Ep. 1850 - New York Elects A Muslim Communist Mayor
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Summary
New York has elected a Muslim communist mayor. Virginia makes a guy who wants to kill Republicans and our kids. It was a clean sweep for Democrats. But there is a silver lining to the storm cloud of an election night.
Transcript
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New York has elected a Muslim communist mayor. Virginia makes a guy who wants to kill Republicans
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and our kids. It's top law enforcement official. It was a clean sweep for Democrats. But there is
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a silver lining to the storm cloud of an election night. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael
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Welcome back to the show. The silver lining, of course, is that Zara Fui can wear her burqa
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again. Isn't that great? You know, Zoran, he was saying that aunt of his, everyone in his family
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is an aunt. All of his friends are aunts, too. And his aunt, Zara Fui, she felt uncomfortable
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wearing her full burqa or whatever after 9-11. So anyway, she can wear it again and feel cozy
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and comfy. Absolutely, absolutely brutal night. We will get to all of it and what we should
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helixsleep.com slash Knowles. Zoron comes out. He wins over 50% of the vote, which means that's with
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90% reporting. They're still counting votes because we live in a banana republic. So somehow we've gotten
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much, much worse at counting votes in elections. But with 90% of the vote in as of this morning,
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Zoron won over 50%, which means that all the people calling on Curtis Sliwa, the Republican,
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to drop out of the race, they were not proven right. Didn't matter. Sliwa could have dropped out.
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Every single one of Sliwa's votes could have gone to Cuomo. Zoron still would have won.
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Would have obviously been much tighter, but he still would have won. Made no difference.
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Mamdani gets on the stage. He celebrates. He talks about all those New Yorkers he's representing.
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I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas.
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You notice who he's not talking about? You know, I can't help but notice there's one group of people
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that you're not representing. Would it happen to be? I guess you look at all the races,
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you could say white people or Europeans. But the other group is just like New Yorkers.
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What about New Yorkers? I am a New Yorker by birth and by upbringing. I spent the first 24 years of my
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life in and within a commuter rail line of New York City. And I, my family had been in New York
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for a long time. There are a lot of people, Italian background, Irish background, even some English
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background, a lot of Jewish background, a lot. But people who have been in New York a long time.
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Zoran Mamdani personally has been in New York for about five minutes. He himself is an immigrant and
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he's speaking to people who are immigrants. Not people whose parents were immigrants even. Not
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people whose grandparents were immigrants even. We're like people who have been in New York for
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five minutes. And the transplants from within the United States and especially from outside the
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United States played a big role in his winning. And he, what he's saying is, yeah, I know that you
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guys were the ones who elected me. And so we're, this is a, this is a new city now on the racial
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front. Forget about white people. Don't we'll talk about every other group of people other than white
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people, but it's, it's even beyond just race. It's, Hey, yeah, there was an old New York. We don't
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care about that. We care about Uzbeki taxi drivers and Mexican abuelas and everyone other than
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New Yorkers. So you, you, he leans very heavily into the racial ID politics and he leans very
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heavily into socialism. The first line that he quotes in his speech is from one of the most
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famous socialists in the history of the United States. The sun may have set over our city this
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evening. But as Eugene Debs once said, I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.
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For as long as we can remember the working people of New York have been. So Eugene Debs,
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for those who don't know, was a socialist presidential candidate. He was jailed for sedition. Okay. This guy
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was very, very prominent, very dangerous man. He, he spoke quite eloquently actually. And he had a
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real dangerous little silver tongue, didn't he? And he was ultimately, I think he had a sentence
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commuted by President Harding. He, he wasn't pardoned because he was guilty of his crimes, sedition,
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but, but he, he was, he was, had a sentence commuted because he was an older man, but he, he really was
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a dangerous figure, the nearest that we've ever had to a socialist takeover of the United States.
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He won something like 8% of the presidential vote from prison. And Mamdani comes out and that's the
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guy he quotes, Eugene Debs. So he, he was very serious about his socialism. The fact that the guy,
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the guy's essentially communist. And he was very serious about his, his identity politics,
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the immigrant politics, the racial politics, every group other than white people.
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He was very serious about that. The silver linings in Mamdani's election are one. I, I did call it,
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you know, I, I, my favorite thing to do in politics is win. My second favorite thing to do is be right.
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And so we couldn't get the first one, but at least we got the second one here. He was going to win.
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It's why I couldn't get behind this big movement to say, we all need to go out and endorse Cuomo.
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We need to vote for Cuomo. You know, I played, President Trump basically leaned into that.
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And I just didn't, didn't think it was really going to do it. I could, I even tweeted last
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night before the election results were in. I said, even at this late stage, we have a,
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we're on the brink of having a Muslim communist mayor in New York. And I still can't bring myself
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to say I'm rooting for Cuomo. I just don't, this guy's, look, I know we were all supposed to say
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that Cuomo was the moderate in this race relative to the Muslim communist, but you know, the guy lit up
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Freedom Tower with a light show to celebrate killing babies. You know, Cuomo's a psycho. I mean,
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he was a terrible governor and he would have been a terrible mayor too. So, you know, it's,
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you're choosing arsenic or cyanide basically looking between Momdani and, and Andy Cuomo.
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The other thing I was right about though, and you know how much I hate to say I told you so.
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Everyone was freaking out when Momdani was running. They said this, this, the scariest thing about
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this guy is that he's a Muslim. The scare is, I can't believe a Muslim is taking over New York.
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And I think it is a shame that a Muslim would be mayor of New York, especially for the 25th
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anniversary of 9-11. But I said, what are you talking about? The fact that he's Muslim is like
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the best thing about this guy. What are you talking about? I said, oh, you think that he's
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like some jihadi or something. No, no, it's worse than that. He's a cringe millennial socialist.
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That's what's, that's the worst part. In some ways, if he took Islam seriously,
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I could deal with him more easily. Islam and Christendom have a very serious 1400 year conflict
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and Islam engages in many theological errors. But at least these people believe in God. At least
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these people grant the existence of a kind of moral order. At least I can speak to these
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people. I can speak to Muslims in many ways more easily than I can speak to the purple haired,
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you know, crazy tatted up, weird piercings, dubious sexuality, millennial or zoomer of the,
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of the kind of atheist Western secularism. So it's not that, and I'll just point out,
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yeah, he leans into the crazy racial stuff. He leans into the ID politics. He leans into Eugene
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Debs and socialism. I don't hear him up there quoting Saeed Qutb, you know, I don't hear him
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up there quoting Osama bin Laden. I think that's probably one of the least significant aspects
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of his, of his identity. He is a regular run of the mill millennial socialist, which involves,
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which therefore involves some race politics and some religion politics. But he's, it's almost the
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worst kind of outcome. Now, the way that the left has reacted to his victory tells you a lot about
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our political moment. And it doesn't only tell you about the left. It tells you about the right
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because Republicans and conservatives have been flailing. They've fecklessly tried to counter the
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rise of a kind of meme-y, semi-ironic streamer, zoomer politics that is typified in people like
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Nick Fuentes. They've been flailing. I mean, they've just been completely feckless at it.
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And there's a similar phenomenon going on on the left. We will get to that because
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I've finally encountered an analysis of it for the first time in years that is actually
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Hasan Piker being interviewed by BT News. This is being aired on PBS. Hasan Piker is a prominent
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left-wing streamer. He's the one who tortured his dog on camera and who has suggested the
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assassination of Senator Tom Cotton and who has called for the streets to run red in the blood of
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capitalists. And so he, the New York Times actually published his assassination-related musings after
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the killing of Charlie Kirk. That's pretty shocking in itself. Here is what Hasan Piker had to say
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Done. What do you think it means that this guy ran as a socialist and anti-communism didn't work to
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stop him? That's big. Yeah, I think we are in the heart of the imperial core. This is the country that
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defeated the USSR, unfortunately. And the reality of the matter is there's a lot of antagonism. There's
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no class consciousness in the United States of America. It's one of the things I try to address
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every day with my commentary. And I will say this, the conditions have deteriorated so much
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that everyday Americans, in spite of their lack of class consciousness, are finally arriving at
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the conclusion that perhaps there is an alternative out there. There is an alternative that focuses on
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them as opposed to the interests of the billionaire. Okay. Even just that last line. Finally,
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people are going to focus on the working class interest. They're going to rise up against the
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interests of the millionaires. That guy is a millionaire. I suspect he's a millionaire many
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times over. He opens up, he says, you know, this is the country that beat the Soviet Union,
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unfortunately. And then that girl is interviewing him. She's like, oh, you're bad.
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Ooh, yeah. We wish the Soviet Union won the Cold War. Yeah. And it's just so fake and stupid.
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It's so lame and fake. And it's total nonsense. This guy would not have lasted five minutes in the
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Soviet Union. And everyone knows it. You think Hassan Piker is going to last very long under Stalin?
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He does look a little weirdly like Stalin. But no, not for five seconds. That guy would have been
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liquidated in five seconds. Say what you will about the Soviets. Soviets were made of tough stuff.
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Okay. The Soviets weren't like giggling on live streams, you know, crying about their dog moving.
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Okay. This is so artificial. It's totally fake. The Zoran victory. The Zoran victory in New York
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is not distinguished by class. He did very, very well. He won over 50% of the vote.
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But the features that distinguished his voters from Cuomo or Sliwa's voters, it's not economic class.
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It's like everything else, but it's not economic class. It's race. It's nationality. It's
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neighborhood. But weirdly enough, you can't map it onto, you know, the poor beleaguered working class
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voted for this guy. And, you know, the plutocrats voted for the other. That really wasn't it.
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This all brings me to an excellent article by Chris Ruffo. I read it yesterday. You know,
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I've been on the road constantly. I gave a speech at the Nixon Library a couple of days ago.
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I was filming in LA yesterday for my PragerU book club show.
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Flying back, covering the election returns. I needed something to buoy my spirits.
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And I read an excellent article by Chris Ruffo on this kind of politics. And he was writing about it
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from the perspective of the right. And he was analyzing the rise to prominence of people like
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Nick Fuentes, who the liberal media love to chatter about, and who even figures on the right are taking
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the bait about. And, you know, I think dissipating their energies, especially before election day and
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spending a lot of time obsessing over. And every analysis, everything, every drop of ink spilled
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on this phenomenon has been wasted for about 10 years. I found the whole thing to be completely
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tedious and totally missing the point. Until I read Chris Ruffo's article, which was excellent.
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It's in City Journal. Highly recommend you check it out. Ruffo's article observes that the reason that
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the Republicans and the conservatives have been completely feckless about stopping the rise to
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prominence of people like Nick Fuentes on the right, or I think you could extend this to the kind of
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politics we're seeing here on the left, Hassan Piker and the rest of it, is because they don't even
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understand what the phenomenon is. They think that the phenomenon is just politics, you know,
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and sometimes the neocons rise up, and sometimes the paleocons rise up, and sometimes the libertarians
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rise up. And it's, they're on, this candidate is going to lead the pack. No, maybe this candidate
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will lead the pack, and that's why we need to win. No, it's not. It isn't that. It is a kind of
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hyper-real politics. It's a kind of a meta-politics. It's a politics about politics.
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And curiously enough, coincidentally enough, I alluded to this. I touched on this a little bit
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in an answer to a question at the Nixon Library two nights ago. And then Chris put that observation
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in much more articulately and in a far more comprehensive way in this article.
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A hyper-real politics is based on some of the thinking of a guy named Baudrillard. We've talked
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about Baudrillard on this show when we interviewed Vocal Distance, who had this concept of hyper-reality.
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And hyper-reality would be like, you know, in Vocal Distance's example that he used on our show,
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said, you know, you start out with a strawberry, and then you want like more of the strawberry.
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So you make a strawberry jam, but you want it to be even more strawberry. So then you make a
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strawberry candy, a hard candy. And then you make that, but then you want it to be even more
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concentrated. So, you know, you've got the strawberry Jolly Rancher. Now you make a strawberry
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Jolly Rancher slushy. And then you make a strawberry Jolly Rancher slushy ice cream or something.
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And by the end, people really like the strawberry Jolly Rancher slushy ice cream, but it actually
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doesn't really taste like the strawberry. And if those same people went back and tasted the strawberry,
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they wouldn't like it. They wouldn't even recognize it, perhaps. That's the process of hyper-reality.
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Baudrillard, very interesting thinker. He wrote a book called The Iraq War Didn't Happen.
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Anyway, he's great. So anyway, on this phenomenon that you're seeing here on the left with the
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commentary of Pike, or you're seeing on the right as well, the hyper-real politics, per Chris Ruffo,
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seeks out taboo, seeks out transgressing all of these standards and norms and taboos
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in order to elicit a reaction. It's not that Hassan Piker is seriously a Stalinist. He doesn't even
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really know what that means. He's not seriously a communist. When he talks about how we need to go,
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you know, destroy the millionaires, he would be destroying himself. He doesn't, it's not serious.
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Same too on the right. The figures on the right who would call themselves Nazis are not Nazis in any
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meaningful sense of the word. And Nazism as an ideology is dead and has been dead for 80 years.
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The very purpose of wielding these symbols is to take something that does have symbolic value
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and charge and energy, and to use that to bait other people to get attention.
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But as I pointed out in my answer at the Nixon Library the other night, well, everyone all over
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the right is having arguments about this influencer and this podcaster and this streamer and how this
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streamer can't talk to this influencer and this podcaster can't. It's all so disconnected from
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actual practical politics. The fact that a lot of this fight was breaking out two days or one day
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before election day is kind of hilarious. You see, when I'm asked to weigh in on this, I,
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really intuiting Rufo's thought here, say like, well, hold on. I just don't even see why I would
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weigh in on this. This seems kind of frivolous. It seems sort of gossipy even, and it just seems
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disconnected from actual politics. I said, if this actually played a role in the political order,
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if these people actually could move, you know, 10,000 votes in Michigan or something,
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if this really weighed in on practical political concerns, I would concern myself with it more.
00:20:49.280
But if it's just this kind of entertaining meta politics, hyper real politics, I might enjoy it
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as entertainment. I might engage with it that way, but I'm just not going to treat it the same way
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as I would if this were actually pertaining to real elections. Really, really brilliant observation
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from Rufo. Highly recommend you go read the article, which he says, you know, the way to respond to this
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is to treat it as, quote, an essentially fraudulent phenomenon and to focus on actions and outcomes,
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which is my view as well. It doesn't mean that that can't affect the way that we all interact
00:21:26.360
with each other. Obviously, it does. But it shows you that this political moment is quite different
00:21:32.620
than political moments of the past. And even the relationship between politics and political
00:21:40.220
analysts is fundamentally different. This isn't Charles Krauthammer going on the news show talking
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about, you know, votes and demographics. There's something different that's changed here.
00:21:52.940
And it's not just on the right. You know, it's on the left as well. And it can be kind of
00:21:58.640
entertaining. It can be, you know, but it's different. You got to know that it's different.
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Otherwise, the people who are really disturbed by this or who want to counter it, they're just
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going to keep spinning their wheels like they continue to do and have been doing for a very
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long time. So beyond New York, beyond the left and the right kind of meta-politics, what happened
00:22:20.160
on election day? We got blown out of the water. More disturbing, perhaps, than what happened in
00:22:24.580
New York is what happened in Virginia. We'll get to that momentarily. First, though, I want to tell
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All right, let's just get through it. Governor Race is Abigail Spanberger versus Winsome Sears,
00:23:41.720
the Republican. Spanberger ran away with it. Last, I didn't even check the numbers this morning.
00:23:47.180
As of last night, I was following it. They called the race at 42% of votes counted.
00:23:51.780
55 to 45 wasn't closed last night. Maybe it tightened up over the course of the night, but
00:23:55.940
she won. She was always going to win. Spanberger
00:23:58.740
infamously refused to withdraw her endorsement from Jay Jones. Jay Jones was that attorney general
00:24:06.240
candidate in Virginia who had text messages come out about him in which he was calling for the
00:24:11.180
murder of a Republican opponent. The opponent's kids said that the Republican opponent was breeding
00:24:15.920
little fascist, said the kids should die in their mother's arms in order to change the father's
00:24:20.500
view on policy, said that he would urinate on the graves of Republicans, said that more cops should
00:24:26.320
die to convince politicians to change cop policy. The guy is just a sick, sick animal.
00:24:35.700
And worse than Spanberger winning while endorsing him is the fact that he won too. He won too.
00:24:44.080
When I was at the Senate, I was testifying before the Senate about a week ago.
00:24:48.540
The most viral exchange from that testimony was sitting there. I was asking Cory Booker,
00:24:56.140
following his commentary, if he would withdraw his endorsement of Jay Jones because he said,
00:24:59.760
we have to be introspective. We need to admit when we're wrong. I turned to where Cory was sitting
00:25:03.160
and he was gone. He ran away. He didn't want to face any questions. Didn't want to engage in anything.
00:25:08.620
He stood by that endorsement and got to hand it to him. It paid off. Not morally. It was deeply
00:25:15.780
immoral. It's very deleterious for the health of our Republic. But Jay Jones won. Jay Jones went out
00:25:26.320
and he proved the phenomenon that we all saw after Charlie was murdered. Just Charlie was murdered and
00:25:34.400
normie Democrats from across the prominence spectrum from elected officials and people on TV all the
00:25:44.840
way down to that girl you went to third grade with. All of them justified, excused, minimized,
00:25:52.340
or even celebrated Charlie's murder. And we said that this was the second national trauma. The first
00:25:56.760
national trauma was seeing a prominent promoter of civil debate murdered on stage just for engaging
00:26:03.680
graciously. The second national trauma was watching all the Democrats celebrate it.
00:26:08.520
Well, this is the apotheosis of that celebration. Jay Jones comes out, says, I want to murder
00:26:14.360
Republicans and their kids. And Democrats in Virginia overwhelmingly elected him to be the top
00:26:19.100
law enforcement official in Virginia. Deeply, deeply distressing. Mom Donnie in New York, obviously,
00:26:27.400
there was a hope that the Republican gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey would win.
00:26:31.160
Didn't happen. Mikey Sherrill ran away with the race, really, in New Jersey. It was a clean sweep.
00:26:37.200
Virginia was the biggest bloodbath. It would just, the Democrats in Virginia did a great,
00:26:42.420
great job. Now, what conclusions do we draw from this? We've got to be careful about the conclusions
00:26:49.760
we draw. Because we don't want to just make excuses and say Republicans didn't do anything wrong here.
00:26:55.000
But we also don't want to draw too many conclusions or the wrong conclusions.
00:27:02.140
It was an off-year election. Democrats tend to do better. They tend to do better because they have
00:27:07.420
more effective machines to get people to the polls and have for many, many years. It's just a fact.
00:27:13.840
It's an off-year election after the Republicans had won the White House. That is maybe going to
00:27:22.180
manage our expectations for the midterms. We were looking historically like we might be doing a little
00:27:26.960
bit better in the midterms. Maybe not now. Maybe this will be a jolt and this will spur Republicans
00:27:31.440
into action to invest more money and time and resources into the midterm elections. We don't know.
00:27:36.020
But it should temper Republicans' expectations for the midterms. And it should inspire us to get out
00:27:41.160
there and actually go get out the vote. Third thing it could be, maybe people are concerned about
00:27:47.940
rising prices. Maybe people are concerned of grocery prices in particular. Maybe people are
00:27:53.840
concerned about the fundamentals of the economy and the political order. President Trump inherited a
00:28:00.380
very, very bad political situation from Biden. And maybe people need more. We've long said if the
00:28:10.800
economy falters at all, that's going to really mess up the Republicans in the midterms and potentially
00:28:15.140
in 2028. Maybe it says, yikes, we got to really put the focus on delivering more material improvement
00:28:25.000
for Americans. Could be. That would be one introspective aspect.
00:28:28.360
And then there's one conclusion that we have to draw, especially from the Jay Jones victory.
00:28:38.820
Democrats, huge numbers of Democrats who are normal Democrats, want Republicans dead. They don't just,
00:28:49.200
you know, disagree with them on certain matters. And they just, they want us dead. And if we died,
00:28:54.700
they would celebrate. And they want our kids dead. And they want us dead. And I don't know how you can
00:29:02.060
pay attention to, to the Democrats since the assassination of Charlie Kirk up to the election
00:29:08.000
of Jay Jones last night and not come to that conclusion. I'm open to it. You know me, man,
00:29:13.460
I'm, I'm like pretty open. And I try to be charitable to my opponents as best I can.
00:29:17.960
And give me an alternative explanation. I don't see one.
00:29:23.960
And that's a fact we have to deal with. And the way to deal with that is yes, in our personal lives,
00:29:29.160
to try to change hearts and minds of the people around us. Absolutely. To work on ourselves,
00:29:32.580
you know, to, to start with the man in the mirror, but there has to be a political solution,
00:29:35.420
which is there have to be political consequences for publicly calling for the death of your opponents.
00:29:42.220
People need to lose their jobs. People need to be socially ostracized. People need to be prosecuted
00:29:49.500
where it's appropriate because the law is a teacher. And so if you enforce the correct standards,
00:29:54.800
you're going to get better behavior. And then you're not going to get people like Jay Jones elected
00:29:57.760
because no one would dare elect him. Silver lining. I told you there'd be a silver lining. And the
00:30:02.640
silver lining is not just that Zara Fui can, you know, wear her burlap sack in New York again.
00:30:07.800
The silver lining is not, I don't know. There's some people trying to offer. So there, here's one
00:30:13.800
good one. An analysis just came out from the public polling project conducted by Big Data Poll,
00:30:22.120
interviewed a bunch of people, October 26th to October 28th, this year, analyzing Trump 2024 voters.
00:30:30.220
And the distinction it has here is America first in the, in the Trump sense of that phrase,
00:30:35.120
you know, MAGA Republican or traditional Republican. Again, these, these phrases are
00:30:40.520
really slippery because they've meant a lot of different things over a really long period of
00:30:43.860
time. But I, I understand traditional Republican here to, to be something akin to Mitt Romneyism
00:30:49.280
or George Bushism. America first being a little more MAGA, a little more Trumpy, a little more,
00:30:55.860
you know, what Reagan was in the eighties, not what Reaganism means today, but what it was in the
00:30:59.380
eighties, you know, the more hardcore stuff. And it looks at all Trump 2024 voters.
00:31:05.120
And says, okay, well, obviously much more America first MAGA than Bushy Romney, traditional,
00:31:14.640
traditional Republican, 51.9% versus something like 35%. All among all Republican voters,
00:31:23.640
it narrows a little bit. You have more traditional Republicans, fewer America first. That makes sense.
00:31:29.800
Obviously because Trump is bringing in people who are outside of the ordinary traditional Republican
00:31:34.660
framework. So that makes sense. But then something very interesting. We've been told,
00:31:39.160
and I have even believed that zoomers are the most right-wing cohort. They're the most hardcore,
00:31:45.240
most likely to be MAGA, most likely to upend the tables of Bushism or Romneyism.
00:31:51.320
Oh yeah, they're pretty hardcore, 55.3% versus, you know, 26% traditional Republican.
00:32:01.000
But you know, the most hardcore right-wing generation, stop the, if you're driving right now,
00:32:08.220
stop, pull over, take a deep breath. It's the millennials. It's the millennials. How weird is
00:32:16.160
that? It's my generation, my generation, which gets beat up all the time, which I beat up all the time
00:32:22.880
because I've always thought of the millennials as being just kind of cringe, disproportionately like
00:32:29.280
gay, LGBT-ish, Obama, bland, progressive. What? No, baby. We're like, we're to the right of Franco.
00:32:38.680
Apparently, look at this. 30 to 44-year-old voters, 63.6% to be America first, MAGA, Trumpy,
00:32:50.440
right-wing versus fewer than the zoomers, fewer to be traditional, you know, whatever, Bush, Romney.
00:32:57.820
Okay. Then it tightens way up among Gen X and tightens up even more among boomers. Let's go, baby.
00:33:05.700
This is good stuff. I'll take that. You know, because the zoomers, the zoomers have youth on us.
00:33:13.420
You know, the zoomers, they've got, in many ways, they seem a little bit more,
00:33:17.380
a little more grounded. But no, millennials are leading the right-wing lurch. I'll take it.
00:33:23.240
I'll take it. It's a nice little, it's a nice little white pill. Is that zoomer lingo or millennial
00:33:27.500
lingo? I don't know. I don't care. Millennials in charge. Millennial patriots are in charge
00:33:31.840
of this country. And I guess that's a good thing. I guess. Okay. Now, what do you know?
00:33:38.680
What do you know? Minutes after the election, that's not even fair. Just before the election
00:33:45.580
results were in, Democrats all of a sudden are changing their tune on the shutdown. This may be
00:33:53.160
shocking to some people, but at the Daily Wire, we do not always agree. Friendly Fire is the show
00:33:57.340
where Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan, and I get together to disagree live for the entire
00:34:02.480
internet to see and comment on. What could go wrong? A new episode of Friendly Fire premieres in two
00:34:08.100
weeks on Daily Wire+. This time, we will also world premiere the official trailer for the Pendragon
00:34:11.960
cycle, The Rise of Merlin, only on Friendly Fire, November 19th, 7 p.m. Eastern on Daily Wire+.
00:34:17.420
I want to tell you about my favorite comment yesterday from PNW Vibes underscore, who says,
00:34:24.460
the timing and irony of Dick Cheney dying the same day as a Muslim communist becomes mayor of New York
00:34:29.240
City is not lost on me. You know, that was lost on me. I didn't notice it until you, until I read your
00:34:33.520
comment. That's a great point. History does have these weird coincidences, doesn't it? The fact that
00:34:40.980
Adams and Jefferson died on the same day, and it was the 4th of July. And the fact that, well, it was
00:34:49.820
50 years, right, after 1776. It's amazing. These little winks. And that should be a consolation,
00:34:57.940
because people are legitimately upset about these, as they should be. This is not good. This is very
00:35:03.280
bad for the country. It's very, very bad for New York. Very bad for New York. And so, we try to lighten
00:35:09.360
the mood a little bit. I posted yesterday. I said, look, okay, unpopular opinion here, but
00:35:12.900
can I say it? Hijabs, they can be tasteful. They can actually be more tasteful than a lot of modern
00:35:19.880
Western clothing. And it's a little bit of a joke. Not totally a joke, though. I like a good mantilla
00:35:24.340
at church. You know, I like, if you took out the specific cultural context of how Muslim the hijabs are,
00:35:31.880
I don't know, they can be very tasteful. Modesty is nice. Anyway, I was, you know, lightening the mood a
00:35:35.680
little bit. But people are down, and they should be down. This is a big disappointment. However,
00:35:44.180
there are these little winks of history. You're using the example of, you know, Dick Cheney dying
00:35:49.120
the day a Muslim becomes mayor of New York. That is kind of a weird wink of history. The winks of
00:35:52.980
history, though, even when they occur during bad things, especially when they occur during bad things,
00:35:57.680
are a kind of a consolation. Because it does remind you that there is an author of history, and there
00:36:02.540
actually is providence, and there actually is meaning to history. And things do happen for a
00:36:07.500
reason. And I know this is going to be particularly offensive to modern, liberal, post-Enlightenment
00:36:14.820
sensibilities. But the traditional Christian understanding of the political order is that
00:36:20.440
we're grateful when God sends us good leaders. Political leadership is appointed by God. Civil
00:36:25.600
authority is there for our good and does not bear the sword in vain, as Scripture tells us. And so,
00:36:30.320
we're very grateful when the Lord gives us good political leaders. And we're grateful when the
00:36:36.260
Lord gives us bad political leaders, because he gives us bad political leaders to chastise us.
00:36:42.300
And we're grateful for that chastisement, because we trust in the Lord. I know, it's very difficult
00:36:47.160
for a post-revolutionary kind of modern politics to hear that. But it's Christian, and it's true. So,
00:36:55.980
there's that. Okay. Just as the election is wrapping up, what do you know? What do you know?
00:37:04.960
Democrats changed their tone on the government shutdown. It remains a little unclear if the
00:37:09.360
government will reopen. But already, yesterday evening, you had the headlines, a group of
00:37:13.780
Democrats would like to reopen the government. Chuck Schumer, who had previously been saying,
00:37:17.300
no, no, we're holding the line. We're keeping the government shut down. It's all Republicans' fault.
00:37:20.140
They need to come to the table on health care. Chuck Schumer then gives an answer to,
00:37:24.040
I think it was the Hill. He says, oh, we're weighing our options. Yeah, we're weighing,
00:37:27.580
there's a tone shift. Which means, again, I hate to say I told you so, but the shutdown was a hail
00:37:33.900
Mary for Dems. The Democrats knew they were on the wrong side of virtually every 80-20 issue.
00:37:40.700
Certainly, almost all the ones that mattered. They own the shutdown. Republicans own the federal
00:37:47.000
government, unified government in all three branches. This was a hail Mary to say, look,
00:37:52.560
health care is our best shot at pushing an issue. And government shutdowns are our best tactic.
00:37:58.280
They haven't really worked, according to the opinion polls. However, they say, okay,
00:38:04.220
it's before the election. We need to juice our numbers with something. Now the election's over.
00:38:09.400
Probably the government reopens relatively quickly. Unless Democrats take from the election night
00:38:17.720
the idea that the shutdown has really worked to juice their numbers. And they say, okay, well,
00:38:23.360
the strategy hadn't seemed to be working so far. Now perhaps it will. And if Republicans hold on
00:38:29.540
because they say, no, actually, it is more likely being blamed on Dems than on Republicans. There's a
00:38:35.360
way in which I guess this goes on for a little while. But there is no question that the purpose of the
00:38:40.500
shutdown was to juice the Dems numbers before the midterms. And perhaps it worked. Okay. I want to
00:38:46.980
turn to an issue, a more tragic matter. I talked about it a little bit at the end of the show
00:38:50.000
yesterday. But beyond domestic politics, Christians are being very, very seriously persecuted in Nigeria.
00:38:57.840
We've talked about this on the show a number of times. I've posted about it to social media a number of
00:39:02.220
times. Trump is talking about it. Trump posts, quote,
00:39:06.540
Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. Thousands of Christians are being
00:39:11.240
killed. Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter. I am hereby making Nigeria
00:39:16.100
a country of particular concern. This designation, you know, with the State Department. But that is
00:39:22.720
the least of it. When Christians or any such group is slaughtered, like is happening in Nigeria,
00:39:27.960
31,000 versus 44,76 worldwide, something must be done. I'm asking Congressman Riley Moore,
00:39:34.200
Riley Moore is great, together with Chairman Cole, love Tom Cole and the House Appropriations
00:39:39.160
Committee, to immediately look into this matter and report back to me. The United States cannot
00:39:43.700
stand by while such atrocities are happening in Nigeria and numerous other countries. We stand ready,
00:39:49.460
willing, and able to save our great Christian population around the world. Donald J. Trump,
00:39:53.760
President of the United States of America. I love this. I love this for a number of reasons.
00:39:59.380
Not the least of which is it does vindicate my view of Donald Trump. When Donald Trump says he's
00:40:04.240
America first, some people hear that and they say that means he's an isolationist, that means he's
00:40:08.540
an ardent nationalist. No, I've long said Trump is an imperialist. He recognizes America's role
00:40:15.060
throughout the world, and he wants to, in his good judgment, in his practical prudential judgment,
00:40:20.340
he wants to preserve America's capital. He wants to maintain the world order. He wants to establish
00:40:26.760
peace. He wants to prioritize American citizens over everyone else, but he does care about everyone
00:40:30.320
else, and he wants to expand America's reach, which is why he wants to buy Greenland, and it's
00:40:33.700
why he wants to invade Canada. And here he says, look, we want to defend our Christians around the
00:40:38.840
world. Our in two senses of the word. Our meaning we, America, are the global hegemon. We're the empire
00:40:46.040
of the world, and so they are, in a certain sense, our constituents. That's Trump's implication.
00:40:51.480
It's not even just my statement. Two, our, we're a Christian country, and they're Christians,
00:40:56.180
and have a solidarity with them because of that. Also, beautifully accurate.
00:41:01.280
So, this got a lot of plaudits, including from Nicki Minaj. Barbs, totally vindicated.
00:41:06.460
Nicki Minaj writes, reading this made me feel a deep sense of gratitude. We live in a country
00:41:10.800
where we can freely worship God. No group should ever be persecuted for practicing their religion.
00:41:14.880
We don't have to share the same beliefs in order for us to respect each other.
00:41:18.020
Numerous countries all around the world are being affected by this horror,
00:41:20.800
and it's dangerous to pretend we don't notice. Thank you to the president and his team
00:41:24.600
for taking this seriously. God bless every persecuted Christian. Let's remember to lift
00:41:27.960
them up in prayer. Love it. It takes courage to come out, if you're Nicki Minaj, and endorse Trump
00:41:33.620
in this way. And it's so beautiful to see her care about this issue and really promote this issue.
00:41:39.760
What is very interesting about this, from the analysis of the left and the right and the changing
00:41:46.240
scope of the right, you know, the right loves to be navel-gazing and introspective and
00:41:50.400
always trying to figure out exactly where we are, is we've heard for many years now that America is
00:41:57.720
sick of forever wars, fighting wars on behalf of other populations in other countries on the other
00:42:03.020
side of the world. Don't affect us. We want to focus on the American homeland, isolation, America first.
00:42:08.720
And yet, I think many of those people will cheer this on. President Trump is threatening to intervene,
00:42:14.620
even militarily, in Nigeria. And I wonder, will people cheer that on? Will the same people who
00:42:23.300
don't want forever wars in the Middle East cheer on a military intervention in Nigeria? Because I think
00:42:29.640
they are more likely to do so. And I don't think they're hypocrites for it. What you're going to hear
00:42:34.620
from the neocons and the squishes is you're going to say, well, you're hypocrites. You care about Nigeria,
00:42:38.100
but you don't care about Syria or whatever. But I don't think they're hypocrites exactly. I'll double down
00:42:44.640
on this with another observation. I've been meaning to talk about this for weeks, and I've mentioned it one
00:42:51.040
or two times. But it looks like we're going to go to war in Venezuela. Looks like there's been a lot of CIA
00:42:55.540
activity in Venezuela. We're blowing up a bunch of drug boats off the coast of Venezuela, and only Venezuela.
00:43:01.280
You know, there are drug boats coming from elsewhere, but we're really focused on Venezuela. Regime change in
00:43:05.440
Venezuela has been a priority of the State Department for a long time. And we tried to get
00:43:10.520
rid of Maduro, and then he held on to power after that election. And it just looks like we're sick
00:43:16.420
of this Venezuelan regime, which is anti-American. There are a lot of good resources in Venezuela.
00:43:20.080
They're doing a lot of things to screw up our country. And so it looks like we might intervene
00:43:25.000
in Venezuela to some degree or the other. And the same question holds. All those people who were
00:43:29.160
decrying wars overseas and regime change and all this, will they support this or oppose this?
00:43:36.780
I think even the anti-war people are more likely to support a war in Venezuela than they would in the
00:43:43.600
Middle East. I think nature is healing. I think we're basically in the 70s again. We're getting back.
00:43:49.800
We've got socialists running our cities. We have political violence in the streets.
00:43:53.880
We have radical ideologies. We have economic crises. It's the 70s. We're living in the 70s.
00:44:01.100
And we got economic interventions. We got the rehabilitation of Richard Nixon's reputation.
00:44:07.700
We have freezing federal spending. We have, anyway, a lot of things. Everyone's on drugs.
00:44:13.220
There's institutional distrust, left-wing terrorism. It's the 70s.
00:44:16.720
And I think Americans are going to be more comfortable
00:44:19.560
with military intervention in our own hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine has been a policy of the
00:44:25.420
United States for a very long time. I think even intervention in Nigeria, I think even the anti-war
00:44:33.300
folks will be more likely to do it. One, because it's on behalf of Christians who are a Christian
00:44:36.380
country. Two, it's to stop a very serious atrocity. Call it a human rights abuse.
00:44:46.720
But in ways that are a little clearer cut. Now, again, I don't know. Some people are going to say,
00:44:51.660
no, keep your, you know, Friday, use soft power. Don't intervene in really hard ways. But
00:44:55.560
to say we should protect Christians from being wiped out by Muslims is different to saying that
00:45:05.440
we need to topple regimes in the Middle East to install Madisonian democracy.
00:45:09.180
Those are different. A prudent and restrained intervention to protect Christians is different
00:45:18.600
from some kind of liberal crusade to spread the end of history ideology of liberalism.
00:45:23.460
Those are different things. And those substantive differences make a difference. Military intervention
00:45:27.800
within our hemisphere in Venezuela is different from military intervention in Iraq or Syria.
00:45:34.040
They're different. But it reminds us that the politics of intervention or isolation or whatever,
00:45:40.520
that is simply too simplistic. Even the politics of prioritizing American citizens and being the
00:45:46.300
global hegemon, that's too simplistic. Politics is a practical science that requires nuance,
00:45:55.760
subtlety of thought, art. This was the subject of my speech at the Nixon Library,
00:46:00.260
which I think you can get online. I think you can get on YouTube. This is something that Trump is
00:46:04.780
really, really good at. Every time you try to pin Trump down into some stupid faction or camp or
00:46:09.220
ideology, he slips away from you. And Trump's enemies on the right, and they've been doing this
00:46:14.180
since the Never Trumpers in 2016, his enemies say, that means he's unprincipled. That means he's
00:46:18.520
unsophisticated. That means he doesn't have a finely crafted ideology. No, it means he's a good
00:46:23.100
politician and a good statesman. That's what it means. And conservatives would do well
00:46:26.800
to learn from his prudential, dare I say, classical and Aristotelian understanding of politics
00:46:33.180
beyond all the factional infighting and the ideologues. Okay, now I want to talk about
00:46:38.100
autism. And I want to do it with my friend Leland Vitter. The rest of the show continues now. You
00:46:41.760
do not want to miss it. Become a member. Use code Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. Check out for two months
00:47:03.800
You very much. You are addicted to something. You and someone?