Ep. 1929 - Iran: The Least Popular War Ever Launched
Michael Knowles analyzes the 41% approval rating of the Iran war, arguing that despite strategic gains against Russia and China, public support remains low due to a desire for stability over economic metrics. He speculates President Trump may reverse this trend before the midterms or has already accepted potential Democratic control, while also critiquing CNN's labeling of two Pennsylvania teenagers as "Muslim terrorists." The episode further examines the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, highlighting new allegations against guard Tova Noel regarding suspicious bank deposits and lies about her presence during his death. Ultimately, Knowles concludes that the disconnect between political reality and media perception creates a hyper-reality where Republicans struggle to connect with voters despite unified leadership. [Automatically generated summary]
The Iran war is officially the least popular war ever to launch in American history.
Less popular than Iraq, less popular than Vietnam, less popular than Libya, which was a disaster from the very beginning.
Will President Trump change course?
Will he instead change public opinion by the midterms?
Do the midterms even matter?
I'm Michael Knowles.
this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
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Iran War Perception Gap00:12:35
Really bad news on the perception of the Iran war.
I have to distinguish here between the actual Iran war, like the boom boom going on in the Middle East that President Trump is waging with the Israelis, and the perception of the Iran war.
They're different things.
The Iran war is, by the standards of war, going pretty well.
The United States military has achieved all of its objectives faster than we were told they were going to.
And so it seems to be doing all right.
Even some of the downstream effects of the war, like the price of oil shooting through the roof, even that has come down a little bit.
There's still some debate over what exactly is going on in the Straight of War moves.
But all things considered, we're killing the people that we set out to kill, and we're giving space for the political movements that we sought to support, and we're deterring the enemies like Russia and China.
So all things considered, it's going pretty well.
That is not translating to public perception.
People hate this war.
They hate this war.
The New York Times, I know I know a big grain of salt.
The New York Times has just come out with some polls on this or with a poll showing the popularity of the war.
But other outlets are bringing out polls too, and it's not all that different.
To put this in historical perspective, 97% of Americans supported World War II when we entered.
Not a huge surprise there because we had been attacked by Japan.
And Germany also declared war on us.
So no big surprise there, 97% support.
Afghanistan, 92% support.
Okay, that was after 9-11.
Iraq, 76% support.
Iraq was controversial from the very beginning because Iraq was not directly tied to 9-11.
And yet, 76% of Americans supported that war.
Now it's considered one of the least popular wars we've ever waged.
Kosovo.
You remember Kosovo?
That was this kind of humanitarian war of choice under the Clinton administration.
I remember it actually pretty well.
58% supported that war at the beginning.
And there, truly, there were basically no American interests implicated, and it was a humanitarian effort.
Libya.
Libya, which was a disaster, a complete Obama bungle.
Susan Rice had to go down for that one.
Obama and Clinton just blew it from day one.
And then they sent the U.S. military in there.
Operations went on for seven months.
It was a disaster.
47% support at the beginning.
This war has only 41% support.
Not good.
And I could speak until I'm red in the face, blue in the face, whatever the expression is, and say, look, guys, actually, the war is going pretty well.
And actually, it does advance America's grand strategic interests.
And actually, this has been a priority of U.S. foreign policy for 47 years.
And actually, it deters China and Russia.
Action, actually, actually.
Clearly, something is not connecting here.
So everybody is hoping that the war ends quickly, of course.
But there are two ways to read this from the White House's perspective.
Either the White House just listened to the wrong people, or the president thinks, look, we're going to make it through this unpopularity for a little bit, but I'm going to be so successful that I'm going to change public opinion on this before the midterms.
Or there is a third possibility that I haven't heard people really talk about, which is that the president has just written the midterms off.
I'm not saying that that's what he's doing, but there would be a rationale for it because we're going to lose the midterms.
We just will, almost certainly.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news.
I'm actually at a Trump property right now speaking to members of Congress about the midterms, but it's just a fact.
You know, that's what happens in the off year after a major presidential election, especially a presidential election in which your party wins unified government.
We're going to lose.
The question is just how bad are the losses going to be?
Are the losses going to be we lose a seat or two in the House?
Or are the losses going to be Antichrist James Tallarico becomes the senator from Texas?
Okay, there are gradations to losing here.
But we have a razor-thin majority in the House.
We're talking effectively one vote.
And so there is a rationale here for President Trump to say, look, we're going to lose the House.
It's just how the government works.
It's not our fault.
We're doing really well on a bunch of stuff.
On some of it, that's connecting in public perception.
On some of it, it's not.
But, you know, whatever.
That's just what happens.
And so if we are going to lose the midterms anyway, you only have to lose a seat or two to lose the House of Representatives, at which point the Democrats are going to get subpoena power, at which point they're probably going to impeach me again, which at this point, whatever.
They don't have a legal predicate to do it.
It makes me even more of a legend.
I'm the only one of two presidents in American history to win a non-consecutive second term.
I've already been impeached twice.
Go on, impeach me a third time.
Impeach me a fourth time.
Whatever.
Just makes me cooler.
If that is all going to happen anyway, I might as well make big moves while I still have the government.
If all that's going to happen anyway, then I might as well Take out the enemy leader of Venezuela who has a warrant for his arrest out in the United States.
We've been trying to take out this regime for 25 years.
Maybe I'll just do it because it's the right thing to do.
And also, it makes me a legend.
I did what George Bush couldn't do with Chavez, what Obama couldn't do, what Biden couldn't do.
I did it.
The Iranian regime, we've been trying to get rid of this regime since 1979.
And really, we've been trying to maintain a pro-Western regime there since 1953.
And everyone keeps screwing it up.
So you know what?
I'm going to do it.
We have been trying to turn around American decline for the past quarter century.
We've been declining since the 90s, at least.
And China's been on the move in the world.
Even Russia, to some degree, has been on the move in the world.
They licked their wounds after the Cold War, and then they started marching in through parts of Eastern Europe.
Well, you know what?
I'm going to turn it around.
I'm going to flip Iran.
It could be what's going on here.
In any case, there is a way to marry all of these objectives.
And the way to marry it is, or the way to marry them is the war has to end quickly.
Now, President Trump has said it's a five-week war.
Famous last words, but Trump has a lot of credibility in foreign policy, and he's already achieving his objectives faster even than he had predicted.
So it could be the case that he just turns public opinion around here.
But all of that to say with these polls, the stakes here are even higher for President Trump than we, I think, previously appreciated.
I said from the beginning, I said from the beginning.
Had I been on the National Security Council, I would have made arguments against this war in Iran.
Not because I'm a pacifist, not because of some ideological reason, but just because of the practical, prudential realities.
I would have thought it was too big a risk.
Trump comes in and he says, no, we're going to go into Iran.
I don't think because of ideology.
I think he went in because he felt he could do it.
The threat from Iran was high.
The effectiveness with which he could wage the war was also high.
And he just bet on himself.
Very, very confident guy.
Now the stakes are even higher because he has to turn public opinion around in an historic way, least popular war ever at launch, before the midterms, which are in a little over six months.
It's a tall order.
It's a tall order for anybody.
It's a tall order for Pericles.
It's a tall order for Count von Metternich.
It's a tall order for the greatest politicians in history.
Now, Trump's, he's a world historic figure, okay?
If anyone can do it, he can do it.
But the high stakes just got higher.
And even people who are sympathetic to Trump are really fretting.
They're panicking.
I think of even guys like Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan cozying up to Trump was one of the factors that really shifted momentum in President Trump's favor, I think, especially among younger voters.
Joe Rogan is openly worrying that this could be the beginning of World War III.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just such a whole situation internationally has been so tense already with what's going on in Gaza, with what's going on in Ukraine.
It's like, and to add this to the pile, it's like, I mean, it genuinely feels like there's a real possibility that we might be entering World War III.
What would that look like?
I don't know.
Well, I never expected Iran to start attacking.
You know, they launched bombs into UAE, Dubai.
I mean, where else?
Joe Rogan worrying that we're on the brink of World War III.
Now don't forget, don't forget, people were saying we were on the brink of World War III with the Fordo strikes over the summer, and then it was fine.
Like two days later, it was totally fine.
People were saying we were on the brink of World War III with Venezuela, and then 88 minutes later, it was fine.
It was totally fine.
And the regime that Trump has installed, or the person from within the existing regime that Trump has allowed to remain in her role, is doing well and is cooperating with us.
So I'm not the one freaking out here.
I'm not panicking.
I realize the stakes of this Iran war are a little bit higher.
But Joe Rogue, I've said for years, one of the great values of Joe Rogan is that he is the median voter.
He's not particularly ideological.
He's not exactly dogmatic.
He's open-minded.
He's curious.
He's smart, but he's not expert in everything.
He's the median voter.
He's great as a measure of where people are.
And on this issue, he's where the people are on the Iran war.
They'll like it.
So what is this about?
What is going on here?
I can explain the polls.
I can explain the apparent surprise that seems to have overtaken the White House and some of the Republican prognosticators.
In fact, I called this some months ago.
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I conducted a highly scientific Twitter poll months and months, six months ago, more.
I said, should the U.S. go to war with Iran?
80%, 90% said no.
And then immediately underneath, I said, should the U.S. allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons?
80 or 90%, almost the exact same number, said no.
Economic Reality vs Fear00:07:12
You see those two statements are at odds.
That was the predicament that Trump was in.
People could say, well, Iran wasn't that close to a nuclear weapon.
Yeah, but they were pursuing it.
No serious person thinks they weren't pursuing it.
They were openly pursuing a nuclear program and they were obviously pursuing nuclear bombs.
So you have the American people are overwhelmingly telling you that they want two things that are directly in conflict with each other, polar opposites.
What does that mean?
I'll give you another example of this.
The majority of Americans today want mass deportations.
Mass deportations remain a popular mainstream political issue.
Most Americans want mass deportations.
Most Americans want ICE to stop deporting so many people.
Excuse me?
What?
Hold on.
Did you guys read the first question before you answered the second question?
The two things that most Americans want are directly in conflict with each other.
We want more deportations, but we want the people who are doing the deporting to stop deporting so many people.
What does that mean?
How do we make sense of that?
Are people just stupid?
That's what a lot of the sneering, condescending political analyst podcast class is going to conclude, that the people are stupid.
I don't think it's that the people are stupid.
I think that what people are expressing is they feel that their situation is precarious.
People feel uncommonly fearful.
They are, even more than usual, desirous of safety.
And they feel that even the wins right now are precarious.
It's the only way to explain how Republicans and Democrats are tied on the economy.
Trump has objectively succeeded at every level in the economy.
Joe Biden had 9% inflation.
Trump's brought inflation way, way down.
The stock market has hit all-time highs.
Unemployment is down.
The economy is doing very, very well.
It could always use some improvement, but it's doing very, very well.
You say, well, what about housing prices?
What about affordability?
Rentals declined six months in a row.
100% of the rental demand increase in recent years was driven by illegal immigration when you look at California and New York.
60% was driven by illegal immigration nationwide.
Trump is deporting the illegals.
Trump is objectively doing well in the economy.
How on earth, after Democrats blew the economy, how could Republicans and Democrats statistically be tied right now?
Right now, the polling says I think 32% support Trump and the economy, 31% support Democrats, and the rest don't trust either.
How could that be the case?
Because they feel, even if the economy is doing relatively well right now, they feel it's precarious.
That's what it's about.
Why do they oppose the mass dev, why do they support the mass deportations and oppose ICE?
Because they recognize that the illegal aliens pose a threat to their safety.
They commit crime in the streets.
They're tied to the cartels.
They bring in drugs.
They are a threat to their safety.
But they also recognize that the lunatics marching through the streets and rioting and protesting and chasing ICE is also a threat to their safety.
They realize that when ICE comes in and does these big raids, then the libs come out of the woodwork and they terrorize the cities for weeks and weeks and they don't want that either.
What they want is safety.
What they want is normal.
What they want is a return to a peaceable kind of time.
Same thing with Iran.
They don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon because that's a threat to their safety.
They also don't want war in Iran because that is a threat to safety generally and maybe to their safety in particular.
That's what it's about.
And I think what Trump has to do is just reassure people that daddy's in control.
Don't worry.
You know, sometimes daddy leaves for a work trip.
You know, daddy leaves as a daddy myself.
You leave for a work trip.
You come home and everyone's a little tense.
Everything's a little kids have been screaming.
You know, mama's had to juggle a lot.
And sometimes I think the analogy works because Trump actually campaigned on daddy's home in 2024.
Okay.
And sometimes daddy's got to come home and say, hey, hey, hey, it's okay.
It's going to be all right.
Don't worry about it.
No use crying over spilled milk.
We're going to clean up those toys.
We're going to get everybody, it's okay.
That's what Trump has to do.
That's what Trump has to reassure people of.
The fastest way to do that right now is to win the Iran war, achieve serious long-term American military objectives within the time span that Trump gave us, which is five weeks, and to tie it all into a coherent vision.
And the coherent vision is we're normal.
We're going to make things safe.
We're going to make things stable.
You're a little worried about the economy?
Don't worry.
Don't worry.
We're deporting the bad guys.
We've got a lot of investment.
It's safe.
It's stable.
Not only is your portfolio doing well today, it's going to be doing well in a month, in six months.
Don't worry, we're good.
Healthcare, that's another big issue.
That's a top five issue that the Democrats are beating Republicans on.
They're always beating Republicans on it because they lie about healthcare.
Their plans are terrible, but they sound more persuasive than the Republicans do.
It's another issue, just kind of like the Iran war, kind of like the deportations, where the reality is, by and large, pretty good for the Republicans, but the perception is much better for Democrats.
What do you do on healthcare?
You say, you know, speaking of those illegals, they're really jacking up the healthcare costs, aren't they?
They're jacking up premiums.
They're using federally funded programs that go to the states.
Yeah, so don't worry.
We're doing something.
We're bringing the prices down.
Don't worry.
And on and on.
But there has to be a coherent vision.
There has to be unity and a coherent vision.
Right now, the Republicans are falling into all sorts of fractious infighting and disunity.
To the point, division, I guess you would say, not disunity.
And to the point that Trump's current activity, his most prominent initiative right now, is, in the face of all actual facts on the ground, the least popular version of that we've seen in American history.
It's got to, the GOP has to connect better on the messaging, certainly, needs to persuade people that, needs to persuade people that there's a plan.
Probably the worst thing about the messaging on Iran, and this is being exacerbated by podcasters, is they're saying this is a betrayal of what Trump promised.
If you were listening to what Trump said, this should not be surprising at all.
But people are saying Trump said he'd never have a war again in the Middle East.
Trump said he doesn't want to go to war generally.
Trump said that, what, he was going to let Iran have a nuclear bomb?
No.
He never said any of that stuff.
GOP Messaging Disconnect00:11:28
He campaigned in 2016 on going in and destroying ISIS.
He campaigned this time around.
This time around, he campaigned specifically on backing an Israeli attack on Iran.
I don't mean to laugh at it.
As I told you, I would have argued against the Iran war.
But don't tell me that he campaigned on something that he didn't.
We need coherence.
We need unity.
We need people to feel that everything's not so precarious.
Okay, speaking of violence in Muslims, the greatest CNN headline, the greatest CNN headline in the history of that cable news outlet has just come out.
It's about the Muslim attack on the former bar fight contestant Walter Masterson in New York.
We'll get to that momentarily.
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This is CNN describing the Muslim terrorists, the male Muslim terrorists who showed up to a counter protest in New York City as a lib was yelling about how everyone's welcome here and we need more Islam.
This guy leaps over, throws a bomb, then pledges allegiance to ISIS and shouts Allahu Akbar.
And this is how CNN described it.
Two Pennsylvania teenagers.
I can't even get through the first three words without laughing.
Two Pennsylvania teenagers crossed into New York City Saturday morning for what could have been a normal day enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather.
But in less than an hour, their lives would drastically change as the pair would be arrested for throwing homemade bombs.
Pennsylvania teenagers.
Now, when you see the picture, if you're just listening to this, you can't see the picture right now.
If you're watching, you can see the Pennsylvania teenager.
My grandparents grew up in Pennsylvania.
They grew up outside of Scranton.
When I close my eyes and I think of Pennsylvania teenagers, then in the 1940s or now, I don't picture Abdul Abdul Abdul Jihad Muhammad.
I don't picture, that's not what I think.
Wait, close your eyes.
Hey, picture a Pennsylvania teenager.
Picture a big hairy Muslim guy with a beard throwing an IED.
I don't.
Maybe I'm prejudiced.
I don't know.
In any case, that's the image that CNN calls to mind.
They talk about how they could have just gone in for a normal day enjoying the city, you know?
Maybe they could have stopped by the Met, gone down to Chinatown, had some dumplings, taken the Staten Island Ferry, gotten a good look at the Statue of Liberty.
You know, it'd be a nice day for those Pennsylvania teenagers.
But their lives changed because they were arrested because they made bombs at home and then threw them while pledging allegiance to ISIS.
Boys will be boys, huh?
Boys will be boys, CNN.
That was so bad.
That headline was so bad, CNN had to take it down.
Because they were just getting so dragged on social media, they had to take it down.
The reason I bring it up, one, it's delightful and amusing, but two, that's every headline.
That's actually every story from the establishment media.
It's so egregious.
It's so ridiculous.
It's so silly.
They went just a little bit too far.
And so you can see it for what it is, which is just pure deception.
Usually they dial it back 10%.
And so it's not as brazen.
It's not as obvious, but it's the same thing.
That's how they treat every story.
Very bad stuff.
Very bad stuff from Pennsylvania teenagers and from American journalists.
I don't know.
Which is worse.
I don't know.
Speaking of room for improvement, Tim Ferriss is apparently one of the great self-help gurus of our age.
I don't know much about him.
I've heard the name Tim Ferriss before.
I avoid all self-help, as should be clear to you.
You can read that however you like, but I don't like self-help literature.
I smell that as a scam from 100 miles away.
I want to improve myself.
I want to improve.
But I don't, the self-help stuff, when I was a teenager, I read a little bit of it.
48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene.
You remember that one?
Or what was the really famous one?
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
I'll tell you, by the way, if you ever want to read, that's really the classic of self-help.
And as I remember it, I haven't read it in many years.
All it boils down to is be nice to people and remember their names.
That's it.
I just saved you 10 bucks on Amazon.
And I guess that's good advice.
But a lot of the self-help stuff, I think, is pretty noxious.
I've thought this for years, and Tim Ferriss agrees.
Tim Ferris seems to have had a road to Damascus moment, not necessarily with a religious conversion, but with a recognition that what he was doing might be wrong.
According to The Telegraph, writing about this, says, now as Tim Ferriss approaches the halfway point of his life, Ferris may be confronting his most profound insight yet.
In his latest blog post, The Self-Help Trap, what 20 plus years of optimizing has taught me, optimizing, that's one of the words they all use.
Ferris, now 48, asks whether his own industry might, with some important caveats, be making people, making desperate people worse rather than better.
Quote, the older I get, the more I think that self-help can be a trap.
Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
I say this after around 20 years of writing self-help and a lifetime of consuming it.
This is a 3,000-word blog post.
What if self-help itself is actually creating or amplifying unhappiness?
Modern self-help contains an inbuilt flaw.
To continually improve yourself, you must continually locate the ways you are broken.
Okay.
Okay.
He gets so close.
I love so much of what he's saying.
And then he totally misses the point.
The point just goes right over his head.
But he gets very close.
And so I give him credit for the introspection.
Some people are reading this cynically as him just doing a new kind of self-help.
Has self-help ruined your life?
Well, read my new book, 10 Easy Steps to Get Over Self-Help by Tim Ferriss.
No, maybe not.
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
I think maybe he's being sincere.
He's in the middle of his life's journey.
He's had this realization.
He says, I think self-help can be a trap.
That's true.
The people who are most obsessed with self-help, in my experience, are the most messed up, depressed people.
And you might say, well, yeah, they're messed up.
They're trying to get help.
Well, it ain't working.
It's like your friend or relative who's been going to the therapist, usually just means drug dealer, but the psychiatrist for 30 years.
They never get any better.
And maybe they get more dope, but they don't ever get any better.
And you say, hey, have you thought about trying something different?
You say, oh, I couldn't.
I'm so messed up.
Could you imagine if I lost my psychiatrist?
Maybe you're, hold on, maybe you're getting that backwards.
Maybe your psychiatrist is actually not helping, maybe even compounding the problem.
I think that's what happens with self-help, but not because of the reason Tim Ferriss is.
Tim Ferriss says self-help has this inbuilt flaw, which is that to continually improve yourself, you must continually locate the ways you are broken.
That's not the problem.
You know what else impels you to continually reflect on the ways in which you're broken?
Christianity does that when you examine your conscience and especially when you go and confess your sins to a priest.
You have to sit down and think of the number and kind of all of the ways that you are broken.
The problem with self-help is that it doesn't do that.
The whole premise of self-help actually is a denial of the fundamental ways in which we are broken.
Because self-help at its root, I think, denies original sin.
The whole point is that you really can help yourself.
And not just help yourself a little bit.
You can save yourself.
You can optimize your life.
And you can't.
Ultimately, you can't.
You can exercise, you can work out, you can practice certain habits of virtue, but ultimately you can't save yourself.
This is what the church formally declared when it condemned the heresy of Pelagius.
The problem with self-help is it misses out on the best way that you can help yourself, which is looking to someone beyond yourself and not looking to Tim Ferris and not looking to, I don't know, who are the other guys? Dale Carnegie,
but looking to someone who is greater than you, who is so far beyond humanity, and yet who mysteriously takes on humanity and so understands us intimately, not only who created us, but who has lived as one of us, who is like us in all ways except sin.
That's what it's about.
Just as liberalism is a perversion, it's kind of a spin-off of Christianity that tries to keep all the fun parts of Christianity without any of the obligations and the duties and the limits.
It's the same thing with self-help.
The self-help literature, I've read some of it.
It spins out of Christianity and it just takes away all the limits and all the essential stuff and all the parts that acknowledge that not just that you're broken, but you're so broken that there is essentially nothing you can do without grace.
So if you want to read some self-help literature, a good writer on this would be St. Thomas Aquinas, first time he's coming up in this show, who points out that without grace, every human being will fall into mortal sin.
And even if you're in a state of grace, you'll still fall into venial sin.
That's how broken we are.
Daily Wire Plus Pun00:02:33
He's close.
We got to help Tim Ferris.
It'd be great.
Wouldn't that be great if one of the big proponents of self-help actually turned people on to real help?
Okay, speaking of self-help and self-harm, the Epstein story just got even weirder.
Breaking news.
Stop the presses.
The prison guard who was supposed to be on watch when Jeffrey Epstein was killed, when he died, it turns out that prison guard lied and is getting all these months and years later is getting caught in all these lies.
If you don't have the Daily Wire Plus app, you got to get it.
You have to get it because I want to beat Ben and Matt and Drew in the subscriptions to the Daily Wire Plus app.
That's actually the main reason.
I want more people to click on my smiling little mug there and I want to mog all of them with my subscriptions.
On top of that, it's the best way to watch the shows and that's how you get the video version of Morningwire to say nothing of all my extra content.
So head on over, download the app to your phone, your Android, your Apple TV, your Roku, your Samsung, your Doom Atari controller that is being played by stem cells derived from neonatal foreskins.
Whatever computing devices you use, get the Daily Wire Plus apps today.
I couldn't pick just one comment yesterday.
You did not disappoint in my episode about how scientists have taught neonatal foreskin to play Doom, to play a video game.
You didn't disappoint.
From the Drummers Workshop, Normans Music says, what console did the scientists use that experiment, use for that experiment?
Skintendo and Adam Howard 4775 says, we teach foreskins to play doom, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
I love that because that's really a double pun.
That's a pun that plays on two levels.
One, you know, you just, you get in there and it's kind of funny.
We go to the moon, not because it is easy.
We used to go to the moon.
Now we just teach baby foreskin to play video games.
That's our great scientific achievement.
Hey guys, we did it.
Kennedy, if Kennedy came back to Earth, he would say, hold on, can we get Lee Harvey Oswald back here?
I'm done.
I'm good.
I don't need to come back.
So there's that level.
But then also, of course, not because it's easy, but because it's hard.
Because it's hard.
Corrections Officer Lie00:04:35
Anyway, I don't need to explain.
They always say the best way to enjoy a joke is to explain it ad nauseum.
Okay, so speaking of lurid things that appeal to the Preyan interest, Jeffrey Epstein.
He died, you may have heard.
And some people say he killed himself.
Others say that he was killed.
The FBI has come out even recently and said that they've gone through all the files and he definitely killed himself and case closed.
And yet we're still getting new information.
So here's the latest.
The New York Post first reported this.
It's based on FBI reports.
The FBI says that Tova Noel, Noel or Noel, whatever, Tova Noel was one of the guards at the Manhattan Correctional Facility on duty when Jeffrey Epstein died.
And she says she was on her computer.
She was shopping online and searching the internet, right, right around the time he died.
And she was specifically searching for information about him.
She was searching for updates about Jeffrey Epstein.
Where's the exact line?
Yeah.
One of the searches was, quote, latest on Epstein in jail.
This is as Epstein is dying or shortly before or shortly thereafter.
So in these FBI files, this woman, Tova Noll, is now found to have brought Epstein linen or intimate clothing around 10.40 p.m.
That's the last time any member of the staff in the jail interacted with him.
However, this corrections officer had previously testified that the last time she saw Epstein was 10 p.m. and that she never gave out linen because that was another correction officer's job.
So now we got this corrections officer in a massive lie.
She saw Epstein later than she said she did, and she brought him linens with which he could have hung himself, hanged himself, when she said that she didn't do that.
Okay.
Then she searches for the latest on Epstein in jail twice the morning that he was discovered, once at 5.42 a.m. and again at 5.52 a.m.
And then she falsified prison records, all allegedly.
She was arrested for this, but then let go, dropped the charges.
And then Chase Bank independently flagged this corrections officer to the FBI because of suspicious cash deposits that were going on in her account starting way back in April 2018, with the largest deposit being five grand on July 30th, just days before Epstein was found dead.
So, you know, it doesn't look great for her.
The only question left is, did he pay her or did one of his associates pay her to get him the linens with which he could kill himself?
Or did one of Epstein's enemies pay her to look the other way while he was murdered?
There is a world, you know, I hate to say, I know this is an unpopular take, but there is a world in which he killed himself.
There's no world in which he just killed himself.
He was certainly aided in killing himself, if he actually killed himself.
Or someone came in and murdered him.
Or at this point, the guy could still be alive.
I don't actually think he's still alive, but we've been lied to about every single aspect of this case that, I don't know, I give it a less than 1% chance, but like maybe.
In any case, it seems like we should look into this woman, right?
It seems like there should be another investigation of this woman or not.
Or not, or maybe there won't be.
And do you know why there won't be?
Because I hate to say I told you so, and you know how much I hate to say it.
But what have I said?
I have been so consistent and I've been so right.
And they hated me because I was so consistent and so right on this.
I said from the beginning, I said, either Jeffrey Epstein is who they say he is.
He's just a rich guy with some sexual perversions.
In which case, we know everything there is to know about him.
Or he's not just that.
Or he's something else.
He's something closer to what the theories about him say.
In which case, we already know everything we're going to know about this guy.
Global Hegemon Chasm00:03:01
And there were other people who came out there and they told you, no, we're going to get to the bottom of this.
We're going to get the information.
This is it.
Charlie Brown, this time you can really kick the football.
No, this is, we got it.
It's Mueller time.
The walls are closing in.
It's happening.
I don't know if those people, those live streamers, those podcasters, I don't know if they were lying to you or they just don't get it.
Either way, there's not going to be an investigation into this corrections officer.
There's not another one.
And you're not going to find out?
I kind of wish we would find out, but we won't.
We just won't.
Sorry.
Sorry I was right.
Sorry I was right.
I shouldn't be so smug about being right because it's truly scandalous that anomalies like this keep cropping up even years later.
That's how it goes.
It's how it goes with all governments, all states, and especially the global hegemon.
It's just how it is.
Now, this is what I was saying about the Iran war.
It's all these people who say, well, I thought we weren't going to get involved in any wars ever again.
You know we're the global hegemon, right?
You know we're not, even if we were just a country, you think we're not going to get involved in wars ever again?
Do you know what statecraft is?
And we're the global hegemon.
What are we doing in the Middle East?
What are we the global hegemon doing in the, I don't know, running the world like we have been doing for 80 years?
I'm not saying that's awesome.
I mean, in many ways, it is awesome, but I'm not, it's just, that's how it is, man.
And there is, to bring us all the way back to the top of our show, there is such a disconnect right now between reality and perception.
Think about even how it's playing out on the right.
We always talk about the conservative civil war.
There is no civil war going on in the actual political order among the elected politicians, the people who write the regulations, who run the government.
There is no civil war any more than there usually is.
Actually, the Republican Party, in terms of the elected people, is as unified as it's ever been in my lifetime.
The civil war is entirely a metapolitical phenomenon being pushed by podcasters about totally extraneous and usually fictional things.
Even the personal petty grievances that are being litigated there, they're not even really with the politicians usually.
It's just with other podcasters.
There is such a chasm between the real political order and perception and commentary and punditry.
And I mean, this is why people keep talking about Jean Baudrillard and hyper-reality.
There's just a big gap here.
But in representative government, perception can become reality.
And that's the wall that Republicans are running into right now.
A little over six months to go, not a lot of time to turn things around.
Okay, much, much more to say.
But I got to go hang out with Congress.
Speaking of, I'll probably have a really chipper speech to give them after this analysis.