Ep. 1862 - Somali Migrants CAUGHT Using Your Tax Dollars To Fund Terrorists
Somalis in Minnesota are using your tax dollars to fund terrorists, an ex-congressional aide mutilates herself for a hate hoax, and a ton of "white" criminals are actually Hispanic.
Ep.1862
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Everyone says Somalis are stupid.
The average IQ in Somalia is supposedly 67 or 68.
Well, well below 100, which is supposed to be the average.
And yet, in many ways, Somalis seem a lot smarter than Americans.
Because according to a new report, Somalis have been tricking Minnesota taxpayers into paying them hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent welfare claims, much of which has gone back to Somalia to fund Al-Shabaab, a foreign terrorist organization that the United States has directly fought against.
As a federal counterterrorism source concluded, quote, the largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.
The Minnesota Somalis managed to pull off this incredible operation for a few reasons.
One, they have a cohesive group identity.
Two, they have a clear sense of political friends and enemies.
Three, they have stable traditions.
Four, they have the ability to coordinate among themselves to achieve political ends.
They might be schemers and they might be criminals and they might even be terrorists.
But I hesitate to call them stupid because as a matter of purely political intelligence, if the average Somali IQ really is 68, ours is in the single digits.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Really big show, really big show.
We have my friend Lila Rose joining us.
She will join us specifically to talk about the ex-Congressional aide who has just hired a fetish artist to carve her body up to make it seem as though she was attacked by leftists for being a Trump supporter.
This is a weird one.
Well, it's weird for a lot of reasons, but it's especially weird because it's a hate hoax coming from the right and you almost never hear about those.
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The Somali story.
It's just unbelievable.
My hat's off to the Somalis.
You got to hand it to them.
The hubris, the chauvinism from Westerners who say those Somalis, their IQ is below 70.
These guys, they can barely walk around and breathe at the same time.
Well, they tricked you, didn't they?
You can call Somalis stupid all you want.
They just tricked you, supposedly genius American taxpayers, into funding their terror group in Somalia.
This is from the report.
It's out of City Journal, Chris Ruffo, just phenomenal work as always.
Minnesota's Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services Program is the first of its kind in its country.
It's not the first subsidized housing program, but it's the first of this kind in as much as the goal was so broad.
It was to help seniors.
It was to help drug addicts.
It was to help the disabled.
It was to help the mentally ill.
And it was specifically designed with very low barriers to entry because the libs say, okay, we got these welfare programs, but they're not reaching as many people as we want them to reach because it excludes all sorts of people who might commit fraud, who might not want to give up their drug addictions, who have all sorts of antisocial behaviors.
And so they say, what if we just get rid of the barriers to entry?
Then we'll give money to more people, including al-Shabaab.
So they say their minimum requirements for reimbursement.
The annual estimate for how much this is going to cost was a little over $2.5 million.
First year, program pays out more than $21 million in claims.
So many, many multiples.
In the ensuing years, costs shot up to $42 million, so doubled.
Then $74 million, then $104 million.
So now we're at 50 times almost what it was supposed to cost.
Then during the first six months of 2025, payouts totaled $61 million.
So annualized could be $122 million.
On top of that, that was one welfare program the Somalis exploited.
There's another one called Feeding Our Future.
When this article was published, which was within the last few days, the U.S. Attorney's Office reported that Abdullah Nur Jassau had become the 56th defendant to plead guilty in the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud scheme.
I think that number now is jumping up to 77 people being prosecuted for it.
The number is going to go way, way higher because it was a massive community-wide fraud scheme to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Then, forget about the housing, forget about the food.
There was an autism fraud scheme.
Yes, autism fraud.
I didn't know that was a type of fraud, but there's autism fraud.
Minnesota's early intensive developmental and behavioral intervention program, the Somalis perpetrated a $14 million fraud scheme against that.
They pretended to have autism and they got a lot of money.
On and on and on.
A ton of this money has gone to al-Shabaab.
So what are we to take from this?
One, we got to get these Somalis out, okay?
It's no knock on them.
Actually, they have my respect.
They don't have my respect because they're lying and committing sins and doing all sorts of bad stuff, but they do at a base political level.
They have my respect for getting it done for their community at the expense of the American taxpayer, specifically the Minnesota taxpayer, but they got to go.
Guys, there are a lot of problems.
They're bringing in foreign religion, foreign religious practices.
They're marrying their relatives.
They're committing immigration fraud.
They're committing welfare fraud.
They got to go.
They got to go.
I'm not saying all of them.
Some, I assume, are good people, but most of them have to go, starting with Ilhan Omar.
However, the real takeaway I have, the thing that I find most interesting and no one's talking about here is for all my life, Americans on the right had this kind of instinct, instinctive, polemical, I don't know, habit against welfare.
They said, oh, welfare is being abused through these welfare queens.
We need to minimize the welfare programs.
These social safety nets can turn into spider webs that entrap people in actual cycles of poverty.
And so we need to cut welfare.
That was what the right believed.
And there's been a turn in recent years from the new right.
And I'm very sympathetic to this, which is to say, well, welfare is not bad in itself.
And, you know, we do need to care about the poor because politics really should be oriented toward the common good.
And one of the great errors of the American right in the last 60, 70 years is it became much too libertarian, much too focused on a hyper individualism that really is borrowed from the left.
It doesn't traditionally come from the right.
And so we need to care more about the common good.
And so maybe we should loosen up on welfare.
And what's very funny, everything old is new again.
You know, as Animal Farm says, donkeys live a very long time.
You've never seen a dead donkey.
Now we're kind of coming back and we're saying, actually, now this welfare program, we got to cut it.
There's so much fraud.
Even just nationally, the government shutdown showed us there's so much fraud with food stamps.
Now we call it snap.
It's like 10% of Tennessee or something is on food stamps.
They don't need it.
There's no social stigma associated with it anymore.
It's like, maybe we need to cut this back, guys.
We're funding al-Shabaab enough with the welfare, right?
So what does this mean for us?
What do we conclude?
Were we right 20 years ago in the super libertarian neocon infused days?
Or is the new right right?
Is the new new right?
What is, where are we supposed to think about this?
The point to take away is you cannot divorce economic policy from social policy.
Ben and I were having this debate the other day on Friendly Fire.
Ben said, you know, really, you got to, you got to separate social policy from economic policy.
Economic health doesn't necessarily mean social health.
And my argument is, no, we're integral creatures and you can't really separate these two things.
And so in this case, what we're saying is, yes, you could have a more robust welfare program and a greater care for the common good if you have a higher trust society, if you don't have a bunch of freaking Somalis who are trying to scheme the system so that they can go fund terrorists overseas.
Yeah, you need social solidarity in order to have a more robust social safety net.
This is why it works in homogenous countries, like in Scandinavia.
That's the issue.
The takeaway is the traditional, like not traditional, neo-traditional, I don't know, Reagan right comes out and says, look, we need to cut welfare.
There's a lot of fraud.
Yeah, they were right about that.
And the new right comes out and says, we need to care more about the common good.
And they're right about that too.
And the conclusion of it is, you need to recognize it's not just culture and politics and social policy and economic policy and foreign policy.
It's all kind of the same.
It's all one political community.
And we need to get rid of these scheming Somalis because they are smarter than us in many ways when it comes to political philosophy.
Okay, I want to bring on my friend Lila to talk about another really bizarre story coming out of Congress.
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Lila Rose, I'm home again, Rose.
Lila, wonderful to have you on the show.
Thank you for being here.
Good morning.
And I've got my pumpkin spice latte.
So I am ready to go.
I am boiling with envy.
It's simmering over, actually, just like that.
Gotta ask that producer to help you out.
Wow, that's, but what do I have?
I just have some, I don't know, millennial bubbly slap.
So Lila, really weird story.
I wanted a female perspective on this.
I'll just state the facts first before I get to my commentary.
An ex-GOP congressional aide has mutilated herself.
So she was found by police and she had all of these scars all over her body, slices, lacerations, and the words Trump whore carved across her body.
Trump whore.
And she was zip-tied and she was, I think, mostly clothed, but still it was really horrifying.
And she said that she was assaulted by three men who did this because she's a Trump supporter.
She's worked for a Republican member of Congress.
I think she's a law student now.
And it turns out she did it herself.
They found zip ties in her car.
I think she was driving a Maserati.
I think that was in some of the reporting.
And she paid 500 bucks to a fetish artist to carve her up.
She's a very pretty girl, a beautiful girl.
And she's now like probably permanently mutilated herself for this hate.
So all of the hate hoaxes in our lifetimes, virtually all of them, have come from the left.
You know, it's Jesse Smollett.
You know, he's walking around just trying to eat a subway sandwich and then a bunch of Nigerian white supremacists come up and say it's MAGA country.
They're calling this woman Hussy Smollett, which is not very nice, but I'm a sucker for a good pun.
And it's really bizarre.
It's coming from the right.
And I don't, part of my instinct, you know how much I love women, part of my instinct is, man, women are crazier than I thought they were.
I don't know.
What am I to make of this, Lila?
I think you're right.
They are crazy today.
I mean, we always have the tendency to be crazy, but the girls today are not okay.
That is an objective reality.
And this is an example of it.
And it is happening on both the right and the left.
In this case, I think it's the extreme attention seeking that many young women are being just from a very young age, they are being formed that this is the way they should be.
I mean, think about social media, what it does to the female psyche.
It's like constant comparison, constant attention, constant making yourself, putting yourself out there via sexualization.
I mean, the issue of OnlyFans today is obviously horrific young girls prostituting themselves.
But in this case, what you're seeing too, Michael, which is really interesting here, is really people trying to cash in on being right-leaning or conservative or Trump supporting and making that their brand.
And then obviously doing their own narcissistic spin on it.
In this case, with this girl, this horrific self-harm narcissistic spin where she's, you know, literally injuring herself to get attention.
That's what this is.
She's injuring herself to get attention, but it shows a culture shift because now it's actually popular to be on the right.
And she's almost leaning into it to say, well, I'm being hurt for it, but it's actually part of some sort of a status symbol for her.
So you could say, in one sense, the one silver lining of this story, Michael, if there is a silver lining, is that now it's mainstream to be on the right.
It's much more mainstream than it's ever been.
But is this how we're going to use and abuse that opportunity and how this young woman is?
So the girls need help.
I'm working on it, Michael.
We're trying to help these girls, but it's rough out there because between social media, mental health issues, the spiritual crisis, the self-obsession is at an all-time high.
And dealing with that is a very complicated problem.
It's very, it's very tough, but it's doable.
It's possible.
We're going to win this, but it's going to take some time.
And I'm so glad you mentioned the silver lining because I didn't want to be the one to say it, but I did have the same reaction.
And you put it in really clear terms.
The girl committed self-harm to get attention, which is a tale as old as time.
That actually is something that teenage girls and young 20s girls have done for a long time.
What makes this weird, well, one is the extreme lengths she went to, but actually what is weirder is this always comes from the left.
It's always, you know, a black girl saying white supremacists attacked her and it never happened.
Or it's a girl saying some man attacked her, it didn't happen.
Or it, or, you know, because of toxic masculinity or whatever.
Or it's a Democrat, it's Jesse Smollett saying, you know, white supremacists came in the south side of Chicago and took my subway sandwich because it's MAGA country.
We never, we never see this from the right.
And to me, it's, it's the same silver lining of the most recent season of South Park.
Some conservatives took it in good fun.
I think Charlie Kirk, who was parodied on it, he took it in good fun.
But, you know, some conservatives said, why is South Park going after the right now?
And I thought, well, it's actually a nice thing because South Park always goes after the regime.
And so when the regime was woke, they went after woke and they had PC principal.
When the regime was, you know, run by just kind of libs, they went after the libs and Al Gore and, you know, Man Bear Pig.
And now the right kind of has political power basically for the first time in my life.
It has real institutional, cultural, popular political power.
I guess that's a good thing.
I want to actually want to get your take on the sort of self-obsession here.
Did you see this woman who just went viral on TikTok for promoting her childless for those who haven't seen it?
Here she is.
If you're only listening, it says things that just make sense in my child-free life.
Sleeping in as long as I want.
Coffee breaks in peace.
Disposable income.
She has like weird sculptures, hand sculpture.
Always quiet.
Candles as plants.
Watching cartoons because I want to.
Oh my goodness.
Never missing a brunch.
Missing a brunch because my time is all mine.
My time is all mine.
She's having some like corpse revival or some kind of brunchy drink.
Lila, your take.
I mean, if you want to eat at McDonald's every day and never have the experience of going to a steakhouse, I mean, it's even, that's not even the best comparison because you can't compare anything to family and love and relationships and children.
There's just, there's no comparison.
It's a new horizon of joy, a new horizon of meeting, a new horizon of responsibility 100%.
But the level of superficiality that this woman is celebrating as some sort of advantage to her, as some sort of, you know, amazing opportunity that she has, it's quite frankly depressing and sad to see.
And it's back to what we were talking about earlier, Michael.
The girls are not okay.
And this girl is her whole identity is making videos now for TikTok and going to brunches.
Newsflash, when you're a mother, when you're a wife, you can still go to brunch.
You can still watch cartoons with your kids.
You can still do virtually everything in her video, except now you're surrounded by human love.
You have someone that you're loving and being loved by, as opposed to being alone and ultimately, I think, miserable.
When people are alone, the social data shows people get miserable.
So I feel bad for her, but this is a trend.
And again, it's TikTok-like.
That's what this is about.
Literally, it's a TikTok video.
And she's not going to be happy.
She's going to probably look back on this in 10 years or 15 years and say, oh my gosh, I can't have children anymore.
And this is happening to so many women today.
I can't have children anymore.
What did I do with my life?
This is what struck me is how TikToky it is in how on the nose it is.
Like when I, when people write in, they say, should I have kids?
Should I get married?
Whatever.
I say, yeah, you should, because at a certain point, brunch just doesn't hit the same way it did 10 years ago.
And she uses that example.
She goes, but I, but I love brunch.
You know, and I said, no, brunch is great, man.
You can go to your kids.
Yeah, you can go to brunch with your kids.
Listen, I've brunched with the best of them.
I used to do those boozy brunches, bottle of champagne to a man.
You know, I look, they're fun, but they kind of, they're less and less fun over time.
She says, I have disposable income.
And then she points at like really kitschy, kind of ugly art.
I don't mean to knock her taste, but it's like, it's not even, you're not even using your disposable income in a good way.
You're not even using your leisure time in a good way.
And I guess what hits me about it, because plenty of women can't have kids, plenty of couples struggle with infertility.
There are women who want to get married who don't get married and it just doesn't work out for them.
And that's a fact of the fallen world.
It doesn't happen a ton.
It's not super widespread, though it's increasingly a problem.
But that's a fact.
And I was trying to think, okay, well, what is the difference between those?
Let's say a couple that can't have kids or, you know, a woman who she really wants to get married and she's tried everything she can possibly try and it just, for whatever reason, it just hasn't worked out.
What's the difference between that woman who will be alone for a lot of time in her apartment and the woman on TikTok?
And it seems to me the difference is the self-obsession, everything that woman talked about was about her.
Yes.
There's no soup kitchens in this video.
There's no, I'm helping my little nieces and nephews on the weekend because you can be a single woman or a single man and live a beautiful, meaningful life.
And you can actually have a vocation to celibacy even, where you don't have biological children, or maybe you struggle with infertility and you're not able to have biological children.
You can still live an incredibly meaningful life.
But the common denominator always is human relationships.
It's always responsibility for other people, being loved by other people and loving them back.
And if you don't have that in your life, you're a hedonist materialist that is going to be miserable on an eternal level.
And that's what this is eternal consequences for this.
And so that's why it's serious.
We can laugh about a TikTok video, but it's a serious spiritual sickness and crisis, which needs people to be waken up from by saying, you're not going to be happy like this.
And look at what you're missing out on.
Yes, it will rob you of all the joys.
It will put you in a temporal, if not an eternal hell.
you will get as many mimosas as you want.
So, you know, you're kind of like on one of the people.
I can still go to brunch with my kids, okay?
So that I don't buy the whole brunch is impossible with kids.
You could buy it.
You could do it.
You should, I would say, I would recommend drinking less than a bottle of champagne per minute, but you could still get half a bottle in.
It's fine, especially if the diner is close by.
Lila, marvelous to see you as always.
Just a reminder, you do a billion, a billion different things, obviously with live action with the podcast, but where can everyone find you?
Thank you.
Well, liveaction.org is our website and the Lila Rose show, wherever you get your podcast.
Go do it.
Go do it right now, Lila.
Lovely to see you.
Thank you.
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Speaking of young people, and speaking of children, actually, famous children, Nalen Haley, Nikki Haley's son, just went on Tucker's show and lit the internet on fire because of this claim that he made about public office and naturalized citizens.
And there's so many different aspects to immigration that it's not just the migration part of it, but a lot of other things that are just out of control.
Like what?
So naturalized citizens should not be able to hold public office.
Growing up here is a big part of understanding the country.
We need to stop and limit the amount of foreign students that are coming into our universities.
Some of them are spies, by the way, for foreign governments.
But it's also just we should put our kids first.
Yes.
And we should also not allow dual citizenship because that's the stupidest idea.
You're either American or you're not.
And everyone wants to make it so complicated.
That's the thing that I don't like about the past generation is they're always about the rules, the process, and regulation.
No, it's really simple.
You're just America first.
People should have their loyalty to America first.
And if they can't do that, then this ain't the country for you.
This is a really important, broad political point.
And I know there are going to be a bunch of people who are going to find exceptions and they're going to say, oh, well, you know, I've got Italian citizenship because of my grandparents.
And I don't, it doesn't mean I'm loyal to Italy or whatever.
I'm, you know, I came from another country and they won't let me renounce my citizenship.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
There are all sorts of exceptions.
No one denies it.
But what about the broader political point he's making?
What he is saying, even go back.
I felt the first point was even stronger when he says naturalized citizens shouldn't hold public office.
Now, it might be difficult to make that, to make a case for that legally or what, you know, you could change laws, I guess.
The broader point that he's saying is citizenship, true citizenship takes time.
It doesn't just happen overnight.
You don't come here from some far-flung country with a radically different culture, with a radically different religion, with radically different practices.
You don't just come here and memorize a few facts about American civics and take the test, raise your right hand and magically become as American as apple pie.
That doesn't happen.
That's a very rationalist view.
That's a very liberal view.
That's a very abstract ideological view, but it's not real.
It's not real.
Citizenship actually takes time.
It's not to say that there is just something magical in the blood that makes a citizen that forecloses citizenship to other people, other peoples, but it is to say that citizenship takes time.
When you're here for a long time, two, three, 10, 12, 13 generations, you're going to see a difference in culture, in tradition, in habit, in attitude.
And you don't just get that overnight.
It takes time.
What Nalen Haley is pointing to here is the fact that politics is deeper than just saying a few words or memorizing a few facts.
Politics is deeper than just assenting to a few creedal abstractions.
And that's in recent decades.
We have reduced citizenship to that.
America's just an idea.
And diversity is our strength.
And anyone can be an American.
That isn't true.
There's a creedal aspect to the country as there is to most countries, but there's more than that.
It's also geography.
It's also borders.
It's also habits.
It's also traditions.
It's also hot dogs on the 4th of July.
And it's also people.
Okay.
The fact that we have a great, you know, great founding story of America, beginning with the Mayflower, which is a terrific cigar brand.
And I think about, okay, so some of my ancestors came on the Mayflower.
Some came on a sardine boat from Sicily, but some came on the Mayflower.
And then some other English settlers came a little bit later in 1660.
You have John Knowles arrives.
The Knowles family home stood in New Hampshire from about 1660 until 1994 when it burned down.
Okay, centuries, 334 years by my count, this home stood.
And when you get that into your bones, when you get that into your habit, you just, that will change you.
That will shape you in a way that arriving off an airplane from Uganda and learning who George Washington is and answering a few simple questions on a test is not going to make you an American.
And what he's saying is the people who just got here probably shouldn't be the ones in office.
And that's obviously true.
That's obviously true.
Maybe there are some exceptions.
Maybe a blue blood is really bad for office and maybe some guy who got here is the exception that proves the rule, but the rule stands nevertheless.
And on the point of dual loyalty, this is just a problem of nationalism, of the Westphalian system.
Yes, you cannot simultaneously be equally loyal to two things of the same kind.
It's just not possible.
You can be loyal to two things of different kinds.
I can have a loyalty to my Mayflower cigars and a loyalty to my comfy sweaters.
By the way, we're going to have a new sweater I'm debuting in the membrane segmentum, so stay tuned for that.
Because those are things of different kinds.
But I can't be equally loyal to the United States and the United Kingdom.
I can have great affection for the United Kingdom.
I can have great affection for Italy as an ancestral home, but no, the two things are the same kind.
You have to have your loyalty chiefly to one of those things.
That's just how it works.
And it's great in the case of Nalan Haley because he is the, what, grandchild of immigrants?
So he's saying, look, I'm speaking from experience here.
You know, I think that it takes some time.
And, you know, you develop more American habits over time.
So really great.
Even if one can't quite implement the particulars of the things he's talking about, at the broader point of political philosophy and citizenship, he's making a very, very important argument that previously would have been considered totally common sense.
Okay, speaking of identity politics, this is another insane story that everyone just knows.
Everyone knew that the Somalis in Minnesota were scheming and defrauding people.
We all knew it.
Now we have proof.
And everyone knew that Capitol Hill staffers are completely insane.
We all knew that.
In fact, I think that woman who chopped herself up, I think she might be the least psychotic Capitol Hill staffer, Washington, D.C. staffer.
We all knew it.
Now we have some proof.
Here, we now have a really important thread.
This is posted by uncorrelated underscore, who went through a meme that you see.
And the meme is you look into crime databases and you see, you know, name, Jose, age, 29, race, white.
And you see the picture and it's like the most Latino looking guy you ever saw in your entire life, you know, face tatted up, Venezuelan, basically ethnicity, white, or race, white, or whatever.
And you see this a lot anecdotally.
So this account posts white by default.
The viral posts were right.
We scraped 5.5 million criminal records and 1.5 million mugshots from 39 states.
29% of Hispanics are being misclassified as white in official Department of Corrections databases.
The thread goes on.
Everyone's seen the collages.
Problem is it's anecdotal, cherry-picked, no way to verify.
So we had 1.5 million mug shots, names, and official racial classifications, time to test it systematically.
And once this individual ran these numbers, according to this guy's analysis, correcting for misclassification, Hispanic criminal record rates increase by 20 to 31%.
White criminal record rates decrease by 4% to 6%.
Black crime rates decrease by 1%.
So the black rates remain basically the same.
The white rates significantly decrease and the Hispanic rates very, very significantly increase.
Why is this happening?
There's going to be some pedantic person says, well, you know, actually, it's because race and ethnicity are different things.
And actually, there are many Hispanic people who identify as white.
And obviously, there are some Hispanic people who are much whiter and others who are a little darker and others who have more of an admixture of the Indigenous people.
And so there's actually, I mean, yeah, But that's not meaningful in the American context.
In the American context, when we're trying to get down to different ethnic or racial enclaves, different cultural groupings, when we're trying to get to the heart of the matter, no one thinks that white and Hispanic mean the same thing.
No one thinks that white and black mean the same thing or Hispanic and black mean the same thing.
We know what you're doing when you are misclass, because the misclassifications only seem to go in one direction.
And the point, obviously, is to avoid the politically incorrect fact that white people commit relatively little crime, especially relatively little violent crime.
And other racial groups commit significantly higher proportion of violent crime.
And that's politically incorrect because we're not supposed to say that white people have an advantage at any kind of social outcome.
Or if they do, it's the result of some terrible system of oppression or whatever.
And it's just icky and it's called racist.
It's like a racist fact or something.
But I guess the rejoinder to this is, if you actually love people and you want to help them and you want them to improve, the first thing you have to do is acknowledge reality.
So if there's a particular problem with black crime, which obviously there is, or in this case, what we're talking about, if there is a serious problem with Hispanic crime, problems that you don't see when it comes to white people, then the first step to helping them, to fixing the problem, and don't forget, we punish evildoers, not only to protect the innocent, but also to help the evildoers,
because it harms you when you do evil things.
This is an observation that goes back to Plato and the Gorgias.
This is an observation that goes back to the Bible.
It helps the guilty to be punished.
If you want to help them, you have to acknowledge reality.
And so much of, I think, what undergirds modern leftism is all the way up to the transgender ideology.
Maybe that's a special example, is that they believe that lies are helpful and good and nice and that the truth is cruel and that you have to avoid it.
Okay.
Oh, there's so much.
There's so much good stuff to get to, but we don't have time because I want to get to the mailbag.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Causcual Doat.
What a name.
It says, let me guess Chicago man is code for like youth or Florida man at this point.
A little euphemistic, I suppose.
Finally, finally, we've arrived at my favorite time of the week when I get to hear from you in the mailbag.
Mailbag sponsored by PureTalk at a puretalk.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S today.
Take it away.
Hey, Michael, I haven't really planned this question, just shooting from the hip here.
So you talked today about how marriages have really fallen in the sense of being able to break apart from them and divorce at will without any cause.
Do you think that would change or do you think there would be a thing where like normal couples like us have go into like a pre-nup agreement, but in the opposite way where they make it really impossible to get divorced because of how it's been made now?
Curious on what you think the trend will be as a father of two beautiful little girls and soon to be three.
Thank you.
The trend will follow.
It's a very good question.
The trend will follow whatever the limits of the political order are.
So what you're describing is a kind of private fix for a public failure, the public failure being the liberalization of marriage, the encouragement of divorce, and the subsequent collapse in marriage rates.
And so the private fix is, okay, well, we're going to constrain people far beyond the bounds of the law, and that's not going to work.
It's not going to work because ultimately, these matters will be adjudicated by courts and the courts will defer to the public law.
They won't honor the private compacts or contracts that you've signed.
So there's no way out.
This is the conservative and especially libertarian instinct is to say, well, look, I don't want to deal with all the stupid politics.
I don't want to have to run for office.
It's such a hassle.
I don't want to have to deal with the extreme tedium of trying to pass laws and then fight the bureaucrats who don't want to properly implement the laws.
And I just don't want to deal with it.
So I'm just going to retreat to my own little community and my own smallest community, my family, and I'm just going to try to have private solutions.
I get the temptations for all of that.
I work in the private sector.
I get it.
Ultimately, that's not going to work.
Ultimately, you have to wield the political order.
And so if the political order encourages divorce and discourages marriage, as it currently does, and the political order now, in fact, has abolished marriage practically by redefining it through a Bergefell, then you're going to get less marriage and you're going to get more divorce, or you're going to get a lot of divorce, at least.
The trends will go up and down.
But if you have a political order that encourages marriage and discourages divorce, then you can get more marriage and less divorce.
That's how it works.
I've talked about the Knowles Prenup.
Knowles Prenup says, before you get married, you sign it.
And it says, whichever party institutes or initiates the divorce forfeits everything.
I like this in principle, but probably in most cases, it would not work because the judge is always going to defer to the liberal political order.
And in the case of liberalism, it's going to favor divorce.
That's just how it goes.
We have to fix that.
It's a political problem.
Next question.
Hi, Michael.
Longtime listener, huge fan.
And I had a question about healthcare.
I have a lot of experience with doctors and hospitals since I'm chronically ill.
I have health insurance, but that's not the problem.
The problem that I and many people face is the quality of the medical system itself.
Medical malpractice and physician error are literally the third leading cause of death in America, and no one ever talks about it.
Women's healthcare specifically is horrible.
Every woman I know has been dismissed and mistreated by more doctors than those that actually cared.
Doctors don't run tests.
They don't do research.
They don't put care into you.
It's a revolving door system, and it's just hopeless.
My question for you is, why is everyone on both sides of the aisle focused on the buzzword healthcare, and yet no one ever mentions the horrible state of the actual medical systems?
Why don't we see any conservatives focusing on this, giving it any attention?
Is change even possible?
I'd love to know your thoughts.
Yeah, really good question.
It's because it's very, very difficult.
And so for the left, they focus really just on medical insurance or government-backed medical insurance or ways to strong-arm private medical insurance.
And they focus on this because they're trying to expand another welfare program to give them themselves more control.
Ultimately, I think that's what some idealists might have more utopian views, but ultimately that's what the brass tax comes down to.
And then on the right, they don't really have very good ideas because unfortunately, of all the options on the table, the system that we currently have is better than the alternatives.
And obviously, the system we currently have was seriously damaged by Obamacare, and Trump tried to repeal that in the first term.
And John McCain stabbed his constituents in the back, basically, and refused to do that.
So we're stuck with Obamacare.
You know, the medical problems really began under FDR.
It was first FDR's fault because he instituted wage caps, but not caps on fringe benefits, which is when you went from very, very few Americans having health care associated with employment to by 1958, virtually virtually all of them, three quarters of them.
That system then continued.
And then with Obamacare, it was, you know, the perverse incentives to it were further entrenched.
And the insurance does affect the quality of care.
And the crazy system we have where if you pay with insurance, a procedure costs 30 grand.
If you pay with cash, it costs $2,000.
It creates all sorts of bad incentives and compromises the quality of the care.
But the conclusion that you should draw from it is that medical care is not this magically different field of human activity from every other one.
If you bring contractors into your house to fix a door or to, I don't know, to improve something, you're going to have to manage them.
You're going to have to get different bids, different offers, try to figure out who really has expertise and you're going to have to pick one.
When it comes to almost anything, a car mechanic, I don't know, a tailor, anything like that, you are ultimately managing.
You're bringing your judgment to bear to figure out who's going to do the best job.
That's true in medical care, too.
You can't, you don't just leave that up to someone else and you don't leave it up to some faceless insurance company or the government because they're going to do a worse job than just about anybody.
Okay.
Do we have time for one more mailbag?
I want one more mailbag question.
Okay.
Hi, Michael.
I'm going to try to keep this short.
I've written mailbag, but never voiced, so I feel awkward, but okay.
My question for you is, do you have any recommendations for a confirmation name?
I was baptized and received my first communion as a child, but I was never confirmed.
For most of my life, I would describe myself as like a sleepy Christian.
In 2020, during college, I lost my mother to cancer.
And in the years that followed, I drifted even further into the traps and distractions of this world.
A few years ago, I found my way back to church through a non-denominational community, thanks in large part to voices and podcasters like yours who helped reignite that spirit of faith in me.
Not long after, I reconnected with my now long-term boyfriend who is Catholic, and he gently led me back to the Catholic Church.
I am now going through OCIA, and I couldn't be more grateful or excited for this journey.
His mother is actually my sponsor.
And again, I want to thank voices like yours who kind of reignited this interest in Catholicism.
As I approach confirmation, I want to choose a name that reflects my story and symbolizes my path that God has brought me on.
And I deeply value your biblical insight and would love to hear any name recommendations you might have.
Thank you for your show.
Thank you for what you do.
I think you impact so many people around the world, me being one of them.
So thank you.
Oh, that's very kind.
Very, very sweet question.
And, you know, you and I have fairly similar stories, oddly enough, other than the boyfriend thing.
You know, I didn't have one of those.
Though I did reconnect with my long-term girlfriend, I guess, around that time.
So it's interesting.
We have very, very similar stories.
The name that comes to mind is Augustine.
You know, you're kind of raised, especially the role of the mother.
You know, Saint Monica played this very, very important role in her son's life and she was praying for his conversion.
And there's a great meme of, you know, it's like, you know, the entire world is basically being held up by the prayers of old women.
And we never acknowledge that.
That is substantially true.
And Augustine, obviously, you know, went through a period of a bit of rebellious youth and then came fully into faith and said, you know, oh, how late I've found you.
How, you know, oh, love ever ancient, ever knew.
And so, yeah, and you can pick name, you know, I, I mean, women religious and lay women who have confirmation names, they, they can pick male names all the time.
There are plenty of men, especially like royals of Europe.
Plenty of men with the name Maria is one of their like 15 names.
So anyway, Augustine comes to mind.
I don't know.
It's kind of, you could pronounce it Augustine in more, it's a more Latinate way, and then it seems more feminine.
But that's the one that comes to mind.
But, you know, you can't go wrong.
Glad to hear it.
Okay.
Today's fake headline Friday.
The rest of the show continues now.
You do not want to miss it.
You don't want to miss it too, because I'm debuting one of my favorite sweaters.
And I need you to settle a debate between me and the wardrobe room.
