Ep. 1368 - 3rd Republican Debate Summarized In 60 Seconds
Republican presidential candidates debate, for some reason; Ohio enshrines infanticide in its state constitution; and Michael’s new cigar company, Mayflower Cigars, sells out of virtually every product within hours (with new stock on the way!).
Ep.1368
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Last night, the Republican candidates who are respectively 44, 49, 54, and 56 points below the current GOP frontrunner met in Miami to debate for some reason.
The guy who's 49 points behind the frontrunner had the most brilliant performance in that he gave the most thought-provoking and exciting answers.
He had the highest highs, maybe he had the lowest lows, too.
The guy who was only 44 points behind the frontrunner, I think, had the best performance overall.
He answered in a way that was impressive, yet still entirely mainstream.
And nothing that anyone said will in any way affect the polls or change the race at all.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
The big story that we'll get to in a little bit happens to be that personal story that I talked about yesterday.
Mayflower cigars.
I'm not saying that yesterday was the greatest day of my life.
It wasn't.
Might have been top five.
It was almost certainly top ten.
I had very high expectations for this cigar company that I'd been plotting out for about 15 years now, and you all, you all the customers who bought all those cigars, totally blew my expectations and the expectations of the cigar industry completely out of the water.
So I know some of you are trying to get some now and are having trouble.
We'll get to that in just a moment.
First, though, we turn our attention to the GOP debate.
That I think very few people would have watched to begin with, because these things haven't seemed to be all that consequential.
Even if you like the candidates, even if you're endorsing one of the candidates in the race who shows up to the debates, they haven't really moved the needle.
And this debate was even worse in some ways, because the debate was hosted by NBC News, which is a liberal outlet.
Okay, why am I?
It's inconsequential and it's being hosted by a liberal network.
Okay, why?
The debate started out fairly strong.
Vivek Ramaswamy comes out swinging as he often does and he called on the chairman of the RNC to resign.
We've become a party of losers at the end of the day.
It's a cancer in the Republican establishment.
Let's speak the truth.
I mean, since Ronald McDaniel took over as chairwoman of the RNC in 2017, we have lost 2018, 2020, 2022, no red wave that never came.
We got trounced last night in 2023.
no red wave that never came.
We got trounced last night in 2023.
And I think that we have to have accountability in our party.
For that matter, Ron, if you want to come on stage tonight, you want to look the GOP voters in the eye and tell them you resign, I will turn over my, yield my time to you.
And frankly, look, the people there cheering for losing in the Republican Party.
Think about who's moderating this debate.
This should be Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk.
We'd have 10 times the viewership asking questions that GOP primary voters actually care about bringing more people into our party.
Do you think the Democrats, and we've got Kristen Welker here, do you think the Democrats would actually hire Greg Gutfeld to host a Democratic debate?
They wouldn't do it.
And so the fact of the matter is, I mean, Christian, I'm going to use this time, because this is actually about you in the media and the corrupt media establishment, ask you the Trump-Russia collusion hoax that you pushed on this network for years, was that real or was that Hillary Clinton made up disinformation?
Answer the question.
Go!
Oh man, Vivek is pretty good at this.
When I say he had the highest highs and potentially the lowest lows, I mean, he's the only one on stage who's really taking risks.
So that was a big high.
That one totally landed.
He had a jibe at Nikki Haley that did not land.
It was one of the lows of the debate.
But at least the guy's taking risks.
I think the points he was making in that opening are totally fair.
He's making points about the Republican National Committee, how it's run.
He's making points about how the debates are run.
Why on earth are we hiring NBC to do the Republican debate?
Totally crazy.
And then he holds the NBC people accountable for the lies that they pushed for years.
So starts out strong in that way.
Then we go on to Tim Scott.
Tim Scott, I thought, again, gave a safe performance.
He's a nice guy.
It probably won't move the polls.
But he gave an answer that was really important that I haven't heard from other Republican candidates, and I'd like to hear more of it.
He pointed out that the country is not just some liberal, vague, abstract hodgepodge of multiculturalism and freedom to have freedom and be free.
But he said, no, actually, it's a Christian country.
The truth of my life destroys the lies of the radical left.
We need a president and a candidate who will actually help our base solidify and attract independent voters into our party.
The Great Opportunity Party is now winning back African American voters and Hispanic voters because we are working on a foundation based on faith.
Our nation is facing some deep challenges.
It is the loss of faith in this nation that is part of the erosion that we're seeing every single day.
It's restoring faith, restoring our Christian values that will help this nation once again become the city on the hill.
When Ronald Reagan talked about the city on the hill, he was coming from Matthew 5.
When President Lincoln talked about a house divided, that was Mark.
Our founding documents speak to the importance of a faith foundation.
You don't have to be a Christian for America to work for you, but America does not work without a faith-filled Judeo-Christian foundation.
It's a Christian country when he's saying, look, Lincoln, he's quoting the Gospels.
Ronald Reagan, he's quoting Christian preachers, quoting the Gospels, going back all the way through the American tradition invoking John Winthrop.
Mayor, Governor rather, of Massachusetts Bay Colony.
This is a Christian country, and so the country is going to be Christian, and survive, and flourish, or we're going to stop being Christian, and we're going to, we'll just be a different country, and we're probably going to fail, but even if we succeeded by some measure, we would be a totally different country.
The country only makes sense if you recognize that it has been, from the very beginning, and through all of our success, an explicitly Christian country.
I love that!
Thank you, Tim Scott.
Thank you for saying what would have been considered obvious 20 years ago that now nobody wants to say, including the so-called conservatives.
For a candidate who's playing it super safe, Tim Scott actually, wittingly or unwittingly, went out on a little bit of a limb here.
Shouldn't be.
That shouldn't be edgy at all.
But even many conservatives, they say, well, no, we're not a Christian country.
We have a firm separation of church and state.
Actually, we're a secular liberal democracy.
And no, no, man, we're just, that's where the progressives want to take us.
That's where the leftists want to take us.
But that just isn't true.
We have, in God we trust, on our currency.
Okay?
Our greatest statesmen have quoted the gospel.
Frequently.
Our country was founded by extremely zealous Christians who came over here on the Mayflower and gave thanks to God and instituted Thanksgiving, our national holiday.
Thanksgiving.
Who are we giving thanks to, guys?
Are we giving thanks to Ahura Mazda, the deity of Zoroastrianism?
Are we giving thanks to the cycle of dharma and karma and nirvana and Buddhism or Hinduism?
No, I don't mean any disrespect to whatever people believe in, but it's a Christian country, okay?
We're Christian people, and Christianity happens to be true, if you ask me.
And Tim Scott has the guts to say it.
Love it.
Then, the vague comes back.
The vague had a really good rejoinder, I felt, to the whole tenor of the debate.
And the tenor of the debate was that for the first, I don't know, hour, virtually the whole conversation, every question, was focused on how we are going to fund foreign governments.
It was amazing.
I couldn't get over it.
Well, how much money are you going to give to Ukraine?
How much money are you going to give to Israel?
How many American troops are you going to commit to this region?
How many American troops are you going to go send to fight in that region?
This, that, or the other thing.
And every candidate seemed to be going along with it to some degree or another.
Until Vivek comes out and said, hey, look, I love the state of Israel.
I strongly support the right of the state of Israel to defend itself.
We're a different country.
The founding vision of Israel was based on the idea that they don't want to depend on anybody else's sympathy or direction in defending themselves.
So what I would tell Bibi is that Israel has the right and the responsibility to defend itself.
I would tell him to smoke those terrorists on his southern border.
And then I'll tell him as president of the United States, I'll be smoking the terrorists on our southern border.
That's his responsibility.
This is our responsibility.
That's how we move forward.
But I want to be careful to avoid making the mistakes from the neocon establishment of the past.
Corrupt politicians in both parties spent trillions, killed millions, made billions for themselves in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting wars that sent thousands of our sons and daughters, people my age, to die in wars that did not advance anyone's interests.
Adding $7 trillion to our national debt.
You have the likes of Nikki Haley, who stepped down from her time at the UN.
Bankrupt or in debt was her family.
Then she becomes a military contractor, she joins the board of Boeing and otherwise, and is now a multi-millionaire.
So I think that that's wrong when Republicans do it or Democrats do it.
That's the choice we face.
Do you want a leader from a different generation who's gonna put this country first?
Or do you want Dick Cheney in three-inch heels?
Oh man, Vivek just throwing haymakers left and right.
And this point that he's making here is an important one.
It's not just knee-jerk isolationism.
It's not just Reddit-tier foreign policy, you know, just only focus on domestic issues.
Obviously, a global superpower needs to look at Things going on all over the world.
But he's absolutely right about the founding of the State of Israel.
The justification, the geopolitical justification for the founding of the State of Israel is that Jews have been persecuted when they have been in countries that are not Jewish for all of history.
And so they need their own country so they don't need to depend upon the benevolence and the magnanimity of host countries.
That's the whole argument.
Without that argument, you could say, well, all the Jews should move to New York.
New York is essentially the second Jewish state in the world, you know?
I think there are the same number of Jews living in New York as there are in Israel, or thereabouts.
But the argument is, well, yeah, America's nice to the Jews for now, except on university campuses.
Except in the halls of Congress, maybe.
America's really nice to Jews for now, but things could change.
That's the argument.
That's the argument for the founding of the State of Israel.
So if that's the argument, then the State of Israel must be able to defend itself.
Because if the state of Israel is entirely dependent on a foreign government to give them armaments, be the military might, be the backstop that stops the destruction of the state, then there's essentially no difference between the Jews having their own explicitly Jewish nation-state and just living in another host country.
He's making a point that probably Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, would have strongly agreed with.
That many Jewish leaders and Israeli leaders over history would have agreed with.
And then he pivots from that and just starts throwing haymakers at the more interventionist side of the GOP.
The vague, not afraid to put it all out there.
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I promise I'll move on from this agonizing debate in just a moment.
First though, Ron DeSantis.
So I told you, Vivek, he shined, he had these highs, he had this low where he went after Nikki Haley's 25-year-old daughter.
Nikki had gone after Vivek for being on TikTok, and he said, well, your daughter, your 25-year-old daughter's on TikTok, too.
And then she really went after him for that and said, don't talk about my daughter.
And, you know, the daughter's not little, but still, you don't want to talk about the family.
And unless it's Hunter Biden, where he's just such a criminal, it's a totally different matter.
And anyway, again, that was the low because Vivek is the one taking chances.
So overall, probably people noticed Vivek's debate performance the most.
But I think the winner of the undercard, you know, the winner of the debate that probably won't move the needle on polls, but I think the clear winner was Ron DeSantis, who gave impressive answers.
He's very, very much in command of the stage.
He composed himself.
But his answers were still broadly safe, unobjectionable, and mainstream, and Now, he gave one answer, and I don't mean that as a criticism.
I think that's probably what you need to do in a debate.
That's how Joe Biden was able to secure the nomination in large part in 2020 for the Democrats.
DeSantis gave one answer on Social Security that I had not heard before from a GOP politician, and it's on a question that Republicans get clobbered with a lot.
The question is, are you going to cut Medicare?
Are you going to throw granny off a cliff?
Are you going to slash Social Security?
How are you going to do it?
And it's always a gotcha question, because if you say that you want to raise the age at which people get these entitlements, then the Democrats say you're throwing granny off a cliff, you have no compassion, you're just You know, counting your pennies.
If you say you want to cut benefits, that's going to be a total loser, too.
Really anything.
That's why entitlements have been the third rail in American politics.
Ron had a really, really good answer here on why he would not raise the age at which one is eligible for these programs.
What can you do to help shore up Social Security?
One of the things that's causing problems is the inflation.
We have to reduce inflation.
When you have higher inflation, the seniors get a cost of living adjustment, which means the program's spending more, but it doesn't cover the increase in the actual inflation rate.
We also do need to get to at least 3% growth.
You're never going to be able to have issues, be able to solve the budget without that.
But I would note this.
Congress for decades took money from Social Security.
Social Security would have more tax revenue than it put out.
They would take it and then they'd write an IOU to Social Security.
Congress has a lot of dirty hands on this.
I'm gonna force Congress to stop spending so much money.
And one thing we have to talk about the retirement age is just something that's changed in the last four or five years.
Life expectancy in the United States is declining.
So Governor, yes or no, would you raise it?
Would you raise the retirement age?
When life expectancy is declining, I don't see how you could raise it the other direction.
So it's one thing to peg it on life expectancy, but we have had a significant decline in life expectancy in this country, and that's just a fact.
Brilliant point.
And you notice the NBC lady, the moment he raises this new objection, To entitlement reform.
She jumps in.
She goes, oh, hold on.
What, are you going to raise it?
Are you going to raise the retirement age?
Because we've been trapped in this rhetorical box for 10 years now, 15, 20 years, where any question the Democrats ask about entitlements hurts Republicans.
Because it shows that we're either fiscally irresponsible or we're going to throw granny off a cliff, that we're totally heartless.
But Ron here raises a question that I hadn't heard yet, which is, hold on, how are you going to raise the retirement age when life expectancy is declining?
The whole idea of raising the retirement age is that life expectancy keeps getting higher and higher and higher.
Well, when Social Security was founded in the early 20th century, The life expectancy was significantly lower than it is today, so we've got to catch up with the times and raise life expectancy because of how great things have been.
No, actually.
That was true for much of the 20th century.
Now it's reversed.
What a condemnation of the policies that have governed our country for the last century that our life expectancy is declining.
Even an answer like that cuts way beyond the entitlement question.
It really shakes people, I think.
It shook me, which is, wait, we're dying?
Oh man, what are we talking about?
We're going to cut around the edges of economic policy or cut around the edges of this policy or that policy?
We're supposed to be healthier, we're supposed to be growing, but we're a dying population.
We don't have kids, we don't get married, and we're dying younger because of suicide and drug overdoses.
Whoa, man, things are sick, and whatever policies have led us to that point, we got to reverse them ASAP.
Very good answer from Governor DeSantis.
Now, speaking of elections, There was this vote in Ohio a couple nights ago.
I didn't get to it yesterday, we'll get to it today.
Very sad because abortion was on the ballot, this was a referendum, and the people voted to enshrine the license to murder children at essentially any point in pregnancy in the Ohio State Constitution.
It's called Issue 1.
It changes the state constitution and takes precedence over laws passed by the state legislature, so it might well be irreversible.
The only way that it could be reversed is by a ballot measure, another ballot measure to reverse it.
Pro-abortion groups did a great job on this ballot measure because they framed the vote as a matter of freedom, as a matter of shrinking the regulations of the government.
It... it... it...
The liberals framed it in a conservative kind of way.
So it tricked a bunch of conservatives into voting to enshrine infanticide at any point in pregnancy in the state constitution.
You've seen similar ballot initiatives here as well.
And so the squishes in the Republican Party are going to say, well, this is proof that abortion is a losing issue for conservatives.
And the real squishes are going to say, that's why we should kill the babies so we can win more elections and cut taxes.
The less squishy people are going to say, well, even if it is a losing issue, obviously, if a country is cares about anything at all.
It should care about not sacrificing its babies to Moloch.
You know, this is a non-negotiable issue.
It's human life.
You're slaughtering the most innocent people in our country.
I don't care how it polls on any given day.
We're going to stand up for life and we're going to stand up for the defenseless.
But the more clever people in the Republican Party are saying, yeah, that's true.
It's a very important issue.
No, we're not going to squish on human life just because some ballot initiative passed.
But people like DeSantis, people like Vivek actually both both pointed this out last night.
Where was the pro-life referendum?
Where were the conservative groups, the Republican groups out there, who are putting their own ballot initiative out to say we're going to enshrine life in the Ohio state constitution or in any other state?
Where were the conservative groups changing the language of how these ballot propositions go up so that they aren't deceptive, so they don't trick conservatives into voting for infanticide, which they don't intend to do?
Is it possible that Pro-life, pro-abortion, it's a contentious issue, but is it possible that people do in fact support life, broadly, but that Democrats are just much better at the operations and inner workings of politics, and conservatives need to get better at that as well.
I, just looking at the language of these ballot measures, just looking at the way they came to be, just looking at how Democrats are much better at rigging elections than Republicans are, and have been for well over a hundred years, It would seem to me, our issue here, getting right back to what Vivek talked about at the top of that debate, is our political organization, which right now, tactically, compared to the Democrats, is very, very weak.
And it doesn't look good.
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Today, my friend Faith Moore, whose maiden name is Claven, though of course she has no relation to her father Andrew Claven or her brother Spencer Claven, she has written a new rendition of the age-old Christmas classic, Christmas Carol, except this time it's with a K!
Hmm?
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Christmas Carol, now available to order.
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James Carville, who is the funny sound and funny looking Democrat strategist of many decades now.
James Carville's take on why Republicans keep losing these abortion propositions on the ballots is because we're lying.
I think voters said that they don't like being lied to.
They did it in Kansas.
They tried to change the wording.
They tried to confuse people.
They tried to rig the election date.
Frank LaRoe, the Secretary of State in Ohio, is one of the great liars that ever lived.
And people fundamentally didn't want a 50-year right taken away from them.
They particularly didn't want to have a rigged system against it.
And it backfired and it blew up in their face.
They keep lying, all right?
And they say, well, gee, Glenn Yelkin says, oh my, it's a 15-week ban.
That's not what we're talking about.
No one trusts them on this issue.
Okay, so Carville, look, he's a Democrat talking point machine and much of what he's saying is dishonest and hyperbolic and all the rest.
But there is a kernel of truth here.
The kernel of truth is that the conservative argument on abortion, the conservative desire, the conservative goal is not merely to leave the issue to the states.
A lot of conservatives said it for many, many years.
We just want overrule Roe v. Wade so that we can restore our democracy and return the matter of whether or not we should sacrifice our children to Moloch to the states!
Where the matter belongs.
Yes, that's right.
Look, some states are going to protect their innocent little babies.
And some states are going to sacrifice them to Moloch in the most gruesome and painful ways.
And look, whatever you choose is totally fine.
We just support choice and freedom and freedom of choice and choice of freedom.
And states and democracy.
And procedure.
All we really care about is procedure.
We don't care about the substance at all.
Keep your baby.
Kill your baby.
We don't care.
We just want you to have the choice.
No.
No.
That is not my understanding of what a conservative believes about the protection of innocent life.
We had to get Roe v. Wade overruled because it created a ridiculous, unconstitutional license to abortion.
But now, we need to ban it.
We just gotta ban it, man.
It's really bad.
It's bad to kill kids, and it doesn't help anybody, and it hurts a lot of people.
It doesn't help the mothers who are exploited by the abortion industry.
It leaves them with trauma for the rest of their lives, rightly so, because they killed their kids.
And you can move past trauma, and you can be forgiven and receive absolution, but the psychological effect of that sticks with people for a long time.
It doesn't help even the abortionists who enrich themselves by slaughtering babies.
Maybe it has their bank accounts with blood money, but it doesn't help their souls and it leads them on the path to hell.
And it leads our country on the path to hell.
Terrestrial and even after we all shake off this mortal coil.
Doesn't help our nation, even just as a matter of national strength.
Even if all you care about is GDP, slaughtering a generation of people is not going to help you grow GDP.
It's not going to help you grow social solidarity.
It's not going to help you love your neighbor and come together and be united.
It's just awful everywhere.
It's just intrinsically, extremely evil.
And so, that's the argument.
The argument is stop killing innocent babies.
That's the whole argument.
It's not.
You don't need to wrap yourself into logical pretzels and misread all sorts of Enlightenment philosophers.
No, don't kill kids.
It's just amazing how you ask an ordinary Joe on the street, hey, you think it's cool to kill a kid?
You think that's all right?
No, I think that's immoral.
Yeah, okay, I think you're probably right.
But you ask some PhD egghead, Looney Tune, With five Ivy League degrees, who's worked in fancy offices all their lives, and they'll explain to you in a 20-minute lecture how it's actually a really good thing to kill children.
Nah.
So, in a way, Carville has a point.
You're right, we gotta be honest.
And the honesty is...
Yes, we want to protect babies all the time because human life matters and people have a right to life and they at the very least have a right to due process if they're going to be deprived of their right to life, which innocent little babies are not currently afforded.
Speaking of persuading people, I spoke at the University of Buffalo in the spring of this year, and I speak at a lot of campuses around the country every single year, even as the administrations try to shut down a lot of those, and that's been happening this semester as well.
Still, I go there, and we face protests from students sometimes.
I was just at Cornell.
There was a small protest.
We face protests from Outside activists, anarchists, Antifa, sometimes there's more of them.
In Pittsburgh, they burned me an effigy and threw an explosive at the building when I walked on stage.
But the craziest part is we face protests from the administrations of these universities, even public universities.
We face protests from the politicians.
And when I spoke at University of Buffalo, You had not only the Buffalo administration, you had the SUNY, State University of New York administration, you had the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, come out against me, attack me before I ever spoke, and I was speaking on the subject of men and women being different.
I was giving a lecture on a subject that everyone should have been taught in kindergarten at the absolute latest and should be uncontroversial after that point.
These days we're very confused, so I gave a speech on that very basic, I think broadly ought to be an offensive point, and we had protests from everybody.
And then the school chapter of the Young America's Foundation was cancelled afterward.
The Young America's Foundation chapter was threatened with removal.
They had to sue.
YAF had to sue, the Alliance for Defending Freedom had to sue.
And now, the student who brought me, Conor Ogrijac, testified before the House Judiciary Committee.
In front of Jim Jordan and other members of Congress.
Imagine how far our country's fallen that this young man had to testify before the United States Congress on why conservatives ought to be allowed to speak and learn at a public university in 2023.
If those who were involved in this mob were able to result to fear tactics and violence without consequence, what is keeping a pattern of this despicable behavior from being set and executed repeatedly?
This thought remained on my mind throughout the planning of a March 2023 event that I hosted as chairman, featuring Michael Knowles.
This event would grow to gain more pushback than any event on campus in the previous four years and provide the most clear-cut examples of freedom of speech violations.
This pushback included delays in contract signing from UB's Student Association that deviated far from their outlined standard course of action, condemnation of the event by a local New York State Senator and multiple Western New York-based organizations, a circulated petition constructed by three university professors calling for the cancellation of the lecture, which gained thousands of student signatures, a forced venue change orchestrated not only by university administration this time, but voted on by a SUNY council.
It goes on.
The rest of the testimony is worth listening to.
It would be hilarious if it weren't actually happening.
on the day of the event, calling comments from Michael, dehumanizing.
The decry of this event garnered a responding statement from university president Satish Tripathi, explaining that the Constitution protects speech on campus, quote, no matter how noxious the content, end quote.
It goes on.
The rest of the testimony is worth listening to.
It would be hilarious if it weren't actually happening.
This would be a Monty Python sketch.
This would be Saturday Night Live bit decades ago.
Conservative wants to come to campus to explain that boys and girls are different.
And every elected politician, they lose their minds, they call it egregious, and then the students who had the audacity to bring the conservative speaker are basically tarred and feathered and run out of town by those very same authorities.
This is a scandal.
This is a national scandal.
What do we do about it?
Well, obviously we should defund, we should vote these people out of office if possible.
We should defund the universities that do this kind of stuff, if possible.
But I don't want to sound like I'm a utopian or I'm some idealist here.
I know that Kathy Hochul's not going to do that.
I know that the New York State government, even though there is a decent Republican representation there, it's not going to do that.
We're not going to have a Republican governor there, certainly not with a unified government, anytime soon.
So what conservatives have to do is to seek to establish and fund our own schools.
I was talking about the Trump proposal for the American Academy the other day.
A lot of people didn't like it.
They said, we don't want government funding for our schools.
We don't want an explicitly pro-conservative school.
No, we do actually.
We do.
That's how the Libs have managed to attain a reasonable degree of cultural hegemony in recent years, is they took over the existing institutions, and then they fired all their enemies, and then they routed all of their student enemies, and then they hired all of their friends, And then they got a ton of government funding, and then they changed the rules such that they could basically never lose power because they were in charge of hiring, and they were in charge of firing, and they were in charge of the kangaroo courts that kick out conservatives for bogus reasons.
And we need to do that.
We shouldn't do anything unjust, we shouldn't do anything immoral, but playing within the extant rules of politics is not necessarily unjust.
Being clever is not necessarily unjust.
We are told to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, and very often conservatives are wise as doves and innocent as serpents.
That was Vivek's big complaint at the top of the debate yesterday, and he was absolutely right.
That's what we have to do.
We're not going to be able to defund you, Buffalo, for the madness, the persecution they put Conor and the other students through.
Okay.
Well then we need to, when we have any modicum of political power, we need to establish, fund, and protect our own institutions to compete against them and route those maniacs out of power.
Now, speaking of building our own institutions, I mentioned earlier at the top of the show Yesterday was pretty great, guys, because we launched a company that I first conceived of about 15 years ago, and it's called Mayflower Cigars.
I've smoked cigars most of my life.
They're very important to me.
Wrote my college admissions essay about how much I love cigars.
One of my most cherished possessions is a box of cigars that my mother gave me made by the factory.
Coincidentally, that all these years later is making the Mayflower cigars.
I got my job.
I got my Daily Wire show because I wrote a cigar column that impressed Jeremy and Caleb.
So anyway, after pitching the guys for years on starting a cigar company, probably mostly to shut me up, they said, OK, Michael, Daily Wire will start a cigar company with you.
And it will be Mayflower Cigars, and you can do whatever you want with it, and we did.
And so the product is absolutely magnificent.
I was very confident.
I had very rosy expectations because, you know, all of the Daily Wire products are terrific.
If I do say so myself, you know, the entertainment products, the political products, the consumer products.
But often we're reacting against somebody.
So we'll just be punching, you know, some lib company or some lib politician or whatever.
When it comes to cigars, This is purely a labor of love.
You know, there's no woke tobacco out there.
This is just purely a labor of love.
And I said, all right, we're just going to make a very, very, very high quality product at what I consider to be the best factory in Nicaragua, in Esteli, Nicaragua, what I consider to be the cigar capital of the world right now.
It's going to be an excellent product with an excellent brand at a very competitive price.
We could have sold this for much more money, but I said, no, I want this to be really accessible to cigar smokers, people like me.
Who are not going to shell out 30, 40 bucks a cigar every single day, but who can get a very high quality product.
So anyway, I had high expectations.
You all completely blew my expectations out of the water.
This cigar essentially sold out.
It mostly sold out within something like eight hours.
It is almost certainly going to be completely sold out by the end of this show today.
I'm talking about the handful of little extra five packs we had lying around.
When I say sold out, I mean we sold four months of inventory in less than 24 hours.
Our partners, who are to my mind the best in the business, told us they're astonished they've never seen anything like this.
Our distributor told us this was the best first day cigar launch they've ever had.
We are ramping up shipments from Nicaragua to meet this unprecedented demand.
This is an aged product, so I am not going to rush production.
Premium cigars, especially these cigars, require aging.
So I'm not going to rush a product and have it not be at the absolute top of quality standards.
We do have some product that is properly aged that we're now trying to get out of Nicaragua, get up here as quickly as possible.
So it's going to come back online.
Some of them have already, and you can, I think, pre-order again now at mayflowercigars.com.
If you want to try the cigars, if you want them for Thanksgiving, if you want them for Christmas, obviously great for Thanksgiving.
Order them now.
Whatever comes available, just order it, even if it's not exactly the box you wanted, even if it's not exactly the pack you wanted.
Once the next supply is gone, I don't know when we're going to be able to restock, so whatever comes online, if you want to try the cigar, which I highly recommend you do, just get it, pre-order it, and also sign up for updates so that you can be the first to know when products are back in stock.
My favorite comment yesterday, It's from Rohi Clem.
Oh, you know what?
I should point out.
I should point out.
When you go to Mayflowercigars.com, do not forget that you have to be 21 years old or older and some exclusions apply.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Rohi Clem 871.
I can't believe that you guys spent a decade building a media conglomerate just as a front for your cigar company.
Clever.
That's what it's all about, man.
You know?
That's what we do at Daily Wire.
When other people are zigging, we zag.
Subvert expectations.
Yes, it's about restoring our republic.
Yes, it's about transforming the conservative movement from squishes to solid rock-ribbed people.
Also, it's about making really excellent cigars.
That's true.
Speaking of establishing institutional control, really sad story coming out of the UK.
It seems these stories come out of the UK every six months now.
There's a baby who is very, very ill, who is an eight-month-old little baby, who has been granted Italian citizenship and admission to a Vatican hospital because the parents don't want to kill the baby.
They want to continue treatment for their precious, beloved child.
And the UK government says, no, we're going to kill that baby.
No, it's pointless.
It's expensive to keep the baby alive.
It's pointless.
You know, it's just going to, the baby's just going to die at some point.
So let's just kill the baby now.
And this is the baby, Indy Gregory.
The parents say, no, no, that's awful.
And Prime Minister Giorgio Maloney in Italy says, okay, we're going to grant the baby Italian citizenship so that the baby has a right to come to Italy.
The Vatican, the Holy See, says we're going to grant the baby admission to Bambino Gesù Hospital so that we can treat the baby.
You in the UK don't want to treat the baby?
We will treat the baby.
Just bring the baby over here.
The UK judge says, nope!
Kill the kid.
It means the UK is now essentially executing an Italian citizen against the wishes of Italy, up to and including the Prime Minister.
More to the point, the UK government is executing a baby against the wishes of the Pope, against the wishes of the Pope and the baby's parents.
It's just awful.
It's just absolutely evil.
And the hardest part here, other than the death and sadness and grief, The hardest part politically is that the judge probably doesn't know.
The judge probably doesn't realize how bad this is.
A lot of liberals probably don't realize how bad this is.
Because in their mind, what they're saying is, look, this 8-month-old baby, terminally ill baby, the baby's not going to survive very long anyway.
So, like, what's the point?
You're just wasting money and the baby might feel some pain.
Maybe, and pain is the worst thing in the world, and suffering is the greatest evil ever, and the whole point of life is to just feel pleasure, and if you can't just live forever, then you might as well just die and be killed.
There are a lot of people who think that, consciously or unconsciously, and there are so many false Philosophical, anthropological, and theological premises just wrapped up in those flippant statements and those glib intuitions.
But people are not conscious of that.
That is the consequence of a liberal culture.
I totally understand how the UK judge came to that conclusion.
Well, he's gonna die anyway.
Might as well be now.
Yeah, well, you're gonna die anyway, judge.
Should we kill you now?
I'm gonna die someday.
Should we just kill me now?
Well, the boy's gonna feel pain.
Yeah, you feel pain, don't you?
Should we kill you the next time you feel pain so you don't feel pain anymore?
Well, no, come on, you know, it's just the... It's just the what?
Well, you know, the baby's gonna die soon.
Yeah, maybe.
You might die soon.
You might walk across the street, get hit by a bus.
Well, you know, it's just, it's very expensive.
Okay, well, when I think about all the money that we waste, that we waste in our country, in the UK, everywhere, Money that we waste on stupid consumer goods or misguided social services, quote-unquote, that actually end up hurting people.
When I think about the money that we waste on just on the gender transition surgeries, gender transition, which is completely preposterous, doesn't achieve a thing, doesn't Help these people feel better is not in alignment with reality, only harms people, violates the Hippocratic Oath, but it's extremely expensive.
We waste a ton of money on that so-called medical intervention, but we can't spend a little extra money to keep this baby alive a few more days?
You won't even let the baby go seek treatment elsewhere?
That's the consequence of a liberal religion.
It's not a religion.
Religion is a habit of virtue that inclines the will to give to God what he deserves.
It's a false imitation of a religion.
It's an ideology.
And in as much as a country loses its religion, it's gonna fall into this stuff.
Because people act with prejudice, necessarily.
People don't just consciously think about every single thing they're going to do.
Should I have pancakes or waffles this morning?
Well, let me examine the benefits and costs of each.
Let me write a long essay comparing the pros and cons.
Let me consider the ingredients and what that will mean.
No, no one, you just, I don't know, I guess we'll eat pancakes today.
We eat pancakes on Tuesdays, that's what we're going to do.
Well, people have the same habitual behaviors and prejudices when it comes to moral calculation.
You could pass a law, that would be a good start, to say no, don't kill babies in the UK or elsewhere, but ultimately Tim Scott is right.
It's the moment of the debate that went almost totally unnoticed, but it's probably the best part of that debate last night.
When Tim Scott said, look, our country just is Christian.
Our country is Christian or it's not our country.
It'll be a different country.
There are plenty of countries that are not Christian and it'll just be like one of those.
But if we want our country, even if you're not Christian, even if you don't think you're Christian or you don't consciously believe in this stuff, if you like the way our country has been in the past up until the present, you can't throw out the animating spirit That, that animates the country as the soul animates the body.
Speaking of, it's Theology Thursday, so the rest of the show continues now.
