Ep. 1500 - Why The Left Is Really Celebrating The Murder Of A CEO
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Today on The Matt Walsh Show, the left celebrates the murder of a healthcare CEO. But why exactly are they celebrating? Many people are missing the point on this story, I think. I'll tell you what's really going on. Plus, the father of Jordan Neely tries to cash in on his son's death by suing Daniel Penny. But Daniel Penny should be the one suing Jordan Neely's father. I'll explain. And the left comes up with its most desperate smear against Pete Hegseth yet. We'll talk about all that and more today on The Matt Walsh Show.

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After the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, there was an outpouring of very primal and vicious rage from all corners of the left, both on social media and in the mainstream corporate outlets. And for the first time in American history, the near assassination of a president didn't bring about a period of national mourning or condemnations from Hollywood and academia. Instead, the overwhelming sentiment was, in effect, that Donald Trump had it coming.

It continued even after the second assassination attempt on Trump, which led the New York Times to explain that Trump was blameworthy because he had stirred anger among the public. And many other publications, of course, had the same basic take. Now, obviously, blaming Trump for his own attempted assassination was always demented, but...

We were supposed to believe that it was acceptable to blame Trump, at least in part because he's such a polarizing figure. The left insisted they aren't always this bloodthirsty. They said that they didn't wanna see every single one of their enemies get murdered in public live on national television. Instead, they said that they just wanted to see Donald Trump get murdered in public because he's basically Hitler and Hitler is a special case.

Once Hitler's out of the way, they said, then they'd return to being normal, functioning citizens who don't want to murder their enemies in cold blood all the time. Now, this is a defense that was never believable. But after the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan this week, even the left is completely abandoning the whole pretense. If anything, the left seems to be gloating over the execution of Thompson even more than the Trump assassination attempt. It's not an exaggeration to say that

You know, we've never seen anything quite like this. They are declaring without any hint of reservation that it's open season on anyone they don't like. They are gleefully celebrating the horrific demise of another human being. Whether you're a politician or a business executive, it doesn't matter. They don't want you fired. They don't want you in prison. They want you dead. And they're being very clear about it now.

Former Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz couldn't have been any more explicit about this. She posted an article on her newsletter entitled, Yes, We Want Insurance Executives Dead. She also posted an image of party balloons with a celebratory caption, CEO down. And she wrote that while people should murder these executives, it's normal to wish death upon them. Separately, in response to a news article about how Blue Cross Blue Shield recently announced that it won't pay for anesthesia past a certain point, Lorenz wrote, quote,

And people wonder why we want these executives dead. She also posted the name and picture of the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield, effectively suggesting that someone should assassinate her. I mean, there's really no other way to interpret it. This is the same woman who says you're a psychopath if you go outside without a mask and raw dog the air, quote unquote. But wishing death on healthcare executives is completely fine, completely normal stuff. Now I could spend the next month going through all the reactions like this from the left. It's been

Suffice it to say, this kind of response was not unusual. It's very much par for the course. For example, Columbia University professor Anthony Zenkes, who apparently specializes in the field of social work, wrote, quote, Today we mourn the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Gunned down, wait, I'm sorry. Today we mourn the deaths of 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.

Then there was this response from somebody named Angie who said that the murder of the CEO had made her feel reinvigorated. I don't know about y'all, but today I feel so reinvigorated. Class consciousness is on the rise today. I haven't had hope like this in a long time. Here's the thing. They are so good at keeping us divided because people who are divided are easier to control.

So they manufacture all these differences between us to make us hate each other and fight with each other so that we don't realize our collective fight is actually against the elites. That it's a class war that we're actually in the midst of. The working class against the elite. Based off all the videos I'm seeing, based off the comment sections, based off the general consensus as a united front, we all feel the same.

We all feel the same and we're all agreeing. Do you know how hard it is to get the American people to come together and agree on something? God, imagine if we put our powers together to actually fight against our real enemy. I have hope today. Maybe it's naive, but I have hope.

So these people are euphoric over the murder of a man with a family, supposedly because they're not happy with his company's insurance coverage, even though most of these people know absolutely nothing about that. They hadn't even heard of the company until this happened. But they've been told by other people on TikTok that they should be happy the guy's dead. And so they are, because on top of being sociopaths, they are just brainless sheep.

But now, like Taylor Larends, they're turning their attention and their threats towards other CEOs. And it appears to be working. Within hours of the online campaign to harass and threaten the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield, the company announced a reversal of its planned policy on anesthesia coverage.

They now say they're going to halt their proposed limits on coverage for anesthesia during surgery. The company put out a statement reading, quote, There's been a significant widespread misinformation about an update to our anesthesia policy. As a result, we've decided to not proceed with this policy change. To be clear, it never was and never will be the policy of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield to not pay for medically necessary anesthesia services. The proposed update to the policy was only designed to clarify the appropriateness of anesthesia consistent with well-established clinical guidelines.

Now, on the surface, this looks like a victory for the assassin and his supporters. The assassin kills one insurance company CEO. The next day, an insurance company rescinds its plan to limit coverage. It's the kind of thing that seems like a major victory if you have no idea how the health insurance industry actually works.

The catch is that as a result of this reversal, anesthesiologists no longer have any incentives to stop over billing, which has been a major problem in their field in recent years. Blue Cross Blue Shield, along with other insurance companies, was trying to force anesthesiologists to accept the standard per procedure Medicare rate for their services. Anesthesiologists hated that idea because they prefer to keep charging high rates for hours that they weren't even working. And now, because of a harassment campaign by left wing activists in the wake of a CEO's murder,

These anesthesiologists have won. In other words, the same people who complain that healthcare costs are too high might have just made it a lot easier for anesthesiologists to jack up healthcare costs even further. It's a development that underscores the complexity of the situation. You know, there are plenty of nuances that are lost when you're reenacting the French Revolution and murdering people in the street instead of discussing complicated issues like reasonable people are supposed to do.

in this democracy that the left told us was so important.

Now, to be clear, there's certainly evidence that companies like UnitedHealthcare are becoming much more aggressive in denying certain kinds of claims. A Senate report from this year, for example, found that, quote, in 2019, UnitedHealthcare issued an initial denial to 8.7% of the post-acute care prior authorization requests it received. By 2022, it denied 22.7% of all such requests, an increase of 172%. Its 2022 denial rate for skilled nursing facilities was nine times higher than it was three years before.

The Democrat-led Senate committee concluded that Medicare Advantage insurers are intentionally targeting a costly but critical area of medicine, substituting judgment about medical necessity with a calculation about financial gain. Now, what the report doesn't mention is that UnitedHealthcare has profit margins of around 6%. After tax, it's really under 4%. And that means that as a matter of basic finance,

They're not driving up profits to some ridiculous degree. Like any business, they have a lot of operating costs, they assume risks. If they started approving every claim, they go out of business overnight, of course. The other important element here that Democrats overlook for obvious reasons is that Democrats are the ones who implemented coverage mandates, which inevitably raised the price of insurance for everybody. We saw that immediately after Obamacare, which was supposedly to lower everyone's premiums. In reality, it increased them dramatically. Now, the point I'm making here

is not that UnitedHealthcare is blameless or that the insurance industry in general shouldn't be criticized or that the CEO that was just killed is some kind of saint. I have no idea what kind of guy he is. I mean, he could be the very face of evil or he could be a decent guy or he could be somewhere in between. I have no clue.

What I'm saying is that there are no open and shut, clear-cut solutions to this problem. Any kind of solution requires real debate and discussion and trade-offs, okay? And murdering executives in the street is not the way to bring that about. What do you know? Okay, when you've got a really complicated issue like healthcare costs, you're not going to solve that by just killing somebody, okay? It will not make anything better. Not a single thing will be made better.

And that should make you wonder why exactly the left is so supportive of Brian Thompson's murder. If they don't actually care about fixing the health insurance industry, which they don't, then what do they care about? It'd be one thing if these left wing activists had the view that sometimes when things get bad enough, an assassin needs to step up and take someone out for the good of the community. Now, I'm not endorsing that view, obviously, but at least there's a kind of moral coherence to that, okay? If they really believed that

UnitedHealthcare is essentially murdering people and profiting from unspeakable moral evils, then you can see why some of these depraved leftists might get excited by the prospect of eliminating one of the company's executives. But any semblance of coherence goes out the window the moment you zoom out 100 feet and you look at how these same activists are reacting to the trial of Daniel Penney.

Now, if these people really thought that it's good and righteous to eliminate a clear and present danger to the community, as they do with the CEO of United Healthcare, which they say is a danger to the community, then why exactly do they have any objection to what Daniel Penny did? Why did they storm the subways and protest after Jordan Neely's death, chanting no justice, no peace? Why have they been outside the courthouse for every day of deliberations, pressuring the jurors to convict?

Why isn't Taylor Lorenz writing articles about how it's normal to be happy that Jordan Neely is dead? Why isn't that article? It's normal to be happy when a violent, psychotic hobo is dead. Why didn't she write that article? Why aren't the Columbia professors telling us not to mourn his death? Now, even if we assume that Daniel Penny actually murdered Jordan Neely, which is not true, but just for the sake of argument,

By their logic, what would be the objection? I mean, even if you pretend that Daniel Penny put a silencer on a pistol, waited until 6 a.m. when Jordan Neely started walking into a Hilton hotel and then shot him in the back, why exactly would the leftist be upset about that? Shouldn't they celebrate that? I mean, there's no way to dispute that Jordan Neely was a menace to the community. He violently assaulted multiple people, including women who were just trying to take a ride on the subway. He was threatening an entire subway car full of innocent passengers the day he died.

Yeah, he was also a Michael Jackson impersonator, supposedly. But on top of that, he was an abuser of women and others. He was, in every respect, a net negative on society, a clear threat to the safety and well-being of the working class. So why exactly is anyone on the left upset that Daniel Penny took action to eliminate the threat posed by Jordan Neely? While they're busy swooning over the assassin of the UnitedHealthcare CEO in Manhattan, how does that work? Well, there's really only one way to make sense of it.

In their world, Jordan Neely, as a black drug addict criminal, has a life of greater value than a white male health insurance CEO. Nobody wants to say that out loud, but it's true. If Brian Thompson had been the CEO of the same company, everything's the same, but he was a black woman,

You would not be seeing any of the gloating and celebration. You'd probably be seeing the opposite. In fact, the Washington Post would be working overtime to find the assassin and dox everyone in his family. They'd rehire Taylor Lorenz and have her track down the white supremacist killer, along with every single social media post he's made since he was in kindergarten. They'd probably solve the case in about 10 minutes. But as it stands, his victim happened to fit in a demographic profile of a greedy subhuman colonizer. In other words, he was white.

Didn't even matter to them that this CEO was probably liberal. His company's PAC certainly donated a lot of money to Kamala Harris. That wasn't important to them. So what we're left with is murderous, unrestrained, anti-white race hatred under the guise of concern about health insurance costs. A problem that none of these people actually have any interest in fixing because all they do when they're in power is make insurance premiums higher.

Their primary interest is destabilizing the country by dehumanizing as many white people as possible. And if that means killing some of them, so be it. In fact, that's just a bonus. That explains the response to what happened in Butler and explains the response to what just happened in Midtown Manhattan in front of the Hilton Hotel. If you're a white conservative Christian and you think that these people wouldn't gloat the same exact way if you were murdered while you were on your way to work, then you have no idea what the left is capable of or what they really believe.

Now, at this point, we don't know why exactly Brian Thompson was executed, but we do know why exactly these ghouls are celebrating his assassin, even as they demonize men like Daniel Penny. Pay attention to what they're saying. Spend some time reading their euphoric posts on social media. And soon enough, you'll find that even if you're not the CEO of a major health insurance company, they will have no problem coming for you next. Let's get to our five headlines. ♪♪

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That's ExpressVPN.com/Wallace to get an extra four months or even six months of Express VPN for free. All right, we'll start with more on Daniel Penny. The New York Post has a support. Jordan Neely's father is suing Daniel Penny over his son's chokehold death on a New York City subway car as the jury still deliberates whether to convict Penny of manslaughter.

In fact, the latest I just saw, as I'm saying this right now, the latest is that looks like we're headed towards a hung jury. That might change, but that's just right before we started recording. That's what I saw. But back to the lawsuit. It says, the suit filed in New York City, in New York Supreme Court on Wednesday, accuses the Long Island Marine veteran of negligent contact, assault, and battery that caused injuries and Neely's death last year. Neely's father, Andre Zachary,

Demands judgment awarding damages and a sum which exceeds the jurisdictional limits of all lower courts which would otherwise have jurisdiction according to the lawsuit. It was filed yesterday, Wednesday as jurors and Penny's four week long Manhattan trial broke for a second time without reaching a verdict. Okay, so Daniel Penny obviously has bigger fish to fry at the moment, but if he's acquitted or there's a hung jury or something, God willing, I'd love to see him respond to this lawsuit by counter suing.

counter-sue the father, Andre Zachary, for being a terrible father who failed to raise his son and allowed him to become a homeless, violent junkie. That's what I'd like to see. Now, we're obviously used to seeing this sort of thing when you have these racial martyrs and suddenly the family comes out of the woodwork. Family members that, by all accounts, were not involved in the person's life, didn't care, didn't give a damn.

Suddenly they're weeping and wailing on TV. Suddenly they care about the person who they never did anything for when they were alive. You know, we're very used to seeing this, but in this case, it's all the more egregious because Neely was homeless before he died. He was a drug-addled hobo screaming incoherently on the subway. That is a direct indictment of his father. His father left him to wallow away as a homeless lunatic, just left him to die on the street, and now he wants to cash in.

Now, if Neely had just died overdosed on the street corner somewhere, I doubt his father would even go to the funeral, you have to wonder. Now, there's an article, a very long article about Jordan Neely's life and backstory in New York Magazine. And the article tells us that Neely's dad, Andre Zachary, had been in a volatile on-again, off-again relationship with his mom.

Big surprise. And it says that he would, quote, waste his money and sleep around. That's the father. Eventually, Neely's mom apparently was murdered. And at that point, Zachary was not part of his son's life at all. The article says that Neely went to go live with his dad when when he was 18, when Neely was 18.

But his dad apparently denies this detail. But it says in the article that Neely at the time was a Michael Jackson impersonator. He was doing these performances. And his dad asked Neely to give him some of the proceeds from his Michael Jackson performances. They got into a big fight. And a year later, Neely was staying at a homeless shelter at the age of 19.

And now that same guy, this deadbeat, wants to cash in on his son's death, a death that almost certainly could have been avoided if he, the father, had actually cared for his son and had been involved in his son's life and raised him. Okay? It's not that hard to avoid a... I mean...

You can't guarantee it. I mean, even with great parenting, you can't guarantee your kids are going to turn out well. It's technically possible that you could be a great parent and a very involved parent and your child still ends up being, you know, a druggie on a street corner. But it's very unlikely. And with my own sons, I'm... There's plenty of things I worry about, you know, in general with my kids. I'm not worried that...

In the not too distant future, any of my kids are gonna be on a subway somewhere, drugged out of their minds and screaming random threats. I feel very, very confident that's just not gonna happen because I'm their father and I'm there and I'm raising them and their mom is raising them. So if that happens with your kid, it almost certainly means that you have failed as a parent.

just spectacularly failed. You failed in every way. You did not do even a little bit of the job that you're supposed to be doing. And the thing is, by the way, I don't think that Neely's father is necessarily pretending to be upset that his son died. I would hope that he's actually upset. I would assume that even if you're a bad father who didn't care for your son, you should still be sad that he died. If you're a human being at all, you'd be sad. So his emotions are

you know, maybe for the most part genuine, but whatever anger he feels should be directed at himself, not Daniel Penny. In fact, Daniel Penny, Daniel Penny is the one who should be angry for a lot of things and at a lot of people, but probably most, mostly at this guy, at the dad. You didn't do your job, dad. So Daniel Penny had to step up and do it for you. You know, that's, that's the thing. Um,

If you don't want your kid to potentially end up dead on a subway after a struggle with someone who had to restrain them, then just make sure your kid doesn't become a drug-addled violent hobo. It's not that hard. Okay, here's a...

Article from Politico says President Joe Biden's senior aides are conducting a vigorous internal debate over whether to issue preemptive pardons to a range of current and former public officials who could be targeted with President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House, according to senior Democrats familiar with discussions. Biden's aides are deeply concerned about a range of current and former officials who could find themselves facing inquiries and even indictments.

The White House officials, however, are carefully weighing the extraordinary step of handing out blanket pardons to those who have committed a crime, both because it could suggest impropriety only fueling Trump's criticism and because those offered preemptive pardons may reject them. But they've looked at Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff and others as people that Anthony Fauci getting preemptive pardons on the way out to the door. So.

We could be looking at a pardoning spree, unlike anything the world's ever seen, or at least that this country's ever seen. And we've seen some pretty extraordinary pardoning sprees, by the way, from presidents in the past. But it looks like Biden's probably about to do something that dwarfs all of that. He already started, obviously. And that brings up an interesting question about, you know, whether the pardon power should even exist.

Biden has already abused the power to an extreme degree. He's about to abuse it even more, it seems like. Is the answer that the power just shouldn't exist at all? Is this just a thing that nobody should be able to do as president? Now, if you're a libertarian minded person, you would say, no, it shouldn't exist, right? This is not a monarchy. Presidents are not kings. It's crazy to give one guy the power to just wave his magic wand and pardon anyone he wants for any reason he wants. Why should he have that power?

Why should the president be empowered to just point at any random person and say, no, they don't get that. You know, they can't go to jail. Not them. It's crazy. It's a power that can only be abused because it's inherently undemocratic and authoritarian. It's a holdover from a from a monarchic system that we fought a war to overthrow in this country. And so it shouldn't exist. That's the libertarian view. Right. I'm expressing the kind of the what we might call the libertarian view of this.

On the other hand, if you're, let's say, Michael Knowles, you would say that monarchy isn't a bad word. And just because something is monarchic, it doesn't make it bad. And besides, you'd argue the pardon power is a last line of defense against injustice. For example, we're all hoping that Trump pardons many of the J6ers. Even more, I'm hoping he pardons pro-lifers who were persecuted by Biden. And if presidents can't pardon, then those people would be doomed. They would have no hope.

So you could argue that the pardon power may be used in unjust ways sometimes, but it can also be a tool to remedy injustices. So those are the two arguments I hear, and I think there's credibility to both of them. My view is maybe a bit in between these two. I certainly wouldn't support abolishing the pardon now, which I assume would take a constitutional amendment anyway, which isn't going to happen. But

I wouldn't support it because Trump has to be able to use it for the reasons I just said and to address and undo many other cases where Biden persecuted and targeted his political enemies. But I do think there are some problems inherent to the system, the system where one dude wields the power to let anyone out of jail just by decreeing it as long as they committed a federal crime or were accused of one or not even accused, but as long as they may have theoretically.

The problem, though, is the same one we find in many other areas of government. You know, there's that famous quote you hear all the time from, I think, from John Adams, who said that our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people and is inadequate to the governing of any other kind of people. We're finding out why he said that and what exactly makes our system inadequate in that scenario.

And this applies not just to the people, but also to those in power. In other words, the problem with the presidential pardon is that it was conceived and instated by moral, dignified religious men. And as long as men like that have that power, there are certain lines they just won't cross. Doesn't mean it won't be abused, but there are just certain things they wouldn't do. But what happens when you're governed by undignified, shameless, power-mad nihilists?

Well, then the pardoning power becomes a problem. And that's where we are. That's how we ended up here, I think.

All right, Daily Wire has this report. CNN devoted multiple segments on Thursday to coverage of a Washington Post report about President-elect Donald Trump's Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, criticizing him for drinking beer during a Fox & Friends segment about St. Patrick's Day. The story came just as NBC News ran a hit piece citing a number of anonymous sources, but apparently not bothering to speak to his former co-hosts and colleagues at Fox News, accusing Hegseth of drinking to excess on a regular basis. And the article points out that, you know, it's...

over on CNN for their New Year's Eve coverage, they get totally plastered. I mean, they get Anderson Cooper and his co-hosts get annihilated on camera, and that apparently isn't a problem. So this is the latest allegation against Pete Hegseth, that they're hitting him for drinking to excess, allegedly, drinking on air. Here's one of those CNN segments. Watch.

Development as Pete Hexeth fights to hold on to his nomination for defense secretary. He arrived on Capitol Hill just a short time ago.

As new reporting from the Washington Post cites six former Fox News employees who say they witnessed Hexeth drinking at questionable moments. They say Hexeth, quote, had a reputation as a heavy drinker. And they say they saw him, quote, drinking on the job or visibly drunk at work events. CNN has learned that Hexeth has faced questions from senators, including, are you an alcoholic? Are you a womanizer? And did you embezzle money?

So drinking at questionable moments on air for a St. Patrick's Day segment is what happened. But this has been the new scandal. Leftists are all over it. Very, you know, very scandalized by Pete Hegseth drinking alcohol. There was also this tweet from an account called Decoding Fox News. It says, some anonymous sources at Fox News claim Pete Hegseth sometimes drinks alcohol while working. He openly drank Tennessee whiskey while filming the war on warriors for Fox Nation and

I provide receipts. She has the receipts. She's dug up the secret footage of a segment that was filmed and aired. Pete apparently filmed an interview with some other veterans, and they sat around and talked and drank whiskey, Tennessee whiskey of all things. It's important to add that in there. Tennessee, not, I mean, if they drank Irish whiskey or something, maybe it'd be one thing, but Tennessee whiskey.

So this is supposed to be very scandalous. Let's actually watch. Here's the receipt. Here's the receipt of this very dark and depraved moment. Let's watch it. Keep going. Keep going. We're good. You got it. Well, thank you guys for making the trip. Cheers to you guys. Cheers. Cheers to warriors. Appreciate you. Cheers. Thank you, sir.

Welcome to a special edition of Modern Warriors, War on Warriors. We are all here at an undisclosed location outside of Nashville, Tennessee, to talk about these concerns over some Tennessee whiskey with real warriors. Wow, pretty horrifying stuff. Drinking on the job is horrible. Never mind the fact that everybody used to drink on the job. I mean, to get all bent out of shape about drinking in general is kind of hilarious considering that

Like every great leader and great man in history drank. So this idea, well, he can't be defense secretary. He drinks. Oh, you mean like everyone ever who's been in any position of leadership for like 10,000 years? This was a normal part of the culture, like of pretty much every culture until recently. I mean, it's still a lot of people drink, but

Your grandfather was drinking whiskey at 1 p.m. on workdays, okay? And the world functioned pretty well back then. Pretty well. I mean, the world, the civilization, the society that brought us from horse and buggy to the moon in the span of 60 or 70 years, all those people were drinking whiskey in the afternoon, okay? So...

But never mind that. Drinking on the job is terrible. Drinking on air is especially terrible. But I have to tell you, I do have to reveal this. This is a widespread problem, actually, drinking on air. In fact, you weren't expecting this, but I'm going to be a whistleblower right now. This is me turning whistleblower here at The Daily Wire. Because I'll tell you that here at The Daily Wire, there are people here who drink on air. I'm not going to mention any names, but there are people. People who are...

Certainly not qualified to be defense secretary, it turns out, due to their rampant on-air drinking. So let me show you this. Here's secret footage that I've captured of a Daily Wire backstage episode. It's just the most recent one. And you won't be able to see this. You have to watch the video. If you're listening to the audio podcast, you've got to watch the video. But look at what you see in the foreground. This is pretty disturbing. Watch this. You hear people talk about it, kind of taking it for granted. Not me.

Not approaching it with not just the reverence, but the fascination that I think these books deserve. There also is this problem we have in modernity, which is we clearly took a wrong exit at some point. And you see that all around us. But if you take a wrong exit and you go 500 miles down the road, you don't just get to tell. So there you see it. That was a that was Daily Wire host Michael Knowles. And you notice the bottles of whiskey in front of multiple bottles of whiskey in front of him.

And I can tell you that Michael Knowles drank during that backstage episode. He drank, he was drinking. He drinks during all of them. And he smokes alcohol and tobacco on air while children could be watching. It's objectionable, incredibly. Now, I know you might be thinking, you might be thinking, wait a minute, Matt, don't you also drink alcohol?

during every backstage episode? Don't you arguably drink more than any of them during that? You'll see me with a whiskey glass consuming a brownish liquid. That's not whiskey, that's apple juice. I always tell them, anyone here can tell you, I'm all about apple juice. And so before we started, I said, bring me my nice apple juice. Give me a nice apple juice to sip on for this. And so that's how I relax. I relax with a bit of apple juice

Big apple juice guy. But I object to the alcohol consumption. I tell them all the time. I say, fellas, this is not right. This is a bad example. I say it. That's what I say. I do. I promise. So pretty terrible stuff. All joking aside for a moment, I would just move on from there. But I do have to say, I can't just leave it there because...

You got to hold the line here. This has to be, you draw a line here, I mean, with Pete Hegseth. Because we can, these scandals that they keep pulling up, they're either obviously totally bogus, you know, the rape claims. And you notice how they've moved on from that, by the way. Okay. Let's talk about that for a moment. If the left actually believed the rape claim that was made,

then they wouldn't be moving on to digging up videos of Pete Hegseth having a sip of whiskey with his military buddies, okay? You wouldn't move on to that if you actually thought the guy was a rapist, okay? If you believe the story that he, I guess, coaxed some woman up to his hotel room, wouldn't let her, kidnapped her. That means he's guilty. I mean, if it was true what he was accused of, then he should be in prison for the rest of his life. This is like kidnapping, this is assault, rape, all these things.

So if you really believe that, you wouldn't now be talking about, oh, he drank some whiskey or had a beer on a St. Patrick's Day segment.

So the fact that you're getting this kind of like machine gun fire of these fake scandals, it shows you that part of it is like they're trying to flood the zone. And but why do they do that? It's because they know that that none of them mean anything. They know that either they're totally made and made up and bogus or the scandals are not scandals. It's just nothing. It's ridiculous. Right.

And that's what you do. If you've got real dirt on somebody, if you've got something real, something serious, something that could really destroy them, then you put that out there and you just hammer that constantly. What you don't do if you have real dirt is just dump a bunch of other dirt on top of it or stuff that isn't even dirt, but like so that the one thing you have gets buried under all the other nonsense. When you see them start using this tactic,

That's how you know that they really got nothing. And which is why Republicans absolutely need to hold the line on this. And this just makes it all the more important that Pete Hegseth is confirmed. I mean, you cannot let this kind of tactic win. And I'll tell you one thing, that if it does, if the left does win on this, if this does prove successful, that's a very, very bad sign for the next two years.

Because we need Republicans. You've got two years. You've got only two years that you can be sure of. And probably will only be two years because in recent history, midterm elections usually don't go very well for the party in power. So you can only count on two years. You've got two years to advance your agenda. You've got two years to push through the policies and everything else that you ran on, that Trump ran on, that all these Republicans ran on. And you're going to have to do it, obviously, over the objection of Republicans.

leftists. They're going to be crying and whining about it the whole time. They're going to try to make every single thing you do into a major scandal. And so if Republicans start off by caving and not holding the line on Pete Hegseth, then that sets a very bad precedent going forward. So this has to be a deal breaker. It just has to be.

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You get unlimited access to BenKey, our kids app packed with content that reflects your values. Already a member? Well, give the gift of Daily Wire Plus this holiday season at 50% off. This deal ends on Sunday. Go to dailywire.com/cyberweek now and join the fight. Yesterday we talked pretty extensively about the Supreme Court case stemming from our law in Tennessee banning child gender transitions. And we discussed the pro-trans, as we discussed, the pro-trans side fell apart during the hearing.

They were forced to concede major points that, until that moment, had been central to their argument. They had to admit that transitioning doesn't prevent suicides. They had to admit that transgenderism is not an immutable characteristic, which means that the law cannot be discriminating based on an immutable characteristic, as they had claimed. They also admitted that

Cross-sex hormones can cause infertility. And they admitted that people regret gender transition procedures. These are all things that the Biden administration and the ACLU admitted during oral arguments while trying to argue against a law banning these procedures. So their whole case was destroyed, and it was destroyed by their own hand. That was the action inside. Outside, it was no better. As you saw, we showed up to rally together outside the Supreme Court. But the other side showed up, too, to try to drown us out. They had their own rally, which was set up right next to ours.

There was one moment from their rally that I initially missed, and it's worth playing now, I think, and discussing a little bit because it's another moment where the so-called trans rights side collapsed in on itself just by talking. So here is the actress Annette Bening, who apparently came to this rally and was there to talk about her quote-unquote trans child. Watch. I think the greatest gift of my life is to have kids.

And to have a transgender child has made me so much more interesting. So much more wise.

For the Supreme Court justices, I encourage them to talk to their kids, their grandkids, their nieces and nephews, because I'll bet if they really sit down and ask them, "Do you know trans kids around you? Do you have any non-binary friends?" They're going to say yes. And they're going to say that this is part of the beautiful rainbow of human beings everywhere.

Pretty compelling constitutional argument there, right, for the justices to take into consideration. The beautiful rainbow, the beautiful rainbow of human beings. Here's just a general comment, though, but even putting this issue aside, if you're a Supreme Court justice trying to decide the constitutionality of a law, no, do not go talk to a child about it. OK, don't don't don't go don't go talk to your nieces and nephews and grandchildren.

It would matter what the issue is. They don't know. OK, I don't. That's not who a Supreme Court justice should be consulting when trying to analyze the constitutionality of a law. So anyway, there's Annette Bening. And I'm not sure I even need to say anything about what we just heard there, but I already did. We'll continue to.

Because that was a classic moment of saying the quiet part out loud. Annette Bening declares that having a trans kid has made her more interesting. Think about that. She didn't even say that it's made life more interesting or that her child is interesting or anything like that. No, she said that it has made her more interesting. According to Annette Bening, the great benefit of transitioning a child is that it makes the parent, it makes her into a more interesting person.

Now there are two extremely large problems here. First of all, it's not true. There's nothing interesting about having a quote trans child. Nothing interesting about this woman. It's not interesting that some washed up left wing actress has a trans kid. That's about the least interesting development imaginable. Every washed up left wing actress in Hollywood has a trans kid quote unquote now. That's the trend.

There's nothing interesting about following a trend. Nobody's fascinated by it. No one's gonna hear that an actress has a trans kid and say, wow, that's amazing. How interesting.

It's like me buying a pickup truck because I think it'll make me more interesting. I like pickup trucks, but if I have one, it makes me the same as literally every other adult male in the state of Tennessee, okay? Now, the difference, of course, is that pickup trucks are good. It's good to have one. Transing your child is not good. And also, of course, a pickup truck is an object. A child is not, but that's the point. That's how these people treat their own kids. They treat their kids like objects, like accessories, like fashion statements.

That's the main point here. Annette Bening has revealed what should already be obvious, which is that it's all about her. Annette Bening's child is trans because Annette Bening is projecting her own desires and preferences and narcissism onto her child. So I've said for years that the trans kid phenomenon is, in so many cases, really munchausen by proxy.

And for those who aren't familiar, I'm unchosen by proxy is when a parent or caretaker, almost always the mother, I'm not aware of any case where it wasn't the mother, pretends that a child is sick and in many cases will actually make the child sick. And she does all this so that she, the mother, will get attention. It's extreme attention-seeking behavior by the mother, and she's willing to do great physical and psychological harm to her child to get the attention she desires.

That's because she doesn't recognize her child as anything but an extension of herself. Her child doesn't have a unique identity in her eyes. Her child is not a person to her. And I believe that something very similar is happening here. Women like Annette Bening, and again, they're almost always women, and Dwayne Wade, see their children as mechanisms for bringing attention and praise back to themselves. They will guide or force their children in whatever direction is necessary to achieve that aim, which is why

as gender ideology falls out of favor culturally, you're gonna find that magically, like some great scientific marvel, all of these Hollywood leftists will discover that their children actually aren't trans anymore. Then they'll go back to just forcing their kids to be vegans or whatever, which is not as bad but also not good. We should always acknowledge that there are parents whose children fall victim to the social contagion very much against the will and guidance of the parents themselves. And I have a lot of sympathy for those parents.

But it's pretty easy to distinguish between those kinds of parents and parents like Annette Bening. The only similarity is that in both cases, the children are victims. In Annette Bening's case, her child is a victim of her. And that is why Annette Bening is today canceled. That'll do it for the show today and this week. It is Friday, isn't it? Yes, it is. So I'll talk to you on Monday. Have a great weekend. Godspeed.