Ep. 1368 - 3rd Republican Debate Summarized In 60 Seconds
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Summary
On this episode of The Michael Knowles Show, Michael talks about the latest Republican Debates, including a story about a cigar company that blew it all out of the water. Plus, a look at the latest Democratic Debates.
Transcript
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Last night, the Republican candidates, who are respectively 44, 49, 54, and 56 points below the
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current GOP frontrunner, met in Miami to debate for some reason. The guy who's 49 points behind
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the frontrunner had the most brilliant performance in that he gave the most thought-provoking and
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exciting answers. He had the highest highs. Maybe he had the lowest lows, too. The guy who was only
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44 points behind the frontrunner, I think, had the best performance overall. He answered in a way
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that was impressive, yet still entirely mainstream. And nothing that anyone said will in any way affect
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the polls or change the race at all. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show. The big story that we'll get to in a little bit happens to be that
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personal story that I talked about yesterday. Mayflower cigars. I'm not saying that yesterday
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was the greatest day of my life. It wasn't. Might have been top five. It was almost certainly top
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ten. I had very high expectations for this cigar company that I'd been plotting out for about 15
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years now. And you all, the customers who bought all those cigars totally blew my expectations and
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the expectations of the cigar industry completely out of the water. So I know some of you are trying
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to get some now and are having trouble. We'll get to that in just a moment. First, though, we turn our
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attention to the GOP debate that I think very few people would have watched to begin with because
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these things haven't seemed to be all that consequential. Even if you like the candidates,
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even if you're endorsing one of the candidates in the race who shows up to the debates,
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they haven't really moved the needle. And this debate was even worse in some ways because the
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debate was hosted by NBC News, which is a liberal outlet. So you think, okay, why am I? It's
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inconsequential and it's being hosted by a liberal network. Okay, why? The debate started out fairly
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strong. Vivek Ramaswamy comes out swinging, as he often does, and he called on the chairman of the
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RNC to resign. We've become a party of losers at the end of the day. It was a cancer of the
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Republican establishment. Let's speak the truth. I mean, since Ronna McDaniel took over as chairwoman
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to the RNC in 2017, we have lost 2018, 2020, 2022, no red wave that never came. We got trounced
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last night in 2023. And I think that we have to have accountability in our party. For that matter,
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Ron, if you want to come on stage tonight, you want to look the GOP voters in the eye and tell
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them you resign, I will turn over my, yield my time to you. And frankly, look, the people there
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cheering for losing in the Republican Party. Think about who's moderating this debate. This should be
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Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk. We'd have 10 times the viewership asking questions
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that GOP primary voters actually care about and bringing more people into our party.
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You think the Democrats, and we've got Kristen Welker here, you think the Democrats would
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actually hire Greg Gutfeld to host a Democratic debate? They wouldn't do it. And so the fact
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of the matter is, I mean, Kristen, I'm going to use this time because this is actually about
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you in the media and the corrupt media establishment. Ask you the Trump-Russia collusion hoax that you
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pushed on this network for years. Was that real or was that Hillary Clinton made up disinformation?
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Oh, man. Vivek is pretty good at this. When I say he had the highest highs and potentially the lowest
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lows, I mean, he's the only one on stage who's really taking risks. So that was a big high. That
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one totally landed. He had a jibe at Nikki Haley that did not land. It was one of the lows of the debate.
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But at least the guy's taking risks. I think the points he was making in that opening are totally
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fair. He's making points about the Republican National Committee, how it's run. He's making
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points about how the debates are run. Why on earth are we hiring NBC to do the Republican debate?
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Totally crazy. And then he holds the NBC people accountable for the lies that they pushed for years.
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So starts out strong in that way. Then we go on to Tim Scott. Tim Scott, I thought,
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again, gave a safe performance. He's a nice guy. It probably won't move the polls. But he gave an
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answer that was really important that I haven't heard from other Republican candidates. And I'd like
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to hear more of it. He pointed out that the country is not just some liberal, vague, abstract,
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hodgepodge of multiculturalism and freedom to have freedom and be free. But he said, no,
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actually, it's a Christian country. The truth of my life destroys the lies of the radical left.
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We need a president and a candidate who will actually help our base solidify and attract
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independent voters into our party. The Great Opportunity Party is now winning back African-American
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voters and Hispanic voters because we are working on a foundation based on faith. Our nation is facing
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some deep challenges. It is a loss of faith in this nation that is a part of the erosion that we're
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seeing every single day. It's restoring faith, restoring our Christian values that will help this
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nation once again become the city on the hill. When Ronald Reagan talked about the city on the hill,
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he was coming from Matthew 5. When President Lincoln talked about a house divided, that was Mark.
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Our founding documents speak to the importance of a faith foundation. You don't have to be a Christian
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for America to work for you. But America does not work without a faith-filled Judeo-Christian
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foundation. It's a Christian country. When he's saying, look, Lincoln, he's quoting
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the Gospels. Ronald Reagan, he's quoting Christian preachers, quoting the Gospels,
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going back all the way through the American tradition, invoking John Winthrop,
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governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. This is a Christian country. And so the country is going to
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be Christian and survive and flourish. Or we're going to stop being Christian and we'll just be a
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different country. And we're probably going to fail. But even if we succeeded by some measure,
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we would be a totally different country. The country only makes sense if you recognize that
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it has been from the very beginning and through all of our success, an explicitly Christian country.
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I love that. Thank you, Tim Scott. Thank you for saying what would have been considered obvious
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20 years ago that now nobody wants to say, including the so-called conservatives.
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For a candidate who's playing it super safe, Tim Scott actually wittingly or unwittingly went out
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on a little bit of a limb here. Shouldn't be, that shouldn't be edgy at all. But even many
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conservatives, they say, well, no, we're not a Christian country. We have a firm separation of
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church and state. Actually, we're a secular liberal democracy. And no, no, man, we're just,
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that's where the progressives want to take us. That's where the leftists want to take us.
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But that just isn't true. We have, in God, we trust on our currency. Okay. Our greatest statesmen
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have quoted the gospel frequently. Our country was founded by extremely zealous Christians
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who came over here on the Mayflower and gave thanks to God and instituted Thanksgiving,
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our national holiday. Thanksgiving. Who are we giving thanks to, guys? Are we giving thanks to Ahura
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Mazda, the deity of Zoroastrianism? Are we giving thanks to the cycle of dharma and karma and nirvana
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and Buddhism or Hinduism? No, I don't mean any disrespect to whatever people believe in,
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but it's a Christian country, okay? We're Christian people and Christianity happens to be true,
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if you ask me. And Tim Scott has the guts to say it. Love it. Then Vivek comes back. Vivek had a really
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good rejoinder, I felt, to the whole tenor of the debate. And the tenor of the debate was that for
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the first, I don't know, hour, virtually the whole conversation, every question was focused on
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how we are going to fund foreign governments. It was amazing. I couldn't get over, well,
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we're going to, how much money are you going to give to Ukraine? How much money are you going to
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give to Israel? How many American troops are you going to commit to this region? How many American
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troops are you going to go send a fight in that region? This, that, or the other thing.
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And every candidate seemed to be going along with it to some degree or another
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until Vivek comes out and said, hey, look, I love the state of Israel.
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I strongly support the right of the state of Israel to defend itself. We're a different country.
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The founding vision of Israel was based on the idea that they don't want to depend on anybody else's
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sympathy or direction in defending themselves. So what I would tell Bibi is that Israel has the right
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and the responsibility to defend itself. I would tell him to smoke those terrorists on his southern
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border, and then I'll tell him as president of the United States, I'll be smoking the terrorists
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on our southern border. That's his responsibility. This is our responsibility. That's how we move forward.
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But I want to be careful to avoid making the mistakes from the neocon establishment of the past.
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Corrupt politicians in both parties spent trillions, killed millions, made billions for themselves
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in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting wars that sent thousands of our sons and daughters,
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people my age, to die in wars that did not advance anyone's interests, adding $7 trillion to our
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national debt. You have the likes of Nikki Haley, who stepped down from her time at the UN.
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Bankrupt or in debt was her family. Then she becomes a military contractor.
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She joins the board of Boeing and otherwise, and is now a multimillionaire.
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So I think that that's wrong when Republicans do it or Democrats do it. That's the choice we face.
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Do you want a leader from a different generation who's going to put this country first,
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or do you want Dick Cheney in three-inch heels?
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Oh, man, the vague just throwing haymakers left and right. And this point that he's making here
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is an important one. It's not just knee-jerk isolationism. It's not just Reddit-tier foreign
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policy, you know, just only focus on domestic issues. Obviously, a global superpower needs to
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look at things going on all over the world. But he's absolutely right about the founding of the
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state of Israel. The justification, the geopolitical justification for the founding of the state of
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Israel is that Jews have been persecuted when they have been in countries that are not Jewish
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for all of history. And so they need their own country, so they don't need to depend upon the
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benevolence and the magnanimity of host countries. That's the whole argument. Without that argument,
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you could say, well, all the Jews should move to New York. New York is essentially the second Jewish
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state in the world. I think there are the same number of Jews living in New York as
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there are in Israel or thereabouts. But the argument is, well, yeah, America's nice to the
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Jews for now, except on university campuses, except in the halls of Congress, maybe. But America's
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really nice to Jews for now, but things could change. That's the argument. That's the argument
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for the founding of the state of Israel. So if that's the argument, then the state of Israel must
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be able to defend itself. Because if the state of Israel is entirely dependent on a foreign
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government to give them armaments, be the military might, be the backstop that stops the destruction
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of the state, then there's essentially no difference between the Jews having their own explicitly Jewish
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nation state and just living in another host country. So he's making a point that probably
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Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, would have strongly agreed with, that many Jewish leaders and
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Israeli leaders over history would have agreed with. And then he pivots from that and just starts
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throwing haymakers at the more interventionist side of the GOP. The Veik, not afraid to put it
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for free. I promise I'll move on from this agonizing debate in just a moment. First, though,
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Ron DeSantis. So, I told you, Vivek, he shined. He had these highs. He had this low where he went after
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Nikki Haley's 25-year-old daughter. Nikki had gone after Vivek for being on TikTok, and he said,
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well, your daughter, your 25-year-old daughter's on TikTok, too. And then she really went after him
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for that and said, don't talk about my daughter. And, you know, the daughter's not little, but still,
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I said, you don't want to talk about the family. And unless it's Hunter Biden, where he's just such
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a criminal, it's a totally different matter. And anyway, again, that was the low because
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Vivek is the one taking chances. So, overall, probably people noticed Vivek's debate performance
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the most. But I think the winner of the undercard, you know, the winner of the debate that probably
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won't move the needle on polls. But I think the clear winner was Ron DeSantis, who gave impressive
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answers. He's very, very much in command of the stage. He composed himself. But his answers were
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still broadly safe, unobjectionable, and mainstream. Now, he gave one answer. And I don't mean that as
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a criticism. I think that's probably what you need to do in a debate. That's how Joe Biden was able to
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secure the nomination in large part in 2020 for the Democrats. DeSantis gave one answer on Social
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Security that I had not heard before from a GOP politician. And it's on a question that Republicans
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get clobbered with a lot. The question is, are you going to cut Medicare? Are you going to throw
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granny off a cliff? Are you going to slash Social Security? How are you going to do it? And it's
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always a gotcha question. Because if you say that you want to raise the age at which people get these
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entitlements, then the Democrats say you're throwing granny off a cliff. You have no compassion.
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You're just, you know, counting your pennies. If you say you want to cut benefits, that's going to be a
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total loser, too. If you really anything, that's why entitlements have been the third rail in American
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politics. Ron had a really, really good answer here on why he would not raise the age at which
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one is eligible for these programs. What can you do to help shore up Social Security? One of the
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things that's causing problems is the inflation. We have to reduce inflation. When you have higher
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inflation, the seniors get a cost of living adjustment, which means the program's spending
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more. But it doesn't cover the increase in the actual inflation rate. We also do need to get to
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at least 3% growth. You're never going to be able to have issues, be able to solve the budget without
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that. But I would note this. Congress for decades took money from Social Security. Social Security
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would have more tax revenue than it put out. They would take it and then they'd write an IOU to Social
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Security. Congress has a lot of dirty hands on this. I'm going to force Congress to stop spending so much
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money. And one thing we have to do when we talk about the retirement age is just something that's
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changed in the last four or five years. Life expectancy in the United States is declining.
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So, Governor, yes or no? Would you raise it? Would you raise the retirement age?
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When life expectancy is declining, I don't see how you could raise it the other direction. So it's one
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thing to peg it on life expectancy. But we have had a significant decline in life expectancy in this
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country. And that's just a fact. Brilliant point. And you notice the NBC lady, the moment he raises
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this new objection to entitlement reform, she jumps in. She goes, oh, hold on. Are you going to raise it?
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Are you going to raise the retirement age? Because we've been trapped in this rhetorical box for 10
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years now, 15, 20 years, where any question the Democrats ask about entitlements hurts Republicans.
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Because it shows that we're either fiscally irresponsible or we're going to throw granny
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off a cliff, that we're totally heartless. But Ron here raises a question that I hadn't heard yet,
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which is, hold on. How are you going to raise the retirement age when life expectancy is declining?
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The whole idea of raising the retirement age is that life expectancy keeps getting higher and higher
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higher. Well, when social security was founded in the early 20th century, the life expectancy was
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significantly lower than it is today. So we've got to catch up with the times and raise life expectancy
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because of how great things have been. No, actually, that was true for much of the 20th century.
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Now it's reversed. What a condemnation of the policies that have governed our country for the
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last century. That our life expectancy is declining. Even an answer like that cuts way beyond the
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entitlement question. It really shakes people, I think. It shook me, which is, wait, we're dying?
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Oh, man. What are we talking about? We're going to cut around the edges of economic policy or cut
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around the edges of this policy or that? We're supposed to be healthier. We're supposed to be
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growing. But we're a dying population. We don't have kids. We don't get married. And we're dying
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younger because of suicide and drug overdoses. Whoa, man, things are sick. And whatever policies
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have led us to that point, we got to reverse them ASAP. Very good answer from Governor DeSantis.
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Now, speaking of elections, there was this vote in Ohio a couple nights ago. I didn't get to it
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yesterday. We'll get to it today. Very sad because abortion was on the ballot. This was a referendum.
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And the people voted to enshrine the license to murder children at essentially any point in
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pregnancy in the Ohio state constitution. It's called issue one. It changes the state constitution
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and takes precedence over laws passed by the state legislature. So it might well be irreversible. The
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only way that it could be reversed is by a ballot measure, another ballot measure to reverse it.
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Pro-abortion groups did a great job on this ballot measure because they framed the vote as a matter of
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freedom, as a matter of shrinking the regulations of the government. The liberals framed it in a
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conservative kind of way. So it tricked a bunch of conservatives into voting to enshrine infanticide
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at any point in pregnancy in the state constitution. You've seen similar ballot initiatives here as well.
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And so the squishes in the Republican Party are going to say, well, this is proof that abortion is a
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losing issue for conservatives. And the real squishes are going to say, that's why we should kill the
00:20:00.660
babies so we can win more elections and cut taxes. The less squishy people are going to say, well,
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even if it is a losing issue, obviously if a country cares about anything at all, it should care about
00:20:10.940
not sacrificing its babies to Moloch. This is a non-negotiable issue. It's human life. You're
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slaughtering the most innocent people in our country. I don't care how it polls on any given day.
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We're going to stand up for life and we're going to stand up for the defenseless. But the more clever
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people in the Republican Party are saying, yeah, that's true. It's a very important issue. No, we're not
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going to squish on human life just because some ballot initiative passed. But people like DeSantis,
00:20:32.660
people like Vivek actually both pointed this out last night. Where was the pro-life
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referendum? Where were the conservative groups, the Republican groups out there who were putting
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their own ballot initiative out to say we're going to enshrine life in the state, Ohio state
00:20:51.760
constitution or in any other state? Where were the conservative groups changing the language of
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how these ballot propositions go up so that they aren't deceptive? So they don't trick
00:21:00.960
conservatives into voting for infanticide, which they don't intend to do. Is it possible that
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pro-life, pro-abortion, it's a contentious issue, but is it possible that people do in fact support life
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broadly, but that Democrats are just much better at the operations and inner workings of politics and
00:21:20.580
conservatives need to get better at that as well. I just looking at the language of these
00:21:25.340
ballot measures, just looking at the way they came to be, just looking at how Democrats are much
00:21:29.220
better at rigging elections than Republicans are and have been for well over a hundred years.
00:21:34.320
It would seem to me our issue here, getting right back to what Vivek talked about at the top of that
00:21:39.120
debate, is our political organization, which right now tactically compared to the Democrats is very,
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today. My friend, Faith Moore, whose maiden name is Clavin, though of course she has no relation to
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her father, Andrew Clavin, or her brother, Spencer Clavin. She has written a new rendition of the age-old
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Christmas classic, Christmas Carol, except this time, it's with a K. Hmm? It's a modern twist on
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the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, except with a female protagonist. In a world where boss babes are
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championed at the expense of family, Faith is making the case that having what matters is far
00:23:37.060
better than having it all. Christmas Carol, now available to order. It's just a perfect story.
00:23:42.640
Perfect story for our time. Give it to any conservative woman in your life. Give it to
00:23:47.420
especially any liberal woman in your life. And the fellows are going to like it too.
00:23:52.100
Order yours on Amazon or wherever you get your books today.
00:23:54.980
James Carville, who is the funny sound and funny looking Democrat strategist of many decades now.
00:24:05.320
James Carville's take on why Republicans keep losing these abortion propositions on the ballots
00:24:12.640
Well, I think voters said that they don't like being lied to. They did it in Kansas. They tried
00:24:17.860
to change the wording. They tried to confuse people. They tried to rig the election day. Frank LaRoe,
00:24:23.820
the Secretary of State in Ohio, is one of the great liars that ever lived. And people were
00:24:29.720
fundamentally didn't want a 50-year right taken away from them. They particularly didn't want
00:24:35.260
to have a rigged system against it. And it backfired and it blew up in their face.
00:24:41.580
They keep lying. All right. And they say, well, gee, Glenn Youngkin says, oh my, it's a 15-week ban.
00:24:47.040
That's not what we're talking about. No one trusts them on this issue.
00:24:51.080
Okay. So Carville, look, he's a Democrat talking point machine. And much of what he's saying is
00:24:58.160
dishonest and hyperbolic and all the rest. But there is a kernel of truth here. The kernel of truth is
00:25:05.320
that the conservative argument on abortion, the conservative desire, the conservative goal
00:25:12.800
is not merely to leave the issue to the states. A lot of conservatives said it for many, many years.
00:25:19.360
We just want to overrule Roe v. Wade so that we can restore our democracy and return the matter of
00:25:24.440
whether or not we should sacrifice our children to Moloch to the states where the matter belongs.
00:25:30.780
Yes, that's right. Look, some states are going to protect their innocent little babies.
00:25:35.800
And some states are going to sacrifice them to Moloch in the most gruesome and painful ways.
00:25:41.080
And look, whatever you choose is totally fine. We just support choice and freedom and freedom of
00:25:46.340
choice and choice of freedom and states and democracy and procedure. All we really care
00:25:53.800
about is procedure. We don't care about the substance at all. Keep your baby, kill your baby.
00:25:57.480
We don't care. We just want you to have the choice. No. No, that is not my understanding of what a
00:26:05.560
conservative believes about the protection of innocent life. We had to get Roe v. Wade overruled
00:26:12.960
because it created a ridiculous, unconstitutional license to abortion.
00:26:19.560
But now we need to ban it. We just got to ban it, man. It's really bad. It's bad to kill
00:26:25.380
kids. And it doesn't help anybody. And it hurts a lot of people. It doesn't help the mothers who
00:26:31.120
are exploited by the abortion industry. It leaves them with trauma for the rest of their lives,
00:26:35.700
rightly so, because they killed their kids. And you can move past trauma and you can be forgiven
00:26:40.240
and receive absolution. But the psychological effect of that sticks with people for a long time.
00:26:46.360
It doesn't help even the abortionists who enrich themselves by slaughtering babies.
00:26:51.340
Maybe it pads their bank accounts with blood money, but it doesn't help their souls. And it
00:26:55.520
leads them on the path to hell. And it leads our country on the path to hell, terrestrial and
00:26:59.500
even after we all shake off this mortal coil. It doesn't help our nation, even just as a matter of
00:27:07.260
national strength. Even if all you care about is GDP, slaughtering a generation of people is not
00:27:12.460
going to help you grow GDP. It's not going to help you grow social solidarity. It's not going to help
00:27:16.860
you love your neighbor and come together and be united. It's just awful everywhere. It's just
00:27:22.620
intrinsically extremely evil. And so that's the argument. The argument is stop killing innocent
00:27:29.660
babies. That's the whole argument. It's not, you don't need to wrap yourself into logical pretzels
00:27:36.200
and misread all sorts of enlightenment philosophers. And no, don't kill kids. It's just
00:27:41.720
amazing how you ask an ordinary Joe on the street, hey, you think it's cool to kill a kid? You think
00:27:47.000
that's all right? No, I think that's immoral. Yeah, okay. I think you're probably right. But you ask
00:27:51.240
some PhD egghead Looney Tune with five Ivy League degrees who's worked in fancy offices all their lives,
00:27:59.600
and they'll explain to you in a 20-minute lecture how it's actually a really good thing to kill children.
00:28:04.680
Nah. So in a way, Carville has a point. You're right. We got to be honest. And the honesty is,
00:28:11.960
yes, we want to protect babies all the time because human life matters and people have a right to life.
00:28:20.200
And they, at the very least, have a right to due process if they're going to be deprived of their
00:28:24.200
right to life, which innocent little babies are not currently afforded. Speaking of persuading people,
00:28:28.840
I spoke at the University of Buffalo in the spring of this year. And I speak at a lot of
00:28:37.080
campuses around the country every single year, even as the administrations try to shut down a lot of
00:28:41.620
those. And that's been happening this semester as well. Still, I go there and we face protests from
00:28:48.760
students sometimes. I was just at Cornell. There was a small protest. We face protests from outside
00:28:56.780
activists, anarchists, Antifa. Sometimes there's more of them. In Pittsburgh, they burned me in
00:29:01.340
effigy and threw an explosive at the building when I walked on stage. But the craziest part is we face
00:29:06.600
protests from the administrations of these universities, even public universities. We face
00:29:10.940
protests from the politicians. And when I spoke at University of Buffalo, you had not only the U Buffalo
00:29:16.900
administration, you had the SUNY, State University of New York administration. You had the governor of New
00:29:21.780
York, Kathy Hochul, come out against me, attack me before I ever spoke. And I was speaking on the
00:29:28.160
subject of men and women being different. I was giving a lecture on a subject that everyone should
00:29:34.680
have been taught in kindergarten at the absolute latest and should be uncontroversial after that
00:29:39.000
point. These days we're very confused. So I gave a speech on that very basic, I think broadly ought to
00:29:43.940
be an offensive point. And we had protests from everybody. And then the school chapter of the Young
00:29:50.340
America's Foundation was canceled afterward. The Young America's Foundation chapter was threatened
00:29:56.460
with removal. They had to sue. YAF had to sue. The Alliance Defending Freedom had to sue. And now
00:30:01.760
the student who brought me, Conor Ogrijok, testified before the House Judiciary Committee
00:30:08.800
in front of Jim Jordan and other members of Congress. Imagine how far our country's fallen that this young
00:30:15.240
man had to testify before the United States Congress on why conservatives ought to be allowed to speak
00:30:26.360
If those who were involved in this mob were able to result to fear tactics and violence without
00:30:31.340
consequence, what is keeping a pattern of this despicable behavior from being set and executed
00:30:36.180
repeatedly? This thought remained on my mind throughout the planning of a March 2023 event that I hosted as
00:30:42.080
Chairman, featuring Michael Knowles. This event would grow to gain more pushback than any event
00:30:46.760
on campus in the previous four years and provide the most clear-cut examples of freedom of speech
00:30:52.340
violations. This pushback included delays in contract signing from UB's Student Association
00:30:57.600
that deviated far from their outlined standard course of action, condemnation of the event by a local
00:31:02.980
New York State senator and multiple Western New York-based organizations, a circulated petition
00:31:08.420
constructed by three university professors calling for the cancellation of the lecture,
00:31:13.100
which gained thousands of student signatures, a forced venue change orchestrated not only by
00:31:18.180
university administration this time, but voted on by a SUNY council, a multitude of threats and torn
00:31:23.480
literature, and even a tweet from Governor Kathy Hochul on the day of the event calling comments from
00:31:28.360
Michael dehumanizing. The decry of this event garnered a responding statement from university
00:31:33.340
president Satish Trapathy explaining that the constitution protects speech on campus, quote,
00:31:38.240
no matter how noxious the content, end quote. It goes on. The rest of the testimony is worth
00:31:44.440
listening to. It would be hilarious if it weren't actually happening. This would be a Monty Python sketch.
00:31:51.420
This would be Saturday Night Live bit decades ago. Conservative wants to come to campus
00:31:58.340
to explain that boys and girls are different. And every elected politician, they lose their minds,
00:32:05.880
they call it egregious, and then the students who had the audacity to bring the conservative speaker
00:32:09.860
are basically tarred and feathered and run out of town by those very same authorities.
00:32:15.420
This is a scandal. This is a national scandal. What do we do about it? Well, obviously, we should defund,
00:32:23.140
we should vote these people out of office if possible. We should defund the universities that do this
00:32:27.540
kind of stuff, if possible. But I don't want to sound like I'm a utopian or I'm some idealist here.
00:32:33.680
I know that Kathy Hochul's not going to do that. I know that the New York state government,
00:32:37.680
even though there is a decent Republican representation there, it's not going to do that.
00:32:42.660
We're not going to have a Republican governor there, certainly not with a unified government,
00:32:47.800
anytime soon. So what conservatives have to do is to seek to establish and fund our own schools.
00:32:55.340
I was talking about the Trump proposal for the American Academy the other day. A lot of people
00:33:02.860
didn't like it. They said, we don't want government funding for our schools. We don't want an explicitly
00:33:07.040
pro-conservative school. No, we do, actually. We do. That's how the libs have managed to attain
00:33:12.040
a reasonable degree of cultural hegemony in recent years, is they took over the existing institutions,
00:33:17.580
and then they fired all their enemies, and then they routed all of their student enemies,
00:33:22.060
and then they hired all of their friends, and then they got a ton of government funding,
00:33:26.520
and then they changed the rules such that they could basically never lose power because they
00:33:30.800
were in charge of hiring, and they were in charge of firing, and they were in charge of the kangaroo
00:33:34.700
courts that kick out conservatives for bogus reasons. And we need to do that. We shouldn't do
00:33:41.460
anything unjust. We shouldn't do anything immoral. But playing within the extant rules of politics is
00:33:48.100
not necessarily unjust. Being clever is not necessarily unjust. We are told to be wise as
00:33:56.000
serpents and innocent as doves. And very often conservatives are wise as doves and innocent as
00:34:01.200
serpents. That was Vivek's big complaint at the top of the debate yesterday, and he was absolutely right.
00:34:05.920
That's what we have to do. We're not going to be able to defund you, Buffalo, for the madness,
00:34:12.700
the persecution they put Connor and the other students through. Okay, well then we need to,
00:34:18.440
when we have any modicum of political power, we need to establish, fund, and protect our own
00:34:23.520
institutions to compete against them and rout those maniacs out of power. Now, speaking of building our
00:34:30.120
own institutions, I mentioned earlier at the top of the show, yesterday was pretty great, guys,
00:34:35.620
because we launched a company that I first conceived of about 15 years ago, and it's called
00:34:42.840
Mayflower Cigars. I've smoked cigars most of my life. They're very important to me. I wrote my
00:34:50.640
college admissions essay about how much I love cigars. One of my most cherished possessions is a
00:34:55.660
box of cigars that my mother gave me, made by the factory, coincidentally, that all these years later
00:34:59.140
is making the Mayflower Cigars. I got my job. I got my Daily Wire show because I wrote a cigar column
00:35:06.300
that impressed Jeremy and Caleb. So anyway, after pitching the guys for years on starting a cigar
00:35:10.680
company, probably mostly to shut me up, they said, okay, Michael, Daily Wire, we'll start a cigar
00:35:15.540
company with you, and it will be Mayflower Cigars, and you can do whatever you want with it,
00:35:19.540
and we did. And so the product is absolutely magnificent. I was very confident. I had very
00:35:24.560
rosy expectations because, you know, all of the Daily Wire products are terrific, if I do say so
00:35:32.380
myself. You know, the entertainment products, the political products, the consumer products,
00:35:36.380
but often we're reacting against somebody. So we'll just be punching, you know, some lib company or some
00:35:43.320
lib politician or whatever. When it comes to cigars, this is purely a labor of love. You know,
00:35:49.440
there's no woke tobacco out there. This is just purely a labor of love. And I said, all right,
00:35:55.380
we're just going to make a very, very, very high-quality product at what I consider to be
00:36:00.480
the best factory in Nicaragua, in Esteli, Nicaragua, what I consider to be the cigar capital
00:36:03.720
of the world right now. It's going to be an excellent product with an excellent brand at a
00:36:07.340
very competitive price. We could have sold this for much more money, but I said, no, I want this to be
00:36:11.140
really accessible to cigar smokers, people like me who are not going to shell out 30, 40 bucks a cigar
00:36:16.800
every single day, but who can get a very high-quality product. So anyway, I had high expectations.
00:36:23.200
You all completely blew my expectations out of the water. This cigar essentially sold out. It
00:36:29.420
mostly sold out within something like eight hours. It is almost certainly going to be completely sold
00:36:36.140
out by the end of this show today. I'm talking about the handful of little extra five packs we
00:36:40.100
had lying around. When I say sold out, I mean we sold four months of inventory in less than 24 hours.
00:36:45.300
Our partners, who are, to my mind, the best in the business, told us they're astonished they've
00:36:50.360
never seen anything like this. Our distributor told us this was the best first-day cigar launch
00:36:53.800
they've ever had. We are ramping up shipments from Nicaragua to meet this unprecedented demand.
00:36:59.500
This is an aged product, so I am not going to rush production. Premium cigars, especially these cigars,
00:37:05.580
require aging. So I'm not going to rush a product and have it not be at the absolute top of quality
00:37:11.060
standards. We do have some product that is properly aged that we're now trying to get out
00:37:14.640
of Nicaragua, get up here as quickly as possible. So it's going to come back online. Some of them
00:37:18.880
have already, and you can, I think, pre-order again now at mayflowercigars.com. If you want to
00:37:24.560
try the cigars, if you want them for Thanksgiving, if you want them for Christmas, obviously great for
00:37:27.540
Thanksgiving. Order them now. Whatever comes available, just order it. Even if it's not exactly
00:37:33.220
the box you wanted, even if it's not exactly the pack you wanted. Once the next supply is gone,
00:37:39.160
I don't know when we're going to be able to restock. So whatever comes online, if you want
00:37:43.760
to try the cigar, which I highly recommend you do, just get it, pre-order it, and also sign up for
00:37:48.860
updates so that you can be the first to know when products are back in stock. My favorite comment
00:37:55.260
yesterday is from Rohi Clem. Oh, you know what? I should point out, I should point out. When you go
00:38:02.560
to mayflowercigars.com, do not forget that you have to be 21 years old or older, and some exclusions
00:38:08.600
apply. My favorite comment yesterday is from Rohi Clem, 871. I can't believe that you guys spent
00:38:14.880
a decade building a media conglomerate just as a front for your cigar company. Clever.
00:38:20.140
That's what it's all about, man. You know, that's what we do at Daily Wire. We kind of,
00:38:25.700
when other people are zigging, we zag. Subvert expectations. Yes, it's about restoring our
00:38:31.940
republic. Yes, it's about transforming the conservative movement from squishes to solid,
00:38:36.480
solid, rock-ribbed people. Also, it's about making really excellent cigars. That's true.
00:38:44.300
Speaking of establishing institutional control, really sad story coming out of the UK.
00:38:50.240
It seems these stories come out of the UK every six months now. There's a baby who is very, very ill,
00:38:56.860
who is an eight-month-old little baby who has been granted Italian citizenship and admission to a
00:39:07.060
Vatican hospital because the parents don't want to kill the baby. They want to continue treatment for
00:39:12.700
their precious, beloved child. And the UK government says, no, we're going to kill that baby.
00:39:18.800
No, it's pointless. It's expensive to keep the baby alive. It's pointless. You know,
00:39:24.280
it's just going to, the baby's just going to die at some point. So let's just kill the baby now.
00:39:30.020
And this is the baby Indy Gregory. The parents say, no, no, that's awful.
00:39:36.620
And Prime Minister Giorgio Maloney in Italy says, okay, we're going to grant the baby Italian
00:39:41.960
citizenship so that the baby has a right to come to Italy. The Vatican, the Holy See says,
00:39:47.700
we are going to grant the baby admission to a Bambino Gesù hospital so that we can treat the baby.
00:39:53.460
You in the UK don't want to treat the baby. We will treat the baby. Just bring the baby over here.
00:39:57.240
The UK judge says, nope, kill the kid. It means the UK is now essentially executing an Italian citizen
00:40:06.180
against the wishes of Italy, up to and including the Prime Minister.
00:40:12.560
More to the point, the UK government is executing a baby against the wishes of the Pope and the baby's
00:40:25.320
parents. It's just awful. It's just absolutely evil. And the hardest part here, other than the death and
00:40:35.640
sadness and grief, the hardest part politically is that the judge probably doesn't know. The judge
00:40:41.740
probably doesn't realize how bad this is. There are a lot of liberals who probably don't realize
00:40:45.880
how bad this is. Because in their mind, what they're saying is, look, this eight-month-old baby,
00:40:50.820
terminally ill baby. The baby's not going to survive very long anyway. So like, what's the point?
00:40:55.620
You're just wasting money and the baby might feel some pain. Maybe. And pain is the worst thing in the
00:41:00.880
world. And suffering is the greatest evil ever. And the whole point of life is to just feel pleasure.
00:41:06.280
And if you can't just live forever, then you might as well just die and be killed.
00:41:11.960
There are a lot of people who think that, consciously or unconsciously. And there are so many
00:41:16.920
false philosophical, anthropological, and theological premises just wrapped up in those
00:41:24.420
flippant statements and those glib intuitions. But people are not conscious of that. That is the
00:41:30.380
consequence of a liberal culture. I totally understand how the UK judge came to that
00:41:37.120
conclusion. Well, he's going to die anyway. Might as well be now. Yeah, well, you're going to die
00:41:40.840
anyway, judge. Should we kill you now? I'm going to die someday. Should we just kill me now?
00:41:47.840
Well, the boy's going to feel pain. Yeah, you feel pain, don't you? Well, should we kill you the next
00:41:51.440
time you feel pain so you don't feel pain anymore? Well, no, come on. You know, it's just the,
00:41:55.560
it's just the what? Well, you know, the baby's going to die soon. Yeah, maybe. You might die
00:42:00.820
soon. You might walk across the street, get hit by a bus. Well, you know, it's just, it's very
00:42:06.140
expensive. Okay. Well, when I think about all the money that we waste, that we waste in our country,
00:42:11.160
in the UK, everywhere, money that we waste on stupid consumer goods or misguided social services,
00:42:22.180
quote unquote, that actually end up hurting people. When I think about the money that we waste on just
00:42:25.900
on the, on the gender transition surgeries, gender transition, which is completely preposterous,
00:42:31.640
doesn't achieve a thing, doesn't help these people feel better, is not in alignment with reality,
00:42:37.880
only harms people, violates the Hippocratic Oath, but it's extremely expensive. We waste a ton of money
00:42:42.460
on that so-called medical intervention, but we can't spend a little extra money to keep this baby
00:42:47.580
alive a few more days. You won't even let the baby go seek treatment elsewhere.
00:42:52.180
That's the consequence of a liberal religion, of a liberal, it's not a religion. A religion is a
00:43:01.480
habit of virtue that inclines the will to give to God what he deserves. It's, it's, it's a false
00:43:05.880
imitation of a religion. It's an ideology. And in as much as a country loses its religion,
00:43:13.360
it's going to fall into this stuff because people act with prejudice necessarily. People don't just
00:43:20.720
consciously think about every single thing they're going to do. Should I have pancakes or waffles
00:43:25.060
this morning? Well, let me examine the benefits and costs of each. Let me write a long essay
00:43:30.480
comparing the pros and cons. Let me consider the ingredients and what that will mean. No,
00:43:34.740
no one, you just, I don't know, you say, I don't know, I guess we'll eat pancakes today.
00:43:37.700
We eat pancakes on Tuesdays. That's what we're going to do. Well, people have the same habitual
00:43:41.880
behaviors and prejudices when it comes to moral calculation. So you never, you could pass a law,
00:43:49.860
that would be a good start to say, no, don't kill babies in the UK or elsewhere. But ultimately,
00:43:55.640
Tim Scott is right. It's the moment of the debate that went totally, almost totally unnoticed,
00:44:01.060
but it's probably the best part of that debate last night when Tim Scott said, look, our country
00:44:05.920
just is Christian. Our country is Christian or it's not our country. It'll be a different country.
00:44:11.160
There are plenty of countries that are not Christian and it'll just be like one of those.
00:44:15.020
But if we want our country, even if you're not Christian, even if you don't think you're Christian
00:44:19.780
or you don't consciously believe in this stuff, if you like the way our country has been in the past
00:44:26.220
up until the present, you can't throw out the animating spirit that animates the country as the
00:44:35.140
soul animates the body. Speaking of, it's Theology Thursday. So the rest of the show continues now.
00:44:40.280
You do not want to miss it. Become a member. Use code KnollSkin at WLAS to check out for two months