The Michael Knowles Show - July 29, 2026


Friendly Fireļ¼š Fauci's Fabrications, A Socialist Repents & Blowing Up Bus Lanes


Episode Stats


Length

55 minutes

Words per minute

202.3

Word count

11,268

Sentence count

705


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.480 Recently, our company's softball team lost the big game by one run.
00:00:04.800 Then Dale tried to console us with the quote,
00:00:07.200 winning isn't everything.
00:00:09.060 Well, Dale and I are very different.
00:00:12.740 I get early payout from Bet365.
00:00:14.680 If my team goes up big, I get paid out instantly,
00:00:17.480 even if they blow the lead later.
00:00:19.540 Sound familiar, Dale?
00:00:21.280 Thanks, Bet365.
00:00:22.920 Must be 19 or older, Ontario only.
00:00:24.420 Please play responsibly.
00:00:25.240 If you have questions or concerns about your gambling
00:00:26.660 or the gambling of someone close to you,
00:00:27.720 please go to connexontario.ca TNC Supply.
00:00:30.000 I just want to know, before we begin, because we haven't done one since, did you guys see
00:00:36.900 the worst movie ever made by Hollywood in the history of images?
00:00:44.240 I mean, well, what I've been told, what I've been told is that the Odyssey, the Odyssey,
00:00:50.560 the better movie would have been for there to be a man who goes around killing everyone,
00:00:55.440 banging the lady who's not his wife for 10 years
00:00:58.140 and then killing all the chambermaids.
00:01:00.520 That would have been better, probably.
00:01:04.480 Now that you put it that way,
00:01:06.040 I am actually coming around to Walsh's point of view.
00:01:08.680 Now I see the flaws in the picture, that's it.
00:01:12.360 I just don't know what we're going to...
00:01:14.000 If I can't complain about the Odyssey for the next 10 weeks,
00:01:17.580 I don't know, like, what are we going to talk about?
00:01:19.000 There's nothing left to talk about.
00:01:21.280 I got a letter from somebody complaining
00:01:23.580 that they had turned Odysseus into a weepy girl man.
00:01:28.660 So I sent him the passage in Homer
00:01:30.320 where he weeps like a woman.
00:01:32.180 And I said, you know,
00:01:33.300 you think this is an argument
00:01:34.220 between good people and bad people,
00:01:35.560 but it's really an argument
00:01:36.300 between people who know what they're talking about
00:01:38.080 and people who have no idea what they're talking about.
00:01:41.860 What's funny about it is that
00:01:42.960 I feel like we're all having the same argument
00:01:44.340 about like that we all kind of agree
00:01:46.300 on what the movie is kind of trying to do.
00:01:48.900 We just have disagreements
00:01:49.800 on whether that's a good thing or not, right?
00:01:51.780 Like, I think that, you know, I heard your take on it, Drew, and I think it was basically the same take as my take on it, which I think was also-
00:01:59.080 But you were more enthusiastic, I thought.
00:02:01.960 You were more enthusiastic, I thought.
00:02:03.120 I like Nolan better than you guys like Nolan.
00:02:06.680 Yeah, I mean, but as a piece of morality, what he was trying to do thematically is obviously he was taking sort of the ghost of Christian morality and pouring it into the vase of a Greek story.
00:02:19.380 because, I mean, and I think we all sort of agree with that.
00:02:22.400 I thought that that's like kind of a good thing
00:02:24.480 because again, if you wanted, I think, well, listen,
00:02:27.200 I get where Matt's coming from
00:02:28.460 because he loves apocalypto, right?
00:02:29.980 Apocalypto is, here's what pre-Christian morality looks like
00:02:32.500 and then here comes Christianity, oh, thank God, right?
00:02:35.360 I mean, that's what apocalypto, right?
00:02:37.380 Everything is horrible and then, oh, thank God,
00:02:39.740 the conquistadors are here and I get that,
00:02:42.420 but that wasn't gonna happen at the end of Homer's The Odyssey
00:02:45.140 because no one comes at the end of Homer's The Odyssey
00:02:48.220 to save you from pre-Judeo-Christian morality, right?
00:02:52.560 You're just stuck in that world
00:02:53.980 where Odysseus is the hero
00:02:55.160 who again bangs everything in sight
00:02:56.840 and then kills all the chambermaids.
00:02:58.500 So like that's not like an amazingly evocative story
00:03:02.840 for a film.
00:03:04.000 So again, you can make Northman,
00:03:05.520 it just, Northman does no box office.
00:03:07.660 I don't understand though,
00:03:09.340 you know, I thought it was an aesthetic problem.
00:03:11.600 Like I didn't think his take
00:03:12.780 really did quite graft on aesthetically onto it.
00:03:16.140 I just, I didn't believe that Odysseus was saying those things, even as he was played
00:03:20.400 in the movie, even as the character was playing the movie, I didn't believe that those would
00:03:23.520 be his problems, but so what?
00:03:25.260 I mean, so it's a summer movie that's incredibly entertaining for three hours, which is hard
00:03:29.560 to do.
00:03:30.060 And so it doesn't all, you know, it's not the smartest movie in the world, but so what,
00:03:34.020 you know, what, what's Nolan supposed to do is his job to sort of make everybody feel
00:03:37.960 that their, their point of view is being represented in his movie.
00:03:41.120 And by the way, I just want to say one thing, Ben, I would much rather hear you overpray
00:03:46.120 a director that you love,
00:03:48.320 which is a wonderful thing
00:03:49.680 to love a director.
00:03:50.580 You know, there's directors
00:03:51.280 that I love more than they deserve,
00:03:52.780 but I just love their work.
00:03:54.300 I would much rather hear that
00:03:55.520 than a bunch of conservatives
00:03:56.680 cranking that somehow
00:03:57.920 they didn't get the ideological,
00:04:00.320 you know, diatribe
00:04:01.280 that they wanted from somebody.
00:04:02.360 There's also on the ideological point,
00:04:04.240 like Ben, you're completely right
00:04:05.660 that he's Christianizing the story
00:04:08.580 in a very overt way.
00:04:10.160 He invokes the golden rule.
00:04:11.460 There's a baptism scene.
00:04:12.980 The big turn at the end
00:04:13.900 is like literally confession.
00:04:15.280 There is a scrim, and he is confessing his sins to his wife.
00:04:18.800 Correct.
00:04:19.480 You know, that is part of the Western tradition.
00:04:22.220 And he lets you know he's doing it,
00:04:24.360 because the Ellen Page part comes from Virgil.
00:04:26.980 It doesn't come from Homer.
00:04:28.040 It's his character Sinon.
00:04:29.680 And though the Sinon character does kind of take the place of Achilles in the Hades scene,
00:04:35.100 so maybe that's why it was leaking that she played Achilles.
00:04:38.100 But in any case, he's reading the poem through Virgil, through Dante in particular,
00:04:43.260 the fact that Odysseus sails off at the end
00:04:46.500 is part of Dante's telling of it.
00:04:49.200 And so Dante is obviously Christianizing the story,
00:04:52.740 but the difference is when Dante does that,
00:04:55.640 he puts both Sinon and Odysseus
00:04:57.660 in like the deepest depths of hell.
00:05:00.220 And here you get Odysseus at the end
00:05:03.920 sort of whining and crying,
00:05:05.580 and then he goes off to sail into the sunset.
00:05:08.220 But it is the most boomer lib version of that,
00:05:11.580 which is he's really upset for the whole movie
00:05:13.640 and then he cheers up
00:05:14.680 when he takes his wife on a cruise.
00:05:16.300 So you don't get that, you know.
00:05:20.240 But the Greeks did this too, you know.
00:05:24.000 The Greeks identified with the Trojans too.
00:05:26.220 They wrote the Trojan women.
00:05:27.840 They, you know,
00:05:28.660 Odysseus cries for the Trojan women in Homer.
00:05:31.860 You know, they identified with the defeated.
00:05:34.980 Well, here's the thing that annoys me.
00:05:36.560 I'm just, are we supposed to think
00:05:38.680 that Christians living in the United States
00:05:41.220 or Jews living in the United States,
00:05:42.740 people who are part of the Judeo-Christian
00:05:44.060 biblical tradition, shall we say,
00:05:45.640 living in the United States in the year 2026,
00:05:48.540 are somehow angry at the Christianization of Greece.
00:05:52.420 Like some of us actually wrote books
00:05:53.520 on why that was a good thing, right?
00:05:55.660 Like I think all three of us may have written books
00:05:57.340 on why that's kind of a good thing.
00:05:59.580 And so like the idea that like what we needed
00:06:00.900 was like the pure Greek brutality.
00:06:02.620 Well, we weren't fans, okay?
00:06:05.340 Like my people have like entire fast days
00:06:08.360 dedicated to the Greeks destroying things, right?
00:06:10.560 We have entire holidays around Jewish revolts
00:06:13.360 against the Greeks, right?
00:06:14.960 And it turns out that Christianity is largely built around
00:06:18.000 the idea that Greece had to be Christianized,
00:06:21.300 that Greek morality was not enough, right?
00:06:23.780 I mean, this is what Paul is doing,
00:06:25.200 not to lecture people on Christianity.
00:06:26.680 But this is why, like, when I see Christians
00:06:27.980 who are very upset about this,
00:06:28.820 I'm like, listen, I get all of the Ellen Page of it,
00:06:30.440 and it's ridiculous and stupid, and I agree with all of that.
00:06:32.720 And I also, like, listen, I sort of get the Lupita Nyong'o,
00:06:35.620 but that didn't bother me very much.
00:06:37.660 The thing that bothered me more than Lupita Nyong'o is that-
00:06:39.420 No, I'm sorry. I'm taking you off course.
00:06:41.580 Yeah, sorry.
00:06:43.140 Because she's in the movie for three minutes.
00:06:45.760 And also, I'm just telling you,
00:06:47.320 Diane Kruger does not look like a Greek chick.
00:06:49.540 Okay, Diane Kruger, everyone's like,
00:06:51.160 wow, shouldn't Helen look like Diane Kruger?
00:06:52.560 I don't know. Is Diane Kruger, you know, like a hun?
00:06:55.400 You know, she's a German.
00:06:57.520 I'm pretty sure that the people from like
00:06:59.100 the Teutonic forests of Germany
00:07:01.740 were not great resemblances
00:07:04.000 to the short brown women of Greece
00:07:05.880 in the year 1500 BCE.
00:07:09.420 right? Or BC. I was saying to Knowles before you showed up that like the attack on Ellen Page,
00:07:16.620 and I agree with you, Ben. I thought it was very brief, but every woke decision he made was bad.
00:07:21.240 It did bring the movie down a little bit. But the idea that Ellen Page is a mentally ill woman
00:07:26.240 who's pretending to be someone she's not, that defines every actress. If you take that out,
00:07:31.560 there are no actresses left in Hollywood. Maybe Meryl Streep, she looks a little sane,
00:07:36.320 but all the rest of them, they're mentally ill people pretending to be what they're not.
00:07:38.740 There's a broader point here, Drew, that I wanted to ask about, and that is, I think
00:07:43.840 the conservatives, at a certain point culturally, we have a tendency to huff our own farts.
00:07:48.880 It's like, oh my gosh, I don't like that Ellen Page is in this movie, therefore we'll do
00:07:51.600 zero business.
00:07:52.720 It's like, no, this movie was always going to do gigantic business.
00:07:55.180 Can we please stop with this?
00:07:56.880 And this is a matter of tactics, which I think will appeal to you, Noles, because you're
00:08:00.020 very big into, you should launch wars that you can win.
00:08:03.320 You should not launch wars that you're going to lose.
00:08:05.460 okay like this movie was always going to make a fortune because it is beautiful to look at
00:08:09.720 and the last one hour of it is actually incredibly well done and exciting even if you think that the
00:08:14.460 first couple hours are slow the last hour of it is really compelling and the and and it's
00:08:18.380 Christopher Nolan and he's got every major star in the world in this film it was always going to
00:08:21.520 do big business and so this kind of bizarre thing that the right did which is like Ellen Page's in
00:08:25.560 it therefore will do no money and therefore anyone who even says that they kind of like it must be
00:08:29.820 cast out must be thrown out of the like what are what are you doing like just on a tactical level
00:08:34.760 It's a category error though, because it's not like putting that clown trans guy on a beer can, which is essentially endorsing the fact that he's wearing woman face and really disrespecting women by pretending to be one. These are actors. They're all nuts. They all have like weird lives and all that. They go on and they pretend to be someone else. That's part of the arts. I mean, the women, men were playing women in Shakespeare's day. You know, they've done it before. It's like,
00:09:04.760 it's part of the arts the arts are weird and they're crazy it's not the same thing as selling
00:09:09.300 beer or selling some object so the entire thing is ridiculous what is is ellen page because she's
00:09:15.080 got problems she's never supposed to work again i don't care if she's in a movie as long as she's
00:09:18.600 i didn't think she was very good in this but i think you know i don't mind her working what's
00:09:22.900 that what's that got to do with me why i also i have a kind of straussian take on this and it's
00:09:29.460 like that the esoteric reading is always the line between that and wish casting is very very thin
00:09:34.460 kind of intrinsically,
00:09:35.740 but on all the woke stuff,
00:09:38.280 which you point out, Drew,
00:09:39.060 like all of it,
00:09:40.000 every bit he did
00:09:40.840 was just so insane
00:09:41.840 and it all blew up.
00:09:42.880 But, you know,
00:09:43.820 the story ultimately
00:09:44.940 is about the greatest trickster ever.
00:09:47.380 The story is about
00:09:48.320 the greatest deceiver,
00:09:49.480 fraudster, trickster of all time.
00:09:51.320 And you didn't really get that
00:09:53.340 in the Odysseus character.
00:09:55.220 Like, one of the critiques of the movie
00:09:57.360 is Odysseus just wasn't Odysseus.
00:09:59.300 It was like Oppenheimer too.
00:10:00.640 It wasn't really Odysseus.
00:10:02.160 But I wondered if,
00:10:03.620 because Nolan didn't just go a little
00:10:05.980 bit woke, it wasn't like, he didn't
00:10:08.080 just pick an ethnically ambiguous
00:10:09.960 Helen of Troy. He picked a woman who called
00:10:11.900 herself dark as night. He picked a
00:10:13.920 very, very black actress. He didn't
00:10:15.920 just pick a gay guy. He picked
00:10:18.040 the tranny
00:10:19.440 lady to play the stand-in
00:10:22.080 character for Achilles. It was so
00:10:23.920 in your face. And I wondered, did he
00:10:25.940 go that far to make a
00:10:27.940 point? Was this his own
00:10:30.000 kind of Odyssean trickster
00:10:32.200 way to generate publicity, to win an Oscar with a DEI. I don't know. I'm just, maybe I'm reading
00:10:38.660 too deeply, but he's a very smart guy. I think the rage publicity was probably a point in his
00:10:43.100 mind. I think it may have been, you know, just to get everybody angry and talking about it.
00:10:47.680 The general point of the film, which again, I think you can boil down the morality of the film
00:10:51.680 to, there is a golden rule that was instituted by, in the movie, it's the gods, but God, right?
00:10:55.880 In our conception, there's a golden rule that God said to do. And if you violate that rule,
00:11:00.340 then sin is infectious and it actually has externalities right and those externalities
00:11:06.760 come back and bite you and sometimes the only way to put the genie back in the bottle is to sin again
00:11:11.020 but that's a sin that causes you to go into exile that is an incredibly biblical message
00:11:14.760 yeah it's not that that is actually like that that was the thing that they got me about again
00:11:19.100 you can even quibble with all these things and i agree with a lot of the critiques of the film and
00:11:21.940 and if i were going to rank nolan films this one comes in like top of the second tier of nolan
00:11:25.480 films for me this isn't like one of his top three films um but again the sort of the overblown
00:11:29.880 like we must we must have a malice struggle session over the odyssey it's so it's so ridiculous
00:11:36.100 it's so ridiculous well speaking of struggle sessions you know there was one on capitol hill
00:11:40.180 today with fauci uh also speaking of great deceivers and one of the worst fraudsters in
00:11:44.480 history so we'll get to that it's friendly fire hey hey ben before we get into fauci i i do have
00:11:57.380 to ask why are you dressed in a vladimir zelinski costume okay here's the actual honest answer the
00:12:04.420 actual honest answer is that it's really really hot where i am so we just filmed a show and we
00:12:09.360 are in like an old mansion in cincinnati ohio and it's like europe here there's no air conditioning
00:12:15.120 and so i cannot wear a jacket and so they gave me the shirt which normally i'd wear with a jacket
00:12:20.160 and then i just decided just because i have to flex that i was not going to you know wear the
00:12:24.900 And also because I want to fire drones at, yeah, exactly.
00:12:28.120 I just wanted to fire some drones in Moscow.
00:12:29.620 So I decided that in honor of Vladimir Zelensky's meeting with the president and the president
00:12:33.600 shifting back to the side of good against Russia, I'm going to dress up like Vladimir.
00:12:37.260 The real answer is I'm in like a cloak closet in Cincinnati is the actual real reason.
00:12:40.560 So what are you doing?
00:12:41.220 Can you tell us why you're in Cincinnati or no?
00:12:43.260 This is very secret project.
00:12:45.940 It's not like the most secret project, but we are doing a new show where I'm interviewing
00:12:50.080 the top names in business and finance
00:12:52.380 about sort of the future of the economy
00:12:54.160 and AI and technology.
00:12:56.060 And so I was interviewing somebody for that.
00:12:57.260 So it should be a great show.
00:12:58.640 All right.
00:12:59.120 That's coming out soon.
00:12:59.840 All right, that's exciting.
00:13:00.660 Can we beat up on Anthony Fauci?
00:13:02.420 He was on, oh, I think we have a,
00:13:03.800 do we have a clip from the show?
00:13:08.140 Here's a simple truth.
00:13:09.200 Almost nobody wants to say out loud.
00:13:10.540 The world you're living in right now
00:13:11.760 is about to disappear.
00:13:12.940 Not in a century, not in a generation.
00:13:15.260 Soon.
00:13:16.260 Artificial intelligence, biotech, energy,
00:13:18.120 capital markets, every foundation of the modern economy is being ripped up and repoured at the
00:13:22.720 same time. One day in the very near future, we're all going to wake up and the world around us will
00:13:26.700 be unrecognizable. Now, a lot of people are terrified of that. They understand. They look
00:13:30.840 at the horizon, they see a dystopian hellscape and a handful of tech CEOs make trillions while
00:13:35.040 everybody else is managed by the machines. Your job automated, your choices decided by algorithm,
00:13:40.340 a world where everything is provided for you and nothing is up to you. But that's not really the
00:13:44.860 truth. This could be the greatest era of human flourishing in history. Free people, free markets
00:13:49.720 armed with the most powerful tools ever created, making life longer, richer and freer. But that
00:13:54.620 outcome is not automatic. It does have to be built. The people building that future are not waiting
00:13:58.620 for permission. So instead of speculating about them, I'm going to sit down with them. The founders,
00:14:03.020 the CEOs, the investors, the people actually making the decisions that will decide the next
00:14:07.340 decade, the next century. What are they building? Why are they building it? What should the rest of
00:14:11.460 us be doing about it. This is Titans on Tomorrow. It's about to be a new world out there. Let's get
00:14:16.380 ready for it. I look forward to my invitation. I'm going to miss the hellscape though. I was
00:14:21.640 hoping it'd be like Doom, you know. I think the one thing we can conclude from that preview is
00:14:26.320 that I look better with a jacket on. Now, Mr. Fauci, Dr. Fauci did not look good on Capitol
00:14:33.740 Hill today. He was totally humiliated by Josh Hawley, by Rand Paul, by, I mean, they were just
00:14:39.500 raking this guy over the coals. He pled the fifth to everything, even though he had a blanket
00:14:45.720 pardon. So our friends over at Cal, she asked whether or not these people will be arrested
00:14:52.740 this year. Right now, other than Fauci, we have John Brennan, 37 percent, Mahmoud Khalil, 27 percent,
00:15:00.500 James Clapper, 20 percent. You know, it's all it'll be great. But I'm really sorry to tell you
00:15:04.760 11% say that Fauci will be arrested. I don't know who the 11% are that don't know what a
00:15:11.400 blanket presidential pardon is, but that seems a lie to me. So two questions. One,
00:15:18.820 will this do anything? It was satisfying to watch him squirm and to hear the great questions, but
00:15:22.720 will this do anything? And two, did Fauci have the right to plead the fifth,
00:15:29.340 given that he received this presidential pardon?
00:15:34.100 So on the legal question,
00:15:35.700 that's actually a pretty complicated legal question
00:15:37.420 because the question is sort of what the Fifth Amendment is for.
00:15:39.840 The typical idea is that you do not have a right
00:15:42.580 against self-incrimination for a crime
00:15:44.120 that you cannot be convicted of, right?
00:15:46.660 So can you take sort of a preemptive fifth,
00:15:48.880 meaning that he knows that the whole thing here
00:15:51.480 is going to be what he considers to be perjury traps, right?
00:15:53.460 People asking him questions to get him to conflict
00:15:55.340 with testimony that he gave at other times.
00:15:57.420 Does his pardon cover his testimony from other times or testimony that he gives now that conflicts with testimony that he gave at other times?
00:16:04.160 None of this is particularly clear.
00:16:06.040 The chances that you get a successful prosecution for perjury or for violation of the use of the Fifth Amendment,
00:16:13.120 you get a contempt that amounts to jail time, congressional contempt, probably difficult, I think.
00:16:19.560 I feel like that's a bit of a stretch.
00:16:21.400 So I don't think the calcium markets are wrong on that one.
00:16:23.560 it does go to show you that this is not a man who is eager to speak exactly with the Senate.
00:16:29.260 I understand why he's suspicious that every Republican is chomping at the bits, put him in
00:16:33.160 jail. I think that it does say something that he's unwilling to answer literally any of the
00:16:38.520 questions, given the fact that his diaries are out there. And we now know that many of the
00:16:42.740 suspicions that people held about him for years have been now fully justified by the insane stuff
00:16:47.880 that's in his diaries. Those diaries are crazy, by the way. That's wild stuff.
00:16:50.440 they're delightful they're really funny i i love the i love julia likes me you know
00:16:55.740 i'm saying i'm saying to those it's like watching a 14 year old girl in a pink fluffy pink dress
00:17:02.080 dancing around the room going i'm so beautiful i'd be the prince will love me i'm going to the
00:17:05.680 well because the diary did i mean it was things like i got a really beautiful picture on the
00:17:10.200 washington post today my hairline was looking really really good love gossip girl or whatever
00:17:15.940 You know, and it was like all of it was the whole diary. But nothing's going to happen.
00:17:20.540 The one thing I want to see, though, Knowles, I want to see I want to see I don't care whether he goes to jail.
00:17:25.160 He's an old man. I don't I really don't care what happens to him.
00:17:27.760 I want to see a reckoning for what the media did and how they contributed to this incredible disaster.
00:17:34.420 Really the worst failure of leadership since World War I that killed the economy, that sent these poor poor children, these poor poor children into a tailspin in their education that will never be caught up with.
00:17:48.880 And every time Donald Trump opens his mouth about the election that he feels he won, the press reports, oh, you know, this unfounded claim is always unfounded in the reporting of Trump talking.
00:17:59.640 But what about the unfounded claims about Hunter Biden's laptop? What about the unfounded claims about where the virus came from? What about the unfounded claims of Russian collusion? The reckoning that we have had for the utter failure of our media class and our leadership class and our elite class just hasn't come.
00:18:16.440 is kind of dribbling out over time because people saw it. They're not going to be lied to.
00:18:21.640 And so the trust in our institutions has vanished as it should have vanished. Our institutions
00:18:26.000 failed us. But why can't we just bring it out into the open and talk about it so that it like
00:18:31.060 rip the Band-Aid off and have the reckoning and fire the people who need to be fired, rejigger
00:18:35.000 the press that needs to be rejiggered instead of this kind of slow bleed where the press is
00:18:39.500 pretending, is hoping it's all going to go away. It's not going to go away. As Ben was just saying
00:18:44.140 in a show. It's a new world where they're not going to be able to hide.
00:18:47.860 Here's the thing. I think that the press already paid the price. I think that the press
00:18:50.720 is basically a defunct institution. That doesn't mean that they can't have impact.
00:18:55.520 But what has happened to the press over the course of the last three years is catastrophic.
00:18:59.880 I mean, truly catastrophic. The ratings do not exist on CNN. Many of the major institutions
00:19:04.480 have been taken over by people who the press disagrees with overtly. Here, I'm thinking of
00:19:08.300 CBS News, obviously. There have been some significant change. Jeff Bezos has reshifted
00:19:13.480 even the editorial page of the Washington Post.
00:19:15.440 Like, things have happened.
00:19:16.880 I think there are two things that, to me, are the dogs that never barked.
00:19:19.860 One is, how is it that we are still playing ball with China?
00:19:23.120 I mean, like, the real story about COVID, I understand that we botched it.
00:19:26.980 So did pretty much everybody else on Earth.
00:19:28.840 Okay, like, the only country that didn't really botch it particularly badly was Sweden.
00:19:32.920 And pretty much everybody else botched this thing pretty horribly.
00:19:35.740 And on a state-to-state level, people botched it at sort of different levels.
00:19:38.660 But you understand that, you know, dealing with a once-in-a-century pandemic where nobody
00:19:42.520 knows what to do. People make mistakes on both a governance level. The thing with Fauci is that
00:19:46.220 he knew what he was doing, right? That's what makes what Fauci did so terrible, is that he
00:19:49.360 knew exactly what he was doing when he was going after Jay Bhattacharya and the Great Barrington
00:19:53.460 Declaration, or when he was shutting down investigations into Wuhan. How China has been
00:19:57.860 able to get away with unleashing a virus on the planet that killed legitimately 5 to 10 million
00:20:01.380 people planet-wide. And somehow, they just keep on trucking, and nobody says anything about it.
00:20:06.440 And the president even said they're trying to steal our election. He's still not really doing
00:20:09.140 anything about it. That's one dog that didn't bark. And the other dog that didn't bark,
00:20:11.800 I got to say it because it just happens to be true. One of the reasons President Trump lost
00:20:16.100 the 2020 election is because he really did not handle this well. Anthony Fauci was a Donald
00:20:21.600 Trump appointee. Hey, Donald Trump could have fired Anthony Fauci at any minute. And he would
00:20:25.660 go on Truth Social or X at the time because he wasn't banned yet. And he would rip into Anthony
00:20:30.240 Fauci. But he worked for President Trump. If President Trump wanted to fire him, he could
00:20:35.180 have fired him. And so I think that because he didn't. And again, I understand why he didn't.
00:20:39.040 There are all sorts of political cross. I get all of that. But in the end, if you're the president and the guy works for you, it is very difficult for you then to be the lead attack point against the guy who you kept employed the entire time and you were using as sort of your figurehead as you tried out COVID policy.
00:20:53.440 I think the argument you made before, though, about the leaders who didn't see it coming and they didn't quite know what it was and they were afraid and they panicked, all of that applies to Trump a lot more than it applies to Fauci and a lot more than it applies to the press, whose job it is to ask questions and to say, is that true and how do we compare these two ideas?
00:21:13.560 and instead hounded Jay Buttigieg from pillar to post.
00:21:16.820 I mean, what they did to him was absolutely disgusting.
00:21:19.580 So, you know, I agree.
00:21:20.580 Look, I agree that the minute Trump won the second time, the press was doomed.
00:21:24.740 And I think that never happened to a nicer institution.
00:21:28.300 But I do think, like, we still have not had the conversation at the level of, like, you know, this is what went wrong.
00:21:34.640 This is what we ought to do next time.
00:21:36.880 I'm ashamed of the churches that let themselves be shut down,
00:21:40.040 Especially, you know, those Catholic churches that let them be shut down, that denied the host, you know, to people, that denied the body and blood to people and didn't have the guts to just say, as what his name did in California, I'm staying open, I don't care what you do to me.
00:21:54.780 And a lot of failure around the board, and I just don't think we've really discussed it on a national level yet.
00:22:00.340 It was amazing to see, especially for the non-sacramental shades of Christianity, they can say, well, it doesn't matter, the church isn't a real place, it's just kind of in the air and we can watch it on TV or whatever.
00:22:13.440 But for those who have sacramental theology, notably including the Catholic Church, you need the sacraments.
00:22:18.860 And I remember in L.A., when some of the churches were going real weak-kneed and shutting down or trying to change things, there was this old, he was kind of a left-winger, but he was this really old Dominican priest who, it was 92 or something, he was still hearing confessions from the side door of the church because he knew that you can't do that.
00:22:38.660 You know, he was of a certain generation that just understood you need to be there for people, especially at moments of crisis.
00:22:44.640 And I think you're right, Drew, that we've had this national and international trauma that we're recovering from still.
00:22:51.520 And that's why you need the reckoning.
00:22:52.620 It's just the problem is, OK, we're going to go humiliate Tony Fauci on Capitol Hill.
00:22:57.260 All right.
00:22:57.860 That was a good we're going to get some good podcasts out of it.
00:22:59.980 And then that's going to be it.
00:23:01.480 Well, you know, one of the things that I think that has been under discussed is is the failure of forget about the reckoning from, you know, people like us who many of us were critical of Fauci very early on.
00:23:11.180 Michael, you were super critical.
00:23:12.440 Drew, you were critical of Fauci.
00:23:13.860 took me a little longer to get to critical of Fauci, but by the middle of summer of 2020,
00:23:16.980 I was pretty critical of Fauci. You know, the thing that is really amazing about the lack of
00:23:23.840 self-critical, right? It's the self-critical thing. It's not that they need to be batted about
00:23:27.840 by members of the Republican Congress. The biggest problem we have right now in sort of
00:23:32.840 the scientific community is the lack of rigor with regard to policing your own. If you don't
00:23:37.940 police your own, then what ends up happening is that the trust in the institution of science
00:23:42.700 really does decline, right?
00:23:44.400 It is not that people like Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton
00:23:47.400 or, you know, you or me or any of us
00:23:49.260 were attacking Anthony Fauci
00:23:50.320 and that was attacking the science.
00:23:51.580 That was not the problem.
00:23:52.520 The problem is that Anthony Fauci
00:23:53.820 didn't give a crap about the science
00:23:55.140 and neither did any of the people
00:23:56.440 who were following Anthony Fauci
00:23:57.900 and yet they stood for the science.
00:23:59.020 And so the natural reaction to that
00:24:00.660 was a counter-science revolution, right?
00:24:03.100 It was, we moved from,
00:24:04.680 we should be skeptical of the experts
00:24:05.980 to we should be completely non-skeptical
00:24:08.220 of the non-experts, right?
00:24:09.820 Which is not the same proposition, right?
00:24:11.740 We should be skeptical of the experts, and we should ask them difficult questions, and we should force them to wall-in-demand, all those things for sure.
00:24:17.860 But the contrapositive of that, to distrust the experts, is not trust the non-experts, which is, I think, where so many people ended up going.
00:24:25.600 And that really is kind of a dangerous thing.
00:24:27.720 And I think that if the scientific community wishes to get back on the horse here, they're the ones who need to do this.
00:24:35.660 It doesn't need to be Republicans who are grilling Anthony Fauci.
00:24:37.820 It needs to be members of the scientific community who are grilling Anthony Fauci, as opposed to doing what they are doing today, which is relighting their Anthony Fauci votive candles.
00:24:47.120 I mean, over at MSNBC, they really were.
00:24:49.440 They were doing this whole, like, we're in mourning.
00:24:51.140 It was so terrible how Anthony Fauci was treated.
00:24:53.380 If you guys had asked those questions, maybe we could have come back to some sort of scientifically-based rigor.
00:24:58.100 But you're not asking those questions.
00:24:59.640 So, you know, the consequences are a complete reactionary shift in a direction that, frankly, I don't think is universally wonderful.
00:25:06.420 And, you know, by the way, when Anthony Fauci, hold on one second, Drew, I want to hear what you have to say, but I just want to point out that when Anthony Fauci was lying down on his bed, kicking his feet in the air, writing down, Dear Diary, I'm still beautiful.
00:25:20.660 Well, he was doing that on his bed.
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00:26:32.820 Drew, you were saying?
00:26:34.740 Yeah, you know, especially with this uprising from the DSA, I was talking to Molly Hemingway
00:26:39.740 last night, and she and I are the only two people who say, you know, the only difference
00:26:43.700 between the DSA and the Democrat Party is the DSA, the socialists are honest.
00:26:48.060 They're like, we hate your country, we're going to destroy it, where the Democrats run
00:26:51.220 on the policy that they're going to be moderate, and then they hate the country.
00:26:54.080 Then when they win, they hate the country and they want to destroy it.
00:26:56.380 But the lack of information about socialism and what it does and how it works, there is now no source in the country that young people can trust or feel they can trust to become educated.
00:27:10.580 They don't, you know, the guys, most of these kids who are voting for socialists, they have no idea what they're voting for.
00:27:15.120 They've never read a book about socialism.
00:27:16.600 They don't know any history about it.
00:27:17.900 They've been taught in college if they went to college that socialism is great.
00:27:21.620 The level of induced ignorance in the country is so high.
00:27:26.040 And now, who can you turn to to get just an honest, here's the news, this is what happens, this is what happens when you have socialism?
00:27:33.160 I know who you can turn to, Drew, if you want to get the promotion of socialism.
00:27:37.740 Well, you can turn to us, but if you want to get the kind of pro-socialist side, you can turn to Evan Barker, our guest, who is the author of Nothing Left.
00:27:46.420 Yeah, we have a socialist on the show.
00:27:48.740 Semi-reform, quasi-reform.
00:27:50.580 I don't know, Evan, nice to see you. Former, former. Former. Thank you so much, you guys.
00:27:56.560 Oh, go ahead. No, you got the goods. What's what is it? What are the youths thinking? I know they're
00:28:00.960 eating Tide Pods and they're going to the sock hop with their honeys. But tell me, what is the voice
00:28:05.480 of the youth? All right. So first of all, correction, former socialist. Thank you guys so much for
00:28:13.580 having me on the show today, by the way. Yeah, so I worked with DSA-aligned candidates for a long
00:28:21.160 time, you guys. I worked at a firm out of Washington, D.C. called Left Rising, and we were behind some
00:28:29.180 of the biggest names on the far left, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Jamal Bowman, Jasmine Crockett, the list
00:28:36.740 goes on and on i worked for abdul al-sayed um and i ended up leaving the progressive movement
00:28:44.040 um in 2024 right after the dnc um i had enough and i left and today i've got a book out um and
00:28:55.240 i wrote all of the juicy exciting details about what it's like inside that movement inside the
00:29:01.080 book. What changed your mind? So many things. So it was actually kind of a long, slow disillusionment
00:29:11.760 for me. I first got activated in democratic politics in 2008 because I have a lung disease
00:29:18.800 similar to cystic fibrosis. And Barack Obama promised me healthcare. And in all actuality,
00:29:27.000 the Democratic Party was a lot different back then. I mean, I think Barack Obama, by today's
00:29:33.460 standards, probably wouldn't even fit in. I mean, he deported people. He was for a closed border.
00:29:40.820 The Democrats were a lot more normal back then. And over time, you know, I ended up getting
00:29:48.800 disillusioned with the establishment wing of the party in 2017. And that's how I found the
00:29:55.040 Bernie Sanders movement. And I thought that they had all the answers. And then in 2020,
00:30:01.440 things got even more insane. I ended up working with a criminal justice reform pack. You guys
00:30:08.960 have probably heard of this guy. His name is Sean King. And that's when I started to feel very
00:30:15.040 uneasy about the things that I was seeing and the things that I was hearing behind the scenes.
00:30:20.680 and by 2021 it all kind of hit me um what the far left was actually about and in 2022 i had a baby
00:30:31.100 boy um he's four years old now and i think he made me a little bit more conservative too to be honest
00:30:37.400 with you um becoming a mother kind of reframed some of my political beliefs and then i kind of
00:30:43.920 stayed out of politics for a few years after that, just focused on being a mom. And then in 2024,
00:30:50.660 I did go to the Democratic National Convention. I was kind of interested, intrigued just because
00:30:56.620 of the whole Joe Biden debacle debate. I was hoping that maybe the Democrats would remake
00:31:03.180 themselves, that there would be some sort of open convention. And instead, when I got there,
00:31:08.020 I just saw the coronation of Kamala Harris. And at that point, I went home and I thought I was
00:31:13.600 posting a resignation video on my TikTok to 40 followers. And instead, I woke up the next day
00:31:19.560 and there was about 2 million views. And so at that point, I just decided, screw it. I'll just
00:31:26.680 keep telling people everything I saw. Now, you said, Evan, that you figured out what the far
00:31:32.680 left was all about. How would you summarize that? I mean, what was it all about? Yeah.
00:31:38.280 So I wouldn't even say it's funny because they like to cloak themselves in the cause of the
00:31:42.540 working class, right? And I actually come from a working class union family in the middle of the
00:31:46.720 country. Um, I've kind of watched over time as how most of my relatives have stopped supporting
00:31:52.940 Democrats and now all love Donald Trump. Um, I was kind of, I was kind of like the last one,
00:31:59.380 but, um, to, you know, to, to, to leave the, the Democrats behind and, you know, they say that
00:32:06.740 they're socialists. I don't even know if I'd really call them socialists because they don't
00:32:09.820 really even focus that much on economics it's more about having a cultural revolution um in
00:32:16.820 the united states they they kind of just want to um demean and denigrate anyone that isn't um
00:32:27.280 oppressed by their standards and if they do actually support socialism i think it's it's
00:32:33.440 basically socialism for like non-white people. I think if you guys saw, oh, sorry, go ahead.
00:32:40.400 No, no, I was, I was chuckling and agreeing with you. I think that's a good diagnosis.
00:32:43.260 Yeah, no, it's true. I mean, if you saw Zeran Mamdani, he ran on like,
00:32:49.400 let's tax rich and whiter neighborhoods more. It's funny when I ask my friends who are still
00:32:54.120 Democrats about that, they like to give him a lot of leeway and they're like, well, you know,
00:32:59.120 he just he just was being overly descriptive. You know, he's not actually talking about poor
00:33:04.040 white people or anything like that. But that's not true. I mean, that language is incredibly
00:33:08.520 intentional. And Democratic elites like they they push that kind of language onto politicians.
00:33:16.800 That is actually what they mean. And so it's kind of a movement that's based in racial grievance
00:33:24.620 and grievance for anyone that, you know,
00:33:28.120 just basically doesn't fit into what they believe
00:33:31.560 is, you know, marginalized, I guess.
00:33:38.380 It's kind of crazy.
00:33:41.020 They basically pushed everybody else out of the movement.
00:33:45.360 Yeah, Evan, one of the things that I've been saying for a while
00:33:48.160 is that many of the things that conservatives like to say
00:33:50.440 are sort of the bugs for the DSA.
00:33:52.480 Those are actually the features that we on the right will say things like, well, you know, Mondani's only popular.
00:33:58.180 You see Jon Stewart do this, and he's not on the right, but he's sort of more traditionally left.
00:34:01.580 He'll say, you know, the reason Mondani's popular among DSA types is because of his talk about affordability and all the rest of this stuff is just sort of the chaff.
00:34:09.600 The real wheat is the affordability argument.
00:34:11.920 And I've been saying for a while that that's nonsense, that actually the affordability is the stuff that allows dupes like Jon Stewart to swallow the medicine.
00:34:18.140 But but the actual thing that most people who are sort of DSA aligned are into is the grievance politics.
00:34:23.400 It is the anti-Americanism. It is the sort of radical victim victimized or oppression matrix.
00:34:30.040 Yeah, I think I I think that is I could not put that more aptly.
00:34:34.440 I think that's exactly right. It's just it's just it's grievance politics.
00:34:39.340 I mean, they they don't like America.
00:34:42.400 You know, I actually I lost my brother on the USS John McCain in 2017.
00:34:48.860 That was actually another little thing that I that I read about in my book actually was huge thing.
00:34:54.760 But it was, you know, I when I went to AOC's office for the first time in 2018 to visit her, it was about a month after she won her election against Joe Crowley.
00:35:07.580 and I went in and I found these like American flag uh stickers and I know this might seem this
00:35:14.760 might seem insignificant to some it was they were crumbled up it's like somebody intentionally took
00:35:20.740 them and crumbled them up and just threw them at the bottom of the garbage can and I remember
00:35:25.900 reaching down I was about a year after I'd lost my brother and I was like I was about to go visit
00:35:31.560 his kids. And I pulled them out of the trash can. And I was like, you know, it was it was just it
00:35:37.540 was a constant thing. You know, I would be behind the scenes on campaigns. And, you know, they would
00:35:42.640 be so reactive to Donald Trump that they would want to just like immediately blast out emails,
00:35:47.680 you know, anytime Trump, you know, did any sort of military action in the Middle East. And I
00:35:55.100 remember one time there was a threat actually towards U.S. troops abroad. This was back in
00:36:01.340 I think it was around 2019, 2020, and they were sending out fundraising emails. And I was like
00:36:08.040 the only person around that was like, you guys, you don't know what's going on with our troops
00:36:14.040 right now. What are you doing? Why are you trying to make money off of this? You should just be
00:36:19.940 saying that you're praying for them and nothing else. And they don't love America.
00:36:25.700 Yeah, they're open about it. And I think all of these things.
00:36:27.880 If you, like, speak to them directly, like, if you get them after a drink or so, they are pretty candid.
00:36:32.500 I don't think we're slandering them at all here.
00:36:35.040 And you even seeā€”
00:36:36.180 It's on their website.
00:36:37.080 Yeah, it's onā€”right.
00:36:37.780 And even, like, on the Mamdani point, you know, Mamdani said he wants to just help poor people or whatever.
00:36:43.160 He's going to tax 31,000 people who don't even really live in New York.
00:36:46.560 They just have pied-Ć -terre.
00:36:47.900 That's extra homes, whatever.
00:36:49.580 And then what happened this week?
00:36:51.480 Heā€”that 31,000 number went up to almost a million New Yorkers.
00:36:55.920 And not only did he say he's going to take their property, he doxed them.
00:37:00.280 After whipping up the mob against these people, he put out their names and addresses and more or less said, go get them.
00:37:07.440 And you just think, oh, wow, this is not about helping poor people.
00:37:10.840 It's really just about hurting rich people.
00:37:13.360 It's not, you know, it is like just profoundly unpatriotic.
00:37:17.780 What drives me nuts about this, by the way, is that, you know, my family back in the Midwest, my mom, like she's really struggling right now.
00:37:25.220 I've had to pay for her rent or help her with her rent the last couple of months.
00:37:30.000 And, you know, if I asked her about Zora Mamdani and like what she thinks of his policies,
00:37:34.640 what she thinks of free grocery stores, she hates it.
00:37:37.300 Even if she's like struggling to pay for her groceries right now, like she thinks government
00:37:42.140 run grocery stores are like an absolutely terrible idea.
00:37:45.320 If you ask her like what she thinks about Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or any of those guys,
00:37:49.680 she doesn't hate them.
00:37:50.860 She doesn't have like envy of their success.
00:37:52.860 She actually likes them.
00:37:54.860 and looks up to them and thinks it's amazing that they're building jobs. And I think that
00:37:59.200 that's a common thing. If you talk to actual working class people, not people in New York
00:38:05.480 City who are highly educated, who have rich parents and have five college degrees and can't
00:38:12.500 get jobs making more than six figures, not those people. They have a lot of grievance towards the
00:38:18.900 rich, but if you talk to actual, everyday, ordinary Americans, so Ron Mamdani does not
00:38:25.080 represent their politics. Yeah, that's right. I know we have to let Ben go because you have to
00:38:28.500 go drone Kiev. Sorry, the Kremlin, not Kiev. You would not know. You're not droning them.
00:38:33.260 Ben, good to see you. I want to keep Evan around. This is like a big trade-up. Hold on. We're going
00:38:37.400 from Ben to Evan. I want this to be permanent. Ben, good luck. Looking forward to the new show.
00:38:43.700 Yeah, I want to see the new show. It looks great. Before I let you go, so there's this new
00:38:47.400 a poll out that shows that the DSA, the Democratic Socialists, are more popular with rank and file
00:38:53.860 Democrat voters than Democrats in Congress. So I guess it's kind of, you know, a low bar for the
00:39:00.400 DSA. But obviously, the candidates are doing pretty well. And the DSA seems to have a bright
00:39:06.880 future, at least in the primaries. What does that say? I mean, what does that mean for the midterms
00:39:11.940 and maybe for 2028?
00:39:15.040 You know, it's kind of crazy,
00:39:16.940 but I have seen the people in the Democratic Party,
00:39:20.520 not just the people that work in the Democratic Party,
00:39:22.700 but the actual voters in the base of the Democratic Party
00:39:25.820 get more radicalized over the last 10 years.
00:39:30.200 I mean, people that I knew in 2016
00:39:32.440 that really liked Hillary Clinton,
00:39:34.580 like these days, they're all in for Abdul El-Sayed
00:39:36.860 and think that Haley Stevens is terrible.
00:39:39.440 So I think that the base of the Democratic Party is honestly just really fed up with the establishment. And they have a reason to be mad at the establishment. The establishment has lost many times now to Donald Trump and has lost pretty key elections.
00:39:56.580 But I think because the progressives, the DSA wing, are the only built-in alternative that they have, unfortunately, it means they are looking to them as their answer to countering Donald Trump.
00:40:11.800 But I think that this is completely misguided and will actually push them in an even worse direction.
00:40:17.440 Evan, you know, one of the things I started out as on the left, too, and one of the things that
00:40:22.080 changed my mind was that just the revelation, the one thing all liberals know is that right-wingers
00:40:26.500 are evil. And when I started to realize, oh, they're not evil and start to question their
00:40:30.060 ideas, their ideas were pretty good. Is there anyone on the right that you think, yeah,
00:40:33.740 I would vote for this guy? Here's a conservative or Republican that I would vote for.
00:40:38.980 So, okay. So I do consider myself an independent now. I did vote for Trump in 2024.
00:40:45.020 Let's go. I've already done it. Love that. I voted for Trump in 2024. I, you know, I like he's a moderate in policy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm from Missouri. I really like the center of Missouri, Josh Hawley. There's still some Democrats I like to, though. So, you know, it really it just depends on the person.
00:41:08.720 I just, I think that the Democrats have,
00:41:10.960 you know, they've just gone so far to the left.
00:41:13.820 Like if Kamala Harris is the nominee in 2028,
00:41:16.860 I'm not going to vote for her.
00:41:18.560 And I don't think anyone in my family would either.
00:41:20.880 I don't think Doug Emhoff's going to vote for her.
00:41:22.540 I mean, I, you know, I think she's pretty much done.
00:41:26.400 She's put a fork in her.
00:41:27.700 Evan, the book is nothing left.
00:41:29.800 Everyone needs to go get the book.
00:41:31.400 We need to fire Ben from this show
00:41:33.080 and just have Evan on.
00:41:34.080 This is so much more pleasant.
00:41:35.940 This is great.
00:41:37.180 Wonderful to see you.
00:41:38.180 Where can people follow you?
00:41:41.040 I'm on X at EvanWCH.
00:41:44.480 All right, EvanWCH.
00:41:46.760 Go see her at X.
00:41:47.840 Thank you, Evan.
00:41:48.760 Now, I want to talk to all of you before we go
00:41:51.140 and before we get to our game show segment.
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00:42:55.560 It's down to me and Drew.
00:42:57.320 No Ben, no Matt, no Evan.
00:43:00.060 This is it.
00:43:00.420 Father time peeking around the corner.
00:43:02.240 Yeah, this is it.
00:43:03.600 Hopefully I won't be alone.
00:43:05.380 I think we're doing that stupid game show again.
00:43:07.860 Is that right?
00:43:08.520 Did you?
00:43:09.340 Oh, my God.
00:43:10.480 Come on.
00:43:10.920 Do we have it?
00:43:11.540 I want to do it.
00:43:12.320 It's called, the producers are telling me it's called I'm Not Convinced.
00:43:18.160 I've been waiting for this all.
00:43:21.040 Yeah.
00:43:21.400 No, I want to do a stinger.
00:43:23.760 I want them to.
00:43:24.380 The game show is called I'm Not Convinced.
00:43:27.200 Bring.
00:43:28.480 There we go.
00:43:29.080 They don't.
00:43:30.480 All right.
00:43:31.080 Well, all right.
00:43:31.640 They'll fix it in post.
00:43:32.480 The first guest, Sunny Joy Nelson. Hello, Sunny.
00:43:40.820 Hey, thank you for having me.
00:43:42.660 What's your pitch?
00:43:44.580 All right, here's my pitch. It's very on brand. You're going to say, wow, of course, but very unique here.
00:43:50.940 My pitch is a serious one, and it is the immediate passing of the Save America Act.
00:43:58.020 Most specifically, the portion that says you have to show your ID to vote.
00:44:02.880 You have to prove that you are an American citizen to vote.
00:44:06.600 And here's my reasoning in that.
00:44:08.140 Last week, I went to TJ Maxx to return some clothes that don't fit me anymore because
00:44:12.220 I'm seven months pregnant.
00:44:13.540 And I had to show my ID to prove who I was to return some clothes to TJ Maxx.
00:44:20.000 When I left there, I went to Target to buy a lighter for my three-year-old sparklers
00:44:25.240 for the 4th of July.
00:44:26.280 I had to show an ID to buy a lighter. Now, this is absolutely crazy. We have our priorities
00:44:32.120 totally mixed up in America right now. It should be common sense that our elections are 100%
00:44:38.640 secure with voter ID. Okay, yes, we all agree. We all need to pass the Save America Act. This is an
00:44:44.860 85-15 issue, at least. But in order to get it done, you need to end the filibuster, which is
00:44:52.080 not part of the Constitution. It's not intrinsic to the Senate, but it is this great Senate tradition
00:44:56.260 that gives the minority party some power when they're out of power. Would you blow up the
00:45:01.780 filibuster over this? I believe that I would. And the president has been very clear about the
00:45:07.520 filibuster and what the Democrats are going to do once they become in power. They're going to
00:45:12.580 stack the Supreme Court. They're going to do away with what little security we have in our voting
00:45:17.780 system right now. So this is something that needs to go. And it's something that is important for
00:45:22.560 Republicans, does this go around? Drew, you're older than the filibuster. Would you blow it up?
00:45:27.760 Before they blow up the filibuster, I would like them to pare down the SAVE Act to exactly what
00:45:33.000 we're talking about right now. The SAVE Act is littered with a bunch of things that put some
00:45:36.920 people off. Susan, I'm sorry, it was Murkowski who was complaining that it put special burdens
00:45:43.640 on people in Alaska who have a hard time getting to the polls. I think all of that would be cleared
00:45:47.580 up if they would just put it, you know, the whole act could be one sentence, you need picture ID,
00:45:52.920 official picture ID to vote in America. And I think if they would boil it down to that,
00:45:57.480 I think there's a possibility they could even beat it without getting rid of the filibuster,
00:46:01.100 which we have to admit is a dangerous thing to do. Power never stays in one hand in America.
00:46:07.000 It's going to go back to the Democrats at some point. And once they have the power without the
00:46:10.680 filibuster and, and, and, you know, I know the argument, the argument is they're going to do it
00:46:14.340 anyway. But before we take that risk, I would like to just see them pare down the SAVE Act to this
00:46:20.020 one thing. Of course you need ID to vote. And I would like to see Democrats vote against that
00:46:25.400 because they made it just too easy for the Democrats to wiggle out of it by adding all
00:46:30.360 this other stuff. Sonny, what do you think? Are you going with Drew's version or are you sticking
00:46:34.520 with your own? The SAVE America Act as is must be passed. I have to say it's a solid point and I
00:46:40.900 totally agree with it. I'm of the mindset that whatever works to get voter ID universally
00:46:47.100 accepted in a federal rule in our elections, let's go with that. I totally think that we need to get
00:46:54.140 that passed and everything else we can focus on after that. Because if we don't have secure
00:46:58.680 elections, we don't have a country. The president said that many times. But when you look at the
00:47:03.780 thing, the voter fraud, the voter interference, the foreign interference that happens in our
00:47:08.020 elections, these are things that happen in third world countries. America is the greatest country
00:47:12.220 on the planet. We all agree on that. We deserve to have the most secure, safe elections on the
00:47:17.180 planet as well. Yes. I think that Drew's addendum to your point, Sonny, is good. So I'm persuaded
00:47:24.260 by that. But you sound and look much better than Drew in every single way. So I think you both win.
00:47:30.320 I'm convinced. Thank you, Sonny. We now have Matt Foldy. Matt, what's your idea?
00:47:34.660 Hello. Guys, I want to win not the war on the suburbs with you, but I want to win a battle
00:47:41.000 in the war on suburbs with you. And the way that we can solve this is by doing something very
00:47:46.300 simple. It is banning bike lanes. Bike lanes, as we know, are not used by anyone. They are
00:47:52.400 certainly not used by bicyclists. And all that they do is they add needless congestion to suburban
00:47:59.160 Americans who use cars. I was just in Australia. Other countries, they don't love cars in the way
00:48:05.320 that Americans do. We have had a love-hate relationship with our cars since they were
00:48:10.160 first created. And bike lanes serve basically no purpose. What do they do? They take up a lane of
00:48:18.700 traffic that should be used for cars, and you still have bicyclists in the car lanes. So my
00:48:25.200 proposal is that? Ban bike lanes. Are bike lanes a big deal in the suburbs? I thought they're just
00:48:29.460 in the cities. They're in the city because they are part of the war on the suburbs. They are part
00:48:34.680 of the war on commuting Americans. Oh, got it. Yeah. Okay. Now I understand. And I will say,
00:48:38.000 look, in the suburb that I'm from in Montgomery County, Maryland, they are now spreading. So I
00:48:41.720 think that, you know, in the same way, you got to kill them over there so you don't have to kill
00:48:44.480 them over here. Stop the spread now before they come to a suburb or to an exurb near you. I have
00:48:51.960 to disagree i'm not convinced because i agree with you the bikes thing is ridiculous and nobody
00:48:56.060 should ride them and but when i travel to cities in the united states especially dc when i travel
00:49:01.000 to cities around the world i could be in budapest my chief mode of transportation my favorite one
00:49:06.320 it's not a bicycle but it's not a car and it's not a subway it's those stupid scooters that are
00:49:11.320 clearly a nuisance and probably carry diseases but i love them they're really cheap they're easy
00:49:16.620 to get around on. And I like the bike lane for that reason. And so I'm not, I'm not convinced,
00:49:21.920 Drew. So Michael, it's just you and Venezuelan gangbangers. Yeah. And, and really you, you
00:49:28.840 repeat yourself, Drew, what is, uh, I don't want to ban bike lanes. I want to ban bikes and
00:49:35.280 bicyclists. I don't know what it is about people when they get on a bike that they suddenly lose
00:49:39.400 all of their manners. They think they have the perfect right to scream at you, to, you know,
00:49:44.040 give you the finger because you didn't see them in your, in your side view mirror. They're
00:49:47.860 impossible to see and they're fun to run over. So it's an added, it's an added incentive to just,
00:49:53.160 you know, just drive right over. I also want to see a picture of you on one of those scooters
00:49:58.480 so I can prove that you're not heterosexual. Sometimes people snap them. If I'm driving
00:50:03.420 by occasion, I'll get someone shout out a window like, Hey, are you, I'm just there full suit on
00:50:07.440 just going down the road. But to your point on bicycles. It's so gay. I'm sorry. No, well,
00:50:12.100 But actually, this relates to my big objection to bicycles, which is bicycles don't really exist.
00:50:17.720 There are straight-sicles, there are gay-sicles, but is there really any such thing as a bicycle,
00:50:22.500 or are you just like, you don't want to admit the whole thing?
00:50:25.380 So anyway, I don't know if that means...
00:50:26.540 You're reaffirming a transportation binary.
00:50:28.180 Yeah, I am. I certainly am.
00:50:30.580 And I don't... Yeah, so we're just going to throw them off our rooftops or whatever.
00:50:34.060 I don't know. Before it's really going downhill,
00:50:36.020 I don't know if that means that I'm convinced by you, Matt, or not convinced.
00:50:40.220 but in any case, this whole segment's been very, very gay. Thank you, Matt. I appreciate that.
00:50:47.400 Do we have any other guests? I just want to say, you guys are talking about other battles in the
00:50:50.400 war for the suburbs. So I think that ultimately we are all in agreement whether or not it's
00:50:54.780 banning bike lane, banning bicycles. We're coming at it from the same heterosexual standpoint.
00:50:59.660 I agree. I agree. We all agree on that. I don't know what standpoint you're coming at from.
00:51:03.420 That's the important one. We all agree on that. Do we have any other heterosexual,
00:51:09.300 homosexual and no we don't it's just us it's just us and we contain multitudes okay that's all i
00:51:16.580 want to talk about drew do you have anything else you need to get off your mind i have one
00:51:20.500 yeah i when i i finally finished uh um jd vance's book i i texted you about it i don't know if you
00:51:27.680 got my text i i was i was really impressed with that book i have to say you know i think he's
00:51:32.080 been i think he's been i know you love him and all this stuff but i think he's been tripping
00:51:35.160 over his own feet lately. And I think he's looked pretty bad in this Iran thing and some of the ways
00:51:40.960 he's handled it. But I feel like there is this person there. I wish we could extract him. You
00:51:46.640 know, I said before that he needs a tuckerectomy. And I think that really is true. I think he needs
00:51:51.140 to show some leadership on this issue. You know, Tucker is the one. I never get panicked about
00:51:56.840 these media figures. They come and go. Tucker is doing something wicked. And I think he's dangerous
00:52:01.780 in this low information, you know, atmosphere that we're in, but I really was interested in
00:52:08.200 this book. I actually thought he said some very self-searching things and some of the things,
00:52:13.040 my objections to his personality, he actually put in the book. You know, some of the things
00:52:16.860 that I worry about in his personality that he follows people too easily, and then he gets angry
00:52:22.320 at other people who suggest he might be wrong too easily. But I think he's at least thoughtful. I
00:52:28.780 hope he can find his way because he may well be the candidate yeah it's funny because i i agree i
00:52:34.560 think he is the presumptive nominee now i think people there are all sorts of campaigns to try
00:52:39.360 to displace him but it's just not showing up in the polls or the scuttlebutt around washington
00:52:43.780 and but but i i really like your point there drew because a lot of it you know there are these
00:52:48.680 descriptions of vance who i who i do like i i really do try to not get involved in primaries
00:52:53.220 i don't think it's my job but i i do think we do we have a calci yeah we do we have a calci
00:52:58.480 report on who the nominee is going to be? What are they saying right now? Okay, right now,
00:53:02.800 Calci's saying Vance, 40, Rubio, 30, DeSantis, five and a half, which is actually-
00:53:07.700 So that's Rubio on the rise, though.
00:53:09.220 Yeah, well, it's closer than the public opinion polls, but the public opinion polls are diverging.
00:53:13.280 And there was just another one. It put Vance somewhere like around 49 or 50, Rubio below that,
00:53:19.980 followed by DeSantis and Ted Cruz, who I actually think has a lane in the race. But then when you
00:53:26.100 go Vance Rubio head to head, it actually goes apart even further. So I think it's like 60-30
00:53:31.820 or 60-29. And I also just don't think Rubio is going to run against him. But because there's
00:53:37.040 this campaign on, I do think people are projecting onto Vance these simplistic ideas that he does
00:53:44.420 not really hold. And so I have the same impression that you have from the book, which is, this is a
00:53:48.860 really sharp guy. He's a thoughtful person who, you know, really is interested in ideas. When I
00:53:54.360 interviewed him a few weeks ago. He gave me an hour. And so I spent 45 minutes of it or something
00:54:00.900 talking about religion. I knew I had to get a couple of questions in there for the headlines
00:54:04.300 about AOC or whatever, but I knew, but I said, no, no, this is the rare politician with whom
00:54:09.120 you can actually talk about like the differences between the Dominicans and the Jesuits and
00:54:14.380 syndicalism and distributism. And I don't know, he's like a really thoughtful guy. So yeah,
00:54:19.060 I'm glad you had that reaction because that was, that's mine too.
00:54:22.620 Yeah, no, it lifted him in my, you know, I'm rooting for him.
00:54:25.780 I've been rooting for him from the beginning, but I do think he's bumbled around a little
00:54:29.160 bit and bumped into the walls a bit.
00:54:30.860 And I think he needs, I think he does, you know, once you're in office, you don't have
00:54:34.260 time to change your mind.
00:54:35.160 You got to act on the principles you have.
00:54:36.780 And I think he needs to establish his principles a little bit more firmly.
00:54:39.800 And one of the things he could do is speak up against the rampant anti-Semitism and anti-Israel
00:54:45.700 idea.
00:54:46.180 You know, I don't care if you think we shouldn't be that involved in the Middle East, that
00:54:50.080 has nothing to do with it.
00:54:51.080 But the anti, to be against the one free country in that area, smacks of anti-Semitism.
00:54:57.240 And I think he needs to get his head around that in some way and show leadership.
00:55:02.120 Because anti-Semitism certainly has been on the rise.
00:55:04.540 And you do see it on the right.
00:55:06.020 I mean, Yoram has only made this point.
00:55:08.020 He said, look, I didn't predict it.
00:55:09.400 I didn't think you'd see it rise on the right.
00:55:11.380 And it has to some degree.
00:55:13.340 But of course, it's so much more pronounced on the left.
00:55:17.080 I mean, it's like not even comparable, you know.
00:55:19.980 So it's true, though.
00:55:21.180 It crops up throughout history, and you've got to tamp it down always.
00:55:24.240 But I think he needs to be really firm on the issues that really matter,
00:55:28.140 like I just mentioned, Dominicans versus Jesuits.
00:55:30.700 And I know where he stands on that.
00:55:32.460 I know that for a fact.
00:55:33.380 Okay, that's Friendly Fire.
00:55:34.960 Drew, good to see you.
00:55:36.840 Now it's just going to be me yelling into a room by myself.
00:55:39.560 Bye, everybody.
00:55:40.340 See you later.
00:55:40.760 I'm Michael Knowles.
00:55:41.360 We'll see you next time.