Ep. 2092 - Conservative Journalists CHARGED For Exposing Minnesota Voter Fraud

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Conservative journalists James O'Keefe and Cam Higby get criminally charged for exposing voter fraud in Minnesota just six days before the midterm elections, an 18-month-old child is found breathing in a morgue five hours after being declared dead, and America's most famous lesbian bar is closing up shop. Just two months after relaxing its mandatory mask policy, six years after the COVID pandemic. Lesbians, huh? I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show. I'm James O'Keefe. I'm James O'Keefe. I'm James O'Keefe. I'm James O'Keefe. I know that the left wants us all to be complaining about President Trump's ballroom or something. I know that the big issue of the campaign is supposed to be some joke Trump made one time that makes a referendum on the government. When we turn to real issues, did you know violent crime is down by over 25% since President Trump took office? That it continues to plummet even. That seems more important to me. I think the ballroom's good too. But do you know when we get to like real issues? You know, things are actually going quite well. We'll get to that in a second. First though, looks like the Democrats are once again attacking conservative journalists. We hear so much from the left about the vaunted, wonderful fourth estate, the sacred journalists who preserve our democracy. But then the moment that journalists start doing real journalism, like they speak actual truth to actual power, all of a sudden those guys find themselves on the wrong end of a list of left wing prosecutors. That is what has happened to my friends James O'Keefe and Cam Higby for exposing potential voter fraud in Minnesota. Here is James in his own words describing the prosecution. Minnesota has just charged both myself and fellow journalist Cam Higby with two felony counts in retaliation for a bombshell investigative report on voter vouching laws that he did August 11th. We stand by our reporting. This is an attempt to criminalize investigative journalism. The charges are an attempt to distract from what we exposed as insecure elections in Minnesota. Today we are charging two individuals, James O'Keefe and Cameron Higby, with felony counts of unlawful voting and identity theft. In the report we did, we clearly stop and walk away before any voting ballot is even touched. Thank you so much, ma'am. Nice to meet you. Thank you. We go get to Muhammad. We come back. vouching system. I think it's pretty clear they did not intend to vote. Okay, so hold on. That seems like a crucial point there right at the end, right? The prosecutor says, now look, we don't believe that these journalists actually intended to vote. Therefore, they did not intend to commit voter fraud. And they certainly, if they didn't intend it, they certainly didn't do it. You might have seen a little clip in there of James dressed up like a Muslim. And James was dressed up like a Muslim to expose some of the potential pitfalls, especially in Minnesota, as regards the vouching system. What is the vouching system in Minnesota? Here again, James O'Keefe and Cam Higby. I'm James O'Keefe, and this is Vouching for Seven Other Muslims at a Minneapolis polling booth. We're going in to this location, and I'm going to say that I'm vouching for them. The name is William Lawrence. The question about the vouching program, yeah, vouching, I can vouch for them, but they are not registered. That's okay, that's fine. Can I bring five more from up to eight people? Okay, that's a good thing. We go back and we get Krishna and Ernesto and Mohammed. In Minnesota, you can show up on election day and vouch for up to eight unregistered voters. Members of the Justice League dress up in traditional Muslim attire, including a transgender wearing a burqa. And put this vouching law to an extreme test on primary day, August 11th. So pretty strange system. You can show up unregistered to vote, show up on election day, say, hey, I'm not registered to vote. That guy's definitely not registered to vote. But don't worry, I vouch for him. So I'm so pleased right now to be joined by that burka-clad transsexual pseudo-Muslim Cam Higbee. Cam, thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Michael. so you're a criminal now, at least according to the left-wing prosecutors. I thought you were just a journalist. I thought in the words of that prosecutor herself, you had no intention whatsoever of actually casting a ballot. I thought you were just doing what journalists are supposed to do. But for that, you now find yourself charged with a felony. Is that right? Yeah, well, it seems that the only real criminals in the state of Minnesota are the people that challenge the state because I have watched so many crimes be committed in the state of Minnesota and none of them were prosecuted. Nick Sorter and I were almost killed outside of the Whipple building, the federal building in Minnesota during the ice riots, and nobody was arrested. The state declined to arrest or the county declined to arrest anybody, but they apparently filed charges against James and I. It's preposterous. So with regard to this particular alleged crime, what are they even charging you with? I heard the prosecutor there say, look, no, they didn't actually intend to vote. What they actually intended to do was just reveal this major vulnerability and openness to fraud in our system. And they did it in a really over the top, flamboyant, ridiculous way, thereby underlining how serious this fraud is. If you can have one of the whitest guys to ever walk the earth, James O'Keefe, come in with this Borat accent, dressed up like he's, you know, the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi. And he comes in there and says, oh, can I bring all my Muslim friends to vote without being registered? The Mohammed, Mohammed, Mohammed, Mohammed. And they say, yes, absolutely. Yeah, you can do it up to eight people, every single one of you. What's the crime? Well, they say, I believe that they're saying we've committed voter fraud, which is just preposterous. We never cast a ballot. I would assume that to commit voter fraud, have to cast yet we didn't vote never signed any affidavit we never touched a ballot we never even saw a ballot we did not do anything illegal but here we are this is obvious and i would just want to hit this point home too this investigation we conducted in august so why does hennepin county hold this until october 28th just before the election do they want to intimidate other independent journalists from investigating their elections during the general election Is that why? Because I can't think of any other reason why you'd hold it that long. August to September to days before the election, this is what they call an October surprise. And the surprise here is not just intimidating some Republicans, some politicians, some activists, but it's journalists specifically. So I just want to make sure I have this right. Not only did you not vote, so you didn't commit, you couldn't have committed voter fraud, you didn't vote. You never signed any affidavit as you would when you apply to register to. You didn't even touch a ballot. Nope. Can you explain to me how you could possibly have committed anything even vaguely resembling voter fraud? That'd be I'd say that'd be a question for the prosecuting attorney in Hennepin County. But unfortunately, she's turned her comments off on her post. So if you wanted to ask her that, you probably couldn't anyway. Do you know her name? Do you know her handle? questions about the obvious political intimidation and persecution that she's engaged in as a partisan hack. I believe it's Mary Moriarty. I believe that's her handle is like Hennepin County District Attorney or something like that. Well, I would strongly encourage all of the listeners and viewers today to just in the interest of journalistic integrity and good government to maybe ask this prosecutor what on earth she's doing, because the nearest case I'm trying to steal man their argument. I guess the nearest case you could possibly make is that James is doing most of the talking. You obviously were a little busy being clad in that burqa and usually ladies in the Islamic countries, they're a little more quiet in public. So James is out there and he's he's chatting and he pretends to be a different person just as he's talking. To whoever this lady is at the at the election facility. Now, there is a very simple way to make sure that people don't pretend to be people that they are not at elections, and that would be to require them to prove their identity, which is what we do in most elections around the world. This is a pretty basic level of voter security. It's been a really hot topic for the left and right in America for the last 10, 15 years or so. The left has argued that it would be a violation of our sacred democracy if you ever asked anyone to prove who he is. But if you don't, how do we know that there aren't a million James O'Keefe's who are not journalists? There aren't a million Cam Higby's who are not journalists who are actually trying to sign the affidavit and touch the ballot and vote. How do we know that the conservatives weren't completely right about voter fraud, especially in left wing strongholds like Minnesota? Yeah, well, I mean, it would be super easy to pull off in Minnesota because you don't need an ID to vote. And you also don't need an ID to vouch for eight additional people who are unregistered. So these are people who are completely unknown to the state. They show up, they're not registered to vote. For all intents and purposes, the state has no idea they even exist, or they could have no idea that they exist. They show up. And I say, Hi, I'm here to vouch for my eight people. I never have to show ID to vouch for those people. Those people register same day, and they cast a ballot. I interviewed three separate Minnesota election judges. And from what they told me, there is no provisional ballot. So when that person when you when you vouch for eight people, they cast their ballot and that ballot is counted. It is a real ballot. No ID has to be shown from any of the parties involved. And if you work at a housing building, like, you know, an apartment complex, you can vouch for unlimited people. Unlimited, unlimited potential for fraud. I contrast this with Tennessee. I was actually disenfranchised in an election by the government. And this was because of some legitimate issues like moving and timing. But there were actual like errors at the level of the government that disenfranchised me from voting in an election. I was very angry about this. It was super annoying. It was entirely the government's fault. And yet, I would much rather, live in a state that takes election security so seriously that I don't get to vote in an election one time. I would much rather err on that side, on the side of security, frustrating as it is, than on the side of a guy shows up, says some random name, never has to prove who he is, gets to vouch for seven, eight other people totally unknown to the state. And then if he has a special office, special authority, gets to vouch for unlimited people. That is a recipe for the collapse of our government, of our form of government. Cam, I hope that they drop this ridiculous political persecution. I hope and I'm confident that your journalism has called great attention to this problem and the corruption of people like this prosecutor in Minnesota. And if they do throw you in the can, you won't even have to convert to Islam, as so many people do in prison, because you'll obviously already have the burqa. Thank you very much for your work. We're going to have a lot of fun. Where can people follow you and James to stay up to date on this case? X is probably the best place. I think that'll be the quickest sort of avenue to information. I'm on all platforms, Instagram, X, YouTube. James is the same. He's on all platforms as well, as well as his organization, O'Keefe Media Group. Go follow them right now. All the platforms, MySpace, Zanga, LiveJournal, X, of course, Cam Higby and James O'Keefe. Cam, thank you very much. for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me. Really important work from those guys. The kind of political persecution you're seeing for conservatives days before the midterms, it is so, so brazen, which is why you need to go out and vote. And I want to tell you about GOP Votes. There's a lot more to say. First, though, go to gopvotes.org. The Democratic Socialists of America won primaries across the country. Next, they're coming for Congress and they're coming for you. If they win the midterms, they will defund the police, reopen our border and force men into women's sports. You are the last line of defense. And gopvotes.org is your partner in the fight. Go to gopvotes.org right now and make a plan to vote early. If you live in the critical Senate battleground states of Alaska, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, Iowa or Texas, early voting is already underway this week. Democrats are energized. The stakes have never been higher. We cannot afford to have people like AOC and her communist cronies running the show. That is why I need you to make a plan to vote early right now. Go to gopvotes.org to find your polling location, vote early and stop the socialist takeover of America. Paid for by SLF PAC, not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. Now, speaking of wearing masks, do you remember that lesbian bar in Massachusetts? We covered this. I can't get through one show without some major headline about weird sex stuff in the news. That's just the culture we live in. There is that lesbian bar in Massachusetts. We covered it. Everyone covered it a few weeks ago. The lesbian bar got in hot water with its clientele because they decided to lift, mandatory masking. You say mandatory masking. Yes, the lesbian bar required everyone at all times to wear N95 masks, the kind of masks you saw during COVID. But COVID was six years ago. But it turns out the lesbians were a little bit strange, a little quirky, a little neurotic. I know you'd never believe it. So they required them to wear masks. But then this was affecting business. So one night a week, the lesbian bar decided they were going to make masks. Masking optional. They didn't even say you can't wear masks. They didn't say you couldn't do it all the time. They just said one night per week, we are going to make masking optional. And the lesbians revolted. This was Lysistrata levels of social shutdown. They totally rebelled against the bar. Now the bar is shutting down. And no one knows the secret to this story. Everyone's covering it. It's kind of funny. Look at those crazy lesbians. It's the last ditch bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts. I kind of want to buy it and open a Mayflower cigar lounge there. I think it'd be really, really funny. I think it'd be exactly the opposite of the masking. Lesbians are welcome. Lesbians like cigars sometimes. But you can't, no masks. Masks would not be allowed. It's hard to smoke a cigar when you have a mask. The bar is closing. They announced it on Instagram. It will shut down effective immediately except for the previously booked events. So this is a soft closing. But then they're closed. They say love and solidarity to all. They're currently looking for new owners. If anyone would like to invest alongside, Mayflower in purchasing this bar, I'm open to proposals. But what is this really about? Everyone's getting the story totally wrong. They think that the lesbian bar is closing because the bar changed the mask rule. That's not true. The bar changed the mask rule because it was going to have to close. And what is underneath this whole story is the bar was going to have to close because lesbianism is in freefall. You heard it here first, or at least second. Lesbianism is in freefall. I actually mentioned this on the story the other day. According to recent CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey data, lesbian and bisexual identification among teenage girls fell from 30% in 2021 to 17% in 2025. So specifically during the era of COVID, it was like peak lesbian and BGT, LMNOP is all the rest of the initialism. That was the peak of it. You had 20, 30% of Gen Z identifying as LGBTQ plus, plus, plus. And then it's been on the decline ever since. The gay male identity has held relatively steady, though it's declined a little bit. Transsexual or transgender identity has collapsed. Bisexual identity has fallen significantly. Pansexual and all the other totally preposterous ones has collapsed. And lesbianism has collapsed as well. That is the issue. The people are joking about this bar in Massachusetts. They're getting the order totally backwards. They had to change the mask rule because they weren't getting any business. They weren't getting any business because wokeness generally is on the steep decline. And a subset of wokeness is this spike in lesbian identity. Also, look, I remember in my I get it. You go to a bar because you want to talk to some women, but you don't want the bar to just be all women. And you definitely don't want it to be all lesbians. It would be more disagreeable than average. It's not what you want, especially you had the masks. And that's why. this is some good cultural news. Now, we're not out of it yet because the Dems are entirely in on LGBT, DEI, every single initialism. They're all in on the woke stuff. AOC says, oh, haha, woke one was crazy, but we're in woke 2.0. Woke 2.0 is identical to woke 1.0. So they want to bring this stuff back. But don't lose sight of how bad things were and how much better they are now. This is my point. When we're looking at President Trump, I'll skip ahead a little bit in the show. I was going to get to this a little bit later. But violent crimes decreased by 25% in 2025. Trump is inaugurated. Crime collapses. This is according to data from the DOJ. Violent crimes across most categories dropped by at least 25% in 2025. We don't have final data, obviously, yet on 2026, but the decline has continued. All the data is still there. We don't have final data, obviously, yet on 2026, that the decline has continued. It wasn't just a blip for one year. This corresponds exactly with the inauguration of President Trump. Why? Because the Democrats openly let all the criminals off the hook, tried to let more criminals out of prison, called for the very abolition of prisons. They persecuted the innocent people, and they let the criminals off the hook. Trump comes in. He says, we're going to have law and order. What do we do? In as much as the federal government can affect this, they started going after the criminals, protecting the innocent people, crime goes down. The other aspect of this, this is where multiple issues relate to one another, is that a ton of the crime is committed by immigrants, and specifically illegal aliens. So just closing the border and stopping three million illegals from coming to the country every year, just that alone is going to drop your violent crime rate. When you add on to that, the two and a half million, now more, two and three quarters million or almost three million illegal aliens have been deported, on top of legal immigrants who have left the country, your violent crime rate is going to drop significantly. This is really, really good news. And it's the kind of thing that we forget heading into the election. But look, dig into these numbers. Last year, you saw 31% reduction in aggravated assaults. That's a drop of 390,000 in raw numbers. 390,000 people were not assaulted last year, basically because of Trump. 25% reduction in burglary or trespassing, almost half a million fewer, 30% decrease in motor vehicle theft, 350,000 almost fewer vehicles stolen. So the preliminary data we have for this year shows violent crime down an additional 10.6%. We've got murder down another 23% on top of more than 25%. Rape down almost 20%. Robberies down almost 20% compared to the same period last year, same period last year, which was already a decline. This is really good news. And this is the kind of stuff, if I'm going to the ballot, ballot box, and I'm not wearing a burqa or a Muslim garb like James O'Keefe and Cam Higby, if I'm going to the ballot box and I'm just casting my ballot based on what kind of country I want, I'm thinking of a few things. Gas is a little more expensive than it was last year. It's a little more, it is a little more expensive than it was last year. It's less expensive than it was during Democrat governance, but okay, it's more expensive than it was last year. And, you know, we got, we got this war that most of the fallout's been managed, but you know, okay, we don't like the war. And, and what, what are the other complaints? Well, DEI, basically over. Affirmative action, overturned. LGBT, pushed out of the schools. Immigration, moving net negative for the first time ever, basically, first time in almost a century. Things are looking pretty, violent crime way down. I don't know. Things are looking pretty good. These are the kind of issues that I would be hammering. Now, speaking of death, the craziest story I've heard in weeks, an 18-month-old kid was declared dead in a hospital, put in a morgue. He's in a freezing cold room, nearly freezing cold. And then five hours later, someone walks in to get his body, and he's breathing. We do not know very much about death. We know less about death today than we did 500 years ago. We will talk about it first. I want to tell you about Pure Talk. There's a lot more to say first, though. Go to puretalk.com slash Knowles. There's a remarkable business model in America where a company can charge you more money every year without actually giving you anything new. Same service, same product, higher bill. 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Go to puretalk.com slash knolls, K-N-W-L-A-S, for Pure Talk's best unlimited plan for just $29.95 a month for life. This offer is extremely short-lived. Go to puretalk.com slash knolls to switch to my wireless company, Pure Talk. Taxes and fees not included. Some restrictions apply. See puretalk.com for details. Offer ends 11-15-26. I coach football. Now, Coach Hank saves up to 25% off grocery store prices. 30 pounds of pasta, three cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks. And that's just pregame. Home of the Save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. BJ's. Home of the Save. This story's freaky, man. This is real, real freaky. The New York Times is reporting that Alexis Fior di Lino of Gilbert, Arizona is filing a lawsuit after her toddler son, Vincent, was mistakenly pronounced dead. This is back in February. The story's just coming out now. He was pronounced dead after he was found having drowned in a backyard swimming pool. Really just heartbreaking story all around. They were throwing some party there. I guess the parents had been smoking pot, and everyone thought someone else was looking after the kid. This happened in a backyard swimming pool. This happened this does happen a lot, even if people aren't smoking pot. They look over. The kid is face down in the swimming pool. Absolute nightmare fuel. Every parent's very worst nightmare. So they get the kid out of the pool. The kid is still alive. You got one of the parents or one of the relatives performing CPR. They take the kid to the hospital. Hospital does everything it can, and they say, all right, we're going to call it. The kid's dead. Everyone is very, very sad about this. They send the kid to the morgue. Now, already there's some questions. They see the kid seems to breathe a little bit, a little spasm here or there, but the doctors, the nurses say, no, no, no, that's just kind of an illusion. Those are gasps that occur after death, but it doesn't indicate that this kid is still alive. So they declare him dead. They put him in the morgue. They go away. Five hours later, someone goes in to get the kid's body, and those little last gasps and flinches that they said were just the after effects of the morgue, they go away. They go to the morgue. They go to the after effects of death. They're still going on because the kid's still alive. So then they come out to the parents. They say, hey, I know we told you your kid is dead, but he's actually been alive in the morgue for five hours. They take the kid out. They put him on life support. The kid is now still alive, though he has obviously very, very severe problems. And the parents are certainly going to sue and assume that putting the kid in the morgue really damaged his recovery. Now, of course, we're going to sue and assume that putting the kid in the morgue really damaged his recovery. Now, it's very sad. We should pray for the kid. We should pray for the parents and everyone involved. What's interesting about the story politically is not so much this incident. It's not so much the little details of how the kid ended up in the pool, the smoking marijuana, safety around kids and homes. And those are all stories that other people can talk about. What I find politically interesting here is we apparently don't know anything about the story. We don't know anything about death. Even our doctors, even our medical professionals, even hospital systems don't seem to know what death is. And this is a real social problem. This happens. Sometimes a patient will be declared dead and then will be found out to be alive. But sometimes they catch it. Sometimes they don't. You hear these stories of people being buried alive. You hear about them throughout history. Two percent of hospital deaths are brain deaths. People are declared dead even while they're still breathing and their blood is still flowing. And so what is brain death? We just assume that brain death is real death. That's why we check the organ donation box in the back of our driver's license. You're declared brain dead. For most organ donation, it requires a brain death declaration because you still want blood going to the organs. And then they harvest the organs and they give them to people who also might die. I have friends who have received organs and thank God they because now they're alive. But what is brain death? Brain death is a concept invented in 1968 out of Harvard, so I'm immediately skeptical of it. It comes out of the late 60s and out of Harvard. That's two strikes. I assume whatever that is is wrong. Brain death is a concept that developed alongside the development of advanced organ donation, and it was very, very convenient because for most organ donation, you can't do it if the person actually has died because then you don't have blood going to the organs and the organs start to die immediately, and now they're no good to the people who would receive them. So brain death is this medical definition that says, okay, the person's heart is still beating, the blood is still flowing, there's still air going to the lungs, but their brain activity has ceased. Except that's not true. I shouldn't laugh about it. It's kind of macabre. But in 50% to 80% of cases of brain death, there is still brain activity. In fact, when they check for brain death, they don't check all of the potential brain activity going on. And what some of the medical professionals will say is, oh, you know, it's minor brain activity. It doesn't relate to consciousness. The people are totally unconscious anyway. And you say, all right, well, just because a guy's unconscious doesn't mean you can kill him. I mean, just because someone's in a coma doesn't mean you can go chop his head off. Two, in a lot of those cases, the person is not actually unconscious. Sometimes they're locked in. They are aware of what's going on. They can hear, and they just can't express that. Three, there have been cases, we've covered them on the show, where people are declared brain dead. They go in to have their organs harvested. As the doctors start harvesting the organs, they start. They start screaming. They start moving. They start. And sometimes the doctors in those cases will stop and say, okay, maybe this person's not actually dead. And in some cases, then the patient just goes home and lives for another five, ten years. In some cases, though, they just keep going. And they say the same thing that the nurses said in the case of this poor little kid. They say, oh, no, what looks like a breath, what looks like a flinch, what looks like a reaction to a stimulus, that's actually just instinctual. It's reflexive. It doesn't indicate that the person is actually still alive. This is. This is a heartbreaking story all around, but it reflects a broader social problem that we have and a broader political and anthropological problem, which is we are really ignorant of death today. The average medieval peasant knew so much more about death than the Harvard MD, PhD surgeon does today. Isn't that kind of crazy? But think about how we talk about death. We murder babies in the womb. We pretend it's not death. The medieval peasant knew that was death. Everybody knew that was death. You murder a baby. That's like moving around. It looks like a baby. And but now we tell ourselves that's not death. We murder granny in the hospital. We help granny to kill herself, or in some cases, if granny has dementia, we just kill her. There was that awful case that just came out on euthanasia where this woman was crying and praying and asking not to be murdered. And they murdered her anyway through euthanasia. Euthanasia means good death, but suicide is the very worst death because it means your final act on earth is total despair. And in some cases, euthanasia. Euthanasia is murder. That would be death. We have this idea of brain death, which is not death. And literally speaking, in the case of brain death, the thing that kills the patient is harvesting their organs. There's a much deeper bioethical conversation to be had about it, but it's not. Whatever we call brain death is not actually death. So much so that we're now putting little 18-month-old kids in the morgue. Absolute nightmare fuel, but it should not just spook you as a crazy anecdote. A kind of. A kind of macabre news story for around Halloween. It should spook you because this is our system. This is how we think about humanity. This is how we think about matters of life and death. And we don't know very much about it. We don't seem to know the purpose of life anymore. And not to get too abstract and philosophical. But, you know, the average medieval peasant that I was just telling you about, that guy knew what the purpose of life was. That guy knew he was going to die someday. That guy knew that he ought to get his affairs in order. That guy contemplated. Whether or not we actually end our existence at physical death. Or whether there's an immaterial soul. Or whether there's such a thing as eternal life. Or whether there's heaven or hell. He thought about these questions. He might come to his own conclusions about it. Most medieval peasants came to the right conclusion. But he at least took those questions seriously. We, our geniuses, our billionaires, our intellectuals, in the modern liberal era, we don't know that we're going to die. We pretend that we're not going to die. You have all of these super-duper. Life extension, genius, rich guys. Who pretend that they're going to live forever by plugging their spinal cords into the computers. They think they're going to upload their brains to the cloud. They don't know what consciousness is. They don't know what intelligence is. This is why they don't know what artificial intelligence is. It's just stories like this. So totally reveal the undeserved hubris of liberal modern man. We think that we're so much smarter. Than Aristotle. We think that we're so much smarter than those scholastics in the dark ages. We are idiots compared to those people. We don't know the first thing about anything. We don't know the difference between boys and girls. That was the story that dominated for the last five, ten years. Now we don't know the difference between life and death. How much dumber can we get? Okay. So much more I want to get to. Speaking of bioethics. More bad news for IVF and the surrogacy industry. 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I coach football. Home of the Save. Open soon. Limited time offer, new members only. BJ's, home of the Save. My favorite comment from yesterday is from MademoiselleSuite74, who says, maybe assisted intelligence, so we can still call it AI. Yeah, I was mentioning yesterday on the show, Trump is really into calling AI, SI, super intelligence. And he's got a good branding point, which is that no one likes anything artificial. So artificial has a negative connotation, and we need the public to like AI because we can't lose the AI race to China because we're in a major Cold War with China, and we can't lose the arms race. That's the general context. But the problem is that AI is not real intelligence. It is artificial. It could be because the intellect is an immaterial substance. It's like an artifact. The AI is just an artifact. It's just computers and cogs together. And true intelligence is like ontologically different from that. So I'm sympathetic to Trump's branding point, but it has this ontological problem. So assisted intelligence. It's not intelligence, but you could say assisting intelligence. Assistant to intelligence, AI, that's something. And everyone wants an assistant. I want a bunch of assistants. That's okay. Maybe that's good. I'm open to that. Are there any other euphemisms for AI that are better branding but not false? Let's turn back to bioethics for a second. For a long time. I have pointed out that IVF and the surrogacy industry are just bad news. They're morally indefensible. That was a very unpopular opinion. I've caught a lot of flack from people. I don't mean it to be judgy. I don't mean it to say that your niece or nephew or kid or grandkid who is conceived through IVF is not a wonderful blessing from God. I don't mean it to say that you're a horrible person if you've engaged in IVF. A lot of people have engaged in IVF. Most people haven't considered the bioethical implications. But I caught a lot of flack for saying, from the beginning, that this is bad news and it's morally indefensible. And people used to just throw rotten tomatoes virtually at me through the screen about it. Now, I think a lot more people are coming around to my point of view, which is not an original point of view. It's been the point of view of serious bioethicists and coincidentally of the church from the beginning. It just doesn't work because you are commoditizing human life. You're selling human life. You're establishing the domination of science and technology over the origin and destiny of human life. You're creating all sorts of problems. You are massively. increasing the number of abortions by permanently or freezing human beings for an extended period of time ultimately to be destroyed by separating the conjugal from the procreative act from you know the list goes on and on and on we could be here all day well let's add another one to the list oh well before we get to that you have scientists swapping the test tubes so they put the black baby in the asian couple and you put the white baby in the black couple and whatever you mix it up so that these babies are growing inside mothers who are not their own which creates medical problems which creates major trauma for the babies and for the parents and sometimes you mix up the test tubes or you mix up the sperm and the eggs you actually create whole human beings whose parents have never even met each other and who knows who's going to raise them and it's just it's just awful it's just awful okay i'm going to get more virtual tomatoes for that but it's true here's another problem there's a new study out of denmark got to give a hat tip to josh wood on this linking frozen embryo ivf to higher childhood cancer rates so this is a 20-year study of a million children this is not some small uh unrepresentative sample size 20-year study of a million children found that kids conceived through in vitro fertilization frozen embryo transfer had double the cancer rate so not five percent not ten percent double the hundred percent higher cancer rate eighty-four percent of uh u.s ivf transfers use frozen embryos so it's not like the frozen embryo transfer is some minor part of the ivf surrogacy industry it's the vast majority of it's almost all of it the danish researchers followed every child born in denmark from 1996 to 2012 for up to 20 years study was published in the journal of the american medical association last week uh children conceived without assisted reproduction developed cancer at 18.3 per hundred thousand kids per year uh for after frozen embryo transfer that rate was 41.1 really really bad numbers by the way this isn't the only study there have been other studies there's 2019 uh jama study of the same danish children at 11 years they found that too there was a 2022 study out of taiwan found uh that kids conceived through assisted reproduction had a 58 percent higher cancer risk and that doesn't necessarily exclude it to the frozen embryo transfers so basically found the exact same information uh this is mainly uh cancers pertaining to leukemia and hepatic tumor anyway bad bad news um what do we do about that what do we do about that uh not very much either you can continue along the a sorry the ivf uh path of saying look some couples are infertile and they suffer infertility and so we need to give them an opportunity to have kids because infertility is so painful i know it's really painful i've experienced it for two two years myself i know it's really painful but good ends do not justify immoral means ever we live in a society that uh accepts consequentialist utilitarian ethics but we should not because that is like a deal with the devil that is what the deal with the devil is you know and uh the the downstream consequences of that you can never totally account for and they they really really run away with you and they can justify or any you know they can't do anything about it they can't do anything about it they can't do anything any manner of evil so you can either say well um we're we're going to allow ivf but not for homosexual couples that's one thing we say because uh children have a right to a mother and a father okay well one you're never going to get that through anti-discrimination law in this day and age but two it's not just the homosexuals it's easy to point to the the guys who are lighting the loafers and blame them for the problems of ivf you say it's oh it's so horrible to create a child intentionally to deprive the child of his mother but that's not it it's it's actually just it's just the whole thing it's just the whole thing unfortunately okay uh now i want to turn back to the trump administration very very important question will at whatever happens in the midterms will president trump run for a third term now two years from now i don't know who's going to be your next president and i think the law said i'm not 100 sure but i think the law says that i'm not allowed to run again i've studied that phrase ashley i've studied that phrase i just got a poll number i'd kill everybody i'd beat him i studied that phrase forever unfortunately it's quite concise there's not a lot of wiggle room it says something to the effect that under no circumstances and for any reason will you even consider thinking about running for president if you had well the one thing is different they cheated us on the second one because we won it three times so i think i have the right to run again what i think i have the right to run again because they cheated they cheated they rigged the election they rigged that we did so good no we won three times but that's all right you know i love this and of course the libs react and they say he's a tyrant he wants to run again me and which is and he's saying this to get that rise out of them i have it on good authority that president trump is not going to run for a third term even as some of us myself included have encouraged it the thing i love about this these little little jokes on the campaign trail is that one they rile up the crowd a little bit but but two i love these kinds of little jokes i love when trump pushes the envelope i love when trump pushes the envelope on the american form of government because it is what what we call a learning opportunity i love when he pushes the envelope on it because it allows us to better understand how our government is actually supposed to work because the way that most people think of our government is really the product of late 20th century liberal indoctrination including among people on the right including among people on the right and so what i love about when trump jokes about that maybe i'll run for a third term is those jokes and the subsequent conversations help to clear the detritus of late 20th century liberalism which has formed the vision of government even among people on the right do you know who else thought we should end the two-term limit for president and and repeal the 22nd amendment ronald reagan the people who are going to freak out about this on the right are going to be all of the very principled reagan conservatives who want to go back to the 1980s and i love ronald reagan i'm a big fan of ronald reagan but the ronald reagan who actually existed and the ronald reagan of those people's imagination are totally different people you're you're upset that a president's talking about repealing the 22nd amendment it was reagan in 1987 he was still president by the way he was still president when he was talking about how we need to repeal the 22nd amendment and allow presidents to run for a third term he did the exact same thing trump is doing and why because there's nothing wrong with having a president serve three terms george washington was the first president to establish the tradition of two terms and there might be some good things about that there might be some bad things about that there's a reason this is the 22nd amendment we did not ban third terms for presidents as a matter of law until the 20th century until until the middle of the 20th century until after fdr because fdr abused it and became the american monarch why couldn't we get rid of the two-term limit because it's anti-democratic the framers of the constitution mention democracy a little over half a dozen times in the federalist papers always in the negative the america the framers of the american constitution were deeply skeptical of democracy so then you'll sometimes hear uh even people on the right they'll say yeah we don't we don't have a democracy the left says we have a democracy but we on the right we know we don't have a democracy we have a republic and you ask them okay what's a republic they say well a republic is a representative democracy it's not a direct democracy it's a representative democracy but the people on the right are wrong about that too we don't actually live in a representative democracy that's not the full story of our government our government is a republic in the roman sense of the term in other words a mixed regime when we say here in america we don't have kings we don't have aristocrats we're a government by for and about the people okay that's great yeah we we definitely care about the people a lot we have a monarchical element in our government because our government is modeled after rome among other polities and the monarchical element is the presidency when people say this president he's getting monarchical he should be that's the point of the president is to be the monarchical element of the government the senate is supposed to be the aristocratic element of the government it's difficult because america doesn't really have an aristocracy but this is why the senators were initially selected by the states to add some remove from the people in that branch of the government then we got rid of that with the 17th amendment before we got the 22nd amendment then we have the house which is the democratic element that's a mixed regime that's what we are the thing that we we have so many misconceptions about our government we sometimes hear people even on the right they'll say you know our government it's as far founding fathers and our framers they did something that had never been done before they gave us a completely new form of government that totally changed the world um that would be news to the founding fathers they certainly didn't think that was true you know how i know that because if i read the federalist papers the founding fathers spend basically the whole thing the framers rather spend basically the whole thing talking about the all of the other governments that they were modeling this one after and so there were were slight, there were some differences in the American form of government informed by people like Montesquieu, like the independent judiciary, for instance, but our government was very self-consciously modeled after other governments, Rome, Carthage, Sparta. So much of what we believe about our country is not true. And so anyway, bringing it all the way back to the top of president Trump, joking about running for a third term. What I love about these jokes where the left and the squishy people on the right, they said, this is authoritarian. This is creeping tyranny. And this is what I love about it, is what he's telling you is a lot of the stuff you think about your government is a joke. It's nonsense. And when you actually investigate the points that he's making, you realize they're deeply grounded in history, not just St. Ronald Reagan, but all the way back to the founding fathers and the framers. Okay. Today's Theology Thursday. The rest of the show continues. Now you don't want to miss it. Become a member and use code NOLSKIN at WLAS at checkout for two months free on all annual plans. Father, I used to feel Christ. I cannot feel anything here. They take me out of my bed and they brought me here and they tell me nothing. What have I done? Article 58. Counter-revolutionary activity. That is all I know. They have to deal with so many enemies of the state, all of whom claim their innocence, who protest, who cry. There are no answers here other than the ones they put in your mouth. You'll break. Today is your opportunity. Today is your opportunity to demonstrate your loyalty to the people. I'd like to know why I'm here. Of course. But you already know, don't you? You must believe in something greater than the party. You will remember your duty. I've told you I know nothing. The ground like a feral animal. You stink of failure. You want me to lie? Still a drunk. Damn you! They all break. Maybe. I coach football. Now Coach Hank saves up to 25% off grocery store prices. 30 pounds of pasta. Three cases of protein. And bars. 75 sports drinks. He knows teamwork. And BJ's knows savings. Home of the Save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. BJ's. Home of the Save. Experian can help take the pain. Out of canceling by handling it for you. Results will vary. Experian.