The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 1700 - SCREENSHOTS： Trump Admin ＂Group Chat＂ EXPLAINED

00:00:00.000 It's every edgy right-wing guy's worst nightmare.

00:00:04.060 Screenshots of your group chat with the boys get leaked.

00:00:07.660 But now imagine that instead of you and your buddies,

00:00:11.660 the group chat included the vice president of the United States,

00:00:14.900 the secretary of defense, the director of national intelligence,

00:00:17.820 the national security advisor, and the head of the CIA.

00:00:20.700 And instead of sending spicy memes,

00:00:23.400 you were describing a bombing campaign on Houthi rebels in Yemen.

00:00:27.400 And instead of the group chat getting leaked to your girlfriend or your mom or something,

00:00:32.980 it was leaked to the editor of one of the most liberal magazines in the country.

00:00:38.540 That is where the Trump administration is right now.

00:00:42.300 We will separate fact and fiction.

00:00:43.800 I'm Michael Knowles.

00:00:44.520 This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:00:57.400 Welcome back to the show.

00:01:05.260 I have never been more satisfyingly proven right than I was yesterday by the New York Times

00:01:12.500 on an obscure little issue about environmentalism that I sounded the alarm on over five years ago

00:01:20.980 On this show, I bring the receipts to show you why the Michael Knowles Show is so much more reliable,

00:01:28.520 so much better for expanding your mind than the New York Times is.

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00:02:10.440 Third, the Atlantic claims to have had war plans texted to it by the Trump administration.

00:02:19.500 This is the headline, the Atlantic.

00:02:22.000 The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans.

00:02:25.960 U.S. national security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen.

00:02:29.980 I didn't think it could be real.

00:02:31.160 Then the bombs started falling by Jeffrey Goldberg.

00:02:35.560 What happened?

00:02:37.080 And the claim here from the editor of The Atlantic, a super-duper lib magazine that has attacked Trump many times,

00:02:45.240 is that some of the top administration officials accidentally included him in a Signal chat.

00:02:54.860 Signal is an encrypted messaging service where the messages sometimes disappear after a while.

00:02:59.260 Sometimes they stay for longer.

00:03:00.500 It's supposed to be safer than ordinary iMessage texting or regular SMS.

00:03:05.240 And that they're all texting the VP, the NSA, the head of the CIA, the SecDef,

00:03:10.240 and they just accidentally include this liberal journalist.

00:03:13.000 It doesn't, there's no way, right?

00:03:15.880 There's no way.

00:03:17.620 What did the messages say?

00:03:19.960 Very interesting messages.

00:03:21.820 The title of this Signal chat was Hootie PC Small Group.

00:03:24.780 J.D. Vance, a person with the name J.D. Vance in the group chat, might really be him, might not be, says,

00:03:34.100 at Pete Hegseth, if you think we should do it, that is, if you think we should bomb the Hooties in Yemen, let's go. 1.00

00:03:40.480 I just hate bailing out Europe again.

00:03:43.660 Let's make sure our messaging is tight here.

00:03:45.480 If there are things we can do up front to minimize risk to Saudi oil facilities, we should do it.

00:03:49.240 A person who goes by the name Pete Hegseth responds,

00:03:53.440 VP, I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. 0.90

00:03:57.000 It's pathetic, but Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, is correct.

00:04:01.580 We're the only ones on the planet, on our side of the ledger, meaning on our, you know, 0.95

00:04:04.500 in the free world, in the America-led world, who can do this.

00:04:07.380 Nobody else even close.

00:04:08.700 Question is timing.

00:04:09.620 I feel like now is as good a time as any, given that POTUS' directive to reopen shipping lanes.

00:04:14.920 So the Hootie rebels, because they're firing on Israel, because the Hooties are funded by Iran, 1.00

00:04:22.360 Iran, the sworn enemy of Israel, Israel at war in Gaza, the Hooties are firing on Israel, 1.00

00:04:28.880 and they're taking over shipping lanes, shipping lanes that we and everyone else in the world needs

00:04:32.680 to trade our goods.

00:04:35.420 Somewhat dizzying, but that's why we care about the Hooties. 1.00

00:04:39.320 It says, given the POTUS directive to reopen the shipping lanes, I think we should go.

00:04:42.600 But POTUS, the president, still retains 24 hours of decision space.

00:04:47.580 And someone, SM, people are speculating, is it Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff at

00:04:52.100 the White House?

00:04:52.580 Who knows who SM is?

00:04:53.900 As I heard, the president was clear, green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and

00:04:57.260 Europe what we expect in return.

00:04:58.760 So notice, this theme keeps returning to Europe's not doing its fair share.

00:05:02.480 Europe needs to start taking responsibility for this security.

00:05:05.420 Europe benefits from this trade.

00:05:06.940 Europe needs to have some skin in the game.

00:05:08.500 We also need to figure out how to enforce such requirement.

00:05:10.640 E.G., E.G., I don't know who E.G. refers to.

00:05:14.540 It's unclear from the chat.

00:05:16.320 If Europe doesn't remunerate, then what?

00:05:19.160 If the U.S. successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost, there needs to

00:05:22.760 be some further economic gain extracted in return.

00:05:26.220 Pete Heggseth agree.

00:05:28.000 And then, you get a bunch of these guys just kind of agreeing.

00:05:31.780 J.V., I guess J.D. Vance, excellent.

00:05:33.940 J.R., John Ratcliffe, head of the CIA, a good start.

00:05:37.120 Michael Waltz, NSA, does a little, I like this fist pump, American flag fire emoji.

00:05:43.980 You know, man, these guys, they really, they are the boys, you know?

00:05:46.880 They are, it's just like yours, yours and my right-wing group chat.

00:05:51.080 M-A-R, unclear how that stands for, good job, Pete and your team.

00:05:55.460 Michael Waltz, team, great job.

00:05:56.840 Great work, all powerful start.

00:05:57.900 Okay, so just, you know, give an ad of boys around.

00:06:00.200 Is this real?

00:06:01.020 First thought, there's no way this is real, right?

00:06:04.200 However, Jeffrey Goldberg claims the minute he got the chat, he didn't believe it.

00:06:09.160 But then, at the predicted times, bombs started falling in Yemen, so he thought it was real. 0.85

00:06:13.940 The Trump administration has confirmed the authenticity of the chat.

00:06:17.860 So this raises another question.

00:06:19.560 Did they just accidentally add this journalist, or was this 5D chess?

00:06:28.220 Some have suggested it is 5D chess, because the libs are claiming that war plans were released,

00:06:35.260 and this endangered American personnel, and that isn't true, that's just hyperbole.

00:06:40.820 This doesn't read like war plans.

00:06:42.400 Because even the more specific details outlined in the chat were just giving a slightly advanced

00:06:49.360 notice of a bombing campaign that most people expected in Yemen anyway.

00:06:52.840 So it's not as though there were actual operational plans here. 0.96

00:06:55.300 You know, the libs are just ridiculous about that. 1.00

00:06:57.900 Furthermore, even the Atlantic article admits that the libs claim that these senior administration

00:07:06.360 officials coordinating on Signal, on an encrypted messaging service, the libs are claiming

00:07:11.100 that's illegal, that's evading federal records laws, and even the editor of the Atlantic here

00:07:17.580 is admitting it is not uncommon for national security officials to communicate on Signal.

00:07:22.280 So that claim goes out the window.

00:07:25.160 Some are suggesting, on the right, that it was an intentional leak to signal to Europe that

00:07:31.040 we are sick and tired of them freeloading off of us and they need to pay up, so that this

00:07:35.100 is kind of a 5D chess move in trade negotiations with Europe.

00:07:39.880 I'm a little skeptical of that.

00:07:42.680 That sort of thing can happen and often does happen, intentional leaks to send a message

00:07:47.840 to some other party.

00:07:49.060 However, in this case, the leak makes it look like the Trump administration is sloppy.

00:07:54.160 And usually, if you're going to try to send a message that way, you're not going to damage

00:07:58.020 yourself in the mind of the public in the meantime.

00:08:01.320 So I don't think that's real.

00:08:02.960 Well, however, you got to ask yourself how this guy got added.

00:08:08.500 So the theory that seems to be floated in the press right now is that it was Michael

00:08:13.460 Waltz, as Daily Wire is reporting this, Michael Waltz, the national security advisor, added

00:08:18.420 the journalist as a Signal connection a few days before he was added to the chat.

00:08:22.920 So was it the national security advisor who added the journalist?

00:08:27.980 Why did he do it?

00:08:28.860 One wild speculation is that, I don't know if I believe this at all, I just kind of saw

00:08:33.280 it floating around and it's as good as any explanation I've heard so far, that he meant

00:08:37.480 to add through a voice command, Elbridge Colby, an administration official, and accidentally

00:08:42.000 added Jeffrey Goldberg.

00:08:43.260 I don't know if I buy that, but maybe, you know, you speak things into the voice to text

00:08:49.200 and you can get totally crazy results.

00:08:51.240 So I guess there's enough assonance and almost a rhyme, maybe, who knows, who knows?

00:08:55.920 It'll be investigated.

00:08:57.580 The consequence of this is nil.

00:09:01.420 The libs are going to pretend this totally upended American foreign policy or something.

00:09:05.600 It had zero consequence on American foreign policy.

00:09:08.980 The libs are going to try to compare this to, they're already doing it, they're going to 1.00

00:09:12.000 try to compare this to Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server and the Republicans

00:09:16.700 making a big deal about Hillary Clinton as secretary of state using a private email

00:09:20.860 server, totally unsecured.

00:09:22.820 They're going to compare that to these top admin officials using an encrypted messaging

00:09:26.500 service.

00:09:27.180 There's really no comparison there.

00:09:28.960 The big problem, two big problems with Hillary's server.

00:09:31.740 One, it was totally insecure.

00:09:35.580 Signal actually relatively is quite secure, certainly compared to the Clinton home server.

00:09:40.240 But the real big problem about the Clinton home server is it appeared as though Hillary

00:09:45.540 Clinton was using the private server because she was also simultaneously raking in zillions 1.00

00:09:52.680 of dollars from foreign donors, foreign governments even, through her Clinton foundation.

00:09:59.100 So the issue with the private server wasn't even just that she was storing classified information

00:10:03.160 in places that were not secure.

00:10:04.760 It was that it, at the very least, gave the appearance that Hillary Clinton was conducting

00:10:09.300 private business and selling American influence for personal private gain, much the same way

00:10:16.000 that Joe Biden did that when his son was the bag man collecting money all around the world,

00:10:20.460 notably from Ukraine, to peddle American influence overseas.

00:10:25.140 No one is suggesting anything like that for the Trump administration officials.

00:10:29.140 So I think that's totally apples and oranges.

00:10:31.340 What's my takeaway from this story?

00:10:32.620 It's a wacky story.

00:10:33.700 There's no question about that.

00:10:35.660 I'm not going to say there are no questions that are raised by it.

00:10:38.900 Really, I guess the top question is, why would any Trump administration official even have

00:10:43.520 this guy's number in his phone?

00:10:45.740 Nobody should be talking to the head of the Atlantic if you are a Republican official.

00:10:49.940 But I'm just going to take the story for what it's worth.

00:10:52.340 What can we learn from this?

00:10:54.140 The biggest takeaway to me, reading these chats, assuming they're authentic and the administration

00:10:58.280 says that they are, my biggest takeaway is that J.D. Vance really is who he says he is.

00:11:04.760 And no one's talking about this.

00:11:06.500 Very few people are talking about this.

00:11:09.720 That's my big takeaway.

00:11:11.080 My big takeaway is Mike Waltz, the national security advisor, is a little more hawkish on

00:11:17.880 foreign policy, a little more interventionist.

00:11:20.000 That we all expected.

00:11:22.720 Pete Hegseth is willing to hear both sides, seems fairly open-minded on the use of military

00:11:30.040 force, but leaned in the direction of intervening here in Yemen.

00:11:35.760 Says, VP, I hear your concerns, but look, we're the only ones who could do it.

00:11:39.060 We should do it now.

00:11:39.880 It's in line with the president's directives.

00:11:42.440 But I agree, we got to weigh costs and benefits.

00:11:45.860 So Pete is open to hearing both sides.

00:11:48.260 And J.D. Vance does not want America to get involved militarily all over the world,

00:11:54.720 which is how he's campaigned for vice president.

00:11:58.620 That's how he writes now.

00:11:59.980 That's how he talks.

00:12:00.660 That's how he campaigned for Senate.

00:12:02.280 He really is that guy.

00:12:04.760 Some people say because J.D. Vance has had a big transformation, he used to be liberal

00:12:10.380 politically, now he's quite conservative.

00:12:12.600 He's kind of on the bleeding edge avant-garde of mainstream conservatism.

00:12:16.080 Some people have questioned the solidity of his views.

00:12:21.300 Let's say if you're actually looking into his private group chat, when the rubber meets

00:12:25.360 the road, and there's a major foreign policy question in a really hot part of the world,

00:12:30.320 J.D. Vance is sticking to his guns.

00:12:33.300 Which I think is where the avant-garde of the MAGA movement is.

00:12:38.540 My biggest takeaway really has very little to do with foreign policy or the operations

00:12:44.340 of the Trump administration.

00:12:45.700 Really, the biggest takeaway for me is J.D. Vance is fully the MAGA guy.

00:12:53.300 He is at the bleeding edge of the Trump movement.

00:12:58.540 And he is setting himself up to be President Trump's successor in 2028.

00:13:02.540 And it doesn't seem deceitful.

00:13:05.500 He really appears to be that guy.

00:13:07.760 There's so much more to say first, though.

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00:14:27.060 Speaking of foreign policy, another doozy coming out of the Trump administration.

00:14:32.620 President Trump has suggested that the United States join the Commonwealth of Nations.

00:14:38.680 What is the Commonwealth?

00:14:39.920 The Commonwealth is the successor organization to the British Empire.

00:14:45.360 When the British Empire fell apart, it transformed into the Commonwealth, which is this group of

00:14:52.800 nations led by the King of England.

00:14:56.520 Wait, what?

00:14:57.880 Hold on.

00:14:59.320 Hold on.

00:15:00.780 Didn't we fight a war in 1776?

00:15:03.700 Didn't my ancestor Simon Knowles fight from Bunker Hill all the way to Yorktown, go up to Newburgh

00:15:11.000 with General Washington?

00:15:12.620 This man crossed the Delaware with Washington just so we could leave the British Empire.

00:15:18.140 Why on earth would President Trump want to rejoin the successor organization?

00:15:22.620 Well, this is just being reported according to the Daily Mail, UK paper.

00:15:28.560 King Charles is expected to offer the United States membership to become the 57th member of the

00:15:34.600 Commonwealth.

00:15:36.580 And Trump responded, I love King Charles, sounds good to me.

00:15:41.020 I, this might be a little unpopular.

00:15:44.580 I like the idea.

00:15:46.460 I'm with Trump on this.

00:15:48.480 I'm with Trump on a lot of things.

00:15:49.560 But I'm, I'm really open to this idea.

00:15:51.720 I think this is an issue that is going to be a great measure of the depth of a person's

00:15:58.080 conservatism.

00:15:59.440 How conservative are you?

00:16:01.240 Are you conservative by 2012 standards?

00:16:04.740 Yeah, that's a lot of conservatives these days.

00:16:06.420 Are you conservative by 1960 standards?

00:16:08.620 How about by 1776 standards?

00:16:11.680 How about by 1620 standards?

00:16:13.420 Are you, how conservative are you, buddy?

00:16:15.860 I often say, I don't want to go back to 2012.

00:16:17.860 I want to go back to 1220. 1.00

00:16:19.560 Why, why would this be a good idea?

00:16:23.580 Well, there's a lot of fake news about the Commonwealth.

00:16:25.420 First of all, if you join the Commonwealth, that doesn't mean you have to acknowledge King

00:16:30.160 Charles as your monarch.

00:16:31.700 Okay.

00:16:32.240 America is not a monarchy.

00:16:33.700 America is a republic.

00:16:34.740 There are plenty of republics in the Commonwealth of Nations that have their own heads of state.

00:16:39.020 President Trump ain't acknowledging anyone else as being above him as a head of state.

00:16:43.600 So you don't have to do that.

00:16:44.840 You don't have to start paying stamp taxes to the British or anything like that.

00:16:49.420 It would be a symbolic gesture, but it would be a gesture to show that we have something

00:16:57.040 in common with, with England.

00:17:01.360 Because to quote Antonin Scalia, he made this point.

00:17:03.320 I played it on the show a couple of weeks ago.

00:17:05.180 Antonin Scalia observed that our culture comes from English culture.

00:17:08.660 He said, you know, he's one of the most Italian looking guys in the world.

00:17:12.500 And yet when he would go to Italy, he did not feel at home.

00:17:15.360 When he goes to England, he does feel at home because that's our culture.

00:17:18.140 That's where we come from.

00:17:19.660 It doesn't matter in America what you look like, where your family came from.

00:17:24.180 You, if you have assimilated at all, you have assimilated into the Anglo-Saxon culture.

00:17:28.340 And it shows that we're willing to take seriously the civilizational threats that we face because

00:17:35.700 we recognize that modern liberalism is living on the fumes of a civilization.

00:17:42.340 But because we cut ourselves off from our heritage, from our cultural inheritance,

00:17:49.340 we're starting to fall.

00:17:51.140 We're starting to crumble.

00:17:51.880 Our institutions are starting to crumble.

00:17:53.320 If we're going to make our country great again, we need to draw on the great wellsprings

00:17:59.840 of our civilization, which did not pop out of the air in 1776 or even 1620.

00:18:05.780 They go back further.

00:18:07.640 They go back to our great heritage in, I don't know.

00:18:11.020 They go back to Magna Carta.

00:18:12.500 They go back to the writings of Shakespeare.

00:18:15.320 They go back to the Roman Empire, the Roman Empire, which was present in the UK.

00:18:20.920 You can see the Roman Wall when you're in London.

00:18:23.320 It goes back to the great foundations of our civilization.

00:18:28.080 And especially at a time when the liberals are trying to involve us in all these sorts 0.99

00:18:33.060 of contrived, lib, stupid, modern institutions like the United Nations, get us to fund the 1.00

00:18:38.320 whole European Union, all of this globalist left-wing nonsense. 0.99

00:18:42.680 If we can show that we recognize that we're part of a broader civilization, and we're going to lead that

00:18:50.340 civilization, and we're going to have a leadership role, but we don't want to be part of this modern

00:18:54.020 globalism, I think one way to do that is to say, yes, we do have something in common with the

00:18:59.280 Commonwealth nations.

00:19:00.720 Yeah, we do have a shared heritage.

00:19:02.760 We're going to keep leading.

00:19:04.400 We're going to keep innovating.

00:19:06.180 We're going to be strong.

00:19:07.220 We're going to recognize we have that role.

00:19:09.320 I've said for a long time, I don't think that Trump is really a hardcore nationalist.

00:19:16.160 I think Trump, I think his political vision is an imperial political vision.

00:19:21.840 There's just two kinds of imperialism.

00:19:23.800 There's the liberal globalist imperialism of the UN and the EU and the IMF and the WTO and

00:19:30.020 the George Soros of the world.

00:19:31.680 And then there's the conservative imperial vision, which is manifest destiny, which is

00:19:36.740 go west, young man, which is we will make America great and strong, and we're not going

00:19:43.740 to be the world's police in every single corner of the world, but we're going to pursue our

00:19:48.760 interests all over the globe, and we have many of them.

00:19:52.140 That's Trump's vision.

00:19:53.540 I don't think Trump himself is an isolationist.

00:19:57.180 I don't think he wants to make America smaller.

00:20:00.120 I don't think he wants to go back to a yeoman republic. 1.00

00:20:03.220 I don't think that's him.

00:20:04.460 I think he wants to be great and big and expansionist, and he wants Greenland, and he wants Canada.

00:20:09.320 There's so much more to say.

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00:21:35.300 Folks, what happens when a Christian rock frontman steps into the yes or no hot seat?

00:21:38.420 In this episode, I'm joined by John Cooper, lead singer of Skillet for a round of stiff

00:21:43.440 drinks and even tougher questions.

00:21:44.800 No dodging, no filters, just yes or no.

00:21:50.020 Does the stereotype, rock star lifestyle, apply to Christian bands?

00:21:56.340 Well, it shouldn't.

00:21:58.720 Are we going to spill some tea?

00:21:59.740 What's going on?

00:22:08.420 Watch a full episode now on the Michael Knowles YouTube channel.

00:22:18.200 For the uncensored ad-free version, subscribe to Daily Wire+.

00:22:20.740 A story closely related to what we were just talking about and the Commonwealth of Nations

00:22:25.300 offer.

00:22:26.360 I think Trump is serious about making Canada a state.

00:22:31.800 So I guess as we join the Commonwealth, we can also take a Commonwealth country away and

00:22:36.840 make it part of our country.

00:22:38.200 President Trump was asked about this again in the Oval Office.

00:22:40.520 Here's what he had to say.

00:22:42.120 And remember with Canada, we don't need their cars.

00:22:45.120 We don't need their lumber.

00:22:46.140 We don't need their energy.

00:22:47.360 We don't need anything from Canada.

00:22:49.240 And yet it costs us $200 billion a year in subsidy to keep Canada afloat.

00:22:53.800 So when I say they should be a state, I mean that.

00:22:56.700 I really mean that.

00:22:57.400 Because we can't be expected to carry a country that is right next to us on our border. 0.97

00:23:07.060 It would be a great state.

00:23:08.140 It would be a cherished state.

00:23:10.180 The taxes for Canadian citizens would go down in less than half.

00:23:16.260 They don't spend money on military because they think we're going to protect them.

00:23:20.520 There are many things that they do, like icebreakers.

00:23:23.240 They want us to provide icebreakers for them. 0.52

00:23:25.860 Oh, that's wonderful.

00:23:27.160 So the Canada, they're very tough traders too.

00:23:32.060 I think he's serious about it.

00:23:33.840 I've talked to friends of mine who are very sharp thinkers who work in a variety of different

00:23:38.440 fields, not just politics, but finance all over the place.

00:23:41.840 I said, what do you make of all this Trump Canada talk?

00:23:45.080 Is he trolling?

00:23:46.180 And increasingly people say, no, no, I think he's serious.

00:23:49.480 I think he just wants Canada to become a state.

00:23:53.660 Some of them have said that they don't want Canada to become a state because they don't

00:23:58.140 want to be countrymen with Canadians.

00:24:00.160 Listen, I like Canadians.

00:24:02.280 I can't say some of my best friends are Canadians, but I like them.

00:24:04.800 I don't know that many Canadians, but I like them well enough.

00:24:07.620 He seems serious.

00:24:09.860 Further evidence that Trump's political vision is essentially imperial.

00:24:15.540 And this is really profound because I have argued for a long time, I support nationalism.

00:24:23.100 I say two cheers for nationalism, not three cheers, but two cheers for nationalism.

00:24:27.860 I think nationalism is preferable to liberal globalism.

00:24:32.460 You know, the George Soros's, the World Economic Forum, just taking away our national sovereignty

00:24:37.660 and our rights and making us all live in pods and eat bugs and plug into the matrix. 0.75

00:24:43.620 I definitely prefer nationalism to that.

00:24:45.540 However, I recognize that nationalism is contrived.

00:24:52.620 It's modern.

00:24:54.400 It's essentially liberal.

00:24:57.060 Nationalism as we know it today, the world order comprising a system of nation states,

00:25:01.820 is a product of the Treaty of Augsburg and the Peace of Westphalia to end the religious wars in Europe,

00:25:08.160 the religious wars which cracked up what we now call Western civilization, used to call Christendom.

00:25:13.560 So it's the second best.

00:25:15.760 You know, it's a perfectly workable compromise, but I don't think it's the ideal.

00:25:20.380 I certainly don't think it's the natural constitution of politics.

00:25:23.180 I think the more natural constitution is imperial because borders cannot be permanently fixed as we pretend in the modern nation state liberal order.

00:25:36.440 Borders can't be permanently totally fixed because peoples grow and shrink.

00:25:42.500 Countries flourish and countries die.

00:25:46.700 Migration does happen. 0.98

00:25:48.300 Wars do happen.

00:25:49.620 Conquest does happen.

00:25:50.860 We pretend in the post-World War II liberal order that doesn't happen, and yet it still happens.

00:25:55.220 And it's been happening immediately since we started that order.

00:25:58.400 We started to pretend that such an order were possible.

00:26:01.580 So the more natural constitution of politics, and this is a classical insight, certainly up through the Middle Ages.

00:26:09.980 We've forgotten it only recently.

00:26:12.020 The more natural political order is imperial.

00:26:14.860 Imperial, 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.

00:26:31.220 And 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.

00:26:46.940 But there are overlapping kinds of relationships of power.

00:26:52.440 This 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.

00:27:03.900 But it isn't.

00:27:05.320 America is the global hegemon.

00:27:07.820 We are certainly the empire that controls the West, if not the entire world.

00:27:12.560 Now we're moving toward a more multipolar world.

00:27:16.400 But when we say multipolar, we're still talking about like two powers, America and maybe a rising China.

00:27:22.300 And you've got India and Russia kind of playing a little bit on the periphery.

00:27:25.860 And then you have regional powers like Iran and the Middle East.

00:27:28.140 But these are all only properly understood as empires or incipient empires. 0.86

00:27:36.900 So when Trump says, yeah, of course I want Canada, it's ridiculous. 0.93

00:27:39.320 Canada is not a real country compared to the United States. 0.92

00:27:41.780 I think that's the vision he's getting at.

00:27:43.700 And because Trump is not particularly ideological, because he's a gut politician, generally the things he says in politics are just naturally right.

00:27:52.460 Even if they're not the most polished statements of political philosophy, he's just got a good gut understanding on it.

00:28:01.380 Which means I don't think he's going to let up on the Canada thing.

00:28:03.980 All of that is a really long way of saying, I don't think the guy is going to let up on the Canada thing.

00:28:09.000 Now, speaking of other nations close to the UK, Rosie O'Donnell has fled America.

00:28:16.760 In her defense, she has made good on the frequent liberal threat to leave America if Trump is elected.

00:28:22.340 Most of the libs who promised to do that did not do that.

00:28:24.880 Rosie followed through. 0.86

00:28:25.940 She moved to Ireland.

00:28:27.040 She does a TV show in Ireland.

00:28:28.500 And she makes a pretty bizarre claim that Elon Musk rigged the election for President Trump.

00:28:35.620 You know, a lot of people did vote for him.

00:28:39.740 Yes.

00:28:40.540 Do you accept their right to do that and their opinion of him?

00:28:45.240 Well, I respect their right to do that.

00:28:47.700 I question why the first time in American history a president has won every swing state.

00:28:53.860 And is also best friends and his largest donor was a man who owns and runs the Internet.

00:29:00.060 So 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.

00:29:14.740 And Donald Trump was not able to do that.

00:29:18.020 So it's curious to me.

00:29:20.400 Okay, there are a lot of if this is true, then that.

00:29:24.840 But the ifs, the premises, seem off.

00:29:29.120 Rosie says Kamala was filling up stadia.

00:29:32.460 Was she really?

00:29:33.000 I didn't notice that.

00:29:34.220 Says Trump couldn't fill up stadia.

00:29:35.820 I was in Madison Square Garden when he completely filled it up.

00:29:38.600 And he was filling up stadia all around the country.

00:29:41.840 Stadia, the plural of stadium.

00:29:43.360 I mean, it's a, you know, I love the English language and in this case, the Latin language.

00:29:48.480 That's just a little, that's just a little pretentious rhetorical flourish for the day.

00:29:53.220 Though it's not pretentious if it's not pretend.

00:29:55.200 That's the first claim.

00:29:56.580 Second one, she says, it's a little curious to me that Trump won the, the, all of the swing states for the first time in American history.

00:30:06.580 But that wasn't the first time in American history.

00:30:09.420 Ronald Reagan, just to use the most obvious example.

00:30:11.420 Ronald Reagan in 1984 won every state but Minnesota.

00:30:16.560 So he won all the swing states and pretty much every other state.

00:30:19.160 And the only state he lost was his opponent's home state.

00:30:22.620 And by the way, I was speaking to Ed Rollins probably 10, 15 years ago who ran the Reagan 84 campaign.

00:30:27.500 And he thinks they won Minnesota too.

00:30:29.880 They just didn't sue about it because they don't want to look like sore winners.

00:30:33.200 So just the premises are totally off.

00:30:34.960 But then what is the, I don't even know what the claim is.

00:30:37.280 She's claiming that Elon Musk controls the internet.

00:30:42.580 We all know Al Gore controls the internet.

00:30:44.320 He invented the internet.

00:30:45.060 But she says, Elon, because he owns the smallest of the big social media platforms, controls the internet.

00:30:52.480 He has internet satellites.

00:30:54.540 He has Starlink.

00:30:55.820 And he, what did he do?

00:30:56.900 He 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.

00:31:09.020 That's your working theory?

00:31:12.400 I had, in fairness to Rosie, I had a family member of mine suggest this to me over breakfast.

00:31:20.220 He says to me, dead serious.

00:31:22.680 He says, you know, I have a theory about the election.

00:31:24.520 Some people are going to call it a conspiracy theory.

00:31:25.980 I think Elon rigged it for, it's the same theory that Rosie just suggested.

00:31:31.460 Let's compare this to 2020.

00:31:35.780 We were told we were evil, terrible election denier, coup d'etat, insurrectionists, because we had a few questions about the 2020 election.

00:31:43.600 2020 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.

00:31:55.080 In some cases, those ballots were contrary to the state constitution, as in the case in Pennsylvania.

00:32:01.200 They 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.

00:32:13.980 And 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.

00:32:25.720 We had election officials putting up cardboard and poster board to keep the public and the news media from looking in at the count.

00:32:33.500 I 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?

00:32:41.760 Compare that with 2024.

00:32:46.520 Some of those abuses had been curtailed, but all of those abuses cut in favor of the left anyway.

00:32:51.540 But we were restored to a somewhat more normal electoral order.

00:32:56.240 There's no evidence that there was really any chicanery in the election.

00:32:59.940 The best the libs can come up with is Elon Musk with a magic space laser zapping Pennsylvania.

00:33:06.380 And we hear boo about it.

00:33:08.700 Pretty weak stuff from the libs.

00:33:12.840 This is, in fairness to Rosie, she is offering as plausible a view as to how Democrats lost as any of the Democrats.

00:33:19.740 You know, DEI, it's collapsing.

00:33:23.760 Walmart, Meta, Morgan Stanley, all backing away from the woke agenda because Americans are done playing along.

00:33:28.340 Trump signed, keep men out of women's sports. 1.00

00:33:30.980 The NCAA started to backpedal the next day.

00:33:33.100 University of Maine caved.

00:33:34.200 Columbia is quietly rewriting policy like no one's watching.

00:33:37.020 The left's grip is slipping and they can feel it.

00:33:40.140 But don't pop the champagne yet.

00:33:41.440 They will be back, louder and more radical than ever.

00:33:44.680 That is why the Daily Wire will keep up the fight.

00:33:46.500 This is your media.

00:33:47.540 This is your movement.

00:33:48.280 Join the fight.

00:33:48.860 Dailywire.com slash subscribe right now.

00:33:52.960 My favorite comment yesterday is from Cara Thrace, BSG.

00:33:55.700 I work at the grocery store and about 85% of people use EBT.

00:34:00.580 People spend $100 on candy, soda, and ice cream.

00:34:05.040 I see it every day.

00:34:06.800 That is not good.

00:34:09.360 That is not good.

00:34:10.400 I agree.

00:34:10.760 And 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.

00:34:24.460 And I don't think that's totally fair.

00:34:27.620 You know, if someone on food stamps wants to buy their kid a candy every once in a while, I don't begrudge them that.

00:34:31.860 But to the point on soda, soft drinks, which, you know, big soda gets like $5 billion a year on your dime because of welfare.

00:34:41.000 I said, this really should not be permitted, no matter what the soda lobby was paying influencers to peddle out there.

00:34:50.460 This should not be permitted in part because it seems kind of frivolous.

00:34:54.480 And if people are really that hard up, then, you know, they should stick mostly to the essentials.

00:34:59.000 But also because soda is not even really considered a luxury anymore.

00:35:03.460 The elite people, the really fancy people who know about luxury, they don't drink soda anymore.

00:35:11.860 They drink like frilly little, you know, seltzer drinks and kombuchas and things like that.

00:35:16.760 It's not, it's really kind of bad for you.

00:35:18.540 We're in the Maha movement, baby. 0.95

00:35:20.500 No more big soda.

00:35:21.280 I grew up, my blood type was like Coca-Cola and Snapple.

00:35:23.740 But it's a different era, baby.

00:35:25.800 We're in, we're in Maha.

00:35:27.600 Okay.

00:35:28.060 Speaking of our national health.

00:35:31.520 Here's a really disturbing story that just came out from NBC News.

00:35:36.080 One in five.

00:35:37.300 Oh, actually, I'm sorry.

00:35:37.980 This 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.

00:35:50.540 The study from all the way back in 2011 showed that one in five American mothers have kids with multiple fathers, which is not ideal.

00:36:03.160 There are hierarchies of good and bad.

00:36:06.440 So 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. 1.00

00:36:16.040 I 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.

00:36:24.580 But that's a pretty low bar.

00:36:26.620 Not ideal for the mother.

00:36:28.700 Certainly not ideal for the kids.

00:36:29.980 Not ideal for the father to have kids out of wedlock.

00:36:33.680 Study shows one in five of all American moms have kids with different birth fathers.

00:36:39.700 Researchers, when they look only at mothers with two or more kids, the number is even higher.

00:36:47.840 28% of them have kids with at least two different men.

00:36:52.280 As 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.

00:37:00.160 It's pervasive.

00:37:01.080 And 43% of the women with kids with multiple dads were married, rather, when their first babies were born.

00:37:10.640 Now, since 2011, when that study came out, probably another reason the study is going around right now, the numbers have gotten worse.

00:37:18.220 And why?

00:37:19.100 What is at the heart of this?

00:37:20.060 Well, 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.

00:37:29.700 Or divorce and having kids out of wedlock. 0.88

00:37:34.420 Meaning, 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.

00:37:42.560 New York, liberal New York, did not tolerate no-fault divorce, so-called no-fault divorce, which is an impossibility.

00:37:50.000 Someone's at fault when you get divorced.

00:37:51.620 When you vow to stay together for life and then you don't, it's somebody's fault.

00:37:56.300 But they didn't have no-fault divorce until 2010, 2011.

00:37:59.700 So this is relatively recent.

00:38:02.460 And what do people say?

00:38:05.100 What do the libs and the squishes say?

00:38:06.680 They say, oh, well, who cares?

00:38:08.620 Just consenting adults.

00:38:09.860 What business is it of yours if people want to get divorced?

00:38:12.920 Well, 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.

00:38:22.960 U.S. mothers have kids with multiple fathers.

00:38:26.660 Well, what business is that of yours?

00:38:28.840 It's just consenting adults.

00:38:30.240 Well, it's not just consenting adults, it's kids who now have to deal with this.

00:38:33.140 And 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.

00:38:47.160 So it's not just a matter of consenting adults.

00:38:52.060 Well, what business is it of yours how these people's kids turn out?

00:38:55.560 Well, it's actually a lot of my business.

00:38:57.520 The state has an interest in how the next generation of Americans turns out.

00:39:03.300 I have an interest in how people in my community turn out because I live in society.

00:39:08.480 And because I can reason about justice in the abstract because I'm a rational creature who can participate in a self-government.

00:39:16.560 That's the premise of our civilization, okay?

00:39:18.660 Or rather, that's the premise of our country and the present of our society.

00:39:22.240 Premise of our society.

00:39:23.420 So what do we do about it?

00:39:27.520 What's the answer here?

00:39:29.740 The 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.

00:39:52.760 Even if they didn't talk that way, they might not preach what they practice.

00:39:56.340 They might preach liberalism and free love and a bunch of nonsense, but they behaved in a rather bourgeois way according to conventional morality.

00:40:06.040 These kinds of issues, lots of kids by lots of different fathers, that was a lower class issue.

00:40:11.440 Now, though, you're seeing this exact kind of behavior modeled by the upper classes.

00:40:16.960 Lots of divorce, lots of kids by different fathers, lots of – you're seeing it at the highest echelons of society.

00:40:26.680 So 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.

00:40:36.500 The social good of having higher classes is – the social good of having an aristocracy, even.

00:40:43.400 Aristo, meaning good, is that you have some good behavior to model yourself after.

00:40:48.660 But now the aristocracy is not good.

00:40:51.440 They don't model good behavior.

00:40:54.320 This is part of the cycle of regimes when the aristocracy turns into nothing more than a selfish oligarchy.

00:41:01.320 They're pursuing not the common good but the private interest.

00:41:05.180 So what do we do about this?

00:41:06.700 Well, we have to recognize the way to turn around a social pathology such as this is to recognize it is widespread.

00:41:15.340 There is grace.

00:41:16.160 There is forgiveness.

00:41:17.060 We can improve.

00:41:18.340 One in five, one in four U.S. women. 0.80

00:41:19.880 Okay, we're not going to throw them all into the outer darkness where there's wailing and gnashing teeth.

00:41:24.000 But the first step to fixing a problem is admitting that you have a problem.

00:41:28.800 And you have to recognize this is not ideal.

00:41:31.520 No one wants this.

00:41:33.040 Really.

00:41:33.820 So what do you do?

00:41:35.900 You have to tighten up the divorce laws. 1.00

00:41:38.940 You have to change the way that we educate people about sex.

00:41:43.300 No more of this free love. 0.99

00:41:45.100 You know, everyone should just use a condom and go have promiscuous sex and explore yourself. 1.00

00:41:48.500 You've got to curtail that. 0.97

00:41:49.820 You have to discourage promiscuous sex, sex outside of marriage.

00:41:52.620 You have to recognize that the moral foundation of your society has to be something other than the maximizing of individual autonomy, individual choice.

00:42:01.700 There's got to be something better, some other good that we're aiming at.

00:42:04.600 We have to reinstitute and re-inculcate the good of family.

00:42:10.460 We need to know what a family is then.

00:42:12.100 We need to recognize that a family requires a mommy and a daddy.

00:42:15.640 That is to say a man and a woman joined together for life for the purpose of the education and beginning of children.

00:42:21.740 Which means that family can't just be anything some liberal judge wants to redefine it as.

00:42:26.940 We need to really get back to basics.

00:42:30.560 Okay, now speaking of getting back to basics, this is such a great, I don't care, I'm going to go a little late today, I don't care.

00:42:37.440 I have never been proven so beautifully, satisfyingly correct.

00:42:44.180 The New York Times has a story out yesterday.

00:42:46.820 Okay, what shopping bags should I use?

00:42:51.480 All bags are not created equal when it comes to the environment.

00:42:54.360 And paper might not be as green as you think.

00:42:58.620 I won't read the whole article.

00:43:00.200 The 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.

00:43:10.680 The good shopping bags that you've used for much of your life, banned.

00:43:15.020 Because they're bad for the environment, we are told. 0.99

00:43:18.600 So they use paper bags, they use cotton bags, canvas bags, and so they make you buy some stupid bag when you check out. 0.75

00:43:27.680 New York Times now admitting, actually, the most environmentally friendly bag that you can use at the grocery store is the single-use plastic bag. 0.91

00:43:38.260 Who could have told you that five and a half years ago on this very network?

00:43:48.160 I turn you to the August 20th, 2019 episode of your favorite podcast.

00:43:55.660 You 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.

00:44:07.960 Now, do you ever reuse paper bags?

00:44:10.440 No, nobody does.

00:44:11.320 You just throw them out.

00:44:12.040 Ironically, you do reuse the environmentally pretty fine plastic bags, but you don't reuse the paper bags.

00:44:21.940 So they're actually much worse for the environment.

00:44:23.840 Why is that?

00:44:25.100 It takes a lot more energy to make the paper bags.

00:44:28.780 You have to create the pulp.

00:44:29.940 You have to manufacture the paper bag.

00:44:31.720 And in all of that energy and all of that time, you could have just made that single-use, very thin plastic bag from oil.

00:44:39.680 1,299 episodes of The Michael Knoll Show ago.

00:44:48.940 You know how much I hate to say I told you so.

00:44:52.900 Your favorite podcast host broke this story.

00:44:57.900 Did I break it?

00:44:58.580 I thought it actually was kind of common knowledge among people who cared to look into these things.

00:45:03.180 And then five and a half years later, the New York Times gets the message.

00:45:09.240 Had you, I don't know when you started listening to my show.

00:45:12.800 Had 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.

00:45:24.440 I want that to be the commercial for The Michael Knoll Show.

00:45:27.140 So, that, know the future, five and a half years in advance.

00:45:31.820 Today is Teeheehee Tuesday.

00:45:32.920 The show continues.

00:45:33.620 Now, you do not want to miss it.

00:45:34.600 Become a member.

00:45:35.060 Use code Knolls at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

00:45:38.000 The bio from the New York Times.

00:45:44.700 Thank you.

00:45:45.760 Thanks for listening.

00:45:49.640 I love you.

00:45:53.660 I love you.

00:45:58.580 Thanks for listening.

The Michael Knowles Show - March 25, 2025

Ep. 1700 - SCREENSHOTS： Trump Admin ＂Group Chat＂ EXPLAINED

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