Ep. 1327 - My Unpopular Opinion： Rights Can Be Temporarily Suspended
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
175.3025
Summary
New Mexico Governor Michelle Grisham's emergency declaration curtailing the exercise of the 2nd Amendment is a bad idea. She's wrong, but she's not wrong in principle, and conservatives seem to be missing the point.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
On Friday, two days after a tragic road rage shooting in Albuquerque,
00:00:05.220
anti-gun New Mexico Governor Michelle Grisham exploited the incident to issue an emergency
00:00:11.020
declaration curtailing the exercise of the Second Amendment by suspending concealed carry
00:00:16.800
in Albuquerque for 30 days, which is, of course, a very bad thing. And here's her reasoning.
00:00:23.340
You took an oath to the Constitution. Isn't it unconstitutional to say you cannot exercise your
00:00:30.940
carry license? With one exception, and that is if there's an emergency, and I've declared an
00:00:38.440
emergency for a temporary amount of time, I can invoke additional powers. No constitutional right,
00:00:45.920
in my view, including my oath, is intended to be absolute. There are restrictions on free speech.
00:00:52.520
There are restrictions on my freedoms. In this emergency, this 11-year-old and all these
00:00:59.160
parents who have lost all these children, they deserve my attention to have the debate about
00:01:06.280
whether or not in an emergency we can create a safer environment. Because what about their
00:01:12.000
constitutional rights? I took an oath to uphold those too. And if we ignore this growing problem
00:01:18.680
without being bold, I've said to every other New Mexican, your rights are subrogated to theirs.
00:01:28.620
Wait a minute, though. You're talking about crimes. There are already laws against the crimes,
00:01:34.520
I got it. But again, if I'm unsafe, who's standing up for that right? If this climate is so out of
00:01:44.280
control, somebody should do something. I'm doing as much as I know to do.
00:01:51.660
Madam Governor, do you really think that criminals are gonna hear this message and not carry a gun
00:02:00.840
No. But here's what I do think. It's a pretty resounding message.
00:02:06.140
To the lawful gun owners. So we all agree, very bad. This power grab is extremely dangerous.
00:02:15.260
But, here's the but. What's even more dangerous, this is the but that got me in trouble on Twitter
00:02:21.540
over the weekend. What's even more dangerous is that the governor of New Mexico actually has a point.
00:02:28.400
And the longer conservatives refuse to acknowledge this fact, the longer we're going to keep getting
00:02:33.700
rolled by these liberal power grabs, which will only continue to increase in frequency,
00:02:39.860
severity, and injustice, if all the conservatives can muster to stop them is ahistorical whining about
00:02:46.560
abstract rights, which do little more than make us feel good and righteous all the way to the gulag.
00:02:53.880
I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:03:03.700
COVID's happening again. You want to talk about emergency powers being invoked unjustly. COVID is
00:03:21.600
happening again. High schools are canceling their football games because of COVID. This after the
00:03:26.240
mask rules in California, in Atlanta, in New Jersey. This after the White House telling you to get the
00:03:32.100
vaccine, they're just doing it again. And they're doing it because of the election. We'll get to that
00:03:35.100
in just a moment. First, though, a related story, I guess. I got in so much trouble on Twitter over the
00:03:42.600
weekend for saying something that is just obviously true. Here's what I said. I don't want to
00:03:50.660
misquote myself by even one syllable. I said, unpopular opinion. Civil leaders do, in fact,
00:03:59.920
have emergency authority to suspend temporarily many legal rights. That's true. And my point being
00:04:09.920
that the New Mexico governor is wrong in particular here. One, because as that reporter pointed out,
00:04:17.740
the criminals aren't going to stop carrying their guns because of this emergency declaration. Two,
00:04:23.100
because the people of New Mexico, the law-abiding people of New Mexico, actually need a gun
00:04:29.740
more than ever. They need to be able to carry a gun more than ever because of the insane amount of
00:04:33.400
crime in Albuquerque. And three, because the incident that took place in the road rage,
00:04:37.440
though tragic, does not constitute an emergency. So that's the reason why what she did is wrong.
00:04:41.820
But she's only wrong in particular. She's not wrong in principle. And conservatives,
00:04:46.660
oddly enough, seem to be misunderstanding this. But the point I was making, that civil leaders
00:04:52.520
have emergency authority temporarily to suspend rights, that is not a particularly controversial
00:04:59.300
point of view. I mean, I guess it is now, but it has never been controversial throughout all of
00:05:04.640
American history, throughout all of the political history of the entire West, on either side of the
00:05:10.700
aisle or any of the different political participants in our country. The basic principle has often been
00:05:17.420
articulated in America as, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. In other words, all legal rights
00:05:27.180
are important. The law is very important, up to and including the Constitution. But when the whole of
00:05:32.540
the law is threatened, then a rigorous, meticulous adherence to the letter of every single individual
00:05:38.860
aspect of the law is actually going to undermine the law because you could lose the whole law and the
00:05:43.200
whole political order to anarchy or to, I don't know, an insurrection or an invasion.
00:05:47.420
I guess those would be the extreme cases where I think everybody has to grant my point.
00:05:51.760
If the United States were suddenly invaded, well, I guess we are being invaded. If the United States
00:05:56.480
were being more obviously invaded and there were a major insurrection, not some Midwestern
00:06:02.740
grannies at the Capitol, but an actual insurrection, would martial law, for instance, be called for?
00:06:10.500
Yes, of course. Would you rather throw away your whole system of law because you're going to
00:06:17.120
uphold every single little statute everywhere or no? Would you take care of the problem and then
00:06:22.540
bring back the law? I think we all agree if martial law is a thing that exists and has been
00:06:28.700
exercised a number of times in American history by some presidents who we like, some presidents who
00:06:32.300
we don't like, then the principle holds true. You wouldn't want to give away the whole of the law.
00:06:38.460
A good piece of evidence that my view is not so crazy is that Ted Lieu, who's one of the most lib
00:06:46.700
frustrating members of Congress out there, tweeted out, he said, this order from the governor of New
00:06:53.200
Mexico violates the constitution. No state in the union can suspend the federal constitution.
00:06:57.920
There's no such thing as a state public health emergency, except to the US constitution,
00:07:02.120
exception to the US constitution. So Ted Lieu's saying, no, no, no, we have to always rigorously
00:07:05.600
follow the letter of the law. I guess Ted Lieu now supports concealed carry. That's great.
00:07:09.920
I don't, I didn't think he did, but I guess he says that he does now. David Hogg, who's that
00:07:13.700
like 12 year old, I think now he's like 30, but he started out when he was 12. David Hogg is this
00:07:18.520
anti-gun campaigner. He says, I support gun safety. There's no such thing as a state public health
00:07:22.460
emergency exception to the US constitution. So the fact that two huge libs are on one side of the issue
00:07:31.040
and I, a conservative are on the other side of the issue. Some people took this to mean that the
00:07:35.820
world has gone crazy. And can you believe it? Even David Hogg, even Ted Lieu. No, they're,
00:07:40.320
they hold this view because they are liberals, because they're extreme liberals. And I hold this
00:07:46.020
view because I am a conservative. This view though has been held by conservatives, by liberals, by
00:07:50.460
everyone going back. Thomas Jefferson probably said it most clearly. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1807,
00:07:55.960
on great occasions, every good officer must be ready to risk himself in going beyond the strict
00:08:01.200
line of the law. When the public preservation requires it, his motives will be his justification.
00:08:06.400
That's a pretty strong statement. His motives will be his justification. There are extreme cases where
00:08:10.980
the laws become inadequate to their own preservation and where the universal recourse is a dictator or
00:08:15.920
martial law. So lest there be any confusion as to how far Thomas Jefferson, who is probably our most
00:08:21.440
open-minded, classically liberal founding father. He said, no, at certain points, if the whole of the
00:08:27.740
law is threatened, if the whole of the nation is threatened, then you've got to take care of the
00:08:30.920
emergency and then go back to the law. Jefferson went on further. A strict observance of the written
00:08:35.400
laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of
00:08:39.680
necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country, when in danger, are of a higher obligation.
00:08:44.100
To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself.
00:08:48.620
This is almost exactly what I just said. With life, liberty, property, and all those who are
00:08:52.440
enjoying them with us, thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means. And Jefferson finally says,
00:08:58.620
the line of discrimination. Because some people are going to say, well, how do you know when it's
00:09:01.720
really emergency? How do you know this won't be exploited? Jefferson addresses this. He says,
00:09:06.660
the line of discrimination between cases may be difficult, but the good officer is bound to draw it
00:09:11.840
at his own peril and throw himself on the justice of his country and the rectitude of his motives.
00:09:16.800
Wasn't just Jefferson. Hamilton and Madison made similar points in The Federalist. John Adams
00:09:25.540
exercised a, not quite a suspension of the law, but a strong circumscription of the law in the Alien
00:09:34.700
and Sedition Acts, a strong curtailing or limiting of the First Amendment. You saw, obviously,
00:09:41.740
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Generally, we like Adams. I think most people like Abraham
00:09:47.700
Lincoln. It's been used by bad presidents, too, Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. But it's
00:09:52.420
been used a lot. We've had martial law declared in the United States on a number of occasions because
00:09:57.220
of war. In the case of the city of New Orleans during the Battle of New Orleans, we've had it
00:10:01.040
declared during natural disasters. Great Chicago Fire, 1871. There are some other ones. 1906 San
00:10:09.060
Francisco earthquake, Omaha race riot, 1920 Lexington riots. So where does this idea come from? It goes
00:10:15.660
back even earlier than Thomas Jefferson. It goes back to this notion that the welfare of the people,
00:10:22.280
the good of the people, is the highest law. Salus Populi Suprema Lex. This is a law that comes from
00:10:29.740
Cicero in ancient Rome, Cicero on the laws. But it was re-articulated by none other than John Locke,
00:10:35.560
the father of liberalism, classical liberalism, a man who was fairly influential, though his influence
00:10:42.440
has been exaggerated, but fairly influential in the American Revolution. He wrote this as the epigraph
00:10:46.360
to his second treatise on government. This is John Locke's most famous book. He said that this is a
00:10:52.240
fundamental rule for government, but that is the highest point of the law. Some people point out,
00:10:56.820
they say, well, Michael, where in the Constitution does it say that there's an exception to this?
00:11:01.740
First of all, it's alluded to in at least two parts of the Constitution, but even let's go beyond
00:11:07.920
that for a second. If the exception were included within the text of the statute, the law, or the
00:11:13.200
Constitution, it would not constitute a true exception. We're talking about something at a higher level
00:11:19.720
than the mere text. That's what Jefferson's talking about. That's what John Locke is talking about
00:11:23.560
here. That's what Cicero is talking about. And in fact, this principle has been upheld by the Supreme
00:11:28.960
Court, or at least articulated by the Supreme Court, on at least two occasions explicitly. In 1949 and
00:11:35.280
1963, Supreme Court decisions explicitly said the Constitution is not a suicide pact. So why do I bring
00:11:42.140
it up? Because I said at the beginning, I'm not bringing it up to justify the New Mexico governor's
00:11:47.100
actions. I said, in the case of what she's done, this is wrong. But it's wrong for different reasons
00:11:53.740
than we conservatives are saying. And I think the reason that Ted Lieu and David Hogg are on one side
00:12:02.760
of this argument and I'm on the other is not because the world has gone crazy, but it's because the
00:12:07.960
liberals don't want conservatives to recognize this point, that when the whole of the law is threatened,
00:12:13.300
it is not only our right, but it is our responsibility to, in certain narrow extreme
00:12:19.980
cases, go beyond the mere letter of the law to save the whole of it. The most perspicacious response
00:12:26.940
to my, I thought, basically uncontroversial point on Twitter was that they said, wow, it was a liberal
00:12:34.480
who said it. The liberal said, this New Mexico governor's decision was so moronic because it's
00:12:39.740
going to empower conservatives to begin to exercise this line of thinking. And I think that's the
00:12:45.120
point. We conservatives traditionally have always been pretty practical, you know, pretty grounded
00:12:52.860
in reality, pretty focused on tradition and history and how the law actually works. In the last few
00:12:57.140
decades, we've gotten very ideological. We've taken a ton of bait from the liberals. And so now we speak
00:13:02.820
in these abstract rights almost exclusively and in a way that's a historical and in a way that is not
00:13:10.000
very effective because we can whine and scream. And we say, this is hypocrisy that what she's doing,
00:13:15.500
this is unconstitutional. This isn't right. We have our rights. And that's going to be the epitaph
00:13:21.000
on the gravestone of conservatism. Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. Imagine if we did this.
00:13:26.200
Well, no, she, in principle, her point is right. And we should fight her on the particulars. This
00:13:32.500
is not an emergency. This is not going to help anything. We should fight her in court. I don't
00:13:37.180
think this thing is going to hold up. And then we should also exercise the correct principle that she
00:13:43.500
is here exercising. In what case would you say we would do that? Well, I mentioned earlier that an
00:13:51.320
invasion would be a good example of a time when we could go a little beyond the ordinary operation
00:13:58.860
of the law because an invasion threatens our entire political order. It threatens the whole of the law.
00:14:05.620
Unfortunately, we have not been able to stop the invasion on our southern border because every time,
00:14:09.660
even Donald Trump, who was really relatively strong on this, when he would try, all of a sudden,
00:14:16.260
the mechanisms of the bureaucracy and the supposed meaning of the strict letter of the law
00:14:21.000
said, no, you can't stop an invasion of foreigners into your country. Now, Trump managed to get around
00:14:25.640
this one time. And you know how he did it? By curtailing and suspending the ordinary operation
00:14:30.200
of the law through Title 42. He said, okay, the libs are going to declare an emergency with COVID.
00:14:34.600
I'm going to use that emergency with COVID to greatly reduce the flow of illegal immigrants into the
00:14:39.380
country. Very important. And then the Biden administration runs and they say, we're going to get rid of that
00:14:44.240
Title 42. Perhaps if conservatives would stop believing a bunch of hogwash about American history,
00:14:54.180
I mean, the notion that so many conservatives didn't understand that the Constitution is not
00:14:58.120
a suicide pact tells me that even on the right, forget about the people on the left who are very
00:15:03.280
confused about American history. Even many people on the right believe a whole lot of things about
00:15:07.980
American history and government and political philosophy that just aren't true.
00:15:11.800
A lot of us believe fairy tales that were invented in the middle of the 20th century
00:15:16.060
about America as a fundamentally liberal democracy. And America, there are no complications to any of
00:15:24.220
our abstract rights or anything like that. That's just not true. And it has really hampered our ability
00:15:30.640
to wield political power effectively. This woman knows how to wield political power. Now, I think she's
00:15:37.120
gone too far. I think she's wrong in the particulars. I think this is going to, I don't think she'll be
00:15:40.700
able to extend this after 30 days. She might not even be able to make it the full 30 days. And even
00:15:44.740
if she does, it'll be litigated in court. And it's a one aspect of a hotly debated part of the
00:15:51.740
Second Amendment. I don't think this is going to be the end of the world for New Mexico. It's a stupid
00:15:57.440
decision, but it's not going to be the end of the world. But the principle that she's articulating,
00:16:01.140
if we were to accept it, would perhaps allow us to get around the very unjust wielding of the strict
00:16:10.080
letter of the law on legitimate national emergencies. I'll leave my point at that.
00:16:17.580
One thing we can also do to strengthen our country, pray, which is why you got to check out
00:16:21.180
Halo. Right now, go to halo.com slash Knowles. There is no better time to build a daily habit of prayer
00:16:26.640
and meditation. Building a habit of prayer can help you cultivate an attitude of gratitude.
00:16:32.480
Focusing on what you are thankful for can increase positive emotions and improve overall well-being.
00:16:37.620
Also, you owe prayer to the Lord your God, so you need to pray. Halo is the number one Christian
00:16:42.960
prayer app in the United States. It has helped countless people maintain a daily prayer routine,
00:16:48.400
and it can help you too. Download the app for free at halo.com slash Knowles.
00:16:53.220
You can set prayer reminders and track your progress all along the way. Not sure where to start?
00:16:58.920
Check out Father Mike Schmitz's Bible in a Year, my favorite podcast, available on the Halo app for
00:17:04.640
brief daily readings and reflections, or pray alongside Mark Wahlberg, Jim Caviezel, and even
00:17:10.000
some world-class athletes. With Halo, you can customize a personal prayer plan that works for you.
00:17:15.740
Listen wherever you are with downloadable offline sessions. Using Halo to connect with others who share
00:17:21.140
your beliefs and values can provide a sense of belonging, support and foster a sense of community,
00:17:25.880
and you will learn to be a better person in today's broken world. Right now, go to halo.com
00:17:32.360
slash Knowles. Try three months for free. Halo.com slash Knowles. They're going to invoke national
00:17:38.720
emergencies. This was the craziest response to my tweet, is that someone said, Michael, how could you
00:17:49.000
still believe that civil leaders have emergency authority after the experience of COVID?
00:17:57.140
To which I said, that's proving my point. They did wield that emergency authority during COVID,
00:18:02.500
and they're doing it again. And they're doing it again. They're wrong on the particulars,
00:18:06.540
but they're right in the principle. That's how they're getting away with it. And you're seeing it.
00:18:11.180
They're bringing it back. Two California high schools just canceled their football games because of
00:18:14.560
COVID. Esparto High School, which is located west of Sacramento, canceled its football game,
00:18:20.840
which was scheduled on last Friday. Because six players caught COVID, allegedly. Santa Paula High
00:18:29.520
School, north of LA, canceled its Friday football game also against La Cañada High School.
00:18:35.600
He has up 20 positive COVID cases on the football and cheerleading teams. It's happening again.
00:18:44.560
And so the question for us is either we can whine and complain and say, you know, actually in 1792,
00:18:53.680
the founding fathers didn't believe, the framers didn't believe that these local people would have
00:18:59.340
this authority, which by the way, isn't even true. The founding fathers and the framers thought that
00:19:04.000
and exercised those rules even then. Actually, probably more audaciously than we do today,
00:19:10.340
than even the Fauci's of the world are doing today.
00:19:12.060
So we can make that argument and it's not going to get us anywhere. Or we can go on offense and we
00:19:17.300
can engage in the substantive debate and we can win. We do have an example of this. The example of
00:19:22.700
this is Ron DeSantis in Florida. Ron DeSantis has given a very good roadmap of how to do this,
00:19:28.880
which is he's not just going to say, look, we don't care what the students learn, only that they
00:19:38.500
learn. You know, we don't care what they think, just how they think. No, no, no. Ron DeSantis goes
00:19:42.000
into schools and he says, hey, we're going to set standards. We're going to ban books from school.
00:19:45.120
We're going to ban certain stupid fake lessons. We're going to set the curriculum and we're going
00:19:49.640
to set on the question of COVID. We're going to set the mode by which we're going to live
00:19:54.500
with this COVID virus. We are not going to start canceling things. We're not going to shut down
00:19:59.100
businesses. There are going to be some Floridians, some liberals who claim that it's their right as a
00:20:05.360
matter of public health for businesses and churches to be shut down. Yeah, we're not going to do that.
00:20:09.400
We're setting the rules. COVID is not dangerous enough. You have plenty of ways to avoid being
00:20:13.860
out in public if you don't want to be around COVID, but we are not going to allow some minority
00:20:20.700
of ideologues to upend our entire way of life here in Florida. This ties in with what we were
00:20:27.200
talking about last week, this bestselling Italian book that got its author and Italian general fired
00:20:34.340
because it was politically incorrect that had to be self-published, even though it's a huge
00:20:37.680
bestseller. The book talked about the dictatorship of minorities. We're not just talking about
00:20:44.440
religious minorities or sexual minorities or racial minorities, but minorities as a concept
00:20:51.400
and ideological minorities who upend all of our culture. We, unfortunately, conservatives in the
00:20:57.200
name of some hyper-individualism, some embrace of liberalism for some reason, and a liberalism that
00:21:05.900
doesn't even define our country and our civilization. We say, okay, let them do it. You do you. I'll do me.
00:21:11.680
We have no rights to any kind of collective or community standards. No. DeSantis said no way, okay?
00:21:20.380
And he's been pretty successful because of that. That might be a way forward. And when you want to
00:21:26.860
set limits around who sees what you do on your computer, you got to check out ExpressVPN.
00:21:30.800
Right now, go to expressvpn.com slash Knowles. Going online without ExpressVPN is like leaving your
00:21:35.680
kids with the nearest stranger while using the restroom. Would you ever do that? I should hope not.
00:21:41.540
Most of the time, though, you'd say it's probably fine, but you never truly know who it is you're
00:21:46.080
trusting. So why would you risk it? That's why you need to be using ExpressVPN every time you connect
00:21:51.300
to an unencrypted network, cafes, hotels, airports, pretty much any network that's not your own. Your
00:21:57.340
online data are not secured. Any hacker on the same network can gain access to and steal your personal
00:22:02.800
data, your passwords, your financial details, you name it. ExpressVPN creates a secure encrypted tunnel
00:22:08.920
between your device and the internet so that hackers can't steal your data. Hackers can make some serious
00:22:14.560
cash selling personal info on the dark web. However, ExpressVPN has made it easier than ever to keep
00:22:20.060
your information safe. Just fire up the app, click one button, you are instantly protected. It works on
00:22:24.820
all your devices, laptops, phones, tablets, so easy that even I can use it. Go to expressvpn.com slash
00:22:30.600
Knowles. Get three extra months for free. E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash Knowles, expressvpn.com
00:22:36.560
slash Knowles to learn more. Speaking of the election,
00:22:40.060
got some spicy stuff. Is this going to get me kicked off YouTube? This isn't weird sex stuff,
00:22:45.640
so it shouldn't get us kicked off YouTube, but this isn't the explanation of fundamental truths
00:22:51.860
about anthropology. So I don't think this should get us kicked off YouTube, but it is about the 2020
00:22:56.960
election. John Eastman was one of Donald Trump's lawyers. John Eastman, I know that Trump had some
00:23:03.600
eccentric lawyers on his team in certain places. John Eastman is a very serious man. This is a very
00:23:08.780
serious legal scholar. He was the dean of Chapman Law School. He's associated with the Claremont
00:23:15.600
Institute. He is a wonderful guy, and he believes that the 2020 election was stolen. And that is why
00:23:24.380
he proposed various legal and political strategies to stop what he believed was the Democrats from
00:23:33.400
stealing the election. So we've always heard since 2020, no, there's no evidence that the election was
00:23:37.800
stolen. They never made their claims in court. Part of the reason that the Trump team never was able
00:23:43.860
to make the claims in court is because courts wouldn't hear the cases. Courts didn't want any
00:23:48.980
part of this. I remember Justice Scalia making this point after the 2000 election, which was another
00:23:55.260
contested election. People didn't go to jail for that one, but that's because it was the Democrats
00:23:59.420
contesting the election. Antonin Scalia said, you want to blame the Supreme Court for deciding Bush v.
00:24:04.040
Gore. We didn't want to decide Bush v. Gore. No, we didn't want that case. You forced that case on us.
00:24:10.480
We would have been happy to stay out of it. So the courts wanted to stay out of it too. We are now
00:24:14.060
finally getting some information though about the 2020 election, some of the arguments for how it was
00:24:19.380
stolen because John Eastman is on trial. And so what did John Eastman do? In the trial on Friday,
00:24:26.520
he had Michael Gableman, who's a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, testify in this California
00:24:35.760
state bar about a legislative audit that he held of the 2020 election. And this investigative report
00:24:43.960
that the former Supreme Court justice presented to the Wisconsin State Assembly showed irregularities,
00:24:50.420
including drop boxes, absentee ballots. And he concluded that the legislature could decertify
00:24:57.520
the election conclusions. So the judge in this case, who's overseeing John Eastman's
00:25:05.680
trial about whether or not he'll be disbarred, the judge doesn't want Gableman to be making these claims.
00:25:13.220
So the judge in the case is telling the Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, no, you're not allowed to talk
00:25:18.020
about the widely held view that the assembly speaker, Robin Voss in Wisconsin, didn't want,
00:25:23.480
quote, a real investigation into the election and granted limited funds for the effort. The judge in
00:25:29.340
this case, Roland, struck that part of the testimony. Gableman then responded to the judge in this case
00:25:34.860
and said, do the rules of civil procedure, do the rules of evidence apply in this court? What do you
00:25:39.540
mean I'm not allowed to present evidence? I thought that's the whole reason I'm here in the court.
00:25:42.680
The judge ordered a five-minute recess and said, you know, basically, hey, defense,
00:25:48.120
you got to get your witness in line here. What else did the Wisconsin Supreme Court justice find?
00:25:53.440
Found that Zuckbuck's, Mark Zuckerberg's money, where Mark Zuckerberg said, I'm going to spend a ton
00:25:57.400
of money to prevent Trump from being reelected. Zuckbuck's contracts required cities to follow
00:26:02.100
instructions provided by this shady left-wing organization called the Center for Tech and Civil
00:26:06.920
Life, which the justice believed was a violation of law because it was a private entity telling
00:26:12.640
the government what to do. Now, the Center for Tech and Civil Life, who's it funded by?
00:26:18.840
It's funded by the Skoll Foundation, Democracy Fund, Knight Foundation, New Venture Fund,
00:26:23.500
Hopewell Fund, Rockefeller Brothers Fund. These are all left-wing organizations. The CTCL was allowed
00:26:29.780
to see voters who had requested ballots but had not returned ballots. So it gave this left-wing
00:26:35.380
organization a complete view over what was going on in real time in the election. This is something
00:26:41.080
that no other group, no other political group would have been able to have, that the conservatives
00:26:45.820
certainly wouldn't have been able to have. The CTCL employees were embedded in clerk's offices.
00:26:51.460
They were essentially running the elections. And Gableman said that votes were illegally cast
00:26:56.060
because the drop boxes in which those votes were cast were violating the law because they weren't near
00:27:01.700
the clerk's offices. They weren't near the clerk's offices because the CTCL, this left-wing group,
00:27:06.660
dictated where the boxes went in violation of the law. So those were not validly cast ballots.
00:27:11.960
That's just one example. Then the Racine County Sheriff referred charges to the county DA regarding
00:27:18.460
election officials who were breaking the law. DA said she wouldn't bring the charges. She said she
00:27:23.300
didn't have enough resources to bring the charges. Completely BS excuse. Gableman then said he looked
00:27:27.940
into the electronic voting machines and had serious concerns about them. This is what he said.
00:27:32.760
I don't want to be slapped with any lawsuits here. Defamation BS left-wing operations. I'm just
00:27:38.780
reporting to you what the former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice said and testified in the court on
00:27:44.920
Friday. So this is just news. Don't shoot the messenger. He said that voting machines,
00:27:50.020
Dominion was the main one, but then also ESS and Hart were, quote, the opposite of cooperative and,
00:27:54.840
quote, hindered my ability to get to the truth of whether there is fraud in the machines
00:27:59.040
and fought us every step of the way with lawsuits to stop the team from finding out if they had
00:28:04.560
safeguards. Pretty strange behavior, wouldn't you say, for an election that was totally on the up and
00:28:10.160
up. And Gableman said he found very concerning pieces of information, but nothing he could
00:28:17.220
totally put together or say without any shadow of a doubt. But things like Wi-Fi connections to the
00:28:21.880
internet, how the machine counted the ballots by taking images and converting it into mathematical
00:28:26.680
formulae so that you'd end up with things like fractional votes, just a lot of issues. And then you have
00:28:31.640
just the broader statistical issue. Trump won 18 out of 19 bellwether counties in 2020. We think that the
00:28:39.880
election is determined across the entire nation. It's not. It's determined by a handful of counties that in
00:28:46.380
recent decades have decided which party, which candidate is going to win the election. In 2020, 18 out of the
00:28:53.980
19 counties that typically would decide the election went for Trump. One of them went for Biden.
00:29:01.120
Yet Biden wins the election. Kind of weird. Now, you know, I hate to say I told you so. I think among
00:29:06.480
conservatives in the media, I have been one of the more open and suggestive voices when it comes to
00:29:15.000
whether or not the 2020 election was stolen. And the evidence presented at the disbarment trial for
00:29:22.380
John Eastman would seem to back this up. But still, it's up in the air. We'll see how the
00:29:26.700
testimony goes. And even at this point, it doesn't really matter because Joe Biden was able to take
00:29:30.940
power and wield that power effectively. But it does get back to the point that we were raising about
00:29:36.020
emergency powers and whether the constant adherence to the strict letter of the law is really in service
00:29:42.680
of the law most broadly, which the liberals are currently arguing it is. The conservatives
00:29:48.920
traditionally have observed that obviously it is not. One of the objections that people made to my
00:29:56.260
point was, well, where in the Constitution is this exception? Well, where in the case law is this
00:30:01.180
exception? And I've pointed to parts of the Constitution and I've pointed to parts of the
00:30:04.020
case law. But even beyond that, I guess my response as pertains to the 2020 election and the 2024 election
00:30:10.520
is, where in the Constitution do you find the compromise of 1877? This is something you may
00:30:20.740
or may not have learned about in high school history class. Compromise of 1877 was you had the
00:30:26.320
presidential election in 1876. You had the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes. You had the Democrat, Sam
00:30:32.520
Tilden, and they couldn't decide who won the election because there were some allegations of
00:30:40.380
voter fraud. There were competing slates of electors. It was a very similar situation to what happened in
00:30:47.020
2020. So similar, in fact, that Senator Ted Cruz in 2020 suggested the creation of an electoral commission
00:30:53.640
to decide that election as took place and to decide whether or not to certify the electors' votes.
00:31:00.100
As took place in 1877. And the reason it was controversial when Senator Cruz said it,
00:31:07.580
the reason it was controversial in 1877 is it's nowhere in the Constitution. Nowhere in the
00:31:12.940
Constitution, nowhere in Article 2 does it say that the way to solve a contested presidential election
00:31:17.860
is to set up this random commission with people from different parts of the government to kind of
00:31:22.600
vote on whether or not the ballots should be certified. And what happened in this compromise of 1877,
00:31:28.820
which wasn't written down anywhere, by the way, the compromise of 1877 was kind of a handshake deal
00:31:33.320
in a back room with probably a lot of smoke going around, was that the Democrats would agree to give
00:31:39.160
the election to Republican Rutherford Hayes if the Republicans agreed to pull troops out of the South
00:31:43.740
and stop Reconstruction and let the Democrats run the South. That was the deal. Nowhere in the
00:31:49.880
Constitution. And you might say, well, that's a rotten deal. It's unconstitutional. It's a violation of
00:31:54.140
rights. But then my question is, what was the alternative? What was the constitutional alternative?
00:32:00.820
There wasn't one. It was a constitutional crisis. It was a national emergency. And when the strict
00:32:09.380
adherence to the letter of law is insufficient to solve those crises, when therefore the whole of
00:32:15.080
the law is threatened by those crises, people need to get a little bit creative. That's what happened
00:32:20.800
then. And it's nearly what happened in 2020. The Democrats just had enough power that it didn't
00:32:25.440
really matter. But folks, the reason I bring all of this up, I think I've made it clear as day. I
00:32:31.720
don't, I'm not talking about the New Mexico lady. I'm as strong a defender of gun rights as possible.
00:32:35.560
I think she's going to lose as she should. We are hurtling toward a 2024 presidential election
00:32:42.360
at a time when neither party believes in the integrity of our electoral process,
00:32:48.220
at a time when there are still lots of questions about whether or not our electoral system has been
00:32:52.840
so weakened by the laws and illegal procedures that the libs put into effect just a few years ago.
00:33:01.340
And by the way, they're doing it again already by trying to bring back the exact same excuse
00:33:06.320
of COVID. We can deny this. We can keep our head in the sand and then the Democrats can steal the
00:33:13.140
election and then we can complain about it. Or we can get a little proactive here and recognize that
00:33:18.860
we are facing a fairly significant likelihood of yet another constitutional crisis. And we're going
00:33:27.180
to need a game plan for how to deal with that. Or once again, the epitaph on the headstone of
00:33:32.980
conservatism is going to be, well, here lies conservatism. Imagine if the shoe were on the other
00:33:39.380
foot. Imagine if the roles were reversed. I don't think it is fully appreciated how far beyond the
00:33:47.760
law the libs are willing to go here. There's a report that just came out. The Georgia grand jury
00:33:53.560
that indicted Trump and his lawyers and I don't know, like his cook, not really his cook, but just
00:33:57.380
so many people who were even vaguely associated with Trump. Georgia wanted to indict more people.
00:34:02.180
Georgia wanted to invite sitting U.S. senators. The grand jury recommended charging 21 people
00:34:08.600
who were ultimately not charged. There were already, what, 19 people charged,
00:34:12.020
Trump and 18 co-defendants. They wanted another 21. They wanted to indict former Georgia Senator
00:34:18.720
David Perdue. Wanted to indict former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler. Wanted to indict sitting
00:34:25.140
U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham. And I know some people don't like Lindsey Graham, so they probably want
00:34:30.000
Lindsey. But I kind of actually get a kick out of Lindsey Graham. And in any case, no good argument for
00:34:34.660
this random county in Georgia to indict a sitting U.S. Senator from South Carolina. Completely insane.
00:34:39.700
They wanted to indict former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. And then Fannie Willis,
00:34:45.860
the prosecutor here, didn't. She only indicted 19 people, including the former president of the
00:34:51.440
United States and the leader of the opposition. Wow, that's moderation from the left. Yeah, we're not
00:34:56.380
going to start indicting senators from other states in this random county. Yeah, we're not going. We're only
00:35:01.140
going to indict the leader of the opposition and anyone who's even vaguely associated with him.
00:35:05.300
Folks, we are in pretty much uncharted territory here. The whole thing, the indictments totally
00:35:14.400
uncharted. The former president running for a non-consecutive second term, that's only happened
00:35:20.720
one other time in American history. The complete upending of our election rules based on this virus,
00:35:28.360
that's fairly unprecedented. There is no script to follow here, okay? And a myopic insistence on,
00:35:40.300
well, just show me exactly where in the strict letter of the, there is, we're, we're writing the
00:35:46.040
script right now. Sorry, let me rephrase that. The script is being written right now as to how these
00:35:51.240
elections are going to take place. The script is being written right now as to how power is actually
00:35:55.580
going to be wielded in the United States. We are not writing it because we're living in a fantasy
00:36:01.520
world. The left is writing it. And so long as we don't accept political reality, basic historical
00:36:07.940
facts of, of politics, basic philosophical truths of politics, and just the news of what's going on
00:36:14.860
right now, the longer that we don't accept that, the less likely we will be to have a share in that
00:36:21.220
power in the future. Now, you know, folks, Convicting a Murderer, the first true crime
00:36:25.300
docuseries ever released by Daily Wire Plus, premiered this weekend. It got over 7 million
00:36:30.060
views and a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics are raving about Convicting a Murderer,
00:36:34.680
calling it, quote, one of the best documentaries of 2023, saying that Candace, quote, delivers
00:36:38.840
everything that you could want from a docuseries in the first three episodes if you have not begun
00:36:43.300
the series. Episodes one through three are available on Daily Wire Plus right now. Episode four is
00:36:47.300
releasing this Thursday. You are going to see yet another missing piece of the puzzle revealed.
00:36:51.800
Do not wait. Head on over to dailywireplus.com slash watch to start the series. If you're not a
00:36:57.200
member, go to dailywireplus.com slash subscribe to join today. My favorite comment on Friday is from
00:37:05.180
ASMR Conservative, who says, I actually appreciate the ADL. They had a lot of conservative pundits on
00:37:12.900
their watch list, so I figured I'd check them out. Here I am now. Thank you. I know this is how I feel
00:37:19.900
about the ADL to some degree. I mean, the ADL is pretty bad in that they call people Nazis if they
00:37:26.880
don't just totally kowtow to the radical left-wing demands of the ADL, and they're trying to take down
00:37:32.900
Twitter. So I think they're particularly a threat right now, and Elon is right to sue them for
00:37:37.400
defamation. It's very funny. Some of the others are pretty bad, too. Right-wing watch, people
00:37:42.820
for the American way is pretty, people for the American way, the most ridiculously named organization
00:37:47.600
in American history. They're pretty bad. Media Matters is pretty bad. I just, my holdup there
00:37:56.340
is the same point that you've just made, which is, I really hope Elon doesn't kick off Media Matters
00:38:02.320
or sue them. They have been my loyal publicists for years at this point, what, seven, eight years at
00:38:07.980
this point. I don't want to get new publicists. I really appreciate them. They watch the show every
00:38:12.600
day they're watching right now. So it's true. Sometimes these guys, the libs, are so wrong-headed.
00:38:18.320
They think they're going to kill us, and they only make us stronger. All right, speaking of elections,
00:38:26.040
Nancy Pelosi, who is, by my last count, 584 years old, she is running for re-election. Nancy tweeted out,
00:38:34.460
quote, now more than ever, our city needs us to advance San Francisco values and further our
00:38:40.040
country. Yeah, we need drug-addled bums defecating on the street from sea to shining sea. That's what
00:38:46.900
we need. We need two cars in every garage and a syringe in every pot. We need San Francisco values
00:38:53.820
in America. Our country needs America to show the world that our flag is still there. It's a rainbow
00:38:58.420
flag, by the way. It's not the red, white, and blue. They got rid of that one, but the rainbow flag is
00:39:01.940
still there. With liberty and justice for all, that's why I'm running for re-election and respectfully
00:39:06.940
ask for your vote, Nancy. And now look, especially depending on what happens in 2024, it's going to
00:39:12.600
be very dangerous for Nancy Pelosi to be in office because she remembers the compromise of 1877.
00:39:18.200
So she's going to be able to wield power very effectively. I don't mind that she's running for
00:39:23.480
re-election. It's not good. It's bad. But I kind of get a kick out of some of these old-timers who have
00:39:27.900
been, these women of a certain age and some of the old-timer male politicians who have been around
00:39:33.140
forever, Bernie, all of them, they're going to hold on as long as they can. The people are allowing
00:39:37.900
them to hold on. Okay, that's just how politics works. However, I will say, the longer the geriatric
00:39:45.520
politicians hang on, the more massive the political sea change is going to be once they inevitably have
00:39:54.080
to leave office because the old Grim Reaper finally shows up. That's just a fact. They can hold on
00:40:02.260
in both parties. Nancy Pelosi can hold on. Mitch McConnell can hold on. Joe Biden can hold on.
00:40:06.880
They can hold on. We had what? We had a boomer president in Bill Clinton, boomer president in
00:40:16.100
George Bush. I thought a boomer, I thought a Gen X president in Barack Obama. Some Gen Xers have
00:40:22.640
written into me screaming and said, Michael, how dare you associate him with us? Obama is technically a
00:40:28.020
boomer. Okay, so fine, count him as a boomer. Then another boomer president with Donald Trump,
00:40:32.380
it's four boomer presidents. And then Joe Biden, who's the silent generation, who's before the baby
00:40:38.680
boomers. So these guys have held on to power for an extraordinarily long period of time.
00:40:42.720
And all that means is that the next generation that comes up is going to be that much more removed,
00:40:51.720
is going to differ that much more from the views of that previous generation. But there's no stopping
00:40:56.980
change forever. It will have to happen. Time rolls on. History rolls on. You look right now at Hungary,
00:41:02.080
a government that a lot of American conservatives quite admire because it's the only country that's
00:41:06.380
been able to turn around its birth rate problem, the only country that's been able to stop mass
00:41:10.940
migration, the only country that's been able to re-beautify its cities. It's the only country where
00:41:15.800
the cities are getting more beautiful, not uglier. And part of the reason they've been able to do that
00:41:20.940
is the government is quite young in Hungary. It's a vibrant young government that's not just stuck
00:41:26.640
with the old platitudes of the 1980s, but is applying eternal principles to the new circumstances
00:41:32.280
that confront us. That's going to happen here eventually. It's going to have to when that grip
00:41:38.080
of power runs out. And this is why I would encourage conservatives not just to recite the same platitudes
00:41:44.300
that you learned in 1982, platitudes which may or may not have even been true then.
00:41:50.640
Politics often boils down to talking points, and talking points are always wrong because they
00:41:54.480
are always oversimplified. They never tell the whole story. Sometimes they outright lie.
00:41:59.260
If we just keep rehearsing the same old script that we learned in 1982, we're going to keep on
00:42:03.240
losing, just like we have since 1982, almost without exception. Or we can use our imagination,
00:42:08.800
we can dig into history, we can dig into philosophy, and we can imagine. We can think about what the
00:42:13.280
future looks like and bring that to effect. Speaking of geriatric politicians, Joe Biden
00:42:19.320
is slumping among non-white voters, which is a big problem because the Democrats rely on a total lock
00:42:27.320
on racial minorities. So if they lose the racial minorities, especially black voters, they could
00:42:32.360
lose basically every election. This is according to CNN and SSRS, shows Trump is up one over Biden.
00:42:39.980
Um, so for the people who say Trump can't win, you know, again, that was disproved by history because
00:42:45.680
Trump did win in 2016. And maybe, who knows, who knows what happened in 2020. Uh, Biden is hitting
00:42:51.340
his targets among whites. So Biden is matching 43, 44% of decided major, major party white voters that he
00:42:59.000
won last time. But he's, he's losing some non-white support, meaning that he's not, he's not behind on
00:43:07.260
non-white voters. He's still massively ahead on non-white voters. He's just not as far ahead as he was
00:43:12.180
last time. So Joe Biden still wins 58 to 34 among non-white voters, according to Nate Cohn of the
00:43:18.460
New York Times. But because he's lost some ground, this could, could be a big problem for him. Uh, Trump,
00:43:25.260
for instance, got 29% of the Hispanic vote, uh, in 2016. That was compared to Romney's 27% of the vote. So
00:43:32.500
this is very funny that Trump, who called Mexicans rapists and murderers, was able to do better
00:43:36.900
among Hispanics than milquetoast, nice, nice sounding Mitt Romney. It really upended a lot of
00:43:41.340
the chattering classes, you know, establishments, uh, anti-Trump rhetoric in 2016. But still 29 versus
00:43:47.280
27, it's not, it's not a lot. It's, it's fine. And, and Trump does better among non-white voters
00:43:54.040
than most Republicans. He got 8% of the black vote compared to 6% that Mitt Romney got. Okay, that's fine.
00:44:00.640
But this also highlights the political importance of immigration. For whatever reason,
00:44:05.540
Republicans just don't do that well with non-white voters. That is why the Democrats are flooding the
00:44:12.940
country with illegal aliens, because they are, by and large, almost entirely non-white immigrants.
00:44:19.680
And they're not doing it because they care about the Venezuelans or the Hondurans or the poor people
00:44:23.520
crossing the border, paying off the cartels to be smuggled and raped and trafficked and sometimes
00:44:27.740
killed along the way. They're just doing it because it swells their numbers. And it swells their numbers
00:44:31.800
in a whole lot of ways. It swells their numbers in Congress because congressional apportionment,
00:44:35.820
the number of districts that, that a state will get, is based on total population, not based on
00:44:40.700
citizens. So you flood the country with illegal aliens millions and millions of years, that's going to
00:44:44.720
increase, especially in Democrat places like California, it's going to increase their
00:44:49.600
representation. It's going to increase their, their representation in the electoral college. It's going to
00:44:55.200
increase their proportion of the voters. It's got, it's, it's helping them. This is not something
00:45:00.360
where we can say, well, in 30 years, hopefully we'll just pass a law and, you know, the Hispanics
00:45:04.740
are conservatives. They just don't know it yet. Some of them are, and it actually varies by nationality.
00:45:09.060
Cubans tend to be much more Republican than say voters from, I don't know, Venezuela, say, or Guatemala,
00:45:17.100
and the children of these immigrants and the grandchildren of these immigrants. But by and large,
00:45:20.800
they're still anti-conservative. They still go for the Democrats. This is an emergency because,
00:45:25.680
well, we can be chattering about the precise application of the rule of the law and whether
00:45:29.200
Title 42 is acceptable or not. Should we really arrest these poor people fleeing the persecution
00:45:34.040
of what? They're seeking persecution by signing up with the cartels. While we're, while we're debating
00:45:40.660
that, the country is being radically transformed as an intentional program by the Democrats to swell
00:45:45.420
their numbers and to, to make the Republicans a permanent minority. Forget about racial minorities,
00:45:49.640
cultural minorities, religious minorities. It just, as an electoral matter, that's what the
00:45:54.020
Democrats are after here. Are we just going to let that happen or are we going to, are we going to
00:45:58.160
get creative in how to enforce the law? At the very least, the highest sense of the law in spirit.
00:46:03.940
The rest of the show continues now, folks. It's Music Monday. You don't want to miss it.
00:46:07.680
Become a member and use code Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S, at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.
00:46:19.640
You don't want to miss it. I don't want to miss it.