Ep. 1850 - New York Elects A Muslim Communist Mayor
A Muslim communist becomes mayor of New York, a man who fantasizes about murdering conservatives and our children becomes attorney general of Virginia, and President Trump vows to protect Christians in Nigeria.
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Ep.1850
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Virginia makes a guy who wants to kill Republicans and our kids, its top law enforcement official.
It was a clean sweep for Democrats, but, but there is a silver lining to the storm cloud of an election night.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
The silver lining, of course, is that Zara Fuy can wear her burqa again.
Isn't that great?
You know, Zoron, he was saying that aunt of his, everyone in his family is an aunt.
All of his friends are aunts too.
And his aunt, Zara Fuy, she felt uncomfortable wearing her full burqa or whatever after 9-11.
So anyway, she can wear it again and feel cozy and comfy.
Absolutely, absolutely brutal night.
We will get to all of it and what we should take away from it.
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Zoron comes out.
He wins over 50% of the vote, which means that's with 90% reporting.
They're still counting votes because we live in a banana republic.
So somehow we've gotten much, much worse at counting votes and elections.
But with 90% of the vote in as of this morning, Zoron won over 50%, which means that all the people calling on Curtis Sleewa, the Republican, to drop out of the race, they were not proven right.
Didn't matter.
Sleewa could have dropped out.
Every single one of Sleewa's votes could have gone to Cuomo.
Zoron still would have won.
Would have obviously been much tighter, but he still would have won.
Made no difference.
Mamdani gets on the stage.
He celebrates.
He talks about all those New Yorkers he's representing.
I speak of Yemeni Bodega owners and Mexican habuelas.
Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses.
Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.
Yes, aunties.
You notice who he's not talking about?
You know, I can't help but notice there's one group of people that you're not representing that it happened to be.
I guess you look at all the races, you could say white people or Europeans.
But the other group is just like New Yorkers.
What about New Yorkers?
I am a New Yorker by birth and by upbringing.
I spent the first 24 years of my life in and within a commuter rail line of New York City.
And my family had been in New York for a long time.
There are a lot of people, Italian background, Irish background, even some English background, a lot of Jewish background, a lot, but people who have been in New York a long time.
Zoron Mamdani personally has been in New York for about five minutes.
He himself is an immigrant and he's speaking to people who are immigrants, not people whose parents were immigrants even, not people whose grandparents were immigrants even.
We're like people who have been in New York for five minutes.
And the transplants from within the United States and especially from outside the United States played a big role in his winning.
And what he's saying is, yeah, I know that you guys were the ones who elected me.
And so this is a new city now.
On the racial front, forget about white people.
We'll talk about every other group of people other than white people.
But it's even beyond just race.
It's, hey, yeah, there was an old New York.
We don't care about that.
We care about Uzbeki taxi drivers and Mexican Abuelas and everyone other than New Yorkers.
So he leans very heavily into the racial ID politics and he leans very heavily into socialism.
The first line that he quotes in his speech is from one of the most famous socialists in the history of the United States.
The sun may have set over our city this evening.
But as Eugene Debs once said, I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.
For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been.
So Eugene Debs, for those who don't know, was a socialist presidential candidate.
He was jailed for sedition.
Okay, this guy was very, very prominent, very dangerous man.
He spoke quite eloquently, actually, and he had a real dangerous little silver tongue, didn't he?
And he was ultimately, I think, he had his sentence commuted by President Harding.
He wasn't pardoned because he was guilty of his crime, sedition, but he had his sentence commuted because he was an older man, but he really was a dangerous figure, the nearest that we've ever had to a socialist takeover of the United States.
He won something like 8% of the presidential vote from prison.
And Mamdani comes out, and that's the guy he quotes, Eugene Debs.
So he was very serious about his socialism, the fact that the guy's essentially communist.
And he was very serious about his identity politics, the immigrant politics, the racial politics, every group other than white people.
He was very serious about that.
The silver linings in Mamdani's election are one.
I did call it.
My favorite thing to do in politics is win.
My second favorite thing to do is be right.
And so we couldn't get the first one, but at least we got the second one here.
He was going to win.
It's why I couldn't get behind this big movement to say, we all need to go out and endorse Cuomo.
We need to vote for Cuomo.
You know, I played, President Trump basically leaned into that.
And I just didn't think it was really going to do it.
I even tweeted last night before the election results were and I said, even at this late stage, we're on the brink of having a Muslim communist mayor in New York.
And I still can't bring myself to say I'm rooting for Cuomo.
I just don't know.
This guy's, look, I know we were all supposed to say that Cuomo was the moderate in this race relative to the Muslim communist, but, you know, the guy lit up Freedom Tower with a light show to celebrate killing babies.
You know, Cuomo's a psycho.
I don't know.
He was a terrible governor and he would have been a terrible mayor too.
So, you know, you're choosing arsenic or cyanide, basically, looking between Mamdani and Andy Cuomo.
The other thing I was right about, though, and you know how much I hate to say I told you so, everyone was freaking out when Mamdani was running.
They said, the scariest thing about this guy is that he's a Muslim.
The scary is, I can't believe a Muslim's taking over New York.
And I think it is a shame that a Muslim would be mayor of New York, especially for the 25th anniversary of 9-11.
But I said, what are you talking about?
The fact that he's Muslim is like the best thing about this guy.
What are you talking about?
I say, oh, you think that he's like some jihadi or something.
No, no, it's worse than that.
He's a cringe millennial socialist.
That's the worst part.
In some ways, if he took Islam seriously, I could deal with him more easily.
Islam and Christendom have a very serious 1400-year conflict and Islam engages in many theological errors.
But at least these people believe in God.
At least these people grant the existence of a kind of moral order.
At least I can speak to these people.
I can speak to Muslims in many ways more easily than I can speak to the purple-haired, you know, crazy, tatted-up, weird piercings, dubious sexuality millennial or Zoomer of the kind of atheist Western secularism.
So it's not that.
And I'll just point out, yeah, he leans into the crazy racial stuff.
He leans into the ID politics.
He leans into Eugene Debs and socialism.
I don't hear him up there quoting Saeed Qutib.
You know, I don't hear him up there quoting Osama bin Laden.
I think that's probably one of the least significant aspects of his identity.
He is a regular run-of-the-mill millennial socialist, which therefore involves some race politics and some religion politics.
But it's almost the worst kind of outcome.
Now, the way that the left has reacted to his victory tells you a lot about our political moment.
And it doesn't only tell you about the left, it tells you about the right because Republicans and conservatives have been flailing.
They have fecklessly tried to counter the rise of a kind of memey, semi-ironic, streamer, Zoomer politics that is typified in people like Nick Fuentes.
They've been flailing.
I mean, they've just been completely feckless at it.
And there's a similar phenomenon going on in the left.
We will get to that because I've finally encountered an analysis of it for the first time in years that is actually insightful and tells you about our political moment.
We'll get to that in a moment.
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Hassan Piker being interviewed by BBT News, but this being aired on PBS.
Hassan Piker is a prominent left-wing streamer.
He's the one who tortured his dog on camera and who has suggested the assassination of Senator Tom Cotton and who has called for the streets to run red in the blood of capitalists.
And so he, the New York Times actually published his assassination-related musings after the killing of Charlie Kirk.
That's pretty, pretty shocking in itself.
Here is what Hassan Piker had to say about the election of Mamdani.
What do you think it means that this guy ran as a socialist and anti-communism did it work to stop him?
That's it.
Yeah, I think we are in the heart of the imperial core.
This is the country that defeated the USSR, unfortunately.
And the reality of the matter is, there's a lot of antagonism.
There's no class consciousness in the United States of America.
It's one of the things that I try to address every day with my commentary.
And I will say this.
The conditions have deteriorated so much that everyday Americans, in spite of their lack of class consciousness, are finally arriving at the conclusion that perhaps there is an alternative out there.
There is an alternative that focuses on them as opposed to the interests of the billionaire.
Okay.
Even just that last line.
Finally, people are going to focus on the working class interest.
They're going to rise up against the interests of the millionaires.
That guy is a millionaire.
I suspect he's a millionaire many times over.
He opens up.
He says, you know, this is the country that beat the Soviet Union, unfortunately.
And then that girl is interviewing him.
She's like, ooh, you're bad.
Ooh.
Ooh, yeah.
We wish the Soviet Union won the Cold War.
Yeah.
And it's just so fake and stupid.
It's so lame and fake.
And it's total nonsense.
This guy would not have lasted five minutes in the Soviet Union.
And everyone knows it.
You think Hassan Piker is going to last very long under Stalin?
He does look a little weirdly like Stalin, but no, not for five seconds.
That guy would have been liquidated in five seconds.
Say what you will about the Soviets.
Soviets were made of tough stuff.
Okay.
The Soviets weren't like giggling on live streams, you know, crying about their dog moving.
Okay.
This is so artificial.
It's totally fake.
The Zoron victory.
The Zoron victory in New York is not distinguished by class.
He did very, very well.
He won over 50% of the vote.
But the features that distinguished his voters from Cuomo or Sliwa's voters, it's not economic class.
It's like everything else, but it's not economic class.
It's race, it's nationality, it's neighborhood.
But weirdly enough, you can't map it onto, you know, the poor beleaguered working class voted for this guy and, you know, the plutocrats voted for the other guy.
That really wasn't it.
This all brings me to an excellent article called by Chris Ruffo.
I read it yesterday.
You know, I've been on the road constantly.
I gave a speech at the Nixon Library a couple days ago.
I was filming in LA yesterday for my Prigger You book club show, flying back, covering the election returns.
I needed something to buoy my spirits.
And I read an excellent article by Chris Ruffo on this kind of politics.
And he was writing about it from the perspective of the right.
And he was analyzing the rise to prominence of people like Nick Fuentes, who the liberal media love to chatter about, and who even figures on the right are taking the debate about and, you know, I think dissipating their energies, especially before election day and spending a lot of time obsessing over.
And every analysis, everything, every drop of ink spilled on this phenomenon has been wasted for about 10 years.
I found the whole thing to be completely tedious and totally missing the point until I read Chris Ruffo's article, which was excellent.
It's in City Journal.
Highly recommend you check it out.
Rufo's article observes that the reason that the Republicans and the conservatives have been completely feckless about stopping the rise to prominence of people like Nick Fuentes on the right, or I think you could extend this to the kind of politics we're seeing here on the left, Hassan Piker and the rest of it, is because they don't even understand what the phenomenon is.
They think that the phenomenon is just politics, you know, and sometimes the neocons rise up and sometimes the paleocons rise up and sometimes the libertarians rise up and it's they're all and that's this candidate is is going to lead the pack.
No, maybe this candidate will lead the pack and that's why we need to win.
No, it's not.
It isn't that.
It is a kind of hyper-real politics.
It's a kind of a meta-politics.
It's a politics about politics.
And curiously enough, coincidentally enough, I alluded to this.
I touched on this a little bit in an answer to a question at the Nixon Library two nights ago.
And then Chris put that observation in much more articulately and in a far more comprehensive way in this article.
A hyper-real politics is based on some of the thinking of a guy named Baudrillard.
We've talked about Baudrillard in the show when we interviewed Wocal Distance, who had this concept of hyper-reality.
And hyper-reality would be like, you know, in Wocal Distance's example that he used on our show, said, you know, you start out with a strawberry and then you want like more of the strawberry.
So you make a strawberry jam, but you want it to be even more strawberry.
So then you make a strawberry candy, a hard candy, and then you make, but then you want it to be even more concentrated.
So, you know, you've got the strawberry jolly rancher.
Now you make a strawberry jolly rancher slushy.
And then you make a strawberry jolly rancher slushy ice cream or something.
And by the end, people really like the strawberry jolly rancher slushy ice cream, but it actually doesn't really taste like the strawberry.
And if those same people went back and tasted the strawberry, they wouldn't like it.
They wouldn't even recognize it, perhaps.
That's the process of hyper-reality.
Baudrillard, very interesting thinker.
He wrote a book called The Iraq War Didn't Happen.
Anyway, he's great.
So anyway, on this phenomenon that you're seeing here on the left with the commentary of Piker, you see on the right as well.
The hyper-real politics per Chris Rufo seeks out taboo, seeks out transgressing all of these standards and norms and taboos in order to elicit a reaction.
It's not that Hassan Piker is seriously a Stalinist.
He doesn't even really know what that means.
He's not seriously a communist.
When he talks about how we need to go destroy the millionaires, he would be destroying himself.
He doesn't, it's not serious.
Same two on the right.
The figures on the right who would call themselves Nazis are not Nazis in any meaningful sense of the word.
And Nazism as an ideology is dead and has been dead for 80 years.
The very purpose of wielding these symbols is to take something that does have symbolic value and charge and energy and to use that to bait other people to get attention.
But as I pointed out in my answer at the Nixon Library the other night, well, everyone all over the right is having arguments about this influencer and this podcaster and this streamer and how this streamer can't talk to this influencer and this podcaster can't.
It's all so disconnected from actual practical politics.
The fact that a lot of this fight was breaking out two days or one day before election day is kind of hilarious.
When I'm asked to weigh in on this, I, intuiting Rufo's thought here, say like, well, hold on, I just don't even see why I would weigh in on this.
This seems kind of frivolous.
It seems sort of gossipy even, and it just seems disconnected from actual politics.
I said, if this actually played a role in the political order, if these people actually could move, you know, 10,000 votes in Michigan or something, if this really weighed in on practical political concerns, I would concern myself with it more.
But if it's just this kind of entertaining meta-politics, hyper-real politics, I might enjoy it as entertainment.
I might engage with it that way, but I'm just not going to treat it the same way as I would if this were actually pertaining to real elections.
Really, really brilliant observation from Rufo.
Highly recommend you go read the article, which he says, you know, the way to respond to this is to treat it as, quote, an essentially fraudulent phenomenon and to focus on actions and outcomes, which is my view as well.
It doesn't mean that that can't affect the way that we all interact with each other.
Obviously, it does.
But it shows you that this political moment is quite different than political moments of the past.
And even the relationship between politics and political analysts is fundamentally different.
This isn't Charles Krauthammer going on the news show talking about votes and demographics.
There's something different that's changed here.
And it's not just on the right.
It's on the left as well.
And it can be kind of entertaining.
But it's different.
You got to know that it's different.
Otherwise, the people who are really disturbed by this or who want to counter it or they're just going to keep spinning their wheels like they continue to do and have been doing for a very long time.
So beyond New York, beyond the left and the right kind of metapolitics, what happened on election day?
We got blown out of the water.
More disturbing, perhaps, than what happened in New York is what happened in Virginia.
We'll get to that momentarily.
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All right, let's just get through it.
Governor Race is Abigail Spanberger versus Winsom Sears, the Republican.
Spamberger ran away with it.
I didn't even check the numbers this morning.
As of last night, I was following it.
They called the race at 42% of votes counted.
55 to 45 wasn't.
Wasn't closed last night.
Maybe it tightened up over the course of the night, but she won.
She was always going to win.
Spanberger infamously refused to withdraw her endorsement from Jay Jones.
Jay Jones was that attorney general candidate in Virginia who had text messages come out about him in which he was calling for the murder of a Republican opponent, the opponent's kids, said that the Republican opponent was breeding little fascists, said the kids should die in their mother's arms in order to change the father's view on policy, said that he would urinate on the graves of Republicans, said that more cops should die to convince politicians to change cop policy.
The guy is just a sick, sick animal.
And worse than Spanberger winning while endorsing him is the fact that he won too.
He won too.
When I was at the Senate, I was testifying before the Senate about a week ago.
The most viral exchange from that testimony was sitting there.
I was asking Corey Booker following his commentary if he would withdraw his endorsement of Jay Jones because he said we have to be introspective.
We need to admit when we're wrong.
I turned to where Corey was sitting and he was gone.
He ran away.
He didn't want to face any questions.
Didn't want to engage in anything.
He stood by that endorsement and got to hand it to him.
It paid off.
Not morally.
It was deeply immoral.
It's very deleterious for the health of our republic.
But Jay Jones won.
Jay Jones went out and he proved the phenomenon that we all saw after Charlie was murdered.
Just Charlie was murdered and normie Democrats from across the prominence spectrum, from elected officials and people on TV, all the way down to that girl you went to third grade with, all of them justified, excused, minimized, or even celebrated Charlie's murder.
And we said that this was the second national trauma.
The first national trauma was seeing a prominent promoter of civil debate murdered on stage just for engaging graciously.
The second national trauma was watching all the Democrats celebrate it.
Well, this is the apotheosis of that celebration.
Jay Jones comes out and says, I want to murder Republicans and their kids.
And Democrats in Virginia overwhelmingly elected him to be the top law enforcement official in Virginia.
Deeply, deeply distressing.
Mom Donnie in New York, obviously.
There was a hope that the Republican gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey would win.
Didn't happen.
Mikey Sherrill ran away with the race, really, in New Jersey.
It was a clean sweep.
Virginia was the biggest bloodbath.
It would just, the Democrats in Virginia did a great, great job.
Now, what conclusions do we draw from this?
We've got to be careful about the conclusions we draw because we don't want to just make excuses and say Republicans didn't do anything wrong here, but we also don't want to draw too many conclusions or the wrong conclusions.
It was an off-year election.
Democrats tend to do better.
They tend to do better because they have more effective machines to get people to the polls and have for many, many years.
It's just a fact.
It's an off-year election after the Republicans had won the White House.
That is maybe going to manage our expectations for the midterms.
We were looking historically like we might be doing a little bit better in the midterms.
Maybe not now.
Maybe this will be a jolt and this will spur Republicans into action to invest more money and time and resources into the midterm elections.
We don't know.
But it should temper Republicans' expectations for the midterms and it should inspire us to get out there and actually go get out the vote.
Third thing it could be.
Maybe people are concerned about rising prices.
Maybe people are concerned about grocery prices in particular.
Maybe people are concerned about the fundamentals of the economy and the political order.
President Trump inherited a very, very bad political situation from Biden.
And maybe people need more.
We've long said if the economy falters at all, that's going to really mess up the Republicans in the midterms and potentially in 2028.
Maybe it says, yikes, all right, we got to really put the focus on delivering more material improvement for Americans.
Could be.
That would be one introspective aspect.
And then there's one conclusion that we have to draw, especially from the Jay Jones victory.
Democrats, huge numbers of Democrats who are normal Democrats want Republicans dead.
They don't just disagree with them on certain matters and they just, they want us dead.
And if we died, they would celebrate and they want our kids dead and they want us dead.
And I don't know how you can pay attention to the Democrats since the assassination of Charlie Kirk up to the election of Jay Jones last night and not come to that conclusion.
I'm open to it.
You know me, man.
I'm like pretty open and I try to be charitable to my opponents as best I can and give me an alternative explanation.
I don't see one.
And that's a fact we have to deal with.
And the way to deal with that is, yes, in our personal lives, to try to change hearts and minds of the people around us, absolutely, to work on ourselves, you know, to start with the man in the mirror.
But there has to be a political solution, which is there have to be political consequences for publicly calling for the death of your opponents.
People need to lose their jobs.
People need to be socially ostracized.
People need to be prosecuted where it's appropriate because the law is a teacher.
And so if you enforce the correct standards, you're going to get better behavior.
And then you're not going to get people like Jay Jones elected because no one would dare elect him.
Silver lining.
I told you there'd be a silver lining.
And the silver lining is not just that Zara Fuy can, you know, wear her burlap sack in New York again.
The silver lining is not, I don't know, there's some people trying to offer.
Here's one good one.
An analysis just came out from the public polling project conducted by Big Data Poll, interviewed a bunch of people October 26th to October 28th this year, analyzing Trump 2024 voters.
And the distinction it has here is America first in the Trump sense of that phrase, you know, MAGA Republican, or traditional Republican.
Again, these phrases are really slippery because they've meant a lot of different things over a really long period of time.
But I understand traditional Republican here to be something akin to Mitt Romneyism or George Bushism.
America First being a little more MAGA, a little more Trumpy, a little more, you know, what Reagan was in the 80s, not what Reaganism means today, but what it was in the 80s.
You know, the more hardcore stuff.
And it looks at all Trump 2024 voters and says, okay, well, obviously much more America first, MAGA, than Bushy Romney, traditional, traditional Republican, 51.9% versus something like 35%.
Among all Republican voters, it narrows a little bit.
You have more traditional Republicans, fewer America first.
That makes sense.
Obviously, because Trump is bringing in people who are outside of the ordinary traditional Republican framework, so that makes sense.
But then something very interesting.
We've been told, and I have even believed, that Zoomers are the most right-wing cohort.
They're the most hardcore, most likely to be MAGA, most likely to upend the tables of Bushism or Romneyism.
Yeah, they're pretty hardcore.
55.3% versus, you know, 26% traditional Republican.
But you know the most hardcore right-wing generation.
Stop the, if you're driving right now, stop, pull over, take a deep breath.
It's the millennials.
It's the millennials.
How weird is that?
It's my generation.
My generation, which gets beat up all the time, which I beat up all the time, because I've always thought of the millennials as being just kind of cringe, disproportionately like gay, LGBT-ish, Obama, bland, progressive.
No, baby, we're like, we're to the right of Franco, apparently.
Look at this.
30 to 44-year-old voters, 63.6% to be America first, MAGA, Trumpy, right-wing, versus fewer than the Zoomers, fewer to be traditional, you know, whatever, Bush, Romney.
Okay.
Then it tightens way up among Gen X and tightens up even more among boomers.
Let's go, baby.
This is good stuff.
I'll take that.
You know, because the Zoomers, the Zoomers have youth on us.
You know, the Zoomers, they've got, in many ways, they seem a little bit more, a little more grounded.
But no, millennials are leading the right-wing lurch.
I'll take it.
I'll take it.
It's a nice little, it's a nice little white pill.
Is that Zoomer lingo or millennial lingo?
I don't know.
I don't care.
Millennials in charge.
Millennial Patriots are in charge of this country.
And I guess that's a good thing.
I guess.
Okay.
Now, what do you know?
What do you know?
Minutes after the election, that's not even fair.
Just before the election results were in, Democrats all of a sudden are changing their tune on the shutdown.
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Friendly Fire is the show where Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Andrew Claven, and I get together to disagree live for the entire internet to see and comment on what could go wrong.
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I want to tell you about my favorite comment yesterday from PNW Vibes underscore, who says the timing and irony of Dick Cheney dying the same day as a Muslim communist becomes mayor of New York City is not lost on me.
You know, that was lost on me.
I didn't notice it until I read your comment.
That's a great point.
History does have these weird coincidences, doesn't it?
The fact that Adams and Jefferson died on the same day, and it was the 4th of July.
And the fact that it was 50 years, right, after the, after 1776.
It's amazing.
These little winks.
And that should be a consolation because people are legitimately upset about these elections, as they should be.
This is not good.
This is very bad for the country.
It's very, very bad for New York.
Very bad for New York.
And so we try to lighten the mood a little bit.
I posted yesterday.
I said, look, okay, unpopular opinion here, but can I say it?
Hijabs, they can be tasteful.
They can actually be more tasteful than a lot of modern Western clothing.
And it's a little bit of a joke.
Not totally a joke, though.
I like a good mantilla at church.
You know, I like, if you took out the specific cultural context of how Muslim the hijabs are, I don't know, they could be very tasteful.
Modesty is nice.
Anyway, I was, you know, lightening the mood a little bit.
But people are down and they should be down.
This is a big disappointment.
However, there are these little winks of history.
You're using the example of, you know, Dick Cheney dying the day a Muslim becomes mayor of New York.
That is kind of a weird wink of history.
The winks of history, though, even when they occur during bad things, especially when they occur during bad things, are a kind of a consolation because it does remind you that there is an author of history and there actually is providence and there actually is meaning to history and things do happen for a reason.
And I know this is going to be particularly offensive to modern liberal post-Enlightenment sensibilities, but the traditional Christian understanding of the political order is that we're grateful when God sends us good leaders.
Political leadership is appointed by God.
Civil authority is there for our good and does not bear the sword in vain, as scripture tells us.
And so we're very grateful when the Lord gives us good political leaders.
And we're grateful when the Lord gives us bad political leaders because he gives us bad political leaders to chastise us.
And we're grateful for that chastisement because we trust in the Lord.
I know it's very difficult for a post-revolutionary kind of modern politics to hear that.
But it's Christian and it's true.
So there's that.
Okay.
Just as the election is wrapping up, what do you know?
What do you know?
Democrats changed their tone on the government shutdown.
It remains a little unclear if the government will reopen, but already yesterday evening, you had the headlines, a group of Democrats would like to reopen the government.
Chuck Schumer, who had previously been saying, no, no, we're holding the line.
We're keeping the government shut down.
It's all Republicans' fault.
They need to come to the table on healthcare.
Chuck Schumer then gives an answer to, I think it was the Hill.
He says, oh, we're weighing our options.
Yeah, we're weighing.
There's a tone shift, which means, again, I hate to say I told you so, but the shutdown was a Hail Mary for Dems.
The Democrats knew they were on the wrong side of virtually every 80-20 issue, certainly almost all the ones that mattered.
They own the shutdown.
Republicans own the federal government, you know, unified government and all three branches.
This was a Hail Mary to say, look, healthcare is our best shot at pushing an issue and government shutdowns are our best tactic.
They haven't really worked according to the opinion polls.
However, they say, okay, it's before the election.
We need to juice our numbers with something.
Now the election's over.
Probably the government reopens relatively quickly.
Unless Democrats take from the election night the idea that the shutdown has really worked to juice their numbers.
And they say, okay, well, the strategy hadn't seemed to be working so far.
Now perhaps it will.
And if Republicans hold on because they say, no, actually, you know, it is more likely being blamed on Dems than on Republicans.
You know, there's a way in which, I guess, this goes on for a little while, but there is no question that the purpose of the shutdown was to juice the Dems numbers before the midterms.
And perhaps it worked.
Okay.
I want to turn to an issue, a more tragic matter.
I talked about it a little bit at the end of the show yesterday, but beyond domestic politics, Christians are being very, very seriously persecuted in Nigeria.
We've talked about this on the show a number of times.
I've posted about it to social media a number of times.
Trump is talking about it.
Trump posts, quote, Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria.
Thousands of Christians are being killed.
Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter.
I am hereby making Nigeria a country of particular concern.
This designation, you know, with the State Department.
But that is the least of it.
When Christians or any such group is slaughtered, like is happening in Nigeria, 31,000 versus 4476 worldwide, something must be done.
I'm asking Congressman Riley Moore.
Riley Moore is great, together with Chairman Cole, love Tom Cole and the House Appropriations Committee, to immediately look into this matter and report back to me.
The United States cannot stand by while such atrocities are happening in Nigeria and numerous other countries.
We stand ready, willing, and able to save our great Christian population around the world.
Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America.
I love this.
I love this for a number of reasons.
Not the least of which is it does vindicate my view of Donald Trump.
When Donald Trump says he's America first, some people hear that and they say that means he's an isolationist.
That means he's an ardent nationalist.
No, I've long said Trump is an imperialist.
He recognizes America's role throughout the world and he wants to, in his good judgment, in his practical, prudential judgment, he wants to preserve America's capital.
He wants to maintain the world order.
He wants to establish peace.
He wants to prioritize American citizens over everyone else, but he does care about everyone else.
And he wants to expand America's reach, which is why he wants to buy Greenland and it's why he wants to invade Canada.
And here he says, look, we want to defend our Christians around the world.
Our in two senses of the word.
Our, meaning we America, are the global hegemon.
We're the empire of the world.
And so they are, in a certain sense, our constituents.
That's Trump's implication.
It's not even just my statement.
Two, our, we're a Christian country and they're Christians and we have a solidarity with them because of that.
Also, beautifully accurate.
So this got a lot of plaudits, including from Nikki Minaj, Barbs, totally vindicated.
Nikki Minaj writes, reading this made me feel a deep sense of gratitude.
We live in a country where we can freely worship God.
No group should ever be persecuted for practicing their religion.
We don't have to share the same beliefs in order for us to respect each other.
Numerous countries all around the world are being affected by this horror, and it's dangerous to pretend we don't notice.
Thank you to the president and his team for taking this seriously.
God bless every persecutor Christian.
Let's remember to lift them up in prayer.
Love it.
It takes courage to come out if you're Nikki Minaj and endorse Trump in this way.
And it's so beautiful to see her care about this issue and really promote this issue.
What is very interesting about this from the analysis of the left and the right and the changing scope of the right.
You know, the right loves to be navel-gazing and introspective and always trying to figure out exactly where we are is we've heard for many years now that America is sick of forever wars, fighting wars on behalf of other populations in other countries on the other side of the world.
Don't affect us.
We want to focus on the American homeland, isolation, America first.
And yet I think many of those people will cheer this on.
President Trump is threatening to intervene even militarily in Nigeria.
And I wonder, will people cheer that on?
Will the same people who don't want forever wars in the Middle East cheer on a military intervention in Nigeria?
Because I think they are more likely to do so.
And I don't think they're hypocrites for it.
What you're going to hear from the neocons and the squishes is you're going to say, well, you're hypocrites.
You care about Nigeria, but you don't care about Syria or whatever.
But I don't think they're hypocrites exactly.
I'll double down on this with another observation.
I've been meaning to talk about this for weeks and I've mentioned it one or two times, but it looks like we're going to go to war in Venezuela.
Looks like there's been a lot of CIA activity in Venezuela.
We're blown up a bunch of drug roads off the coast of Venezuela and only Venezuela.
You know, there are drug boats coming from elsewhere, but we're really focused on Venezuela.
Regime change in Venezuela has been a priority of the State Department for a long time.
And we tried to get rid of Maduro and then he held on to power after that election.
And it just looks like we're sick of this Venezuelan regime, which is anti-American.
There are a lot of good resources in Venezuela.
They're doing a lot of things to screw up our country.
And so it looks like we might intervene in Venezuela to some degree or the other.
And the same question holds.
All those people who were decrying wars overseas and regime change and all this, will they support this or oppose this?
I think even the anti-war people are more likely to support a war in Venezuela than they would in the Middle East.
I think nature is healing.
I think we're basically in the 70s again.
We're getting back.
We've got socialists running our cities.
We have political violence in the streets.
We have radical ideologies.
We have economic crises.
It's the 70s.
We're living in the 70s.
And we've got economic interventions.
We got the rehabilitation of Richard Nixon's reputation.
And I think Americans are going to be more comfortable with military intervention in our own hemisphere.
The Monroe Doctrine has been a policy of the United States for a very long time.
I think even intervention in Nigeria, I think even the anti-war folks will be more likely to do it.
One, because it's on behalf of Christians who are a Christian country.
Two, it's to stop a very serious atrocity, call it a human rights abuse, I guess, but in ways that are a little clearer cut.
Now, again, I don't know.
Some people are going to say, no, keep your, you know, try to use soft power.
Don't intervene in really hard ways.
But to say we should protect Christians from being wiped out by Muslims is different to say, to saying that we need to topple regimes in the Middle East to install Madisonian democracy.
Those are different.
A prudent and restrained intervention to protect Christians is different from some kind of liberal crusade to spread the end of history ideology of liberalism.
Those are different things.
And those substantive differences make a difference.
Military intervention within our hemisphere in Venezuela is different from military intervention in Iraq or Syria.
They're different.
But it reminds us that the politics of intervention or isolation or whatever, that is simply too simplistic.
Even the politics of prioritizing American citizens and being the global hegemon, that's too simplistic.
Politics is a practical science that requires nuance, subtlety of thought, art.
This was the subject of my speech at the Nixon Library, which I think you can get online.
I think you can get on YouTube.
This is something that Trump is really, really good at.
Every time you try to pin Trump down into some stupid faction or camp or ideology, he slips away from you.
And Trump's enemies on the right, and they've been doing this since the Never Trumpers in 2016.
His enemies say that means he's unprincipled.
That means he's unsophisticated.
That means he doesn't have a finely crafted ideology.
No, it means he's a good politician and a good statesman.
That's what it means.
And conservatives would do well to learn from his prudential, dare I say classical and Aristotelian understanding of politics beyond all the factional infighting in the ideologues.
