Ep. 1652 - A Comedian Was Jailed In The UK For JOKES. Is Britain Now North Korea?

Today, Matt Wall Show, a comedian is arrested in the UK for making fun of trans people on Twitter.

At what point do we start treating the UK like North Korea or any other totalitarian state?

Also, another potential BLM martyr is sabotaged by body cams.

A black comedian does a viral skit in Whiteface, and a senator says that only Iranian theocrats think that human rights come from God.

I can think of a few other people who held that view, Thomas Jefferson, for one.

Talk about all that and more today in the Matt Wall Show.

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Well, it's too early to write any kind of definitive assessment about the America First movement, but one observation that we can make, and it's a very welcome change, is that foreign affairs don't matter as much to Americans as they once did.

The internal dysfunction of other nations thousands of miles away from our borders simply isn't that relevant to most people anymore.

It was never relevant, but now millions of people realize that.

Take the recent attacks on the right to freedom of speech, for example.

We've discussed how Australia outlawed certain forms of prayer, saying it's akin to conversion therapy.

Meanwhile, the UK sentenced a mother named Lucy Connolly to 30 months in prison because of a mean tweet that she wrote about so-called asylum seekers, which she deleted after three hours.

Connolly's arrest, according to British journalists, was one of about 30 arrests concerning online speech that take place every day.

Yes, every day in the U.K.

We talked about all these cases when they were in the news.

These are important stories because they illustrate the decline of Western nations, which we share some history with, obviously.

But at the same time, it's hard for most Americans to get too worked up over any of those incidents because our own country has similar problems.

And simply by virtue of the fact that these problems are taking place within our borders, these problems are then vastly more important.

Just a few days ago, a mother in Minnesota was charged for saying a racial slur, something that isn't a crime, was never a crime under our Constitution.

But the Constitution isn't operative anymore in the state of Minnesota.

And that's an infinitely bigger issue than anything that's happening in Australia or the UK or Canada or anywhere else outside of our borders.

Now, that being said,

there are some stories that, although they originate overseas, they do implicate the free speech rights of Americans in a very direct and unprecedented way.

And the recent arrest of a comedy writer named Graham Linehan

is one of those cases.

This is a case that's so egregious and so obviously threatening to American interests and our constitutional rights that it should result in immediate sanctions against every senior official in the UK government, as well as the elimination of diplomatic relations between our two nations.

The United States should treat the UK no differently than, say, Iran or North Korea for the indefinite future.

And the State Department should make it very clear that American citizens should avoid traveling to the UK for their own safety.

So here's the basic factual background before we get into the broader implications for Americans.

57-year-old Graham Linnehan is an Irish citizen.

He's best known for his work on the 1990s comedy series Father Ted.

And on Monday, he was in Arizona preparing to board a flight to London's Heathrow airport.

The reason he was going back to London is that on Thursday, he was supposed to stand trial on charges of, quote, harassing an 18-year-old campaigner for transgender rights, whatever that means exactly.

Now, at the gate, he was told that for some unknown reason, he needed to be reticketed and assigned a new seat.

That was a potential sign that his reservation had been flagged in the ticketing system by the authorities.

And indeed, upon landing at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting for Graham Lineham the moment he got off the plane.

The officers escorted Graham to a private room at the airport, at which point they informed him that he was being arrested for posting three inflammatory tweets on X.

And then by his account, Linehan openly began laughing at the officers because the whole thing was just too absurd.

But it wasn't a joke.

The officers explained that indeed they were arresting this man.

because of three posts that he had made on X.

And they only released him from jail on bail on the condition that he doesn't post any more messages on X for any reason.

So he's barred from communicating on this particular social media platform for the foreseeable future.

To restate, on his way to stand trial for offending trans activists in the UK, the police in the UK arrested Graham Linehan on a separate charge for offending trans activists once again through his online posts.

They're now silencing him completely because these three tweets are just so awful and intolerable.

Now, at the risk of being arrested myself the next time I travel to the UK, a country that's already promised to punish people who retweet offensive content,

I'm going to show you each of these three offending tweets right now.

So batten down the hatches, grab onto something stable.

This could get a little dicey.

Here's the first offending post.

Quote, if a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent abusive act.

Make a scene, call the cops, and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.

Close quote.

Yes, that's the first offending tweet, which led to the arrest of the comedian who wrote it after he landed following a 10-hour flight.

Now, this shouldn't need to be explained, but

this is not an incitement to violence or whatever they claim.

Now, yes, it's true that if you take the comedian, he's a comedian, literally, he tweeted about an act of violence against a certain subset of people.

He said that those people should be punched in the balls, but his post was not intended, obviously, to produce any imminent criminal action, and his post was not likely to produce any imminent criminal action either.

And therefore, it's not criminal.

He didn't say at eight o'clock tonight, everyone should go out and find this particular trans-identifying male and punch him in the balls.

And then post like the home address of the target.

Now, if you do that to anybody, then yes, that would be unlawful.

That is incitement to violence.

What Graham did, by contrast, was to assert that men who invade the private spaces of women as a general matter are a physical threat and should be punched to the balls.

It's a general comment that in context is intended to be somewhat humorous.

The writer is, after all, a comedian.

He was not inciting any lawless action.

He wasn't targeting any particular individual.

He was pointing out to comedic effect that so-called trans women, quote unquote, have testicles.

Like that's the fact to explain this to the cops in the UK.

That was the point.

This is a distinction that might require some nuance to understand, but it is a a very, very important distinction.

I mean, it's not hard to understand if you have an IQ above 70, but

so it really shouldn't be hard.

But if you erase this distinction, as the left is intent on doing, then free speech disappears as well.

And that's because, as we all know, it's extremely, extremely easy for activists to claim that certain speech is supposedly threatening.

If you remove the requirement that unlawful speech must contain an imminent threat and that this threat must be likely to produce imminent unlawful action, then pretty much all right-wing speech will become illegal overnight.

They'll be able to label every right-wing policy as a threat to commit transgenocide and so on.

And of course, that's their goal.

They want to imprison every single conservative for hate speech as soon as they possibly can.

Now, for what it's worth, not many people saw this particular tweet from this comedian, at least not before the UK government blew it up.

It had something like 100,000 views in total, which is not many on the social media platform.

But even if 50 million people saw it, everything that he wrote would be completely reasonable.

In a free society, you're allowed to make comments like that.

But the UK is not a free society, and it hasn't been for quite some time.

Now, to be fair to the government in the UK, there were two other allegedly offending tweets that this comedian wrote.

Here's one of them.

It shows a photo of some kind of trans rights rally, and as a caption to the photo, the comedian wrote, quote, a photo you can smell.

Now, I've thought about this for some time, and admittedly, I can't come up with any argument for why this would be illegal or even remotely controversial.

It's a straightforward observation, like the kind of thing you might hear, you know, David Attenborough make if he ever had the misfortune of narrating a rally full of trans activists.

The rally obviously smelled terrible.

None of these people demonstrate any interest in personal hygiene.

Everyone knows that.

It's very obvious.

He's pointing that out.

So what's the big deal?

In fact, I would even argue that technically he doesn't say that it's, he says it's a photo you could smell.

He doesn't say it smells bad.

Maybe he meant to say that it looks like it it smells like roses in there.

I can't imagine anyone having that visceral reaction to the photo, but who knows?

Now, as best I can tell, the real issue here maybe is the follow-up tweet.

Again, this one refers to the trans activists in the photo.

And here's what the comedian wrote, quote, I hate them, misogynists and homophobes.

F them.

So apparently this is the issue.

He wrote some nasty words about these people, I guess.

There's nothing that you could even,

even if you were bending over backwards, there's nothing in that that you could view as an incitement to violence or a threat of violence.

He just insults them, says, I hate these people and they're misogynists and homophobes.

Apparently, it's illegal in the UK to refer to trans activists as misogynists and homophobes.

and to direct swear words at them.

Or maybe you can't say you hate these people.

Now, it's fine for them to say, you know, F turfs and to call you Nazis and to say they hate you and to call you a misogynist and homophobe, get you fired from your job, celebrate the deaths of Catholic children who are praying in church, all that kind of thing.

But the one thing you can't do under any circumstances is say you hate them.

They can say it to you.

You can't say it to them.

At the moment, the UK government does seem to realize how terrible all this looks.

The Health Secretary has just come out and suggested that the UK's hate speech laws need to be addressed to make sure they're applied in a legitimate way.

The Met Police Commissioner has said that the government needs to clarify its hate speech laws.

Of course, the only actual solution is to abolish hate speech laws entirely.

There's no middle ground here.

As long as you have hate speech laws on the books, political dissidents will be rounded up and imprisoned for offending the regime.

That's why hate speech laws exist.

But the middle ground approach is what they're going with in the UK at the moment.

Here's how a Green Party leader addressed the arrest, for example.

Watch.

According to Graham Linehan, because the only thing the police have said is that they've they've acknowledged a man was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence.

That's why the police say they turned up.

What's your view, Mr.

Polanski?

These are totally unacceptable tweets, and I accept that people who are in politics get lots of abuse.

But let's also face we shouldn't get abuse.

And I certainly recognise that women get more abuse than I do, for instance.

I get a lot of anti-Semitic abuse.

I'm one of a few Jewish leaders that have been in British politics.

Today, a Muslim man was elected as my deputy leader, Motten Ali.

I've seen the amount of Islamophobia he gets.

We also know that for all of those groups, trans people have been in the sights of the nastiness and the toxicity for a long time.

Now, I accept proportionality of police response is a conversation we need to have.

But do you think this was proportionate?

I think it was proportionate to arrest him.

I think there's a pattern here.

There were five armed police officers turning up.

Well, that's the bit that I don't understand why they were armed.

And again, I'd need to hear about the police.

And why there were five, presumably.

For sure.

So he's fine with the fact that this guy was arrested for his tweets.

His only quibble, apparently, is that there were five armed police officers.

It would have been totally fine if they had sent, say, two

unarmed, maybe non-binary officers, plus a social worker, in order to haul this comedian to prison.

In that case, justice would have been served.

This is where, to bring things back to the beginning of this segment, the arrest of Graham Linehan becomes an international incident that's relevant to all Americans.

Everyone in authority in the UK, from the Prime Minister on down, is ignoring one of the central issues in this case, which which is this.

Graham Linehan published these offending tweets when he was in America.

And because of his lawful actions on American soil, he's being imprisoned in a foreign country, a country that's supposedly our ally.

In essence, the UK is exerting sovereignty over America.

They are directly threatening the freedoms of every American who might, for one reason or another, end up in the UK.

This cannot be allowed to stand.

It was just a few weeks ago that the Prime Minister of the UK sat in the Oval Office and lied to the President and the Vice President about the right of freedom of speech in his country.

Watch.

I said what I said, which is that we do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the UK and also with some of our European allies, but we also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British, of course, what the British do in their own country is up to them, but also affect American technology companies and by extension American citizens.

So that is something that we'll talk about today at lunch.

We've had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom,

and it will last for a very, very long time.

Well, no, I mean, certainly we wouldn't want to reach across U.S.

citizens, and we don't, and that's absolutely right.

But in relation to free speech in the UK, I'm very proud of our history there.

Yeah, none of that was true.

The right of free speech does not exist in the UK.

Every American, along with everyone else who's considering traveling to the UK, needs to realize that.

And our government should respond accordingly.

Less than a year ago, in response to free speech abuses in the country of Georgia, the State Department took punitive measures against the political figures who were responsible.

And the same exact punishment should be handed out to leaders in the UK, starting with their prime minister.

He shouldn't be allowed to travel here.

If he sets foot in this country, he should be arrested

for human rights abuses.

All of his assets should be frozen to the extent that we have any access to them.

And his country should be isolated from the civilized world.

Now, if that seems harsh, here's what the Prime Minister of the UK has been posting about

as all this has been going on.

This is something that he wrote on Wednesday, quote, I won't shy away from decisions to protect kids, even if there are predictable cries of nanny state.

We're stopping shops from selling high-caffeine energy drinks to under-16s so they can turn up to school ready to learn.

So that's what the Prime Minister of the UK is focused on at the moment, as their country is overrun with migrant rapists and as comedians are thrown in prison for a couple of tweets that offend trans activists.

The Prime Minister is deeply concerned about high caffeine energy drinks.

Meanwhile, his government is cooking up fake justifications to arrest people based on their speech in America.

Now, the more you look into this arrest, the worse it gets.

This is a report from the Telegraph the other day, quote, After being arrested by five-armed police, Linehan was held by the police for over 16 hours,

during which time his blood pressure became so high that he was rushed to the hospital.

According to him, police used trans activist language when interviewing him.

Now, before we continue with this Telegraph article, this part needs to be explained.

This is a quote from Linehan Substack describing his arrest.

Quote, the police interrogator mentioned trans people.

I asked him what he meant by that.

Quote, people who feel their gender is different than that that was assigned at birth.

I said, assigned at birth.

Our sex isn't assigned.

He called it semantics.

I told him he was using activist language.

Eventually, a nurse came to check on me and found my blood pressure was over 200 stroke, over 200 stroke territory.

Already, this is kind of extraordinary, at least by American standards.

How many police interrogators in this country would use the phrase gender assigned at birth?

I mean, if you had to guess, how many would say that?

It's the kind of thing that, if you know any police officers, doesn't seem like something they'd say.

But in the UK, it's not exactly unheard of.

They have hard-boiled detectives raging about cis men and gender fluidity as part of their standard interrogation practices.

Pathetic does not not begin to describe this.

But let's continue with this Telegraph article because, again, things get worse from here.

Quote: The Metropolitan Police initially claimed Linehan had been arrested on suspicion of inciting violence.

Before clarifying, he'd actually been arrested on the offense of intentionally stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation.

It was hard to understand how Graham's tweets could possibly meet this definition.

Male trans activists are normally quick to reject suggestions that their desire to present as women is autogynophilia, a sexual preference, but the 2010 law under which he was arrested makes no mention of trans identities.

Now, in other words, the authorities went out of their way to twist an existing law, a law which has nothing to do with transgenderism, into a pretext to arrest a comedian for his tweets.

Every aspect of this case is a betrayal of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, of the rule of law, of the commitments that the British have made to the U.S.

as our alleged allies.

No one in this country, whether they're American citizens or not, can rely on the British government to defend the freedom of speech or to honor the legal traditions that laid the groundwork for our Constitution.

With the arrest of Grant Linehan, the U.K.

has made it abundantly clear that the U.S.

cannot ignore the broader eradication of free speech rights in the West.

Yes, it's happening outside of our borders in many cases, but increasingly, foreign governments are making it clear that in their view, they can bring criminal cases against individuals based on their lawful conduct in the United States.

This is a massive escalation in the war against the freedom of speech.

And until the UK can demonstrate some daylight between their legal system and North Korea's, no one in this country, including our elected officials, has any reason to trust these people or take them seriously ever again.

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There was an officer involved in the shooting in Florida a few days ago.

A woman named Tequilla Walker was shot multiple times,

actually, survived apparently.

And now she's arrested.

And

I want to talk about this, although this is not a big national news story.

But there's a reason for that, and we'll discuss it.

And really, the reason, once again, is

that there's a body cam,

footage of this event.

It's interesting that police shootings are the one kind of story where it's less likely to be a national story if there is a video of it.

What does that tell you?

Now, I'm not sure how much of this we can actually show on YouTube.

I suspect not very much, but

here is the footage.

Watch.

Oh, God, that breasts out of the task.

Y'all could have tasked.

Suspect down.

She got it, Taser.

We did taser.

She came at me with a knife.

What the hell did you expect me to do?

Okay, so you won't be able to see some of that or all of it.

I don't know, but Tequilla Walker was surrounded by police.

She got out of her car.

She charged at an officer with the knife that she was holding.

And that's when she was shot.

They tried hitting her with the taser, but it had no effect because she was a very large, obese woman.

So the taser probably just bounced off her.

And her blubber, you know, her lard, her fat is probably

also the reason why she's alive today.

You know, sometimes obesity saves lives, apparently, and it did in the case of Killa Walker.

So that's interesting.

But notice the bystander.

So there's somebody standing off to the side, Monday morning,

quarterbacking it.

Which is always, I guess you're very used to that as a police officer, but that's always, you're in a high-pressure situation, life or death struggle, and you've got somebody off on the side.

No, I don't think I wouldn't have done it that way.

That's not how I would have done it.

So she says,

Why didn't you tase her?

You didn't have to shoot her.

And the cop points out that we did taser.

We did.

And she still charged at us with a knife.

What are we supposed to do?

Just let her stab us?

What do you want me to do?

Now, I think the officer shouldn't have bothered getting into a back and forth with that woman, but

it was a good question.

What are we supposed to do?

What do you want us to do?

Just get stabbed?

Or you want me to get into hand-to-hand combat with this enormous woman who outweighs me by 400 pounds, probably?

And now, this is where, if not for body cams, this is where the BLM propaganda campaign would begin.

It's very interesting to see this stuff now because there's like this alternative in this parallel universe,

right?

If we imagine some sci-fi scenario where there's constantly branching parallel universes, every choice you make is like there's another universe where you made a different choice.

So

we're living in the universe where they started putting body cameras on all the police officers a few years ago.

But in a different universe where that never happened,

and this exact scenario plays out,

we know exactly there'd be riots in the street right now.

Tequila Walker, say her name, say Tequilla Walker's name.

Because all you need is one person standing around, one witness.

This is what they had in the Michael, we'll go all the way back to Michael Brown.

They had, and there was no body cams, and they had one or two witnesses.

And so this is all you need.

You need one person runs to the media and says, I saw the whole thing.

They didn't even try to tase her.

They just shot her.

And she was unarmed.

I heard they had a knife.

She had a knife.

No, she was unarmed.

She was unarmed carrying a child.

She was unarmed carrying a child and

she was rescuing a kitten from a tree when this happened.

She wasn't even doing anything wrong.

This poor woman, she was carrying her child.

She was unarmed.

She was trying to climb a tree to rescue a kitten.

It was a kitten with leukemia.

The kitten had leukemia.

It was stuck in a tree.

So she was trying to climb the tree to get the kitten out and

give it cancer treatments.

And then they just ran up and shot her for no reason.

The officer ran up and screamed, I hate black people, and shot her.

I saw the whole thing.

I'll tell you right now, I saw the whole thing.

That's what happened.

And so that, so you would have had someone run to the media saying all that.

And the media would just report it.

They'd be taking notes.

Oh, so she was climbing a tree.

Oh, the kitten had had leukemia.

Oh, and it's they could have

the bullet could have hit the kitten with

oh, oh, she, she, the officer shot the kitten too.

Well, all right, we got to write that down.

Um,

I don't know why I'm imagining like reporters from the 1950s that have their notepads and they're taking notes, but that's the way it would have went,

and it's the way that it went for years until BLM demanded that all the cops wear body cams, which, as I've said before, has proven to be one of the great political miscalculations of all time.

It has been, I can't think of another example quite like this, where you have a movement, the BLM movement,

that

is calling for one specific thing,

right?

They wanted other things too, but the big thing was like

body cams.

And they get the body cams and it kills the movement.

I can't think of it.

You get what you want and it kills your movement.

It destroys it overnight.

Because now with body cams, we can see clearly that basically every officer involved shooting is not only justified, but like extremely, absurdly justified.

That's what you learn for body cams.

You watch body cams and you go, oh,

so every single time the cop shoots someone, it's justified.

Almost every time.

It's not even like a close call.

And it does help to see it.

I remember, you know, you go back again to 2015 when the cop in Ferguson said that Michael Brown charged at him.

And

that was the, after we got the ridiculous, he had his, he was on the ground with his hands up.

yelling, don't shoot, and he got shot.

Completely made up.

I mean, the scenario I just painted of the cat in the tree with leukemia, that is not more absurd than what they actually claimed in Ferguson.

He was giving himself up,

right?

It's like the scene in Platoon.

He's on his knees, hands in the air, right?

Up to the heavens.

And the cop just comes up randomly and executes him in the street for no reason.

But after we got that lie, then we finally heard the version of the correct version of events from the police officer.

And that version was that Michael Brown,

after he just committed a strong-armed robbery of the convenience store,

that he charged at the police.

And at the time, every leftist in the country said that the cop must be lying, that it can't possibly be true, because nobody would just go charge at a police officer who is pointing a gun at them.

I can remember distinctly having this conversation with multiple people, and this was always the answer: is, oh, do you really expect me to believe what?

What is this, a movie or something?

You're telling me that this officer was pointing a gun at him, and he charged at him?

Oh, come on, that's ridiculous.

And I remember at the time, I was totally on the officer's side the entire time.

I was completely opposed to the BLM narrative in Ferguson from day one.

I didn't buy the false narrative at all for even a second.

But it was hard to sort of imagine a person charging full speed at someone who's pointing a gun at them.

Because I believe that, I mean, that's what the forensic showed.

That was that, the counter-narrative to that was totally fantastical and incredible in the literal sense.

It was incredible.

But still, it was hard because I'd never seen that.

Except in movies, I'd never actually seen it.

It's like,

who would do that?

Unless you are actually completely insane to the point where you don't even function.

You can't function.

You're in an insane asylum.

But anybody else charging at a police office and pointing a gun at you, who would ever do that?

It's hard to imagine.

As a normal, sane person,

you can't picture that.

Well, now we have the body cams, and like every other month, there's footage of someone doing exactly that.

We've seen now, this is not one time, this is multiple cases of

like

a bad guy in a movie.

Knife over the head, screaming, running right into gunfire.

And what we learn is that, no, this actually happens.

Like, these are the kinds of people that cops deal with every day.

They're dealing with the kinds of people who

would do that.

That's a real, that's like a thing that will happen.

You have to worry about that.

And that's why BLM is dead.

Okay, here's something going viral.

It's a skit by the black comedian Druski.

And I mentioned that he's black because the fact that he's black is relevant to the story, as we'll see.

He has a million viral comedy skits that you see circulating on social media constantly.

And some of his stuff is pretty funny, I think.

But in this case, the premise of the skit, the caption that Druski put on it, says, that guy who's just proud to be American.

And then in the skit, he's wearing not just white face, but white body.

He's painted his whole body to look white.

He's even managed to make his body look white and sunburned.

So, in some ways, the makeup effects in this skit, I will say, are kind of impressive.

But

so, this is supposed to be an impression of a white guy, you know, replete with the white body paint.

And here it is.

Watch.

Here's the love.

Here's the honor.

If you can't

hold her.

Born in the USA.

Hey, Suanna.

Suanna.

She's not listening.

Hey, come on.

You need to listen to your nana.

Go ahead, baby.

Six five,

girl, you crazy now.

Hey, Mima.

How you doing, baby?

How you doing, baby?

All right, man.

Born in the USA!

Hey, you lost, Ma?

No, I'm going to the race.

What race?

NASCAR race.

You going to NASCAR?

Yes, sir.

A little bit.

You ain't lost, did you?

No, I'm good.

I'm going to the race, sir.

Sure about that?

Yes, sir.

Find something safe to do, boy.

Okay, so not Druski's best work, I'll say that.

And before we get to the white face, the impression isn't funny.

It's not a funny bit.

And I'm not saying that because I'm offended or whatever.

It's just not very funny.

And it isn't funny because it isn't well observed.

It isn't accurate.

Okay, he's trying to do redneck, but he's obviously never been around rednecks.

I mean, he thinks that, you know, rednecks are Bruce Springsteen fans, for one thing.

I'll tell you, Druski, not a lot of redneck Springsteen fans out there in the year 2025.

I got to tell you.

You walk in with

a bunch of rednecks and say, hey, how about that Bruce Springsteen, huh?

What do you guys think?

Not a lot of Bruce Springsteen fans.

But that's his, he thinks rednecks are Springsteen fans.

He thinks they're vulgar and racist.

So that's the entirety of the impression.

Rednecks are vulgar, racist Springsteen fans.

That's all he's got.

And it couldn't be more off base.

And that's not a huge surprise that, I mean, this is a black guy from Columbia, Maryland, so he doesn't have a great read on white country folk.

But this was lame, even with those low expectations.

And I say this again as someone who generally finds his stuff amusing.

One thing about doing an impression, this is something that I think Norm McDonald talked about, is that to do an impression well, you have to not only have familiarity with the subject of your impression, but also you have to have some affection for the subject or the type of person that you're impersonating.

There has to be some warmth, some affection in the impression, or else it's just kind of low effort mimicry, right?

The worst impressions are angry.

You can tell the person hates whoever they're doing the impression of.

This is why Alec Baldwin's Trump Impression, I think, goes down in history as the worst impression of all time.

Certainly the worst in the history of SNL, and there have been some really bad ones, so that's saying something.

But Baldwin just hated Trump, and you could tell that he was seething.

It was like this seething, dark, angry impression,

and it wasn't funny.

It was just, it was uncomfortable.

It was really uncomfortable watching it and not in a funny, awkward way, but just in a like, I want to turn this off.

This is, this is like this person's working through something and I don't want to see it.

Okay.

And you get the same feeling watching this skit that

Druski just doesn't like these people.

And that's really what is coming through.

And so it makes it less funny.

And as for the white face, look, it's been said now by many people, but I will add my voice to the mix.

Yes, if this is okay,

if it's okay for a black guy to do white face, then it's absolutely okay for a white guy to do blackface.

Absolutely okay.

And the next, and if any white comedian comes along

and does that,

he shouldn't be condemned.

It should just be like, okay, yeah, sure, this is fine now.

Because we're done with the double standards.

We're done with two different sets of rules.

We're done with hiding behind historical trauma or whatever to justify a double standard.

You know, I know I'll be told that blackface is worse because of the history behind it, but

we are done with that also.

You don't get to make a different set of rules for yourself as some childish, arbitrary way of balancing out some historical wrong that never even affected you in the first place.

No black person in 2025 was alive at a point when blackface was socially acceptable.

The last minstrel show in America was when.

Okay, it wasn't 1998.

I can tell you that.

The last one was, what, 100 years ago?

I don't know.

It's been a very long time.

So

you don't get to use that as an excuse.

The past is the past.

We can't change it.

Get over it.

Just get over it.

Today is today.

And today, it's either acceptable to paint your face to look like another race in order to make fun of them and do a comedy bit, or it isn't.

It's either acceptable or it isn't.

And And this thing where we say, well, it depends on the race.

No.

No.

It doesn't depend on the race for anything.

When we're talking about, you know,

it's offensive to say certain words or jokes or, it depends on the race.

No, it doesn't depend on the race.

Either it's offensive or it's not.

And either it's acceptable or it's not.

Either it's the kind of thing that should destroy somebody's career

or it shouldn't.

And based on the fact that Drew Ski's career is not destroyed, then,

okay,

then, you know, floodgate is wide open, and that's all there is to it.

Which, by the way, is, I think, is the correct answer.

It's the correct answer.

Like, if you want to do a comedy bit that involves presenting yourself as another race, yeah, sure.

Go ahead and do it.

It should be judged entirely based on whether it was funny.

I mean, the only real sin that you can commit in comedy is it wasn't funny.

And if it's funny, it's funny.

Funny is funny.

And there are certainly ways to do that that are funny.

I mean, I think this was just not funny because, as I said, it was not a well-observed impression, but,

you know, it could be.

So give it a shot.

All right.

Real quickly, I want to mention this.

Democratic, this is a report from Daily Wire.

Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota socialist, has seen an astronomical increase in her wealth over the past year.

As a recent disclosure revealed, her net worth could be as high as $30 million.

A May disclosure reveals that Omar is worth between $6 and $30 million, an increase of about 3,500% compared to 2023.

Omar's member of Congress earns $174,000 in salary each year.

How did she gain all this wealth?

Well, then it goes into some detail.

You can read the report, but basically

it has to do with her husband

and

whose wealth has also skyrocketed mysteriously.

And now she's a lot richer.

So Ilhan Amarzi, yet another lawmaker who came into office as a humble working-class champion, only to transform almost instantly into a multi-millionaire.

And this, by the way, is why I've never agreed with the idea that we need to have fewer rich people running for office.

You know, this idea that

we just want, like, you know, you want, it's better to have, we don't want the rich people.

We want people who are more middle income

Well, I

I would rather that someone be rich coming into office than that they get rich while they're in office Because those really are unfortunately the only two options with rare exceptions But generally speaking either someone gets rich while they're in office or they're already rich when they run

I prefer the latter, really, if I had to choose.

Now, of course, rich people often get richer while they're in office, so you have this problem no matter what.

Donald Trump is the only guy whose net worth dropped as a consequence of achieving political power.

That almost never happens.

It happened with Trump.

But it would be very easy to clean this up.

You know, you could pass all kinds of laws limiting the ability of lawmakers to enrich themselves in office.

You could have radical transparency, disclosures, and so on.

You could require that lawmakers,

you could require, you could pass a law

that requires that lawmakers stand up in Congress once once a year and announce how much their net worth has increased or decreased over the previous year.

Right?

We could require that once a year,

I'm Representative Ilhan Omar, and my net worth has increased by 3,000% over the past 12 months.

You could require that.

That alone would be enough to put a stop to a lot of this nonsense.

The political cost of having to publicly acknowledge your financial gain would not be worth the financial gain itself in many cases.

So you could do all of that, but the problem, of course, is that it would require the lawmakers themselves to put those laws and policies in place,

which

is never going to happen.

So the moral of the story is we're screwed.

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As you know, this year we're celebrating a decade of the Daily Wire, not by looking back, but by launching what's next.

First up, Monday, for the the first time in years, we're bringing in brand new Daily Wire talent with the premiere of the Isabel Brown Show.

Then, next Wednesday night, the main event, Friendly Fire, all of us getting together to do what friends do, argue, debate, and probably smoke a few Mayflower cigars.

Don't miss the premiere because inside Friendly Fire is where we're going to be dropping the good stuff new series, new projects, huge announcements, surprises we've been holding back until now.

This is the start of our next decade, and you don't want to miss a single moment.

Join us now at dailywire.com.

Now, let's get to our daily cancellation.

Today, for our daily cancellation, we have Senator Tim Kaine.

Now, you may remember Tim Kaine.

Actually, you probably don't remember him.

The most memorable thing about Tim Kaine is that he is not memorable at all.

He is a generic white male Democrat, which is why Hillary Clinton chose him as her running mate in 2016, because she was looking for a generic white male Democrat.

His job was to be completely unremarkable and forgettable, and that is one task that he was able to accomplish exceptionally well.

Tim's great political skill is making everyone forget that he exists.

He's been a senator for 12 years.

He was a governor of Virginia before that, vice presidential nominee in the middle.

And yet nobody knows who he is.

His own wife looks at him every morning and says, wait, who is this guy again?

Now, I wouldn't call Tim a chameleon exactly.

That makes him sound far too cool.

He's more like IKEA furniture.

Something so bland and generic that you hardly notice its presence in the room.

He's like an IKEA side table that you put next to the bed in your guest room and then forget that it's there.

That's how Tim Kaine has survived politically.

Everyone just forgets that he's there.

And this is why it was such a grave mistake this week when Tim decided to open his mouth and speak.

Not only did he speak, but he said something truly incredible, so incredible that it may even make you remember Tim Kaine.

Or at least it will become the new reference point for him.

So six years from now, when he briefly flickers on the radar screen again, you'll say, Tim Kaine, who is that?

Oh, yeah, he's the guy who said that thing, isn't he?

During a hearing, Senator Kaine got into a brief debate about the concept of rights.

And this subject came up because this was a nomination hearing for Riley Barnes, who has been nominated to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor,

whatever that is.

And during his opening remarks, Barnes made mention of the fact that human rights, which are now part of his job title apparently, come to us from our Creator, from God.

Tim Kaine took exception to that idea, and here's what he said.

The notion that rights don't come from laws and don't come from the government, but come from the creator, that's what the Iranian government believes.

It's a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia law and targets Sunnis, Baha'is, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities.

And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their creator.

So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.

Extremely troubling, says Tim Kaine.

He's troubled by the idea that our rights come from God, our Creator.

He says that this is what the Iranian regime believes.

And he's right, of course.

I mean, who can forget that famous line from the founding document of the Iranian government, that line that said, quote, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I believe it was, who is is it, Ayatollah Khamini, who wrote those words.

Actually, wait a second.

It was, no, that doesn't sound right.

My grade school education is kicking in here.

I seem to remember that Thomas Jefferson was the author.

That doesn't make sense because

was Thomas Jefferson Iranian?

Did he serve as the supreme leader of Iran at some point?

This is very confusing.

Oh, wait, no, no, now it's all coming back to me.

Yes, Thomas Jefferson did write that.

He wrote in the Declaration of Independence, which is the founding document of the country, of our country, of the United States, not Iran.

Yes, the idea that our rights come from the Creator is literally the core foundational principle that our nation was built on.

Our entire system of government, the country itself, rests fundamentally on the idea that our rights come from God.

It is the reason our country exists in the first place.

Tim Kaine, a United States senator, has declared himself extremely troubled by the founding principle of the nation that he was elected to serve.

He is extremely troubled by an idea that every single one of our founding fathers affirmed.

Indeed, they not only affirmed it and built our nation upon it, but found it to be so incredibly obvious as to be, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, self-evident.

And now Tim is extremely troubled by this self-evident foundational truth.

Now, it goes without saying that this man should be immediately removed from office.

Anyone who rejects our nation's core principles is not fit to serve in the United States Senate or in any other capacity.

He swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, and yet he is extremely troubled by the philosophy upon which it was based.

And that means he cannot possibly fulfill his oath.

He's disqualified himself.

That should be the end of a career that produced exactly one memorable moment, which is this one.

And yet, it should be said that Tim Kaine has only made the mistake of saying out loud what everybody in his party already believes.

They're all godless heathens who, whether they are explicit about it or not,

reject the idea that our rights come from God.

They all reject our nation's founding principle, just like Tim Kaine does.

Because Tim Kaine was right about one thing.

Rights are a religious

and theological concept.

They are a spiritual doctrine.

They have no meaning outside of that framework.

A godless worldview can't account for rights.

Rights, in that case, are just whatever the guiding power says they are.

There's no higher power or inherent right to appeal to.

So whenever somebody talks about rights, they're making a religious claim, whether they know it or not.

Our nation is founded on this explicitly religious claim, endowed by the Creator, etc.

This is what makes most of our political debates in this country so pointless and fruitless.

Most of the people running around, or many of them crying about their rights, have never once actually considered what a right even is or how they know they have them or from where or whom these rights come.

We have an entire political party that rejects the existence of God, but still claims the rights that originate from him.

And rights can only originate from him.

The government can, should,

recognize and protect these rights, but they do not create the rights.

The government is supposed to be a steward of our rights, not their author.

Tim, here's the problem

with saying that rights come from the government.

You are correct that if rights don't come from the government, the government, if the if rights don't come from God, then the government is the only other place they could come from.

But if they come from the government, then our rights are whatever the government says they are.

If the government came along tomorrow and said that we no longer have the right to free speech, well, then we would no longer have the right to free speech.

It's just that simple.

Rights come from the government.

If the government takes them away, that's it.

They don't exist.

You wouldn't be able to say, oh, you're infringing on my rights.

Well, what do you mean?

How could they infringe on something that doesn't exist?

You cannot appeal to any authority higher than them.

That's the end of the line, according to you.

And as a member of the government yourself, I can see why you would find that idea so appealing.

But

this is how you get Iranian-style tyranny through the notion that the government originates rights.

Now, I know that you understand this at some level, Tim, and I can prove that.

Let's just try this thought experiment.

So imagine that the Supreme Court announced next week that they were overturning Obergefell.

And now imagine that empowered by that decision, Congress passed and Donald Trump signed a law banning gay marriage nationwide.

How would you react, Tim?

What would you say?

Now, if you're consistent, if you actually believe what you just said about rights coming from the government, then you would have no choice but to simply accept this sequence of events.

The right to gay marriage no longer exists.

And if somebody said, I have a right to get married, you would say, well, no, you don't.

The government said you don't have it, so you don't don't have it.

Rights come from the government.

The government took them away.

The right is gone.

That's it.

He certainly couldn't go around screaming that Trump is infringing on the rights of gay people.

How could he do that?

The right is gone.

He can't infringe on a right that doesn't exist.

All you could do is accept the decision.

Now, sure, you could call for the government to once again create the right to gay marriage, but you could not claim that the right had been infringed or was being trampled

or that gay people are not getting something they have the right to.

They don't have the right to it.

The government said they don't.

It's impossible for the government to infringe on or trample rights if they are the authors of the rights.

They decide who has them and what the rights are.

And yet we both know that you would not respond to that turn of events with that kind of fatalistic acceptance.

You would scream to the heavens that Trump and the Republicans are oppressing gay people by infringing on the rights.

You would appeal.

You would appeal, therefore, to an authority higher than the government.

You would declare implicitly, at least, or explicitly, that the right to gay marriage exists in a realm above and beyond the government.

And that they, the government, have no right to take that right away.

Now, of course, the trouble with this thought experiment is that the right to gay marriage really, in fact, does not exist.

It certainly is not a God-given right.

This is, in fact, a right that the government just created out of thin air.

They did so not in accordance with the will of God and our own inherent human nature, but in defiance of both.

The right to gay marriage doesn't really exist.

But my point is that you think it does.

You think the right to gay marriage exists not just as a legal concept, but as a fact of human nature.

And you believe that it exists at a higher level.

than the government, which codified it into law.

Now, and by the way, saying that, oh, well, rights are in human nature, they're not from God.

Like, that's, that's, you can't get around it that way either.

Because, how did the right, what do you mean, rights are part of human nature?

Like, without,

if you take God out of the equation and we are all just Darwinian products of Darwinian evolution, there's no right.

What the hell do you mean?

Evolution doesn't care about your rights.

You don't, there's, there's no evolutionary benefit to a right.

A right is totally invisible.

You can't look inside a person and find their rights.

It's not there.

In a godless-darwinian view of the world, there are no rights at all.

The only right is just do what you can to survive.

And if I'm stronger than you, I can oppress you and do whatever I want so that I survive.

And

that is it.

That's the ultimate right.

So.

Saying that there's some spiritual reality in human nature, again, requires a spiritual author of some kind.

You're talking now in a spiritual realm.

This is a spiritual concept,

which requires a realm of spirits, does it not?

Now, you believe the same about the right to an abortion.

In fact,

on your website right now, you have an entire section entitled, Protecting Reproductive Rights.

And the first paragraph says this.

Right now, women are facing threats to reproductive freedom around the country.

With new draconian abortion restrictions and extremist legislators plotting to rip away even more reproductive rights following the Supreme Court overturning Roe v.

Wade.

After an extreme majority on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v.

Wade, Tim got to work to protect reproductive rights and introduce the Reproductive Freedom for All Act.

But wait a second, Tim.

You're claiming that Republicans want to rip away even more reproductive rights, but Republicans run the government.

How could they rip away rights?

Rights only exist if they say that they do.

That's what you just claimed.

Rights come from the government.

If the party in control of the government decides that a certain right doesn't exist anymore, then it doesn't exist.

Nothing's being ripped away.

Nothing's being infringed or flouted or defiled or defied.

The right to an abortion, reproductive rights, originates with the people in power, according to you.

If the people in power change their mind, then the right no longer exists.

They've taken it away.

It just simply doesn't exist anymore.

Now, once again, in reality, there is no right to an abortion.

God does not endow women with the right to kill their children.

In fact, he does exactly the opposite.

He endows women and men with the inextricable responsibility to care for and love their children.

But my point again is that you think the right to abortion exists at a level higher than the government.

You say you are troubled by the concept of God-given rights, and yet you, in fact, do think that God gives women the right to kill their babies and men the right to marry other men.

You and your ideological cohorts reject the idea of inherent human rights only to go and invent a whole series of new inherent human rights.

And those rights are all perverse and horrifying.

Because you, Tim, are a perverse and horrifying person.

even if you are also boring and forgettable.

And that is why Tim Kane is today canceled.

That'll do it for the show today and this week.

Talk to you on Monday.

Have a great weekend.

Godspeed.

Don't just get the news.

Understand what the news means on the Michael Knowles Show.

I will take you beneath the surface of daily political events to see their historical, philosophical, even religious roots.

Catch it Monday through Friday at 9.30 a.m.

Eastern on the Daily Wire.