Ep. 1931 - Virginia Students Beat Muslim Terrorist To Death
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Summary
Two Islamic terror attacks took place yesterday, one at a Virginia university, another at a Michigan synagogue, as the Iran war entered its 13th day. We ll get into all the details about this, especially at the university, but it all raises a major question in the minds of Americans: if one of the justifications for war in the Middle East, one that we have heard for decades, is that we should fight them there so we don t have to fight them here? Why do we keep fighting them there?
Transcript
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Two Islamic terror attacks took place yesterday, one at a Virginia university,
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another at a Michigan synagogue, as the Iran war entered its 13th day.
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We'll get into all the details, some amazing details came out about this,
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especially at the university. But it all raises a major question in the minds of Americans.
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If one of the justifications for war in the Middle East, one that we have heard for decades,
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is that we fight them there so we don't have to fight them here.
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Why do we keep having to fight them here? I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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Welcome back to the show. The United Kingdom is removing Winston Churchill from its money.
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They're removing Churchill, who is too controversial. Apparently, the removal they consider to be long overdue.
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I assume they not only have to run the new characters for the banknotes by the PC police,
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they also obviously have to run them by whatever bureau determines whether or not the images are halal or haram.
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We'll get to the new UK money. We'll get to the culture we used to call British.
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Distributors, LLC. Two terror attacks, really, really awful stuff. It's always the ones you most
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expect, of course. So it was two Islamic terror attacks, one in Virginia, one in Michigan, same
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day, one against a school, one against a synagogue. We'll start with the school in Virginia. This is
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Old Dominion University. The guy who committed the attack is a former member of our military.
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So this guy was a Virginia National Guard member, and he's also an ISIS supporter.
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Now, that alone is pretty crazy. We have guys in the military who could go on to support ISIS.
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No, it gets crazier, actually, because this guy has not just now been identified as an ISIS supporter.
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This guy was already convicted of trying to aid ISIS. So this guy with a foreign-sounding name, let's just say,
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we try not to name people who commit these kinds of attacks. It ain't John Smith, okay?
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This guy was convicted 10 years ago of attempting to aid ISIS, and he somehow remained in our country.
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For 10 years, somehow, we did not throw this guy out of the country, run him out of our country with
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tar and feathers. So he was here, and then he did the thing that you would expect the guy who was
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convicted of trying to aid ISIS to do. He shot up a school. So he killed one person. He injured two
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others. The guy he killed was the ROTC instructor, ROTC instructor. However, the silver lining in the storm cloud of
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this attack is that the ROTC students, these civic-minded, future members of our military, neutralized the
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threat. That's the euphemism that people are using. What they actually did, these kids were unarmed.
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The guy comes in there armed to the teeth, but it didn't matter because even though he had an arms
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advantage, they beat him to death. How was he diseased?
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There were students who were in that room that subdued him and rendered him no longer alive. I don't
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know what else to say it, but they basically were able to terminate the threat. So he was not shot?
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He was not shot. He shot three people? Correct. We have information that he shot three people.
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I love that this woman, you can tell she actually takes some pride in what those students were able
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to do, their heroic actions. You can tell you see a little smirk there, but she's trying to use the
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neutral clinical language that we all use as euphemisms to cover up harsh realities. But there's
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no way really to hide the reality of beating someone to death. So she says, the students rendered him
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unalive. Rendered him unalive. That's a new one. That's a new one. You're going to say someday,
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you know, Johnny, I've got really bad news. Your grandfather was rendered unalive today.
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What? What does that mean? Rendered unalive. They neutralized the threat
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and they didn't have guns and he did. They beat him to death. So unfortunately, they were only able
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to do that after he killed their ROTC instructor. But our conclusion from this remains a consistent
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one. Our military, past, present, and future, look at these students, is very strong. We can have a lot
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of hope for our military. They are tough as nails, tough as ever. Our political order is not. Our
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political order, the one that in 2016, Barack Obama's president, liberal immigration enforcement,
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liberal prosecutors, all galore, this guy pleads guilty to attempting to aid ISIS. And they say,
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okay, well, don't do it again, Mohammed, Mohammed, Abdul, Abdul, Abdul, Mohammed, Mohammed. Don't you do
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it again. Okay, we're going to let you stay in this country, but that's very naughty of you to try
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to aid the terrorist organization that we're at war with. Very, very naughty. We're very disappointed
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in you. You better not do it again. And then he does it again. The second terror attack yesterday
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took place in Michigan. It was against a synagogue. This is another guy who I guess was American.
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He's an American citizen, but he was born in Lebanon. And he's not what, I really like the
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Lebanese people. I like some of them. I spent a little time. I traveled to Beirut once. The people
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were lovely. The Christians are great, and the more moderate Muslim types are great. But there are
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also some not so moderate Muslim types in Lebanon. I guess this is one of them. He rammed this synagogue
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in his car with explosives. The authorities are already saying that this is related to the Iran war.
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Authorities are investigating those reports that he apparently told multiple family members that
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this was because of the Israeli strike on Lebanon, which killed his family reportedly. That's according
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to law enforcement officials talking to CNN. Those two terror attacks, one just from a guy who's been
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talking about how much he loves ISIS for 10 years. Another, a Lebanese guy who's apparently upset
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about the Israeli strike on Lebanon, which comes in the context of the Israeli and U.S. strikes on Iran
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attacking the synagogue in Michigan. This after the Austin shooter, don't forget, right after the
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American strikes on Iran, you have this Muslim guy in Austin shoot up a bar wearing an Iran
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t-shirt pledging allegiance to ISIS. This after the Muslims go from Pennsylvania to New York to throw IEDs
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over the heads of a liberal counter protest at the conservative protesters in New York City,
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the year that's the 25th anniversary of 9-11. And I have a big question.
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If we fight the wars in the Middle East in no small part so that we fight them there and therefore we
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won't have to fight them here, why do we keep having to fight them here? Clearly fighting them
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there is not preventing us from fighting them here. There is a simple answer as to why we have to fight
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them here. It's because of our immigration policies. The only way you can make the argument,
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we got to go fight them there so we don't have to fight them here. The only way you can make that
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argument is if we actually limit immigration and enforce our border. So Trump closed the border.
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Biden threw the border wide open. Trump has closed the border. The border is effectively
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shut down. You really can't get in. But we still have a million people a year come in through legal
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immigration. We still have tens of millions of people here. We don't even know who they are.
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What we do know about them is that at least some of them are quite hostile and support Islamic
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fundamentalism and jihad. So you can't, in that world where you've got a bunch of people here
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and you have a porous border, at least when the Democrats are in charge,
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then fighting them there actually makes it more likely that we're going to fight them here.
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That's the flaw in that argument. This is why, by the way, this is one of the reasons why it seems to me
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that reasonable minds can disagree on the Iran war. There are two views. There are two views that
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are out there in public right now. One is this pacifist view that says that we should never go
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to war and war is always terrible and it's never justified and that America should never do anything
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abroad and we should only focus at home. And none of that is a serious view. None of that has
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described U.S. policy going all the way back to, I don't know, the Louisiana Purchase in the first
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Barbary War. Not serious. Pacifism is not a serious moral position. It's not a serious political
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position. So forget that, okay? Then there are the war hawks who make these sweeping, grandiose,
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ideological, and moral arguments that we must intervene everywhere from Iran to Iraq to Timbuktu.
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We must, on the abstract grounds of democracy or freedom, even on certain security grounds,
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we must do it. It's our obligation. I don't really take that all that seriously either.
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My view, and I might be the only one saying this, which is, you know, it's very unpopular and
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therefore may be true, is I think reasonable minds can disagree over the wisdom of going to war in
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Iran. There are strong arguments for doing it. It had been a part of U.S. grand strategy since 1979,
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at least really since 1953, to maintain or to install a friendly regime in Iran.
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We had wanted to do that for something like 80 years now.
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And Iran does pose a threat to us. And Iran is buddies with our geopolitical adversaries like
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Russia and China. And Iran does destabilize the Middle East. And our allies in the Middle East,
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not just Israel, but the Gulf states, want us to neutralize Iran. And, and, and, and there are all
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sorts of good arguments for it. And Iran would have hit us after the Israeli strike. And maybe
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we could have stopped the Israeli strike. Maybe we can't stop the Israeli strike and, and, and, and.
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However, I've said, if I had been on the NSC, I would have made the arguments against the strike
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just based on the information that is available publicly. Maybe there's classified information
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that would have changed my mind. But just going on, all I can go on is what I know.
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I would have made the argument against hitting Iran, not because war is always bad, not because
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we should never be involved overseas, but because practically this is very hard to pull off.
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If anyone can do it, Trump can do it. He's got the best record on foreign policy of anyone in my
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lifetime, probably better than George H.W. Bush. Yes. If anyone can do it, he can do it. And if he does
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it well, it will be the greatest foreign policy achievement since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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However, my view would have been Iran is not Venezuela. The regime is not very likely to fall.
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The mullahs have reigned in Iran twice as long as the CIA backed regime after 1953.
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Despite all of the propaganda that we in part put out, Iran is not just this bubbling cauldron of
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liberalism and secularism. You know, the oppressed people of Iran want to rise up and overthrow their
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government. Some of them do, but probably 30 to 40 percent of the population likes their Islamic
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government. And because of our stupid immigration policies, it's going to create problems at home
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for us. So those would have been my arguments against the war in Iran. Now, again, there are very
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strong arguments for the war in Iran. And as President Trump has such a good record on foreign policy,
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I'm willing to give this guy some grace on it. And I think he has a lot of credibility on foreign
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policy. Trump said this strike, this military operation is going to take five weeks. We're only
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in day 13, but we're beginning to see these complications. Iran threatening the Strait of
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Hormuz. An American plane just went down over Iraq. Doesn't seem like it was shot down. It seems like
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there was some other issue. There's an investigation pending. You're getting the bad optics out of the
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mistaken strike, which appears to be from the US, but it's still a little bit unclear on that school
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in Iran. You're seeing, and now you're seeing increased terror attacks at home, which all could
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lead this war to spiral. If anyone's not going to let the war spiral, it's going to be Trump.
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But nevertheless, nevertheless, this shows you the complexity of war. It shows you that anyone on
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either side who tells you there can't be any upsides to this war or, oh, it's going to be easy.
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It'll be over in 15 minutes. No one can really say that because no one really can predict the
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future. You just have to make risk assessments here. I would have come down a little bit on
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the side of risk aversion. The admin obviously came down a little bit on the side of willing
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to take the risk. We'll get to some updates on what's going on in Iran for a second.
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Knolls household, balanceofnature.com. According to the Daily Mail, there's a leak to U.S. intel,
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which suggests that the Iranian government is not at risk of collapse, that its leadership remains
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broadly intact after almost two weeks of U.S. and Israeli bombing. Now, you could read this as a
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good thing. I know a lot of people, especially the hardcore war hawks and the liberals and the
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interventionists, they want a total revolution in Iran. They want to completely decimate the Iranian
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regime. Curiously, that is not exactly what Trump signaled that he wanted. On the one hand, he did.
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On the one hand, he said, hey, Iranians, rise up, take control of your country. But then on the other
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hand, he keeps making comparisons to Venezuela. Don't forget, in Venezuela, they did not replace
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the regime. They did something a little more conservative. They took out the top of the regime,
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then they put a gun to the head of number two and said, hey, you're going to cooperate with us,
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or we're going to blow your head off, which is not the prettiest kind of foreign policy. It's not
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the most idealistic foreign policy, but it's worked out very well in Venezuela. And so there is a world
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in which you say, look, you don't want the whole Iranian Islamic regime to crumble. You just want it
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to cooperate more with us. But then here again, the theory collapses into the political reality.
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There is a world in which the end of this war leaves us with another Ayatollah Khamenei,
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because the guy that the Iranians just picked to be their next leader is the son of the guy we just
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took out. Now, it's a little unclear how injured that guy is, whether or not he's even still talking
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or walking or anything like that. However, he is currently the Ayatollah, the supreme leader of Iran.
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And so if at the end of this military campaign, you get another Ayatollah Khamenei, who's even
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angrier than the first guy, because we just killed his dad and most of his family, that might not be
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great for the US. According to the new Ayatollah, he says, Iran will not refrain from avenging the
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blood of its martyrs. He's apparently in intensive care at Sina University Hospital in Tehran's historic
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quarter, surrounded by security officials. Makes sense. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe that's the next
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target. We still have a few weeks of this thing left, probably. So the question then is, what does
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victory look like? And there are a few ways to declare victory. One would be the total removal
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of the regime. And you put in someone like Reza Pahlavi, the crown prince of Iran, son of the Shah,
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pro-Western. Great. Okay, that would be great. That would be a massive triumph.
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A thousand ifs and ands and buts as to whether or not that could actually happen and whether
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he could hold the country together. But that would be great. If it worked out, that'd be great.
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Or you have Iran basically keep the regime in place, but they're neutralized because we sink
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their navy and we get rid of all of their missiles and we bomb some of their oil and I don't know,
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we just really mess up their country. That's second best case scenario.
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Worst case scenario is we just irritate them, but we don't seriously cripple the regime. We don't
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seriously cripple their capabilities. This seems very unlikely. But in that case, certainly it was
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worse to go in than it would have been to refrain. So if the most likely scenario is number two right
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now, then the question is, how hard are we going to cripple them? Even this is not totally clear.
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Because some people would say, go in there and just glass the place. Just really, just mess them
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up so it's very hard for them to recover. There, however, you could risk Iran, the people of Iran
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actually becoming further entrenched with the regime. If you take away their electricity, if you
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take away their ability to eat and feed themselves and heat their homes, you could be in a really,
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really bad position here. But if you don't weaken them enough, now you've just irritated a guy and
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killed his dad and you're going to have to face more problems. So here is President Trump weighing
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Very good shape. The main thing is we have to win this. They win it quickly, but win it.
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And there are many people, I'm just watching some of the news. Most people say it's already been won.
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It's just a question of when. When do we stop? We don't want to let it regrow. And ideally,
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we'd like to see somebody in there that knows what they're doing. In other words, they can build a
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country. Now, one other thing. We can hit sections of Tehran and other places that, if you do it,
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it'll be almost impossible for them to rebuild their country. And we don't want that. But we can hit
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electric, we could take apart their electric capacity within one hour. And it would take
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them 25 years to rebuild it. So ideally, we're not going to be doing that. Thank you very much.
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I love the way he talks. I love, you know, talk about cool, calm, and collected. As we said at the
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very outset of the Iran war, this is the highest stakes thing that this man has done in 10 years.
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This is not just Venezuela. This is not just dropping the Moab. This is a major assault on a
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real country that is the most destabilizing force in the Middle East that's been a thorn in our side
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for many decades now. And this guy goes in there for real, says this isn't going to be a five-hour
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or a five-day campaign. This could be a five-week campaign. He goes in, and things are starting to
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get shaky, and they're planting mines in the Strait of Hormuz, and the price of oil is going through the
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roof, and it goes up to 115, and it goes down to 76, and it goes up to 90, and it's all over the
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place. Serious risk of a global recession because of this at military action. Small, but nonetheless,
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real terror attacks popping off at home because of this. And this guy remains cool as a cucumber.
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And he reminds us, and this is, I have to remind people too. I'm quite skeptical of the intervention
00:22:43.280
in Iran. He said it was going to take five weeks. I don't start freaking out until week six.
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He said it was going to take five weeks. We're under two weeks right now.
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And the way he says, look, this is how you reconcile the two comments coming out of the
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White House. One, the war is basically over. Two, we've just begun to fight, which is what
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the Department of War put out. Those are not contradictory statements. They're the same
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statement. Trump's just said them both right there. He said, look, some say the war's already won.
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We've already achieved our objective. What exactly is the objective? What exactly does victory look like?
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It's a little bit of a moving target. There are a few options for that. But yes, it could almost be
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over. And also, we haven't really begun to fight. You know, look, Iran, we could obliterate your
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country. And I'm not talking about dropping nuclear weapons, saying we could hit your electricity grid.
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You would be in trouble for years. You would not seriously be able to build back for years.
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We don't want to do it. We could do it. We don't want to do it. We're very restrained right now.
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Maybe we won't be so restrained. It's up to you. That is the way that you would speak.
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Some people are reading this as vacillating or desperate or whatever. Trump set out the gate.
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Do you really think, if you open with that claim, that there are not contingency plans,
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that this is not part of an operation? We're in, you know, what is it, day 13?
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So it's a very, very bumpy ride. No one said otherwise. But at this point,
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the arguments to say, well, we just really shouldn't have gone to war. It was just a
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really bad idea. That's totally useless. Totally useless. We're in it now. How does it work out?
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What is the best move? What does victory look like? What do we want the next year, five years,
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10 years in the Middle East to look like? Those are the pertinent questions right now.
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But that's it. I really hate the abstractions and the hypotheticals and the ideology that comes
00:25:00.760
into politics. And unfortunately, I've been a little tough on my fellow podcasters recently.
00:25:06.220
With right-wing podcasters like we have, who needs the left? They're just very unhelpful in many ways
00:25:12.520
when it comes to trying to win the midterms, trying to achieve political results. They go on all sorts
00:25:19.560
of digressions and abstractions and weird rabbit holes, and it doesn't really serve any political
00:25:24.540
purpose. It gets a lot of views. It's titillating. It's scintillating. It's trash TV, but it doesn't
00:25:29.920
serve real political goals. The question that I have is, get rid of the stupid ideology nonsense.
00:25:36.120
Here's the real politics here. What happens next? What do we do now? How do we achieve real political
00:25:42.900
results? This is, obviously, a lot of people, we're all still reeling from the death of Charlie.
00:25:49.440
The American right is seriously reeling from the death of Charlie. Assassinations work. That's why
00:25:53.700
people keep doing them. And it had a very deleterious effect, not just on Charlie and his
00:25:58.560
friends and his family, but on the American right. But one of the many things I always loved and admired
00:26:04.480
about Charlie, that guy cared about real politics. He didn't care about debate club. He conducted
00:26:09.960
political debates for a purpose. He didn't care about stupid, abstract, hypothetical, what if,
00:26:16.000
what if that, what if this. He cared about real politics. What do we do now? This is a guy,
00:26:20.960
he would make strong arguments against some policy to the president. But then whatever the president
00:26:29.420
decided, then he goes in and he tries to work it. He defends it. He tries to keep the coalition
00:26:34.520
together. He just really got real politics. And unfortunately, a lot of the influencer,
00:26:44.040
podcaster, live streamer, and even activist class just either doesn't get it or doesn't care.
00:26:49.360
Very, very frustrating if you want to see real political results. Okay. Speaking of debates and
00:26:56.180
religion, there's a lot of big religious component to the Iran war. Great new survey out of Pew,
00:27:02.600
Pew, really vindicates being a conservative and a Christian. Not that it needs to be vindicated,
00:27:09.020
but it really vindicates that over being a secular lib. We'll get to that survey. But first,
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see how much you could save. Policygenius.com slash Knowles. Pew survey going around Twitter right now.
00:28:39.200
And I think these are relatively older data, but it's making the rounds yet again,
00:28:44.860
maybe because religion is in the news. This is according to the Pew American Trends Panel.
00:28:49.840
And it shows that conservative Christians who go to church, go to religious services weekly,
00:28:59.900
but in America, generally that means going to church, are the least crazy people in the country.
00:29:07.240
And liberals who don't go to church are the craziest people in the country.
00:29:12.480
This is, the question is, has a doctor or other healthcare provider ever told you that you have
00:29:19.080
a mental health condition? They ever told you. And when you look, it divides it between liberal,
00:29:29.540
moderate, and conservative, and also by religious service attendance. Never go to church, seldom,
00:29:34.440
yearly, yearly, monthly, weekly. The craziest people in the country, 28% have had a doctor
00:29:44.520
diagnose them with a medical condition, a mental medical condition. 28% are libs who never go to
00:29:51.000
church. The next craziest people in the country, libs who sometimes go to church. The next craziest
00:30:01.160
people in the country, libs who go to church monthly. Now, it's a religious service, so it could
00:30:06.200
be some woo-woo kind of lib thing. Keep that in mind, because liberal churches are not real.
00:30:11.760
They're not real churches. They're these heretical, schismatic sects that promote infanticide and
00:30:17.180
creepy sex stuff. So even to call that a church is kind of silly. The next craziest people in the
00:30:22.260
country, libs who go to church once a year. Only at this point do you start to get, okay, the next
00:30:29.200
craziest group. Sorry, no, no, no. The next craziest group are moderates who never go to church.
00:30:33.380
Then the libs who go to church once a year. Then it, but it breaks down. You all the way get down
00:30:37.620
to the conservatives who go to church weekly. 8% have had a healthcare provider say they have a
00:30:43.880
mental condition. So what does this mean? Do we just use this to dunk on the libs and the atheists?
00:30:49.540
We can do that a little bit. Not like we dunk out of love. It's a loving dunk. It's not a,
00:30:55.420
it's a dunk intended to, you know, bring them over to our side. This is also just a vindication of,
00:31:02.260
of John, the gospel according to St. John chapter one, the very first verses. In the beginning was
00:31:09.560
the word and the word was with God and the word was God. And the word here being the logos,
00:31:16.160
the divine logic of the universe. So the gospel of St. John begins, unlike the synoptic gospels,
00:31:22.100
the gospel of St. John begins with this grand theological statement that God himself,
00:31:29.100
that Christ is the word, is the logos, is the divine logic of the universe. And God,
00:31:33.480
and he is God. God is the divine logic of the universe. So faith and reason go together.
00:31:40.400
That would seem to be backed up by this survey.
00:31:47.760
What we were told during new atheism and really for the last hundred years or so,
00:31:53.080
more than hundred years, is that religious people are crazy. They're illogical. They're irrational.
00:31:58.200
They believe in their sky daddy. All these straw men, nonsense descriptions of religion
00:32:05.560
to, because the secularists and the atheists don't want to deal with the, with what we actually
00:32:09.800
believe. But that's what we were told. These religious people, they're crazy. They're,
00:32:13.760
I don't want to vote for some religious person. He's probably crazy. Actually, the data say the
00:32:18.520
opposite. The religious people are the sanest people. The irreligious people are the craziest people.
00:32:27.860
Among the religious people, the conservatives, you can't really break it down as conservative or
00:32:32.300
liberal, but let's just recognize that really maps onto the most orthodox versus the most heterodox.
00:32:40.140
The most orthodox religious people, the ones who believe the religion most accurately, most fully,
00:32:47.860
those people are the least crazy people in the country. So when we're talking about this country,
00:32:52.800
we're not talking about Islam. We're talking a little, little bit about Judaism, but Judaism is a
00:32:57.280
real minority religion. We're talking about Christianity. The conservative Christians are the
00:33:02.600
least crazy people in the country, clinically speaking. And the atheist libs are the craziest
00:33:09.940
people in the country, which is a vindication of the claims of orthodox religion.
00:33:17.980
The, the, one of the chief claims being that God is the divine logic of the universe.
00:33:26.440
I know that these are, it seems like I'm preaching to the choir and you know what? The choir needs
00:33:29.780
preaching sometimes, but this is, this could be a, an evangelical kind of argument because I think a
00:33:37.840
lot of people like me, when I fell away from religion for 10 years, fell away because I thought
00:33:41.660
religion was for stupid people. Only stupid people believed in God and the smart people knew that
00:33:45.620
God didn't exist. And that just isn't true. The sane people, they didn't believe in God,
00:33:51.340
but the crazy people, they believe in, that isn't true. Actually, the opposite is true.
00:33:55.680
It's a good, it's a good argument. I love that. I love that poll. Okay. Before we get to
00:33:59.600
the mailbag, I must, I must get to, uh, the UK removing Winston Churchill from the bank notes.
00:34:09.740
Really, really frustrating. They're removing a bunch of figures from the bank notes. Uh, that includes,
00:34:15.240
uh, Jane Austen. I guess she was on there. That includes, anyway, some other, some other big
00:34:20.100
figures, but notably, uh, Winston Churchill. This is based on a public consultation held in 2025,
00:34:29.560
revealing that the people thought nature would be the most popular, uh, theme for money. So you're
00:34:37.740
going to replace Winston Churchill, one of the great figures in your thousand year national history
00:34:43.040
with a hedgehog. And doesn't that seem nice? 60% of respondents chose nature, animals ahead of
00:34:52.380
architecture and landmarks, you know, the parliament building or on a Westminster Canterbury Cathedral,
00:34:59.080
notable historical figures, arts, culture, and sport, innovation, or noteworthy milestones.
00:35:04.480
So they're removing Churchill in part because he's controversial because Churchill defended the
00:35:09.200
British empire because Churchill, uh, believed in the superiority of British people over other
00:35:15.140
people's, maybe not the moral superiority, the ultimate superiority, but the cultural superiority.
00:35:19.620
He said, he said things that were a little, you know, a little edgy. According to Harold
00:35:24.020
McMillan's diaries, he apparently endorsed a slogan for, uh, running for office, which is keep Britain
00:35:28.880
white. And you weren't, you weren't allowed to say that now, certainly maybe then you were
00:35:33.640
allowed to, you know, the Brits are white people, you know, so I don't know why, I mean, it is like
00:35:37.660
England is, is the country of the Angles, Angles and the Saxons and the Normans come in. But anyway,
00:35:43.720
we're going to, you're not allowed to say that he has to be canceled because he's controversial.
00:35:49.860
Uh, cause he, they don't like his policies in India or whatever. This man, one of the saviors of
00:35:54.780
the United Kingdom going to be taken off the money and he's going to be replaced by not some left-wing
00:36:01.300
political figure, but by an, a hedgehog, by an animal. And so what's really, what's really worse
00:36:07.720
than this, but what's really worse than this being the replacement of the right with the left
00:36:13.480
is it's just the infantilization of the whole society. This is worse than evil or immoral or worse
00:36:23.520
than, you know, ideologically backwards. It's worse than all that because it's insipid. This is what
00:36:30.120
you do to children. A serious civilization puts its leaders on money, puts its achievements on money,
00:36:37.760
has this, not just money, on any monument, recognizes what it has done, understands not
00:36:45.080
only its history, but the meaning of its history, has a, has a point of view about its history
00:36:51.280
and only in so doing has a vision for its future. Children want to play with the hedgehogs.
00:37:00.280
You know, an adult society puts Winston Churchill on its money, a, a, a toy game, you know,
00:37:06.460
children's monopoly puts Mickey Mouse on the money. And the UK is saying, we want Mickey Mouse,
00:37:11.800
give us Mickey Mouse. That's really, that's the deeper problem here. At least when you have these
00:37:18.260
stupid debates in America, should we replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill?
00:37:23.020
First of all, no, we shouldn't. But second of all, at least that's a debate. At least Harriet
00:37:27.900
Tubman is a political figure, really more mythical than historical, but whatever. She's a political
00:37:34.760
figure nonetheless. At least there you're having a debate about ideas and the meaning of American
00:37:38.300
history and what we're going to be moving forward. And with this, it's just a, you know,
00:37:43.440
you're going to, you're going to put a mongoose on the dollar or something on the pound.
00:37:48.400
And I know, I know some would say, well, look, you know, uh, in British heraldry, there's
00:37:53.040
animals play a role or family crests and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. But that's not what they're
00:37:57.540
doing here. They're not going to be putting family crests on the money. They just kicked all
00:38:01.960
of the hereditary aristocrats out of the house of Lords. Like yesterday, this is the infantilization
00:38:08.220
of the country, a country that doesn't believe in the meaning of its history, doesn't believe in
00:38:13.180
its future. Pretty soon, what you're going to get on the banknotes is going to be a little bit
00:38:18.340
different. It won't be Mohammed because you're not allowed to have pictures of Mohammed, but it will,
00:38:23.020
I don't know. Maybe they'll put the Ayatollah. Maybe the new Ayatollah is going to be on the banknotes
00:38:26.920
in the UK. Okay. Hey, do you want to hear what Ben Shapiro and Andrew Klavan and my pals here at Daily
00:38:33.600
Wire? Think about the Iran war and the stupid podcaster wars, which I hate so much, and the
00:38:40.140
Oscars. And do you want to hear what they think? Maybe not, but do you want to hear what I think
00:38:43.640
and then me tell them why they're wrong about what they think? Well, the only way to do it is to watch
00:38:47.320
Friendly Fire live today, 2 p.m. Eastern, only on dailywire.com and the Daily Wire Plus app.
00:38:53.740
You understand? You have to get the Daily Wire Plus app. I am, I'm not begging you. I'm not going to
00:38:58.180
lower myself to that. I'm inviting you to get the Daily Wire Plus app. It's an amazing experience
00:39:04.060
and you can follow me on there and you get the notifications and whenever we got cool stuff coming
00:39:08.140
out, you can go get it. Daily Wire Plus app right now. My favorite comment yesterday is from
00:39:12.700
ChristianGamerGuys6447 who says, I really need to see a conglomeration of clips of Michael being
00:39:19.600
silly while mocking someone. It would be awesome out of context. I didn't pick this. The producers
00:39:24.080
picked this comment. I didn't, I didn't pick the comments. I don't know. Do I really, what? Go
00:39:28.760
back to that. Let me see if I actually agree with that comment. A conglomeration of being silly
00:39:32.960
while mocking someone. I wouldn't, what do you mean I would mock someone? No, I might have,
00:39:39.400
I might have a little fun. Do you mean someone like Professor Jacob or do you mean someone like,
00:39:43.300
you know, James Tallarico? I don't know. Sometimes I do that occasionally. During the, during the Fauci
00:39:49.260
years, I got really into it. Finally, finally, we arrive at my favorite time of the week when
00:39:54.000
I get to hear from you in the mailbag. Our mailbag is sponsored by pure talk at a pure talk.com
00:39:57.040
session. You will save 50% off your first month. Take it away. Hey, Michael, it's Isaac. I had a
00:40:03.480
question about the war with Iran. Um, I can see why people, including yourself, felt like it wasn't a
00:40:13.040
wise move to go in. Um, yet we, we went ahead and did so. But, um, what do you think about the folks
00:40:21.340
who I would consider are on the alt-right or maybe what some refer to the new right, um, calling the
00:40:30.620
United States a terrorist nation for going into Iran or bombing parts of Iran? And what are your
00:40:38.720
thoughts about that? All right. Thanks, Mike. Yeah, that's not a serious position because what it
00:40:44.560
means is not only do whoever is making that claim and not only do they not understand what, uh, we are
00:40:51.940
doing in Iran, but they don't even understand the meaning of terrorism. Terrorism targets civilians
00:40:58.620
to achieve a political end. That's what terrorism is. Terrorism is not accidentally hitting civilians
00:41:06.400
while conducting war. Every belligerent who has ever engaged in war more or less does that. It's a sad
00:41:13.720
fact of war. Uh, terrorism is when you target civilians to achieve a political purpose. Ironically,
00:41:19.960
that is what Iran has done and has brazenly done, openly done. There's no secret. There's no debate
00:41:26.160
over that. That's what Iran has done since 1979, which is why Iran has always had one foot in the
00:41:31.760
global order and one foot outside of it. In some ways, it resembles a legitimate nation state. In some
00:41:38.140
ways, it, uh, appears to be an illegitimate terror organization. Whereas the United States
00:41:44.300
has uniformed soldiers. We target military targets, not civilians. We, uh, we abide by the rules of war.
00:41:52.840
We, it's just, there's no way to make that argument. So it's just, it's just not a serious
00:41:56.580
argument. Sometimes people will say, you know, why don't you debate so-and-so? And it's some mouthy
00:42:01.300
lunatic on Twitter or YouTube or something. And occasionally, look, occasionally I do it because
00:42:05.480
it can be fun clips, but, but often I will say, well, why would I do that? You, I'm, I'm not a
00:42:11.400
free speech absolutist. I'm not one of these people who thinks we just constantly need to grow the
00:42:15.560
public marketplace of ideas. I don't think that's true. I think marketplaces need limits. And I think
00:42:21.860
that, uh, one does not want, one wants a healthy debate and dialogue. One doesn't want cacophony,
00:42:27.920
like in a, uh, sandbox at a playground. You know, there's no point in debating a toddler over
00:42:33.500
it. And so to, to have a debate with someone who doesn't even have the capacity to understand what
00:42:39.400
is happening or the willingness to understand what is happening, that's not, that's not serious.
00:42:44.120
There are lots of good arguments against going to war in Iran, but to say, oh, we're, the U S is a
00:42:49.700
terrorist nation and war is always evil. And you know, it's just very silly. That's not even worth
00:42:55.680
engaging. Okay. Next question. Hello, Michael. This is Landon Corr, your resident member of
00:43:00.500
the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While the church prefers to refrain from overtly
00:43:05.280
supporting political parties or candidates, the values it promotes causes most of my religious
00:43:10.560
brothers and sisters to be some flavor of right wing, at the very least, the majority of the
00:43:15.660
politically active ones. However, in the past few years, during the same time period, the right has
00:43:21.420
gained ground against the godless left, my contemporaries have noticed an increase in
00:43:26.220
religious hatred from the right. The worst of which appears in events like last September,
00:43:31.760
where a Michigan man burned down one of our churches, slaughtered our people, even though
00:43:36.220
he likely submitted a very similar ballot to his victims. This leads many of my brethren to prefer
00:43:42.260
candidates who appear moderate and end up being more squishy or to throw their votes away on third
00:43:48.540
party long shots. My question for you, Michael, is twofold. Can you make the case for why we
00:43:53.900
Latter-day Saints should continue to support the right? And what can the right do to promote
00:43:58.400
interfaith cooperation when the need for religion has never been higher in this nation?
00:44:03.220
Good, good question. Yeah, I've seen that a little bit too. I mean, you know, the Mormon jokes have been
00:44:08.300
around basically as long as that religion has been around. So I'm sure it's deeply unpleasant if you're
00:44:14.340
LDS. But, you know, that's not new. Sometimes it gets a little hotter. Sometimes it's less hot.
00:44:19.480
And there's this paradox, which is that when people don't take religion seriously, you're going to be
00:44:28.340
pilloried and mocked and derided. But when people do take religion seriously, your religion is going
00:44:35.980
to be examined. And so religious differences are going to become more pronounced and hotter. So,
00:44:39.920
you know, you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't. Politically speaking,
00:44:46.000
not eternally. However, what do we do about this? Why should Mormons keep voting for the right?
00:44:52.780
I don't know. I would say to, well, as I have said to my LDS friends, you're not going to vote for
00:44:57.520
the left. You're not going to vote for the left. They want to put all of us in the gulags. They want
00:45:02.220
to put us all on boxcars. So you're obviously not voting for the left. You're not voting for infanticide
00:45:06.120
and weird sex stuff and open borders. And you're not voting for any of that.
00:45:10.260
So then what do you do when some people on the right are prejudiced or, you know, opposed to your
00:45:16.100
religion? Well, I would say one thing the right could do is just emphasize its longstanding
00:45:22.220
commitment to subsidiarity. So, you know, a Protestant Midwest or South or Catholic Northeast
00:45:30.940
might not agree with, or Jewish New York, I don't know, might not agree with the LDS religion,
00:45:38.880
but I don't think they're going to go invade Utah, are they? So recognition that, you know,
00:45:44.840
different localities are going to look a little bit different. That's one way that I think the
00:45:50.500
right could, without betraying her principles, actually digging even deeper into her own principles,
00:45:55.040
could ease some of those fears. But, you know, that's always going to be a tension.
00:45:58.960
You don't want to live in the secular liberal society. You guys are done for in the secular
00:46:04.600
liberal society. But you are going to have challenges in a society that takes religion
00:46:09.840
more seriously because they're going to examine the claims of the various religions. Okay,
00:46:13.040
next question. Hi, Michael. My name is Jessica. I come from a small town down in South Texas,
00:46:19.240
and I was raised heavily in the church, mainly non-denominational and Methodist. My mother
00:46:24.940
is currently working on a doctorate from a Methodist university in theology, so safe to say
00:46:29.840
I was heavily ingrained in biblical teaching. I have been attending a Catholic church for the past
00:46:35.700
year, and I am now considering beginning my catechism. Of course, my Methodist family is pretty
00:46:41.100
against this. So what would your advice be to someone who is battling in the face of opposition
00:46:45.820
from those that she holds most dear? And how do I show respect and devotion to my mother and father
00:46:52.020
while still pursuing my love for God? Any advice would be helpful. Thank you so much.
00:46:57.980
Great question. Wonderful to hear it. I'm so glad you're going to begin catechism.
00:47:03.300
I've had plenty of friends who have dealt with this in my own life, actually. I was a cradle Catholic,
00:47:10.380
kind of cafeteria a little bit growing up, and then cafeteria Catholic meaning, you know,
00:47:14.180
you take this, you do that. Sometimes you go to church, sometimes you don't. But then I was an
00:47:17.860
atheist practically for about 10 years. And when I came back, even some of my own ostensibly Catholic
00:47:24.660
family thought I was crazy. So it's not even just going from the Methodist, Methodism or
00:47:31.280
non-denominational evangelical Protestantism or whatever. It really, even within Catholicism,
00:47:37.260
you might get some strange looks and raised eyebrows. So what do you do? Well, this is where
00:47:42.940
catechism is really great. You keep going to mass, you keep praying. When you have a question,
00:47:47.280
look, your relatives might raise really good questions. Why do Catholics pray to Mary or
00:47:52.880
venerate saints? Or why do they have liturgical feast days? Or why do they take the sacraments
00:47:57.580
so seriously? Or what is transubstantiation or whatever? You know, they might raise good objections.
00:48:01.880
What's great about the Catholic church is there are answers. You know, you're not just on your own.
00:48:07.520
A lot of modern religion is hyper-individualist and relies ultimately on private judgment. And so
00:48:13.720
you have to just kind of come up with your own answers. But with the Catholic church,
00:48:17.780
it balances private judgment with magisterial teaching. So you can say, look, I have my own
00:48:23.560
ideas, but I'm going to go see what St. Jerome and St. Thomas Aquinas and Tertullian and maybe Origen
00:48:29.200
and Hippolytus and all these, Justin Martyr. I'm going to see what all these people said and the
00:48:33.920
popes and these guys and what's endured and what, how has this idea been honed in and St. John Henry
00:48:38.760
Newman and I don't know, development of doctrine. Let's see what they say. And you can actually get
00:48:43.580
an answer and that will help you grow in your faith. That's great. I mean, I think, look, I think
00:48:48.640
you're on the right path, obviously. I'm quite convinced of that. But you could use it as an
00:48:53.240
opportunity to more seriously understand what you believe, what the church believes, and who knows,
00:48:59.280
maybe persuade your family. Next question. Smooth Mickey. Hey, I just want to ask you a question
00:49:07.340
about cloning. Now, obviously there's geneticists thinking about cloning humans, which I totally
00:49:14.840
disagree with. I think it's playing God and it's very messed up. I would love to get your thoughts
00:49:21.040
on that. But on a separate note, what about cloning animals? Animals aren't humans. They don't have
00:49:28.060
rational wills. So is it okay to clone your dog when they pass away and, you know, clone them into
00:49:35.180
a new puppy? Just curious about your thoughts. All right. Thanks, man. Great questions. Okay. So for
00:49:40.840
the first one, why is it wrong to clone humans? Why is that wrong necessarily? Say, well, because we're
00:49:47.380
playing God. But, you know, that argument's a little tricky because we have reason and we do have
00:49:52.400
substantial agency within nature to do things and to make things. So why is it wrong to clone?
00:49:59.560
We make babies the old-fashioned way. Why is it wrong to clone human beings? I think what you have
00:50:04.720
to start to examine is all the things, all the wrong things you have to do before you get to the point
00:50:10.740
of cloning. So for one, you have to divorce the conjugal from the reproductive act. If you're a more
00:50:18.000
traditionally minded Christian, right there, you're committing a mortal sin. Because the only person
00:50:24.240
said to have a right in procreation is the baby to have the right to be the product of the specific
00:50:28.840
conjugal act of his mother and father who are joined together in holy matrimony. So right there,
00:50:33.540
you've got a problem. In order to obtain, I guess it depends on how you do it, but in order to obtain
00:50:38.480
the sperm and the egg, certainly the sperm, you would have to commit a gravely immoral and intrinsically
00:50:45.080
disordered action. That right there is a sin. You would have to then commoditize human life.
00:50:52.720
That would be a sin. You would, and ultimately the reason is you would be empowering scientists and
00:51:01.120
entrepreneurs. You would be giving them the domination through technology and science and
00:51:10.220
commerce over the origin and destiny of human life, which is not their right to do. But usually
00:51:16.440
when things get really wacky, like we're talking about cloning, it's not just that you go from
00:51:21.040
normal, ordinary moral society to this tricky moral question, and then it all goes wrong.
00:51:27.620
There is a path. And the path, this is the, like the phrase, the road to hell is paved with good
00:51:34.280
intentions. The path involves all these little moral compromises. Well, you know, look, it's just,
00:51:42.640
maybe it's a little easier these days not to constantly have kids, breed like rabbits.
00:51:46.980
So maybe we'll, we'll accept some contraception in some cases for married couples. That's what the
00:51:52.460
mainline Protestants did about a hundred years ago. That's what the Supreme Court then permitted
00:51:56.140
more recently, actually in the late sixties, early seventies. And okay, maybe we're going to look,
00:52:02.400
some couples suffer from infertility in part because they've been using contraception too long.
00:52:06.200
But in some cases it's just natural, just happens, fallen world. And so, you know, just to help ease
00:52:10.560
their pain, which is real pain, maybe we're going to allow people to use IVF and surrogates. We're
00:52:15.460
going to need surrogates. We're going to have to, you know, we're going to have to buy eggs and rent
00:52:19.600
the wombs of women. And it's not, it's not, but we're doing so much good, aren't we? You know,
00:52:23.620
the ends justify the means. And eventually you get to human cloning. So how'd we get here? How'd we get
00:52:28.780
here? Because you made a lot of bad decisions along the way that were very tempting. Sin is
00:52:33.660
very tempting. That's how it works. If sin were not tempting, you wouldn't do it. Okay. So then
00:52:39.600
to cloning the animals, is there anything intrinsically wrong with cloning the animals?
00:52:43.500
I'm not a serious, you know, bioethicist or anything like that, but I don't see anything
00:52:49.580
intrinsically wrong with cloning animals. As you point out, they don't have rational souls.
00:52:54.480
They're not, like, I guess you could do it. But I do think there's something wrong with it at a
00:53:01.400
deeper level. The question is, why are you doing it? When you can make animals the old-fashioned way,
00:53:07.640
why would you clone them? And the answer is because you really love your dog and you wish your dog
00:53:12.800
didn't die. So you want to clone your dog to pretend that your dog didn't die. That's really why people
00:53:17.260
want to do it. In the 90s, they were cloning sheep to see if they could, but really what they want to do
00:53:22.320
now is they want to clone their pets because they don't want their pets to die. That seems wrong.
00:53:25.860
And I think it's wrong because it is a way to delude yourself into denying the reality of death
00:53:33.520
and our role as creatures living in time and space where things in this world pass away.
00:53:42.320
That's what's wrong about it. It's really even the reason that animal cruelty is wrong.
00:53:47.700
It's not wrong exactly because animals have rights, you know, akin to natural rights or human rights.
00:53:55.900
It's wrong because it deadens your own humanity. It has a deleterious effect on you who isn't a rational soul.
00:54:03.220
Okay. Today, that's a very good question. Today is Fake Headline Friday. The rest of the show continues now.
00:54:08.480
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