00:01:00.000It's been five years since the establishment of the Juneteenth National Independence Day
00:01:07.020federal holiday, and Americans are once again celebrating with the now traditional rituals
00:01:12.780of issuing politically correct corporate press releases and making racist jokes on social media.
00:01:18.880We will get to why Juneteenth can never actually work. Then, speaking of black Americans,0.57
00:01:24.300I want to make sure I have this one right. U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas, Herschel Walker, warns tourists not to get sexually assaulted on jet skis.
00:01:36.760Imagine you got in a time machine, you went back to the 90s and told somebody that that would, Ambassador Herschel Walker, Bahamas, raping on jet skis.
00:01:47.060We'll get to that momentarily. First, Vice President J.D. Vance offers tough love for
00:01:51.480the state of Israel, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard spends her last day
00:01:57.340in office revealing that Dr. Fauci actually does bear responsibility for creating COVID.
00:02:03.260It was basically all Fauci's fault the whole time. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
00:02:17.060welcome back to the show megan kelly has declared that we all need to come back together
00:02:31.120on the right in advance of the midterms and looking ahead to 2028 especially the media
00:02:37.540figures on the right especially the podcasters and the independent influencer people they've
00:02:42.500all gone in a billion different directions, much to my consternation, as I have lamented for months
00:02:48.120and months now. Megyn Kelly coming out saying, hey, you know what? Enough is enough. We got to
00:02:51.400come back together. We will get to Megyn's commentary. First, though, can you believe
00:02:56.280these white honky devils at the Daily Wire are making me work on Juneteenth? Can you believe0.98
00:03:01.380this? Keeping a man of swarth down, making us come into work, these devils making us come in1.00
00:03:11.080on George Floyd Day, completely, completely outrageous. George Floyd Day, which according
00:03:16.220to the Federal Register is the Juneteenth National Independence Day. And the real problem with
00:03:22.800Juneteenth, it's in that last part. No one had ever heard of the holiday before like five years
00:03:29.160ago. And then we all had to pretend like we all knew exactly what it was. And then we had to
00:03:33.640pretend it was the day that slavery was ended, even though it wasn't. There are multiple days
00:03:37.500that you could say slavery ended in America and none of them were Juneteenth. Wasn't the day that0.62
00:03:42.660Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Wasn't the day that the 13th Amendment was ratified.
00:03:47.340It was the day that a mailman got to Texas and told them that slavery had already been abolished
00:03:52.020or something. So anyway, then we pretended that it was a thing, and then it was established as
00:03:57.880a federal holiday. And it was, I call it George Floyd Day. It actually was in response to the
00:04:04.060riots and the murders and everything that followed in the civil unrest pushed entirely
00:04:08.880by the left after George Floyd was killed resisting arrest and overdosing on fentanyl
00:04:14.560at a dosage of four times the lethal limit. So in the spirit of Juneteenth, let's begin with
00:04:19.920Michelle Obama being insufferable. The Obamas go on Good Morning America on ABC News,1.00
00:04:24.760and they are asked about the next stage of their life. They've just opened up the Obama
00:04:29.740Presidential Center, which looks like a brutalist, communist, gigantic trash can, like literal trash0.99
00:04:36.140can, like Oscar the Grouch trash can in the middle of Chicago. They're launching this hideous center1.00
00:04:42.920for a hideous political project commemorating their hideous presidency. And they're asked,
00:04:48.400okay, so what are you doing now? You've been out of office since 2016, 10 years on. What does the
00:04:54.180next phase of your life look like? Here's Barack Obama's answer, and here's Michelle Obama's answer.
00:04:59.740One word to describe your next chapter.
00:11:53.680But the reason that that clip is going viral is because it's kind of weird, right?
00:12:00.90020 years ago, 30 years ago, no one could have imagined that one day President Donald Trump's,
00:12:10.340first part, ambassador to the Bahamas Herschel Walker would be warning Americans not to get
00:12:19.940raped on jet skis. It's just, it's like a Mad Lib. It's, do you remember Mad Libs when you were0.94
00:12:24.960in school and you'd fill in, fill in a weird noun and a weird verb and a weird that we're living in
00:12:29.860that we're living in a Mad Lib and the Libs are really mad coincidentally about it. So the reason
00:12:34.580that has political import beyond just being kind of weird is it reminds us that one of the chief
00:12:43.160errors that people make in politics is a failure of imagination. People just get stuck in a rut
00:12:49.740in politics. They think that the circumstances in politics to which they have become accustomed
00:12:54.120are some eternal truths. That the Republican nominee for president is always going to kind
00:12:59.600of look like Mitt Romney and kind of talk like Mitt Romney. That the Democrats are always going
00:13:04.880to, you know, they're going to be a little out there, but they're not going to really like hate
00:13:07.680America or anything like that. And that's not true. I mean, you had, just to go back to the
00:13:14.140Obamas, Barack Obama ran for president running against America, saying he wanted to fundamentally
00:13:18.900transform it. And in response to him, the GOP did not nominate another Mitt Romney or John McCain
00:13:25.580or Bob Dole or Bush. There was a kind of a mold for Republican politicians. Trump totally broke
00:13:31.860that mold. And we actually can do things. We can change things. We have a lot more political power
00:13:40.480than we thought that we did. You hear the left, which is always trying to subvert our institutions
00:13:46.320of government and undermine our constitutional order and all the rest, try to create a new
00:13:51.120Independence Day. They're so radical, they won't even be content with the 4th of July. They need
00:13:56.480to make a new 4th of July based on left-wing racial grievance. The left is always seeking
00:14:01.340to do that. And a lot of conservatives and Republicans have felt constrained. No, no,
00:14:06.520we have to maintain the precise status quo in geopolitics or in immigration or in economic
00:14:11.980policies. We're just bound to do it. And often they'll retrospectively backfill a lot of
00:14:19.300principles or something. We'll get to this in a moment. Ross Douthat, the conservative at the
00:14:24.120New York Times, was just grilling J.D. Vance on the change in tone brought about by the Trump
00:14:28.660movement. And Vance, I think, had a very good answer on it. But we can do stuff, guys.
00:14:34.200Politics is not static. If you don't like the way politics is going, you can just change it.
00:14:39.760You are not powerless. There is a kind of op that has made us feel powerless, and ironically,
00:14:46.400the op is to make us focus on individual liberty. The intense focus in recent decades from the
00:14:53.080conservative movement on individual liberty has had this paradoxical, maybe intentional effect
00:14:58.920of having us give up on a higher kind of liberty, which is political liberty. It's the liberty,
00:15:03.520the exalted freedom that Edmund Burke is talking about, the father of Anglo-American conservatism.
00:15:07.260So we focus on individual liberty, and then we use those libertarian pseudo-principles to come out and say, well, we can never, we said this in 2016, we can never regulate Facebook or Google.
00:15:20.840You know, these big institutions that control our public square, they're silencing.
00:23:16.400They say the scientists have been right about climate change all along,
00:23:20.600Says former Vice President Al Gore on the 20th anniversary of the release of An Inconvenient Truth, the Oscar-winning documentary about Gore's campaign to educate people about climate change.
00:23:29.920A big picture of Al Gore, scientists were dead right.
00:23:35.160There is a great, great essay out by Bjorn Lomborg, who is the former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen,
00:23:43.820pointing out that the core narrative of the film, of An Inconvenient Truth, 20 years ago,
00:23:51.060was that climate change is driving ever-worsening disasters such as floods,
00:23:55.360droughts, storms, and wildfires. Mr. Lomberg points out, over the past century,
00:24:03.100even as the global population quadrupled, deaths from climate-related disasters plummeted.
00:24:09.420they have declined by over 97%. It's not that they went up, even as the global population
00:24:16.280massively increased. They declined almost entirely. How about on the hurricanes?
00:24:23.720Al Gore's movie said hurricanes were going to become more frequent and stronger. According
00:24:28.160to global data, there has actually been a decline in hurricane frequency and their total energy,
00:24:33.840their total strength, since comprehensive satellite data began in 1980. How about the
00:24:40.240wildfires? We were told the wildfires were going to get so much worse. Globally, annual burned area
00:24:47.000from wildfires has declined, not increased, declined by more than 25% over the last quarter0.99
00:24:56.200century, over almost exactly the period since Al Gore made his stupid predictions.0.98
00:25:00.440Well, we know the image from Inconvenient Truth.0.99
00:25:02.800One of the most heartbreaking predictions that Al Gore makes is the polar bear.
00:25:06.800The poor polar bear is going to disappear because of the melting of Arctic ice.
00:25:14.520Polar bear populations in 1960 were about 12,000.
00:31:56.720My point is that the tone argument is in some ways, I think, people see what they want to see. And I also think that tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working class ways of communication and covering them in elite preferences.
00:32:15.040like there is the killer line and there's where you see the vice president is very good you may
00:32:21.620have noticed i certainly noticed at speaking in plain terms to normal people who don't spend their
00:32:27.500lives thinking about public policy and political philosophy but you see that the keen appreciation
00:32:36.000of political philosophy and ideological movements you see it come out sometimes and that's that's
00:32:40.560a line of that. J.D. says, this tone policing, sorry, these tonal arguments are a way of policing
00:32:51.080the communication of working class Americans. And curiously, some of the more establishment
00:32:59.200right-wingers have a problem with what J.D. is saying here. They say, well, you sound like those
00:33:04.160woke people who talk about tone policing black people or Hispanic people or the LGBT community.
00:33:09.040this idea of tone policing, you're adopting a left-wing framework here. And to that, I would
00:33:15.380say, hold on, J.D. didn't bring up the question. The question came from Ross Douthat at the New
00:33:21.240York Times, and it was a good question. Douthat is saying, should you guys, should you in the
00:33:28.120Trump administration adopt a nicer tone? It seems at least more Christian. And J.D.'s answer is,0.98
00:33:35.620And yeah, when people are making those tonal arguments, it's because you don't like what
00:33:41.120ordinary people, look, nobody's ordinary in the sense that every person is an individual.
00:33:45.260God makes every person personally, and God has a role for each of us in his providence.
00:33:51.500So in that way, there's no ordinary people.
00:33:53.120But what we are calling ordinary people are often wiser and make better points than the
00:33:59.680really sophisticated elites who never use that nasty tone.
00:34:02.840I'll give you, here, let me bring it to earth.
00:38:44.480The state of Israel relies upon the United States for its military.
00:38:49.520The state of Israel relies upon the United States for even its perceived legitimacy as a nation,
00:38:57.400because so many in Europe, big factions in the United Kingdom even,
00:39:02.920and certainly throughout the rest of the world don't even think the Israeli state is a legitimate
00:39:09.180state. And many of them are trying to prosecute the government through the International Criminal
00:39:12.800Court. And the United States is saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's not true. The state is legitimate
00:39:17.680according to UN declarations, according to a war of conquest, according to the Balfour Declaration.
00:39:21.620You can't do that. But the United States is providing the protection for the state of Israel.
00:39:25.680And Trump is the most pro-Israel president probably we've ever had, so much so he has a
00:39:30.940town named after him in Israel. And probably practically speaking, not the smartest move
00:39:36.980for the pro-Israel side to come out attacking Trump like this over a peace deal, which even
00:39:42.760Israeli officials are acknowledging is in the interests of the United States.
00:39:46.840Probably not the smartest idea. I don't think it's good as a matter of justice,
00:39:50.800but even just from the self-interest of the state of Israel, probably not the smartest idea.
00:39:55.620You can be upset with the vice president for saying it, but can you point out any flaw in
00:39:59.000reasoning? I can't really. It doesn't have to be this crazy divide you see in the media of Israel's
00:40:07.320the worst state ever in the whole history of the world and yada, yada, yada, or Israel's the
00:40:11.000greatest ally and our interests are always perfectly aligned. You can just have like a0.85
00:40:13.880normal view. You're allowed to have a normal view. And I think you should. And I think that's better
00:40:17.320in the long run for everybody, which is why the US is signing this MOU. By the way, the White,0.84
00:40:21.900very curious. I didn't see anyone pick up on this, but the White House posted a picture of
00:40:26.560President Trump signing the Memorandum of Understanding on the Iran War. Notice who's
00:40:30.360in the memorandum. It says President Donald J. Trump signs the Iran Memorandum of Understanding
00:40:34.700Peace Through String. It's Trump and Rubio. A lot of people right now are trying to pin the whole
00:40:43.540MOU on J.D. Vance, which might actually redound his political benefit because I think most people
00:40:47.500in America want to see the end of the war. But they're trying to, they're putting all their
00:40:51.240criticism about the MOU on Vance because they don't want to attack Trump. They don't have the
00:40:55.620guts to attack Trump. And what's ironic about it is many people are making the argument at the
00:41:00.940start of the Iran war that the critics of the Iran war didn't have the guts to actually blame
00:41:06.120Trump. They were trying to blame wicked advisors around him. Now that same crew is doing the same
00:41:11.320thing with the end of the Iran war. And it was unclear. Is the White House trying to put JD out
00:41:17.400to dry here? Are they trying to put it on JD? Trump joked about that. He said, if it works out,
00:41:21.240I'll take the credit. If it doesn't work out, I'll put the blame on JD. But notice,
00:41:25.200the White House here is making clear. No, no, no. This is not just the J.D. Vance thing. It's
00:41:29.120not just a Jared Kushner thing. It's not just a Steve Wyckoff thing. This is a Trump thing.
00:41:33.860Trump is signing this MOU. And by the way, I'm putting the other big figure in the administration
00:41:38.200standing right behind me, Marco Rubio. You're not going to create a division here, Vance versus
00:41:43.080Rubio, or Trump is out of the loop or whatever. No, no, no. You're only getting in the picture
00:41:49.100Trump and Rubio signing the Iran MOU. A message clear as day. This administration is unified
00:41:58.560on this policy. Buck stops with the president. Get on board. Very, very clever. Picture tells
00:42:06.240a thousand words. Clever, clever picture. Okay. I know I'm running late. I know I'm running late.
00:42:10.120I don't care though. Before we get to the mailbag, I have to get to this clip from Megan. Megan was
00:42:13.740talking to Emily Jashinsky on Emily's show on Megan's network. And amid all of this
00:42:20.720talk about the Iran war wrapping up and the midterms and J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio and
00:42:26.980all this, Megan says the right needs to come back together. My ultimate feeling is
00:42:35.240we need to come back together. I still see the left and not everybody on the left. My mom is
00:42:42.620still a registered Democrat, but the left incorporated as the real enemy, the ones who
00:42:48.260are celebrating the Charlie assassination. That's the real enemy. And the right is going to need to
00:42:55.280come back together. We have to find our way back to each other. And there have been a lot of people
00:43:00.500who are very, very neo-conny and pro-Israel and pro this war with whom I am in touch and with whom0.64
00:43:08.040my text regularly. And we've kind of quietly agreed to keep the porch light on for each other
00:43:14.360because the right is going to have to come back together after this is over and before the next
00:43:20.180elections or we're never going to win any more elections again. This very controversial statement
00:43:26.800is obviously correct. She's obviously right. This is a very, very important point. And I've
00:43:36.740talked about it constantly. This is a point that Charlie was extremely insistent upon and was very
00:43:44.320good at actually doing something about because his greatest contribution to politics was keeping
00:43:49.340that coalition together, including excluding really bad toxic elements, but keeping together
00:43:54.560people who really, really hated each other. That is obviously the case. I talked about this yesterday
00:43:59.460on the show. You cannot have a political coalition where the minute one part of the coalition doesn't
00:44:05.920get its way, it takes the ball and goes home. And there are going to be all sorts of recriminations
00:44:10.020and accusations on all sides. They're going to say, no, it was the opponents of the Iran war
00:44:14.520who broke up the coalition. And then the opponents of the Iran war are going to say,
00:44:17.900no, it was the proponents of the Iran war that broke up the coalition. And you wouldn't take
00:44:22.600us back. And you wouldn't take us back. And you were mean. And you said this nasty thing to me.
00:44:25.900And what did Vance say the other day? I thought this was so good. He said, look, it is just a
00:44:31.020fact, the coalition that Donald Trump, that elected Donald Trump, includes people like Joe
00:44:37.100Rogan and Tucker Carlson, and also Mark Levin and even like John Podhoretz. And those guys might
00:44:44.360all hate each other. Those guys might, the people who are attracted to those shows might all sort of
00:44:49.800hate each other. That's just an historical fact. And the American right has always included all
00:44:54.620these little factions, the neocons and the paleocons and the libertarians and the traditionalists and
00:44:57.900We're just writing all these groups that don't even agree together on that much.
00:45:00.520But the question you have to ask yourself is, is the chief threat to what you want in your actual practical politics, is that chief threat Mark Levin or Megyn Kelly?
00:45:15.400or is the chief threat the left, which openly calls for your murder and your censorship
00:45:23.580and your suppression, and which celebrates the murder of prominent centrist, moderate,
00:45:30.540gracious conservatives like Charlie? What's the real threat? You don't have to like Mark Levin.
00:45:37.080You don't have to like Megyn Kelly for that matter. But when we're talking about real politics,
00:45:41.680if the right is to be a real force that wins over voters,
00:45:46.840that maintains or reestablishes a similar version to the Trump coalition
00:51:35.220there's no kissing at the dinner table.
00:51:36.980And so if your brother is willing to be restrained about his relationship and the way he's living his life, if he's willing to be restrained and tactful about it, that's one thing.
00:51:51.180And therefore, you are being accommodating of him as well.0.90
00:51:55.260But it's a very dynamic situation because if he's going to walk in wearing the rainbow flag, singing the village people or something, then you're probably not going to be able to tolerate that.0.63
00:52:05.220It's really about how moderate and subtle he can be about it.0.93
00:52:11.800That's how this issue was handled for all of history.
00:52:14.620Going back, there were plays written about this in the Renaissance.
00:52:17.300So I think you don't need to take a firm ideological position or something.
00:52:23.720You just have to make sure that he's not being ideological about it either.
00:53:31.320and should our laws reflect blanket immunity for all women who have abortions thank you
00:53:38.280keep doing your great work great question great questions the first answer is yes abortion is
00:53:44.400murder obviously and the second question is uh the answer is yeah probably but not for the
00:53:54.640reasons they think should our laws offer immunity to women who kill their kids
00:53:59.440as you say the pro-life leaders in your state the pro-life leaders no less
00:54:03.760say they will not pursue prosecuting women who kill their babies through abortion
00:54:09.300and so should they be allowed to do that or should we punish the women and put them in jail for life
00:54:13.540or something uh and and the answer as far as i see it is yeah we probably should not prosecute
00:54:20.120women for having abortions probably it's certain right now probably uh but not for the reasons
00:54:25.660they think, not because women haven't committed a crime by killing their kids or committed a
00:54:31.140gravely immoral act, but just because, practically speaking, it's going to be harder to get pro-life0.99
00:54:36.320laws passed. It's going to be harder to protect babies if you threaten women with prosecution
00:54:40.080for having abortions. And two, as a matter of mercy, a lot of women have been propagandized0.99
00:54:47.400for their whole lives to be told that abortion is not really murder, and it's just a clump of
00:54:52.400cells and it's ethically meaningless. And so that, you know, as St. Thomas points out in the
00:54:57.320Summa Theologiae, people are at different degrees of virtue in society. And if your laws are too
00:55:02.180stringent, you can actually make the situation worse by sort of cracking people beyond their
00:55:06.000limits. So just as a practical matter, you are not going to protect as many babies if you prosecute
00:55:11.940women for having abortions. But we don't want to argue past reason here. You know, the reason not
00:55:17.300to prosecute women for killing their kids is because in some cases they're ignorant. In some1.00
00:55:22.100cases, they're pressured into it. And because it will have a negative political effect and
00:55:28.640politics is a practical art. So that's why. It's a matter of mercy and prudence. It's not a matter
00:55:34.040of justice. And in the course of justice, people who kill their kids would all be punished for it.
00:55:38.960But in the matter of mercy and prudence and actually having a better effect,
00:55:44.500maybe they wouldn't be. But that's an indulgence. That's not a matter of justice.
00:55:49.120Okay. I know I'm running late. I don't care. Last question.
00:55:52.100Hey, Michael, this is Jordan from the Republic of Texas, and I think it's time that you need to stop supporting your gay little team up in New York and embrace the only true faith and family anti-pride team in the Texas Rangers, the 2023 world champion Texas Rangers, who have won a World Series more recently than the New York Yankees.0.93
00:56:15.080So we're going to welcome you with open arms. See you there, Michael.0.92
00:56:18.560yeah thanks thanks for that question i didn't end up getting to the yankee pride story
00:56:23.860the yankees are promoting stonewall in now the yankees are not only posting some gay stuff to0.91
00:56:31.080twitter they're promoting stonewall in which was this filthy mafia run bar and sex club that was0.99
00:56:37.860best known for assaulting police officers and spreading hepatitis and they're promoting this
00:56:42.000as though it were some great thing for pride months so i didn't cover that story and i don't
00:56:46.460intend to because i'm not a lib i'm not going to go i can't just like root for some team that i
00:56:51.100in a state that i don't have a personal connection to and the yankees are the winningest sports
00:56:56.300franchise greatest and very conservative relatively sports franchise in history and
00:57:00.940they're so i'm not i can't give up on them i just have to hope that the end of june comes soon okay
00:57:08.700the rest of the show continues now it's fake headline friday you do not want to miss it become
00:57:12.060a member use code noles canada be early as a check out for two months free on all annual plans