Ep. 1858 - Marjorie Taylor Greene Joins The Resistance?
President Trump calls to release the Epstein files, Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene chums up to CNN, and a 100-year-old WWII vet says the sacrifices weren't worth it.
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Ep.1858
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All of a sudden, President Trump wants to release the Epstein files.
Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene wants CNN to like her.
And teenage girls want to get married less than boys do.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
A 100-year-old World War II veteran has just come out on television and said the sacrifice of his fallen comrades was not worth it because modern people have squandered it.
Hard to disagree.
We'll get to his argument.
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All right, a ton to get to.
We had the release of more Epstein files.
You know, everyone calls for the release of the Epstein files.
We have a ton of Epstein files, and we've known a lot about Epstein since really 2014, 2015, when it was the conservatives who were exposing him, when it was President Trump who was calling for journalists to look into it.
At that point, the journalists didn't want to look into it.
Then the Democrats ran out of issues, so they thought that was the one issue they could try to get Trump on is painting Epstein more as a Republican scandal than a Democrat scandal.
But we keep getting more and more of these files, and it's led to a little bit of a fissure in the Republican Party.
So even a pro-MAGA, pro-Trump, conservative firebrand like Marjorie Taylor Greene in the House has been turning on Trump a little bit.
And then Trump has been hitting her.
He came out very strongly, hit her.
I think he's threatening to primary her.
So then as a consequence, you're in this bizarro world where Marjorie Taylor Greene is going on CNN and trying to get the liberal viewers of CNN to like her.
You have a pivot from one of the most rock-ribbed, hardline, populist right-wingers basically doing a maya culpa on liberal TV and saying she regrets some of her right-wing rhetoric and asking us all to get along.
I would like to say humbly, I'm sorry for taking part in the toxic politics.
It's very bad for our country.
And it's been something I've thought about a lot, especially since Charlie Kirk was assassinated, is that I'm only responsible for myself and my own words and actions.
And I am going, I am committed.
And I've been working on this a lot lately to put down the knives in politics.
I really just want to see people be kind to one another.
And we need to figure out a new path forward that is focused on the American people because as Americans, no matter what side of the aisle we're on, we have far more in common than we have differences.
And we need to be able to respect each other with our disagreements.
Okay, hold on.
Hold on.
So right off the bat, we have Marjorie Taylor Greene using the rhetoric that I was making fun of, I think on Friday, certainly last week, that you hear from the libs all the time.
You know, the Libs always use this phrase, be kind.
We just have to be kind to one another.
I love kind people.
I don't know why, but the K word, kind, is the left-wing slogan du jour.
And it's ironic because they wish death on Republicans at a much higher rate than Republicans wish death on them.
They disown family members over politics.
They're not kind generally.
It's certainly not relative to Republicans.
Now you got MTG.
She goes on CNN, the liberal channel.
She apologizes for being so right-wing.
I've contributed to the toxic political culture and we need to be kind.
You know, I'm waiting for her to say, you know, like trans rights are human rights or something.
I'm exaggerating slightly, but she's appealing to a left-wing audience using left-wing rhetoric.
And then the most preposterous part of it, she says, you know, something about Charlie Kirk's assassination pointed out to me that we all have a lot more in common than separates us.
That, of course, is the exact opposite conclusion that most of us drew.
I've given how many speeches about this?
I testified before the Senate about this.
I think I'm not saying anything particularly original.
I think the vast majority of Americans realize this.
When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, we assumed, we on the right assumed that the left would say, okay, this is way too far.
Charlie Kirk, the most prominent example of civil discourse, trying to hash out our differences through polite conversation, going out to meet people where they are, putting the microphone down to hear them speak and respond respectfully.
Wow, this has gone way too far.
We're really sorry.
We might not have agreed with Charlie on policy, but we're so sorry that he died.
There's no excuse for this.
That's not what happened.
That's not even close to what happened.
We saw the left at every level, from the normies, the girl you went to high school with, all the way up to elected Democrats, all the way up to people on TV, minimizing it, excusing it, in some cases, justifying and even celebrating it.
We then had the YouGov surveys come out.
The YouGov surveys showing that very liberal people are eight times as likely to justify political violence as very conservative people, and that 26% of young liberals justify political violence, many multiples, what you see among young conservatives.
So the conclusion from Charlie's assassination is, wow, we actually have far greater differences than I expected.
I wanted to go back to the old Ronald Reagan line.
Well, we have no enemies in America, only opponents.
And what's the difference?
Opponents are two people who agree on what ends they desire, but they disagree on methods.
We all want to reduce illegal immigration.
We just disagree on how to get there.
We all want to reduce the number of abortions.
We just disagree on how to get there.
We all want America to flourish.
We all want a strong country.
We all want, no, we all want to tone down the political violence.
But no, what we discovered is there are many more people who are enemies, who actually disagree on the ends, who want us dead.
We realized this when Democrat analysts on MSNBC, as Charlie was dying, came out and said, well, actually, you know, it's his own hateful rhetoric that led to this.
That's what we learned.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, is going on CNN to say, no, actually, that's not real.
don't believe your lying eyes.
We just need to be kind.
We need to sing kumbaya.
I'm sorry that I was so right wing.
What is this about?
Yeah, I'll tell you what this is about.
It's about a fight that she's having.
She's been needling at Trump for many months now.
Trump finally came out and hit her, and now she's on a different team.
And the lesson that you have to take from this, and it's going to be very, very important as we move toward the midterms, as we move toward 2028, as we hear constantly, mostly in the left-wing media, about the civil war in the Republican Party, is that politics is not primarily about ideas.
Politics is, I'm not being ironic here, I'm not being glib.
I am telling you a fact that has been true since man walked out of the cave.
Politics is not primarily about ideas.
It is certainly not primarily about ideology, which is the modern substitute for religion, which lays at the foundation of all politics.
But what politics is about primarily in the day-to-day, in very practical terms, is people.
People who form coalitions to work together to attain power to, we hope, advance the common good.
In failed regimes, the people form together in coalitions to amass power to advance their private interests.
In functional regimes, people come together in coalitions to attain power to advance the common good of all.
But it's about people forming teams to get power.
That's what politics is about.
Okay.
And ideas matter.
Ideology, unfortunately, in the modern world matters.
Ultimately, the ideology is just a substitute for religion, which is a much sturdier foundation of politics.
All human conflict ultimately is theological, as Cardinal Manning says.
But that's what this is about.
This is why, look at someone like Liz Cheney.
Liz Cheney on ideas, on issues, has agreed with Republicans, has voted in Congress with Donald Trump like 90% of the time, probably more than 90% of the time.
But she's on the other team.
When push comes to shove at the crucial moment, when it's about which coalition is about to amass power, she sides with the other team.
And all of those ideas that she talks about, even the votes that she's taken in Congress, don't really matter.
Because when you get to the crucial vote, the vote for the ridiculous January 6th Commission, the vote for president in 2024, when you get to the crucial vote that actually matters, she's on the other team.
The same thing, it would seem, is happening to Marjorie Taylor Greene right now.
I hope she pulls back from the brink.
I hope she doesn't go full Liz Cheney, but it could happen.
It's how Liz Cheney, 90 plus percent conservative voting record, is on the Democrat team.
And it's how John Fetterman, who is a big lib, John Federman, do not forget, John Fetterman is a big lib, but Republicans really like John Fetterman right now because he's relatively moderate within the Democrat Party and he is gumming up their political machine.
And at crucial moments, he is defending Trump.
He is defending the Republicans and the conservatives.
That's how we are kind of claiming him as one of ours and how the left is claiming Liz Cheney is one of theirs, rightly, and might be claiming Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of theirs, because politics is about people.
So when we talk about, and I harp on this a lot, much more so, I think, than many of my other friends with microphones or who were in office on the conservative side.
I say politics is about coalitions.
In fact, she brought up Charlie, the indispensable service that Charlie did.
He did a lot of wonderful things for conservatism and for America.
But the indispensable service that he performed was he kept a coalition together.
He knew who to keep out.
He knew who to keep in.
He knew how to mollify the antagonisms within the coalition and all the different people who hate each other.
He understood what politics is about, which is making teams to gain power to, we hope, advance the common good.
That's what's going on.
Right now, Marjorie Taylor Greene or Donald Trump or Green and Trump have decided that they're on different teams.
And everyone's going to be scratching their heads trying to figure out how to, well, this is so crazy.
Marjorie Taylor Greens on CNN.
It's not that crazy when you recognize that that is what politics is.
It's about people.
Politics, the most basic definition of it is how people live together.
That's what it is.
And now we're seeing different teams.
The flashpoint in this was the release of the Epstein files.
We will get to that because President Trump's just made a big pivot on that.
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President Trump has just come out and demanded release of the Epstein files.
His words, as I said on Friday night, at Board Air Force One, to the fake news media, House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files because we have nothing to hide.
And it's time to move on from this Democrat hoax perpetrated by radical left lunatics in order to deflect from the great success of the Republican Party, including our recent victory in the Democrat shutdown.
Good point.
It's kind of funny.
We now forget about the shutdown.
The news cycle moves so fast.
We forget the Democrats just single-handedly gave us the longest government shutdown ever in American history.
They conceded, at first they argued it was the Republicans doing it.
Then they admitted, okay, it was actually just us.
And eight Democrat senators voted to reopen the government.
We totally forget about that now.
Trump goes on.
The Department of Justice has already turned over tens of thousands of pages to the public on Epstein, are looking at various Democrat operatives, Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, Larry Summers, et cetera, and their relationship to Epstein.
And the House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to.
I don't care.
All I do care about is that Republicans get back on point, which is the economy, affordability, quote, because that's a new buzzword, which we are winning big.
He goes on.
Our victory on reducing inflation from the highest level in history to practically nothing, bringing down prices for the American people.
We'll get to the inflation point because the Federal Reserve in San Francisco just made a massive admission regarding the success of Trump's tariff policy that all the smart economists were saying wasn't going to happen.
We'll get to that momentarily.
Delivering historic tax cuts, trillions of dollars of investment into America, a record, the rebuilding of the military, securing our board.
Okay, he goes on and lists all the great stuff that's been happening.
And then he says, this ties in exactly what we were just talking about.
Some quote unquote members of the Republican Party are being used, and we can't let that happen.
Let's start talking about the Republican Party's record-setting achievements and not fall into the Epstein trap, which is actually a curse on the Democrats, not us.
Make America great again.
Okay, the key word here, and it's funny, I hadn't even read the whole, it was a long truth social post.
I didn't read the whole thing.
And as I read it, I discover Trump is seeing the same point that we were just discussing.
He says some quote-unquote members of the Republican Party.
Why does he put that in quotes?
Trump uses quotes in all sorts of creative ways, as a bold face or other things.
But here he's using quotes in a more traditional sense to cast doubt on the meaning of the word.
Some members of the Republican Party.
Yeah, Liz Cheney is a member of the Republican Party, I guess.
She may have left at this point, but even when she was a member, I guess technically she's a member of the party.
But at the crucial moment, she works against the party.
Right now, I'm just, I like Marjorie Taylor Green.
She and I have gotten along great.
But as of yesterday, going on CNN, using Democrat rhetoric to apologize for being a Republican, to attack Trump, to flatter Democrats with a completely wrong conclusion about Charlie Kirk's assassination, that's not the kind of thing a real Republican does.
That's not the kind of thing a real conservative does.
Trump is saying they're, well, he's saying they're rhinos in a really basic sense, not rhino like you're a little too liberal on immigration.
Not rhino like you want to raise taxes.
Rhino in a really precise sense.
You are a Republican in name and maybe even in all the votes that don't matter.
But at the crucial moment, you don't advance the party's interest.
This is Trump's argument against someone like Thomas Massey, who by all accounts, in his ideology, in his principles, he is as rock-ribbed a libertarian conservative as it gets.
But at the crucial vote, at the crucial vote, he teams up with Rokana and the Democrats to try to embarrass Trump.
At the crucial vote, where is he?
That's the point that Trump is making.
So why is he flipping on Epstein?
Because until recently, well, it's a long story.
Until recently, Trump was saying he didn't really want to deal with the Epstein thing.
And he said, forget about the Epstein thing.
Enough about him.
This is a hoax.
Let's move on and talk about all my great achievements.
But before that, Trump was calling for the release of the Epstein files.
And this has led to all sorts of conspiracy theories by Trump's enemies on the left, certainly, and his enemies who are supposedly on the right.
Even people who would call themselves very rock-ribbed, they say, oh, it's obvious Trump's being blackmailed.
He's being blackmailed by the deep state or he's being blackmailed by some foreign government or he's being blackmailed by whoever, but he's being blackmailed.
He's compromised.
He's this, he's at.
And here Trump is.
He says, release all the files.
I'll give you my view of it.
I think that in, what was it, 2015, 2016, Trump was one of the early people calling attention to the Epstein scandal, demanding more transparency on the Epstein scandal.
I don't think Trump does that if he were seriously implicated in the Epstein scandal.
We all know that he and Epstein were friends.
We all know they had a long-term relationship, though.
They had a falling out at some point.
Epstein apparently had friendships with like everybody, with foreign heads of state, with American heads of state, you know, Bill Clinton, with major philanthropists like Bill Gates, with major institutions like Harvard and MIT.
He was apparently friends with everybody.
Stephen Hawking, I think.
Everybody.
He was a schmoozer.
He was a worker.
He was an operative.
We still don't know.
There's a lot to find out about Epstein.
But I don't think that Trump in 2015, if he were seriously implicated in Epstein, he wouldn't have called for that.
He wouldn't have called attention to that.
So then why did he backtrack?
Why did he try to downplay Epstein?
I suspect it's because, as we know, he's mentioned in the files.
He's probably mentioned in the files many times.
And if you're working in the White House Communications Department, you have to think, all right, well, any document that comes out with Trump's name on it that is going to be used to distract from the issues that we want to talk about endlessly.
That's what the Democrats are doing.
That's what they're trying to do with the help of some so-called Republicans.
And it's going to be spun into a bunch of nonsense.
There was a story over the weekend about like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump like doing weird stuff together or whatever.
And it's like so frivolous, so truly so.
I don't, look, I don't like Bill Clinton, but I don't think Trump is his type.
Let's put it that way.
Not from everything we know about Bubba.
I don't think he's into large men with blonde hair.
I don't buy it.
But that's, I'm sure, what the White House was thinking.
Ah, the more that we talk about Epstein, the worse it is for us.
But something happened, which is because Epstein, as Trump rightly saw in 2015 and 16, because Epstein is such a symbol of the rot, of the corruption of our political class, of the deceit, of the perfidy of our law enforcement higher echelons and the deep state, whatever.
They don't want to let it go.
They want answers.
And I totally understand that.
I sympathize with that.
I think I have a little more of a down-to-earth view of things, which is one of two things is going to be true.
Either Epstein is who we're told he is, which is he was just a weird sex freak.
He was rich, had a lot of rich, famous friends, and that was it.
In which case, we basically know everything we're going to know about Epstein.
Or Epstein was a super duper spy, a triple agent for every foreign government, and he was James Bond and Jason Bourne rolled up into one.
And in which case, if that's true, I'm not saying I believe that.
If that's true, we will never learn anything more about it.
Either JFK was killed by a lone gunman on a grassy knoll, or we will never learn anything else about the assassination of JFK.
We've had a law in this country demanding the release of all the JFK files since like 1992.
And in violation of executive orders and federal law passed by Congress, the government just hasn't released all of it.
You just will not learn anything about it.
So what do we take from this?
Trump is realizing that he miscalculated.
He correctly calculated in the first place.
He miscalculated later on.
It was a very Washington calculus, which is, well, the more we talk about this, the worse it is for everybody, and especially for us, because Democrats are going to be realists.
So let's just not talk about it.
But not talking about it undercuts the first calculation, the first argument, and it wasn't working.
And not leaning more heavily into Epstein was giving Democrats a narrative and it was splitting the Republican Party.
That is in part how you get people like Marjorie Taylor Green, who wants to maintain her rock-ribbed populist cred.
Now you have her in this weird realignment siding with CNN so that she can be on the side of exposing the Epstein scandal, whatever that even means.
So I think this is a smart move by Trump.
I basically think he should have stuck to his guns going back a decade now.
There is no reason.
Here, here we go.
This is my big bet on here.
And I am basically always right on these things.
You know how much I hate to say it.
I'm laying my flag right now, planting my flag.
We will not find anything in the Epstein files that are released that is seriously damaging to Trump.
We will not find anything.
There will be no credible release.
I'm not talking about random emails from like Michael Wolf, you know, fabulous fiction writers.
I'm not talking, I'm talking about actual hardcore evidence from the Epstein files.
We will not find anything that is seriously damaging to Trump.
However, it's become an issue in the Republican Party.
It's splitting the coalition not over ideas, just over people, and politics is about people.
Plus, looking ahead after those disastrous elections two weeks ago, assuming the Democrats win the midterms, when the Democrats take the House, they are going to subpoena all of this.
They're going to make a big issue.
There are going to be investigations.
They might force the docs to be released.
So it's going to happen anyway.
Better for Trump and the White House to get ahead of it now.
I totally agree.
Now we will move on to more substantive issues because the San Francisco Federal Reserve has just destroyed virtually every economist in this country with facts and logic and vindicated part of the Trump tariff policy.
Though it gets a little complicated, we'll get to that in one second.
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In this episode of Michael and The Good Doctor, I sit down with psychiatrist Dr. Josef Witt Dering to unpack one of the most controversial topics in modern medicine, the link between psychiatric drugs and violent behavior.
From SSRIs and Adderall to the rise in mass shootings, we dive deep into how these medications affect the brain, whether Big Pharm is hiding the full story.
Check out this quick teaser.
We've done spinal taps.
We've done functional MRI scans, which are real-time scans of the human brain kind of firing.
Are there any differences between a depressed person and a non-depressed person?
No.
What about the relation of these kinds of drugs to violent acts and to aberrant ideologies?
I've noticed a major uptick in violence from the left, notably associated with transgenderism and gay.
Lion's share of these gay seeds, they're on SSR.
Is it safe for 15 to 20% of our population to be on these drugs?
The FDA is sitting on this because they are trying to cover up one of the biggest scandals in modern medical history.
That's horrifying.
Watch a full episode now on the Michael Knowles YouTube channel for the uncensored ad-free versions.
Subscribe to Daily Wire Plus.
Major, major headline out of the Federal Reserve.
This is in Fortune.
Fed researchers say tariffs actually lower inflation because they're a demand shock that slams employment and economic activity.
Okay, so that second part is not good for Trump.
The first part is really good for Trump, and it's really good for Scott Besson, Treasury Secretary.
And it's really good for the right-wingers who flew in the face of the liberal consensus and all the elite, smart, really clever people in their own party.
Because when some of us were pointing out that tariffs can be good, tariffs serve a purpose.
when some of us were not 33rd degree free traders initiated into the Gnostic cult of liberal trade policy.
When some of us said, there's actually a reason that countries use tariffs, even despite the revisionist history that says that St. Ronald Reagan was allergic to tariffs and would never countenance such heresy and vile evil, Reagan himself instituted certain tariffs.
A bunch of other countries did.
This is why Trump, when he was running, I think it was the first time, he said, hey, if tariffs are so bad, how come every other country has them?
How come we're the only country that doesn't have them?
And so the argument was not that tariffs are the greatest economic policy ever, that they are a fit all, you know, solution to the entire economy.
No, just that tariffs do serve a purpose.
And all the geniuses in the liberal side, but also on the liberal side of the American right, all the free trade absolutists, they would come out and say, actually, actually, tariffs just don't work because I learned that in my seventh grade social studies class.
Tariffs don't work and they lead to higher prices because the prices are passed on to the consumers and that's why they're inflationary and Trump came out with his team, including very, very intelligent, accomplished financial professionals like Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, and said, actually, that's not true.
You're going to find out.
That's completely ridiculous.
They're all inflationary.
Well, here we have it.
The Federal Reserve coming out and saying, actually, well, this is kind of weird.
Not only did the tariffs not contribute to inflation, they were deflationary.
I should have pulled the clip.
Scott Besson, when all of these geniuses on the left and the right were coming out hitting him over the tariff policy, he said, that's not true.
Tariffs are deflationary, or they can be deflationary.
That is what happened.
They were proven right.
Contrary to what everyone in both parties was saying.
The tariff policy, the Trump economic policy was proven right.
Now, there's a caveat here, and it's a pretty big caveat, because the economy right now is a little bit shaky.
The stock market is doing really well, but it's only really because of seven Silicon Valley stocks.
The underlying market is much, much shakier than that.
We're probably due for a recession, not because of the Trump policies.
That's been building for years at this point.
And the Trump policies may or may not contribute to that, not just because of tariffs.
The big problem, the big economic problem when Trump came into office was inflation, the massive inflation under Joe Biden.
We called it Bidenflation.
Trump's policy reduced inflation.
Now, the cope here is, and a legitimate caveat is, the reason they reduced inflation is because they were a massive shock to demand for goods that hurt employment numbers and that hurt economic activity.
That all could be true.
That all could be true.
And the warning to the White House here is you have to get that under control.
Looking ahead to the midterms, especially after the pre-midterm elections, those elections in New York and New Jersey and Virginia, you have to make sure that as people seriously are hurting in this economy, that is real.
They're not really hurting from inflation, but they are hurting.
You need to make sure that you button up the employment problem and the broader economic growth.
You have to do that.
However, I do think this is good news for them.
This is a major notch in the Trump White House corner of the scoreboard because they were right.
Because they tried something different, contravening what everyone else was saying, and they were right.
And all the geniuses now look like idiots.
So there are still major economic problems that the White House has to confront.
But the fact that they were right should give us a little bit of confidence that they might be able to pivot and then focus on the other problems because dealing with an economy for the global hegemon is a little bit of a game of whack-a-mole.
You fix one problem, that creates other problems.
And you have to go fix those problems.
That's going to exacerbate still more problems.
Obviously, that's going to happen.
It's very important, though, heading into the middle.
So it's a good sign heading in.
Very important heading into the midterms that people feel as though the economy is going well and will continue to go well.
Don't forget the market sets prices based on what they think is going to happen.
It's not even about what's going on today.
It's certainly not what goes on yesterday.
It's what the market expects to happen tomorrow.
So you need people to feel, forget about just the eggheads and all the investors.
You need people broadly, voters, to feel as though things are getting better.
That's always true.
You know, to some degree, it's always the economy stupid, as James Carville said in 92.
But it's especially true here because one of the big promises of this presidential term is that we are going to have a golden age.
That adjective chosen intentionally, an age that will result in material prosperity, also spiritual prosperity, also cultural prosperity.
But material prosperity is part of that.
You have to have people believing that that is the case.
Can the White House thread that needle?
I don't know.
They inherited very serious economic problems and they're trying a novel method and I hope it works.
Now, speaking of things getting better or worse, a devastating clip.
It's almost funny in how devastating it is.
From a 100-year-old World War II veteran in the UK who was brought on Good Morning Britain to remember his fallen comrades.
And it was supposed to be a feel-good story.
We fought, we're the greatest generation, and we fought the greatest war ever and we solved all the world's problems for now and forever.
And isn't this great?
And you should remember how great that was.
That's what they expected the segment to be.
And instead, this is what they got.
What does Remembrance Sunday mean for you?
What is your message?
My message is I can see in my mind's eye the rows and rows of white stones of all the hundreds of my friends and everybody else that gave their lives for what?
The country of today.
No, I'm sorry.
The sacrifice wasn't worth the result that it is now.
Oh, well, I'm sorry.
What do you mean by that, though?
What we fought for, what we fought for, was our freedom.
We thought that even now is downsight worse than what it was when I fought for it.
Absolutely devastating.
And you can hear the interviewers, they want it to be a happy feel-good morning segment.
So they say, oh, you know, well, sorry you feel that way, but you know, hey, come on, it's a morning show.
He goes, no, no.
We fought for freedom and things are worse today than they were when we were fighting.
Things are not great right now.
And what does that mean?
What conclusion are we supposed to take?
People are going to take the wrong conclusion from this, but there's a very, very important point that he's making.
We'll get to that in one second.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Stray1239 who says, we got digital Ouija boards before GTA 6.
So true.
So true.
Not great for the culture.
This 100-year-old World War II veteran, he says, I look at all those rows and rows of white headstones, all my fallen comrades.
The sacrifice wasn't worth it.
Things are worse today than they were then.
He says, we were fighting for freedom.
So what were they fighting against?
It's easy, especially for the younger viewers and listeners, it's easy to forget, especially because our schools don't teach history anymore.
At the time that, in this case, Britain was fighting, but us too, obviously, at the time the Allies were fighting, there were twin evils, twin awful ideologies that were rising up in Europe.
Even different varieties of the ideologies, but you had communism from the left, which was wreaking havoc on Europe, which just before the Second World War nearly conquered Iberia.
You nearly had the Bolsheviks conquering Iberia.
They were raping nuns, then killing them.
They were killing priests, burning people, shooting at Christ, you know, just grave evils that happily was pushed out of Iberia.
But then you also had the rise of Nazism.
And so you had communism makes an idol out of class.
You had Nazism, which makes an idol out of race.
Both Nazism and communism were trying to destroy the church and taking very active steps to destroy the church.
In the case of, well, communism had been trying to destroy the Catholic Church and Christianity broadly for a very long time.
And then Nazism was taking very particular steps to kidnap the Pope, kill the Pope.
Hitler wrote to Francisco Franco, said, I consider the Pope my personal enemy.
Plans to eradicate the church in Germany, all the rest.
You have these awful ideologies.
And then you have the Anglosphere, Britain and the U.S., which says, okay, we're going to go in and we're going to first beat Nazism after there was a split between the Nazis and the Soviets.
Okay, we're going to first beat Nazism, then we're going to fight this war to beat communism.
And we beat Nazism and then we beat communism.
And then what happens?
Our societies fall apart.
And if you're this 100-year-old World War II vet, you're looking at this.
You're saying, we fought.
My comrades died 80 years ago.
And now Muslims have taken over my country.
They're raping the girls of our country.
They're given a free pass to do so.
We've had all sorts of hostile foreigners invade Europe, thanks to Germany, actually, thanks to Angela Merkel in Germany, but all throughout Europe, you're seeing the erosion of the freedoms that we thought we were fighting for.
You're seeing women in the UK arrested for praying across the street from abortion clinics.
And that's not because of communism, exactly.
That's not because of fascism or Nazism, exactly.
It's because of the third ideology, liberalism.
I guess really you would say fourth ideology, because at play, the minor player in World War II was fascism.
You had communism makes an idol of class.
You had Nazism makes an idol of race.
Fascism makes an idol of the state.
And then you have liberalism, which makes an idol of the individual, individual autonomy.
And what we all thought, what we were told, not just after the Second World War, but after the end of the Cold War, we were told liberalism had won.
Liberalism had emerged victorious.
This was the final solution, to use a charged phrase from World War II.
This was the final solution to our political problems.
This was actually the end of history.
This was it.
No more changes to ideology, no more traditional conflicts.
This is it.
We're going to have an era of global peace.
This is where the idea of just unfettered global trade governed by these international, non-state, exactly, institutions, that's where that emerged from.
We're all going to sing kumbaya because history is over.
But liberalism failed to.
That's the issue.
It's not that Nazism would have been better.
Certainly would not have.
It's not that communism would have been better.
Certainly would not have.
It's not that fascism would have been, fascism was the weakest of those three.
It's not that that would have been better.
That wouldn't have either.
But liberalism failed to, because ideologies fail, because to use a phrase, pardon the jargon from Michael Oakeshott, great British political philosopher, ideology is the formalized abridgment of the supposed substratum of rational truth contained in the tradition.
Formalized, so it's, you know, you can write it down on a piece of paper, abridgment, you're shrinking it, you're minimizing it, of what we think is the substratum, the operative layer of purely rational truth that we would otherwise get in the tradition.
This is why, as all of these ideologies are back in play, communism on the left, pretty over communism.
Look at our guy in New York.
A little hint of a rise of Nazism, whether it's Nazism is a dead ideology, as Chris Ruffo pointed out, but there are little ironic hints of it again.
Or fascism, you know, people joke, oh, maybe the fascists weren't so bad, whatever.
As there are all these rise, and then the liberals are tripling down.
What is called for is an alternative because all of these ideologies have failed.
The failure of liberalism, so tragic that it's bringing a 100-year-old World War II veteran almost to tears on television when he says, wow, look at our country.
It's worse off today than it was in the 30s and 40s.
What is called for is an alternative to all of those ideologies, an alternative to the habit in modernity of formalizing, abridging, rationalizing, abstracting from the tradition.
What is called for is a more classical kind of conception of politics, classical political behavior.
Dare I say a recognition that politics is not primarily about ideas, certainly is not primarily about ideology, but is about people and the common good of the people who are all living together.
A common good that we can understand and advance much more sturdily in light of the sturdier political resources, namely tradition, what Chesterton called the democracy of the dead.
Was it Chesterton or Burke?
I don't know.
Either way, they're both wonderful writers.
And religion, which is the fundament of all politics.
That's what's being called for.
This is why another one of the buzzwords that you're hearing these days is post-liberalism.
And post-liberalism is this term Adrian Vermeule pointed out the other day.
It's a purely negative term.
It's kind of like Protestantism in the sense that when you say someone is Protestant, that tells you something, tells you it's not Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, but you don't really know.
Is it Baptist?
Is it Methodist?
Is it Anglican?
Is it Presbyterian?
All those groups disagree with each other.
It's just saying it's not something.
Post-liberalism is more a description.
Saying, look, it's the conclusion that that guy came to, that great World War II veteran who says, well, liberalism failed.
What do we do now?
We need something else.
There's one story I have to get to.
I know I'm out of time, but I don't care.
A really, really sad story in New York City.
A very shy teen leapt to death from New York City's Regis High School.
This is a very prestigious high school in New York, because he was about to be punished for offering a controversial opinion in an ethics class.
Listen to this.
This kid was in an ethics class.
They were discussing utilitarianism, a modern rationalist ideology advanced by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which says that what we should pursue is the greatest good for the greatest number.
So the way we should think about ethics is not whether an act is moral or immoral in itself.
That would be Kantian ethics, deontological ethics.
It's not that we should think about the whole person who cultivates habits of virtue that allow him to make proper ethical judgments when they present themselves in their complexity, which is too great to merely prescribe all of it in a manifesto.
That would be virtue ethics coming from Aristotle.
No, no, this modern form, which says the way that we determine the morality of actions is by calculating the greatest good for the greatest number.
So you could justify anything.
By utilitarian ethics, you could justify genocide, murdering babies, and all.
And we do, actually.
And this kid, we don't know what the opinion was, but he offered a contrary opinion.
And he was going to be punished for that.
And he was so afraid of being punished, this shy 16-year-old teenager, that he leapt to his death from Regis High School.
Pascal Emmanuel Gobri, who is a great, a great tweeter, great writer, but you might follow him on Twitter, is a very thoughtful guy.
He responded to this.
He said, we live in a totalitarian society.
I think he's totally right.
And this is a point I've made on the show.
I made this at least a year ago, maybe more than that.
I said, it's funny, we think of totalitarianism as communism or Nazism, but liberalism is totalitarian too.
Inasmuch as it seeks to control every aspect of your life.
You're not allowed to think certain ways.
It controls what you post on Instagram.
You better post that black square when George Floyd dies.
Otherwise, you might be ostracized.
You might be guilty of wrongthink.
You better, hey, you better trans your kid.
Otherwise, maybe the state's going to come in and take the kid from you.
You better not express any controversial views.
In this case, in a class on a terribly wrong ethical point of view, to contradict that would be a good thing.
That shouldn't be controversial at all.
Utilitarianism should be controversial.
If you do that, you're going to be punished.
You're going to leap to your death in some cases.
That's totalitarian.
And another one of these buzzwords that goes around these days is authoritarian.
We say that the left is authoritarian.
Not exactly.
The left says that the right is authoritarian.
That's also kind of silly because even on the right, we're pretty live and let live, pretty laissez-faire.
Frankly, we should probably be a little more authoritarian, whatever that word is to mean.
Because authoritarian means that the government is strong in a limited number of areas.
Hey, we're not going to tolerate Satan displays in the public courthouse.
We're not going to tolerate the Satan club going into the elementary school, as we see.
We're not going to tolerate transgenderism in public life.
We're just not going to tolerate that.
But what you do in your own home, we're not going to concern ourselves too much.
You can have your opinions.
You can discuss your opinions.
But in certain limited areas, we're going to maintain cohesion.
We're going to insist upon that.
That's authoritarian.
Totalitarian is when you get kids to rat on their parents to the state.
Totalitarian is when the political order tries to control every single thought you have.
And if you contradict it in even the mildest of ways, you're going to be impelled to leap to your death.
That's totalitarian.
That is another ironic failure of liberalism.
We thought liberalism was the opposite of totalitarianism.
Actually, in the final count, in the final calculation, they seem pretty similar.
Okay, I want, speaking of high school kids, I want to get to this very strange headline, which is not surprising to me, but it's surprising to a lot of people, that 12th grade girls are less likely to want to get married now than boys.
First time we've ever seen that.
But I don't have time, so we're going to have to get to that tomorrow because today's Music Monday.
