The top German official tasked with investigating right-wing extremism is now being investigated for right-wing extremism, the liberals are probing the psychology of Trump supporters to figure out what's gone wrong in our heads to make us vote for the mean orange man, and Elmo breaks Twitter.
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Hans-Georg Massen, Germany's former head of the Office to Counter Right-Wing Extremism, is now reportedly under investigation for right-wing extremism.
Kind of funny, huh?
According to the press, Massen has landed on the wrong side of the office he used to lead because of his, quote, increasingly radical commentary on mass migration into Germany.
The man spent a lot of time researching what is going on in Germany, and after learning a lot, he ended up on the right.
Now, I am not particularly interested in German politics, but I am interested in the political principle that can be deduced from this case.
Namely, that the greatest predictor of right-wing extremism today is knowledge of politics.
I'm Michael Knowles.
"The Michael Knowles Show." Welcome back to the show.
Elmo asked people how we were doing and the internet broke down over it.
We'll get to Elmo in just a second.
First though, speaking of the threat from the far right and trying to make sense of these far right wing extremists, The Guardian has a helpful guide out.
The Guardian has a headline, to beat Trump we need to know why Americans keep voting for him.
Psychologists may have the answer.
They're asking psychologists.
They could ask economists, they could ask sociologists, they could ask border patrol agents, they could ask Why would anyone ever vote for Trump?
Because people don't like when millions and millions of foreigners illegally flood into their country and invade their country.
They don't like when our jobs are shipped overseas.
That's been a long-simmering tension for a long time.
They don't like when there's a ton of crime in the streets.
They actually don't like dirty syringes and human feces on their sidewalks.
They're not big fans of that.
What's the psychological explanation for the aversion to syringes and excrement?
I don't know.
I think it's called being normal.
That's the psychological basis for it.
This headline, I've seen a million of these headlines, and you hear about this all the time.
Let's just get inside the mind, the weird, bizarre kinks and psyche of the Trump supporter.
We, today, pathologize ordinary behavior.
And we normalize pathologies.
So we say, if you're a guy who doesn't want your country to get invaded by a bunch of foreigners, or you're a guy who wants to be able to walk down the street and not be worried about getting mugged by the spike in criminals, you've got something wrong.
There's something in your synapses, in your amygdala, in the frontal cortex that is a marker of your bizarre conservative affliction.
But if you're a dude who thinks he's a chick, you're totally normal.
That's good, actually.
You need affirming procedures to affirm your normality because of how normal it is.
The whole field of political psychology is so silly.
It's intrinsically anti-conservative because it states that the basis of politics is not rational.
And I'm not saying that mankind is perfectly rational.
Far from it.
And our politics today increasingly is quite irrational.
On the left mostly, not so much on the right.
But we do have faculties of reason.
We can perceive objective reality.
We can talk about it, right?
If we can't, we can't have democracy.
So if the premise of these headlines, if the premise of political psychology is true, that it's all just weird little ticks in our brain that we were born with and that's the way we understand each other is to put ourselves on the shrink couch and figure out why we hate our parents or whatever.
If that's the basis of politics, then we have to have some other form of government, which I guess is what they want.
They hate the people.
They want to disenfranchise as many people as they can who are deplorable and irredeemable and bitter clinging Bible thumpers.
And they believe that the greatest threat to democracy is the people picking the candidate they want to vote for, the most popular candidate in the race.
Normal behavior.
That's a patho- You're a cis man if you're normal.
You're cis.
But if you're a man who thinks he's a woman, you're just a woman.
You shouldn't even have to say trans woman.
You're just a- That's normal.
Just up and down.
Black is white.
Normality is pathology.
Now, speaking of normalizing bad things, a Navy veteran, this guy Michael Cassies, 35 years old, he's the guy who beheaded the satanic statue that was exalted in the Iowa State Capitol.
That man has been charged with a hate crime.
Beheading a satanic statue erected in the Capitol is now a hate crime.
Are we the baddies?
I keep asking this question, it keeps coming up.
Is Joe Biden more evil a ruler than Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin?
I know the latter two guys, they're bad, they do all sorts of bad stuff, I know.
But, like, we throw military veterans into prison, or we're gonna try to throw some military veterans into prison, for objecting to a satanic idol in a government building, in like a really prominent government building.
Are we?
Is Satanism now a protected religion?
It's not a religion.
First of all, Not even the Satanists think that they are in a religion.
The Satanic Temple says that it is ironic.
They're just a bunch of edgy Reddit atheists.
They believe that they're not actually worshipping the devil.
The secret is they are worshipping the devil, because you can't ironically worship the devil.
But they think that they're atheists.
They don't think they're a religion.
Religion is a habit of virtue that inclines the will to render to God the worship that he deserves.
By no even remotely plausible definition of religion, Do these Satanists qualify?
Christians qualify.
I think Jews can make a good case of qualifying.
I think Muslims can make a good case of qualifying.
Even the non-theistic religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, can make a less plausible but still somewhat plausible case of qualifying as a religion.
These guys don't because they say we're not religious.
But second of all, even if they really were worshipping Satan, that would be worse.
And at no other point in American history would we tolerate this.
The Founding Fathers, liberal-minded men, are rolling over in their graves thinking about this.
And then the third part, it just keeps getting more outrageous, the third part is there are regularly attacks on churches in America that basically go unpunished.
Vandalism, attacks, From street criminals and from the government.
The government shuts down churches too.
All during COVID they tried to shut down the churches and the synagogues for that matter.
That, no, no big deal.
There are no face act prosecutions by the Biden administration for that.
No, no, no.
We've got to protect religious liberty only in one case and the religious liberty we're protecting is the religious liberty of Satanists.
Are we the baddies?
Are we the baddies?
Nations can go bad.
I hope we're not bad.
I would love my country, no matter what the political leaders are doing, because it's my country and it's an extension of filial piety.
But it's getting very difficult to defend this.
But Xi Jinping persecutes the Muslims.
He does.
Vladimir Putin, he, you know, he's really bad.
I know, he's really bad.
He annexes territory that the Soviet Union used to have.
I know, it's bad.
It's bad, I'm not defending it.
We take kids away from their parents because the parents won't pretend they're the opposite sex, you know, sometimes leading to their suicide.
We arrest pro-lifers for praying in abortion centers.
We arrest them and sentence them to over a decade in prison.
And now we protect the rights of Satanists, the so-called religious rights of Satanists, more than any other religion, any actual religion as far as I can tell, and we try to imprison Navy veterans for that.
Are we the baddies?
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Turning to a much more gruesome beheading story.
A little bit of a rough transition, but we're not just talking about statues here, we're talking about actual people.
There is a story that went viral yesterday about a young man, I think a 32-year-old man, who beheaded his father, allegedly, picked up the head in a bag, made a YouTube video about it, ranting about all sorts of politics.
The video was up for hours on YouTube before it got taken down.
The father obviously is dead, and luckily the son has been captured.
The story went viral, one, it's so gruesome, so sensationalist, but two, because the kid—kid, he's a 32-year-old man—started making all sorts of political claims, and so it's being framed by the media as though he were a right-wing Trump supporter, because he attacked Joe Biden and he attacked the government and all the rest.
In the video, the reason that it's not going to take total hold is in the video, the guy apparently also attacks Donald Trump and threatens Donald Trump.
So the media are going to spend a few days trying to make this into a political issue.
Apparently the young man was known to the FBI and, you know, another one slips through the cracks, I guess.
They're going to try to make this into a political issue.
It is a reminder that there is more to life than Republicans and Democrats.
There is more to politics, even, than the left and the right.
What was this guy's political ideology?
I don't know.
He certainly said things that sound right-wing, but then he also threatened the Republican nominee for president, and he said he was the leader of a cult, and he was just obviously a complete looney tune.
There is a reality beyond ideological bickering, and that reality is mental illness, legitimate mental illness.
Not what the liberals would say, which is that, you know, if you want to vote for a Republican, you need to go to a psychiatrist.
Real mental illness where you think you're the second coming of the Messiah as this guy did and where you're engaging in all sorts of bizarre attention-seeking behavior for a very long time and then where you ultimately commit a heinous evil crime and then make a big show about it.
Also why I'm not going to play any of the video or say his name or anything you know that's obviously something he was after in as much as he had rational faculties and he doesn't seem to have had much of those.
There is a reality of mental illness and there is a reality of evil.
And sometimes there's some overlap there.
Those are distinct things.
Mental illness is real, and demonic possession is real.
And they don't always overlap.
Sometimes it's one, sometimes it's the other.
Sometimes the distinction gets a little bit blurry.
Sometimes these things are brought on by certain behaviors.
The kid talked a lot about, apparently, how he smoked pot.
I keep calling him a kid because it's... He's old, though.
You know, he's 32 years old.
Did his drug use have something to do with it?
Who knows?
There is a reality here, and ironically, that's what we won't talk about.
We never talk about the existence of evil, and really modern, fashionable people, they can't accept it.
Because if you accept the existence of evil, you have to accept the existence of good.
If you can accept The reality that some things are better than other things, then there has to be a maximal good.
If there's a moral order, if there's a moral law, then there has to be a moral law giver, and you have to accept God.
And that comes with certain requirements.
The yoke is easy and the burden is light, but there is a yoke.
There are some requirements there.
We can know the existence of God through our reason, but To know more about God and how to worship Him and, you know, religion, this thing that we treat in a very glib way these days by protecting supposed rights for Satanists, for edgy Reddit edgelord Satanists.
But when we know things through our reason, then there are implications to that.
And we follow that thread through revelation, continuing to test our reason, and we talk about our religious duties.
Yeah, that's all out the window.
None of the fashionable people do that.
Ironically, though, we don't even talk about mental health.
We have really glib, shallow articles about how you must have a screw loose if you vote for a Republican, and then we pretend that obvious body dysmorphia is totally normal, especially in the transgender issue, and as well as deviant behaviors and desires, we say that's totally normal.
And then we move along, move along.
And then we try to say that a horrific, heinous crime that goes viral, we say, oh, it's because he's a right-winger.
And then some people on the right will say, no, he's a left-winger.
They say, oh, no, he watched too many Ben Shapiro videos.
No, he watched, whatever, some guy on the left.
I don't even know, who are the guys on the left?
There was that guy, Destiny, that Ben just debated.
I don't know, whoever.
They say he watched too many of his videos.
There's more, guys.
There's a little bit more to life than that, but the more we ignore that, the more we can expect to see bizarre episodes, and really evil episodes, such as this.
Now, speaking of social media, Mark Zuckerberg just had to testify before the Senate, and he was grilled by Senator Josh Hawley on the awful effects, especially for young people, and he was asked to make an apology.
So you didn't take any action.
You didn't take any action.
You didn't fire anybody.
You haven't compensated a single victim.
Let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this.
There's families of victims here today.
Have you apologized to the victims?
Would you like to do so now?
They're here.
You're on national television.
Would you like now to apologize to the victims who have been harmed by your products?
Show them the pictures.
Would you like to apologize for what you've done to these good people?
I'm sorry, but we can't be involved in this situation.
It's terrible.
No one should actually go through the things that your families have suffered.
And this is why we invested so much and are going to continue doing the streaming efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things that your families have had to suffer.
You know, why, Mr. Zuckerberg, why should your company not be sued for this?
Why is it that you can claim, you hide behind a liability shield, you can't be held accountable?
Shouldn't you be held accountable personally?
I thought Zuckerberg handled this beautifully, actually.
Hawley's asking a legitimate question, which is, hey, your technology has led to all sorts of terrible consequences for young people, and you haven't done enough to fix it, so should you apologize to the parents of these young people who have been so hurt, or in some cases, perhaps killed themselves?
And instantly, Zuckerberg gets up, they start to stand up, he stands up, and he apologizes.
This looked really good, it is the right thing to do, and moreover, I don't think Zuckerberg bears most of the blame.
Social media is generally terrible for young people.
In some cases, it can be good if it's really, really tightly controlled.
If you're, like, listening to the Michael Knowles Show right now, and you're a member of the Crème de la Crème in the inner circle, and you're in the chat with very wholesome, smart people.
Okay, that can be good.
But if you're a young person, and you're on TikTok, or you're on Tumblr, or you're on any of these other platforms... I don't know, do people do Tumblr anymore?
I don't know.
I interviewed an ex-trans who said that Tumblr radicalized her.
But I don't know, maybe they're probably on some other one now.
All of those, Instagram, Facebook, obviously both owned by Mark Zuckerberg, all of them can lead you down a very bad path.
How are they getting on those technologies?
That's my question.
I don't want to point fingers at the parents, necessarily, but parents are a big part of it.
Are the parents buying their kids' smartphones?
Bad idea.
Really bad idea.
They shouldn't be doing that.
It's crazy, crazy to do that today.
These smartphones are portals to hell.
And if you are adult and educated and well-formed, maybe you can avoid the worst of it.
Maybe if you're very disciplined about your social media use, and you're not too curious, and you develop good habits, maybe You can avoid the temptations in that portal to hell.
All sorts, by the way.
I'm not even just talking about weird sex stuff, which is probably what most people think of when they think about the temptations of the internet.
But all of it.
All sorts of crazy stuff.
Sloth.
You're just doom-scrolling forever.
You get addicted just to those dopamine hits.
Or wrath.
You're just sending out vicious, awful things on Twitter.
And there's just pride.
You're just obsessed with your image and posting pictures of your spaghetti or whatever.
Every deadly sin is a major temptation on social media.
Why would a parent do that?
I'll tell you why.
Because the parents need to reach the kids.
Okay, get the kid a flip phone.
Well, no, no, you don't understand, Michael.
The kids' friends?
The kids' friends all have smartphones.
Okay, well, why do your kids' friends have smartphones?
Why are they friends with those people?
Well, because their kids are in public school.
Okay, I get it, man.
It's really hard.
Private school is very, very expensive.
And in most cases, really not any better than the public schools in that regard.
And maybe you want to homeschool, but you need the money, so you got to go out to work, there's no one to homeschool, or there's not a good homeschooling co-op near you, or there's this, or there's that, or I know the system is set up against you!
I'm not denying any of that.
But we can't just go along to get along anymore with these sorts of issues.
This is not like technological advancements when you were a kid.
Same thing that's being taught in schools.
We say, oh, the schools have always been left-wing.
Yeah, they weren't chopping kids' genitals off 20 years ago, actually.
That's a marked change.
And so, 20 years ago, you send your kid to public school, all right, they're probably going to turn a little lefty, but what are we going to do?
Yeah, now they're going to chop your kid's genitals off.
Now you can't.
Now the calculation changes.
And it is incumbent upon you to figure something out.
And it's incumbent upon us, in the political order, to figure something out.
But it is not all Mark Zuckerberg's fault.
I'm no big promoter of Facebook, and obviously of social media at all, or these tech zillionaires, but, and this guy, you know, Zuckerberg, may have been one of the most significant factors in kicking Donald Trump out of the White House, so I, I, there's no love lost here for Mark Zuckerberg, but it is not all that guy's fault.
Now, Speaking of scandalizing kids, there is a doctor who's gone viral on social media for saying that she will die on the hill of transing the kids.
I'm a doctor and apparently the state of Texas needs to reconsider what it considers child abuse.
Because you know what's abusive?
Ignoring the needs of your child when your child is telling you what they need.
And engaging in behavior as a parent that could lead them to unalive themselves.
Over 80% of trans youth have admitted to having thoughts about unaliving themselves, and over 50% have actually attempted it.
In these individuals, denying them care that we know is lifesaving is child abuse.
And it is proven that providing them gender-affirming care strongly reduces those risks.
Don't worry, I got plenty of receipts for these comments.
You can check my linktree.
I will die on this hill.
Trans rights are human rights, and it doesn't matter the age of the person.
We all deserve to live our truth.
There it is.
There's no evidence of any of the things that she just suggested, and there's a lot of evidence to the contrary, and you'll be shocked to know that chopping off kids' genitals and giving them Permanent damage to their bodies and likely shortening their lives even in the best cases Don't that doesn't actually help them.
You'd be shocked to hear that.
I think you probably already knew that but this woman's convinced of it and Look, she doesn't know anything.
She's got her hair colored five different crazy colors, and she's you know, probably not the sharpest tool in the shed I'm not even making a comment about her IQ.
However she's been educated, she has ended up in a very bad place, and she obviously doesn't know much of anything at all.
But you know what she does know?
She makes a few declarative statements.
We have to trans the kids.
It will really help them.
If you don't do that, they'll kill themselves.
And I will die on this hill.
But then she gets to the last one, and the last one's the really important one.
You have to live your truth.
And this is the receipt that I'm going to save.
When I bring liberalism to court.
We put liberalism on trial and we try to scrap the whole damn thing.
Not just modern progressivism, but even some of the early classical liberalism, the supposedly good liberalism.
I'm bringing that receipt to court.
Because that is the sort of thing that John Stuart Mill That's the sort of thing that you see in the earlier Enlightenment writers.
Just live your truth.
Let's just not violate the harm principle.
The notion that the government should only interfere when you might harm others through your behavior.
But if it's just about you, it's just your own personal life, The government has no right whatsoever to interfere.
You get to do whatever you want to yourself.
Because, as actually John Stuart Mill understood, though he didn't sufficiently answer, what happens in private spills out into public.
And a society that establishes as its basis something this low, this basic, this brittle and weak, is not a society that's going to flourish for very long.
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You've got to live your truth, says the woman who wants to trans all the kids, and she will die on this hill.
But her, her truth is that boys can become girls.
And she's going to live out her truth by transing kids.
My truth is that boys can't become girls.
So one of our truths has to be false.
But okay, let's just... Look, in my family, we don't chop people's genitals off.
And maybe in her family, or whatever kind of community she's got, they do.
And look, that's her business and that's my business.
How does it affect me?
You know?
How does it affect you?
Here's how it affects me, because the woman is making a declarative statement about human nature and reality, and when that view is accepted by anyone, it is going to spill out into society, and how we treat the very notions of men and women, and that's going to spill out into the schools around me, and the communities around me, and my family.
That, because we live in a society.
That's how.
So we're going to need some basis of society that is more forceful, that is more thorough and comprehensive than, don't yuck my yum, bro!
Because these people are willing to die on the hill of transing your kid.
And they've got access to your kid now because your kid has a smartphone and is on TikTok and sees that crazy lady.
If you want to protect your kid from that, you can take away the phone, you can take the kid out of school, you can lock the kid in his bedroom studying the classics.
But society is going to make its way in eventually.
Which is why we have an obligation to defend reality.
It's good for everybody and it's going to affect us eventually as well.
Speaking of political polarization, even with The extreme degree of political polarization we have these days, we can't even agree on basic terms or aspects of human nature.
There's some bipartisan support going on.
Anthony Scaramucci, the mooch, the shortest-serving White House communications director in history, lasted 11 days, worked for Donald Trump.
Well, now he is endorsing Joe Biden.
And here is his convoluted reasoning why.
I've been a lifelong Republican.
I've sort of been in the Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush community of the Republican Party.
And I have a lot of respect for Governor Haley, but I think you have to be honest about where the situation is.
The former president will win this nomination unless there's some type of legal avalanche that takes place from the Department of Justice or perhaps one of the states.
But even in that situation, those proceedings take longer than usual.
Uh and I think we do have a rematch and I'm a patriot first and a partisan second and so I'm going to go with the institutions of the democracy and the checks and balances of the system and not somebody that's talking about tyranny and talking about being a dictator for a day or using the Department of Justice to persecute his political adversaries.
Hold on, hold on, wait a second.
Anthony Scaramucci is not going to vote for Donald Trump because Donald Trump Might have insinuated that for a day he would be tempted to use the Department of Justice to persecute his political opponents.
Hypothetically.
So instead he's going to vote for Joe Biden, who is actually doing that right this second.
He is prosecuting Donald Trump because Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party.
This after Donald Trump was already persecuted by the DOJ and the FBI from the very moment he started running for president.
You had the DOJ spying on him and then working with the Democrats to cook up fake information, working with Hillary, working with the Obama White House to cook up a fake dossier that would be a pretext for trying to undermine the whole Trump administration if he somehow got elected, which he did.
So you're gonna vote for the guy who did everything that you're afraid Donald Trump Jokingly suggested he might be kind of inclined to do for a day.
That's not really good reasoning.
I think Anthony Scaramucci's reasoning has more to do with the first part.
The first part of his statement was, look, I'm a lifelong Republican.
I'm a Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush kind of Republican.
He's a liberal.
Mitt Romney invented Obamacare.
Mitt Romney, when he was running for Senate in Massachusetts, disavowed Ronald Reagan and George Bush, actually.
He said, I wasn't a Republican in the time of Reagan-Bush.
I was an Independent during the time of Reagan-Bush.
I don't want to go back to Reagan-Bush.
He's a... Scaramucci's a liberal.
A liberal Republican.
He's a liberal who wants lower taxes.
Okay, I'm not even knocking it.
I have many friends who have this view.
I have family members who are of this view.
But don't pretend to me it's because Donald Trump is some grave threat to democracy, because Donald Trump is maybe thinking about doing the things that Joe Biden is currently doing.
He already won your vote, apparently.
And please also don't pretend to me that you are a lifelong Republican as though that really means anything in this ideological fight.
The liberal Republicans have been teaming up with the Democrats to pull this move for now.
Over, what, it's about 60 years now.
This happened during the Goldwater campaign.
The Democrats found some squish rhino to go on and say, look, I'm a Republican, but I'm not one of those Republicans.
I certainly don't feel guilty about being a Republican.
I've always been a Republican.
My father is.
His father was.
The whole family is a Republican family.
I voted for Dwight Eisenhower the first time I ever voted.
I voted for Nixon the last time.
When we come to Senator Goldwater, now it seems to me we're up against a very different kind of a man.
This man scares me.
Now maybe I'm wrong.
A friend of mine has said to me, listen, just because a man sounds a little irresponsible during a campaign doesn't mean he's going to act irresponsibly.
You know that theory that the White House makes the man.
I don't buy that.
Sometimes I I wish I'd been at that convention in San Francisco.
I bet that guy does wish he was in San Francisco.
We'll leave that to the imagination.
That ad could have been produced by the Lincoln Project against Donald Trump.
That ad could have been produced by the RINO establishment against Ronald Reagan.
They said all the same things, time and time again.
And what I resent about it is the notion that Listen, I'm a lifelong Republican.
...means anything.
Because the ideological battle that we're talking about is not the Republicans versus the Democrats.
The ideological battle we're talking about is the conservatives versus the low-tax liberals.
That's what it's really about.
And what Scaramucci, with the mooch, is somewhat honestly explaining here, or demonstrating, is that those low-tax rhinos don't have very much in common with the conservatives.
The conservatives have gone along with the low-tax rhinos, the low-tax liberals, for a long time.
When they nominate Mitt Romney, we just kind of suck it up and vote for him.
Maybe he's not our favorite, he invented Obamacare, he's a huge lib, but whatever, he's the Republican number, we'll vote for him.
Pretty big lib on a lot of issues.
I respect his military service, of course.
But, you know, he's kind of a Democrat.
Half a Dem, at least.
We voted for him.
The Bushes... We do it, okay?
We go along with it.
But when it comes to the low-tax liberals voting for the conservatives, then they're out.
Then they say, no thank you.
Sorry.
We're with the Lincoln Project now.
We're endorsing Biden.
We're endorsing Hillary.
Because they have much more in common with the liberals.
When it comes to the so-called social policies—by the way, we're talking about society here, so the social policies seem pretty important—they side with the liberals.
When it comes to epistemology, how we can know anything, when it comes to anthropology, what we know about man, they go with the liberals.
And when it comes to the basis of political philosophy, they go along with the liberals.
You do you.
In this case, though, don't make me pay more taxes.
That's not what the conservatives think.
The conservatives think there's a transcendent moral order.
The conservatives think that norms and standards are good.
The conservatives think that patriotism is a good thing.
Conservatives believe that borders are a good thing.
Conservatives realize that limits are what give shape to beautiful things.
If you don't have limits, then the beautiful sonnet turns into slam poetry, and slam poetry is the death of art.
If you don't have limits, then the nation becomes just a blob to be invaded by foreigners, as it currently is being.
I'm a lifelong Republican, but I'm not voting for this Trump man.
Man, you worked for Trump.
Are you kidding me?
Stop telling me.
Oh, he might be Hitler.
He's not Hitler.
He's just...
Somewhat more conservative than the libs you guys want to run.
And that's too much for you.
Too bad.
Too bad.
Maybe these lifelong Republicans should admit they've been lifelong Democrats the whole time.
As for Trump's numbers, they're looking pretty good.
Bloomberg News and Morning Consult has Trump leading Biden in all seven swing states.
So, you're going to see a lot of headlines.
National polls.
Right after Trump, for all intents and purposes, clinched the nomination.
You saw all these polls shift.
Nationally, Trump is losing to Biden.
Okay, well, the election's not national.
The Democrats could still steal it a million different ways.
But if you look at the polls in the swing states right now, Trump 47, Biden 44.
It's close, but Trump is up by three.
Georgia, Trump 49, Biden 41.
That's a pretty big gap.
Michigan, Trump 47, Biden 42.
Still pretty big gap, five points.
Nevada, Trump 48, Biden 40.
Eight points, pretty good.
North Carolina, Trump's up 10 points, 49 to 39.
Pennsylvania, even.
There are these worries that Trump might not win Pennsylvania He's up three points, at least according to Bloomberg News and Morning Consult.
It's a liberal poll.
Wisconsin, 49 to 44.
Five points, still pretty good.
Now, what happens when you factor in RFK Jr.?
Because there's been a fear RFK Jr.
is going to take votes from Trump.
He could actually tilt the election to Biden.
That's not my view.
He'll take votes from both candidates.
Probably won't take a lot of votes, but in as much as he takes votes from candidates, it'll mostly be from Biden.
Well, you show Kennedy in the race.
Trump still wins.
Arizona, 43 to 35 Biden.
Georgia, 44 to 37.
Michigan, 43 to 37.
Nevada, it looks even better.
Trump's up 12 points when you put RFK in the race.
It's looking pretty good.
I feel good about our chances.
Nikki Haley will continue to run, but the writing is clearly on the wall.
She's not even running in Nevada and South Carolina.
She's going to get trounced in her home state.
Michigan, she's going to get trounced.
That's all before Super Tuesday.
So it would seem there are reports now that some of Haley's big funders are Closing their checkbooks because they don't think they're going to get a return on the investment.
So, I'm not with the RNC here in calling for Nikki Haley to drop out of the race, but for all intents and purposes, Trump is the nominee, and the early numbers look pretty good.
You might say, who trusts the polls, Michael?
Are you a big dummy to trust the polls?
Well, no.
Sometimes I trust the polls, sometimes I don't, and I look for evidence on which to base my decision.
And the polls in this race thus far, in Iowa and in New Hampshire, Have been reliable.
They've been really, really close to what's happened.
And so maybe their polls will be reliable moving forward.
The Biden administration needs to do something.
The economy, maybe they'll be able to putter through with some facade of a strong economy through the election, maybe.
But the potential world war that's breaking out in the Middle East is a big problem.
So that war has been brought on basically through Biden's incompetence and bad political vision.
Don't forget, Donald Trump brought peace to the Middle East in the Abraham Accords, got Saudi Arabia to sit down with the Israelis.
Biden blew it all up and now there's a war.
Joe Biden actually bears the blame even more directly for the Ukraine war.
President Zelensky in Ukraine said, If not for Joe Biden's weak stance on Russia, they would not have invaded Ukraine.
So he bears that responsibility.
So what is Biden going to do?
You know.
To quote Barack Obama, you should never underestimate Joe's ability to F things up.
Joe Biden is now, according to reports from Axios, exploring options to recognize a Palestinian state.
That'll solve the problem!
More on that in a second.
First, though, you know Lady Ballers is the hilarious story of how a group of male losers who can't win against other men decide to identify as women and join a women's basketball league.
Yes, it's absurd.
It's ridiculous.
It's laughable.
Yes!
It's happening right now in the world.
Here's a quick look at what is being called the most triggering movie of the decade.
Leftists are losing it over Lady Ballers.
Nothing's changed.
This movie is a straight-up and intentional transphobic hate crime.
What?
I see you.
The Lady Ballers movie needs to be banned.
I'll cancel you.
Can I get the blinds, please?
Go to 11.
The most toxic BS you've ever seen.
You're a monster.
Yeah!
Next-level hate speech propaganda.
That's it?
That's the pitch?
Watch the most triggering comedy of the decade.
Lady Ballers, streaming exclusively on Daily Wire Plus.
I don't know about you, but I'm triggered.
Don't wait!
Watch Lady Ballers, the movie that Hollywood did not make, so we did, exclusively on Daily Wire Plus, right now.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Moon Mission Passage Totale 1952.
That's a very long name.
It says, if Taylor Swift endorses a 2024 presidential candidate, it will likely be RFK Jr.
Taylor Swift dated his son Connor Kennedy.
Old Joe's too much of a liability.
Hold on.
I actually had forgotten.
I remember that Taylor Swift had dated one of the Kennedy kids.
I'd forgotten that it was RFK Jr.' 's kid.
But I'm not sure I follow your logic here.
If your ex-boyfriend or girlfriend's dad were running for president, Would you be more or less inclined to vote for that person?
Maybe you'd be inclined to do it.
I'm just thinking usually when someone becomes an ex, it's because you're not that favorably inclined to that person anymore, so I don't...
Maybe R.F.K.
Jr.
would be the last person Taylor Swift would endorse.
Just as a political matter, there seems to be zero chance she would endorse him.
One, it might make Travis Kelce jealous.
Two, R.F.K.
Jr.
is being portrayed as the biggest kook in the race.
I don't think he is, exactly, but he's being portrayed as even kookier than Donald Trump by the media.
So, I just, I don't know why.
If she were going to do that, she might as well just go and endorse Trump, which probably she can't do.
But, you know, I'm still pro-Swifty.
I'm real swifty these days, all right?
Not because I would ever voluntarily listen to any of her music, but she's a nice, pretty girl who dresses normal and conducts herself with class and is dating a football player, and that is dispositionally, temperamentally conservative.
I discovered this about my wife years and years ago.
Now, of course, my wife is slightly to the right of Francisco Franco.
She all makes us look like Hillary Clinton, but before that time, When she wasn't thinking that much about politics, she's focused on other things.
I spend all my day thinking about politics, and she hadn't really thought about them too much.
But even at that point, she was dispositionally probably more conservative than I am.
She just conducts herself in a more normal way.
Frankly, with probably greater dignity and class, most of the time.
And Taylor, she got that.
Okay, she baked the Joe Biden cookies.
Okay, whatever.
We're not going to win a war turning on Taylor Swift, who is one of the most conservative elements of American pop culture.
Damning perhaps that is to us, but that's how it is.
Some people don't think it'd be like it is, but it do, to quote Oscar Gamble.
Now, Joe Biden has a solution to the potential outbreak of World War III focused in particular around the Middle East.
And the solution is, give the Palestinian Arabs a state.
That'll do it, right?
What could go wrong?
I don't know how real this possibility is.
It's clearly being floated though because it's an Axios.
Secretary of State Tony Blinken asked the State Department to conduct a review and present policy options on possible U.S.
and international recognition of a Palestinian state after the war in Gaza.
Okay, well there's your first problem.
There's never going to be an end to the war in Gaza.
They're just going to drag the war out forever because the Israeli national interest is to get the Palestinians out of Gaza.
Because the Palestinians, they have concluded, represent an unacceptable security risk.
And fair enough, if I were an Israeli minister, I'd probably come to the same conclusion.
Not saying that clearing the Palestinians out of Gaza is in America's interest, exactly.
But if I were Israeli, that's certainly what I would think.
So they're just going to keep dragging this out.
This war's been going on for, what, 110 days now?
And they're just going to keep dragging it on.
And then, because of the Lindy effect, the longer it goes on, the more likely it will continue to go on even longer.
So, OK, forget about that.
This is according to two U.S.
officials briefed on the issue.
I have no doubt that Biden and the Democrats want to recognize some kind of Palestinian state.
And I sympathize with the Palestinians.
I truly do.
And I'm not making any theological or grand political claim that the Israeli government has the permanent right forever and ever, more fundamental than any other political right, to that strip of land.
I guess I've got a more practical question than all of that, which is, What does the U.S.
get out of recognizing a Palestinian state?
Put aside the fact that any Palestinian state is basically impractical.
You've got Gaza, then you've got Israel, and then you've got the West Bank, and you're going to make a Palestinian state out of two territories that are extremely densely populated, that are separated by their sworn enemy?
And then in the charter, the Hamas charter, Hamas which governs Gaza, you've got the basic aim of the state is to destroy the state in between you and the other part of your state.
Practically, I have no idea how that's going to work.
But again, I'm not making any claims about the land and who's got the right to it and bringing in some grand theological claim, novel or otherwise.
What do we get out of that?
Why on earth would we do that?
Well, because that will pacify the Palestinians or the Iranians who are backing a lot of this conflict.
Oh, it will?
Really?
Yeah, you just give them a little bit more land and then... How is that supposed to pacify them?
The aim of Iran and of the Palestinian Arabs is to obliterate Israel.
As long as the United States funds Israel, we fund 6.5% of the Israeli military, we treat Israel as one of our greatest allies on the face of the earth, as long as we continue to do that and prop up the state of Israel, they're going to hate us still.
You think it's going to be good enough?
Are you kidding me?
Are you that naive?
You're of the persuasion that we should just ditch Israel and, you know, get out of that alliance and stop giving them money and stop problem.
Okay.
And then when we do that, the Israelis, a major war will break out and potentially the Jews get wiped out in the region.
And one, is that a good thing?
Two, put those moral considerations aside for a second.
How does that benefit us?
How does any of this benefit us?
I'm not saying I'm Count von Metternich here.
I'm not saying that I am the greatest grand strategic thinker in the world.
I do know that the Biden administration and these doofuses who are running the State Department, I do know that they are pretty much the worst grand strategic thinkers in the world.
So anyone else is probably doing better than them.
When it comes to international relations, just looking at the track record of Joe Biden here, two major wars breaking out just in the three years that he's been around.
I think it's safe to say that whatever they are inclined to do, do the opposite.
Speaking of jihadis, jihadis are threatening more attacks on Americans.
According to Sami Abu Dzuri, a senior Hamas spokesperson, oh, I hate you.
See how the liberals infect your language?
They make you speak their PC gobbledygook?
Spokesperson, like spokesper-daughter.
You can't say son, that's masculine.
This Hamas spokesman says, the killing of three Americans Is a message to the American administration that unless the killing of innocent people in Gaza stops, it must confront the entire Ummah, so the entire Arab Muslim world.
The continuation of the American Zionist aggression against Gaza is capable of setting the entire region ablaze.
Okay.
The rational Israeli aim in the war is to get rid of the Palestinians in Gaza.
I'm not saying necessarily kill all of them, but just get them out of the region because they say it's too big a security threat.
The aim of the Palestinians and the government representatives of the Palestinians is to get rid of the Israelis.
I'm not saying necessarily by killing all of them, though probably they wouldn't be opposed to it, but even just getting them to move back somewhere else.
That's it.
The aim of these two groups that are at war is the total annihilation of the other group.
So are we as Americans going to support either of those things?
No, I don't think so.
Seems pretty ghastly.
I don't see an American administration, even a Republican one, saying we're just going to get rid of all, we're going to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian territories.
And likewise, I don't see an administration, even the most left-wing one, saying we're going to just rout all the Jews out of Israel.
So, neither of the war aims for these two belligerents Are in our interest.
So the only thing that can be in our interest is to get the war to wind down, to contain it, and to get the war to wind down and not drag on forever.
That's it.
Because the longer it drags on, the bigger the opportunity for it to escalate as it already has.
The more that our troops are in harm's way, the more likely they will be attacked because they know that we're bankrolling the State of Israel.
And so the only thing that we can do if we really want to ramp this down If we want to really minimize our risk, is to contain and ramp down the war between these two belligerents.
That's the Reagan Doctrine.
That's what Reagan did in Lebanon.
And that's what we always invoke St.
Ronald, St.
Ronald of the Blessed Rawhide.
Well, we might take his views into consideration today.
Okay, speaking of bad news, Elmo has gone viral.
Elmo, like the Muppet, he's gone viral for asking how everyone's doing.
That's it.
Oh, Elmo here!
I guess that's Mickey.
I can't do a good... Professor Jacob, can you do an Elmo?
Hi!
That's pretty good, actually.
That's a good one.
Elmo, just checking in!
How's everybody doing?
Forgive the impression.
That's simple enough, right?
And there was a deluge of whining that came out.
It was funny, a lot of it was ironic.
Some of it maybe wasn't.
David Leavitt said, Elmo, I'm suffering from existential dread, from hopelessness.
Someone said, Every morning I cannot wait to go back to sleep.
Every Monday I cannot wait for Friday to come.
Every single day and every single week of the year.
Ziegler, Rachel Ziegler, who is that, she's playing the new Snow White in the Disney movie, she goes, resisting the urge to tell Elmo, I'm kind of sad.
And so some of these are funny, a lot of these are funny and good responses.
I just responded, I said, I'm doing very well, thank you for asking.
Because whatever happened to suffering in silence, huh?
Whatever happened to kiss it up to God and keep your mouth shut and have a stiff upper lip?
I know that a lot of these are jokes, but I have noticed people whine and complain about their own supposed suffering all the time.
And we know we live in a victim economy now where being able to claim some struggle will get you more social currency.
And so everyone does it all the time.
And it's really annoying.
I have to catch myself.
Oh, I'm tired.
Oh, I don't have any more cigars.
Oh, no, the cigar bar closed before I finished wrapping my show in Santa Barbara, so I'm not going to be able to- Whatever it is!
Okay, I'm just using hypotheticals here.
We've got to cut it out.
It's like radon in a home.
It's poison that you don't really notice right away.
It just makes you sick.
Cut it out!
When Elmo asks you how you're doing, you say, you say, I'm doing well.
Thank you, Elmo.
How are you?
All right.
That's our show.
It is Theology Thursday.
And though I am on the road, and though I'm not able to necessarily interact, because Professor Jacob didn't bring me my special iPad, so I'm gonna have to defenestrate him, we did get an interview with my friend, Father Benedict Keeley, all the way from across the ocean, from Canterbury.
So we'll bring that on for Theology Thursday.
We'll get to the mailbag tomorrow, and then I'll get to interact with you in real time again.
