The Michael Knowles Show - July 23, 2026


Ep. 2022 - LIVEļ¼š Brandon Gill DESTROYS Racist Bar Association Head


Episode Stats


Length

45 minutes

Words per minute

180.45

Word count

8,138

Sentence count

554


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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00:01:00.000 This episode is brought to you by Good Ranchers, delivering 100% American beef, chicken, pork,
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00:01:19.400 when you start a plane. GoodRanchers.com, American meat delivered. The author of the
00:01:23.640 most liberal feminist translation of the Odyssey ever weighs in on Christopher Nolan's film,
00:01:30.000 which was apparently too liberal and feminist even for her.
00:01:34.400 Then, speaking of interminable wars in West Asia,
00:01:38.320 a new front opens up in the Iran war as Iran-backed proxies fire on Saudi tankers in the Red Sea.
00:01:43.920 And a clear frontrunner emerges in the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination
00:01:48.920 in that big race coming up.
00:01:51.140 And the polls are absolutely horrifying.
00:01:54.140 I'm Michael Knowles.
00:01:55.080 This is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:02:00.000 welcome back to the show one of the leading democrat uh influencers pundits a real prominent
00:02:23.240 thought leader, Hassan Piker, has just debuted a new image on his set. It is a headline, a
00:02:31.560 newspaper headline, right after 9-11. So this is Hassan Piker doubling down on his previous
00:02:37.460 statement that America deserved 9-11. This is the guy that Democrats turn to, guys like Mamdani,
00:02:42.920 AOC, when they want to campaign, when they want support from the young and activist left.
00:02:48.760 This is one of their leaders, so we'll get to that momentarily.
00:02:52.660 Before I get to any of that, though, I want to turn to a rising star on the American right
00:02:57.220 in Congress.
00:02:58.260 That would be our pal Brandon Gill.
00:03:00.540 They're calling him Brandon Grill for what he's doing to these poor, unsuspecting liberals
00:03:06.120 when they come up to testify on Capitol Hill.
00:03:09.020 Before I bring Brandon on, I got to give the latest hit.
00:03:12.520 This is Brandon absolutely obliterating the head of the American Bar Association.
00:03:19.200 This clip going viral just yesterday.
00:03:22.500 According to the ABA's website, quote, all of us have implicit biases.
00:03:27.520 Would you agree with that statement?
00:03:29.820 The ABA believes that diversity, equity, and inclusion improves the practice.
00:03:35.500 Would you agree with the statement that, quote, all of us have implicit biases from the ABA's website?
00:03:40.400 The ABA believes that diversity in all of us is important.
00:03:44.160 Is that a yes? It's a yes or no question.
00:03:45.620 Do you believe that all of us have implicit biases, as your website says?
00:03:50.280 The ABA looks to remove barriers and we examine.
00:03:53.220 That's not my question, ma'am.
00:03:54.600 Do you believe that all of us have implicit biases?
00:03:57.540 I've expressed what the ABA is doing.
00:04:00.960 That is the ABA's position, as expressed by their website.
00:04:06.240 Against which groups do you have implicit biases?
00:04:09.240 The ABA believes that it's important to always explain.
00:04:12.600 Are you going to filibuster?
00:04:13.640 Because it doesn't make you sound very good.
00:04:15.840 I'm going to ask you again, against which groups do you have implicit biases?
00:04:19.940 It's important to always examine everyone's point of view and where they may need to consider.
00:04:27.760 What about your point of view?
00:04:30.140 I am here as the president of the American Bar Association.
00:04:32.940 And I'm asking you what your implicit biases are.
00:04:35.920 The ABA as an entity.
00:04:37.060 Have you reflected on your implicit biases?
00:04:39.980 I think about how I operate in the world constantly.
00:04:43.600 Would you like to explain to us what they are?
00:04:46.160 I am here speaking on behalf of the ABA and the ABA.
00:04:50.540 Congressman Gill, did you have heartburn yesterday after you devoured the head of the ABA for lunch?
00:04:56.240 it's amazing because this is somebody who's president of the american bar association who's
00:05:05.080 been promoting all this kind of left-wing nonsense for a long time and i mean they're really
00:05:09.860 ideologically connected to this stuff um and she can't even answer a simple question i mean all of
00:05:17.220 this dei nonsense just completely crumbles under even the slightest scrutiny um you know if you're
00:05:24.560 going to say outright that everybody has implicit biases, I think you ought to be able to elaborate
00:05:29.700 in some way on that. But they can't, and that's the result.
00:05:36.560 This is what I love about your approach, is a lot of guys on the right, elected people,
00:05:41.920 people in the media, intellectuals, they'll come in real hot, and they'll just, they'll start,
00:05:47.660 you know, I don't know, they'll get on their soapbox and just start
00:05:50.540 inveighing against the leftist who's being questioned. You're not doing that. You're
00:05:55.880 asking very simple, I think, objective, very moderately stated questions, just asking them
00:06:02.100 to elaborate on the beliefs that they have offered. They volunteered these beliefs.
00:06:07.640 They never do. I mean, this is just the latest example, but you've been doing this for months
00:06:12.380 now. Why can't they answer? Well, I think that the left has, and for the past decade or several
00:06:22.040 decades, they've built up so much institutional power. It's sort of the culmination of the long
00:06:27.860 march through the institutions, where the left has really never had to answer for anything,
00:06:32.960 for this kind of nonsense that they spout, because they've had the ability to just coerce
00:06:39.000 people into believing things that are nonsensical. Everybody can relate to. If you're in college
00:06:45.660 or you're at work and your head of HR comes up to you or the college diversity group comes up to
00:06:52.140 you and makes you sit through some diversity seminar and they tell you, why don't you sit
00:06:56.360 down and reflect on your own inherent racism or your own implicit biases? Because everybody is
00:07:02.240 racist. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that they've put us through and we've never been able
00:07:06.780 to sort of make them answer for it, make them actually kind of explain what they mean by this.
00:07:12.200 Because the obvious follow-up is, if everybody is inherently racist or inherently biased,
00:07:18.380 you know, why doesn't the left tell us who they're racist against or who they're biased against?
00:07:23.260 But I think that the problem is, again, that the left has had so much institutional power
00:07:28.320 that is now finally starting to erode as sort of peak woke is behind us,
00:07:34.720 that they've never actually had to elucidate any of this. They could just say things and coerce
00:07:39.940 people into believing it. And if you pushed back, even in the slightest degree, they would label you
00:07:45.040 as racist or kick you out of college or fire you from your job. And now that that sort of pendulum
00:07:51.740 has swung the other way, it's time for us to hold them to the standards that they set.
00:07:55.920 Yeah, it doesn't take the intellect of Socrates to see how the syllogism is going. If the major
00:08:02.020 premise is everybody is racist. Every person is racist. And then the minor premise is I,
00:08:08.840 the head of the ABA, am a person. The inescapable conclusion is I am racist or I have these biases.
00:08:14.640 So what are they? They don't want to answer them. And I wonder, it pertains to what you just said
00:08:19.160 about peak woke. We all feel like peak woke is behind us. Maybe that was 2022, 2023. The American
00:08:24.960 people really reacted against it. This is why an issue like transing the kids was so prominent in
00:08:31.020 the 2024 election. It's not that it's the most widespread problem in America. It's just so
00:08:36.800 insane. It's so extreme. The left uniformly embraced it that it really sheds doubt on
00:08:42.600 their judgment about anything. So they want to run away. They want to filibuster. This woman
00:08:47.800 doesn't have the integrity. None of these guys that you're grilling have the integrity to say,
00:08:51.360 yeah, I did say that. I did volunteer that. And I stand by that. Likewise, they don't have the
00:08:59.480 the reflection to say, you know what? That was great. Peak woke was crazy. I reject that. We
00:09:05.440 don't want to trans the kids. We don't think everybody's racist. We don't whatever. So they're
00:09:09.800 just obfuscating now. And I wonder if what that implies is, yeah, peak woke at the moment has
00:09:17.260 really declined. It's true. We're in a different spot publicly, but the left hasn't actually given
00:09:23.700 it up. So now they've lost some of their institutional power. The Republicans have
00:09:27.420 unified government. If the midterms go the Democrats way, if 2028 goes the Democrats way,
00:09:33.000 are we going to be right back to where we were in 2023?
00:09:38.180 100%. I mean, it is, I think we like to say that woke is dead. And I do think that we're behind
00:09:43.480 peak woke because the left has a little bit less institutional power, but woke is not dead. It's
00:09:48.100 just dormant. And you can see it at the ABA. You can see it at the Smithsonian Institution. We had
00:09:53.180 a hearing earlier this week about leftism and how it's really infected almost all of
00:09:58.160 the American Museum of American History, a Smithsonian Museum of American History.
00:10:04.420 As soon as they get power back, whether it's in Congress or definitely in the presidency,
00:10:10.460 you're going to see a resurgence of this. You're going to see a resurgence of DEI across the entire
00:10:16.180 country in businesses who want to follow the lead of the president. You're going to see it
00:10:19.540 in universities who believe, who if there's a Democrat president in office or a Democratic
00:10:25.520 Congress, believe that they're going to have a lot more leeway to discriminate against people
00:10:29.920 on the basis of race. Our job right now should be one, to make sure that they don't get that
00:10:35.520 institutional power back, that Republicans continue to win elections, but two, to make
00:10:40.280 sure that we can hammer home as aggressively and thoroughly as possible to the broad American
00:10:47.080 public how evil these ideologies are. I mean, what you saw yesterday, I mean, remember,
00:10:53.220 this is somebody who's the president of the American Bar Association. I've never been to
00:10:57.820 law school. This is somebody who's been practicing law for longer than I've been alive. She ought to
00:11:03.360 have been able to answer very basic questions about her own organization's ideology. And either
00:11:09.680 she is too intellectually vapid or the ideology is completely indefensible. And it's probably a
00:11:16.460 mixture of both, I think, but she was completely unable to do that. We've got to keep pressing on
00:11:21.340 these people, and we've got to show how absolutely indefensible this stuff is so that down the road,
00:11:29.080 if we do ever get into a position where Democrats have a bit more institutional power,
00:11:35.680 it's much more difficult for them to push this stuff on the American people.
00:11:39.300 Yeah, this was not a gotcha question. It's not like you said, hey, head of the ABA,
00:11:43.660 Do you still beat your wife or husband or whatever in this case?
00:11:46.660 You just read from their website.
00:11:49.160 So this is as fair a question as it could be.
00:11:51.700 And yes, they want to obfuscate on it.
00:11:54.280 You bring up 2028.
00:11:55.540 There's a new poll out that shows a clear leader in 2028 for the Democrats.
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00:13:29.300 Okay, Brandon, before I let you go, there's this poll out from University of New Hampshire.
00:13:34.520 and it backs up something that I first heard from the vice president. Vice President Vance was on
00:13:41.500 this show a few weeks ago. I said, hey, before I let you go, who do you think the leader is for
00:13:45.260 the Dems? I thought he was going to say Gavin Newsom or something like that. He said, oh,
00:13:48.280 Michael, there's no question. It's AOC. Had I been drinking a glass of water, I would have done a
00:13:53.960 spit take. I said, what? You really think it's AOC? He said, yeah, there's no question. And made
00:13:58.540 headlines. People didn't know if he was being a little provocative or something. Well, look,
00:14:03.640 the University of New Hampshire poll right now says that AOC is leading the pack
00:14:08.520 with 22% support. AOC's got it. Our sponsor, Kalshi, says that 44% right now, the prediction
00:14:17.880 markets are saying 44% chance AOC announces a presidential run before October 1st, 2027.
00:14:23.760 Behind AOC is Pete Buttigieg. He is relatively, he's actually pretty close to AOC.
00:14:29.880 Then you get to about, what, 10% support or less for Gavin Newsom, Mark Kelly, Bernie Sanders.
00:14:35.820 So AOC, she's only a little ahead of Buttigieg.
00:14:38.140 She's way ahead of guys like Newsom, Kelly, Sanders.
00:14:41.000 Kamala Harris, she's got 5% support.
00:14:44.260 We'll get to the GOP side a little bit later.
00:14:46.820 One, do you agree with the VP?
00:14:49.460 Do you agree with the University of New Hampshire?
00:14:51.960 Is AOC the leading Democrat in 2028?
00:14:57.080 Oh, of course she is.
00:14:58.900 I mean, she's the one who is driving the Democrat messaging narrative.
00:15:02.920 She's the one who is driving the Democratic Party's ideological shift to the left.
00:15:09.020 Remember, I mean, it wasn't that long ago whenever AOC first came onto the political
00:15:13.600 scene.
00:15:13.900 I think she was elected in 2018, if I can remember right.
00:15:17.240 She was the face of the radical left at the time.
00:15:21.120 She was the sign, you know, the institutional Democrats were trying to keep her out as much
00:15:26.100 as possible because she was, even whether she said it or not or admitted it or not,
00:15:30.480 she was the socialist leader in the party.
00:15:34.520 And now you can see that her views are pretty mainstream amongst elected Democrats.
00:15:41.200 You know, we talk a lot about the Democratic Socialists of America.
00:15:45.220 What it really is is just sort of the culmination of political leftism, but she's been the head
00:15:51.800 of it for quite some time now.
00:15:54.240 And I think the Democrat Party realizes that.
00:15:56.800 We'll see how much the donor class on the Democrat side embraces her, whether they embrace her.
00:16:02.700 But she is the leader of the party, without a doubt.
00:16:06.540 She is.
00:16:07.040 I mean, there's no question.
00:16:07.720 We're talking, and we'll get to it a little bit later in the show, but in terms of the thought leaders of the left, the journalists, the pundits, the intellectuals, you know, I'm using that word a little liberally here.
00:16:18.060 But it's no longer the guys writing in the Washington Post.
00:16:22.800 It's no longer the stuffy guys who go on the network news.
00:16:26.600 It's Hassan Piker, and Hassan Piker just put up a sign behind him on his set celebrating 9-11,
00:16:31.460 which is just reiterating claims that he's made for a long time, that America deserves 9-11.
00:16:35.760 You look at the leading politicians, it's no longer even Chuck Schumer.
00:16:39.240 It's no longer Nancy Pelosi.
00:16:40.740 It's AOC.
00:16:42.380 Very, very scary.
00:16:44.280 Hate that very much.
00:16:46.300 Last question before I let you go.
00:16:48.900 What do you think the Republicans need to focus on right now?
00:16:51.340 There are big vulnerabilities.
00:16:52.800 The polls are looking shockingly good for the Republicans in the midterms right now.
00:16:58.700 There was, I think it was an Ipsos poll came out a few days ago, showed Republicans basically running dead even with Democrats, in some cases even a little ahead of them in the midterms.
00:17:06.380 That's insane.
00:17:07.380 Historically speaking, Republicans should get blown out of the water in the midterms.
00:17:11.040 The leader, Mike Johnson, sorry, the speaker, Mike Johnson, said to me during an interview a while ago, he said, I think we're going to keep our majority.
00:17:17.500 We might even grow the majority in the midterms.
00:17:19.000 I said, whatever you're drinking, whatever you're smoking, give me a little bit of that too, please.
00:17:22.620 it sounds great. The polls now are proving him correct. Big vulnerabilities, though. A new front
00:17:27.940 was just opened in the Iran War. The Iran War has obviously dragged on for a very long time.
00:17:32.000 There's still some economic shakiness. They're good indicators, but it's a mixed bag. So what
00:17:37.100 do the Republicans need to focus on from now through the midterms and afterward?
00:17:41.460 Well, first of all, I do think that we've got a real chance to defy history and keep control of
00:17:46.620 the House. And if we do, it will be an historic victory for Republicans and will allow us to do
00:17:53.320 a lot of really good things and continue the great work we've done this Congress for another
00:17:58.760 two years. I think that we've got to exploit the socialist shift on the Democrat side.
00:18:08.180 And there's two ways that we can do that. One is we can point at the Democrats and we can say,
00:18:13.060 these people are communist and communism is evil and communism has created more misery
00:18:18.580 than any ideology ever in American history and in world history. And we can show all the examples
00:18:25.220 and say, we don't want that here. All of that is true. And we should make that case. But I think
00:18:29.980 we also have to make the case to the American people that the Democrat party today, which is
00:18:35.520 totally different than the Democrat party of 30 years ago, the blue dog Democrat party to your
00:18:40.300 point is dead. We've got to make the case that that is the Democrat Party that is selling away
00:18:45.140 Americans' birthright. They're the ones who are flooding our country with illegal aliens,
00:18:49.820 who are flooding our hospital system, flooding our schools, that are making our social system,
00:18:56.340 destroying the economic viability of our social system, that are making our streets less safe.
00:19:03.600 The Democrat Party of today is the one that is spending more money than we're taking in and
00:19:07.900 driving up inflation for working class people. They are the ones who are throwing away the
00:19:13.320 America that we all know and love in order to create what they believe is sort of a left-wing
00:19:19.720 utopia. In other words, they are throwing away our children's birthright. That's the case that
00:19:24.460 I think we need to make to the American people, especially to younger Americans who are living
00:19:29.660 in a country where it is difficult to buy a home, where inflation is still harming,
00:19:35.900 even though it's come down quite a bit, it still does make it a pretty difficult
00:19:40.500 economic situation. I think that we continue to win on immigration and we can continue to win
00:19:46.900 on economic issues as well. I think you're right about that. They're trying, AOC in particular,
00:19:51.980 Mamdani also, they're trying to shift back. They say, wokeness is unpopular. No, no, no. We're just
00:19:56.700 working class. We're working class heroes. To your point, the blue dogs are done and the people
00:20:02.240 still exist, but it's shifted to the Republican Party. The party of labor is the Republican
00:20:07.240 Party right now. And not just in rhetoric, but in really hardcore ways. If you're flooding the
00:20:12.120 country with cheap foreign labor, like the Democrats are doing, you are not for American
00:20:16.920 labor. You are not for the American working class. If you're spending all your time focusing on
00:20:21.820 pushing weird sex ideologies on kids, you are not focused on the American working class. You're just
00:20:26.880 not. And so that was reflected in 2024. It was, frankly, you saw an early stage of it in 2016,
00:20:33.400 but it's been 10 years now. That shift has happened. And if you were an ordinary common
00:20:39.340 sense working class Democrat back in 2015, 2016, you're not a Democrat anymore. It's just a fact.
00:20:45.140 I agree. That's a very tangible argument. Congressman Grill, Congressman Grill him to
00:20:50.460 death on Capitol Hill. I have to let you get back to your very important work, but thank you.
00:20:54.780 Always good to see you, and thanks for coming on.
00:20:57.540 Thanks for having me.
00:20:59.060 All right.
00:20:59.400 Now, on this point, I want to get to the odyssey in a moment, but I do want to finish up on this presidential point because while we have a clear frontrunner in the Democrat Party, I know there's a lot of consternation on the right.
00:21:11.500 Who is the Republican nominee going to be?
00:21:13.660 It's mostly among the chattering class.
00:21:15.380 Well, we have the numbers here from the University of New Hampshire.
00:21:17.600 We'll get to that momentarily.
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00:22:22.760 subscription order, A-R-M-R-A.com slash Knowles. That same UNH poll that puts AOC at the top of
00:22:30.180 the heap for Dems, they are looking at the Republican side. Right now, not surprising to
00:22:36.620 me, probably not surprising to most of you, but maybe surprising to some political activists or
00:22:41.340 people on Twitter or something. The vice president, J.D. Vance, is leading the pack. He's got 36%
00:22:46.040 support. He's followed by Rubio, but Rubio's 10 points down. Rubio's at 26% support. Then all of
00:22:54.300 the other GOP candidates had less than 10%. So that was led by Rand Paul, who was on the show
00:22:59.740 just a few days ago, who I pointed out. He's got a real lane. He's got that libertarian lane.
00:23:04.300 But Rand Paul's got 8%. The rest of the pack has less than that. So it's pretty clear. There's not,
00:23:10.820 there's a long way till 2028, but it is clear that the vice president is the heir apparent.
00:23:15.520 that was implicit when the president picked him
00:23:17.720 for his non-consecutive second term
00:23:19.060 to be his running mate.
00:23:20.860 Rubio, no surprise there, is the number two candidate,
00:23:23.520 but he is substantially lower in terms of support.
00:23:26.140 Even as Rubio's dominated all the headlines,
00:23:28.520 it's no knock on Rubio, he's doing a great job.
00:23:30.580 It's just, that's the way it's set up.
00:23:32.480 This is how administrations and elections work.
00:23:35.920 And Rubio, for his part,
00:23:36.880 has already endorsed the vice president.
00:23:38.200 So I think people are trying to put those two guys at odds.
00:23:41.520 They're really not at odds.
00:23:43.240 From what I can tell from the outside,
00:23:45.020 at a personal level and at a political level, they're really not at odds. So you've got a very
00:23:50.280 stable GOP primary field right now. And for the Dems, it's closer, but the two leading candidates,
00:23:59.100 AOC and Pete Buttigieg. AOC, who is openly the face of radicalism, and Pete Buttigieg,
00:24:06.300 who is the kind of nicer, softer, quieter face of extreme radical ideologies, as we saw when he ran
00:24:12.940 as we see just in his own life. Okay. Now, before we get to more hot political issues,
00:24:18.860 before we get to the Iran war, I want to get to a much older war that is the Trojan War,
00:24:23.180 because everyone's still chattering about Christopher Nolan's new Odyssey film.
00:24:28.980 Ben Shapiro, my friend and colleague Ben calls it a masterpiece. Matt Walsh, my other friend and
00:24:35.560 colleague over here at DW, he says it's like the worst movie ever made and irredeemably woke and
00:24:41.160 just totally sucks. My own opinion is somewhere in the middle of those guys combines a little,
00:24:46.700 I don't think it's a masterpiece. It's not a masterpiece. It's like a pretty good movie,
00:24:49.840 but I don't think it's the worst movie ever. But you don't need to just take our words for it.
00:24:54.700 We now have the translator, the liberal feminist translator of the Odyssey, Emily Wilson.
00:25:02.700 She has rendered the most liberal feminist translation of the Odyssey ever,
00:25:06.620 kind of famously or infamously.
00:25:09.140 That was one of the real source texts
00:25:10.700 for Christopher Nolan's film.
00:25:12.240 She sees the movie
00:25:13.320 and she concluded
00:25:15.780 that the movie is too liberal and feminist
00:25:18.840 even for her.
00:25:21.820 I mean, the film has these flashbacks
00:25:23.900 to the Trojan War.
00:25:25.440 I'm not sure if I see it
00:25:26.740 as an entirely anti-war film,
00:25:28.420 but it certainly presents us
00:25:30.080 with an Odysseus who feels very bad
00:25:32.100 about certain things that he's done in war
00:25:34.740 and is struggling to process them in a very, I would say, very modern, psychiatrised way.
00:25:42.740 He seems to feel bad about being a warrior, and we never actually get to see him doing much warrior-ing,
00:25:48.200 which I thought, in a way, was a bit of a shame.
00:25:50.140 I mean, we do get to see the boat, which is lovely, but I think in some ways,
00:25:54.100 I mean, I was realising, thinking about the film,
00:25:58.880 there's a tolerance for ambiguity in the world of The Odyssey,
00:26:01.420 which I don't think there exactly is in the world of Hollywood blockbuster.
00:26:05.820 He wants glory, and he wants to get spoils from the sack of a city,
00:26:09.980 which you'll see what no one does with all of that,
00:26:12.920 but it's different things from what Homer does.
00:26:15.300 I kept looking in vain for a sense that this was a film about glory.
00:26:20.920 I think it's a film that has some interest in shame,
00:26:23.540 but I don't think it has any interest in glory.
00:26:25.260 i didn't expect to say this but i i totally agree with the translator's critique there are lots of
00:26:33.600 good look i'm i think the movie was pretty good i would go see it again i kind of wish i'd seen it
00:26:38.480 in imax but the the biggest critique there's a lot of good stuff to say about it the fact that
00:26:45.260 people are buying the odyssey now it's it's one of the top books on amazon and the fagel's
00:26:49.860 translation is very good the latimore translation is very good there are a lot of very good
00:26:52.360 translations. Who knows? Maybe you can read Emily Wilson's. I haven't read the whole translation
00:26:55.980 from what I've read of it. I don't like it as much. But nevertheless, she's spot on here
00:27:00.520 because the chief critique of the Odyssey, the best critique of the Odyssey,
00:27:04.980 is not the wokeness or the casting. It's that it's not the Odyssey. It's a Christopher Nolan
00:27:11.300 film, but it's not the Odyssey. It has more in common with Oppenheimer than it does with Homer's
00:27:19.320 poem, The Odyssey. And you see this expressed because Odysseus doesn't really seem to want
00:27:25.380 glory. He doesn't really seem to love being a warrior. He doesn't want the same things. He
00:27:29.720 doesn't have the same motivations that he does in the poem. And so why is that? Well, something that
00:27:35.680 I really got a kick out of or really clued me in to what Nolan is doing in The Odyssey is that he
00:27:42.460 is reading the Odyssey through Western, Latin, and later even medieval Christian readings of
00:27:50.240 the Odyssey. That's a part that Ben gets right in his review, is that it is the Odyssey seen
00:27:55.160 through a Christian lens. The inclusion of the character Sinon, who kind of takes the place of
00:28:01.120 Achilles in the Hades scene, Sinon played by the trans-identifying lady Ellen Page. The fact that
00:28:08.260 that Nolan includes Sinon means that he's reading the poem or the story through Virgil and through
00:28:14.520 Dante. Because Sinon doesn't appear in Homer's Odyssey. But Sinon is a character that comes out
00:28:18.860 of Virgil's Aeneid. And actually, probably the version of the Odyssey of Odysseus' character
00:28:25.680 that Nolan is most clearly reading is through one of my main guys, Dante. Because in Dante's
00:28:31.920 Divine Comedy in the Inferno, he puts Odysseus and Sinon in hell. And he actually puts them in
00:28:39.720 the lowest circles of hell, in the realm, the Malebolge, in the bulges where the fraudsters
00:28:47.140 are, the counselors of fraud. Because this is who Odysseus is. He's this genius rhetorician.
00:28:53.720 A buddy of mine just pointed out, he's sort of like ancient James Bond. He'll be tough when he
00:28:58.420 has to. He'll shoot and punch when he has to, but he really uses his words. He uses his charm. He
00:29:03.100 uses his deceit and cunning in order to get out of scrapes. And so Ben's point is right that Nolan
00:29:11.420 is reading the Odyssey through a Christian lens. It's so on the nose. I mean, he talks about the
00:29:15.420 golden rule, treat others as you would like to be treated. The real culmination of that movie
00:29:20.400 is when Odysseus is confessing his sins to another person through a screen. It's like an actual
00:29:26.080 Catholic confession scene there. But the issue is when Dante reads Odysseus through a Christian
00:29:32.560 lens, it means that he's got to put Odysseus in hell because Odysseus is a fraudster. Odysseus
00:29:39.080 is a liar. And Odysseus has so much ambition, so much desire for glory, and so much pride,
00:29:44.960 and so much curiosity that he transgresses God's limits. And he ends up, Nolan uses this in the
00:29:53.380 movie. Odysseus finally makes it back to Ithaca, but then he leaves again very shortly thereafter.
00:29:58.080 And so you see this in Dante. He gets back to Ithaca. He doesn't stay there very long. He goes
00:30:01.540 after because he's got to transgress the limits and he goes too far and he winds himself up in
00:30:05.600 hell. The problem for Nolan though is Nolan wants to have his cake and eat it too. Nolan wants
00:30:11.260 both worlds. He wants Odysseus to be the hero, the good guy. He wants to combine all of those
00:30:17.300 elements from Homer, but he wants to read it through the Christian lens like Dante, but he
00:30:21.700 doesn't want to put Odysseus in hell. And so what you wind up with is not exactly a Christian
00:30:27.900 morality. You wind up with this kind of liberal boomer morality. You wind up with this liberal
00:30:34.540 boomer morality that Emily Wilson, the translator, is getting at here. It's unclear what he wants.
00:30:39.540 In other parts of that interview, she says he kind of wants to be like, does he just want to
00:30:43.360 be like a suburban dad? That's not in the poem, but does he really want to go home? That's unclear
00:30:48.440 in Nolan's movie too, when he's with the sirens, he says, I realized I don't want to go home,
00:30:52.080 but he does want to go home. And then he does take off at the end, but he doesn't go off on
00:30:55.440 a quest for curiosity and glory. He goes off on the end to basically just go on a vacation with
00:31:00.940 his wife. So you end up with this confused boomer morality where at the end of it, your protagonist
00:31:05.540 just feels kind of bad and then cheers up when he takes his wife on a cruise. I mean, it is a movie
00:31:12.260 for our times. I'm not even knocking the movie. As a movie, I thought it was pretty good. I enjoy
00:31:17.800 it. I'm glad it's sparking curiosity in the Odyssey. But it really does highlight the
00:31:23.420 incoherence, the confusion of the lib boomer morality, which comes out of Christianity,
00:31:30.040 but which doesn't have the boldness or the clarity or the courage of Christianity. And so you just
00:31:34.440 end up with blah. And that way, Nolan's a really great filmmaker because he really is, not only is
00:31:39.760 he making a modern American adaptation of the Odyssey, it's a kind of indictment of modern
00:31:45.340 liberal America. Okay. Now, speaking of all sorts of wars and things like that,
00:31:52.760 I do want to get to the modern war that we have in West Asia, which is a huge development in the
00:31:59.840 Iran war, which I don't see a ton of people covering, but a new front was just opened up
00:32:05.000 in the Iran war, just as we were hoping that the Iran war would, I don't know, wrap up. We were
00:32:10.100 hoping that MOU might lead to a peace deal, or at the very least, we were hoping that some major
00:32:14.620 military strike would just wrap the whole thing up. It's not. It's actually expanding now beyond
00:32:19.260 the flashpoint of the Strait of Hormuz into another strait. It's now expanding into the
00:32:25.080 Strait of Bab el-Mandeb, which is in the Red Sea. So you've got the oil that's getting choked off
00:32:32.760 in the Strait of Hormuz. One of the alternative routes is through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.
00:32:39.260 Well, Iranian-backed Houthis are now firing on Saudi vessels in that strait.
00:32:45.820 This is according to reporting from The Telegraph.
00:32:49.660 The sources told The Telegraph last week that the Houthis were trying to shut down the strait,
00:32:55.220 which is this choke point between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean on behalf of Iran.
00:32:59.820 All of this saying, how long did the Trojan War last?
00:33:02.800 Trojan War lasted about 10 years.
00:33:06.040 And it begins, as we keep quoting Machiavelli,
00:33:09.180 it begins at the will of one man,
00:33:10.940 but wars don't end at the will of any particular man.
00:33:14.140 There really does not appear to be any end in sight for this.
00:33:16.700 There's no clear path.
00:33:18.560 The people who are pushing for diplomacy
00:33:21.060 are coming up short
00:33:22.460 because the Iranians don't want diplomacy
00:33:23.980 because they feel like they still have
00:33:25.900 a ton of leverage over us.
00:33:27.160 And the people who were attacking the MOU
00:33:30.240 and trying to pretend that this war
00:33:33.840 could be wrapped up easily with a few more bombs. I don't see any evidence of that either. This is
00:33:38.360 why I was very skeptical of the war before and at the launch of the war, and it remains so now.
00:33:44.640 It's a brutal position that the administration is in, but it is the chief vulnerability,
00:33:50.220 I think, right now for the Republicans in the midterms all the way up to President Trump's
00:33:53.780 legacy. In the short run, what it means is we need to minimize the importance. We need to try
00:33:58.500 to keep the oil markets. Got a little spiked with this issue in the Red Sea. I think oil right now,
00:34:03.400 oil is about $91 as of this morning. But, you know, this could really jump up. This could be
00:34:10.520 a big issue. We have months between now and the midterms. Republicans are looking good right now,
00:34:14.000 but I don't know that that could hold. Iran does, in fact, have some leverage here.
00:34:19.840 America's enemies abroad, Russia, China, other people who are involved, they do have a lot of
00:34:25.360 leverage here. And so I think the best thing the administration can hope for from the standpoint
00:34:28.720 of American grand strategy and the elections, which are inseparable, is just to keep the issue
00:34:34.320 itself at bay. But anyone who's hoping for a quick resolution to the conflict, I got a bridge in the
00:34:39.800 Strait of Hormuz to sell you. Okay. Now, speaking of Islamic terror, the thought leader of the left,
00:34:46.440 one of the most prominent, it's hard to call him an intellectual, but he's a guy who's shaping
00:34:51.640 left-wing thought, who's campaigning for Democrat candidates, who's shaping their rhetoric, and he's
00:34:56.220 one of the biggest broadcasters, Hassan Piker. He is now doubling down on his support of 9-11,
00:35:02.740 his belief that America deserves 9-11. We'll get to that momentarily first, though.
00:35:05.860 The producer's favorite comment yesterday, I didn't pick this one. We'll see if they did a
00:35:11.060 good job. This is from Steven. I don't even know. Did he comment on YouTube? Did he comment on
00:35:15.440 Spotify? Maybe you need to leave your comments on both. He said, my wife and I saw the Odyssey
00:35:18.540 over the weekend, and when Odysseus talked to Sinon in Hades, she said, she must really be a
00:35:23.300 woman, she keeps bringing up the past. That's, yeah, that would be one. The Sinon scene in Hades,
00:35:30.740 he's really taking the place of Achilles when Achilles is talking to Odysseus in Hades,
00:35:36.000 and Odysseus is trying to console him about his death. And Achilles says, don't console,
00:35:41.060 there's no consolation in death. Death just kind of sucks. A really important observation of the
00:35:46.600 ancient Greek cosmos, different, obviously, in the Christian understanding. But there,
00:35:52.040 that would be a big break because Achilles is all a man and Sinon in Christopher Nolan's movie is
00:35:58.140 you're definitely a woman that's good evidence of that okay uh we'll get to Hassan Piker first
00:36:02.440 though I want to remind you to join Georgia Howe and John Bickley's debate over the Odyssey
00:36:08.360 which is going to be available very shortly on Behind the Wire
00:36:12.800 oh please get it two hours later let's just say my enthusiasm has waned
00:36:21.720 i don't like being the negative one i've got a lot of comments on christopher nolan
00:36:28.100 being the screenwriter i think he should not have written this i loved it i loved it i loved it
00:36:34.180 i'm actually very surprised how i feel about this movie we'll talk about it soon
00:36:42.800 why am i promoting ben davies's show on this show what are we doing
00:36:53.960 i hope he's buying ad space okay go check it out right now behind the wire we have behind
00:36:58.840 the odyssey uh back to hassan piker the intellectual as it were thought leader of
00:37:06.700 the left is now doubling down on his support of 9-11. Also, you might have noticed something,
00:37:14.340 some changes behind me. I finally framed the Cutie Cinderella newspaper from 9-11 the morning
00:37:23.120 of 9-12, the newspaper right there, the newspaper that covered 9-11. It's now officially sitting
00:37:32.680 behind me and i moved the north korean uh poster up uh in in place of the fan art we're going to
00:37:43.620 find a new place to put all the fan art don't you worry okay but in any case ladies and gentlemen
00:37:51.320 boys girls and mbs that's a psa 10 by the way that 9 11 poster or not the the 9 11 news article
00:37:58.860 is a PSA 10.
00:38:03.400 All right, so he's leaning in.
00:38:04.960 Hazan Piker infamously said,
00:38:06.320 America deserves 9-11.
00:38:07.620 F it, I'll just say it.
00:38:08.460 America deserves 9-11.
00:38:10.380 He said he's moving the North Korea poster
00:38:12.620 to his fan art.
00:38:13.680 And then he really lets it slip
00:38:15.920 when he says,
00:38:17.420 yeah, I've got that 9-11 poster behind me.
00:38:19.400 I guess it's not a poster,
00:38:20.320 it's a newspaper headline.
00:38:21.060 But he's viewing it like a poster.
00:38:22.160 He's viewing it as something really great
00:38:23.640 that he wants to celebrate,
00:38:25.080 which he's already said before.
00:38:26.040 this guy i'm not overstating it when i said he he's one of the thought leaders of the left
00:38:33.320 this is not just me taking a kind of cheap shot trying to wish cast some radical into prominence
00:38:38.860 in the dems they have done that themselves hassan piker is a regular um subject of and
00:38:47.160 contributor to the new york times which is the most prestigious house organ of american liberalism
00:38:54.540 Hassan Piker has written twice for the New York Times.
00:38:58.220 He's been profiled twice for the New York Times.
00:39:01.360 He has been featured in an additional op-ed by the New York Times.
00:39:04.540 Regularly, they feature this guy in his own words or in an interview
00:39:09.560 as someone who's really shaping left-wing thought, more so maybe than anybody.
00:39:16.420 And the guy who's leading left-wing discourse right now,
00:39:20.300 who campaigns with guys like Momdani and AOC and all the rest of them,
00:39:23.660 says America deserved 9-11.
00:39:26.700 He openly hates the country.
00:39:29.060 You kind of got to give him credit for honesty
00:39:30.760 because I think a lot of the left
00:39:32.800 hates the country,
00:39:33.680 but they're subtle about it.
00:39:34.880 When Barack Obama says,
00:39:35.940 I want to fundamentally transform America,
00:39:37.520 he's saying I hate the country,
00:39:38.480 but he's being subtle about it.
00:39:39.980 Hassan Piker's not being subtle.
00:39:40.980 He says, I hate America.
00:39:42.340 America deserved 9-11.
00:39:43.920 We need to kill Republicans,
00:39:45.340 including Republicans in the Senate.
00:39:47.500 And by the way, did you hear me?
00:39:49.260 I said, America deserves 9-11.
00:39:50.620 I just put a poster of 9-11 behind me.
00:39:53.660 That's the left you're dealing with.
00:39:55.440 And if AOC really is the Democrat nominee in 2020,
00:39:59.840 she's currently leading,
00:40:00.940 that will be the apotheosis of this ascent
00:40:05.700 of explicitly anti-American liberalism.
00:40:09.560 The American left has always kind of been anti-America.
00:40:12.020 That's just how it goes.
00:40:13.060 The left is always kind of anti-your-own-country
00:40:15.460 and anti-the-good, the-true, and the-beautiful.
00:40:18.000 But this is explicit.
00:40:19.840 So this is a change.
00:40:20.680 and no one is pushing back.
00:40:24.440 The one pushback you would expect
00:40:27.580 would be from the mainstream establishment Democrats
00:40:29.860 who realize, even if they agree with him,
00:40:31.200 they realize it's a bad look.
00:40:32.660 They're not pushing back.
00:40:34.220 The New York Times is featuring him.
00:40:35.540 Okay, speaking of unspeakable actions by the left,
00:40:39.680 Governor Tim Walz,
00:40:41.440 the man who was almost vice president of the United States,
00:40:44.240 almost one heartbeat away from the presidency.
00:40:47.060 Tim Walz is in hot water for pardoning a child rapist.
00:40:50.680 And sorry, I should be more specific. Tim Walls, the man who Democrats picked to be their vice
00:40:55.940 presidential nominee like five seconds ago, just pardoned an illegal alien child rapist
00:41:01.380 in order to stop the Trump administration from deporting him.
00:41:06.100 So who is this guy? This guy is Tu Lu Vong. He's a Laotian. He's ethnically from Laos. He was born
00:41:14.360 in a refugee camp in Thailand. He made it to America, and then he raped a child in really
00:41:20.540 I guess always would be really, really hideous. But the particulars of this case are especially
00:41:28.900 extreme. It's a family show. I'm not going to get into them. Suffice it to say, this is like the
00:41:33.260 worst thing you can do. Just about, he did it to a 10-year-old child. He then defended it when he
00:41:38.260 was brought in by police. He said, oh no, it's just my culture. In my culture, we rape children.
00:41:43.300 So it's just my culture. He didn't express remorse when he was brought in by police.
00:41:46.260 this raises a question. If a culture condones child rape, probably we shouldn't bring people
00:41:53.420 from that culture over here. Nevertheless, he was convicted and then released almost immediately.
00:42:00.280 So this was all the way back in 2006. He got a slap on the wrist for raping a 10-year-old,
00:42:07.220 and then he's just been living his life here. Now, the thing is, even if he had legal status
00:42:12.140 when he first came to America,
00:42:14.040 when you're convicted of a crime like this,
00:42:16.340 you lose your legal status.
00:42:17.620 So he could have been deported whenever.
00:42:19.500 The Dems didn't want to deport him.
00:42:21.320 Trump has moved to deport him,
00:42:23.480 which is why Tim Walz in Minnesota just pardoned him.
00:42:27.840 It's not to get him out of jail.
00:42:28.960 He's out of jail.
00:42:29.460 He's out of prison.
00:42:30.640 They pardoned him specifically
00:42:32.460 because Tim Walz and the Democrats in Minnesota,
00:42:36.940 probably nationally,
00:42:38.260 actually we know this nationally
00:42:39.400 because they're doing similar things around the country.
00:42:41.520 They are willing to spend political capital to keep a child rapist from being deported.
00:42:51.320 He should be deported.
00:42:52.800 The law says he should be deported.
00:42:54.140 He should have been deported long ago.
00:42:55.780 They're willing to spend real political capital to do this, and they're being applauded for it by their own side.
00:43:00.520 The Minnesota Star Tribune says the governor refused to back down from his vote to pardon a Hmong man convicted of felony sexual assault in 2006.
00:43:10.280 It's significant that Tu Luvang needed only two of three votes for the State Board of Pardons,
00:43:14.960 but he received unanimous support. The Liberal Board of Pardons in Minnesota gave him unanimous
00:43:19.040 support. Of course he needs to stay. So this is not based on his behavior in prison as parole
00:43:26.780 can sometimes be. He's been out of prison for a long time. He was barely in prison.
00:43:31.080 No, he got the unanimous support because the Democrats say, we can't deport anyone.
00:43:36.700 The Dems are going to want to say that they oppose the deportation of the nice abuela who's lived here for 30 years, who's never harmed a fly.
00:43:43.500 They oppose the deportation of these people who are the dreamers who were brought here as children, who are just, they just want to be Americans and they don't want to commit any crimes.
00:43:52.240 No, no, no, no, no.
00:43:53.700 No, no, no.
00:43:55.620 The Democrats specifically oppose the deportation of the most heinous criminals in the country who have no right to be in the country.
00:44:05.780 It's blanket.
00:44:06.760 This is blanket open borders with special care given to the very worst of the criminals.
00:44:13.200 Okay, speaking of criminals, I really want to get into the arrests of Andrew and Tristan Tate.
00:44:19.240 Their lawyer has just come out and blamed their arrest on political deep state actors in the UK, even elected officials.
00:44:29.360 He's trying to tie the arrest to the ousted labor prime minister of the UK.
00:44:34.900 I really want to get to that.
00:44:35.880 Some claims of hypocrisy and the arrests of the Tates.
00:44:38.880 I really want to get to an important story,
00:44:41.660 which is relating to Gen Z going back to church
00:44:45.160 and the church's support of conservative politicians
00:44:48.140 like Trump.
00:44:48.840 I want to get to all of it, but I don't have time.
00:44:51.260 Today is Theology Thursday.
00:44:52.360 We will talk about the church,
00:44:53.480 but we will talk about the church
00:44:54.800 with apologist Frank Turek.
00:44:56.660 The show continues now.
00:44:58.560 You do not want to miss it.
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