Michael Knowles critiques President Trump's aggressive stance on Cuba and his attacks on Gavin Newsom, while analyzing reports that Iran's new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khomeini, is gay. Knowles warns against accepting Cuba's economic offers as a desperate "last gasp" akin to Soviet perestroika and highlights neoconservative doubts regarding the Israel alliance. The episode also honors Paul Ehrlich's death, condemning his population control advocacy, before concluding that current spiritual darkness correlates with escalating cultural strife. [Automatically generated summary]
A new intelligence report claims Iran's new Ayatollah is a little light in the slippers.
President Trump declares his honor in conquering Cuba, which he hasn't done yet, but apparently it's forthcoming.
And one of the most evil men of the 20th century dies, and most people don't even know his name.
I'm Michael Knowles.
us The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
President Trump has just declared Gavin Newsom is not qualified to be president.
He's not qualified because he has a learning disability.
This, according to the president, Gavin Newsom may or may not actually have a learning disability.
He's at least claiming to in order to give himself victim status.
I think he kind of blew it, though.
I think he should have picked a different handicap.
We will get to all of that, all of these potential future leaders.
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Trump's Intervention Record00:15:38
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Is the new Ayatollah gay?
Is he the guy gay atolla?
It doesn't work.
It works when you spell it, G-A-Y, hyphen tolla, but it doesn't sound right.
There's a difference between the sound and the writing.
This is like when the libs in the 2000s tried to write Fox news as F-A-U-X, like faux news, but because the sound is different from the spelling, it doesn't work.
So we're just going to have to say it bluntly, no puns at all.
The Ayatollah might be a homosexual, might be a little light in the loafers.
You know what I'm saying?
A couple fries away from a happy meal.
The kind of fella has a long handshake.
You know what I mean?
I'm saying he's gay.
According to the New York Post.
So New York Post exclusive report.
Not only is the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khomeini, probably gay, but apparently President Trump thought that was very, very funny.
Trump could not contain his surprise and laughed aloud when he was briefed on the intel, according to sources.
Others in the room also found it, quote, hilarious and joined in the president's reaction.
Well, one senior official, sorry, one senior official reportedly has not stopped laughing about it for days.
said one person familiar with the briefing.
The shocking claim was described to the post by two intelligence community officials and a third person close to the White House.
Now, when I first read this, I thought, look, it's funny, but this seems to me like an op.
This seems to me like a demoralization tactic from our intelligence services, who certainly would never lie, and especially in the context of war, right?
However, when you look into Khomeini's history, he married relatively late for an Iranian cleric, for an Iranian, the son of the supreme leader.
He married at age 30, I think it was.
He reportedly had a little trouble functioning downstairs, had to go to the United Kingdom for some treatments multiple times.
I think on the third or fourth treatment, he finally was able to produce a child.
So there's a little bit of evidence that the ladies are not exactly his type.
In any case, I don't know that this really matters.
I mean, it's kind of funny and we're all giggling here.
Maybe it's true.
Maybe it's just a demoralization tactic.
I don't think it really matters, though, because after the giggles dissipate, the question that we have is whether or not we will have gone in with a massive show of force to replace the angry Islamist leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, with an angrier Islamist leader of Iran, also named Ayatollah Khomeini.
That's the issue.
I don't think that's a great idea.
I don't know how many of you have seen old Western movies and stuff, but when you kill somebody's paw, he usually sets out for revenge.
Adding on top of that, the Iranians have played their toughest card, which is they closed the Strait of Hormuz through which 20% of the world's oil flows.
And so, look, there are many people who were skeptical of this war, myself included, as I've said many times, if I were on the NSC, I would have argued against going in for this strike.
However, I trust Trump on foreign policy.
He's got the best record on it in my lifetime.
And so I'm willing to let him cook, at least for the five weeks that he said it would take.
However, the die is cast.
Whether you wanted to go in or you didn't want to go in, the die is cast.
We're there.
Alia Yakda Est.
So the question is, what does victory look like now?
And one of the real fears is if you don't completely decapitate this regime, if you don't keep just pummeling them and remove the new, you know, Ayatollah Liberachi or whatever, even really Liberace, you know, kind of kept a lid on his alleged proclivities.
This guy, I don't know, it seems a little more out in the open, according to the CIA.
In any case, if you don't get rid of the guy, you could end up in a position where the situation in Iran is worse than when we started.
On top of that, if the Iranians feel that they were able to succeed by closing the Strait of Hormuz, in other words, if the Iranians leave this conflict feeling that they played a game of chicken with the United States, and because they closed the Strait of Hormuz, they won the game of chicken, we have lost all of our leverage in Iran.
Now the regional situation is much worse than it was before we began.
All of that to say, you know, Trump still has my confidence on foreign policy.
He's very good at these things, you know, and he's demonstrated that over 10 years.
Now, however, two weeks ago, you might have said, well, it could just be some kind of limited incursion into Iran and we can achieve some limited objectives.
Now it would seem to me you really can't pull out until you pummel them, until you demonstrate to them that they cannot close the Strait of Hormuz and get away with it.
Until you demonstrate to them that the regime must cooperate with the West.
Not saying it needs to be a totally different regime.
I know it's immensely complex and maybe improbable to achieve these goals.
That would have been part of my argument against going in because of the immense complexity, the enormous complexity of this kind of operation.
But we cannot now pull out and have the Iranians thinking that they can just close the Strait of Hormuz whenever they want to get what they want to get.
And even if they have a homosexual leader, supreme leader, you know, some jokes and some funny articles in the New York Post about it are not a sufficient victory.
As I said when this operation began, this is the riskiest thing Trump has ever done.
If it works out, it's the greatest foreign policy achievement of the last 30 years at least, maybe more.
It achieves a strategic objective that we've had for 70 years.
But if it doesn't work out, this is the biggest risk to his legacy we've ever seen.
Now, the media are trying to exploit some of the disagreements in the conservative movement, even within the administration, allegedly, on the Iran strike.
So they were basically trying to pry JD, the vice president, off of Trump.
And there's a big move right now.
You're seeing it, especially from a lot of never Trumpers, a lot of people who opposed Trump in 2016, a lot of people who opposed Trump in 2024, who went over to Governor DeSantis' team.
I love DeSantis.
All the context aside, DeSantis is a great governor, but a lot of the never-Trumpers were attracted to him, not even necessarily because of his policies, but because he was not Trump.
And so a lot of the people who have opposed Trump consistently for the last 10 years are going after JD right now.
And they're coming up with all sorts of reasons to do it.
But there's clearly a very coordinated op to sideline President Trump's handpicked successor.
And part of that op is to try to drive a wedge between Trump and the vice president.
And Iran seems to be the way to do it.
So a reporter posed this question to the vice president in the Oval Office yesterday.
Here's JD's response.
I know what you're trying to do, Phil.
You're trying to drive a wedge between members of the administration, between me and the president.
What the president said consistently, going back to 2015, and I agreed with him, is that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon.
We have taken this military action under the president's leadership.
I think all of us, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, should pray for a success and pray for the safety of our troops.
That's the approach that I've taken.
Make it as successful as possible.
So there's no hesitation given your past statements with the current operation.
What do you mean there's no hesitation with my past statements?
Given your skepticism of foreigner countries on your credit cup of the global war on terror previously.
Well, I think one big difference, Phil, is that we have a smart president, whereas in the past, we've had dumb presidents, and I trust President Trump to get the job done to do it.
Great answer, man.
Great answer.
The vice president, he's a good politician.
And I think he benefits from the same thing that Bill Clinton benefited from, that George W. Bush has benefited from, that a lot of presidents have benefited, Reagan benefited from, which is that he is underestimated.
But this was a very good answer.
JD Vance has come out pretty strongly against the endless wars and the neocon interventions and all the rest over the last 20 years.
And so he's asked by the reporters, says, well, hold on.
How are you backing the president on this strike on Iran?
And he says, well, because Trump has been clear from the beginning that we're not going to let Iran get a nuclear weapon.
So that's a pretty good answer.
But the reporter presses it, says, well, don't you feel uncomfortable with your past statements?
You know, what makes you think that this war in the Middle East in a country that begins IRA is going to turn out differently than that last war in the Middle East with a country that began with IRA, albeit one ending with a Q, one with an N.
And JD gives this great answer.
He says, well, because we previously had dumb presidents and now we have a smart president, which is a great little way to flip it.
It's a great little slogan here.
But it's not just a cheap slogan.
It speaks to a really deep observation.
The problem with the war in Iraq, or the war in Afghanistan, for that matter, is not that the United States did not have a right to go in.
It's not that the United States did not have an interest in ousting the Taliban or even Saddam Hussein, who we had been contemplating ousting since the early 1990s, who had destabilized the Middle East, who had, well, who had led the United States into war already one time.
It's not, that wasn't the issue.
The issue was that the war was bungled.
That was the problem.
And so what Vance is saying here is, look, yeah, we obviously have a goal and an interest in preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons, stopping Iran's ballistic missile program, preventing Iran from attaining regional hegemony, which our Gulf state allies clearly think that Iran wants to do.
We've had an interest in ousting this regime since 1979.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Whether or not we do it is contingent upon whether or not we can actually succeed at doing it.
And one reason, and I totally agree with this, I agree with this 100%.
One reason I'm not losing sleep at night over this intervention is because Trump's got a good record.
You know, the shorthand that the vice president uses is we have a smart president now.
We used to have dumb presidents, but it speaks to a lot.
Trump has a very good record on the Moab.
He's got a very good record on killing Soleimani.
He's got a very good record in Venezuela.
He's got a very good record in defeating ISIS.
He's got a very good record in preventing Putin from further invading a country.
Only president in the last 25 years on whose watch Putin did not invade or further invade a country.
Pretty good record on wrapping up wars.
Pretty good record on preventing wars and on and on and on.
That's what Vance is saying.
So what happens now?
There is some leaked audio coming out of Iran over whether or not the Ayatollah is even alive.
And then talk about realignment.
Talk about crazy restructuring on the right.
You know, some of this, the talk about the never-Trumpers and the neocons and this and that.
It is certainly the case that the biggest cheerleaders right now for President Trump's policy were never Trumpers in 2016.
That is true.
There's no question about it.
That is the case.
And I think that irritates a lot of OG Trump supporters.
That's true.
And they're pointing to that and they're saying Trump has betrayed MAGA or whatever, which I think is basically impossible because MAGA is a movement that President Trump built in its current iteration.
America First is a movement in its current iteration that President Trump built.
So they're pointing to that.
They're saying, well, look, now it's all these guys who hated Trump in 16.
Now they're his biggest cheerleaders on this specific action.
Sure.
However, you also have to look at the whole context of Trump.
Trump ran on for 10 years, not letting Iran get a nuclear weapon, intervening in the Middle East, going in to beat the hell out of ISIS.
That's what he ran on in 2016.
His policy has been pretty consistent on that.
So even if you're, me, I like coalitional politics.
I like bringing as many people in as can be helpful, keeping the genuinely bad people out and going ahead and fighting the left and actually winning and not just fighting amongst ourselves as the conservatives want to do every single day.
However, for the people who are a little irritated that, you know, some of the never Trumpers now have the president's ear, we also have to point out this was Trump's vision.
And if you voted for President Trump because you never wanted intervention in the Middle East, because you wanted to let Iran do whatever it wants because this, that, or the other thing, you just weren't listening to Trump.
Okay, they were clear.
And anyone who's trying to drive division in this administration, I don't like it.
I don't like it.
People have very selfish reasons for doing that, but it is not conducive to political flourishing.
Okay.
The president and the vice president, both on the campaign trail and apparently in the Oval Office, are in lockstep, along with the Secretary of State, along with the rest of the cabinet.
People who want to drive division in the most unified and effective Republican presidential administration that I've seen, I don't like that one little bit.
But getting back to the neocons and the intra-conservative movement fights, there's an amazing situation unfolding in which one of the founders of the current version of neoconservatism, one of the great proponents of intervention and war in the Middle East, is now coming out questioning some of the Iran strike and arguing that we really got dragged into war by the state of Israel.
We'll get to that momentarily.
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Israel Alliance Stakes00:07:07
A little noticed conversation occurred yesterday or the day before on The Bulwark, which is that's Bill Crystal's outlet.
Very few people watch it.
But this little clip was illustrative.
Bill Crystal, formerly one of the grand poobahs of the conservative movement, and then he became a liberal because he got radicalized by Trump.
And then he supported Kamala and Joe Biden, and he's abandoned every principle that he ever had beforehand.
He was interviewing Bob Kagan.
Now, Robert Kagan is a foreign policy expert.
He was one of the co-founders with Bill Crystal of Project for a New American Century, which had a lot of influence on foreign policy in the late 90s and the 2000s.
A lot of influence over the Bush administration.
There were a lot of George W. Bush personnel who were signed on to Project for a New American Century, advocated regime change in Iraq long before 9-11.
So Bob Kagan has neoconservative bona fides second to none.
And he's a serious scholar and he's a serious thinker.
Bob Kagan just came out and suggested, not even suggest, kind of laughed about the fact that our alliance with Israel is one of, if not the main reason that we went to war in Iran.
I must say I find it a little bit, it's kind of a syllogism when people talk about what a great ally Israel is.
It is a great ally in defense of Israel.
Which is fine.
I mean, they're entitled to put that first.
No, no, no, right.
That's their great concern.
And look, I mean, let's face it, at the end of the day, Iran is a much greater threat to Israel than it is to the United States.
So when they say that people, when people say that Israel is a great ally in the fight against Iran, It's kind of like saying that South Vietnam was a great ally in the fight against North Vietnam.
You know, I mean, it was, but weren't we there to defend South Vietnam?
You know, so I love this conversation because you can tell Bill Crystal doesn't quite know what to make of it.
But Bob Kagan's great.
And actually, Bob Kagan's father was a professor of mine, truly a giant among historians, Donald Kagan, the historian of ancient Greece.
However, all of this to say, the real political import of this conversation, when you have two of the most prominent neoconservatives in the United States, not quite the OGs, because neoconservatism started in the middle of the 20th century, but the OGs of the second wave, founders of Project for a New American Century, having a conversation about how Israel is only a great ally in as much as it helps Israel.
Bob Kagan mocking this notion.
People who cannot be criticized as anti-Semitic or anything like that, both of them definitely members of the ancient nomadic tribe.
This is a five-alarm fire for the state of Israel.
This is a five-alarm fire for Benjamin Netanyahu.
So much.
Israel has so come to dominate much of the online discourse about the right.
I don't think at the matter, at the level of actual ordinary voters, I don't think it actually matters that much.
But from the commentariat, especially some of the podcast class, which has become deranged over the question of Israel, it's really come to dominate.
And the American right previously was almost wholly supportive of the state of Israel.
That has really weakened over the past several years to the point that many are now asking, well, what is the benefit of the alliance with Israel?
You say, well, Israel is a great ally in the Middle East.
And you have someone like Bob Kagan who's laughing and saying, yes, South Vietnam was a great ally in the fight against North Vietnam.
But the whole reason that we were in there fighting North Vietnam was for South Vietnam and because of what South Vietnam represented for American interests.
So I'm not saying there are no American interests here, but what this means is the state of Israel needs to make the case.
Netanyahu and defenders of the state of Israel and people who are not deranged by Israel on one side or the other because they hate it so much, they think it's the worst thing ever, or because they're fanatically in favor of the Israeli government.
Regardless, people who just kind of have a more balanced view of Israel and who think that it's good for America to be allied with Israel, they need to make the case that the alliance with the state of Israel benefits America because there is a growing sense on the right, including among neoconservatives, that the Israeli alliance really chiefly benefits Israel.
So you have to make that case to American conservatives because also the state of Israel has already lost the American left.
Part of the reason that I find the anti-Israel activism so distasteful, part of the reason I'm just kind of repulsed by it is because it's so left-coated.
You know, regardless of my feelings on the complexity of the Middle East.
I'm just, I'm not going to go march around with Greta Thunberg and a Kefia.
It's just not my bag, man.
No thanks.
I don't want that.
So the state of Israel already lost the left.
If the state of Israel loses the American right, they're in a real big problem because the state of Israel relies, really, I think we would say existentially, on the power of the United States and on the American empire.
So they have to make this case.
It's not enough to dismiss it anymore.
Now, who knows?
I mean, I guess this is part of the risk even of the Iran operation, which is if the Iran operation really works and you get Iran for the first time in 50 years to be relatively pro-Western and not be committed to the utter destruction of the state of Israel and the genocide of everyone there.
Maybe all those issues in the Middle East, maybe they abate.
Maybe they decline in severity or not.
Maybe it all gets worse.
I mean, some of it will just depend on tactics on the ground every single day.
There's some audio that just came out from a top aide to the former Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, the heterosexual one, not the homosexual one, who's speaking to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
And this was obtained by the Telegraph.
Here's what he says.
God's will was that Moshtaba had to go out to the yard to do something and then return.
He was outside and was heading upstairs when they struck the building with a missile.
That was it.
Okay, that's it.
That's all we got.
He was outside.
It doesn't make you think.
You say, hold on.
Was the homosexual Mushtaba, was he the one who ratted out his dad and everyone else?
Was he just happened to not be in the room when the missile struck?
But probably not.
It was probably just a quirk, a quirk of history that that missile, that Israeli missile, could have taken out all of them, including the guy who's now the supreme leader.
But it didn't.
From Good Men to Bad00:04:35
And now we need to figure out who the next leader is going to be.
High stakes.
High stakes for everybody.
High stakes for the state of Israel.
High stakes for the United States.
High stakes for the Trump legacy in 2026 and 2028.
About as high as the stakes could possibly be.
Okay.
Now, speaking of persuasion, the administration needs to persuade, the state of Israel needs to persuade.
One of the most persuasive science writers of the 20th century, who in effect was one of the most evil men of the 20th century, he just died and most people don't even know his name.
We will get to that momentarily.
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Now, we turn from good men like Pavel to bad men.
I know Niel Nisi Bonham, we're not supposed to say anything but good about people who have just died.
And we can pray for this guy who just died because, you know, even the very worst people at a deep level don't know the error of their ways because we're born into the twin darkness of ignorance and sin.
However, this guy left a wake of death and destruction and catastrophe in his wake, and most people don't know his name.
His name is Paul Ehrlich.
Here we have the New York Times obit for this guy.
Evil Policies and Population00:11:08
I write about Paul Ehrlich in some length in my book, Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
Paul Ehrlich, thank you.
Paul Ehrlich, who alarmed the world with the population bomb, dies at 93.
His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement.
But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.
Here we go.
Big lie, 10,000 Pinocchios from the New York Times.
His predictions proved premature.
What were his predictions?
His prediction was that if the population grew anymore, you would have widespread famine because the earth could not sustain all those people.
And therefore, his prescriptions were that we had to stop having kids.
We had to sterilize people.
We had to use the government to reduce the population.
The policies that this led to were the one child policy in China, forced sterilizations in India.
This guy, this guy is not single-handedly, but pretty close responsible for the population depopulation crisis that we face today.
And they said his predictions proved premature.
Since he made his prediction that inevitably at this point we would face mass starvation because the population was growing too much, since that time, the world population has doubled and global malnutrition has cut in half.
There are twice as many people as when he made his prediction, and we are fatter than ever.
It's not that his predictions prove premature.
They were completely wrong.
His predictions were totally wrong.
The New York Times is lying in its obituary to cover for this guy who did more evil than almost anybody in the 20th century.
And the consequences of his stupid predictions and his prescriptions, because he prescribed policy to governments, was mass evil.
The consequences of this led to mass death, sterilization, the violation of basic rights, and he never let up on it.
Here is Paul Ehrlich in the 70s discussing the problem as he saw it.
First thing the government should do is try and take the pressure off to reproduce.
Young couples, if they don't have children, people say, gee, they must be thorough.
They never say, gee, maybe they like good wine and going to the theater and so on.
They prefer that to scraping diapers.
So there's pressure to have children.
So the first thing that should happen is that the president ought to say, from now, here on out, no intelligent, patriotic American family ought to have more than two children, preferably one.
You could move to giving women bonuses for not having babies.
That almost certainly would do the job.
If that didn't have the effect, then you could move to changing the tax structure so that people who had the money and had the children paid for the children.
In other words, you would increase taxes on people with children rather than decrease them since when they have their children, they require more services.
If that doesn't work, then you'll have the government legislating the size of the family.
And people say, oh, that's impossible.
Government can never intrude and tell you how many children to have.
Well, I got news.
You know, it intruded a long time ago and told you how many wives you can have.
And there's not the slightest question that if we don't get the population under control with voluntary means, that in the not too distant future, the government will simply tell you how many children you can have and throw you in jail if you have too many.
So God tells you in the book of Genesis, be fruitful and multiply.
This Antichrist figure comes out in the 1970s and he says, do not have children.
It's unpatriotic to have children.
It's funny because patriotism comes from the word pater.
It's an extension of filial piety.
It's an extension of the family.
And he's saying that the pro-family thing to do is to destroy your family.
He says, first, we're going to incentivize people.
We're going to encourage them by discouraging them.
We're going to say, you know, having kids is bad.
You should just drink good wine instead.
All these kind of liberal arguments today.
Oh, just don't you want to go to brunch?
Don't you want to travel and have experiences?
Don't have kids.
And if that doesn't work, you know what we're going to do?
We're going to pay people not to have kids.
We're going to give women bonuses.
We're going to subsidize feminism.
I'm going to say, instead of having kids and a nice family, if you just go work at the widget factory for Dr. McGillicuddy and you do spreadsheets, we're going to give you some money.
Don't have kids.
Sell your kids for money, money, money.
Oh, that's not going to work.
All right.
We tried to bribe you with booze and entertainment and money.
Okay, I'll tell you what, now we're going to punish you.
Forget about the carrot.
Now we're going to use the stick.
If you have kids, we're going to tax you.
We're going to make you pay more money to have kids for the license to have a kid.
Oh, and you know what?
If that doesn't work, we're just going to stop you from having kids.
And what does that mean?
Well, what that means in practice, because China put this guy's policy into effect, what this means is a campaign of forced infanticide.
The one-child policy led to forced abortion.
So the government would just come in and kill your kid.
You want to keep your kid?
Mama wants to keep.
No, please let me keep my kid.
No, government's going to come in and kill your kid.
That's what that guy advocated.
It's going to lead to policies like we saw in India, where India would go to starving people and say the only way that we're going to give you coupons for food and water and electricity is if you sterilize yourself.
That happened because of that guy, because of that guy's book and that guy's ideas.
He said in the population bomb, in the book that kicked it off, the battle to feed all of humanity is over in the 1970s and 80s.
Hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon.
Now at this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.
Totally wrong, could not have possibly been more wrong.
We must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods failed.
He didn't just misspeak on that talk show.
This was his thesis.
He described population growth as a cancer, the cancer of population growth, which must be cut out.
Population growth is just a euphemism.
Population growth refers to more people.
So if more people is a cancer, then people are the tumor.
Human beings are a disease.
The left has held on to that view for a very, very long time.
And this is where the truly wicked origins of leftism, which endeavors to invert reality and began during the French Revolution as an assault on the church.
This is where the real satanic, Luciferian character of liberalism really begins to show itself.
One of the fruits of liberalism is the view that human beings are a disease that must be cured, that must be eradicated from the earth.
And now this guy's eradicated from the earth.
And it's sad, you know, every man's death diminishes me because I'm a human.
You know, no man's an island unto himself.
So we should pray for this guy.
We should really pray for this guy because he led a very, very evil life.
And so we should really, really pray for him.
In many ways, he probably didn't know what he did.
Christ on the cross says, you know, Lord, forgive them, forgive them.
They know not what they do.
That's how we have to think about him.
But we can't just think about him.
We have to focus on the institutions.
This guy, Paul Ehrlich, got everything wrong.
His chief thesis was not only a little off, it was perfectly wrong.
He never paid a price for it.
He continued to have great academic jobs.
He continued to win awards.
His policies were implemented by governments around the world, led to the deaths of millions of people.
It led to millions of people not being born and led to the deaths of millions of people.
That guy, he never paid a price for it at all.
The institutions backed him up.
And now one of the chief cultural institutions, the New York Times, is continuing to lie on his behalf, continuing to carry water for him.
To say these guys, this guy's anti-Christ policies.
I mean, I don't usually use really, really extreme provocative rhetoric.
I don't know how else you describe this.
This guy's profoundly evil policies were just a little premature.
A little premature.
They were totally wrong.
Really bad stuff.
And, you know, a reminder too, on this point of Lord, forgive them.
They know not what they do.
This is a point I was discussing with a friend of mine just yesterday.
He said, have you mentioned this publicly?
And I said, I actually haven't, but maybe I should.
Right now, at every level of the political order, things feel precarious.
Feels like things are just getting really, really tough.
The stakes are being raised by the administration, the war in Iran.
You've got wedges being driven within the administration.
You've got the apparent collapse of the conservative movement because of the podcast wars and because of all sorts of infighting.
You have genuinely just malicious, terrible things flying all around in the culture.
This, with more terrorist attacks, with, you know, just all sorts of, it just seems like it's getting a little rougher, doesn't it?
Seems like there's more injustice.
It feels, I don't know, the last month or so has felt that way to me at least.
And I think probably to you too.
And I explained it to someone, I thought it was common sense, but he didn't really think of it that way.
It's Lent.
It's Lent.
And for the Christians in the audience, you're probably going to get this immediately.
For people who are not really that religious, you're going to think I'm crazy for saying this.
But I have noticed this.
Pretty much every year during Lent, which is the period in which we walk with our Lord in the desert where he's tempted by the devil, where the devil really has apparently free reign.
During this time of Lent, spiritual attacks increase dramatically.
Temptations increase dramatically.
Rancor, strife increases dramatically.
I've seen it year after year after year.
And then after Easter, things all kind of go back to normal.
I'm not saying this as soft soap or wishful thinking so that you say, oh, the present troubles, they'll just magically disappear, you know, in a couple of weeks.
I'm not saying it for that reason.
What I'm saying is, if you believe that spiritual realities are real, if you believe that there is a meaning to history, that there is a rhythm to the liturgical calendar, it is no surprise that everything seems to be falling apart right now.
Everything seemed to be falling apart in the desert.
Everything seemed to be falling apart at Calvary when Christ was crucified.
Everything seemed to be falling apart.
Our Lord said, Oh, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
And when he also says, Lord, forgive these people, they know not what they do.
And for me, with a Christian view of the world, especially with the Catholic view of the world, which is rich in symbolism, which is a very semiotic view, I can't help but notice that it's very fitting that all of this anxiety, all of this angst comes up during Lent.
And maybe, not through any accomplishment of our own, maybe through the grace of God, it will soon dissipate too.
Maybe the passion will give way to Easter.
Okay.
Cuba Policy and Disabilities00:10:18
Speaking of malnutrition, I want to get to President Trump bragging about the future conquest of Cuba.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Aunt Dello, 5286, who says, good show today, Michael.
On a personal note, I woke up around 28, 28 years old.
I'm so glad I met my hubby and had my two boys.
Oh, yeah, I think that's in response to this, you know, women regret having kids nonsense in New York magazine.
Yeah, I feel for some of my friends because it's a major problem for, especially for millennial women who were lied to their whole lives and who were therefore trained in habits and tastes and desires that are not conducive to their happiness.
And then usually around 30 or mid-30s, it kind of hits them that this is bad.
And that culture has created a situation where it's actually very hard then to go meet a husband, have kids, start a family, because the culture is just trained on all these perverse incentives.
So anyway, I'm glad you woke up from feminism and hope other people do.
Hope it can work out.
Okay.
Forget about Iran.
President Trump is now looking ahead to Cuba.
You know, all my life I've been hearing about the United States and Cuba.
When will the United States do it?
I do believe I'll be the honor of having the honor of taking Cuba.
That'd be good.
That's a big honor.
Taking Cuba.
Taking Cuba in some form, yeah.
Taking Cuba.
I mean, whether I free it, take it, I think I could do anything I want with it.
You want to know the truth?
They're a very weakened nation right now.
They were for a long time.
Very violent, very violent leaders.
Castro was a very violent leader.
His brothers are a very violent leader.
Extremely violent.
That's how they governed.
They governed with violence.
But a lot of people would like to go back.
It will be my honor to take over Cuba.
People are playing this and they're saying he's gone mad.
The king has gone mad.
Now he's just hopping around the globe, gobbling up whatever he can.
The king has gone mad.
Notice what he's saying.
As always, you have to listen to what Trump is really saying, not just go by your gut reaction to some clip you saw on Twitter.
He's saying, it will be my honor to be the one to take Cuba.
In other words, some president was going to take Cuba at some point.
This has been the policy of the United States.
I was going to say since Eisenhower, really, it goes back even to the very earliest part of the 20th century.
We've already controlled Cuba three times.
And then we had a regime in there that was basically fine.
And then it started to go south.
And Eisenhower planned the Bay of Pigs invasion to stop the Cuban revolution.
And it flopped.
And so then Kennedy was stuck in the Cuban missile crisis.
And he levied an embargo on Cuba.
And we'd been trying to get rid of Cuba's leader, Fidel Castro, for many decades.
And then Raul Castro, his brother.
And now there's this new guy, Medel Diaz-Canal, who no one really cares about.
After President Trump's well-executed strike on Venezuela, Cuba's being sort of choked off.
And now finally, what you're seeing is not Trump saying, ha ha, give me Cuba.
That's mine.
Mine, mine, mine.
What Trump is saying is, oh, well, some U.S. president was going to take Cuba.
And I'm honored that I guess I'm going to be the one in the Oval Office when this happens.
This is, it is not overstating it to say this is actually a statement of presidential humility.
Because he's not saying, I'm the one, you know, instituting this policy.
He's saying, oh, yeah, it looks like Cuba's pretty weak right now.
And I guess I'm going to be the one to take it.
Because that was always going to happen.
You have this country that's been hostile, that was a foothold for the Soviet Union during the Cold War, 90 miles off the coast of Florida.
That's ridiculous.
We are going to have a good relationship with Cuba.
According to reports, we are already in pretty high-level talks with the government of Cuba.
One word of caution, though, on this.
Cuba has just come out and said it is open to economic investment from Cubans abroad.
So this is they're pitching this as similar to the perestroika policy in the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War.
You know, we're going to start to open up a little bit economically, and that will stabilize the regime.
Now, what happened in the Soviet Union, the way it was carried out under Gorbachev, is it totally destroyed the regime, and it was over very quickly.
But in Cuba, from what I am reading, the actual policy is they're asking Cubans abroad to give them money to invest in the island and that's it.
Well, hold on, hold on.
That's not going to work.
They're very desperate.
Cuba is starving right now.
The electrical grid is down.
They don't have any oil.
So really what they're saying is, hey, can we please have money from anyone who will give it to us?
But there's no guarantee of legal rights.
There's no guarantee of government reform.
There's no guarantee that Cuba will cooperate with the United States in the future.
So it would be a major mistake, I think, to give in to this policy right now.
I don't read that policy as an about face from the Cuban regime.
I read that policy as a last desperate gasp of the regime.
I'm sure I'm not telling the administration anything it doesn't know.
But this is not the moment to say, okay, great, we'll take it.
This is the moment to push much, much harder and get me some tobacco for the new blends of Mayflower Cigars.
Okay, before we go, one last smack from the Oval Office.
I mentioned it at the top of the show.
I can't miss it.
President Trump is hitting Gavin Newsom as unqualified for President of the United States because he has a learning disability.
That's how crazy it's gotten with a low IQ person, you know, because Gavin Newscomb has admitted that he has learning disabilities.
Honestly, I'm all for people with learning disabilities, but not for my president.
I think a president should not have learning disabilities, okay?
And I know it's highly controversial to say such a horrible thing.
The president of the United States, Gavin Newscomb, admitted that he has learning disabilities, dyslexia.
Everything about him is dumb.
But then he looked at the audience and said, but I'm smarter than you or something like that that was pretty silly.
So now on top of everything else, I call him a racist because it happened to be a black audience.
I will tell you this.
I think it was the worst interview I've ever seen of any human being in my life.
I love him.
I love him.
Trump, not Newsom.
He goes, he says, look, he just keeps going deeper.
He goes, look, Newsom, he said he has a learning disability.
So he can't be president.
He has low IQ.
I'm for people with learning disabilities, but he can't be president.
And he said, well, hold on.
We have friends who are dyslexic or this or that, have learning disabilities, reading disabilities.
I'm for people with learning disabilities, not for president, okay?
He's dumb.
And then I know I can't say it, but he's dumb.
He's racist too, because he said he's dumb, but he's smarter than blacks.
But anyway, and it got me thinking.
One, does Newsom actually have dyslexia?
This is a new disability.
We didn't know about this one before.
He just kind of came up with this one.
And it was actually because Ted Cruz called him historically illiterate.
And he said, how dare you call me historically illiterate?
I have dyslexia.
He said, well, now, not only are you historically illiterate, you're semantically illiterate because you don't even know what Cruz was saying about you.
He wasn't saying you can't read.
He was saying you don't know history.
But regardless, he said, wait, you have dyslexia?
Oh, I have to have dyslexia my whole life.
It was kind of like Joe Biden's speech impediment.
Remember that Joe Biden had a stutter?
Joe Biden's been in the Senate since the 70s.
He's been in national public life for 50 years.
And then only five minutes ago do we learn that he had this disability.
Came out of nowhere, but apparently they just tried to gaslight us and pretend that he had this his whole life.
And it was kind of like that.
So then you go back through Gavin Newsom's old pictures, and it's pictures of him reading books, big stack of books, him reading books.
But he said he can't, he actually can't read because he's dyslexic.
He never reads the speech, but he's a big reader of books.
And so I don't know if I believe him at all.
But regardless, even if this is totally made up, which knowing Gavin Newsom, it probably is, he picked a bad disability.
The reason it was clever for him to claim a disability, like Joe Biden did, is because he's a white guy.
He's a handsome white guy.
And so, according to the Democrats, he's the scum of the earth.
He's so privileged.
He doesn't have any victim points.
So the only way for him to make himself a victim is to pretend to be gay, which is tough because he's actually been married multiple times and both of his wives were quite beautiful.
So I don't think he's going to convince people that he's gay.
Or he can say he has some disability that you can't really see.
But whereas Joe Biden picked a stutter, which was really just a way to cover up for his dementia, but he picked a stutter, which is a clever disability to pick, because stutters can make you sound kind of dumb, but it doesn't mean that you're dumb.
It can make you sound a little bit slow, but it doesn't mean that you have trouble processing information.
The one that Gavin Newsom picked actually does undercut his ability to do the job.
Not because it means if you're dyslexic, it doesn't mean that you have a low IQ.
doesn't necessarily mean that you're dumb, but it does mean that you will have far greater difficulty processing information.
You do have to read if you're president.
That is one of the job requirements.
There aren't that many job requirements, but that's one of them.
And so he picked this disability, which he was probably faking, that actually undercuts his argument to be president.
And that's what Trump was exploiting there.
Like, look, it's one thing if you got a little bit of a limp or you got to stutter or something, but this guy says he can't read.
I like presidents who read.
Okay.
I like presidents who are literate.
Okay.
Much, much more to get to.
I want to get to the Vatican warning against plastic surgery, but it's TE Tuesday.