Ep. 472 - Splattering Suleimani
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
168.1818
Summary
After President Trump responded to Iranian attacks on U.S. servicemen and diplomats last Thursday by splashing Iran s top military official all over the Baghdad airport, we will examine the brilliant geopolitical strategy behind the droning, and we will attempt to explain why the left is so upset over the death of the world s most notorious terrorist. Then, speaking of killing it, Ricky Gervais absolutely slays at the Golden Globes, a new poll shows Republicans' dilemma looking ahead to 2024, and the movie 1917 highlights a major problem with our culture.
Transcript
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President Trump responded to Iranian attacks on U.S. servicemen and diplomats last Thursday
00:00:06.000
by splattering Iran's top military official all over the Baghdad airport.
00:00:10.800
We will examine the brilliant geopolitical strategy behind the droning,
00:00:15.320
and we will attempt to explain why the left is so upset over the death of the world's most notorious terrorist.
00:00:22.180
Then, speaking of killing it, Ricky Gervais absolutely slays at the Golden Globes.
00:00:27.340
A new poll shows Republicans' dilemma looking ahead to 2024,
00:00:31.340
and the movie 1917, Big Golden Globes winner, highlights a major problem with our culture.
00:00:36.840
All that and more. I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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We begin with the prospect of World War III. We finish by going all the way back to World War I.
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How's that for symmetry? We will get to all of that and more, but first, I've got to thank our friends over at Liquid IV.
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All right. So, you know, the big news is Soleimani, President Trump ordered a strike that killed Iranians, top military official.
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We actually have here at the Michael Knowles show, exclusive footage of President Trump ordering the drone attack that killed Qasem Soleimani.
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I want you to find this Nancy boy, Elliot Ness.
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I'm really glad that the Daily Wire's investigative journalists could get in there and so that we can bring that kind of investigation to you.
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There is some disagreement over this, especially on the left, but even in small slivers of the isolationist right, this was a fantastic decision by President Trump.
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On the foreign policy front, it's probably the best move he's made yet, though he's had other really great moves that were unconventional, unexpected, unpredicted.
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Every objection to this, every objection to this is wrong.
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Rarely are decisions so clearly right in foreign policy, and this is one of them.
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And I hate it that Trump is being criticized for it because he made a great call.
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What was so great about the killing of Qasem Soleimani?
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Probably the two most important advantages that you can have in international relations are unpredictability and deterrence.
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And in one fell swoop, President Trump reinstituted both of those in U.S. policy abroad.
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This attack was absolutely perfect in its asymmetry.
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Don't forget, Iran has been attacking us, certainly for the entire Trump administration, and back into the Obama administration, and back into the Bush administration.
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And just in the Trump administration, Iran shoots down a U.S. drone.
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Trump called off an attack, reportedly, because he realized that a number of people were going to die,
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and he felt that it was not worth it to kill those people or to risk escalating some kind of conflict over a drone, even though it was a very expensive drone.
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Then, Iran launches an attack on Saudi oil fields.
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He is not conducting a foreign policy that is this exactly symmetrical tit-for-tat, not how it's going to happen.
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Then, Iran kills an American contractor in Iraq and attacks the U.S. embassy in Baghdad to try to create a Benghazi situation for President Trump.
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And when Iran does that, Trump kills their commander-in-chief.
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That kind of asymmetry is exactly what you want in a coherent foreign policy.
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Now, he's just sort of paint on the walls of the Baghdad airport, but he was huge.
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Soleimani was so big that I knew who he was before we killed him.
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I don't know a whole lot of Iranian officials, okay?
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And yet, we had heard of this guy because he was so important and probably the most notorious terrorist in the world.
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Certainly the most notorious terrorist since al-Baghdadi was killed.
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In some ways, Soleimani was worse, though, because Soleimani was a terrorist.
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But he also had a role in a nation state, which is Iran.
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This is what makes Iran so dangerous in the world, is they funnel terrorism, right?
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They're the number one state sponsors of terror, but they're also a nation state.
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They've had, for now 40, 50 years, one foot in the world order, one foot outside of the world order.
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This sends an important message, not just to Iran, not just to our adversaries in the Middle East.
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It says we're going to back up our tough talk with action, and you're never going to be able to guess when that will happen.
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Because you could shoot down our very expensive drone.
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Maybe we'll kill your top military official, and you'll have no idea when that will happen.
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You have to back up tough talk with action sometimes.
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So Trump tweeted at Iran after the embassy attack.
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Ayatollah Khamenei said, there's nothing you can do.
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And that's been Iran's strategy since the revolution.
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And the whole rest of the world will back off, including the United States, the most powerful country in the history of the world.
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This is why it's so important not to let Iran get nuclear weapons.
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It's because these guys do not play by the rules.
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And so the Ayatollah says, you can't do anything.
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There are a number of objections to President Trump's action.
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Let's just go very quickly through all the objections.
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First one is Trump is moving us closer to war with Iran.
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This is an objection that has some currency on both the left and the right.
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Tucker Carlson on Fox News is voicing this objection.
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Bernie Sanders on the left voicing the exact same objection.
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Yesterday, President Trump ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani, in Iraq, along with the leader of an Iraqi militia.
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This is a dangerous escalation that brings us closer to another disastrous war in the Middle East, which could cost countless lives and trillions more dollars and lead to even more death, more conflict, more displacement in that already highly volatile region of the world.
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Tucker Carlson said almost exactly the same thing on Fox.
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And I really like Tucker, but both he and Bernie are wrong here.
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They're not just wrong that this will bring us closer to war with Iran.
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They're exactly wrong because this kind of response, if anything, is greatly reducing the prospect of war with Iran.
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Ronald Reagan knew how this was possible, which is that you get peace through strength.
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You get peace by the credible threat of violence.
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That is the way you don't get peace by rolling over.
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In just the past few weeks, Iran has killed the American contractor, attacked our embassy in Baghdad.
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The guy that we just killed, Soleimani, is responsible for the deaths of over 600 American servicemen.
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You don't get to determine whether you're at war.
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So the question is, what is more likely to bring us closer to war?
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Rolling over and letting them do whatever they want and kill as many American servicemen as they want?
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Or responding, sometimes, asymmetrically, unpredictably, to those attacks?
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And a national policy of strength is much more likely to deter future violence than a national policy of weakness and isolation.
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Ronald Reagan, in his most famous speech, perhaps ever, the Time for Choosing speech, put it in precisely those terms.
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There's no argument over the choice between peace and war.
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But there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace.
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You know, there are not perfect parallels between Trump and Reagan.
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And yet, it seems so clear, time and again, that Trump is learning from Reagan.
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He stole Reagan's campaign theme, Make America Great Again.
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Reagan's theme was, Let's Make America Great Again.
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And Trump, in his Trumpian way, dropped the let's.
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But in so many ways, Trump is learning from Reagan.
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There are a number of other objections, including, and this is the one that is probably the
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stupidest, the objection that if you have never served in the military, if you are a
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civilian, then you cannot support the policy of responding to Iranian attacks.
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We will get to why that one is so dumb and why the left puts it forward all the time.
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The first objection, or the second objection rather, that the previous policy of appeasement
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That the policy of laying off Iran, give them pallets of cash, thank them for returning our
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sailors rather that they take hostage, give them the path to a nuclear weapon, never do
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We sure wouldn't want this ridiculous country in the Middle East that was taken through violent
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We wouldn't want them to be angry at us, please.
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They are killing our servicemen, hundreds of them at a clip.
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So much of the Trump era was basically saying, hey, those policies under Obama, many of the
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policies under Bush, they weren't working that well.
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Well, now we're trying something different and I suspect it's going to work a lot better.
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You hear this from, mostly from the left, occasionally from isolationists on the right.
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You hear, if you've never served in the military, if you are a civilian, then you cannot support
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Say, yeah, if you're going to support responding asymmetrically occasionally to Iran's acts of
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If you're a civilian, you can't have an opinion on foreign policy.
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Well, for one, our founding fathers thought that argument was very stupid.
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That's why they gave civilians control of foreign policy.
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Our constitution gives civilians control of foreign policy and it gives civilians control
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So you can reject the argument right off the bat.
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Does the left make this argument because they're so supportive of our troops?
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I remember the way the left spoke during the Iraq war.
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I don't believe that it's because of their great support for the United States military
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and funding of our military and growing our military.
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The real reason they do it is because civilians account for 99% of the population, right?
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We live at a time right now in America where 1% serve in the military.
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So when you say that if you are a civilian, you cannot have an opinion on foreign policy,
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you immediately shut up 99% of the population, which is what the left has been trying to do
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They don't even really mean that you can't have an opinion on this response by killing
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Soleimani if you've never served in the military.
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You're not allowed to disagree with us, the left, if you are a civilian, 99% of the population
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And then the final objection, people say that Trump is starting a war with Iran to help him
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First of all, he didn't start anything with Iran.
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They started this years ago and they've been ramping up their attacks.
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But moreover, there is no reason to think that some prolonged conflict with Iran would
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Specifically, we're tired of war in the Middle East.
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So I don't know why you, you would think that this would help him politically, except that
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Since this strike, his approval numbers have been going up.
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Is that because Americans want a conflict with Iran?
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I think the real reason that his numbers are improving is the entire domestic political
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angle here, which is that the left is responding in a ridiculous and absurd way.
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The left is extraordinarily upset over the killing of the world's top terrorist.
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I couldn't possibly wish as a right winger, as a conservative, I could not possibly wish
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for a better response from the left to this killing.
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When will the left get the memo that defending terrorists who kill over 600 American servicemen
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I don't think they're getting that memo because they have Trump derangement syndrome.
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The Washington Post referred to Soleimani in their coverage of his killing as, quote,
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This is only slightly better than when Trump killed the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,
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and the Washington Post referred to him as an austere religious scholar, world's most notorious terrorist.
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New York Times reporter then decided to one-up the Washington Post by, in the wake of Soleimani's
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killing, posting a video of him reciting poetry.
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How is it news that the world's worst terrorist who just got iced once read a poem?
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What it shows is that they have sympathy for this guy, and they have antipathy for the American
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It'd be like on, on VE day in 1945, at the end of World War II in Europe in 1945, the big
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story being pushed by the New York Times on 1945 Twitter is Hitler's paintings.
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I mean, that's basically the media response to the killing of Soleimani.
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You've got Colin Kaepernick, who I guess at this point is just a member of the media.
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It's not like he's a professional athlete or anything.
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He tweeted out, quote, America has always sanctioned and besieged black and brown bodies, both at
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America militarism is the weapon wielded by American imperialism to enforce its policing
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So what Colin Kaepernick is doing here is making common cause with Soleimani.
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He doesn't see himself and Soleimani as different because he's some schmucky, dumb football player,
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former football player, and Soleimani is a murdering terrorist.
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No, he sees them as similar because they have a similar skin color.
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He's saying America is sanctioning and besieging black and brown bodies, both at home and abroad.
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The horrible oppression that I, Colin Kaepernick, have felt, I, multi-millionaire Colin Kaepernick,
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who's made more money since I protested the American flag in the NFL than I ever made actually playing football,
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that that kind of oppression that I feel is exactly the same kind of oppression that poor old Qasem Soleimani felt.
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This is what racial identity politics does to your brain.
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Is it causes you to make common cause with terrorists.
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She accused Trump of war crimes for killing a terrorist.
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I make this point every so often, every time this objection comes up.
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Torturing terrorists, it's not a violation of the Geneva Convention.
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If anything, it is a support of the Geneva Convention.
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The Geneva Convention protections, all of the kind of protections we have for lawful combatants in war,
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Because the whole purpose of the Geneva Convention is to protect civilians in time of war.
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Guys like Soleimani, who play both sides of it, the nation state side, the lawful combatant, uniformed soldier in a time of war side,
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and the funding terrorism everywhere side, are targeting civilians.
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And so if you extend those kind of protections to people who target civilians,
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you undermine the entire purpose of those protections.
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I would not expect AOC to know that, and she doesn't.
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So I know she watches this show, listens to this show.
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That's the word that Ilhan Omar used to describe the killing of the world's top terrorist.
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And then by far the craziest one, Rose McGowan, who is an actress, I take it.
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She became very popular during the Me Too movement as one of the Me Too victims.
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She tweeted out with a bizarre gif of the Iranian flag that had a couple emojis on it.
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Dear Iran, the USA has disrespected your country, your flag, your people.
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We are being held hostage by a terrorist regime.
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They're upset when you disrespect the flag of Iran, of the mullahs in Iran,
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and they celebrate when you disrespect the flag of the United States of America during NFL games.
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She believes, this is what the left believes, that 52% of Americans apologize to Iran.
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We should just killed American citizens, just killed American contractors, just killed American servicemen, tried to attack our embassy.
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That 52%, the majority of Americans, support Iran and oppose Donald Trump.
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But I think it was just, I hate to question her motives.
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The Trump derangement syndrome is so bad, the left is now defending Iranian terrorists who've killed hundreds of Americans.
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He trolled the Democrats into opposing the American flag and mourning for terrorists.
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Ted Cruz right now in the Senate is introducing a resolution to praise the Soleimani mission.
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100% of senators should support this resolution, but they won't.
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He's putting them in a very tight bind because by praising the mission, they have to support Donald Trump.
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And they hate Trump so much that they're going to defend Soleimani.
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That aside, all of that aside, this was a really great move, puts Iran in a terrible position.
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Now Iran is going to retaliate, but how can they?
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How are they, how are they going to really be able to retaliate?
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They've already been attacking us steadily for years and increasingly.
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And they obviously wanted to ramp this up during an election year.
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Soleimani was planning more attacks, reportedly.
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Previously, they knew that the U.S. wasn't going to do anything because we were so afraid of,
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If they plan anything really big though, they're, they're in a position now where
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the U.S. could glass their country practically.
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I mean, they could glass the political leadership of the country, the mullahs.
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He said, Iran is talking very boldly about targeting certain USA assets as revenge for
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ridding the world of their terrorist leader who had just killed an American and badly wounded
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Not to mention all the people he'd killed over his lifetime, including recently hundreds of
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He was already attacking our embassy and preparing for additional hits in other locations.
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Iran has been nothing but problems for many years.
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Let this serve as a warning that if Iran strikes any Americans or American assets, we have targeted
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52 Iranian sites representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago, some
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at a very high level and important to Iran and the Iranian culture.
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And those targets and Iran itself, all caps, classic Trump, will be hit very fast and very
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Why do I trust this guy to conduct foreign policy?
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Well, as of today, he's the only president not to start a war since 1988.
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Trump shares equality with Reagan, which is talking tough.
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They talk tough differently, but they both talk tough.
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Ronald Reagan was asked his theory on the Cold War.
00:27:39.080
After decades of detente, Ronald Reagan said, here's my theory on the Cold War.
00:27:44.180
Ronald Reagan one time was doing a mic test on the radio and he said, I've just signed
00:27:48.940
a law that will permanently abolish the Soviet Union.
00:28:01.560
He knew, Trump knows, that the way to prevent war is to be unpredictable and credible in the
00:28:12.020
But Soleimani was not the most brutal attack of the weekend.
00:28:18.480
Actually, even more brutal than Trump's droning of Qasem Soleimani were Ricky Gervais' attacks
00:28:31.260
Then we will get to what all of this means for 2024.
00:28:38.180
And finally, we go all the way from World War III to World War I to discuss 1917, one
00:28:46.680
And it expresses something very broken in our culture.
00:28:51.140
But first, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
00:29:06.200
You get it all, but you've got to go to DailyWire.com.
00:29:10.380
Far more cold-blooded, far more brutal than the killing of Soleimani were Ricky Gervais'
00:29:29.720
attacks on Hollywood last night at the Golden Globes.
00:29:32.240
The Golden Globes opening up award season here in Hollywood.
00:29:36.320
Award season is so irrelevant these days that I didn't even know it was happening.
00:29:54.900
I didn't know until yesterday when someone said, oh, you know the Golden Globes is on?
00:30:02.280
They decided to become relevant this year that the Golden Globes was going to go vegan.
00:30:06.880
So they served dinner at this particular awards show, and they was going to go completely
00:30:10.580
vegan to help the environment because that's the way that they're going to finally turn
00:30:14.620
their failing ratings around and relate to the American people.
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He's hosted this a number of times in the past.
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He said this would be his last time hosting, and Ricky Gervais didn't care.
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He went for the necks of Hollywood, and he, wow, I just realized the pun there because
00:30:37.780
So that pun was not intended, but all of Ricky Gervais' attacks were intended.
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He said, I don't care, I'm leaving nothing on the table.
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And I think his monologue was pretty much the only shot that the awards season has to relate
00:30:56.400
It was great, and it was great at the expense of the audience in the room, the Hollywood
00:31:00.900
stars, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
00:31:03.060
He opens the night with a joke about Jeffrey Epstein.
00:31:07.440
Spoiler alert, season two is on the way, so in the end, he obviously didn't kill himself,
00:31:21.880
You had to make your own way here in your own plane, didn't you?
00:31:28.220
He opens up with the Jeffrey Epstein joke, right?
00:31:33.040
But Hollywood can't laugh about Jeffrey Epstein.
00:31:37.480
They kind of groaned, which set up Gervais for the actual punchline of his joke, which
00:31:47.020
And they're all friends with all the Me Too perpetrators.
00:31:50.060
And they're friends with all of these sex criminals.
00:31:54.940
And they pretend to be so nice and wonderful and high and mighty.
00:31:57.200
He says, yeah, you had to take your own plane here tonight, didn't you?
00:32:07.900
He went after every single person in that room for hypocrisy.
00:32:11.900
And at many points, you could pretty much hear a pin drop.
00:32:15.920
A superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing made by a company
00:32:23.520
So, well, you say you're woke, but the companies you work for, I mean, unbelievable.
00:32:30.080
If ISIS started a streaming service, you'd call your agent, wouldn't you?
00:32:33.880
So, if you do win an award tonight, don't use it as a platform to make a political speech,
00:32:40.620
You're in no position to lecture the public about anything.
00:32:45.620
Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.
00:32:48.540
So, if you win, right, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your God,
00:32:55.100
That little bit that we had to bleep out there at the end is where Ricky Gervais told people
00:33:03.420
where they could go after they had received their award.
00:33:12.520
Because he showed the gap between Hollywood and the American people.
00:33:17.580
He showed the gap between the Hollywood foreign press, the international press, the big makers
00:33:27.460
And you can't deny that gap because these awards shows have been tanking in the ratings for years
00:33:36.080
Hollywood cannot even laugh at an Epstein joke.
00:33:40.640
A joke about an international sex trafficking criminal, pedophile, everything, everything
00:33:49.100
They can't laugh at it because they knew him, because they were friends with him.
00:33:54.820
Now, the more interesting level of analysis here is whether or not Ricky Gervais was brave
00:34:04.640
And the conventional wisdom is it was so brave of Ricky Gervais to do this set in front of
00:34:10.480
Now, in many ways, it was because this will hurt his employment prospects in Hollywood.
00:34:15.260
He was telling these people that they're degenerates to their face, right?
00:34:22.260
But in another sense, it wasn't brave at all because Ricky Gervais knew, because he's a
00:34:28.080
funny comedian, he knew that the audience would love this, that they would lap this up,
00:34:32.740
that they would say, finally, Ricky Gervais, this guy is so good.
00:34:39.400
He deserves credit because it really will irritate his employers.
00:34:43.600
But this will make him so much more popular among the audience.
00:34:46.740
The only reason that any person is talking about the Golden Globes today is because Ricky
00:34:55.120
And looking ahead on the political scene to 2020, it shows you how absolutely worthless celebrity
00:35:03.840
They say, oh, Hillary Clinton got all the endorsements of Hollywood, all these big time
00:35:24.600
For the ones that are good performers, and there are still good performers in Hollywood,
00:35:28.020
even if they're left wing lunatics, we like watching them perform.
00:35:31.440
And then we want them to shut up because we don't care what they think about politics.
00:35:37.340
A couple of them have interesting thoughts about politics.
00:35:39.420
A couple of them are very intelligent and actually know what they're talking about.
00:35:43.780
James Woods, great Hollywood star, terrific actor, also very, very intelligent man.
00:35:55.300
Obviously, won the Cold War, knew something about politics.
00:35:59.720
And so for most of them, most of these absolutely empty-headed celebrities, we want them to go
00:36:06.840
We don't like them when they yammer on about politics and use the opportunity of accepting
00:36:11.800
golden statues to harangue all of us about how awful we are and how virtuous and wonderful
00:36:22.580
Michelle Williams, in particular, goes out there.
00:36:26.620
Michelle Williams accepts the Golden Globe and she uses the opportunity in a follow-up
00:36:32.960
to Patricia Arquette a few years ago at the Oscars to make a statement about women voting.
00:36:42.060
She said women need to vote in their self-interest, whatever that means.
00:36:46.560
Women, 18 to 118, when it is time to vote, please do so in your own self-interest.
00:36:57.240
It's what men have been doing for years, which is why the world looks so much like them.
00:37:02.900
But don't forget, we are the largest voting body in this country.
00:37:08.780
The world looks like men, not from my vantage, because most people on earth are women.
00:37:20.180
She's kind of working through the incoherence as she's giving the speech.
00:37:24.160
So she says women are the largest voting bloc in this country.
00:37:26.700
So how come they're not, how come they're not voting for far leftist policies?
00:37:37.380
How condescending, how offensive to say that women are just too stupid, except for Hollywood
00:37:42.020
The average American woman, according to Michelle Williams, is a complete idiot.
00:37:47.260
But the average Hollywood celebrity is really smart.
00:37:49.640
That's the only way that you can explain why the average American woman doesn't vote the
00:37:53.460
way that the average Hollywood celebrity wants them to vote.
00:38:01.200
It's the same thing Colin Kaepernick's doing when he makes common cause with terrorists.
00:38:05.580
Colin Kaepernick is saying in his tweet that black and brown people need to have solidarity
00:38:10.960
with Iranian terrorists, that that's, that's the real solidarity.
00:38:15.660
But he's, he isn't talking about black or brown voting identity groups.
00:38:21.580
He's talking about radical leftist voting identity groups.
00:38:26.240
Michelle Williams is not talking about the group solidarity of women.
00:38:30.100
She's talking about the group solidarity of Hollywood liberals.
00:38:39.040
You don't really know what she's talking about when it comes to this women's self-interest
00:38:44.840
issue until you realize that she's talking about abortion in particular.
00:38:49.500
And what's so perverse about this is that as Michelle Williams gives a speech that comes
00:38:55.440
to just be a big full-throated endorsement of abortion, she's pregnant while she gives it.
00:39:01.820
I'm grateful for the acknowledgement of the choices I've made.
00:39:04.580
And I'm also grateful to have lived at a moment in our society where choice exists.
00:39:10.120
Because as women and as girls, things can happen to our bodies that are not our choice.
00:39:18.300
I've tried my very best to live a life of my own making, not just a series of events that
00:39:23.260
happened to me, but one that I could stand back and look at and recognize my handwriting
00:39:28.200
all over, sometimes messy and scrawling, sometimes careful and precise, but one that I had carved
00:39:35.680
And I wouldn't have been able to do this without employing a woman's right to choose.
00:39:45.540
I suspect what this means is that she has had an abortion.
00:39:50.100
She said, I couldn't have the career that I want.
00:39:51.860
And I couldn't be really famous and rich if I hadn't killed my child.
00:39:57.920
Maybe she would be less rich and less famous if she had not killed her child.
00:40:02.140
What makes this so heartbreaking, what makes this so bizarre to the audience is that she's
00:40:11.200
And so on the one hand, she's saying, we need to support abortion.
00:40:17.880
I'm not going to kill my precious baby, but all you poor people should kill your babies
00:40:23.860
And then you kill your babies and you get rich and famous.
00:40:25.920
You sacrifice your children on the altar of career and money and mammon, and then you become
00:40:31.280
rich and famous and then you don't have to kill your babies anymore.
00:40:37.380
She's saying rich people don't have to, poor people should do that.
00:40:44.520
Why is it okay to kill your baby, some babies, but not other babies?
00:40:47.040
Why is it okay to kill your baby sometimes, but not other times?
00:40:51.020
And it's why the speech doesn't make any sense and she just keeps going back to bumper stickers
00:40:54.840
like, a woman's right to choose, my choice, I make my own decisions.
00:41:02.740
These kind of slogans that are distillations of ideology are always wrong.
00:41:12.340
But it's pretty horrifying when you see the reality of it.
00:41:14.960
And that's why Ricky Gervais was so successful last night.
00:41:19.180
When you present to the American people, pregnant Michelle Williams talking about how it's really
00:41:25.480
important to kill your baby if you want to get money and fame, and Ricky Gervais, who's
00:41:30.220
saying you people are degenerates, guess which one the American people are going to go for?
00:41:37.000
Now back to politics in just our last few minutes here.
00:41:43.080
Bernie Sanders is bringing in the most money at the moment.
00:41:47.940
A new poll out from Hill Harris X polling shows that Liz Warren has now dropped down to
00:42:01.240
Buttigieg is sort of surging, but he's only popular among white yuppies on the coasts.
00:42:05.800
So that's probably not going to take him very far.
00:42:10.260
So things are not looking great on the Democratic side.
00:42:18.800
However, it's also important to point out, other than Donald Trump, there's nobody really
00:42:24.540
There's a new poll out from SurveyMonkey and Axios about the 2024 field.
00:42:29.200
That's way too early to predict what's going to happen in 2024.
00:42:32.200
But what the poll tells us is something important about right now.
00:42:35.640
Well, the poll shows that among the top contenders in 2024, among Republicans being polled, are
00:42:51.720
Don Jr. is the clear choice among younger voters, and he's got 29% overall.
00:43:01.340
What this tells us is that the GOP wants an heir to Trump and to Trumpism.
00:43:12.140
They don't want to go back to the way that he used to be.
00:43:21.940
And so they are literally choosing the heir to Trump, which is Donald Trump Jr.
00:43:32.540
But they have not had a political life outside of being a Trump.
00:43:37.980
So you can't really judge them on the merits of their own political life.
00:43:40.920
We don't really know what they believe or what they would do.
00:43:43.600
The reason that they're so high in the polls right now is because the GOP needs an heir to
00:43:48.360
And it does not appear that there is one just yet, a political heir.
00:43:52.020
And so that's going to have to be a major priority of conservatives over the next four
00:43:57.420
Assuming President Trump gets reelected, they're going to have to figure out who comes next,
00:44:06.000
Finally, before we go, there was a big surprise last night at the Golden Globes beyond the Ricky
00:44:10.840
Gervais stuff, which was that the movie 1917 won Best Drama.
00:44:15.400
1917 is this very long movie about World War I.
00:44:23.520
It's not a very good movie, but it is worth seeing, which I think explains the weird Rotten
00:44:30.860
The movie's got 90% critics review, 95% audience review.
00:44:41.040
It was directed, co-written, and produced by Sam Mendes.
00:44:43.760
Stars George McKay, who gave a superb performance in it.
00:44:47.200
But the problem with the movie is it's not really about anything.
00:45:09.520
You follow this guy like you would follow the protagonist in a video game.
00:45:22.000
It doesn't really have a purpose beyond showing how skillfully produced it was.
00:45:41.400
Because it's kind of like moving through a video game.
00:45:47.700
The movies which have pretty much lost their purpose and have become entirely self-referential.
00:45:52.120
Think about the rise of Quentin Tarantino who only makes movies about movies.
00:45:56.040
Think about all these awards shows which are just about the movie industry.
00:45:59.380
Which are just about how wonderful everyone in movies is.
00:46:08.860
We've lost the ability to understand narrative.
00:46:12.920
We've lost faith in the idea that life really does have meaning.
00:46:21.560
The idiom that you would use is we've lost the narrative.
00:46:31.800
It's not a surprise that we're confused over whether this is good or not.
00:46:49.120
It looks like right now the political side is leading things.
00:46:52.280
These people, not just in the United States, but around the Western world.
00:47:00.740
The culture is now going to have to follow suit.
00:47:03.620
It's a little bit of an inversion of that Andrew Breitbart idea that politics is downstream of culture.
00:47:08.920
But of course the line between the two is pretty blurry.
00:47:15.300
Hopefully they get the message from Ricky Gervais and all the rest of us.
00:47:18.680
And they do that because we need to reclaim the narrative.
00:47:26.480
If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
00:47:37.540
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00:47:42.920
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00:47:47.820
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00:47:55.040
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Ben Davies, director Mike Joyner, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay, supervising producer Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
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00:48:20.540
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00:48:25.920
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