Ep. 1308 - This Viral Song Just Changed Everything
Biden’s attorney general moves to protect him from Hunter fallout; the FBI executes a short, morbidly obese 75-year-old over Facebook posts; and a right-wing populist folk song becomes the biggest song in America.
Ep.1308
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If you're an American conservative, it has been a huge weekend for music.
An unknown southern folk singer became the most popular musician in the country for railing against the liberal establishment.
The Vek Ramaswamy rapped Eminem at the Iowa State Fair.
And best music of all, Hunter Biden's business partner sang like a canary to the point that now the DOJ has appointed a special counsel, which, on the bright side, proves that Republicans were right all along, and on the downside, further protects Joe Biden and the Democrats.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Mike Minol show.
Welcome back to the show.
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You remember that mother effer is not real girl?
The one from the airplane?
I'm sorry to say we now know who she is, I think, probably.
There's a little wrinkle to that.
We'll get into it.
And I'm sorry to say she apologized.
Very sad.
She had nothing to apologize for.
That mother effer who was not real had a lot to apologize for.
She did not.
We'll get to that.
First, though, the big political news.
Which every other news story is distracting from, but the actual political news that affects your political order is that the DOJ, under Merrick Garland, Joe Biden's extremely political, wheeling and dealing Attorney General, Has just appointed a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden.
On Tuesday of this week, Mr. Weiss advised me that in his judgment, his investigation had reached a stage at which he should continue his work as a special counsel.
And he asked to be so appointed.
Upon considering his request, as well as the extraordinary circumstances relating to this matter, I have concluded that it is in the public interest to appoint him as special counsel.
This appointment confirms my commitment to provide Mr. Weiss all the resources he requests.
Now, you heard that.
He didn't say we have appointed a new special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden.
He said, Mr. Weiss, David Weiss, who is the U.S.
attorney who had been on the Hunter Biden case, he has asked that he have his title changed, have his role changed to continue the investigation.
Weiss has been investigating Hunter Biden for, these investigations have been going on for years.
Weiss was involved in all of the seemingly incompetent, plotting, dead-end, BS Hunter Biden investigation that culminated in the attempt by prosecutors like David Weiss to get Hunter Biden a plea deal that would have Let him off the hook for all of his crimes.
Wouldn't have even addressed the most serious crimes.
Would have given him a slap on the wrist for tax crimes, which were the evidence of the deeper crimes, the political corruption.
And would have put him in a diversion program for the gun charge so that the gun crime would have been expunged from his record.
So this is a guy, a prosecutor, who has every step of the way tried to let the criminal off the hook.
And now, now that the evidence is just so clear, not only of Hunter Biden's personal crime, but of the corruption that it means for the Biden family, now all of a sudden David Weiss has said, well, you know what, I can't continue this investigation at the DOJ.
All of my schemes to try to let the Bidens off the hook have been foiled, so now I need to be an independent special counsel.
So that I can further screw up this investigation.
On the one hand, this is nice news in that it shows the public, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Hunter Biden investigation is serious.
That Hunter Biden's crimes are serious.
The whole time, Democrats have said, no, he didn't do anything wrong.
Republicans are just distracting.
This is BS, BS, BS.
CNN ran endless segments about how there was no evidence against Hunter Biden, much less against Joe.
The allegations, without evidence, mostly, that Republicans have out there.
There has been no corroboration.
There's no evidence there.
I mean, you would agree, we don't have, there's no evidence of that at all.
Republicans get riled up and keep making allegations that at this point have not been substantiated with evidence.
So far, there is no evidence that the evidence has come out.
They don't have evidence to show that Joe Biden did anything wrong.
Comers said that repeatedly.
He's like, well, I hope we find evidence.
Of course, they present that without clear evidence.
So if there was evidence that they had accumulated in their four to five year investigation, this request to be a special counsel would have come already.
It seems unlikely that they have that kind of evidence.
So before we move on to why this is actually bad for Republicans and a pretty crafty move by Biden and the Democrats, just, I don't want to gloss over the fact that all of those people were completely dead wrong.
Every single person you just heard, the CNN anchors, the CNN guests, the former prosecutors, the special legal analysts, all just completely wrong.
The Republicans right the whole time.
Your dumb, hillbilly, hick, Uncle Jimbo in the middle of the mountains somewhere said, you know, these Bidens are corrupt.
That guy, totally right, completely vindicated, has much better legal insight than all of the geniuses in the neckties on CNN.
Now, probably what they were doing was not just being ignorant and naive.
They probably were doing what the corporate media always do, which is cover up for the liberal establishment.
Truth be damned.
But they were wrong.
By their own standards, the appointment of the special counsel proves that there is a lot of evidence.
There is a there there, and they're going to investigate it.
The reason this is bad, though, for the conservatives is, one, look who the special counsel is.
The guy who has bungled this investigation and actively, intentionally tried to undermine the case against Hunter Biden is now the guy in charge.
as special counsel, not just as U.S. attorney.
He's the last person in America who should be in charge of it if you actually wanted to get to the bottom of something, if you actually wanted to punish Hunter Biden.
But of course they don't.
One of the reasons that they've appointed the special counsel is to give themselves a little bit of distance so they can pretend.
It's not true, but they can pretend that actually Merrick Garland and Joe Biden, they really don't have anything to We wanna make sure there's no semblance of impropriety.
The other reason they're doing this is because it's gonna make it a lot easier for Weiss and his office and the DOJ to resist congressional subpoenas.
Now that the Republicans in Congress are finally digging into this stuff, now that Jim Jordan and the Judiciary Committee and all of these Republican investigators are interviewing Devin Archer, Hunter Biden's former business partner, are hearing stories of Joe Biden's significant involvement in all of these crooked business deals.
Now that that evidence is coming out, the DOJ comes in, and whether this will be successful or not is at least trying to throw a roadblock up there to stop the Republicans from being able to talk to the people who intentionally screwed up that investigation.
They're just going to stonewall and stonewall and stonewall.
The election is only a year and a half, less than a year and a half away now, the 2024 election.
So they're just going to try to drag this thing out until nobody cares anymore, of course.
At least though we can take the tiny victory.
We were right.
We were right the whole time.
And being right, proving that there's a double standard is not going to do anything That and a buck fifty will get Republicans a cup of coffee.
But it is a reminder, I think, the next time that the Democrats try to throw some BS legal argument at us, That some Midwestern granny is a terrorist and needs to be thrown in solitary confinement.
That Donald Trump, because he gave a speech, is an insurrectionist and a threat to democracy and can't be on the ballot.
Whatever BS they throw at us that sometimes convinces the libs and the squishes and the center-right people who want to get along, this should be a reminder.
The whole thing is completely fixed.
The whole thing is completely rigged.
We are not playing by the same set of rules here.
And if we lie down in the name of principles or something, we are Conceding the country, unjustly, to people who have absolutely no respect for the rule of law whatsoever.
And that's not very good.
And that's going to screw up all sorts of things.
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Speaking of incompetence at the FBI, the FBI executed a 5-foot-6, 300-pound, 75-year-old Practical invalid over the weekend.
This is a really, really sad story.
There's a guy in Utah, I guess the news broke sometime on Friday.
75-year-old man who had posted some threats against Joe Biden on his personal Facebook page that had very few connections was executed by the FBI.
How did it happen?
Well, there was a SWAT team that showed up, there were agents who showed up, there were gunshots.
The only video that we really have of it shows a massive show of force very, very early in the morning against this guy.
And what the FBI is saying is that, well, he was resisting and so they had to take him out.
They left his body out, just bloodied, covered with just a bloody sheet for a long time.
Why did they do it?
Because he did post threats.
He said, I'm going to go out here when Joe Biden comes to town.
I'm going to bring my gun out.
I'm going to show up there.
I'm going to put a bullet in his head.
He was saying all sorts of terrible things.
Did the FBI really believe this guy was a threat?
Well, maybe they didn't know that he was so overweight and Maybe they didn't know that he was so elderly.
Maybe they didn't know that he had trouble walking.
If you talk to his neighbors, his neighbors say the guy could barely walk around.
He barely went anywhere.
He was involved in his church, but that was pretty much it.
He'd go from his house to his church, and he could barely walk the distance from his car into the church.
So, did the FBI just not know that?
No, the FBI did know that because the FBI had actually had two encounters with this guy.
So they knew exactly what he was like.
Why didn't the FBI just pick him up when he was getting out of his car, walking maybe to the grocery store, or walking maybe to church?
The FBI had been surveilling this guy for months.
If they thought that he was really a threat to Joe Biden, why didn't they arrest him when there would have been less of a chance for a violent confrontation?
The only conclusion that I can draw is either the FBI is just absolutely, completely incompetent,
To a degree not just what we joke about government incompetence all those government bureaucrats know what they're doing I mean like doesn't know the first thing about law enforcement or This was a political decision to go in there and show those damn right-wingers What for make an example out of this 300-pound short guy who was 75 years old who could barely move I?
take Threats very seriously.
I'm not dismissing the fact that this guy posted on his Facebook page threats against the president.
As somebody who has received a threat or two before, I'm always very happy when law enforcement takes those threats seriously.
The problem is, law enforcement very rarely takes those threats seriously when they're against conservatives.
When prominent conservatives Get death threats.
I won't even name names.
I won't even name examples because, frankly, when you get too specific on some of these examples, they can put people at even greater risk.
But I've been around it enough to know very often law enforcement won't do a damn thing.
And everybody knows, at the public level, law enforcement will get the most prominent criminals off the hook.
BLM burns the country down for eight months.
They get off with a little slap on the wrist.
The Midwestern granny shows up to the Capitol Rotunda, they throw her in solitary and they don't let her out.
And that's exactly what's going on here, as far as I'm concerned.
Unless some shocking new evidence comes out, I just don't see how anybody could conclude that this would be the best way to pick this guy up.
The guy was so immobile.
That even if he had actually been planning to go on the day that Joe Biden showed up to Utah, drive the 40 minutes to go to where Joe Biden was, get out and try to shoot him or something, the FBI could have probably walked alongside him and picked him up.
There was so much time, they were obviously watching him the whole time.
Did they really have to go in and kill him?
No.
That's not even the safest way to pick him up.
Because if they're saying that this actually was a violent, dangerous standoff, then the agents were in far greater trouble trying to arrest him at his house.
They could have just picked him up walking from his car.
They didn't do it though.
I don't want to Monday morning quarterback this thing, but when the FBI gets caught spying on Catholic churches because they think that Catholics are a grave terror threat to America, lying about spying on Catholic churches, getting caught lying about spying on Catholic churches.
They once said it was a single field office.
Turns out it was a nationwide program involving multiple field offices.
When the FBI shows up to fathers of seven pro-life advocates and arrests them in front of their kids and traumatizes them for opposing abortion, meanwhile they celebrate the infanticidal maniacs, give them prizes, give them special days and parades and celebrations.
You know something's very, very corrupt.
When the FBI spies on the Donald Trump campaign because the Donald Trump campaign is advocating for popular conservative messages, meanwhile the FBI is coordinating with the Clinton campaign and the Democrats, that's evidence of real corruption.
When the FBI, not just the FBI in this case, when the DOJ at the higher level goes in and systematically The FBI consistently tries to let Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, that's what they're really protecting here, when they let the Bidens off the hook for flagrant crimes that we've seen with our own eyes.
The messages, the pictures, the videos, all of it.
And then doubles down when they get caught, and they say, okay, we're gonna put it in the special counsel investigation over here, and don't worry.
Nothing to see, move along, move along, nothing to see here.
Then when the FBI goes in and executes some elderly obese man in Utah, according to all of his neighbors and according to common sense, didn't pose an actual threat to anyone.
He was mouthing off on Facebook, I'm not excusing threats.
But if you're using prudence, which is the highest political virtue, you recognize this guy didn't pose a threat to anybody.
I don't know what conclusion I can draw other than yet again, the FBI and the Biden administration and the liberal establishment wanted to make an example and let every conservative know in this country, you better keep your mouth shut.
You better forget about the Democrats who get to go out and maraud and rape and kill and murder.
They get to do whatever they want.
If you so much as mouth off on Facebook, we're going to come to your home.
You could be elderly.
You could be out of shape.
You could be in terrible health.
We will execute you.
We'll leave you out for people to see that, to learn from that example.
Really, really sad and unnecessary stuff.
This is happening all around the world though.
I've mentioned that the phenomenon of conservative populism, which we'll get to in a second, the biggest trending news story of the whole weekend was this folk singer who came out of nowhere with this cri de coeur about how corrupt our political order is.
This is happening all over the world.
The anti-Trump people in America, on the right and the left, they think that Trump is just a weirdo and he's kind of funny and he's a carnival barker and he's tricked people into supporting him.
They don't recognize that And the reason that he got so much support is not just because he has a funny personality, but because he was advocating a different political vision than the Republicans had been advocating for the entirety of my lifetime.
He came out and he questioned GOP orthodoxy on trade.
Not just the squishes on trade, but even the so-called movement conservatives.
He questioned GOP policies on immigration.
Not just the squishes, but the movement conservatives.
On and on and on.
He was on Couth, and so they supported him in the same way that the Brits supported Brexit, in the same way that the Italians supported Maloney, in the same way that the Hungarians support Viktor Orban, in the same way that the Spaniards support the Vox party.
And in Germany right now, there's a far-right political party called Alternative für Deutschland, the AFD.
Which is gaining support.
According to the latest polls, the Alternative for Germany, Alternative for Deutschland has 21% in the polls.
And don't forget, this is a system where there are lots of different parties, so that's a pretty significant number.
And now, the German president, Franz, Franz-Walter Steinmeier, warned in a speech that they might just ban the party to save democracy.
To save democracy in Germany, The President of Germany is considering banning, outlawing one of the most popular parties.
And the party that in terms of political momentum probably is the single most popular.
If you look at the direction of support.
Democracy.
To save democracy, the liberals in America want to do the same thing.
They want to throw the leader of the opposition into prison.
The President of the United States is trying to imprison the leader of the opposition.
To do the American version of the exact same thing they're trying to do in Germany.
And Germany has a history of banning political parties, America doesn't really have that history so much, but they're going to do that.
Because, why?
Because the people, the democracy, is rejecting liberalism.
The alternative for Deutschland, you know they're a real crime, it's not that they, they're racist, they're sexist, they're thisist, they're thatist, whatever the liberals say.
The AFD came out and said the European Union's a failed project.
They're arguing for a federation of European nations, a new economic and interest community for Europe that preserves the sovereignty of member states.
That's the threat.
They're threatening the liberal hegemony there.
And even if all the people want to do that, even if the full democracy is saying we reject liberalism, the liberals are going to come in and in the name of democracy say we've got to stop the people from getting what they want.
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All around the West, the people are recognizing that the problem is not just the Democrats, the liberals, though everywhere in other than one country, other than in Hungary, which is a little advanced in terms of the conservative populist uprising, in every other country in the West.
People are realizing that the problem is not just the Liberal Party, which is the dominant political party throughout the whole civilization, and the problem is not just the conservative political party, which is the junior partner in the Liberal Project, but that maybe the problem is the whole system.
Maybe this whole system that we call the Uniparty here in America.
Or the liberal establishment, or whatever.
The semblance of political opposition, the semblance of the representation of diverse voices, that in fact, castigates a large part, if not the majority of the people, as deplorable, irredeemable, not worth hearing.
They should just go off and die somewhere.
Let small town America die.
Tell these people to learn to code.
Tell them to shut up.
They're insurrectionists.
They need to be put in prison.
They need to be banned on social media.
The people are recognizing that system might be the problem, which is why a man that nobody had heard of until three days ago, Oliver Anthony, just went viral and now has the number one song in America, top of the charts in the country.
The song is called The Rich Men, North of Richmond.
This song is such a phenomenon.
We have to play at least a good chunk of it on the show because What's most interesting about this phenomenon is not the song.
Everybody's saying, oh, this is the greatest song in recent memory, and this guy's a musical genius.
The story is more politically interesting than just that.
Take it away.
I've been sellin' my soul Workin' all day Overtime hours For bullsh** pay So I can sit out here And waste my life away Drag back home And drown my troubles away It's a damn shame What the world's gotten to For people like me For people like you Wish I could just wake up And it not be true But it is
So the first thing that strikes me, this guy is a genuine musical talent.
His voice is captivating.
I just want to have total control.
Who paused right now?
So the first thing that strikes me, this guy is a genuine musical talent.
His voice is captivating.
He reminds me of Levon Helm.
Levon Helm, who was the drummer in the bands, you know, pulled into Nazareth, was feeling bad.
He's got this way of wailing while he sings that sounds raw, it sounds authentic, it's a little dangerous.
This is not a classically trained singer, obviously.
He's really good, and his pitch is good, and he's playing a Dobro guitar, and the whole thing just, he even looks a little bit like Levon Helm.
He's got that red beard, and he's singing a song about how he's selling his soul.
He feels like he's losing his soul and he's working for basically no pay and he's drinking his troubles away.
And the other thing that's raw about this song is that, I'm not knocking the guy at all.
This is a wonderful story and it's a good song, but the lyrics could be tuned up.
You know, he's rhyming away with away.
He's rhyming rich men and rich men, which is not, those don't actually rhyme.
The lyrics are a little bit confused here.
Because is this a neo-confederate anthem, as the liberals are calling it?
Richmond is the capital of the Confederacy, so is that what he's talking about?
Those damn northerners coming in here and bringing their reconstruction or something?
He's wailing about this 200 years later, 150 years later?
No, I don't think so.
I think he's probably referring to Washington, D.C.
as the rich men north of Richmond, and they want to have total control.
So they want to have total control.
But is the problem that he's not making his money?
Is the problem that he's being forced to sell his soul, or being encouraged to sell his soul?
Is it a substance question, the substantive nature of the political order?
Or is it a procedural aspect, just that these men want total control, but we don't want them to have control?
We're not saying how people should live, but we are saying that those guys north of Richmond shouldn't do it.
It's a little bit Confused.
So I don't think that what is making this song go viral is necessarily the lyrical content of it.
You'll see why in just a second.
Keep going.
I want to know what you think.
I want to know what you do.
And they don't think you know.
But I know that you do.
Because your dollar hates you.
And it's taxed to no end.
Those are rich men.
Those are rich men.
See, put a pause there.
This is lyrically what's interesting to me, too, is you hear some real populist complaints.
I'm selling my soul.
This is not the sort of thing that Mitt Romney would complain about.
This is not the sort of thing John McCain would complain about.
Oh yeah, this new liberal economy is making us sell our souls.
And we're not making enough money.
Okay, that's a populist complaint.
And inflation is really bad.
The dollar ain't worth SHIT.
That's a populist complaint.
And it's taxed to no end.
High taxes is not exactly a populist complaint.
That's more of an establishment Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, John McCain kind of complaint.
And the fact is, virtually all the taxes in America are paid by the rich anyway.
So it is the rich men in Richmond, well maybe not them because they're corrupt government apparatchiks in Washington D.C., but it is the wealthy generally who are paying virtually all of the taxes in America.
So that's a little bit of a standard GOP complaint.
But the rest is populist, and the whole vibe of the song is this literally calling out from the woods in the middle of nowhere.
Keep going.
I wish politicians would Look out for miners, and not just miners on an island somewhere.
Oh, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothing to eat, and the old beast milking welfare.
Put a pause there.
So this is probably intentional to be a contradiction or to maybe to seem like a paradox, but I I think it's just a contradiction.
He's saying people in the street don't have any food, but the obese are milking welfare.
People don't really go hungry in America.
The knock on the American political order is that the poor are obese.
And they're not just obese because they're milking welfare.
You could complain about welfare.
Totally a populist complaint, that's a little bit more of the Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan kind of stuff.
And people don't really starve, the problem is that the poor in America are obese because of the culture problems, because we've sold our political soul, because we don't have Really community or political love anymore, because marriages have fallen apart, because we've got rampant drug abuse and addiction, because we've got people who are despondent, don't think they have a future, because their money is not worth anything and they can't get any good jobs.
So it's all kind of jumbled up.
It's a stew of lamenting about the political order.
Keep going, we've got a little bit more of the song.
God, if you're five foot three and you're three hundred pounds, taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.
Young men are putting themselves six feet in the ground, cause all this damn country does is keep on kicking them down.
Lord, it's a damn shame What the world's gotten to For people like me For people like you Wish I could just wake up And it not be true But it is Put a pause there.
So this is where the song really sings.
This is where the song really takes off.
When you're five foot two and you're 300 pounds, then welfare shouldn't be paying for your box of fudge rounds.
And it's so unfair because you got ordinary men who are being responsible, who are trying to take care of themselves, and they're putting themselves six feet in the ground because they're dying deaths of despair.
And it's a damn shame because no one's looking out for people like me and people like you.
Backbone of America.
No one's looking out for us, and it's a damn shame, and I wish it weren't this way, but it is.
And that, that's where it really sings, because it's not this happy-go-lucky, BS, beltway establishment, astroturf conservative movement which says, Everything's really great.
We've got iPhones and cheap Chinese products.
We need to stop complaining and recognize what a special, wonderful political order this is.
He's saying, no, there are really structural problems.
And maybe we do have cheap crap from China, and maybe GDP has been ticking up, but life expectancy is going down.
So clearly something's rotten here.
That's a beautiful complaint.
And he's saying, and it's a damn shame, and it shouldn't be this way, but it is.
But it is.
Very different from the Bubblegum appeal to the Southern man movement conservative kind of music.
This is not your average country song.
Okay, very different.
The political analogy would be, in 2016, you've got a bunch of GOP candidates, and they all have the same, roughly the same kinds of complaints.
This immigration, illegal immigration's out of control.
They never complain about legal immigration, which is the lion's share of immigration.
They say, this illegal immigration's out of control, and there are some economic problems, but look.
We're still the greatest, most prosperous, most wonderful country on Earth.
And it's always just, we don't have any real problems and everything here is great.
But we just gotta work around the edges a little bit.
We got some problems to fix.
And then Trump comes in, he goes, nah man, this is all going to hell in a handbasket.
This is completely screwed up.
We are gonna become one of those S-H-I-T hole countries pretty soon if we keep it up.
And we've got chaos and destruction in our streets.
And I'm gonna turn it around and make America great again.
And what all the chattering consultant geniuses at the time said was, this is too dark.
Oh, this is too dark and divisive.
What was the title of Trump's campaign book?
Every other campaign book is Standing Up for Standing.
The courage to stand in freedom and liberty and happiness and freedom and courage and the future and the sunshine by Senator so-and-so running for some office or whatever.
And then Trump's book was Crippled America.
And this song is, this is the anthem of Crippled America.
This is not your usual, we're going to put a boot up your derriere because this is America and we bleed red, white and blue all day.
I mean, there's a place for those songs.
This isn't those songs.
This isn't even a country song.
This is a folk song.
And for the people who are criticizing this guy and say, well, he just shouldn't be political.
He is coming out of a very long line of American folk music.
He shouldn't be political.
You know, we should just get back to the old days of folk music, like Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen, for that matter, and, I don't know, Joni Mitchell, and all these people.
Joan Baez.
They're always political songs, and they're always fairly urgent contemporary political songs.
The reason that this is so fascinating that he took off is he's the first one of them to be conservative.
Woody Guthrie, communist.
Pete Seeger, communist.
Bob Dylan was a big lib.
He's oddly kind of conservative, and more so over the years, but he's considered a big lib.
The people who really love Bob Dylan tend to be hippies.
Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, all the popular folk singers in America.
Actually, Arlo Guthrie got a little bit conservative too, though he kind of went back to being a liberal.
They're all big libs.
And the fact that you've now got a guy playing, this could be a Woody Guthrie song, but he's a conservative.
What that tells you is, truly, for the first time in my life, conservatism is the popular counterculture.
Liberalism is not only the political establishment, as it has been for a long time, but now everybody knows it.
This is, the Woody Guthries of today, Are that guy.
And that means that the political playbook for conservatives has got to change.
And finally, we can stop telling ourselves these fairy tales that we have for 50 years.
Oh, we're the real cool kids.
We finally are the real cool kids.
The evidence is this kind of a song, the fact that when conservative movies do squeak through, they do extremely well.
The fact that when conservative politicians do squeak through, they tend to do extremely well, and they pose such a threat to the liberal political order that the liberal political order starts changing all of the election rules right before the elections, starts rigging the elections, and starts trying to throw the candidates into prison.
Not just here in America, though they're obviously doing that, but around the entire West.
That is an insurgent culture that shows that the people After a long enough time, have finally woken up.
Are you planning to send your kid off to college this year?
Condolences.
Now, I've been on a lot of college campuses.
Go to at least, I don't know, a dozen, sometimes maybe upwards of 20 per year.
I've seen firsthand how liberal ideology has infiltrated and polluted these universities.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from, or on Friday rather, is from CarsonianTheGreat4672 who says, Michael, if there was a movement to reinstitute the kingdom of the two Sicilies today, would you support it?
I certainly would if I was given at least one of the Sicilies.
If I could be the Archduke Grand Viscount of, and I don't even care which Sicily, then it has my full support.
Speaking of conservatives making music, you know I really like Vivek Ramaswamy.
He's a pal of mine.
We go back to college together.
I think he's one of the most exciting candidates in the GOP race.
I like a lot of what he's saying and calling for and the way he's shaking it up.
I I have to formally disavow my friend Vivek.
I have to, because I have a line.
Okay, my line, it's not how you feel about immigration.
My line is not how you feel about tariffs or something.
My line is, if you embrace hip hop, if you embrace, I can't, I just can't.
I can't bring myself to accept that.
And Vivek did embrace hip-hop.
He could have gotten on the stage at the Iowa State Fair and started humming along to the Brandenburg Concertos.
He could have gotten there and pulled out a kazoo and started humming Fur Elise.
But he didn't.
He rapped Eminem.
It was a pretty convincing rendition.
It was a pretty convincing rendition.
I'm not the biggest Eminem fan in the world, so I don't know how it's supposed to sound.
But I am impressed and horrified that Vivek knows all of the words.
And And I am dismayed that the audience appeared to like it.
So I just formally, for once and for all, disavow my friend.
It's very charming.
If I can take my own prejudices out of it, it is very charming to see a candidate get up there and do that.
And even if you don't like Eminem, and even if you think it's a little too performative or something like that.
This is why this guy is rising in the polls, is because he is taking risks all the time.
All sorts of risks.
He's risking his money on the campaign.
I think he made a, like a, an eight-figure donation to his own political campaign.
He is going out there taking unpopular stances sometimes, so then they become popular stances.
He's debating abortion advocates on the campaign trail.
He's getting in the scrum everywhere.
He's going giving speeches in support of Trump, even though he's sometimes going after Trump and distinguishing himself from Trump.
He's supporting Trump on the indictment stuff, but then he'll go after him, and he'll go after other candidates, and he's just mixing it up, man.
And the only way that you even have a chance of becoming the GOP nominee in 2024 is if you take risks.
And the other candidates are not doing that.
The also-Rams, who are at single digits right now, they're obviously not taking risks.
And even Governor DeSantis, who is in the best position to take Trump out, I don't blame him as the candidate so much as I blame the campaign.
They're not taking the risks that they need to, and maybe that's on the candidate too, and sure, the buck stops at the candidate.
They've got to start taking, I'm not saying Ron DeSantis needs to get up and rap Eminem, please don't rap Eminem.
Nobody in America should rap Eminem.
But the other GOP candidates could learn from Vivek right now.
It is not possible to win this race in a safe way.
You're either going to, you're going to take a big risk, and it's either going to pay off, and you're going to jump from number 7th in the race to number 3, or maybe even number 2, or you're going to flame out.
That's a big risk.
Had that gone a different way, had he messed up the words a little bit, or had someone heckled him, he would have looked completely humiliated.
It actually would have hurt, but he took the risk.
And more importantly, they're taking risks on policy, and they're taking risks on places they're going to visit.
Meanwhile, Trump shows up to the Iowa Fair, and is warmly welcomed by the crowd.
There was a clip that was going viral there.
People seemed to love him.
Four more years!
Four more years!
Four more years, four more years, you see it.
Now, the anti-Trump people will say, well, they weren't all there for Trump, and some people were there for other candidates.
But it doesn't really matter, guys.
Every single poll, with the exception of Reuters, every single presidential poll right now shows the majority of Republicans supporting Trump, greater than 50%.
And Reuters is, I think, at 47%.
And so people sometimes accuse me of flacking for Trump.
I'm really not.
I'm really not, guys.
I'm describing the state of the race right now.
Objectively describing the state of the race might sound like flacking for Trump because he is completely dominating the race and the momentum is with him.
So I don't think that if you support another candidate and you want to win this race, don't shoot the messenger man.
You've got to ask yourself, why is Trump dominating?
I feel that most of my take on the 2024 has been, hey, Donald Trump is absolutely crushing right now.
Here's why I think he's doing that.
And then the supporters, mostly of DeSantis, but of other candidates too, will say, well, he shouldn't be dominating.
I'll say, yeah, maybe, maybe, I don't know, whatever.
But he is.
So here's why I think, stop saying that he's dominating.
Guys, he just is.
That is just a fact.
And if you want to have even a snowball's chance in hell at taking Trump out, Then you need to at least begin to understand why it is that he still has support, instead of just sneering at that support and sneering at his supporters.
That's what the GOP candidates, all the other candidates did in 2016.
That's what Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
People still don't quite get it.
Now, I've got a little tease for you, okay?
And the tease is...
That that mother-effer-isn't-real-girl has just come out.
She's said who she is.
She's issued an apology.
I know, look, I teased it at the top of the show today.
This is going to be an extended tease.
Because we're going to have to get to this tomorrow.
I'm sorry.
We have to.
There's no more time.
We've got to get to the member block right now, okay?
