The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 1318 - Trump's Best Campaign Ad Yet

00:00:00.000 I mentioned last week that liberals were reinstating mask mandates in Hollywood and

00:00:04.820 on campus. I suggested this was a test run two and a half years after the COVID lockdowns,

00:00:11.380 coordinated right on time to justify more BS ahead of the 2024 election.

00:00:17.740 And I'm sorry to say, Joe Biden is already proving me right with his latest announcement,

00:00:24.140 pushing for a new round of vaccines. Speaking with the Associated Press, Joe Biden said,

00:00:29.380 quote, I signed off this. I don't do a good Biden impression.

00:00:33.240 He said, quote, I signed off this morning on a proposal we have to present to the Congress

00:00:41.220 a request for additional funding for a new vaccine that is necessary, that works.

00:00:48.880 A new vaccine is necessary not to stop infection or transmission of COVID,

00:00:53.880 which it has never successfully done, but to set the stage to rig the election again,

00:00:59.800 the same way the liberals did in 2020. Unless there be any confusion, Joe Biden added, quote,

00:01:06.500 it will likely be recommended that everybody get the vaccine, no matter whether they've

00:01:12.320 gotten it before or not. It might seem surprising that Biden would push the exact same old talking

00:01:19.340 points years after they were all thoroughly debunked, including by some of his own experts

00:01:25.740 and officials. But it should not surprise anyone, because the scheme worked perfectly last time.

00:01:32.700 The Libs got their lockdowns. They got the power they wanted. They changed all the election laws,

00:01:38.520 and no one managed to stop them. With a record of success like that,

00:01:42.420 why would the Democrats even consider changing their strategy now? I'm Michael Knowles. This is The

00:01:48.820 Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show. We've got President Trump's statement on the

00:02:12.200 most lucrative mugshot in the history of photography or criminal justice. We'll get to that in a second.

00:02:17.760 First, though, amid the historic crackdown on conservatives, the liberal Republicans are trying

00:02:25.160 to shift the focus back to what really matters. And that, of course, is funding the war in Ukraine.

00:02:33.060 Senator Romney, take it away.

00:02:34.600 The single most important thing we can do to strengthen ourselves relative to China

00:02:39.920 is to see Russia defeated in Ukraine, because their allies and Russia being weakened weakens their ally China.

00:02:50.740 I mean, so, and by the way, being able to take an amount which equals, what, about 5% of our military budget?

00:02:58.920 Actually, less than 5% of our military budget each year to help the Ukrainians is about the best

00:03:04.740 national defense spending I think we've ever done. We're losing no lives in Ukraine. And the Ukrainians

00:03:11.660 are fighting heroically against Russia that has 1,500 nuclear weapons aimed at us. It's like,

00:03:17.980 so we are, we're diminishing and devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money

00:03:26.040 relative to what we spend in the Russian defense. A weakened Russia is a good thing. It tells,

00:03:31.040 it tells China to rethink their territorial ambition. It tells Russia, perhaps most importantly,

00:03:38.900 that the Putin vision of reestablishing the Russian empire and grabbing the old former Soviet

00:03:47.920 republics, that that's not something that's going to work.

00:03:50.360 This is the best argument for funding the war in Ukraine, I think, that the liberals can make.

00:03:58.380 And it's an argument that sounds somewhat convincing even, until you ask yourself,

00:04:05.720 how is Russia going to be defeated in Ukraine? The whole argument rests on this premise that Russia

00:04:14.760 can be defeated in Ukraine. How does Russia get defeated in Ukraine? Does anybody seriously believe?

00:04:20.360 that the Ukraine military, valiant though it may be, is going to repel the Russians and totally

00:04:26.360 vanquish them from the country? No, nobody seriously believes that. So what has been going on for the

00:04:34.280 last year, year and a half, is what a lot of people predicted, which is just a lot of bloodshed,

00:04:40.860 a lot of death, but without really moving the calculus of the war. But there is no evidence that

00:04:46.840 Russia is going to be repelled from the eastern part of Ukraine, from Crimea, anything like that.

00:04:52.320 The way to defeat Russia in Ukraine would be to drastically escalate the war. The United States

00:04:58.340 is already, practically speaking, a belligerent in the war, and Russia has said as much.

00:05:02.520 We are the only reason, our funding, our arms, our equipment, it's the only reason that Ukraine is

00:05:07.920 able to put up anything like a fight right now. So the only way to totally defeat Russia in Ukraine

00:05:13.320 would be to severely escalate that war, which would be to launch World War III. That would be a direct

00:05:20.140 conflict, something we avoided for the entirety of the Cold War. It would launch a direct conflict

00:05:23.420 between the United States and a nuclear former superpower in Russia. Do you really think that

00:05:27.920 would make America safer? No. But these geniuses in Washington, the liberal establishment,

00:05:37.320 German egghead wonk people, they don't seem to get that. The war in Ukraine, to me,

00:05:42.480 is a perfect example of the IQ bell curve meme, where you've got the drooling idiot at the bottom.

00:05:48.820 He says, duh, why we spend the money in Ukraine? Ukraine doesn't matter. Right, and he's drooling

00:05:53.860 on himself. And then you get to that really smart guy, the Mitt Romney there in the middle.

00:05:58.060 He says, well, actually, this is the best way to pursue America's interests. This is the most

00:06:01.120 important thing we could possibly be doing, because if you figure it out, it's only 5% of defense,

00:06:04.560 and then you get up to the genius Jedi voodoo magic guy up at the top, and he says, actually,

00:06:10.880 the war in Ukraine is extremely dumb, and we should wrap it up. And he agrees with the guy

00:06:16.380 who's drooling, as is so often the case. One could easily convince oneself that continuing to fund this

00:06:27.340 endless war in Ukraine would help America's interest in that more Russians die. And it's kind of a dark

00:06:33.420 argument, but I at least see how Romney gets to that argument. But where does it end? These people,

00:06:39.280 these guys running the liberal status quo, they never have any clear articulation of what happens

00:06:45.120 at the end of all this. What happens at the end of mass migration? What happens at the end of the

00:06:49.880 sexual revolution? What happens at the end of this foreign policy of constant war? What's the point of it

00:06:55.920 all? The point of it all is the diminishment of our civilization, or just no end at all.

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00:08:13.000 K-N-A-W-L-E-S, to 989898. Speaking of liberal Republicans, a prominent liberal Republican who

00:08:21.720 happens to be running for president in 2024 is insistent that the Joe Biden, Hunter Biden

00:08:28.680 corruption investigation is not going to make one little bit of a difference come November.

00:08:34.340 Well, look, Hunter Biden's not on the ballot. And you know that I predicted weeks before the

00:08:41.380 Hunter Biden plea was rejected that it would be rejected because it was a completely one-sided plea

00:08:47.620 deal in favor of Hunter Biden. Now he's going to face the same type of trial that Donald Trump's

00:08:55.400 going to face. And here's the interesting part. You know, some of those voters who say that say the

00:09:00.280 Hunter Biden thing matters, but Donald Trump's doesn't. That's just wishful thinking. The fact

00:09:06.400 is that the two people who would be on the ballot if we nominated Donald Trump will be Donald Trump

00:09:11.460 and Joe Biden, not Hunter Biden. And the fact is, it's the conduct of the people who are running for

00:09:18.200 office that's going to matter the most. We might find out more about President Biden in the months to

00:09:23.000 come. There it is. You see, he hints at the complete undercutting of his argument right there

00:09:29.040 at the end, because what he says is, look, this is this match is going to be about Trump and Biden.

00:09:34.680 If Trump is the nominee, it's going to be Trump versus Biden. And no one's going to care about

00:09:38.600 Hunter Biden because Hunter Biden is not on the ballot. Sure. But the probe into Hunter Biden is

00:09:45.340 also not about Hunter Biden. That's why we're not really all that concerned about his sex crimes.

00:09:50.940 That's why we're really not all that concerned about his drug crimes.

00:09:54.840 They're good tabloid material, but that's not really what Republicans are focused on.

00:09:59.320 We're focused on the political corruption. We're focused on the payments from Ukraine.

00:10:04.300 We're focused on the payments from China. We're focused on the payments from other

00:10:07.660 powers around the world that we're paying Hunter Biden because Hunter was selling his father's

00:10:12.300 influence as the vice president. We're interested in that Hunter Biden corruption because it implicates Joe.

00:10:20.940 We don't even need to guess at this. We've got we've got the whole hard drive full of text

00:10:25.640 messages and emails connecting Joe to these crimes. We've got a handwritten letter from Joe Biden to

00:10:31.780 Hunter Biden's business partner, Devin Archer, a handwritten letter that proves that Joe Biden

00:10:37.540 invited Devin Archer to a meeting with Xi Jinping, the president of China, or it may have been the

00:10:45.720 previous president of China at the time, because this this goes back now like a decade.

00:10:50.200 The we've got evidence after evidence after evidence. And now we've got Victor Shokin,

00:10:55.920 who is the prosecutor that Joe Biden forced the Ukrainians to fire.

00:11:01.100 Victor Shokin coming out and saying Joe Biden was being bribed by Ukraine.

00:11:06.140 I have no doubt that there were illegal activities engaged in by Burisma. As a matter of fact,

00:11:12.460 the criminal case had been started before me. It continued to expand. And Zlochevsky,

00:11:18.460 who at the time held the post of minister and was the founder and CEO of Burisma, started bringing

00:11:25.660 in people who could provide protection for him. Hunter Biden was among them. And the corruption

00:11:31.560 network expanded as a result. So yes, to answer your question, there's no doubt in my mind that Burisma

00:11:39.260 was engaged in illegal activities. Had I continued to oversee the Burisma investigation, we would have

00:11:47.520 found the facts about the corrupt activities that they were engaging in that included both Hunter Biden

00:11:56.400 and Devin Archer and others. I do not want to deal in unproven facts. But my firm personal conviction

00:12:04.620 is that, yes, this was the case. They were being bribed. The fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion

00:12:12.260 in U.S. money in exchange for my dismissal, my firing, isn't that alone a case of corruption?

00:12:21.540 Obviously, it is. And the clip that he's referring to there, Victor Shokin, is when Joe Biden publicly,

00:12:29.420 semi-publicly, because it was at a private event of the Council on Foreign Relations,

00:12:33.300 but there was a little camera in the back, and that's how this clip has gone viral.

00:12:36.900 Joe Biden bragged about paying the Ukrainians a billion dollars to fire the guy who was investigating

00:12:43.480 the company that was bribing him and his son, at least his son. And according to the text messages

00:12:48.520 and emails that we've seen, would seem to suggest some of that money, a lot of that money, was going

00:12:53.720 to Joe. I remember going over convincing our team, our brothers too, convincing us that we should be

00:13:01.080 providing for loan guarantees. And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kyiv, and I was

00:13:09.280 supposed to announce that there was another billion dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment

00:13:15.460 from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against a state prosecutor,

00:13:22.040 and they didn't. So they said they had, they were walking out to the press conference, said,

00:13:25.600 no, I said, I'm not going to, we're not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have

00:13:30.780 no authority. You're not the president. The president said, I said, call him. I said, I'm telling you,

00:13:36.000 you're not getting a billion dollars. I said, you're not getting a billion. I'm going to be leaving

00:13:39.820 here, and I think it was, what, six hours. I looked, I said, I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor's not

00:13:44.600 fired, you're not getting the money. Oh, son of a bitch. Got fired. And they put in place someone

00:13:51.420 who was solid. Someone who was solidly going to stop looking into the company that was paying my

00:13:58.720 family a ton of money in bribes. What more proof do we need? We talk a lot about political corruption

00:14:08.560 because, one, we like to attack our political opponents, but two, we just live in a particularly

00:14:13.260 corrupt time. And so we take these accusations with a grain of salt. In the case of Joe Biden,

00:14:20.320 there is no more proof that we could possibly have. Unless we saw a public Venmo payment from

00:14:27.900 Ukraine to Joe Biden that said, for all of the corruption, there is no more proof that we could

00:14:34.580 possibly have. We've got Hunter Biden talking about how the big guy gets 10%. We had Hunter Biden

00:14:40.640 texting his family saying that, unlike his father, he's never going to make them give to him half his

00:14:46.580 salary, half of their salary. We've got the financial documents showing all of these payments

00:14:52.580 from foreign powers to the shell company set up by Hunter Biden and Devin Archer. We've got the

00:14:57.360 letters connecting Joe Biden to Devin Archer and obviously to Hunter Biden. We now know, thanks to the

00:15:02.480 House Republicans that Joe Biden was conducting business while vice president under a pseudonym

00:15:07.940 Robert Ware and Robert L. I forget the line, Peters, Robert L. Peters, several pseudonyms that he was

00:15:19.160 conducting, not just little pleasantry kind of business, but was setting up phone calls with the

00:15:23.600 president of Ukraine. Just obvious rank corruption. And yet no one's going to touch this guy.

00:15:29.080 Meanwhile, Donald Trump, what, as president called the secretary of state of Georgia to inquire about

00:15:35.780 the obvious voter fraud that had gone on. And they throw him in the can for that. And they take a

00:15:40.520 mugshot, first mugshot of a US president in American history. It's, we are so obviously beyond the point

00:15:49.300 of law and order of a serious justice system that, look, in a way I have a grudging kind of admiration

00:15:59.040 for the game that Joe Biden is playing. That guy is just a hustler through and through, a total

00:16:04.620 gangster, okay? He's not even really trying to hide it all that hard. The people that drive me

00:16:10.720 the craziest right now, though, are the squishes. The ones who are trying to deal within these issues

00:16:17.740 as though they were serious matters for abstract legal reasoning. Well, you know, listen, I'm opposed

00:16:24.960 to arresting the leader of the opposition. I'm not saying it's a good thing that we're arresting

00:16:28.980 former presidents, but did Donald Trump on, when he was on the phone, did he call between three

00:16:35.480 o'clock and four o'clock or did he call between five o'clock and six o'clock? Did, what was the exact

00:16:39.520 nature of the statement that, give me a break, man. They would throw this guy in prison for jaywalking.

00:16:45.880 They would throw this guy in prison for not jaywalking. He could walk across the crosswalk

00:16:51.880 with the walk light on, and they would change the video footage and say that it was a stop sign,

00:16:58.980 okay? We are so, meanwhile, Joe Biden is sending his son around to shake down every foreign leader

00:17:04.740 on planet Earth and say, my dad's going to give you American influence. And everybody looks the other

00:17:09.620 way, and they get crooked plea deals, and they get diversion programs, and they get nothing,

00:17:14.860 nary even a slap on the wrist. I'm not saying this to point out the hypocrisy. Normal people,

00:17:21.840 people with two brain cells to rub together, see the hypocrisy. I'm really mentioning this

00:17:27.380 just to shake the squishes out of their stupor. We are not living in a time of ordinary law and order,

00:17:34.260 and people should recognize that when it comes to the persecutions of conservatives, up to and

00:17:38.720 including Donald Trump, but including hundreds and hundreds, at least, more conservatives than that.

00:17:43.440 So, speaking of the mugshot, Trump raises $7 million since this mugshot comes out.

00:17:50.660 Within the first 24 hours, the campaign raised $4.18 million, which is similar to the amount of

00:17:58.100 money he raised after his first indictment. And since that time, he's raised $7.1 million.

00:18:04.560 This is why the election is very likely just about Trump. Okay? From the beginning, I think some

00:18:14.640 people have accused me of being too soft on Trump or too harsh on the other candidates. I don't think

00:18:18.580 I've done that. Not one day goes by where I don't praise Ron DeSantis in some way, or Vivek Ramaswamy in

00:18:25.280 some way, or even some of the other candidates who are polling in the single digits. But it has been

00:18:28.960 my contention from day one, that regardless of any of the virtues of the other candidates,

00:18:34.900 history and politics have come together to make this election very likely about Donald Trump.

00:18:43.200 Whether you got the best candidate in Ron DeSantis, or Vivek Ramaswamy, or Chris freaking Christy,

00:18:48.180 whatever, it just, the type of election this is, where you've got practically an incumbent running

00:18:54.240 for a non-consecutive second term for the first time in 140 years. We just, we haven't seen that

00:18:59.460 before. It's to say, or we haven't seen that in obviously over 130 years now. To say nothing of

00:19:05.160 the fact that Trump is a celebrity for 40 years, to say nothing for the fact that the Libs seem to

00:19:08.900 particularly hate this guy, and they seem to be willing to upend our entire legal system to stop

00:19:13.340 him, not to stop Chris Christy, not to stop Mike Pence, not to stop Ron DeSantis. Maybe if any of those

00:19:19.800 guys were given a term, maybe there's a chance the Libs would be willing to upend our political

00:19:23.700 order to stop them. But that is just not what's going on right now, which is why it seems to me

00:19:30.380 very likely that no matter how good a campaign any of these guys run, Trump is going to maintain his

00:19:34.760 massive lead. And Trump has basically said as much after the mugshot, which we'll get to in one second,

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00:22:00.760 After the arrest, setting the stage to raise $7 million, this is the fourth indictment. Here's

00:22:09.380 Trump's statement.

00:22:10.400 I really believe this is a very sad day for America. This should never happen.

00:22:14.760 If you challenge an election, you should be able to challenge an election. I thought the election

00:22:18.920 was a rigged election, a stolen election, and I should have every right to do that. As you know,

00:22:24.260 you have many people that you've been watching over the years do the same thing, whether it's Hillary

00:22:28.280 Clinton or Stacey Abrams or many others. When you have that great freedom to challenge,

00:22:35.240 you have to be able to. Otherwise, you're going to have very dishonest elections. What

00:22:38.380 has taken place here is a travesty of justice. We did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong.

00:22:43.740 And everybody knows that I've never had such support. And that goes with the other ones,

00:22:48.320 too. What they're doing is election interference. They're trying to interfere with an election.

00:22:52.760 There's never been anything like it in our country before. This is their way of campaigning.

00:22:59.040 And this is one instance, but you have three other instances. It's election interference.

00:23:04.020 So I want to thank you for being here. We did nothing wrong at all. And we have every right,

00:23:09.400 every single right to challenge an election that we think is dishonest, that we think it's very

00:23:15.020 dishonest.

00:23:15.580 This is another part of my calculation as to why I think it's very likely that that guy is going to

00:23:22.040 be the nominee. He is unflappable. Maybe you hate Trump. Maybe you think he's a big jerk. Maybe you

00:23:30.120 think that he's just not the best candidate in 2024. Put that aside for a second. Say that you were

00:23:36.620 indicted four times. Federal charges, state charges. Let's say that you faced something like 750 years

00:23:46.180 in prison, which even with the Trumps that tend to be a little long-lived, that's death in prison.

00:23:53.540 You're facing all of this. This is all a very real possibility. You've got the entire weight

00:23:57.780 of the American and frankly global liberal establishment coming down on you. And you saunter

00:24:04.080 out of the jail and you give a statement like that. I don't know what it is that Trump has or

00:24:12.920 what he's missing that allows him to do that. But it is a reminder that external circumstances

00:24:19.700 are not going to change this guy. They're not going to get him off message. You might hate his

00:24:23.720 message, but they're not going to get him off message. They're not going to change his personality.

00:24:26.980 He would have given that same statement on a sunny day in July seven years ago.

00:24:33.280 And it's not going to change the facts of the election. You might say we shouldn't focus on

00:24:37.320 2020. You might say we need to look forward, not backward. Maybe all of that's true.

00:24:42.280 But the fact is the liberals rigged the last election. Even if you think that the way they

00:24:48.200 rigged it wouldn't have changed the final outcome that Joe Biden would have won anyway,

00:24:51.560 it is simply a fact they changed the way the elections were conducted to such a degree that

00:24:57.320 you had tens of millions more votes to such a degree that you had widespread mail-in ballots

00:25:02.340 in contravention of the state constitution in the case of Pennsylvania. Took a week or more to count

00:25:07.640 the ballots. Completely absurd. And so the election will be about election integrity. In a way,

00:25:15.640 it's an election about elections. It's a meta-political moment. And you might say,

00:25:20.200 well, this is terrible and it's going to hurt Republicans' chances. Maybe it will.

00:25:23.200 I'm not saying that it won't. I'm just saying that is the state of play right now.

00:25:28.240 And if they could at least off-foot the guy, if they could make him cry a little,

00:25:32.620 if they could make him stumble, if they could make him change his message,

00:25:35.460 then maybe you say, okay, it's a lively contest. But if nothing is changing and the guy's 40 points

00:25:41.260 up in the polls, how is any other candidate going to knock him down? I'm not saying it can't happen.

00:25:46.840 I'm just saying it seems very unlikely. So are the other candidates viable? There's some good news

00:25:51.420 for supporters of the other candidates coming out this week, which is 538, the liberal election

00:25:58.620 polling outlet, says that Ron DeSantis won the GOP presidential debate. They say that he slightly

00:26:06.960 edged out Vivek Ramaswamy. New York Post says the opposite, says Vivek won the debate and that he

00:26:12.000 slightly edged out Ron DeSantis. But both of those outlets agree that DeSantis and Vivek were the two

00:26:18.000 clear winners of the debate that Trump did not show up to. Now, 538 goes further. This is other

00:26:24.280 good news, at least apparently, for the DeSantis campaign. They say that more voters are now

00:26:28.840 considering voting for DeSantis than for any other candidate, including Trump. Now, you might hear

00:26:34.880 that statement and say, well, hold on, that doesn't make any sense because Donald Trump is still 40 points

00:26:38.880 up in the polls. How is DeSantis beating Trump in terms of openness to vote for him? Well, because

00:26:44.680 the question is different. It's not who are you going to vote for? It's not who is your favorite

00:26:49.060 candidate. It's who would you be willing to vote for? So more people are open to the idea of voting

00:26:54.940 for DeSantis than of any other candidate, including Trump. Meaning there are going to be some people

00:27:00.360 who really like Nikki Haley, but they're open to voting for DeSantis. There's some people who really

00:27:05.240 like Vivek. Maybe they're open to DeSantis. There's some people who really like Trump. They're open to

00:27:09.400 DeSantis. Whereas for Trump, there are more people who are just saying, nah, I will not under any

00:27:18.940 circumstances vote for that guy. So that's nice that people are open to DeSantis. But as I've said

00:27:24.380 from the beginning, the kind of campaign that DeSantis is running in these circumstances is a great

00:27:29.140 campaign to get you to number two. It's a great campaign to get you to the first loser, but he is not

00:27:34.780 running the kind of campaign that can, at the present moment, can overtake the front runner.

00:27:42.420 You would have to run a much bolder campaign to do that. And even then, the historical circumstances

00:27:47.440 might be such that it's not possible. Even if people are open to voting for you, doesn't help

00:27:53.240 those poll numbers. According to RealClearPoliticsNow, and this is largely, not all of the polls in the

00:28:01.160 average here, but most of them are factoring in the debate. Trump is at 53. DeSantis is at 13.

00:28:12.200 Vivek is at 7.5. Haley's at 5. And Pence at 4.7. And Christie at 2.8. And just down on from there.

00:28:20.120 Doug Burgum still holding on at 0.6%. So it doesn't seem to have moved that all that much. And then

00:28:26.580 moving away from the polls for a second, maybe you say, well, the polls don't tell you anything.

00:28:29.740 Look at the betting odds. So this is where people are actually putting their money down on who they

00:28:33.540 think the likely nominee is. Right now, the top three people are Trump, Vivek, and DeSantis.

00:28:40.740 And importantly here for Trump, Vivek, and DeSantis, Trump's numbers are increasing.

00:28:47.140 DeSantis' and Vivek's are slightly decreasing. In January, it's worth pointing out in the betting

00:28:52.060 markets, DeSantis was way up over Trump. The money people thought that it was much more likely that

00:28:58.260 DeSantis would be the nominee than that Trump would be the nominee. It has steadily reversed

00:29:02.320 ever since then. So my question to the campaigns is, what could change? You could say maybe a

00:29:07.860 consolidation of the candidates. If all the other candidates got out, then maybe the fact that a

00:29:13.540 lot of people are open to voting for DeSantis, maybe that would help him to get the edge over

00:29:18.180 Trump. But even then, I bet a lot of the people who are open to DeSantis are still people who would

00:29:22.820 take Trump as number one. So the question, what could change now? We talk about how the Republican

00:29:29.660 Party is so divided. Oddly enough, it's not that divided right now. The people who don't like the

00:29:36.200 frontrunner might say, well, it's very divided and I don't feel that I have a home in the Republican

00:29:39.140 Party. But the party has coalesced largely around a candidate. And it's the one that everybody has a

00:29:47.100 strong opinion on, whether they love him or hate him. Speaking of division, switching gears somewhat,

00:29:51.020 this is a story I wanted to get to last week. I do want to get to it now. Halle Berry. Halle Berry

00:29:56.760 has gotten divorced. I don't really care about the personal lives of celebrities. I guess marriage

00:30:04.820 and divorce are public matters. So that's not just your private life. Marriage is a public thing.

00:30:10.480 But what makes the story kind of interesting is that this divorce has been going on for something

00:30:15.480 like eight years. Halle Berry has agreed to her child support payments, to her ex-husband. They

00:30:22.680 finalized their divorce. Eight years after this custody battle began, started in 2015. And here's

00:30:29.300 what Halle Berry said in 2015. It is with a heavy heart that we have come to the decision to divorce.

00:30:34.680 We move forward with love and respect for one another and the shared focus of what is best for our son.

00:30:39.760 That is a nonsensical statement. We are deciding to divorce now because we are totally focused on

00:30:51.980 what is best for our child. That's not possible. It's not possible. Maybe in the most extreme rare

00:31:00.520 circumstance where you've got an abusive husband or something like that threatening the wife and the

00:31:07.520 children. I see the argument for a kind of a separation there. That's not what's going on

00:31:12.120 here. That's not what's going on in the vast majority of cases of divorce. What people say

00:31:16.260 in most cases of divorce is, well, look, it's not about any threats to the children or to me. It's

00:31:22.260 just that we need to be happier. That's exactly what Halle Berry said. She said, I just feel fulfilled.

00:31:28.340 I feel happy in my life romantically as a mother, as an artist. I'm a much better mother in this

00:31:33.840 circumstance than I would have been had I stayed in the romantic relationship that didn't serve me

00:31:38.840 and didn't make me feel the way I need to feel as a woman. I'm reminded that we always have to take

00:31:44.480 care of ourselves first because I can't be a good mother for my children if I'm not fundamentally

00:31:50.260 happy and feeling good about myself. This woman is completely wrong. It is amazing to have a statement

00:31:58.420 with this many sentences where every single one of them is just completely and totally wrong.

00:32:05.860 Me, me, me. That's all that matters. I'm a much better mother in the circumstance where you're not

00:32:10.240 putting your children first. No, that makes you a worse mother. I'm not knocking you entirely. I know

00:32:15.720 it's a tough world. I know people do get divorced. I know we deal with all the problems of evil

00:32:23.040 pervading this fallen place that there are, but it's not better. To say it's better, that's just a

00:32:31.200 lie. We need to take care of ourselves first. No, when you're a parent, your responsibility is to

00:32:37.740 take care of your children first. You have to think about other people sometimes more than yourself.

00:32:43.060 I know in our modern culture, it's very difficult to think about, and in Hollywood, it's virtually

00:32:47.840 impossible to think about. I can't be a good mother for my children if I'm not fundamentally happy.

00:32:52.460 Yes, you can. You know how you can? By just doing the stuff you're supposed to do and shutting up

00:32:56.600 about your feelings. That's how we can all do it. I'm not just knocking Halle Berry here. This is true

00:33:02.560 for everybody. You can be a good husband and a good wife and a good father and a good mother and a good

00:33:08.460 employee and a good member of your community, even if you're not totally perky all day long. You know

00:33:13.600 how you do it? You shut up about your feelings and you think about anybody for even one second

00:33:18.700 other than yourself. And if we all did that, just like 5% more than we do, our nation, our local

00:33:26.960 communities, all the way up to our national community would be so much better. We would solve so many of

00:33:32.740 our problems just to that easy.

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00:34:03.820 exclusions do apply.

00:34:05.920 My favorite comment on Friday comes from Polygon Crazy, who says, surprise, they haven't started

00:34:12.480 arresting people that showed up to support President Trump. I'm expecting to see that

00:34:16.040 any day now. You don't need to wait to see it. That's been happening now for years.

00:34:20.500 That's what the January 6th people are about. The January 6th people overwhelmingly were

00:34:27.460 nice Midwestern people, I guess from all parts of the country, who showed up, walked around the

00:34:33.000 Capitol Rotunda, and got thrown in solitary confinement for it. Midwestern grannies, eccentrics

00:34:38.600 who show up and crack a Coors on the Capitol grounds, and then they wind up in the clink.

00:34:44.760 And you might say, well, well, just like those, these wonk people, these squishy liberal people

00:34:50.800 who say, well, you know, let's just, let's analyze the charges against Donald Trump.

00:34:56.660 This isn't just a complete joke, show trial, banana republic persecution. No, let's, let's examine,

00:35:02.120 well, what exactly did you say in the phone call? Give me a break. Give me a break. BLM gets to burn

00:35:07.360 the country down for eight months, and then some Midwestern granny gets thrown in the clink

00:35:10.260 for showing up to the nation's Capitol in the house that's supposed to be the representation for

00:35:14.840 the people. It's a joke. But even beyond the January 6th people, sorry, January 6th people,

00:35:20.900 think about Douglas Mackey. Douglas Mackey is this guy who had a social media account,

00:35:24.480 Ricky Vaughn, on Twitter. It didn't even have that many followers. It had like 58,000 followers,

00:35:29.220 and he sent out memes, memes about the election. Little memes and jokes that we all, that everybody's

00:35:34.340 joked about forever. You know, well, if you're a Republican, vote Tuesday. If you're a Democrat,

00:35:37.980 vote Wednesday, that kind of a thing. And then just really spicy, edgy memes that were meant to

00:35:43.060 provoke people to say he's racist, sexist, phobic, this, this, that. Okay, you might not like his

00:35:48.780 memes or something. You might not have followed him on Twitter. The guy's facing 10 years in prison

00:35:52.860 for memes because he opposed the ruling class and because he supported Donald Trump. So you don't

00:35:58.940 need to wait for them to round up ordinary Trump supporters. It's happening already, and they're

00:36:03.060 facing years and years in prison. Now, speaking of places where people live, be it prison or

00:36:12.580 the homes that are increasingly broken in our country. New homes are shrinking in size. I teased

00:36:19.420 this story on Friday. This was my little tease. It's not the sexiest story. It's not the most

00:36:25.820 scintillating, sensationalist tabloid story, but it tells you something really deep about our country.

00:36:31.660 You know, this is from Wall Street Journal. Goodbye, bathtub and living room. America's homes are shrinking.

00:36:36.920 Faced with high mortgage rates, constrained Americans are embracing smaller homes.

00:36:43.600 For many Americans, home ownership may be attainable only if they give up the dining room.

00:36:47.700 Home prices are near record highs, frustrating millions of potential buyers, to say nothing of

00:36:51.840 the fact that interest rates are now through the roof. Since 2018, the average unit size for new

00:36:57.240 housing starts has decreased 10% nationally to 2,420 square feet. Now, I read that number, and I

00:37:04.660 thought, man, that's a mansion. 2,400 square feet. The house I grew up in, I grew up in an apartment

00:37:09.060 for a lot of my upbringing, but then I grew up in a house that was, I think, 800 square feet. I don't

00:37:14.300 know. I thought 2,400 is pretty good, except you got to remember, I grew up in New York. If you grow up in

00:37:20.460 the middle of the country where real estate is cheaper, okay, 2,400, that's not as big as it used to be.

00:37:24.480 And then in other places, you look at Seattle, newly built homes are 18% smaller than they were

00:37:32.300 five years ago. Charlotte, North Carolina, and San Antonio, 14% smaller than they were four years ago.

00:37:39.920 This stuff is shrinking really, really fast. Why? In part, it's shrinkflation. It's the reason that

00:37:47.340 when you go to the grocery store, you get less coffee in the tin of coffee than you did a few years

00:37:52.660 ago. You get fewer donuts in the bag of donuts. It's because when inflation is rampant, as it has been

00:37:58.420 under Joe Biden, companies know that they can't just jack the price up 50%, or you'll be so shocked

00:38:05.340 by that. So they'll jack the price up 20%, but then they'll shrink the package. So the cost per unit

00:38:09.800 goes up a lot. That's part of the reason. But it's also because our families are shrinking.

00:38:15.820 People have many fewer children now than they did 50 years ago. It's also because our whole

00:38:21.860 population is shrinking. We have a dying population in the United States, as we have for 50 years.

00:38:28.200 And that trend has accelerated at various times in those 50 years.

00:38:32.260 Our whole civilization is shrinking. It's smaller than it used to be. Our view of art. You walk into

00:38:43.000 a cathedral in Europe, or even in America, you walk into St. Pat's Cathedral in New York. This is

00:38:48.000 big. This is grand. This is huge. This is beautiful. You look at modern architecture, it's small.

00:38:55.300 You look at more traditional architecture, it's ornamented. There's a lot to it. There are a lot

00:38:59.500 of details to take in. Modern architecture, you look at the new homes that people are building,

00:39:03.100 you know, there's hideous, like, black and white, sometimes cube, now occasionally more angular

00:39:09.400 monstrosities. They look like prisons. They look like the kind of place you get sent if you send

00:39:14.280 memes out on Twitter supporting Donald Trump, you know? They don't, they're just small and ugly.

00:39:20.340 You see this in the novel The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, her slightly lesser-read novel to Atlas Shrugged,

00:39:27.660 and slightly smaller but equally bad. The Fountainhead is a novel about Ayn Rand's philosophy

00:39:34.580 of objectivism, which is an atheist materialist ideology. But it's also about architecture.

00:39:41.260 And what's so funny about the book is Ayn Rand is wrong about 97% of things. She actually gets to

00:39:47.360 some interesting truths about human nature about 3% of the time, but it's just totally covered up in a

00:39:55.600 bunch of muck and false anthropology and theology. But the most striking thing about the novel,

00:40:01.980 which is about architecture, is that she's wrong about architecture. The protagonist of the novel

00:40:07.080 makes a church. She's supposed to make a cathedral, basically. And it's this small, tiny, ugly, crappy,

00:40:14.040 modern place. The vision that the protagonist of the story pursues so doggedly without getting any

00:40:22.280 advice from anybody, including the people who are paying for his plans. His artistic vision is ugly.

00:40:26.660 It's just modernist, unhuman, small stuff. It's ugly. And so it's no surprise that everything's

00:40:36.200 shrinking. And we joke about how the libs want to make us all eat bugs and live in pods. This is how

00:40:40.700 they do it. The way they make you live in a pod is not by putting a gun to your head and saying,

00:40:45.180 get in the pod now, surf. The way they make you live in a pod is they shrink your expectations.

00:40:51.580 They shrink your vision of the world. Of course, they make it, they shrink your hopes and your

00:40:58.160 dreams and your imagination such that you are content living in a way that is not fitting of a

00:41:05.460 dignified human being. Speaking of reduction, there's another headline where the libs inadvertently

00:41:10.960 tell us how they view humanity. Here's the headline. Put pest animal species on the pill.

00:41:19.440 Don't call them, says scientist. Humane alternatives to killing rampant creatures such as wild boar,

00:41:27.580 deer, and gray squirrels are being developed. So, you know, these wild boar are huge pests in a lot of

00:41:32.440 the country, especially in like Texas. So sometimes people, they'll just go out and say, hey, man,

00:41:36.820 hunt as many of these damn things as you want. We just want to kill them. There'll be people who'll go up

00:41:40.320 in helicopters and just shoot these things from the sky, okay? So what this scientist says is, no, no,

00:41:45.180 no. Don't go out there and kill them. That's kind of nasty and feels unethical. What you should do is

00:41:52.860 just sterilize them. And then I thought, okay, so these masters of the universe who want to control

00:42:02.260 the population that they consider to be pests, the way that they do that, the way that they think is the

00:42:06.740 cleverest without arousing the ire of environmentalists and humanitarians and all the like

00:42:12.400 by outright slaughtering them, is they're just going to put them on contraceptive drugs.

00:42:17.380 But wait a second. Aren't they doing that to us? Well, hold on. Aren't we, human beings in our

00:42:24.840 society, constantly inundated with contraceptive propaganda from the moment that we're in elementary

00:42:30.300 school now all the way up through our 20s and 30s? Everywhere, bombarded by the public health

00:42:36.560 departments, bombarded by the public school system, bombarded by Hollywood, bombarded by

00:42:40.860 every influential institution, the scientific establishment, all of it to say, hey, get on the

00:42:46.120 pill, sterilize yourself, don't have children. It's bad to have children. And I put those two together and

00:42:53.380 I said, well, how does our liberal elite think about us? If they're doing to us the same thing that

00:42:59.480 they're advocating doing to pest animal species, I guess it means they think of us as pests. And of

00:43:05.180 course they do. Sometimes they'll tell us that. There's too many people. We're the problem.

00:43:09.520 You know, we've got it. We just have overpopulation. They'll say it openly and not just fringe people.

00:43:15.520 You'll hear Bill Gates talk about this. You'll hear billionaires. You'll hear the talking head,

00:43:22.240 chattering class pundits. You'll hear politicians talk about this kind of a thing.

00:43:26.180 Now I've got a good story and a bad story in there. I'm going to have to, I can't believe,

00:43:34.340 I'm going to have to tease again. I've been such a tease on the show, but it's Music Monday. So we've

00:43:38.020 got to get to a new Miley Cyrus song. Before that though, here's my little tease. Santana,

00:43:42.580 the rocker made a big splash last week because he came out and he said, I don't know, you have to

00:43:50.200 bleep me on YouTube. He said, a woman is a woman and a man is a man. And then Santana,

00:44:00.040 before I could even talk about this on the show, he apologized. But everyone's focused on the woman

00:44:08.060 is a woman and a man is a man. Then everybody started to focus on the apology and they're

00:44:12.420 missing. There's one aspect of Santana's rant about transgenderism and the sexual revolution

00:44:18.520 that is so insightful and beautiful. And the leftists are going to hate it if they acknowledge

00:44:25.740 it. And even many conservatives have forgotten this lesson. And it's a lesson that we're going

00:44:30.720 to have to get to tomorrow. How's that for a tease? Because today's Music Monday and we've got a new

00:44:34.340 Miley Cyrus song. And you know that while I listen to basically new modern music, I kind of like Miley

00:44:41.820 Cyrus. I have a soft spot for her. Okay. I do. Whatever. Ever since Party in the USA, I've had a soft

00:44:46.680 spot for Miley. The rest of the show continues now. You don't want to miss it. Become a member. Use

00:44:50.700 code Knollscan at WLAS at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

The Michael Knowles Show - August 28, 2023

Ep. 1318 - Trump's Best Campaign Ad Yet

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