Ep. 1327 - My Unpopular Opinion: Rights Can Be Temporarily Suspended
The New Mexico governor declares an emergency to curtail gun rights, a Trump lawyer’s trial provides new evidence of a stolen election, and 83-year-old Nancy Pelosi announces her intention to seek reelection.
Ep.1327
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On Friday, two days after a tragic road raid shooting in Albuquerque, anti-gun New Mexico Governor Michelle Grisham exploited the incident to issue an emergency declaration curtailing the exercise of the Second Amendment by suspending concealed carry in Albuquerque for 30 days.
Which is, of course, a very bad thing, and here's her reasoning.
You took an oath to the Constitution.
Isn't it unconstitutional to say you cannot exercise your carry license?
With one exception.
And that is, if there's an emergency, and I've declared an emergency for a temporary amount of time, I can invoke additional powers.
No constitutional right, in my view, including my oath, is intended to be absolute.
There are restrictions on free speech.
There are restrictions on my freedoms.
In this emergency, this 11-year-old and all these parents who have lost all these children, they deserve my attention to have the debate about whether or not in an emergency we can create a safer environment.
Because what about their constitutional rights?
I took an oath to uphold those too.
And if we ignore this growing problem, without being bold, I've said to every other New Mexican, your rights are subjugated to theirs.
And they are not, in my view.
Wait a minute, you're talking about crimes.
There are already laws against the crimes, so how are there...
I got it, but again, if I'm unsafe, who's standing up for that right?
If this climate is so out of control, somebody should do something.
I'm doing as much as I know to do.
Do you really think that criminals are going to hear this message and not carry a gun in Albuquerque on the streets for 30 days?
No.
But here's what I do think.
It's a pretty resounding message.
To the lawful gun owners.
So we all agree, very bad.
This power grab is extremely dangerous.
But here's the but.
What's even more dangerous, this is the butt that got me in trouble on Twitter over the weekend.
What's even more dangerous is that the governor of New Mexico actually has a point.
And the longer conservatives refuse to acknowledge this fact, the longer we're going to keep getting rolled by these liberal power grabs, which will only continue to increase in frequency, severity, and injustice if all the conservatives can muster to stop them is ahistorical whining about abstract rights.
Which do little more than make us feel good and righteous all the way to the gulag.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
COVID's happening again.
You want to talk about emergency powers being invoked unjustly.
COVID is happening again.
High schools are canceling their football games because of COVID.
This after the mask rules in California, in Atlanta, in New Jersey.
This after the White House telling you to get the vaccine.
They're just doing it again, and they're doing it because of the election.
We'll get to that in just a moment.
First, though, a related story, I guess.
I got in so much trouble on Twitter over the weekend for saying something That is just obviously true.
Here's what I said.
I don't want to misquote myself by even one syllable.
I said, unpopular opinion, civil leaders do in fact have emergency authority to suspend temporarily many legal rights.
That's true.
My point being that the New Mexico governor is wrong in particular here.
One, because as that reporter pointed out, the criminals aren't going to stop carrying their guns because of this emergency declaration.
Two, because the People of New Mexico, the law-abiding people of New Mexico actually need a gun more than ever.
They need to be able to carry a gun more than ever because of the insane amount of crime in Albuquerque.
And three, because the incident that took place in the road rage, though tragic, does not constitute an emergency.
So that's the reason why what she did is wrong.
But she's only wrong in particular.
She's not wrong in principle.
And conservatives, oddly enough, seem to be misunderstanding this.
But the point I was making That is not a particularly controversial point of view.
I mean, I guess it is now, but it has never been controversial throughout all of American history, throughout all of the political history of the entire West.
On either side of the aisle or any of the different political participants in our country.
The basic principle has often been articulated in America as the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
In other words, All legal rights are important.
The law is very important, up to and including the Constitution.
But when the whole of the law is threatened, then a rigorous, meticulous adherence to the letter of every single individual aspect of the law is actually going to undermine the law because you could lose the whole law and the whole political order to anarchy or to, I don't know, an insurrection or an invasion.
I guess those would be the extreme cases where I think everybody has to grant my point.
If the United States were suddenly invaded, well, I guess we are being invaded.
If the United States were being more obviously invaded, or there were a major insurrection, not some Midwestern grannies at the Capitol, but an actual insurrection, would martial law, for instance, be called for?
Yes, of course.
Would you rather throw away your whole system of law because you're going to uphold every single little statute everywhere?
Or no, would you take care of the problem and then bring back the law?
I think we all agree if martial law is a thing that exists and has been exercised a number of times in American history by some presidents who we like, some presidents who we don't like, then the principle holds true.
You wouldn't want to give away the whole of the law.
A good piece of evidence That my view is not so crazy, is that Ted Lieu, who's one of the most lib, frustrating members of Congress out there, tweeted out, he said, this order from the governor of New Mexico violates the Constitution.
No state in the union can suspend the federal Constitution.
There's no such thing as a state public health emergency, except to the US Constitution, exception to the US Constitution.
So Ted Lieu's saying, no, no, no, we have to always rigorously follow the letter of the law.
I guess Ted Lieu now supports Conceal Carry, that's great.
I didn't think he did, but I guess he says that he does now.
David Hogg, who's that like 12-year-old, I think now he's like 30, but he started out when he was 12.
David Hogg is this anti-gun campaigner.
He says, I support gun safety.
There's no such thing as a state public health emergency exception to the U.S.
Constitution.
So, the fact that two huge libs are on one side of the issue, and I, a conservative, are on the other side of the issue.
Some people took this to mean that the world has gone crazy, and can you believe it?
Even David Hogg, even Ted Lieu.
No, they hold this view because they are liberals.
Because they're extreme liberals.
And I hold this view because I am a conservative.
This view, though, has been held by conservatives, by liberals, by everyone going back.
Thomas Jefferson probably said it most clearly.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1807, That's a pretty strong statement.
That's a pretty strong statement.
His motives will be his justification.
There are extreme cases where the laws become inadequate to their own preservation and where the universal recourse is a dictator or martial law.
So, lest there be any confusion as to how far Thomas Jefferson, who's probably our most open-minded, classically liberal founding father, he said, no, at certain points, if the whole of the law is threatened, if the whole of the nation is threatened, then you've got to take care of the emergency and then go back to the law.
Jefferson went on further.
Further, a strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest.
The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger are of a higher obligation.
To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself.
This is almost exactly what I just said.
With life, liberty, property, and all those who are enjoying them with us, thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.
And Jefferson finally says, the line of discrimination.
Because some people are going to say, well, how do you know when it's really emergency?
How do you know this won't be exploited?
Jefferson addresses this.
He says, the line of discrimination between cases may be difficult, but the good officer is bound to draw it at his own peril and throw himself on the justice of his country and the rectitude of his motives.
Wasn't just Jefferson, John Hamilton and Madison made similar points in The Federalist.
John Adams exercised a, not quite a suspension of the law, but a strong circumscription of the law in the Alien and Sedition Acts, a strong curtailing or limiting of the First Amendment.
You saw, obviously, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus.
Generally, we like Adams.
I think most people like Abraham Lincoln.
It's been used by bad presidents, too.
Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
But it's been used a lot.
We've had martial law declared in the United States on a number of occasions because of war.
In the case of the city of New Orleans during the Battle of New Orleans, we've had it declared during natural disasters.
Great Chicago Fire, 1871.
There are some other ones.
There are some other ones.
1906, San Francisco earthquake, Omaha race riot, 1920, Lexington riots.
So where does this idea come from?
It goes back even earlier than Thomas Jefferson.
It goes back to this notion that the welfare of the people, the good of the people, is the highest law.
It's Salus Populi Suprema Lex.
This is a law that comes from Cicero in ancient Rome, Cicero on the laws, but it was re-articulated by none other than John Locke, the father of liberalism, classical liberalism, a man who was fairly influential, though his influence has been exaggerated, but fairly influential in the American Revolution.
He wrote this as the epigraph to his second treatise on government.
This is John Locke's most famous book.
He said that this is a fundamental rule for government, that that is the highest point of the law.
Some people point out, they say, well, Michael, where in the Constitution does it say that there's an exception to this?
First of all, it's alluded to in at least two parts of the Constitution, but even let's go beyond that for a second.
If the exception were included within the text of the statute, the law, or the Constitution, it would not constitute a true exception.
We're talking about something at a higher level than the mere text.
That's what Jefferson's talking about.
That's what John Locke is talking about here.
That's what Cicero is talking about.
And in fact, this principle has been upheld by the Supreme Court, or at least articulated by the Supreme Court, on at least two occasions explicitly.
In 1949 and 1963, Supreme Court decisions explicitly said the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
So why do I bring it up?
Because I said at the beginning, I'm not bringing it up to justify the New Mexico governor's actions.
I said in the case of what she's done, this is wrong.
But it's wrong for different reasons than we conservatives are saying.
And I think the reason that Ted Lieu and David Hogg are on one side of this argument and I'm on the other is not because the world has gone crazy, but it's because the liberals don't want conservatives to recognize this point, that when the whole of the law is threatened, it is not only our right, but it is our responsibility to, in certain narrow extreme cases, go beyond the mere letter of the law to save the whole of it.
The most perspicacious response to my, I thought, basically uncontroversial point on Twitter was that they said, wow, it was a liberal who said it.
The liberal said, this New Mexico governor's decision was so moronic because it's going to empower conservatives to begin to exercise this line of thinking.
And I think that's the point.
We conservatives, Traditionally, we've always been pretty practical, you know, pretty grounded in reality, pretty focused on tradition and history and how the law actually works.
In the last few decades, we've gotten very ideological.
We've taken a ton of bait from the liberals.
And so now we speak in these abstract rights, almost exclusively, and in a way that's ahistorical and in a way that is not very effective.
Because we can whine and scream and we say, this is hypocrisy.
What she's doing, this is unconstitutional.
This isn't right.
We have our rights.
And that's going to be the epitaph on the gravestone of conservatism.
Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot.
Imagine if we did this.
Well, no, she, in principle, her point is right.
And we should fight her on the particulars.
This is not an emergency.
This is not going to help anything.
We should fight her in court.
I don't think this thing is going to hold up.
And then we should also exercise the correct principle that she is here exercising.
In what case would you say we would do that?
Well, I mentioned earlier that an invasion would be a good example of a time when we could go a little beyond the ordinary operation of the law because an invasion threatens our entire political order, threatens the whole of the law.
Unfortunately, we have not been able to stop the invasion on our southern border, because every time, even Donald Trump, who was really relatively strong on this, when he would try, all of a sudden, the mechanisms of the bureaucracy and the supposed meaning of the strict letter of the law said, no, you can't stop an invasion of foreigners into your country.
Now, Trump managed to get around this one time, and you know how he did it?
By curtailing and suspending the ordinary operation of the law through Title 42.
He said, okay, the libs are going to declare an emergency with COVID.
I'm going to use that emergency with COVID to greatly reduce the flow of illegal immigrants into the country.
Very important.
And then the Biden administration runs and they say, we're going to get rid of that Title 42.
Perhaps if conservatives would stop believing a bunch of hogwash About American history.
The notion that so many conservatives didn't understand that the Constitution is not a suicide pact tells me that even on the right, forget about the people on the left who are very confused about American history, even many people on the right believe a whole lot of things about American history and government and political philosophy that just aren't true.
A lot of us believe fairy tales that were invented in the middle of the 20th century But America is a fundamentally liberal democracy and America, there are no complications to any of our abstract rights or anything like that.
That's just not true.
And it has really hampered our ability to wield political power effectively.
This woman knows how to wield political power.
No, I think she's gone too far.
I think she's wrong on the particulars.
I don't think she'll be able to extend this after 30 days.
She might not even be able to make it the full 30 days.
And even if she does, it'll be litigated in court, and it's one aspect of a hotly debated part of the Second Amendment.
I don't think this is going to be the end of the world for New Mexico.
It's a stupid decision, but it's not going to be the end of the world.
But the principle that she's articulating, if we were to accept it, Would perhaps allow us to get around the very unjust wielding of the strict letter of the law on legitimate national emergencies.
I'll leave my point at that.
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They're going to invoke national emergencies.
This was the craziest response to my tweet, is that someone said, Michael, how could you still believe that civil leaders have emergency authority after the experience of COVID?
To which I said, that's proving my point.
They did wield that emergency authority during COVID, and they're doing it again.
And they're doing it again.
They're wrong on the particulars, but they're right in the principle.
That's how they're getting away with it.
And you're seeing it.
They're bringing it back.
Two California high schools just canceled their football games because of COVID.
Esparto High School, which is located west of Sacramento, canceled its football game, which was scheduled on last Friday, because six players Caught COVID, allegedly.
Santa Paula High School, north of LA, cancelled its Friday football game also against La Cunada High School because of 20 positive COVID cases on the football and cheerleading teams.
It's happening again.
And so the question for us Is either we can whine and complain and say, you know, actually in 1792, the founding fathers didn't believe, the framers didn't believe that these local people would have this authority.
Which, by the way, isn't even true.
The founding fathers and the framers thought that and exercised those rules even then.
Actually, probably more audaciously than we do today.
Than even the Fauci's of the world are doing today.
So we can make that argument and it's not going to get us anywhere, or we can go on offense and we can engage in the substantive debate and we can win.
We do have an example of this.
The example of this is Ron DeSantis in Florida.
Ron DeSantis is given a very good roadmap of how to do this, which is he's not just going to say, look, We don't care what the students learn, only that they learn, you know?
We don't care what they think, just how they think.
No, no, no.
Ron DeSantis goes into schools and he says, hey, we're going to set standards, we're going to ban books from school, we're going to ban certain stupid fake lessons, we're going to set the curriculum, and we're going to set, on the question of COVID, we're going to set the mode by which we're going to live with this COVID virus.
We are not going to start canceling things.
We're not going to shut down businesses.
There are going to be some Floridians, some liberals, who claim that it's their right as a matter of public health for businesses and churches to be shut down.
Yeah, we're not going to do that.
We're setting the rules.
COVID is not dangerous enough.
You have plenty of ways to avoid being out in public if you don't want to be around COVID, but we are not going to allow some minority of ideologues to upend our entire way of life here in Florida.
This ties in with what we were talking about last week, this best-selling Italian book that got its author, an Italian general, fired because it was politically incorrect, that had to be self-published even though it's a huge bestseller.
And the book talked about the The dictatorship of minorities.
We're not just talking about religious minorities or sexual minorities or racial minorities, but minorities as a concept, and ideological minorities who upend all of our culture.
And we, unfortunately conservatives, in the name of some hyper-individualism, some embrace of liberalism for some reason, And a liberalism that doesn't even define our country and our civilization.
We say, okay, let them do it.
You do you.
I'll do me.
We have no rights to any kind of collective or community standards.
No.
DeSantis said, no way, okay?
And he's been pretty successful because of that.
That might be a way forward.
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Speaking of the election, We got some spicy stuff.
Is this going to get me kicked off YouTube?
This isn't weird sex stuff, so it shouldn't get us kicked off YouTube.
But this isn't the explanation of fundamental truths about anthropology, so I don't think this should get us kicked off YouTube.
But it is about the 2020 election.
John Eastman was one of Donald Trump's lawyers.
John Eastman, I know that Trump had some eccentric lawyers on his team in certain places.
John Eastman is a very serious man.
This is a very serious legal scholar.
He was the Dean of Chapman Law School.
He's associated with the Claremont Institute.
He is a wonderful guy, and he believes that the 2020 election was stolen, and that is why he proposed Various legal and political strategies to stop what he believed was the Democrats from stealing the election.
So, we've always heard since 2020, no, there's no evidence that the election was stolen.
They never made their claims in court.
Part of the reason that the Trump team never was able to make the claims in court is because courts wouldn't hear the cases.
Courts didn't want any part of this.
I remember Justice Scalia making this point after the 2000 election, which was another contested election.
People didn't go to jail for that one, but that's because it was the Democrats contesting the election.
Antonin Scalia said, you want to blame the Supreme Court for deciding Bush v. Gore.
We didn't want to decide Bush v. Gore.
No, we didn't want that case.
You forced that case on us.
We would have been happy to stay out of it.
So the courts wanted to stay out of it, too.
We are now finally getting some information, though.
about the 2020 election, some of the arguments for how it was stolen, because John Eastman is on trial.
And so, what did John Eastman do?
In the trial on Friday, he had Michael Gableman, who's a former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice, testify in this California state bar about a legislative audit that he held of the 2020 election.
And this investigative report that the former Supreme Court Justice presented to the Wisconsin State Assembly showed irregularities, including drop boxes, absentee ballots, and he concluded that the legislature could decertify the election conclusions.
So the judge in this case, who's overseeing John Eastman's trial about whether or not he'll be disbarred, The judge doesn't want Gableman to be making these claims.
So the judge in the case is telling the Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, no, you're not allowed to talk about the widely held view that the assembly speaker, Robin Voss in Wisconsin, didn't want, quote, a real investigation into the election and granted limited funds for the effort.
The judge in this case, Roland, struck that part of the testimony.
Gableman then responded to the judge in this case and said, do the rules of civil procedure, do the rules of evidence apply in this court?
What do you mean I'm not allowed to present evidence?
I thought that's the whole reason I'm here in the court.
The judge ordered a five minute recess and said, you know, basically, hey, defense, you got to get your witness in line here.
What else did the Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice find?
Found that Zuckbuck's, Mark Zuckerberg's money, where Mark Zuckerberg said, I'm going to spend a ton of money to prevent Trump from being reelected.
Zuckbuck's contracts required cities to follow instructions provided by this shady left-wing organization called the Center for Tech and Civil Life, which the justice believed was a violation of law because it was a private entity telling the government what to do.
Now, the Center for Tech and Civil Life, who's it funded by?
It's funded by the Skoll Foundation, Democracy Fund, Knight Foundation, New Venture Fund, Hopewell Fund, Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
These are all left-wing organizations.
The CTCL was allowed to see voters who had requested ballots but had not returned ballots, so it gave this left-wing organization a complete view over what was going on in real time in the election.
This is something that no other group, no other political group, would have been able to have, that the conservatives certainly wouldn't have been able to have.
The CTCL employees were embedded in clerk's offices.
They were essentially running the elections.
And Gableman said that votes were illegally cast because the drop boxes in which those votes were cast were violating the law because they weren't near the clerk's offices.
They weren't near the clerk's offices because the CTCL, this left-wing group, dictated where the boxes went in violation of the law.
So those were not validly cast ballots.
That's just one example.
Then the Racine County Sheriff referred charges to the county DA regarding election officials who were breaking the law.
DA said she wouldn't bring the charges.
She said she didn't have enough resources to bring the charges.
Completely BS excuse.
Gableman then said he looked into the electronic voting machines and had serious concerns about them.
This is what he said.
I don't want to be slapped with any lawsuits here, defamation, BS, left-wing operations.
I'm just reporting to you what the former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice said and testified in the court on Friday.
So this is just news.
Don't shoot the messenger.
He said that voting machines.
Dominion was the main one, but then also ESS and Hart were, quote, the opposite of cooperative and, quote, hindered my ability to get to the truth of whether there is fraud in the machines and thought us every step of the way with lawsuits to stop the team from finding out if they had safeguards.
Pretty, pretty strange behavior, wouldn't you say, for an election that was totally on the up and up?
Gable once said he found very concerning pieces of information, but nothing he could totally put together or say without any shadow of a doubt.
But things like Wi-Fi connections to the Internet, how the machine counted the ballots by taking images and converting it into mathematical formulae so that you'd end up with things like fractional votes.
Just a lot of issues.
And then you have just the broader statistical issue.
Trump won 18 out of 19 bellwether counties in 2020.
We think that the election is determined across the entire nation.
It's not.
It's determined by a handful of counties that in recent decades have decided which party, which candidate is going to win the election.
In 2020, 18 out of the 19 counties that typically would decide the election went for Trump.
One of them went for Biden.
Yep, Biden wins the election.
Kind of weird.
Now, you know I hate to say I told you so.
I think among conservatives in the media, I have been one of the more open and suggestive voices when it comes to whether or not the 2020 election was stolen.
And the evidence presented at the disbarment trial for John Eastman would seem to back this up.
But still, it's up in the air.
We'll see how the testimony goes.
And even at this point, it doesn't really matter because Joe Biden was able to take power and wield that power effectively.
But it does get back to the point that we were raising about emergency powers and whether the constant adherence to the strict letter of the law is really in service of the law most broadly, which the liberals are currently arguing it is.
The conservatives traditionally have observed that obviously it is not.
One of the objections that people made to my point was, well, where in the Constitution is this exception?
Well, where in the case law is this exception?
And I've pointed to parts of the Constitution and I've pointed to parts of the case law.
But even beyond that, I guess my response as pertains to the 2020 election and the 2024 election is, Where in the Constitution do you find the Compromise of 1877?
This is something you may or may not have learned about in high school history class.
Compromise of 1877 was you had the presidential election in 1876, you had the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, you had the Democrats, Sam Tilden, and they couldn't decide who won the election.
Because there were some allegations of voter fraud, there were competing slates of electors.
It was a very similar situation to what happened in 2020.
So similar, in fact, that Senator Ted Cruz in 2020 suggested the creation of an electoral commission to decide that election and to decide whether or not to certify the electors' votes.
As took place in 1877.
And the reason it was controversial when Senator Cruz said it, and the reason it was controversial in 1877 is it's nowhere in the Constitution.
Nowhere in the Constitution!
Nowhere in Article 2 does it say that the way to solve a contested presidential election is to set up this random commission with people from different parts of the government to kind of vote on whether or not the ballots should be certified.
And what happened in this Compromise of 1877, which wasn't written down anywhere by the way, The compromise of 1877 was kind of a handshake deal in a back room with probably a lot of smoke going around, was that the Democrats would agree to give the election to Republican Rutherford Hayes if the Republicans agreed to pull troops out of the South and stop Reconstruction, and let the Democrats run the South.
That was the deal.
Nowhere in the Constitution.
And you might say, well that's a rotten deal, it's unconstitutional, it's a violation of rights, but then my question is, What was the alternative?
What was the constitutional alternative?
There wasn't one.
It was a constitutional crisis.
It was a national emergency.
And when the strict adherence to the letter of law is insufficient to solve those crises, when therefore the whole of the law is threatened by those crises, people need to get a little bit creative.
That's what happened then, and it's nearly what happened in 2020.
The Democrats just had enough power that it didn't really matter.
But folks, the reason I bring all of this up, I think I've made it clear as day.
I don't, I'm not talking about the New Mexico lady.
I'm as strong a defender of gun rights as possible.
I think she's going to lose as she should.
We are hurtling toward a 2024 presidential election.
At a time when neither party believes in the integrity of our electoral process.
At a time when there are still lots of questions about whether or not our electoral system has been so weakened by the laws and illegal procedures that the Libs put into effect just a few years ago.
And, by the way, they're doing it again already by trying to bring back the exact same excuse of COVID.
We can deny this.
We can keep our head in the sand, and then the Democrats can steal the election, and then we can complain about it.
Or, we can get a little proactive here and recognize that we are facing a fairly significant likelihood of yet another constitutional crisis, and we're going to need a game plan for how to deal with that.
Or, once again, the epitaph on the headstone of conservatism is going to be, well, here lies conservatism.
Imagine if The shoe were on the other foot.
Imagine if the roles were reversed.
I don't think it is fully appreciated how far beyond the law the libs are willing to go here.
There's a report that just came out.
The Georgia grand jury that indicted Trump and his lawyers and I don't know, like his cook, not really his cook, but just so many people who were even vaguely associated with Trump.
Georgia wanted to indict more people.
Georgia wanted to invite sitting US senators.
The grand jury recommended charging 21 people who were ultimately not charged.
There were already, what, 19 people charged?
Trump and 18 co-defendants.
They wanted another 21.
They wanted to indict former Georgia Senator David Perdue, wanted to indict former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler, wanted to indict sitting U.S.
Senator Lindsey Graham.
And I know some people don't like Lindsey Graham, so they probably want Lindsey.
But I kind of actually get a kick out of Lindsey Graham.
And in any case, no good argument for this random county in Georgia to indict a sitting U.S.
Senator from South Carolina.
Completely insane.
They wanted to indict former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
And then Fannie Willis, the prosecutor here, didn't.
She only indicted 19 people, including the former president of the United States and the leader of the opposition.
Wow, that's moderation from the left.
Yeah, we're not going to start indicting senators from other states in this random county.
Yeah, we're only going to indict the leader of the opposition and anyone who's even vaguely associated with him.
Folks, we are in pretty much uncharted territory here.
The whole thing, the indictments totally uncharted, the former president running for a non-consecutive second term, that's only happened one other time in American history, the complete upending of our election rules based on this virus, that's fairly unprecedented.
There is no script to follow here, okay, and a myopic Insistence on, well, just show me exactly where in the strict letter of the, there is, we're, we're writing the script right now.
Sorry, let me rephrase that.
The script is being written right now as to how these elections are going to take place.
The script is being written right now as to how power is actually going to be wielded in the United States.
We're not writing it because we're living in a fantasy world.
The left is writing it.
And so long as we don't accept political reality, basic historical facts of politics, basic philosophical truths of politics, and just the news of what's going on right now, the longer that we don't accept that, the less likely we will be to have a share in that power in the future.
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My favorite comment on Friday is from ASMR Conservative who says, I actually appreciate the ADL.
They had a lot of conservative pundits on their watch list, so I figured I'd check them out.
Here I am now.
I know this is how I feel about the ADL to some degree.
I mean, the ADL is pretty bad in that they call people Nazis if they don't just totally kowtow to the radical left-wing demands of the ADL, and they're trying to take down Twitter.
So I think they're particularly a threat right now, and Elon is right to sue them for defamation.
It's very funny.
Some of the others are pretty bad, too.
Right-wing watch, People for the American Way, is pretty... People for the American Way, the most ridiculously named organization in American history.
They're pretty bad.
Media Matters is pretty bad.
I just... My hold up there is the same point that you've just made, which is I really hope Elon doesn't kick off Media Matters or sue them.
They have been my loyal publicists for years at this point.
What, seven, eight years at this point?
I don't want to get new publicists.
I really appreciate them.
They watch the show every day.
They're watching right now, so it's true.
Sometimes these guys, the libs, are so wrong-headed.
They think they're going to kill us, and they only make us stronger.
All right, speaking of elections.
Nancy Pelosi, who is, by my last count, 584 years old, she is running for re-election.
Nancy tweeted out, Now more than ever, our city needs us to advance San Francisco values and further our country.
Yeah, we need drug-addled bums defecating on the street from sea to shining sea.
That's what we need.
We need two cars in every garage and a syringe in every pot.
We need San Francisco values in America.
Our country needs America to show the world that our flag is still there.
It's a rainbow flag, by the way.
It's not the red, white, and blue.
They got rid of that one.
But the rainbow flag is still there.
With liberty and justice for all, that's why I'm running for re-election and respectfully ask for your vote, Nancy.
And now look, especially depending on what happens in 2024, it's going to be very dangerous for Nancy Pelosi to be in office because she remembers the Compromise of 1877.
So she's going to be able to wield power very effectively.
I don't, I don't mind that she's running for re-election.
It's not good, it's bad, but I kind of get a kick out of some of these old-timers who have been, these women of a certain age, and some of the old-timer male politicians who have been around forever.
Bernie, you know, all of them.
They're gonna hold on as long as they can, the people are allowing them to hold on.
Okay, that's just how politics works.
However, I will say, the longer the geriatric politicians hang on, The more massive the political sea change is going to be once they inevitably have to leave office because the old Grim Reaper finally shows up.
That's just a fact.
They can hold on in both parties.
Nancy Pelosi can hold on.
Mitch McConnell can hold on.
Joe Biden can hold on.
They can hold on.
We had what?
We had a boomer president in Bill Clinton, boomer president in George Bush, I thought a boomer, I thought a Gen X president in Barack Obama.
Some Gen Xers have written into me screaming and said, Michael, how dare you associate him with us?
Obama is technically a boomer.
Okay, so fine, count him as a boomer.
Then another boomer president with Donald Trump, so it's four boomer presidents.
And then Joe Biden, who's the silent generation, who was before the baby boomers.
So these guys have held on to power for an extraordinarily long period of time.
And all that means is that.
The next generation that comes up is going to be that much more removed, is going to differ that much more from the views of that previous generation.
But there's no stopping change forever.
It will have to happen.
Time rolls on.
History rolls on.
You look right now at Hungary, a government that a lot of American conservatives quite admire, because it's the only country that's been able to turn around its birthrate problem.
The only country that's been able to stop mass migration.
The only country that's been able to re-beautify its cities.
It's the only country where the cities are getting more beautiful, not uglier.
And part of the reason they've been able to do that is the government is quite young in Hungary.
It's a vibrant young government that's not just stuck with the old platitudes of the 1980s, but is applying eternal principles to the new circumstances that confront us.
That's going to happen here eventually, it's going to have to, when that grip of power runs out.
And this is why I would encourage conservatives not just to recite the same platitudes that you learned in 1982, platitudes which may or may not have even been true then, You know, politics often boils down to talking points, and talking points are always wrong, because they always oversimplify, they never tell the whole story, sometimes they outright lie.
If we just keep rehearsing the same old script that we learned in 1982, we're going to keep on losing, just like we have since 1982, almost without exception.
Or, we can use our imagination, we can dig into history, we can dig into philosophy, and we can imagine, we can think about what the future looks like, and bring that to effect.
Speaking of geriatric politicians, Joe Biden!
is slumping among non-white voters, which is a big problem because the Democrats rely on a total lock on racial minorities.
So if they lose the racial minorities, especially black voters, they could lose basically every election.
This is according to CNN and SSRS shows Trump is up one over Biden.
Um, so for the people who say Trump can't win, you know, again, that was disproved by history because Trump did win in 2016.
And maybe, who knows, who knows what happened in 2020.
Biden is hitting his targets among whites.
So Biden is matching 43-44% of decided major party white voters that he won last time.
But he's losing some non-white support.
Meaning that he's not behind on non-white voters.
He's still massively ahead on non-white voters.
He's just not as far ahead as he was last time.
So Joe Biden still wins 58 to 34 among non-white voters, according to Nate Cohn of the New York Times.
But because he's lost some ground, this could be a big problem for him.
Trump, for instance, got 29% of the Hispanic vote in 2016.
That was compared to Romney's 27% of the vote.
So this is very funny that Trump, who called Mexicans rapists and murderers, was able to do better among Hispanics than milquetoast, nice sounding Mitt Romney.
It really upended a lot of the chattering classes, establishments, anti-Trump rhetoric in 2016.
But still, 29 versus 27, it's not a lot.
It's fine, and Trump does better among non-white voters than most Republicans.
He got 8% of the black vote compared to 6% that Mitt Romney got.
Okay, that's fine.
But this also highlights the political importance of immigration.
For whatever reason, Republicans just don't do that well with non-white voters, but— That is why the Democrats are flooding the country with illegal aliens because they are by and large almost entirely non-white immigrants and they're not doing it because they care about the Venezuelans or the Hondurans or the poor people crossing the border paying off the cartels to be Smuggled and raped and trafficked and sometimes killed along the way.
They're just doing it because it swells their numbers.
And it swells their numbers in a whole lot of ways.
It swells their numbers in Congress because congressional apportionment, the number of districts that a state will get, is based on total population, not based on citizens.
So you flood the country with illegal aliens millions and millions of years, that's going to increase Especially in Democrat places, like California, it's going to increase their representation.
It's going to increase their representation in the Electoral College.
It's going to increase their proportion of the voters.
It's helping them.
This is not something where we can say, well, in 30 years, hopefully we'll just pass a law and, you know, the Hispanics are conservatives, they just don't know it yet.
Some of them are, and it actually varies by nationality.
Cubans tend to be much more Republican than, say, voters from, I don't know, Venezuela, say, or Guatemala, and the children of these immigrants and the grandchildren of these immigrants, but by and large, they're still anti-conservative.
They still go for the Democrats.
This is an emergency, because while we can be chattering about the precise application of the rule of the law and whether Title 42 is acceptable or not, should we really arrest these poor people fleeing the persecution of what?
They're seeking persecution by signing up with the cartels.
Well, while we're debating that, the country is being radically transformed as an intentional program by the Democrats to swell their numbers and to make the Republicans a permanent minority.
Forget about racial minorities, cultural minorities, religious minorities.
It just, as an electoral matter, that's what the Democrats are after here.
Are we just going to let that happen, or are we going to get creative in how to enforce the law?
At the very least, the highest sense of the law in spirit.
