Ep. 1835 - Lib Magazine DISRESPECTS Trump With Botched Photo
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Summary
Trump secures the release of the Israeli hostages, the end of the Gaza war, and for now, peace in the Middle East. It is the most significant international achievement of a presidential administration in decades. All of President Trump s critics have to eat crow. He did the impossible. And Trump s enemies are so angry about it, they shaved off his hair.
Transcript
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President Trump secures the release of the Israeli hostages, the end of the Gaza war,
00:00:05.160
and for now at least, peace in the Middle East. It is the most significant international achievement
00:00:10.560
of a presidential administration in decades. All of President Trump's critics have to eat crow.
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He did the impossible. And Trump's enemies are so angry about it,
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they shaved off his hair. I'm Michael Knowles, this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show. Vice President J.D. Vance just made the most beautiful
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Indigenous People's Day proclamation in the history of that made-up holiday. We will get to that
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first order. They just can't help themselves. They can't help themselves. Trump did the impossible.
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He did the thing that everyone said he couldn't do, that his enemies said, oh, wear a MAGA hat if
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Trump gets the Israeli hostages released. Oh, could you imagine? It was a punchline in the first term.
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Can you imagine Trump? What's he going to do? He's going to bring peace to the Middle East,
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right? Then this war breaks out on Biden's watch, the Israel-Gaza war, the October 7th massacre,
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two years of strife. And then Trump ends it yesterday. And he brings the hostages home.
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And it's just a completely unimpeachable, indisputable, astounding success.
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So the Libs know that they have to acknowledge that he did this amazing thing. They already set
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the stage for it. There was no way to back out of it. They had to acknowledge it.
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And even as they acknowledge it, they have to try to just twist the knife a little bit.
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So Time Magazine gives Trump this cover. And it's Trump's face. And it says,
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His Triumph by Eric Cordelesa. Then another article, The Leader Israel Needed by Ehud Barak,
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the former prime minister of Israel. Then How Gaza Heals by Mohammed bin Abdul Karim Al-Isa.
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Okay. And what's the picture? It's a picture from below of Trump looking up.
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So already we're at an angle that is not flattering ever. You never want the picture going up your
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nose. But already it's a bad angle. And it's this angle that puts almost exactly in the center of the
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photograph. Your eye is drawn because of the lines of his collar, of his necktie, of his neck, of the
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near centrality of this particular point of the image. It's President Trump's neck kind of being
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pulled in a wrinkle in at his collar. So it's not a flattering image. And I say this without
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myself attempting to flatter Trump. He's a good looking guy. Trump is a good looking guy. And
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before he got into politics, most people would acknowledge that. He's a good looking guy. He's
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tall. He's well built. I'm not saying he's Fabio. I'm just saying he's a good looking guy. He cuts a
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strong image on stage and on camera. That's why he was a number one TV star on network TV for 12 to 15
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years. And this picture is not flattering. This image of where it looks like it's, I don't know,
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they're making his face look like saran wrap being wrapped around a basketball or something.
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Then you look up at his head. And it's a good facial expression that he's making. It's optimistic.
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It's looking up, looking up toward heaven. We'll get to the significance of that.
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But there's something missing. Can you tell what's missing about this picture?
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Beyond, they make him look wrinkly and it's just an unflattering angle on anybody.
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The angle gets rid of his hair. You get a little wisp of hair on the right side of his head.
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The left side of his head, so the right side of the image, it basically looks like he's bald.
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Light shining through it, a little bit of hair on the back. But where does hair go?
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They got rid of his hair. So they take a picture of this man who is, for a man of a certain age,
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he's a good looking guy. They take the least flattering picture they can, but the key to it,
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and this is the part I don't think other people have really picked up on.
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They get rid of the hair intentionally. First of all, images in newspapers, in magazines are selected
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with great precision and specificity. There are people whose job it is, the photo editors,
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to pick the images. Every part of the images are intended to convey something.
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When you're talking about a legacy outlet like Time Magazine, the stakes go much, much higher.
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When you talk about a cover image, it's much higher still. They picked this image intentionally.
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And everyone's just focusing on, oh, they made it look like his neck is wrinkly. Oh,
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they made it look like his head is kind of oddly shaped. And the key to it is the hair.
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And Trump picked up on that. Trump is the only other person I've seen who's picked up on this.
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He posted on Truth Social, Time Magazine wrote a relatively good story about me,
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but the picture may be the worst of all time. They disappeared my hair and then had something
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floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one.
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Really weird. I never liked taking pictures from underneath angles. This is funny. You know,
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it's funny. I saw that he posted about this. This is my first time reading it. And he's picking up on
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all the points that I mentioned. I never liked taking pictures from underneath angles, but this
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is a super bad picture and deserve to be called out. What are they doing and why? Like I skimmed it,
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but I actually hadn't paid much attention to what he actually said. He hones in on the key piece,
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the hair. Why did they get rid of the hair? Just because they think it's funny if they make
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him look bald. No. They had to get rid of the hair because the hair is President Trump's
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most distinctive physical feature. People have been making Trump hair jokes since the 90s.
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Okay. For my entire life, and I grew up in New York where Trump is a very well-known figure. Now
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he's a globally well-known figure, but especially in New York, people have been making Trump hair jokes
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since the 90s for 30 years, more than 30 years. They had to get rid of Trump's hair because they
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had to diminish the distinctive nature of Trump's accomplishment. Trump did something that other
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presidents have failed to do. Trump has achieved the biggest foreign policy win since the end of
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the Cold War. And while they couldn't deny that he did that, it's manifest, it's obvious.
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The next best thing they could do was diminish the Trumpiness of the whole thing.
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So what they're going to try to do is say, well, this was a victory for America,
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or this was a victory for the presidency or something, but they're going to try to diminish
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the Trumpiness of it. They have to de-Trumpify the moment. And so they're de-Trumpifying the picture.
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They're taking away his distinguishing feature. And there is a deeply psychological reason behind
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this. For 10 years now, since Trump seriously entered into politics, the image of Trump has
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been presented as the face of evil. The next coming of Hitler, Time Magazine actually made Trump kind of
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look like Hitler. Their photo editors previously had a picture, I wish I could call it up right now,
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that was reminiscent of Hitler in Time Magazine, sitting on a chair, looking over his arm.
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And so they've made the typical picture you think of Trump, head on, serious expression,
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hair in full view. They've made that into an image of evil. Because Trump has done something here
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that is undeniably good, they have two options. They can either try implausibly to say that it's
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actually bad, just like everything else Trump does. Or they have to try to convey that it's
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not really Trump. They chose the latter course. That's what this is about. It's not just that this
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is a particularly bad picture of Trump. It's that the image doesn't look like Trump. Go back to the
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image. Trump's head, when you look at it, is rectangular. He has a particularly rectangular head
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normally. This image is weirdly round. In the typical Trump picture, he has a ton of hair.
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In this image, he barely has any hair. In the typical Trump picture, Trump's hair is blonde.
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In this picture, because of the lighting, and who knows, maybe because of the photo editing,
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his hair is white. It's not just that it's a bad picture, it's that it doesn't look like Trump,
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because they have to deny that Trump did this. Because Trump can't have done this,
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because they said he was Hitler, and he was going to cause World War III. And instead,
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he has brought about a considerable degree of world peace, and he received a standing ovation
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in Israel, something that Hitler probably would never do. That's what's going on here. That's what
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the photo editors were getting at. That is what the left is going to have to grapple with here.
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If we have now reached, but Trump's done a lot of great things that they've tried to deny.
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Oh, no, the immigration policy is bad. He's not actually deporting all those criminals. And it's bad if
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he's deporting people anyway. And his tariffs are going to cause the destruction of global trade.
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And actually, shoot, the global trade's going fine. All right, the tariffs aren't even
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implemented yet. And it's just they keep tripping over themselves. But with this one,
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it's just the hostages are back. The hostilities have ended. The major global conflict,
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regional conflict involving the entire world in the hottest area of the earth has been resolved for now.
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Shoot. Okay, let's just pretend it wasn't Trump. Now, what does Trump think about all this? We'll
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order. President Trump on Air Force One, speaking to reporters, takes a 30,000 foot view. He's on Air
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Force One, so maybe it's a 40,000 foot view of geopolitics. We're talking a lot about the Holy Land.
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And he's considering religious matters. He previously had said that he wants to resolve
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these wars because he wants to please God so he can go to heaven. Peter Doocy followed up on this
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and said, can you expound upon where heaven fits into your political strategy? Here's what he had to
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say. You talked about how you hope to end the war in Ukraine because it might help you get into
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heaven. How does this help? Does this help? I mean, you know, I'm being a little cute. I don't think
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there's anything going to get me in heaven, okay? I think I'm not maybe heaven bound. I may be in
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heaven right now as we fly an Air Force One. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to make heaven.
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I love this answer. I love it. And it's not just the left that's criticizing him for this. There
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are people who identify as Christian, who are baptized Christians, who are very angry at this
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answer. And they point to this answer and they say, this is evidence that Trump is not a true
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Christian and he's not really saved and we need to spread the gospel with him. I don't know about
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Trump's personal religious convictions. I see his public religious convictions and I'm very impressed
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by them. And I think he's obviously a great leader for Christians in America and throughout the world.
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But even on this answer, as it pertains to Trump's personal life, I love it because this answer
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is humble. It expresses a kind of humility that is deeply Christian. He's making a self-effacing joke
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about his own unworthiness of salvation. He says at the top, he goes, you know, look,
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I was being a little cute about the, I was being a little cute about the heaven thing.
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He's setting a stage for it. Look, I'm making a little joke again. He said, but me, I don't know.
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Hey, Mr. President, if you fix the war in Ukraine, is that going to get you into heaven? He goes,
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me, I don't know. I don't think I'm heaven bound. Some pearl clutching Christians, they say,
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he's confessing that he's damned. He doesn't have the theological virtue of hope.
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He doesn't know that he is. He's making a joke about his unworthiness. Lord, have mercy on me,
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a sinner. Most politicians are the Pharisee who says, oh, Lord, I thank you that you have not made
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me like these wretched sinners, these tax collectors. Trump is in the person of the poor
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man who knows his unworthiness, who says, Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner. I grant he's not saying,
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Lord, have mercy on me here explicitly. I do think there is quite a bit of that implicit,
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though. When he says, me, I don't know. I don't know if that. Could anything get me into heaven?
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So certainly nothing of my own will could get me into heaven. None of my own works could get me
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into heaven. Not even solving the war in Ukraine could get me into heaven. What is left unsaid here
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is I would require God's grace to get me into heaven. That's a deeply Christian expression,
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even if lots of it are being left implicit. And let's not even fill in the gaps. Let's say we don't
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know Trump's personal religious views. So it remains to be seen, and I'm sure he's had a lot
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of religious conversations. He's insinuated as much, certainly since his near assassination in
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Butler. But I'll go a step further. I know this is going to be controversial. We're going to stir the
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pot, kick the hornet's nest a little bit right now. Without weighing in on various debates between
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all of the different Protestant points of view, you know, Calvinism and Lutheranism and Arminianism
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and Antinomianism and this-ism and that-ism, without weighing in on those particular debates,
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without weighing in on the merits of, say, Catholicism over the various Protestant views,
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or Eastern Orthodoxy, or whatever. I just want to make a purely historical observation.
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President Trump's uncertainty about where he's going to end up
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is much more in line with the traditional Christian understanding of salvation than modern
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views of salvation, such as the one popularly described as once saved, always saved. In other
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words, Trump's saying, look, I don't know. I want to go to heaven. I hope I can go to heaven.
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But I don't know. I definitely don't deserve heaven, and I don't know where I'm going to end up.
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That is, indisputably, the much longer-standing traditional Christian view of salvation
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than the notion that one can be saved as a one-time event and then not even possess the freedom
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to turn away from God's grace. I know that there are many people who hold to that view.
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There are very interesting conversations that can be had about Calvinism and eternal security
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and the distinction, as in the Johannine epistles, between mortal and venial sin.
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There are many interesting theological conversations. I'm making an historical point.
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What Trump is saying here would be clearly understood historically by Christians going
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back to antiquity. The notion that one does not possess the free will to reject God's grace
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is a little bit more modern, okay? The too-long-didn't-read version of that.
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Lay off Trump, okay? It's not just, let's not talk about when Trump brings up religion.
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I really like when Trump brings up religion. This is refreshing to me. This is not pharisaical.
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This is not theologically innovative and cocky and prideful and presumptuous.
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This is an expression of humility in the leader of the free world,
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specifically pertaining to eternal things. I really like, I for one like that. Raise your hand
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if you like that. I do. Can we get a hands up? I don't know. Some people won't like it. That's okay.
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There are plenty of opportunities for interesting theological conversations. For me,
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I find it very, very refreshing. Now, one last note about what Trump's affairs with world leaders.
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Trump was caught on a hot mic amid all of this great news and the resolution of the war in the
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Middle East. The new prime minister of Canada, not Trudeau, but the other guy, whatever,
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prime minister Maple Leaf. He shows up and apparently Trump had referred to him as president.
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So just offhand, president is the head of state, prime minister is the head of government.
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In our country, it's both in the same office, but in parliamentary systems, they're divided up.
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So he just, he mixed it up. He called the prime minister president.
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The prime minister says to Trump, hey, thanks for the promotion. Here's Trump's response.
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I love it. It's a little hard to make out because the microphone has trouble picking it up,
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but he goes, thanks for upgrading me from prime minister to president. Oh, did I say that? Oh,
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that's funny. He's laughing. He slaps him on the back and then he goes,
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least I didn't call you governor. I just, I love it. I love the, the ribbing,
00:20:14.980
the kind of vaguely threatening joke. We might invade you. We might, hey, watch out. But also the
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camaraderie, the camaraderie, they, they kind of seem to get along. It's not the stodgy clinical,
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sterile, defensive posture with international leaders. It's an aggressive posture.
00:20:32.920
This too, I think has Christian resonance because there's a line that we say about the church and we
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say it because it's in the gospel and it's a line of our Lord, which is that the gates of hell will
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not prevail against the church, which is often misunderstood as saying that evil forces will
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never overcome the church, but that gets the direction totally wrong. We're not talking about
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the armies of hell. We're talking about the gates of hell. Gates are themselves defensive mechanisms.
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So when they say the gates of hell will never prevail against the church, the image is not
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in the armies of hell attempting to vanquish the church. The image is of the church militant
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conquering hell, conquering death. In other words, the church is on the move. And this is how we should
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be thinking. For far too long, Christians have put themselves in defensive posture,
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apologizing for everything. And not only the things that we should apologize for,
00:21:25.160
but apologizing for just everything, for being Christian, for holding good and virtuous views.
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We're always on the defensive. You got to go on the offensive. Politically speaking,
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the American right, which has a lot more to do with religion than the left does.
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The right has been on the defensive. We're not this. We're not that. We're not racist. We're not this.
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We're not that. No, we don't want to do this. We don't want to do that. We just want to shrink
00:21:46.180
the government. We don't want to do anything, actually. Trump flips that on a whole host of
00:21:50.840
issues. He says, no, we are going to deport people. We are going to force a resolution to
00:21:56.060
foreign conflicts. We're not just going to allow wars to fester forever. We are going to change
00:22:00.000
our trade policy. We are going to prosecute the bad actors, the corrupt people in government. We are.
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The left has been doing that for a long time. And then we get into office and we say, we're not
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going to do that because of some principle about losing all the time. No, we are. We are. We are.
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We're doing stuff, baby. We're doing it. That is the right attitude. We got to be on the move.
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All right. Sometimes the best defense is a good offense. Okay. The libs are up in arms. They're
00:22:26.160
furious. They have to eat a lot of crow today. There might be a MAGA hat on the view. We'll get
00:22:31.260
to that momentarily. First, I want to tell you about an organization near and dear to my heart,
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00:23:49.340
biggest Bible study. Alyssa Farah, the fake Republican on The View. She is at least the fake Republican.
00:23:57.440
She's not an overt Democrat, but she's a lib. She's a lib like all the ladies on The View.
00:24:03.380
She previously said something that she might have to make good on vis-a-vis the war in Israel.
00:24:08.740
My point when I say I'm not going to be apocalyptic, it's not changing a tune. It's not making every
00:24:15.740
single thing a five-alarm fire. If he does good, if he gets the Israeli hostages out, I promise I will
00:24:20.920
wear a MAGA hat for one day on the show and say, thank you for doing it. She'll knock it right off
00:24:25.880
my head. But like, you have to be able to cheer for wins when they happen and then call out relentlessly
00:24:30.820
the wrongdo. Okay, great. Well, it happened. So are we going to get it today? I don't know. I don't
00:24:35.560
know what time The View airs. I assume it's after my show in the morning. I want to see that MAGA hat.
00:24:41.240
I'll be curious to see if she makes good on this bet. Obviously, the clip is going around. She knows
00:24:45.560
that she made this bet. I'll be curious to see if she can do it. Because on the one hand, it would
00:24:51.400
be gracious. It'd be fun. I remember Glenn Beck in 2016 really didn't like Trump. And then when he
00:24:57.300
saw that Trump was doing great stuff, Glenn had the grace to say, oh, I guess I underestimated him,
00:25:02.800
where I got things a little bit wrong. And he wore the MAGA hat on his show. And it was a great image.
00:25:06.580
Ben, actually, Ben Shapiro didn't like Trump in 2016. I did like Trump a lot. I forget what the
00:25:12.160
particular issue was. Trump did something that Ben really, really liked. And he said, all right,
00:25:16.040
Knowles, I'll wear your MAGA hat. Give me the MAGA hat. I'm going to wear it on the show. It was good.
00:25:19.000
That's a very gracious thing to do. It's very self-aware. So, okay, I got something wrong. All right,
00:25:23.660
I got it. I'm going to make good on that. Can Alyssa Farah do that? Who cares about Alyssa Farah and The View?
00:25:29.320
Can the left do that broadly? Or do they have to get the nasty picture of Trump? Not just the nasty
00:25:37.040
picture, but the picture that tries to de-Trumpify Trump. Can they acknowledge what Trump just achieved?
00:25:45.740
Because you got to sympathize with them a little bit. If they acknowledge that,
00:25:52.160
they will simultaneously be acknowledging that they were completely wrong about him for 10 years.
00:25:59.320
completely wrong about him. They said he was going to bring us war. He brought us peace.
00:26:05.120
They said that he was incompetent in politics. He's the best foreign policy president,
00:26:14.280
at least since George H.W. Bush. They said that he turns the whole world against us.
00:26:21.700
He's palling around, even with the prime minister of the country that he's threatening to invade.
00:26:25.400
And they're like joking together. He achieved something other people couldn't achieve.
00:26:31.440
He's not just okay at being president, which would be a major concession for the left.
00:26:36.300
He's really, really good at it. He's better than any other president probably in my lifetime.
00:26:42.440
Yes, certainly in my lifetime, because George H.W. Bush wasn't good enough to get reelected.
00:26:48.200
George H.W. Bush did a lot of great stuff, but he did not have the political skill of Trump.
00:26:54.920
We need to see a lot of that. I want to see that MAGA hat. Weirdly enough,
00:26:58.380
the view is going to be a weather balloon today, or a weather vane rather. The view is going to show
00:27:04.700
us whether or not the left can actually come to grips with this, because it would represent a sea
00:27:08.500
change in American politics. Certain big figures on the left simply cannot. Barack Obama in recent
00:27:16.100
days has taken the occasion of Trump's triumph to sit. And it's unbelievable. Even the way he's
00:27:23.280
sitting is so beautiful. It's Obama. He's not wearing a suit. He's not presidential. He's not
00:27:27.360
strong and established. He's sitting on some cushy, weak-looking modern chair with his legs crossed
00:27:35.640
over his legs, and his arms crossed. Always a terrible thing. Sometimes I see people do this
00:27:40.120
at public events. It really drives me crazy. Sitting with their arms crossed in public,
00:27:44.320
which just conveys to people that you don't like them. You don't want to be there. You're angry.
00:27:48.720
You're upset. It's very, very off-putting. People do it, though. At least top politicians should know
00:27:54.660
better than that. Sitting arms crossed, wearing his dark, looks like a turtleneck. It would be very
00:28:00.580
fitting if it were a turtleneck, but it's not. I think it's an Oxford shirt. In any case,
00:28:03.700
sitting there, it's me, me, me. I don't like what Trump is doing. Me, me, me, me, me. And
00:28:13.000
We don't want kangaroo courts and trumped-up charges. That's what happens in other places
00:28:21.340
that we used to scold for doing that. We want our court system and our Justice Department and our
00:28:29.700
prosecutors and our FBI to be just playing things straight and looking at the facts and not meddling
00:28:37.060
in politics the way we've seen later. We need people who have whatever platforms they have
00:28:51.920
That's not who we are. I mean, that is who I am because I'm the one who started all of that.
00:28:58.960
It almost boggles the mind that he could make this statement with a straight face.
00:29:05.420
We don't want our DOJ and our FBI to be prosecuting our political enemies.
00:29:11.180
We want them to be playing it straight. We don't want them, for instance,
00:29:14.380
to be cooking up fake dossiers with the Democratic nominee for president at the end of the second
00:29:22.120
term of the Democratic president to create a false pretext to spy on the rival's presidential campaign.
00:29:30.060
And then, for instance, if that rival manages to make it to the White House,
00:29:33.980
to be used as a predicate for undermining his entire administration.
00:29:37.420
And we don't want to be wielding, once that rival is running for re-election,
00:29:45.520
we don't want our federal prosecutors to be trying to put him in jail four ways from Sunday.
00:29:51.900
Okay? And we don't want the FBI, under a Democratic president, to be raiding that rival's house.
00:30:02.880
Wait, uh-huh. Say that again. He did all of it. He did it.
00:30:07.960
You can't even only blame Biden. It started, Crossfire Hurricane, all that.
00:30:12.600
The investigation into Trump's campaign started on Obama's watch.
00:30:20.400
With Obama's knowledge, one asks, would seem so.
00:30:26.660
Cooking up the fake dossier with the Democratic campaign, that was on Obama's watch. He did all
00:30:31.480
that. Take Trump out of it for a second. Barack Obama was the one who turned his
00:30:37.140
IRS under his flack, Lois Lerner, to spy on and persecute the Tea Party groups.
00:30:49.140
I was there. Some of you will not be old enough to remember this. I was a member of some of these
00:30:52.360
Tea Party groups. The Tea Party was growing up. It was a populist ground swelling. It was kind of
00:30:56.580
setting the stage for the Trump populist movement that took the White House in 2016. This was back in
00:31:02.020
2009, 2010. All these great groups. And Obama sicked the IRS on these Tea Party groups,
00:31:09.400
on all these conservative groups. The conservative group in LA, Friends of Abe,
00:31:12.720
they were doing everything they could to get the member list.
00:31:17.140
Something tells me if they did get that member list, a lot of people would have had audits from
00:31:20.360
the IRS. We know this all happened because of him. Maybe that's why he's so whiny and shriveled up
00:31:28.360
and bitter and angry and resentful. It's because he is the one, not Trump, Barack Obama is the one
00:31:35.900
who upended American norms. If any president is responsible for that in recent history, it's Barack
00:31:42.040
Obama. He's the one who did it. And he did it because he endeavored to fundamentally transform
00:31:47.960
America. His words, not mine. And he thought he won. He thought he did it. He thought the
00:31:54.500
Republicans were done. He thought conservatism was, for all intents and purposes, out in America.
00:31:58.820
And maybe there would continue to be two parties, but his ideology would dominate.
00:32:04.520
His apparatchiks would dominate. And if he had to go after his political rivals and weaponize the
00:32:10.980
government, well, okay, that's all we needed to fundamentally transform America. And it didn't work.
00:32:14.860
It just didn't work. And now he's whining. He says, hey, stop doing, stop doing to me what I did
00:32:21.800
to you. Stop doing to me a much more just and justifiable version of the thing that I did to
00:32:26.820
you. That's not who we are. That's not, I am not who we are. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Your thing is
00:32:33.460
not who we are anymore. And we're going to make sure that you pay a political price for that.
00:32:39.320
Okay. He makes one point even more explicit. And this bears some discussion. He talks about the
00:32:46.760
distinction between friends and enemies. The point is that we have blown through just in the last six
00:32:55.160
months a whole range of not simply assumptions, but rules and laws and practices that were put in place
00:33:09.760
to ensure that, you know, nobody's above the law and that we don't use the federal government to
00:33:23.140
simply reward our friends and punish our enemies. And the same thing's obviously happening in the
00:33:29.880
justice department. So people are right to be concerned.
00:33:33.300
Just pure, pure projection. I even remember his attorney general, Eric Holder. What was the
00:33:39.120
line Eric Holder said about Obama? He said, I'm your boy. I'm your guy. I'm your main man. I'm your
00:33:44.180
friend who's going to punish your enemies. The distinction here I think is key because as is
00:33:50.540
often the case, when the left is accusing, the left is projecting. But it gets to something that has
00:33:55.900
entered a little bit of the political discourse and controversy lately, namely the distinction between
00:34:00.640
friends and enemies. October is packed with new releases on Daily Wire Plus. We're talking new
00:34:04.660
series, new docs, new premiere of Friendly Fire. Join me, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan,
00:34:09.540
unscripted, unfiltered, no moderators, nothing off limits live this Thursday night at 7 p.m.
00:34:15.280
Eastern plus special appearances from Isabel Brown and your first look at the Pendragon cycle. Do not
00:34:21.380
miss a moment. Join now and get 40% off a new annual membership with code FALL40. This month,
00:34:25.980
there is more happening on Daily Wire Plus than ever before. Do not miss it. Go to dailywire.com
00:34:30.520
and join today. My favorite comment yesterday is from Dilmeister93. All those that shouted free
00:34:36.920
Palestine should thank Trump for freeing Palestine. Sure, that's true. Hey, Greta, where are you?
00:34:42.060
Greta, we will make America great again. We will make America greater again. How dare you
00:34:50.240
free the hostages and declare war in the Middle East? You have destroyed my flotilla.
00:34:56.480
Greta. Okay, we don't want to make any jokes about Greta, obviously.
00:35:03.460
Obama says you don't want to have a government that is just punishing its enemies and rewarding
00:35:09.540
its friends. Okay, this distinction between friend and enemy has come up. People have bandied this
00:35:14.360
about and there are all sorts of accusations flying around. If you even bring up the distinction
00:35:19.640
between friend and enemy. The reason for this in political philosophy is because this term,
00:35:25.060
the friend-enemy distinction, is attributable to a philosopher named Carl Schmitt. And Carl Schmitt
00:35:30.460
is controversial because he happened to be a German philosopher in the 1930s and 40s. It was not a
00:35:38.120
great, it was a little tough time to be, and so he was a Nazi. Not great, not good to be a Nazi.
00:35:44.180
Heidegger was a Nazi too. Heidegger is still taught in philosophy classes. For some reason,
00:35:47.560
Schmitt in particular, remains extremely controversial. The point that Schmitt is
00:35:53.360
making, though, is a really important one in the concept of the political. He says that there's this
00:35:59.860
kind of pre-political even distinction. The distinction that defines politics is the
00:36:04.000
distinction between friend and enemy. And when he says enemy, he's very clear. He's not talking about
00:36:09.220
personal enemies. He's not saying, you know, my friends are morally good and my enemies are morally
00:36:14.800
bad. And he's not even talking about personal enemies, like, you know, Billy slept with my
00:36:19.620
girlfriend in high school and I've never forgiven him. He's talking about political enemies, which is
00:36:23.480
distinct from personal enemies. The political enemy is, he uses the Latin ostis, and the personal enemy
00:36:28.600
would be inimicus. And he's just saying, he's not saying it's good or bad. He's just saying it's a fact
00:36:33.840
of politics that politics is distinguished between people in groups that are friends and people in
00:36:43.040
groups that are enemies to the political community. And it seems persuasive to me, at least. It's a
00:36:52.140
fair telling. I don't think there's anything particularly groundbreaking about that. What's
00:36:56.260
funny about Obama using this phrase is the left in particular has been advancing not only this idea,
00:37:06.080
but advancing this idea in a really irresponsible way. Because what they have been saying, at least
00:37:10.820
since the 2020 campaign, and actually much further back, is that conservatives in America are not
00:37:18.960
merely inimicus, you know, people that they don't like. That conservatives in America are not merely
00:37:24.220
the rival political party that they're going to endeavor to beat at the ballot box. They have been
00:37:28.580
arguing that they pose, that we pose, an existential threat to the country. That's their language.
00:37:35.220
He said, Donald Trump poses an existential threat to the country.
00:37:37.840
It's a threat to democracy, but an existential threat to our country, which justifies his
00:37:44.840
assassination. Ronald Reagan used to say in the 80s, I have no enemies here in America,
00:37:50.820
only opponents. And that's a really nice way to think of it. But the left doesn't think of it that
00:37:54.860
way. They say we're existential threats, which justifies, in their view, in self-defense,
00:38:02.780
assassinating someone like Donald Trump, which explains why they would excuse or minimize or
00:38:08.960
even celebrate the murder of someone like Charlie Kirk. That's a very dangerous way of viewing your
00:38:17.820
fellow countrymen. That's how they view it, okay? And so when they say, we don't want to just punish
00:38:23.560
our enemies. Well, then how about you stop calling us existential threats? How about you stop celebrating
00:38:27.580
it when some of us are murdered? How about you do that? We don't want to weaponize the government.
00:38:32.480
Well, then maybe you shouldn't have done that. Maybe you shouldn't have set the stage for that.
00:38:36.800
The only way out, though, is through. I've said this before. The distinction between a personal
00:38:43.440
enemy and a political enemy is actually an important distinction because it means that
00:38:47.000
things are not merely petty. And it's not just about petty vengeance and grievance or whatever.
00:38:52.520
That it's about viewing political interests, which is actually a better thing. It's a more
00:38:56.880
rational way to think about politics than just trying to slaughter everyone who's ever offended
00:39:00.480
you. I make the same point about political violence. We talk about political violence here. There are two
00:39:04.400
kinds of political violence. There's personal violence, vigilante violence, when the left goes
00:39:11.780
out and murders people. That kind of political violence being a uniquely left-wing phenomenon.
00:39:16.660
And there's state violence. And that's kind of it. The choice is not between violence and
00:39:24.500
kumbaya. That doesn't exist. When you have 100,000 gang members in Chicago, that's not your choice.
00:39:31.800
When you have leftists going around assassinating conservative campus speakers, you don't get that
00:39:38.500
choice. Okay? The only two options are vigilante violence, which generally speaking is unjust,
00:39:46.300
and state violence. When the state, through all the institutions that Barack Obama is talking about
00:39:51.280
here, the prosecutors and the courts and the jails, and actually effect justice. Those are the only
00:39:58.680
options you have. And the left wields the unjust kind of violence. We need to wield the just civil
00:40:05.580
authority to restore order. I think Trump has shown that. It's a more aggressive posture in politics
00:40:12.000
than conservatives have exhibited in recent years. But I think that's important, because the weak defensive
00:40:17.060
posture is what allowed people like Barack Obama to rise up and really screw up our whole political
00:40:21.640
order. Now we have an alternative in the Trump decade, and I think it's worked out pretty well. Okay. Now,
00:40:29.120
speaking of friends and enemies, an important story. I meant to get to it last week. I really want to get to it
00:40:32.560
today. The United States has deported at least 10 people to Eswatini. Do you know where Eswatini is?
00:40:42.300
No? No? Me neither. Eswatini is a very tiny landlocked country in southeastern Africa.
00:40:50.320
This story came out from Reuters. Trump administration sends another third country deportation flight to
00:40:57.140
Eswatini. And the people who have been deported here, just to let you know, as the left cries and
00:41:05.380
rings their garments over it, these people are rapists and child rapists and murderers. Okay?
00:41:12.180
It's not like abuela or your gardener or something. These are like really, really bad people.
00:41:18.880
But the question is, why are they being deported to Eswatini? Well, because we want to get them out of the
00:41:23.940
country. And there are all sorts of roadblocks to sending them to different places. And what the
00:41:28.340
left wants is for the rapists and the murderers to stay in America, because they apparently have
00:41:32.080
some right to it or something. But we want to get them out. And we also want to send a message.
00:41:39.420
Okay? First of all, the illegal aliens who come to this country, even the very, very vanishingly small
00:41:44.620
number of them who claim to be asylum seekers, even they are generally not really asylum seekers.
00:41:49.780
Because if they're from Venezuela and they're seeking political asylum because they're going
00:41:55.020
to be killed by the Maduro regime or something, they could stop the minute they get out of
00:42:01.600
Venezuela. They certainly could stop in Mexico. Why are they coming all the way to the United
00:42:05.200
States? That involves more danger. That involves more trial. Because they're not really seeking
00:42:12.220
political asylum. They could get that in Mexico. What they're seeking is economic opportunity and to
00:42:17.100
exploit the system and to take the invitation of Democrats who have invited them in. Okay,
00:42:22.060
so we got to get them out. And now the libs, if they don't want to explicitly defend rapists and
00:42:28.420
child rapists and murderers in America, they'll say, well, you should send them someplace closer.
00:42:33.600
You should send them to their country of origin or whatever. And my answer is, well, if these guys
00:42:38.960
didn't want a one-way ticket to Eswatini, they probably shouldn't have broken into our country in the
00:42:43.200
first place, huh? They certainly shouldn't have broken into our country and then committed some of the
00:42:46.920
most heinous crimes. I think we're going to send them wherever we want to send them.
00:42:51.940
I think they're lucky we didn't send them to some far-flung island in the South Pacific without any
00:42:56.460
food on it or with cannibals or something. That was the other option. I think Eswatini is the moderate
00:43:02.780
option is what I think. And if you don't want to go there, don't break into our country. Simple as.
00:43:08.380
There's so much more I want to talk about. I have so much more to say.
00:43:18.100
America is harvesting organs from suicidal Canadians. Did you know that?
00:43:24.560
Speaking of the governor, prime minister, president of Canada. I really want, I know,
00:43:29.760
I promised you we would get to that today. But we won't. Because I'm a tease. You're going to have
00:43:35.440
to tune back in tomorrow if you even want hope of getting to that. Because today is Tee Hee Hee
00:43:41.340
Tuesday. And the rest of the show continues now. And you do not want to miss it. Become a member
00:43:45.160
and use code Knowles, Canada WLES at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.