The Michael Knowles Show - August 17, 2026


Ep. 2039 - Horrifying Organ Harvest Story Goes Viral


Episode Stats


Length

46 minutes

Words per minute

185.35

Word count

8,622

Sentence count

601


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 This episode is brought to you by Cardiff, America's favorite small business lender,
00:00:03.240 with over $12 billion funded since 2004, applying under three minutes for same-day funding,
00:00:07.300 up to $500,000 at cardiff.co slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. A new poll out of Michigan has
00:00:14.740 conservatives blaming immigrants and college-educated white women for all of our country's
00:00:20.040 problems. And I'm like the girl in the meme. I say, why not both? Why not both? There's enough
00:00:24.280 blame to go around. But in fairness, one of those groups actually is more responsible than the
00:00:29.680 other, we will examine the underlying psychological issues. Then some happy statistics. Vice President
00:00:35.980 J.D. Vance currently leads not just the Republican field, but all the Democrats in the 2028
00:00:42.220 presidential prediction markets. That's the real key here. We'll see how the right wing primary
00:00:46.820 shakes out, but we want to make sure that the Republican beats the Democrats. Strangely,
00:00:52.040 though, some right wing activists are angrier than ever because of it. Finally, turning back
00:00:56.080 to Unpleasant News, an Australian woman has become the first person to have her organs
00:01:00.860 harvested after committing suicide. Welcome to the ethics of our brave new world. I'm Michael
00:01:06.620 Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:01:26.080 Welcome back to the show. Luigi Mangione has just pled guilty to one of the charges that he faces
00:01:33.040 after the killing of the healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, in cold blood.
00:01:38.280 Meanwhile, his supporters are still defending him, and his supporters tend to be the aforementioned
00:01:43.180 liberal white women. Where are the white women at? They are outside of the courtroom defending
00:01:47.500 a murderer. We will explain why. First, though, I want to focus on the ladies in the Michigan
00:01:53.120 Senate primary. This is a really, really worrisome set of numbers that's just come out.
00:01:58.940 So how's the race stand right now? You've got the Democrat, Abdul El-Sayed, who is the woke
00:02:04.920 DSA socialist candidate who alternately plays jihadi and gay. He's trying to appeal to both
00:02:12.280 sections of the Democrat Party. You have the lavender section and you have the green flag
00:02:17.200 crescent moon section. And the good news is, a new poll just came out from Fox News,
00:02:23.120 among registered voters, the Republican Mike Rogers is leading.
00:02:27.700 So this is the gamble right now for the Democrats. If they nominate the radical DSA candidates,
00:02:34.780 who frankly are not really any more radical than the mainstream Democrats, because the whole
00:02:39.420 Democrat Party has given way to radicalism and has really embraced the Democrat socialists.
00:02:44.520 But if they nominate the radical candidate, then it should make it easier for the Republicans to
00:02:50.360 win in the general election. But this is a midterm election with all the headwinds going
00:02:54.340 against Republicans. So the Democrats are taking this gamble. They're saying, what if we nominate
00:02:58.140 the radical candidate and already we're likely to win? It's just how the year is set up. So if we
00:03:04.300 win with the really radical candidates, then we're going to get even more of what we want.
00:03:07.960 And the way it's playing out right now among registered voters, they're going to lose that
00:03:12.000 that. Among registered voters, the Republicans are more attractive than the radical Democrats.
00:03:18.560 Here's the rub. If you change your lens from registered voters to likely voters,
00:03:25.740 or you dial it up in further to certain to vote, the people who are just dead set on voting for
00:03:32.540 their guy in November, the Republican loses. In fact, the numbers precisely flip. Right now,
00:03:37.400 among registered voters, it's 51 for the Republican, 47 for the Democrat. Among certain
00:03:42.180 to vote, it's 51 for the Democrat, 47 for the Republican. So who is voting for Abdul El-Sayed,
00:03:48.700 who is a deeply unattractive candidate? Well, if you look among white voters,
00:03:54.000 Mike Rogers is way, way up. The Republican's up by 14 points, 56 to 42.
00:03:58.960 If you look among non-white voters, and non-white voters in Michigan largely means immigrants,
00:04:04.700 then you've got Abdul El-Sayed way, way, way, way up. The non-white voters vote much more in
00:04:11.720 lockstep with their racial and ethnic identity than the white voters do. White voters have
00:04:15.340 basically no racial identity. This has been borne out in surveys for many years at this point.
00:04:20.300 Every other race has very high degrees of racial identity. White people have basically none,
00:04:25.800 which is why it's so funny that we constantly hear about white supremacy,
00:04:29.260 white identitarianism, white nationalism. That doesn't exist. Just statistically in America,
00:04:34.180 that does not exist. Black nationalism, Hispanic nationalism, Asian nationalism, all of that
00:04:40.560 exists to much, much higher degrees. So among non-white voters, Abdul El-Sayed's up 42 points,
00:04:45.860 70 to 28. If you look at men, men, very reasonable, the Republican runs away with it, 55 to 44.
00:04:54.140 If you look at women, women are voting for Abdul El-Sayed, but only by a little bit.
00:04:59.820 He's only up one point among women generally, but don't forget that includes married women,
00:05:03.720 that includes all the normal women. Then you get to the white women with the college degree.
00:05:10.180 Then you get to the awfuls, they call them, the affluent white female liberals. The awfuls
00:05:16.980 are giving it to the Democrat Abdul El-Sayed by 23 points, 60 to 37. So who do we blame?
00:05:24.280 Do we blame the non-white voters, which in Michigan largely means immigrants,
00:05:27.980 or do we blame the women? Why not both? Why not both? We could blame both of them.
00:05:32.000 this explains these poll numbers explain why abdul al-sayed right now is leaning gay you
00:05:38.540 remember he posted that that campaign ad this is from his account where it's him singing you know
00:05:43.540 oh i want to dance with somebody and it looks like this really gay high school musical well
00:05:47.920 a lot of people were scratching their heads why is he playing this way he's playing this way because
00:05:51.880 his chief base is affluent white liberals specifically white liberal women so he's going
00:05:59.680 of play up to their sort of flamboyant gay preferences. He needs to win the non-white
00:06:07.860 immigrants. He needs to win 80% of Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan. But he'll get those.
00:06:13.360 The non-white voters are voting overwhelmingly for him. They're voting as a bloc.
00:06:18.420 So the chief reason that we have, the most immediate reason as to why we have all of these
00:06:24.040 radical, leftist, socialist, overwhelmingly racial identitarian, increasingly Muslim sort of
00:06:31.040 candidates rising up throughout the country is because of mass migration. That's full stop.
00:06:36.120 If we didn't have mass migration, we would have a lot of normal politicians, relatively normal
00:06:41.020 politicians. But I assign more blame here to the liberal white women with the college degrees.
00:06:46.360 And I assign more blame because when you look at the non-white voters, by which we mean Muslims
00:06:51.000 in Michigan. They're just voting in a very rational way. If you import a bunch of people
00:06:55.300 who don't assimilate, who come from a radically different culture with a different religion and
00:06:59.140 a different language and different customs, and you tell them not to assimilate, guess what?
00:07:04.540 They're going to vote in the way that benefits their faction, their unassimilated faction.
00:07:11.040 So what they're doing is not destructive for their own political community.
00:07:16.420 The voters in Dearborn, Michigan don't view themselves as Americans.
00:07:19.880 The voters in Dearborn, Michigan, don't aspire to throw away their old foreign customs and become
00:07:26.360 as American as apple pie, as you saw with a lot of immigrants in the early 20th century when there
00:07:30.400 was a very, very serious push for assimilation. They're not doing that. They're voting for the
00:07:34.000 good of their own political communities. They just don't identify with the political community
00:07:36.980 of the United States. With the white liberal women with the college degrees, their voting
00:07:41.800 habits are purely destructive. They are voting for people who want to ruin their country.
00:07:47.320 They are voting for people who campaign with Hassan Piker who says that America deserved 9-11.
00:07:52.460 They're voting for people who say they want to make America weaker.
00:07:55.140 They're voting for people who want to bring in foreign customs and destroy the customs of the United States.
00:07:59.700 The white liberal women with the college degrees are really proving the idiom true that all of leftism just comes down to screw you, dad.
00:08:08.160 That's what's going on here.
00:08:10.060 By the numbers, the immigrant problem is worse.
00:08:12.500 but by the absurdity, by the perversity, by the pure destructiveness of it,
00:08:18.980 it is the white women with the college degree. They will bear the responsibility if Abdul
00:08:26.160 al-Said wins, and right now it's anyone's race. Turning to the presidential election,
00:08:29.980 we do have a little bit of good news. Our sponsor, Kalshi, has just come out looking at not just the
00:08:35.040 Republican field for 2028 or the Democrat field for 2028, but the whole race. And right now,
00:08:40.080 J.D. Vance leads the whole pack. J.D. Vance has 20% odds on Calci of winning the whole thing
00:08:46.800 outright, followed by Marco Rubio, who's at 16%, followed by Gavin Newsom at 11%, followed by AOC
00:08:53.020 at 9.6%. This is really, really good news. One, it's because you've got two Republicans leading
00:09:01.200 the two top Democrats. So whether it were J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio, that person would win
00:09:07.580 according to the prediction markets, which are different from polls, but in some ways,
00:09:11.480 they're more reliable than the polls. And when you look at the candidates overall,
00:09:15.900 it's Vance. Now, this backs up what we saw. I think it was a Marquette poll that came out
00:09:19.000 a couple of weeks ago, which showed that J.D. Vance is the most popular figure in the Trump
00:09:24.620 administration. Trump's approval among Republican voters is about 76%. So it's lower than guys like
00:09:33.560 J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, or Pete Hegseth. Now, I think you got to grade Trump here on a curve
00:09:36.960 because Trump is the chief. He's the guy. The buck stops with him. So he's taking most of the
00:09:41.180 attacks, most of the slings and arrows coming his way. No surprise that he's been dinged a little
00:09:46.720 bit among Republican voters. Hegseth doing very well. Rubio doing even better. But J.D. Vance
00:09:52.860 leading the pack. And this is a little surprising because J.D. has taken a lot of hits, at least in
00:09:56.680 the political media, at least among the activist set. He's taken way more hits than Marco Rubio
00:10:01.060 has, for instance. Marco Rubio has had months of just constantly positive press, and yet J.D. Vance
00:10:08.220 still has a higher approval rating among Republicans than Rubio does. Rubio's very high, too. Rubio's
00:10:13.120 doing a great job. But what does this tell us? This tells us that there is a big disconnect
00:10:17.080 between the political media on the right, the activist groups on the right, the lobbyist groups
00:10:21.760 on the right, and the actual Republican voters. Even after all those hits, people, I think,
00:10:27.560 very dishonestly trying to pin the Iran war on J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance, who is not the commander
00:10:35.640 in chief, not the nation's chief diplomat. He's the vice president, who, according to reports,
00:10:41.820 was rather skeptical of the Iran war from the beginning. I thought it was very dishonest. I
00:10:45.700 thought it was just people who were trying to attack Trump, but didn't have the guliuns to
00:10:50.000 attack Trump. So they attacked Trump's wicked advisors, in particular, their least favorite
00:10:54.320 one, which is J.D. Vance. But there was a huge chasm between that and the actual Republican
00:10:58.540 voters. What it tells me is that the anti-Vance discourse that you might have seen on social media
00:11:05.160 that you've seen coming out of the pundit class, the chattering class, and some of the right-wing
00:11:10.100 publications, that is totally disconnected from actual voter preferences. And it's totally
00:11:16.600 disconnected from prediction markets. So not just what people are saying their preferences are when
00:11:20.660 they talk to pollsters, but even where people are putting the money. I saw this a little bit
00:11:25.520 firsthand over the weekend. It was kind of funny. I responded to a comment of someone criticizing me
00:11:32.520 because, I don't know, I wasn't attacking J.D. Vance. And I can't help but notice, I think a lot
00:11:38.600 of the attacks on Vance are astroturfed, and I think a lot of them are foreign. I'll give some
00:11:43.220 of my evidence for that in a second. First, though, I want to tell you about Helix. Go to
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00:13:00.920 for listeners of this show. So over the weekend, someone was going after Vance. It was the crazy,
00:13:06.160 you want to talk about the disconnect between the online discourse and actual voters.
00:13:08.920 is people going after Vance because they were trying to tie Vance to some academics who appear
00:13:16.500 at a conference. And the academics read a political philosopher from the 20th century,
00:13:21.620 this guy, Carl Schmitt. Carl Schmitt, who, while a prominent political philosopher,
00:13:27.260 was also a Nazi, as were a number of Germans during the mid-20th century.
00:13:31.940 And so basically what they were trying to say is that Vance is a Nazi. That's what a lot of
00:13:36.660 the discourse has come down to. And I said, this is totally ridiculous. It's full of non-sequiturs.
00:13:40.880 I think this is pretty unfair. Then people were going after Vance for, they said he wanted to
00:13:46.340 destroy the American hegemony because he raised questions about the global reserve currency
00:13:52.020 status of the United States. They were calling him some kind of subversive, Catholic, post-liberal.
00:13:59.060 But then you look, and many of the questions that he was bringing up years ago were also brought up
00:14:03.020 by Protestant libertarians. So it was all just so in the weeds, and I felt so dishonest. So I
00:14:09.120 pointed this out, and I get a comment on X from Teacher Julie 08, who was responding, said,
00:14:17.940 I strongly dislike Michael Knowles more and more each day. Because I was making a comment on a
00:14:25.300 comment on a political philosopher, on a theological strain, on an academic conference,
00:14:31.100 on a point about the economy that's somehow vaguely related to Vance's.
00:14:34.680 I strongly dislike Michael Knowles more and more each day.
00:14:37.720 And really what this account was upset about
00:14:40.320 was that I was defending the vice president
00:14:42.740 against what I thought was a very unfair attack.
00:14:45.160 So one of the great features that Elon Musk brought to X
00:14:48.220 is you can tell where the accounts are based.
00:14:50.960 Let me see where this account is based.
00:14:52.520 There's no name other than Julie.
00:14:55.220 There's no face.
00:14:56.500 There's nothing really identifying this account.
00:14:58.420 Let me see where that account is based.
00:14:59.660 So I looked at it.
00:15:01.100 The account is based in Ghana. In Ghana, accessing Twitter from Ghana. So it's not even like the
00:15:08.800 account is based in Ghana and accessing it from New York City. It's from Ghana, accessing it from
00:15:14.140 Ghana. It's either a bot or a foreign operative account. I love my Ghanese audience, my Ghanaian
00:15:20.740 audience. This show actually does have a pretty big international audience. I love that. I'm all
00:15:25.340 about that. I love that people are paying attention to the show and the different political and
00:15:29.160 philosophical, and especially religious currents that we talk about on the show.
00:15:31.880 But I said, this just doesn't make sense. It is not believable that some ordinary Ghanaian
00:15:38.500 citizen is that plugged in with all of the esoteric nuances of the political ideologies
00:15:45.660 that float atop the intraconservative movement debates that then pertain to the Republican
00:15:50.660 Party. It's just not believable. This is an op. And of course, all of social media now is
00:15:56.680 flooded with foreign bots, foreign influence, and activist campaigns here. I mean, look,
00:16:02.720 if you've ever worked on a political campaign before, I've worked on plenty of them,
00:16:06.340 you know that this is how political campaigns work. But I found it to be really, really silly.
00:16:13.700 And for Republican voters who are trying to ascertain the state of the race, are we really
00:16:17.000 going to get blown out of the water? Are the Democrats totally going to run away with it in
00:16:19.660 2028? One, it's a little too early to predict that. But if you want to know the state of the
00:16:24.400 race, let's look at the polls of actual voters. Let's look at the polls of, let's look at what
00:16:30.620 the prediction markets are saying. Because I think the vice president is terrific. I'm a big fan of
00:16:35.060 the vice president. I think Rubio is great too. I think there are even figures who are not in the
00:16:40.300 Trump administration who could run good campaigns for president. As I've said before, I think there's
00:16:45.680 a chance that Ron DeSantis could have a lane, depending on how the Iran war works out, depending
00:16:50.120 on the popularity of the Trump administration, because he's outside of the administration. He
00:16:53.600 could run in the kind of Trump lane outside of the Trump administration, though that's very
00:16:57.080 difficult. It didn't work out in 2024. I think Ted Cruz, a lot of people I think are underestimating
00:17:02.120 Ted Cruz. I think Ted Cruz could have a real lane in 2028. It would again depend on how things work
00:17:08.740 out with the Trump administration, how tight President Trump's hold is on the Republican
00:17:11.820 party. I think Rand Paul could have a lane. I don't think a libertarian is going to win, but
00:17:15.880 he could have a lane to run in that party. I want to make sure that a Republican beats a Democrat.
00:17:21.120 In other words, I want to focus on the chief threats to my way of life, to American sovereignty.
00:17:28.520 You've got Democrats running candidates who openly have disdain for the country.
00:17:32.640 I want to make sure that we keep our eyes on the prize.
00:17:34.880 But there's a lot of mischief, a lot of silliness going on in the shadow race for 2028.
00:17:40.020 A lot of it very silly, and a lot of it coming from overseas.
00:17:43.740 So speaking of the vice president, J.D. Vance made a really important point, I think,
00:17:48.520 on how we think about socialism.
00:17:49.840 One of the attacks that you're seeing in the shadow race for 2028 on the GOP side is people are trying to call Vance a socialist, which I think is pretty absurd on its face.
00:18:00.900 But that's the argument.
00:18:01.700 They're saying J.D. Vance, he's a socialist.
00:18:04.040 His economics, his economic policy is no different from what the Democrats are offering.
00:18:09.240 And Vance addressed this head on on Fox News.
00:18:11.860 and my warning to my fellow republicans will would be if we don't get this right don't blame
00:18:18.960 young people for being sympathetic to socialism we've got to blame ourselves and i think what is
00:18:24.360 so unique and refreshing about donald trump's economic policies is that it's not the same old
00:18:30.820 economic you know ideas that you would have heard 30 40 years ago he's talking about rebuilding our
00:18:36.960 industrial base, rebuilding the heartland, making our streets safer, making it possible for young
00:18:42.720 people to afford to buy a home. This is how you stop socialism. You don't stop socialism by
00:18:48.700 throwing slogans at people about the free market. As much as I love the free market,
00:18:53.240 you stop socialism by making people's lives better. And that's what we're trying to do
00:18:57.660 every single day. I love this point because it's such a political point. People think that J.D.
00:19:02.660 Vance is making an economic point. He obviously has economic ideas. But what he's being a
00:19:06.940 attacked for right now, I think is not his economic argument. It's actually his political
00:19:12.840 argument. What he's saying is we have to stop socialism, but you're not going to stop socialism
00:19:18.740 by just mindlessly repeating slogans about the free market. You're not going to stop socialism
00:19:24.980 by regurgitating the same kinds of political tactics that have failed in the past.
00:19:31.460 What would the opposite of this be? The opposite of speaking to the affordability crisis
00:19:36.500 would be the sort of thing that we saw during the Tea Party, specifically from Paul Ryan.
00:19:40.180 I like Paul Ryan. I think Paul Ryan had good intentions. I think he wanted to solve our
00:19:43.640 fiscal problem. Paul Ryan ran on austerity. The GOP Congress, under his leadership or partial
00:19:51.880 leadership, ran on austerity. The Mitt Romney campaign ran on austerity and 47% of Americans
00:19:58.100 being useless leeches and the fact that we need to cut, cut, cut. Ran on reforming entitlements,
00:20:04.540 which is to say cutting social security and medicare how did it work out it didn't work
00:20:08.380 it empowered democrats democrats ran on that forever they persuaded voters they aired
00:20:13.780 commercials of paul ryan throwing granny off of a cliff and guess what you then had democrat
00:20:19.520 politicians implementing policies far closer to socialism than anything jd vance is talking about
00:20:25.620 so advance is saying is you you can't just recite the same old platitudes forever you need to
00:20:31.700 address people's real circumstances, because politics involves eternal principles, but it
00:20:37.180 also involves constantly changing circumstances. And there's this temptation among the establishment
00:20:44.120 Republicans to just go back to what feels safe. In the 1980s, they would talk about the 1950s.
00:20:50.640 And now, the way that Republicans talked about the 50s and the 80s and 90s is the same way that
00:20:56.060 establishment Republicans talk about the 90s today. Because it was back a few decades ago,
00:21:03.360 and we have nice memories of it and nostalgia's history after a few drinks.
00:21:07.080 But you can't actually return to the past. You can't return to the past, and we shouldn't want
00:21:12.780 to return to the past because this is the key. The past contained the seeds for the present.
00:21:20.080 So there are some Republicans who just want to feel safe. The past, it's over and done with.
00:21:24.240 we all made it through just fine. Many of the people who talked about the wonders of Ronald
00:21:29.200 Reagan in the 20 teens and 2020s, many of those people probably would have opposed Ronald Reagan
00:21:34.220 in the 1980s. Many of them probably would have been Bushies rather than Reaganites.
00:21:37.940 The same attacks that you see lobbied at Donald Trump, now J.D. Vance, those attacks that he was
00:21:44.460 a cowboy, that he was reckless, that he's uneducated, he's unsophisticated, that he's
00:21:48.720 Nazi, these insinuations of bigotry. Those were all the same attacks that were lobbied against
00:21:54.120 Reagan in the 70s and 80s. And so people want to return to the past because it feels kind of safe.
00:22:00.960 There's something deeply conservative about that, but you're going to lose
00:22:03.520 because the past contained the seeds of the present. So if we rewind the clock back to 1999,
00:22:10.100 guess what would happen? If we left everything the same, we would end up exactly right back
00:22:13.120 you're in the same place. So you need to address people's actual concerns. We're not living in the
00:22:19.580 same time as the 1990s. We've had decades of outsourcing our jobs, of getting rid of American
00:22:24.920 manufacturing. That has brought with it some economic benefits. There are economic benefits
00:22:29.220 to free trade. There are economic benefits to being the world's global reserve currency.
00:22:34.120 But there are some downsides too. So it doesn't mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater,
00:22:37.740 but it means you have to address those downsides. And if all we do is ossify ourselves and just
00:22:42.780 turn into Republican chat GOP, where we're just reciting the same slogans of the Reagan campaign
00:22:49.180 and wondering why they're having diminishing marginal returns, you're going to cede the
00:22:53.840 political order to the socialists. In your pure fight against socialism, in your own self-conception,
00:23:02.880 pure fight against socialism, you're going to hasten the advent of socialism. Very,
00:23:06.580 very important point from the VP. Okay, now speaking of the socialists, a lot of women out
00:23:12.620 there outside that courtroom defending Luigi Mangione after he pled guilty to one of the
00:23:18.140 charges against him for murdering the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson. We'll get to
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00:24:28.000 to start saving. So Luigi Mangione has pled guilty to a federal charge. He didn't plead
00:24:34.320 guilty to the state charge of murdering Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO. He pled
00:24:38.740 guilty to the federal charge of interstate stalking. The reason he pled guilty to that
00:24:43.680 is to try to get out of the state murder charge because we have a principle in American
00:24:49.180 jurisprudence against double jeopardy about being tried for the same crime twice. It comes from the
00:24:54.240 Fifth Amendment. However, certain states beef up the double jeopardy protections,
00:25:00.780 including New York State, where Luigi Mangione is facing charges. So what the Mangione defense
00:25:07.980 is hoping, I don't think they're going to succeed, but what they're hoping is, okay,
00:25:11.380 plead guilty to the federal charge, the lesser charge of interstate stalking to try to get out
00:25:18.120 of the tougher charge, which is the state murder charge. Now you would say, okay, you got all of
00:25:22.600 Mangione's supporters, all these crazy women standing outside the classroom, outside of the
00:25:25.940 courtroom. And you'd think, okay, well, now that he's pled guilty to one of the charges,
00:25:29.640 surely they're going to give up, right? Surely they're going to recant of their support for
00:25:33.580 Luigi. Not so. Here's what one of them says. Do you think it's wrong that he murdered someone
00:25:40.820 regardless of why he did it? Everyone has a different opinion. And I'm not going to say
00:25:46.400 it was wrong or right, because I do think I exist within a gray area of the opinions around this
00:25:51.020 case but I see it more as a revolutionary act of protest of the likes of which we haven't seen
00:25:55.980 since the civil rights era. My reactions in court? Relief I guess is the word. I think for a very
00:26:03.120 long time people have ascribed this idea that supporters are painting him out to be guilty by
00:26:09.620 having conversations about the health care industry so to no longer have to fight that battle
00:26:14.520 is satisfying and relieving. He has a lot of battles to fight. I want him to be happy and
00:26:20.540 healthy. But I want America to continue questioning our current predicaments and why we allow our
00:26:26.180 futures to be stolen away by oligarchs. The online bros who campaign for repeal of the 19th
00:26:31.620 Amendment, they have met their spokeswoman. Here she is. This is it. The face of 19th Amendment
00:26:37.120 repeal. And there are a bunch of women like her outside the courtroom. I was a little tough on the
00:26:42.640 white liberal women earlier. I can't tell. She's white-ish. I can't quite. Maybe has a hint of
00:26:46.760 Persian to her. But I think she passes. She's probably got lighter skin than I do. She says,
00:26:51.960 no, no, no. Just because he pled guilty, no, that doesn't mean I don't support him anymore.
00:26:56.260 And she makes a point that actually goes deeper than the psychological irritations of unhinged
00:27:03.700 women. She makes a point that actually goes down to leftist philosophy. This isn't just for the
00:27:09.020 women. This is the most ardent revolutionary communist man. Hassan Piker would make the
00:27:14.760 same argument and has made the same argument, which is, no, no, no. I support him because
00:27:20.120 he pled guilty. I support him because he committed the crime. I don't think in my delusions that he's
00:27:26.020 being framed or something. I like that he killed the innocent healthcare CEO. I like that. That's
00:27:32.340 a revolutionary act of protest. That's not just some frivolous, hysterical woman that you can
00:27:39.080 write off. One, those people vote. But two, that is what the leaders of the American left are
00:27:46.400 openly saying. When Hassan Piker comes out and says, we need to murder Republican senators
00:27:51.500 because they're Republicans. We need the blood to run red with, sorry, we need the streets to
00:27:56.620 run red with capitalist blood. America deserved 9-11. When Hassan Piker says that, Hassan Piker
00:28:01.960 is campaigning with all these prominent Democrat politicians right now, who is effectively the
00:28:06.280 thought leader of the democrat party in the american left when when they say that they mean
00:28:12.820 it and it's it's not you can't i don't think it's unfair to just point to hassan piker we saw this
00:28:18.140 after the murder of charlie kirk after the murder of charlie kirk you saw huge swaths of the democrat
00:28:23.220 party justifying and celebrating political violence and you saw it i'm not even yes we saw
00:28:28.600 it when the democrat strategist on tv was blaming charlie for his own murder before his body was
00:28:32.760 cold. We saw that on MSNBC. Yes, we've seen politicians and activists all justifying,
00:28:39.220 excusing, minimizing the murder of Charlie. But you saw it because that lady who sits next to
00:28:44.220 you at work, she posted about it on Facebook. You saw it because those kids in your classroom,
00:28:49.480 they defended the murder of Charlie. You saw it because you saw it reflected in the public
00:28:54.140 opinion polls that showed that something like 28% of young Democrats, young leftists,
00:28:58.440 justified the murder. That's what we're up against. It's why I lose a little bit of patience
00:29:04.960 with the kind of absurd activist attacks. Mostly J.D. Vance is getting it right now,
00:29:10.560 but the intra-Republican party firing squad here. It's why I lose a little patience with it because
00:29:16.300 people just have totally lost a conception of where the enemy really lies, where the real
00:29:21.320 threat to our way of life really lies. Now, speaking of death, this is kind of a depressing
00:29:28.400 show, isn't it? Well, this one should really make us rethink how we think about ethics more
00:29:33.560 generally. This is a story that occurred months ago, eight or nine months ago. But it's starting
00:29:40.120 to get a little of attention right now. This is from Australia. LifeSite News is reporting on it.
00:29:45.340 And what LifeSite News is reporting, where is it? Here we go. Is that for the first time ever,
00:29:51.320 doctors have harvested a woman's organs after they killed her in an assisted suicide.
00:29:58.700 So we have organ harvesting based on the dubious medical concept of brain death.
00:30:04.100 Brain death, which is not the same as death.
00:30:06.660 Brain death is a kind of political term that emerged in the 1960s
00:30:13.140 to solve a problem that certain unethical doctors were contemplating in the 1960s.
00:30:20.460 With the advent of technology that could allow us to transfer organs from one person to another,
00:30:24.740 with the widespread use of this technology, there came this question, well, okay, when can we bring
00:30:28.700 the organs to the new person, to the person who needs them? Because once a person dies,
00:30:34.100 the organs very quickly lose their vitality. So the best way to transfer an organ is from a living
00:30:39.740 person, but it would be unethical to harvest the organs from a living person. So what can we do?
00:30:45.740 okay, well, we'll declare the person dead before the person actually meets the criteria of death.
00:30:50.700 In other words, we'll redefine death. When it comes to organ harvesting, organ transplants,
00:30:56.740 when it comes to the case of brain death, what actually kills the patients in brain death is not
00:31:01.960 their brains. It's not some natural phenomenon. It is the harvesting of organs. It's when the
00:31:07.240 doctors either pull the plug or when they start to harvest the organs. And there have been really
00:31:11.660 scary stories that have come out of this. People waking up, you know, people who are showing signs
00:31:15.780 of life while their organs are being harvested. Fair bit of evidence that they feel some pain
00:31:19.540 while this is happening. Really ghastly stuff that requires a serious ethical review. But you
00:31:23.960 got that on the one hand, the organ harvesting. Then you have this other just absolutely hellish
00:31:29.240 medical innovation, which is assisted suicide, where doctors who take a Hippocratic oath first
00:31:34.060 to do no harm are actually the ones who are helping to kill the patients. This is a complete
00:31:39.100 inversion, a satanic inversion of the medical field. And now it's very widespread. America's
00:31:43.720 evil top hat Canada practices it all the time. It's why now 5% plus of Canadians each year die
00:31:49.840 of a doctor-assisted suicide. So this is combining the two. In Australia, I think this was in January.
00:31:57.740 In Australia, a woman says she's going to kill herself. The justice system, which should prevent
00:32:05.000 from doing that because it is totally contrary to the natural law. It is totally contrary to
00:32:10.680 civil statutes in all civilized societies. Nevertheless, the government says, okay,
00:32:14.680 we'll help you kill yourself. And then they say, oh, you know what? We need some of those organs.
00:32:18.980 Those organs could be put to good use. They might even have good intentions, but they say,
00:32:21.520 oh, you know what we're going to do? We're going to kill this person and then harvest her organs
00:32:24.640 and give them to other people. And I think most people realize there's something wrong with this,
00:32:31.400 isn't it? First of all, there's probably a reason this is the first time that this has ever happened.
00:32:35.000 as a matter of policy. And you say, why hasn't anyone ever thought of this before? Oh,
00:32:38.780 because it's obviously evil. Okay. Even people who are not particularly religious,
00:32:42.340 who don't care that much about bioethics, everyone feels a little squeamish about this,
00:32:45.580 right? We just depressed people come into the doctor instead of helping the person.
00:32:48.980 We just say, okay, we're going to kill you. And ooh, look at all those good organs. And
00:32:52.760 if you're the doctor here, think about it from their perspective. Think about it with a little
00:32:57.340 sympathy. You say, well, there's no use in letting all these good organs go to waste.
00:33:01.280 We're either going to throw them into the dirt or we're going to help people who are sick,
00:33:04.660 who need new organs. So what would be so wrong about harvesting these organs? We don't want
00:33:10.400 them to go to waste anyway. This is, to me, the perfect example of the ghastliness of consequentialist
00:33:16.820 ethics, the kind of ethics that says that the ends justify the means, that good ends justify
00:33:22.020 evil means. Well, look, I mean, yeah, I don't know. Look, I mean, it's probably not good to
00:33:27.740 kill yourself, but look, it's a liberal society. This is a liberalism. You get to do what you want
00:33:32.260 to do. Consent is the only thing that matters. All that we aim at is maximizing individual autonomy.
00:33:37.600 So if you want to kill yourself, by golly, that's your right. That's your natural right to kill
00:33:42.060 yourself. Of course it's not. That would be totally contrary to anything serious natural
00:33:46.580 law theorists, the developers of natural rights and philosophy, the framers of the constitution,
00:33:52.320 any serious person would ever think there's no natural right to kill yourself. They say, well,
00:33:56.140 look, liberalism tells us autonomy is all that matters. So you're going to kill yourself.
00:33:59.620 And that's kind of, maybe we say that's bad, but can't legislate morality, except all the time
00:34:05.520 because we necessarily legislate morality. But in this case, we're going to go hands off. We're
00:34:09.000 going to pretend to be neutral. And oh, you know what? Some good can come out of that evil.
00:34:14.460 And maybe even we're going to start committing evil. You know, these old people who they don't
00:34:18.720 have much longer to live anyway, these sick people, these depressed people who were just
00:34:21.700 a leech on society, these mentally deficient people, these disabled people, you know what?
00:34:26.540 they're not living great lives. From my perspective, they're not living great lives.
00:34:30.000 The guy, he's missing a limb. That guy, he's got a little touch of dementia. His life isn't really
00:34:35.720 worth it. His organs would be put to much better use in the body of that young person who got into
00:34:42.300 a car accident. So you know what we're going to do? We're going to maybe encourage you a little
00:34:45.220 bit to kill yourself. We're going to help you kill yourself. Then we're going to take your organs and
00:34:48.480 put it into someone who we deem more worthy of them. You see how that works. So what is the
00:34:54.360 answer to that. What the leftists say, and what some of the confused people on the right would
00:34:59.200 say is, well, we just need more regulations around this. Well, we just need to make sure
00:35:02.820 there are guardrails. There never are guardrails. Look at how assisted suicide has worked in Europe.
00:35:07.300 It started out with, it's only going to be the very eldest people in the most pain
00:35:10.520 with seconds to live. We're going to give them a little extra morphine. Now they're killing
00:35:15.200 young people who are simply depressed. They're killing elderly people against their will,
00:35:19.880 having to hold them down while they kill them in the Netherlands. It's a horrible case in Belgium.
00:35:24.360 uh, the slippery slope, you just slip down that slope immediately. So what's the answer? The
00:35:29.960 answer is you need a different ethical system. This consequentialist idea, which you see in
00:35:36.460 utilitarianism, which you see in just trying to calculate the greatest good for the greatest
00:35:40.500 number of people, forgetting about the actual morality of any actions or the moral character
00:35:44.820 of the people who perform the actions, that has failed. That has led us to this. We're not going
00:35:50.020 to rewind the clock 30 years and fix all the problems because the seeds of this destruction
00:35:53.940 were already present 30 years ago.
00:35:55.540 Frankly, the seeds of this destruction
00:35:56.800 were present 200 years ago.
00:35:59.120 What is necessary is a re-examination
00:36:02.020 of our moral calculus.
00:36:04.640 It relates exactly what J.D. Vance
00:36:06.760 is talking about on economics.
00:36:08.000 We don't want to rewind the clock.
00:36:09.780 We don't want to give up
00:36:11.240 and adopt the opinions of our opponents,
00:36:12.840 God forbid.
00:36:13.760 We just want to recognize
00:36:15.600 we may have made some mistakes here.
00:36:17.460 It's a fallen world.
00:36:18.320 We all make mistakes
00:36:18.900 and we need to correct those mistakes.
00:36:20.940 And in this case, the mistake is
00:36:22.260 So, assisted suicide, to some degree, organ harvesting, there you have to really, really draw a firm line on what the ethical, what the line of transgression would be.
00:36:37.780 It's not just putting up guardrails, it's actually determining what is death, how do we protect life, which leads into all sorts of other questions like abortion, which leads into IVF, because IVF almost always entails abortion.
00:36:49.760 It requires a total revolution in ethical thought, and ultimately, it probably means returning to some of the wisdom of the past.
00:36:59.760 There's a lot of talk right now in the American right about this horrible idea of post-liberalism or a return.
00:37:05.500 What that really means is a return to the classical political tradition.
00:37:08.660 What it ultimately means is just saying like, huh, maybe Aristotle had a point.
00:37:12.420 Maybe Aristotle, Cicero, maybe Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, maybe the founding fathers and the framers.
00:37:19.760 to a large degree, had a point, and we shouldn't have thrown out all of their wisdom.
00:37:24.260 Well, what's the alternative? The alternative is you're going to keep getting this.
00:37:27.460 Get ready for granny to get her organs harvested. Get ready for your cousin to get her organs
00:37:31.520 harvested if she feels a little depressed. Okay, now speaking of violence, I do want to get back
00:37:35.400 to Hassan Piker because the left is doubling down on its support of Hassan Piker, and I couldn't be
00:37:40.700 happier about it. First, though, do Catholics worship Mary? Does the church believe that the
00:37:47.200 Old Testament prophets were frauds. Could God make a burrito so expensive that even he couldn't
00:37:51.720 afford it? Almost always going to X for those answers is a bad idea, unless you were discussing
00:37:57.400 those questions with his eminence, Cardinal Burke, one of the great men of the church,
00:38:02.760 over a 15-year-old scotch. Now, coincidentally, that's exactly what we did in the latest episode
00:38:06.200 of Off the Clock. Real posts from X, your actual questions answered by one of the most important
00:38:11.500 leaders in the Catholic Church. Check out this teaser. Could God make a burrito so expensive
00:38:16.840 that he could not buy it.
00:38:18.340 I think there actually is a serious theological question hidden in there.
00:38:22.480 They say, can God make a square or circle?
00:38:24.400 Well, it's a ridiculous question.
00:38:26.000 A circle is a circle and a square is a square.
00:38:28.360 God doesn't contradict himself.
00:38:30.360 See, this is evidence as to why I want to ask my questions
00:38:32.960 instead of taking them from Twitter.
00:38:46.840 from internet trolls to serious theological questions from people like ruslan kd cardinal
00:38:53.280 burke responds to a wide range of questions alongside michael knowles watch full episode
00:38:57.560 now on the michael knowles youtube channel my favorite comment yesterday is from hard-boiled
00:39:02.200 entertainment the fact that jd vance has anticipated aoc being the democrat candidate
00:39:06.760 should tell us he's preparing to face her properly yeah i hope that's what it means i suspect that is
00:39:10.680 what it means. I was actually, I was really impressed with Vance's call on the AOC thing,
00:39:16.680 because I was surprised. I thought he, when I asked Vance, who do you think the leading
00:39:20.620 candidate is? I thought he'd say Gavin Newsom or somebody. When he said AOC, I said, are you sure?
00:39:24.680 I don't know about, I don't know if that's true. Are you, is that a little too online? Is that,
00:39:28.420 and then sure enough, within a couple of weeks, you see polls come out, AOC was leading the pack.
00:39:32.980 It was impressive. Sure, he's got a pretty good political gut, which I guess you would expect as
00:39:37.760 a guy who came from absolutely nothing and then rose up the ranks and made a huge name for himself
00:39:44.440 became a U.S. senator and vice president. Yeah, you'd expect he'd have a pretty good political
00:39:48.020 gut, but the AOC call was an impressive one. Okay. Hassan Piker, getting back to Hassan Piker.
00:39:55.360 Hassan Piker is this left-wing, very, very radical provocateur who has called for violence
00:40:00.360 against conservatives repeatedly and said America deserves 9-11. Now, he has been, he's campaigned
00:40:06.340 Democrat candidates, and he has been identified as one of the real leaders of the Democrat party,
00:40:10.940 perhaps the thought leader on the Democrat side. Now, if I were a Democrat consultant,
00:40:17.360 what I would do as Republicans are making that accusation, what I would do is say,
00:40:22.940 no way, that's ridiculous. You guys are making a boogeyman. We don't care that much about Hassan
00:40:26.940 Piker. He's an edgy streamer. He's got his little place in the entertainment field,
00:40:32.760 but he's not really helping to lead the party.
00:40:34.740 You guys are attacking a straw man.
00:40:37.660 But that's not what the Democrats are doing.
00:40:40.780 They're embracing him.
00:40:43.060 Mamdani embraces him.
00:40:44.860 Abdul El-Sayed embraces him.
00:40:47.120 All of these candidates, AOC, embrace him.
00:40:48.840 They all embrace him.
00:40:50.380 Now you have Mehdi Hassan,
00:40:52.020 my former debate opponent from Dartmouth.
00:40:54.540 If you want to check out that debate,
00:40:55.780 I think it's on the Dartmouth Political Union YouTube page.
00:40:58.640 Mehdi is the author of a book.
00:41:00.780 I think the title is How to Win Every Debate or something like that. And so you can check out our
00:41:05.200 debate from Dartmouth, which you might recall I did win. They scored it at the end. And anyway,
00:41:11.680 no, there's no reason to bring that up. I did in fact win the debate against the guy who wrote
00:41:15.620 the book about how to win every debate. But anyway, Mehdi Hassan, he's had a TV show.
00:41:19.520 He's a prominent voice on the left. Mehdi Hassan brings Hassan Piker. There are a lot of Hassans
00:41:24.340 on the left these days.
00:41:25.620 Mehdi Hassan brings Hassan Piker onto his show
00:41:29.640 not to create distance
00:41:32.040 between the mainstream Democrats and Hassan Piker,
00:41:35.820 but to launder Hassan Piker's views.
00:41:41.180 Classic one they throw at you.
00:41:42.580 America deserved 9-11.
00:41:44.300 You've withdrawn that comment, I believe.
00:41:46.180 Yeah, I said it in 2019.
00:41:48.660 And if you listen to the full conversation,
00:41:51.820 you very quickly understand what I'm talking about.
00:41:53.740 you're talking about foreign policy blowback yeah we're talking about foreign policy blowback
00:41:57.100 you could have phrased it better because it sounds like you're saying people deserve to die
00:42:00.020 of course we don't believe that again in 2019 and then immediately i'm i'm uh you know all over
00:42:05.740 fox news and and getting you know an unbelievable amount of death threats i'm a big boy i can handle
00:42:10.440 it it is what it is but uh i i you know went on the young turks and famously was like i should
00:42:15.860 have phrased things uh better i apologize for those who i've offended and i most importantly
00:42:20.540 apologize uh for for giving an opportunity the right to just like use this this is a seven-year-old
00:42:26.480 clip that you've already explained disowned i i have the same issue there clips of me that i've
00:42:29.700 had to talk about yeah oh my goodness it couldn't be a worse response good for us but it couldn't
00:42:36.080 be a worse response from the left mediasan brings mediasan who you know he's an educated guy he's
00:42:41.620 well-spoken guy he's pretty radical but he's i don't know he is mainstream by the standards of
00:42:46.500 the left. I guess so is Sasan Piker. So he brings him on. He says, now, come on. Come on. You just
00:42:51.260 said, I know it's this old clip. There's no evidence you've changed your views, but it's
00:42:55.260 an old clip where you say America deserved 9-11. Now, come on. I mean, what'd you really mean by
00:42:59.700 that? And what does Sasan Piker say? He says, I meant America deserved 9-11. That's what I meant.
00:43:06.580 I mean, yeah, maybe I shouldn't have said it that way, but the only reason I shouldn't have
00:43:09.280 said it that way is because it gave an opening for the right to attack me.
00:43:11.860 and he doesn't say i shouldn't have said it because it was wrong to say i didn't i shouldn't
00:43:17.840 have said it because america doesn't deserve 9-11 no no i shouldn't have said it because
00:43:21.820 i was being too honest i let the right attack me and then his interlocutor the much more moderate
00:43:28.780 mainstream media son says yeah yeah you're right yeah you probably shouldn't have said it that i
00:43:32.280 did that did give an opening oh wait anyway never mind
00:43:34.280 the party that we are running against in the midterms the party of the mainstream nominees
00:43:43.400 and the candidates and all that is happy that 3 000 american civilians were murdered by muslim
00:43:51.480 terrorists they're happy about it that's not an exaggeration as long as sarum piker doesn't
00:43:59.880 doesn't doesn't recant his views by the way he doubled down on his views like a month ago
00:44:04.260 remember this like a month ago his son piker goes on his show and says he's just framed
00:44:08.460 a newspaper cover of the day after 9 11 also you might have noticed something some changes behind
00:44:17.240 me um i finally framed the cutie cinderella a newspaper from 9 11 the morning of 9 12 the
00:44:26.740 newspaper right there um the newspaper that covered 9-11 um it's now officially sitting
00:44:34.580 behind me and i moved the north korean uh poster up uh in in place of the fan art
00:44:43.880 we're celebrating 9-11 on my show that's what he's saying he's saying yeah i'm so i got you
00:44:51.220 got a lot of fan art here i love north korea i got my north korea poster and you know what else
00:44:55.740 You know what else I love? You know what else I think was awesome? 9-11. That was a month ago. And the Democrats keep campaigning with him. So the people we're running against, whatever your quibbles about, I don't like tariffs that much, and I think they should only be implemented sometimes, and I don't know, I think we need to give more support overseas for foreign interventions, or I need a little bit less, or I need your domestic political opponents.
00:45:25.740 are happy about 9-11. Can you get it together? Can you focus? Sorry, it's not you. I mean,
00:45:34.800 I'm preaching to the choir, but can we focus? Can we get it together? That's what we're up against.
00:45:43.160 We want to murder Republican senators. We are going to cheer when your activists are murdered
00:45:49.500 for having open exchanges on college campus. And we're thrilled that thousands of Americans
00:45:54.900 were killed by terrorists on 9-11 that's what they're openly saying and their views
00:46:01.840 that the views of those honest leftists are being accepted kind of chuckled at by all the other ones
00:46:11.420 okay there's so much more I want to get to uh Zoran Mamdani was just babbling in Chinese
00:46:16.600 uh the left is having another another complete freak out over Trump's ballroom they really hate
00:46:22.160 the ballroom, but they don't even understand what the ballroom is. It's Music Monday, though.
00:46:26.320 The rest of the show continues now. You do not want to miss it. Become a member. Use
00:46:28.460 code Knowles Canada. WLES to check out for two months free on all annual plans.