The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 1400 - Secret Jewish Tunnels Discovered Under New York

00:00:00.000 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.

00:00:14.080 I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:00:30.000 Welcome back to the show. In a moment, we'll get to the pro-Palestine protesters vandalizing U.S. military cemeteries and blocking highways.

00:00:44.820 First, though, we have to get to the Jewish tunnel in Brooklyn. Today is it? It's January 9th. It was pretty quick. 0.63

00:00:52.720 And 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.

00:01:04.020 I don't know. There are a lot of crazy headlines these days.

00:01:06.280 Yes, there is a secret Jewish tunnel in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

00:01:10.580 And we at The Michael Knowles Show have obtained exclusive footage, actually, of the extent of these tunnel networks.

00:01:20.420 Roll the tape.

00:01:22.720 That kicks a little bit.

00:01:30.140 Wait a second. What's underneath that side?

00:01:34.520 Oh, wait a second. It's hundreds of Chabadniks dancing to EDM music. That's amazing. 1.00

00:01:40.960 I don't know. I think we need to verify that footage. I'm not sure that that is.

00:01:45.620 Okay, we've got other footage, though. The footage came out last night.

00:01:49.140 And this is in the worldwide headquarters of Chabad.

00:01:52.460 Now, for those of you who did not grow up in New York, as I did, you probably don't know what Chabad is.

00:01:58.960 And you probably don't know very much about all the different factions of Jews.

00:02:02.060 Having grown up in New York, where most of my friends were Jews, and most people just around me were Jews,

00:02:08.320 I am fairly well acquainted with the distinctions between the Chabad Lubavitch Jews, which these are the ones with the shul in the tunnel. 0.72

00:02:18.400 Then there's another group that kind of look like them, which is the Haredi Jews, sometimes called the ultra-Orthodox Jews.

00:02:24.580 Then there are the Reformed Jews. They're the ones who aren't all that religious, but, you know, they eat a lot of bagels or something.

00:02:31.920 Then there are the conservative Jews who take the religion a little bit more seriously.

00:02:36.420 Then there are just all these different distinctions.

00:02:39.060 And the one we're talking about here is Chabad.

00:02:42.740 This whole story reminds me of one fact, which is I really like the Chabadnics. 1.00

00:02:52.400 And the story is not just a local story about New York.

00:02:56.700 The story is not just sensationalist and silly because it's really weird.

00:03:01.360 The story actually has political import for all of us because I think everybody can learn a political lesson from the Chabadnics. 1.00

00:03:09.660 The reason I like the Chabadnics is not just because they're personally very charming people. 0.99

00:03:14.720 It's because they have been able to maintain tradition and a coherence within their community

00:03:25.540 and big families and political power that they can wield in their communities while also thriving in modernity.

00:03:36.520 They've done something that a lot of people have struggled to do,

00:03:40.020 and it's a lesson that any traditional sort of person might be able to copy.

00:03:47.000 Apparently, what was going on in this tunnel story is there's a debate over who has the rights to operate the Chabad headquarters.

00:03:57.600 And there are two groups.

00:03:58.720 There is the Chabad International, call it, you know, the global organization.

00:04:02.960 And then there's this group of particularly zealous, I suppose, it's being reported as messianic kind of Chabadnics, 0.99

00:04:09.680 students who had come in and were insisting on digging this thing.

00:04:12.720 So something that would deflate a lot of the conspiracy theories that I've seen floating around,

00:04:18.880 I 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,

00:04:25.280 people are open to these sorts of things.

00:04:27.020 But I think something that deflates some of the theories about the Chabadnics in Brooklyn is

00:04:32.800 it was one group of the Chabadnics that ordered the tunnel to be filled in the first place. 1.00

00:04:38.700 It's not as though there was just this unified movement to dig a secret tunnel.

00:04:44.180 It 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.

00:04:52.180 And so then they call in the cops and they try to fill in this thing.

00:04:56.480 And this intra-Chabad battle will go on and on and on.

00:05:01.140 But even with that, one, it shows you that all political communities have these debates and these factions and these rival parties.

00:05:06.640 But broadly speaking, these guys dress in a respectable way.

00:05:12.600 They take their religion seriously.

00:05:14.400 They have big families.

00:05:16.560 They, even when there is factionalism, they operate in a way that is politically cohesive and effective.

00:05:22.200 That's something we should all seek to emulate, I think, even if we don't dig the tunnels,

00:05:28.300 which is generally probably a bad idea and might threaten the buildings around them.

00:05:31.500 All in all, a story that I find very, very delightful.

00:05:35.060 Now, speaking of faith, there's a new Morning Consult poll out that says that faith in democracy remains very strong.

00:05:44.700 I think this poll is total BS.

00:05:48.300 So you look at it and you can see all the little tabs.

00:05:50.960 And not only does Morning Consult believe that faith in democracy in America remains strong,

00:05:56.040 it's faith in democracy everywhere that they take the polls, all of the countries that they survey.

00:06:02.140 Okay, all well and good.

00:06:04.900 Except that, as the Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule points out, democracy means two things in America,

00:06:13.460 two things that are contrary to one another.

00:06:16.160 When 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.

00:06:25.720 We conservatives listen to that.

00:06:27.740 We say, what are you, you're saying it's democratic to stop the people from voting for their favorite candidate?

00:06:32.900 Yeah, and the liberals really believe that that is democratic.

00:06:35.460 They believe that democracy and liberalism are synonymous.

00:06:40.200 Even though liberalism is a minority ideology, it can be deeply, deeply unpopular, and then it's imposed from above.

00:06:50.700 And it is a totalitarian ideology, I guess you would say.

00:06:55.180 It infiltrates every aspect of life.

00:06:57.460 That's how it's managed to corrode, not just federalism, not just constitutional protections, but it's corroded even the family.

00:07:05.780 It'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.

00:07:20.260 That's no good.

00:07:21.000 That's not how I refer to democracy.

00:07:22.560 When I say I support democracy, what I mean is I support the people voting for whom they want to vote for.

00:07:30.360 That's a very different meaning of democracy.

00:07:32.400 So I just don't think this poll means anything at all.

00:07:36.420 It's similar to saying, hey, do you support freedom?

00:07:41.000 You could ask me, a rather conservative person, do you support freedom?

00:07:44.800 I say, of course I support freedom. 0.98

00:07:45.840 You could ask some crazy purple hair doing a bunch of drugs who's in, you know, a lesbian thruple with three dudes and a billy goat. 1.00

00:07:55.120 And you would say, do you support freedom? 0.98

00:07:57.700 And she would say, of course I support freedom.

00:07:59.960 But we would think that the other one does not support freedom because we have different understandings of freedom.

00:08:05.160 The lib would believe that freedom is the ability to do whatever you want, particularly following your base passions.

00:08:10.820 And I would believe the opposite.

00:08:11.960 I would say that true freedom is disciplining your base passions and following your rational will and bringing that into accord with the divine will.

00:08:20.120 That true freedom is the right to do what we ought, not the ability to do what we wish at our lowest levels.

00:08:26.520 Those are totally in conflict.

00:08:28.000 But a morning consult survey that said, do you all support freedom?

00:08:31.100 Say 100% of people support freedom.

00:08:33.020 100% of people support democracy.

00:08:34.660 And the centrists are going to sit back here and say, okay, good.

00:08:38.760 The guardrails hold, no big deal.

00:08:40.400 The guardrails are not holding right now.

00:08:43.080 This is happy talk.

00:08:44.360 This is papering over a fundamental difference.

00:08:46.820 And it gets down to a number one national bestselling book that I recommend that everyone read called Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.

00:08:53.860 Thank you.

00:08:54.160 Because all this happy talk is papering over a battle over language.

00:09:03.180 Whose definition of democracy is going to prevail?

00:09:06.020 For all of human history, democracy was the political order that the people want.

00:09:11.420 The liberals have totally perverted that meaning.

00:09:13.500 They will go on TV with a straight face.

00:09:15.360 They will say, we've got to legally prohibit Donald Trump from appearing on a ballot in order to save democracy.

00:09:23.100 We've got to overturn the Trump administration after he wins in 2016 to save democracy.

00:09:28.400 Oh, no, the Hungarians are electing Viktor Orban.

00:09:31.120 He's a threat to democracy.

00:09:32.680 Georgia Maloney is a threat to democracy. 1.00

00:09:34.160 The Brexit's a threat to democracy.

00:09:35.760 All these things that the people keep voting for, it's a threat to democracy.

00:09:38.580 Who's going to win that battle over the word?

00:09:41.360 It's a very, very powerful word.

00:09:43.200 It still has so much currency.

00:09:44.480 But for all intents and purposes, it no longer means what it traditionally has meant, what it actually means.

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00:11:10.780 Speaking of democracy, the Supreme Court will hear the case about Trump being kicked off the ballot in Colorado.

00:11:15.980 The court agreed to review the unprecedented decision, and that's a very good thing.

00:11:22.660 But we can't just rest easy on that.

00:11:26.140 We can't just say, well, the guardrails are certain to hold.

00:11:29.840 There's no way.

00:11:30.680 Wouldn't it be so crazy if the Supreme Court didn't let the most popular presidential candidate in the country on the ballot? 0.94

00:11:36.240 I don't know.

00:11:37.100 Strange things have been happening in recent years.

00:11:39.320 Wouldn't it be so crazy to shut down the entire world over a cough?

00:11:44.200 Wouldn'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?

00:11:53.840 Wouldn't that be just nuts?

00:11:54.940 Wouldn'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?

00:12:03.920 Wouldn't that be so crazy?

00:12:04.740 And then it just happens.

00:12:06.400 So I am not convinced that the Supreme Court is going to do the right thing here because the Supreme Court pays attention to the polls.

00:12:12.340 The Supreme Court reads the news.

00:12:14.440 The 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.

00:12:25.240 Sam Alito had to go into hiding.

00:12:26.640 Yeah, I think that the political pressure might be too much for them.

00:12:35.900 And 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.

00:12:42.340 Not 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.

00:12:52.700 Well, the political pressure we need to bring to bear is.

00:12:55.980 It has to be just.

00:12:57.340 It has to be moral.

00:12:58.160 But it's got to be effective.

00:12:59.240 So one thing we could do, I suggested it on the show the other day.

00:13:02.020 It was not an original idea.

00:13:03.320 I thought it was a brilliant idea, but I can't take credit for it.

00:13:05.920 I heard it from lowercase g, lowercase k over here, Mr. Jeremy Boring, and he said, you know what the conservatives have to do?

00:13:12.020 We need a conservative governor and specifically a conservative secretary of state to kick Biden off the ballot. 1.00

00:13:17.660 I'm sure there's some reason to kick Biden off the ballot.

00:13:20.100 We're in totally uncharted territory here.

00:13:22.440 We 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.

00:13:31.520 And let's say you don't even want to figure out why to kick Biden off the ballot.

00:13:36.540 You could probably kick Kamala off the ballot pretty easily, right, using the argument of the left.

00:13:42.580 The 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.

00:13:52.700 He told people to be very peaceful.

00:13:54.860 He told people to go home when they were demonstrating at the Capitol.

00:13:58.040 The whole Capitol riot to begin with wasn't even in the top dozen insurrections that have ever taken place at the Capitol,

00:14:04.260 the vast majority of which were left-wing in nature.

00:14:07.640 And then when the guys did get into the Capitol, a lot of them were given private tours by the Capitol Hill police.

00:14:12.220 It was just total BS.

00:14:13.520 They didn't have weapons.

00:14:14.560 The only person who was killed in the political violence that day was a pro-Trump person who was shot by a trigger-happy cop.

00:14:19.720 So what's the argument for kicking Kamala off the ballot?

00:14:23.100 The argument for kicking Kamala off the ballot is that she raised money to bail out violent criminals during the George Floyd riots. 0.87

00:14:31.020 She wasn't bailing out the peaceful protesters.

00:14:33.440 She was bailing out the violent criminals who got arrested for breaking the law.

00:14:36.760 So kick her off the ballot. 1.00

00:14:39.300 Easy enough, right?

00:14:40.320 And then you've broken up the Democrat ticket, and it's going to go up to the Supreme Court.

00:14:45.880 And then the Supreme Court has the political cover to say, all right, we're not kicking anybody off the ballot.

00:14:51.380 The people will have their say, which is all we want in the first place.

00:14:55.320 I don't really care about kicking Kamala Harris off the ballot. 0.92

00:14:57.460 Frankly, I'd put her at the top of the ticket because she's one of the worst politicians I've ever seen. 1.00

00:15:00.520 But we've got to at least engage in the political realities according to justice and according to morals.

00:15:11.440 But we've got to do it.

00:15:12.400 In a battle, your opponent has a say.

00:15:15.360 And that's what we're looking at here.

00:15:17.380 Well, I'm glad to report some people have heeded the call.

00:15:22.020 The Missouri Secretary of State, Jay Ashcroft, is now threatening to remove Biden from the ballot.

00:15:28.240 If the Supreme Court does not reverse Colorado's decision.

00:15:32.620 So this is according to a report from NBC.

00:15:35.060 And I really, really applaud Secretary of State Ashcroft here.

00:15:39.160 I think this is great news.

00:15:40.700 My only quibble with it is I think you've got to be more aggressive about it.

00:15:45.120 I don't think it is that.

00:15:46.980 I 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.

00:15:56.920 In fact, in a way, that might make the situation more tense.

00:16:00.320 That might raise the heat.

00:16:01.560 What I'm trying to do is lower the heat here.

00:16:03.800 Okay, 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.

00:16:19.920 We don't want to get into that situation.

00:16:21.340 That's civil war territory.

00:16:22.680 So you know what?

00:16:23.900 Look, hey, sorry, Democrats, but do you really want that?

00:16:26.400 Look, the Republicans are already kicking Biden off the ballot.

00:16:28.460 You really want that just so that you can kick Trump off in Colorado, which he's not going to win anyway?

00:16:32.440 I don't think so.

00:16:33.560 I don't think, okay, we're just going to back off this thing.

00:16:35.880 No one gets kicked off the ballots.

00:16:37.260 That's what I would do.

00:16:38.500 I'm not a Secretary of State in Missouri or anywhere else.

00:16:42.320 Governor DeSantis has floated this idea.

00:16:44.020 He said, I'm having my administration look into whether or not we ought to kick Joe Biden off the ballot.

00:16:49.780 He said this just a couple of days ago.

00:16:51.320 So it's bubbling up.

00:16:52.860 I'm glad to see that Republican politicians are taking this seriously.

00:16:56.740 But I think this would be a case where a half measure is worse than no measure at all.

00:17:01.740 I think a half measure has the potential to make this a much more volatile situation.

00:17:06.600 If 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.

00:17:15.440 We'll just give the Democrats what they want in Colorado and maybe in Maine, where Trump was also kicked off the ballot.

00:17:20.340 Then 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.

00:17:28.340 The 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.

00:17:33.660 I think sometimes you've got to have peace through strength, as Ronald Reagan would say.

00:17:39.040 You'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.

00:17:49.260 Speaking 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.

00:18:04.420 This 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.

00:18:20.180 And then there's an editor's note here on this op-ed.

00:18:22.080 It says, the DeSantis campaign vigorously denies this assertion.

00:18:25.120 This op-ed has been updated to include the following statement from the campaign.

00:18:28.260 Ron DeSantis is in this for the long haul.

00:18:29.820 Okay, I think both statements are correct, actually.

00:18:37.080 I think it is likely that if DeSantis loses Iowa, that he will drop out.

00:18:40.960 But 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.

00:18:49.620 The reason for this is, I spoke to a friend of mine who is very familiar with presidential campaigns.

00:18:56.380 And he told me, we were going back through some of the older presidential campaigns, 2012, when this candidate dropped out and this candidate.

00:19:04.260 I said, well, I think he dropped out for this reason, and he dropped out for that reason.

00:19:08.100 And my friend said, Michael, presidential campaigns end for one reason and one reason only, because they run out of money.

00:19:17.780 That's why they end.

00:19:18.740 That's why people, because they can't go on any further.

00:19:21.240 Now, DeSantis had raised a ton of money.

00:19:23.660 DeSantis campaign also burned a ton of money.

00:19:25.660 But if the DeSantis campaign looks at Iowa, sees that they're going to lose, and who knows, maybe they'll pull a huge upset.

00:19:34.320 And then looks at New Hampshire, sees for sure they're going to lose.

00:19:37.420 And then looks at this state, and this state, and this state.

00:19:40.600 The 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.

00:19:46.780 They'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.

00:19:53.480 They'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.

00:20:02.020 We'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.

00:20:09.440 And it's going on for a really long time, and nothing has really happened.

00:20:12.180 The 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.

00:20:24.900 Now, 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.

00:20:34.400 We'll get to those in just one second.

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00:20:51.140 I said, okay, so it was just pasta.

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00:21:53.480 Nikki 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.

00:22:05.260 And 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,

00:22:18.020 he 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.

00:22:21.760 And, you know, some of us appear to have been proven correct in that prediction.

00:22:26.420 Nikki Haley is facing the problem that was always going to crop up because it's also her strength.

00:22:33.160 Nikki'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.

00:22:44.580 She has the backing of the Koch network.

00:22:46.720 She was a relatively moderate governor in South Carolina.

00:22:51.040 Also, she worked for Donald Trump.

00:22:52.620 She was the U.N. ambassador.

00:22:54.040 She brought it to the bad guys every day, and Trump feted her as she left the administration and said,

00:22:59.980 oh, Nikki, you're welcome back whenever.

00:23:01.240 You're so great.

00:23:01.800 We love you.

00:23:03.100 And that's a really hard tightrope to walk, and she's managed to do it pretty well.

00:23:08.840 But it does lead to certain contradictions.

00:23:11.600 So there was a town hall in Iowa.

00:23:14.520 Now we're days away from the Iowa caucuses.

00:23:16.400 Nikki Haley was asked what her opinion is on Social Security reform.

00:23:23.940 Here is an unfortunate answer.

00:23:27.780 So Governor DeSantis is hitting you for claiming the retirement age is, quote, way, way too low.

00:23:33.260 He said, quote, I don't know why she's saying that.

00:23:36.760 So are you saying that?

00:23:38.260 Where do you stand on that?

00:23:38.880 I never once said that.

00:23:41.020 Well, wait, wait, wait, wait.

00:23:41.900 In Bloomberg interview, you said anyone who says they'll leave America bankrupt, Social Security will go bankrupt, Medicare will.

00:23:49.660 So we don't touch anyone's retirement.

00:23:51.200 But go to people like my kids in their 20s and tell them the rules haven't changed.

00:23:55.420 Change the retirement age to reflect life expectancy.

00:23:59.300 Yes.

00:23:59.660 Okay.

00:24:00.920 So it's a little bit of a tricky one.

00:24:03.740 And Brett Baer here, he's a very good journalist.

00:24:05.840 So he tests to see if Nikki is going to give a nuanced answer on DeSantis' accusation.

00:24:17.540 Nikki Haley wants to raise the retirement age for Social Security. 0.61

00:24:20.860 She's going to gut entitlements. 1.00

00:24:23.300 And Nikki says, I absolutely have never said that.

00:24:26.120 And then he says, well, hold on.

00:24:27.800 You did.

00:24:28.540 Because I have this statement.

00:24:30.080 And I'm sure, we don't have the rest of the clip, I'm sure Nikki had a masterful response to that.

00:24:35.440 And she probably would have said, I'm almost certain I'm right about this.

00:24:38.800 I haven't even seen the rest of her answer.

00:24:40.740 She 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.

00:24:47.460 But the Social Security fund is going to go bankrupt.

00:24:50.440 And 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.

00:24:58.820 Okay, fair enough.

00:25:00.600 That was the answer that we heard 2010, 2011, 2012.

00:25:05.300 That was a big motivator of at least the more mainstream establishment wing of the Tea Party movement.

00:25:15.740 The reason that the Koch network backed the Tea Party movement was because they were real fiscal hawks.

00:25:20.500 And they said, we've got to shrink the budget.

00:25:22.100 We've got to reform entitlements.

00:25:24.080 There was another side of the Tea Party movement, which was a little bit more populist and was a little bit more grassroots.

00:25:29.380 Which 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. 1.00

00:25:48.640 That 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. 1.00

00:25:58.600 I mean, I think that was a big motivator. 0.99

00:26:00.820 And the two parts of the Tea Party movement didn't always line up in motivation or aim.

00:26:06.580 But at least the Beltway Circuit, the intellectual think tank version of the Tea Party movement, they wanted entitlement reform.

00:26:15.180 And the Trump movement and the conservative movement in the year of our Lord, 2024, has no appetite for entitlement reform.

00:26:23.060 They don't want it.

00:26:24.160 And the people in the first group, they're going to say, well, it's just because you guys don't understand basic economics.

00:26:31.240 You can't do math. 0.98

00:26:32.280 You dummies, you just want something for nothing. 1.00

00:26:34.120 You're becoming like the leftists. 0.92

00:26:35.220 But 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.

00:26:47.100 Let's have a social truce until we can deal with the true menace facing our society, which is the national debt.

00:26:53.100 We have to fix our fiscal house, and then we can deal with the cultural issues.

00:26:57.900 And that didn't work.

00:26:59.320 We elected the Tea Party Congress.

00:27:00.780 We elected Republicans in the Senate.

00:27:02.660 We didn't manage to oust Barack Obama.

00:27:05.320 We elected a lot of Republicans around the country, and nothing happened.

00:27:09.760 And what we began to realize was you couldn't fix the economic problems before you fix the cultural problems.

00:27:18.680 Actually, 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.

00:27:28.760 You can't just throw us all into a computer and fix all the financial problems and then deal with the cultural problems.

00:27:36.480 We're cultural.

00:27:37.220 Even the inside of Andrew Breitbart, the politics is downstream of culture, in a way gets at that point.

00:27:42.260 And the conservatives had learned that lesson.

00:27:44.280 They had taken it to heart by 2016.

00:27:45.960 They said, no, we're going to fix migration first.

00:27:48.700 We're going to fix the family first.

00:27:50.260 We're going to fix the sexual confusion first.

00:27:52.740 We're going to fix the role of Washington, D.C. in our political life first.

00:27:59.060 We're going to fix subsidiarity and federalism first.

00:28:02.080 We're going to fix our communities first.

00:28:03.640 And then and only then will we even be able to think about these financial problems.

00:28:09.280 So what's it going to be for Nikki Haley?

00:28:13.120 Her only role in the race is to be the more centrist, more clubbable 2010, 2012 style Republican. 0.90

00:28:23.800 That's her only role.

00:28:25.740 Even if she wants to be the newer kind of Republican, that was the DeSantis trap. 1.00

00:28:30.120 If you try to be too much like Trump in a race against Trump, you're going to lose because you've got the original.

00:28:35.500 Nobody wants new Coke.

00:28:36.800 They want Coke classic, even if in a blind taste test, they prefer the taste of new Coke.

00:28:42.460 So Nikki is going to have to have to carry on that line. 1.00

00:28:45.360 The 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.

00:28:54.580 Are there enough Republicans who don't like the new flavor of conservatism that came up in 2016?

00:29:06.500 Are there enough Republicans who want to go back to that 2010-2012 consensus?

00:29:12.880 Maybe.

00:29:14.060 Maybe.

00:29:15.400 Politics is kind of slow, and we often run one or two cycles behind.

00:29:19.580 If the new hip thing in 2012 is the Tea Party, who do we nominate?

00:29:23.460 We nominate Mitt Romney.

00:29:25.280 This is the guy who invented Obamacare, okay?

00:29:27.260 So maybe, I actually think Nikki Haley does in fact have a chance, but she's going to face more uncomfortable questions like that.

00:29:34.140 Speaking of changing priorities, good news out of the Vatican yesterday.

00:29:38.400 Pope Francis condemned surrogacy.

00:29:41.100 There 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.

00:30:04.140 And there's this kind of odd book.

00:30:05.920 I won't even get into it because a lot of it seems even kind of obscene.

00:30:09.120 And so there was, anyway, there was bad news coming out.

00:30:13.040 Catholics were feeling a little bit low.

00:30:15.040 And then, all of a sudden, we got this good news from Pope Francis.

00:30:19.840 And 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.

00:30:35.280 He's not just talking about IVF here, which is totally condemned and unacceptable, according to Catholic teaching.

00:30:42.820 He'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. 0.82

00:30:52.180 It's not even just that, it's not just, you know, the commercialization, it's all of it.

00:31:00.160 Pope Francis says,

00:31:00.900 I 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.

00:31:14.440 Pope Francis goes on to say, the child is a gift and, quote, never the basis of a commercial contract.

00:31:22.040 And he has called for a global ban on surrogacy, quote, to prohibit this practice universally, to prohibit what he calls, quote, uterus for rent.

00:31:34.560 Totally, totally right here.

00:31:37.500 Three cheers for what the Holy Father has said, very, very important.

00:31:41.400 And 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.

00:31:54.380 Because it's a new bioethical issue.

00:31:58.080 We don't have 2,000 years of experience of surrogate motherhood.

00:32:02.520 It's just a development that came about because of modern technology.

00:32:06.820 So a lot of people don't know how to think about it bioethically.

00:32:09.220 And in our modern culture, even many conservatives have just accepted, as if by osmosis, so many premises of liberalism and the commercialization of everything.

00:32:22.720 We don't think about it, but that's just the world we live in.

00:32:25.700 And 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.

00:32:35.760 But Pope Francis says it very well here.

00:32:38.000 He says, a child is never the basis of a commercial contract.

00:32:44.400 It is a grave violation of the dignity of the human person to do this.

00:32:48.340 Even when there are the best of intentions.

00:32:50.440 Even when it's a couple struggling with infertility.

00:32:52.600 We briefly went through it.

00:32:54.980 Fortunately, there was a very mild intervention that worked, and so it was no big deal.

00:33:00.120 But 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.

00:33:06.000 And people will say, well, look, if a couple's struggling with infertility, what's the big deal of using a surrogate?

00:33:11.740 The big deal is you are treating a child as a commodity to be purchased rather than a gift from God.

00:33:18.500 The only person who can be said to have any rights when it comes to procreation is the child.

00:33:23.440 And 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.

00:33:31.920 Okay?

00:33:32.540 And the more we tinker around with this, the worse things are going to be.

00:33:39.200 Because 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.

00:33:48.220 A good example, I think, of this is a lawsuit that came up just this year.

00:33:53.060 It 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. 0.80

00:34:05.460 And they got an egg in a way that's extremely invasive and all extremely expensive, by the way.

00:34:10.320 And then whoopsie-daisy, they mixed things up, and they created a child with the wrong sperm and egg. 1.00

00:34:16.580 So 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.

00:34:25.520 I don't know, whatever.

00:34:26.460 But this was a case of a human being was created whose parents had never met.

00:34:34.360 And whose parents, I believe in this case, were married to other people.

00:34:36.740 At least one of them was.

00:34:37.460 I think both of them were.

00:34:38.620 What do you do about that person?

00:34:41.020 Well, it's a fringe case.

00:34:42.180 Yeah, it's a fringe case because you've engaged in an action that is intrinsically disordered and gravely immoral.

00:34:47.620 And so what do you say?

00:34:48.220 Well, you know, look, well, if this happens one time out of a thousand, that's just life, right?

00:34:52.760 No, 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.

00:35:03.460 A person is never a property to be purchased and owned.

00:35:07.320 You've disrespected the rights of a person, and you've done so for the best of intentions.

00:35:11.920 Sure, the road to hell is paved with very good intentions.

00:35:15.700 And this is a great clarification.

00:35:19.480 It's sad that it's even necessary, but it's a good clarification from Pope Francis.

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00:36:04.140 My favorite comment yesterday is from Cheeky Chimp, who says,

00:36:07.880 Aliens in Miami?

00:36:09.180 I prefer the more politically correct term, Californians.

00:36:12.920 That's fair enough.

00:36:14.100 That's a good point.

00:36:16.020 I assumed you would say, you know, Hondurans or something like that.

00:36:19.200 But no, California, actually, you're right.

00:36:20.360 There's probably a greater mass migration of Californians into Florida than there are of foreign nationals.

00:36:26.820 Very true.

00:36:28.080 Speaking of weird sex stuff, it's that time of day. 0.95

00:36:30.140 We should just have a segment on this show.

00:36:32.280 Every day or every other day, you know, it's a five-minute segment.

00:36:34.680 Weird sex stuff.

00:36:35.220 There is a scintillating story going around.

00:36:40.020 This is what we've been waiting for.

00:36:42.520 The Jeffrey Epstein files are going to be unsealed.

00:36:46.400 We're going to find out all this new, juicy information.

00:36:49.120 Some of us told you at the end of last year, this was just a week ago, that we weren't going to get any really new information.

00:36:58.140 No, Michael, we are.

00:36:59.500 And next day, they say, we are.

00:37:00.700 We're getting, we're going to find out about Prince Andrew.

00:37:03.860 Oh, 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.

00:37:15.440 Oh, okay.

00:37:15.880 We're going to find out about Bill Clinton.

00:37:17.580 Do you know, this is one of the juicy tidbits, Bill Clinton likes young women. 0.99

00:37:23.140 Oh, stop the presses.

00:37:25.460 Okay, well, now we got new stuff.

00:37:26.540 Epstein documents allege sex tapes of Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, and Richard Branson.

00:37:36.920 This 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.

00:37:46.880 Ms. Ransom later said she made up the tape's existence.

00:37:49.700 Okay, now, I don't know.

00:37:51.240 Maybe that's true.

00:37:51.820 Maybe Hillary sent some goons after this lady. 1.00

00:37:54.640 Maybe not.

00:37:55.200 I tend to think if Hillary sends goons after you, you don't generally live to tell the tale. 0.99

00:38:00.860 But maybe, maybe.

00:38:02.520 And so then she goes to the cops and she says, I have all these tapes in my possession.

00:38:10.500 Now, are there secret sex tapes of at least some Epstein clients?

00:38:19.940 Maybe including Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, and Richard Branson?

00:38:23.300 Yeah, I bet so.

00:38:24.260 I 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.

00:38:37.860 Guaranteed.

00:38:39.300 The tapes exist.

00:38:40.300 But is it these tapes?

00:38:45.660 Does this woman, this Epstein accuser, who obviously got kind of messed up as a young gal, does she have those tapes? 0.87

00:38:53.000 I kind of doubt it.

00:38:54.700 I 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.

00:39:02.940 She 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.

00:39:14.700 So this is just according to her in 2019.

00:39:17.320 What do you believe?

00:39:18.120 Do you believe her in 2017 and then they intimidated her and she recanted because she didn't want them to kill her?

00:39:24.020 Or 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?

00:39:34.540 And 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.

00:39:44.640 I, 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.

00:39:58.760 Well, I think it's the latter.

00:40:01.400 I think she was a scared, confused woman who had a kind of traumatic upbringing and she made it up and then she admitted she made it up.

00:40:10.920 I think that's true for a lot of this testimony.

00:40:13.000 All of this testimony, the unsealed Epstein documents, it's all just testimony.

00:40:19.700 Isn't that convenient?

00:40:20.960 It's all just stuff that could be false.

00:40:23.860 It's all just, some of which has, the accusers have admitted was false.

00:40:29.080 Now, to me, it's just so convenient.

00:40:31.240 The only people we're hearing about really are the ones that we already knew about.

00:40:36.200 And 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.

00:40:45.420 They're not the conclusions of an investigation.

00:40:48.500 They're just what some lady said.

00:40:52.220 Witnesses who may or may not be credible.

00:40:54.640 I just think the whole thing is a limited hangout. 0.91

00:40:57.360 I think it's all fake and silly to get us all chattering.

00:41:01.280 Ooh, ooh, I think we finally got to the bottom of this Epstein thing.

00:41:05.000 No, we didn't.

00:41:05.900 No, we didn't.

00:41:07.180 The bottom of the Epstein thing is who was he working for?

00:41:09.760 In whose service did he cultivate these relationships, operate the weird sex mansions and islands, and film the tapes?

00:41:16.920 Who, if anyone, was he blackmailing?

00:41:21.240 And more importantly, in whose service was he doing the blackmailing?

00:41:26.260 That's what this is about.

00:41:27.300 And none of the Epstein news of the last two weeks has gotten us one inch closer to finding out that information.

00:41:36.960 Very, very convenient.

00:41:39.560 Okay, one more, at least, weird sex stuff story.

00:41:42.900 I don't know, sometimes these stories come in droves.

00:41:46.860 The World Health Organization has picked someone, among others, to set guidelines for how they will approach child sex mutilations. 0.97

00:41:58.060 And one of the people that they picked is a lunatic transvestite. 0.98

00:42:05.060 Remember 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? 0.98

00:42:18.860 Well, guess what I did about it?

00:42:21.460 Oh, yeah, I got a be gay, do crimes tattoo about it. 1.00

00:42:25.940 That's what I did about it. 0.67

00:42:29.020 If they thought that was going to get me to back down, they know nothing at all about me.

00:42:35.860 No, no, no, no, no. 0.89

00:42:37.020 Their hatred just makes me be gay and do crime even harder, including by now having a permanent be gay, do crimes tattoo on my arm. 0.99

00:42:48.420 Be gay, do crime. 1.00

00:42:51.400 That is the mandate that came from the liberals, right? 0.98

00:42:54.080 But 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. 0.99

00:43:14.180 And 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. 0.98

00:43:30.260 I guess it makes perfect sense that they would pick this person. 0.99

00:43:35.080 Call me old-fashioned, call me crazy. 0.68

00:43:37.820 Shouldn't the first requirement for a position in public health be that you are not a crazy person?

00:43:46.620 Shouldn't the job requirement, and there should be others, this would be necessary but not sufficient, include sanity?

00:43:53.720 You 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.

00:44:08.360 But 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. 0.88

00:44:16.740 It's often the case that psychologists are the craziest people out there.

00:44:22.440 Maybe it's because people with a kooky psychology are disproportionately drawn to the field of psychology.

00:44:27.360 I don't know.

00:44:27.900 But in any case, these are not the sort of people who should be running public health.

00:44:32.080 It 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.

00:44:44.680 Not 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.

00:44:52.400 Weird how that works.

00:44:53.740 The rest of the show continues.

00:44:54.960 Now, you do not want to miss it.

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00:44:56.340 Use code NOLSK, N-W-L-E-S, at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

00:44:59.920 Thank you.

00:45:14.680 Thank you.

The Michael Knowles Show - January 09, 2024

Ep. 1400 - Secret Jewish Tunnels Discovered Under New York

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