The Michael Knowles Show

00:00:00.000 After 14 unsuccessful attempts over the course of last week, Kevin McCarthy has finally been

00:00:08.000 elected Speaker of the House of Representatives, but not before caving to pretty much all of the

00:00:14.600 conservative holdouts' demands, including, just to name a handful, a Southern Border Protection

00:00:20.760 Plan, a budget that stops an increase in the debt ceiling, an end to all COVID mandates and funding,

00:00:26.720 a select committee to investigate the weaponization of the FBI and other agencies, a term limit vote,

00:00:33.440 a minimum 72-hour reading period before bills are brought to a vote, permission for single-subject

00:00:39.200 bills, an increased voice for the Freedom Caucus conservatives on the most important committees,

00:00:43.640 and most consequentially, probably the biggest sticking point for both McCarthy and the holdouts,

00:00:48.940 a return to the former congressional norm of allowing any member to call a vote to boot the

00:00:55.140 Speaker from his spot. Despite all the rancor and all the turmoil and all the gnashing of teeth from

00:01:03.540 the establishment about those evil conservative holdouts, the outcome of this little fight has

00:01:09.780 been as good as anyone could ask for, especially at a time when Democrats control the White House

00:01:15.420 and the Senate. McCarthy gets his coveted title, and the hardline conservatives get pretty much

00:01:22.340 everything else. I'm Michael Knowles. It's The Michael Knowles Show.

00:01:32.900 Welcome back to the show. My favorite comment Friday is from Rachel Gunning, who says,

00:01:37.820 listened to this while going to the gym for the first time in two years. I love that. It's my favorite

00:01:43.380 comment because I really like that I am there, inspiring, experiencing with you as you make an effort

00:01:51.500 to improve yourself. I hope you work out for the two of us. I certainly have not been hitting the

00:01:56.880 gym in the new year. Maybe soon enough, though. I'm really, really inspired to hear that. It's good

00:02:01.380 stuff. That is how you're going to improve your personal life. It's how you're going to improve

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00:03:11.840 One of the big conservative holdouts on the McCarthy speakership was Chip Roy, who is one

00:03:17.420 of my absolute favorite members of Congress. Here is Chip Roy on CNN articulating what the

00:03:25.560 conservatives got. Well, first of all, let's remember that a little temporary conflict

00:03:31.040 is necessary in this town in order to stop this town from rolling over the American people. I don't

00:03:36.740 think anybody on either side of the aisle could say with a straight face that they think that

00:03:41.780 Washington is doing good work for the American people on a regular basis and isn't broken.

00:03:47.360 We have to work to fix this place. And look, some of the tensions you saw on display when you saw

00:03:53.040 some of the interactions there between Mike Rogers and Matt Gaetz, some of that is we need a little

00:03:59.140 of that. We need a little of this sort of breaking the glass in order to get us to the table in order

00:04:03.760 to fight for the American people and to change the way this place is dysfunctional.

00:04:07.820 So this all started going back last summer. We wanted rules to open this place up.

00:04:12.220 We wanted more transparency. We wanted more openness, more ability to add amendments to the

00:04:16.960 floor. So, for example, you ask, what else did we get? We got amendments to be able to, I'm sorry,

00:04:22.040 we got the ability to offer amendments on the floor of the House during appropriations

00:04:25.820 that will open it up again. We haven't done that. So since I've been in Congress, I've not been able

00:04:30.840 to offer an amendment on the floor.

00:04:31.960 Just one example, one really great point. He says, look, there was this congressional norm,

00:04:37.640 then it went away. The whole time I've been in Congress, we haven't been able to do this

00:04:41.160 really basic thing. It takes power away from the representatives, which means it takes power

00:04:45.580 away from the people. The whole point of the House of Representatives is to give the people

00:04:49.540 power. And so this was a real improvement. This is what I was saying from the beginning. I felt

00:04:55.160 the most absurd argument from the GOP establishment was, these conservatives, they don't even know

00:05:03.820 what they're asking for. That was the line that you heard from the establishment that was trying

00:05:10.080 to put McCarthy into power as quickly as possible and quash the conservatives. I said, well, they don't

00:05:15.260 even have demands. We don't even know what they want. Yes, we do. Chip Roy articulated just one point

00:05:20.840 that they wanted. I laid out from Representative Scott Perry a whole list of things in my introduction

00:05:25.960 that they not only wanted and asked for, but ended up getting. And then last week I had Lauren

00:05:30.960 Boebert on the show. And the reason I had my friend Lauren Boebert on the show is because I saw that she

00:05:36.100 and some of her other conservative holdout comrades were going on the TV shows, but then the hosts

00:05:41.860 wouldn't let them talk. So the conservatives would go on the TV shows and those would say, well,

00:05:46.900 what do you want? See there? They say, well, I think actually it would be nice. Yeah,

00:05:50.100 you don't know what you want. You can't articulate anything. You guys just need to go and vote for

00:05:54.200 McCarthy. Well, actually, if you just let me speak, I think, oh, come on, you people, what do you want?

00:05:57.480 What are you actually going to get? And so I said, okay, Lauren, come on the show. Tell us what's

00:06:02.160 going on here. What's the background? What do you want? And surprise, surprise, when you let the

00:06:07.340 conservatives speak, they're actually pretty articulate. They're actually pretty reasonable.

00:06:12.080 They actually do kind of have a plan. And the plan in this case largely worked. They did not stop

00:06:17.560 McCarthy from becoming speaker. One of the big reasons that they were not able to do that is that

00:06:21.760 nobody else wanted the job because it's kind of a terrible job. And it messes up people's political

00:06:27.360 career trajectories if they want to go in a different direction. So Jim Jordan, for instance,

00:06:31.560 was put up as a name. Jim Jordan said emphatically, I will not take this job.

00:06:36.140 Jim Jordan said what Paul Ryan probably should have said when they came to him on this issue.

00:06:40.720 The last time that this came up, 2015, John Boehner steps down. Kevin McCarthy was the heir

00:06:46.140 apparent. The conservatives didn't want McCarthy. He said, okay, we need a compromise candidate.

00:06:50.860 How about Paul Ryan? Paul Ryan accepted it. It destroyed his political career. Now he's in no

00:06:56.320 man's land. He's persona non grata. So Jim Jordan and some other names who were floated, they said,

00:07:01.200 no, I'm not taking that. I'm going to keep on doing exactly what I'm doing. I'm going to keep on

00:07:05.740 fighting on the Judiciary Committee or on this committee or on that committee. And so there was

00:07:10.500 not a great alternative to McCarthy who could get those kinds of votes. So the second best option

00:07:16.580 was they get all of the demands that they asked from McCarthy. And that is what happened. So where

00:07:22.620 do we go from here? Again, not to say I told you so. You know I hate to say I told you so. But

00:07:28.080 while the establishment was telling us that this was the end of the GOP. Oh, we're so embarrassed.

00:07:35.120 We're so humiliated. We're all infighting. We can't get anything done. This is the greatest

00:07:40.020 collapse. Why are we clutching defeat from the jaws of victory? I said, guys, it'll be okay.

00:07:46.600 They're big boys. This is a political fight in Congress. That's what they do in Congress.

00:07:52.340 And yes, the rhetoric gets a little bit heated. And yes, you hear the conservatives calling Kevin

00:07:57.820 McCarthy the biggest squish sellout rhino that you ever heard in the world. And from the team that

00:08:03.420 was pro-McCarthy, you heard some pretty heated rhetoric as well. In fact, my friend Dan Crenshaw

00:08:08.620 referred to the conservatives as terrorists last week. And now, now that the negotiation is over,

00:08:15.940 now that the fight is over, Dan also went on CNN, like Chip Roy did, and said, okay,

00:08:21.720 the terrorist thing, all right, maybe I went a little bit far.

00:08:24.640 You opened up with the whole terrorist comments. I do have to address that.

00:08:27.800 Please. But things get heated and things get said. Obviously, to the people who took offense

00:08:35.280 by that, it's pretty obvious that it's meant as a turn of phrase in the-

00:08:39.000 It's a metaphor.

00:08:40.000 It's in the context of intransient negotiations. Look, I've got pretty thick skin. I'm called

00:08:45.480 awful, vile things by kind of the very same wing of the party that I'm fighting. I was fighting

00:08:51.680 at that moment. So I was a little taken aback by, by the-

00:08:56.280 Sensitivity?

00:08:56.920 Yeah, by the sensitivity of it. But to the extent that I had colleagues that were, that

00:09:02.060 were offended by it, I sincerely apologize to them. I don't want them to think I actually

00:09:05.460 believe they're terrorists. It's clearly a turn of phrase that you use in what is an

00:09:09.600 intransient negotiation.

00:09:11.720 There you go. As far as politicians go, that was about the most direct apology you're ever

00:09:16.320 going to get. And good on Dan for apologizing.

00:09:18.640 I agree. I think that rhetoric was a little bit overheated. It happens. It's a political

00:09:23.700 fight. That's Washington, D.C. The sky is not going to fall in if the conservatives hold

00:09:30.800 out for a few days and get some more concessions out of the speaker. The sky, it's okay. These

00:09:37.640 are big boys. Dan Crenshaw said it right there. He said, look, I got thick skin. Obviously,

00:09:40.920 the guy's a Navy SEAL. All these other members of Congress, they've got thick skin. Kevin McCarthy,

00:09:46.440 he's got thick skin. It's okay. That's what we send them there to do. And the first test of a

00:09:50.800 speaker is, can you get the votes? Eventually he could. And the only way he was able to do it

00:09:56.040 was by going back on his previous bet. McCarthy's previous bet was he didn't need the conservatives

00:10:02.400 from the Freedom Caucus to win his speakership. Because of the way the election turned out in

00:10:07.100 November, he ended up needing those conservatives. And he paid a price for his bad bet. And that price

00:10:13.020 has been to the benefit of the conservatives and of the Republican Party and of the American people.

00:10:17.380 Good stuff. Now we can all kiss, make up, move along, gummy up the system for the Democrats,

00:10:23.860 put forward some conservative proposals, investigate the Dems, expose the corruption in the executive

00:10:30.260 agencies, which was a big conservative win in this whole negotiation. Absolutely great stuff.

00:10:37.920 We had another big win from the appeals court. A federal appeals court on Friday just struck down

00:10:44.780 the ban on bump stocks. Do you remember the bump stock ban? The bump stock ban actually occurred

00:10:51.840 under Trump. I love Donald Trump, best president of my lifetime, but he had a few big missteps. This

00:10:57.240 was one of the big missteps where President Trump basically asked the ATF to ban bump stocks. Didn't go

00:11:04.280 through a normal legislative channel. And what is a bump stock? A bump stock is this little addition

00:11:08.540 you put onto your gun that allows you to fire the gun somewhat more quickly. At the time, the ATF

00:11:14.760 argued that this turned semi-automatic weapons, one pull of the trigger, one bullet comes out,

00:11:19.080 into machine guns, pull the trigger once, and a spray of bullets come out. If you have ever shot a

00:11:25.520 bump stock, you know that's not actually how that works. In fact, you can replicate a bump stock

00:11:31.300 even without any additional technology on your gun. If you hold it in a certain way and you have your

00:11:35.580 finger in a certain way, you can replicate the motion, which is that you use the recoil of the

00:11:40.160 gun to fire the trigger multiple times. But it was always preposterous. And the appeals court,

00:11:45.220 not in a particularly close decision, this was 13 to 3, just struck down that ban. So this is a major

00:11:51.980 win for the Second Amendment. I hope a good sign as we move into the first time in a couple of years

00:11:58.240 where we've had any Republican control of the legislative or executive branches of the

00:12:05.640 government. This is something that gives me a little bit of peace. But when I want true peace,

00:12:10.680 I pray, a great way to pray, Halo. Right now, go to halo.com slash Knowles. If you are listening

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00:13:16.900 We got some good news from the courts on striking down the bump stock ban. We've got some bad news

00:13:22.580 from the courts. A grand jury has just declined to indict a man who attacked Ted Cruz. You might

00:13:33.060 remember this. You might not remember this. Ted Cruz was going through some kind of rally or parade,

00:13:41.140 and a guy threw, I believe, a white claw can at Cruz's face. So this was a 33-year-old guy,

00:13:49.600 Joseph Holm, Archie Diacono. That's too bad. I guess he's Italian. Very frustrating.

00:13:55.040 He was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, then was instead no billed,

00:13:59.960 according to court documents. The grand jury, quote, now asks the court to discharge and release

00:14:04.420 this defendant from custody, according to a filing from the district court of Harris County.

00:14:10.140 What does this mean? The only reason I mention this, I did not think they were going to throw this

00:14:13.880 guy in prison. I did not think they would go after him really at all. And now those of us who doubted

00:14:20.000 that stuff would happen have been proven right. Why? Because the government has been encouraging

00:14:26.440 the public to attack prominent conservatives for years. That's why. That's how we knew that this was

00:14:31.760 going to happen. Because Maxine Waters goes out and says, you get up on those Republicans. You push

00:14:36.200 back on them in public. You go to their homes. You say they're not wanted here. You get Chuck Schumer

00:14:40.940 outside the Supreme Court saying, we're coming for you, Kavanaugh. We're coming for you, Gorsuch.

00:14:45.000 Then you get a would-be assassin takes a bus from California and tries to murder Brett Kavanaugh and

00:14:50.020 possibly his family. This is what you see. You see mobs pushing up on Mitch McConnell in public. You see

00:14:55.980 mobs pushing up on Ted Cruz in public. Again and again on Mitch McConnell, on Elaine Chao, on all of

00:15:04.160 these prominent conservatives. And it's done with the encouragement of the Democrats. Hillary Clinton

00:15:10.760 at the time said, you can't be civil with people who want to destroy your political agenda.

00:15:15.760 Okay, you can't be civil, so I guess you've got to be uncivil. You have to be violent with them,

00:15:22.160 is what she was saying. This ties in, I think, with another story that we'll try to get to a

00:15:29.860 little bit later today. Ashley Babbitt. We just came up on the anniversary of Ashley Babbitt's death.

00:15:36.260 Ashley Babbitt was a Trump supporter who showed up to the Capitol on January 6th and, I guess,

00:15:43.340 was going into an area that she should not have been going into. And obviously, there was a lot

00:15:48.000 of unruly, riotous behavior that day. And a trigger-happy Capitol Hill cop shot her, shot her

00:15:54.580 dead. Ashley Babbitt was unarmed. There was no real threat from this young woman. The cop did not face

00:16:03.240 any consequences whatsoever, was not fired, was not charged. I don't even think he got a slap on

00:16:08.520 the wrist. Not a peep. People say, oh, it's a good, that's a wonderful thing. Someone throws a

00:16:16.240 beer can at Ted Cruz or a White Claw can at Ted Cruz. No big deal. It's nothing. Let the guy

00:16:21.180 completely off the hook. Does anybody really believe if any conservative physically assaulted

00:16:27.820 or killed a Democrat, that that would just be written off? Okay, no big deal.

00:16:34.540 No, of course not. Of course not. You would have nationwide protests. You would have George Floyd

00:16:40.200 2.0. Consider the case of George Floyd. A career criminal was committing a crime and resisting arrest

00:16:46.660 and had a lethal dose of drugs in his system and then died in the process of resisting arrest.

00:16:51.980 Eight months of protests, mostly peaceful, where they burned down cities across the country.

00:16:57.980 It's not to lament the unfairness here. It's just to point out we have two systems of justice in this

00:17:03.460 country. If you attack a Democrat, they are going to throw you in the can. They might kill you for

00:17:07.660 even threatening to maybe sort of get in a position to attack a Democrat. If you attack a Republican,

00:17:13.420 they'll giggle about it and they'll let you off the hook. Gun rights are very, very important.

00:17:18.280 There's a story out of Houston. An armed customer at a Houston Taqueria just killed a gun-wielding

00:17:28.420 robber. And we actually have the footage of it. So the would-be robber comes into the Taqueria

00:17:34.720 and he starts robbing people at gunpoint. So not just the owner of the Taqueria,

00:17:41.960 he's going around the tables, he's picking up money off the table,

00:17:45.700 brandishing this weapon everywhere, pointing it at all the people, reaching out, forcing them to

00:17:49.920 empty their wallets. And then you can see a guy, this older looking ball guy.

00:17:56.580 And he's just, he reaches into his pocket and the minute that the robber turns,

00:18:01.540 he pulls out his gun, perfect form, shoots the robber dead. Then this guy goes up to the robber,

00:18:07.780 takes the money out of his hand and returns the money to all the people that he had just robbed.

00:18:13.980 And then this guy takes his gun out, walks out of this restaurant looking like Clint Eastwood,

00:18:21.120 gets back in an old Clint Eastwood looking like Gran Torino kind of truck from, I don't know,

00:18:27.840 the 50s and drives out of there. So of course the authorities are looking for this man to question

00:18:34.360 him. They're actually, they haven't identified him. They want to bring him in for questioning.

00:18:38.360 Even though it was all caught on camera, this guy was completely justified in his shooting.

00:18:44.860 That's the way the system works these days. Because you can be let off the hook if you rob

00:18:51.600 people and if you threaten people with a gun and you threaten their lives. There we have to feel

00:18:55.660 great pity for you. You're probably just a result of a broken system. And oh, you know how society

00:19:02.220 failed this guy. But then if you defend yourself against the gun wielding threat, that is a far

00:19:08.680 greater problem. Put that aside for a second. Why do I even mention this story? I mention it

00:19:13.020 because it illustrates a very important rule in life. And that is the F around and find out rule.

00:19:20.540 This is a very, very important rule. People don't follow it as much as they should.

00:19:26.280 Because the saddest part of this story, according to the Houston police, is that the now dead suspect,

00:19:34.080 who was the one brandishing the gun everywhere, was actually brandishing a plastic pistol,

00:19:40.020 possibly an airsoft or maybe a little BB gun type pistol. That's according to KHOU.

00:19:47.920 Wasn't even a real gun. Little pellet gun. So what happened? The guy

00:19:54.380 busts into this restaurant to rob people. But he doesn't want to get arrested for carrying this

00:20:03.820 deadly weapon. Doesn't want to get arrested for threatening people with this deadly weapon.

00:20:10.940 Doesn't want to kill people. He clearly doesn't want to kill people. If this guy were really willing

00:20:17.720 to kill people, he would have brought a real gun. But he wasn't. He just wanted to scare people enough

00:20:24.000 that they would give him their money. And then he could get away and not actually have to do it.

00:20:29.260 But if you're that Clint Eastwood bald guy over there, and you're seeing this person waving a gun

00:20:34.960 that looks really, really real at your head, maybe he's saying, I'm going to kill you. He's at least

00:20:38.980 implicitly saying, I'm going to kill you. You have got to react to that. To defend your life and the

00:20:43.700 other people in the restaurant, you've got to react as if that's a real gun.

00:20:46.860 If you are going to threaten people, you need to be totally willing to make good on that threat.

00:20:56.920 If you are not, then you are putting yourself in greater danger. It's a lot of the way we talk in

00:21:04.060 this country. It's a lot of the way we behave. We behave as though we will face no consequences for

00:21:11.060 our actions. So we think there's no worry. We do this even on the right when we talk about

00:21:18.300 civil war. Well, we're in the midst of a civil war in this country. It's a cold civil war. It's

00:21:22.260 a cultural civil war. Are you really ready to be in a civil war? Whenever people ask me,

00:21:26.720 do you think, Michael, the conservative states should secede? Do you think we should get a little

00:21:32.140 more aggressive in our civil war that we're in this country? I think, look, maybe you're eager for war.

00:21:36.460 I'm not. I don't support conservative states seceding because no part of a country has ever

00:21:45.800 seceded from another part of the country in a totally peaceful way. So if you're game for that,

00:21:51.760 you say, okay, we're leading the secession. Okay, fine. Are you willing to shoot your cousins?

00:21:56.960 Are you willing to shoot your neighbors or the people you know in other states? I don't know. I'm not.

00:22:01.960 I'm not there yet. And I don't think that we ought to be wielding airsoft guns and BB guns

00:22:07.800 in these sort of situations. If you're going to, if you're going to F around, you're going to find

00:22:13.860 out, okay? So if you're going to take decisive, aggressive political action, you've got to be

00:22:18.380 100% serious about it, which is why I think we need wisdom. And when you want true wisdom and peace

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00:23:24.380 ascensionpress.com slash Knowles to download the reading plan for free. I mentioned a little bit

00:23:31.160 earlier about the anniversary of the death of Ashley Babbitt and how the comparison here really

00:23:37.820 shows you the two-tiered system of justice. Well, it goes right to the heart of the Ashley Babbitt story.

00:23:43.380 Ashley Babbitt's mother was just arrested. Ashley Babbitt's mother was in Washington, D.C. for the

00:23:50.020 anniversary of her daughter's death at the hands of a trigger-happy Capitol Hill cop and Ashley

00:23:55.360 Babbitt's mother wanted to lay down some flowers for her daughter and she was arrested. It was our

00:24:00.920 plan to go lay flowers on the steps of the Capitol for the four people, unarmed American citizens that

00:24:06.400 lost their lives that day. That would be my daughter, Ashley Babbitt, Roseanne Boylan, who was

00:24:11.220 beaten by a metropolitan police officer, Lila Morris, Kevin Greeson, and Benjamin Phillips all lost

00:24:16.780 their lives that day as unarmed American patriots. So we wanted to lay flowers on the steps of the

00:24:21.280 Capitol. They were letting people in. They had it all barricaded off. They were letting people in,

00:24:25.580 but they would not let us in with our signs and our flags. And so we opted to walk down the street

00:24:32.200 that was already closed off. So we laid flowers on the east side. I'm not sure which side, but then

00:24:38.280 when we went to go turn the corner, there was no sidewalk for us to walk on. There were other

00:24:42.920 citizens walking on that sidewalk. We were not allowed to because we had American flags at the

00:24:48.600 United States Capitol. So we walked down the road because we had no sidewalk to walk on. And our

00:24:55.500 option was to cross four lanes of traffic and walk on the other side, where I also would not have been

00:24:59.720 able to honor my daughter by laying a rose for her around the Capitol building. And so we walked down

00:25:05.380 the road and I was arrested aggressively by one, that man right there. Yeah, the one right there,

00:25:10.940 the tall, bald man. What was this woman arrested for? Jaywalking? Basically for jaywalking. I think

00:25:19.860 the actual charge was that she was arrested for blocking and obstructing roadways because she

00:25:27.280 walked into some areas where they had some impediments set up and she wasn't supposed to be

00:25:31.540 walking there. Blocking and obstructing roadways. Black Lives Matter shut down

00:25:40.860 highways in LA, Seattle, Massachusetts, Washington DC, all over the country. I was in multiple places

00:25:50.820 during the BLM madness as the BLM movement shut down those freeways and highways for hours in some

00:26:00.680 cases, totally blocking traffic. Nobody did anything about it. And this woman grieving the killing of her

00:26:07.840 daughter. She says that the cops, they knew this was a bad, bad group of people. Why? Because they

00:26:24.920 were waving American flags. Had the group been waving pride flags, BLM flags, any of those other anarchist

00:26:34.020 flags, Che Guevara flags. You know the cops would not have done a damn thing to obstruct them.

00:26:41.340 Because those people, they would have been left wingers. They would have been on the same side as

00:26:46.800 our current regime. But because Ashley Babbitt's mother and the protesters were waving an American

00:26:52.800 flag, the cops saw that they said, oh, this is a threat. Can you imagine how far has our country

00:26:58.640 fallen? That these cops, they see an American flag, they say, that's a symbol of a threat.

00:27:04.740 We've got to go arrest this woman. She shouldn't be laying down a rose for her daughter at the

00:27:10.480 Capitol. Our regime affords greater protection to people who burn the American flag than it does to

00:27:19.800 people who wave the American flag. That's not hyperbole. We all know that that is the case.

00:27:26.160 If you burn the American flag, well, you're probably just an aggrieved victim of this

00:27:32.240 terrible, awful society, this traditional American country that we're doing our best to get rid of as

00:27:37.700 quickly as possible. But if you wave the American flag, why, you're probably one of those far-right

00:27:43.880 extremists. We live under a regime today. When I say regime, it's unusual language because we usually

00:27:52.160 only refer to political systems in other places as regimes. We never refer to our own country as a

00:27:59.560 regime. It's only those other places where they have governments that we don't like. That's always

00:28:04.420 the regime. But a regime just means a political order. And so our political order obviously has

00:28:10.860 transformed pretty significantly over the last 50, 60 years, certainly over the last 200 years.

00:28:16.360 We are not living in the political order of the founding fathers and the framers.

00:28:23.100 Our system of government does not work like the bill up on Capitol Hill and Schoolhouse Rock,

00:28:27.840 right? We live in a very different one. And we live in one today where the Department of Justice

00:28:34.180 refers to parents who don't want their kids to have their genitals chopped off and have their kids be

00:28:39.280 told that they're evil because they're white, refers to those parents as domestic terrorists.

00:28:43.220 That's the system that we're living in. We're living under a regime where we are told

00:28:47.900 that people who burn down courthouses, or people who murder dozens of people over the course of

00:28:54.480 months, or people who threaten to assassinate top conservative public officials, they're all

00:29:00.240 referred to as mostly peaceful protesters. But the guy in the horn hat and the smiley Florida guy who

00:29:05.940 took a picture posing with Nancy Pelosi's lectern, those are insurrectionist terrorists,

00:29:10.340 the greatest threat to our country. That's the regime we're living in, okay? And I'm not whining

00:29:15.040 about it. I'm not screaming and crying. I'm just telling you that's how it is. And so when these

00:29:21.180 court decisions come down, and if you throw a can at Ted Cruz's head, basically the liberal

00:29:28.180 establishment just laughs it off. Where a mother grieving the loss of her daughter wants to lay a

00:29:35.240 rose at the Capitol and the cops arrest her for it. No, you're one of the bad ones. You're one of those

00:29:39.480 conservative ones. We're going to throw you in the squad car. Why? I don't know. We don't like the

00:29:43.580 cut of your jib. You looked at us funny. You get in the car. Just don't be surprised. That's the way

00:29:48.460 that it is. And it ties right back to the top of what we're talking about. When a handful of

00:29:53.420 conservatives, those intransigent conservatives, say, hey, we need a little bit more change in

00:30:01.160 Washington, D.C., than just getting another tax cut bill through. When a group of conservatives say,

00:30:08.200 we need structural, serious change to the way power is wielded in this country, and the way that we

00:30:15.100 view good and bad and true and false, and the things that we exalt and the things that we discourage.

00:30:19.500 We need to kind of change that because it's gotten a little bit askew. I don't think that those

00:30:23.840 conservatives are the bad guys. I think they are doing the most that they can do and the very bare

00:30:30.920 minimum of what needs to be done. And I don't think that anyone should attack them for it because it

00:30:36.600 took us three more days to get Kevin McCarthy into the speaker suite, which he already moved into in

00:30:42.180 the first place, by the way. He already moved in there before he even won the vote, okay?

00:30:46.060 Speaking of January 6th and the attack on conservatives, this is a perfect example of this,

00:30:50.200 actually. The January 6th committee, I'm sorry, I didn't pronounce that correctly.

00:30:54.740 The January 6th, the worst day in the history of the world, on the January 6th committee has now

00:31:02.860 been disbanded. They were created by Nancy Pelosi as a purely left-wing partisan attack dog group.

00:31:12.960 They had two fake Republicans on the committee, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both out of the

00:31:18.720 Congress right now. And they existed to get Trump and to get the conservatives and to prove that the

00:31:25.960 right-wingers are insurrectionists and to throw everybody in prison. And it didn't work. It didn't

00:31:30.140 work. They had nothing. It was a complete joke. They accomplished zero. And so on their way out,

00:31:35.180 do you know what they did? They leaked the social security numbers of top Trump officials.

00:31:42.400 They did. I was going to say they doxed the top Trump officials. It's much worse than that.

00:31:46.920 To leak someone's social security number is worse than leaking some of their personal contact

00:31:52.180 information. When you leak someone's social security number, you are inviting identity thieves

00:31:58.140 to go in, steal their identities, destroy possibly their credit, destroy their entire digital,

00:32:07.760 financial, possibly professional life. The January 6th committee did this to hundreds of Americans,

00:32:14.620 including at least three members of Trump's cabinet. We're not just talking about kind of

00:32:21.100 anonymous low-level staffers. We're talking about Ben Carson here. They leaked Ben Carson's

00:32:26.060 social security number. Why did they do that? Was there a legal purpose that was fulfilled in

00:32:33.140 leaking their social security numbers? No. Was there an investigative purpose that was fulfilled

00:32:37.260 in leaking their social security numbers? No. The January 6th committee leaked the top conservative

00:32:43.960 social security numbers to punish them as vengeance for these conservatives having had the audacity

00:32:53.100 to challenge the dominant liberal regime. This was the wielding by Democrats using the executive

00:33:02.060 agencies, wielding the government to try to destroy the people that they view as their enemies.

00:33:08.960 That's all that is. An official attack by Congress on their political enemies.

00:33:16.160 But we're told Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz and Chip Roy and Scott Perry, they're the problem.

00:33:22.700 They're the ones who are upsetting the norms of our Congress. Oh, they're the ones. If only we

00:33:28.380 didn't have those incivil, absolutely barbaric, immature conservatives there. Last I checked,

00:33:38.840 Lauren Boebert and Chip Roy haven't leaked their political enemies' social security numbers. Okay?

00:33:44.440 It's just so absurd. Anything that the libs and the squishes want to accuse the conservatives of doing

00:33:52.520 to upset the standards and norms of our country. The Democrats have done, to a degree, orders of

00:33:58.360 magnitude more egregious. Of course, we're talking about standards and norms. The entire project of

00:34:04.620 the left over the last 60 years has been to upset, pervert, frankly, invert the standards and norms

00:34:09.820 of our country. That is why we now call good evil and evil good. And we call false truth and falsehood

00:34:16.520 truth and truth falsehood. That's the attack that they have made. And so how are we going to fight

00:34:22.400 back? There is some good news coming out of Kentucky. You know, if there's one thing to be

00:34:27.020 learned from the release of the Twitter files, it's that the establishment media cannot be trusted.

00:34:31.620 You know it. We know it. Now millions more people are waking up to it. So no surprise that Morning

00:34:36.360 Wire, the Daily Wire's fastest growing news podcast, is continuing to climb the charts with new episodes

00:34:41.060 seven days a week. Join editor-in-chief John Bickley with co-host Georgia Howe as they cut through

00:34:46.380 the corporate agenda and manufactured outrage to bring you the facts first on all the news you

00:34:51.580 need to know. Wake up with Morning Wire on Daily Wire Plus, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you

00:34:57.020 listen to podcasts. Speaking of fighting back against the enemy, great story out of Kentucky.

00:35:06.140 Kentucky State Treasurer Allison Ball has published a list of financial institutions

00:35:10.900 currently boycotting energy companies for the ESG agenda, for environmentalism, or because

00:35:17.980 St. Greta of the Blessed Sailboat yelled at them. And so they're doing that now. They're saying no more

00:35:22.600 oil, no more gas. And the Kentucky State Treasurer has required that agencies in the Commonwealth

00:35:29.100 divest from those firms. So he's saying, here's a list of the ESG people who are wielding the

00:35:36.380 trillions of dollars in assets that they manage to force the companies that they invest in to push

00:35:43.360 a woke agenda. Well, Kentucky's not going to be a part of that. We've seen this happen elsewhere.

00:35:49.140 We saw this happen in Texas. We saw this happen in Missouri. We saw this happen in Louisiana.

00:35:54.460 We saw this happen in Florida. Idaho has a bill on this coming up. Other states are going to follow

00:35:59.160 suit because it's a perfect issue for conservatives. And the only objection to it is going, on the

00:36:07.280 right at least, is going to come from the squishes and a certain breed of self-styled libertarians

00:36:13.280 who say, well, this is terrible. This is the state bullying a private company, that poor little

00:36:19.020 private company, BlackRock. That little mom and pop shop, Vanguard and State Street, the largest asset

00:36:25.860 managers in the world managing trillions of dollars in assets. All these guys, they're being bullied

00:36:31.220 by that mean old Alison Ball in Kentucky, or by mean old Ron DeSantis, or by mean old Greg Abbott,

00:36:37.080 or their treasurers, or the conservatives elsewhere. This undermines the American Republic

00:36:43.740 because we have a thriving free market here. Why is it not an interference in the free market

00:36:52.780 when a handful of woke asset managers push their fringe radical agenda on every company in the

00:37:02.060 country against the will of the American people? But it is an infringement on the free market when

00:37:07.700 a duly elected public official does the same thing. Or when a duly elected public official does

00:37:14.540 something far more modest, which is to say, okay, if you're going to do that, we're not going to invest

00:37:18.160 our money with you, BlackRock. Why is that? I like free markets. I do. Free markets are a wonderful

00:37:26.920 thing in their proper place as a means to the end of a good and flourishing society. That's what it's

00:37:33.460 for. We're not having the tail wag the dog here, folks. We're not putting the cart before the horse,

00:37:36.780 all right? The political community does not exist to serve the market. The market exists for the good

00:37:43.200 of the political community. And even if you're the biggest, staunchest defender of free markets in

00:37:49.220 the world, how is this a free market when three asset managers get to redefine the entire,

00:37:55.080 essentially the entire national culture by pushing their crazy views on every company in the country?

00:38:01.520 That doesn't seem very free to me. And if it were, then I wouldn't care for it, okay? Because I think

00:38:06.500 that self-government means that we get to say no to this kind of stuff, okay? This is not an

00:38:12.320 undermining of the American Republic when we tell the woke investment people to knock it off.

00:38:18.080 That is an expression of self-government. That is justice, okay? Now, speaking of justice,

00:38:24.500 there is a group of people that has come under attack recently. I'm not talking about the white

00:38:30.500 men. I'm not talking about the straight people or the Christians or the, obviously, the straight

00:38:36.100 white Christian men. That is the most maligned group in all of society. But other people are maligned

00:38:40.460 sometimes as well, one of which groups was Nepo Babies. There's been some chatter recently and

00:38:47.220 lots of think pieces about the Nepo Babies, these children who are the sons and daughters of Hollywood

00:38:55.180 celebrities who then magically get careers themselves. And Tom Hanks has just come out to defend the Nepo

00:39:03.820 Babies. Look, this is the family business. This is what we've been doing forever. It's what all

00:39:10.440 of our kids grew up in. We have four kids. They're all very creative. They're all involved in some

00:39:16.120 brand of storytelling. And if we were a plumbing supply business or if we ran, you know, the florist

00:39:24.100 shop down the street, the whole family would be putting in time at some point, even if it was just,

00:39:28.660 you know, inventory at the end of the year. The thing that doesn't change no matter what happens,

00:39:33.580 no matter who, what your last name is, is whether it works or not. I mean, that goes, that's the issue

00:39:38.820 anytime any of us go off and try to tell a fresh story or create something that has a beginning

00:39:45.620 and a middle of an end. Doesn't matter what our last names are. I know Tom Hanks is a huge lib. I

00:39:51.680 know that he's best friends with Barack Obama. I know that no one has any sympathy for the Nepo Babies

00:39:58.600 or for really anybody else in Hollywood, but I got to say, I got to call it like I see it.

00:40:03.900 I think Tom Hanks is right. I think actually the principle that Tom Hanks is articulating here

00:40:10.740 is not only right, it's right wing. Those two frequently overlap. It's actually a deeply

00:40:18.720 conservative principle. He's saying, yeah, of course the children of Hollywood stars have a leg up in

00:40:25.380 show business. It's a family business. And it's not just Hollywood that operates this way. It's

00:40:33.380 every business. If I were a plumber, my kid would probably know a little bit more about plumbing

00:40:39.600 than the average kid who grew up in Hollywood, let's say. If I were a plumber, my kid would probably

00:40:45.680 have more opportunities to break into the plumbing trade than someone who is the son of a banker or

00:40:53.180 someone who's the son of a school teacher. Of course, we pass on wisdom and practical knowledge

00:41:02.060 to our children. And we help our families out too. There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing

00:41:08.380 wrong with showing some degree of preferential treatment for your family and for your local

00:41:15.840 community. That is perfectly natural. That's perfectly right. That's perfectly just. Conservatives

00:41:20.740 used to know that. I think we still basically get that. We are not just all random individuals born

00:41:30.120 into the ether with no particular ties to our own parents over anybody else's parents or to our own

00:41:36.620 country over anybody else's country. We're not just atomized citizens of the world. We're born into

00:41:43.140 particular places, into particular traditions. And it's totally fine to pass on your trade to your

00:41:48.700 kids. And Tom Hanks says, he says, you know, listen, my kids have done all right and they're

00:41:52.920 telling stories to some degree. But if you don't put out a good product, you're not going to last very

00:41:56.740 long. That's true in any business. How many family businesses get destroyed? It's one generation,

00:42:02.720 two generations, three generations down the line. The kids are screw ups and they can't run the business.

00:42:07.820 Happens all the time. But merely passing on a tradition to your family, that's a great thing.

00:42:12.980 It's a great thing. I hate to defend Tom Hanks, but I have to do it. Now, on the topic of people

00:42:18.640 that I don't have to defend, and on the topic of nepotism, and on the topic of would-be Hollywood

00:42:23.280 stars, Prince Harry. Prince Harry and his new tell-all memoir book by the man who just wants to

00:42:31.440 be left alone, the man who only wants privacy. And that's why he's writing books and doing Netflix

00:42:36.820 movies and going on TV to any channel that will have him. Prince Harry has just admitted

00:42:43.240 that he has done a lot of drugs. Shocking, I know. He's done a lot of drugs. And the worst part of that

00:42:51.260 is he says that those drugs have helped him see the truth. And Prince Harry's life and all the poor

00:42:58.620 decisions he's making, it's all starting to make sense to me. Harry says that while cocaine made him

00:43:05.860 feel different, it did not make him notably happier. But mushrooms did. When he took magic

00:43:12.120 mushrooms in California while drinking a lot of tequila, that had a profound impact. And here's

00:43:17.500 this amazing experience he had. He says he saw a bathroom trash can that looked like it was staring

00:43:23.740 back at him and growing a head. And then the toilet turned into a head and began talking to him.

00:43:30.180 And he says this was the experience of a lifetime, man, you know? Because like when you really want to

00:43:35.740 understand the truth, you know, it's not that you should pray to God for clarity and meditate on

00:43:42.680 the eternal things. And it's not that you should read a lot of books, say, by wise writers. No,

00:43:48.080 it's that you should eat poisonous mushrooms and stare into the toilet. That's going to teach you

00:43:52.120 the truth, man, because it's going to like grow a head or whatever. And then apparently two years

00:43:56.040 after this experience, what happened? Harry married Meghan Markle. Okay, starting to make sense now.

00:44:02.120 Harry said he was able to see another world. And it left him with the impression that this other

00:44:08.180 world is just as real and twice as beautiful as the one that we're all living in, which is not all

00:44:13.400 there is. And Harry said when he saw this world, only the truth existed. So first of all, Prince Harry

00:44:20.060 admitting to doing all these drugs, especially in the United States, could screw up his visa application.

00:44:24.920 This actually could be a good excuse for the United States to boot him out because it means he

00:44:28.680 almost certainly lied on his immigration papers. And if he did not lie and he told the truth and

00:44:33.520 he was using these illicit drugs, that also would be a reason to boot him out. But beyond that

00:44:38.880 hopeful thought for a second, just to the point that Harry is making, I've seen it happen before.

00:44:46.920 I have friends who have done this, who have taken mushrooms or acid, more often acid or one of these

00:44:52.000 even more intense kind of psychedelic drugs. Shrooms too, though. And they'll say, you know, man,

00:44:57.300 I just saw and it gave me peace because I saw all the other beings and they showed me. And I'm not

00:45:04.120 joking. I've had friends tell me. And I realized, man, there's no devil. There's no hell. There's no

00:45:08.200 sin. He said, what? Yeah, man, I just realized like we're all one, you know, we're all one. And I saw

00:45:16.080 these little kind of beings popping out. And I said, you saw like, you're saying you saw incorporeal

00:45:21.340 spiritual beings that told you there's no sense of sin and you don't need to fear hell.

00:45:29.800 I think you were talking to a demon. I'm pretty sure. No, man. I, well, then what was it? Were

00:45:35.680 you just imagining it? No, man, it was totally real. Okay. So you're saying it wasn't just some

00:45:39.640 figment of your imagination. You were talking to a real, not physical. This is a purely spiritual

00:45:47.120 being that is telling you, don't worry about going to hell and don't worry about committing

00:45:51.860 sins. That's a demon. That's what demons are. That's how demons behave, man. And the proof of

00:45:57.780 the pudding is in the tasting. The proof of the Yorkshire pudding is in the tasting here for Prince

00:46:03.540 Harry. Because it does not seem that his life has improved when he has done these things. Even

00:46:10.020 searching for deeper meaning, you are not going to find deeper meaning by eating poisonous mushrooms.

00:46:15.320 I remember my friends would ask me, I'd say, Michael, don't you want to open up your mind,

00:46:19.040 man, and see, experience the truth? And I thought, well, I try to do that. Like for instance,

00:46:23.680 when I go sit outside at night and read a book, like when I read a really wise, deep, profound book,

00:46:30.080 that also changes the pathways in my brain. That also allows me to see things that I previously

00:46:36.280 couldn't see before. But it does so without poisoning the most important organ in my body.

00:46:41.480 And it does so without opening me up to an experience that you describe as being a perfect

00:46:50.060 description of talking to demons. It just allows me to kind of sit out and think and get smarter and

00:46:56.980 growing wisdom. If only Harry had done that, he would be in a much better spot. If only our culture

00:47:01.000 valued that sort of thing, instead of poisoning ourselves, we would probably be in a better spot

00:47:05.500 too. You know, it is Music Monday. The rest of the show continues now. You do not want to miss it.

00:47:11.760 Become a member and use code Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S at checkout for two months free

00:47:15.300 on all of the annual plans. We will see you at the member block.

00:47:26.980 Thank you.

00:47:46.500 You

Ep. 1157 - The Squishes Cave To The Demands Of The Based

Summary

Transcript