Ep. 1397 - The New Epstein Documents Explained In 2 Mins
The highly anticipated new court documents in the Jeffrey Epstein case underwhelm, the first virtual rape case in metaverse is underway, and Conservatives pounce on Harvard president according to the AP.
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Ep.1397
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Highly anticipated new court documents in the Jeffrey Epstein case have just been unsealed, and everyone is talking about all the lurid details.
Did you know that Epstein's lawyer visited his house on multiple occasions?
Did you know that Prince Andrew visited Epstein's island?
Did you know that Bill Clinton, it turns out, has a penchant for young ladies?
Yes, you knew that.
You knew all of that.
You and I and everyone, broadly, knew about every supposedly new revelation to come out of the unsealed documents.
And most likely, that's all we're ever going to know.
It's a limited hangout.
That's a term of art in espionage and public relations, which makes sense because that is quite clearly what the whole Jeffrey Epstein drama has been about from the beginning.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
A girl, a child under 16, claims to have been gang raped in the metaverse.
This is the first investigation of this kind by prosecutors in the UK, and I think I have a different take than pretty much everybody, but we'll get to that in just a second.
First, before we move on from the shocking Epstein revelations, this is the most ridiculous one.
This is my favorite one of all of them.
And this was one of the little special leaks that came out before the court documents were unsealed, just to whet all of our appetite for the shocking revelations that we all already knew.
Headline in the Daily Mail, Judge Set to Reveal Disturbing Claims About Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein by Prince Andrew's Sex Accuser Johanna Schauberg.
And here's the big shocking new evidence that we were told was going to come out and then it did come out and that was supposedly going to blow everybody's minds.
Ms.
Sjoberg has previously claimed that the King's brother put his hand on her breast at the Manhattan home of multi-millionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in 2001.
Ms.
Sjoberg, now a hairdresser, 42 years old, living in Florida, has previously said that Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her to provide massages for Epstein in 2001 while she was in college, recalling This incident, Ms.
Sjoberg said in a deposition given under oath, quote, I remember someone suggesting a photo, and they told us to get on the couch.
Virginia, one of the other girls, and Prince Andrew sat on the couch, and they put a puppet on her lap.
So I sat on Andrew's lap, I believe of my own volition, and they took the puppet's hands and put it on Virginia's breast, and so Andrew put his on mine.
She said it was all done in a, quote, joking manner.
According to her previous accounts, the prince, while being inappropriately tactile, had not caused offense.
Whoa!
Oh, wow, man.
So you're saying we got this guy, Jeffrey Epstein, who is cavorting at palling around buddy buddies with.
Every rich, powerful guy that you could even possibly imagine, all over the world, royalty, heads of state, prime ministers, businessmen, he's got, he's taken them all to this island full of underage girls, this weird pedo island, and flying them around on his airplane, and it was all wired for sound, so he's got videotapes of all these guys doing super creepy illegal sex stuff with children, and the big shocking revelation is that
Prince Andrew touched a girl who was of age, who was clearly over 18, while she sat on his lap of her own volition, and it was all done in a joking manner and did not cause offense.
Wow.
Cool story, bro.
It's nothing.
That's nothing.
What is being alleged here is not illegal, obviously.
It's not even, by today's standards, particularly inappropriate.
I'm not saying it's the way a man ought to behave, but by today's standards?
That's almost wholesome!
Are you kidding me?
Obviously, there is so much more to know about all of the clients.
What do we know?
We know a handful of Jeffrey Epstein's clients by name, but we know that there were many, many others who were extremely powerful.
Who are they?
We know that they were doing super creepy things with underage girls.
Let's hear about those incidents.
We know that there were cameras in all the rooms.
Where are the tapes?
Oh, we don't get any of that.
We just get a slightly embarrassing episode about Prince Andrew that we already knew.
Cool.
Cool, man.
When are we going to get significant information about Jeffrey Epstein?
Sounds like probably on the 31st of February, 20-never.
That's when we're going to get that information.
It's never going to come out.
And the only reason they're making a big hubbub about the unsealed documents now is to distract everybody with a limited hangout, which is a term of art in espionage, which is clearly what was going on on Epstein's Island and in his townhouse and on all of his properties.
And it's a term of art in public relations and crisis communications, which is what's going on here, too.
Totally ridiculous.
Mike Cernovich put this very well.
His take on Epstein is the same take that I've been advancing for a long time.
In fact, what's funny about the timing of all this is right before the new year, I was asked to make my predictions, my Noel Stradamus predictions for the new year.
And my final one was, we're not going to get any significant new information on Jeffrey Epstein.
We're not going to really find out the client list.
We're not going to learn anything.
And then the next day, Right after I filmed that, headlines, we're going to see all the unsealed Epstein documents.
I said, oh darn, maybe I was wrong.
I said, no, I wasn't wrong.
This is totally fake news.
This is going to be a total fake news distraction.
And it turns out I was totally right.
What Mike Cernovich said here was that years ago, back in 2017, his lawyer was working on a Freedom of the Press case.
And it was a defamation case and Epstein wasn't the defendant, but it kind of involved Epstein.
So, this goes on, they're filing all these cases in court.
Cernovich says, hundreds of thousands of dollars later.
A trip to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and a lot of fighting.
We had a batch of documents ready to be unsealed.
The weekend before the documents were made public, the Southern District of New York arrested Epstein.
Quietly.
When he landed his private jet on an airport from a trip he took in France.
No perp walk for Jeffrey Epstein.
He goes on to say the indictment against Epstein does not charge anyone except Epstein.
And there's nothing to indicate that anyone who flew to Epstein's private island has faced scrutiny.
Well, that's kind of weird.
the Southern District of New York, charged the lowest level offenses possible, they, quote, lacked jurisdiction to raid Epstein's island in Little St. James, as well as his New Mexico and Paris properties.
Those houses were left unattended for a couple of weeks.
During that time, a safe went missing.
Well, that's kind of weird.
How did a safe go missing in Jeffrey Epstein's properties?
What would have been in that safe?
He had a lot of lurid stuff, a lot of valuable stuff just sitting out.
So whatever was in the safe had to be very, very valuable.
We know that the properties were totally wired with cameras and microphones.
We know they were recording extremely powerful people doing extremely illegal and embarrassing things.
We, I think, can deduce that what was in the safe was compromise.
During the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, Cernovich points out, it was reported that evidence from Jeffrey Epstein's safe went missing after a raid by the FBI.
Well then.
I don't care who showed up to Epstein's Island to do what, really.
I care a little bit.
It'd be good for people to be brought to justice.
The thing that everyone is talking about, I don't really care about.
Ooh, did you hear this lawyer showed up and did the, ooh, look, Prince Andrew groped a 21-year-old.
Okay, wow, stop the presses.
The question that interests me is, who was all of this in service of?
Where'd all that money come from?
Where'd all these properties come from?
Why were the properties wired for sound?
Why were there cameras everywhere?
What was in that safe?
Who has the contents of the safe now?
Who was the contents of the safe made for?
That's what I want to know.
We know that Ghislaine Maxwell's father was a spy.
We know that he was mobbed up with Israeli intelligence, Russian intelligence, and British intelligence.
We know, we already knew that Jeffrey Epstein had a relation to American intelligence.
We know this because Alex Acosta, who was the U.S.
Attorney prosecuting Jeffrey Epstein back in Florida, while he was being interviewed to be Trump's Labor Secretary, said that in order to explain why he put the kid gloves on for Jeffrey Epstein, he said, oh, I was told from up above that Jeffrey Epstein belonged to intelligence.
So now I think we got pretty good reason to believe that he had a relationship with American intelligence because his safe went missing when the FBI raided the house.
Okay, what was this thing?
What was the Epstein operation?
Obviously some kind of intelligence operation.
What was it and who was it for?
That's what I want to know.
By the way, I'm not suicidal.
Just letting you know.
I want to put this out there right now.
I am not suicidal.
I've not had suicidal thoughts.
Not.
Just asking a question, okay?
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A lot of men feeling a lot of discomfort right now with the questions that are being asked and the evidence that could theoretically come to light in the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Now speaking of making men uncomfortable, the new lady director of whatever the next Star Wars movie is going to be just gave a talk, I guess she was being interviewed by Jon Stewart, at a panel called Women in the World.
And she said that her goal for the next Star Wars movie is to make a really entertaining and beautiful movie that everyone's going to enjoy.
Just kidding!
What she said was her goal is to make men feel uncomfortable.
What is the balance of activating a force for change but also trying to permeate That patriarchy, that power structure, and is that a part of the calculation of your art as well, and what's been the reaction to that?
Oh, absolutely.
I like to make men uncomfortable.
I enjoy making men uncomfortable.
Not you, just naturally.
Point taken, point taken.
But, you know, it is important to be able to look into the eyes of a man and say, I am here, and recognize that.
And recognize that I am working to bring something that makes you uncomfortable, and it should make you uncomfortable, because you need to change your attitude.
And it's only when you're uncomfortable, when you're shifty, when you have to have So this clip is from some years ago.
This lady's name is Charmaine Obaid Chinoy, and it's coming to the forefront now because she's directing whatever the next Star Wars movie is.
And everyone is rightly concluding from this that the next Star Wars movie is going to be terrible.
That's been true of pretty much all the Disney Star Wars movies.
There was that one exception.
Rogue One I think was okay, but the rest of them have been just absolutely unbearably bad.
And the next one is probably going to be even worse.
But, everyone's just making fun of her and saying she's a crazy feminist and she's going to ruin Star Wars, which was ruined many years ago.
She does have a point.
She does have a point.
She says, I want to make men uncomfortable.
Men need to feel uncomfortable.
And I think that's true.
Not in the way that she intends it, but I think it's true.
She thinks that men are uncomfortable because they've never given their power away to women.
Men are uncomfortable because they've never accepted feminism.
Men are uncomfortable because they're living as the beneficiaries of the patriarchy.
That's all fake news.
That's all completely ridiculous.
The opposite is true.
And that is why men need to feel uncomfortable.
Men feel discomfort wielding power.
This goes all the way back to chapter 3 of the book of Genesis when Adam and Eve sin and God tells them what their punishment is going to be.
And their punishment is in a way a blessing because God is equipping man and woman to live in the fallen world.
He's preparing them for that.
And he says to Eve, he says to the woman, your desire will be for your man but he shall rule over you.
Men, contrary to what feminists think, don't actually want to lord over women.
They don't want to.
They don't want to be knuckle-dragging, you know, screaming, barking orders everywhere, making every single decision, just bossing everyone around.
That's not what men actually want.
You know what men actually want?
Men want to sit on the couch and eat potato chips and be left alone.
That is what men would do if we had our druthers.
It is a total lie of feminism that we want to be just stomping around, barking orders at everybody.
That's not what men want to do.
We don't want to make every decision.
We don't want to have all the responsibility.
We don't want the weight of a household and a family on our shoulders.
We just kind of want to be left alone.
That's our at least base appetite, to be resistant.
What we have to do, what we are called to rise up to do, is be responsible and make decisions and take accountability.
And that's what men need to do now.
Part of the reason that we have a lot of social dysfunction is because men won't act like men.
Men feel uncomfortable acting like men.
So we cede every responsibility to women.
So we act like women.
So in some cases we chop ourselves up and try to pretend to be women.
That's not good.
Do you really think that the problems, the social problems of America in the year of our Lord 2024 are that men are too masculine?
Men are too manly these days?
Are you kidding me?
Give me a break.
If social problems have increased over the last 50 years, as I think we would all have to agree they have, Over that period, have men become more manly or less manly?
Have men become more patriarchal or less patriarchal?
Have men become more feminist or less feminist?
The answers are very, very clear.
I totally agree with, what's her face, Charmaine Obaid Chinoy.
Men need to be made to feel uncomfortable.
And the thing that makes men most uncomfortable these days is acting like men and taking responsibility and wielding the just power with which we have been entrusted for most of history.
We feel less comfortable with that than ever, and to quote Don Corleone from a good movie, unlike some of these bad movies that have been coming out, from a good movie, Tells Johnny Fontaine, what do I, what do I do?
I don't know what to do, Godfather.
I know you can act like a man!
What's the matter with you?
What's the matter with you?
Speaking of men and women, and perhaps unexpected opinions, there is a really weird story coming out of the UK.
Police are investigating the first case of rape in the metaverse.
The metaverse is just the video game world that Mark Zuckerberg wants us all to live in.
You put on the goggles and it's a totally immersive kind of video game.
According to prosecutors, a child, a girl under the age of 16, was attacked in a virtual reality video game, and she was left distraught after her avatar was gang-raped by strangers online.
Now, the report goes on to make clear that the girl did not suffer any physical injuries.
Obviously, she was just wearing a headset in a video game.
But, prosecutors say she suffered emotional injuries, and they're going to investigate this as some kind of sexual crime.
And a lot of conservatives are making fun of this.
They're saying, are you kidding me?
She should have just taken the headset off.
Are you kidding me?
It's just a video game.
Grow up.
Are you kidding me?
She doesn't have any physical injuries, so there's no crime took place.
To which I say, that's the most liberal take I've ever heard.
Are you kidding me?
You think that the only kind of crime that can take place is a physical crime?
You think that what we do online is morally neutral?
That we shouldn't be held accountable for what we do online?
Are you kidding?
That's what the libs think.
That's not what the conservatives think.
Absolutely, these guys should be investigated.
I'm not saying it's identical to rape, but it's not totally dissimilar.
Why is rape bad?
Why is rape a more serious crime than any other kind of physical assault?
If rape were just about the body, if human life were just about the physical, Then a sexual assault would be no different from any other kind of assault, right?
The reason it's so much worse is because we're not just bodies, we're souls.
We have psyches, we have emotions, we have souls.
We value things like integrity and modesty and virtue.
And a violation, a sexual violation, is more severe.
It cuts more deeply at the human person than if someone just came up and punched you in the face or cut you on the wrist.
We're talking about a little girl here.
You know, if these guys were just discovered to have texted inappropriate messages to a, let's say, I don't know how old the girl is, but let's say she's 12 or 13.
If these guys were found to have texted inappropriate sexual messages at her, I think everyone would agree they should be investigated and probably prosecuted.
So why is it any different if it happens in a video game where instead of texting words, instead of the symbols being letters and words, the symbols are characters enacting all of these gross, obscene things on the avatar of a little girl.
The reason I think this is important is there is a view that has prevailed on the left and on the right that whatever the law says in the physical world, in the real world, We shouldn't be held accountable for anything we do online.
Online is just the Wild West, do whatever you want.
That's a bad situation that has allowed all sorts of terrible things to proliferate.
Lots of online crimes, obviously the now ubiquity of pornography, you know, sexual acts that you would never tolerate in the real physical world.
Everyone is allowed to indulge in and encouraged to indulge in online all the time.
A vicious kind of speech to one another.
Vicious, often threatening, sometimes illegal speech.
We just encourage that.
You would never talk to someone in real life the way you talk to someone on Twitter.
Online, it doesn't matter.
I think anything that allows us to recognize that what we do online is real Is a very good thing, and I think the girl probably is somewhat scarred.
Maybe not quite as much as if she were attacked in the physical world, but totally immersive virtual reality is a pretty close simulacrum, especially for people who aren't fully developed.
Go investigate these guys.
I mean, there's also this question, why was she even playing the video game in the first place?
Where were her parents?
Did these guys know she was a kid?
Maybe not.
You're just talking about little Avatar characters, but nevertheless, investigate this.
Put some guardrails on this.
If someone is living in the metaverse for, let's say, an hour a day, two hours a day, four or five hours a day, and they're behaving like a total satyr criminal psychosexual sadist, and then they take off the goggles and they go out to the real world.
Our modern liberal culture says, well, we can easily compartmentalize those things.
But any serious study of human nature says, no, you can't.
Because you're crafting your very desires, your behaviors, your way of viewing the world, your way of viewing women, your way of viewing people, your way of viewing yourself in the world.
You're crafting all of that with how you spend your time, how you fantasize, how you engage even if it's in virtual reality.
And that you're not going to be able to just totally cut that off once you re-enter into the real, the so-called real world.
I'm beginning to think the conservatives, you know, the church ladies, they were totally right about violent video games in the 90s.
They were just a little too soon.
Because in the 90s, you're talking about Mortal Kombat.
Everyone knows that's not reality.
Well, now when you throw on the metaverse goggles, the line between reality and video games is a lot blurrier, and it can play a lot more tricks on your psyche and your emotions and your desires, as we see here from the way this girl, I think, rightly claims to be victimized.
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Speaking of pouncing on women, the Associated Press is reporting that Harvard's president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges.
Plagiarism.
That's the new conservative weapon.
We developed it in our conservative bio labs, you know, our conservative armories.
We said, oh yes, here it is.
The new weapon that we're going to wield against the left, and the weapon is called Their own actions.
No, we invented that.
We invented plagiarism, you see.
No one ever cared about plagiarism before.
But now these cynical, bad-faith conservatives have decided that it's wrong to steal other people's academic work in scholarship.
This is the most serious academic crime you could commit and has been forever for the entire history of scholarship.
But now the AP says, no, these conservatives, they just invented that.
So I love the community notes on this post.
Say, actually, plagiarism is a breach of rules for Harvard University.
Claudine Gay was ultimately forced to resign for a series of breaches of this policy.
Plagiarism, or application of the rules around plagiarism, therefore cannot be considered a weapon.
Yeah, yeah, I love that, of course.
Totally ridiculous.
The reason I even mention the stupid AP headline, conservatives pounce!
The reason I mention it is because it shows you that the libs are taking this hard.
There's been some debate.
Is this really a win?
The new president of Harvard, or the interim president, is another huge lib.
So is that really a win?
I don't know.
This woman, Claudine Gay, is going to retain her faculty position at Harvard, which is insane.
She had two jobs, faculty and president.
If you get caught plagiarizing, The last job you should be able to keep is the faculty job.
The last job you should be able to keep is the academic job, right?
She violated the ultimate rule of academia.
If she's going to lose one of the jobs, it should be the faculty job.
She really should lose both of them.
But they're going to give her this nice parachute, she's going to get to keep her faculty job, and she's going to get to keep her president's salary.
So this woman's still going to make $900,000 a year.
We don't know the exact figure, but it's somewhere around there, at least, maybe more.
So you say, hold on.
Harvard gets a new liberal president, this woman gets to keep almost a million bucks a year, and her sinecure at Harvard.
How is this a win?
I'm not saying it's perfect, but the left is feeling the pain on this.
The left thinks this is a loss.
The Associated Press thinks this is a loss.
Mark Lamont Hill, who is a black activist, left-wing professor, and political pundit, He was furious when this came out, when Claudine Gay resigned, he tweeted out, he said, the next Harvard president must be a black woman.
So then some of us conservatives started suggesting all sorts of black women who would be good.
Some were, I think, jokingly suggesting Candace Owens.
I suggested Carol Swain, who actually would be a great choice.
One, because she rose to the very heights of the academic field.
She's a woman who came from nothing.
She grew up in a shack without running water.
She rose to the very heights of academia.
She became a tenured professor at Princeton.
And she won the American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Award, which is the top prize in political science.
She's a very inspiring, very impressive woman.
And then she thought for herself and contradicted liberal orthodoxy, so they tried to boot her out.
She was a tenured professor.
She ended up back at Vanderbilt.
They hated her there, too, because she thought for herself.
But her scholarship was apparently good enough for Harvard standards because the former president of Harvard plagiarized Carol Swain.
So she would be a great choice.
But people were suggesting all sorts of black women.
And Mark Lamont Hill, this same left-wing academic and black activist pundit, He responded to someone who suggested Candace and said, this is the problem.
Y'all really think black people are interchangeable?
Now, he sent that tweet at about 8 p.m.
on January 2nd.
Seven hours prior, he sent the first tweet.
He said, the next president must be a black woman.
Okay, how about this black woman?
Y'all think black people are interchangeable?
How dare you?
No, man, you just said it.
I didn't say it.
That was the quickest defiant L I've ever seen.
They must pick any black woman.
It doesn't matter who.
They're all completely interchangeable.
All right, well, how about this one?
How dare you, you dirty, rotten, white man, white devil races?
You think they're interchangeable?
What, just because I told you so?
Yeah, I guess so.
I don't know, man.
They feel hurt by this, is what I'm saying.
The Libs, however they're trying to put on a brave face here, are furious.
When they got the plagiarism accusations against the Harvard president, they covered them up immediately.
They lied about them.
They tried to push them to the side.
And finally, the political pressure was too tough.
They had to let her go, and they're whining and crying about it.
That's a win.
It's a win.
Even though she gets to keep her almost million bucks a year, the reputation of Harvard has been damaged.
The donor dollars to Harvard are going to decrease.
I mean, that really started.
This isn't really about plagiarism.
This is because Claudine Gay and the former president of UPenn both testified before a congressional committee and said that calls on campus for genocide against the Jews didn't necessarily constitute harassment.
So what this is really about is an accusation of anti-Semitism.
That's what's underlying all of this.
But, the white lady from Penn immediately gets fired.
The black lady from Harvard doesn't immediately get fired because that would be politically incorrect.
So, conservatives wisely recognize drug issues are weak.
Donors are very upset about the Israel thing.
So, this is a good opportunity to press the issue.
Plagiarism was a good issue to use.
It is legitimately the most serious academic crime.
This woman was weak.
She was completely unqualified to be the Harvard president.
So, it was an opportunity for conservatives to exploit multiple weaknesses.
And that's a good thing.
That's just called politics, folks.
The libs are trying to say that Chris Rufo and the conservatives who are really responsible for this are bad faith actors because they were exploiting weaknesses.
Exploiting weakness?
That's just politics.
They didn't write the plagiarized accounts.
They didn't plagiarize Claudine Gay's PhD thesis and a lot of the rest of her paltry academic output.
They didn't give her 11 published scholarly articles by the time she became president of Harvard.
11?
That's what a graduate student should have.
They didn't deprive her of the qualifications to do her job.
They just exploited a weakness.
Good thing.
I'll take it.
I will totally take it.
Mark Lamont Hill has flip-flopped.
Harvard has flip-flopped.
There's another person flip-flopping these days.
It would be the once future President of the United States, Chris Christie.
Who is saying he will not vote for Donald Trump if he's the nominee.
If it's Biden versus Trump in the fall, would you vote for Donald Trump?
No.
So what is it about various Republican candidates for the presidency who live with the knowledge of what Trump has done to the country, the damage that he's done to this country, that will ensue for God knows how long?
What is it about them that causes them to just knee-jerk reaction, oh yeah, I'd vote for Trump anyway?
It's an interesting combination of two emotions, Mike.
Fear and ambition.
So the fear part of it is that all of them treasure their titles.
And so they treasure their titles more than they treasure the honor that's given to them by the people that actually have those titles.
And they don't want to lose them and they're all worried about being primaried by someone who would have Donald Trump's endorsement.
That's it, yeah.
No one's ever accused Chris Christie of ambition, or the guy who worked for Donald Trump, after saying, you know, he's a bad guy, now he's a good guy, now I hate him again because Trump pushed him out.
Would you vote for him in the fall?
No.
But, of course.
The primary condition for being considered to debate in the Republican primary debates was a pledge to say that you will support the eventual nominee of the party.
And you remember Donald Trump said, I don't think I'm going to sign that.
And there was this big hullabaloo.
Donald Trump, he has no loyalty to anyone but himself.
He's destroying the Republican Party.
He's just got unbridled ambition.
He's unmoored from any principle.
He doesn't, he's a... Hey, you know what?
Trump was honest about that.
All the rest of the candidates signed it, including Chris Christie.
And then what happens?
Chris Christie's campaign totally collapses.
All of their campaigns collapse, other than Trump's, which remains strong.
And they say, OK, are you going to honor your pledge?
No, no, I'm not.
No, I'm a liar.
I'm an ambitious liar.
And everything that we accused Donald Trump of, we are all guilty of to the 10th degree.
Yeah.
No.
No way.
It reveals these guys.
To lack what was supposed to be the distinguishing feature between them and Trump, which was integrity, principle, care for the party, ideological mooring, and something solid.
But they don't have that, especially not Chris Christie.
Perhaps it's unfair to say the same about the other candidates.
Certainly not Chris Christie, who was supposed to be the chief Trump antagonist.
Anything, anything you could say about Donald Trump.
accusation that you could make against him, any insult you could throw his way, applies a hundred times to Chris Christie.
So it doesn't work.
So the holier than thou campaign, the sanctimonious campaign, which is in part why that line, that word, that nickname for Ron DeSantis, while it might not have been fair for DeSantis himself, and while it might not have while it might not have been fair for DeSantis himself, and while it might not have been the easiest to roll off the tongue, it's why it was a good choice of words
It's because that has been the chief tool for the anti-Trump campaigns going back to 2016.
The sanctimony.
Well, this Trump, he's a ruffian, he's so immoral, he's so terrible, he's so this, that.
But consistently along the way, it's true on the Republican side and the Democrat side, consistently along the way we found out that Trump's opponents don't often seem to demonstrate much more principle than he has himself.
Often they demonstrate far less.
Now, turning to the more likable presidential contenders, You got two people ahead of, I guess three people ahead of Chris Christie.
You got Vivek Ramaswamy, but Vivek and Chris Christie's poll numbers are still relatively low.
There are two people who are a little further up, even though they're still far behind Trump.
That would be Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.
Or now we might have to reverse that.
Because for the first time in a national poll, Nikki Haley has overtaken Ron DeSantis.
I said yesterday on the show that for the first time, In the RCP average, you had the candidates looking like they were tied for second.
But now, I said, when is one of them going to overtake the other one?
Well, now you got, out of 538, which is a pretty respectable poll, you now have Nikki Haley as the second place candidate.
There is a very real possibility of a Nikki Haley nomination, and nobody believes this.
Going back to when she announced her candidacy, everyone wrote her off and laughed at her.
And you know, I hate to say, I told you so, but some of us said, hey, hey, hey, even if you don't like Nikki Haley, even if you think she's too moderate or something, this is an extraordinarily talented politician who was able to navigate very difficult waters and appeal to the establishment, to the Koch network, to the moderates, to the centrists, to center left, and to appeal to Trump supporters.
She was a, not only A successful member of the Trump administration.
She was a particularly popular member when she was the UN ambassador.
And when she left, Trump gave her a little short of a ticker tape parade, okay?
But they had a big meeting, lots of cameras, oh, Nikki's been great.
Then Nikki turned on Trump, then she supported Trump again, then she turned on Trump, and she's just navigated the waters very, very well.
Don't forget, Trump is being indicted.
The libs are going to do everything that they possibly can to keep him off the ballot.
Totally unprecedented actions that they've been doing since 2015, 2016.
Using the federal government to spy on his campaign.
Trying to undermine his entire administration with bogus charges cooked up by the FBI and the Democrats.
Impeaching him twice.
Doesn't work.
Then, accusing him of insurrection based on nothing.
Then using a court to throw him off the ballot.
Using a Secretary of State to throw him off the ballot.
Doing their very level best to defend democracy by preventing people from voting for the most popular candidate.
They'll do anything.
They've got four indictments now.
The only thing they've got left after that is assassination and I don't put it past them.
So, the number two person might matter.
Because there is a world, even if Trump is the most popular candidate and everybody in the world wants to vote for him, there is a world in which The political order just does not let him be the nominee, which is why the number two thing matters, and could be Nikki.
My favorite comment yesterday is from First Emperor, who says, anything outside of meritocracy should be absolutely rejected.
I say this is my favorite comment because, I feel ya man, and in most circumstances I agree, I guess, but I actually don't think that's a liberal, I don't think that's a conservative perspective, I think that's kind of a liberal perspective, because You don't really believe that.
I don't really believe that in all cases, every single thing in the whole world should be meritocracy.
I don't think so.
If you have a pure meritocracy, then you don't have much care for people who are a little slower, people who are disabled, people who you don't really care for them.
You say, well, I deserve exactly what I get because I'm so smart and fast and big and strong and beautiful.
And You fall into a kind of a dark view where you start to value human beings more than other human beings.
I don't like that.
If you have a pure meritocracy, you can't have any inheritance from your parents.
I don't think that's very conservative.
Not that I come from, you know, a particularly wealthy household, but I like the idea of inheritance because it establishes some continuity between the generations.
Forget about even monetary inheritance.
What about cultural inheritance?
Those sorts of things.
It's not just about a purely individualistic meritocracy.
I think that's good.
What about legacy admissions to schools?
I wasn't a legacy admission to my college, but, and I don't intend to send any of my children to the college that I went to, but I like the idea of legacy admissions because it creates affection for the institution, because it encourages conservatism, which is a good thing.
So, while I agree that our current system of A racial caste that discriminates against whites and, to a lesser degree, Asians, and that says that men are the worst people on the face of the earth.
And I agree that that's all extremely perverse and unjust, and meritocracy is preferable to that.
But there is more to life than meritocracy, especially if you want to conserve anything.
Nikki Haley now, feeling pretty good.
She's playing to win.
Nikki is trying to get Trump to show up to the debate.
She says, with only three candidates qualifying for the CNN debate, it is time for Donald Trump to show up.
As the debate stage continues to shrink, it's getting harder for Donald Trump to hide.
Now, she's saying three candidates qualifying for the CNN debate because it looks as though Vivek might not qualify.
And this is because, I don't know, Vivek is alleging that it's because CNN is changing the rules to keep him off the stage.
And frankly, like probably, Vivek is a very exciting candidate in this race.
He's done much, much better than anybody expected him to do.
His entire role in the race, or a big part of his role in the race, is to say things that the political establishment does not want you to say, and they can't even write him off as some conspiracy theorist kook, because he's smarter than all of them.
So, this is a guy, this is one of the most intelligent people in the political scene in the United States, and he's extremely well-educated, and he's extremely accomplished, and so they can't just write him off.
And they can't even call him some crank racist or whatever, because he's Indian.
So, you know, he's very inconvenient.
For the political establishment.
I don't put it past them to try to torpedo his campaign.
But in any case, Nikki's saying, OK, the field is shrinking.
We're going to get rid of a vague.
So Trump needs to debate.
This call for Trump to debate also seems to coincide with Trump saying he would not pick Nikki Haley for his VP.
So I said on the show a couple of days ago that With Nikki surging, she's saying she would pardon Trump if Trump were convicted of crimes and any of these ridiculous political prosecutions.
Trump was saying some nice things about Nikki Haley, kind of floating the idea that Nikki Haley could be his running mate.
He needs a running mate.
I don't know who it's going to be right now.
And so I said, okay, the question is, Are the Trump supporters loyal enough to Trump, blindly loyal enough to Trump, that they would tolerate a Nikki Haley vice presidency, even as so much of the Trump base appears to hate Nikki Haley?
That's the question.
Maybe, it could be like a Bush-Reagan kind of thing.
Fairly or unfairly, Nikki Haley is the representative of the establishment right now.
That happened the moment she took the Koch Network money.
So, and Trump is the representative of the insurgent populist wing, the paleo wing, the trad wing, I don't know, whatever, whatever label you want to throw on him, he's not from the Bush wing, he's not from the Romney wing of the party.
So, maybe you could have a unity ticket like you had in 1980, Reagan and Bush.
Reagan was the conservative, Bush was the establishment guy, and they unified and they had a successful presidency.
Could you get that with Haley?
But then Trump came out and he said, no, I'm not doing that.
She's a bird brain.
I don't like her.
You know, all the typical Trump insults.
So now Nikki is going after him.
Still, I think Nikki's playing her cards very smart, but still, Trump has no incentive to debate.
I think he came out and said that if the election got close, he would debate.
But right now, even as the field is shrinking, even as support is consolidating behind, you would say, Haley and DeSantis, increasingly looking more like Haley than DeSantis, but who knows?
There still hasn't been a vote cast in a caucus or a primary.
Still, Trump is, how many?
Dozens of points above them?
You know, it's just not close enough.
There's still no incentive.
And the only way you're going to get Trump to debate is if there is a political incentive for him to do it.
Right now, if he shows up to the debate, it's all downside, no upside.
He's dominating the field everywhere.
So he can only lose.
And Trump knows that, and he's not going to play to lose.
The rest of the GOP is consolidating as well.
So you got the primary field consolidating, but now you got the endorsements consolidating.
This started a few weeks ago.
It started actually months ago, but it really kicked up a few weeks ago.
You had people who had endorsed other candidates, notably Ron DeSantis, starting to flip and to endorse Donald Trump.
You had some other high-ranking Republicans come out, even Kevin McCarthy, the ousted leader of the Republicans in the House.
He said, oh yeah, I'm supporting Trump.
You know, Josh Hawley, yeah, I'm supporting Trump.
Guys who had been kind of on the fence, they're going.
Now, Steve Scalise, who is the House Majority Leader, he's the number two Republican in the country, he came out, he said, I'm proud to endorse Donald Trump for president in 2024, and I look forward to working with Trump and a Republican House and Senate to fight for those families who are struggling under the weight of Biden's failed policies.
Okay, why is Scalise doing this?
Because he's the most rock-ribbed Trump supporter in the world?
No, it's because he sees the writing on the wall.
That's what this is about.
And so, as Ernest Hemingway said, of bankruptcy, it happens gradually, then suddenly, a line that Drew Clavin liked to quote, and then I like to quote, and then, you know, like every conservative quotes now.
Every conservative is going to feel this pull.
I'm not saying they're going to do it, but they're going to feel this pull to endorse Trump, particularly as the attacks against him from the prosecutors ramp up.
Now.
Well, you know I'm something of a tease, and today is Theology Thursday, which you'll get in the member block.
If you're not a member, you've got to go on over to dailywire.com and subscribe and use code Knowles, and you'll have a great time in the creme de la creme.
But there's a story I don't have time to get to today about how a Michigan State representative is proposing stripping tax exemption from the Satanic Temple, which you're going to hear some civil libertarians and the secularists are going to go up in arms about this.
Oh, no, this is terrible.
It's actually a pretty good idea in principle, but there's some problems with it.
