The Michael Knowles Show - July 28, 2025


Ep. 1780 - Sydney Sweeney: A Powerful Asset


Episode Stats

Length

47 minutes

Words per Minute

159.00525

Word Count

7,551

Sentence Count

611

Misogynist Sentences

33

Hate Speech Sentences

24


Summary

American Eagle has killed wokeness. Or at least, they killed the idea that it was possible to be woken. And they did it with one of the most memorable ads of the 21st century: Sidney Sweeney in a tank top and jeans.


Transcript

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00:00:37.780 Mark this date Monday, July 28th.
00:00:41.280 Wokeness is officially dead.
00:00:44.060 It has been murdered by the clothing company American Eagle.
00:00:48.180 American Eagle's weapon of choice was Sidney Sweeney's body.
00:00:51.980 And as we all celebrate the nostalgic return of normal arousal in advertising, some on the right are facing a nagging moral question.
00:01:03.080 Is gawking at half-naked hot blondes really conservative?
00:01:07.860 I'm Michael Knowles.
00:01:08.660 This is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:01:09.440 Welcome back to the show.
00:01:30.180 A Cincinnati jazz festival has turned violent and gone viral as a gang of black teens attacks older white people.
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00:02:51.560 She did it.
00:02:52.280 It's not she.
00:02:52.960 They did it.
00:02:53.920 They did it, folks.
00:02:55.500 American Eagle with Sidney Sweeney.
00:02:59.380 They ended wokeness.
00:03:01.160 There have been a lot of moments where we said,
00:03:02.560 is wokeness dead with the end of the 2024 election?
00:03:05.700 You know, Trump wins with the popular vote.
00:03:07.360 Was that the end of wokeness?
00:03:09.740 Was, I don't know, the canceling of Bud Light,
00:03:12.160 was that the end of wokeness?
00:03:14.140 Was, I think this is as good a date as any.
00:03:17.380 For those of you who have not seen it yet,
00:03:19.220 I'll pick one of the more wholesome of the American Eagle advertisements
00:03:24.720 Sidney Sweeney working on a classic muscle car selling jeans.
00:03:34.220 For those who are only listening right now,
00:03:37.720 Sidney Sweeney, she's fully clothed,
00:03:39.660 and she just then walks away.
00:03:41.020 Sidney Sweeney has her jeans.
00:03:43.680 Kind of rubs the back of her jeans.
00:03:46.040 Gets in a sweet-looking Mustang.
00:03:48.100 It says American Eagle.
00:03:49.700 She drives away.
00:03:50.540 That's it.
00:03:54.580 She's got a tank top on.
00:03:56.980 She's not showing too much cleavage.
00:03:59.560 She's got the most skin she's showing, really,
00:04:01.780 is her shoulders and her feet.
00:04:03.060 I mean, it is not, she's got baggy jeans on.
00:04:05.740 It's not even that tight.
00:04:06.680 But it shows some of Sidney Sweeney's assets.
00:04:10.480 That's how she's selling the clothes.
00:04:13.060 This commercial, even down to the car,
00:04:17.180 even down to the presence of the Mustang in it,
00:04:19.480 is the polar opposite of one of the other most prominent commercials of this year,
00:04:25.340 that one for Jaguar,
00:04:26.680 which showed a bunch of gender-bending Unix
00:04:29.540 trying to sell old lady British cars.
00:04:32.760 Remember this one?
00:04:38.000 Got a bunch of people of dubious sex,
00:04:41.180 weird-looking Martian kind of people in frilly costumes.
00:04:45.600 Live vivid.
00:04:47.060 Delete ordinary.
00:04:48.480 It's a key phrase.
00:04:49.300 Delete ordinary.
00:04:51.000 Break molds.
00:04:53.600 It's a bunch of, like, drag queen-type looking things.
00:04:55.620 Not even drag queen, just androgynous people
00:04:58.160 on some weird purple planet.
00:05:00.640 Copy nothing.
00:05:02.320 Jaguar.
00:05:03.560 So this is the opposite.
00:05:04.780 If the Jaguar commercial was the apotheosis of liberalism,
00:05:08.960 the Sidney Sweeney commercial,
00:05:10.520 just looking good in a pair of jeans,
00:05:13.140 is the end of it.
00:05:15.740 There's good news and bad news about this commercial.
00:05:18.920 The good news is,
00:05:20.900 it's not 2020 anymore.
00:05:23.760 2020, culturally, politically, probably peak wokeness.
00:05:29.000 The good news is, that's done.
00:05:31.020 We're past that.
00:05:32.280 The bad news is, we have apparently gone back to 1998.
00:05:36.580 That's it.
00:05:37.260 This is not, we haven't gone back to the 1950s.
00:05:39.900 We haven't gone back to the 1600s.
00:05:44.400 We haven't gone back to the 1320s.
00:05:46.600 We're back in about 1998.
00:05:49.000 What passes for conservatism now is mainstream 90s liberalism.
00:05:56.020 Bill Clintonism.
00:05:57.300 Is there anything more Bill Clinton?
00:05:58.520 Hey, honey, I love those jeans.
00:06:00.880 Love American Eagle.
00:06:02.420 That's what we get.
00:06:05.880 And yet, I think this is still broadly a good thing,
00:06:08.500 even though it's not perfect.
00:06:10.680 The first question you have to grapple with is,
00:06:12.760 why is Sidney Sweeney the it girl of today?
00:06:16.620 She's a very good looking lady.
00:06:18.580 But is she the hottest chick that ever walked on a screen ever?
00:06:22.940 Or, I don't know, people seem to think so today.
00:06:26.120 Why?
00:06:26.400 I think the reason why is, because she looks normal.
00:06:30.200 Like a really, really good version of normal.
00:06:32.140 At a time, especially in 2025, when every prominent woman seems to have ozempic face
00:06:39.140 and those giant clown lips and has made themselves into a hyper real caricature of a woman.
00:06:46.000 It's as if the men decided to turn themselves into caricatures of women through
00:06:50.100 drag queenism and transgenderism.
00:06:52.580 And then the women decided to try to look like the transgender men.
00:06:56.580 And it's just become this weird, hyper real caricature.
00:07:02.980 Sidney Sweeney comes out and she looks natural.
00:07:05.500 And she looked her, everything looks normal, albeit very good.
00:07:08.720 And she looks like the hottest version of the girl next door.
00:07:12.120 And I think that doesn't appeal in every age, but that appeals in our age.
00:07:15.940 And she seems normal in that at a time when all of the movie star starlets and all the TV starlets
00:07:22.560 and the Instagram influencers are braying about politics and abortion and killing kids
00:07:29.000 and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
00:07:31.040 Sidney Sweeney is just kind of bubbly and nice and doesn't really get involved in all that
00:07:35.460 and just does her job and smiles and looks good on camera.
00:07:38.900 She's a pretty good actress.
00:07:40.100 And that's really refreshing.
00:07:42.720 It's a return to how things were in the 90s.
00:07:47.320 But what conservatives have to grapple with then is the 90s weren't all that great.
00:07:53.520 We now think retrospectively that they were great because many of us were children in the 90s.
00:07:59.160 And you always think the era that you were a kid during was the height of civilization.
00:08:03.580 But there were a lot of problems.
00:08:05.660 You had massive violence.
00:08:07.980 You had relative highs of street violence.
00:08:11.360 Social solidarity was fraying.
00:08:13.700 You had a real high point in the divorce rate.
00:08:15.740 You had the peak of abortion activism or a peak of abortion activism.
00:08:21.420 You had, you know, it was the decade of Bill Clinton.
00:08:25.380 So it wasn't all that great.
00:08:28.860 Should we be happy to be returning to that?
00:08:31.660 Do we, are conservatives really the party of just like gawking at blondes and arousing lusts?
00:08:38.240 And is that it?
00:08:38.980 I don't think so.
00:08:39.940 But gawking at Sidney Sweeney is a lot better than gawking at some weird polyandrogenous trans unix.
00:08:52.280 The companies deciding to sell normal sex is better than companies deciding to sell weird sex.
00:09:02.180 Do you understand why?
00:09:03.960 The reason why is you don't want companies to sell sex generally because it's bad to arouse lusts.
00:09:09.620 And really strong, civilized societies don't do that.
00:09:12.540 Don't prey on that.
00:09:13.900 It's not just, you know, a civilization of guys like Wile E. Coyote.
00:09:19.000 You know, their jaw drops to the floor, the tongue unfurled.
00:09:22.360 You know, constantly in a state of titillation.
00:09:24.780 That's not what you want.
00:09:26.680 But it is better if you have to choose.
00:09:28.820 It's better for a company to sell normal sex than to sell weird sex.
00:09:31.400 Because selling normal sex plays on lust, which is a vice.
00:09:35.760 But selling weird sex like androgynous, LGBT, bizarro world, polycule stuff is not only sometimes playing on vice, but it's also contrary to nature.
00:09:49.140 That's why not all, you know, traditionally in Christianity, sexual sins are considered pretty important.
00:09:54.440 They're not the worst sins of all.
00:09:55.480 But they're significant, one, because they're so widespread.
00:09:59.880 And there are differing degrees of sexual sin.
00:10:04.480 It's bad to fornicate.
00:10:06.340 It's really bad to cheat on your wife.
00:10:07.920 But there are some sins that are contrary to nature.
00:10:10.140 And so what I think you're seeing with the Sidney Sweeney defeating wokeness is you are seeing nature healing.
00:10:17.980 It's become kind of a meme.
00:10:19.180 Nature is healing.
00:10:20.200 Sidney Sweeney is showing off her cleveless.
00:10:22.220 Nature is healing.
00:10:23.080 But it is a return to nature.
00:10:25.700 It's a return to how she's a pretty girl showing off her body in kind of normal ways and arousing men in normal ways to sell blue jeans.
00:10:38.540 And we want to, we want grace to perfect nature.
00:10:43.360 We want to overcome some of our more animal nature.
00:10:46.400 But given how degraded a state our culture has found itself in, I say at least two cheers for Sidney Sweeney.
00:10:53.600 I'm not willing to go three cheers for the Sidney Sweeney ad campaign because we want to move into an even more civilized, wholesome kind of culture.
00:11:02.560 But for now, given where we've been, two cheers.
00:11:06.040 Two cheers for American Eagle.
00:11:07.500 It's good stuff.
00:11:09.060 Sometimes when a culture is really decayed, you need a bridge.
00:11:11.900 This is what Trump does.
00:11:13.040 This is what Trump does.
00:11:14.300 Is Trump Russell Kirk?
00:11:16.680 Is Trump Edmund Burke?
00:11:18.020 Is Trump some, I don't know, Cicero or something like that?
00:11:22.820 Not quite.
00:11:23.500 You know, he's a brash billionaire reality TV star, famously a playboy who's dated supermodels.
00:11:31.540 So he's not, he's not this picture of Tweety conservatism, but he is a bridge from where we were, radical leftism, back to a normal country.
00:11:41.680 Make America great again.
00:11:43.200 I'm with you.
00:11:44.260 I want a normal, flourishing society.
00:11:46.300 That's what he is.
00:11:48.020 And I'll take it.
00:11:49.400 I'll take it.
00:11:50.080 I'm into it.
00:11:50.640 Okay.
00:11:50.880 Now, speaking of relations between the sexes, there is a major scandal involving a new app called the Tea App, where women try to spread gossip about men.
00:12:02.720 And then the women just got hacked, so gossip is being spread about them.
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00:12:42.720 Are you ready for the tea?
00:12:45.160 Are you ready for the tea?
00:12:46.860 So there's a new app.
00:12:48.040 I'm not on it.
00:12:48.780 I'm very pleased to say that I missed online dating.
00:12:52.200 Sweet little Elisa and I, who had been high school sweethearts, really met in middle school.
00:12:56.580 We got together just as online dating was taking off.
00:13:01.720 So I've never really been on the apps.
00:13:04.080 And there's the Tinder and there's, if you're a Democrat, there's Grindr and there's Bumble and whatever, Hinge and all this.
00:13:11.500 But there's now, we're so far down the rabbit hole of online dating that there are now apps about the apps.
00:13:19.400 There are ancillary dating apps that allow you to warn other people about the people that you're going to meet on the dating apps, one of which was called Tea.
00:13:29.560 So the New York Times was reporting that there was a data breach with Tea.
00:13:34.060 Tea was this app where girls and women could log on, had to prove who they were.
00:13:38.820 So they submitted their IDs or whatever, and then they said, hey, I went on a date with Johnny and he's a creep.
00:13:44.700 Or, you know, I went on a date with Bill and he didn't pick up the tab.
00:13:48.680 It was basically Yelp for online dating.
00:13:52.480 Reviews of men that other women could date.
00:13:55.580 So before you go on, after you match with the guy, but before you go on the date with the guy,
00:13:59.220 you can go to guy Yelp and read reviews based on his past customers, the other women who've gone on dates with him.
00:14:06.720 Well, now it seems that those gossipy women have been hoisted with their own petard because there was a data breach that exposed the photos and ID cards of the women who signed up for Tea,
00:14:18.940 which was exploding in the app stores, getting a ton of downloads.
00:14:22.360 So on Friday, Tea said hackers had breached a data storage system, exposing 72,000 images, including selfies and photo ID of the users.
00:14:32.980 This app is not totally new, though it was really exploding recently, but it was released in 2023.
00:14:39.240 And it was even likened among its users as a Yelp service for women.
00:14:45.340 So this, of course, raised a question for men.
00:14:48.760 If women can have an app that allows them to warn each other about whether a guy is creepy or cheap or doesn't look like his pictures or something,
00:14:58.420 can men have an app that warns other men of whether or not women are crazy?
00:15:06.080 If the chief fear for the women is that the man is a creep, which is what this was ostensibly about, are these men dangerous?
00:15:13.660 If the chief fear was that the women would put themselves in a bad situation and go on a date with these men,
00:15:19.360 well, the same could be true of men.
00:15:21.340 I'm not saying that women are as physically strong as men, but sometimes they boil men's rabbits.
00:15:25.300 Sometimes there are some crazy birds out there.
00:15:27.760 And so can men have an app where we upload pictures of women and we say, oh, don't go on a date with this girl.
00:15:33.620 She's a total lunatic.
00:15:35.280 No, of course not.
00:15:36.660 That would be totally reprehensible.
00:15:38.960 But the whole thing is really reprehensible.
00:15:41.920 And I think that's what this is exposing.
00:15:45.040 This is one of these great news stories because everyone involved is getting exactly what he and she deserves.
00:15:53.320 Because they are treating dating like going shopping for a handbag.
00:16:00.360 They are treating human beings as commodities to be rated and reviewed like a restaurant.
00:16:07.060 And as a consequence, they themselves are being treated as commodities.
00:16:11.980 Their identities are being leaked online.
00:16:14.040 They're being shared around.
00:16:15.740 They're being rated and reviewed and judged and subject to all of the public scrutiny that they were subjecting the men to.
00:16:25.660 Everyone is getting exactly what he deserves.
00:16:28.020 If you are treating men like restaurants, you are already doing it wrong.
00:16:33.980 And I know what the answer is going to be.
00:16:35.540 The response is going to be, well, Michael, what option do they have in the modern dating world?
00:16:42.180 You know, these women just swipe men on the Internet.
00:16:45.240 They have no idea who they are.
00:16:46.480 They could be axe murderers.
00:16:47.820 And then they show up and go on dates and have dinner with them.
00:16:50.460 And, you know, often they'll end up back at their apartments two hours after they met.
00:16:54.920 If you recognize that there's something disordered about that, then don't do it.
00:17:10.480 You should not be just randomly meeting strangers on the Internet.
00:17:14.060 That's probably a bad idea.
00:17:16.100 A lot of people date that way now.
00:17:17.480 But there are at least ways to put some limits on it.
00:17:21.240 And you could geo-circumscribe it.
00:17:25.680 You know, you say, okay, I'm only going to meet men within this certain area where at least I'm a member of the community.
00:17:30.780 So I might know this.
00:17:31.760 Oh, this person goes to this gym, goes to this church, attended this school.
00:17:35.920 Maybe I know people who know that person.
00:17:37.800 There are, in fact, apps based on mutual connections that way.
00:17:41.360 That's one way to do it.
00:17:42.460 Or you could do it the old-fashioned way and say, hey, sis, you know, do you know any guys that I could date?
00:17:47.400 Hey, even co-worker.
00:17:49.120 Can you recommend someone that I could go on a date with, get set up on a blind date?
00:17:53.080 You could meet someone through a more organic activity like school or church or work or something like that.
00:17:59.120 If you, though, just treat dating like an open marketplace, well, then you're going to be treated like a good that is bought and sold in the marketplace.
00:18:11.640 This actually kind of relates to the Sidney Sweeney story in that we are now, left and right, going back at best to the 1990s.
00:18:20.660 But the 1990s weren't all that great.
00:18:23.860 The 1990s were, in many ways, the triumph of the free market above all, the supposedly free market above all.
00:18:30.480 Yet you're going to have a liberal like Bill Clinton come out and say, the era of big government is over.
00:18:35.380 We're going to privatize.
00:18:36.880 We're going to let the invisible hand of the market do its works.
00:18:39.760 You had the right talking about that for a couple of decades.
00:18:42.380 And then even the left came around, and it spread around the West, not only in America.
00:18:46.600 You had Bill Clinton in the United States.
00:18:48.300 You had Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, the New Democrats, New Labor, this worship of market dynamics, a move toward privatization.
00:18:58.040 But we realized there was a problem with that.
00:18:59.720 Politically, the problem was we were then surrendering a lot of power to corporations who were even less accountable in many ways than the government was.
00:19:08.260 And personally, we were commoditizing everything to the point that now we've commoditized even human babies.
00:19:14.780 You can go to the baby store, you can purchase eggs, you can purchase sperm, you can make a baby like you would design a Build-A-Bear in a toy shop in the mall.
00:19:23.240 And I think we're starting to recognize that's not really good.
00:19:26.000 I mean, that is, at a very, very basic level, a kind of idolatry, where you are treating, in the case of the advertising, you're treating these glittering images of a cute girl as a kind of a god or goddess that you're worshiping.
00:19:47.040 So persuasive that you're going to go buy the blue jeans.
00:19:51.480 And in the case of the T-app, you're treating human, you're conflating human beings with the glittering images on the screen.
00:19:58.360 And you're reviewing them in a way that is deeply inhuman.
00:20:01.580 Not good.
00:20:02.460 They're getting exactly what they deserve.
00:20:03.720 But we're doing relationships wrong generally.
00:20:06.040 There's a woman who's gone viral.
00:20:08.540 Oh, this was sad.
00:20:09.940 But chaos with Camille, I guess, is her handle.
00:20:13.300 She went viral for explaining why she is divorcing her perfectly nice husband, whom she loves.
00:20:20.700 Earlier this year, I told my husband I wanted a divorce.
00:20:25.100 And this would probably shock a lot of my friends and my family because I hadn't told anybody, okay?
00:20:32.020 I walked myself through the logistics of where would I live, how would we split the time with the kids, who gets the dog,
00:20:38.660 where all of those things, okay?
00:20:41.800 Had a full breakdown.
00:20:44.900 I feel like I have been searching for something in my relationship that we don't have for the whole time we've been married,
00:20:52.340 which has been 10 years.
00:20:54.060 I...
00:20:55.020 There is not a single thing about my husband in and of himself that I do not love.
00:21:02.460 Let me be very clear about that.
00:21:03.800 He is the most self-disciplined, loyal, hardworking, good person that you could meet on this planet.
00:21:15.760 And that is probably the reason...
00:21:18.920 That is the reason why I have not left, okay?
00:21:20.920 Our relationship and what my expectations are for my marriage and what they always happen are not met, right?
00:21:32.380 Which I don't know if anybody's are.
00:21:35.240 The reason that pushed me to even bring up divorce and talk about it was the fact that I feel like I don't...
00:21:46.120 I can't be myself with my husband.
00:21:48.320 And it's really confusing because I'm 32 years old, I am a mom of three, and I still don't know who I am.
00:21:59.200 Okay.
00:22:00.000 Okay.
00:22:00.480 I can't even...
00:22:01.300 I was going to stop and start.
00:22:03.100 I was going to examine...
00:22:04.240 I'm like hypnotized by this woman's nonsense because it's so sad and it's so typical of our culture.
00:22:11.480 She says, yeah, okay, I'm going to get divorced.
00:22:14.880 I've already gamed through all of it.
00:22:16.700 Who's going to get our three kids?
00:22:19.380 Three kids?
00:22:20.540 This horrid woman, this horrid, wicked witch.
00:22:25.300 She's going to do that to her kids for no reason other than that she feels like she's missing something.
00:22:33.660 What is she missing?
00:22:35.240 She can't tell you.
00:22:36.940 What is her husband not providing?
00:22:39.140 She can't tell you that either.
00:22:41.080 He's great.
00:22:41.920 She loves everything about him.
00:22:43.520 But she just feels like something's missing.
00:22:46.320 So she's going to ruin her kids' lives.
00:22:49.560 She's going to ruin her husband's life.
00:22:52.460 She's going to probably even screw up the dog a little bit.
00:22:55.180 Because she just feels like there must be something else out there, right?
00:23:01.460 This is the imagination of man's heart is evil from his very youth.
00:23:08.360 You know that line right after the flood of Noah and then the water goes away and then Noah starts sacrificing animals to God and God says, oh, right.
00:23:19.100 The imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth.
00:23:21.380 That's what that is.
00:23:22.200 That's even, I mentioned on the show a week or two ago, Drew Klavan's favorite joke, the orange for a head joke.
00:23:30.480 I won't retell the joke, but the punchline is a guy has an orange for a head because he asked for it, which is about the perversity of man's heart.
00:23:37.600 That's it.
00:23:38.020 This woman self-sabotaging, saying, you know, my life is just too good.
00:23:43.420 There must be something better.
00:23:46.380 There must be.
00:23:47.500 This is truly awful.
00:23:51.400 But it's how a lot of us think about relationships and even up to marriage.
00:23:56.960 And I'll give you a very practical tool for avoiding this.
00:24:02.160 If you make it all about you, something like this is going to happen.
00:24:06.740 If you make it about not you, it's less likely to happen.
00:24:13.200 If you make it about God, it most likely will not happen.
00:24:17.980 It almost certainly will not happen.
00:24:20.640 And in fact, it's within your power for it not to happen.
00:24:22.780 You understand the distinction?
00:24:25.560 If you make your life just all about you, if you merely go back to, if you live in 2020 liberalism, where it's just all about me, me, me, and my identity, and I can redefine reality, you're going to do this stuff.
00:24:39.900 If you even go back to 90s liberalism, which is about, you know, I'm going to live for me now, man, and I'm going to pursue my interest economically, politically, personally, sexually, any of these things, then you're not going to be satisfied because you're not enough.
00:24:58.840 You're not sufficient.
00:24:59.860 Your heart is longing for something that it will not find in a temporal and material world because you are not merely material.
00:25:12.080 Your intellect is not material.
00:25:13.600 Your intellect is immaterial.
00:25:14.720 So you're grasping for something that you cannot grab in a temporal and material way.
00:25:20.860 So you're always going to be unsatisfied if that's where your aim is.
00:25:24.320 If you make your relationships, your relationship to your husband, your relationship to reality, about something other than yourself, if you make it about the other person, that's better.
00:25:35.840 But ultimately, you have to make it about God because only in God, who is unchanging, who is eternal, who is spirit, who made you for many, many reasons, only in God will you find your peace.
00:25:51.640 Only in God will you find the satisfaction for the longings of your soul that cannot be satisfied in this world.
00:25:57.420 And then you'll stay in your marriage because God told you to.
00:26:01.540 And then you'll actually be happy in your marriage.
00:26:04.720 And marriage here is just one example.
00:26:06.620 You'll be happy in your work.
00:26:08.360 You'll be happy in your suffering even because you will be binding yourself to a God who suffers for you.
00:26:17.100 So, this is the big shift.
00:26:20.160 And this is also why, I guess the theme of the whole show, this is why 90s liberalism is not enough.
00:26:24.660 Because 90s liberalism was just before that new atheist movement.
00:26:28.960 You saw a massive decline of religion in the 1990s.
00:26:31.960 It's not going to work.
00:26:34.880 And we can't just go back to the 80s, greed is good, Gordon Gekko.
00:26:38.000 And we certainly can't go back to the 70s where we replaced religion with drugs.
00:26:41.620 And we can't go back to the 60s where we replaced the Christian age with the age of Aquarius.
00:26:47.100 And we can't go, we can't even, we gotta, first of all, you can't go back in time, period.
00:26:53.600 But you can recover things that existed in the past that don't necessarily exist now.
00:26:57.820 And we gotta dig a lot deeper.
00:27:00.480 It's not, we have to stop, especially on the right, with this notion that we've just gone a little too far.
00:27:07.320 We just need to rewind five or ten years.
00:27:09.100 That doesn't work.
00:27:10.120 It's not, we've gone so far.
00:27:13.120 We've gone like 500 years off the rails, okay?
00:27:15.580 And so we need to dig fundamentally if we want to recover a good civilization that isn't literally dying because of a declining birth rate, because of a declining marriage rate.
00:27:25.140 Because women like that horrid witch decide to abandon their husbands because they just feel like there's something else out there.
00:27:33.140 There.
00:27:33.760 It's an illusion.
00:27:34.780 It's glittering images on a screen.
00:27:36.140 Knock it off.
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00:28:06.680 Now, speaking of images on a screen that you should go watch, you should check out Yes or No.
00:28:12.660 Because I sat down with my friend Dave Rubin.
00:28:14.260 Should leaking risque photos be illegal?
00:28:16.420 Do lesbians use their relationships to train for MMA competition?
00:28:19.780 Do you believe in God?
00:28:20.980 Find out the latest in, find out the answers rather, in the latest episode of Yes or No with Mr. Rubin.
00:28:27.620 Did female MMA get so popular because it gave lesbian couples a professional outlet?
00:28:38.700 Hmm.
00:28:52.520 Watch the full episode right now on the Michael Nolsh YouTube channel for the uncensored ad-free version.
00:28:56.520 Subscribe to Daily Wire Plus.
00:29:00.600 Speaking of ugliness, Barack Obama's presidential library is being built.
00:29:04.500 It's substantially built already, and it is the ugliest thing you've ever seen in your entire life.
00:29:09.760 It's so totally horrid.
00:29:12.660 Why?
00:29:13.980 What is it?
00:29:14.700 If you're not watching, if you're just listening right now, try to describe it.
00:29:18.340 It looks like a big, gray, misshapen egg with, oh, I don't, but like the ugliest egg you ever saw.
00:29:29.020 I don't know.
00:29:29.380 It looks like an Easter Island head.
00:29:31.660 It looks, it's just so gross.
00:29:34.940 It's, it's nauseating.
00:29:37.860 Why?
00:29:38.420 Why does Obama want this for his presidential library?
00:29:42.980 I'll tell you why.
00:29:44.840 For the same reason that the libs built all of brutalist architecture.
00:29:49.040 Brutalism is just socialism in architecture.
00:29:52.740 I don't mean to sound like a huge boomer right now, you know, Barack Hussein Obama is a socialist.
00:29:59.060 He kind of is.
00:30:00.140 He kind of is.
00:30:00.880 He's, oh, it's just, and actually, at least the socialists 100 years ago were kind of edgy.
00:30:07.100 At least they were somewhat avant-garde.
00:30:09.120 At least they were trying out new ideas.
00:30:11.200 The modern socialists are so lame because they're so passé.
00:30:16.920 Because this has all been done.
00:30:18.520 Brutalism is 60 years old or more.
00:30:21.020 However, it's so lame now.
00:30:25.300 But, but when I say brutalism is socialism in architecture, I mean, it's, I mean that in a pretty technical way.
00:30:31.960 The, the Eastern Bloc countries, overcome by the Soviet Union, they built socialist architecture.
00:30:38.000 Washington, D.C. during the middle of the 20th century, when extreme liberals and socialists had a lot of sway there, built ugly, brutalist architecture.
00:30:47.320 Why? A lot of university campuses, especially state schools, have brutalist architecture.
00:30:51.540 But it's so ugly.
00:30:52.940 It's drab.
00:30:53.720 The color is awful.
00:30:55.060 It's without ornamentation.
00:30:57.060 The angles are ugly.
00:30:58.300 It's just so depressing.
00:31:00.060 It's spiritually oppressive.
00:31:01.520 Why?
00:31:01.960 Well, it follows earlier modern architectural movements, going back to Bauhaus or the international style even, or, or this notion that form follows function.
00:31:16.240 Very socialist, the idea that you should have nothing superfluous.
00:31:23.940 You should have nothing that is merely for ornamentation or for beauty's sake.
00:31:28.000 You want to use the cheapest materials possible with the simplest designs possible that are clinical, that get the job done.
00:31:36.020 And then you can, all the extra material and all the extra resources of design, you can go use to build even more blocky monstrosities.
00:31:45.480 Because we're just going to have form, the form of the building follow function.
00:31:49.060 But that doesn't actually work.
00:31:53.620 Because function actually follows form a lot of the time.
00:31:58.420 As an example I used last week in a different context, you can have two courthouses.
00:32:03.360 One, some ugly, brutalist, tiny little rat maze.
00:32:06.800 Another, a big temple, like the Supreme Court building, say, in Washington, D.C.
00:32:10.800 Big, giant, high ceilings, big columns, weight, marble.
00:32:14.300 Well, we naturally feel that there will be greater justice done in the Supreme Court building.
00:32:23.560 Why?
00:32:25.500 Because the architecture reflects the function of the building.
00:32:31.640 It's grand.
00:32:33.080 It's big.
00:32:34.080 It elevates itself higher and closer to heaven where true justice lies.
00:32:38.840 It's made of durable materials.
00:32:41.800 There's air.
00:32:42.520 It allows a man to stand up straight with a feeling of dignity.
00:32:46.660 It looks like a temple.
00:32:49.020 It is invoking principles of divine justice.
00:32:53.620 It's solid.
00:32:56.560 The modern, ugly office building kind of courtroom.
00:33:01.440 It feels like any other ephemeral building or organization.
00:33:06.320 subject to all the same political intrigue, subject to all the same pettiness, temporary, native, cheap materials that are not going to last, forget millennia or centuries, they're not going to last 20 years.
00:33:24.000 You just feel as though there's less connection to justice, which is the point of the building.
00:33:31.900 The function can follow the form.
00:33:33.340 If you live in a home and the home is just one of these disgusting, it's not quite as bad as the Obama library, but it's just one of these weird like blocky things they build in the suburbs now, black and white little cubes.
00:33:43.600 You can say, well, the form follows function.
00:33:46.460 Look at how much usable space I have.
00:33:47.940 Look, I have a big kitchen island or whatever.
00:33:50.340 Is it going to feel like home?
00:33:51.520 Is it going to feel comfortable to you?
00:33:53.080 I feel like I'm living in a dentist's office if I have to stay in one of, even like an Airbnb, if I have to stay in one of these homes.
00:33:57.660 It's so cold, so clinical.
00:33:59.500 It doesn't feel like home.
00:34:00.540 You know, it feels like home to me.
00:34:02.100 Ornamentation, detail, all the little nuances that trigger our memory.
00:34:09.480 Nice materials, some of which can be a little more, they don't always have to be expensive, but if they're a little more expensive, maybe that, maybe it's worth it.
00:34:17.900 Maybe it adds something.
00:34:20.380 It's Barack Obama's, Barack Obama's library reflects his politics.
00:34:25.580 And it's a politics that is not only passe, it's a politics that has not only roundly been rejected, it's a politics that is not only ugly, but it's just been disproven.
00:34:39.840 It doesn't work.
00:34:41.320 The central claims that it makes are just wrong.
00:34:45.620 That's why we're trying to knock it down and build beautiful things again, great things again.
00:34:49.340 Okay, now speaking of Dems looking bad, the Democrats just completely obliterated themselves with a tweet that they tried to delete, but not before someone caught a screen grab.
00:34:58.460 We'll get to that in one moment.
00:34:59.720 First, I want to tell you about an exciting new project that I am working on.
00:35:04.720 I'm pleased to announce a brand new original docu-series coming to Daily Wire Plus from your favorite podcast host to give you the very first look.
00:35:12.140 It is titled, The Pope and the Fuhrer, The Secret Vatican Files of World War II.
00:35:18.320 Yes, the title is as provocative as the truth it uncovers.
00:35:22.620 For decades, Pope Pius XII, one of the great men of the 20th century, has been maligned.
00:35:28.600 He has been slandered.
00:35:30.520 He has been condemned for his supposed silence during World War II and the Nazi atrocities.
00:35:35.560 And this has always been wrong, and we are Pope Pius XII respecters on this show, and you should be too.
00:35:42.120 Now, though, with unprecedented access to the Vatican's wartime archives, we uncover what really happened and why history may have gotten it all wrong.
00:35:50.180 The series premieres Wednesday, August 13th, exclusively on Daily Wire Plus.
00:35:53.420 Here's your first look.
00:35:55.800 History is written by the victors.
00:35:59.500 But what if the victors got it wrong?
00:36:05.560 For 80 years, the world has condemned one man as the Pope of Silence, the man who stood by in the face of shocking evil.
00:36:16.600 But can we trust the popular narrative, even after all these years?
00:36:22.100 This is not just a story about Hitler and the Holocaust.
00:36:25.760 One of the worst lies ever told about the Catholic Church is what she did or did not do in one of modernity's darkest hours.
00:36:32.880 Now, for the first time, the Vatican's secret archive is open, and the truth is far more shocking than the fiction.
00:36:41.800 Propagandists have peddled one story for decades, but now we can definitively know better.
00:36:47.700 Join me in this four-part series, where we will discover the true story of Pope Pius XII, Hitler, and the Second World War.
00:36:54.720 The Pope and the Fuhrer, four episodes, nearly an hour each.
00:37:01.640 Not one second waste.
00:37:02.920 Daily Wire Plus members can start streaming August 13th.
00:37:05.280 Are you not a member yet?
00:37:06.420 Well, you're crazy.
00:37:07.180 Join today at dailywireplus.com.
00:37:10.220 My favorite comment yesterday, or no, I guess this would have been on Friday,
00:37:14.780 is from Samuel Underwood, 5286, who says,
00:37:17.360 Mary's fiat is the exact opposite of my body, my choice.
00:37:21.440 It's so true.
00:37:22.100 And actually, today, if you pray the rosary today, you'd be praying the joyful mysteries.
00:37:27.080 You'd start out with the annunciation when the angel comes to Mary and says,
00:37:31.260 Hail Mary, you know, you're going to conceive a child.
00:37:35.400 And Mary says, I'm the Lord's hand servant.
00:37:40.300 Let it be done according to his will.
00:37:42.740 It's quite the, now we say, my body, my choice.
00:37:44.640 To the point that you even had a self-described Christian Democrat go on Joe Rogan's show
00:37:50.740 and talk about how wonderful it is that the Holy Mother could have aborted our Lord.
00:37:57.240 Sick stuff.
00:37:58.020 I like that.
00:37:58.340 Yeah, good comment.
00:37:58.900 Very, very good comment.
00:37:59.980 Okay.
00:38:01.020 Speaking of Democrats looking bad, this is a tweet for the ages.
00:38:06.780 Bookmark it, frame it, put it up in the Smithsonian.
00:38:09.060 Got to give a hat tip here to Tony Kinnett from the Daily Signal.
00:38:14.740 He grabbed this before the Democrats deleted it.
00:38:16.660 So the Democrats, this is the official Democrat account, tweets out, Trump's America.
00:38:22.300 And it's a chart.
00:38:24.040 It says, U.S. grocery prices reached record highs in 2025.
00:38:28.840 Prices are higher today than they were on July 2024 in all major categories listed below.
00:38:36.320 And then you have cheese, alcohol, grocery, dairy, produce, meat.
00:38:40.540 And you see this chart.
00:38:41.660 And among all of them, it really shot up.
00:38:44.420 But you got to look at the timescale because it begins, what is that?
00:38:50.820 That's October 2019, I think.
00:38:54.420 Then it goes to October 2024.
00:38:57.700 So then right when you get to the end of the screen, presumably you're getting into 2025.
00:39:03.200 The problem is the real spike where it all just shoots way, way up top, kind of levels off by the end,
00:39:09.800 but it shoots way, way up, is after 2020.
00:39:14.760 It's actually from 2021 through 2023, 2024.
00:39:22.880 And it's kind of leveling off.
00:39:24.660 In other words, it all happened under Biden.
00:39:28.060 And so then if you try to go to it, it says, hmm, this page doesn't exist.
00:39:33.040 Try searching for something else.
00:39:34.280 And luckily, luckily our pal, Tony Kennett, was able to grab it before they deleted it.
00:39:40.800 Think about how this tweet was posted.
00:39:43.980 We always joke about the social media intern.
00:39:46.580 You know, there were social media interns in like 2008.
00:39:49.860 Now, there are major agencies and very serious professionals who work in social media.
00:39:56.560 This was not just some high school kid's accident.
00:39:59.960 There was a Democrat operative who saw this chart, read the chart, maybe reformatted the chart,
00:40:07.440 posted it to the official Democrat Twitter account, wrote the caption, and clicked publish
00:40:15.540 without realizing that it shows the exact opposite of the point he wanted to make.
00:40:20.820 That's the first part.
00:40:21.960 Second part, imagine you're the Democrats right now.
00:40:24.480 You are so desperate for ways to attack your opponent.
00:40:29.140 Your opponent, Trump and the Republicans, they're doing so well that the best way you have to attack
00:40:36.160 them is to say that grocery prices have gotten higher.
00:40:41.100 And that's actually your fault.
00:40:42.540 The one thing you've got is grocery prices, which isn't even a great way to attack them.
00:40:46.640 And then, on top of all that, you find out it's all your fault.
00:40:51.060 Really?
00:40:52.100 Really bad.
00:40:53.520 Not looking good.
00:40:54.180 Okay, speaking of Democrat polities, before we go, Cincinnati Jazz Festival took place over
00:40:59.620 the weekend and it went viral, not for all those great blue notes, but because a gang of black
00:41:06.400 teens were caught on camera brutally attacking older white people, a man and a woman.
00:41:12.680 So there's a video of it.
00:41:21.100 Knocking this guy down the middle of the street, just kicking him in the head.
00:41:23.980 Women too, not just the men, it's women with their heels, kicking this guy, screaming, crazy, just stomping his head.
00:41:40.720 And then you've got people standing on, not trying to help, not even trying to hurt him, just filming.
00:41:44.800 Okay, and this is dropping on top of him.
00:41:53.340 All right, you get the point on the video.
00:41:55.300 It just keeps going on and on and on.
00:41:56.980 Then there's a picture posted of a woman.
00:41:58.760 We blurred her face, but a woman just knocked out cold, reportedly bleeding from the mouth.
00:42:03.540 Nice looking woman.
00:42:05.960 Just totally knocked out.
00:42:07.420 And lest you think this is just something spreading on social media, but it isn't real or whatever.
00:42:13.820 Cincinnati.com, Cincinnati Enquirer, is reporting on this.
00:42:17.760 Videos of fight in downtown Cincinnati sparked discourse over city safety.
00:42:22.540 What we know.
00:42:23.520 So it's real.
00:42:24.300 This is really happening.
00:42:25.200 But they're trying, the media are trying not to cover it.
00:42:27.640 You're not going to see much more coverage than that in the establishment press.
00:42:30.400 And they're trying to obfuscate what's going on here.
00:42:32.720 Oh, you know, there was a fight.
00:42:36.360 A fight.
00:42:36.920 The woman's bleeding from her mouth.
00:42:38.280 This guy is getting pummeled by a whole gang of people.
00:42:41.560 Oh, well, it's sparking discourse.
00:42:43.280 No, it should be sparking prosecutions and lengthy prison sentences or more.
00:42:48.460 I'm not going to do the thing.
00:42:50.540 You know the thing that you're supposed to do when there's a video like this with a racial angle where it's, you know, a gang of black people attack white people or something.
00:42:59.300 There's the thing you're supposed to say, which is imagine.
00:43:03.600 Imagine if the roles were reversed here.
00:43:06.140 Imagine, not even when it's always racial or if it's like a Democrat or a Republican.
00:43:10.260 Imagine if the roles were reversed.
00:43:11.340 I'm not going to do that thing.
00:43:12.460 Don't worry.
00:43:13.940 Because everyone knows.
00:43:17.640 Everyone knows the reactions would be different.
00:43:20.200 No one cares.
00:43:21.820 That kind of statement doesn't shed any new light on any stories, stories which we've seen for decades.
00:43:27.260 What is to be done about this sort of thing?
00:43:30.720 What the left would say is we need to have conversations.
00:43:33.880 We need to have a conversation about race.
00:43:36.320 You know, we need to really have a conversation.
00:43:38.280 We need to converse.
00:43:39.560 We need to open our mouths.
00:43:41.160 Have sounds come out.
00:43:42.380 Sounds which are symbols to communicate something so that we can converse.
00:43:48.440 That's not it.
00:43:51.660 That's not going to do anything.
00:43:52.940 We've had a lot of conversations.
00:43:54.300 The only thing you can do that would be right for the victims, most especially, but even the right thing for the perpetrators, would be to ruthlessly enforce the law against violent crime.
00:44:09.760 This is really pathetic that Cincinnati puts up with this, but it's true in a lot of our cities, and whenever something like this happens, it's often sweeped under the rug if the racial angle goes in the right direction, or it's blown up to be an international incident if the racial angle of it fits the liberal narrative.
00:44:31.320 But the only thing to do that would be just for everyone is to ruthlessly enforce the law.
00:44:35.820 I think even of Plato's Gorgias, an ancient philosophical text in which Socrates makes the point that to be—obviously, we're thinking about this for the victims, these poor victims who can't walk the street at night without being bludgeoned by gangs.
00:44:53.100 But even the perpetrators, you do wrong by the perpetrators when you don't lock them up for this because you encourage this kind of behavior, and they behave like wild animals.
00:45:01.520 And Socrates is calling this many moons ago, or Plato is calling this in the voice of Socrates, where he says, you actually harm perpetrators when you don't discipline them for their bad behavior because it's worse to do wrong than to have wrong done to you.
00:45:18.200 To have wrong done to you is just a part of human life in a fallen world.
00:45:21.920 To do wrong actually damages your soul.
00:45:24.080 And so for everyone, the only thing you could do at a practical political level, if you run on, we're going to have a conversation.
00:45:31.080 If you run on that, if you run on the liberal line, I don't think that's going to appeal to people these days.
00:45:34.880 And if you run on, I don't know, some kind of really hard line kind of racial campaign or something where you say, you know, like we're going to punish this race or this group or whatever, that's not going to work either.
00:45:50.060 That's going to repel people.
00:45:51.580 But if you just run and say, we're going to enforce the law ruthlessly, and we're going to let the chips fall where they may, and that's going to be good for everyone involved, and we're going to make sure that there's justice, especially at this moment in time, I think that wins.
00:46:06.600 I think that wins even in blue cities like Cincinnati.
00:46:10.180 You know, the media were always huffing and huffing about this notion that we have an over-incarceration problem, but of course we don't.
00:46:16.820 If videos like that are going around, we have a major under-incarceration problem.
00:46:21.680 We need to lock more people up for much longer, and we need punishments to be much harsher.
00:46:27.340 And we need the prosecutions and the punishment.
00:46:32.320 We need harder punishments.
00:46:33.480 We need probably a return to labor in prisons, turning big rocks into small rocks.
00:46:37.960 We need the punishments to increase until morale improves.
00:46:43.600 Our issue today, publicly, is not that we're treating criminals too harshly.
00:46:49.080 That, I promise you.
00:46:50.360 Okay.
00:46:51.020 The rest of the show continues.
00:46:52.760 Now, you do not want to miss it.
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