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Feb. 13, 2025 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:17
Ep. 1673 - Wild Political Week RECAP

A Democrat congresslady thinks the word "manufacturing" is sexist; Tulsi Gabbard is confirmed; and a prominent evangelical pastor, Rick Warren, urges Christians to be politically centrist. Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/4biDlri Ep.1673 - - - DailyWire+: Now is the time to join the fight. Watch the hit movies, documentaries, and series reshaping our culture. Go to https://dailywire.com/subscribe today. GET THE ALL-NEW YES OR NO EXPANSION PACK TODAY: https://bit.ly/41gsZ8Q Order your Mayflower Cigars here: https://bit.ly/3Qwwxx2 (Must be 21+ to purchase. Exclusions may apply) - - - Today's Sponsors: Masa Chips - Visit https://masachips.com/discount/KNOWLES for 20% off your order. PureTalk - Switch to PureTalk and start saving today! Visit https://PureTalk.com/KNOWLES Tecovas - Point your toes west. Get 10% off at https://tecovas.com/KNOWLES when you sign up for email and texts. - - - Socials: Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3RwKpq6 Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3BqZLXA Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3eEmwyg Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3L273Ek

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Amid our many pressing national problems, a Democrat Congress lady has devoted her time to figuring out why young women might want to get married and have kids instead of working on an industrial assembly line.
And she thinks she has identified the answer.
Yesterday, I met with a manufacturing company, but they also are engaged in getting young people.
More engaged in manufacturing.
So I asked them, so how many of those students that are signing up and want to do this, how many are women?
And they said, well, I know there's at least 13% or something.
It was a low number.
And you had mentioned trying to engage more women in manufacturing.
I'm just wondering if just the name manufacturing sounds like a guy.
Man-u-facturing sounds like a guy.
Now, some will observe that manufacturing actually comes from the Latin words for hand and make, manu-factum.
But so what?
Maybe if we start calling it lady factoring, maybe then little girls will put aside all those daydreams about their wedding day and start fantasizing about operating heavy machinery to produce widgets for a wage.
A tale of two political parties.
Trump and the Republicans are working to bring manufacturing, actual manufacturing back to America.
So that our economy and national security can thrive, so that towns and families stop breaking up, and so that men stop dying deaths of despair.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are wondering what kind of euphemism can trick little girls into picking up a wrench.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
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There's so much more to say.
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Speaking of names...
What's in a name?
Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, has just re-renamed one of the most famous army bases in America.
There it is.
Pursuant to the authority of the Secretary of Defense, Title X, United States Code, Section 113, I direct the army to change the name of Fort Liberty, North Carolina, to Fort Bragg.
North Carolina.
That's right.
Bragg is back.
Now, why does it matter that Bragg is back?
Fort Bragg probably is the most prominent army base in the entire country.
Fort Bragg was renamed to Fort Liberty.
Why was it renamed Fort Liberty?
Because...
Bragg, Braxton Bragg, was a Confederate general and he's a very, very bad, nasty man because he was from the South and he fought with the Confederates.
And even though Abraham Lincoln promised us malice toward none and charity for all and we're going to come back together and be a nation, then the woke libs got a hold of things and started.
Toppling over the statues of every Confederate, and we all knew they weren't going to stop there.
As President Trump predicted, the minute they were done with the Confederates, they moved right on to Washington and Jefferson, and Lincoln for that matter.
However, they claimed Fort Bragg.
So they renamed it from this real historic person who played an actual role in American history to this generic concept.
Fort Liberty.
Kind of reminds me of the French revolutionaries going in and knocking down statues of the Holy Mother, an actual person in history, one of the most important people in all of history, and replacing her with the goddess Reason.
Or even the notion of personifying Lady Liberty.
So, you had Fort Liberty.
Now, Pete comes in.
Pete, so good for...
Military morale.
Actually, just a great pick for Secretary of Defense, despite what the haters said.
He comes in, he says, now, you know what?
Here's one really easy way to boost morale again in the military.
Fort Bragg is back, okay?
It's Bragg.
However, there's a twist.
And the twist is, Fort Bragg is not being re-renamed after Braxton Bragg, the Confederate general.
It's being re-renamed after Roland Bragg, who is an Army paratrooper who was awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart.
I think this is really clever.
Some people are going to say it's too clever by half.
Come on, go all the way, man.
Rename it after Braxton Bragg.
Let's make a point that we're not going to deny our history.
We're not going to let the libs knock over statues.
We're going to go right back to that old Confederate guy.
I think here, Pete, and President Trump, the whole administration broadly, this is a good example of being wise as a serpent, innocent as a dove.
Because...
Everyone knows.
They're going back to Bragg because it's Fort Bragg, and that's that, and enough of it.
However, if they had really gone and re-renamed it after the Confederate general, one, there'd be a little political pushback, but two, it's a guarantee that the next time you have a Democrat administration, they're going to rename it again.
And it'll be Fort Equality, or it'll just be Fort Liberty, and it'll go back and forth, Bragg, Liberty, Bragg, Liberty, and it'll be ridiculous.
By renaming it after this other Bragg that no one had ever heard of, I think Pete is insulating the fort against the re-re-renaming.
Because now if the Democrats want to rename it, they're going to have to explain why this perfectly nice, unobjectionable World War II army paratrooper with a silver star and a purple heart, why he doesn't deserve to have a base named after him.
This is probably smart.
It makes it harder to rename the next time.
A lot of people have worried in looking at all of Trump's executive orders.
Well, okay, these are all really good.
But how are we going to protect them from the next time a Democrat gets elected?
Well, this, on a relatively minor scale, is showing you a little bit how you do that.
You've got to make it sticky.
You've got to raise the cost of Democrats undoing what you have done.
And here, on this relatively minor point, I think Pete's done a great job, and hopefully a sign of things to come from the Trump admin.
Now, speaking of controversial Trump nominees, great, great news.
Tulsi Gabbard has been confirmed as the Director of National Intelligence.
Here's Attorney General Pam Bondi swearing Tulsi in, in front of President Trump, in the Oval Office.
I, Tulsi Gabbard, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same that I take this obligation freely.
There she is.
A picture of elegance and class, despite the many unfair attacks on her that accused her baselessly of being a Russian stooge, being unpatriotic.
This is a woman who served her country in the military, served her country in Congress, had such independence of mind that she left her political party, the political party in which she ran for president, to support a guy from the other political party because she felt that her party had become so corrupt.
Really good stuff.
Confirmed by a vote of 52-48, mostly along party lines.
Mitch McConnell joined the Dems.
Mitch is the honey badger at this point.
He does not care.
He's not running for re-election.
He obviously hates Trump.
He is much more establishment within the GOP. Tulsi, one could call her euphemistically a little outside the box, not McConnell's cup of tea.
Okay, fine.
So then how did it end up being 52-48?
Because the usual swing votes, I'm talking Susan Collins, I'm talking Lisa Murkowski, I'm talking even Todd Young in Indiana, they voted for Tulsi.
Now, this is really interesting.
This is really the only part of this confirmation vote that's really interesting.
And it defends, I think, Trump's, or it vindicates Trump's strategy here of forming a coalition that includes some Democrats.
Because you'd expect, okay, hold on, Tulsi Gabbard, one of the most controversial nominees, that means that Collins and Murkowski, they're always the fence-sitters, anything even slightly controversial, they're going to go vote with the Democrats, except, wait a second, Tulsi's kind of a Democrat.
Except, hold on, wait a second here.
The knock on Tulsi is actually coming more from the GOP, and especially the hawk and establishment wing of the GOP. So, weirdly enough here...
You're probably more likely, in fact, I know you are more likely, to get Murkowski and Collins to come along with a Tulsi Gabbard than you are to get them to come along with a rock-ribbed, solid Republican like Pete Hegseth.
Wow!
It's almost like unpredictability, it's almost like scrambling up coalitions can, if you do it right, sometimes work to your advantage, as it has here.
This was arguably one of the toughest Trump picks to get through.
I knew after Hegseth got through, there was a dramatically increased chance that Tulsi was going to get through.
He really opened the gates here.
But the weakness of this pick, the supposed weakness, namely that she's a Democrat and a lot of Republicans don't like her.
In this case, I think it worked to her advantage, and she actually cleared with a four-vote margin.
There's so much more to say.
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Speaking of Oval Office meetings, this one I love.
This comes from the Associated Press.
Quote, Today we were informed by the White House that if the Associated Press did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump's executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred Love it.
Love that.
The Associated Press, most people don't know this.
Most people think, oh, the New York Times is fake news, or the Washington Post is fake news, or the CNN or whatever.
The Associated Press is probably the most egregious offender among the mainstream media outlets for radical leftist ideology.
Specifically on this point of its editorial standards.
The AP is a full-on fake news outlet.
The AP has its AP style guide.
And for years now, AP has issued guidance saying, for instance, on transgenderism, that AP is going to defer to the preferred pronouns of people who pretend they're the opposite sex.
That's just bad journalism.
It is bad journalism.
If a big, hulking dude pretends to be a woman...
It is bad journalism to call him she, but AP is a bad journalistic outlet.
Don't refer to the men by their real names.
No, we have to defer to the transgender ideology.
That's just on trans.
AP, a few years ago, the style guide came out and said, the term illegal alien is out.
Illegal alien.
Illegal is the most technically precise term to refer to the people who have crossed into our country illegally and who remain here without any legal status.
Illegal, meaning not legal.
Alien, meaning foreigner.
That's what they are.
What term would you prefer?
Illegal immigrant?
They're not even really immigrants.
They're not permitted here according to our immigration system.
Undocumented Americans?
These sure ain't Americans.
Dreamers?
Everybody dreams.
That's the most precise term.
A journalistic outlet, supposedly, that says don't use the precise term is doing bad journalism.
The word woke, they struck the word woke from their reporting.
They didn't want to include woke anymore because they realized that that term, it's a polemical term, but it's a term that was used originally by the left.
The right just started using the word that they themselves used to describe them.
And they said, no, we're going to stop using it because People have turned against woke, and so that'll get them to turn against the left.
Even critical race theory.
They didn't want their reporters to use the term CRT. They said, no, critical race theory is this really complicated, important thing.
So if you want to give explanation about it, that's fine, but don't use the word CRT. Why?
Same reason, because the public had turned against it, because they found out what it was.
So the AP, frankly, should be barred from the White House, period.
They are one of the worst offenders of journalistic ethics out there.
They're one of the worst abusers of language in the media.
But then here, of course, the President of the United States comes out.
He says, hey, that body of water that is directly to the south of America, that body of water that can trace a much longer American coastline than it can trace a Mexican coastline, that body of water down there, we're calling it the Gulf of America now.
And the EP says, no, we're not.
I'm actually going to call it the Gulf of Honduras.
No, I want to call it the Gulf of you evil, terrible colonizers who came here and stole the land from the Native Americans.
Okay, well, you guys aren't serious people, so why would we invite you to the Oval Office?
Great, love it.
Boot them out of the press room, too, as far as I'm concerned.
Speaking of other announcements from the Oval Office, President Trump has a message for Hamas.
So you remember...
You might remember there's this war going on in Gaza.
You might have heard a thing or two about it.
After the October 7th attack, when Hamas killed and raped and pillaged over a thousand Israeli civilians, took a bunch of them, hundreds of them hostage.
This war has been going on.
Israel has just been absolutely pummeling and obliterating Gaza.
Now there's a ceasefire.
The ceasefire requires the return of the hostages that Hamas took out of Israel.
Hamas is now signaling that they're not going to return any more hostages.
So Hamas, the United States says, we're going to institute this ceasefire deal.
We're going to get this done.
But you need to fulfill your obligations.
We're the global hegemon.
Don't try us.
Hamas says, we think you're bluffing.
We're going to call your bluff.
Here is Trump's response to Hamas.
Mr. President, when you say all hell is going to break loose, are you speaking about retaliation?
You'll find out.
And they'll find out, too.
Hamas will find out what I mean.
They're going to find out what I mean.
These are sick people.
And they'll find out what I mean Saturday at 12. You'll find out what I mean.
Oh, boy, that's cold.
That's New York talk right there.
I remember when I was a kid.
I would hear a little broken dialect.
Calabrese, Italian, or Sicilian as a boy.
We didn't speak it at home, but I'd hear it from my grandparents sometimes.
And one of the phrases I remember the clearest was, I'm going to show you what I'm going to do.
You know, you never say exactly what you're going to do.
I never knew what my grandmother was going to do.
In regular Italian, in Tuscan Italian, it's ti faccio vedere io quello che ti faccio.
I am going to show you.
Don't worry, just use your imagination.
It's like Alfred Hitchcock in the movies.
I'm not going to show you the killer or the monster.
You're going to imagine it, okay?
And that's what Trump's saying.
He's not going to show his hand.
But I think he is not bluffing because the credibility of the United States is on the line.
The way that Trump gets to be kind of a dove rather than a hawk, The way that Trump gets to not expand wars, the way that Trump, unlike Bush, unlike Obama, unlike Biden, the way that Trump gets to be a kind of a peace president is because every so often he drops the Moab.
And you don't know when it's going to be, but every so often he's going to kill the top Iranian general.
And you don't.
Sometimes.
He's going to go, you know, hug Kim Jong-un, and it's all going to be happy-happy.
But sometimes he's going to just blow up a town.
And I'm not saying, because Americans do not want boots on the ground in Gaza.
Americans do not want Americans to become embroiled in that war between the state of Israel and Gaza.
But he's going to have to do something.
And if you're Hamas...
I think you've got to give up the hostages.
The problem is the minute Hamas gives up the hostages, they're done.
They're signing their death warrants because at that point, the state of Israel has no reason not to just send them not six feet below the earth, but 600 feet below the earth.
Just drop every bomb they have on them.
However, I don't know that they have much option right now.
Listening to Trump speak there, that does not sound like the kind of guy who's joking around.
Now, speaking of foreign soil, Richard Gere, my cousin, Richard Gere is my cousin.
We shared an acting teacher in New York, and we also share a bloodline because Richard Gere is a descendant of, I think, all of my Mayflower ancestors.
Because he's a descendant of Lydia Fuller, and so I think Richard Gere and I share at least one, but maybe up to six Mayflower ancestors.
Mayflower, which is, by the way, a delicious cigar that is back in stock right now, and you can get it at mayflowercigars.com.
Richard Gere has just come out and bashed the United States on foreign soil.
Here's what he had to say.
I'm coming from a place now that we're in a very dark place in America where we have a bully and a thug who's the president of the United States.
But it's not just in the US, it's everywhere.
Everywhere.
You know, I read a really moving letter in the New York Times from a gentleman in Hungary.
And he was the slippery slope of how this happens everywhere.
Authoritarianism takes us all over.
We have to be vigilant.
We have to be alert.
We have to be energetic.
We have to be brave.
We have to be courageous.
And everyone who's watching this in the Spanish-speaking world and elsewhere, we have to be willing to stand up, tell the truth, be honest, and that there's a place in all of our lives for basic kindness, for basic love and understanding.
Basic love and understanding.
That's what we need to get back to.
This guy just flew to foreign soil to bash his own country.
That alone, very disreputable.
But the way he did it was insulting not just to Trump.
He's just saying this creeping authoritarianism, this bully and this thug who most American voters voted for.
Don't forget that part.
He can't even say, oh, it was just the Electoral College and it was only a minority of Americans foisted.
No, it was most Americans.
This guy, Richard Gere, Who has been given a lot by Americans, by the way.
This guy has been given a really nice, cushy lifestyle and a lot of adulation for many decades at this point by Americans.
He's just called the majority of his countrymen quasi-fascists on foreign soil.
Very disreputable.
Because we need to be so nice and kind.
You know, just be kind.
Be kind, everyone.
Be nice.
Be lovely.
Hey, how about Charity Starts at Home?
Isn't that what the Ordo on Maurice...
Touches on.
We were just talking about that last week.
How about before you express your deep-seated desire for kindness to people on the opposite side of the world that you really don't know at all, you have nothing to do with, they don't affect your life in any way, how about you try just not being a huge jerk to the people closest to you?
How about we start there?
Before...
We just give a big old hug and kumbaya to all of humanity.
How about you show some genuine kindness and engage in an actual act of charity with the people who you interact with daily?
Because if you can't muster that, I'm a little skeptical of the nice, nice, happy, happy, lovey kindness kind of talk.
There's so much more to say.
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Speaking of the supposedly hostile takeover of our government, Elon Musk was just in the Oval Office.
The Associated Press was not, but Elon Musk was there with President Trump, and he was asked about this charge, that he is leading an opaque and hostile takeover of the government, contrary to the will of the voters.
What say you, Elon?
Everyone's very quiet.
You're detractors, Mr. Musk.
What?
Including a lot of Democrats.
I have detractors?
You do, sir.
I don't believe it.
Say that you're orchestrating a hostile takeover of government and doing it in a non-transparent way.
What's your response to that criticism?
Well, first of all, you couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from the public.
The public voted...
We have a majority of the public voting for President Trump.
We won the House.
We won the Senate.
The people voted for major government reform.
There should be no doubt about that.
That was on the campaign.
The president spoke about that at every rally.
The people voted for major government reform, and that's what people are going to get.
They're going to get what they voted for.
And a lot of times, you know, people that don't get what they voted for, but in this presidency, they are going to get what they voted for.
And that's what democracy is all about.
Great answer.
Great answer here from Elon.
You see Trump nodding along with it.
He obviously agrees.
This was why it was so smart for Trump to bring Elon on the campaign trail and to bring Tulsi and to bring Bobby Kennedy and to trot out all of the most controversial aspects of his administration before the election.
It's for that mandate.
It's why it was so helpful for Trump to get the popular vote and to campaign in places like New York to try to help him get it.
He wasn't just trying to squeak through and get in.
And, you know, hide the ball.
Remember Mitt Romney in 2012. The whole campaign was just on how bad the economy was under Obama.
He didn't really speak about the things that he proactively wanted to do.
Because he said, if I can just get in on an anti-Obama sentiment, then I can do whatever I want.
But not really, actually.
Because even if he had gotten in, if you don't build consensus for the things that you plan to do, then the media are going to have an easier time.
Attacking you and deflating you once you actually start doing those things.
But here, Elon can come in and say, yo, guys, I was at all the rallies.
We said exactly what we were going to do.
The American people voted for that.
So actually, media, you're on the wrong side of this.
The media knew exactly what they were doing.
The fact that Elon Musk is such a famous guy is actually what makes him perfect to be the head of Doge.
Because you're not being transparent.
Not being transparent.
Has Elon Musk ever had an untweeted thought since he spent $44 billion to buy Twitter?
Hiding the ball, being opaque.
This is one of the most famous men on planet Earth who is constantly telling you every single thing that he's doing on the major social media platform that he bought and that he now owns.
What are you talking about?
This is what the people wanted.
It would have been a lot easier for the Senate to shoot down Tulsi Gabbard had she not been campaigning with Trump.
Okay, it'd be a lot easier for the Senate to shoot down Bobby Kennedy had he not been campaigning for Trump.
But all these guys within the Senate and even perhaps to some degree, even some in the media, recognize, oh, yikes.
It's not just that we have to fear the wrath of Donald Trump or something.
If we push too hard here, we've got to fear the wrath of the voters who made their choices clear.
Caroline Levitt made this point beautifully.
Doge is popular.
Nobody is out there campaigning or protesting for all the bloat in the federal government.
USAID money being sent overseas for transgender ballets in Thailand or something.
No one is really actively campaigning for that.
So the more that the left tries to make an issue out of Elon or an issue out of Doge, the more that the White House can come out and say, hey, you want to know what Doge is actually getting rid of?
Caroline, take it away.
Before it was Elon Musk making our government efficient and accountable, it was some unnamed bureaucrat that none of you knew.
Elon Musk is the richest man in the world.
He's also now one of the most highly scrutinized men in the world alongside President Trump because of what he's doing and the access that he is allowing.
So there's great transparency.
As for the actual receipts, we are happy to provide them, and I actually brought some today because all of you know I love to bring the receipts.
We have contracts upon contracts that we can send.
Let me be very clear.
We are not trying to hide anything.
We have been incredibly transparent, and we will continue to be.
These are screenshots of contracts that Doge found across our government.
This is a DEI contract, $36,000 for U.S. citizenship and immigration services.
That is against the President's policies and his America First agenda.
This is a $3.4 million contract, a Council for Inclusive Innovation at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Department of Commerce, another DEI contract that Doge identified.
I can continue to go through these.
Oh, I love this one.
$57,000 for climate change in Sri Lanka.
What is this doing to continue the interests of the American people?
Absolutely nothing.
This is just going to be a consistent winner for Republicans.
Great.
Please, keep going after Elon Media.
I'm begging you.
Please keep going after Elon.
One of the most public and scrutinized men in the world, meaning he's pretty durable.
You can keep trying to attack him, but trust me, if it were possible to have taken down Elon with some reputation scandal, that would have happened years ago.
He's been scrutinized for a long time.
This is in part why Caroline Levitt is a really good choice for press secretary.
She ran for Congress.
She endured at least some degree of political scrutiny.
This is why I think it's smart for President Trump to pick media hosts for big positions in his government.
Pete Hegg said that the Pentagon's a good example.
If you are in public life, if you are regularly on camera, or you've passed laws, or you run major companies, at least at the degree that Elon has, because he has been such a celebrity, you have been subject to scrutiny.
So there aren't going to be all that many surprises, generally speaking.
And so then the focus is just on the program.
Great, the program's a winner.
This is like when Trump posted to Truth Social and then actually signed an executive order saying that he's going to bring back plastic straws.
Okay, great.
Now you've put Democrats in the position of defending paper straws.
No one likes paper straws.
Now Caroline Levitt and Elon and Trump have put the Democrats in the position of defending sending a...
Bunch of money overseas for climate change in Sri Lanka.
You think the American people want that?
They don't.
Wonderful.
Great.
Keep getting them to defend things that 15% of voters at most support.
Now, this brings us back to the broader problem that the Democrats have now, which is they are not thinking straight.
They're thinking gay because they're Democrats.
No, I'm joking.
They're not thinking straight because they've been driven crazy by Trump.
So they keep falling for his traps.
Because he makes them so angry with the way that he speaks.
And the people that he puts around him, like Elon, just, why Elon?
He's not even wearing a tie.
Why is he there?
I hate him.
They're just going so crazy that they keep making mistakes like defending paper straws or a bunch of money for climate change in Sri Lanka or whatever.
And this is possibly even a clinical fact.
There's an article out from the Daily Beast quoting a number of psychologists.
Psychologists are saying, they've seen an uptick in clients.
It is because of Trump.
The clients are Democrats.
They can't handle it.
Quote, I think we can take so much of something before the human brain just peters out and says, I can't keep up.
Sanam Hafiz, a New York-based neuropsychologist, told Axios.
This is being reported by the Daily Beast.
The digital news site interviewed a handful of psychologists and mental health experts about the impact on Americans.
Andrea Bonior, a Georgetown University professor and psychologist, told Axios she had seen an increase in patients, largely Democrats, citing burnout and despair, in part due to the mounting uncertainty generated by Trump's rapid-fire policies and the energy required to keep up.
So this is actually probably good for Democrats in the long run.
because it's showing them Their own mental, emotional, spiritual fragility.
A politician that you don't like entering office should not be enough to send you to the loony bin.
If that does send you to the loony bin, you have underlying psychological problems.
You have problems of mental resiliency.
You probably have spiritual problems.
You probably just don't understand the world all that well.
I think probably the thing that is driving the Democrats craziest here, and you can see it in how crestfallen they seem right now, how really despairing they seem, is that Trump won the popular vote.
So they can't make sense of it.
I've spoken to Democrat friends of mine who've said, I just thought I understood the country and I don't.
I just thought I understood the country, but then almost half of Hispanics voted for Trump.
What?
Even a disproportionate number of black guys, even a lot of women, even, wow, I guess I... I guess I just didn't understand the country.
I think that's what they're most upset about, is how embarrassed they are.
They just got it wrong.
Either Richard Gere is right and the majority of Americans are fascists, or these Democrats just kind of got it wrong.
Good, that's a good opportunity for us.
This is a teachable moment, as people used to call it.
Say, right, yeah, you were wrong about Trump, about voters.
About politics.
Yeah.
But good.
This is an opportunity for your healing.
Trump is here.
Trump is doing so much great stuff.
Not only is he going to fix the economy and foreign policy, he's even going to fix your brain, Democrats.
Lucky you.
You're getting a lot for this election.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Aslan81 who says, apparently Siberia has such a large trans population they were able to form their own orchestra.
And it's pretty good, too.
It is pretty good.
Man, maybe we need to ship all of the trans-identifying people off to Siberia.
And give them all cellos, because I agree, that orchestra is very, very good.
Speaking of the political divide, Evangelical Pastor Rick Warren has gone viral for making a political point through his understanding of religion.
He posted a picture of our Lord being crucified on Mount Calvary.
With the two thieves on either side.
And Rick Warren said, John 19, 18, they crucified Jesus with two others, one on each side and Jesus in the middle.
And then Warren adds, the guys on both sides were thieves.
If you're looking for the hashtag real Jesus, not a caricature disfigured by partisan motivations, you'll find him in the middle, not on either side.
Now, The problem with this analogy is that the thieves on either side of our Lord were not the same.
The thief to our Lord's right is in heaven right now.
Saint Dismas, the first saint.
And the thief to our Lord's left is in hell.
So, if the point that Rick Warren was trying to make here is, don't look to the right or the left, man.
You know, that's all bad stuff.
It doesn't work when the guy on the right is in heaven enjoying perfect beatitude with our Lord right now, was with him that day in paradise, and the one on the left is burning in hell.
That's not the best analogy for Mr. Warren to prove his point.
I don't really know anything about Rick Warren other than I know he's a very prominent evangelical, and I thought that he was on the right.
But I guess in recent years, My friend Megan Basham wrote a good book about this.
In recent years, I guess he's moved over to the left and a lot of evangelicals who used to be pretty rock solid for the Republican Party, they've moved over to the left.
So Rick Warren has this weak analogy here about Calvary.
But then even, what is the point that he's trying to make?
Is the point that if you want to understand how...
The faith should inform your politics because we're incarnate creatures.
We move through time and space.
We have to engage in politics.
We're the political animal.
We live in a society.
So it would be better for our faith to inform our politics than for our faith to not inform our politics.
That sounds like a really bad idea.
Okay, how should our faith inform our politics?
It seems to me what he's saying is you should just be a centrist according to whatever the standards the age embraces at any given time.
Isn't that what he's saying?
You'll find the real Jesus, not on both sides, not a caricature disfigured by partisan motivations, not on the right or on the left.
You'll find him in the middle.
So that's like what, Bill Clinton basically?
Is that what he's saying?
No, look, if you're a real Christian, you're not going to be over there with those extreme conservatives on the right.
You're...
And you're not going to be even on the left.
You're going to be right in the middle with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
What?
I don't think so.
And hold on.
Now we're using, we're actually using the spirit of the age in order to ascertain what our Lord wants for us?
I was always told if you marry the spirit of the age, you'll find yourself a widow in the next.
I was always told not really to become too attached to worldly things.
What?
It even then, Gets to the question of where these terms left and right come from.
Left and the right.
I hope Rick Warren knows this.
Maybe he doesn't.
The terms left and right come from the French Revolution when the Christians sat on the right of the National Assembly and the atheists and the secularists and the anti-religious people sat on the left.
And broadly, that just kind of exists today.
So, I don't know.
Weak analogy.
Real...
Real confusing.
I don't know what's gotten into Mr. Warren here.
Well, I actually do know a little bit because I'm talking to Meg Basham and other evangelical friends of mine who've said something has cracked among the evangelicals.
I don't know.
So they've got to get back on track here politically.
I don't know.
Whoever knows Rick Warren out there, someone's got to talk to him.
Now, speaking of critical thinking, there's a study out that says that people Who use and trust artificial intelligence lose their critical thinking skills.
This is a study that was conducted by Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft found people who use AI regularly for basic routine tasks will lose their ability for complex critical thinking.
And this from the outlet Futurism.
From social workers to people who write code for a living, the professionals surveyed were all asked to share three real-life examples of when they used AI tools at work and how much critical thinking they did when executing those tasks.
Those who trusted the accuracy of AI found themselves thinking less critically.
And the researchers then concluded that AI can result, quote, in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.
This is not surprising.
It should be expected.
Now, it doesn't mean you shouldn't use AI. I use AI. In fact, now when I'm putting together, I don't know, a little bit of research, whether for something that I'm writing or for a speech I'm going to give or even for part of the show, I will go to AI. In fact, you sort of have to go to AI because even if you go to Google, Google now integrates AI. So I'll check with AI. It can be a good research tool.
But I do not trust AI. Because I've said, hey, AI, I'm thinking of this text from some medieval or ancient writer.
I forget exactly where it is.
Can you pull up that text?
And then AI will sometimes generate a bunch of text.
And you say, okay, give me a citation for that.
They'll say, okay, that's from the Nicomachean Ethics book for, you know, this line, this section.
Okay.
Hold on.
I don't quite remember that.
Pull up a link for that.
And if they will pull up a link, then you click on it and you'll realize AI just made up the quote.
They'll just, you know, just totally made it up.
And then you'll tell AI, you say like, you just made that up.
And AI will say, oh yeah, sorry, I guess I did.
So you can't trust it, but a lot of the time it can be a good place to start.
But then you have to go, you actually have to do the homework and check it yourself.
And even there I find myself, I'm relying a little bit too much on it.
But this has been a complaint going back all the way to antiquity when poems were written down for the first time.
And people complained, oh no, this is going to destroy people's memory.
Previously, epic poetry would be the sort of thing you memorized.
Someone would memorize the Iliad.
And you go and recite the Iliad.
As people started to write things down, all of a sudden you say, oh no, people are going to lose their memories.
And it's true, people are really bad at memorizing things these days.
C.S. Lewis saw this in Abolition of Man.
He said, with this kind of progress, every step forward for man is actually a step backward.
With each advance that we make, we lose a little bit of our humanity.
So you think about the technology of Artificial reproduction.
Whether it's IVF or genetic engineering of babies or genetic selection.
With each step, we're taking a step forward.
Okay, yeah, we can now exert greater control over our children, the kind of children that we're going to have.
But it's a step backward because it means that the children, all future human generations, will have lost something.
They will have become enslaved to the whims and caprices of Their ancestors or of the scientists that their ancestors hired to help develop them.
Every step forward becomes a step back.
The more that we seed of our daily lives to machines, well, the less we have to do, the less human that we will be.
Now, speaking of AI, J.D. Vance just absolutely crushed it at the Paris AI Summit.
But we don't have time to get to that today.
You know I'm a tease.
I'm a little bit of a tease.
I will point out, J.D. Vance did such a good job defending American interests at the Paris AI Summit that shares of Intel, which had been a huge tech company, which had been being pummeled recently, shares of Intel closed 6% up after J.D. Vance gave his speech.
Really impressive performance because we are in a new arms race.
And it's not an arms race for the nuclear bomb like we had during the Second World War.
It's not an arms race that built...
Over the course of the Cold War, as we stockpiled our nuclear arsenals, this is an arms race over AI and quantum computing.
Will we win remains to be seen.
First, though, gotta say goodbye to the hoi polloi right now.
We are heading into the member room segmentum because we have got to discuss Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively.
Because I don't know anything about it.
And I have to know.
So many women in my life are talking about it.
I have to know.
The rest of the show continues now.
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