Ep. 1849 - Democrats Pin Their Election-Day Hopes On Communists, Muslims, And Psychos
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Summary
After six decades in Congress, Nancy Pelosi is stepping down from the House of Representatives and running for president in 2028. She will be the first woman in history to serve as Speaker of the House for a single term, and the first female to do so.
Transcript
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It's election day, and before any results are in, conservatives have achieved a monumental
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victory already. After more than six decades in politics, Nancy Pelosi will reportedly retire
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from Congress, presumably to run for president in 2028. I'm joking. Am I joking? Am I joking?
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I don't know. She's probably one of the leading candidates right now for the Dems.
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Nancy Pelosi began her career interning in Congress in the early 1960s. I am reminded of
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Rose in Titanic, who famously observed that it had been 84 years since the ship sank.
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Here, for those of you listening, I'll describe this photo to you. We see a 20-year-old Nancy Pelosi
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posing for a picture with President John F. Kennedy at his inauguration.
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It has been 64 years since one of the worst figures in modern political history
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has been inflicted upon us. And as we look ahead to the election results tonight,
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mirabile dictu, it seems the worst is yet to come. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show. Speaking of elderly politicians exiting the political stage,
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Dick Cheney died. So we say a requiesced gotten pache for Vice President Cheney.
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Complex legacy, not only on the left, which always hated him, and then started to like him a little
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bit more at the end because he didn't like Trump. And then the right used to like him a lot, but then
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the right doesn't like him anymore. Anyway, we'll get to the Cheney legacy because I am dead certain
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of one fact about the Cheney legacy that I haven't heard anyone mention yet. We'll get to that first.
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We want to talk about vibrant bodies and health. We got to give a shout out to the heroic crew at
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PragerU. I'm in town. I'm filming some episodes of my book club show here. I was giving a speech last
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night at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. I think you can find that speech online.
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And the heroic PragerU staff showed up at, by my, I think it's like 2.30 in the morning right now.
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It's hours before work begins to produce this show. Greatly, greatly appreciate that.
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You know who I don't appreciate? Nancy Pelosi. And you know who Nancy Pelosi doesn't appreciate?
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Donald Trump. Pelosi, as her valedictory to the political world after over six decades in politics,
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including on Capitol Hill, Nancy Pelosi has a message. Maybe this will be the epitaph on her
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headstone someday. It's just a vile creature. The worst thing on the face of the earth, but anyway.
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You think he's the worst thing on the face of the earth? I do. Yeah, I do. Why is that?
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Because he's the president of the United States and he does not honor the constitution of the United
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States. In fact, he's turned the Supreme Court into a rogue court. He's abolished the House of
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Representatives. Speaker Pelosi, after your amazing six decade plus career in politics,
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what would you like to say? How would you like people to remember you? He's a vile creature,
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that Trump. I'll get him. I'll get him. And then Alex Michelson, excellent interview. Great to see him
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on CNN. Alex says, well, he's a worse creature on earth. Why is that? He abolished the House of
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Representatives. Mrs. Pelosi, have you had your medicine today? He abolished the House of... He dead.
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And he shoots laser beams out of his fingers. What is she talking about? I guess she's talking about
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the government shutdown, which was entirely a product of the Democrats. And the Democrats did
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it because it was a Hail Mary, because they're losing on virtually every political issue. And they
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thought that healthcare was the only one they might win on. And the only tactic that they
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traditionally can reliably look to is government shutdown. And even that's not working. It's not
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working. So she's leaving, you know, a few decades too late. But she's leaving at a real low
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point for the Democrats. And that gives me satisfaction. It is nice and comforting to know
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that Nancy Pelosi's political career is ending in rejection. She lost the speakership of the House
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of Representatives when the Republicans took over. And the Democrats nationally have never looked worse
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in our lifetimes. And the Democrats in the House of Representatives specifically
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are somehow bungling the most reliable weapon that Democrats have had, namely a government shutdown.
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It just all flopped. I don't want to be too triumphant here. I wish we could be,
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I wish we could sincerely be more triumphant because Nancy Pelosi and the libs have notched a bunch of
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victories over her time in politics. But right now, she's losing everything. She's leaving in rejection
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as is fitting, as is seemly. Now, speaking of politicians ending their public life and their life
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generally, Dick Cheney died. Woke up to that news this morning. And it's a very strange political
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moment. You know, we're in this seismic shift. This was largely the topic of my speech at the
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Nixon Library last night. And so we're in this weird moment where the left is probably going to
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be sorrier about Cheney's death than the right. I'm old enough to remember when the left thought that
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Cheney was not merely Hitler, but actually the devil himself. When the left thought that Cheney was
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significantly worse than George W. Bush, George W. Bush, whom they also compared to Hitler.
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And I'm old enough to remember when the right loved Dick Cheney. And in fact, many liked Cheney
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more than they liked Bush because Cheney was sort of cartoonishly tough. And Bush seemed like a real
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nice guy. Now that's flipped because Dick Cheney's daughter was a political opponent of Trump within
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the Republican Party. And Cheney, good father, stood by his daughter and that made an enemy of Trump.
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And so he seemed to kind of flip sides. And also because Cheney was the representative
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of an expansionist, hardline, neoconservative foreign policy, a driver of the wars in the
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Middle East, which the American right loved in the 2000s. The American left hated in the 2000s.
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Now they basically flipped and the American right hates them and the American left still doesn't love
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them. But you'll see more defenders of the imperial wars on the American left and all political
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situations topsy-turvy. I, however, believe that, well, one, because Dick Cheney is our fellow man,
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but also because Dick Cheney is a fellow Republican, longtime conservative guy who came basically from
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nothing and had all sorts of personal problems and then ends up at a very young age. I think he was
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31 years old. He was chief of staff to Jerry Ford and worked his way up in politics, was the defense
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secretary under Bush one, then was the vice president under Bush two, very powerful vice
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president. I think we pray for Dick Cheney. Also, because I'm Catholic and we pray for the dead.
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I think we should pray for Dick Cheney. We should say a little R.I.P.
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If you say that you don't pray for the dead, by the way, and you use the initials R.I.P.,
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then you are in fact praying for the dead because that stands for requiescat in pace,
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which is may he rest in peace. In any case, what's the good stuff that we should focus on
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about Cheney? There's one line from a book about him, The World According to Dick Cheney,
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that really sticks with me. He was asked if it bothered him that for the eight years he was
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vice president, he was called Darth Vader, you know, compared to the devil. And so much so that
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he even put a little Darth Vader mask on the back of his truck. And he said, no. He said if he wanted
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to be loved, he would have been a movie star. But sometimes it's more important to be successful
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than to be loved. It is a wartime situation, and it does require tough programs and policies if
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you're going to be successful. And it was more important to be successful than it was to be
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loved. Are you going to trade the lives of a number of people because you want to preserve your honor?
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Or are you going to do your job, do what's required, first and foremost, your responsibility
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to safeguard the United States of America and the lives of its citizens? Now, given a choice
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between doing what we did or backing off and say, yeah, we know you know the next attack against the
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United States, but we're not going to force you to tell us what it is because it might create a bad
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So Dick Cheney here is speaking specifically about the United States' use supposedly of torture,
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or at the very least, enhanced interrogation tactics. And I just want to make a point here.
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I'm not a neoconservative. I'm very, very skeptical, very opposed, actually,
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to ideological wars to spread democracy around the world. That is not my flavor of conservatism.
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However, everything that Cheney was just defending here is totally right. First of all,
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the enhanced interrogation techniques that the United States used in the 2000s during the global
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war on terror were not really torture. And one of the ways that we can know this is that we used
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many of these techniques on our own troops as part of training. And unless you think that we were
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just torturing thousands of American troops, there's a distinction between these two things.
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However, to take it a little further, there is nothing in principle wrong with the use of torture
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to get information from terrorists. There's nothing in principle wrong with that at all.
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There is something wrong with using torture against enemy combatants who are wearing uniforms and who
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are abiding by the Geneva Conventions, which exist to protect civilians in times of war.
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But as Mark Thiessen pointed out famously, some dozen or so years ago, if you extend Geneva Convention
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protections to terrorists, you entirely undermine the Geneva Convention because you are taking away
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any inducement that a terrorist might have not to target civilians. There's nothing wrong with that.
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And as Antonin Scalia famously pointed out with Leslie Stahl, while it might be wrong, immoral to
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use torture to punish somebody, there is nothing in principle wrong with using torture against a
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terrorist to extract information because that wouldn't be cruel and unusual punishment and it would
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be easily defensible. Anyway, all of that to say, how should we think about Dick Cheney today? I know he's
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very unpopular in the Republican Party right now after having been unpopular by the end of Bush's
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second term, having been quite popular at the beginning of Bush's second term, having been one
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of the most popular men in America when he was Secretary of Defense under George Bush the first.
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What I'm going to tell you, and this ties in directly with my Richard Nixon library talk last night,
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there will be a day to come when the right loves Dick Cheney again. There will be a day to come
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when Dick Cheney's kind of, you know, grisly tough talk about defending American interests will be
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really cool and it will get aura cuts on TikTok and the kids will think he's the Rizzler. That will
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happen. He will come back into fashion. There will be wisdom that the American right and maybe the
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American left learns from Dick Cheney. That will happen in much the same way that we have seen happen
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with Richard Nixon. When I was a kid, frankly, until 10 years or so ago, Richard Nixon was a
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footnote at best in the history of conservatism. He was an embarrassment at worst. He was essentially
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written out of the story of conservatism. Reagan could do no wrong. Richard Nixon could do no right.
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And now that situation's changed a little bit. And it's changed in part because of changing political
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circumstances. It's changed because we've seen how the media and the government have worked on Trump.
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It's changed because of the world order shifting. For whatever reason, Reagan's lost a little bit of
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shine. Old Tricky Dick has come back up in the public imagination. The same thing's going to
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happen for Dick Cheney. Take it to the bank. Mark my words. I don't care how much you inveigh against
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the wars in the Middle East or the neocons or whatever. People are going to think Cheney's cool
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again at some point. We can pray for him in the meantime. All right. Now, speaking of
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scary figures, Zoran Mamdani might become the mayor of New York. And we got a little preview of what
00:14:16.680
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As New Yorkers go out to vote, the polls are actually quite tight. There is a chance that Cuomo
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pulls it off. Had the Republican Curtis Lewa dropped out, Cuomo almost certainly would have won the election.
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Now, it's probably the case that Mamdani is going to win. But it's close. We don't know exactly.
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Some of the betting markets have Cuomo up, rising up. If Mamdani does win,
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the first thing that New Yorkers can look forward to is a lot more, you guessed it, violence.
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Oftentimes, we've even found as legislators, when we go into these courts,
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the term violent crime is even used when people are stealing packages. Violent crime is even used
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when people are accused of burglary, and there happens to be a housing unit in that same dwelling.
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So violence is an artificial construction. And we have to be very clear that what is happening here
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with these district attorneys, that is violence. That is violence of the highest degree.
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Two groups of people are going to elect Mamdani. Primarily, it's foreigners, non-native New Yorkers.
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So they're probably used to violence in their terrible countries anyway. That will not be a
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shift for them. And yuppie, wealthy, female whites. And we'll get to those crosstabs in a moment.
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But those are the two. And that demographic is going to be really, really surprised to learn that
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violence is not merely a social construct. Violence is a physical construct. It is actually a physical
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action that hurts a lot and can really damage your life and kill you. I don't mean to laugh at it,
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but that's what they're going to find out. The ethereal, abstract construction of violence,
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man, when you really think about it, man, that is going to collapse into the concrete reality of
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assault and murder quickly. Or Mamdani will abandon his campaign promises. But frankly,
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I don't think there's any evidence that he is even competent enough to abandon his campaign
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promises and keep the city safe. If this guy is elected, whether he does what he says he's going
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to do or not, probably New York is going to become a lot less safe. In any case, New York's going to
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put the theory to the test. Is violence a social construct? Bookmark that clip. Let's see how the
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numbers bear it out. Okay, so the first thing that New Yorkers can expect if Zoran is elected is a lot
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more violence. What's the second thing? They can expect a lot less money.
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So when people say democratic socialist, right? And I'm curious what you think this means. I mean,
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do you like capitalism? No, I have many critiques of capitalism. And I think ultimately the definition
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for me of why I call myself a democratic socialist is the words of Dr. King decades ago. He said,
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call it democracy or call it democratic socialism, there must be a better distribution of wealth
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for all of God's children in this country. And that's what I'm focused on is dignity and taking on
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income inequality. And for too long, politicians have pretended that we're spectators to that crisis
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of affordability. We're actually actors. And we have the choice to exacerbate it like Mayor Adams
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has done or to respond to it and resolve it like I'm planning to do.
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Do you like capitalism? No. As we said, no, period.
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He's not even just running for mayor of Palookaville or mayor of Paris or something like that,
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mayor of Moscow. He's running for mayor of New York City, the most famously capitalist city
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in the world. Is there a second? What's the second most capitalist city? London, maybe? London's
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kind of socialist. What's the second most? I don't know. I can't think of one. Now, to be fair
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to Zoran Mamdani, there are plenty of valid critiques of capitalism. I have plenty of critiques
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of capitalism. In fact, while we're saying nice things about the neoconservatives, the early
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neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, Irving Kristol had a great line. He said, two cheers
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for capitalism. It's not three cheers because capitalism is a modern liberal ideology that,
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if taken to its logical extreme, would make an idol out of money. It would actually worship
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filthy lucre and mammon. That would not be good. The Bible tells us not to do that.
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But there's much to recommend capitalism and markets and the allocation of resources according
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to the impulses of the market. And obviously, there's a lot to recommend private property.
00:20:17.880
But there are critiques of capitalism. The problem is Mamdani's critiques of capitalism
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are all the wrong ones. The real critique of capitalism is that it can weaken social institutions
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and social solidarity, and it can put the cart before the horse. And it can weaken bonds within
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the community, and it can weaken bonds even within families, which is the bedrock political unit and
00:20:41.060
has to be protected. Zoran Mamdani's critique of capitalism is communist, basically. He is an avowed
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socialist and maybe a communist. And he's even what we now call like a gay race communist. He's not even
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like the old school Bernie Sanders kind of socialist. You know, he's not like that old school class
00:21:04.080
warfare, Karl Marx kind of socialist or communist. He's the kind of communist who tweets about queer
00:21:12.000
liberation, who tweets about the need for justice in Palestine or whatever as a matter of the economic
00:21:20.980
order. It's not, oh man, it's going to be bad. I'm all for critiquing capitalism if it means you're
00:21:27.800
going to strengthen the family, if it means you're going to maintain traditions, if it means you're going
00:21:32.440
to have a cohesive society. Yeah, get a healthy critique of capitalism. But it's like the Anakin
00:21:38.040
Skywalker meme. I'm going to critique capitalism. Oh, you're going to critique how it is acidic and
00:21:44.520
corrosive to social institutions and the family and norms and the natural law? It's just Zoran
00:21:51.140
Anakin smiling there. It doesn't destroy the family enough. It doesn't, it doesn't liberate
00:21:58.380
the queers enough. Okay. Going to be a total disaster. But there's an irony to Momdani's
00:22:04.040
critiques of capitalism. Namely, he's most popular among wealthy New Yorkers and wealthy non-New Yorkers,
00:22:13.100
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So I have here some cross tabs. Jeremiah Johnson was pushing this around Twitter. He pointed out
00:23:51.480
that Mamdani does better than Cuomo or Sliwa among transplants and the rich and people who rent
00:24:03.260
their apartments at the market rate. In New York, a ton of apartments are rent controlled or rent
00:24:07.840
stabilized. So you get an old teacher of mine lived in this apartment in New York in a beautiful area
00:24:14.220
by Carnegie Hall for decades. He lived there since the 50s, I think. And he had this beautiful,
00:24:19.740
you know, classic eight apartment. Fair market value would have been like eight grand. He was
00:24:23.920
paying $800 a month. So there are all these distortions to the market. So you would expect
00:24:29.060
the people who would support Mamdani if you just buy him at his Marxist rhetoric. You would expect
00:24:34.820
it to be the rent controlled New Yorkers, the underclass, the proletariat, right? No.
00:24:41.720
Mamdani does better with transplants, the rich and market rate renters per Jeremiah Johnson.
00:24:48.420
If you look at Sliwa, the Republican and Cuomo, the, I guess, more moderate Democrat,
00:24:54.360
it's the guy who lit up Freedom Tower pink to celebrate infanticide. We have to call him the
00:24:57.540
moderate in this race. Disgusting. You see, they both do better with people who were born in New
00:25:04.240
York than people who were born outside New York. Only Mamdani does worse with actual New Yorkers
00:25:10.820
compared to people born outside New York City. You look at all of the cross tabs, it shows you that.
00:25:17.820
And I'm not surprised by this. Some people will be surprised because they think of New York as
00:25:21.980
monolithic and liberal and awful. Having spent the first 24 years of my life in and around New York
00:25:29.820
within, within a commuter rail line of Grand Central, I tell you, there is a deep conservatism
00:25:36.580
to New York. Not enough to beat the Democrats in elections generally, but there's a deep kind
00:25:41.920
of conservatism. And actual New Yorkers are, are not voting for Mamdani. In fact, I don't want to
00:25:48.620
tell tales out of school. I still have, you know, many liberal friends and family members in, in New
00:25:52.520
York. Some very liberal friends of mine will not vote for Mamdani. New Yorkers. However, rich transplants
00:26:03.340
are going to vote for him. And foreigners, foreigners and rich transplants. That's, that's very sad.
00:26:08.340
But you know what this means is that even New Yorkers now have to feel the hideous effects of
00:26:15.360
mass migration. Because New York, New Yorkers, they didn't really care that much about mass
00:26:19.700
migration. Yeah. Okay. Maybe, uh, Minneapolis is going to be overrun by Somalis and that's going
00:26:25.280
to create problems and a lot of crime and social discord, but whatever, you know, they got to deal
00:26:29.720
with it too bad. Okay. Maybe mass migration is going to turn California blue. Yeah, good. All the
00:26:35.100
better. New Yorkers are basically fine with that. Yeah. Maybe, look, okay. Maybe, all right. Some
00:26:40.020
migrants are coming to New York now. That's a little annoying. Even Eric Adams, Democrat mayor,
00:26:43.560
he said mass migration is going to ruin the city. Okay. But whatever, you know, New York's generally
00:26:48.180
always kind of Democrats. No big deal. Well now mass migration, not just illegal immigration,
00:26:54.100
but legal immigration too, is going to tell New Yorkers, you don't get to pick your own mayor.
00:26:59.520
Mayor. Actual New Yorkers, you don't get to pick your own mayor. You want Andy Cuomo for whatever
00:27:05.440
reason? You want maybe Curtis Sliwa? Too bad. Even, even Andy Cuomo though, you regular Democrat
00:27:10.360
New York, you don't get him. You have to get a Muslim communist who's going to raise your effective
00:27:15.060
tax rate to 52%, who's going to take over your grocery stores and who's going to buy up private
00:27:21.380
apartment buildings and create a bunch of communes that are going to decay into even more projects,
00:27:25.260
where there's going to be even more crime and even more drugs, and it's going to be unlivable.
00:27:30.380
You said diversity is our strength. So that's what you get. You said we needed to have lots of legal
00:27:37.020
immigration. Even if it's not illegal immigration, we need endless legal immigration. Okay. That's
00:27:40.760
what you get. You get Zoran Mamdani. The conservatives have seen that happening for a while now.
00:27:47.640
When I was a kid, there were two views you could have on immigration. You could have total open borders,
00:27:53.300
legal's good, illegal's good, bring it on. Or you could have mostly open borders. And you say,
00:27:58.840
illegal's bad, but legal immigration's really good. We all want more migrants, just got to do it
00:28:04.200
legally. Some of us, for many years now, have been calling to drastically reduce all migration
00:28:09.580
for purposes of social solidarity. It's only been the right that's called for that. The right and
00:28:15.440
Bernie Sanders, in his defense, because he's an old school socialist and he recognizes that mass
00:28:19.860
migration is bad for the working class. Other than that, though, no one seems to have noticed.
00:28:25.660
Now they're going to notice. It's too bad. I love New York. It's too bad to see it happen.
00:28:29.800
There is only one dem in the country who seems inclined to moderate. And that would be the
00:28:35.980
Democrat who has recovered from a brain injury. That would be John Fetterman. Here he is on CNN,
00:28:42.360
not merely invading against the far left wings of his party, but admitting what every reasonable
00:28:47.820
person knows. Namely, the Democrats are responsible for the government shutdown.
00:28:53.120
I'm deeply, deeply distressing to know that 42 million Americans are going to lose their SNAP
00:28:58.100
benefits. And now that's one of the big reasons why I refuse to shutting our government down.
00:29:03.540
And again, I feel like the Democrats really need to own the shutdown.
00:29:10.320
I love it. I've gotten more of a kick out of John Fetterman every single day. I pointed out,
00:29:15.780
though, at the Nixon Library last night, you know, there's a civil war on the American right.
00:29:20.740
Everyone talks about it, especially online and in very politically nerdy circles. Always just say,
00:29:26.080
are you in this faction or that faction? Are you with this guy or that guy? And the thing is,
00:29:30.760
there's always kind of a civil war on the American right because the American right is divided into
00:29:34.500
lots of different camps. The neocons and the paleocons and the libertarians and the traditionalists
00:29:39.320
and the religious right and the country club Republicans and the new right and the new new
00:29:42.480
right and me. I was on the new right, but now I'm older, so I'm on the paleo new right, I guess.
00:29:46.580
I don't, that's the right. The left used to be divided between progressives and blue dog
00:29:55.380
Democrats. And the blue dog Democrats were people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan years ago.
00:30:00.760
Or people like Joe Manchin more recently or Kishton Sinema. Or there were, there were these
00:30:05.860
kind of moderate Dems. Now the Democrat party is divided between progressives and super progressives
00:30:13.020
and John Fetterman. John Fetterman is the only, only one, a dying breed. So who do the Democrats have?
00:30:23.400
Mentioned yesterday this strange situation, even CNN had to admit it,
00:30:26.940
which is that in 2000, 2004, Democrats had a front runner. Al Gore was polling above 25%
00:30:33.180
at this time in the presidential cycle. So they, they knew and Al Gore got it in 2000,
00:30:38.420
he didn't get it in 2004, but they still had a clear sense of what kind of candidate they were
00:30:41.480
going to have. Same thing with Hillary in 2008, 2016. Same thing with Joe Biden in 2020.
00:30:45.840
Now there is no candidate polling above 25%. Nevertheless, Kamala Harris insists that the
00:30:55.820
Democrats have a really deep bench. So many stars in their party.
00:30:59.100
We have so many stars in our party. There are so many stars and, and let's not be afraid of them.
00:31:10.420
You know, you talk about Momdani. I mean, he's exciting this group of people who otherwise don't
00:31:18.500
think of themselves as being aligned or apart or even seen by the system. You just look at the range
00:31:25.400
of what we have so many, Jasmine Crockett, who I just talked to recently. I mean, we have so many stars.
00:31:36.160
So that's it. They have so many stars. Who are they? Zoran Momdani and Jasmine Crockett.
00:31:46.580
This woman was the vice president of the United States. She was the presidential nominee 10 months ago.
00:31:53.120
She says that the future of the Democrat party, the most exciting people they have right now,
00:32:00.660
a Muslim communist and a woman who is politically schizophrenic, a woman who one day she goes,
00:32:09.400
she gives an interview and she just sounds like a totally normal person. She says, oh yeah, well,
00:32:12.940
here's the tax policy in this area and this is why. But then she goes in front of another audience
00:32:17.140
where she wants to pander to black people and she sounds like she's in a WB sitcom. She's like,
00:32:21.600
mm-hmm, all right, now listen here, man. You know what I'm talking about, honey?
00:32:26.500
You know, mm-hmm. And you think, all that, wait, you were just talking normal like five minutes ago.
00:32:31.400
You, forget about the ideas. What's the idea, what idea has she offered? All she has tried to do
00:32:38.880
is emulate some of AOC's provocations. That's it. All she's tried to do is just like really hit
00:32:45.560
Trump. All she's tried to do is get nice viral clips on the internet. That's the best. Say what
00:32:51.520
you will about Mamdani. At least he's a communist. Say what you will about Mamdani. At least he has
00:32:56.380
an idea, kind of. At least he might be a jihadi. Great. Okay, I can work with that.
00:33:03.660
There's something to engage with there. What about the rest of the day? And those are the best.
00:33:08.220
And it, it is amazing to think as, as some of these elder statesmen pass away or retire from
00:33:17.120
politics, Cheney exits stage. Nancy Pelosi prepares to leave politics. You think, wow,
00:33:26.440
will there, will there be a day to come that we miss Nancy Pelosi? Are things just getting worse?
00:33:32.500
You know, I'm not a pessimist exactly. Many of my colleagues are pessimists. I'm not an optimist
00:33:38.320
either because pessimism and optimism are just feelings. You know, they're, they're cheap little
00:33:42.460
sentiments. They're two sides of the same coin. I have hope, which is a theological virtue. I have
00:33:47.760
hope, which I'm commanded to have, and which I have based on the fact of the resurrection.
00:33:52.640
But if you ask me to put money down, will the political situation in America over the next five
00:33:58.860
years get better or worse? I would say long-term, we're poised potentially to have a renewal.
00:34:05.500
You see this in the Trump revolution. You see this in the, the very likely J.D. Vance,
00:34:10.340
Marco Rubio ticket. You see this in a return to religion among young people, especially. You see,
00:34:14.480
there are really good signs, Gen Z becoming substantially more conservative. Okay. They're
00:34:18.920
good signs in the short term. There's going to be a lot of Jasmine and Zoron, and it's going to be
00:34:26.280
ugly. It's going to be ugly. Okay. Speaking of President Trump, he's, he's fielding all sorts
00:34:32.700
of criticism from people who saying, who are saying he's going too far. His response, I think
00:34:38.380
we should all emulate. We have less than 2000 Daily Wire lifetime memberships remaining. I met
00:34:43.840
actually a number of lifetime members over the past few days, including out here in Southern
00:34:47.860
California at the Nixon presidential library. Turns out having all access benefits for life
00:34:52.200
with no renewals is something everyone wants. So here are your options. You could buy one while
00:34:57.020
they're still available, or you could win mine. That's right. I have my very own lifetime membership
00:35:03.040
to give away. I made it very easy to enter. You download the free Daily Wire Plus app in the app
00:35:07.300
store. You open it. You tap follow under my beautiful picture, and that's it. You've entered.
00:35:13.040
Who knows? I could be calling you to give you my personal lifetime membership. I could say,
00:35:18.440
hey, hey, you up? Hey, what's going on? Hey. But before any of that happens, you need to download
00:35:26.140
the Daily Wire Plus app and follow me in the app to enter to win. My favorite comment yesterday is
00:35:32.220
from Adichius. New Yorkers. Never forget. Also New Yorkers. We forgot. I know. It's really not just,
00:35:42.780
I don't, I would hate to sound like an Islamophobe. You know me. I would hate to sound like that.
00:35:46.740
But this is, to borrow a word from our Yiddish friends, as there are many of them in New York,
00:35:53.080
this is a Shonda. This is a Shonda. This should not be in the conversation. I don't even think
00:35:59.080
Mamdani, I don't think there's a lot of evidence that he's even particularly Muslim. I think it's
00:36:03.460
worse. I think he's just like a cringe millennial, a liberal Obama era cringe millennial, but
00:36:09.240
should not happen. I remember they were going to try to build a mosque at Ground Zero.
00:36:14.220
This was about 15 years ago. And at the time, the Republican Party, the conservative movement,
00:36:20.820
was really enthralled to libertarian-ish principles. You know, totally small government,
00:36:27.880
you can do whatever you want. We're going to have neutrality in religion. It was quite secular at the
00:36:32.840
time. And it was very difficult to explain why there shouldn't be a mosque at Ground Zero.
00:36:38.220
Everyone knows there should not be a mosque at Ground Zero. There should be city, state,
00:36:44.400
and federal statutes prohibiting mosques at Ground Zero. And you should be deported if you suggest
00:36:49.440
that there should be a mosque at Ground Zero. We all know that in our guts, but no one knew how to say
00:36:55.240
it. I remember Charles Krauthammer had a great column on it. He was a very moderate, respected figure.
00:37:00.140
And he said, it's not that you can't build a mosque anywhere, but just not here. That's not right.
00:37:07.140
He basically said, trust your gut, guys. We all know, and there's some wisdom to our guts.
00:37:12.620
And it's not right. It's not right to have a guy named Zoram Amdani be the mayor of New York. It's
00:37:19.000
just, he can be the mayor of some other place. It's not right to have him be the mayor in New York.
00:37:21.960
Okay. Speaking of immigration and assimilation, President Trump doing a very good job on the
00:37:30.820
deportations, on ending illegal immigration. He's doing a much better job than he's getting
00:37:35.560
credit for, not only from the left, but also even from the right. You know, not only the deportations
00:37:41.720
by ICE, Tom Holman, Kristi Noem, but also the self-deportations, also the inducements to get out
00:37:47.660
of the country on their own. So it saves taxpayer money and resources. Anyway, some have taken notice
00:37:53.900
in the media. Trump was doing an interview on 60 Minutes. He was called all sorts of terrible
00:37:57.760
things. He was asked if his policy was going too far. More recently, Americans have been watching
00:38:04.300
videos of ICE, tackling a young mother, tear gas being used in a Chicago residential neighborhood,
00:38:11.080
and the smashing of car windows. Have some of these raids gone too far?
00:38:15.380
No, I think they haven't gone far enough because we've been held back by the, by the judges,
00:38:21.120
by the liberal judges that were put in by Biden and by Obama.
00:38:27.360
This is the answer. When they ask you, well, don't you think Trump's going a little too far?
00:38:34.060
Oh, you, you just don't understand the political situation at all.
00:38:37.880
Don't you think Trump, this is, this is the stage in the presidency, almost done with the first year
00:38:44.300
when the enthusiasm of the election is supposed to wear off. People are starting to swing back a
00:38:50.160
little bit in the other direction. We're looking ahead to the midterms, which the other party is
00:38:53.980
supposed to win. And, you know, the, the president is supposed to be losing popularity.
00:38:59.700
And this is the point at which you say, you know, maybe he's gone a little too far.
00:39:07.080
The Democrats are not looking, we'll see what happens in New York and Virginia, not obviously,
00:39:11.220
but, and New Jersey, but the Democrats are not nearly as strong as they should be in this stage
00:39:16.320
of the cycle. They're not looking as strong for the midterms. The Democrats are losing the
00:39:21.100
shutdown battle. First time in my lifetime. The, the only complaint the American people have about
00:39:27.280
the Trump administration on immigration is exactly the complaint Trump himself just voiced. Namely,
00:39:32.080
it's not going far enough. We have not nearly exhausted the enthusiasm for the Trump campaign
00:39:38.700
promises. We, we are not nearly through with the excitement for what the guy who won the popular
00:39:46.060
vote as a Republican for the first time in 20 years was promising. This has got to be your response.
00:39:50.940
No going soft, no weak at the knees. I want to minimize the infighting on the right,
00:39:57.580
which is a perennial feature. And even when we're talking about right-wing coalitions,
00:40:02.960
when, when there's a reason to exclude somebody or to sideline somebody, whether for moral or purely
00:40:08.240
electoral reasons, we need to act like grown men and do it behind the scenes. Okay. We got to do it.
00:40:14.180
I'm really inspired by Richard Nixon, having been at the Nixon library last night.
00:40:17.480
Sort your problems out behind the scenes. None of this whining and fighting inside baseballs. None
00:40:22.900
of that. Eyes on the prize. There is still so much energy for what we were told was the radical
00:40:30.240
Trump promises. And the hour is so late and the problems are so dire. And the Democrats are poised to
00:40:36.340
elect a Muslim communist in New York and a man who wants to murder Republicans and our kids in
00:40:40.560
Virginia. And we got to stay focused folks, because we're, we're only guaranteed another what?
00:40:45.700
Another year before the midterms. So we get another 14, 15 months. The Republicans can,
00:40:54.340
are guaranteed to be able to do stuff in the legislature. Even that's hard because it's a
00:40:57.340
razor thin majority. Then we only get another three years guaranteed as Trump, Trump is president.
00:41:03.820
I hope we get, you know, two terms of J.D. Vance. And then obviously Barron Trump can just become
00:41:10.140
the first citizen, abolish elections, inaugurate the Augustan Trumpian age. And, but that's down
00:41:15.920
the line. All we have is this. Got to, got to focus. Got to focus. Got to keep moving forward.
00:41:22.520
Only problem is it doesn't go far enough. Now, speaking of families, there's a video going viral.
00:41:29.660
Actually, a number of videos gone viral. As the government shutdown continues on,
00:41:35.320
there are finally some cuts to food stamps, CBT, the SNAP program. And you're seeing people,
00:41:41.840
I mean, there, there was one woman, I think she was 65. She said, she's been on food stamps for 30
00:41:46.840
years and she looked fine. She looked able-bodied. She'd, you know, these are not programs that
00:41:53.060
generally speaking, you're supposed to be on for decades at a time. They're supposed to get you
00:41:56.820
through tough spots. For some people who are severely disabled, it might be a longer term deal for them.
00:42:03.680
But there's clearly a ton of fraud and abuse in the food stamp program. And it's clearly driving up
00:42:10.180
the cost of groceries for everybody else. Some people can't even imagine life without food stamps
00:42:16.420
as these who have gone viral. Ever been to the food bank before?
00:42:21.460
No, we never have. This is your first time here.
00:42:24.080
Correct. Are you scared? Well, highly afraid because I mean, we didn't ask for these kids to come
00:42:29.920
and what are we going to do at the night? Then we have them. We have to take care of them.
00:42:33.680
We have to find a way. And it's hard right now with everything that's going on. People are even
00:42:37.720
afraid to come out of their houses to work. It's really bad. And especially with everything
00:42:43.180
going on with the new, with the president saying that we have to hang in there. How are we going
00:42:47.100
to hang in there with the kids? Like, there's no way at all.
00:42:52.720
Especially, imagine the people. It's not fair for anybody.
00:42:55.840
What is your message right now to the federal government?
00:43:11.520
I feel, I actually do feel for this woman. I know most conservatives are not going to,
00:43:15.220
they're going to say, are you kidding me? But I feel for her. I feel for her. She's
00:43:18.520
clearly not the sharpest tool in the shed, is confused about a lot of things, but there's
00:43:25.880
one line in particular that really gets her. She said, we didn't ask for these kids.
00:43:30.240
Do we, do we need to go back to seventh grade biology class? You didn't ask for these kids?
00:43:38.680
We didn't ask for these kids. Not only did you ask for these kids through a specific action that
00:43:46.400
you undertook, but living in our contraceptive culture, the fact that you didn't use artificial
00:43:52.640
contraception, which I'm not recommending, by the way, I'm not in any way encouraging artificial
00:43:56.720
contraception. But the fact that you presumably did not use that means that you asked for the
00:44:02.940
kids twice. You did the thing and then you didn't use the thing that sometimes goes with the thing
00:44:09.280
that can stop the consequence of the thing. There was one person at the beginning of that video
00:44:15.480
said he'd never been to a food bank. He just was on the government cheese, didn't even think of
00:44:19.080
availing himself of other charitable resources. So one, this is evidence that even in charity,
00:44:26.720
to these people who, you know, maybe aren't totally with it and aren't the most resourceful
00:44:32.440
and, you know, that exists in society, the poor will always be with you. And so you have to take
00:44:35.940
care of them. But if you do it legitimately have charity for them, it's not always good to just stick
00:44:42.340
them on EBT because that can crowd out other resources like the church, like private charities.
00:44:49.000
It can get them hooked on these programs to the point that they don't even know how to go to a food
00:44:52.740
bank, much less go out and find gainful employment. And also though, and this is going to be the
00:45:00.860
controversial part, this is the consequence of contraception. This is the consequence of a
00:45:07.160
contraceptive culture. You will say, well, Michael, it sure seems like she wasn't using contraception.
00:45:12.200
No, no, no. This is the consequence of a contraceptive culture, a culture in which condoms and the birth
00:45:17.380
control pill are normalized and even encouraged in our schools going all the way down to sixth grade,
00:45:22.400
fifth grade in some cases. Because just the introduction of that and the normalization of
00:45:29.120
contraception in our culture, divorces in the public imagination, sex from procreation.
00:45:36.920
It says that there's not necessarily a link between those things. In the old way of thinking,
00:45:42.340
we used to say, love and marriage, love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.
00:45:49.200
And what happens after the horse and carriage? The baby carriage. That's in the second verse of
00:45:55.300
the song. There's a connection between love, marriage, and the baby carriage. Now we divorce all
00:46:03.680
three of those things. And our birth rate problem comes from contraception. Our mass migration problem
00:46:11.460
in many ways comes from contraception because we don't have an above replacement birth rate. And so
00:46:15.000
we're told that we have to import the third world because it's the only way to keep our population up
00:46:19.080
and our GDP up. A lot of problems come from this. And I know the right is going to be largely unified
00:46:25.460
when I say abortion is bad. I know the right is going to be a little more fractious when I say
00:46:32.820
that, you know, IVF is bad because it practically speaking entails abortion and for other reasons too.
00:46:38.260
But when I say contraception is bad and we should discourage it, and it actually was illegal or at
00:46:45.520
least heavily limited until Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s and 70s invented some constitutional right
00:46:50.860
to condoms. And when I say that, that's when I'm going too far. That's when I'm a knuckle-dragging
00:46:56.600
theocratic troglodyte. That's where, hey, Mike, you got to cool it. I'm just telling you facts.
00:47:01.860
When a woman says, hey, we didn't ask for these kids, she is expressing an intuition that we're
00:47:11.280
all at least pretending, which is that sex does not necessarily entail procreation. Okay.
00:47:18.860
Really important, there is something very positive in the culture. Well, it's a positive sign from a
00:47:23.800
really negative thing in a foreign culture. We don't have time to get to it. I'll give you a little
00:47:28.500
tease. Nicki Minaj. Nicki Minaj is sounding the alarm on Christian persecution in Nigeria and is
00:47:39.940
thanking, actually, the Trump administration. And she's just, she's great. And Trump is now using
00:47:46.720
some of her songs and it's awesome. I don't have time to get into the story today. However,
00:47:51.080
it is perhaps providential. I'm sitting here at the PragerU Studios. My friend, Xavier DeRousseau,
00:47:57.100
was, was the first one to Minaj pill me. He turned me into a barb and the barbs are completely
00:48:02.620
vindicated. She's standing up for the hideous persecution of Christians that is happening in
00:48:07.720
Nigeria. We've talked about that on the show before. We'll get to it a little bit more because
00:48:11.060
the United States might get involved. We'll get to that. We will not get to the member of segmentum
00:48:14.480
today because I got to film two things and then I got to fly back to Nashville. So I will see you
00:48:19.080
tomorrow back in Nashville. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. See you then.