The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 1930 - President Trump Endorses Jake Paul
Aired: 2026-03-12
Duration: 47:17


=== Trump Endorses Jake Paul (13:20) ===

[00:00:00]  President Trump endorses Jake Paul for public office.
[00:00:03]  The Pentagon and Pete Hegseth are under fire for a completely made-up scandal.
[00:00:08]  And a new study tries to get you to pimp out your wife to save your marriage.
[00:00:13]  I'm Michael Knowles.
[00:00:14]  This is The Michael Knowles Show.
[00:00:33]  Welcome back to the show.
[00:00:35]  Really more important news than any of that.
[00:00:37]  Buffalo Wild Wings has debuted a Buffalo Wing-flavored protein espresso martini, a protein-y, they call it.
[00:00:47]  And I am now beginning to understand what Bernie Sanders meant when he said we have too much choice in stores, in groceries.
[00:00:58]  We have too much.
[00:00:59]  We need to seize the means of production.
[00:01:02]  This is too far.
[00:01:03]  This is capitalist decadence.
[00:01:04]  This is late stage capitalism.
[00:01:06]  We need to eat the rich.
[00:01:09]  I got radicalized.
[00:01:10]  I got radicalized by the Buffalo Proteini.
[00:01:13]  Okay.
[00:01:13]  And we will get to it.
[00:01:14]  But first, speaking of our current political order, President Trump broke the internet last night when he endorsed YouTube star slash boxer Jake Paul for public office in Kentucky.
[00:01:31]  Come here, Jake.
[00:01:32]  Sanders.
[00:01:33]  You're crazy, you people.
[00:01:36]  Yeah, what Mr. Trump has taught me is courage.
[00:01:38]  You know, we never back down from a fight, even if they're much bigger than you, much, much bigger than you.
[00:01:44]  And I feel all the local Kentuckians feel the same way.
[00:01:48]  You guys have that fight.
[00:01:49]  You guys have that swag.
[00:01:50]  There's a lot of young kids in here.
[00:01:52]  The future of America.
[00:01:54]  I grew up just a few hours away from here.
[00:01:57]  My dad taught me to fight.
[00:01:58]  And all of our voices matter in America.
[00:02:02]  He's a great guy.
[00:02:02]  He's a courageous guy and a talented guy.
[00:02:05]  He's a hell of a fighter, too, by the way.
[00:02:07]  And I just want to say, I predict, I'm going to make a prediction that you will be in the not too distant future running for political office.
[00:02:18]  Okay.
[00:02:19]  And you have my complete and total endorsement.
[00:02:23]  Beautiful, beautiful endorsement here.
[00:02:25]  So President Trump hitting the campaign trail for the midterms.
[00:02:28]  That's the big story here, actually, that is getting lost amid talk about Jake Paul.
[00:02:32]  I just love this, though.
[00:02:34]  He says, you are not yet running for office, and we have no idea what office you would run for or where you would run for it.
[00:02:41]  But I want you to know that whatever the office is, wherever the office is, whenever you run for it, you have my complete and total endorsement.
[00:02:51]  And everyone's freaking out about this.
[00:02:53]  This is crazy.
[00:02:54]  What a clown show.
[00:02:55]  It's ridiculous that Jake Paul would be involved in politics.
[00:02:58]  What are you talking about?
[00:03:00]  This is totally normal.
[00:03:02]  So much of the news cycle today, especially when we get to this supposedly massive Pentagon spending scandal under Pete Hegseth that we're told is a national shock and disgrace.
[00:03:14]  And we've never said, give me a break.
[00:03:16]  Everyone, breathlessly reporting on this.
[00:03:18]  This is totally normal.
[00:03:19]  It's totally normal for politicians to campaign with popular pop culture figures to try to win elections.
[00:03:27]  That's normal.
[00:03:28]  The reason that it seems a little abnormal is that Republicans have trouble doing it because Republicans aren't cool.
[00:03:34]  And Trump is cool and he is friends with pop culture figures and he's turned the pop culture a little bit more in our way.
[00:03:39]  And so this is shocking to us.
[00:03:41]  The libs are always campaigning with movie stars and TV stars and athletes and musicians and the Republicans rarely do it.
[00:03:48]  But there was a time when we did it and it was the last time that we had a president like Trump.
[00:03:53]  And that was Ronald Reagan, a guy who came out of Hollywood, who was a big pop culture star.
[00:03:58]  And he would pall around all the time with Frank Sinatra, all sorts of people who maybe didn't have the most sophisticated political opinions, maybe did not have degrees in international relations or economics, but who nevertheless are very important because this is a democracy.
[00:04:13]  And so you have to win popular support and you have to pull people and you need to motivate people who maybe aren't even all that ideological.
[00:04:20]  You don't need to pull them to your side so much as you need to inspire them to get out and vote.
[00:04:23]  I think it's great.
[00:04:24]  The strangest thing about this endorsement, can we go back to it for just a second?
[00:04:28]  Is Jake Paul's underarms?
[00:04:30]  Jake Paul, you can see, fast forward, you can even see it in the very first frames.
[00:04:34]  Yeah, he is sweating profusely through not only his suit, but through a three-piece suit.
[00:04:45]  So Jake Paul presumably is wearing an undershirt.
[00:04:47]  Most men wear an undershirt underneath a shirt and a jacket.
[00:04:51]  So you got the undershirt, you got the Oxford shirt, you then have the waistcoat, the vest, and then you have a jacket on top of that.
[00:04:57]  This man perspiring through all that.
[00:04:59]  Now, I am a greasy, oily, sweaty Italian.
[00:05:02]  So I sympathize.
[00:05:03]  I empathize with this to some degree.
[00:05:05]  But that is very, very impressive.
[00:05:06]  This guy's clearly got his blood up.
[00:05:08]  I don't know if it's because he was particularly nervous or maybe it's just because he's athletic.
[00:05:12]  Either way, either way, this is good news.
[00:05:14]  And the really good news out of all of this is that President Trump is hitting the campaign trail hard in the midterms.
[00:05:22]  I spoke with the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, yesterday.
[00:05:25]  I was down at a Trump property.
[00:05:26]  I was speaking to some members of Congress and I sat down for an interview.
[00:05:29]  It's an exclusive interview with the House Speaker on all the hot topics.
[00:05:33]  Iran, the midterm elections, some of the supposed scandals, the dissent, the right-wing civil war, some of the members of Congress who are opposing Trump and the party.
[00:05:46]  We sit down, we talk about all of it.
[00:05:47]  It's an exclusive interview.
[00:05:48]  It'll be up on the YouTube channel and on Daily Wire momentarily.
[00:05:52]  In any case, I said, hey, you know, we're going to get blown out in the midterms, right?
[00:05:56]  This is pretty bad, isn't it?
[00:05:58]  And Mike Johnson had a different take on it.
[00:06:00]  And he had a different take on it because of the way that President Trump is campaigning.
[00:06:04]  We have not seen in our lifetimes a term-limited second-term president serving a non-consecutive second term, campaigning in the midterms as if he's up for reelection.
[00:06:14]  And that is what you're getting out of Trump here.
[00:06:16]  So it remains to be seen.
[00:06:17]  In any case, I love it.
[00:06:18]  Bring on Jake Paul.
[00:06:19]  Bring on Logan Paul.
[00:06:20]  Bring on all the cool pop culture figures that we can bring on and have them run for certain public offices.
[00:06:25]  I love it.
[00:06:26]  That has my complete and total endorsement too.
[00:06:28]  Okay.
[00:06:29]  Speaking of debates over what is normal, this one, look, this is a family show, and so I'm going to try to clean this up a little bit.
[00:06:39]  The New York Post posts this yesterday based on a new study, a new survey that's just come out.
[00:06:45]  Could hot wifing save your marriage?
[00:06:49]  71% of kinky couples say loaning their wives out for that thing that only husbands and wives are supposed to do together, quote, strengthened their union.
[00:07:01]  71%, the overwhelming majority of, now it says kinky couples.
[00:07:06]  These are people whose unions are probably not all that strong to begin with, but they say, and these are people who are obviously very, very confused about a lot of things.
[00:07:13]  Nevertheless, they say that pimping out their beloved actually strengthened their union.
[00:07:20]  Color me a little bit skeptical.
[00:07:25]  I don't really encourage you to read the article or to read the survey, but this is part of a broader cultural trend, broader cultural normalization of polyamory, of consensual, consensual non-monogamy.
[00:07:42]  That's the new gross clinical jargon that they use to euphemize their own perversions.
[00:07:50]  In any case, you hear a lot about this right now.
[00:07:53]  And People are looking at that and they're reacting in the old fuddy-duddy way.
[00:07:59]  These kids say, this is crazy.
[00:08:01]  Can you believe what they're doing now?
[00:08:02]  You know, in olden days, an inch of stocking was looked on as something shocking, but now, you know, anything goes.
[00:08:08]  Anyway, that's the wrong approach because this is not novel.
[00:08:15]  This is not an innovation.
[00:08:16]  There's nothing new about this.
[00:08:19]  This is just paganism.
[00:08:21]  And as our culture, which was the West, we called it the West.
[00:08:27]  Sometimes we describe our nation as a Christian nation, but even what we call the West is really a pale shadow of what we used to call Christendom, which was Christian civilization, which thrived from, I don't know, roughly the age of Constantine up through the Protestant Revolution, which then starts to crack it up a little bit, but still you have a very substantially Christian civilization, albeit amid wars of religion,
[00:08:52]  that finally in the Treaty of Augsburg, the Peace of Westphalia, the Age of the Enlightenment, starts to try to preserve Christianity, but without taking religion all that seriously, you get into modernity.
[00:09:05]  Now you're really on the fumes of Christendom.
[00:09:09]  And soon enough, that gives way to overt paganism.
[00:09:12]  Here's what Tertullian, early Christian writer, father of the church, has to say about how the pagans versus the Christians regarded sex.
[00:09:23]  Great line from Tertullian from his apology.
[00:09:26]  All things are common among us, but our wives.
[00:09:30]  We give up our community where it is practiced alone by others who not only take possession of their wives, of the wives of their friends, but most tolerantly also accommodate their friends with theirs.
[00:09:42]  It's a great observation, fun, almost Chestertonian millennia earlier, where he says, we Christians, we're different from the pagans in that we share everything except for our wives.
[00:09:52]  And the pagans share nothing with each other except for their wives.
[00:09:57]  That's it.
[00:09:57]  They're happy to, they won't share their money.
[00:09:59]  They won't share their food.
[00:10:00]  They won't share their resources.
[00:10:02]  They might not share their time, but you know what?
[00:10:04]  They will share their wives because they're perbs.
[00:10:07]  But we Christians, we're the opposite.
[00:10:10]  We'll give anything to each other except for our wives.
[00:10:14]  Saint Jerome has a famous line in his commentary on Hosea, which is, rarely does a heretic love chastity.
[00:10:23]  Every so often there's a heresy that promotes chastity, like the Albigensians.
[00:10:28]  But generally speaking, you'll notice you see this with modern religion, kind of wacky pastors of the weird breakaway systematic churches.
[00:10:37]  You know, they're always promoting weird sex stuff.
[00:10:41]  That's the one common thread between all of the various sects of the weird heretical forms of Christianity today.
[00:10:47]  They all promote weird sex stuff.
[00:10:50]  Rarely, rarely does a heretic love chastity.
[00:10:54]  What this reveals with this new study that's intended to shock, that's why it's a New York Post headline.
[00:10:58]  Can you 71% of these kinky couples say, actually, it's totally awesome for their marriages when they all cheat on each other.
[00:11:06]  This is supposed to shock us.
[00:11:07]  What is this new discovery?
[00:11:09]  Polyamory, non-consensual non-monogamy.
[00:11:16]  All that reveals is how little we understand paganism.
[00:11:21]  It doesn't reveal a new discovery about the present.
[00:11:23]  It reveals how ignorant we are of the past.
[00:11:26]  This is what paganism was always like.
[00:11:28]  It's amusing when people, they think they've discovered something new.
[00:11:32]  These people who are promoting orgies and decadence and all sorts of bacchanalia, they think they've discovered something new.
[00:11:38]  You know, in the old days, man, people were all uptight, but now we're free.
[00:11:42]  We got free love.
[00:11:43]  We're doing drugs and we have free love and we're polyamorous.
[00:11:49]  You think, oh, wow, yeah, no one's ever thought of that one before.
[00:11:52]  doing drugs and behaving like a degenerate.
[00:11:55]  Yeah, that's never happened.
[00:11:56]  Wow.
[00:11:57]  What an amazing innovator you are.
[00:12:00]  It just reveals how little we understand.
[00:12:03]  We pretend that we understand ancient paganism.
[00:12:06]  We pretend that we understand what Christianity replaced.
[00:12:09]  We don't.
[00:12:10]  A great example of this, and I remember when I came to this realization myself, oh, in the Bible, in Exodus, the Israelites, they leave Egypt and Moses goes up onto Mount Sinai.
[00:12:25]  He's receiving the Ten Commandments.
[00:12:27]  And what happens?
[00:12:28]  He goes up and five seconds later, the Israelites abandon the God who led them out of Egypt toward the promised land and they start worshiping a golden calf.
[00:12:36]  And he comes down and he says, what are you doing?
[00:12:38]  Stop worshiping this golden calf.
[00:12:41]  And, you know, then all sorts of trouble ensues.
[00:12:45]  I remember maybe it's just how kids think.
[00:12:47]  I think this is even how naive adults think these days.
[00:12:50]  What do you think the Israelites were doing?
[00:12:53]  Do you think in my mind, what the Israelites were doing was just kind of like bowing down and saying, oh, golden calf, we worship you.
[00:12:58]  And that was the great offense.
[00:13:00]  But of course, what they were really doing was just all the stuff that the modern pagans are doing.
[00:13:07]  They were doing a ton of weird sex stuff.
[00:13:09]  They were indulging in food and drink and it's kind of like drugs and they just all sorts of revelry and bizarre we, it's just this stuff.
[00:13:18]  It's all just this stuff.

=== Buying Steak For The Troops (10:42) ===

[00:13:20]  There is nothing new under the sun.
[00:13:24]  And so as we come to all of these new discoveries about relationships and marriage and free love, man, really all we're doing is rejecting, wittingly or unwittingly, we're rejecting Christianity, reverting to a kind of base, degraded paganism, and pretending that we've come upon some new revelation.
[00:13:46]  It's the opposite of a new revelation.
[00:13:48]  It's the rejection of revelation.
[00:13:51]  Okay, speaking of decadence, dumbest non-troversy in the world, and it is being plastered across every media outlet.
[00:13:58]  Did you know that Pete Hegseth, that wild, decadent Pete Hegseth, he spent millions of dollars on crab legs last September at the Pentagon.
[00:14:11]  Pentagon spent billions of dollars on furniture and lobster tail and steak.
[00:14:18]  This gluttonous, decadent, fat wastrel, Pete Hegseth.
[00:14:24]  Can you imagine?
[00:14:26]  We'll get momentarily to what the scandal actually means.
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[00:15:54]  What is the scandal?
[00:15:55]  I have the Daily Beast here.
[00:15:58]  Pentagon Pete blew a fortune on crabs in multi-billion dollar spending frenzy.
[00:16:06]  What the shuck?
[00:16:07]  Daily Beast says.
[00:16:09]  Figures show the Defense Department took drastic measures to spend its allocated funds.
[00:16:16]  Pentagon spent millions of dollars on luxury crabs and other food items in a single month.
[00:16:22]  It's part of a frantic end-of-year spending spree.
[00:16:24]  $93 billion in September 2025.
[00:16:27]  That's the end of the fiscal year.
[00:16:29]  $2 million on Alaskan king crab in September alone.
[00:16:32]  $6.9 million on lobster tail, a million bucks on salmon, $140,000 on donuts, $124,000 on ice cream machines, $26,000 on sushi preparation tables, and a whopping $15.1 million on ribeye steak.
[00:16:46]  A lot of people reacting negatively to that.
[00:16:48]  I was supposed to go on TMZ actually and debate this yesterday, but I was flying back home from Florida.
[00:16:53]  I wasn't able to do it.
[00:16:54]  I wish I could have done it.
[00:16:55]  It would have been great because people, they don't even understand what the scandal is supposed to be.
[00:16:59]  First of all, do you think that Pete Hegseth ate $7 million worth of crabs?
[00:17:06]  Is that what you think the scandal is?
[00:17:08]  That seems to be what the libs think the scandal is.
[00:17:11]  They seem to think the scandal is that Pete is just filling his home with ice cream machine, that he's shoveling 140 grand worth of donuts into his face.
[00:17:20]  Pete is a very fit guy.
[00:17:22]  Pete runs with the troops.
[00:17:24]  He's lifting weights.
[00:17:25]  You think he ate $2 million of Alaskan king crab?
[00:17:29]  You think he ate $15 million worth of ribeye?
[00:17:34]  I think this is actually what the libs believe because Paul Bagala, who's a real Democrat political consultant, he was an advisor to Bill Clinton.
[00:17:41]  He was on CNN trying to make this point.
[00:17:44]  Scott Jennings was there to shut him down.
[00:17:46]  What was the spending on?
[00:17:49]  He has spent $15 million in one month for ribeye steak, $6.9 million for lobster tail, $225 million for furniture.
[00:17:59]  He spent more in the month of September than most countries on earth spend in their defense.
[00:18:02]  Do you believe for himself?
[00:18:05]  Lobster tails?
[00:18:06]  Are troops not at MRE?
[00:18:07]  No, no, no.
[00:18:09]  Do you believe the Secretary of Defense is personally eating all the lobster?
[00:18:12]  Well, he can't eat $60.
[00:18:14]  Oh, Rob.
[00:18:14]  Oh, really?
[00:18:15]  The troops are getting lobsters.
[00:18:16]  Frequently in the theater of God.
[00:18:17]  Troops who are going to war.
[00:18:18]  Oh, my God.
[00:18:18]  Great meal.
[00:18:19]  You know that.
[00:18:20]  They're getting a lobster.
[00:18:21]  You are so killed over this.
[00:18:22]  You're going to get killed over this.
[00:18:23]  Internet.
[00:18:24]  Wow.
[00:18:25]  So he actually doesn't know.
[00:18:27]  You almost pity Paul Bagala here.
[00:18:29]  Because he comes out.
[00:18:30]  He says, Pete's spending $15 million on ribeye steak.
[00:18:34]  And Scott Jennings just Scott Jennings, who's terrific, but even if he weren't as good as he is, even if all Scott Jennings had was a modicum of common sense, he says, wait, wait, you don't seriously think Pete is eating $15 million of steak on his own, do you?
[00:18:49]  And Paul Bagali goes, well, our troops are overseas.
[00:18:52]  Pete's eating $15 million of steak.
[00:18:55]  And Scott goes, the steak is for the troops, Paul.
[00:19:01]  It's not a $15 million DoorDash to the office of the secretary.
[00:19:06]  When the Pentagon spends money, the Pentagon spends money on its personnel.
[00:19:10]  It's steak for the troops.
[00:19:11]  He goes, you think the troops are getting steak?
[00:19:13]  You're crazy.
[00:19:14]  You're out of your mind.
[00:19:16]  Yes.
[00:19:19]  We buy our troops steak sometimes and lobster tail and crab legs.
[00:19:25]  That's a nice indulgence.
[00:19:27]  It's a minor luxury that we afford to our troops that we have afforded to our troops, sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes, for many, many years.
[00:19:38]  There are many photos of this.
[00:19:40]  There are many accounts of this in reporting, in military documents.
[00:19:45]  Yeah, we do that because they don't have many luxuries overseas, obviously.
[00:19:49]  So it's not this debate.
[00:19:53]  This is when political debates are really frustrating.
[00:19:56]  It's not even a debate over first principles or ideology or where we should go.
[00:20:01]  It's actually just one side doesn't know something and we're trying to tell that side a completely indisputable fact and the other side just won't believe us.
[00:20:13]  Either pretends not to believe us, is just being obtuse, in which case there's no real communication possible, or sincerely doesn't know and won't believe us anyway.
[00:20:25]  Regardless, this is a totally contrived scandal.
[00:20:28]  Now, if you are of the opinion, you say, okay, those are the facts.
[00:20:32]  We bought some steak for the troops.
[00:20:35]  Okay, fine, but we shouldn't buy steak for the troops.
[00:20:38]  Again, I think we should buy steak for the troops.
[00:20:40]  I think the least we can do for the troops is buy them some steak and the occasional crab leg.
[00:20:44]  Okay, they sacrifice a lot for us.
[00:20:47]  It's not like they're being paid millions of dollars a year to do this.
[00:20:49]  They're putting themselves in harm's way.
[00:20:51]  They're serving their nation at a time when patriotism is relatively low.
[00:20:54]  I think we can buy them some ribeye.
[00:20:57]  But if you oppose that, let me then further demonstrate why Pete Hegseth had to do this.
[00:21:05]  Because government agencies operate on a use it or lose it basis.
[00:21:12]  Congress allocates money to the agencies.
[00:21:15]  The agencies get X millions of billions of dollars per year.
[00:21:20]  All of the agencies, not just the Pentagon, every single agency, has to spend all of that money or else they risk losing their funding the following year.
[00:21:31]  Unlike in the private sector, where, you know, if the business comes in ahead of schedule and under budget, that's good.
[00:21:37]  That's rewarded by the market, maybe by the board of directors.
[00:21:40]  In the government and nonprofits, it's the opposite.
[00:21:43]  If a government agency or nonprofit comes in under budget, that signals to the people allocating the funds that they don't actually need all those funds.
[00:21:51]  So they cut their budgets the following year.
[00:21:53]  This is why all agencies spend their money at the end.
[00:21:56]  And in this case, the Democrats, I think here they really are just being obtuse.
[00:22:02]  The Democrats are objecting to the most basic way that all government agencies operate, really only because it's Republicans doing it.
[00:22:12]  And specifically what they are objecting to, the actual substance of what they're objecting to, is Pete Hegseth was a little too nice to our soldiers.
[00:22:20]  Are you out of your mind?
[00:22:22]  I can't, are the Democrats here ignorant, stupid, or do they just hate our troops and they don't even want to give them a crab leg every once in a while?
[00:22:32]  Is it, which is it?
[00:22:34]  I don't, what is the most charitable read that I can have on this situation?
[00:22:39]  They're ignorant, they're obtuse, or they are so opposed to our men and women in uniform that they would begrudge them a moderate quality ribeye well done every once in a while.
[00:22:54]  I don't know.
[00:22:55]  You tell me, I want to have the most charitable read.
[00:22:58]  None of those are great options.
[00:23:01]  This is the scandal.
[00:23:02]  The other takeaway, this is the scandal.
[00:23:05]  Every now and you hear all this commotion, all this kind of background noise, the Trump administration, all these scandals.
[00:23:11]  The proof that there aren't real Trump scandals is that the Dems are pushing nonsense like this.
[00:23:16]  Isn't that crazy?
[00:23:19]  The proof that Trump is not seriously implicated in any of the Epstein stuff is that Joe Biden didn't release anything.
[00:23:25]  And all the while they were trying four times to prosecute him, kick him off the ballot and justify his assassination.
[00:23:32]  That's the proof that there's no smoking gun in the Epstein files on Trump because they obviously would have used it.
[00:23:36]  It's the proof they got nothing.
[00:23:36]  They've been trying to take this guy out for 10 years.
[00:23:38]  here right now, present day, 2026, the way you know that there is no serious scandal in the Trump administration is they have to make up nonsense about government agencies spending money as they always do.
[00:23:49]  And in this case, the scandal is the agency was too nice to the troops.
[00:23:54]  You couldn't make it up if you were writing a script about this in Hollywood.
[00:23:58]  Okay, speaking of food, Buffalo Wild Wings might be turning me into a communist.
[00:24:01]  We'll get to that momentarily.

=== Rabbit Air And Cigars (03:54) ===

[00:24:02]  First, I want to tell you about Rabbit Air.
[00:24:04]  You need to go to rabbitair.com.
[00:24:06]  Folks, you have heard me sing the praises of Rabbit Air many, many times.
[00:24:11]  I have multiple Rabbit Airs in my home.
[00:24:14]  I've had Rabbit Airs in my office, in my studio.
[00:24:16]  I love Rabbit Air.
[00:24:18]  Rabbit Air's six-stage filtration system is designed for high-capacity air processing.
[00:24:22]  It is engineered to capture heavy smoke particulates and reduce the presence of lingering odors, helping to keep your environment fresh.
[00:24:29]  So when it comes down to air filters, I've tried a lot of them over the years.
[00:24:32]  I've smoked cigars for over 20 years.
[00:24:35]  And I use the Rabbit Air in environments where I never even smoke.
[00:24:40]  And I've used the Rabbit Air in environments where I'm smoking big, fat, heavy cigars.
[00:24:44]  The real test of the air filters is the cigars because it's just the most hardcore thing.
[00:24:49]  There is no parallel to Rabbit.
[00:24:51]  Rabbit is the best if you're a cigar smoker like me, if you never smoke cigars.
[00:24:56]  It's just, it's the best.
[00:24:57]  Okay.
[00:24:58]  I love these guys.
[00:25:00]  They're odor remover, customized filter to your rabbit air as an extra layer of protection, but it's just next level.
[00:25:06]  It's just next level.
[00:25:07]  Go to rabbitair.com, call their consultants 24-7 for a personalized recommendation on the best setup for your smoking or non-smoking space.
[00:25:15]  B-Dubs, Buffalo Wild Wings, according to USA Today, has unveiled its wing-flavored protein espresso martini.
[00:25:28]  So it's an espresso martini that is filled with protein powder, like a workout smoothie, that is flavored with buffalo chicken rub, which is placed on the glass as if it were salt on a margarita.
[00:25:51]  Because you actually don't put salt or sugar on the rim of a martini.
[00:25:54]  You would do it on the rim of a margarita.
[00:25:56]  So it's actually mixing two classic cocktails with chocolate, coffee, whey protein, and buffalo rub.
[00:26:09]  And capitalism's gone too far.
[00:26:13]  You know me.
[00:26:14]  I mean, I'm not one of these ardent libertarian laissez-faire people who worships the free market like the depraved Israelites in the desert worshiped the golden calf.
[00:26:24]  I'm not one of those people.
[00:26:25]  I am, ironically enough, with Irving Kristol, who's the founder of neoconservatism, even though today the paleoconservatives would probably actually embrace the teachings of the first neoconservative.
[00:26:38]  In as much as Irving Kristol said two cheers for the free market, not three cheers, because this is kind of funny.
[00:26:45]  It's really funny when you hear all these battles over the neocons versus the paleocons and the populace and this and that.
[00:26:50]  The guy who founded neoconservatism said that conservatism comes down to economic growth, religion, and nationalism.
[00:27:00]  The founder of neoconservatism sounds like the most hardcore populist paleocon in the world today.
[00:27:06]  It's very difficult to keep up with all those political monikers.
[00:27:08]  In any case, it's too much.
[00:27:11]  When Bernie Sanders, he said, why do I go into the drugstore and the grocery store and there are 30 or 40 different types of deodorant?
[00:27:19]  We do not need 40 types of deodorant.
[00:27:21]  We only need one, the state deodorant, given to us by our general secretary of the American Communist Party.
[00:27:27]  That's what he was insinuating.
[00:27:29]  Bernie Sanders made this critique of America when he was running for president.
[00:27:33]  And it was the opposite of the old critique people used to make of the Soviet Union, which is there was no variety of products.
[00:27:39]  When the Soviet Union fell and you had Russians coming to the United States in big numbers for the first time, what they were amazed by is how much stuff there was in the grocery store.
[00:27:48]  I think it was Yeltsin, Boris Yeltsin, when he became head of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
[00:27:53]  He comes, he marveled at the grocery stores.
[00:27:55]  He said, this is crazy what variety we have.

=== House Lords Merit Debate (08:50) ===

[00:27:57]  It's kind of funny.
[00:27:58]  Bernie, who's more than half a communist, comes out and he says, we have too much variety.
[00:28:03]  But now I get it.
[00:28:04]  I finally get it.
[00:28:04]  It took me 10 years, but I finally get it.
[00:28:06]  This is too much.
[00:28:07]  This is decadent.
[00:28:10]  We need rules.
[00:28:11]  We need structure.
[00:28:12]  We need propriety.
[00:28:16]  No civilization can long endure if we embrace buffalo wing flavored, protein-infused espresso martinis at the chicken restaurant.
[00:28:26]  We can't.
[00:28:27]  We can't.
[00:28:29]  Eat the rich.
[00:28:30]  Workers of the world unite.
[00:28:32]  Tastemakers of the world unite.
[00:28:34]  Speaking of innovations in government, a very disturbing development in the United Kingdom.
[00:28:40]  And a lot of Americans aren't initially, they're not instinctually going to realize how bad this is, but it's really, really bad.
[00:28:48]  The British government just effectively destroyed the House of Lords.
[00:28:54]  So there's the lower house in the British legislature, in the British government.
[00:29:00]  There's the parliament.
[00:29:01]  And then there's the upper house, which is the House of Lords.
[00:29:05]  And until the 1950s, the House of Lords was just made up of hereditary aristocrats.
[00:29:12]  You know, Lord Tweedieth III, you know, the Earl of Streaky Hammersher or something, right?
[00:29:26]  It was like all these kind of silly aristocrats whose ancestors had held these positions for hundreds and hundreds of years.
[00:29:33]  The House of Lords in this forum had existed for 700 years.
[00:29:36]  And then in the 50s, in modernity, after the Second World War, they started instituting these reforms where they have something called life peers.
[00:29:44]  So it's people who were put into the House of Lords who were not really aristocrats.
[00:29:47]  They were just people who had, you know, contributed money to political campaigns or done well in business, and they were brought in there.
[00:29:54]  Then Tony Blair, who pretty much destroyed whatever was left of old Britain, in the 90s, he decided he was going to get rid of the House of Lords.
[00:30:03]  And so he began implementing this plan.
[00:30:06]  It took 25 years to take place, but it's finally come to fruition now, which is that virtually all of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords were lost.
[00:30:13]  A lot of Americans are going to say, who cares?
[00:30:15]  You know, we haven't had anything to do with those people since 1776.
[00:30:20]  And a lot of Americans are going to say, I don't want some dusty old aristocrat who's just, you know, some rich kid.
[00:30:26]  What's funny about the aristocrats is a lot of them aren't that rich anymore because they have these beautiful estates, but they're not actually making any money and they have to keep them up and the government's trying to take away their holdings and privileges and family patrimony for generations now.
[00:30:41]  But in any case, they say, well, what do we care?
[00:30:43]  Why should they sit in the British government when they haven't earned it?
[00:30:48]  Don't we need meritocracy?
[00:30:51]  That's the argument that the Prime Minister of the UK is making right now.
[00:30:54]  That's the argument that Tony Blair was making.
[00:30:57]  In other words, that's the liberal argument.
[00:31:00]  And when I see conservatives in America exalting meritocracy as the be-all and end-all of social organization, I cringe a little bit.
[00:31:12]  Okay, I'm no aristocrat.
[00:31:14]  I didn't come from money.
[00:31:15]  I went to college on almost a full ride financial needs scholarship.
[00:31:20]  I was not exactly born with a silver spoon, okay?
[00:31:22]  I am grateful for the ability to prove myself on, I don't know, testing and working and all this stuff to rise up a little bit in society.
[00:31:31]  I'm glad all Americans are glad for that opportunity.
[00:31:35]  But does this mean that there's no place for, I don't know, privilege?
[00:31:42]  That there's no place for legacy, that there's no place for inheritance, that there's no, I mean, that's what the libs would say.
[00:31:49]  This is why the libs want to tax death.
[00:31:51]  This is why the libs hate, literally hate inheritance and try to tax it away when you die.
[00:31:56]  But don't you want to, if you're the most hardcore meritocrat in the world, don't you want to leave something to your kids?
[00:32:01]  Do you really want, do you want the government taking away all your stuff when you die?
[00:32:03]  You can't leave anything to your kids.
[00:32:06]  If you work really hard, you get into the good college.
[00:32:10]  Wouldn't you like to help your kid get into that college?
[00:32:14]  Isn't there actually, I mean, actually, college is a good analogy here for this because college has people who get in because they're test scores and people who get in because of legacy admissions and people who get in because they're good at sports and for all sorts of reasons they get in.
[00:32:26]  Isn't there something to that?
[00:32:29]  If your family's been going to a certain school for 10 generations, isn't there something to that?
[00:32:34]  Actually, don't the kids who got there on academic merit, don't they actually benefit from being exposed to a portion of society that they didn't previously know?
[00:32:42]  Or furthermore, the kids who got in on academic merit, don't they benefit from being exposed to the athletes who maybe didn't do as well on the SAT?
[00:32:48]  But you know what?
[00:32:49]  The kids who got the perfect score in the SAT, they're probably not the best at football.
[00:32:53]  Exceptions exist, but it's where in society, we want all of these different parts.
[00:32:59]  Okay.
[00:33:00]  And so zoom out from the college example, back to the House of Lords in the UK and a whole country.
[00:33:05]  Yeah, you want the innovation.
[00:33:06]  You want the entrepreneurial spirit.
[00:33:08]  You want the people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps, really make something of themselves, generate wealth, generate excitement, give the country a competitive advantage over rival countries.
[00:33:20]  But don't you also want the continuity?
[00:33:22]  That's what the House of Lords represents.
[00:33:24]  That's what hereditary estates represent.
[00:33:27]  Those great old English country estates that have been around for centuries and centuries.
[00:33:31]  Not if the liberals have their way, will they be around much longer?
[00:33:35]  You need both of those things.
[00:33:36]  This is where actually going right back to that Irving Kristol comment, two cheers for capitalism.
[00:33:40]  I said two cheers for meritocracy.
[00:33:43]  Conservatives cannot be pure meritocrats.
[00:33:48]  I don't even, what does that even mean?
[00:33:50]  I mean, that smuggles in so many philosophical premises that are dubious.
[00:33:53]  What does it mean to merit something?
[00:33:57]  If I have a nice big estate and I want to leave it to my kids, do my kids not merit that estate?
[00:34:05]  Does a recent immigrant from Timbuktu who made it to this country, who was naturalized into this country and who did well on some academic exam, does he really merit my patrimony, that inheritance?
[00:34:19]  Does he really merit that?
[00:34:21]  On what grounds does he merit that?
[00:34:24]  And what do we mean when we talk about merit in a country through generations?
[00:34:33]  The House of Lords, the legacy, the continuity, the tradition, that exists not for the, not primarily even, for the enrichment of a handful of stuffy old Brits with funny names.
[00:34:48]  That actually exists for the good of the country.
[00:34:52]  You want continuity.
[00:34:55]  You want, you know, I remember back in the 2000s, you would have, in 20 teens, you'd have these Republican fundraisers, and they were schizophrenic, because on the one hand, they would talk about the need for, you know, social norms and tradition and family values.
[00:35:09]  And then on the other hand, they'd talk about the need for creative destruction, the kind of radical individualism and capitalism.
[00:35:17]  You see, those things were at odds.
[00:35:20]  Really, a serious politics balances both.
[00:35:22]  Britain is just determined to destroy.
[00:35:25]  What do they say?
[00:35:26]  They say that the House of Lords, this according to government minister Nick Thomas Simmons, is an archaic and undemocratic principle.
[00:35:33]  You're damn right it is.
[00:35:34]  You're damn right it is.
[00:35:36]  Here for archaic and undemocratic principles.
[00:35:40]  Archaic and undemocratic principles, they're some of my very favorite principles.
[00:35:44]  They're crucial in any political society, including democracies, especially in democracies.
[00:35:50]  Our parliament, says Nick Thomas Simmons, should always be a place where talents are recognized and merit counts.
[00:35:56]  It should never be a gallery of old boys' networks nor a place where titles, many of which were handed out centuries ago, hold power over the will of the people.
[00:36:04]  What if the people desire to overthrow parliament entirely?
[00:36:07]  What if the people desire to turn the parliament building, which is an inheritance?
[00:36:10]  It's not something you yourself made, Nick Thomas Simmons.
[00:36:13]  What if they decide to turn it into a gambling hall or a brothel?
[00:36:16]  It's the will of the people.
[00:36:17]  Shall we just give in then?
[00:36:20]  By his principles, yes.
[00:36:22]  By the democratic, modern principle, yes.
[00:36:25]  By the archaic and undemocratic principle, no.
[00:36:27]  We say that there's actually a deeper kind of democracy, to use the phrase of Chesterton, the democracy of the dead, which enfranchises not only the people who have the seemingly random privilege of currently walking around the earth, but all of the people in a political community, including the dead, including our forebears, and including our posterity, the people who are to come.

=== Flag Stigmatization Problem (10:28) ===

[00:36:48]  Have I made my point?
[00:36:50]  Things are even worse in the UK.
[00:36:52]  The UK is now stigmatizing their own national symbol.
[00:36:56]  Folks, I know that you're getting all of the news and all of the opinion that really matter to you right here on the Michael Knowles show.
[00:37:04]  But if you want to find out why my colleagues Ben Shapiro, Andrew Clavin, and Matt Walsh are totally wrong about basically everything, you have to tune into Friendly Fire Live tomorrow.
[00:37:13]  Friendly Fire live tomorrow.
[00:37:16]  No cuts, no edits, no nothing.
[00:37:18]  2 p.m. Eastern on dailywire.com and the Dailywire Plus app.
[00:37:24]  My favorite comment yesterday is from Hard Boiled Entertainment, who says, the only reason this war is least popular is because it's the only one currently being fought.
[00:37:33]  I actually disagree with that.
[00:37:35]  I think that's a little bit of a cope.
[00:37:38]  This war, the war in Iran, is the least popular war at launch that we have ever fought in America.
[00:37:45]  It's less popular, well, certainly than World War II, which had 97% support at launch.
[00:37:51]  It's less popular than Iraq and Afghanistan.
[00:37:53]  It's less popular than Libya at launch, under Obama, at launch.
[00:37:59]  And so someone might say, well, no, it's only unpopular right now because it's currently being fought, but the appreciation of it will grow over time.
[00:38:06]  Maybe, you know, it depends on how the war ends, but that doesn't really hold.
[00:38:10]  Wars usually are very, very popular when they start and they become much less popular over time.
[00:38:16]  The Iraq war was very popular when it started.
[00:38:18]  Now, basically, no one would defend it.
[00:38:22]  So this is a major problem.
[00:38:24]  You know me, I'm not a Panican.
[00:38:26]  I'm generally a plan truster.
[00:38:27]  I've said on the Iran war.
[00:38:28]  Had I been on the NSC, I would have argued strenuously against the strike on Iran based on public information.
[00:38:33]  But I trust Trump.
[00:38:35]  He's got a lot of credibility on foreign policy.
[00:38:37]  I'm willing to give him five or six weeks before I start freaking out.
[00:38:41]  However, this is a big political problem.
[00:38:44]  This is a big political problem.
[00:38:46]  And the people who care about the White House and the administration doing well need to be honest about that.
[00:38:55]  The White House needs to message on this properly.
[00:38:57]  The best kind of message will be a victory that allows us to move on from the Iran war, at which point it will be a major foreign policy success if it all works out, which is why you'll never hear about it again and won't affect the midterms.
[00:39:09]  But it is unusual that a war would be unpopular at this moment.
[00:39:13]  Okay.
[00:39:14]  The UK.
[00:39:15]  Just one point before I move on from the UK.
[00:39:17]  The UK's new social cohesion strategy involves describing the Union Jack, the British flag, as a tool of hate.
[00:39:25]  Do we have that?
[00:39:26]  Yeah, here it is.
[00:39:26]  This is from the Daily Mail.
[00:39:28]  Flying a union jack flag is branded as a tool of hate in government's leaked social cohesion strategy.
[00:39:33]  A leaked draft of the proposal suggests national symbols were sometimes used last summer to exclude or intimidate.
[00:39:40]  It warns that the extreme right has tried to turn symbols of pride into tools of hate.
[00:39:45]  The 47-page document reportedly warns that anti-Semitism has become normalized in many corners of society, from schools to universities to workplaces.
[00:39:53]  Some 800 million pounds over 10 years would be put toward 40 areas where social cohesion is deemed to be under pressure.
[00:40:00]  And I guess one of those areas is the flag.
[00:40:05]  So now there's a response, totally predictable and justified, of people who are saying, no, no, you're not going to get us to take down our national flag.
[00:40:14]  This is a big, big problem.
[00:40:17]  But we're seeing it here.
[00:40:18]  This is not just a foreign issue.
[00:40:20]  We're seeing this here.
[00:40:20]  The notion that the flag, the symbol of our country, is bad and should be discouraged.
[00:40:28]  It's totally predictable because the left in the UK, in America, throughout the West, once called Christendom, the left believes that the countries themselves are bad.
[00:40:40]  So of course they're going to conclude that the flags, which are the symbols of those countries, are bad.
[00:40:46]  They could not come to any other conclusion.
[00:40:50]  All these people sharing this news report, oh, can you, this is so, can you believe how crazy the UK has gotten?
[00:40:55]  They're now stigmatizing their own flag.
[00:40:57]  Yes, of course I can believe that.
[00:40:59]  The left in all of these countries says the country is bad.
[00:41:02]  And so if the thing is bad, then the thing that symbolizes the thing is also going to be bad.
[00:41:07]  But we, of course, cannot tolerate that, not merely from the standpoint of partisans on the right, just we as citizens of these countries.
[00:41:15]  You cannot persist in a political community that hates itself.
[00:41:20]  That political community will be overrun.
[00:41:22]  The citizens of that political community, at the very least, the leaders of that political community, will be replaced by people who are willing to stand for something, who believe in something, who are going to make affirmative declarations and take affirmative actions to defend a thing.
[00:41:39]  So in the UK, what that means is that the UK is ceasing to be a Christian British country and is becoming a Muslim country, an Arab country, a South Asian country.
[00:41:49]  In America, what that means is we're just opening our gates to all manner of migrants.
[00:41:55]  And because most of the migrants who are nearby are Christians from Latin America, we're actually in a stronger position than the UK is.
[00:42:03]  The culture that has been invading is not totally alien to us.
[00:42:07]  I mean, it's quite different.
[00:42:08]  You know, the Latin American culture is different from the Anglo-culture.
[00:42:10]  The Anglo-culture is what built America.
[00:42:12]  In the UK, it's much tougher, but it's the same problem.
[00:42:16]  So the question for the people in these countries, in the UK, in America, in the West is, are we going to stand for our country?
[00:42:24]  Do we think our country is a good thing?
[00:42:26]  Do we have a proper love for our country?
[00:42:29]  And you have some ideologues who say, well, no, no, no.
[00:42:32]  If I have to choose between my country right or wrong or my country only when right, I choose my country only when right.
[00:42:36]  Yeah, that's the symbol of ideology.
[00:42:38]  That's the symbol of abstraction.
[00:42:39]  That's the evidence of a complete lack of patriotism.
[00:42:42]  It's your country, just like your mom is your mom and your dad is your dad.
[00:42:47]  Your kids are your kids.
[00:42:49]  You don't say, well, I support my child only when he's right.
[00:42:52]  When he's wrong, I disown him.
[00:42:54]  Well, then you're going to disown your kid pretty quick, aren't you?
[00:42:56]  But you can't.
[00:42:57]  That's not how family works.
[00:42:58]  That's not.
[00:43:01]  This is coming here.
[00:43:03]  This is already in America.
[00:43:05]  Look at the left-wing protests.
[00:43:07]  They very rarely fly the American flag.
[00:43:09]  They fly the flags of other countries.
[00:43:11]  Okay, but as that persists, gradually and then in an accelerated way, you're going to just lose any semblance of your country.
[00:43:21]  And you're going to lose it to whoever's willing to take it.
[00:43:24]  Speaking of these politically suicidal liberals, Walter Masterson, who was on my show, he was on Barfight a week or two ago, whenever it was, he's the guy who went viral.
[00:43:36]  You show up on Barfight, you become the most viral guy on the internet some weeks later.
[00:43:41]  He went viral because he was protesting.
[00:43:44]  He was protesting protesters in New York.
[00:43:47]  There were these protesters who said, you know, New York is becoming Islamified.
[00:43:51]  We don't like that.
[00:43:52]  25th anniversary of 9-11, we don't like that.
[00:43:54]  This guy, Walter, comes out with a bullhorn.
[00:43:57]  He says, no, we love Islam and we open America to all the illegals and we want more Islam here.
[00:44:02]  And as he's saying it, you couldn't have scripted it better.
[00:44:06]  An Islamist comes running over, jumps on him, throws a bomb, throws an IED at the conservatives, then goes running off yelling Allahu Akbar and pledging allegiance to ISIS.
[00:44:17]  And Walter didn't know what to make of it.
[00:44:19]  Well, now Walter has broken his silence.
[00:44:22]  Has this Islamic terrorist who threw a bomb while he was talking about how open he is to Islamic migrants, has that guy changed his mind?
[00:44:32]  Jake Lang was holding this rally saying things like this.
[00:44:36]  America is a white Christian country.
[00:44:39]  If you're saying America is for white Christian men, you're a white supremacist.
[00:44:43]  Now, I really want to be clear that I made a huge mistake in not taking cover after this explosive device was thrown.
[00:44:51]  We were counter protesting, making Jake Lang look like the idiot that he is when these two idiots came along and committed an act of terrorism.
[00:44:59]  They could not have done more to legitimize Jake Lang's white supremacist talking points.
[00:45:06]  I could have been killed and that weighs very heavy on both me and my family.
[00:45:11]  And all that being said, I'm not going to use this as an excuse to be a xenophobic.
[00:45:16]  Elon Musk and all of right-wing media are having a field day right now because I am choosing inclusion and not bigotry.
[00:45:25]  I still stand by my original point.
[00:45:27]  New York City is for everyone.
[00:45:30]  So Jake Lang, whoever this guy who was holding the protest, Jake Lang comes out.
[00:45:34]  He says, all these Islamic migrants are a danger to New Yorkers.
[00:45:41]  And then this guy Walter comes out.
[00:45:43]  He says, these Islamic migrants are not a danger to New Yorkers.
[00:45:46]  As he's saying this, Islamic migrants jump on his back, throw a bomb, could have killed everyone there or seriously maimed everyone there.
[00:45:56]  Luckily, they were too incompetent.
[00:45:58]  The bombs didn't go off.
[00:46:00]  So they're arrested after running off to endorse ISIS.
[00:46:03]  And Walter says, he acknowledges, he says, look, this is pretty bad because these guys really seem to undermine the point that I was making.
[00:46:12]  And I recognize that I easily could have been killed.
[00:46:15]  And, you know, that really is weighing heavily on me.
[00:46:17]  And it's traumatized me.
[00:46:20]  But I want to assure all of you, I will learn nothing from this.
[00:46:23]  I want to promise you that nothing about the facts that we have learned is going to change my opinion, which was disproven with the shouts and bombs of a Muslim terrorist.
[00:46:36]  I will not change my mind.
[00:46:38]  A total vindication of Robert Frost's observation that a liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel.
[00:46:49]  So much more to get to.
[00:46:50]  I want to get to the Save America Act because the Senate's getting a little funny.
[00:46:52]  They don't want to bring up the voter ID bill, even though it's widely popular with both Republicans and Democrats.
[00:46:57]  They want to get to, oh, so much more.
[00:47:01]  The Vatican's take on plastic surgery.
[00:47:05]  I want to get to the BBLs.
[00:47:07]  I want it, but we, not yet.
[00:47:09]  Tomorrow.
[00:47:09]  Today is speaking of the Vatican.
[00:47:11]  Today's Theology Thursday.
[00:47:12]  The rest of the show continues now.
[00:47:13]  You do not want to miss it.
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