Ep. 1758 - "Will You Strike Iran?" Trump Finally Answers
President Trump finally answers if he is going to bomb Iran, the Oregon House of Representatives hosts a drag queen dance, and the Supreme Court delivers a major win to conservatives.
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Ep.1758
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After days of speculation, President Trump has answered the question of whether or not he intends to strike Iran.
You don't seriously think I'm going to answer that question.
Will you strike the Iranian nuclear component?
And what time exactly, sir?
Sir, would you strike it?
Would you please inform us so we can be there and watch?
I mean, you don't know that I'm going to even do it.
You don't know.
I may do it.
I may not do it.
I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do.
I can tell you this, that...
He starts making a joke to the guys behind him in the hard hats.
Hey, fellas, you hear this?
Hey!
They want me to tell them when I'm going to hit the Iranian nuclear reactor.
Yeah, yeah, hey, hold on, synchronize your watches.
I want you to hear me clearly.
I say this without a hint of irony or exaggeration.
This is the ideal foreign policy.
This is more sophisticated foreign policy than we have heard from 99% of politicians, policy wonks, and pundits in my lifetime.
I may do it.
I may not do it.
And you may not like it, but this is what peak foreign policy looks like.
We will get into why I'm Michael Knowles.
the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Big Supreme Court win.
Though actually some conservatives are saying, is it really such a big win?
But I don't know.
It feels like kind of a big win.
The Supreme Court has upheld a Tennessee law banning transing the kids, and we've got the top Hold on.
I have much more to say.
I have much more insight.
Pearls of wisdom to spread before you.
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All anyone is talking about is the war in Iran.
Israel's war in Iran that might become America's war in Iran that might already be America's war in Iran.
Why is America fighting a war in Iran?
Are we really?
Will we?
All the guys, any guy, I can't speak to the women, but any guy who is at all interested in politics right now is just obsessively refreshing X and the social media feeds.
Some would call this a waste of time.
The fellows would say, no, no, no, we're monitoring the situation.
No, no, no, we're just being close.
So what's going on?
What are we monitoring?
What's happening?
What does Trump want?
Trump wants no less than total victory.
He said I was going back home to make a ceasefire.
Not a ceasefire.
We're long beyond ceasefire.
And I said, why do you say that?
Why would you say ceasefire?
It's a bad term to use.
Because a ceasefire means like everything's going swimmingly, we'll take a little time off.
It's not.
We're not looking for a ceasefire.
We're looking for a total, complete victory.
Again, you know what the victory is.
No nuclear weapon.
I thought it was a very badly worded statement by him, and obviously I let him know that.
I love he just brushes it aside.
When they said you want a ceasefire, in certain areas you do want a ceasefire.
In Russia, Ukraine, winding that conflict down, you want a ceasefire.
Even Israel-Gaza, winding that conflict down, you probably want a ceasefire.
You want the hostages to come back, but you want a ceasefire.
Israel's other war with Iran, which is really just part of the same war, it's the culmination of that same war.
It actually has relatively little to do with nuclear weapons, much more to do with the broader conflict around Israel-Palestine-Gaza, all the rest of it.
He says, we don't want a ceasefire.
I have been clear.
I don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons.
So it's not that I particularly care about this war or another war.
It's not that I particularly want regime change.
It's not that I want other goals of other nations, such as Israel in this case.
But my line, the Trump line that I've campaigned on for a decade, Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.
So I'm not interested in a ceasefire.
You think the Israelis didn't tell the Americans when they were going to launch that attack?
Trump knows about this.
He wants more fire or he wants Iran to say we won't have nuclear weapons.
That's it.
He says, we're long past a ceasefire.
You had 60 days to make the deal.
Day 61, we light you up.
Sorry, the Israelis light you up, but we kind of are involved to some degree.
And come on, let's be real.
So what are the mullahs going to do in Iran?
Well, according to them, they say they will not...
Here's Trump's reaction to their rejection of his demand for surrender.
Say good luck.
Say it.
It's already run out.
That's why we're doing what we're doing.
They had 60 days and a big 60 days, plenty of time.
And they made a mistake.
Their country's in ruins.
So many people are dead that shouldn't be dead.
I say good luck.
What do you say to the Ayatollah who says that he won't surrender?
I say good luck.
You're going to surrender.
And Trump still, he is still pursuing something that's a little different from the Israelis.
It's not that the American and Israeli goals are the same, and it's not even that the tactics necessarily are the same, though they're obviously in concert with each other.
The Israelis clearly want regime change.
For the Israelis, that is primarily what this war is about.
It is not primarily about nuclear weapons.
For Trump, I think it is primarily about nuclear weapons, and he believes some intelligence which says that the Iranians are close to nuclear weapons.
Even though we've been hearing it for 45 years at this point, that the Iranians are five seconds away from a nuclear weapon.
Some intelligence says that they are, some says that they aren't.
They certainly do have...
There is zero question about that.
So for Trump, it's about the nuclear weapons.
And he's holding out the Israelis as the bad cop and saying, look, they want to decapitate all the malas and reinstall the Shah.
Me?
I haven't decided what I want to do.
So tell you what.
Give up your nuclear weapons and maybe we'll make a deal.
Now, for the Iranians, it's very difficult because Muammar Gaddafi in Libya got that same deal.
And then what happened?
The U.S. went in and took him out, even after he gave up his nuclear program.
So I understand it's a complex situation all around the Middle East.
And it's complex at home because Americans, especially Trump's base, do not want to get bogged down in another dusty war in the sandbox to create a democracy in the Middle East.
They don't want a long war.
And they're shouting this at Trump from the rooftops.
And the point that I've been making on the show all week is, you think Trump doesn't know that?
You think the guy who managed to recreate the Republican Party, create a voter coalition that allows Republicans to win the popular vote for the first time in two decades, the guy who wins the top political office in the world on basically his first try.
And then becomes only the second president in American history to win a non-consecutive second term.
You think that guy doesn't have his finger decently on the pulse of the American electorate?
Of course he does.
So he was asked about this.
Well, what about the fears of a long war?
Trump says, why do you think I want a long war?
Some of the people in the base don't want a long-term war.
They're afraid that we're going to get into a long-term war.
We're not looking for a long-term war.
I only want one thing.
Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
That's it.
I'm not looking long-term, short-term.
And I've been saying that for 20 years.
I've been saying it as a civilian who got a lot of publicity.
People would cover it.
Very simply, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
Simple as, he says, look, I don't want a long-term war.
So that gives you a sense of Trump's view here.
Trump is saying, no, no, I am not George W. Bush.
I'm not Dick Cheney.
I'm not going to get bogged down like we did in Iraq or Afghanistan.
I'm not like Barack Obama, for that matter.
I don't want to get bogged down in a long-term war.
But, of course, the rejoinder to that is, well, maybe you won't have a choice.
When you go into war, you don't necessarily get to decide when the war ends.
Your opponent gets a say in war, too.
And I think this is giving people flashbacks to 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago now, 23 years ago, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld It was on a radio show.
He was trying to sell the war in Iraq.
I think this was November 2002.
And he infamously said, oh, the war in Iraq?
That's not going to be a long war.
Don't worry.
We could wrap that thing up in months or weeks or even days.
The Gulf War in the 1990 lasted five days on the ground.
I can't tell you if a It certainly isn't going to last any longer than five months.
And guess what happened?
It did.
So what does that mean for the Trump policy in Iran?
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Rumsfeld there says, look, the Gulf War in the 1990s, the first Iraq War in 1990, that lasted on the ground five days.
And the whole war lasted about five, six weeks.
And then we were out.
The second Iraq War did not last five or six weeks.
The second Iraq War lasted almost nine years.
What was the difference?
Actually, in the second Iraq war, the hot fire, go in, declare victory, that was relatively quick.
I even talked to buddies of mine who served in Iraq.
I mocked the notion that we would be greeted as liberators.
My buddies who were there were saying, no, no, we actually were greeted as liberators.
All the screw-ups occurred afterwards, disbanding the Iraqi military, all the kind of political corruption, the attempt to nation-build and all the rest of it.
But whatever the excuses, it didn't work out.
Rumsfeld was catastrophically wrong in his predictions of what would happen in the second Iraq war.
And Americans have a political PTSD to that.
Our servicemen, many of them have literal PTSD, and Americans have political PTSD.
We don't want that again.
We do not want to get bogged down in another nine-year war in the Middle East.
A war that does not seem to serve our direct national interests.
A lot of people scratching their heads, why are we even in this war?
If it does serve American interests, it seems in a more abstract kind of way, like for the cause of nuclear nonproliferation.
So, where does that leave us?
Well, it means that the doves have a point.
You don't always get to say when your war wraps up.
But you've got to give Rumsfeld his due here.
The Hawks have a point, too.
Because what the doves are saying is it's not possible to have a short war.
And that's not true.
The first Iraq war was really short.
The first Iraq war took about a month.
Okay?
So, the Hawks have a plausible argument, too.
And now it's up to Trump to reconcile these two factions that are within his government.
But Trump does that again and again.
Trump keeps rival factions on all manner of issues in his government.
You see this especially with tariffs and free trade.
You see this with people who are really pro-Ukraine, really skeptical of the Ukraine war.
You see this all over the place.
And we're waiting.
We actually don't know what he's going to do.
I'm saying the thing that no political commentator is allowed to say, even though it's accurate, which is, we don't know what Trump is going to do.
If you're a political commentator, you have to say with dead certainty, I don't know exactly what Trump's going to do.
I can totally predict the future.
I've got a crystal ball.
You don't know.
That's the strength of the Trump foreign policy.
When he comes out there and says, I may strike Iran, I may not strike Iran.
Because I'm not even sure he knows at that moment.
His unpredictability is his great strength in foreign policy.
But the stakes are very, very high.
Because it could be a really short war.
That really has happened.
We could get bogged down for a decade.
That really has happened, too.
And Trump might not strike them at all.
It would behoove the mullahs.
To make a deal.
Maybe it's too late.
Now, speaking of feuds that Trump has fought, and one that he recently won, Trump has been feuding with Tucker Carlson.
Tucker's been hitting Trump pretty hard over the prospect of a war in Iran.
Trump has come out, he said, hey, kooky Tucker Carlson needs to shut his mouth, basically.
And so Tucker got the nickname, he got the much-coveted Trump nickname, kooky Tucker, and then this happened.
Have you seen the Tucker Carlson, Senator Ted Cruz interview?
It seems like this issue on whether or not the United States should strike is kind of dividing a lot of your supporters.
No, my supporters are for me.
My supporters are America first.
They make America great again.
My supporters don't want to see Iran have a nuclear weapon.
Tucker's a nice guy.
He called and apologized the other day.
Because he thought he said things that were a little bit too strong.
And I appreciated that.
And Ted Cruz is a nice guy.
I mean, he's been with me for a long time.
I'd say once the race was over, he's been with me ever since, right?
But very simple.
If they think that it's okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, then they should oppose me.
but nobody thinks it's okay.
People that don't want I'm not looking to fight, but if it's a choice between fighting and Maybe we won't have to fight.
Don't forget, we haven't been fighting.
We add a certain amount of genius to everything, but we haven't been fighting.
So, notice what he puts in.
It's in this nice sandwich.
He's talking about policy, policy, policy, and the bread, but then the meat of the sandwich is, yeah, Tucker, he's a nice guy.
He called to apologize to me.
Yeah, he said he went a little too far.
Which is great.
I was relieved to hear that.
I was really relieved to hear that.
Because, you know, I like Tucker.
Tucker's been a great voice on the right for many decades at this point.
And I love Trump, and I don't want them to fight.
Just as I was relieved to hear that Trump and Elon kind of made up.
This is something that Trump is really good at.
See, people, when they're watching politics, what they want and what they expect, but what they want, what they desire, is division.
Even people on the right, even people who call themselves MAGA or America First or Conservative, they love the fighting.
They love the drama.
Trump doesn't love the fighting and the drama.
He's a pugilist.
He can throw a punch harder than pretty much anyone in national politics.
But he doesn't love the drama.
He tries to unite people.
And for all the little gossipy hens on the right who live, Ooh, haha, Elon and Trump are fighting.
Ooh, pick a side.
Are you team Elon or team Trump?
Ooh, I want to pick a side.
I want to tweet about it.
Ooh, whose side are you on, Trump or Tucker?
Oh, yeah, I like Trump.
I like Tucker.
Oh, yeah, let's let him duke it out.
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
All these little gossipy hens would rather have drama than results.
They would.
All they want to do is nitpick.
You'll notice I don't really pick fights on the right.
I try not to.
Occasionally you have to, but I try not to.
I try to get along with people on the right.
Not just because I'm an amiable, civilized fellow, but because I realize that I am in politics to do a thing.
I am in politics to advance something.
I am in politics to advance the common good of the United States.
And I recognize that I have enemies, I have opponents, And I have people that I have to work with in my coalition.
And I might not like some of the people in my coalition.
And I might have political or personal problems with people in my coalition.
But I realize that I need to put my ego aside for a second because I have a bigger job to do.
That's how I view politics, at least.
That's how Trump views politics.
And all the gossipy little hens who just want to see everyone fighting because it makes good reality TV, they are not helping the situation.
It's kind of funny that Trump is the big reality TV star, but he gets that you got to get along, get together.
He fought that brutal primary against Ted Cruz.
He goes, oh, Ted, yeah, we get along great.
Oh, love Ted.
Yeah, we fought that race.
But, you know, ever since then, we get along great.
Yeah, love Ted.
We get along.
Yeah, Tucker, we get along.
Yeah, it's all good.
Don't worry.
We're going to move forward.
Trump is particularly good at unity.
And this is, by the way, part of the anti-ideology of America First.
What does America first mean?
America first means a million things.
It's a phrase that's been used for a very, very long time.
But when I say America first, I mean the movement that Trump made.
That phrase lay dormant for a very, very long time, many, many decades.
And then Trump picked up that phrase because he liked it and he turned it into something distinct.
Just like Trump picked up the phrase, make America great again.
That wasn't Trump's original coinage.
Ronald Reagan used that phrase.
I think Richard Nixon might have used that phrase.
But Trump picked it up.
He made it his own thing.
And the Trump version of America first.
Is an anti-ideology.
It's rather different than some of the other political movements.
Libertarianism, even traditionalism, even all these different isms, isms, neoconservatism, paleoconservatism, ism, ism, ism.
He says, no, no, no, America first.
And that has a profound meaning.
Because it means we're going to bring in people who have disparate ideological views.
We're going to make them work together.
The free traders and the tariff people.
The pro-Israel people.
The pro-Arab people.
I don't know.
We're going to bring in all sorts.
The big business guys.
The more mainstream populist guys.
We're going to bring them all in.
We're going to put America first.
Not your ideology first.
Not your special political monikers first.
Not your favorite pundit or your favorite senator first.
No, no, no.
America first.
That's what Trump means.
That's not necessarily what other people have meant by that, but that's what Trump means by it.
And he's very good at it.
And it's an anti-ideology.
But it doesn't, they don't totally agree.
Elon Musk and Peter Navarro don't totally agree on trade.
Yeah, shut up, nerd, don't care.
Guess who's the president?
Neither of those guys.
Trump is.
And he's created a coalition that won, and its policies do not satisfy the purest ideologue.
That's why it worked.
That's what's great about it.
And we're just going to, when people start to get a little uppity and a little big for their britches and a little out of line, we're not going to just duke it out on TV and on Twitter and yell and scream at each other.
We're going to pick up the phone.
Oh, hey, hey, Tucker, what's up?
Oh, you're sorry for saying those mean things about me?
All right, it's cool.
You're a nice guy.
Whatever.
All right, back to work.
Here we go.
Oh, hey, Elon.
Yeah, no worries, buddy.
It's all right.
Hey, we figured it out.
It's all right.
Let's back to work.
Back to work.
Keep moving forward.
Don't get distracted by the gossipy, stupid nonsense.
That's my ideology.
It's an anti-ideology is really what it is.
But I dig it, man.
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Before we get to the weird drag performance in the Oregon House of Representatives, before we get to the return of an illegal alien who was deported to El Salvador, who's coming back to America, before we get to any of that, people have asked for me to make an apology.
They say I am mispronouncing the country that we might be at war with.
Iran.
I say Iran.
Sometimes I've said Iran.
Have I said Iran?
I've said Iran.
I don't know.
I've said a bunch of different ways.
But they're upset that I said Iran.
I said, Michael, you Philistine.
You silly fool.
I got an email about this.
You fool.
You say Iran.
Don't you know the country is pronounced Iran?
Iran.
To which I have to ask you.
When you go to the country that's shaped like a boot on the map of Europe.
Do you say, oh, I'm really excited, yeah, this summer my wife and I are going to go on our honeymoon to Italia!
Oh yes, I'm really excited to have some food that is all italiana!
I cannot wait to have some spaghetti alla carbonara!
Va bene, cosa pensate voi, bravissimi ragazzi?
No, you don't say that.
You know what you say?
You say Italy.
I'm going to Italy.
I'm going to eat some Italian food.
You know why you say that?
Because you're an American, and we're in America, and we speak American.
That's why.
And it goes even further with Iran.
The Iran, Iran, this and that.
Iran's so far away.
Because you know where the word comes from?
Arya.
Arya.
Like Aryan.
Aryan.
I mean, it's come from Aryan, actually.
The Shah of Iran.
See, I just did.
I don't know.
I go back and forth.
What do I care?
I speak American.
I don't care how they pronounce it.
The Shah of Iran.
Is styled the king of kings in the light of the Aryans.
Aryans, like the old, like, you know, obviously in the 20th century that word gets a lot of currency because of the Aryan ideology of the Nazi party.
But they view themselves as the Aryans.
Okay?
And how do you pronounce Aryan?
Do you say Aryan?
No, you don't.
Aryan.
Okay?
I have become, in this explanation, I have become the light of the Aryans.
Even though I'm a little dusky.
Like the Persians, who call themselves Aryan.
It's Iran.
Speak American.
No apologies.
Okay.
Speaking of interpretation, we turn now to interpretive dance.
This was on the floor of the Oregon House of Representatives.
There was a resolution.
Resolution was proposed to celebrate the, quote, We have a massive invasion of foreign nationals in our country, millions of people per year for many, many years now.
We are involved in at least one war, obviously the war in Ukraine and Russia.
We might get involved in a direct way in another war in Iran.
We might even have to take out nuclear reactors there.
But the Oregon legislators think it's really important not only to celebrate black drag performers, but to have a black drag performance on the floor of the legislature.
Thank you.
This is how and why Julius Caesar took over in 49 BC.
This is how.
People, they don't get how, in our modern conception of democracy, we think that Julius Caesar is the bad guy.
Julius Caesar is the good guy.
And the Roman people understood Julius Caesar to be the good guy.
You know why?
Because the institutions of the Republic, the Roman Senate and You had legislators.
You had senators who were taking bribes, who were corrupt.
You had widespread sexual immorality and license throughout the society.
You had creepy, filthy, degenerate, shallow, degrading stuff.
And then Caesar comes in.
There used to be old Stoic Roman virtues in the Republic.
By the time Caesar comes around and crosses the Rubicon, those are pretty well-worn.
They've atrophied quite a lot.
And that's the same thing that we're seeing here.
When you ask why people want a strong man like Trump to come in, and really one of the big complaints about Trump is he's not It's that he's not nearly authoritarian enough.
It's not that he isn't deporting enough people.
Rather, it's not that he's deporting too many people.
It's that he's not deporting nearly enough people.
It's that he's not bringing his fist down nearly hard enough on the bureaucracy and the criminals in the streets and the foreign nationals pouring into our border and the adversaries abroad who are mocking us and the degenerates who are corrupting children and all of it.
That's the complaint.
That's the only complaint.
And by the way, he's the guy who won the popular vote.
Okay?
That's how.
Because you look at those legislators.
And those legislators would be the first to tell you.
These libs in order to say, we are defending democracy against the authoritarians.
We are the brave, intrepid keepers of the republic.
A republic if you can keep it!
And that is why it's so important to have gross, degenerate sexual fetish performances on the floor of the legislature.
You say, okay, whatever that is, I want the opposite.
Please, Caesar, oh my Caesar, why do you abandon me?
The bridle is fitted, but the saddle is empty.
Why?
Why?
That's why.
That's why.
The more I see of that, please.
They say no kings.
There's going to be a no kings protest against Trump.
Okay.
All right.
I guess for now, what?
We have to wait for Barron, Octavian, Augustus, Trump I to be the king.
Okay.
I guess we have to wait a little longer.
Speaking of the federal government, the Department of Justice has announced that it will return.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
I know the news cycle moves very, very fast.
You probably forget that name.
Do any of you remember the name Kilmar Abrego Garcia?
He is Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen's boyfriend.
You know, he's the guy, he's the, the judges found him very likely to be a member of MS-13 and he appears to be a human trafficker and he is certainly an illegal alien and he was deported.
There seemed to be a court filing from his wife for an order of protection because of domestic abuse.
So this guy was deported, this illegal alien probable gang member wife-beater.
He was deported, and then a Democrat senator from Maryland flew down to take him out on a romantic lunch because he doesn't care about his constituents, doesn't care about the people who are the victims of these illegal criminals.
He wanted to wine and dine the gangster.
Well, the libs won, sort of.
The court said, you've got to fly this guy back home.
This is what Trump is up against.
You've got to fly this illegal alien gangster back home.
Okay.
So the DOJ says, all right, we're going to bring him back home.
And we are immediately going to prosecute him.
So actually, maybe this guy, Garcia, maybe he would rather stay in El Salvador.
He's being returned to the United States to face charges that he's smuggled many migrants, including minors.
He's a child smuggler.
Into the United States, allegedly.
This is a guy who was told six years ago that he would be deported.
There's not even a slight question about his legal status, but what Trump is up against is courts.
Even one random, one federal district court of 700 presumes to stop the executive agenda of the United States.
But the courts have said, all right, you gotta fly.
Senator Van Hollen's boyfriend back home.
Okay.
All right.
Fine.
Prosecute him.
Throw him in prison.
Throw away the key.
Speaking of conservatism and foreign policy, one last point on foreign policy from our Director of National Intelligence.
There are reports out now that DNI Tulsi Gabbard is on the outs with the Trump administration because she's much more dovish.
She ran for president herself as a Democrat on a more non-interventionist foreign policy.
She served in the military herself.
She posted a video.
Just before the tensions in Iran really kicked off.
And it was a video, curiously, not about this conflict, but about a previous actual nuclear conflict, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I recently visited Hiroshima in Japan and stood at the epicenter of a city that remains scarred by the unimaginable horror caused by a single nuclear bomb dropped in 1945, 80 years ago.
*Rain*
It's hard for me to find the words to express what I saw.
The stories that I heard, the haunting sadness that still remains.
This is an experience that will stay with me forever.
This attack obliterated the city, killed over 300,000 people, many dying instantly while others died from severe burns, injuries, radiation sickness, and cancer that set in in the following months and years.
Yet this one bomb, The bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of just 15 kilotons of TNT, whereas today's nuclear warheads range in size from 100 kilotons to over 1 megaton.
A single nuclear weapon today could kill millions in just minutes.
So, people were scratching their heads.
Some people said, why is the United States apologizing for using nuclear weapons?
I don't think that's what Tulsi's video is.
However, I think it's important for Americans to consider the ethics and morality of our actions.
Even if you say, well, I would have done it anyway.
I would have dropped the bomb anyway.
I would have dropped the first bomb, not the second bomb.
Or I don't know, I might have At the very least, we need to subject even past historical events to principles such as just war, just war theory.
Does dropping the nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki justify the criteria of just war?
That's kind of dubious, isn't it?
Well, you say, what about the bombing of Tokyo?
That was actually worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Yeah, you're right.
What about Dresden?
Yeah, well, good questions.
You're right.
I don't think that Tulsi is releasing this video to get us to hate our own country.
I don't think that's the point at all.
And I don't think it's about the past.
I think it's about today.
Because the war in Iran, and to some degree the conflict in Russia-Ukraine, is about nuclear weapons.
And about how different nuclear weapons are today than they used to be.
And it's got to get us to think about those results.
In some ways, her video is...
But my point actually has very little to do with foreign policy and more to do with political philosophy, which is that kind of a video, that kind of reflection from the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, tells you a lot about what it means to be a political conservative, which is that.
It entails being on your side, on the side of your country.
Your country, do or die, because it's your country.
But having at least a quiet reflection, a moral reflection, you're not just some robot.
You're not just a grunting baboon.
You're a thinking creature with reason.
And in this country, you're supposed to have a say over your own government.
And you have to have a little quiet reflection about that.
That, I think, is what's going on.
And even furthermore, to be a political conservative requires one to resign oneself to aspects of the fallen world.
Not to be utopian, but to resign oneself.
Ah, yeah, this is how it works.
To resign oneself to the ideological impurity of any effective coalition.
To resign oneself to give up ideology.
To have moral principles, to apply those principles, but apply them with prudence and practice in a world that will, at the terrestrial level, be disappointing.
That's what I think this is about, and I think it's an important lesson.
I think Trump has exemplified that better, certainly than any president in my lifetime.
There are others who did pretty well.
Nixon would be an example that comes to mind.
That's a conversation for another time.
In any case, much?
Just as the Trump administration has reordered the political parties, he would seem to be remaking geopolitics as we speak.
Today has bravely chosen to self-identify as a holiday we're celebrating the only way that makes sense by watching Am I Racist?
The official movie of Juneteenth in theaters.
It became the number one documentary of the decade on Daily Wire+.
It became the most watched piece of content in platform history.
Now, thanks to an unverified but enthusiastic number of fans, it is being celebrated as the official movie of Juneteenth.
If you've already seen it, watch it again.
If you haven't, today is the day of reckoning.
Am I racist?
The official movie of Juneteenth, streaming now only on Daily Wire+.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Stray1239.
The founding fathers may have had Harvard, but we have Harvard with remedial math courses.
So take that, Jefferson.
Oh yeah, aren't we so much smarter now?
It's like that viral girl on TikTok.
We're so much smarter today.
You see, back in the founding era, they only had Harvard, but we have Harvard with seventh grade algebra because the students don't know how to do basic math.
Okay, now speaking of young people not understanding basic concepts and older people not understanding basic concepts, you know there's been this ideology in recent years that has been, in my view, the apotheosis of the sexual revolution.
So I don't think it came out of nowhere, but it's...
It's the transgender ideology which says that a man can be a woman and vice versa, and it's an ideology which, taken to its logical conclusion, has to apply to children.
So not just transing the adults, but transing the kids.
And that was what was at issue in one of the most important Supreme Court battles in recent years.
We've had a few pretty big ones in the last five or ten years, but this was up there.
This would be the case involving my own Attorney General, Jonathan Skirmetti.
Tennessee passes a law that says you can't trans the kids.
The libs take this all the way up to the courts.
The attorney general defends the law.
The Supreme Court decides yesterday, 6-3, yes, states can pass laws to say that you can't castrate little children based on a preposterous ideology.
So on the one hand, we say, great, huge Supreme Court win.
This is awesome.
But on the other hand, you say, man, has our country decayed this much?
That this is what we celebrate?
Yes, states now have the right not to mutilate little children based on the sexual perversions of confused adults.
Man, I'm thrilled.
It was a huge win.
But on the other hand, you say, how is it?
It should be 9-0.
How is it 6-3?
How has our country fallen this far?
So I'm so pleased to be joined to discuss this with one of the most important lawyers in the United States.
That would be the head of the Alliance Defending Freedom.
Kristen Wagoner, who is the top lawyer in this whole case.
Kristen, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Oh, thanks for having me, Michael.
So, Kristen, ADF has been obviously not behind only this case and this issue, but so many of them over the years on transgenderism, on defending life, on defending all the good stuff in our judicial system.
Tell me about...
I'm not a lawyer.
What do I know?
I skim through the opinion.
I say, okay, this is all basically good stuff.
However, I noticed the court used pro-trans pronouns.
So on one side, the court is concluding, yeah, transgenderism, at least for kids, is ridiculous.
But they're using the language that would seem to affirm the trans ideology.
Well, I noticed that too.
And at the same time, though, I think recognizing that it was a 6-3 victory is important.
As you have just talked about, the ideologies that Americans have really succumbed to for about 10-15 years now are very destructive.
And frankly, this decision is one to return us back to common sense and biological reality.
But ultimately, even the law and the cases that come before the Supreme Court are a reflection of a flawed vision of what it means to be human.
And we have to correct that.
That is the biggest medical scandal and I think the biggest issue that is ravaging the next generation.
So I was delighted to see the victory.
I think it helps us turn the corner.
And it's also, I think, a phenomenal story for people to understand.
Who all played a role in this?
Because it's far beyond the lawyers.
And it even includes the Daily Wire in terms of us all standing up for truth to get this result.
Well, thank you.
You know, I wasn't going to flatter myself here.
But, you know, DW has certainly been really interested in this issue for a long time.
So I was really pleased to see the decision.
As you say, this might mean that we're turning a corner.
And that's what I'm hoping for, because it's been my assumption from the beginning that just as transing the kids didn't come out of nowhere, I don't think that it's unconscionable.
It seems to me transing the kids comes from the whole sexual revolution.
This radical idea of feminism, that men and women are basically the same, which leads to the LGBT movement, which says men and women are basically the same, which leads to redefining marriage, and the Obergefell decision, which says men and women are basically the same, all the way to the trans stuff.
So once you reach the apotheosis of that idea, then you start moving in the other direction.
It seems to me you keep pulling on that thread.
Maybe you will get, as Justice Thomas, Maybe that Bostock decision enshrining transgenderism in civil rights law, maybe that's got to go too.
Maybe I'm just being too hopeful.
What do you see coming next?
Well, right now we have two cert petitions pending at the United States Supreme Court, and they've been sitting there for some time, and they involve women's sports, the equal opportunities for women and girls to be able to participate without having to compete against boys who we know have a distinct physical advantage.
Those petitions we've been waiting on, and we believe they've been held pending this last decision.
It's important to also remember that just as 26 or so states pass laws to stop the medical transition or to stop Activists from imposing harmful drugs and surgeries on children, about the same number of states have taken that same action to ensure that girls have privacy in their locker rooms and their bathrooms, and that they also have fair opportunities to compete on the playing field.
Those issues are undecided, and while this decision is going to substantially impact those decisions, They don't necessarily resolve them.
In fact, I don't think they do at all because of the way the United States Supreme Court resolved this particular issue under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.
Can you just say, before I let you go, Christy, could you just say a little bit more about that?
How did they resolve this issue in such a way?
Because you would imagine this would have sweeping implications.
If you say, look, you can't trans the kids, it would seem to suggest, okay, well, Maybe you're suggesting that transgenderism is not actually protected as a suspect class under civil rights law, but it doesn't really go that far.
So how do they do it?
The court tends to be a little Jesuitical in some of its argumentation.
So what does the court really say here, and what does the court not say?
The court generally, in issuing its decisions, is going to do so on an incremental basis.
And so this is what happened here, is they dealt with just the issue at hand.
And under the Equal Protection Clause, the question is, if you have people that are similarly situated, Is the legislature treating them similarly?
So are boys and girls similarly situated?
And does this law discriminate on the basis of sex?
That was the primary issue before the court.
And the court said it does not.
Instead, the classifications that are in it involved age and that it applies to minors.
And it involved what you're using the drugs for.
What is the purpose of the puberty blocker or the cross-sex hormone?
And that's the basis on which they ruled.
Now, there are concurring decisions in this case that then take it further, like Justice Thomas focuses a lot on the science.
Justice Barrett focuses a lot on the fact that transgender status isn't a protected class, meaning that it gets higher screenings.
And so all of these other issues have to be fleshed out by the court, including Bostock, that decision that you referred to that applied to Title VII.
It was a wrongly decided case.
We hope that it is reversed eventually and we are working towards that.
But we also need to cabinet because it's toxic to the rest of this issue.
And I would say that this does have profound implications, this current decision, when it comes to if you think about the executive order that Trump issued on stopping federal funding for these types of surgeries and these types of procedures.
It will have a massive impact.
It will have an impact on any time federal funding is at issue or equal protection under these so-called medical transitions that we know are harmful to kids.
But we still have the playing fields as well as secret transitions in schools.
Well, it's a great win, and it's a great victory for ADF and for Jonathan Scrumetti, for Tennessee, and for anyone.
Good conscience and common sense in the country.
But as you point out, Kristen, a lot more fights to fight.
