00:00:56.000Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of The Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.
00:01:06.000Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at NobleGoldInvestments.com.
00:01:23.000Blake's holding it down in Phoenix, Arizona at the YRefi Studios.
00:01:27.000We've got lots of news to cover this morning, a lot of breaking news, unfortunately, out of New York City, where a suspect is in custody now after.
00:01:36.000An incendiary device was set off outside a federal building, which just so happens to house the ICE facilities.
00:01:44.000Let's go ahead and play a quick recap video here just to get everybody up to speed and explain why and how this is so important to our current moment, SOT 6.
00:01:53.000Here in New York and lower Manhattan, new video of the scene at 26 Federal Plaza.
00:01:58.000Now, this was apparently, according to the FBI, someone deployed an incendiary device, as you can see from that smoke, and it's no small matter here.
00:02:06.000That building, so there's what appears to be, yeah, the individual taken away.
00:02:49.000It's, I mean, we've seen these attacks.
00:02:51.000We've seen shooting attacks on ICE facilities.
00:02:53.000We've seen blockades of ICE facilities.
00:02:56.000And what especially stood out about this, and this is pointed out by one of our producers, is this came basically about one day after Tom Holman said, hey, we're going to be doing immigration enforcement.
00:03:10.000In New York City, that was all because Mayor Mamdani was gloating in an interview that we're a sanctuary city, we're not going to be cooperating with any immigration enforcement efforts in the city.
00:03:21.000And so, the federal government needs to lay down the law, they need to show that federal law still exists in New York City.
00:03:27.000So, Tom Holman doesn't announce any particular operations, just says we're going to be doing stuff in New York.
00:03:33.000And lo and behold, 24 hours later, some lunatic goes and tries to start a fire, set off bombs, you know, cause mayhem, possibly kill people.
00:03:45.000Already, my thought is immediately going to obviously they'll charge this guy with a federal crime, but how much of a lift is it going to be to imprison someone for a very clear cut terrorism related crime in New York City if his claim justification is I'm fighting the Trump administration, I'm fighting deportations?
00:04:06.000That's immediately what my mind goes to.
00:04:09.000Isn't that it's a terrible indictment of the political moment we live in, Blake, where we can't rely on juries to do basic.
00:04:17.000Things right now in these deep blue districts.
00:04:20.000It's really, really a terrifying moment.
00:04:22.000Let's go ahead and you mentioned this Tom Homan clip.
00:05:06.000And so instead, left wing lunatic tipped his hand.0.57
00:05:09.000He didn't have any operation to target.0.84
00:05:10.000So he just tried to set fire to a big federal building.
00:05:13.000And I think, all things considered, that's preferable because he's just attacking a.
00:05:20.000Building in downtown Manhattan when he could be hindering an actual ICE operation, putting agents more directly in danger, stopping people who should not be in this country from getting arrested.
00:05:32.000So I guess Tom Holman's strategy worked out there, but hopefully we can get this guy in prison.
00:05:39.000So the point is there's got to be accountability one way or another on whoever did this.
00:05:43.000The suspect is in custody as we speak, which is great.
00:05:47.000But this is probably, I would put dollars to donuts here.
00:05:51.000Blake, that we're going to find out this was a DSA guy or some radical leftist, anarchist, Antifa, somebody that's inspired by radical left wing ideology, right?
00:06:01.000And this is bringing up a massive, massive debate that's ongoing.
00:06:06.000Currently, right now, there was a post from Jordan Peterson that went viral over the weekend talking about ultimately this ideology is rooted in resentment and bitterness.
00:06:16.000You had this great speech by Rubio, actually, a 10 out of 10 speech, phenomenal, phenomenal speech from Rubio talking about.
00:06:24.000How ultimately leftism and socialism, communism, this rise that we're seeing, this DSA rise across the country, is rooted in resentment, a wanting to tear down productive people in our society.
00:06:37.000And what you're starting to see is what I call stage five of this process, where people double and triple down on bad ideas, bad theories.
00:06:47.000They refuse to be cowed by logic or evidence.
00:07:35.000You even have Van Jones attacking the DSA, right?
00:07:39.000So, this is a new wrinkle in everything.
00:07:43.000I believe we've got this clip from Jan Jones, 23.
00:07:47.000I am tired, tired, tired of a set of people on the very far left in the Democratic Party, my party, telling us that in order for us to be progressives, we now have to believe ideas and support ideas that are completely nuts.
00:08:50.000Regardless of the imagery, you're starting to see a little bit of a formation.
00:08:56.000I almost, and by the way, we're going to get into this later in the hour.
00:08:59.000We've got Michael Knowles joining us at 12 30 Eastern.
00:09:02.000And we're going to talk about some of the messaging around specifically JD Vance.
00:09:07.000But you see already the counter argument forming where you've got people that JD Vance is going to uniquely appeal to, that he could expand the coalition in sort of a new direction.
00:11:05.000There's definitely going to be people who are bugged out by this.
00:11:09.000What I worry is it could be a little too easy to overstate it.
00:11:13.000I think people who are really, I think the sliver of people who are left of center, but strongly ideologically opposed to real socialism, the aggressive DSA stuff, is probably not that big and it's probably pretty centered.
00:11:30.000What I worry about with DSA is I worry that their brand of, let's just say it, economic illiteracy, aggressive leveling, aggressive burn it down.
00:11:40.000I worry a lot of that could have a lot of popularity in middle America, in a lot of the states that swung towards Trump in both of his elections, in all three of his elections.
00:11:51.000I worry that that could appeal to a lot of those people because there still is a lot of energy in favor of blow the system up, burn stuff down.
00:12:01.000And a lot of that anger, it's still there.
00:12:05.000And so I think of the opportunity, but the opportunity is coupled with the need to be offering a path where people have a stake in the country.
00:12:16.000Otherwise, they are going to be won over by these hucksters who are frankly happy to destroy their country.
00:12:22.000And all I can think of is in the UK, the UK has been sharply going downhill, and their DSA equivalent, the Green Party, is rising.
00:12:43.000So it's good that we might be able to win over the figures like Bill Maher, but I wouldn't use that as an opportunity to be smug or feel super confident.
00:12:53.000This is a very scary thing that's coming to America.
00:12:57.000And just to be clear, I agree with that.
00:13:00.000That's why we stated very clearly this is not a good thing that you're seeing DSA rise.
00:13:04.000It is a Symptom of a deeper rot in our country.
00:13:08.000And this is why it's always important to say to our political leaders, this is a direct appeal to conservatives, real conservatives in DC and elsewhere, that we are in a race against the clock.0.77
00:13:18.000We have to improve the economic conditions of Americans, of working class Americans right here at home.
00:13:25.000We have to focus domestically, or else all of these other foreign abstractions, these foreign entanglements, will distract us from the core job that we must get accomplished in the next two years.
00:13:36.000Improving the lives of real Americans, working class Americans.
00:13:40.000Fundamentally, at its core, President Trump was re elected because people had a memory of Trump 1.0 of having more money in their pockets than when they did under Joe Biden.
00:13:51.000That was fundamentally what got the white working class on board.
00:13:54.000That's what got the minority working class on board, Hispanics, blacks in greater numbers.
00:13:59.000It's what got young people on board because they believed that it was going to be a restoration of the American dream, the American promise.
00:14:06.000And so we have to stay focused on that.
00:14:10.000I think peeling away at some of the edges of the Democrat coalition because they refuse to police their own ranks of some of these insane ideas like abolishing prisons, abolishing deportations, all of these things are nuts.
00:14:23.000And if you think Bill Maher is overstating things, he's not.0.71
00:14:27.000They are very clear that they want to seize the means of production in Momdani's New York.
00:15:05.000Elon Musk is their person they most hate.
00:15:06.000The problem is, unfortunately, we've changed America a lot, and America has a lot of people who do just feel entitled to a billionaire's wealth.
00:15:16.000So the point that needs to be emphasized politically is when these people talk about equity, they're not just talking about the equity in SpaceX.
00:15:24.000They're talking about your home equity.
00:15:25.000They're talking, they like their plan in New York right now is basically to seize and like basically take state control of every rented building in the city of New York.
00:15:57.000So why aren't you buying silver right now?
00:15:59.000People who recognized oil early didn't just make money.
00:16:02.000They got ahead of one of the biggest economic shifts in history.
00:16:06.000And today, a similar opportunity is unfolding with silver.
00:16:09.000Silver is more than a precious metal, it's a critical resource used in solar panels, electric vehicles, defense systems, AI infrastructure, and the massive data centers powering that digital world.
00:16:19.000While demand keeps growing, it's still affordable enough that the average American can start accumulating it right now.
00:16:25.000That's why investors are turning to silver to protect against inflation.
00:16:29.000And to own one of the world's most important strategic resources.
00:16:33.000Don't be the person who looks back in 10 years and says, I saw it coming, I just didn't act.
00:16:37.000Visit noblegoldinvestments.comslash Kirk and learn how easy it is to own physical silver.
00:17:00.000Well, so Michael, I wanted to have you on because this show and yours have become the focus for a certain variety of critics online.
00:17:10.000And namely, it's because of the way we reacted to JD Vance's interview on Joe Rogan.
00:17:17.000He obviously made some comments about what he perceived to be a communication strategy meant to undermine his MOU negotiations that the president had dispatched him on.
00:17:29.000There was a Time Magazine article that suggested that maybe it was an organized effort.
00:17:34.000To undermine those efforts, to undermine peace negotiations in the Middle East.
00:17:38.000And you and us took some fire because, you know, I don't know what they're alleging, but, you know, a lot of people don't like the way we approached it.
00:17:49.000What is really going on here, Michael Knowles?
00:17:52.000Well, I think from the outset, for people who've never worked on a political campaign, it's a little bit confusing, especially if you haven't worked in the political media.
00:17:59.000However, if you haven't worked in those things, you know exactly what's going on, which is that people are always running these kinds of messaging campaigns.
00:18:07.000Whether they're geared at supporting or harming a certain candidate or an idea or a policy.
00:18:13.000And in fact, that was the vice president's great transgression he just cited this Time magazine article, which said there was a campaign against the MOU or advocating for one position in the Iran war or the other.
00:18:26.000And for that, the way that I got kind of plugged into this was there was some account on X that tagged all three of us expressing dismay specifically about the Charlie Kirk show.
00:19:07.000And then all these sorts of, whether they're artificial accounts, whether they're Real people who are organized in some way, whether they're individuals just expressing their opinion, they all kind of jump in and you get info op over info op over info op.
00:19:21.000And it's all very tedious, but that is just how politics works.
00:19:25.000And the only part of it to me, I don't take offense on behalf of me or my show.
00:19:32.000I think it goes with the territory and politics and political media.
00:19:36.000One thing that has driven me a little bit crazy, though, as it pertains to the Charlie Kirk show, is that everybody since Charlie was killed wants to speak for Charlie.
00:19:45.000Here's what Charlie would have said in this instance.
00:19:56.000And it just really gets under my skin when people do that generally, and especially when people who didn't know Charlie that well, were not particularly close with him, in some cases, like actively didn't like him and undermined the things that he was doing, when they have the temerity to say that they're speaking for Charlie now.
00:20:16.000And I guess it really got under my skin when it comes to the vice president, because we all know that Charlie was very good friends with the vice president and was very supportive of him.
00:20:25.000Again, no one wishes to speak for him now.
00:20:30.000But the artificiality of it all, the contrivance of it all, is just so deeply frustrating, especially as we head into the midterm elections and then into heating up for the 2028 campaigns.
00:20:43.000It just, at a personal level, I find it all very distasteful.
00:20:49.000And I really appreciate that about everyone wants to speak for Charlie.
00:20:56.000I hope Andrew and I have done a good job, for example, on the Iran war, where we usually will say, We don't know exactly what Charlie would say about how things have unfolded the past six months.
00:21:08.000Here is how he responded to Midnight Hammer.
00:21:10.000Here is what he said and did while he was alive.
00:21:13.000And here is our best guess about what he might do.
00:21:33.000But a lot of people, they do clearly want to hijack his tremendous legacy for their personal hobby horse.
00:21:41.000And as he said with Vance, here's what we know what Charlie said about JD Vance he loved him, he endorsed him extremely early, so early that they got ahead of things and had to go clear it up with donors afterwards because we weren't fully prepared for it yet.
00:21:55.000And he said, When people would say, Are you going to run for president or whatever?
00:21:58.000He would say, I don't need to because I have JD Vance there and I feel he's completely aligned with my politics.
00:22:04.000That's what he said about the vice president.
00:22:07.000You know, Michael, I know nothing of this experience that you're speaking of of people that used to attack Charlie and now act like they could speak for him.
00:22:17.000I've never personally experienced that at all.
00:22:43.000I want everyone to stop and appreciate how fortunate we all are to have Vice President JD Vance, the second highest ranking official in the country, proudly speaking at the March for Life.
00:24:02.000You know, this is where when people will sometimes ask me, because I think you're so right, people do really miss Charlie's guidance.
00:24:11.000He was a singular figure when it came to maintaining and curating a conservative coalition, but he was also a thought leader and he was also an operative and he was doing all of those things.
00:24:21.000And so they'll ask me, what do you think Charlie would have thought about this, that, or the other thing?
00:24:36.000But I say, look, it's really not my position to state that.
00:24:39.000Here are some things he said, whatever.
00:24:40.000You guys have an actual institutional responsibility to answer those questions in a way that I do not.
00:24:47.000And I think you've done a very good job at it, as you just did now.
00:24:50.000But from the standpoint of the Charlie Kirk show and TPUSA, you really do have an institutional responsibility to do that.
00:24:57.000And, you know, it is going to be dialed up a lot because we are now in this kind of shadow war for the 2028 presidential nomination.
00:25:06.000I think it's all kind of silly because assuming Trump remains the head of the Republican Party and remains, you know, the powerful figure in the party, he's just going to pick the nominee.
00:25:16.000And the idea that there's some kind of shadow war between Vance and Rubio, I think that's also in the imaginations of a lot of people.
00:25:23.000Let's not forget Rubio endorsed Vance as the nominee.
00:25:26.000Trump himself has said he wants both of them to run together on a ticket.
00:25:29.000So I think a lot of this is really contrived.
00:25:32.000And it's wish casting from factions on the right.
00:25:34.000But there are always going to be these factions.
00:25:36.000I mean, now I think a lot of the anti Vance rhetoric that you're seeing is really just a copy and paste of the never Trump movement.
00:25:43.000There are some differences with it, but it's a lot of the same people making a lot of the same arguments.
00:25:47.000So, okay, you're going to have that lane.
00:25:48.000Look, that's a legitimate part of the conservative movement and the Republican coalition.
00:25:59.000On the right, we have a lot of intellectual diversity, and that's. often one of the strengths of the American right compared to the left, which is uniformly progressive.
00:26:10.000I'm all for, you know, duking it out in primaries and what have you.
00:26:15.000I guess just my, the only thing that gets my blood pressure up a little bit about it is when people would have the temerity, especially people who didn't know Charlie that well, didn't like him all that much, were kind of undermining him during his life, when they would have the temerity to invoke him and pretend that they are the standard bearers for him, especially as a way to shiv.
00:26:35.000The political candidates that he liked the most.
00:26:38.000I mean, to me, it's just a bridge too far, and I think it bears weighing in on what's actually going on.
00:26:46.000And I think it's a little more than wish casting on the Vance Rubio thing.
00:26:50.000Maybe wish casting for Rubio himself, but there does, I was through the first Trump term, there wasn't anything quite like this in terms of the avid power struggle over who would take over.
00:28:26.000JD Vance has become such a warrior for our cause in the past six months.
00:28:30.000JD Vance is acting and looking like the vice president that Donald Trump needs, the vice president that Donald Trump deserves, and maybe beyond that, even the 48th president.
00:29:02.000I'll also say, Michael, I got a message from a Dominican friar I knew in college who says he's a big fan and loves this segment, so I thought I'd throw that out.0.99
00:29:10.000But I'm glad you didn't get a message from a Jesuit.
00:29:12.000You know, the Dominicans, they're reliable, and Jesuit can be a little more hit or miss.
00:29:40.000And I've certainly heard rumors that this isn't just people on X, there's donors lining up saying, We're going to keep upping the amount of money we can offer you until it'll just be too irresistible for you to run.
00:29:53.000Even on social media, it's clear there's a lot of sustained attacks on Vice President Vance, there's a lot of sustained efforts to promote Rubio.
00:30:01.000And even we're going to have this panel discussion.
00:30:03.000We had these panel discussions with some of the young kids when we were at the Chapter Leadership Summit.
00:30:08.000And we haven't released that yet, but one of the things we were talking to them about is who do you prefer?
00:30:12.000And they were very aware there was this Rubio versus Vance dynamic going on, and they had mixed feelings about it.
00:30:19.000So I guess the question is what is motivating this?
00:30:23.000Is it what it seems to a lot of people that this is primarily just about the Iran war and the fact that Vance has become, so to speak, the face of I don't want a full regime change in Iran.
00:30:36.000Are there other factors going into this?
00:30:39.000Help us understand what's driving this intense wish casting, if that's what it is.
00:30:42.000Yeah, I think you're right that the Iran war is the inciting incident for a lot of this campaign against Vance or for Rubio or what have you, not coming from either of the men.
00:30:56.000But it also really draws on caricatures.
00:31:00.000So there's this caricature that JD Vance is an isolationist.
00:31:38.000Or this idea that Marco Rubio, I don't know, on the Israel Iran issue, that he wants to give everything to Israel that they can do no wrong.
00:31:47.000I think that in reality, Vance and Rubio are much closer, even just in the way they think about politics, on economics, on migration, on foreign policy, than the wish casters would have it be.
00:31:59.000And so the dynamic that I see playing out is eerily similar to what you saw in 2024.
00:32:05.000And what you saw in 2024 was a real tragedy of the Ron DeSantis campaign, because the Ron DeSantis campaign, in many ways, was doomed from the beginning.
00:32:14.000The reason being that the thing everyone loved about Ron DeSantis was. that he was a really great governor in the vein of Donald Trump.
00:32:24.000If you recall, the initial pitch for a President DeSantis was he's just like Trump, but even better.
00:32:30.000You know, he has that kind of populist appeal, that common good appeal, that common sense appeal, but he's even better.
00:33:20.000And so I think it's why not only is Rubio loyal and, you know, He doesn't want division in the administration.
00:33:26.000But I think he's smart and he sees some of these dynamics too.
00:33:29.000A lot of the attacks that you're seeing on Vance, that he's not a doctrinaire, laissez faire, late 80s style capitalist on economics, the same thing's true of Rubio.
00:33:40.000The fact that JD Vance will talk about the common good.
00:33:55.000And at least as of now, he hasn't fallen for it in the way that, you know, unfortunately, I think you saw play out in the DeSantis campaign.
00:34:29.000Vice President Vance is supporting policies that are widely and broadly popular across the American electorate.
00:34:36.000There is just huge entrenched, and I don't even know if they're that huge, but groups on social media that will attack you once you say something that is massively popular.
00:34:49.000So I think we're seeing this whole same playbook play out again.
00:34:52.000Michael Knowles, host of The Michael Knowles Show, thank you so much, my friend.
00:35:09.000And TikTok has always strived to build the kind of place that thrives on respectful connection, where curiosity fuels connection and we can share what's on our minds and learn from each other.
00:35:19.000When ideas meet respect, good things happen.
00:35:21.000On TikTok, you can find a mechanic explaining the why behind a problem most of us wouldn't even know how to name, or a father sharing a lifetime of knowledge with his viewers, viewers who listen, discuss, and then they respond.
00:35:33.000TikTok turns connection into community through small acts of understanding.
00:35:37.000You can feel it in the comments, in the thank you from a stranger halfway across the world.
00:35:41.000TikTok is a place where respect opens the door for discussion, and discussion helps us build something real.
00:35:50.000And we have Sean Davis, who is the CEO and co founder of The Federalist here.
00:36:34.000I mean, this is a pretty aggressive attack from the Wall Street Journal.
00:36:40.000You replied back, I'm sorry, but pulling this obvious little stunt against JD Vance, who's Wife just gave birth when Mitch McConnell hasn't been seen in weeks is absolutely absurd.
00:36:55.000I actually think she's a great journalist.
00:36:57.000She's done some amazing work over the years exposing waste, fraud, and abuse in Congress.
00:37:02.000So my complaint isn't with her, it's with this new little op we're seeing against JD.
00:37:07.000We saw it in the wake of the Rogan interview where you had a bunch of neocons who just want war everywhere attacking him for things he never said.
00:37:15.000Then you have this hit come out from the Wall Street Journal, which is very neocon.
00:37:19.000Very pro illegal and ridiculous legal immigration.
00:37:25.000And they don't like JD because JD is America first.
00:37:27.000He's not a neocon and he thinks we should close the border.
00:37:30.000So let's just all be honest about what's happening here.
00:37:33.000And it's a full on interventionist, neocon, America exists to do things for other countries, ideological hit against JD.
00:37:42.000And what I found so absurd about it is the particular frame that they used, calling him AWOL, calling him the leader of the Senate.
00:37:51.000Last time I checked, John Thune was the actual majority leader.
00:37:54.000Now, I understand that he's a potted plant.
00:37:57.000He's not particularly good at his job.
00:38:32.000And if we're going to talk about senators being AWOL, we should probably have a conversation about Mitch McConnell, who nobody has seen or talked to publicly in, I think, close to a month.
00:38:43.000And there actually are standing Senate rules that govern absences that require you, if you are a senator, which Mitch McConnell is and JD Vance is not, to inform the Senate of the reason for your absence and to seek leave, to seek permission of the Senate to remain absent.
00:39:14.000So if you're worried about senators being AWOL, let's have a conversation about Mitch McConnell and whether he should resign since he clearly cannot execute the duties of his office.
00:39:23.000You know what strikes me, and I hadn't thought about this yet, Sean, is you've got me thinking back to some of the conversations we're told Mitch McConnell had from the hospital room.
00:39:53.000But, you know, he had that one quote, interestingly enough, when he was starting to feel ill, saying, I've got this Ukraine stuff to get done.
00:40:03.000I've got, you know, so many foreign abstractions from the people that are supposed to be leading the United States of America.
00:40:10.000And it strikes me that JD Vance stands in extreme contrast to that, talking about the middle class, the American dream, affordability, the common good.
00:40:21.000These things do seem to be widely popular, broadly popular with the American electorate, but they do stand in contrast to the messaging that we're seeing from this neocon wing of the party that seems more obsessed and perplexed by foreign abstractions.
00:40:40.000The GOP establishment, which is run by big spenders who want to open the border and just use the military as the police everywhere, that establishment hates Donald Trump.
00:40:50.000It was John Thune who was calling for Donald Trump to drop out in 2016 after the stupid access Hollywood tape.0.99
00:40:56.000So let's not be mistaken about what the permanent Washington establishment, where, by the way, the Senate is its base of operations, they hate Donald Trump.0.98
00:41:15.000They would love for JD to become the nominee and lose.
00:41:19.000Trust me when I say they want JD to be bloodied up in a primary and to lose so that they can come in and say, Look, we have eliminated all traces of Trump and Trumpism and Vantism from the party.
00:41:30.000And you guys didn't listen to us and you lost in 2028.
00:41:44.000The people who want forever wars everywhere and spending all the time and open borders, they hate Trump and they want to get rid of him.
00:41:50.000And they know that if Vance is the nominee and Vance wins in 2028, because he is widely popular, I think he's probably the only Republican who can win in the Rust Belt in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
00:42:02.000They know that if Vance gets in in 2028, their chance of taking back the party is probably over forever.
00:42:09.000And that's why you're seeing this amount of violence and ridiculous rhetoric against JD in the middle of 2026.
00:42:15.000I'm going to call out the elephant in the room here, Sean.
00:42:19.000Because I don't believe this for a second, but the dig on Vance is that he's somehow anti Israel.
00:42:25.000I've never heard anything that he said that was anti Israel.
00:42:28.000I've heard him say pro America things, I've heard him say pragmatic and realist foreign policy things.
00:42:37.000But what do you make of that specific attack?
00:42:39.000Yeah, I think it is again being used by the same group of people who want the U.S. to be militarily involved all over the earth.
00:42:47.000And the reality is, when it comes to Israel, There is 10% of people on the left who think that Jews in Israel are the worst thing in history.
00:42:58.000The strain of anti Semitism on the left is insane.0.64
00:43:02.000And it's been incubated in universities.
00:43:04.000It's finding its way into the left wing factions like the DSA.0.71
00:43:08.000And then on the right side of the party, you probably have 10% of people who are like, I don't want to do anything with Israel, or I'm done with Israel.0.63
00:43:14.000I'm tired of them controlling our foreign policy.
00:43:18.000You have the middle 80% of the country who's like, yeah, I don't really have a problem with them, but maybe America just focuses on America and where our interests align great and where they don't, we're just going to do what's best for America.
00:43:32.000But you have this segment of the right, which is wildly overrepresented in conservative media.
00:43:38.000And that's the neocon wing, the interventionists, the people who were all for the Iraq war and said we were going to be greeted as liberators, kind of the Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney wing.
00:43:51.000That is not representative of the party, but they're very much in control of the levers of power and they're in control of powerful mediums in DC.
00:44:48.000And for just $28 a month, you can save babies all year long for less than $1 a day.
00:44:54.000A $15,000 gift, and I know there's some of you out there that can do this, will provide an ultrasound machine that will save lives for years to come.
00:45:01.000Whether you want to save one baby, or five, or hundreds.
00:45:05.000That opportunity is just a phone call or click away.
00:45:46.000We had Michael Knowles on earlier, and he was saying similar things that JD Vance is trying to chart a difficult path of foreign policy realism when we have people who are maximally interventionist and people who are sort of, I don't even want to say maximally isolationist, they've decided to become turbo anti Israel.
00:46:04.000And it's a path that we have a moral obligation to lead our party through.
00:46:09.000And when Charlie tried to chart that path himself, he got attacked from both sides.
00:46:13.000He had people who would call him an Israeli puppet and people who would call him an anti Semite, and both were untrue.
00:46:19.000And it strikes me that it feels like Vice President Vance has become the heir to these attacks, where he does get attacked from both sides.
00:46:28.000And both of those attacks are, in my opinion, pretty clearly unfair.
00:47:31.000He's to the point where no matter what he says, the freaks on either side are going to attack him.
00:47:37.000But what he's saying actually makes sense to the 80% of people who don't have like this deep emotional vested interest in a foreign country.
00:47:51.000It's good to have a democratic ally in the Middle East like them.
00:47:54.000But America needs to do what's best for America.
00:47:57.000And sometimes that's going to intersect with what's best for Israel, and sometimes it's not.0.60
00:48:01.000That is like the most benign, banal, vanilla thing you can say about politics.
00:48:06.000And yet, for the people for whom Israel is the only thing they care about, both in the completely Israel hating and Israel pro obsessed mark, that drove them bonkers.
00:48:17.000And it's just the weirdest thing to watch online.
00:48:20.000Because I think you guys are probably like me, you can see an op forming, you know when it's not organic, you can tell when it's completely manufactured.
00:48:28.000And what we've seen over the last week is completely manufactured.
00:48:32.000And I'm just kind of tired of the pretense of it.
00:48:34.000I'm tired of pretending that, you know, oh, it's totally normal and these are normal people just having thoughts.
00:48:40.000Can we all just admit it's an op and move on and argue like adults?
00:48:45.000Well, I got to kick you know, that's frustrating about this, Sean.
00:48:48.000What's frustrating, sorry, Blake, is that we have a real existential problem facing this country.
00:48:55.000We've spent time talking about DSA on the show today.0.98
00:48:58.000This is the kind of crap they're actually saying out loud, Sean.0.97
00:49:02.000And this distraction, these ops, They take our eye off the ball because this is really the game that's being played here if we have the courage to confront the truth.0.99
00:49:13.000And I just, this clip is so shocking to me because of just how true we know it is.
00:49:20.000I think it's particularly important, not just for our community in Tigray, but communities of the global South, period, right?
00:49:28.000There's a certain reckoning that we are going to have to have with the global world order as it exists today and the way that it fundamentally will have to shift going forward.
00:49:38.000The responsibility that we have as Americans, the recognition that is going to be required of us, of the exploitative and extractive nature that we play on the global scale and the global stage, is only going to be challenged if we are getting represented by people who understand that on a fundamental level.
00:49:58.000And that means getting more immigrants into office, that means getting more people who have heritage in the global south into office, because that's where those decisions are made specifically.0.95
00:50:08.000So, they just gave up the whole game there.1.00
00:50:35.000They're all a bunch of invaders and subversives.1.00
00:50:38.000And You know, look, if everyone who is coming across the border was like a dyed in the wool right wing Christian Republican, that border would get closed so fast by the left, it would make your head spin.0.99
00:50:50.000It's not that they have some sort of special love for the global immigrant, for the global South immigrant.
00:50:58.000And they understand that if they want to take over the U.S. government and turn it into their plaything, they have to import people who they can get to support them.
00:51:22.000They're just admitting the game out in the wide open.
00:51:26.000And I'm glad you talked about this because Obama called it the stray voltage theory, where if we can just get you distracted with shiny objects and shiny trinkets, then they can go behind the scenes and do what they want to do.0.95
00:51:37.000We are constantly being distracted on social media, in the news, with shiny objects to distract us from the goal of the left, which is to take over the country with third world left wing communist immigration.0.97
00:51:55.000I'm reminded of that SPLC executive who had the share of the white population slowly dropping as if that was the ultimate goal of these people because it is.0.73
00:52:05.000Sean Davis, co founder and CEO of The Federalist.0.85
00:53:00.000Then refi.com and remember why refi doesn't care what your credit score is, just go to whyrefi.com and tell them your friend Andrew sent you.
00:53:13.000Just a little bit of breaking news here the suspect in the lower Manhattan, the federal building incendiary device incident, has been identified as Andrew Arabaka.
00:53:26.000So, apparently, he's a 43 year old, Andrew Arabaka, per NBC4, local NBC, there in New York City.
00:53:34.000The sign had a pool wagon that he brought with him.
00:53:40.000The man has a history of anti Ice rhetoric.
00:53:42.000So we know now a fuller picture of what happened there.
00:53:46.000And it looks like, yes, indeed, this was most likely politically motivated.
00:53:51.000So we're going to keep monitoring that story, give you details as it comes.
00:53:55.000So without further ado, I want to bring in our next guest who has apparently, reportedly, seen the new movie, just like Blake, Odyssey, Dr. Benedict Whalen.
00:54:04.000He's the chairman and associate professor of English at Hillsdale College.
00:55:01.000It's a very interesting sort of summer blockbuster, as you would expect.
00:55:06.000Of course, as you would also expect, it's Hollywood and it diverges in some important ways from Homer's text, as you would expect, and you can nitpick or not.
00:55:19.000And if it does anything, my hope is that it inspires more people to actually go and.
00:55:23.000Than have questions and read Homer's Odyssey itself.
00:55:28.000So, Dr. Whelan, actually, that might be where I disagree with you the most when you say it's fun, because I think that's what stood out to me it almost is an aggressively downbeat film.
00:55:39.000It sort of portrays Odysseus, the wily Greek hero, the man of twists and turns, as it's often translated.
00:55:46.000He's got PTSD from the Trojan War, he's depressed all of the time.
00:55:51.000One of the climactic scenes is him basically having a PTSD style breakdown about.
00:55:56.000That he did the Trojan horse and sacked Troy.
00:55:59.000So, I suppose what I ask is it does diverge from the text.
00:56:04.000Do you still feel this is a movie that's probably the only big budget adaptation of the Odyssey we're going to get for a long time?
00:56:11.000Do you think it faithfully represents Homer, this foundational work of Western literature, for modern audiences?
00:56:19.000Does Christopher Nolan get it close enough to what the poem is spiritually about, as it were?
00:56:29.000I think that the character Odysseus himself, the central character, is Nolan's Odysseus, is just in some of the most essential ways different from Homer's Odysseus.
00:56:41.000So if the poem's really about the character of this man, and that's actually the first word of the poem, is the man, muse, tell me about the man.
00:56:49.000If it's about the man, then it's, yeah, Nolan's film is different.
00:56:54.000I actually very much agree with you that this, you know, Matt Damon's.
00:56:59.000Odysseus, he is much, much more tormented by his past.
00:57:08.000He's closer to a sort of conflicted, modern, reluctant hero in certain ways who's done things that torment him and he's got this guilt that he's carrying around rather than the sort of ancient Homeric hero who has done things in his past that he regrets and wrestles with, but is also perfectly happy to gloat over his enemies as he butchers them and takes great joy in.
00:57:32.000In telling lies that confuse his enemies and manipulate others to accomplish his ends.
00:57:37.000So, yeah, there is more sort of joy, cleverness, maybe even energy to Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus, than Nolan's.
00:57:47.000I still think, in other respects, though, the film, I think, does give us some sort of vision of the Odyssey.
00:57:55.000I mean, if you think of all of those earlier episodes that are so connected with Odysseus, even just in our cultural imagination, like the fall of Troy.
00:58:04.000The Trojan horse, the Cyclops, Circe, Calypso, those elements are there in the film.
00:58:10.000And so it's at least unmistakably the world of the Odyssey, even if it's not really giving us Homer's Odysseus or obviously cutting things from Homer's Odyssey as well.
00:58:22.000So I was just thinking the Odyssey, incredibly old.
00:58:25.000It's basically the oldest work of literature that we have in the Western canon.
00:58:38.000And so when I ask, did this film get the heart of Homer's text?
00:58:43.000I think it's also worth asking why is it that this text has been, is probably the oldest text that you will read in an English class, in a work of literature, in high school?
00:59:13.000The things he goes through on his journey, his very long journey to get home, and then what he has to do when he gets home to clean a house, to restore his political order, to reestablish his marriage.
00:59:26.000So he's a really interesting, complex hero.
00:59:30.000But the story itself also shows you all sorts of interesting things.
00:59:36.000So, for instance, if you take the Iliad and the Odyssey together, which tells about the destruction of Troy in the Iliad, and then in the Odyssey, Odysseus' return to Ithaca.
00:59:46.000And the restoration of his kingship and marriage.
00:59:49.000What you see is one of the things Homer emphasizes is that a political order that commits itself to the violation or disrespect of marriage ends up being destroyed.
01:00:01.000That's what happens with Troy, which committed itself to this war defending the Prince Paris's abduction of Helen.
01:00:08.000The counterpoint to that is the story told in the Odyssey, where you see, in fact, the king, through great suffering and difficulty, returning home.
01:00:17.000And restoring his political order through the restoration of his marriage.
01:00:22.000Homer understood that the sort of family and the household and the larger political order are inextricably related, and health and virtue in one helps shape and establish health and virtue in the other.
01:00:36.000That's something that, for instance, I'm not sure comes across as clearly in Nolan's movie.
01:00:41.000I want to make sure that our audience is, for those in the audience that don't know, The story of Odysseus and don't know the story of the Odyssey.
01:00:52.000That's kind of, you touched on it, but you know, what is it?
01:00:56.000Like, from a 30,000 foot view, I mean, I understand why, to your point you just made, why it's stood the test of time, why it's remained one of the foundational works of literature in the Western canon.
01:01:09.000But, you know, I kind of wanted just a primer to make sure that our audience was ready, but you sort of answered it.
01:01:15.000But if there's anything else that you would like to fill in, I think it would be helpful to make sure we're all on the same page.
01:01:20.000Yeah, well, one thing that's interesting that happens in the Odyssey is Odysseus has been held captive by this immortal nymph goddess Calypso on her island of Ogidja, and they live essentially alone there for those seven years.
01:01:35.000And in Homer's text, Odysseus spends those seven years on the shore, weeping, yearning to go home, and Calypso eventually is ordered by the gods to release him, to allow him to return home, and this is in part through Athena's intervention on his behalf.
01:01:52.000But one of the things that's interesting there is Calypso is this immortal, beautiful goddess.
01:01:56.000He's sleeping with her, and she offers him immortality as well.
01:02:00.000And he's leading a life of ease, of luxury, of just relaxation and peace on this island.
01:02:09.000Why does Odysseus want to return home to Ithaca, where Penelope's going to be 20 years older than when he left her, where there's this whole messed up political order, all these suitors coming after her?
01:02:22.000You know, why would Odysseus choose that?
01:02:25.000As opposed to a life of ease, luxury, sensuality, and immortality.
01:02:30.000Essentially, in leaving Calypso, Odysseus is choosing death itself.
01:02:34.000And part of the answer to that question why would Odysseus choose Penelope in Ithaca?
01:02:40.000It is loyalty to Penelope and to his place, but on a deeper level, Homer makes clear that, in fact, it's through struggle and suffering that human wisdom is found.
01:02:51.000And it's wisdom sort of in the struggle, in the hard work of forming a marriage, of forming a political order, that humans find wisdom and then actual satisfaction rather than simply animal satisfaction.
01:03:04.000So, as a whole, the work has this really robust, larger vision of what it means to be a human being and what a satisfactory or noble life would look like.
01:03:37.000And to wrestle with what is worth living, what makes life worth living, what makes the struggle worth enduring.
01:03:44.000Is something that all of us are faced with asking ourselves if we're honest, uh, every single day that we breathe, and so that's a profound insight.
01:04:08.000That we mentioned it's a somewhat gloomy movie, uh, Dr. Whalen, and a big part of that is it almost struck me.
01:04:17.000People were debating whether this was a woke movie because it has a transgender casting, because of the racial casting and all of that.
01:04:23.000Yet the core of it felt, I don't want to say it was a right wing movie, but it had a somewhat conservative theme, which is he really harps on this idea of civilization collapsing, the end of ages, that civilization is this fragile thing that Odysseus more or less accidentally brings an end to.
01:04:40.000It has a line people have made fun of where he says, Our age of bronze is collapsing.
01:04:45.000And that's funny because this is set during a period that historians literally call the Bronze Age collapse, where Civilization does go away for a while.
01:04:54.000We lose historical records for quite some time.
01:04:58.000And do you think that that's a good way to present the Odyssey, to present it as a story of the end of an age that is actually somewhat bleak, that is downbeat?
01:05:12.000Does the Odyssey carry that tone in Homer's original?
01:05:17.000First of all, I want to agree with your point that one of the things I really enjoyed about the movie was.
01:05:23.000Its treatment both with Troy and then also on Ithaca with the notion that civilization is fragile and you have to work hard and delicate, and it's a delicate thing that requires reinforcement.
01:05:36.000So, for instance, Penelope has a line, I can't quote it exactly, but no matter how great the structure is, it needs to have people believe in its meaning for this political order to continue.
01:05:53.000The problem is the problem that I had with it, and I'm going to try to express this without.
01:05:57.000Entirely spoiling the end of the movie is that, as I've just said, that in Homer's poem, the epic ends with Homer's great the Greek word is his nostos, the triumphant homecoming and return of the epic hero.
01:06:14.000And Odysseus does this he kills the suitors, he passes his wife's tests to prove that he's really who he says he is, and he restores political order with the blessing of the gods on Ithaca at the end.
01:06:26.000We have this moment, in other words, of Triumphant return and restoration.
01:06:31.000And in contrast to that, without going into all of the details or spoiling it, the movie ends, I thought, sort of apocalyptically.
01:06:41.000That was the tone that we're going into a dark age and we're sailing away from Ithaca and the order has not really been reestablished and we don't really have a hope for the future.
01:06:55.000So it has a sort of bleakness there, even at the end, that is not really in keeping with Homer's tone.
01:07:00.000And I know that you can nitpick all sorts of changes, but that is.
01:07:05.000A fundamental shift in my view from the overall arc of the Odyssey.
01:07:10.000And so I think the big takeaway from that is people have to go read the Odyssey.
01:07:17.000What's the best version of the Odyssey for people to read, in your opinion?
01:07:21.000Well, the one I've taught for years and years, the one we did our Hillsdale online course with, is Robert Fagel's translation of the Odyssey.
01:07:32.000It begins with the great line Sing to me of the man, muse, the man of twists and turns.
01:07:36.000That's his translation of this word, polytropon.
01:07:39.000And it's a great translation, twists and turns, because Odysseus not only does lots of twists and turns on his journey physically, but he is intellectually and in his stories and in his lies and his cleverness, he's a man of twists and turns.
01:08:24.000We got an adaptation of Troy 20 years ago that was of mixed merits.
01:08:30.000What would you like to see if we were going to get other great works of ancient medieval literature?
01:08:36.000I don't know how wide your specialty goes.
01:08:39.000What should we be getting from Hollywood that we're not getting?
01:08:42.000Because we don't get enough of these adaptations of big epics, foundational works of literature.
01:08:47.000I love the question, and I actually had a sort of random thought as I was watching how Nolan did change the end of the Odyssey with Odysseus sailing off towards the West.
01:09:00.000Actually, the next work in Imperial Rome, Virgil's great epic, the Aeneid, picks up with the destruction of Troy because, as Virgil tells it, and as the Romans, the Roman Empire developed this myth itself, that it actually was founded by Aeneas, who was a Trojan and who lived through the destruction of Troy.
01:09:22.000Went on a journey through the Mediterranean and eventually founded Rome, which founded this empire.
01:09:26.000So, in Virgil's retelling, it's the destruction of Troy that gives birth to the seed that becomes the great Roman Empire.
01:09:34.000That's a wonderful work that is sort of picking up the mantle of Homer and ancient epic literature.
01:09:39.000And I would love to see a big budget production of Virgil's Aeneid.