Ep. 1858 - Marjorie Taylor Greene Joins The Resistance？
Episode Stats
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Summary
A 100-year-old World War II veteran has just come out on television and said the sacrifice of his fallen comrades was not worth it because modern people have squandered it. All of a sudden, President Trump wants to release the Epstein files, Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene wants CNN to like her, and teenage girls want to get married less than boys do.
Transcript
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All of a sudden, President Trump wants to release the Epstein files.
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Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene wants CNN to like her.
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And teenage girls want to get married less than boys do.
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I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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A 100-year-old World War II veteran has just come out on television and said
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the sacrifice of his fallen comrades was not worth it because modern people have squandered it.
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All right, a ton to get to. We had the release of more Epstein files. Everyone calls for the
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release of the Epstein files. We have a ton of Epstein files, and we've known a lot about Epstein
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since really 2014, 2015, when it was the conservatives who were exposing him, when it
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was President Trump who was calling for journalists to look into it. At that point,
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the journalists didn't want to look into it. Then the Democrats ran out of issues. So they thought
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that was the one issue they could try to get Trump on is painting Epstein more as a Republican scandal
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than a Democrat scandal. But we keep getting more and more of these files, and it's led to a little
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bit of a fissure in the Republican Party. So even a pro-MAGA, pro-Trump, conservative firebrand
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like Marjorie Taylor Greene in the House, has been turning on Trump a little bit.
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And then Trump has been hitting her. He came out very strongly, hit her. I think he's threatening
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to primary her. So then as a consequence, you're in this bizarro world where Marjorie Taylor Greene
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is going on CNN and trying to get the liberal viewers of CNN to like her.
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You have a pivot from one of the most rock-ribbed, hardline, populist right-wingers
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basically doing a mea culpa on liberal TV and saying she regrets some of her right-wing rhetoric
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I would like to say humbly, I'm sorry for taking part in the toxic politics. It's very bad for our
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country. And it's been something I've thought about a lot, especially since Charlie Kirk was
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assassinated, is that I'm only responsible for myself and my own words and actions. And I am
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committed, and I've been working on this a lot lately, to put down the knives in politics. I really
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just want to see people be kind to one another. And we need to figure out a new path forward that is
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focused on the American people because as Americans, no matter what side of the aisle we're on,
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we have far more in common than we have differences. And we need to be able to respect each other with
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Okay, hold on, hold on. So right off the bat, we have Marjorie Taylor Greene using the rhetoric that I
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was making fun of, I think on Friday, certainly last week, that you hear from the libs all the time.
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The libs always use this phrase, be kind. We just have to be kind to one another. I love kind
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people. I don't know why, but the K word, kind, is the left-wing slogan du jour. And it's ironic
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because they wish death on Republicans at a much higher rate than Republicans wish death on them.
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They disown family members over politics. They're not kind, generally. It's certainly not relative to
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Republicans. Now you got MTG. She goes on CNN, the liberal channel. She apologizes for being so
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right-wing. I've contributed to the toxic political culture, and we need to be kind.
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I'm waiting for her to say trans rights or human rights or something. I'm exaggerating slightly,
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but she's appealing to a left-wing audience using left-wing rhetoric. And then the most preposterous
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part of it, she says, you know, something about Charlie Kirk's assassination pointed out to me
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that we all have a lot more in common than separates us. That, of course, is the exact
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opposite conclusion that most of us drew. I've given how many speeches about this? I testified
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before the Senate about this. I'm not saying anything particularly original. I think the vast
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majority of Americans realize this. When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, we assumed,
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we on the right, assumed that the left would say, okay, this is way too far. Charlie Kirk,
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the most prominent example of civil discourse, trying to hash out our differences through polite
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conversation, going out to meet people where they are, putting the microphone down to hear them speak
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and respond respectfully. Wow, this has gone way too far. We're really sorry. We might not have
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agreed with Charlie on policy, but we're so sorry that he died. There's no excuse for this. That's not
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what happened. That's not even close to what happened. We saw the left at every level from
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the normies, the girl you went to high school with, all the way up to elected Democrats, all the way up
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to people on TV, minimizing it, excusing it, in some cases justifying and even celebrating it.
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We then had the YouGov surveys come out. The YouGov surveys showing that very liberal people are eight
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times as likely to justify political violence as very conservative people and that 26% of young
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liberals justify political violence, many multiples, which you see among young conservatives.
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So the conclusion from Charlie's assassination is, wow, we actually have far greater differences
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than I expected. I wanted to go back to the old Ronald Reagan line. Well, we have no enemies in
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America, only opponents. And what's the difference? Opponents are two people who agree on what ends
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they desire, but they disagree on methods. We all want to reduce illegal immigration.
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We just disagree on how to get there. We all want to reduce the number of abortions. We just disagree
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on how to get there. We all want America to flourish. We all want a strong country. We all want,
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no, we all want to tone down the political violence. But no, what we discovered is there are many more
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people who are enemies, who actually disagree on the ends, who want us dead. We realized this when
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Democrat analysts on MSNBC, as Charlie was dying, came out and said, well, actually, it's his own
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hateful rhetoric that led to this. That's what we learned. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people,
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is going on CNN to say, no, actually, that's not real. Don't believe your lying eyes. We just need to
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be kind. We need to sing kumbaya. I'm sorry that I was so right wing. What is this about?
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Yeah, I'll tell you what this is about. It's about a fight that she's having. She's been
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needling at Trump for many months now. Trump finally came out and hit her, and now she's on a different
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team. And the lesson that you have to take from this, and it's going to be very, very important
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as we move toward the midterms, as we move toward 2028, as we hear constantly, mostly in the left
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wing media, about the civil war in the Republican Party, is that politics is not primarily about
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ideas. Politics is, I'm not being ironic here. I'm not being glib. I am telling you a fact that
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has been true since man walked out of the cave. Politics is not primarily about ideas. It is
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certainly not primarily about ideology, which is the modern substitute for religion, which lays at the
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foundation of all politics. But what politics is about primarily in the day-to-day in very practical
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terms is people. People who form coalitions to work together to attain power to, we hope, advance the
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common good. In failed regimes, the people form together in coalitions to amass power to advance
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their private interests. In functional regimes, people come together in coalitions to attain power
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to advance the common good of all. But it's about people forming teams to get power. That's what
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politics is about, okay? And ideas matter. Ideology, unfortunately, in the modern world matters.
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Ultimately, the ideology is just a substitute for religion, which is a much sturdier foundation of
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politics. All human conflict, ultimately, is theological, as Cardinal Manning says. But that's
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what this is about. This is why, look at someone like Liz Cheney. Liz Cheney, on ideas, on issues,
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has agreed with Republicans, has voted in Congress with Donald Trump like 90% of the time, probably more
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than 90% of the time. But she's on the other team. When push comes to shove, at the crucial moment,
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when it's about which coalition is about to amass power, she sides with the other team.
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And all of those ideas that she talks about, even the votes that she's taken in Congress,
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don't really matter. Because when you get to the crucial vote, the vote for the ridiculous January
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6th commission, the vote for president in 2024, when you get to the crucial vote that actually matters,
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she's on the other team. The same thing, it would seem, is happening to Marjorie Taylor Greene right
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now. I hope she pulls back from the brink. I hope she doesn't go full Liz Cheney. But it could happen.
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It's how Liz Cheney, 90 plus percent conservative voting record, is on the Democrat team.
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And it's how John Fetterman, who is a big lib, do not forget, John Fetterman is a big lib.
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But Republicans really like John Fetterman right now, because he's relatively moderate within the
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Democrat Party, and he is gumming up their political machine. And at crucial moments,
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he is defending Trump. He is defending the Republicans and the conservatives.
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That's how we are kind of claiming him as one of ours, and how the left is claiming Liz Cheney as
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one of theirs, rightly, and might be claiming Marjorie Taylor Greene as one of theirs. Because politics is
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about people. So when we talk about, and I harp on this a lot, much more so, I think, than many of my
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other friends with microphones or who are in office on the conservative side. I say, politics is about
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coalitions. In fact, she brought up Charlie, the indispensable service that Charlie did. He did a
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lot of wonderful things for conservatism and for America. But the indispensable service that he
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performed was he kept a coalition together. He knew who to keep out. He knew who to keep in. He knew how
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to mollify the antagonisms within the coalition and all the different people who hate each other.
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He understood what politics is about, which is making teams to gain power to, we hope, advance
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the common good. That's what's going on. Right now, Marjorie Taylor Greene or Donald Trump or
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Greene and Trump have decided that they're on different teams. And everyone's going to be
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scratching their heads trying to figure out how to, well, this is so crazy. Marjorie Taylor Greene's on
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CNN. It's not that crazy when you recognize that that is what politics is. It's about people.
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Politics, the most basic definition of it is how people live together. That's what it is.
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And now we're seeing different teams. The flashpoint in this was the release of the Epstein files. We
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will get to that because President Trump just made a big pivot on that. First, though, I want to tell
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slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. President Trump has just come out and demanded release of the Epstein
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files. His words, as I said on Friday night aboard Air Force One to the fake news media,
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House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files because we have nothing to hide.
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And it's time to move on from this Democrat hoax perpetrated by radical left lunatics
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in order to deflect from the great success of the Republican Party,
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including our recent victory in the Democrat shutdown. Good point. It's kind of funny. We now forget
00:14:32.880
about the shutdown. The news cycle moves so fast, we forget the Democrats just single-handedly gave
00:14:38.440
us the longest government shutdown ever in American history. They conceded, at first they argued it
00:14:43.060
was the Republicans doing it. Then they admitted, okay, it was actually just us, and eight Democrat
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senators voted to reopen the government. We totally forget about that now. Trump goes on.
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The Department of Justice has already turned over tens of thousands of pages to the public on Epstein,
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are looking at various Democrat operatives, Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, Larry Summers, etc.,
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and their relationship to Epstein. And the House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are
00:15:02.680
legally entitled to. I don't care. All I do care about is that Republicans get back on point,
00:15:08.380
which is the economy, affordability, quote, because that's a new buzzword, which we are winning big.
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He goes on. Our victory on reducing inflation from the highest level in history to practically
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nothing, bringing down prices for the American people. We'll get to the inflation point,
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because the Federal Reserve in San Francisco just made a massive admission regarding the success of
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Trump's tariff policy that all the smart economists were saying wasn't going to happen.
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We'll get to that momentarily. Delivering historic tax cuts, trillions of dollars of investment into
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America, a record, the rebuilding of the military, securing our border. Okay, he goes on and lists all
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the great stuff that's been happening. Then he says, this ties in exactly what we were just talking
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about. Some quote unquote members of the Republican Party are being used, and we can't let that happen.
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Let's start talking about the Republican Party's record-setting achievements and not fall into the
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Epstein trap, which is actually a curse on the Democrats, not us. Make America great again. Okay,
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the key word here, and it's funny, I hadn't even read the whole, it was a long truth social post. I
00:16:05.200
didn't read the whole thing. And as I read it, I discover Trump is seeing the same point that we
00:16:11.380
were just discussing. He says some quote unquote members of the Republican Party. Why does he put that
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in quotes? Trump uses quotes in all sorts of creative ways, as a bold face or other things. But here,
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he's using quotes in a more traditional sense to cast doubt on the meaning of the word. Some members
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of the Republican Party. Yeah, Liz Cheney is a member of the Republican Party, I guess. She may
00:16:32.380
have left at this point, but even when she was a member. I guess technically she's a member of the
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party, but at the crucial moment, she works against the party. Right now, I'm just joking. I like Marjorie
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Taylor Greene. She and I have gotten along great. But as of yesterday, going on CNN, using Democrat
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rhetoric to apologize for being a Republican, to attack Trump, to flatter Democrats with a
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completely wrong conclusion about Charlie Kirk's assassination, that's not the kind of thing a real
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Republican does. That's not the kind of thing a real conservative does. Trump is saying they're,
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well, he's saying they're rhinos. In a really basic sense, not rhino like you're a little too
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liberal on immigration. Not rhino like you want to raise taxes. Rhino in a really precise sense.
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You are a Republican in name, and maybe even in all the votes that don't matter.
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But at the crucial moment, you don't advance the party's interest.
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This is Trump's argument against someone like Thomas Massey, who by all accounts, in his ideology,
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in his principles, he is as rock-ribbed a libertarian conservative as it gets.
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But at the crucial vote, at the crucial vote, he teams up with Ro Khanna and the Democrats to try
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to embarrass Trump. At the crucial vote, where is he? That's the point that Trump is making.
00:17:51.200
So why is he flipping on Epstein? Because until recently, well, it's a long story. Until recently,
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Trump was saying he didn't really want to deal with the Epstein thing. And he said, forget about
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the Epstein thing. Enough about him. This is a hoax. Let's move on and talk about all my great
00:18:04.340
achievements. But before that, Trump was calling for the release of the Epstein files.
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And this has led to all sorts of conspiracy theories by Trump's enemies on the left,
00:18:17.180
certainly, and his enemies who are supposedly on the right. Even people who would call themselves
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very rock-ribbed, they say, oh, it's obvious Trump's being blackmailed. He's being blackmailed
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by the deep state, or he's being blackmailed by some foreign government, or he's being blackmailed by
00:18:31.660
whoever. But he's being blackmailed. He's compromised. He's this, he's that. And here
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Trump is, he says, release all the files. I'll give you my view of it. I think that in, what was it,
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2015, 2016, Trump was one of the early people calling attention to the Epstein scandal,
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demanding more transparency on the Epstein scandal. I don't think Trump does that if he were seriously
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implicated in the Epstein scandal. We all know that he and Epstein were friends. We all know they had a
00:19:01.360
long-time relationship, though. They had a falling out at some point. Epstein apparently had friendships
00:19:06.560
with, like, everybody. With foreign heads of state, with American heads of state, you know, Bill Clinton,
00:19:13.680
with major philanthropists like Bill Gates, with major institutions like Harvard and MIT. He was
00:19:18.120
apparently friends with everybody. Stephen Hawking, I think. Everybody. He was a schmoozer. He was a worker.
00:19:23.380
He was an operative. We still don't know. There's a lot to find out about Epstein. But I don't think
00:19:28.140
that Trump, in 2015, if he were seriously implicated in Epstein, he wouldn't have called
00:19:32.460
for that. He wouldn't have called attention to that. So then why did he backtrack? Why did he
00:19:36.340
try to downplay Epstein? I suspect it's because, as we know, he's mentioned in the files. He's probably
00:19:42.200
mentioned in the files many times. And if you're working in the White House Communications Department,
00:19:48.240
you have to think, all right, well, any document that comes out with Trump's name on it,
00:19:53.380
that is going to be used to distract from the issues that we want to talk about endlessly.
00:19:59.020
That's what the Democrats are doing. That's what they're trying to do with the help of some so-called
00:20:01.800
Republicans. And it's going to be spun into a bunch of nonsense. There was a story over the weekend
00:20:05.820
about Bill Clinton and Donald Trump doing weird stuff together or whatever. And it's just so frivolous,
00:20:14.760
so truly so. Look, I don't like Bill Clinton, but I don't think Trump is his type. Let's put it that
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way. Not from everything we know about Bubba, I don't think he's into large men with blonde hair.
00:20:27.740
I don't buy it. But that's, I'm sure, what the White House was thinking. The more that we talk
00:20:33.420
about Epstein, the worse it is for us. But something happened, which is because Epstein,
00:20:38.780
as Trump rightly saw in 2015 and 16, because Epstein is such a symbol of the rot, of the corruption of our
00:20:45.860
political class, of the deceit, of the perfidy of our law enforcement, higher echelons, and the deep
00:20:55.060
state, whatever. They don't want to let it go. They want answers. And I totally understand that.
00:21:00.940
I sympathize with that. I think I have a little more of a down-to-earth view of things, which is
00:21:07.740
one of two things is going to be true. Either Epstein is who we're told he is, which is he was
00:21:15.220
just a weird sex freak. He was rich, had a lot of rich, famous friends, and that was it. In which
00:21:21.260
case, we basically know everything we're going to know about Epstein. Or Epstein was a super-duper spy,
00:21:27.060
a triple agent for every foreign government, and he was James Bond and Jason Bourne rolled up into one.
00:21:33.560
In which case, if that's true, I'm not saying I believe that. If that's true, we will never learn
00:21:37.700
anything more about it. Either JFK was killed by a lone gunman on a grassy knoll, or we will never
00:21:46.500
learn anything else about the assassination of JFK. We've had a law in this country demanding the
00:21:51.600
release of all the JFK files since like 1992. And in violation of executive orders and federal law
00:21:58.720
passed by Congress, the government just hasn't released all of it. You just will not learn
00:22:03.920
anything about it. So what do we take from this? Trump is realizing that he miscalculated. He
00:22:11.100
correctly calculated in the first place. He miscalculated later on. It was a very Washington
00:22:15.700
calculus, which is, well, the more we talk about this, the worse it is for everybody, and especially
00:22:19.200
for us, because Democrats are going to derail us. So let's just not talk about it. But not talking
00:22:23.040
about it undercuts the first calculation, the first argument, and it wasn't working. And not
00:22:28.780
leaning more heavily into Epstein was giving Democrats a narrative, and it was splitting
00:22:32.620
the Republican Party. That is in part how you get people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wants to
00:22:37.740
maintain her rock-ribbed populist cred. Now you have her in this weird realignment siding with CNN
00:22:43.500
so that she can be on the side of exposing the Epstein scandal, whatever that even means.
00:22:48.940
So I think this is a smart move by Trump. I basically think he should have stuck to his
00:22:52.780
guns going back a decade now. There is no reason. Here, here we go. This is my big bet on here.
00:23:00.580
And I am basically always right on these things. You know how much I hate to say it.
00:23:06.340
I'm laying my flag right now, planting my flag. We will not find anything in the Epstein files that
00:23:14.660
are released that is seriously damaging to Trump. We will not find anything. There will be no credible
00:23:20.980
release. I'm not talking about random emails from like Michael Wolff, you know, fabulous fiction
00:23:27.220
writers. I'm not talking. I'm talking about actual hardcore evidence from the Epstein files. We will
00:23:34.000
not find anything that is seriously damaging to Trump. However, it's become an issue in the Republican
00:23:42.380
Party. It's splitting the coalition, not over ideas, just over people. And politics is about people.
00:23:47.520
Plus, looking ahead after those disastrous elections two weeks ago, assuming the Democrats win the
00:23:52.120
midterms, when the Democrats take the House, they are going to subpoena all of this. They're going to
00:23:56.220
make a big issue. They're going to be investigations. They might force the docs to be released. So it's
00:23:59.440
going to happen anyway. Better for Trump and the White House to get ahead of it now. I totally agree.
00:24:04.140
Now we will move on to more substantive issues because the San Francisco Federal Reserve
00:24:09.320
has just destroyed virtually every economist in this country with facts and logic and vindicated
00:24:16.260
part of the Trump tariff policy, though it gets a little complicated. We'll get to that in one
00:24:20.420
second. First, though, I want to tell you about lean. Go to brickhousesale.com. Here's something
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injections. Lean, big, big favorite over here at The Daily Wire. Multiple producers and employees
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at DW have tried Lean. They've been so impressed with how effective Lean has been in such a short
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head on over to brickhousesale.com. Grab that 30% off while it's still available. That is
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brickhousesale.com for 30% off. In this episode of Michael and the Good Doctor, I sit down with
00:25:39.340
psychiatrist Dr. Josef Witt-Dering to unpack one of the most controversial topics in modern medicine,
00:25:45.440
the link between psychiatric drugs and violent behavior. From SSRIs and Adderall to the rise in
00:25:49.580
mass shootings, we dive deep into how these medications affect the brain, whether Big Pharma's
00:25:54.120
citing the full story. Check out this quick teaser.
00:25:56.380
We've done spinal taps. We've done functional MRI scans, which are real-time scans of the human brain
00:26:03.640
kind of firing. Are there any differences between a depressed person and a non-depressed person?
00:26:09.260
No. What about the relation of these kinds of drugs to violent acts and to aberrant ideologies?
00:26:18.600
I've noticed a major uptick in violence from the left, notably associated with transgenderism,
00:26:26.620
and in the lion's share of these cases. They're on SSRIs.
00:26:31.160
Is it safe for 15 to 20% of our population to be on these drugs? The FDA is sitting on this
00:26:36.320
because they are trying to cover up one of the biggest scandals in modern medical history.
00:26:43.600
Watch a full episode now on the Michael Knowles YouTube channel for the uncensored
00:26:58.760
ad-free version. Subscribe to Daily Wire Plus. Major, major headline out of the Federal Reserve.
00:27:07.380
This is in Fortune. Fed researchers say tariffs actually lower inflation because they're
00:27:13.520
a demand shock that slams employment and economic activity. Okay, so that second part is not good
00:27:18.580
for Trump. The first part is really good for Trump, and it's really good for Scott Besson,
00:27:21.580
the Treasury Secretary. And it's really good for the right-wingers who flew in the face of the
00:27:28.520
liberal consensus and all the elite, smart, really clever people in their own party.
00:27:34.440
Because when some of us were pointing out that tariffs can be good, tariffs serve a purpose.
00:27:41.160
When some of us were not, you know, 33rd degree free traders initiated into the Gnostic cult of
00:27:49.220
liberal trade policy. When some of us said, you know, there's actually a reason that countries
00:27:53.240
use tariffs. Even despite the revisionist history that says that St. Ronald Reagan, you know,
00:27:59.220
was allergic to tariffs and would never countenance such heresy and vile evil.
00:28:05.720
Reagan himself instituted certain tariffs. A bunch of other countries did. This is why Trump,
00:28:09.660
when he was running, I think it was the first time, he said, hey, if tariffs are so bad,
00:28:12.640
how come every other country has them? How come we're the only country that doesn't have them?
00:28:17.280
And so the argument was not that tariffs are the greatest economic policy ever,
00:28:21.460
that they are a fit-all, you know, solution to the entire economy. No, he just said tariffs do serve
00:28:28.220
a purpose. And all the geniuses in the liberal side, but also on the liberal side of the American
00:28:33.960
right, all the free trade absolutists, they would come out and say, actually, you know,
00:28:39.120
actually tariffs just don't work. Because I learned that in my seventh grade social studies class,
00:28:42.900
tariffs don't work. And they lead to higher prices because the prices are passed on to the consumers.
00:28:47.500
And that's why they're inflationary and meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh.
00:28:52.080
And Trump came out with his team, including very, very intelligent, accomplished financial
00:28:56.260
professionals like Scott Besson, the treasury secretary, and said, actually, that's not true.
00:28:59.680
Oh, you're going to find out. That's completely ridiculous. They're all inflationary.
00:29:04.760
Well, here we have it. The Federal Reserve coming out and saying, actually, wow, this is kind of
00:29:10.860
weird. Not only did the tariffs not contribute to inflation, they were deflationary. I should
00:29:19.080
have pulled the clip. Scott Besson, when all of these geniuses on the left and the right were
00:29:23.880
coming out hitting him over the tariff policy, he said, that's not true. Tariffs are deflationary,
00:29:29.180
or they can be deflationary. That is what happened. They were proven right.
00:29:37.140
Contrary to what everyone in both parties was saying, the tariff policy, the Trump economic
00:29:42.680
policy was proven right. Now, there's a caveat here, and it's a pretty big caveat because the
00:29:47.780
economy right now is a little bit shaky. The stock market is doing really well, but it's only really
00:29:51.700
because of seven Silicon Valley stocks. The underlying market is much, much shakier than that. We're
00:29:56.880
probably due for a recession, not because of the Trump policies. That's been building for years at
00:30:01.040
this point, and the Trump policies may or may not contribute to that, not just because of tariffs.
00:30:07.040
The big problem, the big economic problem when Trump came into office was inflation,
00:30:12.760
the massive inflation under Joe Biden. We called it Bidenflation. Trump's policy reduced inflation.
00:30:19.260
Now, the cope here is, and a legitimate caveat is, the reason they reduced inflation is because they
00:30:26.720
were a massive shock to demand for goods that hurt employment numbers and that hurt economic activity.
00:30:34.420
That all could be true. That all could be true. And the warning to the White House here is,
00:30:39.700
you have to get that under control. Looking ahead to the midterms, especially after the pre-midterm
00:30:45.780
elections, those elections in New York and New Jersey and Virginia, you have to make sure that
00:30:50.240
as people seriously are hurting in this economy, that is real. They're not really hurting from
00:30:55.960
inflation, but they are hurting. You need to make sure that you button up the employment problem
00:31:01.840
and the broader economic growth. You have to do that. However, I do think this is good news for them.
00:31:08.920
This is a major notch in the Trump-White House corner of the scoreboard because they were right.
00:31:18.900
Because they tried something different, contravening what everyone else was saying,
00:31:24.360
and they were right. And all the geniuses now look like idiots.
00:31:28.380
So there are still major economic problems that the White House has to confront.
00:31:31.940
But the fact that they were right should give us a little bit of confidence that they might be able
00:31:39.560
to pivot and then focus on the other problems. Because dealing with an economy for the global
00:31:44.340
hegemon is a little bit of a game of whack-a-mole. You fix one problem, that creates other problems.
00:31:48.780
Then you have to go fix those problems. That's going to exacerbate still more problems. Obviously,
00:31:51.920
that's going to happen. It's very important, though. So it's a good sign heading in.
00:31:57.700
Very important heading into the midterms, that people feel as though the economy is going well
00:32:03.100
and will continue to go well. Don't forget, the market sets prices based on what they think
00:32:07.820
is going to happen. It's not even about what's going on today. It's certainly not what goes on
00:32:11.940
yesterday. It's what the market expects to happen tomorrow. So you need people to feel,
00:32:17.980
forget about just the eggheads and all the investors. You need people, broadly voters,
00:32:22.740
to feel as though things are getting better. That's always true. To some degree, it's always
00:32:28.480
the economy stupid, as James Carville said in 92. But it's especially true here because one of the
00:32:34.920
big promises of this presidential term is that we are going to have a golden age. That adjective
00:32:41.340
chosen intentionally, an age that will result in material prosperity, also spiritual prosperity,
00:32:49.140
also cultural prosperity. But material prosperity is part of that. You have to have people believing
00:32:54.760
that that is the case. Can the White House thread that needle? I don't know. They inherited very
00:32:59.920
serious economic problems, and they're trying a novel method, and I hope it works. Now, speaking of
00:33:05.620
things getting better or worse, a devastating clip. It's almost funny in how devastating it is.
00:33:10.860
From a 100-year-old World War II veteran in the UK who was brought on Good Morning Britain to remember
00:33:18.260
his fallen comrades. And it was supposed to be a feel-good story. We fought, we're the greatest
00:33:23.200
generation, and we fought the greatest war ever, and we solved all the world's problems for now and
00:33:26.880
forever. And isn't this great? And you should remember how great that was. That's what they
00:33:30.420
expected the segment to be. And instead, this is what they got.
00:33:36.800
What does Remembrance Sunday mean for you? What is your message?
00:33:42.620
My message is, I can see in my mind's eye, there was rows and rows of white stones of all the hundreds
00:33:51.900
of my friends and everybody else that gave their lives for what? A country of today. No, I'm sorry.
00:34:01.220
But the sacrifice wasn't worth the result that it is now.
00:34:09.300
What do you mean by that, though, at this point?
00:34:12.660
What we fought for, and what we fought for was our freedom. We find that even now, it's
00:34:20.940
darn sight worse than what it was when I fought for it.
00:34:27.320
Absolutely devastating. And you can hear the interviewers, they want it to be a happy,
00:34:35.300
feel-good morning segment. So they say, oh, you know, well, sorry you feel that way, but you know,
00:34:39.680
hey, come on, it's a morning show. He goes, no, no. We fought for freedom and things are worse
00:34:46.920
today than they were when we were fighting. Things are not great right now. And what does
00:34:53.140
that mean? What conclusion are we supposed to take? People are going to take the wrong conclusion
00:34:56.620
from this, but there is a very, very important point that he's making. We'll get to that in one
00:35:01.260
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your place in Daily Wire history right now. My favorite comment yesterday is from Stray1239,
00:37:39.720
who says, we got digital Ouija boards before GTA 6. So true. So true. Not great for the culture.
00:37:44.420
This 100-year-old World War II veteran, he says, I look at all those rows and rows of white headstones,
00:37:52.560
all my fallen comrades. The sacrifice wasn't worth it. Things are worse today than they were then.
00:38:00.360
He says, we were fighting for freedom. So what were they fighting against? It's easy, especially for the
00:38:07.060
younger viewers and listeners, it's easy to forget, especially because our schools don't teach history
00:38:12.500
anymore. At the time that, in this case, Britain was fighting, but us too, obviously. At the time
00:38:20.080
the allies were fighting, there were twin evils, twin awful ideologies that were rising up in Europe.
00:38:29.300
Even different varieties of the ideologies, but you had communism from the left, which was wreaking
00:38:34.360
havoc on Europe, which just before the Second World War nearly conquered Iberia. You nearly had the
00:38:40.180
Bolsheviks conquering Iberia. They were raping nuns, then killing them. They were killing priests,
00:38:44.460
burning people, shooting at Christ, just grave evils that happily was pushed out of Iberia.
00:38:50.760
But then you also had the rise of Nazism. And so you had communism makes an idol out of class.
00:38:56.880
You had Nazism, which makes an idol out of race. Both Nazism and communism were trying to destroy the
00:39:02.760
church and taking very active steps to destroy the church. In the case of, well, communism had been
00:39:07.160
trying to destroy the Catholic church and Christianity broadly for a very long time.
00:39:11.500
And then Nazism was taking very particular steps to kidnap the Pope, kill the Pope.
00:39:16.040
Hitler wrote to Francisco Franco, said, I consider the Pope my personal enemy,
00:39:19.700
plans to eradicate the church in Germany, all the rest. You have these awful ideologies.
00:39:24.460
And then you have the Anglosphere, Britain and the US, which says, okay, we're going to go in
00:39:30.200
and we're going to, we're going to first beat Nazism after there was a split between the Nazis and the
00:39:35.960
Soviets. Okay. We're going to first beat Nazism. Then we're going to fight this war to beat communism.
00:39:39.060
And we beat Nazism and then we beat communism. And then what happens? Our societies fall apart.
00:39:49.360
And if you're this 100 year old World War II vet, you're looking at this, you're saying,
00:39:52.920
we fought, my comrades died 80 years ago. And now Muslims have taken over my country. They're
00:40:00.200
raping the girls of our country. They're given a free pass to do so. We've had all sorts of hostile
00:40:06.140
foreigners invade Europe, thanks to Germany, actually, thanks to Angela Merkel in Germany.
00:40:11.660
But all throughout Europe, you're seeing the erosion of the freedoms that we thought we were fighting
00:40:16.540
for. You're seeing women in the UK arrested for praying across the street from abortion clinics.
00:40:22.920
And that's not because of communism, exactly. That's not because of fascism or Nazism, exactly.
00:40:30.320
It's because of the third ideology, liberalism. I guess really you would say fourth ideology,
00:40:38.260
because at play, the minor player in World War II was fascism. Communism makes an idol of class.
00:40:44.460
You had a Nazism makes an idol of race. Fascism makes an idol of the state.
00:40:49.300
And then you have liberalism, which makes an idol of the individual, individual autonomy.
00:40:57.740
And what we all thought, what we were told, not just after the Second World War, but after the end
00:41:02.560
of the Cold War, we were told liberalism had won. Liberalism had emerged victorious. This was the
00:41:09.100
final solution, to use a charged phrase from World War II. This was the final solution to our political
00:41:15.020
problems. This was actually the end of history. This was it. No more changes to ideology. No more
00:41:22.800
traditional conflicts. This is it. We're going to have an era of global peace. This is where the idea
00:41:26.980
of just unfettered global trade governed by these international, non-state, exactly, institutions,
00:41:34.180
that's where that emerged from. We're all going to sing kumbaya because history's over.
00:41:37.920
But liberalism failed, too. That's the issue. It's not that Nazism would have been better.
00:41:46.680
Certainly would not have. It's not that communism would have been better. Certainly would not have.
00:41:52.300
It's not that fascism would have been. Fascism was the weakest of those three. It's not that that
00:41:56.440
would have been better. That wouldn't have either. But liberalism failed, too, because ideologies fail.
00:42:03.700
Because, to use a phrase, pardon the jargon, from Michael Oakeshott, great British political
00:42:10.680
philosopher, ideology is the formalized abridgment of the supposed substratum of rational truth contained
00:42:16.220
in the tradition. Formalized, so it's, you know, you can write it down on a piece of paper.
00:42:22.820
Abridgment, you're shrinking it, you're minimizing it, of what we think is the substratum,
00:42:31.760
the operative layer of purely rational truth that we would otherwise get in the tradition.
00:42:38.540
This is why, as all of these ideologies are back in play, communism on the left,
00:42:45.000
pretty over communism. Look at our guy in New York. A little hint of a rise of Nazism, whether it's,
00:42:52.620
Nazism's a dead ideology, as Chris Ruffo pointed out. But there are little ironic hints of it again.
00:42:57.880
Or fascism, you know, people joke, oh, maybe the fascists weren't so bad, whatever.
00:43:01.760
As there are all these rise, and then the liberals are tripling down, what is called for
00:43:06.760
is an alternative. Because all of these ideologies have failed. The failure of liberalism is so tragic
00:43:14.080
that it's bringing a 100-year-old World War II veteran almost to tears on television when he says,
00:43:18.920
wow, look at our country, it's worse off today than it was in the 30s and 40s.
00:43:22.860
What is called for is an alternative to all of those ideologies. An alternative to the habit in
00:43:33.140
modernity of formalizing, abridging, rationalizing, abstracting from the tradition. What is called for
00:43:41.280
is a more classical kind of conception of politics, classical political behavior. Dare I say, a
00:43:47.640
recognition that politics is not primarily about ideas, certainly is not primarily about ideology,
00:43:53.200
but is about people and the common good of the people who are all living together.
00:43:57.640
A common good that we can understand and advance much more sturdily in light of the sturdier
00:44:04.020
political resources, namely tradition, what Chesterton called the democracy of the dead.
00:44:09.420
Was it Chesterton or Burke? I don't know. Either way, they're both wonderful writers. And religion,
00:44:17.440
which is the fundament of all politics. That's what's being called for. This is why another one
00:44:22.740
of the buzzwords that you're hearing these days is post-liberalism. And post-liberalism is this term
00:44:28.680
Adrian Vermeule pointed out the other day. It's a purely negative term. It's kind of like
00:44:33.560
Protestantism in the sense that when you say someone is Protestant, that tells you something,
00:44:37.700
tells you it's not Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, but you don't really know. Is it Baptist? Is it
00:44:41.620
Methodist? Is it Anglican? Is it Presbyterian? Is it all those groups disagree with each other?
00:44:45.800
It's just saying it's not something. Post-liberalism is more a description. It's the conclusion that
00:44:51.720
that guy came to, that great World War II veteran who says, well, liberalism failed.
00:44:57.640
What do we do now? We need something else. There's one story I have to get to. I know I'm out of
00:45:04.220
time, but I don't care. Really, really sad story in New York City. A very shy teen leapt to death
00:45:12.480
from New York City's Regis High School. This is a very prestigious high school in New York
00:45:17.120
because he was about to be punished for offering a controversial opinion in an ethics class.
00:45:24.140
Listen to this. This kid was in an ethics class. They were discussing utilitarianism,
00:45:32.420
a modern rationalist ideology advanced by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which says that
00:45:38.520
what we should pursue is the greatest good for the greatest number.
00:45:43.620
So the way we should think about ethics is not whether an act is moral or immoral in itself.
00:45:49.700
That would be Kantian ethics, deontological ethics. It's not that we should think about
00:45:54.780
the whole person who cultivates habits of virtue that allow him to make proper ethical judgments
00:46:02.900
when they present themselves in their complexity, which is too great to merely prescribe all of it
00:46:07.700
in a manifesto. That would be virtue ethics coming from Aristotle. No, no. This modern form which says
00:46:13.480
the way that we determine the morality of actions is by calculating the greatest good for the greatest
00:46:17.520
number. So you could justify anything. By utilitarian ethics, you could justify genocide,
00:46:22.760
murdering babies, and all. And we do, actually. And this kid, we don't know what the opinion was,
00:46:27.740
but he offered a contrary opinion. And he was going to be punished for that. And he was so afraid
00:46:33.520
of being punished, this shy 16-year-old teenager, that he leapt to his death from Regis High School.
00:46:40.740
Pascal Emmanuel Gobri, who is a great tweeter, great writer, but you might follow him on Twitter.
00:46:46.400
He's a very thoughtful guy. He responded to this. He said, we live in a totalitarian society.
00:46:53.420
I think he's totally right. And this is a point I've made on the show. I made this at least a year
00:46:58.900
ago, maybe more than that. I said, it's funny, we think of totalitarianism as communism or Nazism,
00:47:04.940
but liberalism is totalitarian too. In as much as it seeks to control every aspect of your life.
00:47:17.460
You're not allowed to think certain ways. It controls what you post on Instagram. You better
00:47:21.920
post that black square when George Floyd dies. Otherwise, you might be ostracized. You might be
00:47:26.640
guilty of wrong thing. You better, hey, you better trance your kid. Otherwise, maybe the state's
00:47:33.200
going to come in and take your kid from you. You better not express any controversial views. In this
00:47:38.640
case, in a class on a terribly wrong ethical point of view, to contradict that would be a good thing.
00:47:46.380
That shouldn't be controversial at all. Utilitarianism should be controversial.
00:47:49.160
If you do that, you're going to be punished. You're going to leap to your death in some cases.
00:47:53.780
That's totalitarian. And another one of these buzzwords that goes around these days
00:47:57.260
is authoritarian. We say that the left is authoritarian. Not exactly. The left says that
00:48:03.680
the right is authoritarian. That's also kind of silly because even on the right, we're pretty
00:48:10.160
live and let live, pretty laissez-faire. Frankly, we should probably be a little more authoritarian,
00:48:14.660
whatever that word is to mean. Because authoritarian means that the government is strong
00:48:20.680
in a limited number of areas. Hey, we're not going to tolerate Satan displays in the public courthouse.
00:48:29.560
We're not going to tolerate the Satan club going into the elementary school, as we see.
00:48:33.920
We're not going to tolerate transgenderism in public life. We're just not going to tolerate that.
00:48:39.440
But what you do in your own home, we're not going to concern ourselves too much.
00:48:42.880
You can have your opinions. You can discuss your opinions. But in certain limited areas,
00:48:47.940
we're going to maintain cohesion. We're going to insist upon that. That's authoritarian.
00:48:53.700
Totalitarian is when you get kids to rat on their parents to the state.
00:48:59.900
Totalitarian is when the political order tries to control every single thought you have. And if you
00:49:05.240
contradict it in even the mildest of ways, you're going to be impelled to leap to your death.
00:49:08.380
That's totalitarian. That is another ironic failure of liberalism.
00:49:14.340
We thought liberalism was the opposite of totalitarianism. Actually, in the final count,
00:49:20.280
in the final calculation, they seem pretty similar. Okay. Speaking of high school kids,
00:49:25.100
I want to get to this very strange headline, which is not surprising to me, but it's surprising to a lot
00:49:29.980
of people. That 12th grade girls are less likely to want to get married now than boys. First time we've
00:49:35.680
ever seen that. But I don't have time, so we're going to have to get to that tomorrow because
00:49:38.140
today's Music Monday. The rest of the show continues now. You do not want to miss it.
00:49:41.080
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