Ep. 152 - Buh-Bye-Atollah! Trump Scraps Iran Deal, Obama Legacy
Summary
Trump withdraws from the Iran deal, John Kerry cries, and anti-Pope Rihanna shows up in a bedazzled cassock and mitre to last night s Met Gala. Plus, more good news out of the federal government.
Transcript
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President Trump announced today that the United States is withdrawing from the Iranian nuclear deal,
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torching the sole foreign policy achievement of Barack Obama
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and relegating Mr. Obama's entire legacy to the dustbin of history.
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Mmm, oh, those are salty, those are good, those taste just...
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Then, more good news out of the federal government.
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Shockingly, showing up on time and under budget.
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Finally, anti-Pope Rihanna shows up in a bedazzled cassock and mitre to last night's Met Gala,
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Heavenly Bodies, Fashion, and the Catholic Imagination.
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We will discuss the danger this poses to the culture, but not the danger that Iran poses,
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Before we get to any of that, you know, back in the old administration,
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My fellow Americans, today I want to update the world on our efforts to prevent Iran from
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The Iranian regime is the leading state sponsor of terror.
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It exports dangerous missiles, fuels conflicts across the Middle East, and supports terrorist
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proxies and militias, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda.
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Over the years, Iran and its proxies have bombed American embassies and military installations,
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murdered hundreds of American service members, and kidnapped, imprisoned, and tortured American
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The Iranian regime has funded its long reign of chaos and terror by plundering the wealth
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He's been calling his former co-workers and allies abroad.
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Former Secretary of State John Kerry, what is your comment on this deal?
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Can you kiss a pretty girl, Peppy boy, Peppy boy?
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I am wished to enlist in the foreign legions so I may forget.
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I need 10 more Leftist Tears Tumblers, Colton, please.
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In his honor, I think we have to play the Klavan happiness montage in Drew's absence.
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We're going to win with healthcare and for our veterans.
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We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
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You say, please, please, it's too much winning.
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It's a clavin-less week, but it turned out to be a pretty good clavin-less week.
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You know, I never listen to Pod Save America because I value the cognitive faculties that I have.
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But today, I'm probably going to have to make an exception
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It's all the, like, 16-year-olds that used to work in the Obama White House and destroyed our country.
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And, oh, man, I'm going to just bring my tumblers to the iPod today and just pour them right into.
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I'm going to have to, obviously, bring in a MAGA hat for Ben tomorrow.
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I haven't broken that one out for him in a while, but going to have to bring it in.
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I'll just pass him out to everyone here at the Daily Wire.
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I might sprout a John Bolton mustache just to celebrate.
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I might will it in just all the covfefe forces in me to pop out a John Bolton mustache.
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Don't believe what the lefties tell you on Twitter today.
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It was terrible practically, and it was terrible symbolically.
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It was terrible practically because it paved the way for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
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I'll explain the intricacies of the deal in a little bit.
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It was also terrible symbolically because it was the United States just bending over to Iran
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after we said for years and years, you're not going to get a bomb.
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And then we just bent over and gave them all this money and bowed down.
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Just don't build a bomb for the next 15 minutes, and then you can build a bomb.
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What Donald Trump said today, President Trump, in his announcement,
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is that the United States no longer makes empty threats.
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The entire Obama age was, you better not do this.
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Although I'm going to be, I'm going to write you a strongly worded letter.
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Can we all just admit, finally, that Donald Trump is a way, way better president
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I bet right now the last anti-Trump conservative is somewhere in the oak-paneled study
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of the Weekly Standard or somewhere, and he's saying, yeah, sure, sure,
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Now, you might be wondering, how can Donald Trump just scrap the Iran deal?
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Doesn't he have to go through Congress or the Senate or, I don't know, anybody?
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Doesn't he have to ask this person or that person?
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It's an international agreement between the United States and another country on pretty
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important matters, matters of national security.
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There are other would-be signatories to this non-treaty treaty.
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The current Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, then a congressman from Kansas in 2015 when
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The State Department wrote to Pompeo, the current Secretary of State in 2015, and said,
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the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that's the Iran deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan
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of Action is not a treaty or an executive agreement and is not a signed document.
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The reason for that is that it could never get through the Senate.
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And Barack Obama couldn't build consensus even within his own party.
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He certainly couldn't get an international treaty like that where we just surrender and
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So they did everything they could to avoid having any oversight from the people, any oversight
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from our elected representatives on the Iran deal.
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Now, we should have seen this coming a little while ago.
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When Donald Trump named Pompeo to be Secretary of State, that was a signal from the White House
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Apparently, his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, was a little more open to the Iran deal.
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So when that shift happened, when you brought in Ambassador John Bolton to be the National
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Security Advisor, one of the great critics of the Iran deal and of Iran generally as the
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When you brought him in, you had to think, hmm, I bet this deal isn't very long for this
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But the Iran deal, because it's not a treaty, because treaties need to be ratified by the
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Senate, the Iran deal can just be scrapped because Donald Trump says so, and Pompeo says
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so, and John Bolton says so, and every reasonable American says so.
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It's not only do we get rid of this stupid, terrible policy that further imperils the world
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order and destroys American credibility abroad, not only do we scrap that, but we add insult
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to injury with Barack Obama, because the Obama rule is that which can be enacted with a pen
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and a phone can be repealed with a pen and a phone.
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He would brag about how he was a king, how he was a dictator.
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He would say, I don't need to go through Congress.
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If Congress doesn't want to enact my policies, I've got a pen and a phone.
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I'll sign executive orders and I'll just make them instituted by my godless, headless,
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unaccountable bureaucracies and the bureaucratic agencies.
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And now there's, there is no more Obama legacy.
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What is left of the Obama legacy after the Iran deal is gutted?
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It hasn't been officially repealed, but the individual mandate, the sticking point of Obamacare,
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the government saying you have to pay this penalty or tax or a tax when it's not a penalty
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You got to buy a product from a private company.
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The clean power plan, a signature Obama EPA achievement, gutted.
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But we got this new guy in his place who's an originalist on the court.
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The balance of the court would have totally been in disarray had Donald Trump not won
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the presidency, would have preserved a lot of Obama era policies and priorities.
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The transgender military experiment that existed for 15 minutes, you know, that didn't exist
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And then he decided to poke a finger in the eye of Americans because he believes that the
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only thing that matters in the United States are the handful of people who suffer from gender
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And we need to tailor all of our priorities as a country to eliminating biological sexual
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Offshore Arctic oil drilling, offshore drilling and Arctic oil drilling.
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Government regulation of the internet and the so-called net neutrality.
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Another fake treaty that Barack Obama knew he couldn't get through.
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So he had to sort of anti-constitutionally sign this agreement.
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John Kerry now, Barack Obama's secretary of state, one of the most boring men in the world,
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when he's not spending time just standing on his yacht calling to Teresa Hines and saying,
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When he's not doing that, when he's not just being Thurston Howell III on Gilligan's Island,
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he has been working overtime to try to save this deal.
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He's been calling the leaders of Iran, all the people he used to work with overseas when
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He met with the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, to try to save this deal.
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You would say, wait a second, why, how, why is he doing this when he's not the secretary
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And not only that, he doesn't hold any position in our government.
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Oh, because he's a big jerk who thinks too highly of himself and really wants to salvage
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any even slight vestige of a legacy for him or for Barack Obama or for Hillary Clinton.
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So he's, he's meeting with these people and he's meeting with adversaries of the United
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States and he's negotiating behind the back of the U.S. government.
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Not only is this a sort of uncouth, not only is this a little bit gauche and disrespectful
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of your current administration and your current government.
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Of course, in typical Trumpian form, the president responded via Twitter.
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Donald Trump wrote, quote, the United States does not need John Kerry's possibly illegal
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shadow diplomacy on the very badly negotiated Iran deal.
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He was the one that created this mess in the first place.
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This is what John Kerry and the Obama people are doing now.
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There is a little kid and he was playing around where he shouldn't have been and he broke the
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cookie jar and he smashed the vase or whatever.
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And he's trying to clean it up really quick before you notice.
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He's trying to, oh, they won't, they won't notice if I do it really, except, except we
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And now Donald Trump is cleaning up your mess and doing it very well.
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So what he did here, what John Kerry is clearly doing is violating the Logan Act.
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It criminalizes unauthorized persons from negotiating with foreign governments that have a dispute
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Makes sense that there's a reason that this law was passed very early on in our nation's
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history, almost immediately, is you can't possibly have that, can you?
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You can't have a government negotiating deals and then have the opposition party.
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You can't have the Republican administration governing the country and, and the world because
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the United States is the leader of the free world.
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And then behind their backs, you have Democrats saying, hey, don't listen to them.
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Yeah, don't, we're going to kick them out in a few years and then you deal with us.
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That would, that would destroy the United States.
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And, uh, and then otherwise men quoted that you can't possibly have that.
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This is how they got former Trump national security advisor for, for also about 15 minutes,
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They got him on the Logan Act because the incoming national security advisor talked with his
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counterparts overseas during the transition, a perfectly normal practice.
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They decided to go after him on, on the Logan Act and, uh, and try to get him on this.
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What John Kerry is doing right now, up until two hours ago, is way, way worse than anything
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The trouble here, of course, is that no one has ever been convicted of violating the Logan
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It's a good little thing to point out because it is a good law.
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But no one's actually going to get prosecuted for it.
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Uh, the, the law started because President Adams, John Adams, didn't like France very
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So a Jefferson loyalist, George Logan of Philadelphia, went to Paris in 1798 to get around the Federalist
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You had the anti-Federalists led by Jefferson and the anti-Federalists sent some people to
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Paris and said, don't, don't negotiate with the Federalists.
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I, I totally understand why that law was passed.
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As a matter of politics, we probably don't want to prosecute people for it.
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It would just get pretty messy if you have, uh, your political opponents talking with people
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overseas and you start throwing your political opponents in jail.
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Even if they deserve it, even if they're Hillary Clinton, frankly, it's not a great look to
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throw your political opponents in jail, no matter how criminal they are and how much
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So it's, I suppose it's a good thing we don't prosecute people for this, but important to
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keep in mind because John Kerry is violating this.
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It's very anti-American, but hey, we're talking about John Kerry.
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We're talking about John Kerry who just speaks in French on his yacht to, to little monkey,
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you know, monkey, hello, bring me my, bring me my Tom Collins.
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Barack Obama's flax, the people who were 14 years old when they worked in the White
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The one that this one came out, I believe from Ben Rhodes, quote, beyond the potentially
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catastrophic consequences with Iran, Trump's decision is devastating to U.S. credibility
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After this, why would anyone trust an international agreement that the U.S. negotiates?
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This guy, he was in a master's program for fiction writing and for some reason he came
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to determine foreign policy for the United States under Barack Obama.
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I think he drove a van one time for the Obama campaign.
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So he was promoted to this major presidential advisor.
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You're going to talk to me, Ben Rhodes, about the credibility of the United States?
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You're going to talk to me, Obama administration officials, about international credibility
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The Obama administration, the president himself, not just a flack, not just one of you, the
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We're drawing a red line in Syria and there will be dire consequences if Russia, if Syria
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They said, well, Barack Obama, you look like kind of a wimp.
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And Obama said, I'm going to write you a strongly worded letter.
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People who allow the international community, people who allow our foreign adversaries, little
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tin pot dictators in the middle of nowhere, when they allow them to push us around and
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we stand down and we don't back up our threats, those are the people that are going to tell us
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Getting rid of the Iran deal is finally restoring U.S. credibility abroad.
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It's finally saying, no, we're not going to allow the worst regime on planet Earth.
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And look, there are other crazier regimes like North Korea is a kind of crazier regime, but
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as a threat to the world order, as a persistent, constant threat to the world order, nobody
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And we're going to let the, okay, you can have a nuclear weapon, but hey, we'll only give
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you a nuclear weapon if we can give you a ton of money too.
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And by the way, Mr. Rhodes, what about, what, what international agreement are you talking
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What, what, why would they get into an international agreement with the United States?
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I thought this wasn't an international agreement.
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It's because that's, that's the way the Obama administration sold it because what their actions
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It can't be a binding treaty that the United States committed itself to when it's convenient
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And then, oh, just a thing that nobody actually had to sign because we don't want to go through
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On the other hand, you can't have it both ways.
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Another Obama flack, Dan Pfeiffer tweeted, quote,
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pulling out of the Iran deal will make all the Trumpists feel good.
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But what is the plan now to contain the Iranian nuclear threat, huh?
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It doesn't seem like anyone in the White House has even thought past today's event.
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He's one of the people on Pod Save America that I've been saving my brain from by not listening
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But I'm going to have to listen today because it's going to be the biggest wine fest ever.
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It's going to be the biggest wine fest since November 8th, 2016.
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But to Mr. Pfeiffer's suggestion that nobody in the White House has thought about how to
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prevent the Iranian bomb after the Iran deal is scrapped, pretty sure someone has.
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If memory serves correctly, the National Security Advisor to President Trump, John Bolton, published
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while the Iran deal was being finalized, while all people of good sense were protesting
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this stupid deal, he published an op-ed in the New York Times titled,
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And by the way, that was the headline that was written.
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Just like all things with John Bolton, the headline always sounds crazy.
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And then you actually read anything about it and you realize this is an extremely nuanced
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thinker who knows much more than you do about these topics that people spout off on.
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But to stop Iran's bomb, bomb Iran is an important statement because it doesn't mean that we're
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It doesn't mean that we're going to invade Iran.
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It doesn't even quite mean that we're going to bomb Iran necessarily.
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What it means is that we're not going to appease Iran and we're going to have the credible threat
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of violence against them if they continue to threaten the world order.
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Simple-minded people, pacifist type people, they say, oh, if you threaten violence, that
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When you have strength, when you come to adversaries from a position of strength, you can have peace.
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The Reagan years were, his critics said they were bellicose.
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They were some of the most peaceful years in recent history.
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Peace, when you come to an adversary and you say, I'm not going to fight.
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You have peace through strength and you have chaos and war through appeasement.
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And it threatens the world order in a very specific way.
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We have kept a lid on nuclear weapons for a very long time.
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We've been using nuclear weapons since the 1940s and we've been developing them.
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We've been trying to develop them for a long time and we used them in the Second World War.
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We've been able to keep a lid on nukes since then.
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And it would stand to reason if the United States has nuclear weapons, if the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons, pretty soon everybody would have nuclear weapons.
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Right now, the countries that possess nuclear weapons are the United States, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Israel, Pakistan.
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They've had nukes and then they've gotten rid of them.
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South Africa, the former Soviet republics like Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine.
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They've actually denuclearized and we've kept nukes away from the other countries.
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We're going to keep a hold on it for as long as we can.
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We've done a very good job for six, seven decades.
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Because if we allow, if we permit Iran, the greatest threat to the world order, it's always got one foot in the world order, one foot funding terrorism abroad.
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If we allow them to have a nuclear weapon, every other country is going to demand this.
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Every other country around the world is going to demand these things.
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Despite what the Obama bros and the pod bros and John Kerry thinks, this is great news.
00:27:14.260
Well, it was sold to us as reducing Iran's ability to produce plutonium and uranium, two components used in nuclear weapons.
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There's also a sunset clause that would ease the restrictions over time.
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So at best, even if Iran was a straight player, it would delay the program slightly.
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But we know from the recent presentation in Israel, it didn't even really do that.
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Nobody can trust them, especially on this issue.
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So in return, that's what we get, is basically nothing in return.
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Maybe at best a slight delay in the nuclear bomb for Iran at best.
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We unfroze between $50 and $150 billion of Iranian assets in banks throughout the U.S. and overseas.
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And then, to top it all off, we sent an airplane carrying $1.7 billion in cash, euros, Swiss francs, other currencies.
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We just flew it to Iran and just gave them cash.
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We pretend that Iran doesn't have a nuclear program, that they're trustworthy enough to be trusted, to work with here.
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Even though we know definitively that they've been lying to us about the nuclear program they already have,
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That took two years to say, hey, would you like a bomb and a lot of money?
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By the way, Donald Trump tried to fix this deal.
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He didn't initially scrap it altogether or seem determined to scrap it altogether.
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The New York Times reports Trump negotiated, but the talks collapsed when Trump insisted on sharp limits on Iran's nuclear production continuing after the sunset clause in 2030.
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Under the Obama deal, within 12 years, Iran gets a bomb.
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So, Trump has told the allies, we're going to reinstate all those sanctions.
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Donald Trump told his new BFF, his best friend forever French president, BFFF, Emmanuel Macron.
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This is significant because France is typically the most dovish.
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You know, they call this as the flag of the French army, is what they say.
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Macron has been skittish about the U.S. withdrawing from the deal.
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The AP reports, breaking Trump to withdraw from landmark nuclear accord with Iran, dealing blow to U.S. allies.
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The CNN reports, he's withdrawing from the nuclear deal, further isolating himself from the world.
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Then CNN reports, OPEC official, ditching Iran deal would harm the global economy.
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OPEC is the organization of petroleum exporting countries.
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That includes Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela.
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Just like some of the worst places on planet Earth.
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And so, it's basically, the headline could read, Iran warns, ditching Iran deal is bad.
00:30:21.920
So, and by the way, Trump is sending a message with the timing of this announcement.
00:30:28.500
Today is, you might have forgotten in the excitement.
00:30:31.340
The New York Times headline in 1945 today, the war in Europe has ended, surrender is unconditional.
00:30:36.260
VE will be proclaimed today, our troops on Okinawa gain.
00:30:40.420
Now, critics always say, oh, it's just a coincidence, you're reading too much into Trump.
00:30:44.080
Oh, you just got lucky, it just happened to be, it's just an accident, just a coincidence.
00:30:50.960
So, either Donald Trump knows what he's doing, or he's a complete idiot buffoon who just happens to be the luckiest person in the history of the world.
00:31:00.260
The entire Trump foreign policy promise from the beginning of the campaign has been, we don't win anymore.
00:31:06.560
We need to have more wins, like we had in World War II, the last time we had a major world-acknowledged win.
00:31:12.800
So, he chooses the anniversary of the greatest U.S. foreign policy win to declare this nuclear deal over, and to say we're going to have peace through strength.
00:31:30.700
I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but we have really good news.
00:31:33.260
And I've got to give you my thoughts on the Met Gala last night.
00:31:42.000
For those who are already subscribed, thank you very much, and you're very lucky that you can save your friends and family.
00:31:46.780
For those who aren't subscribed, it's $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
00:31:49.860
You get me, the Ben Shapiro show, the Andrew Plavin show.
00:31:54.320
The next episode of the conversation is going to be little old me.
00:32:02.240
During the next episode of the conversation, featuring me, little old Michael Knowles, Tuesday, May 15th, at 530 Eastern, 230 Pacific.
00:32:10.260
I will take all your questions and ease your anxiety by answering live on air.
00:32:14.820
Every query that has burned in your hearts will be resolved.
00:32:17.940
Best of all, it's an extra hour-long dose of, you guessed it, little old me.
00:32:22.700
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00:32:29.400
This month's episode will stream live on Daily Wire's YouTube and Facebook pages.
00:32:36.820
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00:32:40.140
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00:32:42.740
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00:32:45.680
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00:32:48.560
Subscribe to get your questions answered by little old me, Michael Knowles,
00:32:51.500
on Tuesday, May 15th, 5.30 Eastern, 2.30 Pacific.
00:32:58.440
I'm going to just guzzle back some of these so I can make room for all the new ones that are pouring in,
00:33:02.900
so a little bit more of the John Kerry variety.
00:33:04.980
We'll be right back with excellent other political news.
00:33:19.780
How am I supposed to go through all of these leftist tears and I'm going to be drowning?
00:33:26.280
From the federal government, believe it or not, under Donald Trump,
00:33:31.100
the federal government has had a month which was on time and under budget.
00:33:34.780
In April, the federal government had the best budget month in history.
00:33:39.680
The federal government took in $515 billion in taxes.
00:33:49.500
It beats the old record that happened 17 years ago of $190 billion.
00:33:54.780
You always hear they talk about the great budget surpluses.
00:34:08.200
The CBO analysts predicted lower receipts to the government.
00:34:12.340
And this, they said, is the result of a stronger than expected economic growth.
00:34:26.260
And these analysts, these experts keep telling us, well, we all expected this.
00:34:33.800
You just, you are not expecting it because you're not seeing what's going on.
00:34:38.360
Because you're still living in fantasy land, 99% certainty Hillary Clinton's going to win
00:34:45.120
Trump isn't going to pull out a paraclimate accord.
00:34:47.280
Trump isn't going to rip up the Iranian nuclear deal.
00:34:54.460
But it ain't unexpected if you're just mainlining covfefe every day.
00:35:03.020
This reminds me of a favorite clip of mine of Donald Trump from 13 years ago.
00:35:06.920
I understand a residential luxury building is far more complex than an open floor office
00:35:18.900
Office building is essentially open space with subdividers.
00:35:21.820
So I looked at it and I added up some of my costs.
00:35:26.800
And for Trump World Tower, across the street, built not long ago, I spent approximately $258
00:35:36.860
It's the tallest building, tallest residential building in the world.
00:35:52.740
A lot of people are surprised when they see that clip because it's Donald Trump speaking
00:35:59.540
We usually hear it because he's talking about so many things, the Iran deal, tax reform,
00:36:05.120
And so he speaks in these broad terms, just like all presidents do.
00:36:08.820
They have to speak in broad terms because they can't nail down to the minute details on
00:36:14.660
And we know that building buildings is something on which Donald Trump has a technical knowledge,
00:36:23.080
So he says, oh yeah, he was being called to testify before Congress.
00:36:26.900
I think Tom Coburn was who was interviewing him.
00:36:31.340
And he said the UN building renovations were going way over budget, taking way too long.
00:36:37.140
And Trump said, oh yeah, I'd pay $200 a square foot.
00:36:44.220
He really is expert when it comes to tangible things that you can put your hands around.
00:36:48.720
And that's why Donald Trump, even if he lacks precise, technical, wonkish knowledge of certain
00:36:55.200
areas of public policy or economic policy or foreign policy or whatever, he get, on issues
00:37:01.640
where there's a gut reaction, his gut seems to be in the right place.
00:37:05.420
On the Iran deal, the Iran deal actually isn't that complicated because it was such a terrible
00:37:09.300
deal, but he doesn't, maybe he doesn't know the minutia of this bank account had to be
00:37:12.800
frozen and this because of blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:37:19.580
We're allowing them to have a nuclear weapon over time.
00:37:27.440
Do you think, do you think we should just give our adversaries the greatest threat to the
00:37:32.440
Should we just give them a bunch of money and nuclear weapons?
00:37:44.140
They've turned up the attacks on Donald Trump over the past few months.
00:37:46.860
According to a new Media Research Center study, gotta love the Media Research Center, Brent
00:37:53.340
91% of Trump coverage on major networks has been negative.
00:37:58.140
Specifically of the evaluative comments, 90% negative.
00:38:02.520
39% of TV network news coverage of Donald Trump has focused on the scandals.
00:38:09.240
The porn star and the whatever other stuff they're going to gin up.
00:38:14.600
16%, an additional 16% of coverage was on the scandals of Trump administration officials.
00:38:20.660
So some guy buys an expensive table for his office.
00:38:25.000
Only 45% of TV network coverage was devoted to actual issues, actual policy issues.
00:38:38.960
45%, the minority of time was spent on actual policy issues.
00:38:58.060
Incredibly, though, this is the incredible thing.
00:39:00.540
Trump's job approval rating actually rose over this period of time.
00:39:04.840
It rose from 37% in mid-December to 43% at the end of April.
00:39:09.280
And that's not just selectively picking polls that are nice to Donald Trump.
00:39:12.420
That is broadly reflected across all public polling.
00:39:17.900
So all that scaremongering nonsense about tax reform, that's over.
00:39:29.460
Oh, okay, that's, oh, this is, oh, this is kind of nice.
00:39:36.420
Additionally, public perception of the direction of the country is at a 10-year high.
00:39:46.560
Some people are saying, Donald Trump's a good president.
00:39:55.620
57% of Americans, the majority of Americans, now say things are going well.
00:40:03.640
This is the largest proportion of people in America who say things are going well and the
00:40:09.060
direction of the country is in the right place since January 2007, since the Bush administration,
00:40:16.280
since the beginning of the last year of the Bush administration, since before the financial
00:40:20.000
crisis, since before that awful nightmare of the Barack Obama administration, this is
00:40:24.760
the largest proportion of Americans who say the country is going in the right direction,
00:40:29.640
which means that all of the Obama administration was the country going in the wrong direction.
00:40:34.940
There's even a surge of approval among Democrats.
00:40:37.480
40% of Democrats now say the country is doing well.
00:40:44.360
That is a 37.5% surge in the number of Democrats who thought the country was doing well in February,
00:40:53.320
Trump's daily approval rating from Rasmussen, the only polling firm that still does daily
00:41:03.680
CNN shows that those who approve of Donald Trump, this is a pretty interesting fact of
00:41:09.060
Those who approve of Donald Trump overwhelmingly cite policy for their positive view.
00:41:16.400
The majority of those who disapprove of Donald Trump cite his personality or his body language
00:41:25.620
The people who approve of Trump say, hey, look, all the things that matter, they're going
00:41:29.480
The people who still disapprove of Trump, for now, they cite ephemeral nonsense.
00:41:33.900
Another poll, Huffington Post and YouGov poll, shows that more than half of Hillary Clinton
00:41:39.300
voters say the country was better 50 years ago, which makes them deplorable.
00:41:45.580
There is a sense, even among Hillary Clinton voters, that something in recent years is broken.
00:41:50.840
There's a sense that America used to be better and greater than it has been recently.
00:41:57.600
There is a sense that we need to make America great again.
00:42:04.320
In the last, because it's too much good news, so we have to get a little bit of ridiculous
00:42:09.660
We just got to inject that just so that we're not like going through the ceiling today.
00:42:13.680
I have to talk about this Met Gala last night, the Met Ball.
00:42:17.140
This happens every year to support the Costume Institute at the Met, and it's very big.
00:42:25.360
They wear these crazy costumes designed by all these amazing designers.
00:42:29.980
This year's was titled Heavenly Bodies, get it, Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.
00:42:38.340
Now, I would have preferred Heavenly Bodies, Fashion and the Catholic Logical Deduction of
00:42:43.360
the Nature of Reality, but that is a minor semantic quibble.
00:42:47.920
This is the annual show, and usually they have these boring themes.
00:42:52.080
Recently, they had China through the looking glass.
00:42:56.440
Now, you probably can't do that because that's cultural appropriation.
00:43:13.400
Chesterton described it as a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar.
00:43:17.860
That the aesthetics of the Catholic Church are the aesthetics of the West.
00:43:23.060
And some of these costumes last night, some of these gowns and costumes were really quite good.
00:43:44.820
This singer, Rihanna, you know, I'm sure we're all very familiar with her odes and, you know, quartets or whatever she writes.
00:43:56.300
So she just wore a miter, you know, and that's, but I kind of liked it.
00:43:59.940
It's sort of, it didn't look good exactly, but it was kind of fun, you know, and I don't know.
00:44:06.720
I get this, I kind of like Rihanna as a, you know, she works with Kanye.
00:44:16.440
And so, but she, you know, she wears this Pope hat as if to say like, did I do it right?
00:44:20.820
And you're like, well, probably could have done a little better, but that's okay.
00:44:28.720
And she decided that her response to the Catholic Church, she's going to wear a rainbow flag cape, you know, because she's a, she's a lesbian, I guess.
00:44:39.700
And that's her, but yeah, now you could say that she was evoking Joseph's coat of many colors.
00:44:44.700
I don't know if that's quite what she was going for, but either way, you know, she wears this, this rainbow flag cape and she's basically saying, yeah, yeah, that'll show you Roman Curia.
00:45:05.680
They said, you know, no, you shouldn't make a mockery of this.
00:45:08.740
I don't think it makes a mockery of the Catholic Church or the Catholic aesthetic to wear clothing that's evocative of the Catholic imagination, as they call it.
00:45:19.380
I wanted some, some crusaders to show up wearing the big cross and the, you know, chain link arm or whatever.
00:45:25.960
But the Catholic aesthetic is the aesthetic of the West.
00:45:28.820
The greatest art in history has been made by the Catholic faithful, Dante, Michelangelo, Raphael, people that have last names.
00:45:36.940
You know, a lot of, a lot of, of the art of the West is Catholic, the majority of it.
00:45:42.820
Certainly all comes from the tradition of Catholicism, the culture of Catholicism.
00:45:47.920
The part that's sad about this is that it's a costume.
00:45:51.200
The West now wears crucifixes and they were, people were wearing big crucifixes.
00:45:56.440
They wear them for costume rather than for worship.
00:45:59.820
And lest I be accused of being like the cultural appropriation people, I'm actually making the exact opposite of their argument.
00:46:08.660
I'm not saying that, you know, my culture is not a costume or my, I'm not saying that at all.
00:46:13.240
I'm happy that they're wearing Catholic aesthetic garb.
00:46:17.860
I'm happy that they're appropriating the Catholic culture.
00:46:21.100
I just wish they would appropriate the Catholic cult as well.
00:46:24.380
I wish they would go further in their appropriation actually.
00:46:27.200
Because this dinner wasn't, or this, this gala wasn't medieval themed.
00:46:31.800
It would be one thing if they said fashion and the early church, fashion and the late medieval church, fashion and the Provencal bishops or whatever.
00:46:46.280
So it's not just wearing clothing from a different time period and saying that's my costume.
00:46:52.840
All clothing that's out of fashion becomes costume.
00:46:55.980
When you wear it, I can wear the armor of a knight.
00:47:02.400
But now we're saying Catholic culture itself is a costume because we don't do it anymore.
00:47:10.860
This is fundamentally disconnecting the culture from the cult.
00:47:16.180
The culture is defined by what the people worship.
00:47:20.420
So this could threaten to transform modernity into a new dark age because everybody's got to serve somebody.
00:47:29.440
The culture that fashioned the West now wears that garb as a costume.
00:47:40.780
But it ain't going to happen today because today we're fighting back.
00:47:44.920
I'll try to bring in some clavin-ness here because Drew's out all week.
00:47:51.040
If you have a good day, then have a good day tomorrow.
00:47:56.380
If you do that enough days, you have a good life.
00:48:07.880
I hope you enjoy your John Kerry vintage 2018 salty, delicious leftist tears.
00:48:16.680
We're going to take on, well, I won't spoil it.
00:48:25.420
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
00:48:47.560
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.