Ep. 1709 - The Stock Market Is Crashing — and Americans Love It
President Trump's tariffs tank the market while his approval rating soars, Bernie and AOC plan a “Stop Oligarchy” rally, and Russell Brand is charged with multiple serious crimes.
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Ep.1709
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Except, they're all ignoring one really important number for Trump's and MAGA's political future.
When Trump implemented the tariffs that tanked the market, his approval rating went up.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Russell Brand, Hollywood celebrity, has been officially charged with rape for a crime that allegedly occurred 25, 26 years ago.
There's so much more to say.
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The market is getting absolutely pummeled, okay?
Right off the top.
Some of you are a little more wild with your investments than others.
I'm extremely conservative, which means I miss out on all these great runs of the market, but it also means I'm not sweating bullets when things like this happen.
But there is a major, major market correction that has happened.
Dow Futures has posted back-to-back losses of more than 1,500 points.
The S&P 500 was down 6% on Friday.
NASDAQ has entered a bear market.
It is rough out there, man.
Rough out there in the markets.
And yet, Daily Mail jail partners just posted a poll.
This is a poll of Trump's approval during the tariff week.
So, Trump announces the tariffs.
The market immediately reacts.
Everyone on paper is losing a ton of money.
Well, not everyone, but a lot of people are losing a ton of money.
And yet, during that period, President Trump's job approval rating rose four points.
It went from 49% to 53%.
So actually, Tariff Week, the worst week in recent history for financial markets, that actually was the breaking point for Trump to get over 50%.
Now he's at 53%.
Since March 7th, Trump's approval among young voters, we're talking voters 18 to 29, that jumped up 13 points.
Well, surely his approval among Democrats or independents, that must have gone down, right?
Nope, that actually went up six points.
Well, what about some of the most solidly Democrat voters?
What about black voters?
Sure, I know Trump did fairly well with black male voters, but there's no way he must be getting pummeled with black voters, right?
No, it's actually up 17 points in a single week.
What about the tariffs?
What if you ask people about the tariffs themselves?
More people support the tariffs than oppose the tariffs.
39% support, 37% oppose.
Something like 25%, 24%.
Don't have any idea.
In reality, 100% of people have no idea what the tariffs really mean and what all the long-term consequences are going to be.
But everyone's pretending like they know what the tariffs are.
So anyway, 24% of people are honest.
But among the people who have an opinion about the tariffs, more people support the tariffs than oppose the tariffs.
The tariffs and the market.
How do we make sense of this?
There is a difference between the chattering class and public perception.
There is a difference, in other words, between the media presenting to you what's going on in the world and what's actually going on in the world.
And we've known this for a long time.
We always talk about the lamestream, left-wing, drive-by, stupid, legacy establishment media.
But even with new media, even with the rise of podcasting and streaming, still, there is a chasm because virtually everyone I've been listening to has said that the sky is falling in.
And I don't mean to downplay it, by the way.
There are serious, serious risks to this tariff regime, which we'll get to in one moment.
I'm just pointing out, the chattering class does not at all reflect actual public perception.
More people like these tariffs than do not like these tariffs.
Most people approve of what Trump is doing right now.
Most people don't care at all that this market is way down.
Because for most people, this doesn't really mean anything.
If they have their money invested in the market at all, even through 401k or something, they're not going to touch it for a while.
It's just numbers on a screen.
It'll bounce back.
This always happens in the markets.
The 50 wealthiest people in the country are getting absolutely destroyed right now.
Other than Warren Buffett.
I think he's the only one that hasn't posted major losses.
Oracle from Omaha, really doing an amazing job.
But the rest are just getting absolutely pummeled.
But guess what?
The vast majority of Americans don't care.
They don't care if Zuckerberg loses some money.
They don't even really care if Elon loses some money.
And Elon is a big voice in this administration, though possibly opposed to the tariffs, according to some reports.
In fact, even more than some reports, Elon's taking to Twitter to go after some of the pro-tariff voices in the Trump administration.
Trump, for his point of view, is coming at me saying the tariffs are like medicine.
There's pain in the market.
at some point you're unwilling to tolerate this idea of a Trump hood?
Is there a threshold?
I think your question is so stupid.
I don't want anything to go down.
But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.
We have such a horrible...
We have been treated so badly by other countries because we had stupid leadership that allowed this to happen.
They took our businesses.
They took our money.
They took our jobs.
They moved it to Mexico.
They moved it to Canada They moved a lot of it to China And it's not sustainable.
We're not going to do it now.
We have Hundreds of billions of dollars is pouring into our country on a monthly basis.
It's boring It's already started because they put tariffs on and eventually it's going to straighten out and our country will be solid and strong again The tariffs are like medicine.
And so for some people, that medicine is going to be like taking a little Advil and putting a Band-Aid on the boo-boo.
And for some people, the medicine is going to feel like a combination of Amputating multiple limbs and maybe having your brain scrambled up too.
What was that process called?
What was that in the middle of the 20th century?
I can't believe the name escapes.
They did it to the poor Kennedy girl.
Anyway, it's going to feel a little tougher for some people than others, won't it?
I think that message resonates with people.
And it's going to resonate with the people, politically, that Trump has to speak to.
And that's not necessarily going to be multi-millionaires who are going to be pulling their hair out, but the base, the people that are actually the ones that go to the polls and drive the elections, I think they're probably on Trump's side.
Because whatever pain people are feeling with the market downturn now is the kind of pain that a lot of America has been feeling for 30 years.
And for those 30 years when the jobs were being outsourced, when the People in the middle of the country who were in the lower middle class to the working class were losing their economic and social position while this was leading to the dissolution of families and deaths of despair and all the rest of it.
And while the wealthier classes were cheering this on because it meant that they could get cheaper knickknacks from China, while the lower classes were complaining about this, the upper classes said, oh, we'll learn to code, catch up, innovate.
What's wrong with you?
This is creative destruction.
This is great.
This is just naturally how the economy develops.
Now, of course, it wasn't natural.
It wasn't natural for Bill Clinton to welcome China into the World Trade Organization.
The policies of free trade, especially in the 1990s, that came about that did, in fact, gut a lot of America, they didn't just fall out of the sky.
OK, they were intentional choices by political leaders who weighed the costs and the benefits and decided to move forward.
And a lot of the benefits accrued to the upper classes.
And a lot of the costs were borne by people in the middle of the country, people in the Rust Belt, people who worked in manufacturing.
And that's just a fact, OK?
So I don't think you're going to get a lot of sympathy out of that middle America working class base because now they're going to get a lot of sympathy out of that middle America working class base.
They're going to say, hey, where were you when I was feeling pain for 30 years?
Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, explained this very, very well.
There's so much more to say.
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Also, speaking of life insurance and the possibility of death, I'm going to be speaking at the University of Pittsburgh tonight.
So that'll be with YAF.
You can live stream it on the YAF YouTube channel.
You might recall two years ago when I went to Pitt.
They set the street on fire, burned me in effigy, and then anarchists threw an explosive at the building when I was supposed to walk on stage.
And I was fine, happily.
A police officer, female police officer, was very seriously injured there.
One of those anarchists is in a federal prison right now.
So anyway, I'm coming back tonight.
Should be a lot of fun.
If you're in Pittsburgh, go check it out.
Stay safe, but check it out.
Hopefully I'll see you in the venue.
And if you're not, if you're just online...
Go check it out on the YAF YouTube channel, and I think we're going to try to stream it to my YouTube channel as well.
Subscribe to the Michael Knowles YouTube channel, smash the subscribe button, ring the bell.
Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, please explain how Trump implementing these massive tariffs, completely tanking global markets, might not be a terrible thing.
I'm not happy with what's going on in the market today, but...
The distribution of equities across households, the top 10% of Americans own 88% of equities.
88% of the stock market.
The next 40% owns 12% of the stock market.
The bottom 50 has debt.
They have credit card bills.
They rent their homes.
They have auto loans.
And we've got to give them some relief.
And I was really struck by two different statistics last year.
Summer of 2024, Americans took more European vacations than they had in history.
Summer of 2024, more Americans were using food banks than they ever have in history.
I don't think the bottom 50% of Americans are losers.
I think the system hasn't worked for them.
I think that they are winners.
It's just a bad system.
So we are going to fix the system.
Okay, so much insight in what the Treasury Secretary has said here.
Let's just go to the first part, though.
He says this system is broken.
He uses the great example of the record number of people going on European vacations and the record number of people using food banks.
That's a systemic problem here.
OK, and what he what it speaks to is a more immediate problem, which is the system, even in its particulars, was unstable.
Do you really think the stock market gains of the past year have been sustainable?
Do you think they've really reflected sturdy underlying economic realities?
I certainly don't.
And by the way, I'm not just saying this now to cover for the administration or to try to put a good spin on this policy.
I have been very bearish in my personal investments.
I have not...
I don't have Scott Besson money, but for what...
Coins I do have lying about.
I have not seriously invested in the stock market over the last year because it just feels like it was all about to collapse.
And that's Besson's point.
Besson says we were headed for an economic calamity.
Would have been really fun for me to come in and just keep issuing a lot of debt.
And it's almost like a bodybuilder is taking steroids.
Outside looks great.
You're muscular.
Inside, you're killing your vital organs.
That's what was going on here.
But it would have been easy to keep pumping up the economy, borrowing a lot of money, creating a lot of government jobs.
There was no controversy when we're doing all that.
But you were going to end up in a calamity.
If you go back and look, you look at the financial crisis in 07-08.
Economy looked great right up until then.
You go back and you look at the end of the dot-com bubble and then the whole credit problem, the fraud at WorldCom, Enron, some other companies.
Economy looked great until it didn't.
And I think one of the things that we won't get credit for, but that this administration will have done, is avoiding a financial calamity.
There it is.
And his critics are going to mock him for this, say, oh yeah, it's an unfalsifiable, hypothetical situation.
And you're saying that had we not implemented the tariffs and tanked the markets, there would have then been a financial calamity.
Yeah, give me a break.
What's your evidence?
Well, here's some evidence.
Economists had already been predicting a recession, an imminent recession, before Trump got elected.
Here's a little bit more evidence.
Heavily investing my money in the stock market, and there are a lot of other people just like me who said, this just feels fake.
I don't really believe these market highs.
It just doesn't seem serious.
Even with this major correction, as of Friday at least, we'll see what the markets do today, it's not as though the market returned to 1929 levels here, folks.
Even with this major market correction, this huge tanking of the global markets, The U.S. markets returned to where they were May 2nd of last year.
Okay, so, you know, wipes out a year of gains.
Okay, fine.
But, like, come on, man.
It's actually not the end of the world, even though it might seem like it is in the moment.
What is Trump doing here?
What is Scott Besson implying that Trump is doing here?
He's implying that he's pulling a Reagan.
This is what happened to Reagan.
In 1981, Reagan is inaugurated, and the economy goes...
Pretty much immediately into recession.
And Reagan, it would seem, wanted to get that recession out of the way early.
The idea was, go through the financial pain that is going to happen.
There is going to be economic pain.
So just go through it quickly.
You have a recession, 1981 to 1982.
Then you can come out the other end of it and be ready for the re-elect.
And people aren't going to remember.
When you're running for president in 1983, 1984, people aren't going to remember all that financial pain.
And you're going to have mourning in America again.
So I think that is a similar thing to what Trump is doing here.
The problem is Trump isn't running for another term unless they amend the 22nd Amendment and he goes for term three and becomes, you know, Donaldus Magnus, the first emperor, followed by Octavian Baron Augustus Trump.
And so we'll see.
A boy can dream, but probably that's not going to happen.
Which means...
I've been really rosy, and I'm totally defending the Trump policies in principle.
But in practice, we have to have some caution here.
The midterm election season is about to start.
We're not that far off from the midterm.
Midterm election season will be in full swing in earnest a year from now.
And the markets most likely will not have recovered.
We very likely could be in a recession, and that will clobber Republicans.
At the ballot box.
Almost certainly.
It's one thing to have a good week, two good weeks of poll numbers, but if you enter into a very serious recession, already with the headwind that the party in the White House loses the midterms, that just almost always happens, then how are you supposed to have an upswing before the midterms?
The fear here is that the Trump plan is just too ambitious.
Or, you might phrase it as, the fear here is that the Trump plan just came about too late.
We had too many decades of this brittle, fragile financial system, economic system, and that trying to totally overhaul it overnight, the hour was just a little bit too late.
But the problem with Trump's plan is not the plan in principle.
And you don't just have to take my word for it, even the House Democrats.
Agree with that.
The House Democrats released a video with some, I don't know, some two-bit Democrat congressman, Chris Deluzio, who was taking advantage.
Here is the Democrats' opportunity to pummel Trump.
The markets are tanking.
But listen to how he criticizes Trump.
Chris Deluzio here from western Pennsylvania, proud son of the Rust Belt.
I think a wrong for decades consensus in Washington on free trade's been a race to the bottom.
It's hollowed out our industrial power, cost us good jobs.
The president's tariff announcement, though, and his trade strategy has been chaotic.
It's been inconsistent.
We should not treat our economic allies like Canada, the same as trade cheats like communist China.
I do not want to see corporations use the cover of these tariffs to now price gouge families.
Tariffs are a powerful tool.
They can be used strategically or they can be misused.
They've got to be used in sectors that make sense.
They've got to be paired with real meaningful institutions.
I'm talking about tax incentives to juice American manufacturing, get those supply chains back home, to go after corporate price gouging and...
Stock buybacks and better protections for workers to have the freedom to form and join a union.
We've got to get a better trade approach in this country, and we've got to put workers and American families at the heart of it.
Okay, the first craziest thing about that video is the horrible production value.
I'm not the one who chopped that video up.
That's just the video that the House Democrats posted with all those crazy jump cuts.
Aren't these guys supposed to be in bed with Hollywood?
Can't they get a little show business?
Apparently not.
The second craziest thing about that video is that even while the Democrats are taking advantage to pummel Trump, the weakest he's been in many years, and they're going to slam him over the head, as they do that, they're admitting that Trump is right.
The whole thesis of that video is Trump is right, in principle.
In theory, he's totally right.
More right than the establishment Republicans and the establishment Democrats.
It's just, we disagree on the details.
That's it.
That's the whole thing.
That's a terrible position for the Democrats to be in.
And it, I think, helps to explain why Trump's approval ratings went up the week of the tariffs.
And smart political observers, I don't care, hopefully the Democrats don't pay attention to this bit of advice because I don't want to doubt them.
But the Republicans who are listening right now, pay attention to that number and pay attention to what the Democrats are doing.
The smart Democrats, the clever Democrats are recognizing don't go after Trump's policy and principle.
Trump's policy and principle is really popular.
Maybe don't even really go after it in practice because most voters, at least the plurality, but maybe most voters, they don't care when billionaires' portfolios decline.
They want and they are demanding and they have been demanding for decades a major reform to the whole economic system.
Lost civilizations, Nephilim, ancient megaliths.
In this episode of Michael and I sit down with the rogue archaeologist Tim Alberino to uncover what your history books will not tell you about the ancient past.
Check out this teaser.
Many of these extraordinary megalithic sites around the world were built in the age before the flood.
The ancient Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans and all the rest of them, they believe that the very same thing occurred.
I don't even know if people are going to believe me when I say this.
When you started talking about the aliens and the antimatter, all the lights went off.
They have a $4,000 confidence monitor.
It like fizzed like the picture got all crazy.
Maybe somebody's signaling to us to shut up.
Watch the full episode right now on the Michael Knowles YouTube channel or catch the uncensored AFRI version exclusively at DailyWire Plus.
Democrats are taking advantage.
There were massive protests over the weekend.
They really were.
I'm not being facetious about that.
There were big protests in a whole lot of cities all around America.
Thousands of people in Boston.
You can see there's a good number of people.
A little swarm.
It's like Democrat Mecca.
You know, almost like they're swarming the Kaaba or something like that.
And it wasn't just Boston.
It was all of D.C., all over the country.
And okay, you see one frame of a picture, you say, wow, that's a lot of people.
However, thousands of people in Boston, one of the most Democrat cities in the country, thousands is the best you can get.
Something like 1,500 in D.C. D.C.?
Those numbers are not that impressive.
To put that in perspective, that's a fraction of a fraction of the people who show up to one Trump rally.
One Trump rally, maybe in the middle of nowhere.
I don't think this protest showed what the Democrats wanted it to show.
It was highly organized, so you know there was big Democrat campaign money going into this.
There were some real people.
I don't think it was all paid actors or anything.
In fact, I personally know some people who showed up to this protest, because as you know, I'm from a liberal place, and I've lived in other liberal places, and I went to a liberal school.
Anyway, I...
Grant, that this was a real protest.
Numbers don't lie, though.
1,500?
A few thousand?
Compared to a Trump rally, which could have 20, 30,000, 40,000 people?
Just look at the numbers on his approval.
The approval rating goes up four points, north of 50% now.
The week of the tariffs.
I don't think so.
Democrats are going to need to try something else.
To really gin up popular resentment against Trump.
So what are they trying?
Bernie Sanders and AOC are teaming up with, let me check my notes here, Neil Young and Joan Baez for a stop oligarchy rally in Los Angeles.
This is like a Mad Lib of Mad Libs, actually.
You just fill in the blank with all the silliest answers you possibly can.
AOC. Okay, AOC I get.
She is a leader of the left wing of the Democrat Party.
But if you're talking about the future, the avant-garde, how we're really going to create a great new America tomorrow, do you think of Bernie Sanders?
Is Bernie Sanders the future?
He's 150 years old.
I don't think so.
If you really want to excite the youths, you know, young voters swung for Trump in the last election.
Well, how are you going to swing them back?
I know what we're going to do.
We're going to get a couple of aging rock stars who look like crazy people.
Neil Young?
Neil Young looks like he always looked like a crazy person.
Now that he's old, out of shape, hasn't written a popular song in decades, what is going to happen?
He's going to keep on rocking in a free world!
There won't be any young people at the rally, but they would be scratching their heads.
And where are you going to hold it?
You're going to hold it in L.A., the city that just burned to the ground because of Democrat mismanagement, because of politicians blowing it on the basic aspects of government.
And we know this for a fact because President Trump warned the Democrat governor of California, who wants to run for president now, in 2018 that this exact thing would happen.
If the Democrat governor kept up with the Democrat policies.
So they're going to go in the charred ruins of L.A., burn to the ground because of Democrats.
They're going to bring a bunch of people who haven't been hip in 50 years.
And the nearest to an attractive, exciting person there is going to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Who else is going to be there?
Neil Young, Joan Baez, Maggie Rogers, Indigo D'Souza.
Jeff Rosenstock, the Red Pairs, and Ray's Gospel Choir.
Again, I ask.
I thought the Democrats were in bed with Hollywood.
This event is taking place in L.A. That's the best lineup they can get?
I haven't heard of any of those people.
Nothing, nothing, says avant-garde, like 150-year-old rockers.
The silliest part of all, though, is the title of the rally, Stop Oligarchy.
Because whatever Trumpism is, it is not oligarchical.
That doesn't ring true.
That doesn't ring authentic.
You cannot simultaneously attack oligarchy and populism.
The knock on Trumpism, on MAGA, is that it's populist.
And it's unleashing all of the unwashed hordes, you know, the deplorable, irredeemable mob of miscreants to take over our government.
These people who lack expertise, who lack sophistication, who are basically like those filthy insurrectionists at the Capitol.
That's the argument against Trump.
But that's the opposite of an anti-oligarchy argument.
In fact, when you make the argument against Trump that the Democrats have been making, the anti-populism argument, you are making an implicit argument for oligarchy.
Because you're saying we actually do want the deep state and the financial elites and these moneyed, powerful, entrenched interests to run our government because the unwashed masses are just unfit to lead.
That's the argument they're making.
Does anyone seriously think Trump is an oligarch?
All the billionaires just lost like hundreds of billions of dollars this week.
And they're furious about it and the people who don't care or who are happy are the relatively poor people.
Which is most Americans.
You're calling that oligarchy?
What on earth are you talking about?
It doesn't, that just doesn't, none of this rings true.
And so, it will be poorly attended and it won't make a lick of difference.
Just like the hands-off protest this weekend won't make a lick of difference.
Trump's numbers are going to keep going up.
The economy could get to such a horrible point that it finally starts affecting Trump.
It will have nothing to do with Democrat tactics against him.
If Democrats do end up winning in the midterms or the next presidential election cycle, it will be in spite of themselves, not because of anything they have done.
Now, speaking of celebrities, Russell Brand has been charged with multiple counts of rape.
This according to Reuters.
British police say they charged actor-comedian Russell Brand on Friday with rape and multiple counts of assault in cases relating to four separate women between 1999 So the most recent case is from 20 years ago.
And this entire series of charges comprises cases between 20 and 26 years ago.
Russell Brand denies the allegations.
Hello. Firstly, thank you for these incredible and overwhelming messages of support.
We're very fortunate in a way to live in a time where there's so little trust in the British government.
We're very fortunate I suppose that this is happening at a time where we know that the law has become a kind of weapon to be used against people, institutions and sometimes entire nations that will not accept and tolerate levels of corruption that are unprecedented.
I'm speaking particularly to those of you that are watching this in the UK.
How do you feel about your legal system?
Right now, how do you feel about some of the high-profile cases that are not being pursued and prosecuted?
How do you feel that the Southport murders were handled?
How do you feel about the government of Keir Starmer?
Now, that's just sort of general context.
Me, I've always told you guys that when I was young and single, before I had my wife and family, who were just about a shot over there, my beautiful children, I was a fool, man.
I was a fool before I lived in the light of the Lord.
I was a drug addict, a sex addict, and an imbecile.
But what I never was, was a rapist.
Okay, he says he wasn't a rapist.
This video does nothing to convince me that he was a rapist.
Or that he wasn't a rapist.
I don't know.
He might have been a rapist.
He might have been.
I don't know.
I know he says, I've never been that.
I was a drug addict.
I was a sex addict.
I was completely out of my mind.
Well, if you tell me all those things, then you tell me you might have committed a crime.
You might have...
I don't know.
I'm not accusing him of that.
I just don't know.
What I do know is that these allegations are from 20 to 26 years ago.
And I will give you the Knowles rule of forensics.
This is what I apply when I'm trying to ascertain if a charge is legitimate or not, if an allegation is legitimate.
For every year, That passes.
Between an alleged crime and a formal allegation, skepticism should increase by 5 percentage points.
That's my rule.
Okay? So, for every year, so if it's 5 years, I'm going to be 25% skeptical.
You make it, you say, 5 years ago, so-and-so committed this terrible action.
I'm only hearing about this now 5 years ago?
Look, five years isn't a lifetime away, but I'm a little skeptical.
If you tell me something happened ten years ago, but it's really serious and he needs to be prosecuted, especially if he's a public person, especially if he's saying things I don't like.
Ten years ago, I'm about 50% skeptical that this even happened.
Twenty years ago, I am now fully 100% skeptical.
This seems to me like Brett Kavanaugh stuff.
This seems to me like Donald Trump stuff, where starts saying and doing things that people don't like politically, and all of a sudden someone comes up and says, hey, actually, back during the Coolidge administration, this guy used the salad fork for his entree.
I don't have any explanation as to why...
These allegations would not have come out earlier.
You might say, well, because 20 or 26 years ago, the society was totally prejudiced against women coming forward.
Yeah, maybe.
What about the Me Too movement?
What about Time's Up?
When was Time's Up and Me Too?
That was like five years ago now, or more.
You're telling me, no, during all of that, forget about it.
No, we still couldn't come forward.
But now that Russell Brand is a prominent...
Political media figure.
He's identified, weirdly enough, on the right.
He doesn't really seem like a conservative, but he's on the right.
And he's embracing Christianity, at least in some way.
And now, all of a sudden, he's a rapist and needs to rot in prison.
I don't know.
I disagree with Russell Brandt that he could not have been such a degenerate that he actually committed that kind of a heinous crime.
In theory, I'm sure he could have been.
If you delve to the depths of vice and degeneracy, you could commit just about any crime.
But did he?
Seriously? 26 years later, we're making the allegations?
The Knowles Rule of Forensics.
Five percentage points for every year that goes by without an allegation.
20 years, we're at about 100% skepticism.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Kellygirl4996, who says, Christians forgive.
He can't let this thug ruin his life, too.
I think this is in response to Jeff Metcalf.
Story we're about to get into right now, actually.
But really good comment.
Really good observation.
Because forgiveness, we forgive because God tells us to.
We also forgive for ourselves.
When something terrible happens to you, you know, look.
You allow the prosecutions to continue.
You trust in God's justice and everything.
But you forgive in part because the man who sets out for vengeance should dig two graves.
That's the old proverb.
Because if you constantly are focusing on avenging old wrongs, it'll ruin your own life.
And it's easy to say when someone stole your cupcake in the third grade or when someone smacks you across the face.
It's harder when someone Really commits very, very grievous sins against you.
But at least for your own good, it'll serve you better.
So speaking of that crime, there's an ongoing criticism of Jeff Metcalf, the father of Austin Metcalf.
Austin Metcalf, the 17-year-old football player with really good grades, with a bright future ahead of him, who was stabbed in the heart by some complete animal at a track meet, or a football meet.
It was football meet, right?
It was some kind of sporting event.
Oh, it was a track meet.
Okay, but he was a football star, the kid.
And this absolute animal stabs him in the chest because Austin Metcalf said, get out of my seat.
So the murderer, the murder suspect is arrested and the father, Jeff Metcalf, comes out and he says, I forgive him.
God's got me.
God will deal with this.
I forgive him.
There's been all this criticism calling him weak, some insinuating that he's been paid off because the alleged murderer was black and the victim was white.
So that in order to advance political correctness and wokeness and to quell racial tensions, He was somehow forced to forgive this kid.
Just crazy stuff.
Jason Whitlock, I thought, had a good take on this.
He said, If you believe your son is sitting with Jesus and that biblical obedience requires you to deny yourself, then you can understand Jeff Metcalf's effort at grace and mercy.
The effort to shame and smear Austin Metcalf's dad is despicable.
Totally agree.
Whatever one thinks of Jeff Metcalf's reaction, everyone is going to form his own opinion, some are going to say it was the perfect reaction, some are going to say it was a terrible reaction, and one can make all sorts of arguments.
Whatever one thinks of that reaction, one simply does not criticize the grieving father of a murdered son the week the son was murdered.
That used to be common sense.
There is such a thing as decorum.
Decorum is conservative.
I'm not saying we need to be all little prissy fancy playing by the Marquess of Queensbury rules in politics.
Certainly not.
And if anyone thought that before 2016, Trump knocked that idea right off the table.
But in our daily comportment, in the regular social relations that constitute most of our lives, we can have a little class, folks.
We can have a little decorum.
Why is this coming out?
What has changed?
Obviously, social media, where everyone thinks not only that he is entitled to his own opinion, but that he is entitled to express it in any venue or any mode that he wishes at any time that he wishes.
And that just isn't true.
That's not how civilized societies behave anyway.
Okay. Yes, does one have a private opinion?
How would you react?
First of all, you don't know how you would react if this horrible thing happened to you.
But everyone has a private opinion.
I would do this.
I would do this differently.
This is what's better.
This is the problem with us.
The guy just lost his son.
You don't criticize him.
Two days later, you don't.
Good grief.
Decorum. We've lost a lot of that.
It's really because of social media because everyone's a big tough guy behind a keyboard on Twitter or whatever.
But it's not even about toughness or gentility or anything like that.
It's just...
How society is supposed to behave?
Were you raised right, people?
Were you raised right?
Did your parents raise you right?
Well, act like it.
Good grief.
Now, speaking of crimes, an illegal alien has bragged about being an illegal alien on TV at the aforementioned left-wing hands-off protest this weekend.
My name is Greisa Martinez-Rosas.
I am an immigrant.
I am undocumented, unafraid, queer.
The way that the Trump administration could go from being an A administration to an A-plus administration is if right at that very moment Tom Homan just rushed the stage and tackled that woman and then arrested her, threw her blindfolded in the back of a military cargo plane and shipped her to El Salvador to be personally interrogated by Naeem Bukele.
I'm joking!
I'm a quarter joking.
The temerity, the audacity.
To come into our country, to break our laws, enter into our country, violate some of the most basic laws in the country, and to get up on stage, on television, on our publicly funded television channel, and say, yeah, I broke all your laws, and you're not going to do anything about it.
Now I'm making even more demands.
Gimme, gimme, gimme.
This is why that is why Americans are not upset about the tariffs.
That is how Trump's approval rating went up when the tariffs were implemented and the market tanked.
Because Americans increasingly understand that elites view this country as an economic zone, as a piggy bank to be just shaken, jumble the whole thing up if we can squeeze out another penny, and social order, law, justice, that's all a joke.
Who cares?
We're just going to ring this thing for every dollar it's worth.
And most Americans here are saying, no, you know, we want a country actually.
We want social solidarity.
A country is not only GDP.
Not that these illegal aliens do all that much for GDP.
They just allow the elites to pay slave wages.
That's really what this comes down to.
Trump needs to ramp up the deportations considerably.
And I understand it's a difficult thing to do and they're working on it.
They're first going after the face-tattooed gangsters.
But if you have a country where that lady feels empowered to get up there and say, I'm breaking all your laws!
Hey, come and get me!
You're not going to do it!
Then we have a ridiculous-looking country.
And what's the argument?
What's the argument to tolerate that?
The best argument the Democrats are making right now, the best argument is that These illegal aliens need to be imported into the country so that they can work for very, very low wages that Americans won't work for.
Americans won't do their jobs because Americans won't work for such a low wage.
So hold on.
Your liberal, bleeding heart, kumbaya humanitarian argument for mass migration is that we need to oppress the poor?
No, Americans, they have too much dignity.
They're accustomed to too good a lifestyle and too many rights, so we can't pay them the slave wages that we can pay the Guatemalan peasants.
That's your argument.
Oppression of the poor is one of the four sins that cries out to heaven for vengeance.
And the Democrats, who are always prattling on about how much they care about the poor, their explicit argument for mass migration is we need to oppress the poor.
And the American poor won't let us do it, so we gotta import the Venezuelan poor.
Bad look.
Bad look, guys.
But it does help you to understand How we can have the worst days of the stock market since 1987, okay?
We can have what could be the beginning of a global financial collapse, and people will continue to support Trump, will actually support him all the more so.
That is how toxic the liberals in this country and elsewhere have made.
