Ep. 951 - The Climate Change Assault Continues On Ukraine
John Kerry hopes Putin’s invasion of Ukraine doesn’t distract the world from the Sun Monster, the White House admits its sanctions won’t do anything, and the U.S. immigrant population hits a record high.
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As the casualty count mounts in Ukraine, as the Chinese Communist Party begins ratcheting up the aggression in Taiwan, as the post-Cold War world order seems to be on the brink of collapse, the Biden administration wants to make sure that you don't get distracted from the real threat, global warming.
Hopefully President Putin would realize that in the northern part of his country they used to live on 66% of a nation that was over frozen land.
Now it's thawing and his infrastructure is at risk and the people of Russia are at risk.
And so I hope President Putin will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate.
Yes, that'll stop Putin.
The man currently shelling civilians and killing children in Ukraine, the world leader famous for assassinating journalists and poisoning his political opponents with nerve agents, the ex-KGB spy who openly brags about his ambition to reassemble the Soviet Union, once the ex-KGB spy who openly brags about his ambition to reassemble the Soviet Union, once known as the evil empire, that man is going to call off his soldiers out of fear of Greta
So hopes John Kerry and the Biden administration.
And the scariest part of all is that John Kerry just might be the most lucid tactician in the entire administration.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
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Yes, it's very chilly.
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I'm not joking when I say John Kerry, who believes that fear of the sun monster and a Swedish child yelling at him will stop Vladimir Putin from conquering Ukraine.
I'm not exaggerating or lying when I say John Kerry is one of the more reasonable, sane people in the administration when we're talking about tactics on this Russia-Ukraine situation.
The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has been making the rounds.
What are we doing?
How is diplomacy working?
How are the sanctions going to work?
And he was asked a very simple question.
What sanctions are you placing on Russia?
How are you going to squeeze Vladimir Putin and the Russian economy to resolve this situation in Ukraine?
And what is that going to mean for Americans?
And the Secretary of State wants to reassure everybody that the sanctions are going to do absolutely nothing.
Russia's economy is fueled by gas and the U.S. is a consumer.
So would the U.S. consider cutting off oil and gas purchases from Russia?
Well, what we're doing, Nora, across the board, is making sure that we inflict maximum pain on Russia for what President Putin has done, while minimizing any of the pain to us.
We're in full coordination with other countries, both consumers and producers alike, to minimize any impact that this may have on energy prices and on gasoline.
Okay, hold on.
Hold on a second here.
You'll notice Secretary of State Blinken did not answer the question.
It was a pretty good question, actually.
And he didn't answer it, though I think the fact that he didn't answer it means that he actually did answer it.
She asks him, the reporter asks him, are we going to go after Russia's oil and gas?
Russia makes all of its money on oil and gas.
Now, America consumes a lot of oil and gas.
So if you go after Russia's oil and gas, that's going to hurt Putin, but it's going to also hurt the Americans who are filling up their tanks.
It's going to disproportionately hurt poor Americans.
We all need to fill up the tanks of our cars, and so people who have less money, if the price of oil and gas goes up, people who need to not just fill up their tanks, but also heat their homes, we use oil for a whole lot of stuff, all consumer goods are going to go up in price See oil and gas prices go up.
So it's going to disproportionately hurt poorer Americans, but it's going to hurt all Americans.
How are you going to do that, buddy?
And he says, well, what we want to do, we want to really hurt Putin, but we don't want to in any way hurt the American oil consumer.
Well, that's not possible.
All right, so how are you going to do it?
Well, thankfully, the deputy national security advisor to Joe Biden gives a blunter answer, and it's the answer we all suspected when we heard Blinken run his mealy mouth, which is, they're not going to do anything.
Targeting the Russian energy industry is totally off the table.
Is that what you're saying, Gilead?
What I'm saying is that our measures were not designed to disrupt in any way the current flow of energy from Russia to the world.
Now, we have also said we are going to cut off Russia's access to cutting-edge technology.
That technology can be used across many sectors.
And so, as it relates to Russia's long-term productive capacity, we are seeking to degrade that capacity, but nothing in the short term as it relates to energy.
No, we want to reassure the world we are not in any way going to hurt Russia's only industry.
You know the only industry that gives Putin his money with which to wage the war in Ukraine?
We're not going to touch that.
But we are going to lever some pretty heavy sanctions on Russian haberdashers.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, buddy.
It's going to be bad.
Russian trinket makers?
Russian ice cream parlors?
Oh, yeah, we're going after them hard.
But the oil and gas industry, which funds the entire country?
As John McCain said, one of the few precise things and accurate things that John McCain observed is that Russia is a gas station with a country attached.
They're just entirely reliant on oil and gas.
Yeah, we're not going to touch that.
That'll show you, Putin.
No, don't worry.
It's okay.
Greta Thunberg and John Kerry are going to yell at Putin, so that's going to stop the war.
Okay, buddy.
Oh my gosh.
How do these people make it to such positions of power?
It's a simple problem, actually, that they're dealing with, which is they don't want to make any decisions.
They know that any decision you make, especially when you're talking about the presidential level of politics, any decision that you make is going to help some people and hurt other people.
There are no easy decisions that make it to the presidential level.
If it goes all the way up there, you're dealing with really, really difficult problems.
And they don't want to deal with that because they're extremely immature and irresponsible and living in a fantasy world.
These are the kind of people who can't tell the difference between men and women.
They don't think you even have to make a decision there.
They don't think that you No, listen, if you're a man, maybe you can be a woman.
If you're a woman, maybe you can be a man.
Actually, you don't even need to be a man or a woman.
You can be any of the other 57 genders.
That's fine.
Is it any wonder that these people can't make the simple decision?
No.
If we're going to sanction Russia, we're going to sanction Russia.
When Donald Trump sanctioned Russia, what did he do?
Did he go after the Russian Garments Association?
No, he went after the pipeline.
He went after Nord Stream 2.
And it worked, by the way.
Russia did not launch a full invasion of Ukraine during the Trump administration.
And does that lead to some problems at home?
Maybe, not if you catch it early enough, by the way.
Does that cause some consternation in Europe?
Yeah, maybe it does, but Donald Trump laid it out for Europe.
He said, hold on, we're paying for your military so that you can go pay Russia to go give you your energy.
We're paying for your military, specifically...
Welcome to my show!
We're protecting Germany.
We're protecting France.
We're protecting all of these countries.
And then numerous of the countries go out and make a pipeline deal with Russia, where they're paying billions of dollars into the coffers of Russia.
So we're supposed to protect you against Russia, but they're paying billions of dollars to Russia.
And I think that's very inappropriate.
And the former chancellor of Germany is the head of the pipeline company that's supplying the gas.
Ultimately, Germany will have almost 70 percent of their country Controlled by Russia with natural gas.
So you tell me, is that appropriate?
I mean, I've been complaining about this from the time I got in.
It should have never been allowed to have happened.
But Germany is totally controlled by Russia, because they will be getting from 60 to 70 percent of their energy from Russia and a new pipeline.
And you tell me if that's appropriate, because I think it's not.
And I think it's a very bad thing for NATO, and I don't think it should have happened.
What happened when Donald Trump posed that problem to Russia?
The mainstream media in the United States said, he's undermining NATO. Donald Trump is undermining NATO. Not at all.
He was strengthening NATO. He was strengthening NATO by weakening Russia.
But now we've got the worst of all worlds because this administration doesn't want to make any choices.
No one does.
No one is thinking about the broader strategic picture or the common good.
They're all just thinking about themselves, summed up perfectly by Joy Behar on The View, who said, you know the worst part of this whole Ukraine issue?
What's going to happen to my Roman holiday?
Estimates are 50,000 Ukrainians will be dead or wounded and that this is going to start a humanitarian crisis, a refugee crisis in Europe.
We're talking about 5 million people that are gonna be displaced.
I mean, it's heartbreaking to hear what is going to happen.
Well, I'm scared of what's going to happen in Western Europe, too.
Yeah.
You know, you just plan a trip.
You want to go there?
I want to go to Italy for four years.
I haven't been able to make it because of the pandemic.
And now this, you know, it's like, what's going to happen there?
When Joy Behar started saying this, I thought it was the setup to a joke.
Yeah, and the real problem is I don't get to stay at my Tuscan villa this summer.
And I didn't even get to last year either.
But it wasn't.
She was dead serious.
She was 100% serious.
And this is instructive.
This is how our elites think.
I'm not just talking about the elites in government.
I'm talking about the elites in government, media like Joy Behar, the elites in private industry.
They're not thinking about...
The national good.
They're not even thinking about the global humanitarian good.
They're just thinking about numero uno.
You know, gosh, this really teaches me about suffering.
Because I feel bad for those children being shelled in Kiev right now.
But I might not even get to go to the Uffizi this summer.
You know, it's suffering, right?
Ain't that just the way suffering works?
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Forget John Kerry.
Forget Greta Thunberg.
Forget...
Joe Biden's fake sanctions that aren't actually going to stop any industry in Russia or squeeze Putin at all.
The left has one more strategy here to stop Vladimir Putin.
This one, I think, actually has the best chance of doing it.
Slam poetry.
Dear President Vladimir Putin, I'm so sorry that I was not your mother.
If I was your mother, you would have been so loved, held in the arms of joyous light, Never would this story's plight the world unfurled before our eyes, a pure demise of nations sitting peaceful under a night sky.
If I was your mother, the world would have been warm, so much laughter and joy, and nothing would harm.
I can't imagine the stain, the soul-stealing pain that the little boy you must have seen and believed, and the formulation of thought quickly taught that you lived in a cruel, unjust world.
Is this why you now decide no one will get the best of you?
Is this why you do not hide nor away shy from taking back the world?
Was it because so early in life all that strife wrapped your little body with fear?
Two more minutes of this, I would be willing to turn over my family.
I would surrender my entire country.
This is psychological warfare.
I believe this is prohibited by the Geneva Convention.
So torturous is it?
People are making fun of this actress Anna Lynn McCord.
If Putin were actually strapped down to a gurney and made to watch this, I promise you he would stop the war in Ukraine.
So painful, is it?
In the words of Harold Bloom, the late, great literary critic, slam poetry is the death of art.
The death of foreign policy, apparently, as well.
The saddest thing about this little viral clip of this actress reading her slam poem to Vladimir Putin, her strategy is no less effective than John Kerry's.
What her strategy is, hey, hey, Vlad, I think you're acting really bad, and you need to stop being so mad and invade Ukraine.
It's insane!
Maine.
So that's her strategy.
Here's John Kerry's strategy.
It's going to get really hot, Vladimir.
No, not because of our weapons.
We're not going to fire any weapons or anything.
But because of the sun.
So stop, please, because of the sun monster?
And here's Joe Biden's actual official strategy from the White House.
Hey, Vladimir Putin, we're not going to let people buy Russian toy dolls anymore.
You know those stacking dolls where it's the doll and there's like 10 more dolls inside the doll?
They can still buy your oil, but we're not going to let them buy those dolls anymore.
All of those strategies are equally effective.
They don't do anything.
Our nation is being led by the slam poetry actress lady.
It's just a lot of the slam poetry actress lady wearing suits with really serious faces and really prim and proper haircuts, but it's exactly as effective.
We have been so hollowed out morally, intellectually, politically, economically.
We've been so hollowed out.
I don't know that we are capable of serious international action anymore.
We had a reprieve during the Trump administration.
He actually was pretty good on the international front.
But Donald Trump was the bull in the China shopper.
Donald Trump is in no way the foreign policy establishment that, generally speaking, runs our foreign policy.
And by the way, he ended up getting run out by the deep state anyway.
So he was the exception, not the rule.
The rule is really pathetic.
How did we get so hollowed out?
In part, I think, I've said this before about TikTok.
You know, we always play TikTok videos here to show you what the youths are listening to.
I would not be surprised if I discovered that TikTok were just a Chinese psychological operation to hollow out America.
I would not be surprised at all.
I feel that way about a lot of social media.
Well, there was a really brilliant idea.
It just came up in the Wall Street Journal.
Saw this article yesterday.
I think it's great.
In an article by Thomas Lehrman and Brad Wilcox, the idea is no Instagram or TikTok without parental consent.
Okay.
What does that mean?
Well, look, if I'm a teacher and I want to take my students on a field trip, what do I have to do?
I need to give a permission slip out and the parents or guardian need to sign the permission slip and say, okay, my kid can go on the field trip.
There are a whole host of activities for which you need a little permission slip if you want a kid to be able to do it.
And there are a lot of activities that kids are not even permitted to engage in.
Well, how come they're allowed to go on Instagram and TikTok?
This just gaping whole pathway straight to hell where there is all sorts of insane content.
I'm not just talking about the obscenity and the porn that's on these channels.
I'm talking about the weird, creepy, ideological stuff that's going to convince your kid little Johnny that he's really little Jane and convince him that his country is evil and all sorts of really wacky ideology.
Yeah.
Obviously, there should be a permission slip.
Now, this seems to me to be a pretty fair middle ground compromise between, on the one hand, the licentious animals who think that little kids need to be able to do whatever they want.
They should go to Drag Queen Story Hour, and that's a blessing of liberty.
And then, on the other hand, the conservatives who think this stuff should just be banned, and TikTok should just be banned, and pornography should not even just be age-limited, but just banned.
Just get rid of it.
That's what we did for most of American history.
Let's just go back to that.
That would be much more what I'm interested in.
I'm just saying, let's get back to a semi-reasonable kind of national policy.
Nobody benefits from allowing creepy grooming drag queens to go on TikTok and pervert your kids' minds, so let's just get rid of it.
Okay, but we're not ready for that.
Let's have a middle ground.
You need a permission slip for this stuff.
How do you do it?
Instagram's not going to do it by itself.
Instagram, TikTok, all of these social media companies are preying on your child.
They're finding the weakest parts of your child's psychology, the most vulnerable aspects of their mind, and they're gunning for those, and their algorithms are feeding those.
There have been huge reports on this.
Feeding eating disorders.
Feeding all sorts of psychological disorders and pathologies because it gets more clicks, it keeps the eyeballs on the screen longer, and that way they get to sell you more things from their advertisers and they get to collect more data from your kids.
So that's what the media companies are going to keep doing.
How about we use our political power and our elected representatives to go in and say, no, you can't do that.
Sorry, you need a permission slip.
Fine by me.
It's a middle ground compromise.
I would much rather go in with a wrecking ball, knock down these woke big tech companies' servers, and then plow the ground with salt where they once stood.
But if you think that's a little too far right wing for right now, okay, I'm willing to grant maybe that's the case.
At the very least, we need the permission slips.
We need limits, okay?
This gets to something I talked about yesterday.
I got to it at the very end of the show, but I don't want to just skip over it.
This is really important.
There's a new report out from the Center for Immigration Studies.
The United States population of legal and illegal immigrants has now reached an all-time high.
That's 46.6 million immigrants in the United States.
This is up 1.6 million since Joe Biden was inaugurated.
It's a huge increase, and it's just a huge percentage.
And it's just too many immigrants, okay?
Part of my family...
We're immigrants.
The Italian side, part of the family came on the Mayflower and they were here from the very beginning, but part of my family came basically on a sardine boat from Sicily and they were immigrants.
So I'm not, I don't have a problem with immigrants per se.
I'm sure lots of these immigrants, legal ones and frankly some of the illegal ones, I'm sure they're very nice people, but...
You can't just replace the population of a country with lots of foreigners who have no connection to your national rituals, your beliefs, your traditions, your language, who are not part of the people of the country and expect to have the same country.
It's not possible.
You can't assimilate 50 million people overnight, period.
You can't do that at all, and you can't expect to have the same country that you would have afterwards.
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For many years, the Republican line, even the conservative movement line on immigration, was, we don't want illegal immigration, but we want lots of legal immigration.
Right?
We don't...
Illegal is bad, legal is good, and there should be no limits to legal immigration.
Even Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is the most right-wing, conservative, rock-ribbed president of my lifetime.
He said, I want more legal immigration than ever.
I love immigration, but it's got to be done the legal way.
No, that's wrong.
That's the wrong line, okay?
I don't besmirch anybody's reputation.
I don't think that people engaged in this kind of talk necessarily with bad intentions, but it's crazy.
If there's no limit, then what?
Okay, we've got 330 million people in America.
Let's just bring in 330 million people next year.
We've already got 46.
So let's say the majority of America is just foreigners with no real connection to American history or tradition.
Would that be a good idea?
Would you support that?
No, of course not.
You wouldn't help the immigrants, exactly.
In some ways you would, I guess.
But you would completely destroy America, so the place they're coming to wouldn't really exist anymore.
Because America is not just an idea.
It's a place and it's a people with traditions and connections and rituals and a language.
So you can't do that.
You've got to have some kind of limit.
The limitless immigration thing, it's the same as the Joy Behar problem.
The problem is that the ruling elite have been governing without any thought toward the common good, without any thought toward the national good.
They've been thinking about the good of their own pockets.
The Democrats support limitless immigration, legal and illegal, because immigrants broadly, not just illegal but legal too, are likely to vote for Democrats.
So the Democrats like that.
More immigration, please.
And the Democrats are opposed generally to a lot of traditions in America, so if you flood the country with people who have no connection to those traditions, you're going to weaken those traditions.
Okay, that's why they like it.
Why do the Republicans like it?
Because for a long time we were the party of the Chamber of Commerce, and the Chamber of Commerce likes cheap labor, and they know that when you flood the country with immigrants, the cost of labor decreases, and so they get to fill their pockets.
Right, so that's both...
It's purely selfish motives without any thought to the common good.
Actually, it harms the common good.
And what do we have?
We have a country that's falling apart with little faith in our institutions, little connection to our past, toppling our statues.
It barely feels like a country anymore.
It's very difficult to project our influence overseas right now, for instance, because we don't even know what we're projecting.
This immigration issue is an important one.
It's not hateful.
It's not bigoted.
It's not even xenophobic or nativist, these kind of silly terms, to say that a country needs to have limits.
A country needs to have borders.
A country needs to have a people that do things together, that have a national memory, a national history, national ritual and practice.
It means you can't let everybody in.
And it's going to be basically impossible to teach Democrats that lesson.
At least the Republicans, though, need to figure it out.
There are shifting political winds, I will tell you that.
CPAC is going on right now.
I was really hoping that I could be able to get down there.
I was planning on going.
I'm very grateful to CPAC for the invitation.
We couldn't make the logistics work, so maybe next year.
You know who is going to CPAC, though?
Tulsi Gabbard.
Tulsi Gabbard.
Who is Tulsi Gabbard?
Well, you might remember her as a Democrat candidate for president in 2020.
Tulsi wasn't your usual Democrat candidate for president.
She's a Democrat.
She's a liberal.
Make no mistake about that.
She supports abortion, not in all cases, but in a lot of cases.
She supports all sorts of Democrat policies.
But she broke with the Democrats over their kind of desiccated, corrupt ruling establishment.
She was very anti-Clinton.
She was very anti-war machine, even though Tulsi Gabbard served in the military.
So she's got a lot of credibility here when we're talking about war and foreign policy.
So why is Tulsi a Republican now?
It's not really even the issue so much.
I think it's a little bit generational.
It's a little bit generational.
This is going to seem like it's not connected, but it actually is.
On President's Day, on Washington's birthday, the GOP account posted on Instagram a picture of presidents that it liked.
And it had all the hits for the Republicans.
It had Ronald Reagan, and it said, you know, thank you to all of our not-you presidents who've made America great.
And the not-you was Joe Biden, and then all the rest were these Republican presidents.
But which Republican presidents did they pick?
They picked people like Ronald Reagan.
Yeah, we all like Reagan.
Picked people like Donald Trump.
Yeah, we all like Trump.
They picked the Bushes.
They thought, you know, the Bushes, that's great.
And they left out presidents like Teddy Roosevelt.
He's a Republican.
And that had been the view of the Republican Party.
We're the party of the Bushes.
We hate Teddy Roosevelt.
He was sort of a progressive.
He was a conservationist.
He didn't want to just destroy all of the natural parks and environments and just, I don't know, create more industry there.
We're the Bush Party.
And if you looked in the comments on Instagram, it was all these Republicans saying, wait, hold on, the Bushes?
Hold on, you have the Bushes over Teddy Roosevelt?
What are you talking about?
Seems like a minor point, but it's...
It's more and more evidence of something we've seen since Trump.
The Republican Party is reimagining itself.
During the Bush years, the Republican Party was the party of the plutocrats and the big business, and they hate the environment, and they're super pro-immigration, and they love bombing the Middle East, and they never saw war they didn't want to start, or at least ratchet up.
And the Republican Party of Trump is not that...
We were told that Donald Trump was completely changing the Republican Party.
He was making it into something that's not.
The opposite is true.
The opposite is true.
Donald Trump was in many ways returning the Republican Party to what it was when it was founded.
The party of Lincoln.
The party up through Teddy Roosevelt.
The party really up through the 1970s or 80s even.
He's returning it to something more traditional.
Now, before we get to the mailbag, there is some breaking news, which is that Joe Biden has made his pick, reportedly, for the Supreme Court.
So his pick, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal, well, I'll pull it up right now.
I just got it.
I got the notification on my phone.
Biden plans to nominate Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.
The reason she's ostensibly the more qualified candidate for the Supreme Court.
There were a few other people being considered.
There was a lot of political pressure from close Biden allies to go with someone else.
Ketanji Brown's got a sterling resume.
She's probably a complete lunatic.
So that's too bad.
The reason I mentioned it though as well is there was a news report yesterday that the George Floyd family lawyer was really pushing for Ketanji Brown.
And I thought, I don't really care who the nominee is.
Any nominee from Biden is going to be terrible.
I thought, why do I care what the George Floyd family lawyer thinks about the Supreme Court?
Why do I care What the lawyer for the family of this career criminal who has been turned into the greatest saint in American history because he was killed while resisting arrest in a police altercation while committing a crime, why do I care?
How perverse has our judicial process become and our process of government, even when we're talking about naming the judges, that that sort of thing...
It's important.
This nomination for the Supreme Court has been sort of poisoned from the beginning because Joe Biden said he's not going to pick the most qualified candidate.
He's really only looking at race and sex, which is ugly to most Americans.
It's repulsive to most Americans.
More and more evidence.
So he picked the candidate who's probably most qualified.
Okay, I can only imagine...
In a way, I don't want the most qualified candidate from Joe Biden, because it means that that person's going to be extremely intelligent and capable and clever and probably better at getting her way.
But that's the news.
You know, it's more important than ever to understand just how insidious the foreign threats are within our own country.
We have just the way for you to do it.
Our new show, The Enemy Within, is a docu-series featuring acclaimed journalist and expert in national threats, Lee Smith.
In the fourth episode, Lee describes how the NBA has come to depend on China for much of its profit, and as a result, how the NBA and its players have become a mouthpiece for CCP propaganda.
Also, you got to make sure to check out Ben Shapiro's new show, The Search, His second episode features his good friend and highly lauded historian, Neil Ferguson.
These two great series are exclusive to Daily Wire members.
If you're not currently a member, go to dailywire.com slash subscribe to join.
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out.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
First question in the mailbag from Lydia.
Hey, Michael.
You keep talking about how Putin did not invade any sovereign nations while Trump was in office because Trump was too unpredictable.
And while I agree with that, I've been struggling with the fact that China invaded Hong Kong in 2020, despite Trump being in office.
Is there a serious difference here?
Sincerely, Sen Bapira.
Well, there is a difference.
First of all, China already had Hong Kong.
The British gave Hong Kong back to China over 20 years ago, what, 1999?
I think something like that.
So they already had it.
That's a categorically different situation than what you have in Taiwan, which is ostensibly still independent and free, at least more so than Hong Kong has been.
The encroachment into Hong Kong has been more gradual.
But let's even grant the premise for a second.
Let's say that the situations were comparable.
I never suggested that no one was ever going to test Donald Trump because Donald Trump was so scary that he completely intimidated every threat around the world.
He was unpredictable, and so these foreign hostile leaders had to make their own risk calculation.
I'm sure a lot of people thought that Donald Trump was not really going to deploy forces.
In fact, Donald Trump ran as one of the most anti-war candidates in recent history.
Certainly, as the most anti-war Republican we've had in a long time.
Right?
He said the Iraq War was terrible.
He didn't want to send our kids overseas.
He wanted to focus on America first and wanted to give up global empire.
So if you just heard that, if you were Putin or Xi Jinping, you would say, okay, well, it's time for me to go in and I'll take Ukraine and I'll take Taiwan, respectively.
But the thing about Trump is...
Every so often, he'd just shoot some missiles into Syria or into Afghanistan.
Or every so often, you'd have Little Rocket Man, a name given to Kim Jong-un by Donald Trump.
You'd have him say, you know, I've got a nuclear button.
I keep the nuclear button on my desk at all times.
And then what does...
What does Donald Trump do?
Does he go to a podium and he says, listen, we should not use this kind of rhetoric.
We need to tone down here.
No, he sends out a tweet.
He says, yeah, little rocket man's got a button on his desk.
Well, he should know that I've got a button too.
And mine's a lot bigger.
And mine's a lot more effective.
And mine actually works.
And the international community says, what is this maniac doing?
He's going to start a nuclear war on Twitter.
And if you're Vladimir Putin, when you hear that, you say, you know...
Maybe I'll hold off on Kiev.
Maybe I'll just stay in Crimea for now.
Because this guy, this game show host, reality TV star, real estate mogul, tweeting maniac, he might just do it.
He might just freaking do it.
Xi Jinping, he says, well, look, maybe I'll go a little further into Hong Kong, and then what does Trump do?
Trump starts clobbering him with tariffs, starts a massive trade war that poses huge risks to the United States.
Xi Jinping thought that would never happen.
They thought, because for 20 years you had people, including Joe Biden, especially Joe Biden, saying, we want China in the international community.
We want a rising China's good for everybody.
Let them into the World Trade Organization.
Who cares if they violate the treaties?
Who cares if they steal our IP? Who cares if they illegally subsidize steel and aluminum?
That's okay.
We want a rising China.
Trump says no.
Trump used a lot of salty language that this is a family show, so I'm not going to repeat.
And he goes in and he starts a massive trade war.
It's very unpredictable, and it's an example of China calls Trump's bluff.
It turns out it's not a bluff.
And then what happens?
China releases a virus that shuts down the world for a couple of years.
Perhaps accidentally, perhaps not accidentally.
But people forget this because we all focus only on COVID. Don't forget, we were winning that trade war with China before COVID happened.
So, anyway, these leaders are making their risk calculations.
And the key here is not even to be the most aggressive or, on the flip side, to be the most dovish.
The key here is...
Be unpredictable.
From Matthew.
Dear Mr.
Knowles, you seem to be an educated and very well-read man.
Thank you, Matthew.
I'm handsome, too.
While we're complimenting me, I'll take everything you got.
As such, my questions relate to some of the founding texts of Western literature, namely the Trojan epics.
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid.
First, which one is your favorite and why?
Second, how should one go about reading them?
Just dive in with the Iliad or read some other sources to gain some context.
Love the show.
Keep up the good work.
Well, I'm partial to the Aeneid because the Aeneid inspired my favorite poem, which is The Divine Comedy by Dante.
But if you told me just right now you're going to sit down and read all of these, what's your favorite?
I would probably say The Odyssey.
is my favorite.
It includes one of my favorite lines from Telemachus, who says it's a wise man who knows his own father.
It's just a really salty, funny line, and it's just a wonderful story.
So how would I dive into reading them?
I would pick up an annotated copy, and I would read it And I would read all the notes.
This is really important, speaking of Dante.
When you're reading Dante, one problem that people have with reading Dante is he has so many literary and political allusions that people just don't get these days.
Unless you're a medieval Florentine, you're not going to get some of them.
So you need an annotated copy.
So get a good, nice, thick one.
For Dante, it's the Durling Martinez.
There are other good translations and annotated versions of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid.
I like the Fagels, but there are others.
So get a critical edition.
Just read all the notes, and you'll get it.
And it's going to be plotting and plotting and plotting.
And the first time, you're going to need all the notes.
And maybe even the second time you read it, you're going to need all the notes.
And then you're going to be able to really, really enjoy it.
So that's what I would do.
I don't think you need to go necessarily take a course or read it in any particular order.
Just jump in.
Whatever grabs you.
I don't really care for the Iliad as much as the Odyssey.
So the Odyssey comes after the Iliad.
But for me, I would go for the Odyssey first.
Your mileage may vary.
Part of reading is erotic.
You know sometimes people say old books are sexy.
Books actually are sexy.
And this is an important thought on how to pursue education.
Alan Bloom in The Closing the American Mind says that education is so sterile.
Kind of like our relationships.
We don't have love affairs anymore.
We have relationships.
I'm in a relationship with my partner.
Oh, that sounds hot.
That's about as hot as an accounting firm.
No, you're supposed to be in love.
You're supposed to be drawn.
Dante talks about this.
Where we are drawn to grow in Wisdom and maturity should be a sort of erotic thing.
We turn our loves, our natural desires, toward the good.
We perfect our loves, and then we grow.
So if you have an attraction to a story, let's say it's the Odyssey, you should pursue that.
If you have an attraction toward adventure stories, you could either waste all your time watching stupid Marvel movies, or you could turn it toward something that will be a little bit more edifying.
So do that.
Don't suppress your desire.
Don't deny your desire.
But turn your desire in a way that's going to be more edifying.
From Kelsey, I need the love guru.
Speaking of Eros, I'm a 29-year-old woman with a beautiful 8-year-old son.
When my son was 4, I met my boyfriend.
Before things got serious, I said I wanted what I wanted, which consisted of marriage, kids, and to follow God.
He also wanted these things, so it was a great match.
I love him to pieces, and he's been amazing.
He stepped up and became the father my son did not have.
He's raising him to be a good Christian and a good patriot.
However, we've been together four years, and he doesn't seem to have any future plans of marriage, which in turn means children as well.
As I said, I'm 29, so the clock is ticking, and he is 44 years old, so I feel the time is not on our side.
Any thoughts?
I do have some thoughts.
I'd need to know a little bit more detail about your situation.
Are you a widow?
Did you, were you previously married, you know, to the, maybe the father of your son?
Were you, was that like a licit marriage, like a real marriage?
Were you not married?
Was it, you know, you sort of were impregnated by this guy and then he was a deadbeat and he ran off?
So those things are going to matter a little bit.
In terms of what you should do now.
But all things being equal, let's say, you know, the boyfriend who, the first boyfriend who gave you your child, you know, even bad things can result in good things.
You know, let's say he was a total deadbeat.
He ran off.
You meet this guy.
He really is the father figure to your son who's been dating four years now.
I would tell him To piss or get off the pot.
That's what I would tell him to do.
Because it's not going to get any easier.
Men sometimes need a good kick in the rear.
And four years is long enough.
And if he doesn't want to marry you, and he doesn't want to have more children, and he wants to keep his options open, and maybe he wants to be able to run off at some point, then that's no good.
Better to rip that band-aid now.
But maybe he's a good guy and he just needs a little encouragement, and you should give him that encouragement.
And you can point him to this clip and say, you know, my friend Michael gave me that encouragement to give you that encouragement, too.
From James.
Hello, Michael.
I'm a 21-year-old black guy who's spent the last couple of years listening to your show because I realized how important having some political knowledge is.
I find your show to be a trustworthy source of it.
My 16-year-old sister has also recently dove into politics, but for a different reason.
Her woke CRT-teaching English teacher has instilled all the horrors of America bad and racist ideology into her.
She informed me that she doesn't believe that cracker is a slur against white people because white people are the oppressors, not the oppressed.
She told me I wouldn't want to vote for a Republican unless they have my values and are not a racist piece of garbage, which is highly unlikely.
I've challenged her views a couple of times, but I never pushed too hard for fear of pushing her away since we used to be very close.
I'm just unsure how I should speak to her or what I should say to convince her that she and all her friends have been misled.
I just don't want to see my sister turn into the average Twitter user.
So there's two problems here and they both come back to the same thing.
They both come back to religion.
One, your sister is obviously steeped in this CRT ideology.
Critical race theory derives from critical theory.
Critical theory derives from cultural Marxism.
Cultural Marxism derives from Marx.
And there are Obviously, lots of distinctions along the way, but to quote Whitaker Chambers, the ex-communist turned conservative, Marxism is not the newest ideology in the world.
It's the second oldest.
It began in the Garden of Eden when the serpent told Eve, ye shall be as gods.
It is a vision of the world without God.
It's an anti-Christian vision of the world.
So if you view the world in this way, with the oppressor and the oppressed and this whole sort of dialectical view, then you're going to have problems.
The second part is, your sister is viewing herself primarily through the lens of race.
Through this religious lens, first of all, and then she's grounding her identity primarily in race.
That's a big problem, too.
Not to say that race does not exist, not to say that race doesn't have some effects in the world, but if your identity is primarily in race, you're going to have a lot of problems.
I do not think of myself primarily as white.
Well, I guess I'm sort of swarthy.
I do not think of myself primarily as swarthy.
I do not think of myself primarily as Italian, primarily as waspish, primarily as English or Irish or Welsh or anything like that.
I don't even think of myself primarily as an American.
I'm very patriotic.
I love my country deeply.
I certainly love my American identity.
But primarily, I view myself as Christian.
I'm a Catholic.
I view myself as a child of God, someone made in the image of God.
I ground my identity in the God who says my name is I am that I am, being itself.
And so I don't get too hung up on the race stuff or the this or the that or the other thing.
I don't know about your views, but it sounds like you don't view yourself primarily as a black man.
I'm a black...
You say I'm a black guy, but you say that sort of incidentally.
You don't say I'm a black man.
Forget my nation.
Forget my creator.
Forget my...
I'm a black...
No, of course, it's very silly.
Very silly thing to do.
So...
Both of those issues are religious problems, and your sister's going to have to sort that out before she can figure out how completely wrong she is.
Maybe she could listen to this show.
Maybe you throw a couple episodes of the show into your sister's queue, and she figures it out.
I hope so.
Or you can just talk to her.
From Maria.
Hey, Michael.
First off, I would like to say I love the show.
Thank you.
But for business at hand, I'm in a predicament.
I've been with my boyfriend for four years and counting.
He's the person I want to marry and spend my life with.
What is it with this dating for four years?
I'm seeing a theme here.
This is what millennials do, I guess.
I have certain fantasies and desires that I don't want to indulge in.
But he wants to talk with me about them.
But I feel ashamed for having these thoughts and feelings to begin with.
Is this something I should open up to him about or should I keep this part of myself locked away?
Sincerely, a lady who wants to lead a virtuous life.
Wow, great question.
So what you're saying is, I have these presumably sexual desires that are disordered, that I want, at the lower level of my will, I want to indulge in them.
You've got some weird sort of kink or something.
But at the rational level, I don't want to indulge in them because they're weird and they're not virtuous, and so I don't want to do it.
And he, who's a curious little chap, says, no, come on, tell me about all your weird sexual desires.
And you're like, no, I don't want to do that.
I don't want to indulge in that.
I'd rather push it to the side.
You are right, and he is wrong.
He is channeling the wisdom of our age, which is you should never repress anything, especially not a sexual desire, but you are right.
You should.
First of all, virtue is a habit.
The more you indulge these things, the worse they get.
And the more you practice the virtues, the easier it becomes to practice the virtues.
It's like anything.
The more you smoke cigarettes, the easier it is to smoke cigarettes, the harder it is to stop smoking cigarettes.
And the same thing when you try to quit.
The longer it's been since you quit, the easier it is to go without having a cigarette.
But this gets back to something we talked about a few questions ago, which is your desires.
You've got these disordered desires.
We all do.
In a fallen world, everybody's got disordered desires.
Disordered sexual desires, disordered political desires, disordered economic...
Everybody's got disordered desires.
The key to really overcoming something like this, or at least improving your situation, is not to completely suppress desire.
But to perfect desire.
To reorder it.
So all desire is pointing towards something.
All desire is evidence of something good.
It wants something good.
But the aim sometimes gets a little bit off.
Okay?
And all desire ultimately should lead back to God.
So you see this with Dante.
Dante has a crush on this girl Beatrice that he met twice.
And he's married to someone else, but he just has this crush on this girl, Beatrice.
And that's not necessarily evil and awful and adulterous.
If Beatrice, as she does in the Divine Comedy, leads Dante, channels his erotic love for her, channels that to bring him to God.
That's what you've got to do.
It's a little bit pie in the sky.
It's a little bit out there.
But I think it's also quite practical as well.
Take those desires that you've got, even if they're a little bit off, and turn them.
And work on turning them and allow grace to allow them to turn toward the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
See you Monday.
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Copyright Daily Wire 2022.
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You know, some people are depressed because the republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon's turned to blood.
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