Ep. 1699 - RFK Jr. Goes After Big Soda

As President Trump makes good on his campaign promise to abolish the Department of Education, benighted Congressman Eric Swalwell is raising the alarm. The literal and figurative airbag Democrat warned on Friday, quote, Education Secretary McMahon just delivered a WWE-style smackdown to you and your kids' dreams of affordable college.
Now, Swalwell is right about something that the Democrats don't usually admit. The vast majority of education department spending, 71%, according to PolitiFact, goes toward college grants and loans.
It's about paying for college. The Department of Education spends very little time and money on things like school lunches and special ed and all the other things that Democrats are fear-mongering about losing.
The chief activity of the Department of Education is, as Swalwell suggests, making college more affordable. So let's see how the department has done on that front.
I have a little chart here. It's very simple.
I just took a chart from the National Center for Education Statistics, and then I added my own little marker on here. You see, here's the cost of college education from 1960 or so.
It was a bit flat, ticks up a little bit. It kind of goes down, actually, until 1979, when the Education Department is founded.
And then, starting exactly when the education department is founded. And then starting exactly when the education department is founded, costs of college skyrocket with no end in sight.
And you know what the Democrats are going to say? Well, they're going to say, well, the other thing that happened just after 1979 is Reagan got elected. Let's blame Reagan.
But you can't just blame Reagan. You look at the chart.
Okay, here we go. Here's the absolute low point for the cost of college.
Then it starts to go up under Reagan. Okay, then it kind of plateaus a little bit at the end of Reagan into Bush.
It's still going up though. And then Clinton gets elected.
There's a Democrat. It goes up again by a lot.
Then Bush gets elected. keeps going up.
Then Obama gets elected, keeps going up. So it just keeps going up.
Now, I'm no education policy one, but it seems to me that if we want to make college affordable again, the very first thing that we should do is abolish the Department of Education. It's pretty simple.
Why has college cost increased so much since the Department of Ed was founded? Might it be because the Department of Ed just gave a blank check to colleges, said we'll pay for basically anything, or at least we'll entrap students in cycles of endless debt so that they can pay for anything? And then obviously the costs rise with that. So I'm very grateful to President

Trump for following through on his promise. I'm also especially grateful to Congressman Swalwell

for accidentally undermining the entire Democrat argument against it. I'm Michael Knowles.
This

Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show.
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showallegiance.com for American flags made the American way. So much nonsense about the Department of Ed.
The really clever Democrats are able to make their silly arguments for the Department of Ed seem somewhat plausible. But Swalwell just completely guts it.
He says, the point of this is to fund college education and make it more affordable. They say, okay, we're supposed to make it more affordable.
How come the costs have skyrocketed exactly since the department was founded? It doesn't matter who's in office. Doesn't matter which party controls the government.
It's Department of Ed. Okay.
There's more nonsense, though. They're saying Trump wants to cut special needs education programs, that Trump wants to cut food programs for poor kids in school.
Is that true? Can we get a fact check on that? Can we get a fact check

from President Trump in the Oval Office? And also, Bobby Kennedy, the Health and Human Services, will be handling special needs and all of the nutrition programs and everything else. Rather complex, but that's going to be headed by and handled by Health and Human Services.
So I think that'll work out very well.

Those two elements will be taken out of the department of education and then all we have to do is get the students to get guidance from the people that love them and cherish them including their parents by the way who'll be totally involved in their education along with the boards there you go go. There you got it.
The libs, their latest talking point because they have so few arguments for the Department of Education. We need the Department of Education so that test scores improve.
Oh, right. Oh, they've declined since the department was founded.
We need the Department of Education to reduce college costs. Yikes, college costs have skyrocketed.
Okay, well, we need the Department of Education

so that poor kids

can get cheap lunches

and so that special needs kids

can get the attention they deserve.

Wait a second.

Trump's just going to put that

into other departments

because that constitutes,

nutrition in schools

and special needs students

constitutes so little

of what the Department of Education does.

They just put it under HHS.

Some other department doesn't matter.

They'll take care of it. There won't be any interruption to service, and the rest of the Department of Ed can go away.
The problem for the liberals with the Trump administration compared to other Republican administrations is that there are Republican ideologues, usually of a more libertarian bent, who actually do want to end subsidies for poor kids to get lunches in schools. Who actually do want to cut funding for special needs education in schools.
Who actually do want to cut various government services. Trump is not one of those Republicans.
Never has been, never will be. Trump has been running consistently, not just since 2016, but since he flirted with the presidential run for the Reform Party in 2000, really since he was flirting with the presidential run back in the 1980s.
Trump has been vocally in favor of maintaining certain entitlement programs.

He's not some libertarian ideologue.

So when the libs say, well, if you cut that department, it's going to cut, you know, the cheap lunches for kids in the inner city. Trump will say, what? Oh, I don't want to do that.
Yeah. Okay.
Kennedy will handle that now or someone else will handle that. But yeah, we'll keep that.
Of course, we'll keep that. It's the same argument.
It's just a particular instance of the same argument that the Democrats make with Trump when they say, if you elect Trump, he's going to cut social security. One thing I can promise you, I can guarantee you about a Trump administration, he'll never cut social security.
He's made that a key pillar of his platform. He has irritated Republicans, libertarian ideologues, because he will not cut entitlements.
So this is why when Chuck Schumer is trying to make arguments, when Biden and Kamala were previously making arguments during the campaign, they have this basic problem of they don't even know how to argue against Trump's kind of conservatism. Because Trump's kind of conservatism is new by our standards.
It's actually, I think, a more traditional kind of conservatism, but it's not the kind of conservatism that we've seen for the last 40, 50 years. They got nothing.
They're burning down fields of straw men. Okay, fine.
That's not going to persuade voters. Now, speaking of Bobby Kennedy, Kennedy is taking on one of the most nefarious lobbies in Washington.
You know, the kind we're not allowed to talk about, the kind that secretly controls our politics, apparently. I'm talking about big soda.
Oh yeah, baby, big sugary soft drink. Kennedy is proposing cutting welfare subsidies for soda.
Not cutting welfare subsidies overall, but a huge amount of money from SNAP programs, food stamps, goes toward high fructose corn syrup soft drinks that are bad for everyone's health. So if the idea is that we are going to subsidize people's food because they don't have enough money and we want to make sure that they're healthy and they can continue to eat.
Why would we subsidize food that is contrary to their health, that's actually going to undermine their health? Apparently, the $113 billion program that serves 42 million Americans pays for soda and other processed foods, and Kennedy wants to end that. So apparently, it's hard to get hard numbers on this, but soda companies make $2 to $5 billion per year from food stamps.
Your taxpayer dollars are subsidizing soda companies because the SNAP welfare program spends a huge amount of money on soft drinks. So Kennedy says this is bad.
It's bad for the people who are drinking the sodas. It's bad for the taxpayer that we have to subsidize these soda companies, and we're not going to do it.
Immediately after Kennedy proposes this, there's a massive campaign from influencers online to say, oh, this is government overreach. This is, no, we conservatives, we don't support this.
No, no, no. You need to keep giving our tax dollars to welfare programs to pay for soda for poor people whose health it's going to harm.
No, no, no. This is really, keep the soda.
Keep the soda subsidies going. And it was really curious.
I'm not accusing anybody of anything, but all these little influencers, many if not most of whom make money by taking association and endorsement deals from various entities, all of a sudden started promoting Big Soda right when it's a crucial moment in policy decisions. Maybe there was a little lobbying going on.
I don't know. It was curious to me.

I understand the arguments for and against. The best argument for keeping the welfare subsidy for soda is that it's a little stingy, it's a little cruel to begrudge poor people this one simple

luxury. Look, we're a society.
Some people are not as well off as other people. We actually do

Thank you. begrudge poor people this one simple luxury? You know, look, we're a society.
Some people are not as well off as other people. We actually do have a great wealth disparity in America.
And so if people who really don't make money, who are really kind of down and out financially, if they want to have a Coca-Cola, like an actual Coca-Cola, I'm not even using that as a euphemism for booze. If they want to have a soda, who begrudges them that, right? Who begrudges them that luxury? However, the best argument against that argument, and it's the side that I come down on, is it's not really a luxury soda.
It'd be one thing if all the rich uncle penny bags of the world We were just guzzling two liter bottles of Pepsi. But that's not what happens.
In fact, most of the rich, fancy people that I know never drink soda. They drink fruity little seltzers and they drink, I don't know, they drink kombucha or something, whatever.
I don't know, whatever rich people, they drink boba tea, I don't know. Whatever fancy, rich, elite people drink, that's what they drink.
They do not drink soda. And I kind of come down on this side.
I am totally sympathetic to the argument that if we're going to have any kinds of welfare programs, we should allow people certain luxuries. It's okay.
Life isn't just about getting the basic amount of sustenance into your body and just going to toil for the rest of the day. It's nice to afford people certain luxuries.
Soda is really not a luxury anymore. We've moved past that.
When I was a kid, my blood type was like Dr. Pepper and Diet Snapple.
I drank a lot of soda. It's not good for you.
We're realizing it's not good for you. It doesn't seem like a luxury anymore.
We've moved on. Sorry.
I know even if the soda companies are spending zillions of dollars to lobby the online influencers, I'm with Kennedy on this. I'm with the Trump administration on this.
I don't want my tax dollars funding soda that I don't even consider a luxury. If we're going to have our taxpayer dollars funding luxuries for people who are a little bit financially down and out, have it fund Mayflower Cigars.
At least that's a real luxury. There's so much more to say first, though.
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Speaking of elites, Democrat Senator John Ossoff has just made a big claim. He's made a serious accusation against Trump and the Republicans.
He said that Trump and the Republicans were elected on a populist tide of changing the government, changing the direction of the country. But Trump and his friends are actually the very elites that they all claim to hate.
Trump's cabinet is worth like 60 billion dollars. That's not even including Elon.
They are literally the elites they pretend to hate. The president is not at his palace in Florida thinking about whether you can afford daycare for your daughter or how to stop insurance companies from denying your claim or anything that matters to our daily lives.
When is the last time you even heard Donald Trump talk about health care or child care? He's talking about invading Greenland. They are the elites.
They are literally the elites that they claim to hate.

No, they're not. They're different elites.

What Ossoff is trying to make this about is some kind of class war.

But it's not really a class war.

The lower classes, the middle classes, and the upper classes are not monolithic. That's what this election showed us.
Most of the billionaire class are libs and Democrats. People like Zuckerberg, people like Jack Dorsey, people like Sundar Pichai, the Google execs.
Those guys are, to say nothing of the just regular Fortune 500 company owners and CEOs, but some billionaires are on our side now. A handful, a small number.
Really, it's just Elon and Trump, actually, I think. And then some of the other corporate billionaires are trying to suck up to Trump now that Trump won and won the popular vote.
But that means that some billionaires are for the libs, some billionaires are for the conservatives. In the middle class, where most of us are, we certainly know that many in the middle class are for the libs, especially the upper middle class.
Many in the middle class, especially the lower middle class, are for the conservatives. And then among the lower economic classes, we know a ton of them are for the libs.
All those blue cities in the inner urban areas, but many of the lower economic classes are for the conservatives, the deplorables, the irredeemables, all the people that Hillary Clinton invades against. In other words, it's not merely an economic issue.
Furthermore, every political movement has elites, must have elites. This is obviously a very conservative insight.
There's always hierarchy. There's always order.
Not everyone is totally leveled out, egalitarian, Harrison Bergeron, lowest common denominator stuff. People are different.
People have different skills. Some people make more money.
Some people have more status. Some people come from more privilege.
Some people build bigger companies. Of course, people are differentiated.
I'm not anti-elite. I'm anti the elites that have governed us for a quarter century, at least.
I'm not opposed to university education, to give a pressing example when we talk about the Department of Education. I'm not against university education in particular, or in principle.
I'm against it in particular. I'm against the elite schools that we have today that aren't giving people a proper liberal education, that aren't teaching them anything of value at all, that are actually just screwing up their heads and arousing their base passions and leaving them more ignorant that they came in.
Ossoff is trying to blur all of these distinctions. He says, they're literally the elites that they claim to hate.
No, no, no. They're different elites.
And we know that. We know that there is a big difference between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
On the surface, they seem to be the same kind of person. They're both super rich.
They both made their money in Silicon Valley or made a lot of their money in Silicon Valley. They both run social media platforms.
But while Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook were suppressing conservative speech and trying to destroy conservative media businesses, including ours, Elon Musk bought Twitter for the express purpose of increasing conservative speech,

allowing conservative media companies to flourish. Those are not the same thing.

Furthermore, last point on this, this is yet another example of what I've pointed out is the theme of the Trump administration going back to 2016. I was talking about this at the National

Review Ideas Summit over the weekend. I've been hammering this on the show for years now.

There is a theme of the Trump administration, going back to 2016. I was talking about this at the National Review Ideas Summit over the weekend.
I've been hammering this on the show for years now.

There is a shift away from a focus merely on procedural norms toward substantive goods.

Yes, there are elites, there are foot soldiers, there are people in the middle on both sides. The question is, what exactly are the elites elite in service of? What are we doing? Obama and Trump were both presidents of the United States.
That doesn't make them the same. What are they doing? What are they working toward? Why were they elected in the first place? That's the question.
And our elites are better than their elites. And our political movement is better than their political movement.
And more people want our political movement because they know that our political movement is better for the country. There's so much more to say first, though.
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Speaking of elites, big win out of one of the

most elite institutions in the entire world, JPMorgan Chase. JPMorgan Chase has just, well,

it depends on how you read the headlines. Some of the headlines will say that JPMorgan has

eliminated its DEI department. It's not exactly true.P.
Morgan has eliminated its DEI department.

It's not exactly true.

J.P. Morgan has changed its DEI department.

It's changed it from DEI to DOI.

DOI, what's that?

They've changed, not diversity and not inclusion.

Those remain the same.

They've changed the call for equity to a call for opportunity. Okay, you're a little bit skeptical, right? I'm a little bit skeptical too.
What does JP Morgan say? Here's Jen Piepsak. Am I mispronouncing that? Probably.
We are changing equity to opportunity and renaming our organization to diversity, opportunity, and inclusion because the E always meant equal opportunity to us, not equal outcomes. And Jamie Dimon, the head of J.P.
Morgan, has been pretty emphatic about this in his investor letter earlier this year. Even though J.P.
Morgan is usually associated with the Democrats, and I think has been a lifelong Democrat, he's pushed back against the excesses of the left. And he said, for me, equity always means equal opportunity.
It doesn't mean whatever these communists think, which is equality of outcome. So the J.P.
Morgan COO goes on. This means some activities councils or chapter may be consolidated to streamline our process and engagement strategy.
Rubber meets the road. What does this mean for J.P.
Morgan? We've always been committed to hiring, compensation, and promotion that are merit-based. We do not have illegal quotas or pay incentives, and we would never turn someone away because of their political or religious beliefs or because of who they are.
We're not perfect, but we take pride in constantly challenging ourselves and raising the bar. Okay, so if you took the initialism out of it, D-E-I-D-O-I, whatever, and you just read that statement, if you're a conservative, you'd probably say, oh, this is good stuff.
Great. Okay, we're not going to have this insane hyper-focus on a new racial caste system from the left that is going to disadvantage men in favor of women, is going to disadvantage white people in favor of other groups, strictly on the basis of their sex or their race.
Good stuff. But then, what about the diversity and the inclusion? I get the opportunity part, but what about the diversity and the inclusion? I think J.P.
Morgan's trying to split the baby here, and I get it. J.P.
Morgan is the fifth largest bank in the world. If you take out the Chinese banks, it's the largest bank in the world.
It's the biggest bank. Okay.
So they don't want to alienate the libs who we know are very vindictive. And if I were the head of J.P.
Morgan, I'd probably do exactly the same thing. If the Democrats come back into power, you don't want to have to face down Elizabeth Warren and all these vindictive libs who are going to harangue you and try to diminish your status as the biggest non-Chinese bank in the world because you contradicted the sacred faith of DEI.
So you want to try to keep, no, we got the D in the I. It's just, we don't want all this kind of commie gobbledygook.
We don't want all of this illegal, racially discriminatory, sexually discriminatory stuff that the left is pushing.

So we're going to do DOI. But if JP Morgan is doing what it says it's doing, if JP Morgan is only considering performance-based merit, how good you are at spreadsheets, you know, how good you

are. I don't really know what bankers do.
How good you are at moving the money around from one screen to the next screen. Is that what bankers do? I guess so.
If that's all J.P. Morgan is considering, then J.P.
Morgan cannot consider the D or the I. D, E, I all go together.
Diversity means create a grouping by race according to the caprices of the DEI master. Equity means exactly the same thing, means that certain races and sexes and people with sexual desires and so on have been unjustly discriminated against and kept down.
How? We don't even have to explain. They just have.
So we are going to create an assemblage of people according to the caprices of the DEI master. Inclusion.
What does inclusion mean? It means exactly the same thing as the D and the E. Inclusion means we're going to include people that we want according to our caprices, and we're going to exclude people, which we have.
If you're going to determine who you include, then you're also determining who you exclude. We're going to exclude certain people also according to our caprices.
So DEI all mean exactly the same thing. There is no difference.
They don't need three letters. They only need one letter.
What JP Morgan is doing here is we're saying we reject DEI ideology, but we're going to keep two-thirds of the initialism because we have to protect our bank from the vindictive libs. But DOI is incoherent.
If you're going to only focus on performance-based merit, then you can't take into consideration racial diversity or sexual diversity. You're only considering performance-based merit.
If every single person in your organization ends up a white man, but they all just happen to be better at spreadsheets than the women and the black people and the Hispanic people, and you're really only promoting based on performance-based merit, then you're going to have an organization only made up of white men, and you're going to have zero diversity by the left standards. You're going to have zero inclusion by the left standards.
So it's a totally incoherent initialism, but it's a good move by J.P. Morgan.
J.P. Morgan should be applauded for this move.
They're hedging their bets, as I guess people in finance do. They're hedging their bets on the initialism, as is true in practical politics, because politics is a practical science.
It's not a theoretical science. It's not an abstract science.
They are giving a solution to a political problem that in principle isn't really totally coherent, totally logical. But that's how politics works.
I've been using this quote from the political philosopher John Gray recently. Politics is much more a conversation than an argument.
And the logic of a conversation isn't always as strong as the logic of a syllogism or a lengthy argument. Good move from JPMorgan Chase and a good sign of the political times.
But ideas have consequences. We got to go even further.
If you really don't believe in the E, then you don't believe in the D or the I either. Speaking of opportunities, Gavin Newsom, governor of California, sees his opportunity.

His opportunity to become the presidential nominee for the Democrats in 2028. This is it.
The field is totally creamed. Unless Joe Biden's going to run again at age 150, unless Joe Biden's going to run again from the crypt, then Kamala ain't going to get it.
Who's going to get a Buttigieg, Liz Warren? None of these people are going to get it. So Gavin Newsom sees this opportunity.
He launched a podcast to appeal more to the center. His first guest was Charlie Kirk.
His second or third guest was Steve Bannon. He's trying to appeal specifically to MAGA Republicans, people who are personally close to President Trump.
And he's also making claims about his governorship that are a little dubious. He made the claim to Charlie Kirk that the word Latinx, Latinx, is the silly overreach, this preposterous kind of politically correct, woke neologism that he would always reject, okay? He opposes such excesses of the extreme left.
And yet, well, let's just go to the tape. By the way, not one person ever in my office has ever used the word Latinx.
So can we finally put that to bed? We agree. No more Latinx, everybody.
Well, I just didn't even know where it came from. I'm like, what are people talking about? I hope we can really paint a picture in terms of our consciousness of how impactful this has been on the Latinx community.
Latinx community, the Latinx and black communities. You've got politicians that are banning not assault rifles, but the word Latinx.
They're not even serious. Oh, yeah.
Oh, me. Hey, listen, fellow, fellow

centrists. Listen here, normal people.
I would laugh with this crazy term Latinx. Who would ever say that? Oh, I did many, many times.
And I actually, not only did he use the phrase Latinx, he specifically defended the phrase Latinx. So this guy is a stone cold liar.
I've called him Governor Bateman. He is

American psycho. His campaign opening in 2028 is going to be, hey, do you like Huey Lewis in the

news? Try getting a reservation at Dorsey now. Try getting a reservation at the French Laundry now.

He is a stone cold political animal. He lies effortlessly and he's extremely left-wing.

It's not just that he's slick willy and he's a liar. He does remind me a lot of Bill Clinton.
But it's not just that. Also, ideologically, he is very left-wing.
Remember, Gavin Newsom was permitting so-called same-sex marriage in San Francisco when he was mayor there in 2004, 11 years before Obergefell, when same-sex marriage, which just doesn't exist because it's an incoherent concept, when it was explicitly illegal, he was permitting such weddings. Furthermore, though, here's one a lot of people don't know about.
This is from a New Yorker profile in 2018. Gavin Newsom helped his mother kill herself.
Gavin Newsom helped his mother commit suicide. I'm just reading from the New Yorker profile.
Not exactly a right-wing profile, right? This is a left-wing sympathetic profile. In May 2002, his mother decided to end her life through assisted suicide.
Newsom recalled, she left me a message because I was too busy. Hope you're well.
Next Wednesday will be the last day for me. Hope you can make it.
I saved the cassette with the message on it. This is Newsom talking.
I saved the cassette with the message on it. That's how sick I am.
He crossed his arms and jammed his hands into his armpits. I have PTSD and this is bringing it all back.
The night before we gave her the drugs, the night before we gave her the drugs, I cooked her dinner, hard-boiled eggs, and she told me get out of politics. She was worried about the stress on me.
Oh man. I actually feel bad for Gavin Newsom.
I don't like Gavin Newsom. I hope he never gets near power.
He's the worst governor ever. He's terrible.
But I really, could you imagine this? I do think he's being totally sincere here when he says, I have PTSD from helping my mom kill herself. And this is bringing it back, and I saved the cassette tape where she left this message telling me she was going to kill herself, and she wanted me to be there, and I totally believe that.
Of course, how could you not? That is a horrible thing for a mother to do to a son. It's a horrible position to put the son in, and it's a horrible thing Gavin Newsom did to help his mother to kill herself, and why did they do it? This isn't just some weird quirk of the Newsom family.
This is a political movement on the very, very far left to normalize and encourage suicide based on a deeper leftist philosophical premise, really kind of a utilitarian premise that the greatest evil to be avoided is suffering. And that contrary to the classical and Christian conception of life, which is that we are endeavoring for happiness, eudaimonia in Aristotle's term, to engage in rational activity in an excellent way in accordance with virtue.
Contrary to the Christian notion that our life is from God, we didn't create our lives, we don't own our lives, we do not have the total freedom to do whatever we want with our lives, the Christian and just even classical pagan idea that there is a moral order that we are accountable to. And one of the basic aspects of the moral order and the natural law is self-preservation, that it is wrong to commit murder and it's wrong to murder yourself.
And it's wrong for many reasons that we don't really have time to get into now, but we've understood this for thousands of years. There's the liberal idea that there is no moral order, there is no God, we're going to become our own gods.
The greatest good is individual autonomy, and that is expressed most completely by killing ourselves, which is ironic. It's ironic, but it should be expected because liberalism is wrong about human nature, that the greatest expression of our freedom is to destroy ourselves.
It shows you the suicidality of liberalism. In any case, that is an extreme, extreme form of liberalism.
Newsom not only believes it, he participated in it. And you can tell he's torn up about it, and I feel for him.
And I'll probably pray for Gavin Newsom, because of how terrible this is. This guy cannot be anywhere near power.
This guy, and he's really politically adept, and he's a smooth operator and all those things, and he could get the Democrat nomination, and he could be the president of the United States. He should not be.
He is enthralled to an extremely dangerous ideology. He's not only totally incompetent, he not only allowed one of his greatest cities to burn to the ground because of his incompetence, he's also just ideologically so extreme that the things he believes are deeply, deeply evil and would greatly accelerate the destruction of our country.
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My favorite comment on Friday

is from Aaron Guzman, 7940. We're talking about hobbies at the end of the show Aaron guzman says my favorite hobby is listening to the michael knolls show.
Well, thank you. You are a gentleman and a scholar.
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Now, some people's favorite hobby is smoking dope. Did you know that? Having the old Haitian oregano, a little bit of the ganj, you know, Mary Jane, the old Peruvian parsley.
You catching what I'm putting out there, baby? I'm talking about marijuana. And, you know, I'm not the biggest fan.
I'm not saying it's the greatest evil in the world, but I'm totally unsympathetic to arguments in favor of liberalizing marijuana. Tobacco, I like.
Tobacco is the crop that built our country. Tobacco, if it does anything, you know, I smoke cigars, so it doesn't get in your lungs.
It doesn't really give you a lot of nicotine. But in as much as it gives you any nicotine, it kind of sharpens your mind, makes you a little quicker.
It's a nice way to relax, good way to have a conversation with friends. It doesn't really alter your state of mind other than in the way a cup of coffee does.
Well, pot does alter your state of mind. Now, unlike alcohol, which has been with us for the entire history of our civilization, our Lord's first public miracle is turning water into wine for people who've been drinking for a very long time.
Marijuana is a foreign kind of thing, novel to our culture, whereas alcohol is a social lubricant. In moderation, it can help ease and facilitate socializing, which is good and part of our human nature.
Pot generally doesn't do that. It draws you further into yourself, and it makes you kind of dumber and hungrier and makes you less funny, even though it makes other things seem funnier to you.
Anyway, I'll end my diatribe about why I'm not encouraging of the old sin spinach here. There's a study out published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Young potheads are six times more likely to have a heart attack than non-marijuana enthusiasts. Six times more likely to have a heart attack.
Potheads under 50, I'll try to use nicer language. people who use marijuana under the age of 50 are 6.2 times more likely to experience a heart attack.
They are 4.3 times more likely to experience an ischemic stroke, and they are twice as likely to experience heart failure, according to this study. Now, you might say, well, this might be a small sample size.
How could you find all those pot smokers? Well, a lot of people use marijuana. So this actually had a huge sample size.
Researchers surveyed over 4.6 million people under the age of 50. Now, 4.5 million of them did not use marijuana, but 93,000 did.
And all participants were free of health conditions that are associated with heart troubles. And the study also excluded people who use tobacco.
So they wanted it to be a pure, what is the effect of marijuana on your heart study? And it looks like marijuana is very, very bad for your heart. So where does that leave us? People will say, well, tobacco might not be good for your heart.
Maybe alcohol is not good for your heart. Okay, sure.
Where does that leave us? I'm not even just in vain against marijuana. I know the comments are going to be full of people who tell me they love marijuana.
Okay, I'm not even really arguing with you. I guess what irritates me most about the pro-marijuana political campaigning is the claim that I've heard from many, many pro-pot people that marijuana has no downsides.
This is what bothers me, more than the drug itself, more than even the conversation about legalizing drugs. It's this preposterous claim that there can be a substance that you light on fire and inhale into your lungs, or else cook in a brownie and eat.

Or else, I don't know.

I don't know the other ways people smoke pot

or indulge in marijuana.

But however you do it,

you're telling me that this has no risks to you,

it has no downsides, I don't believe that.

Everything has a risk.

Everything has downsides.

Some significantly more than others.

I am skeptical of anything that is said not to have downsides. And this political point is something that a lot more people are waking up to than were in the truly utopian, starry-eyed 1990s and early 2000s, where we thought that there were no limitations to our politics.
There's no limitation to our economy. There's no limitation to global trade.
There's no limitation moving into the Bush era to American imperialism. There's no limitation to Madisonian democracy all over the world.
It was the era of no limits in politics. And we're waking up and realizing, everything has limits.
Everything has downsides. This is, I think, a big motivating factor behind the populist or Trump or MAGA movement of the last 10 years is people recognizing, oh, there are limits to everything.
There are downsides. There are cons to everything, including what we have been told are unfettered political goods like free trade, like the open society, open borders, mass migration, the movement of peoples.
No, there are downsides to that. There are downsides to everything in this fallen and finite world, all the way from pot to migration and trade.
Okay? So recognize that. If you're making some no limits utopian argument to me, just know I'm immediately going to reject your argument.
Now, speaking of disordered behavior, there's a Wall Street Journal report out, quite troubling, that American women are giving up on marriage. Just read a little bit from the report.
Women are doing comparatively well when it comes to education and their early years in the labor force, and men are doing comparatively badly, says Brad Wilcox, a fellow at family studies and a sociology professor at UVA. This creates a mismatch because people prefer to date in terms of comparable education or outcome.
But, I mean, I even saw this, I remember. Right after college, in college, everyone's kind of equal.
In high school, everyone's kind of equal. You're all in, if you're not in the same math class, it's your, you know, someone's in the honors math class, someone's in the regular math class, but you're all basically equal.
And some kids are on the football team and some kids do the plays and some kids do student government. Some kids are in the marching band, but you're all, you're within three or four years of each other.
You're all kind of the same. When you get out into the real world, the working world, all of a sudden, when the blonde girl that was attracted to the football player at senior year of college, all of a sudden, now she might be attracted to the guy who's five, ten years older, who's way advanced in his career, who's rich, who's got a nice car, who's, she might start dating that guy.
And the guy that, the guy who was like the cool giga-chad football player just the year prior, now he's at the bottom of the totem pole in the working world and he's not making as much money and he's not. And so, and just, you just don't see as many people in your age cohort.
You go from being on a campus that has hundreds or thousands of people around your age. Now you're working in an office.
Maybe you're around five or 10 people who are around your age. I don't know.
You're working at some job. You're working in a store.
Maybe there are two or three people who are around your age. It just really shrinks your possibilities, your opportunities rather.
So Brad Wilcox further pointed out on Twitter that as people have been delaying marriage, as some women are giving up on marriage altogether, when you look at happiness here, the Institute for Family Studies has this chart out, it remains the case that the happiest group of women is married moms with children. The least happy group, single women without children.
Even in our modern age, with all these changes, all of the consequences of feminism, you see the breakdown. It's quite clear.
The natural law is undefeated. It's undefeated.
What does the natural law tell us? It's inscribed in every human heart. It's true throughout every culture that's ever existed.
It's just like the first principles of practical reason, the stuff that we just kind of know intuitively, we don't really have to reason about, the things that we have to know actually in order to reason. We know that man is a social creature.
We don't fall off a coconut tree like Kamala Harris tells us. That was the one smart thing Kamala's ever said.
We're a social creature. We're a coupling creature.
Marriage is normal for human beings. It's the kind of thing we just do.
And people sometimes divorce, but that's contrary to reason. We can subject our instincts to reason.
And in this case, the fundamental things apply as time goes by. Just remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh.
So that remains true, even with liberalism, even with modernism, even with feminism. Married moms with kids are going to be happier than single moms, single women without children, which means, as a general rule, marry your high school sweetheart.
when you take all the consequences of this study into consideration the lack of dating opportunity when you get out into the professional world and the kind of stratification and the and the the specialization and the blah blah blah and you take into account the happiness surveys of all the women the inescapable conclusion is that shared experience, growing together, becoming one flesh are important in marriage. The inescapable conclusion is you should marry someone basically sort of like your high school sweetheart.
In other words, the conclusion of all of our learning and all of our science and all of our investigations is that the things that we've pretty much always known are true, are true. Today is Music Monday.

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