It's every edgy right-wing guy's worst nightmare. Screenshots of your group chat with the boys get leaked. But now imagine that instead of you and your buddies, the group chat included the vice president, the secretary of defense, the director of national intelligence, and the head of the CIA. And instead of sending spicy memes, you were describing a bombing campaign on Houthi rebels in Yemen. And, instead of it getting leaked to your girlfriend or your mom, it was leaked to the editor of one of the most liberal magazines in the country. That is where the Trump administration is right now, and we will separate fact and fiction.
00:25:15.760You know, it's a perfectly workable compromise, but I don't think it's the ideal.
00:25:20.380I certainly don't think it's the natural constitution of politics.
00:25:23.180I think the more natural constitution is imperial because borders cannot be permanently fixed as we pretend in the modern nation state liberal order.
00:25:36.440Borders can't be permanently totally fixed because peoples grow and shrink.
00:26:12.020The more natural political order is imperial.
00:26:14.860Imperial, not meaning that we're going to impose some tyrant from the top who's going to dictate every aspect of your life, but recognizing, kind of like feudalism, that there are just overlapping relationships of power and responsibility.
00:26:31.220And those exist at a really low level, they exist to a higher level, they usually have to have a little bit of a lighter grasp because of the principle of subsidiarity, that decisions that can be made more efficiently and effectively at the lower level ought to be made at such a level.
00:26:46.940But there are overlapping kinds of relationships of power.
00:26:52.440This is how we have a nation-state liberal order where we have to pretend that who's Becky, Becky, Stan, Stan, Stan, to quote Herman Cain, is a nation in precisely the same way as the United States is.
00:27:07.820We are certainly the empire that controls the West, if not the entire world.
00:27:12.560Now we're moving toward a more multipolar world.
00:27:16.400But when we say multipolar, we're still talking about like two powers, America and maybe a rising China.
00:27:22.300And you've got India and Russia kind of playing a little bit on the periphery.
00:27:25.860And then you have regional powers like Iran and the Middle East.
00:27:28.140But these are all only properly understood as empires or incipient empires.
00:27:36.900So when Trump says, yeah, of course I want Canada, it's ridiculous.
00:27:39.320Canada is not a real country compared to the United States.
00:27:41.780I think that's the vision he's getting at.
00:27:43.700And because Trump is not particularly ideological, because he's a gut politician, generally the things he says in politics are just naturally right.
00:27:52.460Even if they're not the most polished statements of political philosophy, he's just got a good gut understanding on it.
00:28:01.380Which means I don't think he's going to let up on the Canada thing.
00:28:03.980All of that is a really long way of saying, I don't think the guy is going to let up on the Canada thing.
00:28:09.000Now, speaking of other nations close to the UK, Rosie O'Donnell has fled America.
00:28:16.760In her defense, she has made good on the frequent liberal threat to leave America if Trump is elected.
00:28:22.340Most of the libs who promised to do that did not do that.
00:28:40.540Do you accept their right to do that and their opinion of him?
00:28:45.240Well, I respect their right to do that.
00:28:47.700I question why the first time in American history a president has won every swing state.
00:28:53.860And is also best friends and his largest donor was a man who owns and runs the Internet.
00:29:00.060So I would hope that that would be investigated and that we would see whether or not it was an anomaly or something else that happened on election night in America when Kamala Harris was filling up stadiums with people who supported her.
00:29:14.740And Donald Trump was not able to do that.
00:30:56.900He used a combination of Twitter and his space lasers to zap the voting machines in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and change all the ballots from Kamala to Trump.
00:31:35.780We were told we were evil, terrible election denier, coup d'etat, insurrectionists, because we had a few questions about the 2020 election.
00:31:43.6002020 election, the libs in the weeks before the election changed all the big voting rules, sent out widespread mail-in ballots that are quite vulnerable to fraud.
00:31:55.080In some cases, those ballots were contrary to the state constitution, as in the case in Pennsylvania.
00:32:01.200They then took hundreds of millions of dollars from big tech oligarchs who were super lib, who wanted to get Trump out, to fund left-wing organizations that established the ballot drop boxes, in some cases illegally far from county clerk offices.
00:32:13.980And then the vote count took days and weeks, and we had reports of pipes bursting, and we had ballot watchers who were not permitted to actually look at the count.
00:32:25.720We had election officials putting up cardboard and poster board to keep the public and the news media from looking in at the count.
00:32:33.500I mean, you know, regardless of what you think happened in 2020, there was at least a justification to ask some questions, wouldn't you say?
00:34:10.760And I, you know, I got in a little bit of trouble yesterday with some of the really hardline, more libertarian conservatives who said that food stamps, EBT, SNAP, should not be permitted for use on anything other than the most basic subsistence foods.
00:34:24.460And I don't think that's totally fair.
00:34:27.620You know, if someone on food stamps wants to buy their kid a candy every once in a while, I don't begrudge them that.
00:34:31.860But to the point on soda, soft drinks, which, you know, big soda gets like $5 billion a year on your dime because of welfare.
00:34:41.000I said, this really should not be permitted, no matter what the soda lobby was paying influencers to peddle out there.
00:34:50.460This should not be permitted in part because it seems kind of frivolous.
00:34:54.480And if people are really that hard up, then, you know, they should stick mostly to the essentials.
00:34:59.000But also because soda is not even really considered a luxury anymore.
00:35:03.460The elite people, the really fancy people who know about luxury, they don't drink soda anymore.
00:35:11.860They drink like frilly little, you know, seltzer drinks and kombuchas and things like that.
00:35:16.760It's not, it's really kind of bad for you.
00:35:37.980This study came out a while ago, but it, it's cropped back up in the public discourse because we're all talking about the population decline, the breakup of the American family.
00:35:50.540The study from all the way back in 2011 showed that one in five American mothers have kids with multiple fathers, which is not ideal.
00:36:03.160There are hierarchies of good and bad.
00:36:06.440So at the very least, you could say, well, these women having kids with multiple baby daddies is better than them killing their kids through abortion because abortion is now so promoted.
00:36:16.040I guess we need that little caveat is better to have the kid, even with multiple fathers, even out of wedlock, even then to murder the kid.
00:36:29.980Not ideal for the father to have kids out of wedlock.
00:36:33.680Study shows one in five of all American moms have kids with different birth fathers.
00:36:39.700Researchers, when they look only at mothers with two or more kids, the number is even higher.
00:36:47.84028% of them have kids with at least two different men.
00:36:52.280As a postdoctoral fellow who worked on this said, to put it in perspective, this is similar to the number of American adults with a college degree.
00:37:20.060Well, that last part there, 43% of women with kids with multiple dads were married when their first babies were born, mean that a lot of this comes from divorce and remarriage.
00:37:29.700Or divorce and having kids out of wedlock.
00:37:34.420Meaning, if we did not have the liberal divorce regime that we've had since the 1960s and 70s, that really only solidified in recent years.
00:37:42.560New York, liberal New York, did not tolerate no-fault divorce, so-called no-fault divorce, which is an impossibility.
00:37:50.000Someone's at fault when you get divorced.
00:37:51.620When you vow to stay together for life and then you don't, it's somebody's fault.
00:37:56.300But they didn't have no-fault divorce until 2010, 2011.
00:38:09.860What business is it of yours if people want to get divorced?
00:38:12.920Well, a consequence of that, a direct consequence of that, is now many mothers, in 2011 it was one in five, now it's more like one in four or more.
00:38:22.960U.S. mothers have kids with multiple fathers.
00:38:30.240Well, it's not just consenting adults, it's kids who now have to deal with this.
00:38:33.140And when kids are raised in unstable households, when they're raised in single-parent households, when they're raised with stepmothers and stepfathers, they have worse outcomes, worse educational outcomes, worse social outcomes, worse marital outcomes themselves.
00:38:47.160So it's not just a matter of consenting adults.
00:38:52.060Well, what business is it of yours how these people's kids turn out?
00:38:55.560Well, it's actually a lot of my business.
00:38:57.520The state has an interest in how the next generation of Americans turns out.
00:39:03.300I have an interest in how people in my community turn out because I live in society.
00:39:08.480And because I can reason about justice in the abstract because I'm a rational creature who can participate in a self-government.
00:39:16.560That's the premise of our civilization, okay?
00:39:18.660Or rather, that's the premise of our country and the present of our society.
00:39:29.740The problem is only getting worse because it used to be that the elites in society, the people who got the fancy jobs and went to the fancy schools and bought the fancy house and the fancy neighborhood, that those people all got married and stayed married and had kids by one father and did all the things that are supposed to be model behavior.
00:39:52.760Even if they didn't talk that way, they might not preach what they practice.
00:39:56.340They might preach liberalism and free love and a bunch of nonsense, but they behaved in a rather bourgeois way according to conventional morality.
00:40:06.040These kinds of issues, lots of kids by lots of different fathers, that was a lower class issue.
00:40:11.440Now, though, you're seeing this exact kind of behavior modeled by the upper classes.
00:40:16.960Lots of divorce, lots of kids by different fathers, lots of – you're seeing it at the highest echelons of society.
00:40:26.680So with no model whatsoever, you know, the only point in having upper classes, every society has various classes, even the ones that pretend that they don't.
00:40:36.500The social good of having higher classes is – the social good of having an aristocracy, even.
00:40:43.400Aristo, meaning good, is that you have some good behavior to model yourself after.
00:41:49.820You have to discourage promiscuous sex, sex outside of marriage.
00:41:52.620You have to recognize that the moral foundation of your society has to be something other than the maximizing of individual autonomy, individual choice.
00:42:01.700There's got to be something better, some other good that we're aiming at.
00:42:04.600We have to reinstitute and re-inculcate the good of family.
00:42:10.460We need to know what a family is then.
00:42:12.100We need to recognize that a family requires a mommy and a daddy.
00:42:15.640That is to say a man and a woman joined together for life for the purpose of the education and beginning of children.
00:42:21.740Which means that family can't just be anything some liberal judge wants to redefine it as.
00:43:00.200The upshot is that in recent years, the libs, who all read the New York Times, have been banning single-use plastic bags from the grocery stores.
00:43:10.680The good shopping bags that you've used for much of your life, banned.
00:43:15.020Because they're bad for the environment, we are told.
00:43:18.600So they use paper bags, they use cotton bags, canvas bags, and so they make you buy some stupid bag when you check out.
00:43:27.680New York Times now admitting, actually, the most environmentally friendly bag that you can use at the grocery store is the single-use plastic bag.
00:43:38.260Who could have told you that five and a half years ago on this very network?
00:43:48.160I turn you to the August 20th, 2019 episode of your favorite podcast.
00:43:55.660You would have to reuse a paper bag, a paper grocery bag, three times if you wanted to bring its environmental impact down to the level of a single-use plastic bag.
00:44:58.580I thought it actually was kind of common knowledge among people who cared to look into these things.
00:45:03.180And then five and a half years later, the New York Times gets the message.
00:45:09.240Had you, I don't know when you started listening to my show.
00:45:12.800Had you been listening to The Michael Knoll Show then, you would have known the breaking news from the New York Times, the paper of record, five and a half years early.
00:45:24.440I want that to be the commercial for The Michael Knoll Show.
00:45:27.140So, that, know the future, five and a half years in advance.