In this episode of The Knowles Show, Michael talks about Bitcoin, aliens, the midterms, and the tragic story of a transgender high school athlete who killed his own family. Wealthsimple is a simple, low-cost way to get started on your financial goals without the high-interest rates, high-yield debt, and low risk, high reward options. Learn more about your ad choices.
00:27:51.000It took American leadership in partnership with many of the countries here today just to bring the two sides to the table in search of a still elusive peace.
00:28:00.000It was powerless to constrain the nuclear program of radical Shia clerics in Tehran.
00:28:06.000That required 14 bombs dropped with precision from American B2 bombers.
00:28:11.000And it was unable to address the threat to our security from a narco terrorist dictator in Venezuela.
00:28:17.000Instead, it took American special forces to bring this fugitive to justice.
00:28:21.000There we have it, this focus on the tangible.
00:28:25.000Liberalism wants to abstract everything into the ether, but nationalism, conservatism, ordinary patriotism, it brings it back down to earth.
00:28:36.000Patriotism being an extension of the love of one's own family, the family which is eminently tangible, the bedrock unit of society.
00:28:45.000He says it wasn't the UN that is solving these global problems.
00:28:50.000These global problems that spun out of control under the Biden administration, I'll point out, which has this undue faith in liberal internationalism.
00:29:04.000And that will not merely benefit us and tyrannize everyone else.
00:29:08.000That will be conducive to the good of everyone.
00:29:10.000This is the make America great again idea.
00:29:12.000This is America pursuing our interests, putting America first, not to the exclusion of other people, but to put things in their proper order.
00:29:19.000It actually gets back to a point J.D. Vance made months ago on the ordo amoris, the order of loves, the ordo caritatis, the idea that we have a greater responsibility to those who are close to us.
00:29:28.000A husband has a greater responsibility to his wife than he does to some lady down the street.
00:29:32.000And a nation has a greater responsibility to its constituents.
00:29:36.000And by caring for one's nearest, one can actually do much more good for the rest of the world than one can by inverting that order, by ignoring our families.
00:32:08.000Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move?
00:32:16.000You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a, this is of course a very longstanding policy of the United States.
00:32:37.000And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point.
00:32:43.000And we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation.
00:34:03.000And it's funny because when AOC first hit the scene, everyone made fun of her and called her stupid and ignorant.
00:34:09.000And then AOC impressed a lot of people with her ability to get attention, first of all, and to maneuver herself within the Democratic Party, which was initially hostile to her.
00:34:20.000So many people, myself included, softened up on AOC a little bit and said, you know, look, I don't know that the lady has done a lot of reading, but she's a pretty good political operator.
00:36:17.000She probably doesn't know that Spain introduced horses to America.
00:36:22.000Spain also, she refers to the Hispanic people and the black people in America.
00:36:27.000Europeans also introduced black people to America and Europeans also created the Hispanic race, the Latino race, which is a mixture of American indigenous and European Spanish.
00:36:39.000So she also probably doesn't, but like at a, at a, at a more basic, at a simpler level, she doesn't know that it was Europeans who brought the horses here.
00:36:51.000But she has vague impressions of history.
00:36:58.000She has an ideology, but she doesn't have any of the facts, the data points that undergird that ideology.
00:37:07.000This, this, this was a big shift that happened actually when AOC and I were in elementary and middle and high school in virtually the same area.
00:37:16.000She was in the wider, richer town over from me in Westchester County.
00:37:19.000And AOC and I, when we were in school, the way we were taught history generally was great trends, great themes.
00:37:30.000Previously, history had been taught on facts, men and dates and battles and things that happened.
00:37:35.000And then if you were going to come up with a theory of history, if you were going to arrive at some ideology, you would arrive at that after you had at least memorized some facts of history.
00:37:47.000By the time we got to school, that had flipped.
00:37:50.000You weren't really supposed to learn dates and battles and men and facts.
00:37:54.000As long as you had the general trends, that would suffice.
00:37:58.000And that's clearly what's going on with AOC here.
00:38:00.000So then this brings us to her ideological pitch at the Munich Security Conference, which was literally for communism.
00:38:09.000But, you know, I think it's also important to note how thin that foundation is.
00:38:19.000The response that we have to have is, again, it's material, it's class based, it's common interest.
00:38:26.000We talk about when we talk about a class based internationalist perspective also means ending the hypocrisy towards the global south.
00:38:37.000OK, so there were a lot of buzzwords here, global south, hypocrisy.
00:38:42.000But then what was that phrase you just used?
00:38:44.000A class based international perspective.
00:38:48.000Let me translate that into common language.
00:38:52.000Class based internationalism is communism.
00:39:11.000You could have a system of nation states where different peoples have sovereignty and they get along together in the world while pursuing their own national interest.
00:39:21.000There is the empire model where you have great powers that comprise lots of different peoples.
00:39:27.000But they have a broad swath of territory with some basic shared aspects of law, a different but shared conception of the common good.
00:39:37.000And they face off against other great powers.
00:39:40.000And then there is an international class based form of world order, which is communism.
00:40:10.000Hasn't worked, by the way, which is why even the Soviet Union had to shift to a more national and imperial perspective than a workers of the world unite perspective.
00:40:19.000But furthermore, this kind of communism isn't even the smart kind of communism.
00:40:25.000I guess there's no such thing as smart communism, but there was at least.
00:40:30.000You know, when when Karl Marx is writing and he's quoting Ludwig Feuerbach and he's thinking seriously about history and he's engaging with serious thinkers.
00:40:51.000The other reason why it's hard to be a smart communist today is because after the 19th century, there were many experiments with communism and they always turned out bad every single time with that exception.
00:41:02.000So to even take Marx seriously today is to come to grips with that fact.
00:41:08.000And if you're going to try to salvage Marx, you have to shift what he's talking about.
00:44:15.000When it comes to the Pendragon cycle, Rise of the Merlin, which Roger Avery, author of Pulp Fiction, just came out and said is just absolutely unbelievable.
00:44:38.000My favorite comment yesterday is from Olivia Vaughn, 4428, who says, it's amazing that with food stamps, you can't buy rotisserie chicken because it's considered warm food, but you can buy liters of soda and candy bars.
00:44:50.000There probably should be some loss leader exception on this because the weird thing about a lot of grocery stores is it's actually cheaper to buy the rotisserie chicken cooked than it is to buy a chicken and then rotisserie it yourself.
00:47:40.000So the argument that the universe is really, really big actually does not imply that there is intelligent life or life of any kind anywhere else.
00:49:11.000But it is curious that so much of liberalism comes down to a prideful attempt to exalt man above his station and ends by degrading man below his station.
00:49:25.000It begins by this notion that we'll have no kings or priests.
00:49:28.000You know, man will only be free when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
00:50:21.000It is a more realistic view, but it's more difficult.
00:50:26.000And it entails more responsibility to say, yes, we are special.
00:50:30.000It's kind of weird, right, that we, among all of the created things, have rational wills.
00:50:37.000Isn't that kind of weird that we can conceive of abstract things, unlike every animal and plant and all organic matter on earth?
00:50:45.000That we are finite, immortal, we die, but we have this immortal, eternal aspect to ourselves because we can reason.
00:50:55.000Isn't that kind of weird that like nothing else that we've ever encountered or really even can conceive of has that, has that combination of flesh and reason and will?