Talking Points USA: Combating far-right disinformation

This is what one might call a living document as well as a sort of “best/worst of” for this blog. How this is going to work is that we are going to do this by year and month and every time I cover a right-winger who says something particularly dumb I’ll add that post to the hall. In short, watch this space every time I get ticked off in a post.

October 2024:

Allie Beth Stuckey plugs her book for fifteen minutes and then uses a grocery store checkout magazine to prove that witchcraft is on the rise.

Tim Pool and three other morons discuss government weather control and AI. It’s as bad as it sounds.

Steven Crowder makes agonizingly dumb arguments against feminism and declares that the left isn’t charitable because…they think that the government is responsible for disaster relief.

September 2024:

Ben Shapiro accidentally comes out against lobbying

Michael Knowles doesn't understand poetry at all and decides that the reason that Trump is being made fun of on TikTok is because Trump intentionally set himself up to be mocked so that he could be associated with "delight"

Dave Rubin discusses the latest way the Democrats are going to steal the election....Taylor Swift.

August 2024:

Matt Walsh tries to go "undercover" at the DNC, it goes about as badly as you might expect and he gets his cover blown on the first day.

Matt Walsh doesn't know what a "holiday park" is, can't seem to decide whether he likes riots or not, spews white nationalist bigotry, and then defends colonialism.

Laura Loomer desperately tries to spin a conspiracy theory about Tim Walz having ties to terrorist organizations

Charlie Kirk has no idea how to handle Tim Walz and advocates for parents to financially abuse their kids into voting for Trump.

July 2024:

Broadcasting live from a Bitcoin convention, Michael Knowles lies about Kamala Harris and complaints about the Olympics and lab grown testicles.

Dave Rubin thinks that Biden isn't president anymore. This has nothing to do with him wanting to walk out of a bet he made in 2020.

Candace Owens compares transgender people to baphomet, cites a guy who talked shit while he was high, and declares that the Beatles were a psy-op

June 2024:

Charlie Kirk hosts a "Young Woman's Leadership Summit" dedicated to how he feels that men are under attack and allows Candace Owens to tell ridiculous lies about the Daily Wire during her speech.

Charlie Kirk interviews a felon who seems to think that COVID was engineered as a bio-weapon.

Dave Rubin knows absolutely nothing about New York's justice system

May 2024:

Matt Walsh's absolutely horrendous take on the dating market.

Tim Pool devotes an excruciatingly long amount of time to using ChatGPT to predict the 2024 election results.

April 2024:

Charlie Kirk speculates that the Pro-Palestine protests on college campuses are Soros funded because "the tents all look similar" and then goes on a bizarre rant about how oppressed he is because he's white.

Michael Knowles defends a Republican politician who admitted that she shot her dog and, seemingly forgetting that he made an episode with a segment praising predictive AI just days earlier, warns that predictive AI will corrupt our humanity.

Tim Pool dedicates an entire episode to yelling about furries in Utah.

The Daily Wire attacks women's sports and accidentally reveals their hypocrisy around trans athletes.

Fox News and the Daily Wire freak out over European Scrabble with hilarious results.

March 2024:

Candace Owens uses old photos, an RT writer, a clairvoyant that defamed the French prime-minister, and an antisemitic blog that says that Emmanuel Macron wearing a pink tie is a sign that he's a satanist as sources to prove that Brigitte Macron is secretly a transwoman.

February 2024:

According to Ben Shapiro, AI is anti-white. To prove this he lies about an executive order, ignores a massive amount of data, and digs through the old tweets of some guy who works at Google.

Chaya Raichik gives a terrible interview where she endorses a white nationalist conspiracy theory and split hairs about how ok it is for journalists to lie (but only her, not everybody else)

Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro attempt to argue that society has abolished all taboos and that's leading to an increase in "sexual boredom"

Matt Walsh advocates for harassing trans kids and tells people who are having difficulty living on the minimum wage to "stop being on the minimum wage".

Tim Pool makes multiple poor defenses for some guy's who defaced a rainbow crosswalk meant to honor the LGBTQ victims of a mass shooting and then calls on Ron DeSantis to commute their sentences.

January 2024:

Dave Rubin accidentally reveals that he may be the laziest journalist of all time multiple times over the span of a single episode.

Charlie Kirk teams up with a guy who collaborates with Neo-Nazis, a guy who got fired from FOX for being too racist, and some guy who works for him that sued Arizona once to declare that all movies are psyops, make disgusting false statements about the border, and praise a white nationalist who works at VDARE.

Tim Pool puts out an absolutely ridiculous episode where he uses jokes from TV shows to prove how AI women are going to lead to the death of society.

Matt Walsh thinks it's gay to love your wife and misrepresents every point he argues in the episode.

Tucker Carlson interviews a congressman who thinks that his wife having a nightmare is proof that COVID is a ploy to take away American liberty about supposed January 6th evidence that we will never get to see.

Michael Knowles wants to create cartoon Nazi propaganda to "own Disney for transing the kids"

Tim Pool thinks that "sneaky fucker males" are turning women lesbian.

December 2023:

Michael Knowles is really concerned that a five second clip from a CocoMelon video is going to turn kids gay.

Dave Rubin casually suggests that 65,000 people being laid off due to the Bud Lite boycott is OK because "They'll just get a job somewhere else"

Matt Walsh fantasizes about misgendering trans people on air and generally conducts himself like an unempathetic child.

Ezra Levant doesn't even bother to read a document he's citing even though it directly contradicts his point

Tim Pool uses an out of context tweet containing disinformation as a source and as a result ends up spreading misinformation about Taylor Swift.

Michael Knowles decides that porn videos turn people trans and gay, to prove this he interviews a woman who tries to push back on his stupidity but ends up getting steamrolled by him

I recently had an epiphany. I realized that I’ve been covering a lot of former BlazeTV guys like Dave Rubin and Steven Crowder but I haven’t actually covered a show from their network on this blog yet. So I decided to check the Blaze’s menu of morons and settled on Allie Beth Stuckey as someone who’s content is right at home here on Talking Points USA.

Allie is an ex-social media coordinator who eventually became fairly big in the right-wing space after starting up a Facebook page called The Conservative Millennial. She has been a sort of anti-LGBTQ/anti-feminist influencer ever since and hosts a show called Relatable which is mostly just her complaining about how people have too much empathy towards minorities. In short, she’s kind of a dick.

She also once testified in front of Congress against reproductive rights as an “expert” because the GOP has decided that random internet pundits qualify as experts now. Her show could probably be renamed to “Internalized Misogyny with Allie Beth Stuckey” and I would just shrug and go “Yeah, checks out”. She’s also really gross when it comes to LGBTQ issues which we’ll talk about later when she gets really transphobic.

Todays episode starts out the way most conservative internet shows do: shamelessly plugging a product. In this case, it’s Allie’s book.

01:05, Allie Beth Stuckey: “Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Wednesday, hope everyone is having a wonderful week so far. We’ve got a lot to get into today, a lot to get into. First I just want to thank you guys for your support of Toxic Empathy over the past couple days or day since the book came out.”

So, Allie’s new book came out last week Tuesday. Because of this, we’re greeted with the one of the most agonizingly long plugs I have seen in my life. I’m not kidding when I say that the first ten minutes of this video are devoted to just trying to sell more copies of this book.

01:38, Allie Beth Stuckey: “Here’s what we’ve gotta do guys, because I was looking at this Amazon list and who was at the top of the Amazon list of books overall? And, I mean there are some books that I want to be on there, like you know, Casey Means. She’s awesome, I want her book to be up there. But then we’ve got The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates and he is crazy and he is far-left and we don’t want his book to be number 7, we want Toxic Empathy to be number 7.”

Yeah, give me money to stick it to the far-left!

I mean, this is like if I dedicated the first three quarters of my blog to plugging an Etsy page or something. This is like a satire of really shameless conservative show plugging. I couldn’t make this up if I tried.

Also, Casey Means is a total grifter but that’s another post for another day.

02:14, Allie Beth Stuckey: “And this is not just for me. Because there’s nothing really that happens to me if this moves from number sixteen to number ten to even number two. But I really want people to hear the message in this.”

“Yeah, there’s nothing that happens to me…except I get more money!”

This would make sense if it weren’t for this little thing called the economy.

From what I’ve gathered, the TL:DR version of Allie’s book that I’ll probably never read is that the left is manipulating peoples empathy to push…accepting LGBTQ people I guess. Because if there’s one thing that I’ve learnt writing this blog, it’s that conservatives are just overflowing with empathy! So basically, common human decency bad! Bigotry good!

This plug is just agonizingly long. It also gets into anti-LGBTQ territory really freaking quickly.

04:22, Allie Beth Stuckey: “So, one of the most controversial things we talk about in this book. We go through the five lies; abortion is healthcare, transwomen are women, love is love, no human is illegal, social justice is justice. Like, you hear those and those are the actual circular mottos — the mantras that we hear from the left and that should tell you something. That they use these circular mantras and they never define their terms. Like what is transwomen are women mean when you can’t define what a woman is. They can’t even tell you what a transwoman is.”

Yeah, I can tell that this book is extremely stupid just from that.

I’ll just quickly answer Allie’s question. A woman is anyone who identifies with the gender that is defined by society as female. Transwomen are people assigned male at birth who transitioned over to becoming a woman. Boom, done! No book required!

I’m hoping that someday we all learn the difference between sex (biological) and gender (social) so that we can move on with our lives.

04:53, Allie Beth Stuckey: “And that’s one of the most controversial chapters, I think, in here because even among conservatives you’ll see that they’re kind of just abandoned the marriage question. That they don’t really want to talk about the LGB part of the LGBTQ movement and they won’t really touch the ridiculousness of love is love.”

Don’t worry Allie, conservatives are still as homophobic as you are. Trans people are just the minority of choice to demonize right now. The pendulum will probably swing back to gay people eventually.

You know, this stuff just sucks on its own but it’s made extra shitty by the fact that it’s part of what’s essentially a fifteen minute ad.

05:23, Allie Beth Stuckey: “I was talking to someone recently and who was speaking about the craziness of trans ideology, that we’ve just gone so far in that direction and we’ve gotta go back. And it really started with people announcing their pronouns in the name of being nice or just kind of affirming someone’s stated gender identity to be kind to them but really it goes back a lot further than that.”

First they asked me to put pronouns in my Twitter bio and I did not speak out!

You want circular terms that don’t mean anything? What is trans ideology? I hear conservatives baying about it all the time but nobody has actually adequately defined what it means.

Probably because they realize that they’d sound like complete assholes if they told you what it actually is: the mere existence of trans people and transgender identity.

05:46, Allie Beth Stuckey: “It really goes back — you could say to feminist ideology, the queer theory ideology that was propagated several decades ago, but certainly it goes back to Obergefell. Certainly it goes back to redefining marriage because when we said that marriage no longer has a natural definition of male and female, that it no longer matters whether you can naturally procreate within a marriage, that we can define it however we see fit. Well then we said that men and women are arbitrary.”

Allowing gay marriage doesn’t cancel out heterosexual marriage. It’s just granting the same rights to everyone. Also, Allie’s definition of marriage is really stupid. What about heterosexual couples that can’t reproduce because of infertility issues? I guess they can’t get married because according to Allie Beth Stuckey marriage is all about procreation.

This definition is dumb but it’s kind of supposed to be dumb. When Allie talks about marriage she’s doing it from a place of bigotry, mostly formed by her own extremist fundamentalist worldview.

Here’s something that I’ve noticed about right-wing media figures like Allie, they are all painfully intellectually uncurious. What people like Allie Beth Stuckey do is start from a conclusion, usually because of their fundamentalist Christian worldview, and then work backwards to try and prove that conclusion. That’s why their arguments are always weak and easily debunkable. They don’t really care about the actual “evidence” part of what they’re saying.

So, I’m getting kind of tired of this overly long plug so we’re done with that. If you don’t believe me that the entire beginning of this episode is just plugging the book, here are the literal time stamps of the video.

I’m not even going to touch Allie Beth Stuckey’s thoughts on pot legalization. Nobody deserves to watch that.

Well, I guess we might as well take a brief look at some of this Harris and black voters crap. Every single one of these right-wing media ghouls hasn’t been able to shut up about it lately.

15:24, Allie Beth Stuckey: “So, Kamala Harris — I thought this was so interesting and Barrack Obama was losing it over this, that Kamala Harris is not doing well with black voters. The polling shows that Trump could possibly get more — higher percentage of black male voters than any Republican since 1960.”

Couple problems here.

A lot of the polls that are saying that Harris is down with black voters come from people comparing previous elections to this years polls. Unfortunately, that leads to a wide margin of error. Biden over-performed with black voters compared to polls in 2020 and so did Clinton in 2016.

There’s also the fact that black males are less likely to vote altogether. This is kind of the case for all racial minorities and there are a lot of systemic factors that contribute to this, such as the police disproportionately targeting black people which leads to them not being able to vote in states that prohibit people with felony convictions from voting, that need to be addressed.

As a matter of fact, females are more likely to vote than males across all racial lines. According to the Center for American Women And Politics, females overall had an 82.2 percent turnout rate in the 2020 presidential election. This is 12.5% higher than men who had a 72.5% turnout rate. This trend continued with black women who have an average turnout of 47.8% compared to black males who have an average turnout of 41.9%.

18:52, Allie Beth Stuckey: “But Harris of course, shes got a strategy for trying to win black men and this is it. It’s called the Opportunity Agenda for Black Men. Provide one million forgivable loans up to 20,000 dollars to black entrepreneurs and others who have a good idea but don’t have the resources, connections or access to capital to get their business off the ground. So, I just want to translate this. She is saying that she is going to provide forgivable loans to black entrepreneurs. So, if you are a white entrepreneur and you have a good idea but you don’t have the resources or connections or access to capital you are going to be discriminated against. Because of the color of your skin, you will not have access to this privilege, you won’t have access to this program. That’s not even close to legal, that’s not even close to Constitutional.”

Yeah, this framing of the Opportunity Agenda doesn’t make sense if you think about it for more than a minute. I guess university scholarships for black students like Harvards Lewis and Harriet Hayden Scholarship for Colored Students are illegal now because white people can’t win them. That’s gonna be a shock to every college in America!

The Opportunity Agenda doesn’t cancel out other entrepreneurship funds that people of all races can access. It simply provides black people, who are often at a disadvantage compared to white people due to systemic racism, with an opportunity to start their own businesses with the help of the government.

Is the Opportunity Agenda perfect? No, I’m not saying it is. But it’s definitely not what Allie is saying it is either.

Also, in 2020 Donald Trump unveiled his “Platinum Plan” which was explicitly stated that it was going to fuel capital into black owned businesses so Allie can quit this BS pearl clutching routine.

20:34, Allie Beth Stuckey: “But, of course, she said before the last election, like you’ll remember that tweet she put out, that video that she put out that said ‘you know, equality means we’re given equal opportunities but equity means we all end up in the same place’. That’s communism girl, that’s communism. You can’t guarantee that everyone ends up in the same place without tyranny.”

Addressing systemic racism is now apparently communism and tyranny.

So, she goes on about how white people are being oh so discriminated against because of this program that doesn’t cancel out any other programs and is similar to something Trump tried to do in 2020 and then she goes on about a transgender individual convicted for murder who received gender affirming care in prison.

To quickly address this story since we still have all the dumb witchcraft stuff at the end of the episode to get to, what this person did to land herself in prison was bad. Denying someone their right to gender affirming healthcare is also bad. Two things can be true at the same time.

Anyway, to all the young women reading this post: the culture wants you to get into witchcraft.

47:20, Allie Beth Stuckey: “Ok, speaking of Kamala Harris we are gonna talk about — we’re talking about witches because I got this text from my brother the other day and it was the magazine rack at a grocery store in the checkout aisle and it was a magazine that said witches. And on the front was a — was a woman clearly engaging in some kind of satanic ritual.”

Or, here’s a thought, it’s getting close to Halloween so magazines are trying to run stories that play into that spooky atmosphere. It’s not that deep.

I’m pretty sure that nobody in history has bought one of those grocery store checkout rack magazines by the way. I’m almost convinced that they’re a front for some sort of money laundering operation because I’ve never seen anyone buy one. This is just Allie getting mad at nothing!

48:07, Allie Beth Stuckey: “So this is clearly a glorification of witchcraft and this is actually a trend that we have been seeing for the past few years. I did an episode maybe in 2020 called the Rise Of The Millennial Witches because there is a big trend on ‘Witch Tok’ for young women who don’t necessarily look demonic, they just look like your normal suburban mom, casting spells, burning sage, using their crystals.”

So, Allie’s found some videos on TikTok of people pretending to cast spells and a magazine at a grocery store so that means that witchcraft is on the rise. This would be kind of hilarious if people didn’t take it seriously.

48:38, Allie Beth Stuckey: “And you know, witchcraft doesn’t necessarily always look like a ouji board or like dying your hair black and casting spells. Today it looks more like manifesting. Today it looks more like transcendental meditation. Or it looks a lot more new age.”

“EVERYTHING I DON’T LIKE IS WITCHCRAFT”

I have a lot of issues with transcendental meditation and the way a lot of sects of it seem kind of predatory but it’s still not witchcraft. And manifesting? Seriously?! Manifesting is so far from witchcraft it’s not even funny.

50:02, Allie Beth Stuckey: “I saw this tweet from someone named Allie on X and she said ‘I don’t understand why so many women pretend they’re witches now. Is it an aesthetic? Harry Potter cringe gone too far? Actual witchcraft?’ And then she, you know, posts this picture of someone who is like, dressed as a witch. Very disturbing.”

This is the “disturbing picture” that Allie is talking about. It looks like a basic witch costume from Spirit Halloween.

It’s kind of embarrassing for a grown woman to call a random stock photo “disturbing”.

Allie reads a Vogue article about “witchcore”, shows what’s basically a Pinterest board about witchcore, and then complains about Taylor Swift.

53:12, Allie Beth Stuckey: “So, apparently this is witchcore and Taylor Swift said in December of 2020 ‘Witches be like sometimes I just want to listen to music while pining away/sulking/staring out a window. It’s me, I’m witches, never fear. The willow lonely witch remix is here’. Whatever that means and you know a lot of people said that in her Eras Tour there was a ton of witchcore.”

So, Taylor Swift promoted a remix and made an artistic decision that Allie doesn’t like. Satan! She plays a clip from one of Swifts concerts and then analyzes it.

54:56, Allie Beth Stuckey: “Ok, very disturbing. They’re basically bowing down to her and, look I like Taylor Swift’s songs, I get it. But this is so — that is clearly demonic. I’m not saying she’s the only artist that’s demonic but she does have a particular hold on a lot of Christian women that tend to think that she’s more innocent than Sexxy Red and I don’t think that’s true.”

Ah yes, famous demonic conduit Taylor Swift.

56:43, Allie Beth Stuckey: “Now, really, I mean, this goes hand in hand with feminism. It is self empowerment, it is wanting to take matters into your own hands, your relationships into your own hands, your success in your own hands.”

So feminism opened the door for witchcraft…apparently. This is honestly so divorced from reality that it’s hard to address.

Anti-feminist female conservative influencers are so bizarre to me. Allie would not be hosting a talk show without feminism.

Conclusion:

Well, that was my first time covering Allie Beth Stuckey here on the blog. This show is really dumb and pretty bigoted. She kind of feels like Candace Owens if she didn’t go completely off the deep end and just stuck to going “you know feminism? That’s bad actually”.

I’ve never seen such a shamelessly long plug. Fifteen minutes is a new record here on the blog. I don’t think we’re ever going to top that.

Original Video:

We have been seeing a lot of disinformation lately about the recent hurricanes in the south, particularly the false claim that the United States government is somehow controlling these hurricanes and using them to somehow steal the election. It’s a claim that’s stupid on its face but that didn’t stop Tim Pool from hosting a completely batshit insane panel discussion on supposed government weather manipulation. It turned out to be about as dumb as it sounds and I figured that we needed a lighter debunk after the last post. Let’s let Tim introduce the topic and then the co-panelists (who are all internet lunatics but I’ll get into each individual when they’re introduced) and then we’ll get on to debunking some conspiracy BS.

00:07, Tim Pool: “All these corporate journalists are livid cause Marjorie Taylor Greene was tweeting that they can control the weather. Of course she’s referring to militaries, powerful individuals, the general — the man right? But the media wanted to make it about the Jews because that’s the only way they can go after Marjorie Taylor Greene when she talks about geoengineering, cloud seeding, and other weather manipulation techniques that are available.”

Yeah, there’s a long history of antisemitic coding revolving around the word “they” but leaving that aside for now let’s talk about weather manipulation.

There’s a great recent article in the Atlantic that goes over some of the details about cloud seeding and geoengineering but suffice it to say that these are both really new technologies that really don’t have the kind of power that these guys think they have.

Take for instance cloud seeding, the process of injecting silver iodine into clouds in order to create artificial condensation. Cloud seeding is only semi-affective at best right now and as the article notes, we can’t artificially create clouds right now and we need clouds in order to seed them. Scientists have tried to artificially dim the sun in the past but that’s an extremely finicky process that requires releasing a quadrillion carefully calibrated particles into the atmosphere. It’s not like you can just pull a lever and then boom, different weather. That’s not a thing that exists outside of imagination land.

As for hurricanes, the notion that anybody can create a hurricane out of thin air with the current technology that we have is ridiculous. We can *barely* make it rain (and even then only with the right conditions) and these dumb-dumbs think that we have the kind of technology to control something as powerful as a hurricane?! If somebody tells you that the government can create hurricanes, the only reasonable response is to laugh in their face because clearly they don’t know what they’re talking about.

00:46, Tim Pool: “This results in this massive viral conversation from tones of people about, can the government make hurricanes? Ok, well that seems a little bold but some people are talking about actual weather manipulation. We’ve talked about Operation Popeye a little bit on Timcast IRL because the subject came up where the US Military was cloud seeding as a weapon of war to wash out roads in Vietnam.”

Except that there’s no proof that this operation was actually successful. Just because the government tried to do something doesn’t mean that they actually succeeded.

Also, trying to wash out roads with cloud seeding is a far cry from the government being able to create targeted hurricanes. Anyway, here are the panelists. I’ll let them introduce themselves and then I’ll explain how every single one of them is completely batshit crazy.

01:26, David DuByne: “Hi, I’m David DuByne, I run the Adapt 2030 channel and the Civilization Cycle podcast. I was a former coffee buyer in Myanmar and when we were purchasing coffee there circa 2012, we were encountering cold leaf damage, leaf kill on the top, and then the bean density was decreased but talking to the farmers they told us that their great grandfathers who were also farming at that time in the 1880’s experienced the same cold wave but you realize, and this is in Myanmar so I was a global warming believer, so I went back to the end of the 1880’s to take a look and then suddenly I found these cycles through history that eb and flow food production and that follows right along with civilization cycle and decline, apex and decline.”

Congratulations David, you’ve discovered what seasons are. Nice job buddy.

David DuByne is a climate denial grifter who’s YouTube channel is all about how the economic collapse is coming any day now, climate change is fake, society is going to reset, and you’ve got to buy his junk to “adapt”. His arguments are the usual climate denial nonsense like “Well, if global warming is a thing how come it snows sometimes?” (I guess when he discovered seasons he stopped before he discovered the difference between weather and climate).

It’s just brain rot stuff and I have no idea where Tim even found this guy since he’s not that well known. We don’t hear from him too much over the course of this episode which I think is a positive thing.

Let’s move on to the next grifter.

02:27, Ransom Godwin: “I am Ransom Godwin, I’m the host of Mountain High Time, a YouTube channel and you know, I’m not an expert on anything I’ve just been around the circle continually getting banned everywhere cause I seem to find the right topics to talk about that are taboo I guess. So I keep getting banned and now I’m the co-host with DuByne on Civilization Cycle where we talk about how things are changing and you know, some of these things like global warming. I’m not a fan of global warming, I don’t believe that, but I also don’t believe that governments have enough power to control things as big as hurricanes, I just don’t see it happening.”

I love how this dudes entire qualification is just “I’m kind of a dick and keep getting banned on social media”.

Ransom’s a former DJ turned weirdo right-wing YouTuber and later David DuByne’s co-host. The dude has one thousand subscribers on YouTube, again no idea where Tim found this guy.

I guess he’s the one arguing for the reasonable side of the aisle. They didn’t get a meterologist or someone who actually knows what he’s talking about, just a guy who’s big introduction is “I GOT BANNED FROM YOUTUBE ONCE”. Also, he later admits that he thinks that the government can amplify the strength of hurricanes so he’s not even that reasonable.

03:04, Brian Smith: “How you doing guys? In2ThinAir. I run the In2ThinAir channel. I am a creator, private researcher.”

Tim Pool: “You gotta slide over to your right a little bit.”

Please don’t, I’ve already heard enough of this guy for one lifetime.

So, Brian Smith is a self-proclaimed weather expert and the owner of the In2ThinAir YouTube channel. A cursory look at his channel shows videos with titles like “🤯 DOG Climbs the GREAT Pyramid IN EGYPT! - MESSAGE From the GODS!”, “🤯Trump 2nd Assassination Attempt PREDICTED By TIME Magazine!” and my personal favorite “SOLAR FLARE Shows 'Phoenix Rising' Ahead of Total SOLAR ECLIPSE!!”

Now, if those extremely illuminating titles didn’t tip you off, this guy is…how do I put this delicately? COMPLETELY FUCKING BANANAS!

Half of this guys videos are of him ranting about a coming spiritual war and sounding like that guy on the subway that everyone tries to avoid! This is not a serious person.

Speaking of unserious people, the final panelist is a weirdo chemtrail guy who appears to have made up his own system for classifying clouds.

03:31, Shane Cashman: “Very excited for this episode today. Shane Cashman, host of Inverted World Live every Sunday at six on YouTube and weather channel reject and I study fake clouds.”

Tim Pool: “What’s a fake cloud?”

Shane Cashman: “Well there’s a classification system, there’s a whole bunch. There’s vintage clouds, god made.”

I can see why this guy got rejected from the weather channel because I found absolutely nothing on this classification system outside of Tim Pools YouTube channel.

Shane’s one of Tim’s “news writers” and is mostly here to represent the chemtrail weirdo contingent of Tim’s audience. This whole thing is a circus full of disinformation spreading clowns.

With all of that out of the way, let’s take a look at the actual discussion and debunk some BS. Tim starts off by asking the question on his audiences minds and accidentally lets a bit of his reasoning for hosting this panel slip.

04:54, Tim Pool: “Alright, so the question that everybody wants to hear first I suppose; did the government make the hurricanes to destroy the southeast so that Kamala Harris can win the election?”

Shane Cashman: “Make or manipulate?”

Tim Pool: “Well, I went for the most extreme version of this story.”

Yeah, I believe that. This whole thing is basically just Tim dragging the dumbest people he could find onto his channel so that they can launder government weather control conspiracies to his audience and get him more money as a result.

Anyway, Ransom has really dumb thoughts on cloud seeding.

05:13, Ransom Godwin: “No, I don’t think they can control it. Now, manipulating it is another topic because obviously they do have a lot of cloud seeding programs and a lot on the internet right now they’re talking about lasers seeding clouds as well and I looked at their experiment and this is a very small room and a little thing. However, the sun we just had a flare. That produces enough electrons to seed lots of moisture so whenever you have a solar flare combined with a Hurricane and maybe some manipulations I think they can do a Ho Chi Minh trail type thing and make it rain more.”

Ok, this is extraordinarily stupid for a wide array of reasons.

The only thing less developed than standard cloud seeding is laser assisted cloud seeding. That technology is extraordinarily experiential and can barely influence standard weather, let alone hurricanes.

No cloud seeding technology can influence hurricanes. As I said before, hurricanes are extraordinarily powerful and the amount of energy required to manipulate them is greater than our current technology affords. The clouds found in hurricanes also contain less water droplets that silver-iodide targets making influencing them with cloud seeding even more infeasible.

There are so many moving parts in this conspiracy too. So the shadowy government cabal needs to wait for just the right solar flare and then just the right Hurricane and THEN they can influence the election. This is ridiculous.

06:01, Brian Smith: “I believe they can create them. I don’t think it’s as easy as people may think. This is a combination between HAARP, lower level things like NEXRAD, and the simple radar towers, 5G.”

Yeah, one thing that you’ll notice about this Brian Smith guy is that he likes to just throw out a lot of conspiracy buzzwords and never provide specifics. This is one of the massive red flags that the person you’re talking to shouldn’t be taken seriously. The enemy of conspiracy is specificity.

For example, how exactly can 5G influence a Hurricane? That’s just stupid on its face. Next thing you know we’ll be hearing about how the lizard people are using vaccines to create hurricanes. It’s alt-right mad libs.

To give you an example of this in action, here’s what happens when Tim asks Brian for specifics.

06:15, Brian Smith: “Things can be manipulated, the jet stream can be controlled. There’s definitely examples out there where they have hurricanes that were sitting in one area with a lot of military around them like the airplanes and stuff like that as if it was a project. They were working on it, it was getting bigger and smaller and then eventually dissipated.”

Notice how again, there are no specifics. Just “well there’s definitely some examples out there, just trust me”.

Tim then asks an armour piercing question.

06:33, Tim Pool: “When was that?”

Uh-oh.

Don’t get me wrong, Tim is a terrible interviewer whose main goal is laundering his guests extreme positions to his audience but that’s a really really basic question. If this “independent researcher” is what he says he is this should be a slam dunk.

Spoiler alert: it isn’t.

06:37, Brian Smith: “They started — they started doing that in the 40’s and 50’s.”

Tim Pool: “When they started creating a hurricane?”

Shane Cashman: “Project Cirrus. Creating hurricanes? 1948 is when they started dropping silver iodine into Hurricane King.”

Brian Smith: “47 was Project Cirrus, that’s when they dropped dry ice into a hurricane thinking it would dissipate it. It actually caused it to hook a turn into right into Florida and actually killed somebody.”

Oof, saved by Tim’s idiot co-host.

Nothing about what these guys are saying about Project Cirrus is true. While a lot of people did blame Project Cirrus for causing the hurricane to hook a turn into Florida most scientists nowadays agree that the notion that 80 kilograms of dry ice could even remotely impact a hurricane is pretty ridiculous.

Hurricanes are strong, unpredictable, and make unpredictable turns all the time. For example, Hurricane Charley made an unexpected turn in 2004 which led to Tampa being spared and Sarasota being hit. In 2005, Hurricane Wilma made a sudden 90 degree turn towards Florida. There’s no evidence that the shadowy cabal of Democrat operatives had any role in either Hurricane or the countless others that made unexpected turns in the past.

Tim reads the first quarter of the Wikipedia page for Project Stormfury and then makes a remarkably dumb statement.

08:29, Tim Pool: “I’d actually assume that creating is substantially easier than manipulating because planting a seed is very very easy, moving a tree is very very hard.”

Ah yes, because trees are equivalent to a giant tropical storm. What are we even doing here?

08:40, Tim Pool: “If, so you have a small depression form and then it starts to expand and grow as the storm grows wild and crazy. The implication to me that you could move a thirty mile wide Hurricane sounds pretty nuts but the idea that you could seed with a very small and I mean very very small portion of warm water that creates the beginnings of what could create a hurricane seems much more plausible. Not that I’m saying it’s possible, I’m saying it seems easier to plant a seed than move a hurricane.”

Both sound pretty nuts to me considering that modern cloud seeding technology hasn’t even came even remotely close to the level it would have to be to create a hurricane. Neither of the options that Tim has given here are scientifically feasible. We are not even close to being able to generate the amount of energy that’s needed to just create a hurricane out of thin air or even increase its size. The only way this metaphor would make sense is if planting a tree required enough energy to wipe out all life on the planet!

I’m definitely using “it’s easier to plant a seed than move a hurricane” in my day to day life though.

So, they yap on about how cloud seeding was utilized in Dubai once and I’m not going to waste your time with it. Just because one piece of technology exists doesn’t mean that some larger scale piece of related technology also exists. We can call people with FaceTime but that doesn’t mean that Star Wars-esque holographic projectors exist. We can fly through the sky on airplanes but that doesn’t mean that we can teleport.

10:23, Shane Cashman: “I wonder if you could go back to 1861, there was that colonel they called the rain maker who went out and literally bombed the atmosphere and said I could create the — and he had a patent for it right? And then he took credit for every storm.”

This is an argument you hear from weather control conspiracy theorists all the time, this is a Marjorie Taylor-Greene line too. Years ago somebody filed a patent for a machine that supposedly could control the weather so that surely must mean that the government can create hurricanes now, right?

The problem is that patents are absolutely meaningless. There have been patents filed for; full body teleportation systems that transport the body through “hyperspace”, greenhouse helmets, and devices that calculate your life expectancy. Do MTG, Tim Pool, and Shane Cashman mean to tell me that we can secretly teleport because some nutcase filed a patent for it years ago? And in case you were wondering, none of the specific patents that these guys always cite are compatible with modern technology and science. I couldn’t find the specific thing that they were talking about but provided that it does actually exist, it’s still some dumb patent from the 1800’s and that doesn’t prove anything.

Anyway, time to learn about HAARP. They harp on about HAARP for a bit and then Brian decides to try and prove to the others that HAARP can influence the weather. It’s predictably very stupid.

12:35, Brian Smith: “That’s not the point though. HAARP’s not creating the hurricane, HAARP’s adjusting the atmospheric conditions on earth to allow hurricanes to be formed in a certain area on earth.”

None of these dumb-dumbs know what HAARP is. I feel like HAARP is one of those things that people talk a lot about but nobody actually seems to know what it does. Enter morons like Alex Jones who exploit that lack of knowledge to push conspiracy theories about HAARP because it has kind of a scary sounding name.

HAARP stands for High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, it is a research facility located near Gakona, Alaska. The purpose of HAARP is to study the ionosphere which is the highest ionized part of earths atmosphere. The way that HAARP does this is by sending radio signals into the ionosphere which causes electrons to move in waves. It’s pretty complicated stuff and I’m not really an expert in this particular field, nor is 99% of the population including Brian Smith.

The fact that what HAARP does isn’t really clear unless you read up on the science, which is a pretty complicated process in and of itself, is something that conspiracy theorists have taken advantage of. Lots of people have claimed that HAARP is used to control the weather (they never elaborate on HOW it’s supposed to do this). HAARP research data is actually pretty public and they offer annual tours of the site.

Anyway, Tim doesn’t believe in HAARP conspiracies…for now. So as a result everybody starts selling him on why HAARP is controlling the weather.

14:05, Shane Cashman; “I think it’s more than just controlling weather. I think they’re burning — they’ll tell you they’re burning a hole in the ionosphere, which is where radio transmissions go, migratory birds use the ionosphere the magnets with their cryptochromes, it’s affecting something. I think it doesn’t just stay in the hole, I think there’s a ripple effect honestly. And other people would say that by doing this — you ever hear of cymatics? Like with frequencies used to make sound become matter. I think there’s something to Tim’s point. The leap — that’s for me is where I’m thinking. If you can control something through frequencies like cymatics does with shapes and matter or sound into matter, that’s the reason it could potentially be controlling weather.”

One of the games that conspiracy theorists will often play is throwing out a bunch of complicated words and concepts and capitalizing off of their audiences ignorance around those concepts to sell a faulty premise.

Shane Cashman has no idea what he’s talking about here. Cymatics is the study of visualizing audio frequencies and has nothing to do with HAARP or the weather. If we’re taking what he’s saying seriously, we essentially are being asked to believe that somehow sound frequencies can manipulate the weather and create hurricanes.

Also, they’re not “burning a hole” into the ionosphere. They’re heating small portions of it to study it’s effects.

This part is pretty funny. Presented without comment.

15:19, Tim Pool: “I’m concerned about this right, because we got a few super chats from people saying HAARP is disinformation or distraction, one thing that we know that intelligence will do is fake conspiracies, that’s the real conspiracy right?”

HAARP’s a psy-op everybody!

“Yeah, all this dumb stuff that guys on my side are saying including everyone around me at this very table…that’s the CIA bro.”

I guess that’s one way to do damage control.

16:06, Brian Smith: “I try to tell people that when — a lot of people bring up HAARP and I’m like, you know, HAARP is like an idea. It’s a thought process of a very powerful type of technology but it’s old and I think it’s possible that yeah, the whole term is being used as a distraction now to discredit people who talk about it. I do think there’s a technology that’s bigger than HAARP that can do exactly what HAARP conspiracy theories are saying that it does though.”

This guy is such a dick. Five minutes ago he was all in on HAARP conspiracy theories but then when he gets the most mild pushback I’ve ever seen it becomes “Yeah, I think that HAARP’s a distraction from this bigger weather control station that I won’t name in this video”. This is embarrassing.

However, Tim’s brilliant analysis got me thinking. Brian seems almost intentionally dumb. Could it be that he’s a CIA operative using Tim’s dumb Russia-funded YouTube show to poison the well and make conspiracy theorists look bad? I think we’re getting close people.

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve stopped taking this “panel” seriously. They start talking about CERN and “anti-matter weapons” and I honestly don’t care about what their thoughts on that are. People aren’t throwing black hole grenades around and the entire CERN leg of the discussion just comes across like a bunch of twelve year old boys making stuff they think sounds cool up. They then have a very dumb discussion about AI.

21:42, Tim Pool: “The fascinating thing too is, I remember watching these old sci-fi movies where they’re trying to find a chemical formula for a cure or something, and they’re in a computer and the computers like running a simulation and it shows like the chemicals and everything and that was sci-fi. AI literally does that now. So, they collect all of our health data, put ten million different files from various humans and various ailments into the computer and let the AI run through it and they don’t go to do anything. Basically the AI brute forces all the data and finds patterns and then it says ‘we discovered that every single person who is suffering from pancreatic cancer also had this one weird marker that no one’s ever noticed before’ because it can see patterns we can’t recognize. Then doctors are like wow. Then if you take some random persons medical data, load it into the AI, they’re gonna be like in ten years you’ll have pancreatic cancer because you have the same marker as them and we can treat it right now.”

So AI apparently can predict if you have cancer now.

There are some AI tools that have been developed to identify if a certain cancer patient is likely to respond to certain drugs like checkpoint inhibitors and some that can identify cancer, the tech isn’t currently even remotely close to where Tim’s saying it’s at.

Take for example, a recent AI tool debuted by the Royal Marsden NHS foundation that can accurately identify cancer. While the AI can identify cancer in people, it’s extremely far away from being able to detect hidden markers that indicate that the person may be suffering from cancer. Even the researchers behind the tool admit as much, quote:

“In the future, we hope it will improve early detection and potentially make cancer treatment more successful by highlighting high-risk patients and fast-tracking them to earlier intervention,”

So yes, what Tim’s saying might very well be the next step for AI’s utilization in medical research but we aren’t quite there yet. If that were the case we’d be throwing parades in the streets because we’d have basically cured cancer.

22:40, Tim Pool: “So if you were to load all the worlds weather data in real time, constantly, into an AI it’s gonna show you basically a map of probabilities where storms may form.”

There is technology being developed to predict the weather using AI but that still doesn’t mean that people can control hurricanes. That’s a massive leap.

Tim Pool also has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to climate change.

26:44, Tim Pool: “We did a show, I think a few months ago, maybe more than a few months ago. We were talking about the poles shifting and one of the interesting things that was brought up that I didn’t really think about but it’s so obvious is that there’s a glacier in Indonesia. That there’s a gigantic ball of ice on top of a mountain in Indonesia and it seems crazy because it’s a warm area but at the high altitudes these glaciers take very very long times to melt. And so, thinking of that, and then hearing stories about global warming it really does feel like — when I hear about climate change scientists, and you know or whatever, or the climate scientists and blah blah blah, it feels like a kindergartener trying to explain what’s going on with the weather without having enough data or understanding of the billions of years.”

What?!

So, let’s break this down. Glaciers exist on top of mountains in Indonesia so that means that climate change is fake…that’s it, that’s the argument. Never mind the fact that those exact same glaciers are literally melting because of climate change or the fact that there’s really no connection between both of those topics.

Science is also fake apparently.

27:45, Tim Pool: “I think there’s a strong possibility when you look at everything, actually I think it’s a 100% probability, we are wrong about all science. To be fair, 99.9. What we get right is what we can replicate. We can make video games, we can drive cars, so science does get us to these points where we can predict and make these systems. But to predict global weather, I don’t know that humans have been around enough, tracking enough data, to really understand what’s happening.”

Even in the context of this video that statement doesn’t make any sense. Tim was just going on about how AI can predict the weather (which we now apparently can’t do) and cancer, not to mention all the stuff about how we can apparently manipulate the course of hurricanes.

Also, David DuByne is an idiot who sucks.

28:09, David DuByne: “Let me combine these two ideas and then Brian, I’d like to get your opinion on it. So, going back to this, if you’re going to really control weather, not manipulate it, not modify it, you’re going to have to have sensors about every foot on the planet to understand what’s going on from the ground level up to what? 18,000 feet, maybe 20,000 feet? The same thing is true with what we get fed with global warming and global temperature data. They don’t have sensors everywhere. In the oceans it’s barely a cover, they might have a few buoys out there. And when they’re talking about overall land temperatures, there’s very few temperature data stations collecting data anywhere and they’re trying to say the entire planets heating at this uniform rate in this area but it’s not.”

There are over 100,000 weather stations around the world. Furthermore, there are satellites monitoring the climate and there’s the fact that our recorded temperature data shows that the present keeps breaking records in terms of heat. In short, David DuByne has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.

Half of the episode is just these guys making stuff up about climate change. They play an extremely boring slideshow from DuByne for a majority of the other half of the video that’s basically “hey guys, look…weather patterns exist” and I’m not going to bother looking at that. They then go back to talking about weather modification and it’s basically the same stuff as before. If you want to watch it, go right ahead. It’s just the same dumb crap from the beginning constantly being repeated ad nauseam.

Conclusion:

Wow, I’m pretty sure I lost brain cells looking at that one. When Tim Pool is the most reasonable person in the discussion, you know you’re screwed. It’s probably going to be a long time before I look at another one of Tim’s panel discussions because these are just way too long and everyone there has a bad habit of saying absolutely nothing.

Original Video:

Out of all these Daily Wire guys, I tend to be the most dismissive of Michael Knowles. That’s mainly because he has comparatively low viewership compared to all the other Daily Wire grifters and he isn’t always as openly monstrous as guys like Matt Walsh. He usually talks about the dumb stories that nobody else at the Daily Wire seems to want to cover. Stuff like lab grown penises or AI that can predict your death.

Unfortunately, this is one of those episodes where he IS monstrous. Naturally it has to do with the rights favourite boogeyman; trans people trying to live their lives. The main story of this episode is a report the CDC put out on October 10th about trans youth and where he decides to take it is absolutely disgraceful.

But before that, did you guys know that someone tried to assassinate Trump again? Strap in folks because this is the weakest “assassination attempt” narrative yet.

CW: when we get to the anti-trans narratives Michael gets extremely bigoted. Also, suicide is mentioned. If you don’t want to read that, I totally get it. Stay safe out there.

01:49, Michael Knowles: “Before we get to what I think is the biggest news story in the world right now, which is about how one in eighteen American high school students doesn’t know what his gender is, I guess I have to mention there might have been a third assassination attempt on President Trump over the weekend. This was at Trump’s massive Coachella rally, that looked bigger than the Coachella Festival that’s been going on for years now, it was a huge rally. There are reports that a half a mile outside of the security gate a man was arrested with a bunch of guns potentially trying to assassinate President Trump again.”

We’ll get to the stuff about high schoolers later but for now let’s take a look at this so-called “assassination attempt”.

This is about a man named Vem Miller who was arrested outside of Trump’s Coachella Rally with multiple illegal firearms. Miller claimed that he was a journalist with “VIP status”. A search of his car found the guns as well as multiple passports. The car was also unregistered. Evidence from the fake license plate ties Miller to the far-right extremist “sovereign citizen” movement.

It’s pretty likely that this was just one of Trump’s extremist fans trying to bring his guns to the rally. It’s not exactly unheard of for Trump to be popular with the sovereign citizen gun nut crowd.

Even if this was an assassination attempt, he was caught before Trump was even in his field of vision making this a complete non-story. This kind of thing is quite common, just look at all the attempts on Obamas life.

This is weak stuff and a clear attempt to get the Trump is a victim ball rolling again.

02:26, Michael Knowles: “The man denies it, he says that he’s a Trump supporter and he was there to protect himself because there were so many attempts on Trump’s life and so I don’t know, there’s not a lot of information about this one. The only reason I even mention the story yet with so few details is it is a crazy thing that ‘President Trump Almost Assassinated Again’ is the kind of headline that we don’t even bat our eyes at.”

Because this was barely an assassination attempt. We didn’t really pay attention to all those attempts on Obama’s life either.

The reason why the first one got so much press was because Trump was actually shot. The other two (if you can even call this Coachella one an assassination attempt) were just huge nothingburgers.

03:09, Michael Knowles: “Democrats have so normalized trying to assassinate Trump that we don’t even really pay attention to it. There were prominent leftists, the first time that Trump was very nearly killed and the bullet actually did hit him in the ear, who said ‘well you know, that’s the consequence of spreading hate. Well, what do you expect when your a threat to democracy. When your Hitler 2.0 you know, that’s what happens.’”

Yeah, nobody was saying that. The closest incident to that was an MSNBC clip that came out after the second assassination attempt that the right collectively freaked out over. But, as we discussed on this very blog earlier, that was just a very standard broadcast news pivot.

03:48, Michael Knowles: “Now I want to get to our most important news story of the day that is being completely neglected and I — I guess you’d say even suppressed by the establishment media. Over 3% of American high schoolers now identify as transgender. Over 3%, I guess 3.3. So you have a one in thirty chance, if you are an American high schooler today, of identifying as transgender. And there’s an additional 2.2% of students on top of that who are questioning their gender identity.”

Yeah, there’s a reason that the legacy media is “neglecting” this story. It’s just warmed over culture war garbage.

Michael is getting these numbers from a recent CDC report entitled “Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance —United States, 2023”. More specifically, it comes from a section of the report entitled “Disparities in School Connectedness, Unstable Housing, Experiences of Violence, Mental Health, and Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors Among Transgender and Cisgender High School Students”. Click the link to read it for yourself.

So for starters, Michael tries to later turn this into an anti public school narrative but as it turns out some of the students polled for the report came from private schools. But that’s not the important part of this study.

So, 5.5% is still the very small minority of students. I know that Michael’s trying to turn this into some kind of massive sweeping thing but it really isn’t. 94.5% of students do not identify as trans making the ones that do an extremely small minority. However, this study took a closer look at the mental health outcomes of that 5.5% and what it found was absolutely heartbreaking. Quote:

“Transgender and questioning students experienced a higher prevalence of violence, poor mental health, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and unstable housing, and a lower prevalence of school connectedness than their cisgender peers. Compared with 8.5% of cisgender male students, 25.3% of transgender students and 26.4% of questioning students skipped school because they felt unsafe. An estimated 40% of transgender and questioning students were bullied at school, and 69% of questioning students and 72% of transgender students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, a marker for experiencing depressive symptoms.”

The report goes on to state that 26% of transgender students attempted suicide in the past year, a number that’s more than double that of their cisgender peers. But the most heartbreaking statistic of all is this, 10.7% of transgender students reported experiencing unstable housing. This number is extremely high compared to cis males (2.1%) and cis females (1.8%).

You know who’s creating the conditions for this kind of thing to thrive? Michael and everyone else in the right-wing media who persistently spread bigoted narratives about the trans community. These narratives turn trans identity into a thing to be ashamed of as opposed to just a part of who these high schoolers are. No wonder they’re getting bullied at such a high rate, no wonder their parents seem to be throwing them out of the house for being who they are, no wonder that their suicide rate is so high.

Michael is essentially taking a report that talks about how trans people are struggling due to stigma and then using it to stigmatize trans people. This is just disgusting. And guess what? Michael knows these stats because he goes through some of them here.

04:48, Michael Knowles: “Now, what do we know about students who identify as transgender or who are questioning their gender? We know that they try to kill themselves at extraordinarily high numbers.”

Because of the bigotry that YOU spread dipshit. I know I might sound a little passionate here but I have a lot of friends who are trans, many of whom undoubtedly went through similar experiences that the kids in this study did.

Michael naturally ignores the parts about trans people experiencing extremely high rates of bullying, or the parts about how most trans students skip school because they feel unsafe in their own classrooms, or the parts about how the parents of trans kids (who no doubt consume a lot of right-wing media) are more likely to kick their kids out for being who they are. No, it’s just that being trans naturally causes suicidal ideation so we have to isolate kids so that we can try and crush the trans identity out of them.

The fact that Michael knows the numbers about suicidal ideation in the trans community tells me that he read this report and actively chose to ignore the parts that disprove what he’s saying. He knows what he’s doing here and that makes it so much worse.

06:28, Michael Knowles: “You need to find alternatives to regular American high schools for your kids. You have to find alternatives. Whether it is an orthodox religious school, you know I’m a big supporter of traditional Catholic education, Christian education broadly, but whatever. Let’s say you’re Jewish, let’s say you’re Muslim, let’s say whatever you are, an orthodox — a serious religious school that doesn’t follow the religion of liberalism or leftism, that isn’t going to fall into this kind of craziness, is going to be a much better option for your kid. Or homeschooling, obviously.”

Except that private schools were included in the YRBS data, it wasn’t just public schools. As for homeschooling, there are valid reasons to homeschool your children but “isolating them from everyone left of Donald Rumsfeld in case they become trans” isn’t one of them. If one of those kids being homeschooled turns out to be trans, they’ll have grown up exclusively in an environment that stigmatizes trans identity which will increase their risk of depression and suicidal ideation.

Accepting trans kids saves lives.

07:27, Michael Knowles: “What the schools are teaching now, the schools are teaching that your boy is not really a boy, that your girl is not a girl.”

Than why are trans people still a really small minority? If all this fearmongering was true, we wouldn’t live in a world where 94.5% of students are not trans.

08:20, Michael Knowles: “Conservatives have to take control of the schools back again. We have to fire the leftist activists who are trying to lead your kid to suicide, we have to fire them. We have to ban them from being around children ever again, certainly in a classroom setting.”

So basically, take away any hope of trans kids being accepted in schools which will almost certainly increase the amount of bullying they experience and that suicide rate.

Here’s Michael Knowles comparing being trans to cancer. You can’t even make this stuff up.

08:51, Michael Knowles: “It’s like — it’s like having a kid go to Fukushima high school after a nuclear explosion and you say, well what are the odds of him developing a cancer”

Presented without comment.

09:55, Michael Knowles: “LAUSD, the Los Angeles School District, has just celebrated thirty-five years of National Coming Out Day. Coming Out Day is a day when school staff encourage kids to identify as gay and now trans and queer and questioning or whatever the initialism has come out to.”

That’s not even close to what National Coming Out Day is. Accepting LGBTQ youth when they come out isn’t the same thing as pressuring them to adopt a queer identity. Your sexuality is what you were born with, there’s nothing that changes that. Plus, as we discussed earlier, LGBTQ acceptance in schools seems to be extraordinarily low if we’re going off how much these kids are being bullied.

Also, in case you’re curious, only 3% of trans people experience some form of regret around their decision to transition.

Not content with comparing trans identity to cancer, Michael decides to defend conversion therapy.

10:43, Michael Knowles: “There’s a real irony — is the libs in recent decades have invade against what they call ‘conversion therapy’ which is when someone, you know, has disordered affections and desires and they go to a therapist, they say ‘I wanna have normal desires’ or ‘I’d like to mitigate some of these disordered and harmful desires I have’ and the therapist says ‘Ok, well here’s some ways to work on it’ or whatever, I don’t know.”

Well, I guess we’re partying like it’s 1986 because apparently conversion therapy is back on the table over at the Daily Wire. I didn’t expect to hear a pro-conversion therapy argument here. “Disordered and harmful desires”, again I don’t see how you could view this as anything but extreme anti-LGBTQ bigotry.

Conversion therapy is pseudoscience that does nothing but traumatize the people that it claims to “help”. There is a mountain of research that proves that and the only reasons why you’d still support conversion therapy are either extreme ignorance or extreme bigotry. With Michael I’m going to go with both.

11:04, Michael Knowles: “The libs have presented this as though kids are being like, electric shocked or something which is not occurring.”

Yes it is.

11:12, Michael Knowles: “But what would you call National Coming Out Day in the public schools? That is a kind of conversion therapy.”

Again, acceptance does not equal forced change. Comparing LGBTQ acceptance to forcing people to change their sexuality is an absolutely ridiculous argument to make.

We’re now done with Michael’s hot takes on queer identity, thank god. He does an ad for steaks and then talks about some teachers who were thankfully suspended after being caught giving kids melatonin patches.

I’m not going to cover Michael’s take on this story (this post is already long enough as is) outside of saying that what these teachers did was wildly inappropriate but that doesn’t mean that this is a practice that’s been widely adopted by the school system at large. The teachers involved were dismissed, as they should have been, and if you want to make an argument that this specific school should have had more oversight I would 100 percent agree with you. However, projecting this one incident onto the entire public school system is just silly.

He also later talks about Venezuelan gangs in Aurora Colorado. Since this is a big narrative going around in the right-wing media I decided that we might as well get it out of the way. Here’s what Michael says.

17;43, Michael Knowles: “Speaking of libs endangering your family, unbelievable news story out. There is a Venezuelan prison gang, this sounds like it’s out of the Onion or the Babylon Bee, there is a Venezuelan prison gang called Tren De Aragua that has taken over a town in Colorado. Aurora Colorado has been overrun with a prison gang from Latin America. They’ve apparently overrun several apartment buildings, they’ve been expanding their reach in the US, because Kamala Harris as the border czar is letting them all in.”

Boy, Michael’s really never going to let that made-up border czar thing go is he?

This story is about an apartment complex in Aurora Colorado that was the target of false claims that stated that Venezuelan gangs took it over. The initial source of the claim was the owner of the building, CBZ Management. The reason why this is important is because company is sketchy as all hell.

There have been numerous reports detailing building code violations at the complex that have dated back years. CBZ has accrued more than $44,000 in fines at one of its properties. These included fines for mice infestation, ceiling damage, and illegally parked vehicles. CBZ said this year (despite the fact that the complaints go back years) that they could not address these concerns because they felt it was unsafe to send their employees into the building. Suuurrreeeee. The game that these guys are playing here is pretty transparent.

Aurora police stated that CBZ was attempting to “fabricate false narratives” about a gang takeover at the building but did acknowledge that some elements of Tren De Aragua have operated in Aurora in the past.

This was then amplified when surveillance footage from a CBZ owned property of armed men entering an apartment went viral. There is zero evidence tying these men to Tren De Aragua nor is there evidence that this was part of some shadowy gang takeover. From the looks of things this was just a burglary. The Aurora police have identified ten members of TDA in the city and arrested nine of them.

Essentially, this is the story of a really sleazy developer trying to weasel their way out of managing their building properly and someone’s apartment possibly being robbed. Immigrants haven’t taken over the town.

Conclusion:

Yeah, that was just a really gross affair. I don’t really have words for it because it kind of speaks for itself.

If you’re a trans youth or just a trans individual reading this post, remember that you ARE valid and stay safe out there. Hopefully the next post is more fun.

Cheers and I’ll see you in the next one.

Original video:

So, I’ve managed to avoid covering Steven Crowder thus far in my career debunking right-wing media. However, I figured it was finally time to add him to the pantheon of idiots that we talk about here on the blog….lord help us.

Steven’s show is mindblowingly dumb. He’s basically that one guy who nobody liked in high school who thought that saying brazenly offensive stuff made him “cool and edgy”. Unfortunately Steven isn’t that, he’s just embarrassing. This episode of his show in particular is extraordinary embarrassing.

So the beginning of Steven’s show is always just nonsense so we’re just going to skip to the main theme of the episode: women, am I right?

05:38, Steven Crowder: “It’s the year of the woman and when I say this I mean the year of the weak woman. Feminists are weak women. Melinda Gates, billionaire sure, weak woman. It’s not you, we’re not talking about you. I think we’re at the point now where you understand that we’re speaking in generalities and about these specific women. And uh, good women out there, do you think that - do you think no vagina no opinion or would you like some guys to step in as allies here because you’re not able to clear out — clean out — is it clear out or clean out your own ranks?”

Oh boy, I’m sure Melinda Gates is all broken up that Steven Crowder called her weak.

So, Steven’s whole argument is that he doesn’t hate women…just so long as they agree with all of his misogynistic ideas and never step out of line ever and even then they’re bad because they can’t “clean out their own ranks” and thus men have to step in. If you think that Steven sounds like a cartoon character version of an asshole conservative that’s because he is.

07:51, Steven Crowder: “Speaking of rape, this professor at the University of Kansas who now is apparently on leave, so this isn’t necessarily a new clip but some of you may have missed this. I want to touch on — everything that this professor at the University of Kansas says is wrong. Warning there’s a death threat.”

Phillip Lowcock (Professor who is the subject of the clip): “Guys are smarter than girls you’ve got some serious problems. It’s what frustrates me, there are going to be some males in our society that will refuse to vote for a potential female president because they don’t think females are smart enough to be president. We could line all those guys up and shoot them, they clearly don’t understand the way the world works.”

Steven Crowder: “Not you, you can’t touch your toes”

Phillip Lowcock: “Did I say that? Scratch that from the recording, I don’t want the dean hearing I said that.”

So this is a story that alt-right shit-slinger LibsOfTikTok broke concerning a professor at the University of Kansas who was dismissed for “making a highly inappropriate comment in his classroom suggesting violence against individuals for their personal views.” While I personally think that he probably shouldn’t have said what he said, it’s pretty clear that he was using a figure of speech and wasn’t threatening violence. He even chuckles in the video when he says “scratch that from the recording”. It’s clear that he’s making a joke and I think that the right-wing circus around it is an absolute farce.

Isn’t Steven Crowder supposed to be a free speech warrior? He regularly whines about how YouTube is being mean to him when they demonetize him for spreading hate against minority groups. He should be really against this guy getting fired for simply using a turn of phrase. But I guess a little internal consistency is too much to expect from these goons.

Also, let’s not pretend that guys like Steven Crowder and LibsOfTikTok don’t incite violence all the time. I discussed LibsOfTikTok’s ties to violent threats when I broke down an interview she gave with Taylor Lorenz but to summarize, she’s been responsible for a lot of bomb threats. Alex Jones, one of Steven Crowders close associates who regularly appears in Mug Club branding, regularly declares that his enemies should be hung.

The right threatens violence against their political enemies all the time so this pearl clutching over a professor using a sort of inappropriate turn of phrase is more than a little disingenuous.

Also, not for nothing but the comedy aspect of Steven’s show also sucks ass. What exactly is that joke about Lowcock not being able to touch his toes supposed to mean? Since when did being able to touch your toes have any bearing on understanding how the world works? For a comedic rebuttal to be funny, it needs to make sense while also addressing the argument being presented by the opposing side. Not being able to touch your toes doesn’t impact your ability to understand how the world works so this joke doesn’t make any sense.

This whole show is just a farce. The “facts” that Steven cites are misrepresented at best and completely made up at worst, the jokes are the same stuff you’d expect to hear a fifth grader say, and the actual arguments fall apart the minute you think about them for more than eleven seconds.

08:44, Steven Crowder: “This is the lazy strawmanning you see from the left.”

Lazy strawmanning? You mean like making judgement call about an entire political ideology based on an edgy joke some professor made? That kind of lazy strawmanning?

08:54, Steven Crowder: “There are some men who won’t vote for a woman because they think that uh — that guys are smarter than girls. Nope, that’s not why. There are some men, and a lot of women too by the way according to the polls, that are concerned about voting for someone completely unqualified solely because they are a woman.”

Ah, so the reason people won’t vote for Harris is not because she’s a woman it’s…because she’s a woman but we threw the word “unqualified” in there to make the argument sound smarter.

Also, name Trump’s qualifications, go on. Before being elected president, Trump was a real estate developer and reality TV star. The skills that are required for that job don’t really translate into leading a country.

Steven then says this and undercuts his entire argument.

09:12, Steven Crowder: “We don’t actually think that women are less intelligent than men, I don’t know a single guy that thinks that. I know that most men believe that, as a general rule, women are more emotional and reactive and we would be concerned if someone in a position of leadership reflexively responding in a way that would be a liability for the country.”

Said the man proudly producing propaganda for a candidate who throws temper tantrums over MSNBC segments.

Saying that women are incapable of decision making because they’re too emotional is still saying that women are less intelligent than men, your just packaging it in a way that you think makes you sound less like a sexist dick (mission failed by the way).

Also, this talking point about women being more emotional has been debunked multiple times. For instance, the journal Scientific Reports did a study investigating this claim and found that it was completely false. From a press release about the study, quote:

"We also didn't find meaningful differences between the groups of women, making clear that emotional highs and lows are due to many influences — not only hormones,"

In short, in this clip Steven managed to be wrong in about a dozen different ways. It takes effort to be this much of a dumbass.

A lot of this show is just Steven and his co-hosts just telling dumb jokes to eachother. Here’s a particularly incomprehensible one.

10:15, Steven Crowder: “He sounds like how fat guys talk”

“He sounds like how fat guys talk”. So you mean to say that he sounds like a fat guy? (Also this is just gross but still, really dumb phrasing).

Boy howdy, I wonder why this genius failed at standup.

11:08, Steven Crowder: “It’s the strawman that they do. It’s like, ah look, the reason they won’t vote for women is because these dummies think that women are stupider than guys. But that’s not true though. If you want to address the concern that a lot of women have and yeah, I would say a majority of men have, it’s about the emotional response that we tend to see among most women, not all women in positions of leadership. That’s a legitimate concern, if you want to say that that’s stupid and present some data that’s one thing but to say ‘well you just think that women are stupid’, I don’t know a single man who thinks that women are stupid, I don’t.”

Still saying that women are stupid Steven. By removing agency and the ability to make decisions from women by calling them “emotional”, you are demeaning their intelligence and essentially infantilizing them.

Also, that argument is stupid and I have cited data to prove it. This claim about women being more emotional than men has been the subject of several studies and all of them have found that it’s simply not true.

Anyway, we move on from this clip of the professor and start discussing Hurricane Milton and Steven has a point about the left. For context, Steven just played a clip of Bill Nye speaking on MSNBC about how climate change played a role in the magnitude of the hurricane.

16:00, Steven Crowder: “Well hold on a second, there are people there who are dying and are without power. Maybe before they talk about some international accord where if everybody played ball because everybody in every nation is inherently altruistic and certainly their leaders, maybe you could focus on getting them water, getting them energy, maybe you could focus on helping your fellow citizen. This is the ultimate problem right with the leftists, is the government is the charity. This is why statistically they are not charitable people. The left doesn’t take it upon themselves to help their neighbors, the government does it.”

I don’t even understand what Steven’s argument is supposed to be here.

Is he arguing for mandatory donation to hurricane relief efforts, because in practice that would be a form of raised taxation which isn’t conservative at all. I’m not sure what Steven thinks taxes are because that’s how your average person pays for disaster relief. Does he want to increase that? Because again, that’s not very conservative.

Is he suggesting some sort of draft system where citizens mandatorily have to help out in the event of a disaster? Because your average citizen doesn’t have the level of training that a first responder does and would be more of a hindrance than a help.

What Steven is essentially saying here is that we shouldn’t have to rely on the government for disaster relief because that would make it a charity…which is a bad thing I guess? I don’t see how you’d make the alternative work without really high taxes and even then the government would still be doing the disaster relief. It’s amazing how Steven can manage to be so dumb that he can accidentally argue against one of the huge pillars of his own ideology and get it wrong in a way that doesn’t make sense from both sides. It’s an eight year olds view of the world.

17:06, Steven Crowder: “By the way, don’t know if you know this that Joe Biden was the least charitable public servant ever.”

Gerald Morgan (co-host): “Gave used underwear at one time. Tighty whiteys.”

Steven Crowder: “Gave less than 0.1% to charity. Isn’t it nice to have a worldview where as long as you support — you say the right things echoing the sentiment that we can have a giant centralized government that can be Santa Claus, it’s not incumbent upon me to actually help my fellow man. That’s why it’s an evil ideology.”

Keep in mind that this is the same guy who was whinging about strawman arguments.

No citation for that stat or claim at all so I had to track it down and shocker, Steven is playing a really dishonest game here.

The stats that Steven is using here are from a 2008 article about how the Bidens gave an average of $369 to charity. Their high point was $995 in 2007 (or 0.3% of their income) and their low point was $120 in 1999 (or 0.1% of their income).

For starters, this was during the 90’s and early 2000’s. This was long before Biden was president and even before he was vice president. When Steven and his crew call him the “least generous public servant ever”, they’re obviously implying that these numbers are from his tenure as president and that’s simply not the case, they’re so old that they’re not even from when he was vice-president! It was from one year and he got the less than part wrong, it was just 0.1%. There are valid criticisms about Biden, don’t take this as some passionate defense of him. However, the complaints that I have about Biden are based in the real world and complaining about a donation he made during the Clinton Administration is monumentally idiotic.

Secondly, while Biden’s donation certainly seems pretty miserly at face value it should be noted that Steven’s candidate Donald Trump has committed charity fraud and has barely given to charity himself. Very generous of Donald. While Biden was kind of miserly back in the 90’s, it’s a little disingenuous to complain about that from one side of your mouth and then praise the guy who stole from charity with the other side.

Finally, I couldn’t find any evidence that Biden is the “least charitable public servant ever”. Even Steven’s ancient article that he didn’t bother to cite wasn’t claiming that.

Steven plays a weird skit of him and his co-host Josh Firestine dressed as old school newsboys because this is theoretically a comedy show in the same way that a rusted out chassis rotting in a junkyard is theoretically a car.

After that, Steven to complain about abortion. He plays a montage of clips about abortion from cable news shows and decides to try and formulate an argument. It ends up becoming an “I’m a divorced dad who wants to force people to stay married” thing.

22:52, Steven Crowder: “So, Melinda Gates, let’s get into this, we’re talking about abortion. Melinda Gates has now committed a billion dollars of her ex husbands money to promote abortion.”

Steven actually did cite a source for this one, unfortunately he didn’t read it. If he did he would have read this line:

“About $200 million (£157m) will go to organisations fighting for gender and reproductive rights in the US.”

So no, she hasn’t contributed one billion to promoting abortion. Thats actually a small part of the overall fund ostensibly devoted to advancing women’s rights across the globe.

Steven then goes off about Melinda and Bill’s divorce and I realized then and there that the only thing I care less about than celebrity relationship gossip is billionaire relationship gossip. It’s dumb, it’s built off a faulty premise (namely that the billion is exclusively going towards promoting abortion), and we aren’t covering it.

Conclusion:

This was my first time subjecting myself to Steven Crowder and oh my god was it painful. Stevens an awful comedian, an even more terrible political analyst, and his show should be painfully dumb to anyone who isn’t completely indoctrinated.

The whole discussion around the professor in Kansas doesn’t make sense, especially if you know about how much Steven pretends to care about freedom of speech. It’s transparently just an excuse for Steven to be a misogynistic asshole. His hurricane coverage is so dumb that it barely event warrants mentioning.

It’s pretty clear that Stevens show is just a half-baked excuse to present warmed over bigotry in lieu of actual arguments in the hope that he can get his audience angry enough to maybe buy one of his novelty coffee mugs. Did I mention how much I think that this guy sucks?

I probably will debunk his show a little more often in the future since I want this blog to be a comprehensive snapshot of the American right-wing media and how it’s built on nothing but lies and racism but man the pure undistilled shittiness of Stevens show doesn’t make it easy.

Anyway, I’m going to do something more productive and enjoyable like taking a bath in fire ants or practicing my cactus juggling skills. Cheers, Happy Indigenous Peoples Day to all the Americans in the chat, and I’ll see you in the next one

Original Video:

So, this is an older Ben Shapiro video from late September that I was meaning to cover but kind of slipped through the cracks. As any Knowledge Fight fan will know, one of the hallmarks of the Alex Jones Show is spinning insane conspiracy theories about the Soros Family. So when I saw that Ben Shapiro, the supposed "logical conservative", put out a video entitled "The Not So Secret Soros Machine" I knew that I had to take a look.

00:00, Ben Shapiro: "Well, with Kamala Harris flailing in the polling data she is now headed down to the Southern Border today. Part of the most consequential election of our lifetime which is just 38 days away. The mainstream media won't tell you the truth, we will. Over here at Daily Wire plus we cut through the lies and deliver real unfiltered news every single day."

Please view the dozens of posts I've done on the Daily Wire (including this one) for an idea of how "honest" these guys are. I don't really care about Ben's take on Harris' polling numbers since the election is absolutely going to be extremely close and the polling fluctuates based on sources. Ben even says that five seconds later.

So, these Ben Shapiro videos are really lazy. It's sort of a hallmark of his. He reads one of Kamala's tweets (who cares? Not me!) and then goes back to yapping about the stupid border.

03:14, Ben Shapiro: "So, she's headed down to the border today. She's trying to close the gap with Donald Trump on the border issue. When it comes to the economy she's closed some of the gap that was left by Joe Biden. And part of that is that the Federal Reserve has been lowering those interest rates, part of it is that we haven't had a sort of full scale unemployment crisis in the United States, everybody just feels kind of uncomfortable about the embedded inflation that's happened over the course of the last three and a half years, the wage declines, but it's not as if the economy is truly in the toilet."

I love the amount of mental gymnastics that Ben does in some of these videos.

"Oh yeah, the economy is bad but uh...it's actually kind of good but its still bad. Just ignore everything that me and my employees have been saying about the economy being on the verge of crashing for the past couple months...unless we need to bring that narrative back, then it's disaster time and you'd better buy some gold!"

Nice to hear someone admit that the right-wing medias complaints about the economy are based more on vibes than actual hard numbers though. Anyway, time to lie about the border.

03:58, Ben Shapiro: "Where she really trails is on immigration and so she is headed down to the border today to pretend that she's actually a hardcore border hawk, not even joking. After presiding over the worst administration in the history of the Southern Border, she's going to now pretend that she's a border hawk who wants law and order on the border."

There are a bunch of issues with this line of thinking.

For one thing, Kamala Harris does not have a lot of power as vice-president. Vice-presidents in general don't have that much power. To say that Harris "presided" over the southern border is just absurd. The media did call her the "border czar" for a little while but that was because she was assigned to a diplomatic operation to address the root causes of migration into the United States, not because she was in charge of the border.

Secondly, I'll keep banging on this drum till the day I die but one of my huge issues with the Democrats right now is that their immigration policy is really not that different from Donald Trumps.

In an excellent article for The Nation, Todd Miller laid out how much of a myth this open-border narrative truly is. In fact, the Biden Administration set a record for the highest budget for border and immigration enforcement with a total of $29.8 billion USD being poured into the issue. Biden's spending on the border was actually higher than Trump's by a whopping three billion dollars. Biden's kept the wheels of the border industrial complex well oiled. Of course there will always be people trying to cross the border, that's just how it works when you've got a country with a fundamentally broken immigration and refugee system that leads to people being forced to take illegal measures to find refuge and safety.

So yes Ben, I'd imagine that if Kamala Harris wins she will be a "border hawk" because the current administration is ran by a border hawk. While Harris doesn't have control over the administrations current border policy, I don't see why she wouldn't adopt it as her own. Ben does some ads and then comes back with more border BS.

05:40, Ben Shapiro: "This administration has let in somewhere between seven and ten million illegal immigrants into the country, just let them willy-nilly into the country."

While there certainly was a surge in migration into the US in the Biden years compared to the Trump years, a lot of that was due to factors entirely outside of the presidents control.

The increases in undocumented migration into the States actually coincide with seasonal immigration patterns which were more pronounced due to a backlog caused by the COVID pandemic. Outside of the COVID backlog which exacerbated the pattern, these "surges" have been present since 2014, including during the Trump administration.

Also, Ben's conflating encounters and people successfully crossing into the states illegally. There were 7.2 million encounters at the border and encounters include arrests. The data also shows that if Trump won the election he wouldn't be deporting any more people than Biden.

05:55, Ben Shapiro: "According to Politico, VP Harris will make her first visit to the US-Mexico border, travelling to the small town of Douglass Arizona. What she's expected to say while there is a reflection of the political reality she faces. Tough border talk in an attempt to dull Donald Trump's attack on the issue while laying blame for the status quo at his feet. Well again, good luck with that. The fact is that laying the status quo at his feet ignores the fact that she's the current vice-president of the United States. I don't know how many times I have to say this, she is the vice-president of the United States, right now! Joe Biden has said, over and over and over, she is the last person in the room. He said on the View just two days ago that she was delegated power on every issue of this administration. How does she turn around then and claim that Donald Trump is responsible for the border crisis that is entirely the creation of this administration."

The border crisis that's about as real as the tooth fairy, yes.

The story about Biden saying he "delegated power" to Kamala on the View is just another nonsense story meant to downplay the fact that the vice-president in the US has basically no power. His quote was "So I was able to delegate her responsibility on everything from foreign policy to domestic policy.”

Essentially, he's saying that he used Harris to represent his positions henceforth why he said "foreign and domestic policy". This isn't some admission that Harris was in control of the entire administration, that's just Ben twisting the story into something completely unrecognizable. The president has to sign off on everything in America while the VP has next to no power, that's just how the system works.

06:40, Ben Shapiro: "Apparently Harris is going to argue that American sovereignty requires setting rules at the border and enforcing them. Oh, you think? That might have been nice to know when you were literally telling border patrol that their number one job was facilitating illegal entry into the country. That's what she told them, that's what she and Joe Biden told them. I know cause I went down to the border to investigate it. We literally did a ride-along with the border patrol and what they showed us is that there was no one staffed at the border because the way it now works is because the Mexican drug cartels are now in charge of the border. They drive up with truckloads of illegal immigrants, they release them at the border, and then at the part of the border I was at which was an Indian Reservation -- an American Native American Reservation in Arizona there was a literal button you pushed to call for border patrol help. They would arrive, you would shout asylum, and then they would take you to a processing facility and within 72 hours you were being released into the country."

Ok Ben, then who were you riding with? A cartel operative pretending to be a border patrol operative? Gee, there's a lot of 4-D chess going on here.

Naturally Ben can't PLAY any of the video that shows big trucks filled with migrants at the border being waved in by ICE (who aren't there by the way) but, as every journalist knows, the best source is "just trust me bro". Also, there's a lot of assumptions being made here. So, there's a button on this reservation to call the border patrol for assistance, great! Given how dangerous the crossing between Mexico and the US is and the fact that a lot of the people making the crossing have children in tow this seems like a pretty good thing. But how on Earth does Ben know that these people are being released after three days? That seems to contradict, oh I don't know, literally every piece of data released that isn't from Ben. And where exactly did he pull that quote of Biden saying the ICE's job is facilitating illegal immigration. Oh yeah, he pulled it out of his ass like he does with everything.

Anyway, time to spread George Soros conspiracies. I'm honestly shocked that Ben is doing this since a lot of the conspiracies about George Soros are steeped in antisemitism, something which alt-right assholes like Alex Jones and Stew Peters have cued into.

That's not to say that I really like George Soros. George Soros is a billionaire and I think that billionaires are inherently a bad thing, thus he's no friend of mine. It's entirely possible to criticize Soros without playing into antisemitism but unfortunately right-wing criticism of Soros is very often not that.

The conspiracy theories slung around regarding Soros are just nonsensical distortions of reality and regularly play into these antisemitic theories of Jewish (or "globalist") control. Ben Shapiro, a Jewish commentator who has been the victim of disgraceful antisemitic attacks himself, should be WAY more careful about this. I'm not accusing Ben Shapiro of antisemitism, but what I am accusing him of is being irresponsible and spreading a conspiracy theory beloved by the alt-right for nothing other than clicks.

09:13, Ben Shapiro: "The thing is, it's all a lie. It's all a lie."

New Talking Points USA description of right-wing media just dropped. Thanks Ben :D

09:14, Ben Shapiro: "The actual ideological predilection of the Democratic Party and of Kamala Harris is the George Soros program. They're not even trying to hide it anymore. So, a couple of years ago George Soros decided that he was going to hand over the running of the Open Society Foundation, which is his deeply left-wing, really ugly, 501 C3. He's gonna -- it's responsible for the appointment and election of extraordinarily radical DA's in major cities across America fostering the BLM riots."

Brief pause here but the "Soros DA's" narrative is complete BS. The main "Soros DA" that everyone on the hard-right points the finger at is Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Unfortunately, Soros has never directly funded Alvin Bragg but did provide donations to a group that supported Bragg and other aspiring Democrat prosecutors. Due to the nature of George Soros' huge philanthropy and investment portfolio you can find Soros ties pretty much anywhere if you try hard enough. For instance, Vivek Ramaswamy, who Ben recently hosted on his show for an interview, was awarded the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship in 2011 to pursue his JD in law at Yale. Oopsie-doopsies.

You can flip this argument around as well for Republican billionaires. So many of these goons like Dave Rubin, Ezra Levant, and Charlie Kirk have received money from the Koch Brothers. Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire and PragerU would be nothing without money from the Wilkes Brothers. JD Vance has huge ties to Peter Thiel. Hell, Elon Musk was just jumping around like a caffeinated jackrabbit at a Trump rally.

Perhaps the problem that Ben Shapiro is noticing here is that billionaire funding and lobbying is all over the political spectrum in the United States and maybe checks and balances should be put in place to keep said billionaire influence out of government or even better, maybe we shouldn't have billionaires in the first place. Ben will definitely not address that though because it's OK when he and his side take money from right-wing billionaires.

10:17, Ben Shapiro: "In any case, yesterday photos were released of Alex Soros with Tim Walz in his apartment overlooking the proletariat."

JD Vance admits that he's been begging Peter Thiel for Trump campaign money. Do you have a problem with that Ben? No, well then shut up! If you have an issue with billionaire donors influencing political administrations (which by the way, is a position that me and most of the left holds while conservatives don't so that's fun) than it cuts both ways. If you asked me if I liked this photo of Tim Walz hanging out with Alex Soros my answer would be "no", if you asked me if I liked JD Vance hanging out with Peter Thiel my answer would also be "no". Would that be how it worked with Ben? I doubt it.

How about that photo of Elon Musk basically bouncing around at that Trump Rally? That seems like something that Ben wouldn't like if we take him on his face here since Elon is literally the richest man on Earth.

So, he goes on whining about Soros and then finally acknowledges the elephant in the room.

12:20, Ben Shapiro: "Now, whenever you mention Soros I understand that there is a caudry in the media that have a relationship with Jewishness that shall we say is fraught that suddenly decides that its antisemitic to point out that Alex Soros and George Soros have spent literally billions of dollars on promoting far-left policy across the US. That's just a reality, that's not antisemitic in any way shape or form."

Ok Ben, I can prove that it's antisemitic.

When people talk about Alex and George Soros they often talk about him as part and parcel with the "globalists", a shadowy group of elites. Globalist is very clearly a dog-whistle for Jewish elites, this is excepted by everyone including organizations like the ADL who wrote an article on the antisemitic ties that Soros conspiracies have, mainly due to them playing into the antisemitic archetype of the shadowy Jewish “puppet master”. Is the ADL all of a sudden antisemitic?

And again, I’m not saying that Ben Shapiro is antisemitic. That would be ridiculous given his own Jewish identity and history. BUT I’m saying that the narratives that him and the right-wing media push when they talk about families like the Soros’ and the Rothschild’s play into well established antisemitic canards. You can criticize both families in a way that isn’t antisemitic, again they are uber-wealthy and that’s a problem in and of itself, but spreading these theories ain’t it. The right-wing media tends to ignore all the non-Jewish billionaires doing the same things and hones in on the Jewish ones like Soros. Why do you think that is?

So, I guess Ben’s saying that noted uber-wealthy billionaire guy Alex Soros is some kind of…socialist or something. I’m not sure even he knows how absolutely ridiculous that sounds. Oh well, let’s hear about these “far-left” ideas.

14:11, Ben Shapiro: “So what exactly does Alex Soros believe? He believes the most left-wing things it is possible for him to believe.”

Yeah, you mentioned that a couple thousand times already Ben.

The way he tries to elaborate this is hilarious. Get a load of this one where he tries to prove that Alex Soros is somehow facilitating illegal immigration.

14:38, Ben Shapiro: “For example, November 1st 2021, this is a press release from the Open Society Foundations. ‘The Open Society Foundations today announced 1.3 million dollars to support front line organizations working to aid Haitian and black migrants dislocated, detained, and expelled, as they sought asylum and safety at the US Southern Border this fall. This funding will help provide legal services to Haitian asylum seekers arriving at the Southwest Border and support advocacy to protect their rights. It will further enable black led organizations to champion more broadly the humane treatment of all black immigrants seeking safety and stability in the United States’”

So his far-left ideas are…that these Haitian asylum seekers are human beings too and deserve to have their human rights protected. Well, if being far-left means caring about the disenfranchised, sign me up!

Conclusion:

So that was Alex Jones Ben Shapiro yapping for way too long about the Soros Family. Sorry for the lack of posting recently. I’ve been having computer issues. However it’s always fun (and by fun I mean painful) to check in on old Bennifer Jalapeño and see what he’s lying about this time.

Cheers and I’ll see you in the next one.

Original Video:

If you haven't heard, shots were fired at Trump's Mar-A-Lago Golf Course and the FBI is investigating this incident as an assassination attempt. As was the case with the first shooting, new details are coming in hour by hour and by the time this post comes up it very well could be outdated already. I'll try my best to cover this responsibly with the information that I have but it's important to acknowledge that political violence of any kind is unacceptable from either side of the aisle.

You know who isn't covering this responsibly? Far-right media. And that brings us to Charlie Kirk who put out an "emergency episode" this Sunday the day of the assassination attempt. It's mainly just him and his co-host spinning baseless conspiracy theories without providing any evidence, you know like responsible journalists do.

00:59, Charlie Kirk: "Ok everybody, usually we don't stream on Sundays or do any broadcasts on Sundays as you well know, I wanna thank Real America's Voice for taking us, we are here also on Rumble. Joining me is Blake for this breaking news day. Blake, this is something else. We -- we thought that, you famously said 2024 might be a boring year."

Blake Neff: "Might"

Oh great, so we have Tucker Carlson's old producer who got fired for anonymously spewing out slurs on an online forum co-hosting Charlie's very serious assassination attempt coverage. This is like bringing in David Duke to co-host your Kennedy assassination broadcast, only Blake Neff is even more of a D-squad tier figure.

Another thing that you'll notice here is that the mood here is pretty light for a video entitled "They Tried To Kill President Trump — Again" and I have a theory as to why that is.

All of these guys in the right-wing media really seemed to enjoy the weeks after the first assassination attempt because it seemingly confirmed all of their narratives about being oppressed and targeted by the government (never mind that the gunman was a lone nutjob who was a registered Republican). Now, in the wake of a debate that was a complete disaster for Trump and the right-wing media, they get to steer the conversation away from Trump's flailing performance and onto this failed assassination attempt. For these guys this is a godsend.

02:06, Charlie Kirk: "Now, we're learning a lot about Ryan Routh, the first of which is that he is a Democrat doner. Over nineteen transactions to Democrats that we know of since 2019. Ryan Routh is also a very -- he is a pro-Ukrainian lunatic, very much in favor of the Ukrainian War."

This attempt to ascribe a Democrat-based motivation to the shooter is exactly what happened the last time and just like last time it's murky at best.

Ryan Routh seems like a guy who was pretty mentally ill and his politics are all over the place. Routh's social media posts indicate that he was a Trump supporter in 2016 before becoming disillusioned with the former president around 2020 and pivoting to supporting a Nikki Haley/Vivek Ramaswamy ticket. While a man with the same name as Routh who appears to be him at the time of writing did donate to the Democrats, a large number of those donations were to Tulsi Gabbard who's as much of a Democrat as RFK Jr is. Routh did post about the War in Ukraine and his posts demonstrated a Pro-Ukraine stance, even going as far as to involve himself in the recruitment of American's who wished to volunteer overseas.

While it appears, at least with the information that we have now, that this guy leans to the right I think that it's pretty clear that this was just a seriously mentally ill guy who was as all over the place politically as he was mentally. The right-wing drive to pin this on the left doesn't help this climate of political violence that they are supposedly oh so against.

03:26, Charlie Kirk: "Now, here are two pieces of items (sic) and I want to be very clear on facts. Number one, how did this guy know that Donald Trump was going to be golfing at this moment? It's not public, it must have been a very very good guess or somebody might have leaked the information. And number two, what, if any connections did Ryan Wesley Routh have with US intelligence services? With the Department of Defense? With the Central Intelligence Agency? With NATO or the Pentagon? Considering his entire lifes work is about supporting Ukraine or trying to take out Vladimir Putin."

"I want to be very clear on the facts, now here's a mountain of unfounded speculation."

There are a million reasons why this guy knew when Trump was golfing besides "Oh, the CIA leaked it to him". He had a car that he fled the scene in, is it that hard to believe that he hung out there waiting for signs that Trump was on the course or even cased out the course previously. As a matter of fact, recently unveiled cellphone data shows that the would-be assassin waited near the golf course for nearly twelve hours. If the CIA was involved, this would've been a million times more thought out as opposed to "Oh, I'm going to hang out in the bushes and hope for the best!"

Also, Routh as of the time of writing has no documented ties to NATO or any of those other organizations and I seriously doubt that this fact will change.

So, Charlie throws it to Blake and it's just him reading Ryan Routh's deranged tweets. They probably shouldn't be showing how insane this guy was if they want to push the narrative that he was somehow stable enough to be working with the CIA but whatever. Oh yeah, and Blake is also a total moron. Here's some of his "analysis".

05:54, Blake Neff: "This was a deeply unhinged guy but he was a deeply unhinged guy deeply involved with the single biggest cause that our elites in DC care about and are obsessed with. I think the prospect that no one in DC never met this guy or interacted with this guy is quite unlikely and as we dig into this I think it's quite possible that we will discover there are people who at least heard this guy spout off about going after Trump."

I'm sure that politicians hear guys spout off about going after people on both sides of the political aisle. What that doesn't mean is that they have some kind of database with the names of every lunatic who has said something dumb on Twitter. Do you know how many people on both sides are tweeting out dumb things right this very second? Keeping track of all of them would be a herculean effort.

Also, this guy was not "deeply involved" in the war in Ukraine. We're not even sure right now if his little conscription agency even successfully sent a guy overseas. He was some Twitter addicted bit player trying to insert himself into something bigger than him.

Unfortunately, Charlie's other Z-Tier co-host Andrew Kolvet is also here to deliver his "hard hitting analysis". Andrew Kolvet is basically the guy they dragged in to replace Tyler Bowyer, a man who I previously described as being "as articulate as an intoxicated long-haul trucker". Does Andrew Kolvet live up to the lofty standard of suckiness that Tyler established? No, because intoxicated long-haul truckers are a million times more charismatic and entertaining than Andrew Kolvet is.

10:12, Andrew Kolvet: "And I think Charlie, one of the most appalling parts of this entire saga today is the piece of tape, and I believe we have it, during the press conference where they basically admitted that had Trump been the current president that they would've had the entire perimeter of the golf course closed down, no roads would have been opened, but they don't have enough resources for President Trump since he's not the current president."

It took me a little bit of time to dig up what Andrew was talking about but when I did it proved to be a nothing-burger. Andrew Kolvet is talking about something that the Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said when responding to a question from the press about how the shooter managed to get on the grounds of the golf course. Quote:

""Well, you got to understand, the golf course is surrounded by shrubbery, so when somebody gets into the shrubbery, they're pretty much out of sight, all right," Bradshaw said after a question about how the gunman could get so close. "And at this level that he is at right now, he's not the sitting president. If he was, we would have [the area around the] golf course surrounded. But because he's not, security is limited to the areas that the Secret Service deems possible. So I would imagine that the next time he comes at a golf course, there'll probably be a little bit more people around the perimeter. But the Secret Service did exactly what they should have done. They provided exactly what the protection should have been, and their agent did a fantastic job."

Ric's not wrong, ex-presidents get less protection than the current president. Keep in mind that there are only 3,200 special agents in the Secret Service and special agents are the ones in charge of protecting the president. To give you some context, that's only 31.68% of active FBI special agents (10,100) and 14.83% of active CIA agents (estimated at 21,575). The Secret Service is a relatively small agency with relatively low numbers.

This combined with the fact that there are currently six living presidents who have also received death threats and in the case of Obama had attempts made on their lives as well, multiple congresspeople who need protection, and the actual president and his cabinet to protect and you realize that the department is stretched for people and needs to prioritize. Trump's life was saved by the Secret Service and they did their job properly. Giving Trump the same level of protection as the current president is absurd given what the Secret Service has at it's disposal.

I'm also willing to bet that Trump gets more Secret Service protection than the average former president given the previous assassination attempt.

The other thing that we should keep in mind here is that Trumps golfing habit has been a notorious security risk for years. After Trump became president, the secret service warned him of the risks that his golf courses posed even going so far as to provide him with visual aids. Trump responded by shrugging off the threat. It doesn't help that Trumps visit to the golf course on Sunday was apparently unplanned which led to the Secret Service having to work on the fly. Given the circumstances I'd say that they even went above and beyond.

13:28, Blake Neff: "It's so obvious what's been whipped up here and we're having to sit through -- one of the things that's most appalling is it's like on each successive major threat you've seen the press get more flagrant with what they do. So there were like, gestures at this being unacceptable after the first shooting in Butler but after this one it's pretty much an immediate turnaround of Lester Holt saying 'Yeah, you know President Trump brought this on himself because he talked about Haitian migrants in Springfield.'"

Holt didn't say that. He talked about the assassination attempt and then said quote;

“Today’s apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail. Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants.”

First of all, they cut off in the middle of Holts sentence which is always a major red flag. Even still, that's not saying that Trump deserved to get shot, that's a basic cable news pivot and a factual statement.

The assassination attempt happened right after Trump made xenophobic comments at the debate. Does that mean that Trump making statements about migrants pushed this guy over the edge? No, not with the evidence that I have. However, Holt isn't wrong to point this out. Trump's inflammatory rhetoric doesn't help this political climate that we've found ourselves in cool off, it only escalates things. That's not victim blaming or saying that Trump deserved to die, that's stating the obvious. I don’t really like Lester Holt or MSNBC but this is just dishonest. Everybody has roundly condemned political violence and this fantasyland nonsense will not change that.

Rounding off Charlie Kirk's quartet of bullshit is Jack Posobiec who joins the show to say basically the same things that Charlie, Blake, et all were saying earlier. This whole show is just repetitive dreck that could have been trimmed down into a 20 minute video. There was zero need to make this show an hour long. It's obvious that they did the bare minimum to prepare for the show and are now struggling to fill an hour.

As a result you get this, just rehashing old bullshit from the last assassination attempt and putting an anti-Ukraine bow on top. It's just a slog all around for everyone involved and I feel like everyone's time would have been better spent if they just took Sunday off and worried about this story during the work week. *Sigh*, well lets hear from Jack. This promises to be enlightening.

20:17, Jack Posobiec: "We're living in a situation now where political violence is not just a myth, it is not just a potentiality, it is something that we now live with on a regular basis."

So that's why Jack always condemns political violence from his side like, oh I don't know, January 6th right?

Oh. Extremely sincere political actor Jack Posobiec strikes again. What an absolute tool. The rest of the show is basically just this same redundant schtick. It'll be interesting to see how the narrative evolves with time. I'll tell you one thing, it really sucks now.

Conclusion:

This episode made the journalism major in me very irritated. Don't get me wrong, Charlie Kirk's repetitive ass BS always makes me very irritated but for some reason this particular episode really struck a cord.

I don't think there could be a more irresponsible way to cover an assassination attempt than this. I don't think I could be more irresponsible if I tried. The only thing you could possibly do to make this more irresponsible is to outright call for violence and retribution.

This is a serious event that has the potential to severely inflame people on both sides of the aisle, particularly Republicans. The way that a real journalist would cover this is by sticking to the facts and leaving speculation behind. If only because, again, this was a breaking story involving a major political figure and as a result you need to be extremely careful when you talk about it in the capacity as a person who people are getting their news from.

Charlie on the other hand barged in without preparing, randomly linked the shooter to NATO without providing any proof, implicated everybody on the political left, and then spewed conspiracy theories for an hour. The fact that they occasionally threw in "Oh, this is all speculation" isn't enough! You can't "speculate" on a news show, Charlie's supposed to be the big brain conservative that uses FACTS and LOGIC for crying out loud.

Oh well, can't expect anything less from Charlie Kirk. Cheers and I'll see you in the next one, stay safe everybody!

Sources Cited:

Falconer, Rebecca. "What to know about the suspect in the Trump golf club assassination attempt". Axios.

Folk, Zachary. “Who Is Alleged Trump Golf Course Gunman Ryan Wesley Routh?” The Daily Beast, The Daily Beast, 15 Sept. 2024.

Gerstein, Josh. "Man charged in Trump incident may have waited near his golf course for nearly 12 hours". Politico

“Frequently Asked Questions about Us | United States Secret Service.” Www.secretservice.gov.

“The Job of a Special Agent | United States Secret Service.” Www.secretservice.gov.

If there's one thing you should take away from this blog, it's that the Daily Wire is a horrendous news source. Even for them though, Michael Knowles manages to constantly outdo himself in the realm of being an absolute idiot.

So, right-wing media has all decided that the racist myth about Haitians eating pets is 100% true. Myths like these are dangerous and will absolutely get somebody killed in a hate crime. As a matter of fact, Springfield Ohio has already been the target of bomb threats that have led to hospitals being put on lockdown and schools being evacuated. This rhetoric being pushed by the right-wing media right now is legitimately dangerous and it might end up killing somebody.

Nobody has shown a proven case of pet eating actually happening but that hasn't stopped the right-wing media from trying to prove that this rumor is totally factual. This brings us back to Michael Knowles being an absolute dipstick.

02:22, Michael Knowles: "Do Haitians eat cats? That is the question that has implausibly come to dominate our political discourse in the final weeks of the 2024 presidential election. Liberal politicians and journalists, such as David Muir, say they don't. But Haitians say that they do. Like this second generation Haitian American in a video reposted by Elon Musk."

So, the TikTok video that Michael and Elon Musk are holding up as proof that Haitian immigrants are eating pets is an absolute nothing-burger. In the video, this person who claims to be a second generation Haitian immigrant explains that her dad told her that Haitian's eat dogs and cats during voodoo rituals.

If you're wondering how this proves anything, it doesn't. This is some "my friends cousins great uncles dog told me" type bullshit and it still isn't an actual example of a Haitian eating a pet. Michael loves this video though because it confirms him and the rights little racist narrative.

04:06, Michael Knowles: "The political nerd class hated that President Trump brought up Haitians eating cats at the presidential debate. I disagree -- I disagree with their revulsion. This is one of Trump's greatest political skills, he can translate complex frequently dry policy issues into vivid images."

So, Trump can spread racist lies and demonize minority groups effectively, got it. I don't think Michael realizes this, but creating moral panics out of nothing is an extremely bad thing. Those "vivid images" are going to lead to a hate crime!

Also, "the political nerd class". I guess I'm also one of those guys but come on Michael, you run a politics podcast. You're one of us! Embrace the nerd Mikey!

Michael does an extremely long ad for razors and comes back with more xenophobic BS.

06:55, Michael Knowles: "Do the Haitians eat cats and dogs? I -- not all Haitians. That lady, a second generation Haitian American, she obviously doesn't eat cats and dogs and she doesn't practice voodoo and she's Christian. But do some of these people, unvetted, from a failed state where there's rampant cannibalism and ubiquitous voodoo, do these people eat cats and dogs? TikTok has weighed in. One of the top trends on TikTok right now, I am reliably informed by my Zoomer associates, is this remix of President Trumps debate comments."

I guess when you have no evidence to back up what you're saying you might as well throw some remix on TikTok in there as evidence.

The reason why Haiti is a "failed state" is because they've been continuously punished for their freedom by western nations like France and the United States. They literally were forced to pay "reparations" to France for their freedom from slavery, a process which took centuries for Haiti to pay off. There's years of history there and none of these guys ever get into it. It's just pure ignorant ahistorical bigotry and it ticks me off.

According to the World Religions Database, 94.26% of Haitians practice a form of Christianity with the majority being Catholic. It's almost as if those scary minorities aren't so different from you or I and it's racism that's leading to these ridiculous rumors spreading around the internet.

07:47, Michael Knowles: "I was discussing this yesterday with my friend Jack Posobiec on his show and he raised the question, he said 'This trend going around on TikTok, all these Zoomers dancing around to eat the dogs eat the cats. Is this good for Trump? Is this pro-Trump or is this anti-Trump?' And that's the wrong question. This is the kind of question that you'll hear in elementary poetry classes. You know, 'what does the poem mean'. People don't really read a lot of poetry anymore, I like poetry but they'll look at the poem and they'll say 'Ok, what's the hidden meaning'. But that's not what poetry does. The reason that good poets write poetry is to convey meaning in a way that it cannot be conveyed in an essay or a book or a tweet. It's just a different way of communicating."

And the award for dumbest metaphor goes to Michael Knowles.

First of all, Michael clearly doesn't know anything about poetry. If he did he would understand that subtext and metaphor are huge elements of poetry. From the sounds of this, the way that Michael interacts with poetry is the most shallow and surface level way imaginable. Michael's mind is going to be blown when he learns about poetic irony.

Trump isn't a poet, he's somebody trying to be a world leader. The standard for honesty is obviously way higher for the guy trying to be a world leader. Trump can't just spread an untrue rumor about a group of people to "paint an image in peoples heads". Millions of people are listening to him and spreading rumors when you're in a position like that is extremely dangerous.

09:20, Michael Knowles: "The memes just kind of delight you and I think that's the experience people are having. The zoomers who are dancing to this and the many many many more people who are -- who are watching these reels and these little TikTok's. You watch it and you kind of laugh and it's just kind of funny, it's delightful. You have a sensory experience of surprise, of humor, of delight, and then you associate those things with Trump. Trump is the medium of those experiences."

Well, I guess I'm going to keep making fun of Michael Knowles on this blog and if he protests we should remind him that he's the medium of those experiences which means that it's actually a good thing that we're making fun of him. After a while we'll start to associate him with humor and delight after all.

That's one way to deal with everyone making fun of your candidate I guess.

"Oh ya?! Well, when you're laughing at him for being a moron he's still the reason that you're laughing in the first place! Ha! You're gonna be Trump supporters before you know it!"

And that conveyance is happening through TikTok's. Things that people famously spend a lot of time watching individually as opposed to scrolling through them at rapid speeds while only giving them half of their attention. Michael Knowles is truly a brilliant political strategist.

10:05, Michael Knowles: "Frankly, I strongly suspect this is what inclined Trump to bring it up during the debate at all."

Yes, it couldn't possibly be because Trump is a racist lunatic. He's playing 4-D chess by....tricking people into making fun of him I guess.

10:42, Michael Knowles: "And what's the consequence of that? If there is a downstream political effect it's going to be people realizing that Trump is not, you know, Hitler 2.0, he's just kind of -- he's like a funny guy, you know? Hitler wasn't that funny, I don't know, I'm not totally familiar with Hitler but he was always screaming and banging the lectern."

Ah yes, spreading a racist myth about a marginalized group of people is a great way to distance yourself from fascist leaders like Hitler. It's not like that's been one of the main elements of every fascist regime ever.

Also, really really stupid analysis of the Nazi's from Michael. I guess that fascists are physically incapable of being funny. There's a genetic trait in fascists that make them physically incapable of cracking a good joke....actually, I've watched Republican comedy so maybe this sarcastic diatribe has some truth to it. Still, really dumb stuff here.

Michael then plays a video of some MAGA lunatic at a city council meeting spewing a racist rant about Haitians. Michael then does an advert for his own YouTube channel and goes back into being a bigot.

18:47, Michael Knowles: "Now, the minute I say that I know that the Democrat activists who watch my show every single day and who subscribe to the Daily Wire to do it, they're gonna start writing their headlines. Michael Knowles spreads misinformation, false news, fake news, about illegal aliens voting in elections. It does not happen, this is not real, it's a calumny. Well, what do you make of this news report aired on a CBS affiliate?"

Yeah, hi Michael. I guess I'm one of those guys that he's talking about. I don't subscribe to the Daily Wire though, I'm not giving these grifters a red cent (I also couldn't afford it even if I wanted to but that's an entirely separate issue, #collegestudentlyfe and all that).

So, the CBS News report that Michael played is about an undocumented immigrant by the name of Angelica Maria Francisco who was caught forging a passport and voting in two elections illegally. Here's the thing about this story, Michael should've buried it.

If there's indeed a controlled plan on the Democrats end to smuggle migrants into the country to vote in elections, how come the big scary Biden DOJ proceeded to catch and arrest this woman?

Just because there was one migrant who committed voter fraud once doesn’t mean that there’s a major scale democrat plot to bus migrants in to vote illegally. We don’t even know who she voted for in those elections, for all we know she voted for Trump or even Jill Stein. There's a lot of assumptions being made here on Michael's end.

19:54, Michael Knowles: "That's one woman in Alabama, not exactly a swing-state. One person who's been prosecuted. Now, there are many more examples of this that are reported, this is just the latest one. But you know what the libs are gonna say, they're gonna say 'Oh, you know. This is just a one off'. Well, we don't really investigate this sort of thing. By definition this is a very difficult crime to pin down. It's an act of deception that half of our country and most of our political class is intentionally obscuring. The reason that the libs are importing these foreigners into our country is to rig elections in the long run, many have said that openly, so it's hard to figure it out."

"We don't really investigate this sort of thing" he said while talking about someone being prosecuted and charged for doing the thing that he says we don't investigate. I'd love to see those videos of top politicos admitting that they're intentionally bringing in migrants to rig elections by the way. Michael never plays them so either they're not real or the Daily Wire is sitting on the biggest story in decades.

I'm not denying that people have attempted voter fraud in the past. What I am denying is that there's a widespread conspiracy on the part of the Democrats to bring in migrants to rig elections. That's great replacement theory nonsense that's contradicted by the story that Michael's reporting on.

20:56, Michael Knowles: "If you are illegally in this country and you need to get a false document to get a job, which is not true, many times you can just get the job without a false document but lets say that's why, why would you imperil your freedom, your ability to skirt the law even, by going to vote? And then if you're voting why would you specifically vote in these presidential election years, 2016 and 2020? Do you think someone maybe suggested that she do that?"

There a million different reasons. Maybe she just wanted to be a part of the political process. Maybe she just did it because that's what people do around that time and it helps you blend in. That explains why she'd vote in the presidential elections as opposed to the congressional ones. Think about it, if she was a Democrat operative wouldn't it make more sense to vote in the Alabama congressional elections as opposed to the Presidential elections? You're way more likely to get a Democrat into the senate in Alabama than turn Alabama blue. That's another issue, why would the Democrats import all of the illegal voters into Alabama as opposed to a swing-state. You're not going to flip Alabama but you might flip Michigan. Michael's story might as well be called swiss cheese with all the holes its got.

Anyway, this voter fraud story is just dumb and doesn't really have anything backing it up. Most of the remainder of the episode is devoted to Michael complaining about an article in the Washington Post. It's a filler segment that is not worth our time.

Conclusion:

The cope was hard in this episode. I will say that "He's intentionally trying to get people to make fun of him, really guys we promise" is a new one and I don't think that Michael's going to get very far with it. Since Candace Owens left, Michael Knowles is the new reigning champ for dumbest Daily Wire guy with Matt Walsh as most disgusting and Ben Shapiro as most irritating. Glad to see that he's holding on to his title in this episode.

Cheers and I'll see you in the next one.

Sources Cited:

Helmore, Edward. “More Bomb Threats Hit Springfield, Ohio, after Trump Elevates False Claims about Haitians.” The Guardian, The Guardian, 14 Sept. 2024.

Bhatia, Pooja. “US-Backed Foreign Intervention Has Led to the Disaster in Haiti.” The Guardian, 19 Oct. 2022.

Rosalsky, Greg. ““The Greatest Heist in History”: How Haiti Was Forced to Pay Reparations for Freedom.” NPR, 5 Oct. 2021.

“National Profiles | World Religion.” Www.thearda.com.

Dave Rubin didn't take the presidential debate very well. He really didn't take Taylor Swift endorsing Kamala Harris well. I can understand this to a certain degree, it's been a pretty rough couple of days for Dave what with that whole "Unwittingly taking money from Russia to spread propaganda" thing and that other "My candidate chocked on national TV in front of the entire free world" thing.

Keep in mind when Dave starts rambling about Taylor Swift that his shows motto is "Crazy world, sane views" and his shows new theme song (which I'm 99% sure is AI generated) is "It's a crazy world, somebodies gotta have the sane views".

Somebody does indeed but it sure as hell ain't this guy.

01:41, Dave Rubin: "It's not really about the policies, it's really just about the narrative and I think we really saw a very very sharp example last night, lets say a very obvious example last night, of how the narrative is shaped and shifted right in front of our eyes because that was a three on one, that was not a debate, we've seen it in the post coverage."

So, right-wing media has settled on calling the debate rigged. It's the "8 year old who's angry that they lost a game" approach to politics. "Oh no, the moderators moderated the debate. We shouldn't do that anymore." Naturally, they're all ignoring the points where Trump made an ass of himself like when he declared that migrants in detention centres are forcibly getting trans surgeries or when he amplified the debunked racist smear about Haitian immigrants eating dogs. None of that was caused by the moderators, that was all Trump.

Part of what makes this all so embarrassing is that guys like Dave Rubin are constantly going on about how Trump is this political genius playing 4-D chess against the Democrats and yet simultaneously he turns into a blustery mess against three "dumb libs". Even if we're accepting that the debate was rigged, which it wasn't, Trump still should have mopped the floor with everybody there. You can't have both!

So, Dave launches into a diatribe about 9/11 which is just him politicizing a tragedy so he can push a narrative about the debate, gross. We won't dwell too long on it but he does say some royally stupid things in this segment.

05:02, Dave Rubin: "I wanted to just sort of show you something there because that was only 23 years ago and think of how fundamentally different the world is from that morning to this morning, like wildly different. The fact that there was no questions even asked about it at the debate last night and the one time it was referenced, Kamala Harris completely dismissed -- well, it wasn't referenced actually. Kamala Harris said that January 6th was the worst moment in US history since the Civil War, completely dismissing 9/11. I mean, absolutely disgusting."

Why were there no 9/11 questions at the debate? I don't know Dave, could it be because it was 23 years ago?! 9/11, while tragic, isn't a current issue. There are no people basing their vote around 9/11 related policy. If you want to talk about questions about terrorism and the Department of Homeland Security, fine, but I don't think any sane person was expecting any 9/11 related questions during the debate.

So, Dave does an ad for mattresses and then reads a tweet from Ben Shapiro, also Dave's super objective. Just oh so objective.

08:47, Dave Rubin: "So, it seems to me, I'm gonna try to cover this as always as objectively as possible, you know my feelings about these two candidates, you know my feelings about the two parties, you know my feelings about the mainstream media but it seems to me that the main takeaway is not 'Oh my God, Kamala got Trump on this policy' or 'Trump really had that great line that exposed her for being a fraud' or any of that. It really is the narrative thing around the mainstream media because watching that debate last night, I don't know how you could be an even approximate objective person and think that it was not a three on one."

Yeah, the main takeway people seem to be having is "Holy shit, Trump's nuts!" Also, Harris absolutely won the debate. She swept the post debate polling with a 23 point margin with 57% of respondents saying that she won the debate. Turns out that racist diatribes about migrants don't pull in the moderates, shocker.

Also, Dave sounds very objective just parroting dumb right-wing media talking points.

09:22, Dave Rubin: "They repeatedly, dishonestly, fact-checked Donald Trump instead of just letting Kamala retort and they did not do it to her once. She went on lie after lie after lie including very fine people which, as I said last night, it is the most debunked lie of all time."

Yeah, like the time where she fell for a Facebook hoax about migrants eating pets....oh wait, that's your guy.

Very fine people isn't debunked. There is a Snopes article saying that the claim that he called Neo-Nazi's very fine people is false but if these guys read past that appealing big red X they'd find this paragraph. Quote:

Editors' Note: Some readers have raised the objection that this fact check appears to assume Trump was correct in stating that there were "very fine people on both sides" of the Charlottesville incident. That is not the case. This fact check aimed to confirm what Trump actually said, not whether what he said was true or false. For the record, virtually every source that covered the Unite the Right debacle concluded that it was conceived of, led by and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump's characterization was wrong. 

So, he didn't specifically call Neo-Nazi's at Charlottesville very fine people, he just both sidesed it. This is just a dumb semantics game. Trump absolutely should be criticized for that.

Dave then plays a clip of RFK Jr and then a clip of Trump with Hannity. Dave then plays a clip of Trump being fact-checked on crime being down (which it is). Naturally, the Dave Rubin Clip Show hasn't really changed much since the news about Russia broke out.

Anyway, here's Dave lying about the crime rate.

14:39, Dave Rubin: "You can argue actually, I think you can make an honest argument that it is a moderators job to fact-check, we all wish there would be a little more fact-checking right? So, when she lies about very fine people on both sides I would like a fact-check there. So I am not throwing David Muir under the bus as if he shouldn't fact-check but he only did it one way and actually Trump was right about that, we've got this from Washington Examiner. In fact, violent crime is up substantially from 2019 levels and last years 2023 apparent drop is less significant than it appears. Part of the problem is how police departments report offences to the FBI, that's exactly what Trump was referencing. The FBI asked, then demanded, that law enforcement agencies transfer away from the system that they used for decades to a new more detailed but onerous one"

Well, Dave finally gave me a specific, I love when they give me specifics.

So, the Examiner article that Dave's referring to is a Washington Examiner article called "Bad Data From The FBI Mislead About Crime". Since the Washington Examiner is journalistic garbage, I looked into this myself and found that they're being intellectually dishonest as hell.

First of all, the Examiner is looking at 2019-2023 whereas people saying that crime is down are looking 2022-2023. There was indeed a brief spike in crime during 2022 but that doesn't change the fact that crime is down now in 2024. The Examiner itself concurs that crime continued to drop from 2023 to 2024 meaning that Dave's own dumb source was forced to admit that crime is indeed down. Unfortunately, guys like Dave need crime to be up because that helps them panic their audiences into buying their junk.

16:21, Dave Rubin: "Go to New York City, see whats going on. See what happens the second the sun goes down, the types of people that are out on the street. They're out during the day too but then suddenly it's like a zombie movie, they all start coming out."

Yes, at night they DOUBLE come out! They're out during the day but during the night it suddenly becomes like a zombie movie and then they....come out again I guess? What an absolutely moronic statement.

Also, as somebody who's been to New York City and walked around there at night, no it's not like a zombie movie.

So, Dave complains about MSNBC which is just stupid. I'm not going to deal with it. MSNBC is a network I have lukewarm feelings about as it is (their website is better than their cable coverage) and Dave Rubin just sloppily rambling about clips from them that he's clearly taken out of context isn't interesting. What is interesting is Dave whinging about Taylor Swift. Dave reads her endorsement and then gets really mopey and stupid.

27:00, Dave Rubin: "It's all confusions that she said there, I don't know what the issues are she cares about so Taylor Swift, do you want 15 million illegals here bringing in fentanyl and taking out our cities? Is that what you want?"

I've discussed this on the blog before but migrants aren't bringing in most of the fentanyl, it mainly comes in on trucks and tractor trailers. So yeah, pretty bold of Dave to try and accuse somebody else of having "confusions".

Dave then has some high-level political analysis. All I can say is just...just look at this absolute moron.

27:45, Dave Rubin: "There's something -- I would say there's something even more nefarious. She obviously didn't write that statement, probably didn't even look at that statement but they put that out immediately after the debate because what they want to happen there -- what they want to happen there is that they want young girls to be angry at their parents. That's another piece of this, they're using her as a tool so that when a father comes home from work, and generally conservatives have jobs and he's worked hard all day to put food on the table for his family and he comes home from work, that the daughter will start screaming at him for supporting Donald Trump and then the wife will probably start screaming at him too because the wife doesn't want the daughter to be upset because they are trying to hatchet away at everything."

Ah yes, conservative dads. If there's one group of people famous for changing their worldview when their family challenges them on it, it's conservative dads. That's why every thanksgiving since, oh I don't know, the concept of presidential elections was established has been peaceful whenever politics comes up.

The pandering in that clip is also just painful. "Hello audience of mostly conservatives who hate me for my marriage, just wanted to let you know that you are all HARD WORKERS and that's why you shouldn't take what your family says seriously."

He goes on too and it just gets dumber from here.

29:44, Dave Rubin: "So think about it, that statement was planned, obviously. She didn't write the statement, somebody -- they pay somebody, a PR person or whoever it might be, to write that statement. The picture with the cat -- like, this was a plan right? She didn't just take a selfie with her cat and then write that thing up, obviously. They put that out immediately after the debate and then moments after that, Tim Walz is on television talking about how excited he is about the Taylor Swift endorsement. Really think how fucking pathetic, I think it's my first one since I came back, that this is."

Getting this riled up over a celebrity endorsement is pretty pathetic Dave. He does realize that she's wealthy enough to have a photo taken of her after the debate right? Or more importantly, that this endorsement doesn't really mean that much in the grand scheme of the election. I'm convinced that the only people who really gave it a lot of attention are Taylor Swifts fans and guys like Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin who've been blowing a gasket about it since it dropped on Instagram.

31:07, Dave Rubin: "Ivy (?) just mentioned to me that Taylor Swifts tour that she's on was supposed to wrap up but they've now extended it to go through the election, do you think that's a coincidence right? Probably not."

So, Taylor Swifts master plan to steal the election is as follows:

Step One: Become famous over the course of decades by producing music.

Step Two: Go on tour during the election and endorse Harris after the debate

Step Three: Extend that tour through the rest of the election because...if you aren't on tour you'll just suddenly stop being famous I guess?

The Russians really go their moneys worth with this Dave Rubin guy. I wonder what the refund policy on grifters is. So, the rest of the show is pretty boring stuff. He plays a clip from the View at some point which is further proof for my theory that conservatives are the only people watching the View in 2024. Then he remembers that Taylor Swift is a person who exists and decides to get gross as hell.

58:30, Dave Rubin: "Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris on Instagram, after the debate on ABC, proudly calls herself a childless cat lady. Elon Musk, who they hate, he saw that and he wrote this; 'Fine Taylor, you win. I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.' So, he's mocking. He's exposing the ridiculousness. Right, it's like Taylor Swift, you are a young pretty girl. Do you know what the gang members from Venezuela do to young pretty girls? It ain't pretty."

God, both Dave Rubin and Elon Musk are gross as all hell. Gotta hit that "fair white women will get raped by those scary brown people" button whenever you can I guess. Again, gross. Also, she's a 34 year old woman you misogynistic creep.

On the bright side, it certainly helps cement the fact that these guys are indeed weird as all hell despite their protestations.

Conclusion:

Well, that was a grown man having a conniption fit about a pop star endorsing a political candidate. The yearlong conservative meltdown over Taylor Swift is hilarious and I figured we could all use something on the lighter side after all the Matt Walsh we've been seeing on the blog lately. I'm sure we'll go back to naked racism and bigotry in the next post and all our souls will be destroyed oncemore but for now lets just take a moment to laugh at this absolute moron prattling on about Taylor Swifts supposed evil plans to throw the election.

Sources Cited:

Archacki, Liam. “Kamala Harris Sweeps First Batch of Post-Debate Polls by 23-Point Margin.” The Daily Beast, The Daily Beast, 11 Sept. 2024.

Bump, Philip. “Analysis | Fox News Twists Data on Economy and Crime to Attack Biden.” Washington Post, 9 Apr. 2024.

Well folks, I'm back from a weeklong camping trip and am ready to tackle some more right-wing media brain rot. While I don't normally like covering the same show twice in a row I figured what better way to celebrate being back from the woods in Canada than debunking an episode about the woods in Canada.

So, Matt Walsh decided to cover the recent forest fires in Canada (finally, my country gets a mention) and you would think that it would be very hard to make that offensive. Shockingly enough though, Matt managed to find a way. At least he's innovative.

01:10, Matt Walsh: "One of the most basic assumptions about climate change that you're told to accept is that if you give the government enough power and make enough personal sacrifices you can help change the weather. You can make natural disasters less likely, you can save beaches and endangered species, even entire countries, the entire world can be saved and all you need to do is pay more in taxes to fund more government bureaucracy and give up your car and your gas stove and airline travel and plastic straws and maybe your entire livelihood and then everything will be fine."

Right out of the gate there is a mountain of BS that needs to be addressed here. Strap in guys, we've got a lot to unpack.

Matt's conflating weather and climate, what else is new? I explained this in a previous post but weather refers to short term changes in the atmosphere while climate refers to the weather of a specific region over time. Does climate change increase the probability of extreme weather? Yes! For example, 2023 was the hottest year on record and the world saw record breaking heatwaves as a result.

More specifically, many recent extreme weather events can be directly tied to climate change. According to Carbonbrief.org, which has actually mapped extreme weather events across the world and determined which ones have ties to climate change or not, 71% of the extreme weather events mapped by their organization were made more likely or severe by anthropogenic climate change. Furthermore, 93% of the extreme heat events charted by their scientists were made more likely or severe by anthropogenic climate change. So yes, climate change does change the weather and addressing climate change will make those disasters less likely. The only way to agree with Matt's BS assessment that climate change is a government run scam is to ignore mountains of data.

As for Matt's list of things that we're allegedly being forced to give up, it's complete rubbish;

Nobody has banned gasoline cars, although they're being phased out in favor of EV's. Even with this phaseout, you can still drive your gasoline car or even buy a new one if you chose and even if you couldn't you still have the option to drive an EV or hybrid or even a hydrogen powered car in certain states.

While New York state did ban gas stoves (and even then only by as early as the year 2026 meaning it's not like they're going to come into your house and drag you and your gas stove out by force), nationally they are only subject to energy efficiency and health related guidelines.

Airline travel is absolutely not getting banned, if only because the airline industry controls a fourteen million dollar lobbying arm that would crush that idea in five seconds flat.

As for plastic straws, a lot of states have banned them but to be honest who gives a crap? As someone who lives in a country that has banned single-use plastic straws, society has yet to collapse. Using a paper or metal straw isn't some herculean sacrifice.

In terms of peoples incomes, it would be dishonest to say that some people won’t most likely lose their jobs due to phasing out fossil fuels. However, renewable energy will also create thousands of jobs many of which can be occupied by the people who were previously employed in the fossil fuel sector. According to the DOE, there are currently just over 8 million jobs in renewable energy in the United States and in both 2021 and 2022 renewable energy job growth outpaced overall US employment. Another thing that the government could do is provide federal grant money and create transition programs, similar to Colorado’s lauded Office of Just Transition, to help out of work coal miners and other fossil fuel related workers transition to other jobs in the energy sector. I doubt Matt would like that solution though because that would require a bump in his taxes and as we’ve already established, he doesn’t like that very much. Taxes have gotta stay low, actual solutions to climate change that help everyone be damned!

Also, climate change is the real job killer. According to the National Climate Assessment Report, climate change will also drive up electricity costs and severely impact trade and the economy. In other words, if we don't address climate change Matt's economic fears will not only occur but will be a thousand times worse than what will happen with regulation.

*pants*, I know that was a lot of words but it's important to address Matt's arguments for what they are: poorly sourced bullshit.

01:42, Matt Walsh: "Now there's no other country on Earth that's internalized this way of thinking more than our neighbor to the north Canada."

First of all, get my countries name out of your goddamn mouth.

Second of all, not even close. I'd say that Denmark, which is honestly a case study in how countries should address climate change, is a lot more of a climate-friendly nation than Canada. We don't even make the top ten nations leading on climate and we're still pretty beholden to oil interests up in Alberta unfortunately.

01:48, Matt Walsh: "They've declared a national climate change emergency, they have a constantly increasing national tax on carbon which raises the cost of living for pretty much every household in the country, they've banned plastic straws, they've shut down oil and gas permits off their pacific coast. If you're an insomniac and you pull up a video of a debate in the Canadian parliament to help you sleep there's a good chance they'll be debating climate change in some way or another."

Brief pause, the carbon tax hasn't significantly increased the cost of living for the average household in Canada. According to StatsCan, the carbon tax has only made overall consumer prices 0.6% higher. As a matter of fact, Canada has a climate rebate called the Canada Carbon Rebate that actually helps small businesses and families offset pollution pricing.

Hmm, it almost sounds like Matt doesn't know what he's talking about here. Perhaps if he actually decided to look into Canadian politics instead of just going "boooring" and looking at random right-wing blogs talking about some obscure report released by the health department (we'll get to that later) he wouldn't make these extremely stupid mistakes while covering this story.

02:22, Matt Walsh: "Surely we can assume that at the very least Canada's carbon emissions are much lower as a result of all of this government beuracracy. After all, Canada's not even a top twenty country by population. The GDP barely ranks in the top ten, shouldn't be hard for them to rank low on the list of global carbon emitters, especially since they've been trying so hard and punishing their citizens so much.

We actually have the ninth largest GDP in the world according to the World Bank but go off I guess.

Also, how are these things that Matt previously listed off "punishing citizens"? As mentioned previously, the carbon tax has barely impacted the cost of living and comes with rebates. Banning plastic straws is an extraordinarily mild inconvenience at best, as a Canadian I can confidently tell you that I've barely noticed the difference. As for shutting down oil and gas permits off the Pacific Coast, your average citizen has zero idea that that even happened. This is completely ridiculous.

Also, the Canadian economy is outperforming expectations. Pretty much everything that he's saying here is a lie.

02:43, Matt Walsh: "But, as it turns out Canada is currently one of the biggest carbon emitters on the planet. They're setting new records in the wrong direction. They're adding more of that dreaded carbon into the atmosphere than countries three times their size and it's all because of a series of wildfires last year that the Canadian government clearly could not control, watch."

Matt's citing a study in Nature that actually contradicts his climate change denialism. The study makes it extremely clear that Canada's record breaking forest fire season was made more likely due to the impact of climate change. Here's a quote from said study:

"Canadian forests cover a vast area of nearly 362 million ha (ref. 9), amounting to 8.5% of the global forested area. These forests are an important sink of carbon, absorbing fossil carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and slowing the pace of climate warming. However, climate change is increasing forest fire activity, acting to suppress the carbon uptake capacity of these forests. Although more frequent fires have been widespread, 2023 has seen forest fires on an extreme scale."

So, essentially the way to address these extreme forest fires is to address climate change. In the meantime, countries need to learn how to adapt to record-breaking forest fires as they will only become more common as the climate continues to change. The study says as much here:

"The role of Canada’s fire management strategy in managing fire carbon emissions also deserves some discussion. Fire management strategies require balancing several considerations, including socioeconomic costs, ecological impacts and carbon emissions. Canada’s present strategy adopts a risk-based approach, for which decisions on whether or not to suppress fires are made on a fire-by-fire basis, with differing priorities across provinces and territories. Understanding how fire regimes will change with climate change is thus of high importance, for future decision criteria and costing."

This is a pretty important point to hammer in because it shows how lazy guys in the conservative media ecosystem like Matt Walsh actually are. They don't read anything that they're trying to cite, they don't bother to look into the topics that they're discussing, and when you look into those topics the stuff that they're citing often directly contradicts the point that they're trying to make.

03:59, Matt Walsh: "Now, if you check in with the experts of course they'll tell you that the wildfires were only so severe because of climate change."

The experts which include the study that you're citing. But yes, as the world gets hotter and drier forest fires will become more likely and more severe. I find it absolutely bizarre how Matt can admit that the Canadian forest fire season was record breaking but also try to make the argument that this...disproves climate change somehow. The mental gymnastics here are gold medal worthy.

Matt reads from an article published in MIT Technology Review that ties climate change to forest fires and decides to make a really dumb argument.

05:16, Matt Walsh: "Now, what's striking about explanations like this is that they conveniently absolve the government of all responsibility from managing the forests which is the single most direct way to prevent wildfires from spreading out of control like they did last year. And even the Canadian government admits that, I went on the website of Canada's Natural Resource Department and found that in addition to blaming fossil fuels they admit that they could do more to prevent wildfires from spreading."

What kind of dumbass argument is that?

"Oh yeah, this argument absolves the government from responsibility to manage the forest. And to prove that I'm gonna read this article from the government that says that it's the governments responsibility to manage the forests."

Absolutely galaxy brained content from friend of the blog Matty Walsh here.

06:18, Matt Walsh: "Now they don't mention that preventing arson is another way to stop these fires even though that's true as well. While the majority of these fires were apparently caused by lightning and some other natural event, there's at least one guy that pleaded guilty for setting more than a dozen fires last year."

What Matt's talking about is a story out of Quebec where a far-right conspiracy theorist plead guilty to setting fourteen fires.

The arsonist, a man by the name of Brian Paré, was a climate denier who posted multiple conspiracy theories that the government of Canada intentionally started forest fires across the country. Hmmm, sounds almost like someone who would agree with Matt and other right-wing media nutcases.

So, essentially what we have here is some guy who watched too much stuff like Alex Jones who set multiple fires after seeing posts about the record breaking fire season. This doesn't prove anything outside of the fact that right-wing conspiracy theory nonsense often has dangerous consequences.

So, Matt says that the government should "do things competently and prevent and contain forest fires" which is exactly what the government is trying to do. Then he finds another thing to lie about.

07:59, Matt Walsh: "And volcanoes erupt too like the one I talked about last year that drove temperature changes all of the world."

Matt's talking about the Tonga Volcano eruption and wouldn't you know it, he doesn't have the facts straight on this one either.

While the Tonga Volcanic eruption did impact the climate as well as weather patterns around the world, there are dozens of studies showing that the majority of climate change is anthropogenic, or caused by humans. Most volcanoes actually have a net atmospheric cooling effect with Tonga being an outlier meaning that they don't explain heating across the planet in years before the eruption occurred.

08:40, Matt Walsh: "Instead they're predictably turning the wildfires into another opportunity to harp on racial grievances and divide their country even more. TrueNorth reports this week quote; 'The Public Health Agency of Canada Wants To Review the Way That Wildfire Evacuations Are Conducted Because They Supposedly Disproportionately Impact Minorites.'"

Ah yes, well known reliable source of information TrueNorth.com.

Since I don't trust some dumb right-wing blog to reliably convey what this report was all about, I went and found a copy myself and wouldn't you know it, they're not telling the full story.

First of all, this report was published by the Public Health Agency which is not responsible for forest fire prevention. That falls under the jurisdiction of the governments of the provinces where the fires occur unless the fire occurs on federal land in which case it would probably fall under the Federal Government and Parks Canada. Provinces also have resource sharing agreements which are all outlined in the Canadian Wildland Fire Prevention and Mitigation Strategy which was published by the Canadian Council Of Forest Ministers which is a coalition of the federal, provincial, and territorial governments established to address forest related concerns in Canada such as wildfires. In short, this report on the health effects of wildfires published by an agency that has nothing to do with actual forest fire prevention isn't the only thing that Canada is doing to manage forest fires. It may come as a shock to Matt but governments are huge entities capable of doing multiple things at the same time.

Second of all, right-wing entities like TrueNorth.Com and Rebel News are severely misrepresenting the contents of this report. While Indigenous communities are mentioned in this report, mainly because their land is often in areas more susceptible to forest fires, it also talks about other groups that have nothing to do with race and sexuality such as women, children, and the elderly and how they're more vulnerable to the negative physical and mental health impacts of wildfires.

09:22, Matt Walsh: "Yes, they've turned their worst wildfire season on record into an opportunity to complain once again about nonbinary people. Yes, nonbinary people are more impacted by fire than the rest of us. The rest of us are impervious to fire, it turns out, as a straight white male they could set me on fire and I would be unharmed by it."

Nonbinary people only got mentioned in the 26 page analysis once and it was about the mental health impacts of wildfires on kids that identify as nonbinary. Quote:

"Results from several studies conducted after the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire found that women experience worse mental health impacts in comparison to men. This was also noted for people who did not identify within the gender binary. Among Grade 7-12 10 students, those who identified as female exhibited higher mental health symptom scores, higher rates of probable diagnosis of MDD, PTSD, and GAD, and lower scores for self-esteem, quality of life, and resilience in comparison to their male-identifying students. (27) Students who identified with another gender or preferred not to state their gender identity exhibited worse mental health outcomes compared to both their female- and male-identifying counterparts."

So yeah, he absolutely did not read this document and is just riffing as right-wing media morons tend to do.

09:57, Matt Walsh: "So, here's a couple of lines from the Canadian governments report to give you some idea how unhinged the country has become. Quote; "The impact of wildfires on Indigenous peoples is influenced by colonialism and has forced many Indigenous peoples to live in isolation or in communities that are isolated from the rest of the country. Evacuation measures conducted in Indigenous communities served as traumatic reminders of being taken away to residential schools and or the sixty scoop as some were forced onto busses and separated from their family.'"

He's playing a pretty dishonest game here as he's mashing two sentences that appeared on different pages of the report into one big sentence and leaving out critical context for each. Quote (from the report):

"The impact of wildfires on Indigenous Peoples is influenced by colonialism, (33) and has forced many Indigenous Peoples to live in isolation or in communities that are isolated from the rest of society. Their geographic isolation makes it difficult to access basic goods, services, and other resources that are necessary for mitigating and building resilience against the impacts of wildfires. In addition, Indigenous communities often depend on the land for food, water, recreation, and cultural practices. Therefore, wildfires disrupt Indigenous ways of life and threaten important cultural activities, such as hunting, fishing, harvesting, and gathering."

Sounds a lot more reasonable when you read the actual context behind the sentence huh? I feel like I shouldn't have to say this but "people who live in isolated areas have a harder time accessing resources" and "wildfires impact peoples way of life" aren't dumb statements.

The sentence about trauma occurs a page later as part of a bulleted list of the impacts that previous wildfire evacuations had on indigenous communities in Canada. Quote:

"These findings were reinforced by a report from the House of Commons Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs that examined the impacts of the 2017 wildfires on First Nations communities across Canada. (41) The report found that many Indigenous Peoples also faced additional economic challenges during evacuations and recovery phases. While they were eligible for reimbursement of funds utilized during an emergency through Indigenous Service programs; many experienced difficulties claiming these expenses due to challenges with applying for reimbursement and not always receiving the full amount of a claim. (41,42)

For First Nations evacuees, there was a lack of space for the practice of traditional activities and preparation of traditional foods, as well as a lack of mental health resources for those being temporarily housed in shelters.(41)

Finally it was noted that the evacuation measures conducted in Indigenous communities served as traumatic reminders of being taken away to residential schools and/or the Sixties Scoop as some were forced onto buses and separated from family(41).

A community-based qualitative case study examining how residents of Sandy Lake First Nation were impacted by the 2011 wildfire evacuation found that a lack of pre-event preparedness resulted in some Elders with medical conditions being evacuated without a caregiver and families were separated and displaced during evacuation operations. (43)"

Again, it's a wonder how much context changes the report that you're lying about. I guess it doesn't matter when you can just deceptively combine sentences together and ignore half of what the report was actually saying.

Conclusion:

Matt Walsh: Forest Fire Prevention Expert wasn't something that I had on my right-wing media bingo card but here we are. This was just a really dumb experience all around but dumb experiences seem to be the name of the game in right-wing media these days.

Also, as a palette cleanser here's an image I created in photoshop after I finished the fact-check to celebrate Matt's newfound "expertise" in forest fire prevention.

Original Video:

“Ep. 1433 - When Wildfires Strike, Canada Blames Racism instead of Taking Action.” Dailywire.com, The Daily Wire, 29 Aug. 2024.

Sources Cited:

Lopez, Nuria. “Copernicus: 2023 Is the Hottest Year on Record, with Global Temperatures close to the 1.5°c Limit | Copernicus.” Climate.copernicus.eu, 9 Jan. 2024.

Pidcock, Roz, and Robert McSweeney. “Mapped: How Climate Change Affects Extreme Weather around the World.” Carbon Brief, 2022.

“There’s a New Federal Standard for Gas Stoves. Here’s What It Means for Your Kitchen.” CNET, 2024.

Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy. “Clean Energy Job Creation and Growth.” Energy.gov.

U.S. Global Change Research Program. “Fourth National Climate Assessment.” Globalchange.gov, vol. 2, no. 4, 31 Dec. 2017, pp. 1–470.

“Carbon Pricing Is Not to Blame for Canada’s Affordability Challenges.” Policy Options, 7 Dec. 2023, policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/december-2023/carbon-price-affordability/.

Agency, Canada Revenue. “Canada Carbon Rebate (CCR).” Www.canada.ca, 20 Apr. 2022.

Byrne, Brendan, et al. “Carbon Emissions from the 2023 Canadian Wildfires.” Nature, 28 Aug. 2024, pp. 1–5.

Ghori, Aiman. “How Can the Forest Sector Respond to Fires due to Climate Change?” Canadian Climate Institute, 31 Jan. 2024.

Serebrin, Jacob. “Quebec Man Who Blamed 2023 Wildfires on Government Pleads Guilty to Setting 14 Fires.” CBC, 16 Jan. 2024.

Canada, Public Health Agency of. “Rapid Review: An Intersectional Analysis of the Disproportionate Health Impacts of Wildfires on Diverse Populations and Communities.” Www.canada.ca, 18 July 2024.

If there's one thing that following right-wing media's coverage of the DNC has taught me, it's that all of these guys are massive dorks.

Apparently Matt Walsh went "undercover" at the DNC and, like all of the great investigative journalists of our time, he got his cover blown in about twelve seconds. I guess between this and his upcoming self-described "documentary" Am I Racist? (I could've answered that question but whatever), Matt's trying to pick up where James O'Keefe left off and become the new "I went undercover to [INSERT ORGANIZATION THAT RIGHT-WING MEDIA IS PISSED AT HERE] and spliced together a bunch of out of context clips" grifter since his whole schtick of being the "transphobia guy" is slowly dying before his eyes.

The only issue with Matt's plan? He absolutely sucks at going undercover and seems to be physically incapable of creating decent "gotcha" moments.

So, the beginning of the show is just Matt plugging his "documentary" (heavy quotes) and then he decides to lay out the few clips that he managed to obtain, literally none of them achieve what Matt wanted them to achieve and it's glorious to watch.

03:37, Matt Walsh: "The honest truth is that I went to the event as part of my ongoing journey of self-discovery and that's a journey that begins in the movie but certainly doesn't end there. I wanted to learn how to be a better anti-racist, a better human being, and what better place to do that than a convention with a baby killing bus right out front."

Ok, it's pretty obvious that Matt's being sarcastic here since he's the personification of the phrase "Schrodinger’s douchebag" but since he put it out there I'm going to help long-time friend of the blog Matt Walsh out on this journey of his by linking some of my previous constructive feedback of his work here. After all, the first step to self-discovery is self-reflection. Here are some helpful suggestions for Matt as he continues his journey of being a public nuisance self-reflection and perhaps we can all learn something about good journalism, ourselves, and just generally not being a waste-product of society along the way:

When you're covering far-right anti-immigrant riots, maybe do some research first before whole-heartedly embracing the position of the rioters. At the very least, understand the meaning of basic phrases in the stories you cover.

When you're asking the question of why millennials are struggling in the dating scene, maybe don't go on a weird misogynistic rant where you declare that the solutions are arranged marriage and workplace sexual harassment.

Oh yeah and stop being a massive dick. That last one in particular would be massively helpful for Matt on his "journey of self-discovery". I think that the best way for Matt to accomplish this would be to give all the proceeds from his show to an LGBTQ+ charity and then disappear into the woods never to be seen again.

As for the "baby killing bus", what Matt's talking about here is that Planned Parenthood set up a mobile unit near the convention offering free reproductive healthcare services, including abortion medication. The point was to offer reproductive healthcare to people coming from states that have restrictive laws around reproductive rights and it had no actual connection to the DNC. Not a good hill for Matt to die on either, 63% of American's in the US think that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Restricting reproductive rights, despite what right-wing media may tell you, is deeply unpopular.

Anyway, with that aside, back to Matt's experience trying and failing to make content at the DNC. But before we get into Matt's next quote, I just want to share a picture of his slick disguise. It's an absolute wonder that people figured him out so quickly. As you can see from this picture he's clearly the next James Bond:

I love how he didn't even shave his beard, the literal most recognizable thing about him

I like the freedom from gun violence pin because the sarcasm element of his "disguise" (heavy quotes) implies that Matt has the opposite position. I'm afraid to ask but...does Matt Walsh like shootings? Given that he's used his show to justify the motivations of mass shooters in the past I figure that I don't want to actually know the answer. There's also the fact that I am now putting way more thought into this disguise than Matt did so lets just move on.

03:59, Matt Walsh: "Now, I realize of course that elephant in the room here, no pun intended, that I'm not a popular figure in Democratic circles. I would go so far as to say that many of these people have a negative view of me. But I also knew that Democrats value tolerance above all, they embrace diversity, they have a welcoming and loving attitude towards everyone and I took great solace in that and I knew that I would be greeted with the same spirit, the spirit of joy and welcoming."

Hilariously enough as you'll see later, the one clip that Matt plays of him actually interacting with someone attending the DNC is just someone treating him with kindness and embracing his presence while he acts like a sarcastic dick to them. With that in mind, I don't understand what he's even trying to be sarcastic about here. If Matt had a clip of somebody who doesn't know the right way to handle grifters like him (ignore them if possible and keep your cool) calling him a fascist or spitting in his face or something of that nature you can bet that he would have played it.

Here's a little bit of Matt at the DNC having a conversation with one of the attendees. Note how she's genuinely nice to him while Matt just acts like a dick and slowly gets more frustrated as he fails to produce a good out of context clip for his show.

05:24, DNC Attendee: "So, are you -- are you super partisan?"

Matt Walsh: "Well, we're partisan for the truth is what we're partisan for."

DNC Attendee: "Right, I like that. Partisan for the truth. That's --"

Matt Walsh: "Even though I'm wearing a Kamala Harris hat, that's not partisan -- I'm advocating for her -- that's like a nonpartisan way I'm advocating for her."

DNC Attendee: "Exactly because the truth is if you don't vote for Kamala Harris and Trump gets in these policies get implemented."

Just for fun, lets compare this to an actually good example of what Matt's trying to do here, the movie Borat springs to mind.

In Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen went completely all out with his character and managed to get people to admit some of the pretty horrifying beliefs that they hold in private, like that scene where he got someone at a rodeo to admit that he wants Muslims to be hung. Here, Matt's not going all out with his stereotypical lefty character at all and is just saying dumb stuff while this woman is forced to just politely agree with him and make some pretty basic and obvious points like "if you don't want the policies of one guy to get implemented you should vote for the other guy".

This woman's just clearly trying to be nice to Matt while he does his dumb "undercover" bullshit and it's kind of a self-own on Matt's part that this was the best he could produce from his little trip to the DNC. When I first saw that Matt was at the DNC I knew that A): I needed to cover it here on the blog and B): that it would turn out to be dumb as all hell. I didn't realize that it would be THIS dumb though.

Matt plays the rest of the clip, if you want to watch it go right ahead. It's basically this woman being extraordinarily generous to Matt while he keeps trying and failing to manufacture clips for videos with titles like "UNDERCOVER MATT WALSH INTERVIEWS CRAZY LEFTIST WHO SAID X". I feel kind of sorry for this woman to be honest but I do think she handled this exchange pretty well and I hope she doesn't see any blowback from Matt's fans over this.

Matt later got kicked out by security because as it turns out his "disguise" isn't really as slick as he thought it was. Here's a little bit of that exchange.

08:07, DNC Security Guard: "So, I've been requested to escort you out and ask you to leave and in the process we're gonna need your wristband back."

Matt Walsh: "Why are they kicking me out?"

DNC Security Guard: "The people running the event is requesting that (sic) so this is a event run by the organization and they want you out."

Matt Walsh: "They didn't give a reason?"

DNC Security Guard: "What was that?"

Matt Walsh: "They didn't give a reason?"

DNC Security Guard: "They don't really give me a reason."

Matt Walsh: "Alright, I wasn't causing a scene. I was being very friendly."

I can give Matt a reason: he's a right-wing troll who was trying to mine a serious political convention for content. It's understandable why the DNC didn't want to deal with his bullshit.

Matt then says something to the guards that lets on how pissed he is about this.

08:55, Matt Walsh: "Wanna defund the police until they're calling the police huh?"

Go and listen to the clip of him saying that if you're curious - he sounds pissed. That's also a pretty dumb argument for two reasons: these guys are private security guards and you can be for defunding the police while also acknowledging the reality that you have to call the police in certain situations. Even though I think the police should be defunded, if I witness a stabbing I'm not going to stand there and go "Oh, I want the police defunded. Better not call those guys and let this person die".

Matt later went back to the DNC, which is trespassing but I guess his "law and order" crap doesn't apply to him. Here's one last comment from his show on the actual "undercover" part before we look at some of the other lies he's trying to push.

09:53, Matt Walsh: "So, later that night I did go back only this time I had learned a valuable lesson, if you want to become welcomed in left-wing spaces its important to not talk to anyone or express any point of view at all at any point."

Or just don't be a dumb far-right troll with a reputation for peddling disgusting bigoted rhetoric against minorities, that whole part of Matt might factor more into why he wasn't accepted at the DNC than "Oh, look at poor me, I expressed a point of view and now the lefts being mean to me".

The rest of the main segment on Matt's time at the DNC is just him being snarky and plugging his movie and I really don't care about either. But we're not quite done with him just yet because later in the episode he says something so mind-blowingly dumb and oblivious that my jaw dropped when I heard it. I then promptly burst out laughing. For context, he's talking about Josh Shapiro's DNC speech.

21:13, Matt Walsh: "It really is creepy how Democrats simultaneously pick up certain words and phrases all at once and use it incessantly."

Woke, DEI, "libs", ANTIFA, critical race theory, cultural marxism, pronouncing Kamala Harris' name "CAM-A-LA", and those are just the right-wing media buzzwords that I can name off the top of my head.

Seriously, what an absolutely insane thing for any right-wing pundit to say. Wow, imagine picking up on words and driving them into the ground MATT.

22:27, Matt Walsh: "The point from that clip is Josh Shapiro's examples of freedom, speaking of weird, and he says its not freedom to tell our children what books they're allowed to read. Now, as you know this is, in reality, Josh Shapiro's defending gay pornography in schools because what he's directly referring to is the attempt by Republicans to get gay porn out of schools."

We've discussed this particular line of attack from right-wing media before but no, the books being banned aren't "gay porn", they are often banned for so much as featuring LGBTQ characters and themes while books that feature heteronormative themes, even explicit ones, remain unchallenged. The books that have explicit material are restricted to high schoolers only and obviously aren't being read by say, a second grader.

What Walsh also will not tell you is the positive benefits of having LGBTQ affirming literature and curriculum in schools on the mental health of queer youth. There is a crisis going on with the mental health of LGBTQ youths. According to the CDC, 73% of LGBTQ youth have experienced symptoms of anxiety and 58% have experienced symptoms of depression while the Trevor Project estimates that nearly half of LGBTQ youth have considered suicide in the past. However, LGBTQ affirming schools have been shown to have an extremely positive impact on these kids lives and can even save lives. According to the Trevor Project, transgender and nonbinary students who go to gender affirming schools reported lower rates of attempting suicide. Furthermore, LGBTQ youth who reported living in accepting communities attempted suicide at less than half the rate of those living in unaccepting communities. LGBTQ positive spaces save lives which is why right-wing figures that advocate for taking those spaces away are a special type of awful.

24:03, Matt Walsh: "Lets just take the statement at face value. It's not freedom to tell our children what books they're allowed to read. What? I mean, do you not tell your children what books they can read? Would you allow your children to read any book they want? Ok, if your 8 year old picks up Fifty Shades of Grey are you gonna let them read it?"

If you watch the speech and think about it for five seconds you'll understand that Shapiro was talking about the government telling parents what books their kids are allowed to read. It was worded in a kind of clunky and awkward way for sure but it's not that hard to figure out what he meant.

One thing about Matt Walsh is that he's not really trying to produce a good forty minute show, he's trying to produce a couple good clips for TikTok and YouTube shorts and the rest of the show is just lazy nonsense like this. Michael Knowles does the same thing. Don't get me wrong, all of these Daily Wire shows are profoundly lazy but with Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles you just have these long stretches where they say absolutely nothing.

Conclusion:

Well, Matt Walsh isn't exactly the master of disguise that he thinks he is and hopefully this is the end of his career as an undercover operative. However, there is one unresolved question that's been plaguing my mind about all of this:

Did Matt Walsh ever stop by the random pizza place that Charlie Kirk took over and visited Charlie and Jack Posobiec? I'll give Charlie Kirk this, at least he went to the DNC as himself and embarrassed himself in a way that had his name attached to it. Matt doesn't even have that going for him. Is James O'Keefe still around to give this guy pointers? He definitely needs them.

Cheers and I'll see you in the next one

Original Video:

“Ep. 1428 - My Incredible Journey of Self-Discovery at the DNC.” Dailywire.com, The Daily Wire, 22 Aug. 2024.

Sources Cited:

“From Vasectomies to Abortion Pills, Planned Parenthood Sets up Mobile Clinic near DNC.” NPR, 20 Aug. 2024.

Pew Research Center. “Public Opinion on Abortion.” Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, Pew Research Center, 13 May 2024.

Sandoval, Martha. “6 Stats You Need to Know about LGBTQ+ Youth Mental Health | Northwell Health.” Www.northwell.edu, 14 Nov. 2023.

Charlie Kirk is currently at the DNC...apparently.

He's apparently decided that the best use of his time was traveling to the DNC to make an absolute idiot out of himself, a pursuit which he could and has easily accomplished back home in Arizona. Anyway, he's mostly dedicated his trip so far to interviewing a bunch of liars as well as making really stupid points about the DNC daring to have security measures in place. Still, I think it's worth seeing how the right-wing media is responding to the DNC so lets power through this together.

06:00, Charlie Kirk: "We are here at Bacci's Pizza right outside of the United Centre within the secure perimeter. We have an amazing show in store for you, we have Senator Rick Scott right out of the gate, he's actually right down the street. The security, you wouldn't believe it. They have walls here, they have voter ID here, they have police everywhere. It doesn't feel like a Democrat city, at least today, it does not feel like a Democrat Convention, it's funny how that works."

Alright, some takeaways here.

Apparently Charlie's just hanging out at some random pizza place inside the secure perimeter of the DNC, fun. Charlie should do all of his shows like this. You know, just show up at a random Dominos in Arizona and go "This is the Charlie Kirk Show now bitches".

The more serious point here is that Charlie seems to think that the Democrats having security at their convention is some kind of gotcha, it really isn't. The RNC had the exact same security precautions set up because they're both major political events and they obviously have to have steps in place to protect the high-profile people who are going to be there. Isn't Charlie supposed to be for more security for politicians in the wake of the Trump shooting? This line of attack doesn't make any sense, especially coming from him!

I guess what he's trying to say is that the Democrats are being hypocritical because they have an open border in place. That is completely false and is just overall a ridiculous comparison to make. "They have voter ID here", does Charlie think that you can just randomly stroll into a voting booth and vote in the presidential election? If he truly thinks that he truly inhabits an alternate universe. And voter ID for what?! Is Charlie Kirk a delegate all of a sudden? What is he even talking about?

So, the show cuts to commercial break and then Rick Scott shows up to open the show. For those who don't know, Rick Scott is the current junior senator from Florida and an unrepentant fraudster. I don't really care about what he has to say about anything but there are still some lies that he tells that are worth debunking, such as:

12:28, Charlie Kirk: "Senator, it will be interesting to see how, if at all, they address the illegal immigration problem. I was joking around, I am here on the interior of the Democrat Convention, right here is the United Centre, we're just feet away from where the convention is going to be occurring. In order to get in senator, there is massive walls here. Huge walls, I thought walls do not work. Senator, how do we best put on display the failed immigration policies of Kamala Harris."

Rick Scott: "What you do is talk about how it's impacted families. Talk about somebody that lost their kid to fentanyl, talk about somebody like Lakin Riley that was raped and murdered, talk about just in Florida, just recently we had two women raped and or panhandled by illegal immigrants."

So, what Rick Scott here wants the Republicans to do is exploit tragedies to fearmonger about migrants. Lovely.

Migrants aren't smuggling in the majority of the fentanyl into America. A majority of fentanyl is smuggled in through ports of entry via trucks and tractor trailers. Obviously fentanyl is a huge problem in America which is why falsely blaming the crisis on migrants smuggling it into the border is extremely unhelpful, we need to be addressing the real crisis and not the made up one. Migrants are also statistically less likely to commit crimes than American citizens but Rick's never going to acknowledge that fact and neither is Charlie who's still obsessed with his stupid wall joke.

As for those two women who were allegedly raped by a migrant, I have absolutely zero idea what Rick is talking about! The closest I could find was a story from July where two migrants were arrested for sexually assaulting a teenage girl. Either I'm missing something or this story was made up by Rick because he couldn't think of another example of this supposed immigrant crime epidemic that's not the one that they've been exploiting for months.

13:45, Charlie Kirk: "And senator, in addition to that they say that the border crossings are going down but in reality they're just letting the same amount of people if not more through the CBP One app so it's just different how they're categorizing it."

The CBP One app has actually been a total disaster for the opposite reason that Charlie and Rick think. For those who don't know, CBP One is the app that you have to use if you want to apply for asylum to the United States and so far it's been a humanitarian disaster.

As many human rights organizations like Amnesty International have found, CBP One has imposed extreme restrictions on people applying for asylum. One of the conditions of using the CBP One app is appearing at a port of entry with a prior appointment. This has basically turned seeking asylum into a luck of the draw system and many people are left waiting for months to get an appointment. As a result, many asylum seekers have been beaten and or killed while waiting for an appointment.

So yeah, the CBP One app is bad but for the exact opposite reason. They're not "letting a flood of migrants in" using this app, they're turning the asylum process into a lottery system and people are dying because they're stuck on the waiting list.

14:29, Rick Scott: "There's nothing the Biden administration puts out that is factual but here's what they're doing, they're allowing people to just, in their own country, just apply through an app and we pay to fly them here and then we give them benefits. Think about it, we're giving benefits -- we're giving benefits to people, money benefits, health benefits, all sorts of things to people who are bringing illegal drugs into this country. So, they just changed how they do it. We have names of people coming across the boarder and they're not vetted, we don't know who these people are."

It's amazing how basically everything he said here is a lie.

Rick Scott clearly is smarter than this, he's in government after all. Obviously he knows that this notion that people can just push a button on an app and then hop on a plane to America with zero vetting whatsoever is blatantly absurd, I refuse to believe that he's that stupid. As mentioned previously, the vetting process that asylum seekers have to go through when they apply through CBP One is extremely extensive. Asylum seekers aren't bringing drugs into the country either, as a matter of fact 86.3% of all convicted fentanyl smugglers in 2021 were US Citizens.

Charlie has another really dumb point about the security at the DNC, shocker.

16:06, Charlie Kirk: "Getting into the DNC this morning was a fun challenge, right Andrew? I can say this with complete certainty, it is easier to walk into America as a terrorist than to walk into the DNC Chicago as a journalist."

Charlie seems to have had his mind absolutely blown by the security at the DNC, it's all he seems to be able to talk about. No Charlie, you're not a journalist and it's way harder to get asylum in the United States than enter the DNC. What a ridiculously out of touch assertion to make.

So, they talk about the senate for a bit and then do an ad. Radio break happens, Charlie talks to Ron Johnson for a bit who says basically the same things Rick Scott did, and then there's another ad. Charlie comes back and introduces his next guest.

35:25, Charlie Kirk: "Ok, we are back with Jack Posobiec but first I want to tell you guys about Hillsdale College-"

Kill me now.

So, Jack Posobiec is with Charlie at the DNC to lie a lot and also make a moron out of himself. I'm sure that Jack feels right at home here, after all he's back in a pizza place again. Jack's "role" at the DNC seems to be approaching pro-Palestinian protestors, trying to create "gotcha" moments, and promptly falling flat on his face. Here's a sample of his "work" that one of Jack's accounts posted recently:

Jack's next big scoop: "We've been informed by a DNC attendee that my mom is paying women at the DNC to have abortions on stage".

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this idiot but here's a little sample of what he was saying on Charlie's show. They basically just talk about "vibes" the entire time.

36:30, Jack Posobiec: "Charlie, this is an incredible place. We're actually seeing -- so, you've been here all day, I just got in off the plane coming through, when you look at the DNC and the RNC and the differences between the two you see the reflection of the differences of the character of the two movements putting these here. And so, I don't know if people can kind of see it, you guys can maybe widen the shot just a little bit, there's nobody on the street behind us here, its completely empty, there's nobody walking around, there's no one playing games-"

Charlie Kirk: "And we're right next to the convention centre"

Jack Posobiec: "That's the United Centre right there. It feels cold, it is sterile, it is lifeless, it is child free."

I love how Jack's best criticism is "BORRRRINGGGGG". It's a political convention, not Six Flags. What was Jack expecting? A roller coaster and some cotton candy? There are going to be entertainment events at the DNC if he's really THAT bored.

This is basically all that he talks about for the entire time that he's on screen. The rest of the show is just Charlie interviewing a guy named William J Kelly about the pro-Palestine protests and it's just idiotic stuff meant to demonize protestors that we've all heard a million times before, nothing new or worth talking about.

Conclusion:

Well, that was Charlie Kirk live at the DNC. Can't say that it was anything too unexpected. I'm shocked he didn't say "Democrats say that they're against walls yet the Vice Presidents last name is Waltz, curious" because that was the level of insight that he brought to the table here.

I look forward to seeing more of Jack Posobiec taking people who are trolling him 100% seriously and I wish them all the worst. Cheers and I'll see you in the next one.

Original Video:

Kirk, Charlie. “The DNC: Day One | Kelly | 8.19.24.” Rumble, 19 Aug. 2024.

Sources Cited:

Miller, Todd. “Biden’s Supposed “Open-Border Policy” Does Not Exist.” Www.thenation.com, 22 Nov. 2023

Sganga, Nicole, and Camilo Montoya-Galvez. “Fentanyl Seizures Rise at U.S.-Mexico Border — Here’s Why.” CBS News, 3 Feb. 2023.

Garsd, Jasmine. “Immigrants Are Less Likely to Commit Crimes than U.S.-Born Americans, Studies Find.” NPR, 8 Mar. 2024.

“CBP One Mobile Application Violates the Rights of People Seeking Asylum in the United States.” Amnesty International, 9 May 2024.

Something very interesting is going on in right-wing media and that is that a lot of them are slowly starting to say that they're turning on Trump. While some of his most loyal propagandists like Charlie Kirk and the Daily Wire aren't budging on Trump, some of the more fringe figures like Nick Fuentes are due to them claiming that Trump isn't taking the concerns of white-nationalists seriously enough. Than there's the FOX News side of right-wing media that just want Trump to shut the fuck up and stop embarrassing himself and the GOP as a whole but that's a story for another post.

I personally think that this "war" is just another grift on Fuentes' part. Nick Fuentes sees that he's slipping into irrelevance, in part because his rhetoric is way too fringe for most of the right who prefer more "mask on" bigoted content like Matt Walsh and Charlie Kirk, and he realizes that the last time he got a lot of attention was that time him and his followers went to "war" with Charlie Kirk. So, Fuentes figures that he can get some of that sweet traffic by going to war with another major figure on the right, namely Trump. Considering that he's managed to get Candace Owens to launder his image for him I'd say that he's sadly succeeding a bit on the attention side of it.

As for the actual "war", it's not looking so hot for Nick and his fans. They tried to brigade Trump's Truth Social account and then promptly got shadow-banned by the moderators. Oops, looks like the right actually doesn't really care about "free speech" after all. Who, outside of everybody, could have seen that coming?

All of this has made life kind of awkward for Candace Owens. Out of all of the "mainstream" right-wing media figures, Candace Owens is the one who is the coziest with Nick Fuentes. She's defended the white-nationalist in the past and Fuentes endorsed her show back when she was getting real antisemitic over at the Daily Wire. This has led to Candace and Fuentes' audiences seeing a bit of cross-pollination which I think is a huge factor to why Candace Owens has ramped up her antisemitic rhetoric since she left the Daily Wire. However, Candace also knows that she has to tow the party line with the pro-Trump side of her audience which led to a rather....awkward episode of her show.

01:23, Candace Owens: "So, I'm overseas in Europe periodically checking in to see what's going on in the American political world and I was pretty shocked when I saw Groyper War trending on Twitter. Literally overseas, here in Europe, that's how big of a trend it was."

Candace probably saw "Groyper War" on her Twitter feed because she travels in fringe alt-right circles and the algorithm picked up on that. For the rest of the world, the so-called Groyper War was treated the way it should be treated: as a grift and a joke. If you look at the news, it was barely mentioned and as I mentioned previously, it ended with Fuentes and his fans getting unceremoniously banned and crawling back to the hole that they came from.

I will say that this whole "I saw this thing on Twitter and now I'm going to cover it on my show as if its actual news" thing is pretty ridiculous. I get that things aren't really looking great for the right given Kamala's polling and that Candace wants to plug her ears and pretend that's not happening but man alive, find actual news for your news show. Candace plays the video of Fuentes "declaring war" and goes full homophobe. This is all monetized on YouTube by the way.

04:36, Candace Owens: "If you're not familiar what the first Groyper War was about, essentially you had a bunch of young kids, I would say between the ages of eighteen and twenty three, who were showing up on college campuses and essentially calling out people who they believed were neo-cons. Essentially people that where RHINO's pretending to care about American interests but effectively having sold themselves out to some broader cause, lets call it the military industrial complex or as one example I distinctly recall them showing up to a Turning Point event and saying 'Hey, Charlie Kirk. You say that you are fighting for Christianity but why are you paying people like Dave Rubin, who is a gay married man, to speak at your events?' but I thought, and I remember going through this with Charlie, that actually we have to be able to answer those questions."

God, Dave Rubin really needs to do some introspection about what his "friends" in the griftosphere think about his identity and marriage. Unfortunately, if there's one thing I know about Dave Rubin its that self-reflection isn't his strong suit.

Anyway, Nick Fuentes' fans weren't "just asking questions about the military industrial complex". They were barging into Charlie Kirk events and asking homophobic and generally bigoted questions like "Does anal sex help us win the culture war?". It was just a plea for attention and an attempt to mainline far-right extremism in more "mainstream" right-wing spaces.

Candace continues to try and whitewash Fuentes' record.

05:38, Candace Owens: "Now, this sort of led to a media backlash and all of the groypers were essentially put into a pile and termed white supremacists and I always thought that that was inaccurate and it was wrong because I was on those college campuses and I actually thought some of the questions they were asking were meaningful like, if we do say that we are conservatives and we are Christians why are we platforming so many gay married people? I think it's a fair question that we have to be prepared to answer."

Again, Dave Rubin should really ask himself if these are the people that he really wants to support and pal around with. They clearly have zero respect for him as a person or for his marriage. Hopefully his right-wing grift money was worth selling out his own identity and the rest of the LGBTQ community.

Saying that Nick Fuentes and his fans being called white supremacists "is an unfair characterization" is an absolutely insane statement for Candace to be making here. These people are open white supremacists! Fuentes has defended Hitler in the past and has even endorsed teen pregnancies. He's one of the most openly disgusting guys on the internet politics circuit and Candace's attempts to launder his image to her audience are equally disgusting.

06:43, Candace Owens: "So, that was I guess was considered the first groyper war and now we're at the second groyper war but these concerns that they're bringing up, I wouldn't dismiss these as the concerns of some fringe alt-right white supremacist group."

They definitionally are the concerns of a fringe alt-right white supremacist group.

As I hinted at earlier in the post, Candace has put herself in an awkward position when she decided to cover this story. She's got a good number of Fuentes fans in her audience and she's also got a giant chunk of her audience that like everything that Donald Trump does without question. Here's how she tries to reconcile with that.

06:58, Candace Owens: "I want to be very clear, I am voting for Trump because he is the better candidate between him and Kamala Harris and the coup that was just established on the left and my concerns about what they will do if they actually get into power, there is no doubt that Trump is the better candidate but I cannot say that statement without also being honest about the fact that something feels a little different right now."

They're so clearly scared. Kamala's doing great in the polls and people are starting to see their grift for the farce that it is. As a result, a lot of right-wing media are crying "psy-op" or saying that Trump's been somehow compromised. It's definitely amusing to see these guys rationalize these facts and lay the groundwork for Trump if he loses.

08:28, Candace Owens: "And I wanna be clear, again, that these are not -- just because you're hearing these concerns from Nick Fuentes does not mean that Nick Fuentes is the only person who feels this way. I'll give you just another example, Ashley St. Claire, she's somebody that I follow on Twitter, I think she's very funny. She tweeted this, 'MAGA energy is very strange lately. Trump campaign needs a shakeup'. I don't think anybody is accusing Ashley St. Claire of being a groyper, in fact she's usually at war a lot of the times with the groypers but she's sensing the exact same thing."

Ashley St. Claire was literally fired from Turning Point USA for taking a bunch of pictures with Nick Fuentes and other white-nationalists so yeah, I'd say that she's pretty friendly with that crowd.

09:06, Candace Owens: "I said, it reminds me, this moment kind of reminds me of a conversation that I had with Vivek Ramaswamy. I think Trump should've picked Vivek Ramaswamy as his VP, I felt very strongly about Vivek Ramaswamy and his general energy and his general philosophy."

There we have it, the only possible pick worse than JD Vance. I'm sure that Candaces whole-hearted endorsement of Vivek has nothing to do with the fact that Vivek gave her attention whilst more conventional Republicans like JD Vance didn't.

09:18, Candace Owens: "But he and I were discussing what it was that failed about the Ron DeSantis campaign."

Because he pushed the culture war BS that you and Vivek have devoted your entire careers to pushing and it blew up in his face?

09:51, Candace Owens: "And Vivek Ramaswamy said to me, he said because sometimes when you're a startup, having too much money can actually hurt you."

Ah yes, if there's one issue with Donald Trump that applies in 2024 that doesn't apply in 2016 it's that he has too much money. I guess Candace was living in some sort of weird vacuum in 2016 where Trump wasn't also an extremely wealthy billionaire back in 2016 too.

So, the rest of the episode is just Candace complaining about Trump "selling out" which is dumb as all hell. Here's just a little bit of that before we end off the post.

14:20, Candace Owens: "And now it seems like there's just a ton of consultants and those consultants are probably saying to him 'Don't you dare go on the Alex Jones Show. He's a conspiracy theorist. Haven't you heard about what happened with his lawsuit? Being bankrupted? The lies that he's spreded. Bad for your brand, we don't want you doing that. Oh, don't you dare talk to this person. That person is not for war with Iran and that's gonna be bad for your brand because we're now excepting money from the Pro-Israel lobby and we wanna keep you there.' And now he's doing interviews again with Megyn Kelly and people who were the face of the Never-Trump movement."

You can just hear "Why won't he go on MY show?" radiating off of Candace in this clip. Trump's been on plenty of extremist dumb dumb platforms lately. He was recently interviewed by far-right grifter Tim Pool and Nick Fuentes associate Adin Ross. The reason that Trump won't go on Alex Jones is because he's irrelevant and won't give him an effective platform to campaign on anymore. Alex Jones was a Sandy Hook truther in 2016 too, the thing that changed between then and now is his influence.

15:14, Candace Owens: "I'm not saying that if you were once Never-Trump you should never be allowed into the camp, I don't believe that. I think people should be able to change their minds. But what message is that sending to the people that got him into the White House the first time? What message is it sending when you don't go on those shows that you did when the mainstream media turned you off and wouldn't listen to you? It's sending a message, whether you like it or not, that you are now kowtowing."

Won't somebody please think of poor Alex Jones!?

Again, Trump goes to where he can get attention and Alex Jones doesn't have the kind of influence that more modern internet shitheads like Tim Pool have. That's just how he's always been, nothings changed except the landscape of the griftosphere.

Conclusion:

Well, Candace Owens is continuing her descent into the right-wing fever swamps of Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes and it really shows more and more every time I check in with her.

Candace is making a very self-destructive decision through defending Nick Fuentes and trying to get into his crowd. These people traditionally don't take too kindly to black people or females and eventually they're going to decide that they don't have a use for her and throw her away. Just like how right-wing media seems to have decided that Dave Rubin doesn't have much use for them and have thrown him away because he's gay. This isn't going to end well for Candace and it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

Original Video:

---. “MAGA Civil War?! What’s Going on with the Trump Campaign… | Candace Ep 44.” YouTube, 13 Aug. 2024.

Sources cited:

Covucci, David. “Nick Fuentes’ All-out Groyper Posting War Defeated by Truth Social Mods.” The Daily Dot, 14 Aug. 2024.

Petrizzo, Zachary. “Charlie Kirk Has Finally Had It with These White Nationalists in His Movement.” The Daily Dot, 5 Nov. 2019.

Holt, Jared. “TPUSA Cuts Ties with “Brand Ambassador” Photographed with White Nationalists | Right Wing Watch.” Right Wing Watch, 30 Sept. 2019

As I mentioned previously during my last post on the anti-immigrant riots in the UK, this whole situation has really exposed the extremist and racist beliefs of the right-wing media machine in the United States. Naturally, Matt Walsh decided to weigh in on the riots and, as anyone who reads this blog knows, any sentence that begins with “Matt Walsh decided to weigh in” never ends well.

02:10, Matt Walsh: "Southport is a seaside town in the northwest of England that looks quite a bit different than it did 20 years ago. There used to be a lot of young people living there for one thing and back in 2001 only around 4% of the population of Southport said they were born outside of the UK, it was a pretty homogeneous place."

According to the most recent data available to me, 95% of the population of Southport is white and 91% were born in the UK. Furthermore, 61.9% of Southport residents identify as Christian with the second largest religious group being atheists.

What this means is that Matt's not only being a racist prick when he pushes the notion that white people are being replaced in Southport, he's straight up lying! Matt and all the other right-wing shitheads like Charlie Kirk and Alex Jones are playing a dangerous game here and all it does is incite further violence in the UK. We're only 2 minutes into the video and this is already a shameful display on Matt's part. Trust me, it somehow gets so much worse.

02:37, Matt Walsh: "Southport's now much older, mainly because young Briton's no longer see much opportunity there. They've been replaced mainly by foreigners. One in ten residents now voluntarily report that they were born outside the UK."

Matt's playing a pretty dishonest game here because that I found that one in ten statistic also....and it's actually about the entire country of Britain. So, Matt's essentially obfuscating the fact that the statistic he's using applies to a way broader swath of the population which conversely is probably why he didn't provide a citation!

03:09, Matt Walsh: "All of these changes have been accompanied by various indignities along the way. Last year for example, British officials floated the idea of housing illegal migrants in Southports Holiday Park because it would be cheaper than paying for hotels."

This is just Matt misunderstanding British dialect because he's a moron.

This story was about the British government floating the plan to potentially house migrants in Southport's now defunct Pontin's Holiday Park. Why is it called "Pontin's Holiday Park" instead of just Holiday Park you ask? Because in Britain the term "Holiday Park" refers to a resort. They were planning on putting migrants in parts of a struggling resort complex, not a literal park like Matt seems to think.

This is the quality you get at Daily Wire. Some smug blowhard completely butchering a news story he's trying to cover either because he didn't research the story enough or because he's willfully lying to the audience.

We're only two minutes in and Matt's already messed up; the population demographics of Southport, his big statistic about Southport that was really about the entire nation of England, and now this story about the government planning to give migrants a public park that was really just another hotel. If you took Matt Walsh seriously in the past, let this be a wakeup call.

03:36, Matt Walsh: "That episode was pretty clear indication that Southport's decline was not accidental, it was deliberate. That's why the British government doesn't see a flood of illegal immigrants as a problem, they see it as an opportunity to shut down the local park."

The local park that wasn't even a park to begin with but go off Matt.

How does this conspiracy even make sense internally? Matt admitted that the plan to convert the "park" fell through so were the people that vetoed it the few good parts of the government that don't want British people to suffer? This might also come off as a shock to Matt but governments have goals other than making their citizens miserable. Government officials aren't sitting at some big table rubbing their hands together plotting new ways to make people miserable and make small towns decline, it's just not a thing that happens outside of cartoons. To be fair to Matt, at this point cartoons probably are his primary news source given how informed he seems to be about this whole situation.

03:59, Matt Walsh: "That's true even after the massacre that took place on July 29th. Police say that a seventeen year old man entered a dance studio in Southport that was hosting a Taylor Swift themed workshop for young children. Armed with a knife he allegedly murdered three girls, ages six, seven and, nine and seriously injured ten others including eight children."

And that's absolutely tragic. It also makes Matt Walsh and the right-wing media ecospheres exploitation of this event to push white-nationalist dogma against immigrants even more disgusting and wrong. Don't get it twisted, Matt Walsh and the rest of the right-wing media ecosystem are using the deaths of children to push hatred and stoke violence in the UK and it's sickening to watch.

So, Matt plays videos of the riots and then proceeds to give his take on the events. Keep in mind that this is a man who is still crying about the BLM protests being "violent riots" to this very day.

06:07, Matt Walsh: "So, competent leaders, people who care about the future of their country, would look at scenes of civil disorder like this and ask themselves why exactly it's happening. Its not enough to shake your fist and say that committing crimes during mass protests is a bad thing, although generally it is a bad thing."

But none of that applies when black people are being killed by the cops, got it Matt. To be fair, he does briefly attempt to acknowledge how dumb this line of thinking is coming from him.

06:25, Matt Walsh: "That doesn't address the problem and to do that it's important to figure out why people are so upset that they're willing to commit crimes in broad daylight. Is it because they've bought into years of lies about so called police violence against black people culminating in false narratives about life-long criminals like George Floyd, Jacob Blake and many others? That was the impetus for BLM as we all know."

We've talked about police brutality many times on this blog but just a quick recap of the numbers:

Black people are two times more likely to be pulled over by police officers than white drivers despite being less likely to be carrying illegal contraband, except for at night (what's more likely? Black people are just calmer drivers at night or that this is because cops can't see the drivers race?).

Black people are also two times more likely to get shot by the police than white people. This is despite them only making up 13% of the US population.

Furthermore, black people are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by the police when they aren't attacking or have a weapon.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. So yes, there is a problem with police brutality in America despite what Matt Walsh will tell you. Not content with dismissing the dangers of police brutality, Matt proceeds to defend January 6th.

06:48, Matt Walsh: "Or is it because, as was the case with January 6th, people didn't buy into government lies about lockdowns and mail in voting and Russian collusion culminating in an election in which Joe Biden somehow won millions more votes than Barrack Obama did in 2008."

I've talked about the "Biden won more votes than Obama" thing before but in essence, yes Biden won more votes than Obama in 2008 but won several less counties than Obama. What gave Biden the edge was record turnout in urban areas. In 2008, 61.6% of the eligible population voted in the election whereas in 2020 66.2% of the population voted. As a matter of fact, the Global Elections Project estimates that 27 million more people voted in the 2020 election than in 2008. This applies to both Trump and Biden by the way. When more people vote you get a higher turnout, it's that simple.

But what Matt's saying here should be crystal clear at this point: you shouldn't be allowed to protest unless its for a cause that he approves of or unless you are white. Notice how Matt just casually wrote off a primarily black protest whilst whitewashing a primarily white riot at a government building. If J6 was carried out by BLM protestors we'd never be hearing the end of it from Matt, but since its his side they're simply people who "didn't buy into government lies". It's a ridiculous double standard and requires insane amounts of mental gymnastics to take seriously.

07:04, Matt Walsh: "Or is it because, as is the case in Southport, people are tired of the decades long government effort to reengineer the demographics of their country."

As I pointed out last time we covered the riots in the UK, the population of England is 82% white. If there has been a decades long project to "reengineer the demographics of England", the government is doing a terrible job of it. This is just Great Replacement Theory nonsense that can be debunked in about twelve seconds.

Matt plays a clip of British prime-minister Keir Starmer stating that there's going to be a crackdown on the riots and then decides to attempt a gotcha.

09:12, Matt Walsh: "Now, through all of this Keir Starmer claims that he's not motivated in any way by the prospect of shutting down criticism of his countries open borders policies. Instead he says that he's really upset about civil disorder in general. Anytime protests turn to arson or violence, Keir Starmer says he's opposed to it."

Matt then plays a clip of Keir Starmer saying he's opposed to violence of any kind and stating that the UK riots aren't protest. However, Keir *gasp* endorsed BLM four years ago. He plays that clip.

11:56, Matt Walsh: "Ok, so you get the idea. You get the idea. Very different -- but slightly different tone. Can we agree on that? Maybe a slightly different tone between the two riots?"

Woah Matt, imagine having a different tone about two different riots. Wow, can't imagine that. Good thing you don't act hypocritically about these kinds of situations and condemn January 6th and these anti-immigrant riots, right Matt?!

By the way, 93% of BLM protests have been peaceful whereas these anti-immigrant riots have categorically been violent so this narrative that Matt's trying to build about BLM isn't even supported by facts.

12:07, Matt Walsh: "Starmer was talking like this several days after BLM protests in London resulted in injuries to more than two dozen police officers and this was after the BLM violence that I mentioned in the United States. The message was clear, violence for state approved purposes is fine but descent that humiliates the state and exposes its failures will be crushed."

If police being injured is the red line for Matt Walsh, he should be condemning the anti-immigrant riots left and right. During the anti-immigrant riots, more than one hundred police officers have been injured as opposed to the BLM protests in London which saw a total of 27 officers hurt. It's clear which movement is more violent towards cops.

12:47, Matt Walsh: "The idea is that because this killer reportedly was born in Britain to Rwandan parents the protests must be illegitimate. Now, pause for moment to consider the extraordinary degree of irony here. The same people who tell white Briton's and white American's that they're colonizers and oppressors, people living on land that their ancestors conquered hundreds if not thousands of years ago, are now telling the same white Britons and Americans that they have no right to be upset about the flood of third world migrants colonizing their country."

This is so dumb.

First of all, nobody is saying that modern white Americans themselves are colonizers. What we're saying is that it's important to acknowledge the historical atrocities carried out by colonizers in the past if only because it helps us understand where we are today. Especially since Native Americans are still treated like trash by the US government.

Second of all, how is modern immigration remotely close to colonization? Immigrants and even undocumented immigrants aren't barging in and slaughtering every white person they see in an effort to conquer the country, most are simply trying to live their lives.

Matt then remembers that he actually likes colonialism and decides to just spew out white nationalist dog whistles and defend colonialism for the rest of the segment.

13:35, Matt Walsh: "But what we have now is a colonization by subversion, its a subversive colonization. Colonization orchestrated by the elites of the country that is being colonized. Its a kind of self-imposed colonization not done for the purposes of spreading civilization which is why the Europeans did it but done for the purpose of destroying civilization."

What he's basically saying, if you cut through the dog-whistles, is that white people are civilized and non-white people aren't. Its blatantly obvious if you process it for more than twelve seconds.

I'm not the only one who's noticed this either, open white nationalists have noticed that Matt Walsh seems to endorse their rhetoric quite a bit on his show. In April 2021, white nationalist and political extremist Vincent James Foxx gloated that Matt Walsh is "beginning to sound like us" while reading a tweet that Walsh sent out about white people "not being allowed to be proud of their identity" in America.

Lest we forget that the thing that Matt is saying here is also stupid as all hell. America wasn't colonized by the Europeans to "spread civilization", it was colonized primarily for its resources, forcibly spread Christianity, find new routes to nations like Asia, and take more land. The colonizers killed and displaced the people that lived here before us, it was a brutal genocide and if you know anything about history you would know that this effort on Matt's part to whitewash it is completely ahistorical.

13:58, Matt Walsh: "European colonizers, for hundreds of years, brought civilization to uncivilized lands."

The way that Matt talks about colonization makes it sound like absolutely nobody was living there before and the Europeans just came in and tamed this untamed wild land. That's simply not true, there were people there and the Europeans brutally slaughtered them. Notice how Matt isn't even saying what the colonizers actually did in his bizarre little rant. Its just thinly veiled "white people good, everyone else bad" BS and genocide apologetics.

14:05, Matt Walsh: "In this case, uncivilized people are bringing chaos, poverty, and lawlessness to previously civilized societies. Very different kind."

Again, this is just extremely mask-off racism on the part of Matt which sounds almost identical to rhetoric I covered last week that was pushed by open white-nationalist Laura Loomer. Absolutely zero proof backing up what Matt's saying.

So, Matt reads a tweet from a left-wing activist and whinges about that for a bit. I don't really give a shit about Matt analyzing some random tweet from some person who I've never heard of as if its the opinion of every single person on the planet except for him and his fans. Then he decides to complain more about BLM, surprise surprise.

17:13, Matt Walsh: "And no, the same logic does not apply to BLM. Reasonable person are capable of distinguishing between the BLM riots and the civil disorder taking place in the UK."

Agreed, Matt really is an extremely unreasonable person isn't he? In all seriousness, these riots in the UK are categorically way more violent than the BLM protests back in 2020. We've seen bricks getting thrown at police officers and buildings were set on fire. These riots were sparked by racist disinformation like what Matt's spreading here and now people are getting hurt as a result.

Conclusion:

This episode had everything. Extremely disturbing white nationalist rhetoric, Matt demonstrably having zero idea what he's talking about, and genocide apologetics. Even by Matt Walsh standards this is really fucking bad and it just goes to show you how much the riots in the UK have peeled the mask off of the American far-right.

Cheers and I'll see you in the next one.

Original Video:

“Ep. 1416 - People Have Finally Had Enough of the Illegal Immigrant Takeover.” Dailywire.com, The Daily Wire, 6 Aug. 2024.

Sources Cited:

“Southport (Merseyside, North West England, United Kingdom) - Population Statistics, Charts, Map, Location, Weather and Web Information.” Citypopulation.de.

PTI. “One in 10 People “Living in Britain Born Abroad.”” The Economic Times, Economic Times.

Grierson, Jamie. “Home Office Shelves Plans to House Asylum Seekers in Southport Pontins.” The Guardian, 3 Feb. 2023.

Bennett, Jordan. “Research Shows Black Drivers More Likely to Be Stopped by Police.” NYU.

“A “Veil of Darkness” Reduces Racial Bias in Traffic Stops.” News.stanford.edu.

Bunn, Curtis. “Black People Are Still Killed by Police at a Higher Rate than Other Groups.” NBC News, NBC Universal, 3 Mar. 2022.

Ray, Rashawn. “How Can We Enhance Police Accountability in the United States?” Brookings, 25 Aug. 2020.

Greenberg, Jon. “Obama’s and Biden’s Vote Totals: A Flawed Comparison.” Politifact, 2020.

GOV.UK. “Ethnicity Facts and Figures.” Www.ethnicity-Facts-Figures.service.gov.uk, 2021

Mansoor, Sanya. “93% of Black Lives Matter Protests Have Been Peaceful, New Report Finds.” Time, Time USA, 5 Sept. 2020.

I mentioned to you guys that I might be doing a blog post on the recent anti-immigrant riots in the UK. Well, here we are. I didn't really want to do another Charlie Kirk post so soon after the last one but since islamophobia and right-wing extremism seem to be the theme of the week on the blog, given my most recent post on alt-right provocateur Laura Loomer, I figured that this interview that Charlie Kirk did on his August 8th show was something that I just couldn't ignore.

Charlie Kirk decided that in the wake of violent anti-immigrant riots in Britain it would be a great idea to provide an uncritical platform to one of the far-right extremists that led to the whole thing starting in the first place, Tommy Robinson. This booking is an absolutely shameful display on the part of Charlie Kirk and deserves to be held up for what it is: providing an extremist a platform to stoke a major scale crisis. I'll explain in greater detail as we go along but for now lets start the interview.

01:37:02, Charlie Kirk: "Joining us now is Tommy Robinson who can talk all about what's happening in the UK. Tommy, welcome to the program. Tommy, I've been following you for years, for whatever reason the oligarchs of western society tell me I'm supposed to hate you but I've followed you for years, I think you do great work, introduce yourself to our American audience."

I'm not an "oligarch" but I can tell you all about how much of a piece of shit Tommy Robinson is and how Charlie Kirk endorsing him is a damning indictment of everything that Kirk stands for.

Tommy Robinson, born Steven Yaxley-Lennon, is an anti-immigrant propagandist and pathological liar with a history of violence who's currently hiding out in Athens after he violated a court order that barred him from repeating false allegations against a teenage refugee named Jamal Hijazi. Robinson falsely claimed that Hijazi was assaulting girls at his school, he wasn't and this was a clear cut example of a teenager getting put on blast by a bigot to further a narrative. Hijazi sued Robinson for libel after he was assaulted outside of his school and the court barred Robinson from repeating the false allegations.

That didn't stop Robinson from screening his "documentary" Silenced in Trafalgar Square which repeated the lie about Mr Hijazi. The court ruled Tommy's behavior as an injunction because, well, it was. Before his hearing, Robinson fled to a five star resort in Cyprus like the lionhearted manly man that he is. However, Tommy did leave the resort after the press found his location leading to him recording a video in Athens where he whinged that journalists ruined his little holiday by revealing his location.

This guy has incited violence against innocent people and is currently inciting riots in the UK but heaven forbid that we infringe on his little vacation/attempt to flee from the consequences of his actions. Tommy's the real victim here, he claims. Just ignore the lives of the people in vulnerable communities that are being ruined by the violence that he incites against them.

Robinson also had a huge hand in the current anti-immigrant riots that we're currently seeing in Britain due to him spreading lies about the identity of the person who carried out the recent tragic stabbing in Southport. Initially the police concealed the identity of the stabber since he was seventeen years old, legally a minor in the United Kingdom, however that didn't stop Tommy from falsely claiming that the stabber was an "undocumented immigrant". This is false, the stabbers identity was later revealed to be Axel Rudakubana, who was born to Rwandan parents in Whales. Disinformation like this eventually led to violent anti-immigrant riots across the UK and that's where we are right now.

Tommy Robinson is a truly vile individual and if we got into all of the monstrous things that he's done we'd be here all day. Charlie endorsing him like this gives up the game about his own extreme belief system and he should be ashamed that he's giving Robinson a platform to spread this crap.

01:37:21, Tommy Robinson: "The names Tommy Robinson, I'm a journalist and author from the UK. I tell the stories that the government don't want you to see."

Those stories are false, that's why the "mainstream media" doesn't cover them. Because they actually fact-check what they're saying instead of just going "Muslim bad" and inciting violence against vulnerable communities.

Robinsons lies are well documented online for everyone to see and for him to get up here and claim that he's some kind of journalist is an insult to actual journalists. In case you can't tell, I really do not like this Tommy Robinson guy.

01:37:26, Tommy Robinson: "The problems with mass immigration, with open boarders, I'm from a town thirty miles north of London. When I was born there was one mosque, there's now forty five. I've seen the attack on freedom, I've seen the cultural change, right now in Great Britain we are fighting for our survival."

As you can see here, Tommy's rhetoric is steeped in white nationalist fear-mongering and paranoia against the Islamic community. His entire schtick is basically saying "Us whites are going to take back Britain" without saying that explicitly.

Also, there aren't forty-five mosques in Luton (where Tommy was born). Not even close. Luton has 25 mosques and 47 churches. In short, it's basically the opposite of what Tommy's saying but that doesn't really matter to Charlie and Tommy. For them, even one mosque is a sign of their culture being "attacked".

01:37:54, Tommy Robinson: "I face two years in prison for creating a film."

That contained a claim that you knew was defamatory but you repeated anyway yes. It’s pretty clear that Tommy aired that documentary because he knew that he would be violating his contempt order and now he gets to pretend that he’s the persecuted journalist on shows like Charlie Kirk and Alex Stein while he parades around luxury resorts in the Mediterranean.

Speaking of defamatory claims, here's Tommy trotting out a particularly disgusting one.

01:38:05, Tommy Robinson: "An entire generation of British daughters were raped at the hands of Muslim gangs. It was something the UK calls grooming, they give it a pretty name. I think in India they call it love jihad. In Holland they call it loverboys. What that is is groups of predominantly Pakistani Muslim men torturing, raping, and murdering young English girls."

The "grooming gangs" myth is something that's been pushed by British white nationalists to fearmonger about Islamic immigrants for ages. The problem of course is that it's a lie.

According to data from the Home Office of the UK, group based child sexual exploitation based on the limited data available is predominantly carried out by white offenders. Furthermore, according to the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse 89% of child sex offenders in the UK are white.

This exploitation of the very real problem of child sexual abuse to demonize minorities is a very common move in the white nationalist playbook and it's one of the most disgusting ones out there. Things like this not only dilute the response to real cases of sexual abuse by reducing it to a racial issue but also incite violence against innocent minorities by priming people to believe that they are inherently predisposed to sexually abusing minors.

01:38:27, Tommy Robinson: "Ninety percent of the convictions for assault crime in the UK are by Muslim men. 30 percent of the men convicted are named Muhammad."

The only source for those numbers that I could find was Tommy Robinson who pushes them a lot. In reality, Muslim men in the UK don't commit a lot of crime seeing as how the arrest rates for predominantly Muslim groups such as Arabs (who have an arrest rate of 4.8%) is actually quite low. The rate for hate crimes against Muslim's in the UK however is extremely high with 3,400 hate crimes against Muslim's being reported in 2022 and 2024, the highest of any religious group in the country with Jewish people coming in at second with 1,510 reported hate crimes. But yeah, Tommy's the one fighting for his life while cruising around five star resorts in Cyprus.

Tommy sucks as you probably figured out but lest we forget that Charlie Kirk also really really sucks.

01:40:53, Charlie Kirk: "Everything you said I have no disagreement, in fact I have total agreement with and the only difference between what I do and what you do is in my country my government can't put me in jail for making a movie."

Oh piss off Charlie.

As I've stated before and I will keep stating every time it gets brought up, Tommy wasn't charged with "making a movie", he was charged with defaming a teenager which led to the kid getting violently assaulted. Tommy knew exactly what he was doing when he aired that documentary in Trafalgar Square and now the right-wing media is embracing his narrative as gospel.

Nobody forced Tommy Robinson to make a film that repeated a defamatory claim about a teenager that he knew was a lie and yet he did and is now facing the consequences. I have zero sympathy for him whatsoever.

01:41:40, Tommy Robinson: "Charlie, the head of prosecution just came out today and they said they will prosecute and convict people who share footage of the riots if the footage they share may incite racial hatred."

Lying again. The prosecutor wasn't talking about "sharing footage of the riots", he was talking about messages and posts that incite racial violence. Obviously you can post videos from the riots as dozens of people have but when you start inciting dangerous racial violence that's when you might get charged.

In fact, Tommy's whole schtick is proof that this narrative is a lie if you're paying attention. Tommy only got charged when he intentionally defamed a teenager, his incitation otherwise has gone relatively unchecked. We're literally looking at him being interviewed on one of the largest right-wing media outlets in the country for heavens sake.

Charlie proceeds to build on Tommy's narratives and push his own form of white nationalism because these guys suck so hard.

01:42:42, Charlie Kirk: "So, I wanna get to this because I think it's very important. You talk about the mass Muhammad invasion of the United Kingdom and the lack of rebellion against that or response against that. Help me understand why that happened cause it's so obviously self-destructive, it's self-evidently suicidal."

"The mass Muhammed invasion". When I said in my last post that there's very little separating alt-right figures like Laura Loomer and more mainstream figures like Charlie Kirk in terms of rhetoric these days I wasn't joking. This is a prime example of that. That quote wouldn't be out of place on Laura Loomer, Stew Peters, or Alex Jones and it's pretty disturbing to watch.

01:43:20, Tommy Robinson: "It effects us, the working class and the UK is a very classist country."

Nothing helps solve classism quite like going on a conservative radio show. Tommy's so working class that he can afford to hobnob around the Mediterranean in luxury resorts and live in a million pound home, give me a break.

01:43:32, Tommy Robinson: "It's our towns and our communities that were effected where all these migrants were brought in. And they were brought in originally by the labor party which is democrat party to rub the rights nose in and basically to replace the working with lower voters because the working class decided to vote conservative."

And there it is, the great replacement theory. By the way, in the UK the population is 82% white so this "replacement" is truly something that only exists inside Tommy's bigoted little imagination.

So, these two tools go to radio break and then complain about Muslim "no go zones" which have been debunked so many times that I'm shocked that they can mention them with a straight face. Whatever, it's just more dumb crap that's derivative of the same rhetoric that they've been pushing throughout the interview.

Conclusion:

I cannot stress enough how dangerous and disgusting this is. Considering that Tommy's rhetoric literally started riots in the UK, you'd think that Charlie and the right-wing media ecosystem would be just a *smidge* more careful about booking him so that he can continue to pour fuel on the fire and incite further violence.

These riots in the UK have exposed how key anti-immigrant bigotry and the white nationalist great replacement theory are to the right-wing media machine in the United States. Instead of pausing and thinking "Hey wait a minute, maybe our rhetoric may be causing real world violence and we should cut it out before somebody gets hurt" the right-wing media has broadly responded by doubling down like they always do. It is the responsibility of progressives everywhere to push back against this dangerous rhetoric in whatever way we can before another teenager gets assaulted or the hate crime number increases to 4,000 because the Tommy Robinson's and Charlie Kirk's of the world will not stop and people in the real world are getting hurt in the process.

Cheers and I'll see you in the next one.

Original Video:

“Reagan” + the Truth about Britain + AMA | Dennis Quaid, Whatley, Robinson | 8.8.24.” Rumble, 8 Aug. 2024.

Sources Cited:

“Tommy Robinson Moans Luxury Cyprus Holiday Ruined after Stoking Riots from Abroad.” The Independent, 9 Aug. 2024.

Specia, Megan. “How Disinformation Fed a Far-Right Riot after a Deadly Stabbing in England.” The New York Times, 31 July 2024.

Waterson, Jim. “Braverman’s Claim about Ethnicity of Grooming Gangs Was False, Regulator Rules.” The Guardian, 28 Sept. 2023.

Karsna, Kairika. Child Sexual Abuse in 2020/21: Trends in Official Data. 2022.

“Repost Hateful Messages about Disorder Online and You Could End up in Court.”” The Independent, 7 Aug. 2024

GOV.UK. “Ethnicity Facts and Figures.” Www.ethnicity-Facts-Figures.service.gov.uk, 2021

“Religious Hate Crimes in England and Wales 2023, by Religion.” Statista.