Ep. 1786 - Americans DENIED Federal Aid If They Don’t Support Israel？
Summary
Billie Eilish is being accused of racism because she says she likes Ireland. Why is that racist? Is it okay to like being around people who look like you? Is NASA building a nuclear reactor on the moon? And, does President Trump like Sidney Sweeney's jeans?
Transcript
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These are questions that take cultures thousands of years to answer.
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During Answer the Call, I take questions from people just like you
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about their problems, opportunities, challenges, or when they simply need advice.
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How do I balance all of this grief, responsibility?
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My daughter, Michaela, guides the conversations
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as we hopefully help people navigate their lives.
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Is FEMA now denying disaster relief to U.S. states
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that refuse to do business with the state of Israel?
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Is NASA Administrator Sean Duffy building a nuclear reactor on the moon?
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Most important of all, does President Trump like Sidney Sweeney's jeans ad?
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I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Is it okay to like being around people who look like you?
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Very happy about that, always, but especially these days.
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It's a tempest in a teapot, but it was a major tempest in a teapot.
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Yesterday, it was reported that the federal government would deny disaster relief
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And this raised a lot of eyebrows, not only on the left, but even in certain corners of the right.
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You say a hurricane comes through your state, major flooding, I don't know, a tornado, an earthquake,
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and the state is not going to get disaster relief from the federal government
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if that state doesn't have a good business relationship with a Middle Eastern country,
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There's a little bit of logic to it, which we'll get to in a second, that a lot of people are missing.
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But the notice that came from the Department of Homeland Security in April
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was that recipients of federal disaster relief must comply with all applicable federal anti-discrimination laws
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material to the government's payment decisions.
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Times of Israel is reporting that FEMA, Federal Emergency Management Agency,
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said in grant notices posted Friday that states must follow certain terms and conditions.
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Those conditions require that they certify that they will never sever, quote,
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commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies.
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Again, it means that $1.9 billion in federal funding is on the line.
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That's $1.9 billion for search and rescue equipment, emergency manager salaries, backup power systems,
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Now, I say it's a tempest in a teapot in part because this policy has already been updated or clarified.
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Probably the administration would say it's been clarified.
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In any case, it will not cut off American states if they don't want to do business with Israel.
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Also, on top of that, the terms and conditions also cut off disaster relief to states that would promote DEI,
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to states that would express a kind of racial antipathy against other people, against white people, against other people,
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against states that undermined immigration laws.
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So there was a lot of other stuff in here, a lot of other requirements to get the disaster relief.
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But the part that's sticking in people's craw is the doing business with the Israel part.
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And I think there is a coherent way to defend this.
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Although, clearly, the administration doesn't think the Jews is worth the squeeze because they've already backed off the terms and conditions.
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But the coherent way to defend this is on federalist grounds.
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The coherent way to defend it is to say the national government conducts foreign policy.
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The state governments do not conduct foreign policy.
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So if you have a state government or multiple state governments, probably Democrat governments, probably left-wing governments,
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that band together and say we're going to boycott any country, in this case, though, let's say it's the state of Israel,
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then you have the states undermining U.S. foreign policy, especially a country that is ostensibly a major U.S. ally.
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And there are going to be people who say, well, the way this country was founded, Michael,
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it was supposed to be a confederation of states.
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The states were supposed to have most of the power.
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And that also, by the way, presumes that it was even true at the beginning.
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In any case, we have a federal system where some rights and privileges belong to the local governments,
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These, some belong to the state government, some belong to the federal government.
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Foreign policy belongs to the federal government, and so the federal government has the right
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to beat the states back into line if they're taking some of the power that properly belongs
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So they've backed off it, tempest in a teapot, moving on, moving on, panic hands once again
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discredited, plan trusters once again vindicated, doesn't end up being a big deal.
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But it does show that this Israel issue, which used to really only be an issue on the left,
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the left was at each other's throats over Israel, the base hated Israel, the elites liked Israel,
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the right was basically in favor of Israel, that is beginning to fray.
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And the reason it's beginning to fray is not just because some kind of fever has overtaken
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The immediate cause of why it's beginning to fray is because Israel has been involved in
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a very long war beginning on October 7th when Hamas came over and massacred a bunch of Israelis.
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But that's been going on now for two years, and people have war fatigue.
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Now, to show you some of the rancor on the American right, Mike Johnson, Speaker of the
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House, went viral just yesterday or the day before because he flew to the state of Israel,
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he spent some time with Israeli settlers in the West Bank, reportedly, but then he also
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Mike Johnson, the 56th Speaker of the House of Representatives in America, we're here with
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We're so grateful to be in Israel, particularly on this day, recognizing the destruction of
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But it's such a moving time for us to be here, to be here at the Wailing Wall.
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We put our notes into the wall as just traditional, and we're so moved by the hospitality of the
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Our prayer is that America will always stand with Israel and that we will, we pray for the
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It's a matter of faith for us and a commitment that we have.
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Okay, so this has raised a lot of questions among some people who, I guess, have only
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recently started paying attention to politics, because there are a lot of pictures of US
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politicians, presidential candidates, presidents, praying at the Wailing Wall.
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They say, hey, what's that wall you have to touch to become president?
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You're telling me the deal is all I got to do is go to the Middle East, touch a wall,
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But a lot of American politicians, presidents, vice presidents, senators, go and they touch this
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They put little slips of paper sometimes in the wall.
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The wall, ostensibly, is a ruin, a remnant of a wall that surrounded the old temple, a retaining
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Now, some people, some contrarian historians or archaeologists will say it's not even a retaining
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It's actually just a ruin from a Roman fort, Fort Antonia.
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I'm not really persuaded by that, but I don't know.
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And actually, the fact that there is any uncertainty whatsoever about what this wall is shows you
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how strange it is that the wall has taken on this significance in American politics in
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It's a very important site for Jews, but it's not a traditionally Christian ritual to go pray
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In fact, from right around the year, I don't know, 30 AD, when Christianity begins, you don't
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really see Christians care that much about this wall.
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In fact, our Lord in his ministry says that the temple will be destroyed and he will raise
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it again in three days, and he does because he raises his body, which is the real temple.
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And so we can experience God not merely in this temple in Jerusalem, which would go on to be
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destroyed, but any day that we like in tabernacles all around the world.
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However, for Jews, they still have this memory of the temple, and the temple goes on to be destroyed
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in 70 AD by the Romans, and there's this desire to build the third temple.
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Christians, of course, believe that the third temple has already been raised, and the third
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We're told to pray continually everywhere, so there's no bad place to pray.
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But two, because of evangelical Protestantism, basically.
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So this has never been the sort of thing that Catholics have made a habit of doing, or Eastern
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Sometimes, maybe in antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages, people would go visit the wall
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as a historical curiosity, but they were much more likely to pray at, say, the Church of
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the Holy Sepulchre, which is where Christ was entombed.
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They would be much more likely to pray at any of the other holy sites in Jerusalem.
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It's really only become popular since 1967, when the state of Israel retook control of the
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And so it's in recent decades that people have gone to pray there.
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But it gets to something even deeper, I think, than sectarian conflict or distinctions between
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I think what it gets to is man needs a physical aspect to religion.
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And especially in our religion, Christianity, it's an incarnational faith.
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So we believe that God becomes a man, dies on a cross in a real place, and raises from
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the dead, and has a bodily resurrection, a glorified body, and that we will have a bodily
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And he leaves us a church, and it's a physical religion.
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And for certain flavors of Christianity, not all flavors of Protestantism, but certain flavors,
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there isn't that physical, tangible aspect, a lot of it which focuses on theological notions
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of faith alone, of not having big, beautiful cathedrals, of not recognizing even the tomb
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of the Holy Sepulchre, Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
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And so I think the Wailing Wall just provides a kind of novel way to do that, depending on
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I think this also helps to explain the fascination with the modern state of Israel, especially
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among evangelicals, because, well, one, they have certain theological views that pertain
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to the end times, but two, because we all need a kind of physical representation of God's
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And so if you're not going to recognize, say, the Catholic Church, the Pope, the Church
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of Rome, if you're not going to recognize, I don't know if you're Anglican, the Archbishop
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of Canterbury, or the King of England, then you need some physical representation.
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And the modern nation state of Israel, I guess, is just as good as any other that you might
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What it ties into is the fact that we are bodies.
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We're not just intellect floating in outer space.
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And a lot of people, they attribute all sorts of nefarious motives to politicians going and
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I think it's pretty straightforward and simple.
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Evangelical Protestantism is a very important political force in America, especially on
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the right, but a little bit on the left, too, to win voters in the middle.
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And so politicians will go and do the sorts of things that they do.
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That's not, to me, that's not all that nefarious.
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It's not the sort of thing that happened for the first millennium and, I don't know,
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first 1800, 1900 years of the history of the church.
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One can dispute the matters of theology and the reality of that.
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Now, if Alexei de Tocqueville is right, and if that flavor of Christianity will ultimately
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decline, and if the two forces that will then rise, as Tocqueville predicts in Democracy
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in America, are Catholicism and atheism, then I think you'll see some of those rituals change.
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In the meantime, speaking of traveling to different countries, Billie Eilish is in trouble for
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Billie Eilish, this horrid racist, had this to say.
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Well, as you guys know, I'm Irish, so it's cool to be here.
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Obviously, I am not from here, abida, but it's really cool to come somewhere and like
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You can understand why some people are accusing her of it.
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I know my name's Eilish, but I'm Irish and I'm American, so I'm not from here, but I come
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here and it's really cool to be here because everyone looks exactly like me.
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It's kind of racist, but it's also something everyone believes in.
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It makes claims about race that are not politically correct.
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It's okay to enjoy being around people who resemble you, whether in behavior, whether
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in education, whether in culture, or even whether in appearance.
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Some of you probably don't like going to family reunions, but I don't know.
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And so we do hold one or two family reunions every year.
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My extended family, the uncles, and the aunts, and the cousins, and the this, and the that.
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And we all go somewhere, and we have a great time.
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Then the bedrock unit of society is the family.
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You know, not like they're accusing Billie Eilish up here.
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But just like a clan, you know, like a group of families.
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And then, I don't know, you've spread it out wide enough, you get to a tribe.
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And you spread that out wide enough, you get to a nation.
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And you spread that out wide enough, you get to a big political community.
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Is that wrong to have an affinity for those people?
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Doesn't mean that other people can't come into that kind of group.
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You know, obviously, in-laws come into a family.
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This is true even for the most coherent tribe, probably, that's ever existed.
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So when Ruth comes in, she says, your people will be my people.
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But it's okay to have an affinity for people who look like you.
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Is it wrong for a black kid to like it when a black guy achieves something?
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You know, who is the guy in the Hitler Olympics?
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But anyway, when that guy wins, is it wrong for black people to say like, hey, that's cool.
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If Joe DiMaggio becomes a really important baseball player, is it okay for Italians to say, hey, he's our guy.
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There are two errors in modern life when it comes to race.
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One is thinking that race means everything, and one is thinking that race means nothing.
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It doesn't, it's, as Aristotle tells us, virtue is the mean between two extremes.
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You want that kind of via media, proper mean between preposterous extremes.
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Yes, it's okay to prefer your family to other people's families.
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Yes, it's okay to have a sense of community based on all manner of shared traits, including appearance.
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But you don't want to make an idol out of these things to the point that you engage in cruelty or immorality.
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It's okay if you're an Irish American to get a kick out of going to Ireland where everybody looks like you.
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Now, speaking of race baiting, a new race baiting euphemism has dropped.
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I fear a lot of people missed this, but it's come to us by way of CBS News.
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Black swimmers teach others a mid-history of aquatic segregation.
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No one in America should have any barrier to connecting to water.
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The stereotype is that black people don't swim generally.
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Black people, unfortunately, are more likely to drown.
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Well, segregation, racism, systemic oppression.
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If they're along the coastal regions, they can't go into a lake.
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It's a perfectly fine thing for black people to go swimming.
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Not every quirk of the differences between peoples demands an activist slogan.
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Not every quirk demands a claim of oppression and victimhood.
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Italians, they're not the tallest people in the world generally.
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This is not based on altitudinal oppression or segregation.
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Asians are just stereotypically not the greatest drivers in the world.
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This is not based on transmissional oppression.
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It's not to say that an Italian can't play basketball.
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It's not to say that a black person cannot swim.
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But it's okay to acknowledge that there are just quirks and strengths and weaknesses of all sorts of peoples.
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And if the headline is black people want to swim more, that's a good thing.
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This gets back to a story we were talking about yesterday.
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Jonathan Capehart, who is with the Washington Post, and he's quitting the Washington Post now because he had demands placed on his editorial coverage.
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And he was describing this on MSNBC, and he said it was outrageous.
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They demanded that we writers be patriotic and say positive things about America.
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Can't you just say, hey, black people are going to learn how to swim?
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Hey, Italian people are going to learn how to, I don't know, put down the salami, eat a little healthier.
00:24:34.020
I have a thesis that if everyone in the country just stopped complaining, just stopped complaining for 36 hours, 94% of our problems would go away, our political problems.
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If we just stopped complaining, this is true in your household, it's true in your office, it's true women complain more than men.
00:25:00.420
And if we just stopped, it's kind of funny because I'm not complaining.
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Now, speaking of transportation, speaking of doing something constructive, apparently the Trump administration is going to construct a nuclear reactor on the moon.
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But in the Trump administration, because Trump is a businessman, he's an entrepreneur, he expects a lot of people,
00:27:07.100
Sean Duffy is also the interim NASA administrator.
00:27:09.720
And as NASA administrator, he has announced that we're going to build a nuclear reactor on the moon.
00:27:17.880
You know, things are going very well for the Trump administration right now.
00:27:20.780
But this is the sort of thing that I would reserve for if there were some really bad scandal going on,
00:27:26.760
like if Trump were about to be impeached, if, I don't know, if we'd just been invaded by Mongols or some really bad political scandal.
00:27:34.460
That was, that's when I would play the, we're going to build a nuclear reactor on the moon card.
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Sean Duffy says, to properly advance this critical technology, to be able to support a future lunar economy,
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high power energy generation on Mars, and to strengthen our national security in space,
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The reactor will be a 100 kilowatt nuclear reactor.
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I, when I read this, I thought, well, wouldn't it be more efficient to build a nuclear reactor on Earth?
00:28:13.360
Like, you know, if the point is to power our suburbs, why would, isn't it going to be kind of complicated
00:28:18.540
to take all that nuclear energy from the moon and then transport it back to Earth?
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But, I don't know, if anyone else had that stupid thought, it turns out the nuclear energy is supposed to stay on the moon.
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And the point of this is to develop a more permanent human presence on the moon.
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Half a century after we first went to the moon, now we want to develop a longer presence there.
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There are many people who don't think we went to the moon.
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But for those of you who do accept the evidence that we went to the moon,
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we've actually already had a nuclear reactor on the moon, a very small nuclear reactor on the moon in 1969.
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So now they want to build a really big nuclear reactor on the moon because you need a nuclear reactor
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if you are going to maintain a human presence on the moon for any longer period of time.
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And then the astronauts will be very, very chilly unless we have power, unless we have a way to sustain their presence there.
00:29:18.000
Because then you're also going to hear from, especially libertarians, who say,
00:29:28.840
We have people who are stressed out about paying for groceries.
00:29:38.040
I'll tell you why we're building nukes on the moon.
00:29:40.660
Because if we don't, China's going to do it first.
00:29:43.840
That is the explicit reasoning of the Trump administration.
00:29:49.000
The first country to have a reactor on the moon could, according to this directive,
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declare a keep-out zone, which would significantly inhibit the United States.
00:29:59.160
And there's potential for a joint Chinese and Russian project.
00:30:02.660
And geopolitics continues, despite domestic disputes.
00:30:11.800
You know, we complain about not just the deep state, but specifically the deep foreign policy
00:30:17.040
You know, it seems like you elect Republicans, you elect Democrats.
00:30:20.900
And there are certain aspects of foreign policy I'd really like to tweak.
00:30:23.660
But we shouldn't be surprised that certain foreign policy initiatives just continue on,
00:30:34.660
Because no matter how the ideological winds blow in the United States,
00:30:38.840
nations continue to have concrete interests in the world.
00:30:55.360
And so even if you get a change of political ideology in the country, and all of a sudden
00:31:04.100
we are more positively inclined toward Russia than we were in decades past, Russia still has
00:31:12.560
We still have these firm rivalries, adversarial relationships.
00:31:20.240
We have to build a nuclear reactor on the moon.
00:31:27.280
A lot of the reason that there's rancor over Ukraine right now or over the state of Israel right now,
00:31:33.920
I'm intimately involved in the domestic squabbles.
00:31:36.760
But part of that is because from a geopolitical perspective,
00:31:43.380
And Iran is seen as being on team Russia and China.
00:31:46.440
And the U.S. is fighting a war with Russia right now.
00:31:49.360
And we're fighting a war with Russia through the proxy of Ukraine.
00:31:53.860
Nobody really seems to care that much about Ukraine.
00:31:56.060
But we do care about our interests vis-a-vis great power politics in Russia and China.
00:32:02.700
It's not that people care all that much about Taiwan, qua Taiwan,
00:32:05.760
but we care about the resources that Taiwan has.
00:32:07.860
And we care about preventing China from expanding and gaining leverage on the geopolitical stage.
00:32:15.220
We care if China is getting involved in Africa.
00:32:17.940
That's one of the reasons why we keep spending a lot of money in Africa.
00:32:20.860
And I understand that this is very frustrating to a lot of people who say,
00:32:34.880
And to a point that I've made that's deeply unpopular, but it's just a fact,
00:32:40.460
We're not just merely a nation in a Westphalian system where we all get an equal seat at the UN.
00:32:45.800
What we do affects everything around the world.
00:32:50.320
And we can acknowledge that or we can bury our head in the sand and deny that.
00:32:57.060
So we have to wield power given those political realities, which is deeply conservative.
00:33:01.160
It's not conservative to deny hardline political realities and say,
00:33:05.500
well, would that our country were a yeoman republic as Thomas Jefferson envisioned?
00:33:14.960
The only options really are, are we going to behave like a good empire or a bad empire?
00:33:27.180
Okay, now speaking of the administration, going back to domestic squabbles,
00:33:32.040
Bobby Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services.
00:33:36.660
I think he might have been in my dream last night.
00:33:38.600
That's weird, probably because I was writing my show right before bed.
00:33:42.880
Anyway, there's nothing more interesting than listening to someone's dream.
00:33:45.540
I'll have to remember what that dream was about.
00:33:47.000
In any case, Bobby Kennedy Jr. has announced that they are going to ban thimerosal,
00:33:58.400
Hi, I'm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., your HHS secretary.
00:34:02.520
I'm happy to report that last week we closed the final chapter in the long history of thimerosal
00:34:10.380
Thimerosal, of course, is a mercury-based vaccine preservative.
00:34:14.180
Its main component, ethyl mercury, is a known and very potent neurotoxin.
00:34:18.860
Until we withdrew the recommendation last week, flu shots containing thimerosal, astonishingly,
00:34:26.340
were still being administered to millions of Americans, including pregnant women and children.
00:34:32.100
Now, I've taken a lot of flack from the vaccine industry and from its allies in the press
00:34:40.840
So I want to talk a little bit about my reasons.
00:34:43.740
In early 2001, the director of the FDA Office of Vaccine Research and Review,
00:34:50.660
late William Egan, admitted under oath before Congress,
00:34:55.160
that thimerosal safety had never been studied in human beings.
00:34:58.940
Further, CDC has no existing guidelines for safe exposures to hasyl mercury.
00:35:05.180
Okay, so it goes on, but that's the thrust of the announcement,
00:35:09.580
Bobby Kennedy has been going off about thimerosal in vaccines for decades at this point.
00:35:13.180
And some people have claimed that thimerosal is linked to autism.
00:35:16.140
He's not going that far to make the claim here in this video.
00:35:18.460
He's just saying it's a neurotoxin and I'm getting it out of the vaccines.
00:35:22.900
The reason I care about this is a little bit because I'm interested in the vaccine issue.
00:35:27.900
I did a long Michael and with a vaccine skeptic.
00:35:30.100
You can check that out on the Michael Knowles YouTube channel or on Daily Wire.
00:35:32.600
But mostly, it's because I'm curious about how the Trump administration is going to behave
00:35:46.840
Most administrations don't fulfill any of their promises.
00:35:49.520
For goodness sakes, George W. Bush ran in 2000 against nation building.
00:35:53.300
Okay, so sometimes things go really, really screwy.
00:35:56.020
Trump has a good record of making good on his promises.
00:36:00.100
I mean, for goodness sakes, the guy got Roe v. Wade overruled.
00:36:05.240
But this was an issue that was kind of a weather vane.
00:36:08.400
Is the administration going to stick to its promises or not?
00:36:12.040
You're going to pick as your health and human services secretary,
00:36:14.860
one of the most outspoken radical health reformers, public health reformers in the country,
00:36:20.700
who happens to be from a different political party,
00:36:23.180
who's been canceled even by that political party, who ran for president.
00:36:31.900
And on his biggest lightning rod issue, he's now making good on the promise.
00:36:38.740
It tells you that this administration is going to be bold.
00:36:42.280
This administration, the Kennedy versus Big Pharma fight,
00:36:45.640
the Kennedy versus Big Pharma on vaccines fight was always going to be a big tell.
00:36:50.280
Is this administration going to do what it said it's going to do?
00:36:52.880
Or is this administration going to make nice with all the usual powers that be
00:36:57.800
and just kind of moderate their message and go along to get along?
00:37:03.500
They're doing what they said they were going to do.
00:37:10.880
The fact that Bobby Kennedy is going to stick it to the vaccine industry like this
00:37:14.340
after decades of being maligned, after massive campaigns against him,
00:37:20.100
after effectively switching political parties in order to get anything done.
00:37:29.300
Now, Kennedy also making another big announcement on public health.
00:37:33.040
And then we'll get to the most important issue of the day.
00:37:36.440
And it's not inclusive, safe, or moderated by NPR.
00:37:39.420
On August 13th, the Pope and the Fuhrer exposes the lie that a lot of people hoped we would never fact check.
00:37:46.680
It exposes how Pope Pius XII did not, in fact, just stay silent during World War II.
00:37:54.520
This fall, Isabel Brown's new show joins the lineup alongside the most trusted and handsome voices in conservative media.
00:38:12.620
My favorite comment yesterday is from Johns363, who says,
00:38:18.800
I don't think any further explanation is necessary.
00:38:27.400
Bobby Kennedy, moving on from vaccines, is not just banning mercury and thimerosal.
00:38:34.760
Snap, we're spending $405 million a day on Snap.
00:38:45.200
And between, and if you add candies to that, it's about 13 to 17%.
00:38:57.480
People can make their own choice about what they're going to buy and what they're not going to buy.
00:39:01.300
If you want to buy a sugary soda, you ought to be able to do that.
00:39:09.440
The U.S. taxpayers should not be paying to feed kids foods, the poorest kids in our country,
00:39:18.060
with foods that are going to give them diabetes.
00:39:21.360
And then my agency ends up, through Medicaid and Medicare, paying for those injuries.
00:39:30.300
Okay, so he's not banning your Mountain Dew, unless you're on Snap, unless you're on food stamps, in which case he is.
00:39:36.900
And this has been a debate going back years and decades, really, on the right.
00:39:42.200
Because you can see strong arguments on both sides.
00:39:45.600
The one argument is, why are we paying for these luxury goods for these poor people who, you know,
00:39:51.500
we're already paying for them to eat, but I don't want to pay for them to have nice, tasty soda.
00:40:00.880
And then there's a related argument, which is, yeah, why am I going to have to pay for their health care costs?
00:40:06.000
If they're going to just stuff their faces with donuts and Mountain Dew and become big fatties,
00:40:10.440
and why am I going to have to pay for all their health care costs later on?
00:40:14.840
Bobby Kennedy is making that argument a little bit.
00:40:17.760
Then there's another argument, also a kind of a libertarian argument,
00:40:26.580
Why is big government coming in this nanny state and deciding what people can use their SNAP money on?
00:40:32.680
You know, look, I'm a libertarian, and I don't think that we should have SNAP anyway.
00:40:35.880
I don't think we should have food stamps anyway.
00:40:37.460
But as long as we're going to have food stamps, you should let the people pick whatever they want.
00:40:40.400
We don't need big nanny government coming in and picking out what kind of soda you're allowed to drink.
00:40:48.180
And I think what the stronger argument actually does not come from those libertarian premises,
00:40:56.840
because any country, any civilized country is going to have some kind of national policy for the poor,
00:41:07.820
It's better when those policies are a more local level, but any country such as ours is going to have a national policy for the poor.
00:41:12.600
So, okay, should we be allowing the poor to have soda?
00:41:21.820
Some people are going to argue they don't deserve these kind of luxury goods.
00:41:24.800
We should just give them bare sustenance, give them cereal and rice.
00:41:28.680
And then once they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, then they can buy luxury goods if they want.
00:41:34.420
I actually don't mind a national welfare policy that allows for poor people to have some luxuries, some minor luxuries.
00:41:42.960
I'm not saying, you know, they're not going to buy them a Rolex, but like there's some, you know, having a nice drink or something like that.
00:41:48.540
The reason I think this is a good policy, the reason I think it's good that we should not allow food stamps to pay for soda,
00:41:53.900
is actually a little bit more esoteric than all this.
00:42:02.620
My argument is not we shouldn't allow these filthy poor people to have what we, you know, fancy elites get to enjoy.
00:42:11.580
My argument is the fancy elites don't drink soda.
00:42:17.500
Do you know, of all, I know a lot of people who are a lot richer than I am.
00:42:25.460
With one exception, some of them drink Diet Coke because it's a habit they cultivated over the decades.
00:42:31.140
And Diet Coke is very popular because Trump drinks Diet Coke.
00:42:34.820
But with the exception of Diet Coke, and even largely including Diet Coke, soda is not like a luxurious, fancy thing.
00:42:41.840
They drink seltzer, you know, like fruity seltzers.
00:42:52.540
They drink all these like stupid bougie drinks.
00:42:57.980
So it's not, it's actually not, because soda is not good for you.
00:43:00.740
And it does give you all sorts of problems down the line.
00:43:04.080
I think the robust defense of this decision not to pay for soda through food stamps is to say, oh, it's not, it's not good for you.
00:43:19.620
It's not just about liberty, the liberty to have Mountain Dew, the liberty not to have to pay for Mountain Dew, the liberty for, it's, it's about, well, what's good?
00:43:27.280
And it's not good really for anyone in society.
00:43:32.640
We're going to have a nice, we're going to have a nice mean between extremes here, between miserliness and prodigality.
00:43:38.960
We're going to have a nice mean between total decadence and indulgence of toxic foods and a total abstinence from anything that's kind of sugary.
00:43:50.740
We're going to have a nice mean, but we're going to recognize it's not really good for people.
00:43:54.780
No, we should, if anything, if we're going to inject anything back into the SNAP program, have it be some like fruity millennial seltzer or something.
00:44:02.780
You know, have it, have it be a genuine luxury good.
00:44:05.720
Before we go, I have to get to the most important story of the day.
00:44:09.360
President Trump finally weighing in on Sidney Sweeney's jeans ad.
00:44:13.180
Uh, actress Sidney Sweeney, it came out this weekend that she was a registered Republican.
00:44:21.160
Sidney Sweeney, she's like a very hot actress right now.
00:44:30.440
You'd be surprised at how many people are Republicans.
00:44:33.140
That's what I wouldn't have known, but I'm glad you told me that.
00:44:38.480
If Sidney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I think her ad is fantastic.
00:44:46.880
I love the shamelessness of it, and I love the little wink.
00:44:52.700
What's this thing that you're asking me to give my opinion on?
00:45:04.120
Is the person in question, before I give my objective opinion about a work of art, let
00:45:11.820
me just, is the artist on my team or the other team?
00:45:24.720
If you had told me that the artist is on the other team, I would tell you it's absolute
00:45:31.280
And some people will say that's a cynical approach.
00:45:37.300
Politics is a team sport, and we give a little bit more grace to the people on our side, and
00:45:43.260
And we should give a little more grace to our families than we would to other people.
00:45:52.560
It ties into the Ordo Amoris that the vice president was talking about not so long ago.
00:45:58.240
He says, Sidney Sweeney, a registered Republican, is the hottest ad out there.
00:46:01.780
It's for American Eagle, and the jeans are flying off the shelves.
00:46:06.120
On the other side of the ledger, Jaguar did a stupid and seriously woke advertisement.
00:46:14.460
The CEO just resigned in disgrace, and the company is in absolute turmoil.
00:46:17.780
Who wants to buy a Jaguar after looking at that disgraceful ad?
00:46:21.140
Shouldn't they have learned a lesson from Bud Light, which went woke and essentially destroyed
00:46:25.980
The market cap destruction has been unprecedented with billions of dollars so foolishly lost.
00:46:32.640
Ever since I alerted the world as to what she was by saying on truth that I can't stand
00:46:41.980
her, parenthesis, hate, she was booed out of the Super Bowl and became no longer hot.
00:46:56.020
The tide has seriously turned being woke is for losers.
00:46:58.680
Others, being a Republican is what you want to be.
00:47:09.140
I've said this ever since he settled on Make America Great Again for his hat all the way
00:47:27.200
I know some people are going to say, oh no, this is going to be bad for Sidney Sweeney
00:47:29.560
because she's a Hollywood starlet and everyone likes her.
00:47:31.620
And now she's got Trump supporting her and that's going to be bad for her.
00:47:40.200
So when American Eagle first released the Sidney Sweeney ad, the most effective ad campaign
00:47:44.340
of the last 20 years at least, the stock price jumped 10% and they gained $200 million
00:47:51.280
in market cap yesterday after Trump's comments on the True Social Post.
00:47:57.840
The American Eagle saw its stock price jump 23.7%.
00:48:08.700
And the stocks rally was the biggest since it rose 26.5% 25 years ago.
00:48:21.640
When Trump says all these things, I like Sidney and she's hot and being woke is for losers.
00:48:29.180
When he says all these things, these audacious claims, he's basically right.
00:48:47.800
It's the sort of thing that Sidney Sweeney knew.
00:48:50.540
That's why, that's one of the reasons why I suspect she did the ad campaign.
00:48:53.620
It's one of the reasons why I suspect she hasn't been out there promoting Democrats and Planned Parenthood
00:48:59.160
and doing everything else that every other Hollywood starlet does.
00:49:05.280
Part of it might be, but she's also a very savvy operator in Hollywood.
00:49:10.500
And the cold calculating reality here is Trump is hot.
00:49:24.400
Okay, speaking of hotness, there's a story I really, really want to get to.
00:49:30.400
Wired Magazine has an amazing article called Confessions of a Recovering AI Porn Addict.
00:49:40.100
I should have understood this already, but porn has come to AI.
00:49:44.740
And apparently this has become something of a phenomenon.
00:49:46.780
And it is, the tales that this guy tells are horrifying.
00:49:52.120
And they tell you so, so much about technology, about liberalism, about who we are.
00:50:04.340
Because today we need to move to funnier matters.
00:50:11.560
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