The Big Damar Hamlin Question

It is good to be back in studio. Happy New Year, everyone. I hope everyone had fun with their family, with their friends, relaxing or busy, whatever it was that you did. We went to visit family in Ohio, although we ended up getting smacked with the flu, so even better to be back in studio. We have so much to talk about today. I was chomping at the bit to get back here talking with you because my goodness, who would’ve thought so many things happened over Christmas break. Before we get to all of that though, if you wouldn’t mind subscribing to my show, I would greatly appreciate that. Maybe you heard the news, maybe you have not. So in the event that you have not, let me tell you right now. We are moving to five days a week. That’s right. You can now download The Liz Wheeler Show Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

We’re very excited about this, and thank you. I mean, this is really due to you. Not only have you requested this repeatedly until we made it happen, but it’s also the success of this show is also a partnership. You and I, we have an ongoing conversation, and I really appreciate this powerhouse that we’re building, and I really appreciate you guys all being teammates on this journey. So that five episodes a week will be starting next week. So whether you listen on Apple Podcast or Spotify, whether you watch the video version on YouTube, on Rumble or on Locals, hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss even a single episode as we ramp things up. So what are we going to talk about today? Well, a couple things. We are going to talk about the Buffalo Bills Damar Hamlin’s collapse on the field during Monday Night

Football. Horrendous, heartbreaking. There’s no words to describe the horror of watching someone keel over the way that he did. And we’re gonna talk about the legitimate questions about the correlation between what happened to him and the you-know-what. We’re told we’re not supposed to talk about this, but that’s a stupid rule. It’s a stupid rule that we don’t have to follow, and we actually should talk about this for the good of Damar Hamlin and people like him. So we’re gonna talk about that. We’re also gonna talk about the House leadership vote. They’re, Republicans are trying kind of to elect a Speaker of the House. McCarthy has been stymied by what CNN has called, I actually think this was a great nickname that CNN coined, CNN called the 20 Republicans who refused to vote for McCarthy, CNN calls them the rebels.

The rebels. And I really feel like this is an opportunity for those 20 Republicans to co-opt that insult and make it their war cry. Like we did, when the British called us Yankee doodle during the Revolutionary War, we actually just co-opted that tune and took it, changed it from an insult to a battle cry here. We’re gonna talk about this, though, because some conservatives and Republicans are very pro-McCarthy, which is baffling. And some conservatives and Republicans think that there’s an urgency to elect a Speaker, and that we shouldn’t be having this gridlock. And I dissent. I object, I do not understand the huffing and puffing. I find it hilarious and delightful to watch this unfold. And I’ll tell you what should happen and what ought to happen. We’re gonna talk about that today.

We’re also gonna talk about former President Trump blamed the midterm loss, now technically, as you know, Republicans won that election because technically we won more seats than the Democrats did. But it wasn’t the red wave that we were hoping for, that we expected. And so in that case, Trump blamed this lack of a red wave victory in the midterms on pro-lifers, of all people. He tried to assign blame for the missing red wave to the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade. And we’re gonna talk a little bit today about what is happening with Trump, because I have a couple of thoughts that I wanna share with you on that. So let’s get to it.

Okay. The Damar Hamlin collapse is actually one of the most difficult things that I’ve seen when it happened. It was during Monday night football, probably a huge percentage of the country was watching this live. I was upstairs in my parents’ house, actually. We were there for Christmas. I was upstairs putting my daughter to bed. When my phone starts blowing up, I start getting all these text messages. Did you see this? What do you think of this? From political friends, but also just my family. My sister texted me from downstairs, are you watching what’s going on right now? And so I bring up this video and I watch, I watch the replay of Damar Hamlin making a tackle, which football’s always a violent sport, but comparatively, this hit was on average, an average hit. It wasn’t one of the ones that you’re like, holy cow, it wasn’t one of those extra violent ones. And I watched it and I just thought, wow, there are several things about this video that strike me as being different from other football injuries. So first of all, in case you didn’t see it, this is what happened.

Hmm.

That’s not what any of us wanna see. And everybody’s around him and just hope that he’s gonna be okay.

So we’ll take another break here in Cincinnati.

And I think my reaction was the same as the reaction of most people is, before I even started looking for speculation on what happened, you know, you just, like I said, I was upstairs putting my daughter to bed, and I just sit there and pray in our father. I just sit there and pray for the safety of this young man. He’s 24 years old. He’s so young. He’s in the prime of his life. He’s obviously living his dream playing in the NFL. And I just pray for his mother who had to sit there and watch it. They rushed him down. They rushed him to the hospital. He and his family rode in the ambulance. And you just pray to God to protect this man, to give the medical professionals the guidance that they need to give him the care that he needs to recover from this.

Because the strange things about this video, and by the way, I know that there are some, this is a little tangential, but I’m gonna get criticism for even playing that video. And I wanna explain two things. I wanna explain why I’m playing it, and I wanna explain why I disagree with the people who think that we shouldn’t play this video. There’s a fashionable trend happening amongst particularly alternative media outlets. And what I mean by that is, is new media, so like podcasts and non-corporate cable news outlets, where they don’t name the name of killers, whether it’s a serial killer, whether it’s a mass killer, whether it’s a terrorist, whether it’s a school shooter, they’ve decided not to publish the name of that individual because they say they don’t wanna spark copycats. They don’t wanna give that individual the notoriety that they might have sought.

And I understand the intention of that, and I think that that’s a mistake. I don’t think that that’s a good way to handle it. Because what we want to do as broadcasters, what I strive to do when I sit here with you every day, is unpack what’s going on in the world, and properly order our response to what’s happening in the world so that we can effectively fight for our liberty and effectively fight against a political enemy that seeks to subvert our liberty. And in doing that, I’m not a gatekeeper. I’m not your mother. I’m not your guardian. I’m not serving in this parental role where I decide what’s suitable for you to see. Right? And when news networks or outlets censor something because they don’t think that you have a right to see it, what they’re saying to you is they’re saying to you, well, I’m a little bit better than you.

I get to see this because I’ll be responsible with the information. But we don’t think that you will be responsible with the information, or that if it’s widely disseminated, that the general populist can handle it. And so we’re going to censor it. And I think that that’s a slippery slope to exactly what we’re seeing on Twitter, where they don’t want, quote unquote health covid disinformation and misinformation circulating because they only want their prevailing narrative to reach people’s ears. And so there’s been a lot of people that said, listen, when you talk about Damar Hamlin, don’t show the video out of respect for him. Don’t show the video out of respect for the game. Don’t show the video. And there’s no disrespect meant when I show this video, there’s no, I mean, not football. There’s no disrespect meant to Damar Hamlin showing this video.

I mean, it was broadcast on Monday Night Football. It’s hardly something that’s going to be kept private at this point. But I’m not the gatekeeper. I’m not the one deciding what’s suitable for you to watch or not to watch. We’re talking about something that happened. This is the thing that happened. You need to look at it so that you understand what it is that happened so that we can respond to it and order our response properly. So just a little preemptive explanation for those of you who are going to, I’m sure reach out to me saying, well, why did you have to play that? That’s not respectful. No, it’s necessary for us to understand. So besides that, looking at that video, there’s a couple things that stuck out to me. First of all, when people have passed out or been injured on the field before, even people who’ve been knocked out, there’s a difference in how their body reacts, even as they’re losing consciousness.

For example, if you faint, you typically crumble. And until you actually hit the ground, your body attempts to protect itself from that fall. That wasn’t the case with this. There was no attempt at unconscious protection. His body was completely, completely out of it, for lack of a better term. That is very, very unusual. That shows that it’s something incredibly serious, which we now know that it is. So that’s the first thing that I noticed. The second thing that I noticed is this photograph of his teammates surrounding him in prayer, right? And I, this struck me at the time, because everything has gotten so political in the NFL, you can’t escape the politics. It seems it’s gotten a little bit less than it was when they were showing all the athletes kneeling for the flag. This actually shows the heart of our country more than the Colin Kaepernick garbage did.

This shows that the American people, even these football players might be majority leftists. That’s very possible. They might be liberal. They might, as Colin Kaepernick claimed, most of them might believe the Black Lives Matter narrative. I don’t know. But this shows that at our core, we are still a believing nation. We are a nation that believes in God, and believes in the power of prayer, and believes in using that prayer to intercede for each other. And that’s a moment that regardless of everything else we’re gonna talk about or what, how this might unfold, that we should not forget. In fact, this is something that I never thought I would see from ESPN. On Air, an ESPN host said a beautiful prayer for Damar Hamlin. Take a look at this.

Yo, like, this is a little bit different. I heard, I’ve heard it all day, like thoughts and prayers, and you just heard Scherff and Jonathan Allen say, like, all we can do is pray for him. And I’ve heard the Buffalo Bills organization say that we believe in prayer, and maybe this is not the right thing to do, but I want to, it’s just on my heart that I wanna pray for him, Damar Hamlin, right now. I’m gonna do it out loud. I’m gonna close my eyes. I’m gonna bow my head and I’m just gonna pray for him. God, we come to you in these moments that we don’t understand that are hard because we believe that you’re God and coming to you and praying to you has impact. We’re, we’re sad, we’re angry and we want answers. But some things are unanswerable. We just wanna pray, truly come to you and pray for strength, for Damar, for healing, for Damar, for comfort for Damar, to be with his family, to give them peace. If we didn’t believe that prayer didn’t work, we wouldn’t ask this of you. God. I believe in prayer. We believe in prayer. We lift up Damar Hamlin’s name in your name. Amen. Amen.

Amen. Amen. It’s beautiful. Respectfully.

Amen. Think about the audience, the huge audience that saw that prayer, that took part in that prayer. This is the heart of our country. And again, I know, right now, as we sit here talking, as I film this show, there are a lot of blue check marks on Twitter who are virulently criticizing me for talking about the correlation between the you-know-what and Damar Hamlin questioning whether there is a correlation. And we’re gonna talk about that. We’re gonna talk about that in just a second. But putting that aside, this is something that we should all focus on. This part of our country, this heart of our country, being a people of faith who believe in God, who believe in the power of prayer. That is something that, honestly, I never thought I’d see in NFL football again. But let’s talk about the you-know-what and the correlation between what happened to Damar Hamlin’s collapse and, you know, his vaccination status. So I know I was not the only one who saw this, and immediately thought, well, that’s unusual for a professional athlete, an NFL football player, to collapse on the field, especially when it wasn’t a particularly hard hit. Nothing out of the ordinary compared to what we, well, what we saw earlier in the game.

I wasn’t the only one to think, well, first you pray for us safety. And then second, you ask, has this ever happened before? The answer to that is no. Well, then why? Why did this happen? Was this correlated to the COVID-19 vaccine? Because the COVID-19 vaccine is not safe and effective the way the CDC says it is. And you’ll notice that we are going to be bleeping this part out for YouTube because of YouTube’s terms of service. We’re still in the penalty box over on YouTube. We’re talking about reality for exploring these kind of questions. So you can always find the entire show uncensored on Rumble.com/LizWheeler because we have to be so liberal with the censorship over on YouTube, go to Rumble.com/LizWheeler. So the first thing I thought was, pray for this man’s safety. Has this ever happened before?

And is this correlated to the COVID-19 vaccine? Because it’s very unusual, almost unheard of, for professional athletes to simply keel over, keel over in the way that he did. We now know that he suffered a cardiac arrest. So really, really unusual, never happened on an NFL field before. And it struck me that this is the first time that a lot of people are probably hearing about or seeing before their very eyes, the possibility of the adverse side of the, the nasty side effects of the COVID 19 vaccine. Now, let me preface this by saying I don’t know what caused Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest. I don’t know. Nobody knows. Perhaps the doctors in the hospital know, perhaps his family knows, but we don’t know. The public doesn’t know. Nobody claiming to know knows anything. Everyone is just speculating at this point. But what I will tell you is the mainstream media and pharma talking puppets on the Left are going crazy.

They’re going berserk, trying to prevent us from asking questions about what happened. What caused this cardiac arrest? Was there a correlation between this cardiac arrest that Damar Hamlin suffered? And the COVID-19 vaccine? The NFL requires the COVID-19 vaccine. These teams brag about being 100% vaccinated. If there are unvaccinated members of the team, they’re pretty widely known. I mean, there were I think two members of the Buffalo Bills that were known to be unvaccinated. It would be odd for someone of Damar Hamlin’s status, meaning he’s not one of the richest most famous quarterbacks in the NFL. It would be awfully odd for someone like him to have the leverage to deny, to refuse this COVID vaccine. So I don’t know what his vaccination status is. I’m not pretending to know, but I’m saying playing the probabilities here, it’s likely that he had gotten the COVID 19 vaccine. So we’re told, though, that we can’t have this conversation. We’re told that this is insensitive. We’re told that this makes us brutes. There’s a doctor on Twitter by the name of Dr. Jonathan Reiner. This is what he tweeted. Moments after Damar Hamlin collapsed, he said, the anti-vaxxers who watched a potential lethal injury to a young man and decided that it was the perfect time to blame vaccines are beneath contempt, the worst this country has to offer. Climb back under your rocks.

Eric Erickson, who I know, I like, he’s a friend. I think he has good takes on many things. I think he’s, well, incorrect on this one. He says, when your first reaction to seeing this impact is, I wonder if he had the COVID vaccine. I’d submit you’ve spent too much time on this website inside an echo chamber. I highly disagree with both of these two men. Eric Erickson means this in good faith. Dr. Jonathan Reiner does not mean this in good faith. This is completely the opposite of the proper way to approach a question like this. When these blue check marks on Twitter end in the mainstream media tell us that we can’t speculate about what happened about what caused this, they don’t mean it. They don’t mean that speculation shouldn’t happen. They mean that I shouldn’t speculate. And you shouldn’t speculate, but that their speculation is fine because they are speculating.

They’re speculating that, in the case of Jonathan Reiner, specifically speculating that this is a condition called commotio cordis or commotio cordis Now, this is a heart condition, commotio cordis, that is extremely rare. But it happens generally to young men who are athletes when there is blunt impact on their chest wall. If their chest wall is thin at a specifically certain time of the heartbeat, it can stop the heart, and the heart needs to be then restarted by an AED. And so immediately, while these blue check marks are telling us not to speculate about any correlation, any possible correlation asking whether this is correlated or not to the COVID vaccine, they’re speculating about this other condition. This is what Dr. Jonathan Reiner said. He said, thinking about Damar Hamlin, commotio cordis is caused by an abrupt blow to the chest at exactly the wrong time in the cardiac cycle. Must be resuscitated with an AED.

So what they’re doing is they’re not only speculating, but they are assuming and trying to plant this in your mind, without any evidence, that it is not or could not be vaccine-related. That in and of itself should raise the red flag. That should cause us to ask, why are they doing that? Why is Dr. Jonathan Reiner, why are these people who won’t even investigate, who aren’t interested in whether there’s a correlation, why are they so incurious? Certainly not. It’s certainly not science. So I did a little research, right? I did a little research because there are a lot of people who, like me, are wondering whether this is correlated to the COVID-19 vaccine. This is what I found in my research. There are one in 5,000, one in 5,000 young men in this age group that Damar Hamlin is in.

He was 24. One in 5,000 young men have heart issues, myocarditis. That’s the inflammation of the heart from the COVID vax. This is from the FDA and was reported on by the New York Times. And I’m citing this because when I tweeted this on Twitter, people tried to criticize my sourcing, even though I put the sourcing underneath the tweet. No, no, you criticize my sourcing, then you criticize the New York Times that reported on an FDA statistic here, one in 5,000 young men have myocarditis from the COVID vax Katia Cordes or Kadia Cordes cases. How many of those occur in our country on average between 10 and 20 per year, between 10 and 20 per year. And the average age of the young men that suffer from this is 15 years old. Rarely, rarely do you see a case of this in a young man over the age of 20.

So then we have since January of 2021, which coincides to the rollout of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, we have 1,598 athletes who suffered cardiac arrest. 69% of those cardiac arrests in those 1500, almost 1600 athletes, were fatal. That’s almost 1200 athletes that dropped dead of heart problems in the last two years. So how does this number compare to before the vaccine, right? Is this how many athletes were dropping dead of heart attacks? You know, not withstanding the vax? Well, no. The average number of athlete cardiac arrests per year before the vaccine was 29. This is incredibly, statistically significant. And what we have here is we have a public health establishment, politicians, pundits, whoever you may be, the quote unquote science that ignores this.

And when science ignores this, and you have the studies, and you have the statistics that show this anomaly, that’s why people ask questions. People ask questions because they seek the truth. They’re hungry to know the reality, and they feel that the truth is being hidden from them. And perhaps it is. There’s a reason that 10 million people saw this tweet, that 10 million people reacted to this tweet, that Elon Musk reacted to this tweet. He said, certainly worth further investigation. That’s how the majority of the American people feel. The people that are telling us not to even question this, not to wonder, not to pursue the answer to the question, why did Damar Hamlin suffer this cardiac arrest at age 24? A professional athlete who has no preexisting conditions that we know of? They’re out of step with what the majority of the American people sees and hears and how we think. We’re hungry for reality here.

There were some people who in response to my tweet said, well, cardiac arrest was a leading cause of death. It has been before the vaccine. And my answer to that is, for a healthy 24-year old professional athlete? No, cardiac arrest is not a leading cause of death. In fact, for young men, between the ages of 20 and 24, 42% of deaths are due to unintentional injury like drug overdose or car accident. Suicide is the second leading cause of death in that age category. Then homicide, 18% of deaths of that age category are murders. 4% of deaths in that age category are cancer. 3% at the very bottom, 3% of deaths in the 20 to 24 year old age range or heart disease. But this is congenital heart defects. You’re born with it.

This is not normal. Anybody telling you that this is normal, you should ignore because it’s not normal. We don’t know what happened. We don’t have any answers yet, but people pretending, politicians and public health officials and blue checks on Twitter telling you that this is normal, that there’s nothing to see here, they’re wrong. These are the same people. These are the same people, the ones that are calling us anti-science, calling us conspiracy theorists, calling us heartless for asking these questions. These are the same people that call women pregnant people. These are the same people that address 13, 14, 15-year olds as ze and zer using neo-Marxist pronouns. These are the same people that advocated for masks on three-year olds in preschools. These are the same people that, in the beginning of COVID, they ignored early interventions. They ignored vitamin D, they shut down playgrounds, they wore masks while riding in the car, driving a car by themselves.

You know, these people are not operating according to the science. They are the anti-science now. And yet they tell us that we’re not allowed to examine the various possibilities, especially when this is not something that just impacts Damar Hamlin. How many people have have decided to take the mRNA COVID jab in this country? Everybody knows someone, whether it’s your own family member, your own child, your spouse, your cousin, your friend, your students, whoever, your coworkers, people have been harmed by these vaccines. And we’re not getting the honest truth about it from our public health establishment. And so we’re pursuing that truth ourselves. That’s what’s happening here. When these people tell us that we can’t ask questions, they don’t get to make the rules.

I hope that you’ll join me in continuing to pray for Damar Hamlin and his recovery and his family and his team and everyone who’s witnessed that event, and pray also for the truth, to seek reality. And I’m grateful for you that we sit here and we have these conversations that we’re able to talk about difficult topics, painful topics, heartbreaking topics, controversial topics in a way that is rational, that is keeping in mind that the goal of these conversations is to understand reality so that we can properly order our response to that reality, to protect our freedom and defend ourselves against those who infringe upon us and our families and our freedom. Alright, now let’s talk about the battle that’s going on in the House of Representatives, this effort by Republicans to elect a new Speaker of the House. So the shenanigans that’s happening in the House of Representatives right now, I gotta tell you, I do not understand the huffing and the puffing coming from even a lot of Republicans, who are so urgent to elect a Speaker of the House.

Like, what is your urgency? Why are you in such a hurry here? Like, do it right. I don’t want you to hurry and us to be stuck with a terrible Speaker of the House. I want you to take your time and do it right, because one day, two days, three days, five days, sacrificed to this fight in an effort to get a Speaker of the House who understands the reality of the political enemy that we face, and who is committed to standing strong in his principles and fighting the cultural battles? Yeah, okay. You’re gonna have two or three or five days. Take all the time. The urgency, this is actually a negotiation tactic. If you’re sitting across the negotiating table from someone and you’re trying to get them to acquiesce your demand, then you give them a false deadline.

You say, well, you gotta tell me in five minutes or this expires. Or you gotta gimme an answer by the end of the business day or the offer’s not gonna be good anymore. Even if you have no real deadline for your negotiation, putting this false sense of urgency on people makes them more likely to cave to your demands. So just a little something to keep in mind when you hear this urgency for this election to take place and this gridlock that’s holding up the process. Take a chill, people. Take a chill. It’s not gonna hurt anything. I actually have changed my mind about three times on this. So let me walk you through how I’ve been thinking about this. First of all, McCarthy, he’s a swamp creature. My first objective, primary objective would be to get him out of his leadership role.

I don’t think he deserves a leadership role. I don’t think he does a good job. I don’t think he will do a good job. I don’t think he has any principles. I think he is just a creature of Washington, D.C. He likes power, he likes the politics of the things, but he’s not so much on the principles, and I’m not about that. It’s time for the Republican Party to graduate all of those types of politicians and put real fighters, real culture warriors in at the top. And we know that we need this in Congress. How are we going to investigate if we don’t have a Speaker of the House leadership that is committed to this? I could go on and on about the reasons that McCarthy is not fit for this role, but he’s obviously not fit for this role. I’m all about a challenger.

Someone who, from the Freedom Caucus, who would be committed to fighting these fights. That was my first iteration of thought, is great, let’s get rid of McCarthy. I’ve been saying for months after Republicans lost in November that we need to get rid of McConnell. We need to get rid of McCarthy, and we need to get rid of McDaniel, all the people at the top of the Republican apparatus, whether it’s the party, whether it’s the Senate, whether this’s the House. Let’s get someone new. So then we get to this challenge, right? Where these 20 members of the Freedom Caucus are refusing to vote for McCarthy, which is preventing him from winning the speakership. And in and of itself, that’s great. I’m happy to see that I’m a supporter of this idea of not having McCarthy speaker. However, they’re missing one big part here.

Where the heck is their challenger? If you’re gonna challenge McCarthy, you don’t just challenge him by saying, no, we don’t like you. You present an alternative, put a candidate to compete against McCarthy in the race. The Republican Party is often branded as the party of no, and it’s deserved. We are the party of no, we’re the party of no, we say no when the Left tries to infringe upon our freedoms, we say no to burgeoning big government. We say no to Marxism. We say no to too many laws, or this is what we’re supposed to be doing. And in this case, Republicans are being the party of no, they’re saying no to McCarthy. But you have to have a plan. You have to have somebody who is willing to step up and be an alternative. So come on, if you’re gonna make this challenge, then you have to do it, right?

Otherwise, this was my second iteration of what I was thinking. Otherwise, you’re gonna risk having a Democrat Speaker of the House if you can’t get a Republican that gets a majority. And the Democrats, who have the minority in the House right now, yes, but only by a small margin, if they are able to get a candidate who has enough votes that a split Republican vote leads to a Democrat Speaker of the House, then Republicans are bigger idiots than anyone that I can possibly think of. So that’s my second iteration of how I was thinking of this. Like, okay, well you did this wrong, so maybe we’re going to be stuck with McCarthy. But then I’m thinking about this. I’m sitting there thinking about this, and I’m thinking, you know what? There is no way that we’re gonna end up with a Democratic Speaker of the House.

Republicans are stupid sometimes, of course they are. But there is no way that Republicans are idiotic enough that they have not pre-planned how they are spoiling McCarthy’s attempt, his bid for Speaker here. So the question still remains, why wasn’t there an alternative presented to give people a choice? But McCarthy, in this situation where we’ve had six rounds of voting and 20 Republicans are not budging, they’re not caving, they’re standing strong in their principles as they should. McCarthy owes these caucus members a voice. But what McCarthy is doing instead is very telling. He’s trying to negotiate with Democrats. He wants fewer Democrats to vote for the Democrat option so that his percentage of votes, even if Democrats don’t vote for him, his percentage of votes is higher because of the votes that the Democrats wouldn’t cast for their candidate, which would lead him to win the speakership even if he couldn’t convince these 20 Republicans to vote for him.

So McCarthy would rather negotiate with Democrats than negotiate with 20 members of his own party. This is what I’m talking about. This is why we gotta get rid of McCarthy here. He owes these caucus members a voice. What should happen here is instead of complaining about gridlock, instead of complaining about the Republicans holding up the process, McCarthy should step aside. We would have, Republicans would have no problem electing new leadership if McCarthy steps aside. Then someone will step in from the Freedom Caucus and this election will will conclude. Now, whether this is Jim Jordan, whether this is Byron Donalds, I still think the Freedom Caucus should have presented an alternative candidate at the beginning. They should have run this candidate against McCarthy, but they didn’t. And that doesn’t mean that this is over. It does not mean that this is over. I mean, I have found this whole exercise very telling in how many people who pretended to be conservative stalwarts are turning towards McCarthy just literally days after pretending that they were lovers of freedom. I’m talking about Marjorie Taylor Green, I’m talking about Donald Trump. These are people who claim that they are anti-swamp. They claim they wanna drain the swamp, and then they’re turning towards McCarthy? What?

What? Lauren Boebert, Congresswoman Boebert says that Trump called her and told her to knock it off. I don’t think so. I would’ve found that very, very off-putting. And Crenshaw is perhaps the new Adam Kinzinger in the house now, calling the 20 Republicans enemies. This is an exercise for you and I to step back and understand who is actually on the side of freedom and who will cave in the moment of opportunity here. There is no urgency for Republicans to elect a speaker. There is impetus for Republicans to do this right. Now maybe they made a mistake with how they presented this, but that doesn’t mean that it’s over. McCarthy should step aside. He should step aside and Republicans should elect a leader who’s actually committed to fighting for what base you and I want from the Republican Party.

And I hate to say I told you so about Marjorie Taylor Green or even, it’s not that I told you so about Trump here, it’s that something has happened to Trump recently that I think that we should put a pin on. We should put a pin on. So if you go back before this speakership election chaos, President Trump tweeted either late last week or early this week, he tweeted, or not tweeted, he’s not on Twitter, is he, over on Truth Social. He posted and he said, quote, it wasn’t my fault that Republicans didn’t live up to expectations in the midterms. I was 233 to 20. It was the abortion issue, poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on no exceptions, even in the case of rape, incest, or life of the mother that lost a large number of voters. Also, the people that pushed so hard for decades against abortion got their wish from the US Supreme Court and just plain disappeared not to be seen again. Plus, Mitch stupid monies.

In other words, Donald Trump blamed pro-lifers for the fact that Republicans did not see the red wave that we had hoped to see in the midterm election. This is bananas on many levels, but let’s just break this down, break this down. So Trump’s bombastic nature, I have always found to be very entertaining. I’ve never been one that’s particularly offended by Trump. I think his comments are generally funny. I don’t mind that he pushes politicians. They’re politicians, for goodness sake. They should be pushed, especially swamp creatures in mainstream media. Like sure, yell at Jim Acosta. I couldn’t care less. That’s hilarious to me. Now everyone else treats these people because they work for CNN and at the New York Times, they treat ’em like they have earned this position of respect when they haven’t. Their behavior has been atrocious. I’ve always found Trump’s bombastic nature to be more or less entertaining.

And he used it to his advantage in negotiations, political negotiations, right? It was Trump’s no-BS demeanor that won him the white working class vote in 2016, because this is very key. It’s not because it was charming to everyone. It’s not because everyone found it entertaining. It’s not because it was inoffensive. A lot of people were offended by what he said, whether or not I agree with that. The reason it worked in 2016 was because Trump was an outsider. And it was because he wasn’t a politician that when he called out BS the way that he did, it resonated with people because they were like, yes, this is what I’m thinking as a non-politician when I see slimy politicians being corrupt. And so they saw something of themselves in Trump because he was an outsider, because he wasn’t running a traditional campaign. He was talking directly to the people at these rallies.

He was freestyling, he was engaging in a conversation, and people liked it. It worked. But now, something has changed. Even a lot of people who think President Trump was a good President, at least up until COVID, or who were Trump supporters outright are turned off by Trump’s behavior. So why is that? I’m gonna tell you why that is. Trump should be listening to this. I hope he is listening to this because he needs to recognize the disconnect that has happened between he and his base. Now, Trump is not an outsider. He is no longer one of the people. He is one of the politicians. In fact, he is a consultant-class politician now. And what I mean by that is I know for a fact that the political consultant class who feel like they control all politicians, they feed politicians talking points.

They tell politicians, if you don’t handle a certain situation or a certain topic by saying XYZ, then this demographic will turn against you. And so they control politicians, both candidates and politicians in office by this fear mongering of, oh, we know we’re the experts. We know the demographics of the people. And if you don’t say what we think you should say, then the people will turn against you and you’ll lose your seat. Trump is now a consultant-class politician because I know for a fact that the narrative that the consultants are pushing on Republicans right now is a narrative that says, don’t touch abortion. Don’t talk about Roe v Wade. Don’t act overjoyed. Don’t celebrate this. Don’t be pro-life. Be silent, hide, pretend you don’t support this, otherwise you’ll lose all the voters that you ever wanted. That is what Republican consultants are pushing on Republican politicians and on Republican political organizations.

It’s why you’ll never see fundraising emails about Roe v Wade. It’s why you’ll never hear people talk about, politicians talk about abortion right now. They’re all silent about it. We just experienced the biggest pro-life victory in the history of the pro-life movement with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and politicians won’t touch it because the political consultants are threatening them. Trump is being controlled by political consultants right now. He’s not an outsider anymore. He’s a politician. He was a wrecking ball before with his bombastic nature, and it was charming because he was an outsider. But it’s not so charming when that wrecking ball is not aimed at the swamp. It’s aimed at us. His base. He’s aiming that wrecking ball at the principles of the base that he would need in order to ever win an election ever again. And the reason he’s doing this is because he’s lost touch with his base.

Instead of talking to the people, he’s talking to his consultants. And so on major pivotal issues like the vaccine, for example. He still touts his own vaccine. He wants to take ownership of that. He brags about Operation Warp Speed as the rest of the Republican electorate is like, wait a second, this vaccine is not effective. And it’s not safe. It’s harmful. It cost people their jobs. He’s lost touch with his base on the pro-life issue. There have been no more loyal voters to the Republican party than pro-lifers. He’s lost touch with his base on McCarthy, too. Speaker of the House, not Speaker of the House now. But in his bid for Speaker of the House, Trump is threatening the 20 members of the Freedom Caucus to vote for McCarthy or else. He’s lost touch with his base because he is relying on consultants instead.

And why else? Because he is off Twitter. I know the mainstream media liked to pretend that Trump never spent any time on Twitter on his own, that he just typed stuff out and then he sent it to staffers and staffers posted that, but that’s not true. Trump himself spent time on Twitter, and it was a good way for him to keep his finger on the pulse of his base. When he did something or said something and people didn’t like it, he responded. But he’s distant from that now. He’s out of touch. He’s a politician. If I’m Trump, what do I do right now? I fire all my political consultants. I get back on Twitter, I start listening to the people. Because blaming this lack of a red wave on pro-lifers is bananas. It’s untrue. It’s completely ignorant. There was a great Federalist article, I can pull up the title and post it on Locals because I don’t have it in front of me right now, but it’s a great Federalist article that details how in a country that has the views on abortion that our country has, meaning there are wide disparities in some areas,

meaning if you identify pro-life or if you identify pro-choice, but, or if you support abortion in early term versus late term, there are a lot of people that are okay with abortion in early term. There are not many people that are okay with abortion in late term. But in this divided culture that we have, people have varying views on abortion. There’s a specific algorithm on how to win abortion legislation at the state level. And this Federalist article said it’s three things. It’s that the legislation that’s pro-life has to make an incremental change. It can’t go from abortion with no restrictions to no abortion. It has to be incremental so that people can move along that trajectory of it being a flip. And instead of being a flip of a coin, it has to move along a bar incremental change.

The language of the legislation has to be very clear as well, meaning there can be no misunderstanding. It can leave no room for the Left to misconstrue it, to misrepresent it, to pretend that it’s about ectopic pregnancy or contraceptive, for example, versus about what abortion is. And then of course, at the state level, it’s about money. You have to actually fundraise on abortion. You have to spend money on these topics in order to educate people and to combat the false narrative that’s coming from the Left. And if you do those three things, then the pro-life position is and can be a winning issue. And if Trump had his finger on the pulse of his base, then he would realize that. If he’s listening to consultants, then he’s going to make banana statements like blaming pro-lifers. Which the reason I say bananas is there’s maybe been not a single thing that Trump did during his tenure as President, except his Supreme Court Justice appointments where there was unity in the base.

Even never-Trumpers like the fact that there’s a conservative Supreme Court. Like, this has been the most unifying thing. And now to say that he’s against that, to blame that for the loss in the midterms is clearly bananas. But, like I said, if I’m Trump, all you have to do is fire that consultant class and start listening to the people again, and a lot of your problems will go away and you’ll be more connected to your base. And your base does not want McCarthy as Speaker of the House. Your base wants a Freedom Caucus culture warrior who understands the reality of the political enemy that we face. And I certainly hope that, I certainly hope that this is fulfilled when we do elect a Speaker, and I’m here for the ride. I’m watching with popcorn, you know I’m sitting here with popcorn watching this unfold. All right guys, thank you for watching today. Thank you for listening. I’m Liz Wheeler. This is The Liz Wheeler Show.