J.D. Vance is getting memed more than any figure in American history. Why is this happening? And why is it so hard to figure out why? Today on The Michael Knowles Show, Michael explains why.
00:04:19.500Were they made by the left or were they made by the right?
00:04:22.100I think the first J.D. memes actually were from the left, and the left can't meme.
00:04:28.240So this means that the J.D. meme was the first sort of funny meme that the left has made maybe in a decade.
00:04:37.400Because the right is very good at memes, and the right kind of memed President Trump into the Oval Office in 2016.
00:04:44.200That's our version of political cartoons.
00:04:47.580The left has political cartoons in the New Yorker and the New York Times.
00:04:51.380And because we've been shut out of the establishment mainstream institutions, ours are just like frog pictures on the internet, on Twitter that go viral.
00:04:59.100So the fact that the left could meme J.D., and then the right took those memes and started using those memes, and then J.D. Vance himself posted a J.D. meme.
00:05:10.640To answer that question, you have to know a little bit about what a meme is.
00:05:14.520The word meme was invented by Richard Dawkins, of all people, the biologist and new atheist.
00:05:22.200It was coined in 1976 in a book called The Selfish Gene, I believe.
00:05:27.380But the notion of a meme comes from the word mimesis, which is to imitate.
00:05:33.220I've talked about mimesis a fair bit on this show, specifically with regard to a writer named Rene Girard, who has this theory, which is obviously correct, that human behavior and human desires even come from imitating others.
00:05:48.860And this comes from even deeper classical philosophy, which shows that we're the social animals.
00:05:53.640So we're not just islands unto ourselves, but we're social creatures naturally.
00:05:57.840We don't just fall out of a coconut tree, to quote Kamala Harris.
00:10:08.620J.D. has come to these conclusions just a little bit ahead of where the American people have.
00:10:15.100And so I don't think it's an exaggeration to say, as goes J.D. Vance, so goes the nation.
00:10:20.860And a lot of people—people aren't going to blame him for changing his views on this because the American people have changed their views in line with J.D. Vance.
00:10:28.760The same American people who voted for Barack Obama voted for Donald Trump.
00:10:34.220The majority of voters voted for Donald Trump in 2024.
00:13:08.500Because, you know, I'm a real hip, cool guy.
00:13:10.300So I'm friends with some Zoomers and everything.
00:13:12.600And when I hang out with the Zoomers, they are much less interested in boozing, throwing back a couple of Coca-Colas, than even my generation has been.
00:13:22.200And my generation is much less interested in it than Gen X and the boomers.
00:13:27.340And even though the plural of anecdote is data, we have real data on this.
00:13:33.000While the media, including this publication, has been chattering about Gen Z and millennials scaling back on alcohol, many of us have missed that older generations are bucking the trend.
00:13:42.500Many baby boomers are turning into baby boozers.
00:13:46.880They're hitting retirement, have savings to spend, and they're enjoying a little victory lap accompanied by a glass of wine or three.
00:13:53.020So the way that they came to these numbers is based on an analysis of credit card spending by Bank of America.
00:13:59.580Now, some people will say that the Zoomers and the millennials are boozing less because they're doing other things like smoking pot and whatever, vaping.
00:14:13.440Just like I have an explanation for why JD is being memed more than anyone else in American history, the reason that the Zoomers and the millennials are boozing less than the boomers and Gen X,
00:14:27.320the reason that they're going on sober dates, for instance, the reason this isn't included in the Business Insider report,
00:14:32.820but it ties into a report that we talked about last week, that Zoomers are much less likely to engage in one-night stands.
00:14:39.720Something like a quarter of Zoomers have friends who regularly engage in one-night stands compared to 75% of millennials.
00:14:46.660So you're seeing this drop within one generation.
00:14:49.180The reason for that is everything old is new again.
00:14:53.300It's the 80s with a twist, and it's hip to be square.
00:16:13.500Because we've gone so far in the other direction, everyone realized it was making them miserable.
00:16:18.000One in five women was hooked on anti-depression pills.
00:16:20.860Children, teenagers were getting hooked on these depression drugs.
00:16:24.680People are trying to deal with their unhappiness by going so far as to mutilate their bodies and sterilize themselves and chop their gonads off.
00:16:33.080And it's just, it got really, really crazy, and the poison of subjectivism had just reached levels of toxicity that we could no longer tolerate.
00:16:41.100So we're giving up the drugs that alter our state of mind toward fantasy and laziness, and now the drug of choice is nicotine.
00:17:03.580Now, speaking of the Trumps, Donald Trump Jr. has just distinguished himself even further.
00:17:09.620The guy's got a lot of feathers in his cap throughout his career, and he's been an important political figure in the Donald Trump senior political ascendancy.
00:17:18.860But he gets a new feather in his cap for the funniest answer to a liberal media request that has ever been given.
00:17:27.300Mediaite, liberal media outlet, asked Trump.
00:17:32.180Trump Jr. if he was going to run for president in 2028.
00:17:35.460They had this report based on all sorts of sources from around the Trump family that Don Jr. was planning a 2028 presidential run.
00:17:46.440Three high-level sources told mediaite that Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son and an omnipresent MAGA evangelist across the internet is seriously considering a run for president in 2028.
00:17:57.180Trump Jr. denied he's considering a run for 2028.
00:18:00.640In a statement to mediaite, I would now like to read you this statement verbatim.
00:18:05.360I accurately predicted that my buddy JD would be an instant power player in national GOP politics.
00:18:12.640So your theory is that I worked my ASS off to help him get the VP nomination because I want to run for president in 2028?
00:18:23.460I'm actually glad you're printing this BS, he says the whole word, because at least now the rest of the press corps will see how S-H-I-T-T-Y your sources are and how easily you were played by them.
00:19:37.500He has been influential in the Trump administration.
00:19:40.380To his point, he was instrumental in securing the VP nomination for J.D. Vance, which also, to his point, goes to show he's probably not looking at the job for himself.
00:19:52.080If he picks a guy as strong as J.D. Vance to be the VP, he recognizes he's setting that guy up to be the president next time.
00:19:58.800And Don Jr. is doing all sorts of stuff in the private sector and, you know, having a, having a good time of it.
00:20:17.980Now, speaking of things that are not the wisest, I'll, I'll clean up that word.
00:20:23.100You know this, we try to be a little more delicate and diplomatic on this show.
00:20:26.440Speaking of things that are not the wisest, Stacey Abrams has just explained a $2 million, sorry, $2 billion climate change graft that she was involved in.
00:20:40.600She went on, also speaking of the liberal media, she goes on, MSNBC is asked a softball question by Chris Hayes about this $2 billion climate change graft that President Trump alleged during his joint session address that she was involved in.
00:21:28.340I led a program called Vitalizing DeSoto.
00:21:32.220We worked in a tiny town in South Georgia to demonstrate that by replacing energy inefficient appliances with efficient appliances, you can lower your costs.
00:21:45.240For 75% of the community, they got appliances that are lowering their bills.
00:21:50.260A coalition of organizations, famous organizations, came together and said to the EPA, if we can do this here, we can do this for millions more Americans.
00:22:03.040Let us invest the money of America in lowering the cost for Americans.
00:22:07.700And the EPA said, okay, great, go for it.
00:22:19.080He's saying, this is the best you can do.
00:22:21.460According to her own explanation, this program that Trump called out in front of Congress is Dems in government giving Dems in the political operative sphere $2 billion to dole out on household appliances for whomever they see fit.
00:22:42.700The Democrats in government give $2 billion of your taxpayer money to extreme left-wing operatives to just dole out buying goodies, household goodies, for anyone they want to buy votes.
00:23:01.300Notably in Georgia, where the program began.
00:23:05.580That's the best defense of the program that Stacey Abrams, intimately involved in the program, can come up with.
00:23:13.960You remember during the Obama administration, people pointed to a government program where Democrats would just buy cell phones for people to buy their votes, and they called them Obama phones.
00:23:48.080Okay, I'm not, there are libertarians and conservatives in the right-wing tent, and we oppose the same things for different reasons.
00:23:56.660The libertarians oppose these kind of programs because they're so wasteful and inefficient, and that money would be better spent in the private sector or the free market.
00:24:03.240And my problem with it is not so much the spending.
00:24:07.100Big nations have robust governments, and robust governments spend some money.
00:24:11.160My issue isn't that the government is spending money.
00:24:16.580If you've got to spend the money, spend it on something good and useful and not obviously in furtherance of the self-interest of the Democrat Party, which is exactly what it is.
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00:29:26.480Well, the real answer, what the liberals would tell you is we're transing mice to see that it's safe to trans human beings.
00:29:32.680Or that we can continue to monitor the health effects of transing human beings and try to adapt to the ways in which transing human beings is not good for their health and so on and so forth.
00:29:44.840The problem is we shouldn't be transing human beings.
00:29:47.320The issue is not quantitative but qualitative.
00:29:51.120The issue is not the amount of money we're spending.
00:29:54.540The issue is we should be able to make value judgments about the substantive good of these kinds of policies and say, no, we're not going to trans human beings.
00:30:06.140So then there should be no need to trans the little mice.
00:30:09.160So there should be no need to spend the half million dollars.
00:30:11.620And that kind of decision can't be made purely on the basis of efficiency, which is the charge of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency.
00:30:21.120We also need a Department of Substantive Goods, which I guess is just the president and the legislators and the way that we arrive at who is in charge of that, which is always the next question.
00:30:33.740Who decides what's good is, well, you know, we have elections in this country and the power of the voting public is circumscribed by the Constitution, circumscribed by certain rights.
00:30:44.500But broadly speaking, we get to decide what is good at the federal level and at the state level and at the local level.
00:30:50.660And we have principles of subsidiarity that also govern which decisions are made where.
00:31:18.160You know, those are questions that have to be answered, not according to the sophistry of economists and calculators, but according to serious moral philosophy.
00:31:28.680And so we didn't, we didn't actually need to take these particular questions all that seriously, even 25 years ago, because everyone knew we shouldn't like chop up people and, you know, pretend that they're the opposite sex.
00:31:39.480But now we're morally confused and we're living in a world after virtue.
00:31:41.980So we need to invest some resources in those calculations as well.
00:31:48.940Now, speaking of the trans stuff, which dominates the news every single day, even though, even though I'm so sick of talking about it, the libs are not sick of pushing it.
00:31:57.360So we conservatives need to respond to it to make sure that, that the cancer of, of their preposterous anti-human ideologies don't spread too much.
00:32:05.520Democrat representative Jennifer McClellan has just come out.
00:32:10.200She was on Leland Vittert's show on News Nation.
00:32:12.420And she made the claim that the only way to put into effect President Trump's plan to get men out of women's sports, the only way that we could possibly do that is to pull down the pants of the athletes and check for ourselves.
00:32:28.840I don't think that the American people want school professionals pulling their children's pants down to determine what sports team they should plan.
00:32:38.520No, how do you, how do you enforce that bill?
00:32:50.380You know what people, you know what sex is on someone's birth certificate and you say if it's on your birth certificate, if you're a boy, you can't play in girls' sports.
00:33:08.520But the only way to enforce that bill, in many cases, it allowed people in schools to pull children's pants down to determine what sex they are.
00:33:34.760And he just goes, give me a break, lady.
00:33:36.560You pass a law that says that men can't play in women's sports, women's sports, which, by definition, exclude men.
00:33:45.360Until the social engineers now want to blur the distinction between men and women.
00:33:51.540So there was already a legal right for women to have their own sports leagues.
00:33:55.120There was already some way that we were able to tell the difference between men and women so that the men wouldn't play in the women's sports league.
00:34:36.760If it really comes down to it, you can just, you know, you have to take all sorts of medical tests to go to public school in this country anyway.
00:34:41.620You have to take all sorts of vaccinations, undergo all sorts of medical exams.
00:34:45.380So I don't think it would be that hard to just check someone's blood and say, oh, no, yeah, it's a dude.
00:35:40.960Now, if we have so lost our prudence that we need to pretend now that you have to examine someone's genitals to know if they're a man or a woman, then I guess we're not capable of self-government, right?
00:36:03.520The one good point that she's making is we live in a culture right now that is so intentionally confusing that we can't trust typical longstanding markers of truth like birth certificates.
00:36:17.480That's not an argument to further the confusion.
00:36:21.860That's an argument to clear up the confusion that the libs have recently put into place.
00:36:25.220That's an argument to not let people change the sex on their birth certificates.
00:36:29.220To align with fantasy rather than reality.
00:36:32.700This is the same argument people make about marriage.
00:36:34.940When I say, you know, marriage is good and it's meant the same thing everywhere for all of human history until about five minutes ago.
00:37:03.420The left will respond to that and they'll say, well, you know, even the squishy right, they'll say, you know, marriage has been so degraded in recent years through things like no-fault divorce and through things like radical feminism that diminishes the role of the husband and the wife.
00:37:23.040And it's been so degraded over the years that really, what's the difference?
00:37:27.600Why wouldn't we redefine it to include two fellas?
00:39:49.540Even on issues of weird sex stuff, he was one of the most left-wing politicians in America in 2004 when he was mayor of San Francisco.
00:39:56.400So I don't trust a word that the guy says.
00:39:59.040He's a noted liar who tried to make himself the face of COVID and the lockdowns and sacrifice, and then they caught him breaking his own COVID rules at the French Laundry.
00:40:08.940I think he is dishonest as the day is long.
00:40:11.640But I think he's a clever politician, and he recognizes that's the only hope that Democrats have in 2028.
00:43:40.420What I do know, zooming out from the story, is this kind of story is the consequence of a society that increasingly refuses to confront death.
00:45:45.900Two days of clashes and revenge killings in Syria leave more than 1,000 people dead.
00:45:50.660There were initially reports that Christians were among those who were being targeted, along with Alawites and Druze, other religious minorities.
00:45:56.920Then there were reports coming out that Christians aren't really being targeted.
00:46:01.500And it's rather unclear, actually, because there's a lot of propaganda around that region from all of those sides.
00:46:08.420On the one side, you have Turkey, Israel, the al-Qaeda slash ISIS slash general Islamist terrorists who took over Syria.
00:46:18.980On the other side, you have Iran and Russia, which had been backing Bashar Assad, who was the erstwhile leader of Syria.
00:46:26.960And then when he fell, all hell broke loose.
00:46:32.400Conclusions, however, though, as I predicted at the time, though it was not popular, ousting Bashar Assad was probably a terrible thing.
00:46:40.260Because Bashar Assad, for all his sins, generally took care of religious minorities.
00:46:44.440Okay, my other take on this story, well, obviously, pray for these people, the Alawites and the Druze and the Christians, even though it's disputed if the Christians are being, Christians have been persecuted in Syria for a long time.
00:46:56.860I'm sure they're still being persecuted now.
00:46:59.000Also, when there is a tectonic political shift going on, as there is now, some eras, there aren't huge shifts going on.
00:47:07.040The mid-90s, there weren't huge political shifts.
00:47:09.900The big political shift had occurred in the early 90s with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
00:47:14.440Then things were kind of the same until 9-11.
00:47:17.780Right now, there are tectonic political shifts going on.
00:47:20.320You see this especially in the conflict in Ukraine, also in the conflict in Gaza, also in President Trump talking about acquiring Greenland and adding Canada to the country, retaking the Panama Canal.
00:47:32.660There is a tectonic shift that is even reflected in the election of President Trump.
00:47:37.420We talked earlier about mimesis and our leaders reflecting the body politic.
00:47:44.880We came to the end of something with the first election of Trump, and now we're really seeing that come to fruition.
00:47:49.420And when those shifts take place, the propaganda backed by organizations, backed by states, gets very, very intense.
00:47:57.800So it's another reason not to believe everything that you read on the internet and to try to do some of that research for yourself.
00:48:06.280And, of course, to pray for these people because there are – there's no doubt in my mind that Alawites, Druze, and even Christians are being seriously persecuted there.
00:48:14.840And there's no doubt in my mind that greater changes are even to come.