Ron DeSantis has officially entered the 2024 Republican presidential race. Will he be able to take on Donald Trump? And will he be the funniest presidential candidate of them all? All that and more on this week s episode of The Michael Knowles Show.
00:05:41.060And there's a play on words because he's going to accuse DeSantis of robbing the nomination or trying to rob the nomination from Trump or robbing his mannerisms or personality or something like that.
00:05:50.880So DeSantis' announcement came off pretty much as expected.
00:05:54.980Trump's reaction certainly came off as expected.
00:07:22.760I think it's completely unknowable what it will look like in January of 2025.
00:07:28.200But I would not want to see the United States with our troops get enmeshed in a war in Russia or in Ukraine.
00:07:36.120It's a hard question on a hard topic that most voters don't generally base their presidential decisions on.
00:07:45.460Most voters are basing their decisions on domestic policy.
00:07:49.040And so Governor DeSantis here is trying to pivot the question from this thorny issue of Ukraine, which splits the GOP, onto this issue of wokeness in the military.
00:07:59.940But wokeness in the military obviously has nothing to do with the policy of the president vis-a-vis Russia and Ukraine and this war that's now been expanding for over a year.
00:08:09.460A war that's really been expanding for more like eight or nine years at this point.
00:08:14.760I think DeSantis has to get a clearer answer on this.
00:08:20.440This issue, if the war continues on the trajectory that it's on, this could come to play a large role in the presidential campaign.
00:08:29.340And so he's going to need, I think, clearer views here.
00:08:32.640Trump, whether you love him or you hate him, has relatively clear views on these things.
00:08:38.180And they upset a lot of settled GOP orthodoxy.
00:08:41.040DeSantis has done a very, very good job in the state of Florida.
00:08:43.900But as any governor who's ever run for president knows deep down, these individual states don't have a foreign policy.
00:08:51.280So I think he's got to come up with an answer there.
00:08:53.740And while he says, I don't want a wider war, I want to come to a settlement, that's good.
00:13:52.000The White House is always involved in these things.
00:13:54.940He just doesn't want to comment on this because it's indefensible.
00:13:58.380And yet he knows that his side is on the side of the anti-Christian drag queens.
00:14:04.160And so he doesn't want to put himself in a bad position where he's going to have to overtly and publicly disavow his faith in order to side with them.
00:14:11.500But he also doesn't want to defend the faith because he knows where his bread is buttered, at least in this world.
00:14:54.880Is it I want to back the candidate that can see the assault on religion that is going on right now, the sacrilege that is going on right now, that will not merely chip away at popular piety, but will fundamentally undermine all of the most important aspects of our society.
00:15:20.880Because religion is not just some fun little hobby that people have in society or they don't.
00:15:27.640Religion is what animates the whole society.
00:15:30.480And so if you live in a culture that publicly mocks religion, then you're not going to have a very flourishing society.
00:15:39.740So which candidate am I going to go for?
00:15:41.980I'd like the candidate who can credibly propose to stop that all-out assault.
00:15:48.740What a ridiculous line from the White House.
00:15:50.300Oh, it's just some little sports team thing.
00:16:17.260And you're going to keep your mouth shut because the politics is going in your direction and you don't want to upset that.
00:16:22.760I want a Republican presidential candidate who's willing to upset that.
00:16:26.860Some Republicans are doing this sort of thing.
00:16:28.520In Montana, they just banned drag queen story hour.
00:16:31.240One of the biggest fights on the right among movement conservatives and conservative intellectuals and the activist class, not necessarily the rank and file card carrying Republican voter, but the people who are setting the agenda for what the party believes.
00:16:47.420One of the biggest fights six, seven years ago was over drag queen story hour.
00:16:51.980And you had the liberal Republicans like David French, who's now just become a liberal.
00:16:55.660Now he's a columnist for the New York Times.
00:16:57.780David French said drag queen story hour is a blessing of liberty.
00:17:00.600Our constitution gives us that beautiful right to jiggle around in stilettos for kids in the library or whatever.
00:17:06.960And then you had the conservative conservatives who came out and said, no, there's no right to drag queen story hour.
00:17:12.520If James Madison ever thought this were in the constitution, he'd be rolling over in his grave.
00:19:10.060This Republican state senator, Fred Mills, just joined Democrats in a five to four vote.
00:19:18.180So it's the decisive vote on the Health and Welfare Committee to block the advancement of a bill that would have banned using cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and surgery to alter a minor's appearance in an attempt to validate a minor's perception of his sex if the minor's perception is inconsistent with his sex.
00:19:33.620With Republicans like Fred Mills, who needs Democrats, I know that Fred Mills' office, his phone number is available online on the Louisiana state government website.
00:19:43.820I would strongly encourage concerned Louisianans and Senator Mills' constituents to call his office and express your view in, of course, a polite and just way that it is unacceptable to defend transing the kids.
00:20:05.540The answer to that question would probably be a Democrat or a liberal.
00:20:09.080But in this case, Fred Mills is a Republican.
00:20:11.720And with Republicans like this, truly, there is no need for Democrats.
00:20:15.320This Republican primary is going to be a clarifying experience.
00:20:18.940That's why I'm generally pro-primary, is because it forces candidates to take clearer positions on these sorts of issues.
00:20:27.120And some issues we can be a little conciliatory on.
00:20:31.520Some issues have to be very, very clear.
00:20:33.860Any Republican that defends transing the kids is a far-left, radical, liberal, and should be given no quarter.
00:20:46.940Should not receive a single Republican vote ever.
00:20:49.580Should not receive a single penny from any conservative.
00:20:52.240And his government office should receive lots of phone calls from concerned constituents.
00:20:57.420Now, if you're maybe in this extremely confused state senator's district, you're probably going to want to move out of town.
00:21:05.700You know, you're probably going to want to go to a district with decent political leadership.
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00:21:23.780Before you walk into a dealership and spend the whole day with the crowds and the stress and the potential that you won't even find the right car,
00:22:36.720The consequences of this disunity date all the way back to the time of Moses.
00:22:41.760Just listen to what Jordan Peterson has to say about it in Exodus.
00:22:45.160There's an irony here that for all the insistence upon equality, the very foundation for that equality in Western culture, the idea that human beings are made in the imago dei, in the image of God, has been lost, of course.
00:23:04.880So it's almost as if because of the erosion of this foundation, the drive for equality is stressed all the more.
00:23:15.140That's exactly what Nietzsche claimed would happen when he wrote, particularly in Beyond Good and Evil.
00:23:22.440He said that would be an inevitable consequence.
00:23:25.940Jordan is joined by a roundtable of big thinkers from different backgrounds who explore one of the most important books in the Bible.
00:23:51.400And so any Republican who goes squishy not only has zero backbone and maybe is missing some other anatomical features as far as I'm concerned, but also just has no idea what time it is, does not have any clear perception of where politics is in this country.
00:24:10.740Target, look at Target, the Target CEO had recently come out to defend the Pride Month displays, which include bathing suits meant for tucking, women's bathing suits meant for men so that they could tuck the features that are male so they could look more like women, even though there are bathing suits already that are fine for men to tuck.
00:28:42.880And this fight, this beautifying federal civic architecture act, if signed into law, would mandate that, quote,
00:28:51.780classical architecture and the historic humanistic architecture, including Gothic, Romanesque, Pueblo revival, Spanish colonial, and other Mediterranean styles of architecture historically rooted in various regions of America, be preferred for new federal office design.
00:29:04.020So this is a better law, even than the Trump executive order, in that it's more specific on which kinds of architectural styles are appropriate for different parts of the country and the different geographies in which they're situated.
00:29:20.020And the other reason that this is really important is that this kind of a law is going to highlight a major split on the right.
00:29:27.080And it's not only going to highlight that split on the right because you've got some of the Republicans who are just the business Republicans, just the money Republicans.
00:29:34.320They're the Republicans who, they're sophisters, economists, and calculators, to quote Edmund Burke.
00:29:38.900They're the ones who don't really pay attention to the deeper things in life.
00:29:44.000And then you've got the cultural conservatives, the social conservatives, the traditional conservatives, who realize that life is about more than money.
00:29:51.580But it even gets down to the question of what kind of architecture do we want.
00:29:54.820This gets to a fundamental split on the right because it's the plot of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.
00:29:59.760The plot of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand is that the bad guys want there to be classical, beautiful architecture in the city.
00:30:07.460And the ostensible hero of the story, Howard Rourke, wants ugly modernist architecture.
00:30:14.580And oddly enough, some conservatives, at least in the 1980s, really liked Ayn Rand.
00:30:19.680They were very pro-Ayn Rand, even though Ayn Rand is a modernist, materialist, atheist writer.
00:30:26.160Because she didn't like the communists, the right embraced her to some degree.
00:30:34.620For the past 30 years, there's been schizophrenia on the right at Republican fundraisers, which is the first part of the speech would say, we need to preserve traditional values.
00:30:43.460We need to preserve the historic American nation.
00:31:20.660Are we going to do so with caution, slowing down a little bit, evolution, not revolution?
00:31:26.320Or are we going to adopt the perspective that is essentially the perspective of the liberals and say, ah, yeah, that old stuff, that's dumb.
00:31:45.460And we should totally defend beauty because there are eternal principles of beauty.
00:31:50.660Ayn Rand's argument in The Fountainhead is that circumstances are the chief determinants of what is beautiful.
00:32:00.900So gothic architecture or classical architecture, that won't look good in the modern age because today we're more adept at working with steel and metal.
00:32:12.200And because we're in modernity, we've just got to build big, boring, ugly skyscrapers or something like that.
00:32:18.000So it's a very progressive idea of beauty.
00:32:23.280But the conservative, the traditional idea of beauty is, no, some things are just beautiful.
00:32:28.120Some things are just beautiful and some things aren't.
00:32:30.060And try as you might, you can try for years and years and years to make mutilation and minimalism and degradation.
00:32:41.560You can try to make that beautiful, but it never will be beautiful.
00:32:44.260Because beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder, but it's an objective reality that we can perceive and that we can reason about and we can deduce things about and we can know.
00:35:39.600The insistence that everybody has to go to the exact same kind of college and education has led to a dramatic decline in the standards within those colleges,
00:35:47.020such that even the students who are a little more inclined to go to college can't get the college education that they previously could.
00:36:29.980We're not just fleeing from something.
00:36:32.020We have a long march to build new institutions.
00:36:34.140There are conservative colleges that have been built up, thinking of places like Hillsdale, thinking of places like Ave Maria, Franciscan Liberty.
00:36:42.980Thinking of these, Thomas Aquinas College, these institutions that, some of which are relatively new, at least in their present iterations.
00:36:52.960And they say, hey, maybe you want to go to Harvard or Yale or Princeton, but those places aren't what they used to be.
00:37:08.260My friend Spencer Clavin has pointed out, he says, he thinks that we will get to a point in society where wise people will recognize a Hillsdale education as being more impressive than a Harvard education.
00:37:19.780And every year since he made that prediction, it seems to be more and more true.
00:40:04.560Even in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, what people are doing to children now, what people are stating about objective reality and human nature, they weren't going that far.
00:41:20.420This was Rosie O'Donnell's daughter was saying, I don't know if I feel like a girl or a boy.
00:41:25.200And Rosie making this point saying, you can be a girl and still like the boy stuff.
00:41:32.220Of course, had Rosie O'Donnell been a child today, depending on her parents and her community, they almost certainly would have tried to trance her.
00:41:41.360I'm a girl who has a sexual desire for other girls.
00:41:45.200I'm a girl who likes to ride motorcycles.
00:41:47.260I'm a girl who likes to watch football.
00:41:48.280But I'm a girl because you can't change that.
00:41:52.180And even the people who think that you can change that, that if you're a girl but you like football, you're a boy and you need to chop your body up, they know that they're not identical with boys.
00:42:01.660Even the really pro-trans people, they know that there's a difference.
00:42:04.460They know that there are, in some ways, at least, they're like the sex that they appear to be and are.
00:42:13.160So Rosie is just giving a different perspective here.
00:42:16.800And Rosie is more right than most people on this issue.
00:42:21.160It's not even quite so simple as Rosie is making it, though.
00:42:24.940There's some people who are saying, being a girl is purely about biology.
00:43:32.580And one answer that I like to give is that a woman is sugar, spice, and everything nice.
00:43:36.420I think that's much more precise than any of the other answers that people give.
00:43:42.560Being a girl is about a lot of different things.
00:43:47.360And where Rosie goes a little bit wrong, actually, is she says, you can like whatever you want and do whatever you want and still be a girl.