Ep. 1689 - JD Vance Becomes the Meme King

The libs are posting memes of J.D. Vance.
Conservatives are posting memes of J.D. Vance.
J.D. Vance is posting memes of J.D.
Vance. Some make him fat.
Some make him ripped. Some make him look dumb.
Some make him look smart. Some normie, some radical, some commie, some fascist.
There is a J.D. Vance meme for every whim and preference.
Most people think the memes are funny, which they are, but no one

I've seen

can quite explain For every whim and preference. Most people think the memes are funny, which they are.

But no one I've seen can quite explain why they are funny.

Or why J.D. Vance, of all people, is getting memed more than any figure in American history.

And I think I can.

I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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But no one's deleting J.D. Vance off the internet.
It's not going to. He is, even if he weren't the vice president of the United States, at this point, he has been memed too much ever to be deleted from the internet.
Why? Why is J.D.? There's one here. I'm just going to go through the ones I see on my board.
I see the one of J.D.'s looking all goth and everything. It's got a great caption to it.
It says, can't you just, why won't anybody end the G.D. war? There's him looking kind of fat and silly playing Halo with Mountain Dew.
There's one where his face is really, really tiny, but his head is still kind of big.

One of him is Shrek.

You can't even tell with these. Are they

pro-J? Yeah, one of them is like an Oompa Loompa

with a big lollipop. That's not even

really his face. There we go.
We're back to emo JD.

Who?

Born to dilly-dally,

forced to lock in. Yeah, even

were they made by the left or were they made

by the right? I think

the first JD memes actually were from the left and the left can't meme. So this means that the JD meme was the first sort of funny meme that the left has made maybe in a decade.
Because the right is very good at memes and the right kind of memed President Trump into the Oval Office in 2016. That's our version of political cartoons.
The left has political cartoons in the New Yorker and the New York Times. And because we've been shut out of the establishment mainstream institutions, ours are just like frog pictures on the Internet, on Twitter that go viral.
So the fact that the left could meme J.D., and then the right took those memes and started using those memes, and then JD Vance himself posted a JD meme. Why? Why him? To answer that question, you have to know a little bit about what a meme is.
The word meme was invented by Richard Dawkins, of all people, the biologist and new atheist. It was coined in 1976 in a book called The Selfish Gene, I believe.
But the notion of a meme comes from the word mimesis, which is to imitate. I've talked about mimesis a fair bit on this show, specifically with regard to a writer named René Girard, who has this theory, which is obviously correct, that human behavior and human desires even come from imitating others.
And this comes from even deeper classical philosophy, which shows that we're the social animals. So we're not just islands unto ourselves, but we're social creatures naturally.
We don't just fall out of a coconut tree, to quote Kamala Harris. And so we imitate each other.
So that's where memes come from, is the ability to imitate, for ideas to pass through culture as if they had a will of their own. Who is responsible for Pepe the Frog being everywhere in 2016 and 2017? Is it one person? Is it even the cartoonist who made it? No, it's just an idea that kind of propelled itself.
It just was imitated throughout the culture. And J.D.
is that guy now. Why J.D.? J.D.
has been memed more than Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is a very famous person and a very powerful person.
And he is a singular figure in American history. And he's the president.
He's not the vice president. So why is J.D.
getting memed more than Trump? Because J.D. is maybe the most mimetic person in the country.
That's my theory, at least. I think the reason that it's J.D., the libs are going to say, because he looks funny or whatever.
He's got mutton chops. He doesn't really have mutton chops.
He's got a big beard. No, that's not why.
It has nothing to do with how he looks.

J.D. looks relatively unremarkable.
Pretty good looking guy, certainly by politician standards.

That's not it. It's because people see themselves in J.D.
Vance.

He can be kind of anything to anyone. Think about his trajectoryd vance grew up hillbilly graduated from yale law school he was a silicon valley venture capitalist he became a super socially conservative politician jd vance was the toast of the liberal intelligentsia he had that book hillbilly elegy which became a big hollywood movie he was the toast of the liberals liked thatia.
He had that book, Hillbilly Elegy, which became a big Hollywood movie.

He was the toast.

The liberals liked that book.

It wasn't so much the conservatives who liked that book.

It was liberals trying to understand how Trump came to power and who all these deplorable, irredeemable hillbillies were who voted for him.

So he was the toast of the liberal intelligentsia.

Now he's the vanguard of the new right.

He's frankly more ahead of normie political watchers than just about anyone in the upper echelon of politics. He was raised an evangelical.
He became a Catholic. He was raised in a broken family.
He now leads a very strong traditional family. J.D.
Vance is the everyman. That's why he's being memed.

Donald Trump is not exactly the everyman.

Donald Trump comes from a very specific background, and he's got a very specific character.

And people love that character.

They loved that character in tabloids in the 90s.

They loved that character on The Apprentice.

They loved that character at the height of national politics. But he's not everything to everyone.
Trump is Trump, okay? He wears the same suit and the same tie and does the same stuff and talks the same way for his whole life. J.D.
Vance, not so much. J.D.
Vance is the everyman. Everyone can see something of themselves in J.D.
Vance because he has grown and developed over time. He's changed his views.
I think it's good to change your views. If your views were wrong and then they become more correct, that's good.
Some people point to that, they say, ha ha, he's a hypocrite, he's flip floppy. No, no, no.
If you go from being wrong to being right, that's good, actually. That's natural.
If you never change your mind on anything, you're probably not a serious or reflective or intellectual person. So he's grown and he's developed.
And this is what's crucial. He's grown and developed with the culture.
Okay. His journey has been a journey of the American electorate.
Started out, you know, kind of like even just to take Silicon Valley to the social conservatism started out kind of, you know, live and let live. Let's just be really gung-ho about the future.
Do whatever you want, man. None of the, oh, actually, hold on.
The erosion of these, of these values that formed our culture has actually really injured society. And maybe it wasn't such a good idea to outsource all of our jobs.
And maybe total free trade without any care for American manufacturing and American, maybe that wasn't such a good idea. J.D.
has come to these conclusions just a little bit ahead of where the American people have. And so I don't think it's an exaggeration to say, as goes J.D.
Vance, so goes the nation. And a lot of people, people aren't going to blame him for changing his views on this because the American people have changed their views in line with J.D.
Vance. The same American people who voted for Barack Obama voted for Donald Trump.
The majority of voters voted for Donald Trump in 2024. That's why.
And that is a great political strength. It shows that he's really got his finger on the pulse.
It shows, because I think he's sincere in his beliefs, it shows that he is developing with the American people. So it's not even just cynically putting your finger on the pulse.
It's actually growing with the American people. It makes him a very, very strong politician.
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Speaking of the times, there's a new report out. Gen Z and millennials are drinking much less alcohol than Gen X and boomers.
They're booze and less. My generation, the millennials, and especially the Zoomers, and I've noticed this because I'm a real hip, cool guy.
So I'm friends with some Zoomers and everything. And when I hang out with the Zoomers, they are much less interested in boozing, throwing back a couple of Coca-Colas than even my generation has been.
And my generation is much less interested in it than Gen X and the boomers. And even though the plural of anecdote is data, we have real data on this.
Business Insider has the report. While the media, including this publication, has been chattering about Gen Z and millennials scaling back on alcohol, many of us have missed that older generations are bucking the trend.
Many baby boomers are turning into baby boozers. I like that line.
They're hitting retirement, have savings to spend, and they're enjoying a little victory lap accompanied by a glass of wine or three. So the way that they came to these numbers is based on an analysis of credit court spending by Bank of America.
Now, some people will say that the Zoomers and the millennials are boozing less because they're doing other things like smoking pot and whatever, vaping.

And I guess that's true, though.

The Boomers have definitely smoked their share of the Sin Spinach over the years, so I don't know that that totally explains it. I have an explanation.
Just like I have an explanation for why JD is being memed more than anyone else in American history.

The reason that the Zoomers and the Millennials are boozing less than the boomers and Gen X, the reason that they're going on sober dates, for instance, the reason this isn't included in the Business Insider report, but it ties into a report that we talked about last week, that Zoomers are much less likely to engage in one-night stands. something like a quarter of Zoomers have friends who regularly engage in one night stands

compared to 75% of millennials.

So you're seeing this drop within one generation. The reason for that is everything old is new again.
It's the 80s with a twist, and it's hip to be square. That's why.
But because fashion comes in cycles, politics comes in cycles, it's not exactly a repeat.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

We are in the new version of the 80s.

It is hip to be square.

Zen, those little nicotine pouches, that's the new Coke.

Trump is the new Reagan.

We're back.

That's why.

If you want to understand it, just recognize we're living in kind of the 80s.

It's not exactly the same.

It's a little bit weirder. It's a little bit crazier.
You can't predict everything, but that's it. Hippie-dippie, loosey-goosey.
If it feels good, do it. Obama era, over.
When the millennials came of age, over. Flower child, boomer, let's put little daffodils in the rifles, and it's the age of Aquarius, boomer era, over.
We are fully back in dialing in, dressing normal, not being a total

degenerate hedonist. We're going to make America great again.
We're going to have priorities.

We're going to form families. Trad wives are in going to have priorities.
We're going to form families.

Trad wives are in.

Promiscuity is out.

Trad wives are in.

It's hip to be square.

That's what's going on.

It really is that simple, okay?

Because we've gone so far in the other direction,

everyone realized it was making them miserable.

One in five women was hooked on anti-depression pills.

Children, teenagers were getting hooked on these depression drugs. people are trying to deal with their unhappiness by going so far as to mutilate their bodies and sterilize themselves and chop their gonads off and it's just it got really really crazy and the poison of subjectivism had just reached levels of toxicity that we could no longer tolerate so we're giving up up the drugs that alter our state of mind toward fantasy and laziness.
And now the drug of choice is nicotine. It's back.
And our politicians of choice are not the weird hippie-dippie people who want to dismantle the country and deconstruct everything. It's Trump.
It's cool, man. It's cool.
I like that. That's good news.
Now, speaking of the Trumps, Donald Trump Jr. has just distinguished himself even further.
The guy's got a lot of feathers in his cap throughout his career, and he's been an important political figure in the Donald Trump senior political ascendancy. But he gets a new feather in his cap for the funniest answer to a liberal media request that has ever been given.
Mediaite, liberal media outlet, asked Trump Jr. if he was going to run for president in 2028.
They had this report based on all sorts of sources from around the Trump family that Don Jr. was planning a 2028 presidential run.
In fact, this is the preface. Three high-level sources told Mediaite that Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son and an omnipresent MAGA evangelist across the internet, is seriously considering a run for president in 2028.
Trump Jr. denied he's considering a run for 2028 in a statement to MediAid.

I would now like to read you this statement verbatim.

I accurately predicted that my buddy JD would be an instant power player in national GOP politics. So your theory is that I worked my ASS off to help him get the VP nomination because I want to run for president in 2028?

Are you effing retarded? I'm actually glad you're

printing this BS, he says the whole word, because at least now the rest of the press corps will see how S-H-I-T-T-Y your sources are and how easily you were played by them. Congrats, moron.
are you effing retarded

that

responds to a liberal media

request moron. Are you effing retarded? That response to a liberal media request will never be topped.
It is not possible. We all, all of us in conservative politics, we get requests from liberal media outlets for comment on occasion, more than on occasion.
These days we get them frequently. And you sometimes say, are you kidding me? That's crazy that you're totally off base here.
You don't understand. But are you effing retarded? I don't, I don't know how to be that.
That's from the president's son. It's evidence that he probably would be a quite good presidential candidate, but I, I, I, I take him at his word.
He says he's not going to run in 2028. I have no reason to believe I, you know, had I not seen this media this media report, I wouldn't have bet on Trump Jr.
running in 2028. Though, the fact that they raise it does point out to me he probably could do pretty well.
He might get the nomination. I don't know.
He's a very popular figure. He's very politically plugged in.
He has been influential in the Trump administration. To his point, he was instrumental in securing the VP nomination for J.D.
Vance, which also, to his point, goes to show he's probably not looking at the job for himself. If he picks a guy as strong as J.D.
Vance to be the VP, he recognizes he's setting that guy up to be the president next time, and Don Jr. is doing all sorts of stuff in the private sector and having a good time of it.
However, I don't know. He could do pretty well.
He knows how to handle the press. Are you effing retarded? I don't know.
That's a new level. Good luck beating that.
Now, speaking of things that are not the wisest, I'll clean up that word. You know this, we try to be a little more delicate and diplomatic on this show.
Speaking of things that are not the wisest, Stacey Abrams has just explained a $2 billion climate change graft that she was involved in. She went on, also speaking of the liberal media, she goes on, MSNBC is asked a softball question by Chris Hayes about this $2 billion climate change graft that President Trump alleged during his joint session address that she was involved in.
She knows this question's coming. She's got to be prepared to answer this question.
She's got to be prepared to defend the program, right? Here's her defense. $1.9 billion to recently created decarbonization of Holmes Committee headed up, and we know she's involved.
Just at the last moment, the money was passed over by a woman named Stacey Abrams. Have you ever heard of her? I led a program called Vitalizing DeSoto.
We worked in a tiny town in South Georgia to demonstrate that by replacing energy inefficient appliances with efficient appliances, you can lower your cost.

And in fact, we accomplished that.

For 75% of the community, they got appliances that are lowering their bills.

A coalition of organizations, famous organizations, came together and said to the EPA,

if we can do this here, we can do this for millions more Americans.

Let us invest the money of America in lowering the cost for Americans.

And the EPA said, okay, great, go for it.

Okay, so you see Chris Hayes there.

He had a couple interjections, but I cut it out for time.

You see, he's just nodding along.

You can almost read his mind.

He's saying, this is the best you can do.

According to her own explanation, this program that Trump called out in front of Congress is Dems in government giving Dems in the political operative sphere $2 billion to dole out on household appliances for whomever they see fit. The Democrats in government give $2 billion of your taxpayer money to extreme left-wing operatives to just dole out buying goodies, household goodies, for anyone they want to buy votes.
Notably in Georgia, where the program began georgia an important swing state that's it that's the best defense of the program that stacy abrams intimately involved in the program can come up with you remember during the obama administration people pointed to a government program where democrats would just buy cell phones for people to buy their votes, and they called them Obama phones. Now we've got Obama toasters.
Now we've got Abrams toasters. I don't know.
Democrats are buying toasters and refrigerators and, I don't know, new blenders for people to buy their votes. The issue is not the waste, though there's obviously a lot of waste there.
The issue is the corruption. That's the issue.
Okay, I'm not, there are libertarians and conservatives in the right-wing tent, and we oppose the same things for different reasons. The libertarians oppose these kind of programs because they're so wasteful and inefficient, and that money would be better spent in the private sector or the free market.
And my problem with it is not so much the spending. Big nations have robust governments and robust governments spend some money.
My issue isn't that the government is spending money. It's the graft.
It's the corruption. If you're going to spend the money, spend it on something good and useful and not obviously in furtherance of the self-interest of the Democrat Party, which is exactly what it is.
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Speaking of these stupid government programs and the different reasons that the libertarians and the conservatives oppose them, Doge, run by a very famous libertarian, Elon Musk, has just canceled a government program to trans animals. doge has announced that the nih canceled seven grants for transgender experiments on animals

including over half a million dollars to, quote, use a mouse model to investigate the effects of cross-sex testosterone treatment, and $33,000 to test feminizing hormone therapy in the male rat. You could look at that and say, that's not a lot of money.
All in just a little over half a million dollars. And if the federal budget, that's just a drop of a drop of a fraction of an iota of a drop of the bucket.
Yeah, sure. But first of all, you got to start somewhere.
And two, to me, it's not really about the amount of money. It's what they're doing.
So you see this sometimes. Conservatives and

libertarians will publish these lists of the dumbest government spending. They put shrimp on treadmills and measured how fast they could run.
What a waste of your taxpayer dollars. And yes, this seems wasteful, I guess, to accept, not really, in the sense that the purpose of testing drugs and medical treatments on animals is to see how they would work in humans.
That's what it's for. So I'm in favor of testing things on animals in as much as I want to make sure that these sorts of treatments are safe for human beings.
And human beings are rational souls, are rational creatures with souls proper to human beings, and animals are not. Animals have souls proper to their own nature, but they're not rational.
They don't possess rights in the sense that we think of human rights. And so I actually think it's fine to do experiments circumscribed by notions of justice on animals.
And so if they were testing cancer drugs on these animals, I'd say, well, that's good. Even if it's not so nice to the animals, I'd say, it's good.
You got to test the cancer drugs so that we can treat human beings who have greater dignity. The issue here is that we should not be attempting these trans procedures even on humans.
That's the issue. Why are we transing mice? Well, the real answer, what the liberals would tell you is we're transing mice to see that it's safe to trans human beings or that we can continue to monitor the health effects of transing human beings and try to adapt to the ways in which transing human beings is not for their health and you know so on and so forth the problem is we shouldn't be trans human beings the issue is not quantitative but qualitative the issue is not the the amount of money we're spending the issue is we should be able to make value judgments about the substantive good of these kinds of policies and say, no, we're not going to trans human beings.
So then there should be no need to trans the little mice. So there should be no need to spend the half million dollars.
And that kind of decision can't be made purely on the basis of efficiency, which is the charge of Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. We also of substantive goods which i guess is just the president and the legislators and the the way that we arrive at who is in charge of that which is always the next question who decides what's good is well you know we have elections in this country and the power of the voting public is circumscribed by the constitution circumscribed by by certain rights.
But broadly speaking, we get to decide what is good at the federal level and at the state level and at the local level. And we have principles of subsidiarity that also govern which decisions are made where, but that's what we need to have.
Department of Government Efficiency, great, love that. We also need to recognize a Department of Substantive Goods.
Should we trans people in the first place? I don't think we should. Should we kill babies in the womb? Should we sell babies on an open market through the fertility industry, through specifically IVF and surrogacy? Should we, should we, should we? Those are questions that have to be answered, not according to the sophistry of economists and calculators, but according to serious moral philosophy.
We didn't actually need to take these particular questions all that seriously even 25 years ago because everyone knew we shouldn't chop up people and pretend that they're the opposite sex. But now we're morally confused and we're living in a world after virtue.
So we need to invest some resources in those calculations as well. Okay, now speaking of the trans stuff, which dominates the news every single day, even though I'm so sick of talking about it, the libs are not sick of pushing it.
So we conservatives need to respond to it to make sure that the cancer of their preposterous anti-human ideologies don't spread too much. Democrat Representative Jennifer McClellan has just come out.
She was on Leland Vittert's show on News Nation. And she made the claim that the only way to put into effect President Trump's plan to get men out of women's sports, the only way that we could possibly do that is to pull down the pants of the athletes and check for ourselves.
I don't think that the American people want school professionals pulling their children's pants down to determine what sports team they should plan. No, how do you enforce that bill? If you read the bill, if you read the bill, how do you enforce it? How do you enforce it? Come on, you know what sex is on someone's birth certificate, and you say if it's on your birth certificate, if you're a boy, you can't play in girls' sports.
It's pretty simple. It's a completely false talking point.
Come on. It is not a false talking point.
You don't want to accept it. We can move on to something else.
But the only way to enforce that bill, in many cases, it allowed people in schools to pull children's fans down to determine what sex they are. Okay, great response here from Leland, who, by the way, is not like the most red meat bomb throwing right-wing republican or anything like that he's a pretty fair news guy and he comes out and this democrat rep says what these republicans want to do is pull down kids pants and that's the only way and he just goes give me a break lady you pass a law that says that men can't play in women's sports, women's sports, which by definition exclude men.

Until the social engineers now want to blur the distinction between men and women.

So there was already a legal right for women to have their own sports leagues.

There was already some way that we were able to tell the difference between men and women so that the men wouldn't play in the women's sports league. That was true until five minutes ago.
So what, were we pulling everyone's pants down in schools before? I don't think so. We were obviously able to tell somehow.
Now this woman is being obtuse and she's saying there's no way to tell. And Leland points out, he says, you know, we have birth certificates.
But in fairness, the Democrats have also tried to compromise birth certificates. They've tried to allow people to change their birth certificate to pretend that they're the opposite sex.
So in fairness, birth certificates are not totally reliable these days. But we also have genetic testing.
If it really comes down to it, you have to take all sorts of medical tests to go to public school in this country anyway. You have to take all sorts of vaccinations, undergo all sorts of medical exams.
So I don't think it would be that hard to just check someone's blood and say, oh no, yeah, it's a dude, right? It's a check in a real margin case. But also it's not going to really take it that far because one, we live in a society where people are not lying all the time.
So, So, you know, probably like the parents will fess up. Probably people live in a society where people are not lying all the time so you know probably like the parents will fess up probably people live in communities so they remember they say like hey you know jane over there she was jack until like a week ago you know so i can remember that but also you can usually tell you can usually tell right i'm not saying that there has never been a a transvestite that's a little bit confusing.
It's a confusing culture. But 99 times out of 100, you can tell.
They're not fooling anybody. Actually, it's ma'am.
No, I don't think it is. And you don't need to pull someone's pants down to know that either.
You can tell. If we have so lost our prudence that we need to pretend now that you have to examine someone's genitals to know if they're a man or a woman, then I guess we're not capable of self-government, right? But I think we can.
I think we can tell. And this woman's point is well taken.
The one good point that she's making is we live in a culture right now that is so intentionally confusing that we can't trust typical longstanding markers of truth like birth certificates. That's not an argument to further the confusion.
That's an argument to clear up the confusion that the Libbs have recently put into place. That's an argument to not let people change the sex on their birth certificates.
To align with fantasy rather than reality. This is the same argument people make about marriage.
When I say, you know, marriage is good and it's meant the same thing everywhere for all of human history until about five minutes ago. So we don't hate anybody.
We're not phobic. When we say that two fellows can't marry each other, we're just saying that that is not within the definition of marriage.
It's not phobic or irrationally hostile and antagonistic to say that a circle can't be a square. It just isn't that.
It's not square-a. That's not what it is.
The left will respond to that, and they'll say, well, you know, even the squishy right, they'll say, you know, marriage has been so degraded in recent years through things like no-fault divorce and through things like radical feminism that diminishes the role of the husband and the wife, And it's been so degraded over the years that really, what's the difference? Why wouldn't we redefine it to include two fellows? And I say, you're right. Marriage has been degraded, especially by the liberalization of divorce.
That's not an argument for further weakening or even abolishing marriage in our law. That's an argument for strengthening marriage.
If you're telling me that an institution has been greatly degraded previously, then we should strengthen that institution. We shouldn't totally abolish it.
Well, you know, we can't even really trust the birth certificates anymore to tell us who's a boy and a girl. Okay, let's fix the birth certificates then, shall we? Let's not further confuse people.
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But the media, they're crazy. The media wants you to believe that President Trump is a criminal, that Elon Musk is unhinged, and the world is spiraling into chaos.
Here's the truth, though. We're winning.
The Libs' lies are unraveling. The narrative is crumbling.
Their tears are falling. That is why The Daily Wire is here, to cut through the noise and bring you the facts that others won't.
Uncensored, ad-free daily shows, investigative journalism, live chats, breaking news first, no filter, no corporate leash, no nonsense. The Daily Wire is where the real story lives.
Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe and join the fight today. My favorite comment on Friday is from Ric Flair of Astra, who says, why the heck does a governor have a podcast? He should be working.
This is in reference to Gavin Newsom, the Patrick Bateman of politicians. I actually don't think it's a bad thing that he has a podcast.
As someone who hosted a podcast for two or three years with a sitting politician, I don't think that's necessarily bad. FDR had his fireside chats.
Politicians spend most of their time giving speeches and sitting on the phone raising money. So they talk.
That's the job of a politician 97 of the time, is just to talk and communicate. So I'm not opposed to that.
That's a part of public service. The better question to me is, why specifically does Gavin Newsom specifically have a podcast specifically right now? And the obvious answer, why was his first guest Charlie Kirk? The obvious answer is he recognizes there's a big problem with the Democrat Party.
If they keep going down the open borders, trans the kids kind of madness, they're going to never win an election again. Newsom wants to be the nominee in 2028.
He wants to be the president in 2029. And so he's going to tack to the center.
That was a very calculated move. I don't really trust him.
Even on issues of weird sex stuff, he was one of the most left-wing politicians in America in 2004 when he was mayor of San Francisco. So I don't trust a word that the guy says.
He's a noted liar who tried to make himself the face of COVID and the lockdowns and sacrifice. And then they caught him breaking his own COVID rules at the French Laundry.
I think he is dishonest as the day is long, but I think he's a clever politician and he recognizes that's the only hope that Democrats have in 2028. And why podcasts? Because that's the way that people communicate now.
Trust the New York Times, trust the Washington Post. It was the podcast election.
Now, speaking of, turning from Congress Lady Jennifer McClellan, but also still speaking of sad and bizarre medical stories. Did you read about the death of Gene Hackman, the great actor Gene Hackman? This was spooky, man.
The story, for those of you who have not followed it all that closely, Gene Hackman was found dead in his home. Now, he was quite old, and he had been suffering from Alzheimer's, so it's not all that surprising.
What was weird was Gene Hackman and his much younger wife were both found dead in their home at the same time. To add further to the oddity of the story, their dog was also found dead at the same time.
So people had two theories that were floated right away. They said either it was carbon monoxide, the silent killer just kills people.
You don't even know what's happening. We've heard those stories before.
Or was it some kind of suicide or something? People were just wildly speculating without any basis. Now we found out what happened.
According to Heather Gerald, New Mexico's chief medical examiner, apparently Gene Hackman's much younger wife died from Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. It's this respiratory virus illness caused by a virus transmitted by rodents.
So, who knows? Maybe she was bit by a mouse in her garden. We don't know.
But she was infected by a rodent. Her exact time of death is unknown.
She was last seen on February 11th.

Gene Hackman died of hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. According to information from his pacemaker, he likely died seven days after his wife was last seen.
so that means that gene hackman's wife died and he lived in the home with her body in it for up to a week now why did their dog die their dog had been in a crate because he was recovering from some veterinary procedure a day before the wife was last seen so the dog was locked up in a It's just really gruesome. The fact that Gene Hackman had advanced Alzheimer's means he might not have even known that his wife was dead.
She was taking care of him, so he might have just not, he wasn't given his medicine, probably wasn't given food, probably wasn't given water. Now, he might not have even been out of bed.
We don't know. But if you have ever had a loved one suffer Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia, this story is pretty believable.
I was talking to a buddy of mine and he said, I just don't believe the story. Something doesn't seem right.
I said, I don't know. Having had a loved one who died of dementia and possibly Alzheimer's, I actually don't know what the specific dementia was.
We never had it checked. I believe it.
This could have, if our loved one had been left in the home like this, I could totally have seen this happening. And so then the question was, well, why were they in the home together? Why wasn't someone checking in for a week? Gene Hackman had three kids.
I don't know. I don't know the relationship of the kids to Gene Hackman.
I don't know why someone didn't check on him. I don't know.
Sometimes people in advanced illness like that, they kind of pull away from people. They don't want to talk on the phone.
They don't want people to come over. I don't know.
What I do know, zooming out from the story, is this kind of story is the consequence of a society that increasingly refuses to confront death. We do not want to think about death.
Say what you will about ancient and medieval society. It took death pretty seriously.
It looked at death head on, maybe because it was more accustomed to seeing death. Now, everyone still dies.
The death rate is exactly the same today as it was in the Middle Ages, and it's actually just slightly higher than it was in antiquity, because we have one case of someone surviving death from antiquity, none recently. So why can't we confront death? Well, because we have no, it's not a medical issue.
Medically, we're better at dealing with death than we ever have been. But ethically, philosophically, theologically, we have no idea how to confront death.
Even anthropologically, you've got people now, all these futurists talking about how they're going to conquer death, how they're going to end death. Death is over.
So we don't know how to deal with it. When people are really close to death, we just try to shove people off into homes and hospices and just ignore them.
Older people live alone much longer than they should because they don't want to confront the reality of death. Their kids don't want to confront the reality.
We just don't. We've lost.
We don't have intergenerational living anymore. We have a highly individualist society that refuses to acknowledge that we have obligations between the generations to our loved ones.
And even our aging loved ones have obligations to the rest of their family to accept their help. That's been shattered.
And it's been shattered by the individual, the hyper-individualism of the left and the right. But that's what's going on here.
Now, speaking of death, story I talked about at the top. There are these reports that Christians and other religious minorities are being slaughtered in Syria.
There's a report here from, this is from the Associated Press. Take it for what it's worth.
Two days of clashes and revenge killings in Syria leave more than a thousand people dead. There were initially reports that Christians were among those who were being targeted along with Alawites and Druze, other religious minorities.
Then there were reports coming out that Christians aren't really being targeted, and it's rather unclear, actually, because there's a lot of propaganda around that region from all of those sides. On the one side, you have Turkey, Israel, the Al-Qaeda slash ISIS slash general Islamist terrorists who took over Syria.
On the other side, you have Iran and Russia, which had been backing Bashar Assad, who was the erstwhile leader of Syria. And then when he fell, all hell broke loose.
Conflicting reports. Conclusions, however, though, as I predicted at the time, though it was not popular, ousting Bashar Assad was probably a terrible thing because Bashar Assad, for all his sins, generally took care of religious minorities.
Okay. My other take on this story, well, obviously pray for these people,

the Alawites and the Druze and the Christians,

even though it's disputed if the Christians are being,

Christians have been persecuted in Syria for a long time.

I'm sure they're still being persecuted now.

Also, when there is a tectonic political shift going on,

as there is now,

some eras, there aren't huge shifts going on. The mid-90s, there weren't huge political shifts.
The big political shift had occurred in the early 90s with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then things were kind of the same until 9-11.
Right now, there are tectonic political shifts going on. You see this especially in the conflict in Ukraine, also in the conflict in Gaza, also in President Trump talking about acquiring Greenland and adding Canada to the country, retaking the Panama Canal.
There's a tectonic shift that is even reflected in the election of President Trump. We talked earlier about mimesis and our leaders reflecting the body politic.
And something has changed. We came to the end of something with the first election of Trump, and now we're really seeing that come to fruition.
And when those shifts take place, the propaganda backed by organizations, backed by states, gets very, very intense. So it's another reason not to believe everything that you read on the internet and to try to do some of that research for yourself.
And of course, to pray for these people, because there are, there are,

there's no doubt in my mind that Alawites, Druze, and even Christians are being seriously persecuted there. And there's no doubt in my mind that greater changes are even to come.
Tax Act knows you probably don't need help filing taxes, but if you get stuck, we have live experts you can talk to. And who knows, you could hit it off and become long-term tax friends.
Staying up late at night, talking about deductions, refunds, personal exemptions. Heck, you could even fall in love and create a little dependent of your own one day.
Or they could just answer your filing questions. Tax Act.
Let's get them over with. Okay, it's Music Monday.

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