Not one but two factions of Orthodox Jews clashed in Crown Heights yesterday, among themselves and with the NYPD, over what to do about the secret Jewish tunnel in Brooklyn. What's going on there? And why are they fighting over it?
00:00:00.000Not one but two factions of Orthodox Jews clashed in Crown Heights yesterday, among themselves and with the NYPD, over what to do about the secret Jewish tunnel in Brooklyn.
00:00:14.080I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:00:30.000Welcome back to the show. In a moment, we'll get to the pro-Palestine protesters vandalizing U.S. military cemeteries and blocking highways.
00:00:44.820First, though, we have to get to the Jewish tunnel in Brooklyn. Today is it? It's January 9th. It was pretty quick.
00:00:52.720And the story broke on the 8th. We got eight days into 2024 before we got to the craziest headline I've read in weeks, at least, I guess.
00:01:04.020I don't know. There are a lot of crazy headlines these days.
00:01:06.280Yes, there is a secret Jewish tunnel in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
00:01:10.580And we at The Michael Knowles Show have obtained exclusive footage, actually, of the extent of these tunnel networks.
00:03:58.720There is the Chabad International, call it, you know, the global organization.
00:04:02.960And then there's this group of particularly zealous, I suppose, it's being reported as messianic kind of Chabadnics,
00:04:09.680students who had come in and were insisting on digging this thing.
00:04:12.720So something that would deflate a lot of the conspiracy theories that I've seen floating around,
00:04:18.880I know because, you know, the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth is six months when it's Dr. Fauci and all these guys saying it,
00:04:25.280people are open to these sorts of things.
00:04:27.020But I think something that deflates some of the theories about the Chabadnics in Brooklyn is
00:04:32.800it was one group of the Chabadnics that ordered the tunnel to be filled in the first place.
00:04:38.700It's not as though there was just this unified movement to dig a secret tunnel.
00:04:44.180It was this group of students who were digging it, contrary to the wishes of the people who had the legal right to operate the school.
00:04:52.180And so then they call in the cops and they try to fill in this thing.
00:04:56.480And this intra-Chabad battle will go on and on and on.
00:05:01.140But even with that, one, it shows you that all political communities have these debates and these factions and these rival parties.
00:05:06.640But broadly speaking, these guys dress in a respectable way.
00:06:04.900Except that, as the Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule points out, democracy means two things in America,
00:06:13.460two things that are contrary to one another.
00:06:16.160When the Libs talk about democracy, in the same breath, they will talk about how important it is to kick Donald Trump off the ballot and stop people from being allowed to vote for him.
00:06:57.460That's how it's managed to corrode, not just federalism, not just constitutional protections, but it's corroded even the family.
00:07:05.780It's corroded even local rule, and it just, it's like an acid that you pour on society until everything is just divided up and alienated into the atomic individual.
00:08:11.960I would say that true freedom is disciplining your base passions and following your rational will and bringing that into accord with the divine will.
00:08:20.120That true freedom is the right to do what we ought, not the ability to do what we wish at our lowest levels.
00:08:44.360This is papering over a fundamental difference.
00:08:46.820And it gets down to a number one national bestselling book that I recommend that everyone read called Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
00:09:44.480But for all intents and purposes, it no longer means what it traditionally has meant, what it actually means.
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00:11:37.100Strange things have been happening in recent years.
00:11:39.320Wouldn't it be so crazy to shut down the entire world over a cough?
00:11:44.200Wouldn't it be so crazy to shut down churches and synagogues in New York, actually, in that neighborhood that we were just talking about, over a cough and suspend fundamental constitutional rights?
00:11:54.940Wouldn't it be crazy to change all the election rules in the weeks before a presidential election in a way that totally advantages the opposition, supposedly opposition political party, the Democrats?
00:12:14.440The Supreme Court doesn't want the Democrats sending any more assassins to go kill them like the Democrats did in the case of Brett Kavanaugh, like the Democrats did in the case of all the conservative justices.
00:12:26.640Yeah, I think that the political pressure might be too much for them.
00:12:35.900And so what the conservatives have to do, the rest of us who are not on the Supreme Court, we have got to bring political pressure to bear on the other side.
00:12:42.340Not the Democrat kind of political pressure, which is where you go send assassins after your enemies, whether the assassins are a BLM mob or the assassins are some loony tune from California trying to kill a Supreme Court justice.
00:12:52.700Well, the political pressure we need to bring to bear is.
00:13:03.320I thought it was a brilliant idea, but I can't take credit for it.
00:13:05.920I heard it from lowercase g, lowercase k over here, Mr. Jeremy Boring, and he said, you know what the conservatives have to do?
00:13:12.020We need a conservative governor and specifically a conservative secretary of state to kick Biden off the ballot.
00:13:17.660I'm sure there's some reason to kick Biden off the ballot.
00:13:20.100We're in totally uncharted territory here.
00:13:22.440We are in an unprecedented political situation, but there's probably some reason, and it's probably a better reason than the nonsense they're cooking up to kick Trump off the ballot.
00:13:31.520And let's say you don't even want to figure out why to kick Biden off the ballot.
00:13:36.540You could probably kick Kamala off the ballot pretty easily, right, using the argument of the left.
00:13:42.580The left is saying that Donald Trump engaged in an insurrection, and they're a little fuzzy on the evidence for how he engaged in an insurrection because he didn't go take over the Capitol.
00:15:46.980I don't think it is sufficient to say, okay, if the Supreme Court declines to overturn the case, then we're going to kick Biden off the ballot.
00:15:56.920In fact, in a way, that might make the situation more tense.
00:16:01.560What I'm trying to do is lower the heat here.
00:16:03.800Okay, I think you've got to bring that political pressure to bear before the case is decided so that the Supreme Court can say, okay, look, we don't really want to get into this game where the party candidates are only appearing on the ballots in their respective states where their parties have a majority.
00:16:19.920We don't want to get into that situation.
00:16:52.860I'm glad to see that Republican politicians are taking this seriously.
00:16:56.740But I think this would be a case where a half measure is worse than no measure at all.
00:17:01.740I think a half measure has the potential to make this a much more volatile situation.
00:17:06.600If we just wait, if we make little, mild, meek threats, and then the Supreme Court says, all right, there's not enough pressure coming from the right.
00:17:15.440We'll just give the Democrats what they want in Colorado and maybe in Maine, where Trump was also kicked off the ballot.
00:17:20.340Then all of a sudden, the Republicans are going to want retribution, and you might really end up in a situation where the red states have the Republican on the ballot.
00:17:28.340The blue states have the Democrat on the ballot, and we're just going to duke it out, and no one's going to accept the results of the election.
00:17:33.660I think sometimes you've got to have peace through strength, as Ronald Reagan would say.
00:17:39.040You've got to bring that pressure early, make clear that the threat is legitimate, and then we can move on and have a semi-normal election.
00:17:49.260Speaking of these early primaries, The Hill, which is a center-left-ish news outlet, is reporting in an op-ed, so this is an opinion piece, that DeSantis will drop out after Iowa.
00:18:04.420This op-ed from The Hill says, I've heard from two people very familiar with the DeSantis campaign, a major donor and a high-level political operative, that if the Florida governor loses the Iowa caucuses to former President Trump, as expected on the night of January 15th, he will either drop out of the race that night or make his announcement the next morning.
00:18:20.180And then there's an editor's note here on this op-ed.
00:18:22.080It says, the DeSantis campaign vigorously denies this assertion.
00:18:25.120This op-ed has been updated to include the following statement from the campaign.
00:18:28.260Ron DeSantis is in this for the long haul.
00:18:29.820Okay, I think both statements are correct, actually.
00:18:37.080I think it is likely that if DeSantis loses Iowa, that he will drop out.
00:18:40.960But I also believe that the DeSantis campaign is telling the truth, which is that the campaign is going to stay in it as long as it can.
00:18:49.620The reason for this is, I spoke to a friend of mine who is very familiar with presidential campaigns.
00:18:56.380And he told me, we were going back through some of the older presidential campaigns, 2012, when this candidate dropped out and this candidate.
00:19:04.260I said, well, I think he dropped out for this reason, and he dropped out for that reason.
00:19:08.100And my friend said, Michael, presidential campaigns end for one reason and one reason only, because they run out of money.
00:19:18.740That's why people, because they can't go on any further.
00:19:21.240Now, DeSantis had raised a ton of money.
00:19:23.660DeSantis campaign also burned a ton of money.
00:19:25.660But if the DeSantis campaign looks at Iowa, sees that they're going to lose, and who knows, maybe they'll pull a huge upset.
00:19:34.320And then looks at New Hampshire, sees for sure they're going to lose.
00:19:37.420And then looks at this state, and this state, and this state.
00:19:40.600The only way they could even possibly make a claim to be able to compete in some of these states is to spend oodles and oodles of cash.
00:19:46.780They're not going to be able to raise any more money when the donors smell blood in the water, and the campaign will end then.
00:19:53.480They'll be in it for the long haul, but circumstances have a way of forcing the hand of candidates, and it can happen really quickly.
00:20:02.020We've just gone through, what, 16, 18 months already of candidates running or signaling that they're going to run or starting to raise money.
00:20:09.440And it's going on for a really long time, and nothing has really happened.
00:20:12.180The minute that voting starts, the minute you see the Iowa caucuses, the minute you see some of those early primary states, things are going to winnow pretty quickly, I think.
00:20:24.900Now, there's a new number two candidate in the race, at least according to some polls, but that candidate is facing some problems now as well.
00:20:34.400We'll get to those in just one second.
00:20:35.780First, though, I've got to talk to you about what I had for dinner last night, which would be Good Ranchers.
00:21:53.480Nikki Haley's campaign is feeling pretty good because a lot of people wrote them off in the early days of the campaign, and DeSantis looked as though he were the only Republican who could possibly unseat Donald Trump.
00:22:05.260And then some of us suggested early on that Nikki Haley's a very talented politician who would be able to last pretty long in the race, and that DeSantis, in part because he's so good, in part for the reasons that make him so likable and admirable,
00:22:18.020he was going to have a very hard time in the race and was going to be a man without a home, and he'd go away.
00:22:21.760And, you know, some of us appear to have been proven correct in that prediction.
00:22:26.420Nikki Haley is facing the problem that was always going to crop up because it's also her strength.
00:22:33.160Nikki's strength is she has a ton of centrist establishment cred, and she has played very well with the right of her party sometimes too.
00:22:44.580She has the backing of the Koch network.
00:22:46.720She was a relatively moderate governor in South Carolina.
00:24:30.080And I'm sure, we don't have the rest of the clip, I'm sure Nikki had a masterful response to that.
00:24:35.440And she probably would have said, I'm almost certain I'm right about this.
00:24:38.800I haven't even seen the rest of her answer.
00:24:40.740She would say, well, no, what I'm saying is I certainly will not raise the retirement age for people who are at retirement or even anywhere close to retirement.
00:24:47.460But the Social Security fund is going to go bankrupt.
00:24:50.440And so if we want our children who have been paying into it to have any Social Security at all, we need to raise the retirement age and reform entitlements.
00:25:24.080There was another side of the Tea Party movement, which was a little bit more populist and was a little bit more grassroots.
00:25:29.380Which was just an anger that the government under Barack Obama was becoming tyrannical, that it was spinning out of control, that it was being wielded against political enemies, that our basic freedoms and traditions were being upended, that our border was being blown wide open.
00:25:48.640That we weren't being respected, that our president now was sneering, was looking down his nose on those bitter, clinging, Bible-thumping rubes and idiots who just have to go away.
00:25:58.600I mean, I think that was a big motivator.
00:26:00.820And the two parts of the Tea Party movement didn't always line up in motivation or aim.
00:26:06.580But at least the Beltway Circuit, the intellectual think tank version of the Tea Party movement, they wanted entitlement reform.
00:26:15.180And the Trump movement and the conservative movement in the year of our Lord, 2024, has no appetite for entitlement reform.
00:26:35.220But I think the conservatives who have moved on from entitlement reform for now actually have an important point, which is that in 2010, we were told, put the social issues on ice.
00:26:47.100Let's have a social truce until we can deal with the true menace facing our society, which is the national debt.
00:26:53.100We have to fix our fiscal house, and then we can deal with the cultural issues.
00:27:02.660We didn't manage to oust Barack Obama.
00:27:05.320We elected a lot of Republicans around the country, and nothing happened.
00:27:09.760And what we began to realize was you couldn't fix the economic problems before you fix the cultural problems.
00:27:18.680Actually, all those Wall Street geniuses and all those think tankers, many of whom were wearing bow ties and tweed, they weren't right about the fundamental premise of how politics and human nature works.
00:27:28.760You can't just throw us all into a computer and fix all the financial problems and then deal with the cultural problems.
00:28:36.800They want Coke classic, even if in a blind taste test, they prefer the taste of new Coke.
00:28:42.460So Nikki is going to have to have to carry on that line.
00:28:45.360The question is now in a race where potentially DeSantis gets out relatively soon, in a race where Chris Christie will be out, in a race where who knows what happens with the vague.
00:28:54.580Are there enough Republicans who don't like the new flavor of conservatism that came up in 2016?
00:29:06.500Are there enough Republicans who want to go back to that 2010-2012 consensus?
00:29:41.100There have been some other unfortunate things that have come out of the Vatican, an embarrassing book about using all sorts of bizarre sexual language from the person who is now the head of the dicastery for the doctrine of the faith, once called the Holy Office, once called the Inquisition, you know, the doctrinal office of the Catholic Church.
00:30:05.920I won't even get into it because a lot of it seems even kind of obscene.
00:30:09.120And so there was, anyway, there was bad news coming out.
00:30:13.040Catholics were feeling a little bit low.
00:30:15.040And then, all of a sudden, we got this good news from Pope Francis.
00:30:19.840And it's worth repeating because the people who think that Pope Francis is just purely a liberal, the kind of liberal left-wing atheists who applaud Pope Francis without reading everything that he has to say, they're going to try to paper over this one, but it's important.
00:30:35.280He's not just talking about IVF here, which is totally condemned and unacceptable, according to Catholic teaching.
00:30:42.820He's not just talking about certain kinds of surrogacy, homosexual couples renting out a womb, which is a phrase that Pope Francis uses, uterus for rent.
00:30:52.180It's not even just that, it's not just, you know, the commercialization, it's all of it.
00:31:00.900I deem deplorable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child based on the exploitation of situations of the mother's material needs.
00:31:14.440Pope Francis goes on to say, the child is a gift and, quote, never the basis of a commercial contract.
00:31:22.040And he has called for a global ban on surrogacy, quote, to prohibit this practice universally, to prohibit what he calls, quote, uterus for rent.
00:31:37.500Three cheers for what the Holy Father has said, very, very important.
00:31:41.400And the fact that Pope Francis has some cachet among liberals and non-Catholics and non-Christians and big-lib atheists, I hope will allow this message to resonate more.
00:31:58.080We don't have 2,000 years of experience of surrogate motherhood.
00:32:02.520It's just a development that came about because of modern technology.
00:32:06.820So a lot of people don't know how to think about it bioethically.
00:32:09.220And in our modern culture, even many conservatives have just accepted, as if by osmosis, so many premises of liberalism and the commercialization of everything.
00:32:22.720We don't think about it, but that's just the world we live in.
00:32:25.700And as a fish is unaware of the water in which he swims, so too we are unaware of so much of the liberalism and the commercialism and the materialism that we walk around in.
00:32:35.760But Pope Francis says it very well here.
00:32:38.000He says, a child is never the basis of a commercial contract.
00:32:44.400It is a grave violation of the dignity of the human person to do this.
00:32:48.340Even when there are the best of intentions.
00:32:50.440Even when it's a couple struggling with infertility.
00:32:54.980Fortunately, there was a very mild intervention that worked, and so it was no big deal.
00:33:00.120But for a couple years we went through it, and so I know how profoundly painful that can be, what a strain that can put on marriages.
00:33:06.000And people will say, well, look, if a couple's struggling with infertility, what's the big deal of using a surrogate?
00:33:11.740The big deal is you are treating a child as a commodity to be purchased rather than a gift from God.
00:33:18.500The only person who can be said to have any rights when it comes to procreation is the child.
00:33:23.440And the child has a right to his natural mother and father join together in holy matrimony and to be the product of the conjugal act of his parents.
00:33:32.540And the more we tinker around with this, the worse things are going to be.
00:33:39.200Because we will be, and we are not even aware of this, but we will be establishing the domination of technology over the very origin and destiny of human life.
00:33:48.220A good example, I think, of this is a lawsuit that came up just this year.
00:33:53.060It was back in April, I think it was, where a couple struggling with infertility went to one of these quack doctors, and, you know, they managed to collect the sperm in a way that is gravely immoral.
00:34:05.460And they got an egg in a way that's extremely invasive and all extremely expensive, by the way.
00:34:10.320And then whoopsie-daisy, they mixed things up, and they created a child with the wrong sperm and egg.
00:34:16.580So this is not just even a case of embryos being mixed up, and, you know, the black baby comes out of the Chinese lady, and, you know, white baby comes out of the Mongolian lady.
00:34:48.220Well, you know, look, well, if this happens one time out of a thousand, that's just life, right?
00:34:52.760No, you've created a human being because you've reversed the order of responsibility of a parent to child, and you've treated people like property to be purchased.
00:35:03.460A person is never a property to be purchased and owned.
00:35:07.320You've disrespected the rights of a person, and you've done so for the best of intentions.
00:35:11.920Sure, the road to hell is paved with very good intentions.
00:37:00.700We're getting, we're going to find out about Prince Andrew.
00:37:03.860Oh, the guy that we already know about, the guy that we've known about for years, he actually lost his job working for his mom because we know so much about his relationship with Epstein.
00:37:26.540Epstein documents allege sex tapes of Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, and Richard Branson.
00:37:36.920This woman, the accuser, Sarah Ransom, claims that her friend was approached by special agents sent directly by Hillary Clinton, who ruffled her up after she went to police with her accusations.
00:37:46.880Ms. Ransom later said she made up the tape's existence.
00:38:24.260I don't know about those guys in particular, but certainly Jeffrey Epstein videotaped his very wealthy, influential, powerful clients doing weird sex stuff with underage girls.
00:38:54.700I kind of doubt it because in 2019, this is what, two years after she made these accusations, this woman told the New Yorker that the tapes were made up.
00:39:02.940She said that she made this up to raise intrigue into Epstein's affairs and to convince Jeffrey Epstein that she had evidence that would come out if he harmed me.
00:39:14.700So this is just according to her in 2019.
00:39:18.120Do you believe her in 2017 and then they intimidated her and she recanted because she didn't want them to kill her?
00:39:24.020Or do you believe that the whole reason she said that she had these tapes was to create a kind of dead man's switch and give herself some apparent leverage so that they wouldn't kill her?
00:39:34.540And then when she's talking to the police, it is difficult to lie to the police and the story fell apart and she said, okay, that didn't really happen.
00:39:44.640I, someone who believes that there are sex tapes of all these weirdos on Epstein Island, I, who have believed the Jeffrey Epstein story long before many mainstream voices believed in it, I don't think these tapes are real.
00:40:31.240The only people we're hearing about really are the ones that we already knew about.
00:40:36.200And all of the stories that we're hearing, titillating, scintillating that they may be, can easily be denied because they're not findings of a court.
00:40:45.420They're not the conclusions of an investigation.
00:41:39.560Okay, one more, at least, weird sex stuff story.
00:41:42.900I don't know, sometimes these stories come in droves.
00:41:46.860The World Health Organization has picked someone, among others, to set guidelines for how they will approach child sex mutilations.
00:41:58.060And one of the people that they picked is a lunatic transvestite.
00:42:05.060Remember when, like, libs of TikTok, Jordan Peterson, and et cetera, got really pissed at me for saying, as a criminal law professor, I feel compelled to tell you to be gay, do crimes on my TikTok?
00:42:51.400That is the mandate that came from the liberals, right?
00:42:54.080But certainly within the last six or seven years, everything that said, be gay, do, read gay porn in elementary schools, be, have pride marches everywhere, have coming out day, have guidance counselors and teachers keep all the weird sex stuff that the kids are up to that they're being encouraged to do from their parents.
00:43:14.180And also do crime, and it's unrelated to the gay stuff, but go out there, rob, loot, pillage, burn, set courthouses on fire, do, just do a bunch of crime and kill dozens of people because of BLM and racial justice and be gay and do crime.
00:43:30.260I guess it makes perfect sense that they would pick this person.
00:43:37.820Shouldn't the first requirement for a position in public health be that you are not a crazy person?
00:43:46.620Shouldn't the job requirement, and there should be others, this would be necessary but not sufficient, include sanity?
00:43:53.720You have to be saying, I don't even mean this to mock, obviously this person's completely nuts, and some of it has to do with his or her, whatever, you know, behavior and discipline or lack thereof.
00:44:08.360But some of it might just be this person was born with a little bit of a screw loose and didn't receive support from the community and so ended up this way.
00:44:16.740It's often the case that psychologists are the craziest people out there.
00:44:22.440Maybe it's because people with a kooky psychology are disproportionately drawn to the field of psychology.
00:44:27.900But in any case, these are not the sort of people who should be running public health.
00:44:32.080It seems that when it comes to the way our liberal political order is structured, the people who are running the show are the very last people who should be in those positions of power.
00:44:44.680Not just that they're a little unqualified, they're like the very last, they're the opposite of the people who should have those jobs.