Ep. 1531 - Trump Picks His Vice President
Summary
Sen. J.D. Vance (D-Ohio) has been selected as President Trump s running mate for his re-election campaign in 2024. I've been a long-time admirer of Senator Vance and think he's the perfect VP pick.
Transcript
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President Trump has selected his running mate, and it is, drumroll please,
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Senator J.D. Vance from Ohio. Many people have only heard of J.D. Vance recently.
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Some people are probably only now hearing of him for the first time. I, however,
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have been following Senator Vance's career for a long time. I'm a longtime admirer of him,
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and I think he is absolutely the perfect VP pick, especially now. This pick tells us something
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extremely important about Trump 2024, which is that this campaign is all about the future.
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We will get into it along with further fallout from Saturday's assassination attempt
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on President Trump. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show. The Mayflower Cigar Sampler is back in stock. I know that every time
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21 years or older to order. Some exclusions apply. President Biden, after calling Trump Hitler for
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eight years and saying that he represents an existential threat to democracy, Biden and the Democrats
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call for unity in lowering the temperature, which I thought was disingenuous from the start,
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well, it really appears to be disingenuous as libs, up to and including big Hollywood stars,
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are now urging future assassins not to miss, like Saturday's assassin actually didn't. He actually
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did hit President Trump, and he hit multiple other people. There's so much more to say. First,
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J.D. Vance, Trump Vance 2024. Trump doesn't even really need to change the yard signs. This might
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have been a cost-saving move because you can just take the Trump-Pence yard sign. You can cut out the
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first two letters, replace P-E with V-A, and then you've got it. Trump Vance 2024. I think this is a
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really great pick. There were a number of people who were discussed as potential VP picks who they
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ended up, you know, a lot of them didn't quite make the short list. But I've said for a long,
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long time, I thought J.D. Vance would be an excellent choice. Here's what President Trump
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said. After lengthy deliberation and thought and considering the tremendous talents of many
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others, I've decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the
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United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the great state of Ohio. J.D. honorably served our country in the
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Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, summa cum laude, and is a Yale Law
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School graduate where he was editor of the Yale Law Journal and president of the Yale Law Veterans
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Association. J.D.'s book, Hillbilly Elegy, became a major bestseller and movie as it championed the
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hardworking men and women of our country. J.D. has had a very successful business career in technology
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and finance, and now during the campaign, we'll be strongly focused on the people he fought so
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brilliantly for, the American workers and farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio,
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Minnesota, and far beyond. As Vice President, J.D. will continue to fight for our Constitution,
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stand with our troops, and will do everything he can to help me make America great again.
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Congratulations to Senator J.D. Vance, his wife, Usha, who also graduated from Yale Law School,
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and their three beautiful children, MAGA 2024. Others have noted that picking J.D. is in some ways an
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insurance pick. Presidents, even after the horrific attack on Saturday, presidents often want to pick
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at least what we would call impeachment insurance, now you might say assassination insurance,
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someone that the liberals would really hate to have assume the role. I think J.D. Vance provides that.
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J.D. is solidly conservative. He is extremely intelligent. He knows what he believes.
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One knock on J.D. I've seen from critics is that, well, you know, he used to be more liberal or
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something. He used to be more opposed to Trump or something like that. Yeah, that's true of a lot
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of people, but J.D.'s evolution of his thought and his politics, I don't think is just a convenience.
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I don't think it's something that is disingenuous or happened overnight, because I've followed it
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somewhat closely. Of note, J.D. is a convert to Catholicism. He explored many of the themes that
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have now come to dominate his political vision and agenda in his best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
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And so, obviously, the seeds there were planted for a long time. When one does have a religious
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conversion, which had begun, it would seem, around 2015, 2016, and then he was baptized and received
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into the Catholic Church in 2019, when one has a religious conversion, you know, all politics
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ultimately is religious, as Cardinal Manning reminds us. So, that is going to lead you to rethink or
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clarify or deepen some of your political positions. So, I think that in as much as J.D. has developed
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his views over the years, I think they've developed in a really beautiful direction, very solidly
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conservative direction. There are all sorts of factions to the Republican Party, you know.
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There is the squish faction. There's the pro-Chamber of Commerce faction. There is the
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bomb every country on earth faction. Those are kind of the neocons. There is the libertarian faction,
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which has great stuff to contribute, but sometimes founded on shaky principles and liberal principles
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sometimes can move left on certain issues. And, you know, you get a hundred conservatives in a room,
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you're going to see them all disagree on something. J.D. seems very much in line with the ways that
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President Trump, I won't say has remade the Republican Party. I would say President Trump
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has restored the Republican Party in many ways to its roots. Don't forget, the Republican Party was
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founded on economic protection and say, you know, protecting American industry. Not to say we
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shouldn't trade with the rest of the world, but we've got to protect our own industry. We've got to
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recognize that the economy is here so we have a flourishing country, not the other way around.
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The country isn't here for the economy. The people aren't here to serve the GDP number. It's the
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other way around. A strong economy is good for us, but it's good for us. You know, it's good for our
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political society. Good political societies have limits. Restricting what has become now just total
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open borders and mass migration, that's important to protecting American workers, encouraging the
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growth of American families, all of this kind of stuff, which a lot of the GOP neglects or undermines.
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Well, President Trump has made that a big focus of his campaign going back to 2016. J.D. Vance has
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focused on those issues tremendously. It was a big motivator behind his Ohio Senate run and his
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whole political vision going back to that memoir, which then became a big Hollywood movie. I'm sure
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Hollywood wouldn't make that movie now. The question about Trump's VP pick was, is he going to pick a
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guy to balance out the ticket? You know, is he going to pick someone, I don't know, pick a black guy just
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because he's black or pick a woman just because she's a woman? You know, a kind of identity politics
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pick to balance out the ticket? Or was Trump going to pick just a kind of a wallflower, you know,
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a really boring guy because Trump is so eccentric because Trump is such a showman. He takes up so
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much attention. Is he going to pick someone who just, you know, blends in with the furniture to
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balance that out? Or is he going to pick an old guy, you know, an old guy so that he's totally
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innocuous? Or is he going to pick someone like J.D. Vance? J.D. Vance is young. He's brilliant. But not,
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you know, it's not that he would ever upstage Trump. I don't think he would do that at all. But he's
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clearly brilliant. He has a strong political vision that is very much in line and could continue on the
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project that Trump is doing. And he's a candidate for 2028 or 2032 or whatever. He's young. He's
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really at the beginning of his political career. He hasn't hit the peak yet. So it's a pick about
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legacy. When the libs tell you Trump's second term is just going to be all about revenge and settling
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old scores and, you know, just mollifying his ego or something. I think a pick like this is
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exhibit A. No, that's not what Trump's doing. Trump is setting up a political vision that he intends
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to extend far beyond 2024, maybe into 2028, 2032, to solidify the restoration that he has brought in
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many ways to the GOP. Even if you don't like that language or you don't like Trump, you say, well,
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he's changed the GOP from the party of George Bush or even the party of Milton Friedman,
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Reagan or whatever. What you would have to conclude, I think, even if you hated Donald
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Trump, is this is a guy who is oriented now toward the future and building a legacy. And I think that's
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a good thing. Meanwhile, how is the White House reacting to everything? How is the White House
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reacting to the assassination attempt on Saturday? You heard from Biden. He had that six sentence
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statement written by some staffer. Then he came out, he made some brief remarks, said nothing. Then he
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came out, said some more, nothing. But what he focused on was he said, we need to lower the
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temperature and we need to unite America. Biden obviously hasn't done that. And Biden has a big
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problem. Because Biden's entire campaign is premised on Trump's posing an existential threat
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to democracy akin to Adolf Hitler, whom Biden accuses Trump of admiring and channeling. So
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Karine Jean-Pierre, president's spokesman, was asked today, hey, is Biden going to keep,
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in the wake of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Trump has part of his ear blown
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off and a Trump supporter was murdered in cold blood and two Trump supporters were critically
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injured at a rally. Is Biden going to lead the way in lowering the temperature and uniting America?
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Is he going to stop calling Trump an existential threat to the country?
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Are we going to continue to hear the president in official events around the campaign trail use the
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I want to be very clear. The president's always going to denounce violence, forcefully denounce it.
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He's always been against this throughout his career, throughout the last four years.
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We do not want to politicize this. It's unacceptable to do that. That's what the president has said.
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It is time to bring this country together, to bring American people together. That's what he wants to see.
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And so that's where I'm going to leave it. He wants to unite this country. And that is something that
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That would be really hard to do, though, if you're trying to make a shift away from what has been the
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platform of this administration, of his campaign, in that the view is that Trump and the MAGA
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Republican agenda is a threat to democracy. So how do you get that message across while bringing the
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temperature down? How is that phrasing going to be replaced? Is it going to be replaced?
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Well, look, what I can say is this. We have our differences, and it's okay to have our differences.
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But you're saying it's not okay to have our differences. This is the quandary for the Biden
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campaign. And this reporter very astutely pointed it out. Biden's campaign is not Trump and I have
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our differences. We both love America, but we have a very different vision for America. And I have a
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different economic agenda and different immigration agenda, different foreign policy agenda.
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We have our differences. We're going to hash it out in the democratic system.
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Biden's campaign says Trump poses an existential threat to democracy itself. The election of Donald
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Trump represents the end of America. Donald Trump is Hitler.
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Hitler and I have our differences, but we respect each other. And my opponent wants to completely
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destroy democracy, but we have our—that's not—that has not been the Biden campaign.
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But now there's a quandary because Biden's rhetoric, Biden's campaign premise sets the stage
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to justify assassination. But now that someone tried and very, very nearly was successful in
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assassinating Donald Trump, the Biden campaign has to turn away from that kind of rhetoric. But
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that's the whole campaign. So the question for Biden right now—Kareem Jampier can't answer it.
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She's dancing around it. She's got no answer. Joe Biden would have no answer. No Democrat has an
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answer. The option is admit that Donald Trump is not Hitler and admit that Donald Trump does not
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pose a threat to democracy and therefore abandon your campaign or continue to justify the assassination of
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Donald Trump. Those are the only two options. Stop campaigning. Effectively concede the 2024
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presidential race because you got nothing else. Or continue to justify the assassination of Trump.
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Those are the only options. And if you asked me, if I were a gambling man, which one is it going to be?
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They're going to continue to justify the assassination of Trump. They have to because he's not going to
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concede. But they don't have any other issue to run on. This is why it was so insane.
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When you heard from Biden, you heard from AOC, you heard from all these top Democrats.
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Oh, I'm so grateful that President Trump is okay. I thought he was Hitler. You're grateful that
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Hitler's okay? You're glad? Oh, I hope nothing bad happens to Hitler. Listen, Hitler and I have our
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differences. I thought Trump was an existential threat. I'm glad that the existential threat to our
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whole country is doing well. That doesn't make any sense. So what they're saying is completely
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senseless. They call this a senseless act of violence, the assassination attempt. It's a very
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sensible act of violence if you believe the premises that they established. The premises that they can't
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deny. So after, what's it been? 24 hours, 48 hours since the assassination attempt? Democrats are
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already going back to Trump as an existential threat to democracy. If Karine Jean-Pierre cannot say with
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100% certainty, we will stop calling him a threat to democracy, we'll stop calling him Hitler.
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That means they're right back to justifying the assassination of President Trump,
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which is what they've been doing for years. Awful. There's so much more to say. First, though,
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Balanceofnature.com, promo code Knowles. Did you try to tune into Morning Joe yesterday on MSNBC? You
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probably did not because you're a reasonable person, but some people, I guess, did. Some people
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watch that show, and they will not have found Morning Joe there. MSNBC made the decision to pull
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Morning Joe from the air on the Monday after the execution attempt, successful in that it killed
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people, not quite successful, and that it only pierced Donald Trump's ear and didn't succeed in
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killing him. MSNBC, one of its biggest shows, longstanding morning show, doesn't air that day?
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Why not? According to CNN, so it's not even a right-wing news source, a left-wing news source,
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person familiar with the matter told CNN that the decision was made to avoid a scenario in which one
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of the show's stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television
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that could be used to assail the program and the network as a whole.
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What does it say about Morning Joe that that's a concern, that the day after the biggest news
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story since September 11th, 2001, or the Monday after that story, they couldn't even air the program
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because the executives knew that one of the hosts or one of the guests was going to say something so
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hideous, so vile, that it would imperil their whole network. What does that say about the show? What
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does that say about the caliber of the guests and the hosts? What does that say about the rhetoric
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from the left? This is one of the most mainstream news shows on the left, on one of the most mainstream
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left-wing networks. And they were so afraid that one of their guests or hosts would say something
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so vile and hideous that could destroy the whole network. I thought all the nasty political rhetoric
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was coming from the right. It seems to be coming primarily, if not exclusively, from the left. And we
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know this. We saw major left-wing figures justifying the assassination attempt, mocking it, laughing
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about it. Keith Olbermann, former host on MSNBC for that matter, saying all sorts of vile things about
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Trump. Still saying he's still Hitler. He's still Hitler. Still justifying him. Tenacious D. You remember
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tenacious D. It's this rock band with Jack Black, the movie star, and some other guy, whoever the other
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non-Jack Black guy is. They were just doing a show right as the news breaks of the assassination
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attempt on Trump. Here's what they had to say on stage before a ton of people.
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You see, you hear some people on the crowd saying, whoa, whoa, but a lot of people laughing, clapping,
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applauding, and this is what they think. Jack Black is not some fringe figure. He's a big movie star. I mean,
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he's not in much lately. But he just showed up to be a big fundraiser and surrogate for the Biden campaign
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just weeks ago. Took a picture in a big Biden t-shirt and American flag overalls.
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That's what they think. How is it? How do you come to that conclusion? Because you don't see the right
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when our opponents are killed or nearly killed or even die of natural causes. Why not? The reason
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that I don't celebrate when my political opponents die or are injured or are nearly assassinated
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is not because I like them a lot. I feel some human solidarity with them. I think they're before
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the grace of God go I. I am called to love my neighbors and to pray for my enemies. The reason
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that I don't wish death upon them or celebrate when something bad happens to them is one, because
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if I have hatred for my neighbor, I've committed murder in my heart, according to my Lord, and also
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because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, and I don't want to offend God who is all
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good and deserving of all my love. That's why. And so if you don't believe that stuff, if you don't
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believe in God, as many if not most liberals don't, if you don't really believe in a moral order, not an
00:20:44.360
objective moral order, maybe you think, I don't know, morals are just something we all came up with.
00:20:47.660
We all, in the early evolution, we all just came up with it to kind of survive. If you don't believe
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it's real, if you don't believe in an afterlife, if you don't believe in the immortality of the soul,
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if you don't believe in the reality of things like justice, then why wouldn't you wish death on your
00:21:06.160
enemies? If all that really matters is just these, you know, meat puppets are walking around with the
00:21:13.520
illusion of love and truth and reason, and, you know, we're all going to just die. And the highest
00:21:18.120
things in the world are just the political order, you know, the contingent history, the principalities
00:21:25.100
and powers and spiritual wickedness that govern this world in its fallenness. If that's all there
00:21:31.800
is, then, you know, why wouldn't you? You should, you, of course you would celebrate the death of your
00:21:35.100
enemies. And they do. So it's very difficult for them to unite, very difficult for them to lower the
00:21:40.900
temperature. Because, because if they're saying we all need to lower the temperature, the right has
00:21:46.540
already done that. The right just generally does that. The right generally would like to unite and
00:21:51.020
the right generally recognize it as an objective moral order. The left doesn't, they don't want to
00:21:56.000
do it. So, so their, their platitudes about this to try to attract moderates months before a
00:22:00.880
presidential campaign, they just ring hollow. It's so obviously disingenuous. There's so much more to
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is puretalk.com slash Knowles today. President Biden couldn't even get out his Oval Office
00:23:14.260
address without a Freudian slip. The purpose of the Oval Office address after the assassination
00:23:20.480
attempt was to say, we need to lower the temperature, we need to unify, we need to resolve our differences
00:23:26.500
In America, we resolve our differences at the battle box. You know, that's how we do it,
00:23:32.960
at the battle box, not with bullets. In America, we resolve our differences at the battle box.
00:23:39.920
And then he repeats it, at the battle box. That is, I believe, what the psychologists call
00:23:47.560
a Freudian slip, a Freudian slip where you say one thing but mean your mother, right? Is that what it
00:23:51.540
is? Biden doesn't really know how to speak anymore because he has dementia, which they denied, but then
00:23:58.220
it became clear at the presidential debate where Trump destroyed him. So then the Democrats were in
00:24:03.700
complete crisis and it looked like there was no way to beat Trump other than to kill him. And then
00:24:07.240
there was an attempt on Trump's life and he survived it. It would seem miraculously.
00:24:12.800
And so now they're trying to downplay everything and they say, no, we're good Democrats, lowercase d.
00:24:18.040
We just want to resolve our differences democratically, even though we're prosecuting
00:24:21.400
our opponents and we're trying to put a former president in jail for the first time,
00:24:25.160
top presidential candidate in jail for the first time. And hey, there might be an assassination
00:24:29.060
attempt. We might even celebrate it, some of us. But even when Biden's trying to say that,
00:24:35.220
he gets that slip in there, the battle box. Because that's what they think. They don't think
00:24:41.820
politics is a reasonable conversation where we persuade one another. They think it's all just
00:24:45.780
about the irrational will. Whose irrational will is going to win out? Who's got a bigger club that he
00:24:50.860
can bop the other guy in the head with? And so the address failed Biden. It failed Biden on a couple
00:24:58.660
of levels. It failed in that it didn't really even seriously convey the message he wanted to say. He
00:25:03.940
couldn't even get the words out right. And the words he got out actually were the opposite of the
00:25:09.700
message he was trying to express. But it failed at a deeper level. Biden did not reassure Americans of
00:25:16.620
anything. Biden got out there and he needed to convince people that he was the adult in the room.
00:25:22.220
He was going to restore order. He was in command of his faculties. He didn't achieve any of those
00:25:25.800
things. He wasn't even able to speak properly. So the Biden campaign is in complete disarray.
00:25:31.500
There's a report to Axios now that a senior House Democrat has told Axios that a lot of Democrats on the
00:25:38.780
Hill have just resigned themselves to a second Trump term. Now, there's a lot of time between now and
00:25:42.080
November. And there's nothing, there's nothing that these people won't do to stop Trump because
00:25:50.580
they say he's Hitler. They say he's an existential threat to the country. There's nothing they won't
00:25:53.880
do. And now, speaking today, there's nothing they haven't tried against him. So speaking of that
00:26:01.000
attack, who's the shooter? What information do we have? As I mentioned on the show yesterday,
00:26:04.080
we don't know very much about him. We know that he's 20, he is, he was 20 years old.
00:26:10.640
It would appear that he was a registered Republican. That's what all the left-wing
00:26:14.740
news networks are trying to point out. The thing that they don't want to say is that
00:26:17.840
the only political donation he ever made, the only political activism he seems to have taken part in
00:26:23.520
is donating to Democrats, a progressive Democrat group. So that's kind of weird. Why was he a
00:26:31.080
registered Republican? And why did he donate exclusively to Democrats and progressives?
00:26:35.200
I don't know. His dad apparently was a registered, is a registered Libertarian. The mother is a
00:26:40.240
registered Democrat. Who knows? Who knows? We now know that he had explosives in his home and in his
00:26:47.100
car. And this doesn't, doesn't make a lot of sense. If he's crawling up on the roof and shooting
00:26:52.600
at the president, he had to know that he was going to have his head blown off as soon as secretly,
00:26:57.180
but you would think he would, he would have understood that he would have his head blown
00:27:00.140
off the minute he started to get those rounds off. Some people are wondering why he didn't
00:27:03.420
have his head blown off sooner, why it took so long for the secret service or local police to respond.
00:27:09.720
But then why would he have explosives in his car if he, if he knew that he was going on a suicide
00:27:13.440
mission? Very strange. Something even stranger has just turned up. The shooter, the would-be assassin,
00:27:21.280
two years ago, appeared in a TV commercial for BlackRock, possibly the most powerful financial
00:27:31.320
My name is Brian DeLallo. I teach AP and honors economics in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
00:27:37.480
Financial well-being to me is knowing that I can be free to do the things that I love to do.
00:27:42.220
I hope when I retire someday, they say, you know, that guy made this place a special place to come
00:27:50.680
to school and gave as much as he could to help the community. That was him.
00:27:56.760
This isn't some conspiracy theory. BlackRock acknowledges this. They've pulled the commercial
00:28:02.940
down. BlackRock has $9.1 trillion in assets under management. When you take actual nation states out
00:28:15.140
of the equation and when you take, I don't know, the Federal Reserve out of the equation, you're
00:28:18.760
talking about basically the largest financial institution in the world. What? So this is setting
00:28:24.780
people, you know, everyone's pulling out the tinfoil hat now. What does it mean? How on, what?
00:28:31.080
How is the would-be assassin who apparently doesn't have any social media? It's kind of
00:28:36.120
hard to believe that in 2024, people don't have a trail on the internet. They don't know social
00:28:42.620
media we can find. And then he's registered Republican, but he donates to Democrats. That's
00:28:46.880
really weird. That doesn't really satisfy. It doesn't answer any political narrative. We don't
00:28:50.160
need no manifesto, no, no nothing. What? And then he pops up in a glossy TV commercial two years ago for
00:28:59.480
one of the most powerful and, you know, kind of has a reputation as a really swampy,
00:29:05.200
politically involved financial institution with $9 trillion under management. What? Now,
00:29:12.240
I don't know. I don't know. No one really knows.
00:29:16.740
Any assassination, successful or unsuccessful of a president, I think legitimately should raise lots
00:29:23.240
of questions about a conspiracy. It's not saying there was some conspiracy. It could have been acting
00:29:28.120
alone, but you've got to investigate that, obviously. But I'm not convinced it had to be
00:29:34.200
a conspiracy. I'm not convinced that this BlackRock commercial has to have some particular meaning.
00:29:41.560
And here's why. Here's why. It gets to exactly what I was talking about on my show yesterday.
00:29:46.560
The entire introduction of my show yesterday. A 15 to 20 degree turn of Donald Trump's head
00:29:53.060
was the difference between him losing the top of his ear and him losing the back of his head.
00:30:00.580
A 15 to 20 degree turn of Donald Trump's head at the precise moment that it occurred just before
00:30:06.880
the round went off from the assassin's bullet or from the assassin's gun is the reason that Donald
00:30:12.880
Trump is alive today. So improbable that his head would have turned that way is to seem impossible to
00:30:21.320
recognize. Unless you recognize that the cosmos, this is what Christians would recognize, what
00:30:27.000
religious people would recognize, the cosmos is so finely tuned to God's providence that when
00:30:34.760
coincidences happen, a Christian would say, yes, of course. You know, as a priest friend of mine
00:30:40.900
points out, it's a wicked generation that seeks for signs and wonders, but it's a stupid generation
00:30:46.320
that ignores signs and wonders. The Christian vision of the world is a semiotic vision of the
00:30:52.540
world. It's rich in symbols. Things mean something. And when coincidences pop up, you don't always need
00:30:59.920
to find out their particular meaning. It's a sign, as far as I'm concerned, that just, yeah, God exists.
00:31:04.880
The universe is intelligible. There is a creator. Creation implies a creator. Just from reason,
00:31:11.200
just from nature, you can come to that conclusion. And that might just be what's happening here.
00:31:19.540
If you can chalk up Trump's turn of his head to the playing, the playing out of God's providence,
00:31:29.520
you could attribute this coincidence to that as well. I don't know. I just don't know.
00:31:33.660
We don't really know very much. We don't know how this guy was allowed to get his
00:31:37.380
rounds off. Get up on that roof. Right now, local police are blaming the Secret Service.
00:31:42.560
Secret Service are blaming the local police. There was an interview with a former Secret
00:31:47.120
Service agent who made the obvious point. Even if local police had been tasked with securing the area
00:31:54.400
outside of the security perimeter of the rally, even if local law enforcement did drop the ball,
00:32:01.660
it is the responsibility of Secret Service to ensure that everything is going according to plan.
00:32:07.060
Even if the Secret Service says, hey, local police, I want you to secure those buildings
00:32:11.680
over there. It nevertheless is the responsibility of Secret Service to make sure that happens.
00:32:17.380
The job of U.S. Secret Service is to protect the president. You show up to a small town of 12,000
00:32:22.500
people that has a handful of buildings of any size in it, and you're not going to go check those
00:32:28.900
buildings when, according to reports, Secret Service knew these were security threats. You're just
00:32:32.540
going to trust that to some almost certainly underfunded and understaffed local police
00:32:36.880
department out of your mind if you think that's acceptable. So ultimately, the buck stops with
00:32:43.640
Secret Service. When are we going to hear from the Secret Service director? When are we going to see
00:32:48.880
any accountability? As one source for these reports added, just because it's outside the perimeter
00:32:55.040
doesn't take it out of play for vulnerability. You've got to mitigate it in some fashion.
00:32:58.640
Anthony Congelosi, who is a former Secret Service agent, he's now a professor at John Jay College
00:33:04.120
in New York. He says, you don't surrender the discretion of what's supposed to be done to the
00:33:08.500
local police. In other words, you guys have the outer perimeter, but you want to say, we need an
00:33:12.940
officer on that roof. Not, that's your responsibility, do what you see fit. You don't entrust the safety of
00:33:18.820
the president, of the former president, or the future president in this case, to a local police
00:33:22.840
department. It's so bizarre. Jim Cavanaugh, also in this report, is a retired ATF agent,
00:33:30.420
points out, he says, the only way to stop that is you have a lot of people, you get there first,
00:33:34.380
you command the high ground. This is basic, and the Secret Service has done it for years
00:33:39.640
successfully. So I'm really surprised that they did not have that high ground from which the shooter
00:33:43.460
shot covered. That point is, the Secret Service has done this successfully for years.
00:33:49.120
We haven't seen one of these attempts since the last really conservative president, actually,
00:33:54.260
Ronald Reagan. Weird. Weird. How did that break down? Somebody is responsible. This is not,
00:34:04.920
you know, oh well, mistakes happen. Somebody, this is highly unusual. We have video of a crowd of people
00:34:12.960
saying, look, there's a guy on the roof. Look at him. What's that guy doing on the roof? That guy's
00:34:15.920
got a rifle. Why isn't someone doing, why isn't someone pulling Trump off stage? Doesn't get pulled
00:34:19.560
off stage from, ever, really, but for minutes this is going on. What happened? What broke down?
00:34:28.760
Now there's, in addition to this, there's an, this must be the biggest news week since September 11th,
00:34:33.360
2001. You have the attempted, nearly successful assassination of Donald Trump. You then have the
00:34:40.680
Republican convention kicking off two days later. You then have the announcement of Trump's running
00:34:47.560
mate, a major, very exciting announcement. Then you have news out of the judiciary that, that probably
00:34:54.900
the, the biggest case against Donald Trump and all of these four prosecutions, Joe Biden trying to
00:34:59.800
throw his, his political opponent in jail. That case gets dismissed. We'll get into that in just one
00:35:04.980
moment first though. At the Daily Wire, we are all about action. The ticket is officially set.
00:35:11.020
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00:35:43.880
now. My favorite comment on, oh, yesterday was from Nashville Preds fan 2562. It says,
00:35:52.200
didn't Michael Knowles report last week that Joe Manchin wanted to wait for this weekend
00:35:55.220
to say whether he wanted to support Joe Biden? What a big coincidence. So this is a weird one. This
00:35:59.240
has been playing out in my head. I didn't mention it on the show, but I did play it.
00:36:02.660
I thought it was the strangest clip of last week where Manchin was asked, this is a somewhat
00:36:09.040
moderate Democrat senator from West Virginia and potential presidential candidate, was asked,
00:36:14.720
do you still support Joe Biden or should he drop out? Manchin said, he didn't want to answer the
00:36:18.440
question. He said, look, I like Joe, support Joe. I think things are going to be a lot clearer after
00:36:23.000
this weekend. So we're just going to wait and see for this weekend. And so in retrospect, in light of
00:36:28.020
the assassination attempt, this seems really ominous. This seems really eerie. And people
00:36:32.020
are asking, did Joe Manchin know about the assassination? And I want to be explicit about
00:36:37.100
this. I don't. I don't think Joe Manchin knew about the assassination attempt on Trump. I don't.
00:36:43.980
I don't think, you know, he was part of some plot. If anybody were to be part of a plot or a conspiracy,
00:36:50.000
I don't think it'd be Joe Manchin. He's one of the last guys in Washington I would expect to be part
00:36:53.880
of it. But it is odd in retrospect. In retrospect, it looks totally bizarre. We'll know more after
00:36:59.060
this weekend. That's why I point out there are sometimes little coincidences, little winks in
00:37:05.900
history in retrospect that can look very different from a different vantage. If you play back the clip
00:37:15.680
of when Trump is shot, he says, look at this. I think those are his exact words. Look at this
00:37:22.940
at the moment that we're all called to look. Then the head turns slightly and the bullet
00:37:29.360
grazes him instead of blowing his brains out. There are no miracle incidences in the Christian
00:37:37.060
view of the world. Doesn't mean everybody's up to some crazy conspiracy plot, but the whole world
00:37:43.000
is imbued with meaning. And we see that meaning played out in history, in retrospect.
00:37:49.440
If we have time, we'll get to the meaning of history. Actually, that's a story I want to get
00:37:52.320
to, but I don't know if we'll have time today. That might just be a tease. I do want to turn to a
00:37:55.960
major news story, which is that Trump has had his biggest case against him dismissed. Judge Aileen
00:38:04.060
Cannon, district judge, wrote a 93-page decision and said that the appointment of Jack Smith,
00:38:12.260
the special counsel who's prosecuting the case against Trump, was, quote, unlawful. It was
00:38:16.760
unlawful. It was unconditional. I'm sorry, rather unconstitutional. The clerk is directed to close
00:38:25.240
the case. Attorney General Merrick Garland had appointed Smith back in 2022, and Trump's lawyers
00:38:33.200
have been arguing that he did not have the right to do that. Said the appointments clause of the
00:38:38.100
Constitution, quote, does not permit the Attorney General to appoint, without Senate confirmation,
00:38:43.120
private citizen and like-minded political ally to wield the prosecutorial power of the United States.
00:38:47.980
As such, Jack Smith lacks the authority to prosecute this action. Now, this is different
00:38:52.120
than, say, the appointment of a special counsel in the, or a special prosecutor in the Hunter Biden
00:38:57.680
case. You know, Hunter Biden is being prosecuted for his lowest level crimes. This is rather different,
00:39:04.580
because in that case, you had someone who was already working with the DOJ. Weiss was already
00:39:14.580
a U.S. attorney, the prosecutor in the Biden case. Smith was a private citizen at the time that he was
00:39:19.780
appointed, and Trump's lawyers argued that this was an illegitimate appointment, and the judge now
00:39:25.880
agrees. So what's going to happen? Does that mean Trump's off the hook? No. It means that Jack Smith is
00:39:30.700
going to appeal. This is going to go to an appellate court. But even if the appellate court rules in
00:39:36.500
Smith's favor, even if it goes all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, it means that this case is now
00:39:41.360
pretty much for certain pushed until after the election. A major win for Trump. Really good move
00:39:47.040
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00:40:26.340
Speaking of Trump victories, Don Jr., the president's son, just gave a masterclass in
00:40:32.800
handling the hostile liberal establishment media from the Republican National Convention.
00:40:41.060
What is that change going to look like, Don? Practically, your father as president,
00:40:45.120
I think you would even say, was a divisive figure. What's it going to look like in the second term?
00:40:48.980
I don't think he was a divisive figure at all. I think the media created divisiveness around him.
00:40:52.620
They lied about Russia, Russia collusion. They said he was a traitor. They went after him in
00:40:57.000
every which way as possible. If the media actually starts being an honest broker talking about the
00:41:01.780
things that he did, the prosperity he brought, the peace deals that he signed around the world,
00:41:05.640
rather than the disaster that we're living right now, I think you'd do everyone in the country a big favor.
00:41:09.580
I know immigration's important to him. I covered the family separation crisis closely.
00:41:13.260
Will we continue to see policies like separating 5,000 children deliberately from their parents?
00:41:17.860
You mean the Obama administration? You know they didn't do that, sir.
00:41:21.440
Sure. Will there be a second family separation policy?
00:41:24.880
It's MSNBC, so I expect nothing less from you clowns. Even today, even 48 hours later,
00:41:29.860
you couldn't wait. You couldn't wait with your lies and with your nonsense. So just get out of here.
00:41:35.680
Love it. Love it. It's a master class. You look at how he holds himself. He comports himself very well,
00:41:42.340
standing up straight. And first, what he does is politely and succinctly
00:41:48.120
rips apart the liberal reporter's nonsense. Does a very good job at that.
00:41:55.500
And then the liberal reporter, he doesn't want to hear it, so he pulls the microphone. He says,
00:41:59.140
are you talking about the Obama era policies? The Obama era policies of putting kids in cages or
00:42:04.280
whatever nonsense you're talking about? The reporter pulls the microphone away. He doesn't want Don Jr.
00:42:07.920
talking about that. Then the reporter just doubles down on his nonsense, and Don Jr. recognizes
00:42:12.780
this guy is immune to logic and reason. You're not really going to convince the liberal reporter.
00:42:19.420
What you want to do is embarrass the liberal reporter for having his facts wrong. You want
00:42:23.840
to persuade the public, maybe the people on the fence who are watching the liberal reporter's
00:42:27.740
newscast, but you say your piece. And then when the reporter just shoves his fingers in his ears and
00:42:35.680
says, la, la, la, la, la, la. You say, okay. Then you instruct the liberal reporter to go pound
00:42:41.680
sand, which is what Don Jr. did. He's asked a question. He gives a very good answer to the
00:42:45.680
question. The reporter keeps pushing him. He observes the hypocrisy in the reporter's rhetoric.
00:42:55.320
The reporter then keeps trying to dig in, and he says, okay, I've made my point. You're not going to
00:43:00.700
be persuaded. I got two words for you, and they're not happy birthday. Bye-bye. That's not
00:43:06.140
bye-bye either. And that's it. Beautiful, beautiful masterclass, something we all ought to
00:43:11.160
keep in mind for our debates. Now, speaking of the sons of presidents, there's a report. This is a
00:43:18.480
really worrying, a lot of worrying reports recently. There's a report out that, according to the Daily
00:43:23.620
Beast, Joe Biden's acting chief of staff right now, the guy who's actually controlling access to the
00:43:29.380
president and is directing the president's decisions, is Hunter Biden, a former crackhead,
00:43:37.960
a crook who's sold his father's influence in the government all over the world to some of the
00:43:42.640
worst people on earth. According to this report from the Daily Beast, this is a left-wing outlet,
00:43:47.460
Joe's family is standing with him, his wife, Jill, and sister, Valerie, who Democrats relied upon to
00:43:51.920
provide wise counsel, not just cheerleading. His son, Hunter, has been seen at the White House so much
00:43:55.600
lightly that one well-connected lawyer, lobbyist, Democrat dubbed him the acting chief of staff.
00:44:00.620
He's the gatekeeper. He's the one who's bucking up his dad, which would explain a lot. That would
00:44:07.440
explain a lot of Joe Biden's failures. But regardless, you see, the conclusion from this
00:44:15.400
story is he's keeping that tight circle around him. He's surrounding himself with family and the
00:44:20.600
very, very close allies. And so Obama wants him out. Joe doesn't give a damn.
00:44:27.180
The Clintons want him out. Nancy Pelosi, Schumer, they all want him out.
00:44:32.100
What does Joe Biden care? What does Joe Biden have to gain by getting out of the race? What does he
00:44:36.020
have to lose by staying in the race? Nothing. Nothing. And what's the campaign going to be?
00:44:42.060
All Joe Biden's campaign is, is Trump is Hitler and he's going to destroy our country.
00:44:45.500
And that's going to justify getting Trump killed. And they tried to kill Trump. Some guy in
00:44:51.760
Pennsylvania tried to kill Trump based on the premises established by the leading Democrats,
00:44:56.540
including Joe Biden. So now Joe Biden can't even campaign on that. He can try. He's going to
00:45:00.620
continue to try. It's going to rub a lot of people the wrong way. It's going to rub a lot of moderates
00:45:04.120
and independents the wrong way because they're going to see the consequences of that kind of rhetoric
00:45:07.920
of those premises. So he's got nothing. Okay. Speaking of ancient things, I'm glad I did get to this.
00:45:15.500
We're talking about history. You look back at history, your personal history, the history of
00:45:20.960
your community, of your country, and things start to make sense. They don't always make sense at the
00:45:25.500
time. Things happen. You pull your hair out. Why is this happening? But they start to make sense
00:45:30.380
looking back. And God's providence, the intelligibility, which Christians believe in,
00:45:37.000
liberals don't necessarily believe in it. They have their own progressive utopias actually,
00:45:40.740
that comes up with a kind of an anti-narrative, a very different kind of narrative. But Christians
00:45:47.620
believe, actually, things don't always seem to make sense in the short run. But in the arc of
00:45:52.520
history, the story that God wants to tell is unfolding as he wishes. There's a story, a news
00:46:00.220
report that's just come out from the Daily Mail. Archaeologists find more evidence of Bible story about
00:46:04.600
Moses leading his people to the promised land 3,200 years ago. So without getting too much into the
00:46:09.620
weeds of the story, there's more evidence coming out from the Israeli Antiques Authority or Antiquities
00:46:14.820
Authority that the story of the Exodus told in the Old Testament, in the book of Exodus, really did
00:46:21.340
happen. It literally happened in history, which does not surprise me at all. There are four layers of
00:46:29.980
meaning. We want to really go back in time. The scholastics in the Middle Ages, the height of our
00:46:37.200
civilization, they understood that there are four layers of meaning to a text. There's the literal
00:46:42.300
meaning, there is the typological meaning, the allegorical meaning, there's the moral meaning,
00:46:49.040
and there's the anagogical meaning, meaning the meaning from the perspective of eternity, of the end
00:46:53.840
times. So how does this play out? Well, a great example of this, Dante actually lays this out in a
00:47:00.200
famous letter to his patron, Congrande de la Scala. He points to the book of Exodus, and he said, this is
00:47:05.620
a great example of the four layers of meaning. What's the literal story of the book of Exodus? Moses leads
00:47:11.060
the Israelites from Egypt into the promised land. What is the typological meaning, the figurative meaning
00:47:20.560
of this, is the redemption won for us by Christ? That's what that figures, prefigures. What's the
00:47:29.320
moral meaning? You know, like the moral of the story. The moral meaning is the struggle that each
00:47:35.320
of us undergoes from the misery of sin to the status of grace. And then what's the anagogical meaning?
00:47:44.760
It's the taking, and this is Dante's words, the taking of the blessed soul from the slavery of
00:47:52.620
this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory. And all of those meanings simultaneously are there
00:47:58.600
in Exodus. And none of them takes away from any of the others. Moses really did lead the Israelites
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out of Egypt. And that really means all of these other things for us individually and for us
00:48:11.580
collectively, politically. A bullet really did, a bullet that was in line for President Trump's head
00:48:21.280
really did miss his head and only took off part of his ear because he turned just a little bit right
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there at a rally in Pennsylvania. And what exactly that means, that literally happened. What exactly
00:48:36.120
that means will become clearer with the retrospection of history. But what I can promise you is it does
00:48:44.720
mean something. There's no member block today because I'm going to the RNC in Milwaukee. See
00:48:48.860
you over there from the RNC. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show.
00:49:06.120
You're fired. I don't want to know that. I'm like, you and Michaelç«‹ I wasn't going to go to the
00:49:22.800
every place you have where the task is or to turn it up.