Ep. 1917 - USA DESTROYS Its Evil Tophat In Olympic Hockey Match
Michael Knowles dissects the Supreme Court’s 6-3 Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump ruling, where originalists like Thomas dissented despite striking down tariffs under IEEPA, then praises Mike Huckabee’s defense of Israel’s legal and biblical right to exist—though his Genesis 15 argument sparked Arab backlash. Meanwhile, NYC Mayor Zorhan Mamdani’s ID demands for snow shovelers clash with liberal voting rhetoric, exposing hypocrisy amid immigration debates. The episode ties legal, diplomatic, and cultural contradictions to broader questions of American identity and policy consistency. [Automatically generated summary]
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The Supreme Court kills President Trump's tariffs.
Sort of.
Another assassin tries to kill President Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Canada keeps killing its own citizens.
The U.S. hockey team, the Olympic hockey team, kills the gold medal hopes of America's evil top hat.
And cartels are trying to kill everyone in Mexico right now.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
A lot of killing going on in the Western Hemisphere, but we will also turn our attention overseas because Tucker and Mike Huckabee have squared off in Israel, on Israel.
It was a fascinating conversation.
I happen to know both those guys and quite like both of those guys, actually.
I've gotten along with both of them over the years, and now they're obviously very much at odds over this issue that really seems to have split, at the very least, the chattering class on the American right.
And I think the interview is a great service in that it shows us where the conversation is going wrong.
And I think it gives a good view on where the pro-Israel side should go.
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Surprising Olympic Reactions00:06:11
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So much to get to.
So much killing, so many threats.
However, I want to start with an uncharacteristically happy story.
There's just no negative side to this story at all.
It was great.
And it came out of the Olympics, which I don't even like.
And I certainly would never choose to watch, but there was a clip that even I had to watch, which is when, for the first time in how many decades since the Miracle on Ice Team in the 80s, the U.S. Olympic hockey team took the gold and they did it specifically by destroying America's evil top hat, Canada.
Here is Jack Hughes, who had been hit with a stick earlier in the game, gets one and a half of his front teeth knocked out of his face, bleeding from his face, keeps playing the game, and here he is scoring the winning goal.
Here's McDavid moving it on Jack Hughes.
Trying to swallow it down.
Put back up behind the neck.
And it's Werenski.
Now Jack Hughes puts him around the park.
But I'm states with numbers.
Rockets, it comes!
Jack Hughes wins it!
The golden gold for the United States!
For the first time!
Take that, Canada.
Take that, Justin Trudeau.
You think you can just take Katy Perry like that without any consequences?
No, sir.
We're coming back for the first time in 50 years.
40 years?
How many years?
Anyway, we're going to take the gold.
Even after you try to smack out our boys' teeth.
Now, this is a young team, obviously.
It's always a young team.
And this Zoomer guy who scores the winning goal, he comes out afterward.
And you'd expect from a Zoomer, especially on this Olympics team, where all they ever do is whine and complain, you'd expect some whiny, crying, lamenting, woe is me.
Is that what Jack Hughes said?
No, sir.
Here's what he had to say afterward.
I'm lucky I'm from the best country in the world, and we got great dentists there, too.
So I'm lucky I'm American, and they're going to fix me right up.
Standing there listening to the anthem.
What's going through your head?
Just so proud.
I'm so proud to be American.
I'm so proud of this group.
I'm so happy that we could win.
You know, we have so many people here supporting us.
We have so many people back home supporting us.
And, you know, we're just, we're so thrilled with how this whole tournament played out.
And, you know, just an unbelievable moment for USA hockey.
I'm from the greatest country in the world and we have great dentists there too.
And he posts on social media after word, I love my country.
And it was great.
Great pictures.
This kid gets his teeth knocked out, grinning, takes the gold.
Pro-America.
It's so refreshing.
And here's the little, I don't know, storm cloud in this otherwise sunny sky.
It's sad that this is surprising to us.
Not winning the gold, but this reaction.
It's sad that it is surprising to us when our Olympic athletes like the country.
That's kind of sad.
It's sad that our standards have fallen so low that an Olympic athlete winning the gold and saying nice things about our country is surprising to us.
That's kind of sad for our country.
However, the whole story is great.
And this kid is so American.
The conversation that we've all been having, especially as we look ahead at the 250th anniversary, is what is an American?
What does it mean to be an American?
Can some Somali fraudster pirate who landed in America five minutes ago, can that person be an American?
Is that person actually more American than the guy whose family has been here for 12 generations?
You know, this is the conversation about identity.
And I would respectfully submit this guy's interview, just this guy, as a great piece of evidence about what an American is.
This kind of a good attitude is distinctly American.
Smiling is not uniquely American, but it is distinctly American.
You travel around the rest of the world.
People don't really smile.
I remember the first time I went to India.
I really like India and I really like Indians.
But one of the first things that struck me is that nobody really smiles in India.
There are a lot of problems in India, so I kind of get it.
They don't really smile that much around the world.
You travel around Europe.
People don't smile as much.
It's actually one of the caricatures of Americans that we're kind of, we look kind of goofy because we're smiling all the time.
And this guy goes out there.
Obviously, he just won the gold medal.
He has reason to be happy.
But, you know, they knock his teeth out.
And what's he doing?
He's just smiling with missing teeth.
It's kind of a good attitude.
Just, yeah, it's awesome.
Don't worry about it.
Whatever.
I'm missing my teeth.
Whatever.
We got good dentists.
That is not a German characteristic.
The Germans, very serious, you know, very serious people who write philosophy that no one can understand, even in the original German.
You know, the Russians, they're not a happy people.
The Russians are depressed about everything.
The French, are they a happy people?
No, they're kind of, they're a little bit laissez-faire, you know, qu'escon pe faire ge bo, you know, they just smoke their cigarettes.
They wear their hijabs now, I guess.
I don't know.
They have French identities in flux too.
The Italians, they don't care about anything.
They don't want, you know, they just kind of shrug it off too.
Very Mediterranean attitude.
But the Americans, we got a good attitude.
Very determined, a little proud, happy, generous.
Why Healthcare Matters00:03:55
That's it.
That's part of what resonated here too.
Not just the low bar of an Olympic athlete saying nice things about his country and being patriotic, but the fact that he's just so exuberant.
He's just big.
He's smiley.
His problems, he just writes them off.
Whatever.
I got dentists.
Who cares?
I won.
I won.
And I beat you, Canada.
Take that.
It's great.
Distinctly American.
Now, one of the biggest criticisms that the Libs have of America is healthcare.
You hear this kid, Jack Hughes, come out.
He says, we got great healthcare.
We got great dentists.
But that's one of the biggest criticisms.
I just did a bar fight the other night.
We released it on Saturday.
You can get it exclusively on Dailywire Plus.
One of the big conversation topics was the Libs saying that America has horrible health care.
And you hear this all the time.
And probably the Libs are going to campaign on this in the midterms.
Say America has bad health care and every civilized country in the world has universal socialized medicine.
We're so far behind.
We're so retrograde.
We need to have socialist medicine.
Now, of course, we do have socialist medicine for illegal aliens.
We do have socialist medicine for the very poor or for elderly people.
So we do have, but the only way that it works is that we have a substantially capitalist healthcare system that actually funds the whole thing.
So we do give a lot of freebies away.
We have a robust social safety net.
But the way it works is we have a strongly capitalist healthcare system that actually allows the whole thing to function.
In any case, let's take a little look at some of the socialist healthcare systems around the world.
This is a story, terrible story out of the UK.
Woman 97 was found dead on the floor of her home after being told she would have to wait 10 days for an ambulance for a suspected hip break, according to the coroner.
What the coroner is hearing, this is Babette Burge found on the floor of her home in Newport, Isle of Wight on October 19th of last year.
Now the story is just coming out.
Five days earlier, a paramedic had attended Ms. Burge's home and assessed her condition and found that her leg was shortened and rotated.
So she had a fractured hip.
And she was told she would have to wait 10 days for an ambulance.
Not 10 days for surgery.
That would be bad enough.
10 days just for an ambulance to give a woman who was nearly 100 years old a ride to the hospital.
And then she was found to have died.
She was actually barely alive.
She was just slightly breathing when they found her and then and then she died.
That's it.
Everybody, everybody gets medical care in the UK.
The problem is you just can't get an ambulance there.
You can get medical, if you can get to the hospital, you get medical care, but you have to get to the hospital first, and we're not going to send an ambulance.
Meanwhile, out of Canada, a Canadian writer who's apparently a big lib, Kelly, she's got Kelly Broadway Baby TO, 45,000 ex-followers, says, I'm about as far left as you can get, but we do have problems with MAID, medical assistance in dying in Canada.
How do I know?
It was offered to me in lieu of care.
I'm disabled.
I was alone.
My condition's expensive.
Yes, I was allowed to say no, but no alternative care was offered.
That's coercion.
So you're seeing this a lot, not just in Canada, though Canada's particularly egregious about it, but throughout Europe, especially in the Netherlands.
People who are elderly, people who are not elderly, people who are young, but maybe disabled, even just young people who have seasonal depression.
Doctors working for the government are telling them to kill themselves because it's expensive to treat them and their wait lists and because the socialist healthcare systems don't work that well.
So instead, the doctors are saying, hey, how about you kill yourself?
The American leftists, on the one hand, they want to say, we're the only country in the civilized world without socialist healthcare.
Meanwhile, you look at the supposedly civilized world and they look to anyone who's got, you know, like a fractured thumb and they say, well, well there, mate.
You know, have you considered killing yourself then, in it?
You look up to Canada, the supposedly civilized Canada.
It's like, well, probably about time you kill yourself, eh?
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Yeah, no, I know.
I know you just got a little bruise.
I know you were just asking me for some aspirin, but aspirin sure is expensive, innit?
No, that's the in it is what they say in Britain.
Anyway, but the point is they just tell you to kill yourself, which is not medical care.
It's the opposite of medical care.
Beware, beware the supposedly greener grass on the other side of the fence, especially when that fence is our northern border separating us from the snow Mexicans.
Speaking of money and foreign affairs, the Supreme Court just sort of torpedoed the center point of President Trump's economic agenda.
We'll get to that momentarily.
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I posted an emergency video about this on Friday because Friday, my show comes out and I had to take a flight down to Florida.
Supreme Court Rejects Trump's Tariffs00:15:22
And while I'm in the air, shortly after my show airs, the news breaks that the Supreme Court has shot down Trump's tariffs, tariffs, which are the centerpiece of the whole economic agenda.
So I say, cool, cool, cool.
That's great.
I filmed a little video, which we put on YouTube at the airport.
However, the broad scopes of this case, it was Learning Resources Incorporated versus Trump.
Now, it's not the quality learning center run by the Somali fraudsters in Minneapolis.
That would be very funny if it were the Somali pirates in Minneapolis who brought the laws, but it wasn't.
It was Learning Resources Incorporated versus Trump.
They were the company to bring it, but it was really just about the blanket tariffs.
Does Trump have the right to issue these tariffs?
It was a 6-3 ruling.
It was the three squishy conservatives versus with the three liberals against the three solid conservatives.
That was basically the breakdown.
So you had Roberts, who is super squishy and tries to maintain the institutional integrity of the court by making extreme political calculations to not irritate the libs too much, ironically undermining the legitimacy of the court, but I digress.
You have Roberts, along with Gorsuch, who is a conservative nominated by President Trump, and then he enshrined transgenderism into civil rights law.
So a little squishy there.
And then Amy Barrett, who likewise, I think she clerked for Scalia, but she can go a little soft sometimes.
along with Elena Kagan, who's the smart liberal judge on the court, and then Sota Mayor and Katanji Jackson, who I don't want to get into the sin of detraction or anything, so I'll just say they're not Elena Kagan.
And Katanji Jackson famously, infamously during her confirmation hearings, couldn't define what a woman is when Marsha Blackburn asked her.
So that's who sided against Trump and torpedoed the tariffs.
Then you had excellent dissents, notably written by Clarence Thomas, but then also in the dissent, Alito and Brett Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh, another Trump appointee who still likes beer, but he sided with the more conservative judges here.
And what you're going to hear from a lot of kind of establishment conservatives, what you're going to hear is that this is actually a really good thing.
It's really, it might have actually helped Trump that they torpedoed his tariffs because, you know, the tariffs are really, really bad.
And tariffs are always bad because in seventh grade social studies class, I was told the tariffs are bad.
And I was also told that in the 1980s that a true conservative can never support a tariff, even though Ronald Reagan supported tariffs and even though the Republican Party was founded on tariffs.
And even though Abraham Lincoln said, give me a tariff and I'll give you the greatest country in the world.
And actually, forget about all of that.
Tariff's bad, free trade good.
90s is all of history.
There was nothing before 1990.
There was nothing after 1999.
That's just, that is the end of history.
That's what you're going to hear from a lot of conservative types.
And they're going to ground their claims on originalism.
So it's worth pointing out that originalism and textualism more broadly, which is what is championed by the established kind of conservative powers.
It's jarring to ground your support of this ruling on originalism when the most famous originalists in the country dissented.
Clarence Thomas is the most famous originalist, the most prominent, the most authoritative originalist in the United States.
He wrote the dissent.
So whatever you want to say about the tariff, maybe you hate tariffs, maybe you don't like Trump that much, whatever, but don't tell me that this ruling was actually the vindication of originalism.
And, you know, actually, if you just read the Constitution, blah, blah, blah.
If you are going to stake your claim on originalism, it's very difficult to contradict Clarence Thomas and Alito for that matter, maybe Kavanaugh for that matter, too.
I said on Twitter, I'm a simple man.
I didn't go to law school.
I don't pretend that I went to law school.
I can understand some legal reasoning.
I have a little bit of education on the principles of the law and the judiciary, but I'm not a lawyer.
However, I'm a simple man.
When Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito agree on something, I assume they're right.
Certainly on matters of the law, maybe even just matters generally.
I assume they're right.
And they agreed on this.
So what did it come down to?
Just very quickly, this was about whether or not Trump could use a 1977 law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, IEEPA, to institute these tariffs.
The majority said, no, he can't do it.
He doesn't have legal predicate, and this violates the major questions doctrine.
The major questions doctrine is actually a relatively novel legal concept.
It first appears really in the 1980s, but it's not really used and codified and promoted until around 2000.
I don't think it even really appears in scholarship really until the 2000s up to 2013.
So it's relatively modern, but it says that on questions that would have a major impact on politics or economics, you need caution.
We need to rein in the administrative agencies.
We need to have explicit delegated authority from the legislature to the administrative agencies.
Implicit authority and even some precedent doesn't hold up.
So the conservatives in the majority said this violates the major questions doctrine.
And so we're done with the tariffs.
The libs agree with the ruling.
They say, yeah, we like shooting down the tariffs, but we don't agree with citing the major questions doctrine because the libs never want to rein in the administrative agencies.
Practically, they love using the administrative agencies.
So they say, well, we're not going to go along with the reasoning, but we do agree that we want to shoot down the tariffs.
Meanwhile, the conservatives made a very good point.
Clarence Thomas cited delegations of tariff authority all the way back to the 1790s.
Okay, so he says, you want to have a history of how these laws have been implemented.
Let me take you back to the very beginning of the country.
I think there's a citation literally to 1790.
Then he points out that this kind of authority was used in the case to uphold Nixon's tariffs, Ford's tariffs, cites other decisions.
And then Kavanaugh comes in and says, look, the IEEPA's ability to regulate importation includes tariffs under ordinary meaning, text, history, and precedent, citing Nixon, Ford, also the Algonquin decision.
In any case, unfortunate that they torpedoed Trump's agenda, but there's already a backup plan.
And by Saturday evening, Trump had not only slapped another 10% tariff on the world, he upped it to 15% using other legal mechanisms.
So in any case, he's doubling down.
What this means for the economy remains to be seen.
But to me, the most interesting part of the whole case is to see the breakdown of the judges.
The squishier conservatives side with the liberals.
The hardcore conservatives uphold Trump's tariffs.
And the supposed originalists in public life, the pundits and the prognosticators and the politicians, the most originalist, you know, scalia-worshipping politicians there are, end up siding with the squishier conservatives and not the hardcore originalists.
Okay.
Enough of that.
More tangible attempts to stop Trump involved the attempted assassination of President Trump at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend, where the assailant had his face blown off by police.
We'll get to that momentarily.
And then we will get to Tucker and Huckabee duking it out on Israel.
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I don't even know if I should cover these stories anymore.
The Libs try to murder Trump so frequently.
Is it even a news story?
Is this exactly Man Bite's Dog?
This is how I felt about, there's another little story here.
You know, Mexico is on fire because officially the Mexican army took out the head of the biggest cartel in Mexico.
What's his name?
El Mencho?
Sounds Yiddish, doesn't it?
I don't, is that?
I know he's Mexican.
I know he's not Jewish, but El Mencho, it sounds like he's like Yiddish for like a good guy, like a really good drug cartel.
Oh, he's a Mencho.
That guy, that guy's a total mencho, okay?
Don't give me any of that Shmagegi.
He's a Mencho.
But no, he was a very bad guy.
And he gets taken out reportedly by the Mexican army.
I assume we had to be involved.
I mean, President Trump said we were going to start conducting raids, military operations in Mexico.
How many months ago was that?
And then all of a sudden, Mexico just miraculously starts taking out top cartel leaders.
Okay, great, whatever.
As Ronald Reagan said, there's no limit to what a man can accomplish if he doesn't care who gets the credit.
In any case, it's led to chaos in Mexico.
Do we have that picture of, I think a Costco is on fire?
This is because this is the cause of his belly, as far as I'm concerned.
We take out the, or sorry, Mexico takes out the cartel kingpin.
Then the cartels launch this vicious attack, start burning stuff, attacking the airport, threatening a lot of tourists in this region of Mexico.
But then there was reportedly an attack on a Costco.
And this, as far as I'm concerned, time to break out the nukes.
Okay.
You don't, you can threaten a lot of American interests.
You go after Costco.
This means war.
But in any case, I didn't have all that much to say about the Mexico standoff, the cartels today.
And the producers were very angry with me.
They said, why aren't you talking about Mexico?
I said, what's the story?
Cartels blow stuff up in Mexico?
Like, that's not exactly man bites dog.
And I'm sorry to say the same thing is true here.
And an attempt on President Trump, we've all just become immune to it.
We've all just gotten so used to it.
The guy actually had part of his ear blown off on a stage in Buntler, Pennsylvania.
The only reason he didn't have the back of his skull blown out is because implausibly, at the very last second, he turned his head.
What was it, 30 degrees?
And the bullet whizzed by him.
Still hit him a little bit, but not fatally.
And then everyone just moved on and we never learned really anything about the assailant.
And then another guy tried to kill Trump at one of his golf courses.
And now another guy's trying to kill Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
And the left just generally has been justifying murdering Trump for years.
Joe Biden started his presidential campaign by saying that Trump poses an existential threat to democracy, which is a justification for his assassination.
And it's very sad that we're so used to this now.
The Libs celebrated after a leftist murdered Charlie Kirk.
So we're just kind of used to this.
But in any case, it's worth reminding even ourselves that they do keep trying to kill Trump.
And the meme remains true.
They're not after Trump.
They're after us.
And Trump just happens to be in the way.
Here are the police giving an update on the Mar-a-Lago shooting.
At 1:30 this morning, the security detail detected that an individual had made his way into the inner perimeter of Bar-a-Lago.
A deputy and two Secret Service agents on the detail went to that area to investigate.
They confronted a white male that was carried a gas can and a shotgun.
He was ordered to drop those two pieces of equipment that he had with him, at which time he put down the gas can, raised the shotgun to a shooting position.
At that point in time, the deputy and the two Secret Service agents fired their weapons and neutralized the threat.
He is deceased at the scene.
That's all we know about him for now.
We probably will never learn anymore.
It's kind of curious how we never seem to learn anything about the people who try to murder Trump, even as they continue to try to murder Trump.
The only update I'm waiting for on this story is when the libs are going to start rallying for him.
You know, justice for this assailant.
Why, why didn't the cops shoot him in the leg?
You know, why did they fight back?
He was murdered.
He was executed.
And in this case, the assailant wasn't even driving his SUV into any cops.
So I'm sure they're going to be furious about it.
Expect protests in a neighborhood near you.
Very high-stakes stuff.
Speaking of high stakes, a really illuminating interview between Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, former presidential candidate, former television host, former governor, Mike Huckabee and Tucker Carlson.
Mike Huckabee, famously very, very pro-Israel and now the ambassador to Israel.
Tucker, how should we say this diplomatically?
Not the most pro-Israel guy in the country, I think we would have to say.
Tucker, in this interview, insists that he actually likes Israel or he supports Israel.
It doesn't totally seem that way from some of Tucker's commentary of late.
So in any case, they were kind of sniping at each other over Twitter.
And Mike Huckabee says, well, hey, why don't we just talk about this in person, Tucker?
You know, these guys used to work together at Fox News.
How about you come over here to Israel where I work and we can just talk about this in person.
And Tucker says, okay, great.
I'll go talk about this in person.
So they fly to Israel.
There were all sorts of questions about where they were going to do it.
Were they going to have security?
Tucker came out and said that the embassy was not going to give him security, even as Israeli politicians are ratcheting up the pressure on Tucker.
And so anyway, they ended up just doing it in the airport.
I don't have time to get into the whole interview.
It's pretty interesting.
But I thought that generally Mike Huckabee gave a pretty good defense of Israel.
There was one crucial moment where I thought that defense really started to weaken.
But generally speaking, I thought Mike Huckabee gave a pretty good defense.
Here's the best part of that defense.
They were attacked again in 1973 in the Yom Kippur War.
They won the war.
The point is, does Israel have a right to exist?
They also had wars in 1982 in Lebanon.
They've had Dafadas, two of those.
They've had Lebanon again.
I was there.
No, I'm very familiar with the modern history of the state.
Israel's Right to Exist00:12:15
Okay, pretty familiar, I think.
But a Zionist simply means somebody who believes that Israel has a right to exist.
Now, the question is, I believe Israel has a right to exist?
Yes.
I mean, I want Israel to exist.
Well, no, but I want to know what that means.
So like, do other countries have a right to exist?
Well, they do exist.
Do they have a right to exist?
You keep saying Israel has a right to exist.
And I want to know what other countries have a legal right because every international body in the last 100 years has said the Jewish people have a right.
I understand.
So that's a legal right.
Do they have a biblical right?
I would say that yes, but you may say they don't.
I don't know.
I'm actually sincerely interested in finding out what you mean by a biblical right.
Okay, so the biblical right, I think, is where the debate starts to turn against Ambassador Huckabee and more in Tucker's favor.
But there, I thought Huckabee did a great job.
He handled the interview very well.
And he said, look, Israel has a right to exist because they fought a bunch of wars to defend their territory.
And every international body for the last hundred years has recognized their right to exist.
And so they have this right.
They're a nation that has been granted a state.
And according to the standards that we set for every other country, they have a right to exist.
All pretty solid.
Then he turns it on the, he says, I personally believe they have a biblical right to exist.
You might disagree with that.
And I don't think that's essential for U.S. foreign policy, but I personally, because Mike Huckabee is a former pastor, he says, I personally believe they have a biblical right to exist.
And I thought this was a tactical error because I think it gave Tucker a real opening where if Huckabee was landing some punches in defense of Israel's right to exist, I thought this was where Huckabee gave Tucker the opportunity to really land a blow on what he means by the biblical right for Israel to exist.
I'm not going to let you off on this because you have said it three times that God gave this land to this people.
And so it is entirely fair for me with respect to ask, what land are you talking about?
Because I just read Genesis 15, as I have many times.
And that land, I think it says from the Nile to the Euphrates, which is, once again, basically the entire Middle East.
So God gave that land to his people, the Jews, or he didn't.
You're saying he did.
What does that mean?
Does Israel have the right to that land?
Because you're appealing to Genesis.
You're saying that's the original deed.
It would be fine if they took it all.
It was a tough one.
Now, look, I think Huckabee is speaking a little tongue-in-cheek here, though he might also believe it too.
It's clearly a little bit of a punchline, but I think it probably does express more or less his opinion because it would have to be the opinion of people who believe that the state of Israel has a biblical right to exist.
So he says, well, look, I'd be fine if they took it all.
And this caused a little bit of a diplomatic flare-up when all of the Arab states said, yo, hold up.
You do not get to take our countries because of your particular view of theology.
Like, what?
We ain't doing that.
And the embassy kind of walked it back.
In any case, the conversation was illuminating in many ways, but it was frustrating in many ways too, because it did seem like these guys were talking past each other a little bit.
And all of it comes down to this central claim, which is Zionism is simply the belief that Israel has a right to exist.
That's kind of the claim made to people who are raising questions about Christian Zionism, which is a kind of novel 19th century theological innovation that comes from a subset of Protestantism that a lot of Christians, Protestant and Catholic and Eastern Orthodox and the rest, reject.
So they say, no, no, no, it's not that.
It's just a different thing.
It's just a more basic political thing.
If you think that Israel has a right to exist, then you are a Zionist.
But I don't think that claim is exactly true.
And the claim hinges on the meaning of the word right.
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And then once you do that, you can watch Matt Walsh's real history.
Episode one made a huge splash.
The libs were very upset about it where he debunks all the nonsense about slavery.
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Go watch it.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Ian Hamilton, V6R, who says, and this is kind of apropos of discussions around the Middle East.
Ian Hamilton said, Elmo has been forcefully converted.
Oh, yes, because Elmo is celebrating Ramadan.
Elmo has been forcefully converted.
Elmo is sad inside.
This is the song, La La Huakbar Elmo Shong.
I added that part at the end, but yeah, that was pretty weird.
That was weird with Elmo going making the Hodge.
Now, speaking of jihads and fights, we had a great bar fight that came out on Saturday.
This is with the jolly good Ginger and Walter Masterson.
Here's a clip.
I forgot to bring my Epstein files with me.
I'm sorry we talked about your favorite pedestal.
You f ⁇ ing pedophile apologists.
I am glad that after Joe Biden, why do I give a f ⁇ about Joe Biden?
What about Biden?
Doesn't lose every election going forward.
Boom!
Now I lose.
Well, go check out the full episode only on Daily Wire Plus.
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Okay, back to Zionism.
Back to the Huckabee Tucker showdown.
The whole question hinges on the meaning of the word right.
Some people say, look, I think God gave this land to the Jews.
Then the traditional Christian perspective is that the church is the fulfillment, the New Testament is the fulfillment of the Old Testament, and the church is the new Israel, the spiritual Israel.
And so these kind of specific ethnic claims that come out of the Old Testament, which we view as a figure, a type of the New Testament, they don't really hold true because we believe that there is neither Jew nor Gentile, nor slave nor bond, nor male nor female, but all are one in Christ Jesus.
So that's the Christian view.
There is a kind of innovation that comes about in the 19th century, which is focused on returning the Jews specifically to the Holy Land.
And we don't really need to get into that because it's a little bit of a distraction.
And to the point on defending Israel or opposing Israel, a lot of people will say, well, no, no, no, don't focus on this novel theological innovation.
Just observe that Zionism means you believe that Israel has a right to exist.
If you believe that Israel has a right to exist, that means you're a Zionist.
And I don't think that's persuasive.
You should have to ask, well, on what grounds are we talking about a right?
I believe that the state of Israel has a right to exist.
But as I've pointed out many times over the years, I think that that right to exist is predicated on international law.
I think that right to exist is because the British Empire, which was the legitimate authority in mandatory Palestine, gave to the Jews some land for a homeland starting in 1917.
And then this was ratified by international bodies such as the United Nations.
And then Israel fought a war of conquest for its independence and has defended the territory.
So when you look at the law of conquest all the way to other aspects and more modern aspects of international law, and you look at the sovereign authority in the region and how authority and sovereignty was transferred and evolved, those are the reasons that I would say Israel has a right to exist.
That is not what Zionism even self-consciously argued when it came about.
Zionism is a 19th century political movement.
And it was basically secular in nature when it started at the end of the 19th century.
But before the Jews were substantially in Mandatory Palestine, before, or even in the Ottoman Empire, before the Jews were in that land in substantial numbers, before they had political authority in that land, modern political authority, on what basis would you say Israel had a right to exist?
There were only really two ways to argue it from the rights perspective.
One would be that God gave us the land a long time ago and we're going to take it back.
That's the kind of the biblical argument.
And then the other one is indigeneity.
Well, this was our homeland.
This was our homeland 2,000 years ago.
And so we're going to take it back because we still think that we have a legal right to it.
Which neither of those arguments really works from the perspective, certainly, of modern day American conservative politics.
Because if we really buy the indigeneity argument, we would have to give Mount Rushmore back to the Lakota Sioux.
The Lakota Sioux occupied Mount Rushmore two centuries ago.
The Jews occupied the Holy Land two millennia ago before the founding of the modern nation state of Israel.
So from an indigeneity perspective, if we grant that premise, there's a much stronger case to give Mount Rushmore back to the Lakota Sioux.
I don't think we're going to do that.
And then you have to get to the biblical argument, which once again is not going to be persuasive to a lot of people, including the majority of Christians.
So then where do we end up?
Well, if you look at the 19th century, you could say, well, maybe it would be good for the Jews to have a homeland in the Holy Land.
That's a much more solid argument.
It would be good for that to happen.
You know, the Jews, they've been pogromed a lot.
They've faced a lot of persecution.
So it would be good to give them a place to go.
And where are they going to go?
Probably in their historic homeland.
You could make that argument.
That's not a rights argument.
That's a good argument.
And it's a much better argument, it turns out, than the rights argument.
You could make that kind of an argument.
Now, that gets you in trouble with the modern left, which says, well, that means that Israel is essentially a colonial settler project, to which I would say, yeah, basically.
So is America.
You know, it's not too bad.
I'm willing to accept that.
That's one argument that you could make.
But you, from the period of, I don't know, 1880 to 1917, you cannot establish the right of Israel to exist in the Holy Land without recourse to religion or indigeneity, which is going to be rejected by a lot of people.
So it seems to me, I've gotten in trouble from the people who hate Israel.
I've gotten in trouble from the people who love Israel because I've stated my view, which to me, when I get attacked from both sides, that's how I know I'm most likely correct.
To me, it seems to behoove the pro-Israel side to ground their arguments in more modest ways, to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Leo Strauss, to establish the justification, the legitimacy for the state of Israel on the low but solid ground of international law and the interest of great powers.
I think there's a very robust argument to be made that it's in America's interest for the state of Israel to exist where it does.
Not entirely.
It's not that our interests are identical, but there is a reason that our foreign adversaries view the state of Israel as an extension of the American empire.
And there is a reason that our foreign adversaries seek to undermine the state of Israel.
You can make some arguments from the national interest of the United States, and you can certainly make arguments from international law.
But when you start going down this rabbit hole, and Tucker even kind of hints at that, he says, I think it'd be good for Israel to exist.
But when you start going down these more ambitious rabbit holes, the Bible demands that we give the whole Middle East to Israel.
I don't know.
Most people are not going to agree with that, including most Christians.
Voting vs. Shoveling Snow00:04:00
Probably not going to believe that.
When you go down this argument, well, the Jews are a people that don't have a state, so they need to have a state.
Well, what about the Tibetans?
What about the Tibetans?
What about the Gypsies?
What about the Kurds?
What about the Uyghurs?
There are a lot of peoples that don't have states.
Are we just going to establish states for all of them?
And probably not.
When you go down, well, they were indigenous to this area.
Okay, well, then I guess we have to get rid of the United States, give it back to the Apache and the Comanche and the Lakota Sioux.
You're going to find yourself in a lot of trouble.
I think it's much smarter to ground it on this low, solid foundation, which is much more easily defended.
But, you know, I'm sure that will be taken to irritate both the pro- and anti-Israel side, as is usually the case with rational opinions on the subject.
Okay, turning from the Middle East to Mamdanistan, this is a delightful story.
And as the snow is falling in the Northeast here in Nashville, even Zorhan Mamdani, fresh off of killing now up to 20 New Yorkers because of his stupid policies during the last snowstorm, Zorhan Mamdani is taking this one a little more seriously and he's hiring shovelers.
He says, hey, New Yorkers, first of all, we're going to clear the homeless camps.
You got to get off the street and we're going to try to shovel all this snow more quickly this time.
And we're actually going to hire shovelers.
If you want to make some money, sign up to work for the city as a snow shoveler.
And we're utilizing 33 DSNY vans and two DSNY buses to transport shovelers where they're needed faster.
And for those who want to do more to help your neighbors and earn some extra cash, you too can become an emergency snow shoveler.
Just show up at your local sanitation garage between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. tomorrow with your paperwork, which is accessible online at nyc.gov slash snow, and you can get started right away.
This is great.
I think it's a good idea.
Finally, put some of these kids, you know, who are causing all that crime in New York, these shiftless, you know, urban youth who aren't really, good, put them to work, serve their community.
Maybe they can make a little extra money.
That's really great.
How do you sign up, Zoron?
Well, to register for an appointment, workers must have two small photos, one and a half inch square, two original forms of ID, plus copies, and the social security card.
So three, hold on.
If you want to shovel snow in New York City, you need three forms of identification.
But if you want to vote, you don't need any.
Does that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
Now, the libs are responding to this obvious hypocrisy.
And they're saying, well, no, you don't understand.
It's different.
You know, this is to get a job.
And, you know, there are all these requirements, all these laws that say that you need to prove your identity and that you're eligible to work if you want to work.
So that's why.
That's different from voting.
I say, right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's why we're passing laws to make sure that you're eligible to vote before you vote.
Because wouldn't we say that voting is a more serious responsibility than shoveling snow in New York?
I thought it was the liberals who told me that there is nothing more sacred than our precious democracy, that President Trump poses an existential threat because of his threat to democracy.
Or everyone has to vote.
It's your sacred right and duty and obligation.
First of all, I don't think everyone has to vote.
If you want to vote and you are entitled to vote, fine.
You have the right to vote.
Okay.
I hope you're informed.
But I don't think it's good to vote in itself.
Voting is instrumental.
It's a way to get us good government, at least in theory.
So I don't, but you, libs, you're the ones who say we have to vote.
It's so sacred.
It's such a grave responsibility.
And yet you're telling me it's less important than shoveling snow in New York.
Does that make a lot of sense to you?
Well, it's for employment.
Are you saying that your sacred civic duty is less important than some random job?
Not even like a full job, like a gig?
Voting's Sacred Duty00:02:43
Hmm, I don't know.
I love it.
Watching Mamdani twist himself into knots because his stupid agenda keeps running into reality is delightful.
And we're only, what, a year into this thing?
So much more to get to, especially on the immigration front.
But we have to wait until tomorrow because today's music Monday.
The rest of the show continues at the Daily Wire.
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What was it like, Merlin?
To be alone with God is that who you think I was alone with, Mardin.
I knew your father.
I am yet convinced that he was not of this world.
All men know of the great Taliesin.
You are my father.
Are the gods war for my soul?
Princess Garris, savior of our people.
I know what the bull god offered you.
I was offered the same.
And there is a new pirate work in the world.
I've seen it.
A god who sacrifices what he loves for us.
We are each given only one life, singer.
No.
We're given another.
I learned of Yezu the Christ, and I have become his follower.
He's waiting on a miracle, and I think you can give him one.
Trust in Yezu.
He is the only hope for men like us.
Fate of Britain never rests in the hands of the Great Light.
Great Light, Great Darkness.
Such things mattered to me then.
What matters to you now, Mistress of Lies?
You, nephew.
The sword of a high king.
How many lives must be lost before you accept the power you were born to wield?
Still clinging to the promises of a god who has abandoned you.