Ep. 1762 - Trump Nukes His Enemies With This Meme
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
172.32079
Summary
The New York Times has a new attack on President Trump. It's a desperate play on a desperate political strategy that's been going on for a decade. And it's a good one. Michael Kinsley explains why.
Transcript
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If you were the president of the United States and you had just negotiated a tenuous ceasefire
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between two nations that hate each other more than any other two nations on earth,
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one of which has a nuclear weapons program of dubious legality and the other of which
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has a nuclear weapons program of certain illegality until you blew it up three days ago.
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If you were that guy and you had managed to achieve an improbable peace without escalating
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the war and destabilizing the region, you would probably play it cool for a few days, right?
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That's what you would do because you are not Donald Trump who instead posted this to social media.
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Went to a mosque, gonna throw some rocks, tell the Ayatollah gonna put you in a box.
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The country's got a feeling, really, it's a ceiling.
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I don't have to tell you that that post is hilarious, but what I might have to tell you
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is that that post also achieved at least three strategic political objectives
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and exemplifies a political posture that goes all the way back to Julius Caesar.
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I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show. The New York Times has a new attack on President Trump.
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This is the, I think, the desperation play for them.
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It's that Iran's nuclear sites might not have been totally obliterated.
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He didn't start World War III. He didn't get American troops killed.
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Okay, well, I guess the best way, maybe it didn't work.
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And people are going to say, this is Trump being crazy.
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Look, I don't know how conscious Trump is of his excellent, obviously, insanely successful political strategy that is undeniable at this point, even for all the haters.
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But even if he's not totally conscious of it, the fact that he just keeps doing it for 10 years straight shows you it's a pretty good strategy.
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What this post does is reestablish three things.
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Two days ago, President Trump was walking to Marine One, and the reporters asked him about Iran and Israel breaking the ceasefire.
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He said, these countries don't know what the F they're doing.
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Trump has that gift that Ronald Reagan had, which is opening with a joke.
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By posting the bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, he's funny again.
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Second thing that the post reestablishes is ideological balance.
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Because Trump was being hit from the right, not just from the libs, but from the right, over this mission in Iran.
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You had people, very serious voices on the right, saying that Trump was no better than George Bush, and he was going to get us bogged down in a forever war.
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And he was risking American troops when there was no real American interest at play.
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And this was awful, and he was being dog-walked and all the rest of it.
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So, because you had this extreme dove position, not even just a dovish position, an extreme dovish position.
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If the United States ever flies a fighter jet, you know, it's an immoral act or something like that.
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We have the, we have not only the greatest military in the world, we basically have the only military in the world.
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The only actual military that can project power anywhere.
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You don't need to cry every time an American fighter jet takes off.
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He's reestablishing ideology, the balance of both of those.
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And then, third thing, he's reestablishing his madman credentials.
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And I think this is probably the most important.
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The lyrics, and it's not just, we've all heard the version of the song before.
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The song is Trump coming out and saying, ha ha ha, I'm gonna kill you.
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It's helped him dealing with Iran in both terms.
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Famously, it was reported that Trump warned Putin.
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Said, Putin, if you invade into Ukraine while I'm president, I'll bomb Moscow.
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And Putin might think, okay, look, 95% chance he's bluffing.
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He's the kind of guy who, after securing a tenuous ceasefire, a real stop and go ceasefire
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between two nations, at least one of them has nukes, one of them almost had nukes, two
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nations who hate each other more than any other nations on Earth.
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I'm gonna take my finger and rub it right in their wound.
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Yeah, I'm gonna take some salt and rub it in there, too.
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They're gonna say, this is not how statesmen believe.
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George Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden would never do that.
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There's a temptation to say that posting this kind of video is modern or postmodern even.
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This comes to us from Plutarch's Parallel Lives.
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Julius Caesar is on his way to study oratory at Rhodes, and he's captured by Cilician pirates.
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So they capture Caesar, and they, Caesar's, you know, 25.
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And they say, okay, we're gonna set the ransom at 20 talents.
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Does he throw himself on the mercy of the pirates?
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And he says, you, you idiots, you don't even know who you have.
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You should set the, you should set the ransom at 50 talents.
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Then he sends his entourage back to Miletus to go get the money.
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And for 38 days, he's captive, but he doesn't behave like a captive.
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He starts reciting speeches of his, and he's gone to study oratory.
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And when the pirates don't get it, he makes fun of them.
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And then every so often, he would say, I'm gonna crucify you.
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He says, but don't forget, I'm gonna crucify you.
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And the pirates think the guy's completely nuts.
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And he's vacillating on whether or not to punish them.
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And the lesson, I would say the chief lesson of that classic political episode is you probably
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He just dropped a bunch of bunker busters and blew up Iran's whole nuclear program.
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The thing that they have wanted, that they have been pursuing more than anything else
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I don't want to hear any counter-signaling the bomb Iran video.
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It achieves at least three political objectives for Trump.
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And it's an example of strong political leadership.
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Now, speaking of Trump threatening people, declaring war, memeing, not only did we get
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that short film from the president yesterday, we got this novel, we got this war and peace
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I'm going to fly through it, but it's good writing.
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Because Trump, as commander in chief, led maybe the most successful military expedition
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Just in terms of cost to the United States, cost in destabilizing any region, strategic
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This was what, like a three-hour military operation that obliterated Iran's nuclear program?
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I haven't seen anything this successful, at least since Desert Storm, and maybe including
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Anyway, Trump writes, stupid AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the dumbest, in quotes,
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people in Congress, is now calling for my impeachment, despite the fact that the crooked
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and corrupt Democrats have already done that twice before.
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The reason for her rantings is all of the victories that the USA has had under the Trump
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The Democrats aren't used to winning, and she can't stand the concept of our country being
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When we examine her test scores, her test scores, like her SAT, we will find out that she is
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not qualified for office, but nevertheless far more qualified than Crockett, who is a
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seriously low IQ individual, or Ilhan Omar, who does nothing but complain about our country.
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Yet the failed country that she comes from, Somalia, doesn't have a government, is drenched
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in crime and poverty, and is rated one of the worst in the world, if it is even rated
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How dare the mouse tell us how to run the United States of America?
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Because she does kind of look like a mouse, and that's never occurred to me, but that's
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As often, not always, but most of the time, Trump's nicknames usually work.
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We're just now coming back from that radical left experiment with Sleepy Joe, Kamala,
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AOC should be forced to take the cognitive test that I just completed at Walter Reed Medical
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As the doctor, all sorts of random capitalizations throughout.
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As the doctor in charge said, President Trump aced it, meaning I got every answer right.
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There's actual political import to this, but you kind of have to read all of it to get
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President Trump aced it, meaning I got every answer right.
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Instead of her constant complaining, Alexandria should go back home to Queens, where I was
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also brought up, and straighten out her filthy, disgusting, crime-ridden streets in the district
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she represents, and which she never goes to anymore.
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She better start worrying about her own primary before she thinks about beating our great Palestinian
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He calls one of the most famous Jews in America the great Palestinian senator because he's a
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kind of a traitor to the Jewish interests, at least as regards Israel.
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And he ended up backing a lot of the anti-Israel measures, which there's a lot of political conclusions
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But anyway, he goes, our great Palestinian senator, crying, Chuck Schumer, whose career
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She and her Democrat friends have just hit the lowest poll numbers in congressional history.
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It does the same thing as the video, which is intentional.
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Now, Trump, at least at some level, and maybe totally consciously, knows what he's doing
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Shoot, I'm starting to look like I'm losing my cool here.
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Now, the right has just been fighting over this Iran war.
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The doves and the hawks at each other's throats.
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It's Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin at each other's throats.
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This restores the ideological balance because we have a common enemy, our most prominent
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farcical enemy that we've had for 10 years now, AOC.
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This is written like a madman, and he knows what he's doing.
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This is the guy who wrote the tweet about the Taco Bowls at Trump Tower.
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The best Taco Bowls in the world are at Trump Tower.
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He was the top-rated guy in network primetime TV for like 15 years.
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The Trump haters, the best they can muster at this point is, well, it's all just an accident.
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He's just accidentally really good at all this stuff.
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Whatever helps you maintain your self-conception having been wrong about the Trump admin for 10 years now.
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And if he's really crazy, maybe I better tread lightly.
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Also on the charge, though, it triggered AOC because AOC responds and she goes, also, I'm a Bronx girl.
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You know, you should know that we eat Queen's boys for breakfast, respectfully.
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But I have a little insight into this because AOC and I, AOC is maybe a year or two older than me.
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AOC and I were raised in almost exactly the same place at almost exactly the same time.
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AOC is, she grew up in a town called Yorktown Heights.
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I grew up, it's a suburb, about an hour, a little more than an hour north of the city.
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The irony is that AOC actually grew up in a slightly wealthier and whiter suburb than I did.
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So if you look on a map, if you're watching this right now, you can see the red circle, that's AOC's town that she grew up in.
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And then that circle all the way down at the bottom of the map in black, that would be the Bronx.
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She's Alexandria from the Burbs, which is fine.
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But AOC has gotten in trouble for years lying about this.
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And because I, oddly enough, AOC and I actually have very similar life circumstances.
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But I have a lot of insight into how she grew up.
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I spent a lot of time in the Bronx, too, because I'd go to the Bronx, to the Italian section, to go grocery shopping on the weekends.
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The funny thing is Trump actually did grow up in Queens.
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But Donald Trump has much more in common with the average guy on the street in Queens or the Bronx than AOC from the fancy northern Westchester suburbs does.
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And it's the reason why his tweets hit like that and AOC's, you know, we eat you Queens boys for breakfast.
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That's such a northern Westchester thing to say.
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We, do you know, actually, we, it's like you're trying to come up with the playground taunt, and you don't have it because you didn't actually grow up on them mean streets.
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Whereas with Trump, whatever it is, if it's a show, if it's authentic, if there's no difference between the two, his performance is more persuasive.
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And that's why he has greater political effect than she does.
00:21:21.880
Now, really, really bad stuff coming out of the Bronx.
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AOC is positively conservative compared to the next mayor of New York.
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In this episode of Michael and the former spy, I sit down with Jack Barsky, a former KGB agent who lived a double life as both a Soviet spy and a suburban American dad.
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We dive into the secrets of Cold War espionage, the lies he told to survive, and the psychological toll of living a life split in two.
00:23:05.120
When Donald Trump criticized the CIA and the FBI, partially I think it was his ego, but he was also right.
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They said 51 intelligence officials, past and present, see Trump as a threat.
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If Russia today is sending amateurs to do their spying, are there any countries that are still good at it?
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The Mossad is superb, and they also have a lot of Arabs among their ranks, which helps them a lot.
00:23:40.160
Well, that's one of the reasons that they could blow up a bunch of Hamas people with drones, because they knew exactly where they're going to be.
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Watch the full episode now at the Michael Knowles YouTube channel.
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For the uncensored ad-free version, subscribe to Daily Wire Plus.
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Speaking of New York politicians, the results are in from the New York Democrat mayoral primary.
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And the next mayor of New York is going to be freaking terrible, just terrible, just the worst we've seen in our lifetimes and well beyond our lifetimes, maybe the worst ever.
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I feel confident to say that now before he's even won the general election, before he's won, before he's ever entered into office.
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On the one hand, you had Andrew Cuomo, former governor of New York, who left during a big scandal.
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It was really because he mishandled COVID and lied about COVID, and he was trying to mount a political comeback.
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Andy Cuomo, I was a waiter for him one time in northern Westchester.
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He has been a fixture in New York politics for 50 years.
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His dad was governor, a very famous governor, almost ran for president.
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He wanted to make a comeback as mayor of New York.
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And then you had this guy, Zoran Mamdani, a 12-er Shiite Muslim socialist who wants to stop arresting criminals and affirmatively wants to trans little kids.
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And we should look at why, because it's going to give you, forget about New York.
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There's like three views on this that get you to deepening levels of conservatism.
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The first view is, we should care because the New Yorkers are our fellow countrymen.
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And even though it's our city, or even though it's their city, you know, we should care about what happens to them.
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I mean, it's really their right to elect whoever they want, but we should kind of care.
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The next year of conservatism is, well, whatever.
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It's a terrible city up by the axis of evil and whatever, let it burn.
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But then the deeper level of conservatism is, it's a great American city.
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Those miscreants up there who elected Zoran Mamdani don't have any right to ruin it.
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I go there twice a year and I want to make sure I can safely walk to go get a bagel and even maybe ride the subway.
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So no, I care about it because I'm an American.
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So what's really interesting about this race is both of these guys ran on the same issue.
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Andy Cuomo has leftist credentials on abortion that cannot be exceeded.
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Andy Cuomo changed the law to permit abortion up until the moment of birth and changed the penal law to redefine murdering a pregnant woman as double homicide to single homicide.
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Andy Cuomo is a left winger, even on all the social issues.
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And each of these guys ran a TV ad about affordability.
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New York City has an affordability crisis, but we will rise.
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I raised it to the highest in the nation as governor.
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We built new bridges, train stations and airports and got through COVID together because there's a simple solution to a crisis.
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Look, it's a little unaffordable now, but we're going to grow.
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I did it when I was housing secretary under Clinton.
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Listen, we're going to have abundance liberalism.
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That's how things are going to be more affordable.
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Here's how the other guy talked about affordability.
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I'm Assemblyman Zahran Maldani, and I'm running for mayor to freeze the rent for every rent stabilized tenant.
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We're going to be more affordable by growing and by raising the minimum wage a little bit and rising together and growing and being abundant.
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He says, hey, you're going to have more money because I'm going to eat the rich.
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We're going to get those dirty, nasty landlords.
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Andrew Cuomo was running on a 90s liberalism campaign.
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Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, George Bush, Mike Bloomberg in New York.
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We're not going to worry so much about, you know, hostilities and tensions.
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No, we're just all going to grow and be rich, and we're going to have a truce on some of
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the social stuff, and that's 90s liberalism, and Mamdani ran on socialism.
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Implicit is someone's going to have to pay for that.
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It's going to be the landlords, and they're whatever.
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We're going to, I'll eat them if you get hungry, and guess who won?
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Now, there is a Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa.
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Curtis Sliwa is the founder of the Guardian Angels, the civic group to protect people when
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the political order was failing to deal with crime on the streets.
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It's this group, the Guardian Angels, would ride the subways and just protect people from
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the criminals and the vagrants who are coming back because of bad governance in New York.
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George Pataki, the former Republican governor of New York, he came out.
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He said, I think Curtis Sliwa might be able to win here.
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I mean, it might be the case that Zoran Mamdani is just so radical that the Republican has a
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chance, but I don't think so, because Curtis Sliwa is such a colorful character in his
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own right, and New York has become so liberal, and so many conservatives have left New York
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even since COVID, since Cuomo's terrible management under COVID.
00:31:17.300
They've left for places like Florida and Tennessee and Texas.
00:31:23.300
I think that politics has moved away from a kind of squishy procedural norms where we're
00:31:31.960
I think on the right, we've concerned ourselves more with substantive goods, family, virtue,
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And on the left, they've concerned themselves with more putative substantive goods, not
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They're actual evils, but substantive goods like class struggle, race struggle, soaking
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the rich, you know, real substance, not a kind of broad procedure that supposedly is going
00:32:13.680
Speaking of threats and New York, you're getting some reports out now.
00:32:19.300
New York Times has a report that the Iranian nuclear sites might not have been totally
00:32:29.900
So you got this piece of strike set back Iran's nuclear program by only a few months, U.S.
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Preliminary classified findings indicate that the attack sealed off the entrances to two
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facilities but did not collapse their underground buildings.
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And here's why actually it wasn't that good and what Trump did is just not that impressive.
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Sean Parnell, who is the spokesman for the Pentagon, he responded.
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He said, we dropped 14,000 30,000 pound bombs directly on their target, 420,000 pounds of
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It doesn't take a genius to know that these nuclear facilities have been completely obliterated.
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New York Post, though, even, which is a little bit more right wing, is hitting it from another
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Says, top Trump official calls U.S. airstrikes on Iran pointless, suggests deep state swayed press.
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Now, this is great clickbait because it's a total red herring here.
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The Trump official reportedly called the U.S. airstrikes pointless before we knew what
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So this actually has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not they collapse the nuclear
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It's just a guy who said, look, I just disagree with military intervention generally.
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And they're trying to turn this into a narrative that says that the strikes weren't effective.
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The New York Times is going at it more directly.
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Saying, well, they didn't even stop the program.
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The libs are just out of ways to criticize Trump.
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And the right, in many ways, is out of ways to criticize Trump.
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Or on the flip side, he's a maniac, belligerent.
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He's going to get us embroiled in an endless war in the Middle East.
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And then the criticisms, even from the extreme right.
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He's just going to get us embroiled in a regime change war.
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Carried out probably the most successful military operation of our lifetimes.
00:34:35.660
Just so, I mean, it remains to be seen if the ceasefire holds.
00:34:38.740
But if, assuming it holds, it's just, it was just a complete grand slam.
00:34:49.820
The only way they can criticize it now is, yeah, well, I don't know.
00:34:52.780
I mean, maybe it didn't like totally 100% work.
00:35:08.740
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00:35:46.720
Now, CNN is responding in a slightly different, though equally farcical way.
00:35:53.780
CNN is not focusing on the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the bunker buster attack.
00:36:02.440
CNN is trying to cultivate sympathy for the Ayatollah because you just misunderstand.
00:36:09.780
You ugly Americans, you just don't have enough cultural enrichment to understand that when the Iranians chant death to America, it's actually an act of friendship.
00:36:21.480
Israel stays in place, and that is part of the discussion, right?
00:36:31.240
And, you know, I remember, Dan, at one point being in Tehran years ago, and they're chanting death to America all around me, even as I say, oh, I'm an American reporting for CNN, and they were happy to speak to me.
00:36:43.340
So those two sort of jarring realities of the chant, and yet the friendliness have existed together.
00:36:55.980
We had mostly fiery but mostly peaceful protests.
00:36:58.900
Now we have mostly friendly death to America chants.
00:37:03.760
We're going to have to go back to the drawing board on that one, too.
00:37:09.720
Now, speaking of jokes, President Trump was flying on Air Force One, and he was asked by reporters if he was going to see Zelensky.
00:37:20.660
Before the Israel-Iran war, there was this other war we were dealing with, the Ukraine-Russia war.
00:37:25.760
We're also a little focused on the war that could break out, the China-Taiwan war.
00:37:29.080
But what about happening to Ukraine and Russia?
00:37:35.560
Do you think you'll meet with Zelensky when you're there?
00:37:48.680
So, well, what are you going to say to Zelensky?
00:37:52.760
I'm probably going to talk to him about the weather.
00:38:00.960
He might even have volunteered this story about a phone call he got from Vladimir Putin.
00:38:16.820
And I hope we're going to be getting a deal done with Russia.
00:38:29.940
He might as well, Trump might as well light up a cigarette on the plane.
00:38:32.020
You know, spotlight on him, grabs the microphone.
00:38:37.720
He says, hey, can I give you any help with Iran?
00:38:49.860
These guys, I tell you, I tell you, I get no respect, no respect.
00:38:54.860
He's doing a stand-up routine, which he's done for 10 years.
00:39:03.780
The clearest example of that was back in the 2016 race, when he was pinned down on a question
00:39:09.680
by Megyn Kelly, that you've called women fat and ugly and stupid and whatever, and what's Trump's answer?
00:39:15.440
It's not, no, I didn't really, actually, you don't understand my meaning, actually.
00:39:18.840
Actually, his response was, yeah, only Rosie O'Donnell.
00:39:23.660
Totally wins over the audience, completely cuts the tension, disarms everybody.
00:39:29.960
And it's not, the mistake that people make when they look at him is they think he's a clown.
00:39:35.080
The mistake that people make is they think he's frivolous, that he's a superficial person.
00:39:41.860
I don't know how you could continue to think that, especially because we're citing historical
00:39:46.100
examples of these kinds of political strategies.
00:39:48.260
This is an obvious one, much more recent than Julius Caesar.
00:39:52.080
This is exactly the kind of thing Ronald Reagan did.
00:39:54.340
Ronald Reagan started every cabinet meeting with a joke.
00:39:57.000
This is exactly the kind of thing Winston Churchill did.
00:39:59.520
Winston Churchill, famous for his wit, so famous for his wit that people attribute jokes
00:40:05.080
Even more recently, Berlusconi, Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister of Italy, had this,
00:40:10.840
in many ways, he was kind of a proto-Trump, this media mogul, billionaire, playboy persona,
00:40:16.980
always telling jokes, but it was for political effect.
00:40:21.920
Now, as a related story, a media story, it's not even directly related to politics,
00:40:30.760
Now, for the first time ever, streaming took over TV viewing.
00:40:44.540
First time more Americans watch TV on streaming than on cable and network combined.
00:40:50.660
It's the first time that that has ever happened over a full month.
00:40:55.200
This presents a political risk to Trump, to the Republicans, to everybody, really.
00:41:02.020
Which is, we've had an expression for 10 years now, which is, Twitter is not real life.
00:41:11.340
If you're in media, if you're in politics, you're on Twitter all the time.
00:41:13.560
But most people are not on Twitter all the time.
00:41:16.400
And so, the Twitter algorithm doesn't really reflect reality, especially now.
00:41:21.060
I mean, it promotes all this, like, really fringe, crazy content that a lot of people have never even heard of.
00:41:25.540
And so, it's easy to get sucked into that and think that Twitter represents political reality, but it doesn't.
00:41:30.480
If a political candidate campaigned only on what Twitter favors, that political candidate would go down in flames.
00:41:39.340
There's this guy in California that he's running, and it's just a total Twitter campaign, and no one's even heard of his name, really.
00:41:49.740
However, as streaming overtakes TV, network, and cable combined, Twitter will become real life.
00:42:00.140
Twitter matters now because perception can affect reality.
00:42:03.900
But Twitter will soon matter because that will be where people are living, streaming, online.
00:42:10.460
It's a little bit different than being on your phone or being on your tablet or being on your laptop or something, but it's pretty related.
00:42:17.800
And so, you could see the political order, political incentives, political opinions begin to shift rapidly.
00:42:25.920
When streaming really takes over, and we've been waiting for the death of TV for 30 years now, when streaming really takes over, that's going to be a rapid shift.
00:42:35.160
And politicians are going to have to keep up with that.
00:42:38.140
Now, there's so much more I want to tell you about.
00:42:42.440
We didn't even get to, apparently, Big Balls has left his employment at the White House.
00:42:46.420
I don't know that that's his name on his birth certificate.
00:42:52.140
We don't have time because it's Woke Wednesday.
00:42:56.460
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