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Sept. 11, 2018 - The Michael Knowles Show
42:25
Ep. 215 - 9/11: The Beginning Of The End Of Globalism

Maxine Waters wants to impeach every Republican from president to dog catcher. The NFL and Nike continue to get woke and go broke. Then, has the West learned anything in the 17 years since the September 11 terror attacks? Finally, John Bolton defends the nation-state while Democrats promise to tear it down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Maxine Waters wants to impeach every Republican from president to dog catcher.
The NFL and Nike continue to get woke and go broke, despite fake news to the contrary, though they both are getting some unlikely financial help from President Trump.
We will explain.
Then, after another knife attack in Paris on Sunday night, we ask on this anniversary of 9-11, has the West learned anything in the 17 years since those awful attacks?
Finally, John Bolton defends the nation state while Democrats promise to tear it down.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
So much to get to today for...
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Okay.
There is so much to get to today on the 17th anniversary of 9-11.
And a lot, actually, in political news that ties into that, both internationally and at home from the Trump administration.
So, before we get into that, because I really want to spend some time going into what we've learned in the last 17 years.
This is a very emotional day for a lot of New Yorkers.
I'm a New Yorker for a lot of Americans.
Before we go into that, into the analysis of the day, I want to run through the political news because there's still a lot of that going on.
And sometimes politicians try to hide little political and campaign actions in bigger news cycles like this.
So, you know, in politics, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
And the squeakiest wheel in our politics is probably Maxine Waters.
I can't tell.
I think she's the squeakiest wheel in the Democratic Party.
So this came out yesterday.
We talked about it a little bit at the end of the show.
Maxine Waters has her strategy for the midterm elections.
Here she is.
And I said, if you see him anywhere...
If you see them at a restaurant, if you see them in a department store, even at a gasoline station, just tell them you're not welcome here or anywhere.
They say, Maxine, please don't say impeachment anymore.
And when they say that, I say impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, impeachment.
I think that's because that's all Maxine Waters can say is impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, And I'm starting to get the feeling, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm starting to get the feeling that Maxine Waters doesn't like Republicans very much.
You'll remember Maxine Waters very famously or infamously said, When all of these Democrats were going out harassing Republicans, members of the Trump administration, she said, you bet you better go harass them.
Go harass them at restaurants.
Go harass them at the bank.
Go harass them when you see them on the street.
And she's doubling down on that here.
She's saying, absolutely, go out there and harass them.
Later on in that fundraising speech, she said, I wasn't threatening Trump supporters there, but I threaten them all the time.
I threaten them all the time.
So this is her strategy going into the midterms.
Impeachment, impeachment, impeachment.
And I actually can sort of understand this strategy because what they're saying is, well, we can't really run on policy.
The policies are all going very well.
So what we're going to do is run on the personal grotesqueness of the president.
We're going to say, you don't want him to be the president anymore, so elect us and we'll impeach him.
Because if the Democrats get a majority in the House, they're going to impeach the president.
Okay, so I can sort of see how that works.
But the reason that I think Democrats are actually running a little scared here, that maybe that generic ballot For the midterm elections is not going as well for them as all of the expert pollsters are telling us that it is, is because of this next strategy.
They keep calling for the removal from office of the president for the 25th Amendment because the president is apparently crazy.
Here's Sarah Sanders addressing this issue.
What does the president make of all of this talk of the 25th Amendment and some of what he hears on media outlets regarding the word crazy talk?
It seems like there's a lot of talk about that on many of the mainstream media outlets.
I think we would say that it's about as ridiculous as most of Bob Woodward's book.
The fact that that's actually being honestly discussed is And frankly, it's insulting to the nearly 62 million people that came out and overwhelmingly supported this president, voted for him, supported his agenda, and are watching and cheering on as he successfully implements that agenda every single day.
So the 25th Amendment is that if the president is incapacitated, physically or mentally incapacitated, you can remove him from office.
And I gotta ask, if the Democrats are talking about this, if they're saying we need to invoke the 25th Amendment, the Bob Woodward book, the press corps in front of Sarah Sanders, the press corps being the communications wing of the Democrat Party, if these elected Democrats are talking about this, then do they really think their electoral chances are that good?
Because if I thought that I were going to win an election, then I would say, we'll get rid of him when I win the election.
If I didn't think I were going to win an election, then I'd be talking about 25th Amendment.
It seems to me they're tipping their hand a little bit.
They're kind of showing, maybe things aren't as strong as everybody wants to pretend they are.
Because, you know, it was all of the experts in 2016 who told us Hillary's going to win.
99% chance Hillary's going to win.
Polls coming out the night before.
Analyses of meta-analyses of polls of polls saying it's guaranteed the Democrats are going to win.
Don't even show up to vote Republicans.
And then what happened?
It was a pretty landslide victory in the Electoral College.
So we hear Maxine Waters saying run.
Impeachment, impeachment, impeachment.
You know, there's supposed to be a legal basis of impeachment.
You have to charge the president with a crime.
And so far they haven't done that.
Collusion is not a crime.
We don't even see evidence of collusion.
Sending mean tweets is not a crime.
Not being very nice to Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, that's not a crime.
So they should provide a crime, but even if not, even if it's just a purely political matter, if they thought they were going to win, they'd just run on that.
I don't see it.
And by the way, I don't know if the Democrats know this.
If you impeach Donald Trump, then you get Mike Pence.
Do they like Mike Pence?
What are they going to do when Mike Pence comes around?
He's a very normal conservative.
He doesn't tweet all the time.
He's an Indiana conservative.
Maxine Waters actually provides the answer on what they're going to do if they finally get their wish.
They impeach Donald Trump.
Here is what they will get with President Pence.
And so we have a responsibility to continue.
I had a conversation here today when someone asked, but what about Pence?
If you were able to impeach, Pence will be worse.
And I said, look, one at a time.
You knock one down.
One at a time.
You knock one down and then we'll be ready for this.
We'll get him too.
We cannot be intimidated by...
We cannot be made to fear anybody who would undermine our ability to have a decent quality of life.
Oh, they're just going to get Pence too.
Okay, they're just going to get him too.
Just wait your turn, then we'll get him too.
Listen to how Maxine Waters projects here.
Because what she's calling for is lawlessness.
Maxine Waters has always called for lawlessness.
So she said, you know, you've got to go harass them in the street, get in their face, harass their children, harass their families.
But then she says, we will not be intimidated.
You're the one who's calling for people to go harass the families of elected Republicans and appointed Republicans.
You're the one who's saying, go out in the street, and you're the one who's saying, use the mechanisms of our Constitution to remove people that we don't like from office, even if they haven't committed a crime.
Just lawlessly remove the president, and then we'll remove the vice president.
What are we going to accuse the vice president of?
The worst thing they've been able to accuse Mike Pence of is only having dinner with his wife.
Ha ha!
The worst thing they've been able to accuse Mike Pence of is being too good a husband.
It's unbelievable.
And the projection is so loud at this point in the election, at this point before the midterms.
She said, Maxine Waters said right there, we will not allow anybody to interfere with our good quality of life, to stop us from having a good quality of life.
I live right near Maxine Waters' district.
Maxine Waters has a very good quality of life.
People who aren't from California maybe don't know that.
Maxine Waters.
So she represents South LA, Inglewood, all these pretty bad, poor neighborhoods.
But she doesn't live there.
Of course she doesn't live there.
Maxine Waters has a pretty nice quality of life.
She has a house that's worth millions of dollars.
I've heard estimates up to four and a half million dollars.
A punch above the average home price down in South LA, down in Inglewood.
She has a perfectly fine quality of life.
But she's always projecting this.
She's saying, they're intimidating us.
They're preventing us from our quality of life.
When the Democrats in this election are accusing the Republicans of something, you can know that they've done it in spades.
You know that they've done it at a much higher rate, much more frequently.
So that's what Maxine Waters and the Democrats are doing.
What is Donald Trump doing?
Donald Trump is doing exactly what we elected him to do.
I'm not just talking about fix the economy and create jobs.
I am talking about the actual reason we elected Donald Trump, which is to troll the entire left.
Here is a video that Donald Trump released from his Instagram account just last night.
Because some of those jobs of the past are just not going to come back.
And when somebody says, he's going to bring all these jobs back.
Well, how exactly are you going to do that?
What are you going to do?
What magic wand do you have?
We've created more than 400,000.
That's very soon going to be 600,000 manufacturing jobs.
Growth during the Trump years has been much more robust.
This year we should get up here 3%.
That would put us about 50% above Mr.
Obama's performance.
The economic boom continues.
It's the big story of 2018.
Jobs, growth, wages.
Doesn't get much better than that.
More than four million jobs created since the election.
Wages are growing at the fastest pace in nearly a decade.
More Americans are now employed than ever before in the recorded history of our country.
The list goes on and on.
New policies are working.
All right?
I just love...
So the video, obviously, is great.
It's this beautiful troll.
And it's defensive, by the way.
It was Barack Obama who has been saying all of these things.
He was saying, you know, Donald Trump, he's just terrible.
He's degrading our politics.
He doesn't get credit for the economy.
So what does Donald Trump do?
He comes back and hits him.
And I'll show why it is so important because it highlights a true fact of our economy.
But first...
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So, the video wouldn't have worked if President Trump didn't have the goods to back it up.
But he does have the goods, so you get both aspects of it.
I'm so pleased that Republicans are finally using humor again.
It's been probably since Ronald Reagan.
Republicans haven't really used humor at the federal level.
But he's going, he's saying, look, this guy, womp womp, he told us it couldn't happen.
All the experts said these jobs are gone.
They're never going to happen.
Come back.
And the experts have a lot of opinions that often aren't true.
We'll talk about that certainly when we reflect on September 11th and when we reflect on Ambassador Bolton's comments yesterday on the International Criminal Court.
But just look at the...
Economy all around us.
Small business optimism is the highest since the Reagan administration.
The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index is at the highest level that we have ever recorded.
And it's not just going to the very tippy-tippy top of the socioeconomic ladder.
It's actually affecting blue-collar jobs.
This is really important.
This is the first time in a long time we're seeing jobs in goods-producing industries.
Mining, construction, manufacturing...
They grew tremendously over the past year, 3.3%.
This also is the best rate since 1984, since the Reagan administration.
They told us if President Trump were elected, the economy would implode, that the markets would crash, the jobs are all gone, they're not coming back.
They're not coming back, Donald.
But they are.
They're growing and growing.
And that is a great thing.
Which makes me think, from the mouth of Nancy Pelosi herself, that Democrats, in their heart of hearts, actually think President Trump is going to win.
They actually think that he's going to survive.
Because Nancy Pelosi gave her party some hope within the last few days.
She said, oh, we need some new blood.
We need some new blood.
But there was an important caveat.
Nancy, take it away.
I do agree that it's time for new blood and we should move on.
And if Hillary Clinton had won and the Affordable Care Act was protected, I feel very proprietary about that.
I was happy to go my way.
We didn't know who would come forward, but that's up to the caucus.
They give me the honor of serving, and it's up to them to choose who comes next.
But to have no woman at the table and to have the Affordable Care Act at risk, I said, as long as he's here, I'm here.
You catch that?
As long as he's here, I'm here.
Sounds like Nancy is betting on President Trump being here for a while, because that is her play right now.
She's saying, as long as he's here, I'm here.
She needs a foil.
The Democrats need a foil.
The American people want the TV show to keep going on.
So they can talk a good talk, he's out, the generic poll, impeachment, impeachment.
I think that the Democrats are betting on Donald Trump staying in office for a long time.
And speaking of bad Democrat plays in recent weeks, they've somehow managed to turn against the American flag.
This is true in...
We see this especially in the National Football League, but we see it throughout corporate America and we see it among Democratic candidates.
So you remember...
We've been talking about this NFL kneeling for the flag drama now for two years.
And in May of this year...
The NFL came out and they said, no more kneeling.
No more kneeling.
You can't kneel.
It's creating too much distraction.
The NFL ratings had been tanking.
They were down 8% in 2016 when this all started.
They fell 10% last year.
Analysts are predicting that they'll fall even more this year.
So they said, okay, we've got to stop doing this in May.
No more kneeling.
But then the politically correct crowds, the left came out and said, how dare you?
How do we're going to do it?
And what are you, how are you going to police this?
And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So then in July, right after they announced the policy in July, they come out and say, well, maybe there can be kneeling.
So what?
They said, well, maybe we won't enforce the policy.
We don't know how we're going to enforce the policy.
So what you get is more and more confusion.
Over the weekend, we saw this come to fruition.
There were two people in the NFL who kneeled for the national anthem.
Now, that's not so bad.
There were 2016s, 13 games, I think, over the weekend.
There was these two guys, Miami Dolphins, Kenny Stills and Albert Wilson.
But what that really means, even though it's just two guys, this is going to keep going on.
It's going to keep going on and on and on.
The right, obviously, is bashing this.
This is a very bad thing.
They're protesting the American flag, symbol of our country.
And the left is embracing this.
So the part of me that is, like, earnestly taking in this information says this is a horrific thing to do.
The political, cynical side, that little devil voice up there says, this is terrific news for conservatives.
This is terrific news for Republicans.
Because we've somehow gotten the left and the Democrats to protest the American flag itself.
I wonder if this whole protest wasn't just started by some slick Republican operative, Roger Stone or Paul Manafort or somebody.
We have right now elected Democrats...
Applauding the flag protest.
Ayanna Pressley, running for Congress in Massachusetts, is applauding this.
Beto O'Rourke in Texas is applauding this.
The only thing that we could do that might be more effective is to get Democrats to protest apple pie.
That's going to be the next one.
We're going to say, you know, for social justice, you really ought to protest apple pie.
They'll say, yeah, I hate apple pie.
Apple pie is the worst.
Because polls show that the Americans hate this protest.
You know, and now Nike has made this protest the face of their advertising.
Colin Kaepernick is now their advertiser.
There was a...
There was this...
After Kaepernick became the spokesman and the big image for Nike, there was a poll conducted by Morning Consult that showed that Nike's net favorability had fallen 34 points because of the move.
Among Republicans, the favorability fell 70 points, but across all sectors it fell.
And then in the key demographics that Nike cynically thought it was going to boost by this...
There was no change.
And if anything, there was a slight decline in favorability.
That includes younger generations, Nike users, black customers, and others.
They cynically thought they were going to win over those key demographics, and it didn't happen.
Obviously, the NFL ratings have been falling and falling.
And the one aspect of this that the left is pointing out, they say Nike's sales were up over the weekend, over Labor Day weekend.
That's true.
But Nike sales are always up over Labor Day weekend.
They were up over Labor Day weekend last year as well.
They were up more this year.
But perhaps that's because the Trump economy is up.
Our economy has jumped dramatically in the last year.
We're at record high economic growth.
And so it just gets back to the flag.
And the left is saying, oh, he's not protesting the flag.
He's protesting police brutality.
He's protesting the flag.
He says he's protesting the flag.
Here's Kaepernick in his own words.
When there's significant change and I feel like that flag represents what it's supposed to represent and this country is representing people the way that it's supposed to, I'll stand.
It's the flag.
It's about the flag.
He says it's about the flag.
If he were protesting police brutality, he could protest a police department.
If he were protesting some specific policy, he could go outside the government office and protest the policy or protest Congress.
But he's protesting the flag and that is horribly offensive because the flag represents the country.
The flag is the symbol of the country and this country is the greatest country in the history of the world.
That's not chauvinism.
That's not just my own bias.
That's not just because I was born here.
It is the greatest country in the history of the world.
And Americans find this very offensive when you disrespect the country.
Because of all the sacrifices Americans have made.
No time is this clearer than on September 11th.
The greatest country in the history of the world learned a real lesson 17 years ago.
And we look around us now and we see that.
Just on Sunday night.
In Paris, there was another knife attack.
It was a knife attack by a young Afghani man.
The authorities are saying it wasn't terrorism or they're not willing to call it terrorism.
But there have been many other knife attacks this year that we know are terrorism that have been claimed by ISIS just in Paris, just in Paris alone.
So 17 years after September 11th, has anything changed?
Has anything changed in global politics, in domestic politics, in our relations to one another?
Since 9-11-2001, there have been seven attacks on the United States by Islamic terrorists.
I think sometimes we think there haven't really been any because 9-11 was so traumatizing to so many people.
But there were attacks at Fort Hood, the Boston Marathon, Chattanooga killed four Marines, one Navy sailor, San Bernardino, Pulse Nightclub, on and on.
Many of these attacks claimed by ISIS are done in the name of ISIS. In the European Union, just since 2014, there have been 65 attacks.
Just since 2014, the last four years.
So it seems like not a lot has changed.
We're getting all of these attacks again and again, year after year after year.
I remember 9-11 pretty well, even though I was very young.
young.
I was 11 years old on September 11th.
So I was in my sixth grade classroom in New York.
All of our parents, basically, most of our parents worked in the city.
I was up in the suburbs.
And I remember it clearly.
I remember the strongest memory I have of that day was President Bush sitting in the Oval Office addressing the nation that night.
And he articulated perfectly what we all were feeling.
Good evening.
Good evening.
Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, Our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.
The victims were in airplanes or in their offices, secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers, moms and dads, friends and neighbors.
Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror.
The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness and a quiet, unyielding anger.
Disbelief, terrible sadness and a quiet, unyielding anger.
That is precisely what New York felt that day.
It's precisely what the rest of America felt that day.
It's what we still feel.
I've never heard anyone articulate that feeling better than President Bush did in that speech.
Because I think a lot of times what we hear is, we shouldn't feel that anger anymore.
Oh, let's let the anger go away.
And let's just, you know, let's just come together.
And okay, it's not, let's don't be angry.
But a lot of us feel that today.
A lot of us feel that today because justice still has not been fully completed.
There are five animals sitting down at Guantanamo Bay right now, five animal terrorists who participated in that attack.
They have not been tried.
It's been battled around.
Are they going to be tried at Guantanamo Bay?
Are they going to be tried in Manhattan?
Are they going to be back and forth and back and forth?
They need to be swiftly tried and executed.
And President Trump could do a great service to the matters of justice if he were able to hasten that along.
Because we still feel that anger.
We still feel that justice hasn't quite been done.
That sense of justice is what President Bush showed us on the pile at Ground Zero after September 11th.
He showed us that sense, that feeling of justice.
And this is, I think, the one silver lining that we might have out of us.
Here's President Bush famously with his bullhorn.
I want you all to know that America today, America today...
It's on bended knee in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn.
This nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut as we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens.
I can hear you.
I can hear you.
The rest of the world hears you.
And the people...
And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.
Thank you.
I can hear you.
The rest of the world hears you.
And the people who knocked this building down, these buildings down, will hear from all of us soon.
What a beautiful sense of justice.
That's why he got those cheers that day.
We were all begging for that.
We're still begging for that.
That there is a satisfaction to that anger, that unyielding anger that we all felt.
And that satisfaction will be completed in justice.
That's what satisfies that anger.
We were talking the other day, we were reminiscing over the September 11th attacks, some friends around here in the office, and we said, was there any silver lining to that storm cloud?
Was there anything good that came out of it?
Is there anything we can say, well, that's a consolation.
And there were a few things.
The country was unified after September 11th for about five minutes.
It didn't last very long, but it was unified.
America really did come together.
New York came together.
The rest of the country came together.
Democrats and Republicans came together after September 11th.
I wish it had lasted longer.
But that was a real achievement.
The other is patriotism and sacrifice, and the great sacrifices of the heroes not only of that day, though there were many heroes that day on September 11th, first responders, people on the airplanes.
There were many heroes there, but there were many heroes afterward who enlisted, who went overseas and fought to defend our freedom.
Many gave the ultimate sacrifice.
Many others came back with wounds, mental and physical.
That...
Sacrifice for my freedom and yours.
That's a beautiful thing that also came out of that day that we're all very grateful for.
On an international political level, On the level of statecraft, is there anything good that came out of it?
We look at all of these attacks that are still happening.
We might think, not quite.
But there was something that we learned, which is the lie of globalism.
And globalism goes by many names.
We hear globalism, we hear globalization, we hear the New World Order, we hear the International Order, whatever.
The lies of that were exposed that day.
National Security Advisor John Bolton showed us that just yesterday, not coincidentally on the eve of September 11th, because he showed the American people and the rest of the world what happens when you try to infringe on American freedom and on the sovereignty of the United States.
This was the question.
What is the best form of government?
What is the best way to order our world?
But before September 11th, 2001, We had been told from all experts across the political spectrum that history was over.
History is over.
The nation state is over.
We're moving into a period of perpetual peace and prosperity, a new world order.
We heard it in that essay from Francis Fukuyama, The End of History.
He wrote, quote, what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such, that is the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. that is the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and Has there been any more triumphant, triumphalist statement than that?
We'll get into what that means and what we learned 17 years ago about that new, homogenous, universal state.
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We were told that history was over.
And then we learned it wasn't true.
History wasn't over.
No matter how much we said it, not everybody had to listen to us.
We often hear in the United States that some people are on the right side of history, some are on the wrong side of history.
Barack Obama would say this all the time.
Well, they're on the wrong side of history.
They're on the right side of history.
Well, history doesn't have sides.
There's the moral right, there's moral wrong.
You can be morally right and morally wrong, but you can't be historically right and historically wrong.
History just comes and goes.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, history was moving in one direction.
It was a beautiful day.
We had peace and prosperity all over the world.
And then that history took a turn that morning.
And we learned that history doesn't care about our ideology, doesn't care about our periods of perpetual peace.
That won't happen.
We learned that some people won't go along with what we tell the whole world to do.
We saw this in the form of Islamism, political Islam, imperial Islam, that sees itself as at odds with the West.
Not because of anything we did.
Not because we helped found the state of Israel in the West.
Not because we helped this nation in the Middle East over this nation in the Middle East.
Because of who we are and what we believe and the culture that we have and the language that we speak and the land that we live in and the freedom that we have in that land.
That's what we learned.
9-11 was not the first time that this ideology of Islamism, political Islam, tried to conquer the West.
It goes back a long way.
It goes back all the way to the 8th century.
It goes back to the Battle of Tours in 732.
It goes back to the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and it goes back to the Battle of Vienna in 1683.
Now, why bring up all of this history?
It might seem like ancient history, all of these incursions of Islamic empires into Europe to try to conquer Europe, being held back at various points.
The reason I bring it up is because history isn't over.
History is not alive.
Or history, rather, is alive.
It's not over.
There's no end of history.
The Battle of Vienna was won by the West on September 11, 1683.
This is no coincidence.
History isn't over and the terrorists who planned those attacks knew their history.
Christopher Hitchens was certain of this.
Lawrence Wright, who wrote the Looming Tower, won a Pulitzer Prize for it, was certain of that.
There's no end of history.
History matters to other people around the world and we can't tell them not to believe in it because there are two ideas.
There are two ideas for the international order.
Nationalism and globalism.
the order in which independent free nation states get to determine their own destiny, get to govern themselves, have sovereignty, get to live in their freedom with their culture and their language, and global empire, global empire institutions that date back all the way to antiquity, all the way global empire institutions that date back all the way to antiquity, all the way back to Rome, all the way back to
And also we see them in supernational organizations today, like the United Nations, like the European Union, like the International Criminal Court, which John Bolton beautifully talked about last night.
Nationalism and globalism, we saw that come into conflict 17 years ago, and we're still debating We're still resolving that conflict.
The 2016 election was in no small part a debate over nationalism and globalism.
President Trump made that the hallmark, the center of his foreign policy.
Here's President Trump talking about it in 2016.
Americans must know that we're putting the American people first again.
No country has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first.
Both our friends and our enemies put their countries above ours.
We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism.
The nation state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony.
I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down.
Those are your choices.
These international, supranational organizations that take away national sovereignty or the nation-state.
This has been a long-standing debate here in the United States.
Basically, after World War II, it seemed that all of the Western world was moving toward this, what has been called the New World Order.
The UN, the Kumbaya, everybody gets along.
Oh, the system of nation states that we developed after the Treaty of Westphalia, oh, that's over, that's passé.
We're in a New World Order.
But it's nothing but empire, and empire creates serious problems.
Is the United States going to chart its own course, defend its own people, defend its own interests or are we going to be told what to do and pushed around by various global interests?
In 2016, we began to resolve that question.
There was a clear articulation of National sovereignty, of nationalism, of putting America first.
And the American people voted for that.
But the Democrats on the left are still fighting against that.
Even some areas on the right.
We have to debate that.
That was the question that was raised after the end of history ended.
After the end of the end of history, 17 years ago.
And we're still debating that now.
Our National Security Advisory Ambassador John Bolton laid out this argument so beautifully yesterday when it comes to the International Criminal Court.
So, Ambassador Bolton yesterday was at the Federalist Society.
He was giving a major speech on American foreign policy, and he assailed the International Criminal Court, the ICC. A lot of people don't know what the ICC is.
The ICC is a relatively new institution.
It was founded in 2002, theoretically, to prosecute war criminals.
The international, we're going to go in, the supranational body is going to go in and prosecute criminals in various countries, and even if they don't want us to, we're just going to go do it.
Now, early on, the United States, Russia, and China didn't sign on.
The Clinton administration in 1998 made it seem as though the United States was going to go along with it.
President Bush reversed all of that and said, we're not going to go along with it, largely thanks to John Bolton.
So, in theory, the International Criminal Court sounds great.
In reality, all it does is take away national sovereignty.
So, countries that are advocating globalism, Europe, parts of the United States, parts of the American political scene, loved the idea of this.
John Bolton realized it was awful.
Here is Ambassador Bolton assailing it.
Today, on the eve of September the 11th, I want to deliver a clear and unambiguous message on behalf of the President of the United States.
The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court.
We will not cooperate with the ICC. We will provide no assistance to the ICC. And we certainly will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own.
After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us.
Gotta love Ambassador Bolton.
That man does not mince words.
I think his mustache is made of titanium.
I mean, that is a seriously strong hombre.
So he says the ICC is already dead to us.
And of course this makes sense.
When you look into the particulars of it, you see how ugly it is.
Are we really going to agree that the supernational body, you know, Venezuela, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is going to tell the United States how to order our affairs?
There's no more just body on earth than the United States, than our criminal justice system.
If justice is going to be served anywhere on earth, it's going to be served in the United States.
We don't need other countries telling us how to do it or what to do and allowing politics to infect it and allowing it to infect our international system and international politics.
One aspect of the International Criminal Court when it was founded is that people could be prosecuted for ecocide.
Ecocide.
What is that?
It means you attack the environment.
You know, you smash a rock or something.
You could be brought up on charges for the International Criminal Court.
The reason that John Bolton was so precise here is because the ICC wants to go after American soldiers.
They want to go after American soldiers who served in Afghanistan or Iraq and they want to prosecute them for alleged war crimes.
And we are not going to allow that to happen.
Ambassador Bolton was so clear.
If you come after us, we're going to sanction you.
We're going to not allow you to enter the United States.
This is not going to end well.
And at the same time, in the same speech, he makes an announcement that the U.S. is booting out the PLO's office, the Palestinians' office in the United States.
We're kicking them out because it's illegal.
Here's Ambassador Bolton.
The Department of State will announce the closure of the Palestine Liberation Organization office here in Washington, D.C. As President Reagan recognized in this context, the executive has the right to decide the kind of foreign relations, if any, the United States will maintain.
And the Trump administration will not keep the office open when the Palestinians refuse to take steps to start direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel.
According to a 1987 law, the PLO should never have had an office there in the first place.
And now this administration is enforcing the law.
So much of this administration is about enforcing the law, which is a very important thing.
Because as we reflect 17 years later, as we reflect and look around the world, so much of what we can do is to simply enforce the law and keep the order of nations going and to defend American national interest because the United States is the greatest country in the history of the world.
We ought to do that.
We ought to be a sovereign country.
People hate us because of our freedom, but we need to maintain that freedom.
And if there's any silver lining, that is the silver lining of that tragic day 17 years ago.
So, we've...
It's so hard on September 11th because there's just no way to feel good about it.
There's a silver lining to the storm cloud, but there's no way to say, yeah, but really it was all for the best.
Oh, it was all for the best.
You can't say that.
I speak as a New Yorker and as a little kid when it happened, you felt it so viscerally in New York.
And then people all, you know, virtually everyone in New York...
Knew somebody who was killed that day or knew somebody who was killed that day or was related to somebody.
And then everyone around the country, after 9-11, even if you weren't affected directly by that attack in New York and Washington, you were, a lot of people know, servicemen who signed up to defend the country.
And it's just a tough day.
It's a tough day and you've got to...
Just sit in that, I think, and try to reflect and see if there are lessons for that, for how we move forward.
But you can't put lipstick on a pig.
You can't say that it's a nice thing.
It was good and we learned something from it and really it was all worth it or something in the end.
It was a really awful moment for the country.
There were some nice things that we can get out of suffering, but it's suffering nonetheless.
Suffering can sanctify, but it's still suffering.
So to everybody who lost somebody that day, my condolences, and you'll be in our thoughts and prayers.
And for people who sacrificed, went overseas, thought to defend our freedom, thank you for that, because freedom isn't free.
And we'll be back tomorrow, and we'll be able to cover all the craziness in the news.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal.
Executive producer, Jeremy Bory.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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