Ep. 1939 - The Worst Serial Killer In American History Has Died
Michael Knowles opens with an Islamic sign at a 9-11 memorial, arguing America's vulnerability stems from left-wing anti-Christianity and liberal religious indifferentism. He condemns Kermit Gosnell as history's worst serial killer, criticizing media silence on abortion as "human butchery." Knowles asserts liberalism reduces to "screw you, dad," citing Democratic candidates' public trauma stories and USC canceling a debate due to all-white candidates. He links cultural shifts to military policy changes like raising the enlistment age to 42 amid the Iran war, warning of a Yuan-dominated oil trade. Finally, he notes Trump's Graceland visit highlighted Memphis crime drops, contrasting domestic success with foreign policy struggles and declining youth approval. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrats are running for president on daddy issues, according to Axios.
The army raises the enlistment age as the Iran war rages into its third week.
I thought I was too old and not nearly athletic enough, but we'll find out.
Also, the worst serial killer in American history dies in prison.
And most people have never heard his name.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
An Islamic sign was just draped over a 9-11 memorial.
This is we enter into the 25th anniversary of the September 11th terror attacks in which America was told never to forget.
And we forgot.
Looks like we forgot.
We'll get to what that means in our changing culture.
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Totally vindicated.
Dad Trauma and Politics00:09:45
You know how much I hate to say I told you so, but this is as pure a vindication as ever I've seen in politics.
What have I been telling you for who knows how many years at this point?
There are a few things that I come back to every month, every week, maybe every show.
I quote Dante.
I refer to St. Thomas Aquinas.
I tell you how much I hate to say I told you so.
One point that I come back to all the time is that all of liberalism, write this down if you haven't written it down yet.
Get the pencil.
Pull over if you're driving pencil and pad of paper app.
All of liberalism comes down to three words.
Screw you, dad.
That's what it's all about.
At a very deep level, it's an opposition to God, our Heavenly Father.
At a terrestrial level, it comes down to hating people's humanly fathers.
Screw you, dad.
In the middle of those two things, it comes down to an aversion to patriotism, patriotism, which is an extension of filial piety.
All of liberalism comes down to screw you, dad.
You no longer have to take my word for it.
Even Axios agrees.
Here's Axios.
Dems eyeing White House lean into their childhood traumas.
Dems eyeing White House.
Who are they talking about?
Well, it opens up with, let's see, my article's actually slightly cut off.
It opens up with Josh Shapiro.
Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania.
In his recent book, Where We Keep the Light, Shapiro writes that he had a happy childhood and it points an unhappy childhood home.
He says his mother, Judy, could be unstable and that he and his siblings believed if we were good, we could stop the chaos and the yelling.
And he just talks about how this is not so much a daddy issue as a mommy issue.
He says this is what really moved him on.
And I guess his mom didn't like the book, surprise, surprise.
And Governor Shapiro said, in many ways, I hope she's able to see this one day.
My mom is the hero in that book.
I talk about what an unstable lunatic she was and how the trauma she inflicted on me made me the man that I am.
So in many ways, she's the hero because of what a bad mom she was.
Gavin Newsom is even, according to Axios, even more candid about his at-times fraught relationships with both parents, which he says left him caught between two worlds and fully accepted by neither.
In his book, Young Man in a Hurry, he recounts how he has dyslexia and his mother told him it's okay to be average, Gavin, because he didn't do well on tests.
He said there were no crueler words she could have told him.
Then his parents got divorced and I guess his father worked a lot.
His father was a financial advisor to the Getty family and was a judge.
And so, you know, he played that off in an interview and pretended to a black audience that, you know, he was he was just like them.
He said, you know, my pops went out, got a cart in milk one day, never came back.
I was playing hoops and eating mac and cheese and mayonnaise sandwiches or whatever, you know.
But really what he meant is his parents got divorced and his dad worked a lot.
In any case, he says it gave him a lot of trauma.
His sister also talked about this.
And this is really bad.
I mean, seriously, divorce is really awful.
It's one of the worst things that can happen in the life of a person because it blows up the fundamental building block of politics.
And so I grant that some of these, you know, having a crazy mother, like I guess Josh Shapiro did, that can be really bad.
And here, though, this goes next level.
Forget about divorce, forget about the crazy mother.
Gavin Newsom's mother was so crazy that she killed herself.
And before she killed herself, she called Gavin and said, if you want to see me, you got to see me before next Tuesday because I'm going to kill myself.
So I do feel bad.
Gavin Newsome is obviously extremely messed up.
But in any case, not only is he super messed up, he is running on being really messed up.
J.B. Pritzker, governor of Illinois, he talks about how his dad died when he was seven and his mom was an alcoholic who died when he was 17 and how awful this was.
So I want to make the point.
I'm not actually mocking any of these people in their claims of trauma.
I'm sure they all did deal with some traumas.
You know, everybody deals with some traumas in life.
It's a fallen world, isn't it?
The specific things that they're talking about are all really bad.
I'm not denying any of that.
Everyone has experienced similar traumas in their lives.
The thing I'm making fun of them for, the thing I'm pulling up that red flag for, is bragging about this.
We should not be bragging about these things.
In the old days in politics, when we had a healthy society, if you were to brag about your upbringing at all, you would brag about coming from a good family.
You would downplay the bad stuff.
You would downplay the bad stuff because, one, you wanted to protect your family.
And two, you wanted to protect your own image because having a good family carried social currency and having a bad family was considered disreputable.
It was the sort of thing you'd want to hide.
Ronald Reagan didn't talk very much about how his father was an alcoholic.
When it came up, he spoke about it very broadly and always in a very charitable way.
He wasn't whining about his dad, even though Reagan had a pretty traumatic childhood.
Discretion is a good thing, folks.
Stiff upper lip is a good thing.
This actually relates to that really viral tweet that people are still talking about.
It was this guy, this Christian social media marketer who posted this now, I don't know how many tens of millions of times it's been viewed, tweet where the first line of it is, my wife was promiscuous.
I was a virgin.
But, you know, we're both redeemed in the light of Christ.
And then he goes on to this description of a good religious truth, but he opens up.
He says, yeah, my wife, she was a real slut.
Me, I was very wholesome.
I was a virgin.
I was wonderful.
I was just a beacon of virtue and morality.
But my wife, she was a tawdry lady of the streets.
And anyway, let me tell you about the gospel.
And I say, no, look, guys, it's not.
Yes, there is redemption.
Yes, everybody suffers.
Suffering is part of life.
Suffering can be sanctifying.
Josh Shapiro can even be right that his mother, in a way, can be a hero of the story in as much as whatever trauma she did or did not inflict on him did allow him to become the successful man that he is.
You can keep it to yourself sometimes.
You can keep a stiff upper lip.
To quote Tony Soprano, whatever happened to Gary Cooper, the strong silent types, you can kiss it up to God.
Your suffering does not need to become everyone's problem.
You don't need to engage in the sin of detraction by telling the true sins of others to anyone who will hear, to millions of strangers on the internet.
Maybe Shapiro's mother was a nut.
Gavin Newsom's mother definitely was a nut.
Maybe Pritzker's mother was an alcoholic.
I'm sure she was.
Maybe the guy who went viral on social media, maybe his wife really did have a promiscuous past.
You don't need to tell everybody all the time.
Sometimes we can just keep these things to ourselves.
But you don't get as much social media clout.
And in our perverse culture, good things no longer really carry social currency.
Victimhood does carry social currency.
There are these all sorts of these perverse incentives.
I saw it described in that the Christian social media post.
Someone, I forget who it was.
I wish I could give attribution, but I guess I'll just steal the idea for myself, made the point that specifically among evangelical Protestants, there is this hazard sometimes of coming to the true conclusion that the greater the depths of degradation, all the more glory to God for redeeming somebody.
I was so low.
I was so low, everything seemed impossible for me, but then God saved me.
That's a more powerful story than I was only a little bit low.
That's a more powerful story than, I did something that was kind of a little bit wrong.
I stole a cookie from the cookie jar and then God redeemed me.
Much, much more powerful to say, I was a murderer and a thief and a prostitute and a glutton and a drug addict and God saved me.
And so in a culture that rewards personal exposition, in a publicly confessional kind of culture such as ours, a culture where we share just a little bit too much about everything.
I mean, isn't that what social media is?
In that kind of culture, there's this real moral hazard that in a way encourages lurid bad behavior, because then when it turns around, all the more glory to God.
Well, same thing in our politics.
We went from a political order which prized people who had their act together, who were successful businessmen, who were long-standing statesmen, who were pillars of their community.
We went from that culture to a much more populist and individual culture where really political debates began to surround whose mother washed more floors for less money.
That culture that makes an idol out of suffering, poverty, lack of opportunity, lack of education, even that kind of culture is not going to be the most conducive to political good.
Gut Health and Thriving00:02:28
Proof positive here, case in point.
Look at the leading candidates for president on the left.
Now, hilarious story, because one thing you'll notice about those guys, Shapiro, Pritzker, Newsome, they're all white guys.
Shapiro is Jewish, but he's white.
I know Kamala didn't pick him to be vice president because he was a Jew.
And I know, I know, I know, I've heard all the stories, but they are three white guys, and the Democrats don't like that.
It's actually one reason why in California, USC just canceled a gubernatorial debate.
Delightful New York Times story.
We'll get to it momentarily.
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Folks, I told the team I'm putting my foot down.
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Democracy Under Threat00:15:58
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Beautiful headline.
Frame this one.
New York Times.
California governor debate canceled after criticism over lack of diversity.
The debate would have featured six candidates, all white.
And the inclusion of a low-polling mayor drew scrutiny in particular.
So USC was supposed to host a gubernatorial debate.
Less than 24 hours before it was supposed to take place, they canceled it because the candidates were white.
According to the university, the selection criteria have created a significant distraction from the issues that matter to voters.
KABC, the local LA TV station, was going to broadcast the thing.
So the candidates were Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, who's one of the guys running.
It was two Republicans and then three Democrats who were polling at the top.
And you know some of these guys.
It's Swalwell.
It's Tom Stiers up there.
Anyway, they're white guys.
But they're the top polling candidates.
And you got this mayor Mahan who's making waves.
So what's the problem here?
You say, okay, here are the criteria.
We're going to have the top polling guys, top polling people, sorry.
And they're going to debate to see who should be the next governor.
And then they look at it and they say, well, hold on, it's all white guys.
Well, we can't have that.
But hold on.
I thought that we supported democracy.
I thought this is what democracy looks like.
We need to defend democracy.
And the Republicans pose an existential threat to our democracy.
And yet it's these libs who are undermining democracy because the criteria was polling.
So the voters want the white guys or ladies, I guess.
Is there a lady in there?
Is Katie Porter in there?
I don't know.
Didn't even read the whole article.
It doesn't matter.
The problem is the whiteness.
So the voters say, we want the white people.
And the people who defend democracy say, well, you can't have that.
You can't have that.
We're not even going to let you see those candidates.
The problem here is a tension between democracy and liberalism.
When the left talks about democracy, they're usually talking about liberalism.
This is how they can say that Trump winning the popular vote is a threat to democracy.
That statement taken literally is incoherent.
Someone winning the popular vote, by definition, cannot be a threat to democracy.
He is the expression of democracy.
This is how they can say that Victor Orban winning election after election, popular elections can be a threat to democracy in Europe.
Because when they say democracy, what they really mean is liberalism.
And liberalism is an ideology that animates a society.
And so you have constantly changing circumstances.
Liberalism at its core, basing itself on the primacy of the individual and the maximization of the autonomy of the individual, breaking free from all constraints, all restrictions.
One constraint in the minds of liberals being race.
The idea that the whites are the oppressors, that the non-whites are the oppressed.
And so to truly liberate oneself, we need to overthrow the white people.
But by golly, the liberal Democratic voters have reflected their opinion in the polls, have expressed their opinion in the polls.
The polls reflect that.
They want a white guy.
What do we do now?
Do we go with democracy or do we go with liberalism?
They always go with liberalism.
Even when it means punishing their own candidates, their own liberal Democrat candidates for governor by kicking them off the stage on the basis of their race.
I love this.
It's beautiful.
I just want to sit back.
I'm going to sit on my hands.
I'm going to sit on my hands, just look over at California and watch, watch the implosion, because it's not just California.
This is playing out at the national level, as we see.
Pritzker, Shapiro, Newsome, whole lot of white guys, whole lot of clean-cut, rich, Brooks brother suit-wearing white guys at the top of the polls for the Democrat presidential nomination.
You notice that?
I know there are some weirdos in the mix.
There's AOC.
You know, she's not a top candidate for president, but she could be taken seriously.
But who are the ones who are really getting the buzz, who've already run before, who are already getting all those profiles, who are already running their campaigns?
It's Newsome, it's Shapiro, it's Pritzker, it's Buddha Jedge.
Don't forget Boutij.
On and on and on.
I guess Whitmer is probably going to run.
She's not a man, but she is white.
Why is this?
Well, obviously, it's because Kamala lost.
It's because wokeness, the ideology that really places a primacy on race, is out of favor with the electorate.
The electorate overwhelmingly voted against that.
That's why they elected Trump with a popular vote and they gave Republicans unified government.
So they're going to go for a white guy.
The only Democrat who has even ostensibly won the presidency in recent years is Joe Biden.
He's a really old white guy who wears nice suits.
So that's what they're looking at.
And they can't accept it, but they want it.
They hate it and they love it.
Odiadamo, says Catalas.
They don't know what to do.
They're torn between two extremes.
And I'm here to watch the show.
Meanwhile, beyond the political battles, real battles rage on.
The Iran war is in its third week, and the army is raising the enlistment age to 42.
I'm about to pull out that banjo, start playing that Arlo Guthrie song, the draft dodger rag.
You ever hear that?
I remember, I actually did play it in high school.
I was in my little high school band.
And the song goes, Sarge, I'm only 18.
I got a ruptured spleen and I'll always carry a purse.
I got eyes like a bad and my feet are flat.
My asthma is getting worse.
This whole thing about this guy who doesn't want to be drafted.
And he's making all these excuses.
How quaint it is now, too, by the way.
I'm only 18.
I've got a ruptured spleen and I always carry a purse.
The excuse is I'm a gay guy.
Under Obama and Biden, they were only recruiting gay people.
You know, the CIA and the military were putting out commercials about going with your lesbian moms to the Pride Parade and how that would prepare you for the army or whatever.
Now the commercials are getting a little tougher.
Now they're going back to just the regular old guys, disproportionately white guys, actually, but just like real tough guys.
And in any case, they're raising the age.
Why?
Does this mean the Iran war is going to go on for years?
Does this mean that there's going to be a draft?
I don't think that's what it means.
I think what it means is the world is getting more dangerous.
I think what this means is the vacation from history.
We had a vacation from history from the fall of the Berlin Wall up until 9-11.
And then even during the global war on terror, a very small number of, a very small percentage of Americans actually served in the military.
The wars dragged on forever, but there was not a real intense national focus on winning the wars.
It wasn't clear what the objectives were.
They ended up being this kind of imperial wars.
Some of the objectives became these vague humanitarian objectives.
We need to protect women's education in Afghanistan or whatever.
Now I think the world is getting a little more real with talk of multipolarity, with talk that even this war in Iran that has led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz could lead to the end of the petrodollar, the fact that oil is purchased in U.S. dollars, which gives the United States a massive, massive advantage and privilege on the global stage.
You could see a world, I'm not betting on this happening.
Trump still has my full trust.
But if things really went south, you have a world in which China could perhaps step in, demand that oil be purchased in Yuan, and you could have a major shift in who leads the world order, multipolarity, or even a more seriously rising China.
All of that means things are going to get more dangerous.
And when things get more dangerous, we raise the enlistment age to 42, which is a little scary for me.
You know, listen, I basically, I barely made it on the T-ball team.
Okay.
I'm not the most athletic guy in the world, but I just turned 36.
I'm still well within that age range.
Also, they're lifting a restriction.
Previously, if you had been convicted of a marijuana offense, you know, minor drug offense, you would not be eligible to enlist.
Now they're lifting that restriction.
And coincidentally, they are lifting the marijuana restriction on April 20th, 420, which I know that's clearly someone in the Pentagon is having fun with that.
But regardless of whether or not now you can puff up a little bit, you know.
You can have a little bit of that devil's lettuce.
What this is telling you when you sober up is that the world is getting more dangerous.
The Pentagon is declaring that and we should be listening.
Now, speaking of this war, how much of a threat is this to President Trump, to his administration, and to the Republicans in the midterms?
There are a lot of people beating the war drums.
We call them the neocons, the Warhawks.
Ironically, these were the people who were opposed to Trump for most of the last 10 years, much of the last 10 years, who are now the most ardent supporters of this war in Iran.
And they will point to the fact that the war in Iran has something like 90% support among Republicans, certainly among MAGA Republicans.
Beneath the surface, though, I think those numbers are a little bit dangerous, and the White House needs to watch out for it.
We'll get to that in one moment.
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So I love watching CNN sometimes.
I never thought I'd make that statement, but I love watching CNN sometimes because the guy that they have doing the polls has had a lot of good news for Republicans.
So it's not really on CNN, but it's on the polls.
The polls have been very good for Republicans.
Now you're seeing the polls begin to turn a little bit.
This is the same guy who just a week ago said the Iran war has 90% support among Republicans.
President Trump has 100% support among MAGA Republicans.
Here is the first chink in the armor.
Here is the first recognition of some negative poll numbers, specifically when it comes to the president standing with young men.
In November of 2024, he beat Kamal Harris among them by 13 points, by 13 points.
Look at where he is now on his net approval rating.
Down he goes.
It's a 20-point shift away from Donald Trump.
He is now seven points underwater at this particular point among men.
I think it is very difficult for Republicans to do well in this midterm cycle.
If Donald Trump is underwater with men, as my uncle once wrote, where the boys are, where the men are, they are underwater when it comes to Donald Trump.
Okay, so that's overall men.
But what about young men who were really influential?
Yes, young men.
Of course, there was a massive shift to Donald Trump from 2020 to 2024 among young men.
And look right here.
Whoa, yikes, yikes, yikes, yikes.
Men under the age of 25 on Trump.
He won them in 2024 by five points.
Look where he is now.
The net approval waiting way down there.
Down we go to negative 19 points.
That's a nearly, what is that?
Nearly a 25-point switcheroo.
Okay, don't love this, obviously.
And this is where, you know, I have been inveighing of late against my fellow podcasters because I don't want to be too harsh against my comrades here, but the podcasters are a real problem right now.
The podcasters are a real problem because their interests have diverged from the interests of conservatives in politics proper.
There's the political media, that's where we are.
And then there is elected politics, operative politics, activist politics.
The interests have diverged.
The interests were aligned in 2024.
That's why they called 2024 the podcast election.
The podcast bros helped bring President Trump the presidency and the popular vote.
Let's not forget the youth vote, driven largely by young men, shifted 10 points to the right in 2024.
That was driven in large part.
If you had to give it to a singular individual, probably you would hand that one to Charlie Kirk.
But broadly, you would hand it to the podcast bros.
Charlie did a million things, one of which was he hosted a podcast.
But that was one of the drivers.
Since that time, certainly since Charlie's death, since he was killed by a leftist assassin at a political event that could have unified the right, you've seen a divergence.
And in part, that's because I was talking to Chris Ruffo about this yesterday, and he was saying what I've been saying for weeks, and he's a very sharp guy, and he's done his own reporting and investigations and come to the same conclusion, which is the politicos are after votes, unity, coalition building, policy.
The political media is after clicks and money.
And sometimes those things line up, sometimes they don't line up.
But in recent weeks and months, the podcast bros have turned on Trump.
A lot of them.
Not me, obviously.
I'm still very pro-Trump, but a lot of them have turned on Trump.
And this is where, you know, we point out there's a distinction between the real political order and the podcast bros.
What the podcast bros say about things is pretty different from what a lot of voters say about things, even on the right.
But this is one of those places where the two meet.
There is an interaction between the two.
The interaction is young men.
Young men in particular listen to the podcasts.
I mean, I think it's a federal law now that every white man under the age of 50 in America has to have his own podcast.
But that's where those two meet.
And so I think that is why you're seeing a cratering in particular among young men.
It's because of the perverse incentives of the podcast class and because of all of the baked in problems.
The Podcast Class Problem00:11:44
This is the first midterm election after a presidential cycle.
That's usually when the party in power loses.
This was coming off a particularly bad presidency, Joe Biden's.
And so if you look on the actual fundamentals, if you look on things like inflation, if you look on jobs, certainly if you look on the stock market, Trump has done a good job.
You look on affordability.
Trump has brought rental prices down six months in a row.
Trump has done a good job.
But things got so bad under Joe Biden that nobody could move fast enough to make people not feel that pain.
On top of that, I think the foreign interventions, even though they have been very successful so far, those foreign interventions have created the perception, especially among the podcast class, which then bleeds down into the young men, which then does affect the vote, is The idea is that the United States is not focusing enough on domestic matters, only more on foreign matters.
There are reasons for this too, which is it's easier for the president to intervene internationally than it is domestically because there are no federal judges and Democrat congressmen and governors internationally.
You actually don't need to really deal with them.
In any case, in any case, this is a major problem.
This should be a five-alarm fire for Republicans heading into the midterms.
And I mentioned Charlie earlier.
Assassinations work.
That's why people do them.
And this one worked.
This one led to a lot of division on the right because they took out one of the clearest leaders of the young right.
And what's so funny about Charlie is Charlie is recognized as the voice of a generation of the young conservatives.
And he became that.
But when Charlie started, one of the ironies is Charlie was primarily talking to boomers.
When he started, he was speaking on cable news and he was going to these fundraisers with a lot of gray-haired Republicans.
And the pitch was always that he was going to speak to the young voters.
But the first skill that he honed was speaking to older voters and donors.
It was this kind of funny paradox.
What's so amazing about Charlie, though, is he then became the thing that he was pitching.
He then really built the thing that did speak to young men and young women.
And he built up the largest young conservative organization in the entire country.
He took those boomer bucks and he actually put them to good use.
And he was speaking to those people.
And he was skeptical of war in Iran.
There's lots of broadcasts and tweets to prove it, but he was also completely supportive of the president.
And he was just one of these figures holding it together.
You can attribute a lot of that polling decline among young men to the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
These are all real political problems that we have to solve.
And you know me, I'm a glass half full kind of guy and I'm not a panican and I don't always focus on the negative stuff.
But in order to solve a problem, you have to acknowledge that there is a problem.
And right now, there are many, many forces arrayed against the White House.
And a lot of the arguments they're making and a lot of the campaigns are disingenuous and divorced from reality.
But in order to turn this thing around, one, we need to get a handle on the podcast problem.
We need to be able to bring the political media back into alignment with the actual political good that we're trying to achieve.
Right now, they're spun out in a million directions.
And two, the administration needs to be seen as having a chiefly domestic focus.
They're doing a lot of great domestic work that they're not getting credit for.
So there's a messaging issue here.
There's a media issue here.
A lot of it's driven by the podcasters.
I'm not even blaming the admin, but we have to fix this problem.
That I don't care how many Iran polls you show me saying that 90% of Republicans supported.
If young men are swinging that rapidly in the wrong direction, and we can attribute that to specific problems, including my own industry, not this show, but certainly this industry, that's a problem that has to be solved.
It is March.
If this problem gets worse and worse and worse, we're going to get blown out in a tidal wave in the midterms.
It's early enough to fix it, but we have to fix it now.
Okay.
Speaking of President Trump, speaking of President Trump on domestic issues, great moment two days ago when President Trump visited Elvis' home.
And you know, I'm a huge Elvis fan for over 30 years.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Ocean Yan, who says, man, it is wild that the OnlyFans guy was able to pimp out like 18% of the global female population and didn't even need a backhand to backhand a single one of them.
Truly one of the greatest feminists of all time.
So true.
He was sex positive, wasn't he?
He was sex positive.
Okay.
President Trump, this was a very special moment for me.
I don't know how many, I haven't talked about this too much.
I have been a huge Elvis fan since I was five years old.
I used to do an Elvis impersonation.
I roadied for an Elvis impersonator.
I could probably sing or play almost every single Elvis song.
I love Elvis.
Now I live in Tennessee, Elvis' state.
I remember when I was younger, I had visited Graceland, Elvis' home, and the West Wing within a relatively short period of time.
And I was very much in awe of both places.
I was more in awe when I walked into Graceland.
So anyway, President Trump just visited Graceland, Elvis' house.
Why, you ask?
What did he have to say?
Here it is.
We love Elvis.
Who doesn't love Elvis?
Everybody loves Elvis, right?
Hello.
Hello, everybody.
We were here and we're touting how well it's done with the crime stats.
And over a period of five months, it's way, way down, and we're proud of it.
We're going to come back in two or three months and we'll have a very, very one of the safest cities.
So Memphis went through a terrible thing.
And like in D.C., we're doing great.
And every place we go, we're doing great, to be honest with you.
So, Frank, I'd love to go to Chicago.
I'd love to be invited to Chicago.
We would get rid of the crime in Chicago very easily.
But the Democrats don't want to do that.
I'd love to go to San Francisco.
We'd make it something.
We'd bring it back to where it was.
And the mayor's working hard.
He's a Democrat.
He's working hard there, but we could do things that they just can't do.
But every place we go and Memphis, I guess you probably heard the crime numbers are way down.
Right off the bat, I've said this many times before.
Trump is Elvis.
That's something I realized the first time I went to see a Trump rally when I was at MSG.
He walked out there and you have to see it in person to really get this.
He's Elvis.
He's larger than life.
He comes out into the stadium.
He is in complete control of the crowd, every movement, every little this, every, he's just Elvis.
I don't know how else to put it.
He's larger than life.
He wears kind of funny suits.
Some of the coloring, especially the ties, very loud.
Elvis had the scarves.
Trump has the ties.
Controversial, blunt.
A lot of beautiful women in his past.
The guy's Elvis.
So then you say, why is he in Elvis' house?
Well, very simple.
What he was actually doing politically was telling the media and therefore the people that his administration has reduced crime in Memphis.
That's all he was doing.
He has this policy of deporting illegal aliens and bringing in law enforcement to get down domestic crime.
And he says, we're going to do this in the badly run Democrat cities.
Part of the reason he has to do Memphis is because Memphis is a blue city in a red state.
So he says, I want to go to Chicago.
Chicago is a blue city in a blue state.
So it's actually harder for the federal government to go in.
They could, but it's harder.
LA, San Francisco, blue cities in a blue state.
Can't do it.
Memphis, blue city in a red state, you can do it.
So this could have been a tweet.
This could have been a truth social post.
Hey, guys, we've brought down crime in Memphis, but that wouldn't have done anything.
It's got to be a little weird.
It's got to be a little cultural.
He's got to show up to Elvis' house.
Talk about we love Elvis.
I didn't know Elvis.
I knew Sinatra, but I didn't know.
Anyway, we've done a great job bringing down crime in Memphis.
Memphis is a rough place.
There have been two places that I've been jumped in my entire life.
One is the Jersey Shore.
One is Memphis.
There's only two places ever.
This is good.
This is show business.
This is how, I mean, he's just a pro.
No one needs to tell Trump, but we need a little bit of that.
We need a little creativity.
We need, especially focus on domestic issues.
We need a little bit of that headline-grabbing creativity because it seems to me, there's so many issues like this.
There are plenty of issues where I know that I'm right.
Not to be overly confident, but there are plenty of issues where I've examined the issue and I'm as reasonably confident as a person can be that I am right, and yet I know it's a losing issue.
That's true a lot of the time.
Very often, the truth is not popular because people's passions run away with them.
And so you can be the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.
You can be in the minority and the minority can be correct.
However, if it's a losing issue, you would be crazy tactically to focus on that issue all the time.
The Iran issue might be like that.
The Iran issue, if President Trump succeeds in Iran, don't forget, we're on week three.
He told us it was going to take five weeks.
So we're not freaking out until week six.
We're on week three.
And the Iran issue, if he pulls it off, could be one of the great masterstrokes of foreign policy ever in American history, certainly the greatest since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And yet, harping on the Iran issue doesn't seem to be serving President Trump's poll numbers very well.
Even if he's right.
And even if it turns out to be spectacular.
Look, if it turns out to be spectacular, maybe then we harp on it.
But while there's still uncertainty, the administration can be totally right on the issue and it can be kind of a losing issue or at least a stalemate to talk about.
You know what's not a losing issue?
Crime.
That's one of the few issues that Republicans are still way up on.
You know what's not a losing issue?
Border control and to a lesser degree, immigration broadly.
Those are issues that we can talk about.
We might be right on all the issues.
Right now, we're kind of losing, according to polling, on the economy.
Our economic policies are way better than Democrats' policies, but if it's a losing issue, that's not the one you focus on.
You can highlight where we've really succeeded.
Six months decline in rents, 100% of rental demand increases in New York and California being driven by immigration.
You can tie back into an even more winning issue, immigration.
But that's the way you got to look at these things.
It's not enough to be right.
You need people to be talking about the things that are good for you.
That's the key here.
That's what Trump is doing at Graysland.
Good stuff.
I love it.
Okay, speaking of murder, not just murder in Memphis, but murder more broadly.
Final Injustice in Gosnell Case00:03:15
The worst serial killer in American history just died in prison, and most people don't know his name.
Now, I suspect if you're listening to this show, there is a good chance you remember this guy's name.
This guy made the news over 10 years ago now, probably closer to 15 years ago now.
Kermit Gosnell.
Do you remember that name?
Kermit Gosnell.
Gosnell was a butcher abortionist who had a filthy clinic in which not only thousands of babies were murdered, probably thousands of babies were murdered after having been born alive.
So even with our perverse abortion law, if a baby is born alive, certainly at the time that Gosnell was committing his killings, but even broadly today, if a baby's born alive, you have to provide medical care to that baby.
And I know this is really weird because three seconds prior when the baby was inside the mother, you would have the legal right to chop that baby up and murder the baby.
But then the minute the baby moves six inches, now you have to provide medical care to save the baby.
But anyway, that was the law.
And Gosnell ignored that.
In many ways, Gosnell's position was much more consistent and coherent.
So, well, hold on.
If I'm allowed to kill the baby, if it's moral or legal to kill the baby inside the womb, there's no reason it would be immoral to kill the baby when he moves six inches.
So we're going to murder the baby anyway.
Anyway, they murdered thousands of babies in his clinic.
Multiple women died because of the terrible medical conditions, the filth of this clink.
I mean, I don't want to be too graphic, but they found like body parts in jars.
I mean, this was truly a house of horrors.
And now he's dead.
And he dies with a final injustice.
You know, it's all this injustice.
Obviously, this guy is one of the worst killers in American history, the worst serial killer in American history.
Killed grown women, killed lots of babies, just a true sociopath serial killer.
And then at his trial, the media didn't show up.
This was one of the great scandals.
The media didn't show up.
They didn't want to talk about it because his trial revealed abortion for what it is, which is just butchery, human butchery.
That's all abortion is.
Abortion is nothing other than that.
And we use euphemisms and we try to pretend it's not.
We say it's women's health care and it's medical decisions and it's reproductive choice and it's, and it happens in hospitals and medical facilities and it's planned parenthood.
But you know what it really is?
All it is is just butchering little babies.
That's all it is with like knives and stuff.
Sorry, I am intentionally being a little vivid here, just to show you the difference between the euphemism and the reality.
And Gosnell's trial showed us that.
It became undeniable.
And so what did the media do?
Did they change their minds?
No, they ignored the trial.
They wouldn't show up.
And so Gosnell quietly goes away and he goes to prison.
Then he dies quietly.
And the final injustice is most people still don't know his name.
The final injustice is the completion of the cover-up.
Islam and Religious Heresy00:05:10
Okay, before we go, just real quick, real quick, there is an Islamic sign that was just draped over a 9-11 memorial in a cemetery.
This being reported by NBC Bay Area.
A banner displayed at a Contra Cross County Cemetery has many in the community fired up tonight.
The banner advertising a new Islamic portion of the cemetery was draped over a 9-11 memorial.
And as NBC Bayer's Jody Hernandez tells us, that has many people shaking their heads.
That banner has caused a huge uproar.
Memory Garden Cemetery took it down at about noon today, but many say it never should have been placed at the 9-11 memorial site in the first place.
Gee, you think?
Yeah, of course not.
Of course not.
I'm a New Yorker.
I was in New York before, during, and after 9-11.
New Yorkers knew people who died.
And the line was never forget.
And now on the 25th anniversary of 9-11, we have a communist Muslim as mayor of New York, and we're getting Islamic signs placed over 9-11 memorials.
So we forgot.
And part of the problem here is that there are three lanes for Islam to gain a greater foothold in the United States.
It's not just within the purview of one political ideology or one faction or one party.
There are actually three ways for Islam to enter into the U.S.
The left wing hates America and hates the West, and the West is Christendom, and Christendom is animated by Christianity.
So inasmuch as Islam has been in conflict with Christianity from the very beginning of Islam, because Islam, if we're being blunt about it, is just a Christian heresy that became entangled with pan-Arab nationalism.
That's basically what Islam is.
It's a version of a Christian heresy.
It began after Muhammad encountered a heretical Christian monk in the desert, even according to the Islamic accounts.
And then it became its own kind of religion, splintering off of a Christian heresy that has also animated pan-Arabism.
That's what it is.
And so it's been in conflict with Christianity for 1,400 years, tried to conquer the West for 1,400 years.
And so the left, which hates the West and which really hates Christianity, likes Islam for that reason.
The liberals, not the hard left, but the liberals are open to Islam because they've given up religion entirely.
They've embraced a kind of religious indifferentism where they think all religions are basically the same.
They're all a little bit wacky, you know, but whatever.
If people want to just have their own religion, that's their own private matter.
And who are we to judge?
A liberal, in the words of Robert Frost, is the kind of person who can't take his own side in a quarrel.
So for the liberals, they say, well, who am I to say that Islam is wrong or to draw distinctions between religions or to exclude anybody from anything?
So come on in.
The water is warm.
There's no difference between taking in Christians from Finland through our immigration system or a ton of jihadis from Afghanistan.
What's the difference?
We're all the same.
Kumbaya.
And then on the right, the right which is the most hostile to Islam, there is, you know, a kind of a fringe right that doesn't like the Jews.
And because the Muslims also don't like the Jews, they're more open to Islam.
And so you have this trifold problem, which is that Islam can enter into the United States through really any of the ideologies, any of the factions.
And I'm not an extreme Islamophobe in the sense that I think a small number of amiable, low-voltage, don't take the religion that seriously, Muslims, is fine.
It's okay.
Small number, not enough to change the culture of a community, not very limited.
Okay, then we can convert them to Christianity.
It'll be very nice.
They're very nice people.
They're very polite a lot of the time.
Good food, but, you know, and then they can come to America and convert very small numbers.
Okay, that's fine.
But in large numbers, people who take that religion very seriously, that poses a very serious threat to the country.
And there is no doubt on the 25th anniversary of 9-11 that when you have a Muslim mayor of New York, a guy who campaigned with one of the original World Trade Center bombers, an unindicted co-conspirator in that, and when you've got Islamic signs over 9-11 memorials, we forgot we are particularly vulnerable to the predations of all sorts of outside ideologies and influences,
but Islam in particular.
Islam weirdly checks a lot of boxes.
And this is nothing new.
It's been going on since Charles Martel and even earlier, but pretty scary to think on the quarter century anniversary of 9-11.
Okay, I want to get to the Muslim mayor of New York, Mamdani.
But the rest of the show continues now.
I got to say goodbye to the Hoi Baloy.
You don't want to miss this.
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