Ep. 1395 - Pro-Life Woman Burns Down Abortion Clinic
A pro-life woman goes to prison for burning down a clump of bricks, conservative women in bikinis cause the biggest political controversy of Christmastide, and Maine becomes the second state to kick Trump off the ballot.
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Ep.1395
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A federal judge has just ordered a woman to pay $298,000 for burning down Wyoming's only full-service abortion clinic.
According to NBC News, quote, Lorna Green is already serving five years in prison for burning Wellspring Health Access weeks before the clinic was set to open in 2022.
But hold on.
Can one really call it an abortion clinic if it hadn't opened yet?
Shouldn't the stage of development at which this woman aborted the building determine whether or not her actions constitute a crime?
I'm not saying the building could not one day have become an abortion clinic.
It could have.
It was maybe a potential abortion clinic.
But when she burned it down, it was not an abortion clinic.
It was just a clump of bricks.
And five years in prison seems pretty steep for damaging a clump of bricks.
There are criminals in this country, many criminals actually, who don't even face five years in the can for murder.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Merry Christmas.
Happy New Year.
I can already hear it.
Some people are going to criticize my analogy.
I'm sure Media Matters is already writing up the hit piece, all the left-wing outlets, they're already writing it up.
They're going to say that my analogy does not hold because when a woman has an abortion, she makes the choice to end the life of her own child, which they say is her right.
Whereas the woman who burned down the potential abortion clinic, she burned down someone else's property over which she has no rights.
I hear it.
I know that this is going to be the rejoinder.
But then the logical follow-up to that would be, are people property?
Can people ever be someone else's property?
Democrats say yes.
They've said yes to that question a number of times throughout history.
But they're wrong.
No surprise there.
Breaking news.
The libs are wrong.
Not exactly stop the presses kind of news.
There's a lot going on.
A lot going on in this week that I've been off.
I tell you, I love being off for a week because I get to see my beautiful family.
I get to play with my cute little kids.
I like that and I know it's good to do that.
Every now and again.
But it kills me.
It pains me not to do this show.
I would have come in and done this show a little bit.
Last week.
Maybe not every single day, but I would have done a little work last week, but out of deference to our beautiful Daily Wire staff, we didn't.
We were down for a week, and that means that a lot of stuff happened during the week.
Maine kicked Donald Trump off the ballot.
We'll get to that in a second.
A whole lot of stuff happened, some of which was surprising, some of which was unsurprising.
Probably the least surprising news to have happened over the last week or week and a half is that on New Year's Eve, Green Day, do you remember Green Day?
They were really popular in 2002, and we haven't heard very much from them since, but they're back.
Green Day performed a version of the only song of theirs that anyone has ever heard of, which is called American Idiot.
But in their new version, they swap out some words to make it an attack on those MAGA Americans.
Well, maybe I'm a f***er man.
I'm running part of a MAGA gym.
Everybody seems to be a problem.
I stand alone at the age of paranoia.
You hear it?
They said MAGA Agenda!
And I guess it worked because people are talking about Green Day for the first time in over 20 years.
Some people are surprised by this change, in part because punk rock has sometimes had a right-wing flavor to it.
Wasn't one of the Ramones a big right-wing Republican?
It's unlike all of the rest of popular music outside of country, say.
It's not totally left-wing, but Green Day has always been super left-wing.
There's no big change here with Green Day.
The original lyrics to American Idiot in that line that you just heard where they changed some of the words was, quote, well, maybe I'm the f*** America.
I'm not part of a redneck agenda.
Now everybody do the propaganda and sing along to the age of paranoia.
And they just swapped out redneck for MAGA, which every single lib in America identifies as a synonym of redneck anyway.
And don't want to be an American One nation controlled by the media.
Information age of hysteria.
It's calling out to idiot America.
Okay, so Green Day hasn't changed.
They're still attacking Republicans.
They're still attacking right-wingers.
They're still attacking the most recent Republican president.
But something has changed.
This is much more ridiculous in 2023 than it was in 2003.
Why is that?
Well, because In 2002-2003, Green Day could pretend to be part of the opposition.
They could pretend to be dissidents.
You know, George W. Bush is out here with his redneck coalition of voters that's going to go out and police the whole world.
And George Bush Controls the media.
That was always ridiculous.
But they say, you know, Fox News and and the actually even the New York Times, even the rest of the media did support Bush in the Iraq War.
They didn't support Bush most of the time, but in the run up to the Iraq War, the entire media were pretty much on board with that.
So they had a claim in 2002, 2003.
But what about today?
Does anybody really believe one nation controlled by the media refers to the right wing media?
Are you kidding me?
The right-wing media have been banned.
There's one social media platform where the right-wing media are not heavily suppressed, and that would be Twitter.
Information Age of Hysteria.
Information Age of Hysteria.
Where's the hysteria?
Is the hysteria on the right?
Where we're saying, hey guys, can you not let Husky Hank go into the girls changing room at the public pool with my daughter?
Would you mind?
Can we acknowledge that boys and girls are different and nations have borders and can everyone be normal?
Or is the hysteria on the left where they're screeching and screaming that Donald Trump is Hitler 2.0 and that's why we've got to kick him off all the ballots and the only way to save democracy is to stop the most popular candidate in the race from appearing on ballots.
Who's hysterical?
Who's calling out to idiot America?
Idiot America.
Okay, some Americans don't know the difference between boys and girls.
Okay, now I don't like to call anybody an idiot.
I understand there's a lot of confusion in this fallen world.
But if you're going to call someone an idiot, if you're going to call one ideology in America an idiot ideology, which ideology is it going to be?
The ideology that says, hey, be normal, or the ideology that says men actually can be women?
Green Day hasn't changed at all.
Too bad that they haven't.
Had they changed, they would appear much less ridiculous today.
What has changed is the political order of the country.
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Now, I haven't even touched on the biggest controversy of this week off that we had.
It was all anyone could talk about.
It is much more important than any wars going on overseas, much more important than the migrant invasion going on within our borders, much more important than the 2024 election.
I, of course, refer to the bikini calendar.
If you have not heard about this, that means you are not on Twitter during or X now.
Between Christmas and New Year.
The calendar is put out by the guy who has the ultra-right beer company, Seth Weathers, and his brand is Conservative Dads.
And the calendar is Conservative Dads, Real Women of America, 2024 calendar, and it features a bunch of pretty right-wing gals, some of whom perhaps have appeared on this show and who I'm friends with, actually.
But you know, the one on the cover is Riley Gaines, and a number of other women are in the calendar.
I don't want to knock the calendar too much because, as I've mentioned, I'm friends with a number of the people involved.
I think the big reason why this became a controversy is because it was a very quiet Newsweek.
Christmas is going on.
New Year's is going on.
People didn't have that much to bicker about, so people bickered about this.
In part, I assume it was a marketing strategy to sell more calendars, and I assumed it worked very well because everybody was talking about it for a while.
The only reason I bring up the calendar The only thing about it that I think is politically significant is that I think the controversy, beyond all those other causes I just mentioned, stems from a conflict, a festering conflict, that has gone on for a very, very long time, but is really coming to the surface now, between two kinds of conservatism.
Boomer conservatism and Zoomer conservatism.
Two kinds of conservatism.
The conservatism of 15 years ago, just, yeah, man, do whatever you want.
Just don't make me pay for it.
Let's shrink the government.
Let's not pay any taxes.
Freedom!
There's that kind of conservatism.
And there's the younger, Zoomer conservatism, which is, hey, can we please have a normal society?
Can we maybe recall some of the virtues?
Can we have order?
Can we have normality?
Can we Can we have a nice flourishing country in which to live that has standards and norms?
Those are very different types of conservatism, okay?
I think you know where my sympathies lie in this kind of battle, but that's what this battle is.
It really has nothing to do...
It has very little to do with the pretty ladies who are posing in the calendar.
It has a little bit to do with the fact that the brand happens to be Conservative Dad.
So even if you're fine with pretty girls in a calendar, the fact that it's being marketed by and perhaps to fathers who should be married, with women who are married, and that kind of creates a little bit of an issue with it too.
Wouldn't necessarily recommend that.
But below all of that, the deeper issue going on, is a battle between Russell Kirk and Ayn Rand.
Who has the soul of the conservative movement?
Is conservatism about conserving a way of life and order and norms?
A moral sense and maybe a Christian religious tradition, or is conservatism just about freedom?
Do whatever you, not even, again, not my view of freedom, but freedom, like, you know, just go do whatever you want.
Don't tell me what to do, man.
Get out of here, authority, right?
What is it?
Russell Kirk or Ayn Rand?
Is it Pat Buchanan or is it George H.W.
Bush?
We had this debate in 1992.
What is it?
Is it the conservatism of normality, a way of life, a whole political order, or is it, let's get that GDP up again?
Is it the conservatism of order and virtue?
Is it the conservatism of choice and licentiousness?
That's the battle.
And probably the calendar's defenders would say, oh, Michael, you're making a big deal out of it.
I'm not denying that this issue was overblown.
It was overblown because people were bored over Christmas, no doubt.
But that political conflict that the calendar represents, that is very real, and that is not overblown.
That's a conflict that has been simmering in the so-called conservative movement going back to World War II, okay?
Going back to the founding of what is called Capital C, Capital M, conservative movement trademark over the T. That's been boiling for a long time.
Which is it going to be?
Brent Bozell had this argument in the pages of National Review back when National Review was the house organ of the conservative movement.
It's a freedom of virtue.
What does freedom even mean, right?
That's what's going on here.
Which side is winning?
Well, the dominant side remains the boomer side, because the boomers still wield most of the political power.
But the ascendant side is the zoomer side.
The ascendant side is order and virtue, which is fine by me.
Fine by me.
Now, we might not need to worry about what the future of the conservative movement holds, because conservatives might not hold any political power.
If we hold any now, we might not hold it for very long.
Anyway, because Maine has become the second state to kick Donald Trump off the ballot in the 2024 primary.
Now you remember a couple weeks ago Colorado kicks Trump off the ballot.
The way Colorado did that was in a very contentious decision, 4-3 decision by the Colorado Supreme Court that said that Trump is a terrible insurrectionist and that's why they're going to invoke some Never used in this way precedent of the, or non-precedent I guess, never used in this way provision of the 14th Amendment which was really just a Civil War era provision to stop Confederate generals from taking over the country.
Well they're going to use it to kick Trump off the ballot.
Okay.
Now Maine is going even further.
It's not the Maine Supreme Court.
It's not a group of robed lawyers who are seriously considering the law and bringing their legal scholarship to bear.
It's just some Democrat politician, some total kook, whose name is Shena Bellows.
She's the main Democrat Secretary of State.
She is seen in photographs.
Buddy, buddy with Joe Biden.
She visited the White House in March.
She visited the White House in June, according to visitor logs.
She says that the Electoral College, that is to say, the way we do elections in America, is a relic of white supremacy.
Okay, she's a nut.
And she's come out and single-handedly kicked Donald Trump off the ballot, which is even worse than it sounds.
Because if you're a Republican, maybe you don't like Donald Trump.
But still, you would have to say, well look, Donald Trump is the most popular candidate in the Republican Party.
So now you've got a Democrat politician single-handedly kicking off the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties in the United States.
That's crazy.
But it's even worse than that.
Because Donald Trump is not just the most popular Republican candidate.
He is the most popular presidential candidate in the country.
By pretty much any measure.
So if you look at the RealClearPolitics average of polls, RCP is very good.
I cite them a lot because they don't just look at one poll or this poll and this one's an outlier or maybe this one's not reliable.
They look at all the polls and they weight them according to their reliability.
And so you get a much sturdier number here from RCP.
And according to RCP, head-to-head, Trump over Biden, Trump wins by 2.4 points right now.
Now, it might not just be Trump and Biden.
Don't forget, Bobby Kennedy Jr.
might be running, right?
Okay, what happens if it's Trump versus Biden versus Bobby Kennedy Jr.?
Trump wins by one point.
Beats both of those guys.
Okay, it might not just be Bobby Kennedy Jr.
What if it's Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate?
What if it's Cornel West, who is a radical leftist professor from Princeton?
I think he was at Harvard for a while.
He's a leftist who kind of pulls support from Joe Biden and it's Biden and it's Trump.
What happens in that case?
Trump wins by five points.
Donald Trump is the most popular presidential candidate in the United States by any measure.
If a random Democrat politician can single-handedly take him off the ballot in a state In the name of defending democracy, then what does democracy mean?
In that case, it doesn't mean anything.
Democracy is government by the people.
If the people are not permitted to cast their ballot for the most popular guy, then there's no democracy anymore.
Now, Trump remains the top dog in the race.
There was a change over the break, though, and the change is that there is a number two dog in the race who we haven't seen before, and that would be Nikki Haley.
Ron DeSantis has been the number two guy in the Republican race for all of 2023.
And he is still the number two guy.
He's just the number two guy that's tied with the number two lady who is Nikki Haley.
Now, people are shocked by this because people have very strong feelings about Nikki Haley.
People who are a little bit more centrist.
They really like Nikki Haley.
A lot of the Republican consultants really like Nikki Haley.
They think that she's got the best chance to beat Joe Biden because she appeals to a broader array of people.
Conservatives often do not like Nikki Haley.
They find her to be a bit establishment, a bit Bush-era kind of Republican, a little eager to go invade foreign countries, and so they don't like her.
And some of the criticism from the conservative side of the Republican Party has been intense at Nikki Haley.
But when Nikki announced that she was running in this race, you know I hate to say I told you so, I believe I pointed out that one should not count out Nikki Haley.
Everyone was making fun of her, she's going nowhere, she has no constituency, her views are outdated, blah blah blah, all this stuff.
I said, you guys don't know what you're talking about.
Nikki Haley is a very, very talented politician.
She managed, think about this, she is...
One of, if not the, only politician in America who has huge establishment cred, who has major cred among the Bush wing of the Republican Party, who did very, very well under Trump.
She served under Trump.
She was Trump's face at the United Nations.
She was very popular in that role.
When she left the White House, Trump basically gave her a ticker tape parade, okay?
He had that big press conference, sitting with her.
Nikki's done a great job.
We really like her.
Then she turned on Trump, then she turned back and supported Trump, then she kind of turned on Trump again, running against him, and still Trump is saying nice things about her.
Nikki is very good at politics.
So it is no surprise to me that entering into 2024, she is now a number two candidate in the race.
What we will wait for this week and next week is, can Nikki kick DeSantis to number three?
Right now they're tied.
Can she kick him to number three?
I would not be surprised.
As I said, you know, I hate to say I told you so, but as I said for a year, DeSantis is great.
He's really great.
He's a great governor.
He's terrific.
I really admire the guy.
He's fabulous.
But part of the things that are really likable about him to someone like me are going to make him unpopular as a candidate because he's a little too Trumpy To attract the establishment centrist folks, but he's not Trumpy enough.
He's not Trump, so he's not going to pull enough of the Trump voters.
Which means that while he looks like maybe he's the best candidate in the race, he's also a man without a home.
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Now, things are looking good for Nikki Haley.
She did get in a little bit of trouble over the break.
She was asked a question on the civil war of all things on the campaign trail, and she was criticized for her answer.
What was the cause of the United States civil war?
Well, don't come with an easy question or anything.
I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run.
The freedoms and what people could and couldn't do.
What do you think the cause of the Civil War was?
I'm sorry?
I'm not running for president.
I wanted to see your report on the cause of the Civil War.
I mean, I think it always comes down to the role of government.
We need to have capitalism.
We need to have economic freedom.
We need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.
Thank you.
And then in the year 2023, it's astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word slavery.
What do you want me to say about slavery?
No, you've answered my question.
Thank you.
Next question.
Obviously this questioner here is trying to trip up Nikki Haley.
I don't know if it's a Democrat plant.
Probably it is.
It could be a plant from one of the other Republican campaigns.
Or I guess it could be just a person who doesn't like Nikki Haley very much for personal reasons.
But what's astonishing about the question and the answer This is not the question, and it's not the answer.
It's the apparent belief on the part of the questioner, and maybe on the part of Nikki Haley, that slavery is a wedge issue in the Republican Party.
That's what this is about.
The questioner asks the question because he thinks that any way Nikki Haley answers is going to alienate some of her voters.
If she says that the Civil War is about states' rights, then she's going to alienate voters who are anti-slavery.
You know, that the anti-slavery faction of the Republican Party.
But, that if she says that the Civil War was about slavery, she's going to alienate that huge pro-slavery portion of the Republican Party.
And so, haha, we've got a great wedge issue here.
Not surprised that Democrats think that.
They think all sorts of nasty things about Republicans that aren't true.
Nikki appears to I think that there's some portion of Republicans who don't want to hear about slavery.
Now, I actually think that her answer was almost fine.
Everyone was saying it's catastrophic, it's the end of her career, it's the worst answer.
I think the answer was basically fine because the true answer to what was the Civil War about is, yeah, it was about all those things.
It was about the political power of the South in the federal government.
Abraham Lincoln was able to win the presidency without the South, meaning the South no longer had much of a say at all in the federal government, which might be reason enough, if you think of the South as a distinct political entity, totally distinct from the North, might be reason enough to impel you to secede.
And also, what was the hottest issue of the time that had taken over the country, that had dictated so much of the politics of westward expansion?
It was slavery, no question about that.
So yeah, it was both of those things.
And furthermore, I don't think that there are very many pro-slavery Republicans.
I don't think there are any, actually.
I think, as we mentioned at the top of this show, That there are many Democrats who support the logic of slavery, the premises of slavery, the notion that you can own another person.
You see the Democrats, I'm not even just making some point about Democrats or they're true racists or it was the Democrats who owned all the slaves or kind of talking points we've heard in the past.
I'm making a point about the politics of today.
Democrats today are arguing that if you have a child, that you have full property rights over that child and you can kill that child if you want, if it's convenient for you.
That's what I'm saying.
That's the logic of abortion.
Or even more than that, it's the logic of IVF and surrogacy.
The notion that if you have a child, or you even have the potential to make a child, that you have total property rights and you can order your child out of a catalog.
And if you don't like the way the child comes out, then you can order the child to be killed in the womb of your surrogate, who you also paid for.
We've seen stories about that.
I gave a long speech about that just about a month ago.
You can catch that on the YAF YouTube channel.
So, I'm saying that the logic of today, the policies argued today by the parties, if in any way it touches on the logic of slavery, it's coming from the Democrats, not the Republicans.
And it's silly that this Democrat questioner, this anti-Haley questioner, thought it was a Republican thing.
But it should be a wake-up call to the Haley campaign.
That Nikki stumbled on the question too.
I think you could say both of those things and move on.
And she did move on, that was very smart of her.
I don't think it's really gonna hurt her.
There are way worse gaffes on a campaign trail than this.
But I don't think I think if you fall into the error of believing there's a big pro-slavery portion of the Republican Party, it's because you've just believed the Democrat propaganda that has been crammed down our throats for the past 50 years.
Now, another smart thing the Haley campaign is doing, she's promising to pardon Trump if Trump is convicted of crimes.
So Haley came out, she said, A leader needs to think about what is in the best interests of the country.
What is in the best interest of the country is not to have an 80-year-old man sitting in jail that continues to divide our country.
What is in the best interest of our country is to pardon him so that we can move on as a country and no longer talk about him.
So, she's still got a properly anti-Trump tone to this.
She's running against him.
She's got to be opposing him.
The substance of what she's saying is, yeah, I'll pardon him, as well she should, as all of the Republican candidates should promise to do.
The only reason that the Democrats are going after this guy is because he was an effective conservative.
He's the most effective conservative president of our lifetimes, even if you hate his guts, and his tweets, and his face, and his demeanor, and everything about him.
You have to admit that, I think.
The guy got Roe v. Wade overruled, he is the first Republican president Maybe ever.
First Republican president in probably about 100 years to make mass migration a major political issue and do anything to try to stem the tide of that.
He's the first Republican politician in well over a quarter, no, over probably half a century now to focus on America's national interest in explicit terms against globalism and Global liberalism, liberal empire.
He was pretty good, you know?
He had some flaws, but he was pretty good.
And the only reason the libs are going after him is not because he led an insurrection or whatever.
The liberals have led many more serious insurrections on the Capitol that have actually killed people, not just their own supporters, killed members of Congress, killed all sorts of people, blown up parts of the Capitol many, many times over the years.
We never heard insurrection then.
Donald Trump disputed the results of an election that was obviously rigged.
Democrats have been denying the results of elections, of most elections that they lose, at the national level and of state national prominence for a long time.
The 2000 election, the Stacey Abrams non-election in Georgia, a lot of them, even the 2004 election, Bush versus Kerry.
The only reason they're going after him is because he's an effective conservative.
I want to hear every Republican candidate saying, yes, of course we'll pardon Trump.
If I don't hear that, I understand you're running against Trump, you don't like the guy, you want to knock him down.
But if I don't hear that, then it makes me think you're on the other team.
If I hear, well, you know, if the Democrats discover that Donald Trump actually did commit a crime, that makes me think, all right, you're a lib.
You know, you're a Democrat shill.
If you can't acknowledge the injustice of what they're doing to Trump while still effectively running against him, then you're not it, man.
Then you're not it.
Now, does this mean that Nikki Haley is cozying up to Donald Trump a little bit here?
Maybe.
Maybe.
And Trump says some nice things about Haley, too.
Does this mean that Haley's strategy is get stronger, stronger, stronger, Displace DeSantis as the number two candidate.
Vanquish Vivek.
I guess Chris Christie's still running, but forget about Chris Christie.
He'll endorse Nikki Haley.
And then try to have a unity ticket, like a Reagan-Bush 1980 sort of ticket.
Trump-Haley.
Then the question that comes from that is, will the Trump supporters tolerate a Nikki Haley VP pick?
That I don't know, because Fairly or unfairly, the perceived political vision of Trump and Haley is quite different.
The way that their supporters perceive their candidacies, very different.
On the Trump side of things, it's people like Tucker, okay?
It's people who want fewer foreign entanglements, who want a more intense focus on the American nation, who don't want to just Give money to Chamber of Commerce-like candidates to focus on economics above all.
The Haley candidates tend to be a little bit more centrist.
They tend to be a little bit more Wall Street donor types.
They tend to be a little happier with foreign entanglements, especially in the Middle East.
Are Trump voters going to tolerate a Haley BP?
That remains to be seen.
Speaking of foreign entanglements, a good report out of Politico over the week.
It's good.
It's a good report, but it's frustrating.
The report is that the Biden administration is subtly, quietly shifting strategy on Ukraine.
This from Politico.
For two years, Biden and Zelensky have been focused on driving Russia from Ukraine.
Now, Washington is discussing a move to a more defensive posture.
Quote, With U.S.
and European aid to Ukraine now in serious jeopardy, the Biden administration and European officials are quietly shifting their focus from supporting Ukraine's goal of total victory over Russia to improving its position in an eventual negotiation to end the war, according to a Biden administration official.
And the way you know that this isn't just some random leak coming out of the White House, or a bunch of smoke being blown, is that you're seeing the same kind of language being echoed in the other state media organs.
New York Times, headline.
This isn't an opinion piece, headline.
Ukraine doesn't need all its territory to defeat Putin.
And who wrote this op-ed?
This was Serge Schumann, who is a member of the New York Times editorial board.
Ukraine, oh, Ukraine doesn't need all of its territory to defeat Putin, who invaded, and this whole war is about Ukraine's territory.
But it's not, you don't need all the territory.
That's a pretty big change.
That's a pretty big change.
Because some of us have argued this point from day one.
And for that we were called Putin stooges, and we were called useful idiots, and we were called all sorts of nasty things.
Anti-American, undemocratic, you support fascist dictators, and oh, hold on now!
Now that opinion, for which we were all pilloried as Putin idiot stooges, non-patriots, that is now the opinion of both major political parties in the United States.
Why?
Because what's the alternative?
Ukraine is not going to beat Russia.
That can't happen.
On its own, the war would have been over in 24 hours.
But because the U.S.
was actually fighting Russia here through this proxy of Ukraine, because we were funding the whole war, because we were sending all the arms and maybe some people to help fight the war, it has dragged on now for quite a while.
But it was never going to be enough unless the United States got directly involved.
So that means that the other alternative would be a world war.
We avoided it for the entirety of the Cold War, but now we're going to decide that the U.S.
the superpower in the world.
China's rising, but we remain the global hegemon.
We're going to go in and engage in a direct war with a nuclear former superpower in Russia.
And we're going to do this over the territorial integrity of Ukraine, the territory of which has changed about a bazillion times over the last thousand years, which is roughly how long this conflict has gone on.
Does that make a lot of sense?
That didn't make sense to me.
So what happened?
We are now totally vindicated.
Those of us who said that this was a bad war that was egged on by the USA.
and by NATO.
I'm not the only one to say it.
Henry Kissinger said it, Sam Nunn said it, George Kennan implied it, the author of the Long Telegram, the architect of American Cold War policy.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan said it.
A lot of very serious Americans have said this for a very long time.
And we were completely right.
You know how much it pains me to say it.
We were totally right.
And now we are exactly where we were at the very outbreak of this war, except that now, because the Democrats and the establishment Republican types got their way, at least 30,000 Ukrainians have been killed.
So at least we got that.
We got no strategic advantage whatsoever.
We got no difference to the way the war is going to end.
But, hey, at the very least, tens of thousands of Ukrainians are dead.
That's it.
These are the geniuses, by the way.
These are the grand strategists.
These are the guys who say the adults have got to be back in charge.
We can't let those unwashed, crazy populists, those right-wingers take over.
Okay, well, had the right-wingers been running the show, had those crazy, awful, nationalist, populist types been running the show, show me how we would have been any worse off.
I don't really see it.
My favorite comment, this would have been, what, a week ago now, more than a week ago, is from Heaton James, 2545, who says, Oh wow, man, talk about providential.
The comment actually ties in exactly with what I just said.
Hmm.
All nature is but art unknown to thee.
Comment is, isn't everyone glad that the adults are back in charge?
It just warms my heart that Caligula Biden is running the show.
Yes, it does, doesn't it?
Speaking of grand strategy, big breaking news.
Oh, this is good.
Report documents naming Jeffrey Epstein's associates to be unsealed.
Here's what to know.
This is from NBC News, ABC News.
All the news are reporting this.
But I got NBC right here.
What I love about this headline.
They send out the headline, everyone goes crazy.
And I had this prediction.
Look, it could still be proven wrong.
But my prediction Before the year ended was, we're not really going to get the Epstein client list.
We're not going to find out new people, okay?
And then, five seconds later, this headline.
They're going to unseal the Epstein client list.
I said, oh wow.
Man, maybe I was totally proven wrong.
That was fast.
That's the fastest I've ever been proven wrong, huh?
But hold on, here's the headline.
Court documents naming Jeffrey Epstein's associates to be unsealed.
What to know?
Subheader.
Former President Clinton, Prince Andrew, and others are expected to be named.
Hold on.
We know that Bill Clinton was an Epstein associate.
We've known that for the better part of 10 years.
Okay?
We've seen his name on the flight logs.
We've seen pictures of Bill Clinton with Jeffrey Epstein.
We know that Bill Clinton flew all around the world with Jeffrey Epstein on the Lolita Express.
When he wasn't flying with Epstein, it's because he was borrowing his plane.
I don't need to find out that Bill Clinton is an Epstein-associated plane.
Prince Andrew?
Prince Andrew lost his job working for his mom because we all know that he hung out with Epstein.
We have pictures of Prince Andrew with Jeffrey Epstein.
We have court settlements where Prince Andrew has paid Jeffrey Epstein's former young ladies.
Okay?
I don't need to hear about that.
I want to hear about the and others.
That's what I want to hear about.
I don't want the names that we already know.
That's called a limited hangout, okay?
It's a term that in intelligence circles and crisis communication circles, where you're caught.
You're up against a wall.
They got you dead to rights.
You've been lying.
You've been lying.
You've been denying.
You've been denying.
And now you say, okay, what are we going to do?
I'm going to give them something.
And so what you do is you only give a little bit.
In this case, you'd be giving something that everyone already knows.
Yeah, we already know that Bill Clinton hung out with Jeffrey Epstein.
Oh, did Bill Gates hang out with him too?
Yeah, we got pictures of that also.
I don't want to hear about those guys.
I mean, I'll hear more, I guess, but I want to hear about the guys that I haven't heard about yet.
That's the first thing I want.
Give us the real Epstein client list, the names we haven't heard.
More than that, though.
The question that I want to know the answer to with regard to Jeffrey Epstein is, who was he working for?
Nothing about Jeffrey Epstein's life really adds up.
Very shady past.
He's got this business associate slash romantic partner whose father was mobbed up with at least three intelligence agencies around the world.
We know he was mobbed up with British intelligence, maybe Russian intelligence, and certainly Israeli intelligence, okay?
We know that Jeffrey Epstein was mobbed up with intelligence.
We know this from Alex Acosta, who was a U.S.
attorney prosecuting Jeffrey Epstein in Florida, who then was up for Labor Secretary under Donald Trump, and reportedly in his interview, when he was asked about the Epstein prosecution, he said, I was told not to really go too hard after Epstein because Epstein, quote, belonged to intelligence.
What intelligence?
I don't know.
Is all of that fake?
Is that all just fake news and weird coincidences with Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell?
Maybe, but I want to know.
Was Jeffrey Epstein rigging up his properties to record people engaging in weird, illegal sex stuff with underage girls just to enrich Jeffrey Epstein?
Look, maybe he was just a con artist, a blackmail artist, who was shaking down these rich guys to enrich himself.
Was this part of an intelligence operation?
If so, which intelligence?
Was he working for foreign intelligence?
MI6, Israel, Russia?
Or was he working for American intelligence?
Or was he working for lots of different types of intelligence?
But I want to know...
Less about the scintillating little details of who did what with whom, in terms of what was going on in those massage rooms.
I want to know who did what with whom with regard to what was this operation for?
You know a thing by what it's for.
What was this for?
What was the Epstein weird sex island and the penthouses and the video cameras, what was that all in service of?
Speaking of weird sex stuff, another day another Republican disappoints you.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has just vetoed a bill banning boys from girls sports.
Seems like the kind of bill that should be a no-brainer, right?
Boys, being different from girls, should not compete against the girls in girls sports, which only exists so that girls have their own places to compete because they can't beat boys.
Mike DeWine doesn't seem to get that.
He vetoed a bill on December 29th that would protect these kids from the crazy trans stuff.
So it would prevent the kids from going through the modern-day lobotomies of being medically transitioned, which leads to all sorts of health problems, bone problems, early death in some cases, sterility in a lot of cases, and also it would ban the dudes from playing in women's sports.
He vetoes it.
Now Trump, who had been initially an opponent of DeWine, and then endorsed DeWine, he's now turned on DeWine again.
And he said, DeWine has fallen to the radical left.
No wonder he gets loudly booed in Ohio every time I introduce him at rallies.
But I won't be introducing him anymore.
I'm finished with this stiff.
What was he thinking?
The bill would have stopped child mutilation and prevented men from playing in women's sports.
Legislature will hopefully overturn.
Do it fast!
What was he thinking?
DeWine explains his logic.
He says, I've also listened to youth and parents, parents who have told me if not for this treatment, their child would be dead.
He might be sincere.
He might be, I don't know.
He might be just a bought and paid for chamber of commerce jerk, but he might be sincere.
I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Because I know that there are parents out there who have subjected their kids to this stuff, who aren't just completely insane ideologues who hate their children.
I know there are parents out there, I think there are a lot of parents out there, who hear this stuff from the teachers, from the guidance counselors, from the doctors.
They say, if you don't do this, If you don't sterilize your kid, put your kid on puberty blockers, castrate your kid, pretend that your kid is the opposite sex when we all know he isn't, if you don't do that, your kid's gonna kill himself.
And then, would you rather have a living daughter or a dead son?
What is it?
This guy might have good intentions.
The road to hell, you will recall, is paved with good intentions.
And what's wrong about this here is the ethical principle that led DeWine to come to this decision, which is an ends justify the means.
Morality.
It's consequentialist thinking, to use a more technical term.
It's the idea that you make moral decisions based on the outcome that you think is going to occur, rather than the goodness of the actions themselves, or the virtue and the character of one who would make those decisions.
Good judgment.
Prudence.
That is leftist thinking.
Because people, when they try to predict the consequences, they usually get them wrong, And two, because actions are moral or immoral.
Characters are good or bad, okay?
You're not going to live a good life by doing lots of bad things.
You're not going to have a good country, a good outcome for your country, by doing lots of individual really, really bad things.
You're not going to flourish individually or politically by lying all the time.
You're not going to flourish individually or politically by denying reality.
Well, if we just deny the most basic aspects of biological reality, of human reality.
Then somehow, secretly, through a magical procedure, we're going to end up with a really good country.
I don't think so.
I think people who lie to themselves and nations that lie to themselves, they fail.
