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July 7, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
01:21:25
Why Does Trump Keep Winning？ ｜ Michael Knowles Interview
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Hey folks, I've been very lucky and I've managed to get an impromptu conversation with Michael Knowles from the Daily Wire.
Michael, how are you doing?
I'm doing well man, thanks for having me.
Oh my pleasure answer.
I've been looking forward to having a chat like this with you for a long time.
Right, so let's just jump straight into the clown car that is the Democratic primary process.
What's your thoughts on it so far?
Well, I think that Donald Trump is vulnerable.
I actually think he's vulnerable, especially if the economy tanks or something.
I mean, he has a real vulnerability.
He could be beaten.
And yet, which of these ridiculous people is supposed to be Donald Trump?
Joe Biden, I think, is a paper tiger.
I think his strongest day was his first day.
I think the polling now bears that out.
I mean, he's roughly tied with Kamala Harris now, and Kamala Harris herself is what?
She's running on an unpopular racial policy from the 1970s.
She's running on busing.
I mean, she seems to be sort of the flash in the pan, at least for now.
You've got Pocahontas.
Her issue isn't even that she's so disingenuous and such a liar.
It's that she's so shrill.
Who on earth could listen to her long enough to vote for her?
That's a good point.
And then who else is there?
I mean, Bernie is 150 years old.
It's kind of there.
Rabudijej, I mean, he's the mayor of a small town.
He's apparently not even doing a good job there.
Yeah, and what I find interesting is after Darth Clinton sort of decided not to run again against the God Emperor.
But you can see the power vacuum there.
That's why there's so many contenders.
And there's nobody in the party that seems to be a uniting force.
And so anyone that gets picked, I get the feeling there's going to be a large resentful group, whoever it is, that say, oh, it should have been our guy, and therefore they're going to be constantly needling them.
They're not going to unify and get behind them.
Well, you know, the same could have been said in 2016.
I mean, there was a whole contingent of conservatives who were never Trump.
They just felt he was either a Democrat or he was too absurd or he was unqualified or whatever.
And so I felt there's no way the Republican could win because you'd have this contingent that just hated his guts.
And then we eeked it out.
I mean, we were running against the least popular human being on the face of the earth.
And this time, no matter how much they say Trump is unpopular, he's doing pretty well.
His approval ratings are about the same as Obama's.
I mean, the economy is going gangbusters.
There's peace abroad relatively.
You know, there's not a whole lot to complain about.
Whereas people had hated Hillary since the 80s or the early 90s.
Well, yeah, I mean, she's got a long, really long history of screwing people over.
I mean, don't be wrong, Donald Trump does as well, but not politically.
Right.
Because he wasn't a politician, so it was always, you know, one of those things.
But what I found really interesting about all this is that Trump, the optics, despite the media storm that's been surrounding him the whole time, I really feel that this has got some kind of, it must have some kind of shelf life because, like you say, his polling is actually really quite good.
Yeah, right.
For a man who's had 90% negative press coverage for the last three or four years, just non-stop.
And, I mean, literally, when we say negative, that's downplaying.
Just how about it?
I mean, this is Satan himself.
And when we say 90, we're downplaying him.
I mean, certain figures put it at 92 or 93% negative press coverage on the major networks, which is what most people are watching.
But he's so clever with the optics of what he's managing to get out there.
Like the walk into North Korea.
Yep.
That's historic.
It was brilliant.
And even, I mean, this just happened a couple days ago.
Or yesterday, I suppose, the 4th of July parade.
So he does this military parade, you know, flags and tanks.
And somehow he gets his opponents to protest the flag.
He says, we've never had tanks in America.
We had it at FDR's inauguration.
We had it at JFK's.
We had it at Eisenhower's.
And so Trump does this.
But there was a study that came out in 2011, I think it was, out of Harvard, which showed that if you go to a 4th of July parade as a kid, you are statistically more likely to vote Republican as an adult.
And then there was another study that came out a couple years later, I forget who put it out, which showed that even a single exposure to the American flag makes you more likely to be a conservative.
I mean, you know, it's like you're being exposed to a disease or something.
And so I think Trump on a gut level understands this.
And that's what Make America Great Again is all about.
It's what the 4th of July parade is all about.
It's what standing up for your flag is.
It's just if you show people the symbol of the country, they will feel a perhaps long-dormant affection and loyalty for the country.
I think there's also this sort of inclusive spirit of it.
Because there is something like, we're Americans.
It's very much an inclusive sort of philosophy.
And when it's being presented with great confidence, and you're at a giant festival and everyone else is there and you've got fireworks going off and everything's fun and everyone's having a good time, you are naturally going to feel like this is a good thing.
Right, because obviously it is.
But yeah, it was genuinely genius.
And it wasn't even a big parade, really, was it?
It wasn't like a giant thing.
As far as parades with tanks, it was relatively modest.
But that's the thing.
But it got the Democrats attacking the concept of the U.S. itself on its birthday.
Right.
What are you doing?
Even beyond the elected Democrats, you had Nike, so Corporate America, a good American company, coming out against a revolutionary war flag, the Betsy Ross flag, because apparently they made Colin Kaepernick their CEO.
I thought he was a pitch man, but they made him like he's calling the shots now.
And so they are now saying the flag is offensive.
And I said this, when they in the NFL started protesting the flag, I said they're protesting America.
The flag is a symbol of the country, so they're protesting the country.
They said, no, we're only protesting police brutality.
We're only protesting whatever.
And now we know that that's a lie.
I mean, were they protesting police brutality in 1776?
British brutality?
I don't know.
You guys have to answer that.
You didn't even have police then.
That's right.
You know, the police are quite a modern invention, really.
So, you know, you certainly couldn't even...
It really is the concept of America as a nation that they are against.
That's right.
But this is, like, I think this has been a seed that's been gestating within the Democrats for quite some time, and it's finally finding its full bloom with the communist revolution that's taking over that party.
And I'm not even joking when I say that.
It's genuinely quite worrying how socialism and communism are genuinely becoming the cool, edgy thing that the left-wing kids are doing.
You know, it was amazing.
I went about two weeks ago, there was a rally for the Revolutionary Communist Party, which is this kind of bizarre cult.
And I mean, it's any day of the week that you walk around L.A.
But they had this rally, and I'm listening to them and all of their crazy ideological points.
And if you really get down to the essence of their points, it's not all that different from what Democratic candidates for president are saying.
I mean, even if you've just read the Green New Deal, you're talking about a $93 trillion program that would remove your political liberty.
It would basically appoint a committee to make virtually every legislative decision for you.
It would outlaw your car.
It would outlaw your airplanes.
It would outlaw your cow.
It would outlaw your home.
Every building in America would have to be knocked down and rebuilt within 10 years, which will be very difficult because it also outlaws 93% of American energy.
Man, that's an ambitious plan.
I mean, that is actually taking over the means of production and distribution.
That is communism, right?
And there were allusions in there to racial justice and things like this.
And exactly the way you feel, like, I've talked to a few left-wingers about Lee Greene.
I was trying to explain to them, look, there's no way any Republican can ever agree to this because the framing of it effectively confirms far-left beliefs.
It's framed.
So before you've even put pen to paper, you're effectively alienating every Republican.
And moderate swing voters who are looking at the proposals then afterwards going, wow, these are crazy.
It seems to fail.
It includes racial reparations in it.
You think, what does racial reparations have to do with lowering carbon in the atmosphere or something?
So you now have, I think, most of the Democratic candidates for president endorsing reparations for the great, great, great, great-grandchildren of black slaves.
Now, the question, of course, becomes, now, 150 years later, who gets the reparations?
So for instance, the first formally recognized slave owner of an arbitrarily declared slave for life in America, ironically, was a black man.
Anthony Johnston.
And he was a black Angolan.
Do his descendants get reparations?
How about his slave's descendants, John Kaysor?
I guess they should be entitled to descendants.
What if you're descended from both of those guys?
And what if you're an indentured servant, an Irish bondsman or something?
Now your taxes are paying, could possibly be paying to someone who's the descendant of a slave owner.
And even then, that's the complexities of getting into the mechanics of what would actually be done.
I mean, you've got to stop just the moral problem of reparations, which is it literally is not something that has a limit.
Of course.
If we're going to sit there and go, hang on, hang on.
At some point in history, someone did something bad, someone else, and all of those people are dead, there is literally no fixing it.
Right.
And I actually have a great deal of sympathy for the feeling.
Not for the narrative exactly, but the feeling.
Because look, my ancestors, four of them came over on the Mayflower.
A bunch of them came over in a sardine boat from Sicily.
But the ones who came here on the Mayflower, you know, they came here, they helped to found the country.
John and Simon Knowles fought in the American Revolution.
When I look at American history, I feel a great deal of affection and loyalty for it because I know that my ancestors helped to found the country.
If my ancestors were brought over on a slave ship, I would have a very different view of the country.
Yes.
You can't fix history.
I mean, so if someone is descended from us, as is often the case, from a slave owner and a black slave, how do you determine who they are?
I mean, what is their identity?
Let's say they're 30% from a slave owner, and, you know, I mean, how do you come up with that?
I don't know.
But I'm very sympathetic to what you're saying here as well, because what you're describing is like the heroic narrative of your family.
That's right.
And it's why you feel included in the country and as part of the country.
And I do completely empathize with the descendants of slaves who are saying, well, look, we don't have a heroic narrative.
You're right.
And it's like, that's true.
Though, actually, they did build the country, right?
I mean, the slaves obviously were just as much of that as anybody.
And the worst part is as well, any kind of heroic narrative you try to craft from the history, it becomes a revolutionary narrative against the country itself.
Right.
You know, like, you know, abolitionists and all this sort of stuff.
So it's one of those things that it's actually, I don't even know what the answer is.
And I really don't know.
And look at how it can apply.
I mean, so obviously, descendants of black slaves in America have a particular historical grievance, right, Lisa?
Yes.
Now black immigrants, say from Africa or something.
Well, yes.
They don't have an historical grievance, though the culture that was created by the legacy of slavery does, I guess, pertain to them.
But what about any other group?
I mean, you know, to a perhaps lesser degree or a more limited degree.
The Irish had it tough.
The Jews had it tough.
The natives?
The natives had it real tough.
Yeah, right.
The natives own slaves, though.
The five civilized tribes own slaves at roughly the same rate as their neighboring whites.
That complicates the reparations in era.
And the largest lynching in American history was against my own people, the Sicilians, in 1891.
But that was justified.
It was justified.
If they had met me, they would know.
Yeah, that's right.
But that's the thing.
I do understand why people would have a grievance, but there is no untangling the historical mess that we inherited to become us.
There's no fixing it.
There's no repairing it.
It's something we just have to accept.
History was a bad place.
And the thing is as well, it's so asinine to sit there and say, oh, we're morally superior to them.
Of course we are.
We've had 300 years of moral development that they weren't privy to.
And by the way, I think the premise that these people have is that we, we who were born five minutes ago, we're perfect.
We're unimpeachable.
But those old bad people, they're the bad.
What are people going to say about us in 200 years?
I tell you what, meat eating will be the great sin.
That's right.
I'm sure of it.
We'll have abortion on demand, but you're not allowed to eat turkey.
That's going to be, I know, they'll look at us as barbarians.
Yeah, barbarians, battery farming, slaughtering animals.
they'll say this is horrific you know meat should be probably never eaten but you know lab grown or something like this right and then And they'll be in a position of privilege so they can say, nope, those were bad people, morally deficient.
You know, and as for me, if I'm still around, I mean, they'll cure death by then.
We'll be all living to 800 years old.
But I will continue to make the argument that meat is obviously morally justified because the most delicious meats are the most tortured.
That seems to be for a purpose.
Foie gras, veal.
I mean, it seems quite clear to me.
Even self-evident, isn't it?
It's self-evident.
It's a self-evident truth.
Yeah, no, I completely agree.
Right, so getting back to the Democrats then.
I find it very interesting.
The second debate was very much more interesting than the first I found.
Because that was where the crazy started to really sort of bug its eyes out.
There were so many things, like the Spanish speaking Spanish.
It was just like, what are you doing?
Like, this is insane.
I was trying to explain it to a chap I know in England, and I was saying, look, there is a serious concern about mass immigration from Spanish-speaking areas.
How dare you?
And it's true.
And it is a displacement of culture.
It really is something that affects the tone and tenor of American life.
It is something that people on the sort of border areas are genuinely concerned about.
And sure.
If you live somewhere else, you're not bothered about it.
Or if you live in a very sequestered area like this, you don't care, because all they're doing is mopping the floors and whatnot.
Cheap labor.
Exactly.
But if you're competing with that cheap labour and you're also watching a foreign culture come in and start establishing itself, I was trying to explain, look, to the sort of like, you know, the left-behind working classes, this is as if politicians in my country had started, their leadership debates, started speaking in Arabic.
That's right.
You'd be like, what the hell are you doing?
You need to speak English in an English-speaking country.
Boris Johnson actually recently today in fact was saying, well, no, these people should all speak English as a first language.
Yes, they should.
This is one of the trappings of American-style freedom.
I mean, we love freedom.
We want to be free as can be.
And this can be self-undermining.
So now, you know, the American flag, according to Nike and the left, is a hate symbol.
You're not allowed to have the American flag.
And they say that it's exclusive to speak English.
So it's exclusionary.
You should be able to speak whatever language you want.
And obviously, they're just pandering for votes.
But there's very little in America right now that unites us.
We don't go to the same churches.
Really, we never did.
But we don't go to church generally.
We don't watch the same TV shows.
We don't watch the same movies.
We don't read the same books.
When we do read books, we have very little binding us.
Basically, except for the English language.
And the left is trying to undermine that as well.
You know, if you're fleeing some awful place, El Salvador, Honduras, and you come here, wouldn't you want to assimilate?
I mean, you were coming to a new place.
And yet I see these pro-immigration or illegal immigration rallies.
They're waving a Mexican flag.
Yes.
You can go there.
You can right across the board.
It's easier to go that way than it is to go this way.
And legally, you should.
That's right.
So, no, no, you're absolutely right.
And it's a peculiar statement, isn't it?
Because it seems to come from a position of cultural inferiority.
We feel that you are better than us.
And therefore, we've got to make our stamp.
No, no, we're Mexicans.
It's like, well, look, we didn't invade your country.
You've come to us.
At least not in the last 150 years.
Historical greens aside.
We're sorry we won.
Because that's all this is.
That's all this is.
It's like, you know, in the great game of empire that was played throughout history, the English-speaking peoples came out as the winners.
And it's like, well, I'm sorry.
And it's not, you know, people have this idea.
This is the new Democrat line.
That's not who we are.
We don't have tanks.
We don't have parade.
So that's not who we are.
We've put thousands of tanks in dust in the desert.
Yeah, sorry.
And we have, so one of our earliest flags, this is probably the earliest known American flag is this arm holding a sword.
And it says, vince out morire.
Conquer or die.
This was flown in the French and Indian War.
This was likely flown at Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution.
And this isn't just true of the English-speaking peoples or of America.
This is true of every life.
Yeah, this is true of every civilization.
And so they say this is stolen land.
We stole it from the natives.
Now, that narrative obviously is literally not true in many cases because of certain treaties, although sides were not held up in those treaties.
But let's say that we took the land from the Comanche Indians.
Should we give that land back to the Comanche or should we give that land back to the Apache from whom the Comanche stole the land?
If you steal land from the Aztecs, should you give it back to the Aztecs or their descendants or should you give it back to the people that the Aztecs conquered?
Exactly.
And again, once again, the fantasy that we can right historical wrongs by mass change.
And even then, I hate this thing because the left doesn't even realize that they're espousing a blood and soil ideology here.
And it's like, wow, that's really not what you believe until it comes to a minority group.
And then suddenly, you're like the alt-right.
You're literally beating the blood and soil drum.
And it's like, no, that's not how it works.
Like, the smirking kid with the native protest.
Like, Europeans go home.
It's like, dude, it's not how it works.
I mean, talk about how the media manipulated that.
I mean, you know this kid.
He's 16 years old.
He's there for a pro-life rally, which was his first mistake in the eyes of the media.
And he's wearing the hat that our president put out.
And he's sort of smiling.
And the way the media portrayed this was he was accosting black civil rights activists and a Native American combat veteran.
First of all, he's not a combat veteran.
And they were not civil rights activists.
They were black supremacists.
Well, I mean, you could call that a form of civil rights.
You know, I mean, in the same way that owning slaves before the abolition of slavery was a civil rights.
I mean these guys They were awful Yeah That kid was just standing there.
These guys attack him, but that's how the media turns it.
I mean, that's how the media turns.
Well, it was totally portrayed as if they were attacking the guy, and he was getting in his face, etc.
And he's saying...
It was the complete opposite.
He said, this is stolen land.
You're standing in the capital of the greatest, most powerful country in the history of the world.
It's over.
I'm sorry if you don't like the treaty of 1622, but that's in the past.
What is inherent, I think, or intrinsic about this trying to right historical wrongs is the key flaw of the progressive ideology, which is that it's utopian.
The progressive ideology is marching ever toward progress.
It has this idea of perfecting human nature.
And so if you stand in the way of progress, you're either evil or stupid.
And conservatives know that there's no utopia.
We are not going to perfect human nature.
We are not going back to the Garden of Eden.
We are fundamentally imperfect.
Necessarily imperfect.
And so when you try to right historical wrongs, not only is that you can't go to the past, you also can't do it because we're not perfect here.
We're not going to be perfect tomorrow.
We're not going to be perfect in 100 years.
This world has fallen.
It's tragic.
It has suffering.
We're going to commit immoral acts and we must strive not to commit immoral acts.
But what that requires, theologically and politically, is a little bit of grace.
And the left is now giving us a graceless society.
That's a really interesting way of framing it as well.
And it kind of links into a lot of the things that Jordan Peterson's saying, because the way that I've been thinking about it recently is it's kind of similar to Plato's World of Forms.
You've never seen a perfect circle, but you know what a circle is, even though you've never seen it.
And that's basically the left with their political activism.
They've got a vision in mind.
And that's why they talk about having the correct politics.
Because what they're trying to do is chip out the perfect hypothetical political form and say, right, that's what I believe, and therefore I'm a good person.
And that's just not how it works.
Whereas, like you said, the right are a lot more sort of local in their politics.
They think, okay, what can I personally do to be a good person and to make the world a better place?
Instead of these grand, pie-in-the-sky utopian schemes, it's very much more practical and level-headed and on the ground.
I can do some charity work.
I can do some good work or whatever it is.
But you can actually see a tangible result.
But this is the Iron Age.
The left calls the right greedy because we don't want to give all our money to the government.
And yet, study after study after study shows the right is much more charitable, at least in America and I think elsewhere as well, than the left is.
Why?
Because we like to do charity.
We don't want to just talk about it.
We don't want an abstraction of charity.
We don't want to do charity in theory.
Charity in theory doesn't do anything.
We actually have to do it ourselves.
And this is a great philosopher, one of your guys, Michael Oakeshott, the British political philosopher, he constantly goes back to this in his rejection of ideology.
He says the conservative rejects ideology.
To be conservative is to prefer the tried to the untried, the familiar to the unfamiliar, present laughter to utopian bliss.
And none of us can construct a perfect politics.
We just don't have the brain power for it.
But we can do good things.
You can do good in the world.
You can inherit certain political traditions, which we in America inherited from you guys.
And those are traditions of freedom, a particular kind of freedom.
that have worked out very well.
Yeah, and another way that I've been thinking about this is essentially the concept of fairness.
Like, I think there are two broad ways that the left and the right view fairness, and they're different.
Like, the left know what they think a fair outcome is before they've done anything.
They've got a vision in their heads.
You know, they're perfect.
Oh, no, no, that's what fairness is.
And so to get to there, you can have all of the procedural unfairness you like.
It can be any amount of racial discrimination, as long as it's in the right direction, and we get the right outcome.
That's the fair thing.
And that's, honestly, I think the great danger of the sort of utopianist sort of communist fascist worldviews.
And that's why they do such terrible things.
Because it is the end's justified immediately.
You've got to crack a few eggs to make an omelette, right?
Absolutely.
This is what we hear from the Jacobins at the French Revolution, all the way through the communist revolutions, all the way to the feckless 2020 Democratic candidates.
And then that then puts them completely in the wrong when they say we need to right historical wrongs.
It's like, no, we cracked a few eggs.
Yeah, you're cracking the eggs right now.
You're committing the historical wrongs.
Yeah, you're okay with doing that, as long as we come to a fair result.
So you could literally repurpose their own method against them there and disarm them.
But yeah, so that's, I think, I've been thinking about that a lot, because it really is a glaring difference in world views.
It's shocking.
And I genuinely am getting to the point where I'm quite concerned that the left has left the reservation and isn't coming back.
Well, the issue, I mean, this quote has been attributed to a million people, so you know it's true even though probably nobody said it, which is, at bottom, all political problems are theological problems.
And I mean that in a very broad way.
You know, typically the right is more traditionally religious, Christianity, Judaism, something like that.
But the left, in its secularism, now has a religion.
I mean, global warming actually meets every criterion of a religion, right?
Or of a cult at least.
It's unfalsifiable.
It has original sin in pollution.
It has redemption in recycling.
It even sells indulgences in the form of carbon tax credits.
It's a totalizing ideology, and that's why they're willing to crack eggs to bring about redemption.
I mean, they think they're saving the world.
Something I find very interesting is their reaction to nuclear power as well.
Because nuclear power is just an obviously good thing.
It's incredibly efficient.
It's the safest, the cleanest.
It's, yeah, very productive.
And so you would just say, well, this is the sensible person's solution to the – and, you know, I totally agree with that.
I don't want to pollute the planet.
I don't want to pump gas into the atmosphere and all this sort of stuff.
You're right, let's choose a sensible alternative.
And it's not solar panels or wind power because there are genuine, they're not very effective means of generating power.
Nuclear is.
And you see the reaction when you bring it up.
Like Hank Green, you're aware of him?
Yeah.
He's got a personal sort of vlog channel.
And he'd obviously been badgered by pro-nuclear activists in his comment sections because he put this video up going, fine, I'll talk about it.
And he's angry.
And I'm like, man, why are you angry about nuclear power?
A great solution.
Exactly.
Because it essentially undermines the legitimacy of the cult behaviors.
You can't really deny it.
It's all obviously true.
And it's not about the environment, is what they, time and time again.
I mean, nuclear is one example of this.
They told us in the 70s it was global cooling.
We were headed for a new ice age.
And this wasn't just popular press.
This was scientists telling us this.
Then it was global warming, and then the Earth stopped warming, and then it became climate change, which is unfalsifiable.
Which is inevitable.
And which is inevitable.
Climate will change.
No one suggests that it can't change.
It can't not change.
Right.
And so you have, for instance, this Paris climate agreement that we had a few years ago.
The U.S. pulls out of the Paris Climate Agreement.
We're told this is going to destroy the world.
Then, fast forward two years, the United States is leading the world in reducing carbon emissions.
We produced many, many fewer carbon emissions, and yet signatories to the Paris Climate Accord, the European Union, Canada, China, all dramatically increase their carbon emissions.
But it doesn't matter what you're actually doing.
What matters is you surrender some of your national sovereignty, you surrender your individual liberty, whatever, to this ideology of climate change.
I mean, then they told us, they said if we pull out, it'll end the world.
Then we pull out and they say, actually, the Paris Climate Agreement, it'll only reduce global temperatures by a fraction of a degree in 50 or 100 years.
You say, oh, so it's not about doing anything at all.
It's just about control.
Yes, it's about doing what they want.
I mean, like, what year was it?
Al Gore was like 2002 or something.
They're saying, right, there'll be no ice on the polar ice caps.
Everyone will be underwater.
The bears are going to be dead.
Yeah, and this will happen in 2013.
And then you see record ice sheets.
And it's like, right.
Okay, I'm not a climate scientist.
I don't know the arguments.
All I'm saying is your predictions appear to have been the opposite of what has happened.
And, you know, he predicted that my hometown of New York would be completely underwater by 2015, I believe it was.
Well, desirable, but...
Yeah, depends on the neighborhood, but it's certainly true.
And so obviously that didn't happen.
I was in New York a few weeks ago.
Things are fine there.
And he said, no, it did happen because you had Hurricane Sandy.
But they moved the goalposts, right?
He said that New York and Florida were going to be underwater.
He didn't say they were early.
They were, yeah, he said, you know, Al Gore, these places have flooded before.
I mean, you know, the subways fill up, you can't use it for a day, and then it's okay again.
But they keep moving the goalposts.
And like any apocalyptic cult, AOC says in 12 years the world's going to end.
And guess what's going to happen in 12 years?
She's not going to abandon her beliefs.
She's going to double down on her beliefs.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
I forgot.
I was speaking to a young lady the other night who was parroting the same thing.
And it was just uncritically, no, no, the world's going to end in 12 years.
I'm like, man, if you thought the world was going to end in 12 years, you wouldn't be just sat in a bar talking random.
You would be making preparations.
There would be serious, like national and international moves being made.
It wouldn't just be, oh, we're going to raise your taxes.
You'd at least be living it up.
You'd either be trying to get on that first ship to Mars, or you would be going crazy.
I mean, you'd be going out every night, but that's not what they're doing.
They're just sat in their cubicles, tapping away, reading Vox.
But you are right with the attitude, because like I said, I don't care about the science of it.
I don't know anything about it.
It's not my wheelhouse.
But it is part of a larger kind of religious movement that is taking hold in the left.
And it is a secular religion.
It doesn't have a God, but it does have tenets.
And it does have a priesthood.
They come out of universities.
They've been indoctrinating.
Right, I mean, that is the cathedral.
It has liturgical calendars.
This is a great point that you made the other night.
We've just wrapped up.
In the Catholic Church, we celebrate the month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in June.
In the secular culture, we have a much more widespread liturgical month, and it's Pride Month.
Black History Month.
Black History Month is February 1st.
Women's History Month is April.
We have, I mean, Martin Luther King, a great American, has become a secular saint.
He has a feast day.
So one of the issues when I think liberals, lowercase L, right-wing liberals or left-wing liberals, when they sort of pretend that we just have this neutral society, neutral government, and then it's up to the winds of culture to move, it isn't really neutral.
I mean, nature abhors a vacuum.
And the government does have a role in the sacred.
I mean, the church and the state have never been perfectly separated.
Certainly not in your country.
No, no, absolutely not.
And that, so now we have the sort of secular virtues there.
Tolerance, inclusivity.
We have deans of colleges, deans of tolerance and inclusivity and diversity.
Those are the virtues.
And now we've made the queen of all vices, pride, a virtue.
That is interesting.
And it's actually now become the vice of all queens, which is quite a coincidence.
That's a very nice play on words.
But no, it is interesting, isn't it?
Because the pride stuff is baffling to me because I don't see why it couldn't be people in suits walking down the streets holding hand waving politely.
You're right.
That would be, you know, look, we're gay and we're just, you know, hello.
But no, that's not what they're doing.
This is a very clear, like, sort of cultural jihad.
They're like, no, no, no, no.
This is now kink pride.
You know, I'm going to have three guys in ball gags walking on leashes down the street as these children are waving these flags.
Like, you know, I mean, it's like, I'm a father, so I'm just watching this thing to write.
I would never take my children to this.
This is disgusting.
It's not really about sex or even homosexuality.
I mean, I always thought if you're going to pick one of the deadly sins, have gay wrath month.
I mean, that'll be more interesting.
Gay envy month or gluttony.
Oh, God.
But could you imagine the parades?
No, I don't want to even think about it.
You know, in your country, they showed us that it's not about sex because Budweiser came out.
They said it's Pride Month.
All of corporate America loves Pride Month.
And they issued a new cup for asexuals, people who are not into sex.
Proud.
Proud.
And what on earth does that, I mean, that's like the opposite of what Pride Month used to be.
And now there's Pride for being fat.
there's pride for being skinny and pride is that you stay strong brother Stay strong.
I'm proud.
I'm here.
I'm not going anywhere.
I mean, that issue, it shows you it's actually about pride itself.
I mean, what is pride?
Pride is the excessive love of one's own excellence or the delusion of one's own excellence.
And pride makes you miserable.
I mean, if you are really...
I've known many narcissists because I live in L.A. and I work in politics, so it's like an occupational hazard.
And the thing about narcissists is they're never happy.
They're miserable.
Because, you know, a man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package indeed.
So when you're in a culture that is worshiping the self, you're going to be miserable.
And I think we see the symptoms of that.
I mean, at a large level, we have skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, stress, suicidality.
Suicidality, particularly among teens, is up 70% in the last two years.
It's amazing, isn't it?
Because, I mean, like, I can't imagine just walking along and saying, right, I am great for being me because I am me.
Like, that strikes me as the sort of deeply unhappy person that wants to do that.
Needs to do that.
I'm too busy living my life and actually doing things that I think are important.
And again, it comes from the complete opposite end of the spectrum to, I guess, the right-wing worldview.
That is, you know, things are demonstrated through action.
You know, you are the thing.
So go and do that thing and other people recognize that you are that thing.
If you've got to come out with big placards and tell me that you're that thing, that means I can't see it.
That means I'm not thinking that because you don't appear.
You appear to be a giant loser who is deeply ashamed of themselves and needs to find a way of feeling better about themselves.
This is why the opposite virtue of pride and vice is humility.
Yes.
And humility is always great.
I don't say this in any pious way or to be some goody-goody.
Personal humility is just an appealing trait.
It's appealing.
It makes your life better.
You will live a better life if you are humble and if you try for humility.
Everyone will like you.
That's right, yeah.
No, no, they will.
They won't find you abrasive or aggressive, and you will actually have a nice life.
That's right.
And one tool of this, or one way that as a culture we could bring this about, I think, is the naughty word.
You're not allowed to say it now.
Shame.
Shame is a very useful feeling because we all do, at least me, maybe not you.
Maybe you have a perfect behavior.
For me, I do plenty of things that I'm ashamed of.
It's very important to feel that shame, to have a sense of your own failings and sins, to confess it, to own up to it.
Oh, God, there's getting the Catholic pitch now, aren't they?
I know, yeah.
And not to whip yourself with a cat of magic.
No, that's just what the Catholics do.
But you know, as a culture, if we would just fess up and own up to the fact that we regularly fail, we do things we don't want to do, and we don't do the things that we should be doing.
If we just owned up to that, gave each other a little bit of grace, we would have a much more pleasant society.
Yeah, I like now.
When you say grace, I mean, I interpret that to mean sort of charity.
You know, when someone says something or does something, like the Donald Trump thing with they took over the airport, and I'm sorry, oh, Donald, all right.
You know, but charitably, look, he's an old man, he works really hard.
You know, he's always doing things, he's always doing interviews, he's constantly got a million people coming at him.
Yeah, you know, maybe he mistook the whatever it is.
Or he read the prompter wrong or something.
He bumbled it, yeah, fine.
But no, they make a massive deal out of absolute nothing.
I mean, it's nothing.
What's funny, too, is Trump is an incredibly transparent president.
I mean, this is a guy who does impromptu talks with the press all the time.
He invites George Stephanopoulos, who's Clinton's former advisor, to come and do an interview with him in the Oval Office.
Obama didn't do those things.
Barack Obama was a very closed-off president.
And they get angry at Trump.
Very stage-managed, and he wasn't good on the fly.
Trump isn't great with the teleprompter, but he's very good ad-lib.
And Obama was the opposite.
His rallies are just, you can tell he loves it.
They're amazing.
He just gets up and riffs.
Right.
You know, what's on my mind at the moment?
I'll just say, you know, and the crowd loves it.
And you know this, I mean, as a content creator, to just go for like over two hours and have it be entertaining is incredibly difficult.
It takes a skill.
Yeah.
You know, it is a very, very well-trained skill.
But like I said, I do like the fact that he is eager to engage with the press.
You see what I mean?
When he's getting off the helicopter stuff, he'll come up to them and give them what he wants them to know.
Right.
And then, almost like he's attacking them with his narrative, and then he'll be like, no, no, no, that's it, and then just wander off.
That's right.
He just knows.
I mean, people think of him as this mean, rude guy, which he frequently is.
But what you'll notice about Trump is he rarely, if ever, starts fights.
He is always responding.
He's very reactive.
He's very...
Because otherwise he puts out very positive messages.
It's just constantly, you know, I'm great.
Everything I'm doing is great.
Watch this.
It's going to be brilliant.
And then someone, and then he reacts in a very strident way.
That's right.
But you're right.
I mean, even he's nice to Kim Jong-un.
Then Kim Jong-un says he's a madman.
Yeah.
And then Trump calls him short and fat.
Or even Rosie O'Donnell.
Trump famously had this feud with Rosie.
Oh, God.
And he, you have to, I'm sure you've seen it, the supercut on YouTube.
I haven't seen it.
Oh, this is amazing.
We have to put it in here.
So she went after him pretty viciously on The View.
She started it and said he's bankrupt, he's fraud, whatever.
And he does a supercut of just hilariously awful insults about Rose.
He says, she's unattractive inside and out.
The mind is weak.
And he's just going, he is pummeling her with his words.
And he has this very New Yorker attitude, which is, don't take any guff from anybody.
And someone hits you, you punch him like 10 times as hard.
And it served him very well.
I mean, it allows him to take back control of a narrative.
Imagine if we had a Mitt Romney type right now as president.
He wouldn't be elected.
No, you wouldn't get elected.
He would have been crushed.
Yeah, absolutely crushed.
Mitt Romney would just get pilloried for being the devil of progressivism.
That's right.
He is like the Satan, but they're not.
He just looks like the white male patriarchal capitalist right away.
Yeah, yeah.
I know he is imperialist hegemony embodied.
And do you remember, this was one moment, I mean, I was very skeptical of Trump in the primaries in 2016.
And the moment that he pretty much won me over is he used the phrase anchor baby to refer to, you know, you come here as an illegal alien, you have a kid, and because of our current reading of the 14th Amendment, you have birthright citizenship.
And so he was using this term, and a reporter said, don't you know that that term is offensive?
And Trump said, okay, what would you like me to call them?
He goes, well, the child of a future undocumented American dreaming dreamer, this, and goes on for five years.
And Trump goes, you want me to say all that?
I think I'm going to stick with Anchor Baby.
Thank you very much.
I just thought, perfect.
This is exactly what America is thinking right now.
And he just reels him in, and then he just doesn't give him an inch.
Yeah, I love the way that he won't have his behavior dictated by them.
But yeah, so right, getting back to the Democrats, I want to keep hammering on this because the illegal immigrants, health care for illegal immigrants, and they all put their hands up and I'm just like...
Everyone.
Oh, God, you're such lunatics.
Because, I mean, being generous to illegal immigrants is not a popular public position.
It's understood that they are a drain on finances.
It's understood that they also cause social problems, because there are lots of criminals that are coming across because they're not checked.
And it's also, like, if you go back to the sort of Bill Clinton build-a-wall speech, unironically, you know, I mean, Trump just sounds like him in a more bombastic way.
And so, you know, okay, so the Republicans obviously understand the necessity of border security.
The moderates, the sort of like, you know, center-right, center-left, who are not necessarily devotees of any one side, they also understand it because there's no direct interests.
And they've got the radical fringe of the Democratic Party that is actually dominating their entire platform now.
And it's crazy.
I'll give you an example.
I mean, the immigration one is a great example.
But on the question of abortion, according to one recent poll, 94% of Americans believe there should be some restrictions on abortion, you know, a certain day or whatever.
94%.
That's really useful, actually.
It's the 6% of absolute lunatics who are like, no, abortion's mandatory.
And the trouble is, basically that entire 6% is currently running for president of the Democratic Party.
I mean, every single candidate says there will be no restrictions on abortion.
That is a radical and extreme position that the vast majority of America opposes.
But they hold it.
Same thing with illegal immigration.
I mean, you had, forget the free health care paid for by yours truly.
They also said, Julian Castro, and I believe also Corey Booker said, we need to decriminalize illegal border crossings.
Is that what they said in Spanish?
Well, I think in Spanish they said, yoquiero taco bell.
I mean, their Spanish was not great.
But they called for decriminalizing illegal immigration, which is to say...
Make all immigration legal.
Make it all, I mean, to erase national borders, to erase the nation itself.
And that is a position held by multiple 2020 presidential candidates.
And the thing that I think we need to do...
It's just absolute madness.
It's madness.
I mean, that's insane.
Obviously, virtually all of America opposes that idea.
No nation could withstand that.
I mean, just by definition, you'd erase the country, right, if you don't have borders.
Well, yeah.
The way that Trump handles his own narratives is how we as conservatives need to handle this narrative because what the left says is we're so compassionate.
We want everybody to come here.
We want to give them free, quote-unquote, healthcare.
We want to give them free, quote-unquote, education.
I'm really sick of the word free.
It's free, yeah.
As PGO Rook said, you'll never guess how expensive health care is until it's free.
But what we should hammer on is the moral argument.
First of all, there's nothing democratic about having a few lawyers in Washington overturn our immigration laws, which were enacted through our self-government.
There's nothing Democratic or Republican about that.
There's nothing compassionate about that for a country not to be able to govern itself, a free country.
But also, according to Amnesty International in Fusion, through the Huffington Post, 60 to 80% of women and girls who cross that southern border illegally are raped along the journey.
When you incentivize that system, you are culpable in that regime.
I mean, there are roving gangs of men, this being reported now by Mexico, who are in Tijuana trying to purchase children from mothers in orphanages, or from mothers in shelters.
Why?
Because in the United States, we're told you can't separate parents from their children, but you can't keep them together because you can't put them in jail, so you have to just let them go.
It's a de facto amnesty.
And so guess what happens when you incentivize that behavior?
You get more family units, even if it's just a young male economic migrant who bought a child for $350 and dragged them across the border to do God knows what.
I mean, God knows what happens to that kid afterwards.
Yeah, and it's one of those things that it's probably best not thought about too hard and just do what Trump's doing and just get the border closed.
And this is the thing.
It's like everything the Democrats are doing is set up to absolutely incentivize this.
They're saying, look, if you can get your children here, they're like, oh, we want paths to citizenship.
It's like, no, illegal aliens should be sent home.
That's just the end of that conversation.
But no, we're leaving path to citizenship, free health care.
We're going to speak to them in their native language.
We're going to give them preferential treatment over the native working people of America.
I mean, the most provocative sign I saw the other day was blacks before illegals.
And I'm like, I totally support.
Well, if the left wants to engage in racial politics, they ought to be very careful because who does unfettered, low-skill, illegal immigration hurt the most, demographically speaking, is more minority groups.
So it's not compassionate in the slightest.
It's compassionate to people who don't even live in the country.
Right.
It's like, why?
What's wrong with you?
You know why, though?
I mean, part of it is there's this woke ideology, which I think is a lot of it.
But also, Ronald Reagan said Hispanics are Republicans, they just don't know it yet.
And I think that was wishful thinking because all of the data that we have show that illegal aliens and their children and their grandchildren overwhelmingly identify with Democrats.
And this does not change.
You know, because other groups assimilated, you can't judge their politics based on their race.
So the Italians, for instance, I'm Italian.
Nancy Pelosi is Italian.
Andrew Puomo's Italian.
Antonin Scalia is Italian.
Vastly different politics.
The Irish, same thing.
The Irish assimilated, and so you.
But with Hispanics, that isn't happening.
So even throughout generations, you get to a point at which Hispanic immigrants that have come in the last 30 years or their ancestors did, their parents, are upwards of eight times as likely to identify Democrat as Republican.
Is that down to the identity politics pandering?
I think there's a lot of pandering that goes on.
I mean, they were speaking Spanish.
That's the issue.
They were trying to speak Spanish.
There's Spanglish, I would say.
Yes.
A lot of it is pandering, and a lot of it is also just a sort of historical and linguistic and cultural ignorance.
I mean, you can't really blame them.
You've got a low-skilled worker from Honduras comes into America, probably doesn't speak English, doesn't know about the American Revolution or the War of 1812.
And we used to have a system in America that would assimilate, that would teach them about these values and history into them.
Exactly.
And that doesn't occur.
I mean, that doesn't even occur for our own American citizens anymore.
There was a study out of ISI, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
It showed that at elite universities in America, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, graduating seniors knew less about their civics and history and politics than incoming freshmen.
They were unlearning their own history in college.
That's very interesting.
And then you've got the left who are just justifying everything.
You are perfect as you are.
You don't need to change to be here.
We don't have a culture.
Self-abasement, complete negation of what it is to be an American.
And it is something to be an American.
It was an aspirational thing.
I've come here to be an American.
I'm going to join this.
Like you said, it was an inclusive thing.
It was never racial.
It was something that was open to anyone who wanted it.
But the left are essentially undermining that by saying, well, look, if you don't want it, you can still come here.
It's like, no, that's not how immigration to any country should work.
You have to want that to go there.
Sure.
And the left, I think, is beginning to crack.
Because for decades and decades, they wanted to have both sides of every issue.
So they would stoke racial consciousness among every racial group, except for whites.
There you have to just feel guilt.
They would stoke sexual consciousness among every sexual preference and among women, but not straight men.
You weren't allowed to.
And I think the place that this falls apart is transgenderism.
Transgenderism affects 0.2 or 3% of the population, and yet it's come to dominate our national discussion.
Why?
Because to obliterate sexual difference is essential to the left's revolutionary agenda.
Because it obliterates the family as we know it, it obliterates marriage as we know it.
Basically, all of these social structures that impede their ever-growing march toward progress and their increasing control are obliterated if you obliterate sex.
I mean, sex is so important that you find it in the first chapter of Genesis, the sexual difference.
You find it in the first, you know, I guess really for the first several chapters of Genesis.
find it in Gilgamesh I mean sex a sexual difference or it's the purpose of life rise to procreate you know And it always has been, because otherwise, what are you handing down?
Nothing.
And this is really interesting, isn't it?
How they're effectively abolishing themselves.
They're like, look, we're not going to marry.
I mean, millennials, you know, they don't marry, they don't have sex.
They don't have anything to pass on.
And they're not very bad.
They have born a million babies a year.
Yeah, exactly.
And they're not very persuasive.
There's actually been an uptick in the number of Zoomers, the Generation Z, who don't like LGBT politics.
They reject this sort of excessive permissiveness.
And it's like, yeah, because why do you think?
We're looking, not we, but me personally, but they are looking at what it is now, what it's become, the sort of form it's taking, and they're like, hang on, that's wrong.
This is total degeneracy, frankly.
And the thing about it is, if they had just stopped, if they said, if boys like boys and girls like girls and we're not going to be cruel to them or something, if they had stopped there, I think the culture would be fine.
But that's where I stopped.
That's where you stopped writing.
Because I considered myself part of that before I got to this point and realized how awful they are.
And now you're a vicious, bigot, fascist, Nazi alt-right.
Believe it or not, I actually agree with most of Hillary Clinton's social ideas in the 90s.
Right, right.
You know, it's like abortion should be safe, legal, and right?
Yep, sensible, you know.
But I was more progressive.
I thought that gay marriage should have been legalized.
Right.
But yeah, you guys are always like 15 years ahead of American politics in the UK.
I know.
The left in the UK is about a year behind the American left.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
You can see it coming down the pipeline.
And you can tell that it's because of the sort of cultural diffusion where it's being brewed in America's academies.
And then it seeps over.
And it sounds weird and like tin-eared to the English.
Because it's always very extreme.
Right.
It's always very radical.
And Britain is not a radical or extreme place.
It's very moderate.
And as soon as someone starts getting extreme, the public generally pull away from them.
Right.
Just on principle.
They're like, no, no, no, that sounds a bit extreme.
I'm not going to do that.
And so, like, for example, a BBC interviewer was interviewing Anne Whitacombe the other day and literally accused her of having white privilege.
And to the average person in England, that means nothing.
They do not know anything about this.
I mean, essentially, it looks like she's attacking Anne Whittaken for her race.
A BBC presenter.
The bastion of neutrality.
It's wild.
That extremism, that radicalism is what you see.
I think people can get behind progressive sexual views or whatever.
You can't tell people that a man is a woman.
Because we know.
You can't tell people not to believe their lying eyes.
And when we see, I mean, there was that video of that.
Trans women are women, Michael.
They're women.
Well, if they're women, why do you have to use that separate phrase trans woman?
I don't know.
Why are we making any kind of distinction here?
You saw that video of that giant man who was a transvastite, and he's screaming at some store clerk.
And he said, it's ma'am.
I'm a woman.
Manifestly, you are not a woman.
A woman doesn't need to say that.
You're all right.
No woman walks into a store and says, it's ma'am, I'm a woman, because everyone can see it.
Of course.
You look like a rugby player.
I mean, this issue of transgenderism, the ideology of it, not the condition that affects very few people.
Not gender dysphoria.
Not gender dysphoria, but the ideology of transgenderism.
It is undoing so much of what the left has been building.
For instance, if gender is socially constructed, if there's really no such thing as sex, there are biologically female penises, and there are biologically male uteruses.
Unironically, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but there is a court case in the United Kingdom that includes the phrase, she got an erection in a prison shower.
And it's just like, listen, look, you know, I'm very tolerant of differences, but there are some things where you've just gone too far.
That's it.
A real, I don't even know what I'm picturing right now, but I don't like it.
She.
Whatever I'm picturing, I don't know.
You've got a very surprising erection in the showers, apparently.
It's like, right, okay.
I mean, that, but let's say that that were possible.
Let's say that she could have an erection.
What you've done, if you accept that premise, is you've gotten rid of homosexuality.
Homosexuality is a sexual essentialist act, right?
Yeah, yeah, you have to, yes, if you're two members of the same sex.
That's right.
That is the definition of homosexuality is you're a man.
You can know for a fact that you are a man.
You are not a woman.
You can't be a woman.
And you are attracted sexually to other men who are men who are not women.
So you get rid of that.
If you accept the premises of transgenderism, you lose feminism.
What is feminism?
It's an ideology to promote women, to understand what it means to be a woman, to allow women to define womanhood as they see fit.
When you accept transgenderism, then all of a sudden you have men defining womanhood.
it means to be a woman i mean and what's so funny about it is patriarchy wins again The patriarchy summits.
We always find that feminism, you know, it gave us a bunch of casual sex, too, and somehow that was empowering to women.
Another patriarchy, you know, coming up again.
Look, I'm from New York.
We have a lot of drag bars in New York, a lot of crazy parades and stuff.
So only the left could make transvestites uninteresting and boring.
I mean, that's an amazing thing.
But when you go and see a transvestite walking the streets of New York, the thing you notice is they're not dressed like women.
They're dressed like a caricature of a woman.
You know, highly sexualized.
They do this to this poor little kid.
Desmond is amazing.
I mean, this 11-year-old, they put him in very sexual sort of sultry woman's attire.
Lots of makeup, you know, tight, yeah.
A lot of lipstick.
I mean, how many women do you know that actually dress like that on a daily basis?
I don't know any women who dress like that at all.
Right.
You know, like you say, it's a caricature of essentially a prostitute.
Right.
It's what a particular man imagines or fantasizes a woman to be, which actually doesn't really jive with reality.
Yeah.
I mean, that's a really great point.
They're not dressed like women.
They're dressed like transgenders.
I mean, you know, Caitlin Jenner, formerly Bruce, when he was on the cover of Vanity Fair after his some surgeries at least, was he wearing a sort of sensible romper, you know, and going out to the store?
No, he was wearing, he was like a pin-up girl.
He was wearing an outfit from the 60s, very buxom, very revealing.
Like a Playboy model.
Right.
Like that's the ideal of womanhood.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, it's actually legitimately interesting how they view women, isn't it?
Because you could consider that to be quite derogatory, really.
Of course.
It wasn't being done with sincerity.
You'd say this is a parody and it's actually insulting.
Right.
If I were to put that on, and I were, let's say, I was doing a sketch or something, they'd say, how offensive, how sexist.
Crowder does the same thing.
Because at the same time that we have Caitlin Jenner with his breasts, you know, sort of he.
His breasts.
Yeah.
Or her erection.
At the same time that we're seeing that, we're seeing Lena Dunham say, women should not be sexy.
I'm going to desexualize even the naked body.
Oh, God, I wish she wouldn't take pictures of herself.
Fortunately, I've never seen girls, but it just pops up in the culture.
He comes through my timeline on Facebook, and then I've seen Lena Dunham naked from behind.
Thanks, Lena.
I feel like there's been some kind of Me Too moment here.
That's right.
Maybe you have a good case.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
But yeah, so Wells came out of the Democrats.
There was one more thing, though.
Oh, no.
Trump, his foreign policy has been remarkably decent.
I don't know how much of this is him bumbling into the most fortuitous and advantageous result of every foreign policy conflict he comes into.
And it's a pattern that is just too coincidental.
It's not just a coincidence.
This must be something he's doing on purpose.
So you've got like the Syria strike on the airfield.
That was actually a stroke of genius because once it silenced all of his critics.
And he didn't do anything particularly.
There was no particular trouble.
It was just a quick jab to the nose.
There's a bit of damage on their runway.
The Hawks have been satisfied.
The left have had to shut up because what's happened is bad.
And the issue's kind of smooth over.
Then you've got the North Korea thing.
Trump's just giving him hell on Twitter.
And now he's walking across the border.
And then you've got the Iran thing.
It's like, right, okay, there's been tag, right?
A drone's been shot down.
And Trump comes out and says, you know what, I heard there was going to be 150 deaths, so I called it off.
I didn't think it was proportionate.
That makes him look like a humanitarian.
That makes him look like a strong capable leader because he's about to do something.
But then he's like, you know what?
It's not worth it.
Human life is more important.
That's amazing.
He also has an incredibly healthy foreign policy team around him.
Insomuch as he has hawks, like John Bolton.
And then really, probably the majority of his supporters are doves.
They don't want to be involved in foreign war.
He campaigned basically on no more wars in the Middle East.
Unlike Hillary Clinton.
Unlike Hillary Clinton.
Never saw countries shouldn't want to invade.
And the two issues, the Korea issue and the Iran issue, are quite related, it seems to me.
You know, Iran has been trying to provoke us into some sort of war.
So they're blowing up oil ships.
They shot down our $130 million drone.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama is sending pallets of cash to Iran.
So I don't know, it's like insult to injury.
And so you have this stage.
So what were they doing?
Why were they being so provocative?
Most likely it was to cause chaos at the G20, right?
To basically make them the center of attention at the G20 and force the United States back into some version of the Iran deal and force the United States to keep getting waivers to Europe to cooperate with Iran.
This was Mike Durand's idea in Mosaic magazine.
And so this would have been the centerpiece of the G20.
So what does Trump do?
He's in Korea, and he just sends a tweet and he says, if you want to meet Kim, I'm around.
And Kim responds.
Obviously, there had been a stage set, but I do think it was more or less impromptu.
And you get this great image of him walking across the DMC.
And he was honest.
He said, well, I hope something comes of this.
He wasn't saying something is certainly going to come.
But the thing that we weren't talking about was Iran.
And the thing that we weren't doing was going to war with Iran or relitigating the Iran nuclear deal or making them the sort of allowing them to position themselves as the key to the world war.
Yeah, the villain of the peace, you know, the focal point.
Yeah, absolutely.
Trump drags the narrative where he wants it.
That's right.
And he's, I mean, like I said, a lot of it, the 4D chess meme and all this, I didn't believe.
But there is a lot that's stacking up, especially in regards to, and like I say, he's got a healthy team around him.
I find that very interesting.
I watched him justifying.
It was John Bolton, you said, The Hawk.
I was watching him justify to the press why he had him on his team.
And Trump was, he was literally like he was talking to children.
He was saying, well, no, look, you know, that's what he says, and I listen to him, and then I also listen to other people, and I make the decision.
And they were acting like this guy would effectively format Trump's brain every time he spoke.
And Trump's just like, no, I'm making a decision by being informed by lots of people.
I mean, he didn't say it as articulately as maybe he could have done, obviously.
But the essential message was very, very solid.
And that's exactly what I want a president to do.
I don't want the all-one way, because that's an echo chamber.
Then you don't get all the ways.
From the Oval Office, you get isolated.
I mean, you just can't be in the real world.
And this is true in almost any political office.
It's certainly at the highest auto-double world.
And so this 4D chess thing, we're supposed to believe that just coincidentally, just accidentally, the guy succeeded in real estate.
He succeeded in casinos.
Even though the casinos went bust, he succeeded.
Sometimes that happens, you know, businesses go up and down.
Right.
He succeeded in network television, top of it for 14 years.
He succeeded in politics, got the highest office in the world on his first try.
Accidentally.
Yeah, I know, right?
The coincidence is just static.
It's amazing.
You know, the thing that gave me a lot of confidence in Trump's messaging, because he's the greatest branding genius of modern times.
And what people would always say about him is he just shoots from the hip.
He's emotional.
He's reckless.
He can't control himself.
Where you saw that that isn't true is when he was doing that interview with Stephanopoulos a couple weeks ago, and he's in the Oval Office.
Did you see this?
Is this one where he a guy coughed?
His chief of staff coughed.
And so he's giving his answer, I forget even what it was about.
And you hear this little cough off camera.
And he keeps going at his answer.
He goes, no, we've got to stop.
You can't cough.
You're going to mess up the tape.
And because what Trump knows is, if you hear the cough, you can't use that audio, which means you can't use that clip, which means they're going to use a different clip.
But he wanted that message to go in the interview.
So he starts it again.
He goes, we're going to reset.
All right.
And they're resetting the cameras.
He goes, yeah, get the camera over there.
And he starts his answer again, and the camera guy screws up a little.
He goes, all right, we'll do it again.
And he starts it again, and what he does is, for the third time, gives a totally casual, off-the-cuff remark for the third time.
Yeah, he knows what he's doing.
He is a master of the cameras.
He knows exactly what he's doing when it comes to messaging.
And I mean, what is that skill?
That is the skill of reality television.
Oh, absolutely.
Right, and he is just so aware of where the cameras are, where the light is, what tape is going to be used.
He's so aware of it that I think that little clip, which they released a couple days after they did it, it should blow up for people this idea that reality TV is reality.
There is a guy who is crafting a lot of what you're seeing.
What I found really interesting is the left-wing reaction to that bit, though.
That's how I know about this, because I follow a bunch of left-wing commentators.
And they all talked about this as if this was evidence that Donald Trump was some evil villain who was oppressing everyone around him.
Because he was, come on, you know that we're shooting to the chap.
And the chap who had done it was, you know, he was also, oh, God, I've screwed up there.
And it's, you know, and it's an understood thing.
That's not Trump, like, demolishing the guy.
Right.
You know, that's just Trump being a leader.
You know, it's normal.
You'd expect that in that kind of setting.
And yet they were treating it like, Donald Trump, but this is proof that he's, you know, a monster who's enslaving the people around him.
What is wrong with you?
It's proof that he knows what a film set is.
I mean, you could be filming anything, and if there's a sound, you have to stop.
You have to reset.
It's a business.
He's doing a job.
Right.
And this person also knows this.
It's expected.
But yeah, one thing I find really interesting is the sensible decisions Trump makes.
Because it's so easy to attack him on the way he speaks or the silly things he says about airports and so on.
The factual inaccuracies and a lot of things he says, yeah, yeah.
But that's not really the problem because Trump isn't actually the, he's not the machine.
He's just the person telling the machine where to go and what to do.
So he's just the decision maker at the top.
He's not doing anything that requires any technical knowledge or anything of the sort.
So any of these sort of criticisms of his level of expertise and certain things, they're kind of irrelevant.
They fall by the wayside.
The question is, whose interests is he working in?
And it's unbelievably obvious that he is pro-America.
I mean, that is his entire brand, it's his entire message.
But all of his decisions fall in line with this messaging.
So it's very consistent.
So he is the bumbling avatar of Americana, the giant orange dick who straddles the world and goes, no, we're in America.
But the actions are all in line with that message.
Right.
And so really, like, I don't have anything to complain about.
You know, all I would be able to do is nitpick silly things like the left does.
But otherwise, and even through the negative media coverage, it still comes out kind of shiny.
You know, Donald Trump still is winning.
And there's no getting around it.
You know, presidents can't do very much.
I mean, it's the most powerful office in the world.
But you can't do everything.
It's hugely constrained, obviously.
Hugely constrained.
By design.
Right.
And so Reagan basically woke up every day.
Yeah.
And what he wanted to do was cut taxes and win the Cold War.
Yep.
Sensible goals.
Sensible goals.
George W. Bush woke up every day, wanted to win the war on terror, win the war in Iraq.
Idiot.
That was his focus.
Right, yeah.
And President Trump, his, I think his raison d'être in the Oval Office is to restore American greatness, to make America great again.
And what does that mean?
It means getting your allies to pay what they're supposed to pay in NATO.
It means, actually, in so much as they're doing that, is they're increasing their defense budgets, rebuilding those countries again so that they're not just relying on big daddy America.
It means renegotiating trade deals.
I mean, China is cheating left and right on WTO treaties, on their subsidizing their steel and aluminum.
And the very fact that they're essentially enslaving people.
They enslave people.
We can't work to those standards.
They steal RIP, they put spyware in it.
The people is in bed with them.
We'll come on to Silicon Valley in a minute.
Right.
Right.
I mean, you know, he's seeing all this around the world.
He's seeing that the economy under Barack Obama was just dreadful.
He's seeing that there's a national malaise, you know, to use Jimmy Carter's word, that people don't feel proud of America.
American pride or American fidelity or affection is way down right now, and especially among young people.
And I think what he is doing is in every action, he's just trying to build that up again.
And where he can do it in immigration policy, he'll do it.
Where he can do it in foreign policy, he'll do it.
Where he can do it economically, which is really his strength, he'll do it.
That's a very simple message, and it's very difficult to oppose that unless you're a radical leftist.
Well, yes, and this is the thing.
He just keeps having these successes.
And at the end of it, people are going to, I mean, like, it looks to me like the left are like, look, we're going to save the world.
That's the messianic, we're going to save the world, and we will bleed our country dry to do it.
But obviously, you're going to lose what you have and fail at your mission.
And Trump is the polar opposite of that, isn't it?
We're going to become amazing, and the world will become better by proxy.
Our net impact on the world from us being good will be good for the rest of the world.
It's a much more sensible policy.
The two most peaceful presidents that we've had in recent memory are Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.
They're the two people who they said were cowboys.
They wanted to build up the military.
But what they understood, both of those men, is that you achieve peace through strength.
You need to have the credible threat of violence.
You need to be totally prepared for war.
And ironically, the more prepared you are for war, the less likely you are going to need to engage in a war.
Weakness is provocation.
Right.
Weakness is provocation.
Weakness lies.
It invites someone to see you and say, I think I can.
Right.
You know, but like you say, I mean, Donald Trump's built the military quite significantly, hasn't he?
So there's no point.
What are you going to do?
And it's not like you think, well, Donald Trump, he's not Obama.
You know that Donald Trump, if it came to it, if the rubber met the road, Donald Trump's going to do it.
Right.
You know, he'd press the button.
He would absolutely do it.
And you can be sure of that.
You know, compared to someone like a Bernie Sanders, probably, like, or in my country, Jeremy Corbyn, who has just actively told the rest of the world, oh, we would never use our nuclear deterror.
We would never, yeah.
Hell have we got it?
Right.
Exactly.
But I mean, he wants to get rid of it.
And then this is why it's so smart for Trump to have these different advisors around him.
It's why it's smart for Trump to say crazy things every now and again.
You could predict quite well what George Bush would do in realms of foreign policy.
You could predict quite well what Barack Obama would do.
You actually can't predict what Trump is going to do, and that's probably his greatest foreign policy asset.
Yeah.
Right.
Let's come on to Silicon Valley and what the God Emperor is going to do about the tyranny of the radical left there.
Are nuclear weapons an option, or is that off the table?
Well, I think that Donald Trump is concerned about preserving his Twitter account in that regard.
So if he destroys Twitter, he can't then drive the left wild.
Right.
But I find it very interesting how he's very plugged into the culture war.
He seems to know who the major players are on both sides, and he deliberately antagonizes the left-wing ones and supports the right-wing ones.
And, you know, like the taking on the White House website putting up a thing where tell us how they've censored you.
You know, this is clearly going to be a big policy platform when it comes to his proper run in 2020.
And I think it's desperately important.
What's your beat on it?
What do you take on it?
Well, he's always been smart about engaging in the culture wars.
And there was this idea before him that conservatism is about economic tables and spreadsheets and bean counters and boring.
And it totally misses the point.
Edmund Burke, the great philosopher of modern conservatism, said the age of chivalry is gone.
That of sophistors, economists, and calculators has succeeded it, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
We are not a party.
We are not a movement of economists and calculators.
We like having them.
They're helpful.
But that's not what motivates us.
What motivates us are ideas and culture.
I mean, politics, as the patron saint of Hollywood Conservatives, Andrew Breitbart, said, politics is downstream from culture.
Culture is downstream from religion.
The cult and culture come from the same word.
If you're not talking about Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the American flag and you're only talking about lowering marginal tax rates, no one's paying attention.
And you're not going to lower the marginal tax rates.
No.
Because that is, you need to win the cultural battle first.
And so I thought it was brilliant of him to stand up for the flag, and now he somehow made his opponents protest the American flag.
I thought it was brilliant when Bett Middleton.
He's stopped winning.
You know, Bette Midler, who is actually a has-been, she tweeted out some meme about how awful Trump is.
I mean, she was a singer in the 70s, right?
He was in your country.
He was with the Queen, and at 1.30 in the morning, he tweeted out, washed-up psycho Bette Midler, got the facts wrong or something.
And people say he's a maniac to do it.
He's totally right to do it.
We're engaged in Trump the show.
I mean, we want to keep watching the new season.
We want to follow the characters.
We want to follow the narrative.
And his, I mean, if not for Donald Trump, the censorship on Twitter and other social media would already be far worse than it is.
Oh, yeah.
And you can tell, I mean, like, the Project Veritas leaks show that they're well aware of the impact that Trump has had on social media and his followers have on social media.
And they don't want that to happen again.
I mean, they restrict my episodes.
We put up my show on YouTube, part of it at least.
And they'll demonetize a lot, and they'll restrict who gets to see it.
Now, they did this to Prager University.
I've done a number of videos for them.
I did one called Control the Words, Control the Culture.
It was a video about language.
This is pretty dry stuff.
This is not like sexy content, right?
They restricted it.
You can't watch it in schools.
Dennis Prager did a series on the Ten Commandments.
You can't watch it.
Radical.
Radical stuff.
If you are in a school, if you're a teenager, you're not able to watch those videos on the Ten Commandments.
That's very interesting.
That is, I mean, and that started a couple years ago.
What this is.
Oh, my channel gets the same.
Channel, I mean, you've been demonetized.
I know I'm being suppressed as well.
I can see it in the metrics.
Right.
The passive daily views, if I didn't upload a video, it used to be something like 120,000.
But now it's down to 24,000 if I don't upload a video.
I mean, and you can literally see on the graph that just the day it drops off.
It's like that's where they put the thumb on the scan.
I know, I was thinking, I finally get to come on your channel and they're going to kick you off in like five minutes, right?
I mean, and what this is all about on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube, this is all about 2020.
Because Donald Trump won that election largely thanks to social media.
He was better at it organically, and his strategists were better at it just from the paid advertising perspective.
I've talked to people at Google about this.
I mean, they had a strategy, and Hillary Clinton did not.
And, you know, when the new media came out, it allowed the conservatives, who had been basically censored for 30 years by the mainstream media and by the gatekeepers, to get our message out there.
And it helped us to win the 2016 election, and they're getting a lot of phone calls at Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and Google saying, don't you dare let that happen again.
And so all of, they're just testing the waters.
They de-platform Alex Jones.
Yeah, yeah, this was the, this is exactly it.
Like, the conservatives have got, and not just conservatives, you know, the people who are not progressives or against.
Liberals, centrists, modernists.
Anyone who opposes political correctness, they have to understand, I mean, because there have been so many left-wing channels that deal with the culture war and are not particularly politically correct.
They're not actually interested in that, who are also getting censored.
And they're now on Twitter going, I can't believe I've had these videos taken down saying, no, we warned you.
It'll come like a scythe.
It's very important.
It's fine.
I actually don't get any credit for this, we at the Daily Wire, but when they came after Alex Jones, we were vociferously going after Twitter and social media.
We were vociferously defending people.
When they came after Gavin, I mean, I've had Gavin on my show a number of times, we were vociferously defending them.
And so people said, but Michael, Gavin told an offensive joke one time.
I said, okay, I think it's okay.
He could tell a joke.
But Michael, Alex Jones peddles conspiracy theories sometimes.
I said, look, so what?
So what?
So what.
He's got the right to be wrong.
He's got the right to be wrong, and they're going after Alex Jones because they know that good, fancy, respectable people we're not going to defend them.
That's not the hill to die on.
I'm not defending anyone.
I won't.
That's right.
Yeah, no, you've got to.
It's a test.
Because guess who's next?
It's you and me and Ben and Drew and Crowder.
I mean, they're actually already going after Crowder.
Unironically, Crowder is the, like, Alex Jones is the canary in the coal mine, but Crowder is the round against the gates.
Yeah.
You know, because Crowder, like, you know, he is the most mainstream conservative.
You know, there is nothing controversial about his views from a conservative.
He's totally mainstream.
Right.
And, you know, like, and because he's a comedian, he's not, you know, you know, he's, and so when, when one lispy queer can get his entire channel demonetized, you know, what, nearly four million subscribers, you know, he would have been making hundreds of thousands a year off of this channel.
And that's it.
Carlos Maz has offended.
He's tweeting about it, right?
Get rid of that guy's income.
Beyond the pale.
A guy who refers to himself as a lispy queer.
Right.
His Twitter handle is gay wonky.
Yeah, and his Red Hat account was gay wonkin.
That was pretty shocking.
Right.
Yeah, so it was, yeah, it's one of those things where, I mean, it's a self-evident war on the dissidence against political correctness by those people who use political correctness as their bread and butter.
And you know, the question, this was so interesting because we're all so tolerant, we're very nice people these days.
And so when this came out, he said, you can't call me a lispy queer.
You can't use the word queer.
Say, well, you all use the word queer.
It's in LGBTQ, which stands for queer.
I said, well, we can use it.
And I said, well, plenty of straight people use it too, like Democratic candidates for president, or they're not only Buddhajudge is gay.
They said, well, they can use it because they're pro-gay.
But you can't.
And so, okay, so you have to now analyze or guess what someone's motivations are.
But let's say that Crowder weren't just making a joke, which is actually what he was doing.
Let's say that it weren't a comedian.
Let's say it were a priest or a rabbi or an imam.
And they went on YouTube and they said, we find homosexuality and homosexual acts to be morally objectionable and sinful, and we discourage people from doing them.
This is the view of every theistic religion.
Are you now not allowed?
Is that priest going to be censored?
Is that Imam going to be censored?
Of course there.
I haven't been following this story too closely.
I've only been following the headlines.
But there's a New Zealand rugby player who, through religious conviction, has said, look, I think this stuff is sinful.
I can't support it.
And man, like I said, I've only been looking at the headlines, but they have been going so hard at him.
And it's like, look, that's just an opinion, man.
He's just, he plays rug to the business.
It's like the dude.
He's just like your opinion, man.
But it literally is just this guy's opinion.
Who is he?
He's a rugby player.
Well, don't talk to him then.
Just let him run a ball around.
What difference does it make?
But no, the fact that he isn't 100% on board with the agenda means that that's it.
How dare you?
You keep your mouth shut.
That's right.
one is too great either.
The way that the left tried to, because I asked this question on my show, and some people said, well, it depends how they would be talking about it.
If they were being...
I said, well, what if they were quoting Leviticus, which says that homosexual acts are an abomination?
I mean, that's worse than anything Crowder ever said.
Are you not allowed?
I mean, and this is what I mean by the sort of secular religion.
This is what I mean by the cathedral and by the liturgical months.
The government and big tech, and often it's hard to tell the difference.
They are subsidized in many ways.
They're subsidized in many ways.
They have a ton of control.
They are setting the secular religion, the secular morality, which is one of tolerance.
So tolerance, while they're censoring us, inclusion, while they're censoring us, diversity, while they get rid of diversity of thought.
And they are now saying you can't hold a sexual view, a view of sexual morality, that has been held for thousands of years.
Yes.
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