with one of your exes. The answer should be no because you are a 33-year-old woman and because Turner has children. You should say you understand why Turner is engaging in petty behavior — because her feelings are involved — but since you don’t have those same feelings, you say no because you don’t want to get involved in someone else’s divorce.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/convicting-a-murderer#?utm_campaign=convicting&amp;utm_medium=memexp&amp;utm_source=wisepops&amp;utm_content=banner_web_desktop_camshowpage" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: Candace&#8217;s new documentary series &#8216;Convicting a Murderer&#8217;</a></h4>
When it comes to men and being petty, there seems to be no bottom to Taylor Swift’s behavior. She recently dated Joe Alwyn for six years, and after they broke up, she coordinated with her girlfriends so they would all unfollow him on the same day on Instagram. Why? Because she has the maturity of a 15-year-old. These are middle school antics. To have all your friends en masse unfollow him on social media to prove their loyalty? That is not how a 33-year-old woman should act. Unfollowing someone on the same day to prove a point — “These are my friends, not yours!” — is bratty. That type of behavior should be beneath her. But this is why she has a legion of 15-year-old fans who will go to bat for her. (They will do it in my comments.) But she has never grown up from engaging in 15-year-old behavior. In fact, I might actually even say younger.
This friendship is one developed out of spite. And it’s yet another reason I will never be a Swifty. She is a brat who has an underdeveloped brain because she found fame when she was too young. No one will ever convince me otherwise.
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Candace_516x9 copy 26

Taylor Swift Has The Maturity Of A 15-Year-Old Girl

Candace Owens

Music

Opinion

Taylor Swift

“The Office” might be the latest property heading for Hollywood’s reboot factory.
Puck News reports that NBC will attempt another “Office”-related series. The network toyed with a spin-off sitcom, to be called “The Farm,” based on “Office” oddball and beet farmer Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson).
That never materialized.
Nor did a project based on <a href="https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/the-office-actor-returns-fan-donations-stnaley-spinoff-1235687187/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">secondary character Stanley Hudson</a> (Leslie David Baker), despite a crowdfunding effort to bring the crusty salesman back to the small screen.
The latest news sounds more official but equally worrisome.
Hollywood reboots routinely spoil the magic behind the source material. “Will &amp; Grace” 2.0 took on Trump, turning a frothy affair into another lame part of the Hollywood “resistance.”
“Mad About You” revisited Paul and Jamie’s enduring love story, but the culture essentially shrugged its shoulders at the revival.
A new “Office” is fraught with similar pitfalls, plus one that’s undeniable. Much of the show’s humor is now forbidden by woke diktats. The show, which signed off a decade ago, has a forbidden appeal today, much like fellow “problematic” NBC sitcom “Friends.”
The sexual harassment happening on every third episode alone would spark a Cancel Culture outcry.
Audiences crave comedy, especially jokes that dance on the edge between sweet and sour.
That explains why “The Office” (spun from Ricky Gervais’ BBC original) still matters to American consumers. It remains an in-demand title for the Peacock streaming service, and if you enter any crowd today there’s a chance you’ll spot a Dunder Mifflin T-shirt, the show’s fictional paper company.
Here&#8217;s why we can’t stop loving “The Office” – with or without a reboot.
<h4>Michael Scott</h4>
Steve Carell joined the series just before his breakout role in 2005’s “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” He turned Michael Scott’s character into a modern-day Archie Bunker, a character we should loathe for his worst traits. Michael is petty, juvenile, thin-skinned, and ignorant to the point where he’s patently racist – without having enmity in his heart for other races.
Carell turned Michael into a lovable soul, both deeply flawed and wildly charismatic. The sitcom’s ensemble nature is clear, but Carell’s performance stood out, always.
<div id="attachment_627139" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-627139" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-627139" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/GettyImages-1232593951-1-864x576.jpg" alt="THE OFFICE -- &quot;Goodbye Michael, Part 2&quot; Episode 722 -- Pictured: (l-r) Phillis Smith as Phyllis Lapin, Steve Carell as Michael Scott -- (Photo by: Chris Haston/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/GettyImages-1232593951-1-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/GettyImages-1232593951-1-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/GettyImages-1232593951-1-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/GettyImages-1232593951-1.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Chris Haston/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images</div>
<h4>Jim And Pam: A Love Story</h4>
It’s one of TV’s great romances, and a love story that didn’t fade once the couple officially fell in love. The first few “Office” seasons tortured viewers with the “will they or won’t they” storyline, but the show shrewdly united them instead of teasing it out indefinitely.
They could have become a dull married couple, bickering over bills or “Office” politics. Instead, the show’s writers made them human and relatable, as they dealt with the perils of parenthood while keeping their romantic fires ablaze.
Jenna Fischer and John Krasinski had killer chemistry from the jump, giving “The Office” a beating heart beneath the wacky gags.
<div id="attachment_627119" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-627119" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-627119" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/GettyImages-157239128-864x576.jpg" alt="THE OFFICE -- &quot;Dwight Christmas&quot; Episode 910 -- Pictured: (l-r) John Krasinski as Jim Halpert, Jenna Fischer as Pam Halpert -- (Photo by: Byron Cohen/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/GettyImages-157239128-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/GettyImages-157239128-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/GettyImages-157239128-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/GettyImages-157239128.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Byron Cohen/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images</div>
<h4>Creed</h4>
Did you know co-star Creed Bratton played guitar with The Grass Roots in the 1960s, or that his emergence on the show proved as mysterious as his character itself? “The Office” had so many strengths it’s easy to discount the actor’s small but palpable role in its greatness. He might have only one line per episode, but Bratton always made it count.
<h4>Office Nostalgia</h4>
The pandemic forced many Americans to work from home. Some never went back to the office, while others split time between their homes and the workspace. Office drones routinely complained about the nine-to-five grind, but there’s something special about seeing the same co-workers day-in, day-out. 
“The Office” leaned into that, delivering characters who could be supportive one day, then manipulative and cruel the next. “The Office” didn’t pull those punches, one reason why we look back at office culture with a mix of nostalgia and emotional pain. Except the show made us laugh at the worst of those exchanges.
<h4>Kramer. Barney Fife. Karen Walker. Dwight Schrute.</h4>
Wilson’s inscrutable anti-hero offered the perfect second banana to Carell’s Michael Scott. Dwight could be cold, cunning and darn near blood thirsty, but his kooky magnetism always drew you in. 
It’s one of the most original characters in TV history, with full credit going to Wilson for making sure we never knew what Dwight might do or say next.
<div id="attachment_627111" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-627111" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-627111" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/GettyImages-167858737-864x576.jpg" alt="THE OFFICE -- &quot;Livin' The Dream&quot; Episode 921 -- Pictured: (l-r) Jenna Fischer as Pam Beesly Halpert, John Krasinski as Jim Halpert, Kate Flannery Meredith Palmer, Oscar Nunez as Oscar Martinez, Angela Kinsey as Angela Martin, Rainn Wilson as Dwight Schrute -- (Photo by: Vivian Zink/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/GettyImages-167858737-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/GettyImages-167858737-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/GettyImages-167858737-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/09/GettyImages-167858737.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Vivian Zink/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images</div>
<h4>‘Diversity Day’</h4>
The show’s second episode set a high-water mark for hilarity. It also earned the show a brief Cancel Culture moment when it <a href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/diversity-day-the-office-cancelled/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">mysteriously disappeared</a> from regular rotation at Comedy Central.
Hmmmm.
Michael Scott’s Post-It Note-driven attempt to bring cultures together did the opposite, resulting in a wildly inappropriate series of gags and a satire of forced diversity measures. Suffice to say no one could write the same episode today, all the more reason to savor this rerun above others.
<h4>‘That’s What She Said’ </h4>
Michael Scott’s favorite punch line is now problematic, to say the least. The quip sent his character into convulsions more than a few times, punctuating how he saw the work place as an extension of his nonstop comic persona.
<a href="https://collider.com/steve-carell-no-office-reunion-explained/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The final word goes to Carell</a>, the genius behind both Michael Scott and some of the show’s episodes. He, like co-stars Mindy Kaling (Kelly), B.J. Novak (Ryan) and Paul Lieberstein (Toby), wrote several “Office” installments. He told Collider in 2018 why he’s not interested in rejoining any future reboot.
“I just can’t see it being the same thing, and I think most folks would want it to be the same thing, but it wouldn’t be. Ultimately, I think it’s maybe best to leave well enough alone and just let it exist as what it was. You’d literally have to have all of the same writers, the same producers, the same directors, and the same actors, and even with all of those components, it just wouldn’t be the same.”
Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of <a href="http://www.hollywoodintoto.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">HollywoodInToto.com</a>. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood. Follow him at <a href="https://twitter.com/HollywoodInToto?lang=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@HollywoodInToto</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

The Office

Rumors Of A Reboot Remind Us Why We Still Love ‘The Office’

Entertainment

Rainn Wilson

Steve Carell

You remember Ibram X. Kendi. 
He’s a genius. How do I know he’s a genius? He’s such a genius that he actually won a MacArthur “genius grant” in 2021. The grant was a $625,000 no-strings-attached fellowship honoring his “exceptional creativity, scholarly achievements, gift for communicating his antiracist work and ideas with diverse audiences.”
<a href="https://www.bu.edu/articles/2021/ibram-x-kendi-macarthur-fellows-genius-grant-winner/#:~:text=The%20%24625%2C000%20no%2Dstrings%2Dattached,promise%20for%20further%20benefiting%20society&amp;text=Boston%20University's%20Ibram%20X." target="_blank" rel="noopener">Boston University</a> gave him an anti-racist grant. For those who have not followed the prodigious career of Ibram X. Kendi, the founder of the new Center for Antiracist Research, he is the author of a bunch of mediocre books and he speaks nonsense for a living. The nonsense that he speaks is all about how America is deeply and irrevocably racist. 
He has written that America was literally racist in all of its iterations from the very beginning, up to and including all of the constitutional protections of the Bill of Rights. So what exactly does this genius say about racism? He can’t really define the term. He just knows racism exists wherever there is a disparity. In his book, “How to Be an Antiracist,” he says, ”Racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas.”
Let me give you an example of how stupid that is. The vast majority of the NBA is black. That is a massive racial disparity. Only 13% of the American population is black. Does this mean there has been some sort of deep and abiding racism in the NBA to make all of that happen? Conversely, in hockey, virtually all the players are white. Does that mean there is deep and abiding racism that exists at the roots of hockey, and that is why there are not that many black hockey players at the NHL level? Of course not. That’s incredibly silly. If you see 99% of people in prison for violent crime are men, is that because of deeply sexist roots in society? 
The truth is, disparities exist across virtually every industry and every metric in society — and they have for all of time. They’re tied to everything from geography to environment. The idea that if two groups by race do not stack up identically in any particular area is because of systemic and abiding racism is absolute nonsense. But all Kendi has to show is any disparity, which makes his job really easy because I too can point to disparities in every arena of life.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1814-the-greatest-scam-in-modern-america-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h4>
In 2020, we decided as a society that you no longer had to prove racism was at the root of, for example, crime statistics. Instead, you could just simply claim that it was. And then everyone who said it wasn’t was deemed to be racist. That was a scam. The idea that American society rests in unidentifiable but ever-present racism is a lie. The notion that disparities in crime statistics are caused by racist policing is a lie. This is the magic of Kendi. He says colorblindness is racist. If you think race shouldn’t matter, that’s because you’re racist. According to Kendi, race does matter. And the way we know race matters is because of disparities. And those disparities are evidence of racism. And if you say that’s why race shouldn’t matter, that’s because you’re a racist, don’t you see?
So why am I discussing Ibram X. Kendi today? Because Boston University is now announcing an inquiry into his anti-racist center. It turns out the whole thing is a scam. 
You don’t say. 
A person who can’t define the word racism but is being paid not to define the word racism — you mean that was a scam? You mean just like any other cult? If the cult leader can’t define the terms, it can still be a cult.
This was the Emperor’s New Clothes garbage. Everyone knew this at the time. Anti-racism is a collection of anti-racist policies that target racist disparities backed by racist ideas. But everyone could tell this was gobbledygook nonsense. And now Boston University has announced an “inquiry” into Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research. The predicate for this is that the center laid off some 20% of their entire staff and has been accused of misusing millions of dollars in funds. They have published hardly any research.
It’s hard to have a research-based approach when you do no research. A giant scam.
That is the message here: If you can’t articulate why someone should give you money to do something, all you can do is threaten them that you will call them a racist or a bigot if they do not do that something.
Boston University professor Phillipe Copeland, who is black and used to work for Kendi’s center, stated, &#8220;Boston University needs to explain how one of its premier Centers ended up in this situation and how mass layoffs are ’antiracist.’ This act of employment violence and trauma is not just about individual leaders. It’s about the cultures and systems that allow it to occur.”
“It’s about the culture and systems that allow it to occur.” I love it. Kendi preaches the grift, and then when he actually uses the grift to fire his own people, creating a disparity in outcome, this means he is now violating his own anti-racist precepts.
It’s a snake eating its own tail here.
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Ben Shapiro Editorial Series 01 copy1

Ibram X. Kendi’s Grift Catches Up With Him

Anti-Racism

Boston

Ibram X. Kendi

Racism

Universities

Since releasing my docuseries “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/convicting-a-murderer#" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Convicting a Murderer</a>,” one question I have been asked is, when did I become interested in true crime? While I have always liked true crime stories, this docuseries is about more than just crime. It’s about why society turns villains into heroes, how the media manipulates stories, and how lies become viewed as truth on a grand scale. When I began my political journey, I was fascinated by the concerted effort of culture, mainstream media, and school systems all working together on one thing: creating minds. Once I realized the extent to which <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-untold-truth-of-the-matthew-shepard-story" target="_blank" rel="noopener">I had been brainwashed</a>, I wanted to know how it had happened in the first place. How had I become brainwashed by their efforts? I have been examining how this is possible ever since — and enlarging that examination to the entire world.
Psychosis is a mental illness in which someone loses contact with reality. Mass psychosis is when a major part of society follows some identified leaders’ directives, guiding in one direction or another, regardless of what any data shows. Mass psychosis has plagued society throughout history, but as I have lived through some, all have been intriguing to me. COVID, for example, was an occurrence of mass psychosis. “Experts” convinced people that everyone was dying, and we were facing another bubonic plague. It was effective — and that fascinates me. I was interested in the mass psychosis that took place during Black Lives Matter, which is why <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/videos/the-greatest-lie-ever-sold" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“The Greatest Lie Ever Sold”</a> was my first project with The Daily Wire. I wanted to explore how people became convinced that George Floyd was not just a person who died an unfortunate death but was, in fact, a hero. How did people get to the point they were being baptized at the location of his death? How did that happen?
When I paired my love of studying psychology with my interest in this period of heightened propaganda and a cultural battle for minds, I naturally ended up focusing on the mainstream media. They are the most potent form of brainwashing in existence today — and they are everywhere, fighting for minds. Obviously then, I was interested in Netflix’s docuseries “Making a Murderer.” When it came out, it was incredibly successful. People were not just convinced that Steven Avery was not guilty, they formed what can only be described as a cult — a Steven Avery cult. In later episodes of “Convicting a Murderer,” we see that people wanted to marry him; they cried for him. But the first four episodes show what kind of man Avery was his entire lifetime. He was nothing short of a monster. How are we turning villains into heroes — and why?
When the filmmakers of “Making a Murderer” started their project, they probably set out just to cover the story. The man was in prison for 12 years for a crime he didn’t commit. So to be exonerated and murder someone two years later? It is quite a story. But it’s a story these two female filmmakers ended up creating with an angle. They said they didn’t have an angle, but they did. They told Avery they believed him, and they were forthcoming with the view they had for the film. But Steven Avery is a monster. And to pretend you are agnostic or objective is just dishonest.
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Regardless of their original intent, what these two documentary-makers had was a perfect media firestorm. There was an anti-police sentiment already building in the country, so they made their series which presents plausibility that this person was being set up by police in this glorious $36 million lawsuit. The reason the media picked up “Making a Murderer” is not because they cared about Avery’s victim, Teresa Halbach, or Steven Avery. The reason they picked it up is because the media knew they could extract a certain narrative they were interested in perpetuating at that time, which was that police are rotten and should be protested because they aren’t only after just black men but they are after white men too. So Avery became their icon.
Here I was again wondering how the human mind can bend so outlandishly to believe lies as truth. There were such obvious answers people refused to accept: the last place Halbach was seen, her discomfort around Avery, her car outside his lot, and the number of times he changed his story. This was another example of people wanting to believe an anti-hero narrative, which we not only see in real life but also in fantasy narratives. We now have a story behind the Joker so we will feel sympathy for him because of his background. We know Maleficent&#8217;s history so we sympathize with her character who has a heart. We are in a time when we are trying to turn villains into heroes. It’s everywhere. But some people do not need to be unearthed to have their legacy cleaned up.
We are also in a period of excuses. There is no accountability. I blame a lot of this on what I call new-age therapy. I speak out against the younger generation of psychologists and psychiatrists who refuse to give people the tools they need to correct their lives and, instead, give them excuses: “You did a bad thing? Let’s talk about your childhood and figure out what happened because it’s not really your fault.” In “old” therapy, psychologists and psychiatrists helped people get their lives together. But not now. This has spread to a nationwide issue, and culture reinforces the “excuse” sentiment. When George Floyd died, BLM raced into Target, stole flat screen televisions, and the CEO of Target’s response was, “We understand.” The CEO of a major corporation was evidently teaching that if you have a feeling and you’re upset, you are authorized to become a criminal.
A big part of the problem at large is that some of these <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/youre-not-stuck-youre-allowed-to-be-better">people are spiritually void</a>, and they are looking to fill that void with something, with anything. It is impossible not to seek some kind of spiritualism, so when that spiritualism is misplaced, situations can get very scary, very fast. That is part of what we see in “Convicting a Murderer.” Some people who heard Avery’s story were so overtaken by his story that they were putting Avery in the place of the void they felt.
There are huge facts coming out in future episodes. It was an interesting experience to unpack the evidence that was left out of “Making a Murderer” in order to soften his past crimes. The Truther community is going to have a difficult time when these episodes air because there is just no way to defend him when everything is revealed.
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Mass Psychosis: How Villains Become Heroes In The Media

Convicting a Murderer

Legacy Media

Murder

The idea of jury nullification has been around since this country had juries. The idea is pretty simple: juries can vote to acquit defendants, even when the government proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt. If you serve on a jury, and you listen to all the evidence, then you can still vote &#8220;not guilty.&#8221; And you can walk right out of the courthouse, and tell everyone that the guy did it, but you didn&#8217;t care. Maybe you didn&#8217;t like the law. Maybe you didn&#8217;t like the prosecutor. Whatever it is, it&#8217;s your right to vote to acquit. The defendant will walk. The judge and the government can&#8217;t do anything about it.
In the history of this country, jury nullification has been especially prominent in periods of open race hatred. During the 19th century, juries often refused to convict people who were accused of helping escaped slaves, in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act. Later, in the civil rights era, some all-white juries would acquit people who clearly committed acts of violence against blacks. So there are clearly good uses of jury nullification, and bad instances of it, as you&#8217;d expect. But on balance, this is a feature, not a bug, of our judicial system. That&#8217;s the conventional wisdom.
What&#8217;s not conventional wisdom — because no one is talking about it, even on the Right — is that jury nullification is making a major comeback right now. And this is not the jury nullification that Supreme Court justices like John Jay endorsed back in the day. I&#8217;m talking about a return of the civil rights era of jury nullification, where juries — egged on by prosecutors, in some cases — refuse to punish racist criminals who are obviously guilty. Only this time, the criminals are not white, they&#8217;re black. This is widespread at the moment in this country. It is impossible to deny. We have fully imported South African-style juries, where race and caste matters more than the facts of the case.
I&#8217;m going to start with one of the most egregious recent examples of jury nullification I&#8217;m talking about. This is a case involving the brutal killing of a 17-year-old white high school student in Akron, Ohio, named Ethan Liming. Last summer, Ethan Liming and his friends decided to do some stupid TikTok challenge, where they took a toy gel gun and fired it at random people. 
Here&#8217;s the police chief in Akron explaining what the gun looks like and what it does:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Akron police provide update on Ethan Liming&#039;s death" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_mNMvUJDNsk?start=434&#038;feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
So Ethan Liming and his friends, armed with this toy water gun, drove around and then they came across several young black men, ages 19 to 21, who were playing basketball in a parking lot near LeBron James&#8217; &#8220;I Promise&#8221; school. And Liming&#8217;s friends made the very dumb decision to shoot at these black men with the toy gun. Evidence at trial, which includes surveillance footage, shows that the black men initially ran away, thinking they were under attack. But then, they turned back and charged at the car Liming was in. There was testimony that Liming fired some water pellets at the men who were now running at him. The key point here is that this was not a split-second thing where the black men attacked in self-defense, thinking the gun was real. They pursued Liming to get back at him for his prank.
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What happened next is that Ethan Liming died a horrible death. When police arrived, they found blood coming from Liming&#8217;s mouth, ears, and nose. He hadn&#8217;t simply been punched in the face and given a black eye, although that&#8217;s true as well. He had been stomped. He had a broken collarbone. He had multiple blunt-force injuries all over his body. The coroner noted that there was a shoe print on his chest. Think about the amount of force that&#8217;s required to leave a shoe print on someone like that. Think about the savagery involved in this. At trial, the defense argued that Ethan Liming&#8217;s killers were in fear for their lives. They weren&#8217;t mad they had been pranked. Instead, they were deathly afraid of the water gun, so they went to town.
Is that plausible? Initially, prosecutors didn&#8217;t think so. That&#8217;s why they brought murder charges against the men responsible for this killing, which seems obviously appropriate given that the facts of the case simply don’t support a self-defense claim. Again, they pursued him, assaulted him, and stomped on him while he was on the ground. It was three against one, and after killing him they stole his car. Even if we were to accept the outlandish idea that they ran after this guy still thinking that he was a crazed shooter with a real gun, by the time they were stomping him to death on the ground it would have been exceedingly clear to everyone involved that he was not a threat. Also, keep in mind that at least one of the three assailants had been hit in the face with the water pellet. That couldn’t have felt very good, but it does mean that they obviously knew that it was a toy gun. Their lives were not in danger. They stomped him to death and stole his car because they were angry. This was murder, obviously. But the murder charges didn&#8217;t last long. Watch:
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A couple of things about this. First of all, if the prosecutors had wanted the grand jury to indict on murder charges, they could&#8217;ve done that. That&#8217;s not really in dispute. Especially after the Trump prosecutions, where the grand jury wanted to indict everyone who&#8217;s ever talked to Trump, everyone knows how grand juries work in this country. There&#8217;s no defense counsel present. Prosecutors can basically say whatever they want to grand juries. And they can indict anyone for any crime. 
So why didn&#8217;t prosecutors want murder charges here? Why did they effectively downgrade to a much less serious offense — involuntary manslaughter? Liming&#8217;s father spoke to local media about the prosecutors&#8217; decision. He says that at least one prosecutor said that his son got what he deserved, in the form of &#8220;hood justice.&#8221; Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Witnesses to beating death of Ethan Liming testify in high-profile trial" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/syW7KI7eqjM?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
You can believe what Liming&#8217;s father says, or you can choose not to believe it. Whatever the case, it&#8217;s objectively true that &#8220;involuntary manslaughter&#8221; is an absurdly lenient charge when you pummel someone on the ground after he fired a water gun at you. Involuntary manslaughter makes sense when you&#8217;re speeding and you hit someone in a crosswalk. When you&#8217;re standing over someone with a child&#8217;s toy, causing blood to come out of every orifice of his body, you&#8217;re probably committing a voluntary act called murder. At the very least, you&#8217;d think it would be up to a jury to decide that question.
But prosecutors in Akron didn&#8217;t see it that way. So the murder charge was off the table. And just by doing that — just by removing the prospect of murder from the case — prosecutors sent a very clear signal to jurors. That signal is that this was all an accident, at worst. No one really intended anyone to die. And just to reiterate that point, the prosecutors offered jurors another option. They could also convict the thugs of &#8220;assault.&#8221; 
And lo and behold, that&#8217;s exactly what happened. This week Ethan Liming&#8217;s killers got off with a conviction for assault. They were acquitted of involuntary manslaughter. It&#8217;s as if they just got into a nasty bar fight. They&#8217;ll almost certainly be out of jail within two years, if not sooner. This is jury nullification, encouraged by prosecutors. There&#8217;s no other term you can use to describe this. And it&#8217;s not just happening in Akron.
Consider that just a few weeks ago, a jury found that a member of a black nationalist militia named Othal Wallace had committed manslaughter, instead of murder, after he shot a police officer to death on camera. Wallace shot this officer, named Jason Raynor, in the head. This was an unprovoked murder. Raynor was responding to a call of suspicious activity in an apartment complex, and Wallace killed him. Again, there&#8217;s no doubt about it. The murder was caught on body camera. Othal Wallace is not simply a member of a black nationalist group. After executing Jason Raynor, Wallace boasted on Instagram about putting &#8220;pigs&#8221; in their place. He fled to Georgia, where his black nationalist group — called NFAC, for the &#8220;Not F—ing Around Coalition&#8221; — helped him hide. Wallace also cut his dreadlocks to hide his appearance. This all came out in trial. Watch:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
NFAC (Not F&#39;ing around coalition) member Othal Wallace testified in his own defense today <a href="https://t.co/6Whma3OAxC">https://t.co/6Whma3OAxC</a>
Probably didn&#39;t help him much &amp; could definitely hurt him in a death penalty phase. Prosecution grilled him over social media posts about &#39;crackers&#39; &amp; &#39;killing pigs&#39; <a href="https://t.co/STkA85Pbf8">https://t.co/STkA85Pbf8</a> <a href="https://t.co/8trjMQ2FaM">pic.twitter.com/8trjMQ2FaM</a>
&mdash; AntifaWatch (@AntifaWatch2) <a href="https://twitter.com/AntifaWatch2/status/1702388085273796821?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 14, 2023</a></blockquote>
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After that testimony — after shooting a police officer in the face, and killing him — Othal Wallace was convicted of manslaughter. Not murder, which carries a possible death sentence, but manslaughter. The local sheriff said he has, &#8220;never been more disgusted by a verdict&#8221; in his entire career. You can see why.
Again, this is not simply jury nullification. This is race-based jury nullification that prosecutors are encouraging. In some cases, they&#8217;re not even leaving it to juries. They&#8217;re offering murderers really attractive plea deals, to short-circuit the whole trial process altogether. Remember the 41-year-old guy in North Dakota named Shannon Brandt? He confessed to killing Cayler Ellingson, who was a teenager. Why? Brandt was drunk, and he assumed that when Ellingson was on the phone with his mom, that he was really communicating with some MAGA Republican militia. So Brandt ran Ellingson over with his Ford Explorer and fled the scene. That&#8217;s murder, but Shannon Brandt wasn&#8217;t charged with murder. He was hit with manslaughter charges instead. Prosecutors offered him those charges as part of a plea deal, which of course he accepted.
There are many more examples like this. There&#8217;s the case of James McGee, who used a metal pipe to bludgeon a 62-year-old cab driver named Arif Mohammed Qasim to death back in 2019. He literally beat his brains out. San Francisco&#8217;s DA at the time let McGee plead to involuntary manslaughter, in the name of equity. 
The same thing happened to the killer of Seth Smith, a Berkeley student who was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range by a lifelong criminal named Tony Walker. The moment homicide detectives reached out to Walker, he explained how frustrated he was that they cared about Smith&#8217;s death: “A white kid gets killed and the damn whole world stops… F—- that white motherf——-,&#8221; he said.
How did prosecutors respond? They offered Tony Walker a plea of manslaughter. That&#8217;s despite the fact that a probation officer determined that, &#8220;The defendant has demonstrated that he is a danger to the community and needs to be separated for the community’s protection … the defendant has established an entrenched pattern of criminal conduct that probation, prison and parole have been unable to eradicate.” Nevertheless, Tony Walker was not brought up on hate crimes charges, or thrown in prison for life, as he would be if he were white. This was not a repeat of the Ahmaud Arbery case with the races reversed. Instead, prosecutors let Tony Walker take a manslaughter plea. And for good measure, lawmakers in Berkeley later prevented police from running most parolee searches, like the one that led cops to apprehend Walker in the first place.
We could go on and on listing examples, but there’s one more very recent one we need to fit in here. A man named Calvin Ushery brutally assaulted, pistol-whipped, and robbed a jewelry store owner. The whole thing was caught on camera, plain as day. But guess what happened at trial? Watch:
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The jury couldn’t reach a verdict. Ushery is on video walking into a jewelry store, grabbing the store owner, pistol-whipping him, stomping on his head, and beating him with a hammer before walking off with $100 thousand worth of stolen merchandise, He was charged with assault and robbery — because you can see him on camera assaulting and robbing. But the jury was deadlocked. We all know why it was deadlocked. There were members of that jury who didn’t want to convict a black man, no matter how obviously guilty he was. 
This is what&#8217;s been happening in courtrooms all over the country, without any fanfare whatsoever. The Left has targeted conservatives, whether they&#8217;re politicians or pro-lifers or random people posting memes that offend Hillary Clinton. Everyone knows that. But at the same time, all over the country, the primary voting blocs of the Democratic Party are committing the most heinous crimes imaginable — including murder — only for prosecutors and juries to let them off the hook. They&#8217;re doing it deliberately. And in the process, they have established a true two-tiered justice system. A hierarchy where the severity of a crime is judged based on the demographics of those involved. And the lives of victims are ranked based on their race and their politics. Sadly for the family of Ethan Liming, he falls at the bottom of that totem pole, which means that there will be no justice for him. Because we are no longer a country that believes in justice.
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Courts Across The Country Are Letting Murderers Off The Hook In The Name Of Racial Equity

Blacks

Courts

Robbery

Violent Crime

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