Ep. 1934 - The Secret To Kim Jong Un's Nail-Biter Election In North Korea
Michael Knowles analyzes Virginia's 98th district election results and the Iran war, noting 89% MAGA support versus lower independent approval. He critiques Greta Thunberg's protests against Trump's Cuba oil policy and discusses the failed Save America Act. The host examines Ali Khamenei's death, contrasting Kantian deontology with Aristotelian virtue ethics to argue true political prudence lies in character cultivation. Finally, Knowles addresses Pete Sessions' comments on 2,500 Marines, asserting their deployment constitutes ground presence essential for protecting oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz and securing Trump's midterm legacy. [Automatically generated summary]
Major updates on the war in Iran, important poll numbers and a significant escalation involving ground troops.
The Save America Act is being advanced in the Senate, sort of.
It's actually kind of a fake out.
Environmental activist Greta Thunberg is upset that President Trump is not burning enough oil.
I want to make sure I read that correctly.
Is that what great is angry?
Trump is not burning oil.
Okay.
A lot of people didn't see that one coming, though I did.
An election last night in Virginia throws the midterms into chaos.
There's a lot to get to.
But first, the biggest election news.
Kim Jong-un has officially been re-elected dictator of North Korea with 99.93% of the vote.
By North Korean standards, the election was a real nail biter, but the final results did come in with last-minute mail-in ballots in Georgia and Wisconsin reportedly pushing Kim over the finish line.
I'm Michael Knowles.
is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Greta Thunberg, Saint Greta of the Blessed Sailboat, who began her activist career by skipping school and sailing her boat across the ocean to protest the use of oil is now back protesting the fact that Trump won't let Cubans use oil.
How is this possible?
How could that, is it perhaps the case that Greta is not who she told us she is?
I have a long history with Greta Thunberg going back many years.
We will get into it first.
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Folks, first off the top, I want to thank everybody for the happy birthday wishes.
It's very kind.
I am now officially an old man.
I said last year to my father, I said, I'm 35 this year, which means according to King David and Dante, I am halfway through my life's journey.
I'm middle-aged.
And my father said, no, no, no, you're not middle-aged at 35.
You're only middle-aged when you turn 36.
So now I'm middle-aged.
And as a gift to you, for my birthday, you get a gift on my birthday.
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We won't cover too extensively the North Korean dictator election that Kim Jong-un with just a 0.07% shy of 100% of the vote.
However, it's worth pointing out that democracy is so dominant around the world.
It has, over the last, I guess, what, 300 years, 400 years, it has so established itself as the only legitimate form of government that even the most totalitarian dictatorships on earth have to pretend to be democracies.
From the standpoint of history, that's pretty weird.
There are, I know it's a heresy to say in today's day and age, but there are other legitimate forms of government.
There is such a thing as a good monarchy.
There is such a thing even as a good aristocracy.
And there can be good democracies.
Although I'm with St. Thomas Aquinas, that the ideal regime is a mixed regime.
I'll be talking about that a little bit tomorrow because I'm going to be speaking at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast.
So if you're in Washington, D.C., hopefully I'll see you there.
But today, we're told that the only legitimate form of government is democracy.
It's funny because our founding fathers, who gave us a substantially Democrat government, Democratic government, in the Federalist Papers, the only references they make to democracy are negative.
There are warnings about democracy.
But in any case, it shows you, man, when even Kim Jong-un has to pretend to be democratically elected, democracy won.
And I don't know which election result was less believable, those post-1 a.m. ballots in Georgia back in 2020 or the results coming out of North Korea.
Speaking of elections, big, big news out of Virginia last night.
The Republicans gave a big, big upset in a special election.
Now, this is not a presidential election.
It's not gubernatorial.
It's not Senate or the House of Representatives.
This is the Virginia legislature, the Virginia House of Delegates.
It was the 98th district special election between Cheryl Smith, the Democrat, and Andrew Rice.
Now, the Republican was always going to win.
Andrew Rice was always going to win.
But the district is an R plus 10 district.
So substantially Republican, but Rice did not win by 10 points.
Rice won by 15 points.
The final tally was 62.5 to 37.5.
It narrowed there at the very end for much of last night.
It was really more like 64.5 to 35.5.
But in any case, that's a good result.
A 15-point result.
Republicans ran way ahead in this special election.
Republicans were very nervous after the gubernatorial election in Virginia, the Momdani result in New York.
We're told that, you know, historically speaking and looking at some of the polls, the midterms are supposed to be a blowout for Republicans.
I sat down with Speaker Mike Johnson at President Trump's club at Dural, Florida, a week or two ago.
And Speaker Johnson said, I don't think we're going to lose the midterms.
I think we're going to defy the historical trend.
And I think that we're actually going to expand the majority.
And I said, okay, well, look, I have a lot of respect for Speaker Johnson.
Part of his job is to rally the troops, obviously, for the midterms.
I said, I don't know if I buy that.
I don't know.
That's really, you're going against history here.
This is the first hard sign that we are getting out of the only poll that matters, which is at the ballot box, that Republicans might not be in such bad shape as we thought we were.
If you listen to the podcasts, you know, I've been, I've been really going hard on the podcasters the last couple of weeks.
I know that's not popular and not a popular view, but I don't care.
I'm here to tell you that it's the least popular view, which is how you know I'm right.
But if you listen to the podcasters, you only look on social media, you would believe that Republicans are completely screwed.
We're never going to win another election again.
You would believe that Trump is sunk.
His base hates him.
It's all over.
The war in Iran was the greatest blunder of any president in recent memory.
That's what you would believe if you were listening to not just the media, not just the liberal media, but even the conservative media ecosystem.
And yet, when you look at the poll numbers, that's not quite right.
Here's a poll from no less an outfit, no less a liberal outfit than CNN.
Okay, MAGA GOP on the U.S. military action Iran.
Look at this.
Nearly nine in 10, 89% approve of the U.S. military action in Iran.
That is the MAGA GOP base.
Just 9% disapprove of it.
This is tremendously popular among the Republican base.
And of course, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, overseeing the effort.
It seems to me that a lot of people are taking that into account, including President Donald Trump, who has been smiling an awful lot at Marco Rubio lately.
Okay, so it's funny.
They get in there at the end of this little horse race thing about 2028.
I have noticed a pretty big op, a pretty big concerted effort to drive a wedge in the Trump administration.
Don't forget, Trump has already basically endorsed JD Vance.
Rubio has already endorsed JD Vance for president.
But there's this op to try to drive a wedge in the administration.
And I think that the clearest way people are going to try to drive the wedge is to try to split JD and Rubio because that's really the only way to cause division in the Republican primary.
Trump has said he wants J.D. and Rubio to run as a ticket.
So I think the people who don't want another Republican presidency, they're going to say, well, let's try to split Rubio and JD.
Regardless of they also hate JD Vance because they think he's too conservative.
But regardless, it wouldn't really matter who the personalities were.
They just want to create some division because the administration seems too unified right now.
But let's just go to the poll numbers.
Let's just go to the data.
89%, 89% of MAGA GOP supports the war in Iran.
That was a surprising number to me.
I'm not surprised that most of the Republican base supports the war in Iran.
I told you, as someone who is skeptical of intervention in Iran, who had I been on the NSC, I would have made arguments against it, but who ultimately says, look, Trump has the greatest record on foreign policy of my lifetime.
And so I'm going to trust him on it, at least for a bit.
At least while Trump says it's going to take five weeks, I'm going to trust him on that.
I'll start worrying in week six, maybe.
But for right now, I think, yeah, basically he's done a good job.
He's been running on this for a long time.
Iran's been a thorn in our side for many decades, so on and so forth.
So I don't really want to go to war in Iran, but I kind of trust Trump.
I think that's where most actual Republicans are.
That might not be where most tweeters are, but don't forget Twitter represents a small fraction of the United States.
The reason it gets so much outsize influence is for the same reason that Jon Stewart's Daily Show got so much outsize influence.
Very few people watched Jon Stewart's daily show 20 years ago, but all of the journalists watched it.
All the politicos watched it.
And so it seems to have an outsize influence.
Same thing goes for Twitter.
If you just listen to the podcasts and looking at Twitter, the Iran debacle is the least popular thing in the world.
It's a catastrophe.
But if you look at the polls, the Iran intervention is overwhelmingly popular.
Now, there's a little wrinkle in all of this.
And the key is that CNN in this poll is citing the MAGA GOP.
What does the MAGA GOP mean?
Before we start popping champagne over the great success of Iran, there are some warning signs.
We'll get to the warning signs that few people are talking about.
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So great.
CNN says 89% of the MAGA GOP supports the war in Iran.
What is the MAGA GOP?
Notice it doesn't say 89% of the GOP.
Doesn't say 89% of conservatives.
Doesn't say 89% of likely Republican voters.
89% of MAGA GOP.
That is a subsection of the GOP and of the conservative movement.
Let's dig in a little deeper.
Sean Cooperman Research conducted a poll.
Now, this is a poll on behalf of the Israel on Campus Coalition.
The Israel on Campus Coalition presumably is pretty in favor of strikes on Iran, would have to be my guess.
I don't know much about the organization, but I don't think it takes a political genius to infer that.
Nevertheless, that poll finds 44% support the U.S.-Israeli military operation, 41% oppose.
So the electorate is almost perfectly split, though it still favors it.
Republicans are supportive, but it's not 89% of Republicans.
It's a little bit lower.
It's 82% of Republicans.
82% of Republicans support it.
Only 32% of independents support it.
17% of Democrats support it.
So yeah, the Republicans are still overwhelmingly in favor of the Iran intervention, but it's lower than just the whole MAGA GOP.
And don't forget, the Trump coalition is not the MAGA GOP.
So I think with some of these polls, some of these headlines want you to believe is that the MAGA GOP is the group that elected Trump.
That's not really true.
The MAGA GOP is a subsection of one of the two political parties in the country.
So it's a minority of voters.
The Trump coalition is the hardcore MAGA base, the America First base, the moderate Republicans who came over to Trump, the disaffected Democrats, the blue-collar Dems, the Maha Moms, the Independents who don't really have rhyme or reason to their voting.
That's the whole coalition.
And so if you're President Trump and you're looking ahead to the midterms, if you're JD Vance or Marco Rubio and you're looking ahead to 2028, 89% of the MAGA GOP isn't enough because MAGA, the actual MAGA coalition is way, way bigger than that group of people.
And 32% of independents, if 32% of independents support you, you're not winning.
17% of Democrats, you're supposed to pry some of those Democrats away.
Aren't you going to try that?
Now, I think what this is really all going to hinge on is whether or not Iran works.
That's what I've said.
All these people who said war is terrible and we should never go to war and they make it all about this pacifist ideology.
Or the people who say, you know, we must go bomb the Ayatollah.
He's a super duper Nazi double Hitler, and we need to spread liberal democracy all around the world.
Those people, neither of those groups are to be taken seriously.
They're both ridiculous.
We're talking about practically here.
Reasonable people, I think, must conclude it would be good to make the Iranian regime pro-Western.
That's something the United States has wanted since at least 1953.
And it's hard to make the Iranian regime pro-Western.
We've tried it before, going all the way back to 1953, and it doesn't always work.
And regime change generally is very hard.
And so there are some real risks.
And the question is, what is the threat that Iran poses?
Why is it that we want to depose Iran?
How great is that risk?
How imminent is that risk?
And two, how effective will we be in the regime change and how efficient?
That's where the debate is.
It's all practical.
It's all prudential.
Making Iran Pro-Western Again00:16:00
Right now, according to Rasmussen, 61% of people think that the war is successful so far.
29% think it is unsuccessful.
So even here, the Trump administration is winning, but it ain't 89%.
And don't forget, wars tend to be more popular at the beginning than they are at the end.
Wars don't become more popular over time.
Wars become less popular over time.
This is one of the warning signs about the intervention in Iran is that the Iran war is the least popular war at launch that we've ever had in American history.
World War II had 97% support when we got involved, probably because Japan and Germany both declared war on us and Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
But even Libya, even Barack Obama's completely bungled intervention into Libya was actually more popular at launch than the Iran war is at launch.
So the devil's in the detail on these numbers.
And as I've been saying for weeks now, there is so much propaganda flying around in wartime.
Not that you can always believe what you read on Twitter to begin with, but at this point, it's just all war propaganda.
That's true of other social media as well.
You even see that in some of the polls.
You really, really have to dig in.
Meanwhile, you have a YouGov poll, then I promise I'll be done with the polls because, you know, the only poll that matters is Election Day, but this stuff could affect Election Day.
There's a YouGov poll that just come out, has just come out that shows that support is dropping.
Well, of course, that's what always happens during war.
But the real worry here is that support is seriously dropping among independents.
So among U.S. adults this week, 36% strongly or somewhat approve, 56% strongly or somewhat disapprove.
So those numbers are moving in the wrong direction from last week when 39% of U.S. adults said they approve, 52% said they disapprove.
Now, Democrats, 92% disapprove.
Those numbers have not changed at all.
For Republicans, the approvals has ticked down just a little bit, 83 to 81, but it's still pretty close.
Disapproval has only gone up by one point.
Actually, no opinion has gone up by 1.2.
But it's the independents.
The independents here, 53% disapproved last week, 63% disapproved this week.
That's the fear.
And so, look, I'm not telling the White House anything it doesn't know.
What I'm observing is whether or not this is a success depends on how efficiently it can be conducted.
If this goes well, this will be the greatest foreign policy victory since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
You already have other political indications that the midterms are not going to be as bad for Republicans as everyone is predicting.
They might actually be pretty good for Republicans.
If you come into that with a success on the Iran war, who knows?
We might actually expand the majority in the House.
Who knows?
But every hour that the war goes on, the riskier it gets.
And, you know, we can point out that the podcast class has totally lost its mind over this.
We can point out that social media is really not to be believed over this because not only have the sincere users of social media lost their mind, but it's just filled with foreign bots and op accounts, especially during times of war.
So we can point to all that stuff.
But on the ground, you look at poll after poll after poll.
We cannot hang our hats on 89% of the MAGA GOP supports this today.
That is not going to help us in the midterms.
That is not going to help us in 2028.
There's no substitute for victory.
I think Trump knows that.
But I want to remind the other Republicans.
Got to win.
Now, it's not just the podcasters that are up in arms over this.
There is one defection at the White House.
That is Joe Kent.
He was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
He's a combat veteran.
He lost his wife in the war.
His wife was a combat veteran and she was killed.
So he's a gold star husband.
He ran for Congress, unfortunately, lost that race.
So President Trump appointed him to run the National Counterterrorism Center.
He resigned yesterday over the war in Iran.
And it was a lengthy letter.
I'm not going to read the whole thing, but it was pointed.
He said, President Trump, after much reflection, I've decided to resign from my position as director.
I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.
Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.
And it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.
So there he's just placing the blame for this at Israel.
And people are going to attack him.
They're probably going to call him an anti-Semite over this.
But, you know, in Joe Kent's defense, one of the causes belly that was offered by the administration, specifically the Secretary of State, is that we got into this war because Israel forced our hand.
That was one of the arguments.
That's not the whole story, but that is one of the arguments.
The official story, I think, even today is that Israel was going to attack Iran.
It was going to do so unilaterally.
We had strong intelligence that if Israel attacked Iran, which it said it was going to do, that Iran would attack American interests and our casualties would be much higher than if we just joined on the first attack and preempted them.
That isn't conspiracy theory.
That isn't reading between the lines.
That is the verbatim, explicit argument made by the administration.
So Joe Kent has a reason to say, look, I think it was basically just Israel that pressured us into this.
Now, the problem is that doesn't tell the whole story because one, I'm not sure that that causes belly that was offered wasn't also strategic to kind of give the administration a little domestic cover in case the war wasn't all that popular.
And two, we just know that President Trump has wanted to do this for a long time.
President Trump has been talking about attacking Iran since the 1980s.
President Trump has campaigned on this in every one of his presidential campaigns.
In fact, in 2024, the administration ran specifically on backing a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran to stop the nuclear program.
And Trump already struck Iran six months ago or whatever it was, eight months ago.
So, you know, you can't put all of the blame at Israel's feet.
Yes, it might well be the case that Israel pressured us to get into this.
Might also be the case that Saudi Arabia was pressuring us to attack Iran.
But regardless, this has been a pretty high-level priority for a U.S. grand strategy, at least since 1979.
And really, if you count the CIA coup in 53, 26 years earlier than that.
So regardless, Joe Kent is out.
Now, you know, when people leave, when people are seen to diss Trump, Trump does not react well.
I think this letter, all things considered, was pretty respectful.
This was not one of these, you know, Trump, you're a dirty, rotten sellout and I'm the only principled person.
It's not the kind of thing that we see from the emotionally incontinent kinds of people that you get in politics or in the political media.
I thought it was restrained and respectful.
How is Trump going to respond?
Well, he already gave his answer in the Oval Office.
Your director of national counterterrorism, Joe Kent, he just resigned today.
He said he can't support your conflict with Iran.
What's your reaction to that, and did you talk to him?
Well, I read his statement.
I always thought he was a nice guy, but I always thought he was weak on security, very weak on security.
I didn't know him well, but I thought he seemed like a pretty nice guy.
But when I read his statement, I realized that it's a good thing that he's out because he said that Iran was not a threat.
Iran was a threat.
Every country realized what a threat Iran was.
The question is whether or not they wanted to do something about it.
And many people, many of the greatest military scholars are saying for years that president should have taken out Iran because they wanted a nuclear weapon.
Okay.
By Trump standards, that was the absolute height of restraint.
And I really, really like this.
I really like this.
I hope that this is where we leave it.
And it doesn't really even have anything to do with Joe Kent.
I agree with President Trump.
He does seem like a nice guy.
I don't know Joe Kent.
I'm very grateful for his military service.
He's obviously sacrificed a lot for this country.
He has a disagreement with the administration over Iran.
I hope we just leave it at this because putting aside the personalities of Joe Kent and President Trump, putting aside even the question of whether or not we should be in Iran or how the war should be conducted now.
The left wants division within the administration.
The left wants to crack up the coalition that Trump built.
Not just the left, but our enemies abroad.
Iran, well, I guess Iran is otherwise occupied right now, but they have been trying to crack up this coalition for a long time.
Russia does want to crack up that coalition.
China wants to crack up that coalition.
Our enemies, foreign and domestic, really, really want to sow division and chaos within the administration, within the conservative media that cover the administration, that fly some air cover for the administration and that report the news, and for all the people in between.
And you saw a lot of rancor and division in the first Trump admin, and it prevented some things from getting done.
This administration has been remarkably unified.
All these big names, big egos, big intellects, multiple presidential candidates in this administration.
The fact that you could get President Trump and the vice president, JD Vance, and the Secretary of State all totally united, love that.
Then you add onto that another presidential candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, DNI.
Then you add onto that another presidential candidate, Bobby Kennedy at HHS.
Those are presidential candidates from a different party.
And you just get this unit.
And you see that unity throughout the administration.
Let's not give them what they want.
Let's, okay, we had a disagreement over this issue.
It's up to the president to direct foreign policy.
Turns out that the base is pretty behind Trump on this.
It's a risk.
We get it.
Some people, they don't, okay, that's fine.
You can leave.
That's good.
We move on.
Now, there is a big difference, I think, between the vision that people were putting on to President Trump and the reality of President Trump.
There's a big, some people, they really thought that Trump was running against all wars.
I don't know where they exactly got this.
He said he wants peace.
Ronald Reagan said he wanted peace.
Peace through strength.
People imposed on Trump.
They projected onto him this idea that he would never intervene in the Middle East.
I don't really know where they got it.
Trump ran in 2016 on going back to the Middle East to beat the hell out of ISIS.
He dropped the Moab.
He killed Suleimani.
The guy intervenes sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes.
So look, there was a chasm between this image that some people, especially disaffected Democrats, had made of Trump and the reality of Trump.
And if the chasm between those two things becomes unbearable and one or two guys need to resign, so be it.
They go their separate way.
No harm, no foul.
Thanks for the contribution.
We keep moving on.
Speaking of the difference between image and reality, Greta Thunberg, noted environmental activist, is now very, very upset.
She is protesting for people to burn more fossil fuels.
We'll get to that momentarily.
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Right now, Cuba is in talks with the United States.
After 60 plus years, almost 65 years, we might end the embargo.
We might normalize relations.
Who knows?
Cuba might become a protectorate of the United States for all we know.
It has been before.
We've controlled Cuba, I think, three times in the 20th century.
It's all, why is it happening?
Because President Trump struck Venezuela, which was the big sponsor of Cuba.
Cuba lost its big sponsor.
It lost its oil.
Now it can't power its island.
Now it's in talks.
And you would think that Greta Thunberg would be thrilled about this.
Her entire raison d'être, we're called, we're told, is that she wants to stop people from burning oil.
She wants to reduce the use of fossil fuels because you have stolen my dreams, you with your oil, your fossil fuels.
How dare you?
You're destroying the environment and you've stolen.
Now she's upset that we've stolen her oil.
Initially, she was upset that we stole her future because we burned the oil.
Now she's upset that we stole her oil because she wants President Trump to give all that oil back to Cuba so they can burn more fossil fuels.
We need to talk about what's happening in Cuba right now.
As the Trump administration is waging illegitimate wars across the world, killing countless people, it is also strangling the Cuban people deliberately, methodically, and openly.
The pedophile Trump himself bragged about it, saying there's an embargo.
There is no oil.
There's no money.
There's no anything.
He said it like it was something to be proud of, while millions of people have been plunged into darkness by rolling blackouts, while hospitals lose power, while ambulances run out of fuel, while shelves go empty.
Perfect, perfect conclusion, perfect completion of the narrative for the Greta Thunberg story.
She enters the public scene as a teenager.
She's 16, 17, truant, leaves school to sail a boat across the ocean to protest fossil fuels.
to bring awareness to climate change.
Now, of course, she had her handlers flying jets across the ocean to meet her.
So she ended up burning more fossil fuels on that stunt than she would have otherwise.
But regardless, that was it.
It was all about climate change, fossil fuel.
Cover of Time magazine.
One of the great women of the year, she goes and speaks at the World Economic Forum at the United Nations, the voice of a generation, the humanitarian leader crying out for the world to do the right thing and stop burning oil.
And now she completes this by remaking herself into the great humanitarian voice of a generation crying out to the world, demanding that we all burn more oil.
Greta Burns More Fossil Fuels00:12:41
So long as it's Cuban communists burning the oil, not American or European capitalists burning the oil.
That's very, very bad.
When American and European capitalists burn the oil, that destroys the earth.
Then we're all going to die.
But when Cuban communists burn the oil, that's very, very good.
They have special ovens or something.
I don't know.
They have special stoves.
Their engines work differently.
When they burn the oil, it actually helps the environment.
Every time a Cuban turns on his petrol vehicle, a polar bear is born in the Arctic.
Did you know that?
That's what I have to infer from Greta's apparently incoherent activism.
Except it's not really incoherent.
And I've pointed this out over the various stages of Greeta's career.
She's not an environmentalist, chiefly.
She can be incidentally or instrumentally an environmentalist, but that's not primarily what she is.
She's a leftist.
She's a leftist truant with a funny accent.
That's what Greta Thunberg is.
She's just a leftist.
She's done more to get attention than other leftists.
I think of David Hogg.
He was another teenage guy who decided to make his cause celeb gun control because it was convenient for him to do that.
So then he used that to get on CNN and to go give speeches.
And then he became the voice of a generation crying out, you know, demanding that the world take action.
But the gun control was always secondary to what he really is, which is just a leftist.
They're just leftists.
And they will just go along with whatever the current thing is.
We've already seen this with Greeta.
She started out saying we need to stop burning oil.
Then when Democrats stopped caring about climate change, I mean, Bill Gates just this past year issued a letter saying, look, I know that this was our big issue for 20 years, but it's over.
We need more energy.
So climate change, it's fine now.
We solved it.
It's fixed.
Yeah, I know we said the world was going to end in 12 years.
We said that like 11 and a half years ago.
I know.
Yeah, no, I remember Green New Deal or whatever.
Yeah.
But anyway, our business needs, our political and business needs have changed.
So climate change is solved.
Mission accomplished.
Now we're going to do other stuff.
So when that happened and Greta fell out of the headlines and she needed a new career, she decided that her new cause was going to be Palestinian liberation for some reason.
What that has to do with the environment, I don't know.
Well, I do know.
It's just all vaguely leftist.
So Greta turns in the sailboat and she puts on the kefia and she goes away from the windmills and she starts picking up Molotov cocktails.
I don't know.
I don't know what pro-Palestine activists pick up.
But regardless, that was her cause.
And so she's marching in the streets and just did the whole playbook again.
She got herself arrested.
She went on TV.
She gave speeches about a totally unrelated issue.
And now you see the perfection of this, which is not only has she engaged in an ideological digression, she's now totally contradicted the initial political claim she was making.
We need to burn less oil.
Now we need to burn more oil.
But she's just a leftist.
Not an environmentalist, not a humanitarian, just a leftist.
And that's really all these guys, all these guys.
When they come, they say, this is the most important thing.
Climate change.
Oh, gosh, I heard that for how many years?
How many decades did we hear?
Climate change is the greatest threat.
And then it was racism is the greatest threat.
That's why we need to hear, take out your environmental images on social media and put the black square on social media.
That's the greatest threat.
And then it was COVID.
COVID was the greatest threat.
Remember, we have to lock everyone down and take away their businesses and change the election rules.
By the way, what was that last part?
Huh?
Oh, no, I said we were going to shut down businesses.
No, no, no.
After that, what did you, oh, we're just going to change all the election rules.
Oh, excuse me?
What?
That was the big issue.
But then BLM wanted to go out and murder and loot and commit arson and stuff.
So then the libs said, oh, yeah, well, we need to all lock down for COVID, except for BLM, because racism actually exacerbates COVID.
Many scientists signed a letter saying that racism exacerbates COVID.
So we need to let BLM marchers go torture to terrorize cities.
But so it changes, it changes, it changes.
You could get to the point where the same people who said we need to stop burning oil are now demanding that we do burn oil to save the world.
You could get to the point where the same people saying we need Black Lives Matter riots would say we need White Lives Matter riots.
It's pretty unlikely because they hate white people.
But I say that just to point out, all of these issues are merely instrumental.
They're mere tactics for the longer-term strategy, the real objective of just bringing about leftist government, a leftist culture, a kind of culture that maximizes individual autonomy, prioritizes the will over reason, and totally inverts the civilization we once called Christendom.
That's really what it's about.
Don't be surprised that Greta is now a petrol head.
Folks, you know me, I've always loved the interactive parts of this show, the all-axis and the membrane segmentum.
Some of my colleagues, they don't like it as much, but I've always loved it, like talking to you guys, and then I can hear your ideas and steal them and pass them off as my own.
Anyway, we will now get live chat for the members, but you have to subscribe.
You got to go to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Chat live during the show.
I can take your questions.
I can talk to you.
I can steal your ideas.
Dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Okay, my favorite comment yesterday, before we get to some real policy, the Save America Act, talk about changing the voting rules.
This is the top priority.
President Trump says we're going to get it.
This is a great big issue.
85% support.
Both political parties.
By golly, this is easy.
It's a slam dunk, right?
No, the Senate doesn't want to pass it.
Now they're saying they're going to bring it up for debate.
Do not be fooled.
Devil's in the details.
But my favorite comment yesterday is from Emma Rance, 7513, who says, Michael, when you mentioned the whole notion that things get precarious during Lent, I couldn't help but realize that President Trump also mentioned the war in Iran solely taking seven weeks, just more than 40 days.
Yeah, that's true.
What do we have left?
Four or five weeks left?
Whatever the number is.
There have been a few numbers offered, but it is quite interesting.
I hadn't put that together.
The Trump, who launched this war right around the start of Lent, what, about a week into Lent?
And then if he says the war is going to take, whatever, five, six weeks, yeah, that takes us to 40 weeks, 40 days.
I've noticed that.
I've just noticed it.
This is a people are going to think I sound woo-woo or mystical, or maybe it is a little mystical, but the rancor, the strife, the difficulty, the suffering, it increases during Lent.
It just does.
Those who have eyes to see can see.
You know, it's a faith is a lens that allows you to see the world. differently.
You know, that is probably the chief way that faith sometimes feels like a superpower is you see the world, not just differently, but more clearly.
The world just makes a lot more sense when you have faith, when you don't have faith, when you find yourself out of a state of grace, the world, even more than it seems scary or, you know, I don't know, unpleasant, it just seems absurd.
Tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing, you know, it doesn't make sense.
Or a bunch of weird molecules walking around on a rock in the middle of nowhere.
That's kind of what the world feels like when you're not in faith.
When you do have faith, you can see these things.
And one of the things you see is that things get real funny during Lent.
It's true.
Speaking of funny business, the U.S. Senate has been under fire in recent weeks from President Trump and from the MAGA base because there's something called the SAVE Act.
The House has already passed the SAVE Act multiple times.
The SAVE Act was to insist upon voter ID to fix the voting rules such that if you vote, we need to know that you're eligible to vote.
Now, the Senate is considering the Save America Act, which is a version of the SAVE Act.
It's even a little bit beefier, but that's really what it comes down to.
Voter ID.
Voter ID, contrary to whatever you've heard from Democrat politicians or the liberal media, voter ID is one of the most popular issues in the country.
It enjoys 85% support among the whole electorate.
85% of people say that you should present an ID to vote.
That means not just almost all the Republicans, but the vast majority of Democrats agree with that.
And yet the Senate, made up of Democrats and Republicans, but more Republicans than Democrats, the Senate can't muster the votes to get this thing through.
So the Senate leadership said, we're just not going to deal with it.
Trump has come out and said, I will not endorse anybody.
I will not back any Republican who votes against the Save America Act.
The way, what the Senate leadership is saying is they don't have the votes to pass it because in the Senate, you need 60 votes, not just 51.
So they say, we need 60 votes.
We don't have it.
The Republican majority is too slim.
We're not going to get past the filibuster.
You could take it then to a talking filibuster.
That's like the old, you know, Mr. Smith goes to Washington kind of filibuster where, you know, a guy gets out there.
Even Ted Cruz did this famously.
He was reading Green Eggs and Ham.
Senators go out and read the phone book and they just go for ages and ages and ages to try to stop this bill from getting through.
Thun doesn't want to do that.
And they really don't want to nuke the filibuster.
So they say, sorry, we can't do it.
Now, because of the pressure from President Trump, the Senate has decided they're going to take up a vote on the Save America Act.
On this vote, the yays are 51, the nays are 48.
The motion is agreed to.
Okay, and this is being reported as great news.
And all the naive social media influencers and some of the op accounts are saying, this is great news.
Isn't this great news?
It's no, it's not.
I guess it could be event, but this in itself, this doesn't matter at all.
This bill has zero chance of passing.
Zero.
I hate to be the bearer.
Actually, I'd love to be the bearer of unpopular information.
I enjoy it.
I like that.
When everyone is saying one thing that is false and I get to say something that is true and everybody pillories me for it, I don't know.
I get a masochistic pleasure out of it.
Because I love the truth.
Okay.
And the truth here is this bill has zero, zero chance of passing.
This doesn't mean that no political good can come out of it.
But the only political good that will come out of this is that we will get the squishes on the record and so that that can help prune the Republican Party, but we will also get the Democrats on the record.
So the Democrats will vote against it.
They'll argue against it.
We can play all those clips in the midterm election.
So it might, it could serve the political purpose of helping us in the midterms.
You know what would really help us in the midterms?
Voter ID.
That's what would really help us.
Look, President Trump has deported a lot of Democrat voters over the last year, but what would really help us is the Save America Act.
It's common sense.
It is a national scandal and a disgrace that the Democrats will not support it and we can't even get enough Republicans to support it.
Disgrace.
So they're going to kill it.
Eventually, they're going to kill it.
Speaking of killing things, the effective leader of Iran, not the son of the Ayatollah, not the guy who the New York Post tells us is a little light in the slippers.
You know what I'm talking about?
Kind of kind of Iranian, sometimes takes a long walk off a short roof.
You know what I'm talking about?
I'm talking about Mojtaba Khameni, not him.
That guy's probably in a coma.
I'm talking about Ali Karijani.
Ali Karijani is the security chief of Iran who was probably running Iran effectively.
He was just killed by the state of Israel.
Now, this doesn't really matter other than to show you that tactically speaking, this war has been pretty effective.
I mean, we just keep killing everybody that is rising to the top.
Everybody who keeps getting that job, one, two, or three in the Iranian regime, not a good place to be.
Ali Karijani Is Dead00:03:00
Not the sort of job you want.
But the reason I mentioned it too is because Ali Karijani is this really interesting figure because he's a scholar of Immanuel Kant.
I mentioned this on the show a while ago, right when the Iran war kicked off.
He's a scholar of Immanuel Kant, who's one of the very prominent philosophers of modernity.
And Immanuel Kant is best known for deontological ethics, which is a duty-based moral framework, deontological ethics, usually counterposed to consequentialist ethics, the kind of ethics of people like Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill, utilitarian kind of ethics that says that the ends justifies the means, and which is really hideous and immoral way of thinking about the world.
But deontological ethics are only a little bit better because deontological ethics is duty-based.
It's this kind of modern attempt to preserve Christian morality without Christianity.
But that one's weak too.
You know, that one's really weak too.
And really, for the based conservative patriots, we are Aristotelians.
We like virtue ethics.
The belief not that morality is based on consequences and calculations of the ends justifying the means.
And neither is it the belief that morality is based on some universal moral duties that have nothing to do with the character of the person carrying them out.
But rather that morality comes from the cultivation of good habits of character from virtue, such that we cultivate the judgment and the prudence to know what is right and apply them to the particular situations, which are not so cut and dry as Kant would have us believe or as the consequentialists would have us believe.
This actually does have import to modern life because it seems to me that most of the screeching that you hear in our political discourse is really between the consequentialists and the deontological ethics guys.
It's really, it's between the Benthamites and the Millions on one side and the Kantians on the other.
But Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, who brings Aristotle up through into Christianity, they're actually right about everything.
And so the way you can tell this in political discourse is the people who seem like really, really evil, the ones who say you have to crack some eggs to make an omelet, the ones who would like kill whole populations of people to affect their political ends, the kind of the wacky, you know, trannies with guns and stuff, those tend to be the consequentialists.
The preening, moralizing, sanctimonious, just politically ineffective people, often on the right, sometimes on the left, tend to be the Kantians.
And then the normal people who are prudent, who are effective, who understand the mean between extremes as virtue.
Those are the Aristotelians.
And a Kantian is dead, and I'm not losing sleep over it.
Kantians Versus Aristotelians00:03:13
Okay.
That's my actual read.
It has nothing to do with Iran.
It really, my main read on his killing is all about modern and ancient philosophy.
There is an update, though, on the Iran war.
Do I have time to get to it?
I wish I did.
Gosh, I wish I did, but I don't.
Trump is giving an update, though.
Is the war going to end anytime soon?
Is President Trump afraid that this is going to become a forever war?
Are Marines about to land in Iran?
Okay, one bit before we go.
Look, I know we got to go.
I'm going to hand this over to Ben in a moment, but first, can we just go to Pete Sessions?
Pete Sessions, member of Congress, Republican, was just asked point blank, okay, how is the war going?
Are we going to get troops on the ground?
Remember, initially the question was, are we going to strike Iran at all?
Then it was, okay, is this going to go on for more than a few days?
Then it was okay.
Are we going to get boots on the ground?
Here's what Pete Sessions had to say on television about potential boots on the ground.
Ron, the president is moving about 2,500 Marines to the region.
Are you okay with putting those troops on the ground?
I actually spoke to some media last night, and I indicated that I believe that what these 2,500 Marines of the Marine Expeditionary Force would be would be this probably secure the island.
The island is not, in my opinion, boots on the ground in combats of purpose.
It is a territory.
It is Iran.
Well, I'm not going to argue that point.
As a matter of fact, you're right.
But what I would say is the president has chosen not to obliterate the ability to get oil.
And I think he wants to go secure that to make sure the Iranians don't do themselves in.
So I think it's probably wisdom.
Is that boots on the ground?
No, not like inside Iran where they're in the cities.
Okay, hold on, hold on.
I love political spin as much as the next guy.
And you know me, I'm a partisan and a team player.
But you're telling me you got thousands of Marines going to Iran and they're about to step onto Iranian territory, but that's not boots on the ground?
He said, that's not boots on the ground.
Well, for one thing, they're going to take their boots off before they get off the ship.
He's not, hold on.
I don't care.
I don't care if it's sneakers or if it's, come on, that's boots on the ground.
In fairness to Congressman Sessions, he's drawing a distinction between this very limited occupation of an island for the purpose of getting oil moving and, you know, 50,000 ground troops going into Tehran.
There is a difference.
I mean, in fairness to him, there is a difference between those things.
You're not going to commit a ground invasion with 2,500 Marines, that's for sure.
And frankly, the Marines might just be sailing over here as a show of force to spook the Iranian regime.
But regardless, regardless, the war is still ramping up.
It's not ramping down.
It's ramping up.
Gamble Pays Off For Now00:00:59
What are we?
We're in week three of this.
Trump said it was going to take about five weeks.
So I guess that makes sense if it's still ramping up.
Hopefully it'll ramp down soon, but it's ramping up to take care of the flow of oil in the Strait of Hormuz, which is essential, because if the oil doesn't get flowing, we're going to be plunged into a global recession.
That's going to be very tough for the president's legacy.
It's going to be very tough for the Republicans in the midterms.
So it's a live event.
And the stakes are only getting higher and higher and higher.
But for right now, from the military perspective, even from the polling perspective, President Trump is winning.
For right now, his gamble is paying off.
Whether that continues into the future is anybody's guess.
Now, the rest of the show is going to continue.
This is my birthday membraneum.
I'm very excited to spend it all with you.
And then I'm going to go fly to Washington, D.C., because I'll be speaking at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast.
So you do not want to miss this nice little hangout.
We're going to have become a member.
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