Michael Knowles argues that Artemis II astronauts debunking moon landing conspiracies exposes the instability of contrarianism, contrasting this with Eric Swalwell's financial scandals and Trump's Easter egg roll appearance blending war rhetoric with holiday whimsy. He supports making Easter a federal holiday to restore Christian values while critiquing Ozempic-induced weight loss and Trump's Miami library-hotel hybrid, ultimately dismissing judicial rulings on White House construction as absurd given the site's military significance. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Food vs Factory Reality00:03:02
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The Artemis II astronauts have officially flown by the moon.
It is amazing for a lot of reasons.
One, it is the farthest that human beings have ever been from planet Earth.
The photos are absolutely stunning.
That's one and two.
Number three, most important of all.
It has convinced at least some people that we did actually land on the moon over 50 years ago.
One little trip around a natural satellite has become a superluminous supernova explosion of conspiracy theories.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Eric Swalwell, the former paramour of Fang Fang, the current congressman, the man who wants to be the future governor of California, is in a big scandal.
He's actually in a triple scandal.
We know that he's got the sex problem.
We know that he might not even be eligible to run because he's not actually a California resident.
But now he's got a third scandal.
He appears to be paying his wife out of campaign funds to watch their kids.
We will get to the end of Eric Swalwell.
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The Moon Landing Debate00:15:13
The lunar flyby is very, very cool.
We've been getting all sorts of photos from Artemis, and of course, some people want to say it's AI.
I actually posted some photos of it, one of which includes Alice Cramden from.
The honeymooners sitting because finally, you know, Jackie Gleason just pound her right and she flew all the way to the moon.
But so some people are saying because of that, they're saying the photos are ai.
However, the photos are really, really beautiful and I think we've reached peak.
We never landed on the moon conspiracy.
I'll be honest, i'll be real, i'm always honest and real with you.
I I went through a period where I wasn't sure if we landed on the moon.
I watched this long documentary that you can find on some weird You know, subreddit of a forum board of some dark recess of the internet.
I watched it, it was like two hours long, and I got almost to the end of it, and I said, Wow, we didn't land on the moon.
I texted sweet little Lisa, I said, We didn't land on the moon.
We didn't go to the moon.
She said, What?
And then I get home that night, I said, You got to watch this.
We watched the end of the movie, and I said, No, that's not enough.
You got to, let's watch the whole thing.
And I watched it again, and the second time I watched it, I said, Oh no, we actually probably did go to the moon.
Because I found holes in the conspiracy theories, and I think that is what the Artemis 2 mission is doing.
I saw it take off.
I was there.
I know some people didn't believe me.
I had to go pull the grass up behind me, stand in the sun, do jumping jacks.
I said, I definitely saw this thing take off.
And we're getting communications from space.
And now they've flown around the moon.
And they're coming back.
And I think that when we landed in Apollo 8, the vast majority of people, like everybody, believed we landed on the moon.
Then over the years, you had more and more people, 10%, even more than 10%, start to say we didn't land on the moon.
Then when you looked at younger generations, especially the generations that had no living memory whatsoever of landing on the moon, then you started to see those numbers go up.
What was it?
One in four millennials didn't think we ever landed on the moon.
Gen Z creeping even more in that direction.
Now I think the contrarian position is, yeah, we definitely did land on the moon.
And this is what interests me the most about this.
I mean, it's cool.
It's cool.
It's very cool that there are human beings flying around the moon right now, especially that they're Americans.
I love that.
But what really interests me is what it means for political philosophy.
Because being contrarian and being cynical is a very unstable position.
There are so many contrarians.
I'm a little contrarian myself.
There are so many cynics now when it comes to politics.
And they have good cause in a way because our government has become very self-interested.
The politicians have turned away from the common good.
It's a fallen world.
There are always people looking out for themselves.
But if you compare this era with, say, the founding era or the 19th century, politicians really do just seem to be on the make for themselves.
We'll get to Eric Swalwell momentarily.
But the reason that always being contrarian, always being cynical is unstable is because your positions constantly have to change to be contrary to whatever the mainstream position is.
So if that was the cool contrarian thing for the last 10 years, 15 years, now I think maybe it's not.
Now it's reached critical mass.
It's kind of like listening to punk music, you know?
It's kind of like just being a hipster, which is you really like the band until the band is mainstream and now you have to hate the band because you liked the band before the band was cool.
And when you look at the moon, I never thought very deeply about the space program, but the conspiracy theories don't make a lot of sense.
They would make sense if all we ever claimed to have done was land on the moon one time and take a picture with the flag and then go home and that was all.
But we landed six times.
Now you say, well, yeah, we lied six times.
There were a dozen astronauts who walked on the moon.
You say, yeah, a dozen astronauts lied.
Okay, how does that explain Apollo 1?
Apollo 1, where you had these astronauts who just blew up.
What happened to the astronauts?
If this was all a big ruse to make America look good, why did we look bad?
One of the other problems with the moon conspiracies is Apollo 13, because Apollo 13 failed, and the astronauts made it home, but it failed.
How do you explain that?
How do you explain the Indian lunar orbiter that just within the last few years got photos of the landing sites of Apollo 11 and Apollo 12?
The Indians are just trying to make us look good?
I mean, I like the Indians and we have a decent relationship, but why would and then the biggest problem for the theory that we didn't land on the moon, of course, is that the Soviet Union said we landed on the moon.
The whole reason we went to the moon is because we were in a war with the Soviet Union.
We were in a Cold War and part of the Cold War was the space race and we beat them to the moon.
They beat us to space and we beat them to the moon.
If we faked it, wouldn't they have said so?
That's the problem for me.
And so now it just seems to me, putting all that evidence aside, it seems to me that the contrarian view now is that we did land on the moon.
Like, oh, you still think we didn't land on the moon?
You know, just take a drag of your cigarette, be a real cool guy.
You think we didn't land on the moon?
Let me tell you, man, I got the real, you think you have the secret knowledge we didn't land on the moon?
I have the double secret knowledge we did land on the moon.
So, the contrarian view is always going to be unstable.
This is another reason why it's good to have actual principles.
This is another reason why it's good to be okay being not cool.
This is something my fellow conservatives, they drive me a little crazy with this because the left is very ideologically stable.
Their ideology is not stable.
Their ideology goes from, you know, Clinton Democrats to trans the kids and let the illegal Guatemalan criminals in in about 20 years.
But the ideology itself is just progressivism and they're all progressive.
Whereas on the right, we all have to be really special guys.
We all have to be paleo, neo, post-liberal, pre-liberal, libertarian, this, that.
We basically all have to find a way to say I'm a conservative but not that kind of conservative.
Because being conservative isn't cool.
Being conservative, I'm wearing a bow tie.
I'm doing it on purpose because I was in D.C. for the White House Easter egg roll.
I get to wear my Easter egg bow tie at most once a year.
Being conservative is just wearing Brooks Brothers, you know?
Being conservative is just holding common sense views that aren't sexy.
They're just normal.
They're just right.
Being conservative is recognizing that the best we can hope for in politics is the second best.
It's never the ideal.
It's never utopia.
It's always just kind of there it is.
It's always kind of shoulder shrug, isn't it?
This is why for a long time we were told that vaccines are uniformly good, there's no threat from vaccines at all, and only a few quacks opposed vaccines.
Then, especially after COVID, where we were lied to specifically about the COVID vaccine, then the fashionable position, now very mainstream, is that all vaccines are terrible.
I think the contrarian view again is that vaccines are good.
There are so many people now who say vaccines are bad, and I'm kind of skeptical of vaccines, but there are so many people who say vaccines are bad. that I now think they're probably good.
And you know what the reality is?
The reality is some vaccines are good sometimes, probably.
That's the most accurate view of that issue.
Did we ever go to the moon?
Did we not go to the moon?
Do you know the reality?
We sometimes went to the moon.
And sometimes we blew up and sometimes we failed.
But we sometimes did.
That's the reality.
And this time we did go around the moon and we want to build a moon base.
It's very, very cool.
Now, speaking of things back at home and speaking of blowing stuff up, President Trump was at the White House Easter egg roll yesterday and he sat down with some kids, cracked some jokes with some five-year-olds about Joe Biden, Sleepy Joe, and the audio pen, and he gave an impassioned address on the present war with Iran from the White House portico while standing next to the Easter bunny, a man in a bunny costume.
We'll get to that momentarily.
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President Trump, he, you know, I don't like that phrase breaks the internet.
Because if you break the internet every day, then the thing's broken, but it's still functioning.
So it's not, he always breaks the internet in a way.
The last time he broke the internet was with that tweet, the Truth Social Post, where he said as his Easter proclamation, open the effing straight, you crazy bastard Iranians, or you will all be living in hell.
Peace be to Allah.
Yours, President Donald J. Trump.
Well, he doubled down on this from the White House yesterday.
The war is about one thing Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
Had we not broken the Barack Hussein Obama agreement, you know what I'm talking about, the Iran nuclear deal.
This is years ago, my first term.
You would have had a total.
Israel would have been gone, extinguished.
Israel would have been wiped off the face of the earth, and the entire Middle East would have been. at a minimum in big trouble.
But I did it.
That was phase one.
We killed Soleimani.
Without Soleimani, if they had Soleimani, it would be a whole different thing.
Maybe.
We'd still be winning, but it would have been harder.
Because we are obliterating that country.
And I hate to do it, but we're obliterating.
And they just don't want to say uncle.
They don't want to cry as the expression goes uncle, but they will.
And if they don't, they'll have no bridges.
They'll have no power plants.
They'll have no anything.
I won't go further because there are other things that are worse than those two.
And we might have, well, the thing, if I had my choice, what would I like to do?
Take the oil.
Because it's there for the taking.
There's not a thing they can do about it.
Cinema.
Cinema.
This is so American.
People were very upset.
You had people on the left upset that President Trump would talk about something so serious in front of all the kids.
I mean, there are thousands and thousands of people, thousands and thousands of kids who show up to the Easter egg roll.
This is so inappropriate to talk about a war with Iran.
Well, you know, he is the president of the United States.
We're at a war with Iran.
He gave it a five-week timeline.
We're now into the sixth week.
Everybody, certainly including the president, is feeling the desire to wrap this thing up quickly because people are starting to get concerned.
So what's he going to do?
Of course, he's going to talk about it.
But then you had people from the right attacking, saying this is undignified to be giving this kind of address next to the Easter Bunny.
I have a totally different take.
I think this is so profoundly American.
This is, to me, the American character.
A lot of the conversations during the 250th anniversary of the country surround what it is to be an American.
Is America just an idea, like some liberals say?
No.
But there are ideas.
Is America a race?
Well, we have a founding stock, certainly.
Came over on the Mayflower, came to Jamestown, the Wasps.
Mayflower is a great cigar brand, by the way.
But yeah, there's a founding stock, and then a lot of immigrants added to it.
But there's still like a people to the whole thing.
Is America a contribution, an ethic of service?
Yes, it's all that.
But you know, the American character is this.
It's this paradox.
It's this paradoxical combination of high and low.
It's the president giving an address on our very militarily successful strikes on Iran from the White House next to the Easter Bunny.
That's what it is.
What is the American?
The American is the least sophisticated man in the world on the one hand, and he's the most civilized man in the world on the other.
America is a very civilized country.
We have families more than other countries in the West.
We mind our morals more than other countries in the West.
We're a little bit more prudish than other countries in the West.
We say yes, sir, no, sir, yes, ma'am.
We're more polite than a lot of other countries.
The French, please.
We're kind of bumbling yokels.
Yankee doodle dandy, but we're also paradoxically very civilized.
We're the most religious country in the whole West, by far.
It's not even close.
We take religion seriously.
We're also the most commercial country in the West.
We're like the last country in the West that still makes stuff, that still is entrepreneurial, that still wants to grow, that still wants to make money.
We've always been that way, going back to Alexis de Tocqueville and prior to that.
That's weird.
On the one hand, we take spiritual matters more seriously.
Than other countries, and we also take terrestrial economic, pecuniary how many more adjectives can I throw in matters more seriously than the others.
America is paradoxically, the most self-interested country in the world, individualist, rugged out for number me, number one looking out for me, pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of country.
We're also paradoxically, the most charitable, by far, not even close.
We are the charitable country in the world.
Africa exists because of us.
Africa exists in its present form, with peace such as it is, with health such as it is, with population growth such as it is, because of us.
The most self-interested and the most charitable.
That's the paradox.
It's so profoundly American.
Federal Holiday Politics00:16:53
So you can say, well, I don't like that.
I wish our president were different and didn't speak about war next to the Easter bunny.
Yeah, I know.
It's funny, isn't it?
It's kind of wacky.
We're a funny, wacky country.
The other thing President Trump did, I would be remiss if I didn't mention, he sat down with the kids at one of the tables at the Easter egg roll and just started talking to him.
And he talks to kids in a slightly more jovial version of the way he talks to adults.
I really like that because I do that too.
I don't do goo-goo-gaga.
I don't generally roll around on the floor.
I try to get on the level, hey, hey, what's up, pal?
How you doing, buddy?
You have a good time?
That kind of thing.
I don't know.
And he does that.
He's sitting there and a kid asks for an autograph.
Well, anyway, here's the clip.
Biden would use the autopen.
He'd have an autopen problem.
And Joe Biden didn't sign.
He was incapable of signing.
So they'd follow him around with this big machine.
You know what it was called?
An autopen.
And he'd have the autopen signed for him.
He'd take the paper, hand it to his guys, sign it with an autopen.
Not too good, right?
He's making the same jokes about his political rival that he would make to an adult.
To the kids and it's so charming, it's.
It's like that time that he, he was doing the the phone calls at christmas to the little kids.
They said, how old are you?
You're seven, you still believe in Senate.
Because at seven it's uh marginal.
Right, it's marginal.
He says to a kid, it's beautiful it's it's, it's so forthright, it's so blunt, it's so innocent in a way.
It's so, it's so American, I love it.
Sorry, I know.
Look, it's weird.
I get it.
If you want to go, move to France, move to France.
But I, being very American, I love it.
Now, speaking of the government and Easter, Congressman Riley Moore and Senator Eric Schmidt, two of my absolute favorite legislators in the country, have an excellent proposal to make Easter a federal holiday.
We'll see what that means.
And then we'll get to Congressman Swolewell being a dirty, rotten crook.
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Riley Moore and Eric Schmidt want to make Easter. a federal holiday.
So Riley Moore writes, there is no federal holiday for Easter, the most important day in the Christian faith.
Senator Schmidt and I think that should change.
We've introduced a bill to make Easter Monday a federal holiday.
And then he posts a headline for the op-ed in which he pitched this, which coincidentally was in the Daily Wire.
And if you want to get this news first, you've got to subscribe and become a Daily Wire member, because we got the goods, baby.
So Congressman Moore goes on, beautiful thread, including an image of the Pietà by Michelangelo, and all sorts of beautiful art and reasoning as to why this should be a holiday.
Really, this is intuitive to a lot of people.
One reason why Easter is not yet a federal holiday is Easter falls on a Sunday.
But other federal holidays at least sometimes fall on Sundays or Saturdays.
And what do we do?
We celebrate the holiday on the following Monday.
That's what we do.
Any sort of day.
And we do that because we want to distinguish what our society considers holy.
That's why we have them.
You'd think if a federal holiday fell on a weekend, you'd say, okay, well, all right, you're not getting a day off.
You had time to spend with your family, you had time to celebrate now.
But no, we make a point.
Federal holiday, you get a day off.
And we don't do that for Easter.
Holidays don't only reflect what a society considers holy, holidays in many ways establish what a society considers holy.
Just like the law is a teacher, the libertarians have this view that politics is entirely downstream of culture, so the law is merely reflective of what we've already decided ourselves in the popular culture.
The liberals, the true left-wing liberals, they know that that's not really true.
They might muse about that in their philosophical bull sessions.
But they know that's not really true.
The real left-wing liberals understand that the law is a teacher.
That's why they change society.
They social engineer through the law.
And conservatives need to get onto this, too.
No one cares about Juneteenth, right?
When did Juneteenth become a federal holiday?
Six, seven years ago?
When Juneteenth became a federal holiday, statistically, no one cared about or had even heard of Juneteenth.
Most people, hey, quick question.
What's Juneteenth?
What does it celebrate?
What event does Juneteenth commemorate?
Don't Google it.
Don't grok it right now.
Can you close your eyes?
Can you tell me what Juneteenth commemorates?
No.
You say, well, the emancipation of the slaves.
No, it doesn't.
The slaves were emancipated in two ways the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment.
The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the rebelling states, and then the 13th Amendment abolished it as a matter of the Constitution.
Juneteenth celebrates neither of those things.
Juneteenth celebrates the day that the mailman finally got to Texas to bring word. to a town that slavery had been abolished.
Most people today don't know that.
But we do know that we have to consider Juneteenth holy.
If Juneteenth is a holiday, then Easter certainly should be a holiday.
Easter is the most important day in the Christian liturgical year.
It's more important than Christmas.
Christmas is a federal holiday.
Easter should be too.
On Easter, we commemorate the conquest of death on the cross from Good Friday.
Good Friday probably should be a holiday too.
Just doling out free pay, free days.
But we should.
It's a good investment because it establishes what we consider holy.
Are we a Christian nation?
I know there's no official religion.
I know we have no established church at the federal level, though we did have established churches at the state level for decades after the Constitution was ratified.
I know.
I'm not talking about anything official.
It comes to the official state religion.
But are we a Christian country?
The guys on the Mayflower, were they Christian?
Even the Founding Fathers, did they speak in a Christian way, speaking of Providence?
Did John Jay write in Federalist No. 2 that he thanks God that Providence has given this people a common religion?
He wasn't talking about Islam.
He wasn't talking about Shintoism.
He was talking about Christianity.
Does our national anthem say, conquer we must when our cause is just and the spear motto in God is our trust?
Is one nation under God in our national, sorry, in our Pledge of Allegiance?
Is in God we trust on our money?
Yeah.
Are we a Christian country?
Yeah.
Even today, even today we're still a Christian country.
How is Easter not a federal holiday?
Because the Libs don't want us to be a Christian country.
That's why they want to get rid of Columbus Day in large part, because Columbus was a devout Catholic.
That's why they want to add all these other holidays.
You want to have Martin Luther King Day?
Fine.
I think there were better talent that could have filled that role if you want to have a holiday of that sort.
But fine.
Okay, we can have MLK Day.
We have all sorts of days.
We should have Easter.
Is Christianity at least as important to America as the day the mailman finally got to Texas to tell them that slavery had already been abolished?
I think so.
I think the resurrection is at least as important to Americans.
This is a no-brainer.
Any members of Congress, any senators who vote against that, they're not going to make it.
And they shouldn't make it in their primaries.
Speaking of Congress, another scandal for Eric Swalwell.
This guy can't win for losing.
Swalwell already had the sex scandal.
He shacked up, allegedly, with a Chinese spy named Fang Fang.
This was some years ago.
Compromised, looks goofy, okay.
He has another scandal as he's running for California governor.
And this is being pushed even by Democrats, Tom Steyer in particular.
Swalwell is not a resident of California.
The state constitution of California says you have to be a resident to run for governor.
He's not a resident.
His residency is a kind of a cheat where he's renting a room in a friend's house or something, but he really lives and his family lives in Washington, D.C., which is fine.
I actually think legislators, federal legislators, should move their families to D.C.
It's a fact of our modern election system with airplanes that What legislators have to do is abandon their families, leave their families at home in the district to be a prop for their political careers, and then if they do want to see their families, they have to fly back and forth all the time, and it's disastrous.
It's bad for getting things done in Washington, D.C., it's bad for the families, it's bad for everybody.
So I actually commend Swalwell for moving his family to D.C., but he's not eligible to run for governor.
Well, now he's got another one.
And it comes from the same reason that he can't establish residency in California.
Similar reason, at least.
Swalwell, according to, got to give a hat tip here, to Apple Lamps on X. Swallwell is paying his wife many, many thousands of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars out of his campaign account.
I don't have the total number.
It's a little unclear how much money's come out.
He's paying his wife out of the campaign account to watch their kids.
Does that seem like a legitimate campaign expense to you?
Can I do that?
Can I bill Daily Wire?
Can I send invoices into Daily Wire because sweet little Elisa watches the kids while I do my podcast?
Do you do that?
Can you do that at work?
You can send in an invoice to your boss and say, hey, my wife, she cooked dinner tonight for a couple hours.
She took the kids to the zoo.
That'll be $10,000, please.
No.
That's ridiculous.
I don't know if this is illegal.
It might be legal.
Even if it's legal, it is most definitely corrupt.
Now, I view this for Swolewell as three strikes, you're out.
I view this as the Democrats cutting bait on this guy.
He's a doofus.
He would be a terrible governor.
He's not a good candidate for governor.
It's California, which is left of Lenin.
But even still, this guy's pretty weak.
I think this is three strikes and you're out.
Why is he doing all of this?
Well, this gets, as always, these stories interest me mostly because of what they tell us more deeply about political philosophy and how to engage in politics.
The reason he's doing this, the reason he has at least two of these scandals, I don't know about Fang Fang, but at least the two latter scandals, the reason he's doing this is because he's broke.
His net worth is basically zero.
I think he reported, it's hard to track down the precise net worth of these guys, I think his purported net worth is over $400,000, which is a good amount of money.
But I don't think that's really liquid.
I don't think it's based on some investment or something.
I don't think he has access to that cash.
And when you add on liabilities that he already reports, like student loans, like his mortgage, other things, I think he has zero money.
And he has zero dollars or negative money.
He might have more debts than he has assets, which means he can't buy the second house.
It's expensive being a politician.
Sometimes people say, these congressmen, they're making too much money.
They're making, what is it, $174,000, $175,000 a year?
That's a lot of money.
It's really not for that job because that job, if you want to do it well, requires you to have two houses in at least one very expensive area, Washington, D.C.
But maybe also in an expensive area if you're a congressman from California or New York or wherever.
It's expensive.
You've got to fly all over the place and it's tough.
They don't make a lot of money given their job requirements.
You've got to buy people stuff.
They don't make a lot of money.
They are open to a lot of bribery and corruption, and they give into it.
These are the risks of being a poor politician.
I remember for years the populist base, of which I am a member despite my bow ties.
I am a member.
I like pop.
Two cheers for populism, I say.
But they would say, we need to get these billionaires out of politics.
Uh-uh.
Totally disagree.
Hard disagree.
Give me more millionaires and hundred millionaires.
Give me billionaires in politics.
Give me Trump, actually.
You know why?
There are some risks of having rich guys in office.
Sure.
There's risks to anything in politics.
The risks of political corruption are much, much less.
It's very hard to buy those people off.
It's very easy to buy off Swalwell.
It's very easy to compromise Swalwell.
It's very easy to open Swalwell up to blackmail.
Very hard to do it to someone like a Trump or a Mitt Romney for that matter or a Mike Bloomberg for that matter.
I'm for it.
Who's our richest president we've ever had?
Trump.
Who's our second richest?
George Washington.
That's who.
Pretty good.
Pretty good example.
Tough for Swalwell because really these attacks are not coming from the right.
These attacks are coming from the left.
I think they've had enough of him.
And had he run his career a little bit differently, he wouldn't be dialing for dollars and getting caught with Fang Fang.
And I think he's out.
Speaking of marriage, speaking of fat cats.
The fat jabs, the shots, the Ozempic shots, they're also having a negative effect.
Everyone's only seeing the upside.
There's some real negative effects.
Namely, it's causing everybody to get divorced.
The fat jabs are reportedly doubling the divorce rate.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Bob Gunner, 3086, says, I thought I was an S-H-I-T talker, but Mr. President, chef's kiss.
Yeah.
Yeah, I made this point on Twitter yesterday, and some people were very upset with me.
I said that tweet about, we're going to turn your country into hell, open the effing straits, praise be to Allah, Trump.
I said, that's a really masterfully written tweet.
I said, what are you talking about?
I said, it's actually rhetorically sophisticated.
The reason it's rhetorically sophisticated is because it's this crazy shock to the system.
Trump, for all his trash talking, he doesn't usually go blue.
Well, sometimes he does.
He doesn't usually go blue in tweets, in written language, and he only rarely does it when he's speaking.
But this was so blue, so in your face.
And then he had that praise be to Allah thing, and you realize, okay, this is actually a disciplined tweet.
He actually thought about this, because that was dry humor that he inserted there at the end.
And what it also showed us was that that whole tweet was itself mocking the way that the Iranians speak.
The Iranians are the ones who say, Fury, fire from heavens raining down.
They're the ones who talk trash like this.
And so what does Trump do?
He does the American version of that.
He says, Open the effing straits or you're going to be living in hell.
You're going to be, I'm going to blow up all your bridges.
I'm going to blow up all your power plants.
Praise be to Allah.
The praise be to Allah is a revelation that he is mocking the way that they talk.
He says, Maybe you don't get me, so let me speak your language.
Looks Maxing and Marriage00:04:54
You can say, I don't like that or I do like that.
I think it's funny.
But regardless, that is rhetorically very sophisticated.
It is.
It is.
Okay.
Everyone's hot on the fat shots.
Everyone's hot on it, right?
Everyone's taking it.
And they say it's for health reasons.
Maybe in some cases it is.
But for a lot of people, they just want to look better.
Well, a real downside here.
Namely, people are getting divorced because of them.
Here's from The Telegraph.
Fat jabs to unleash divorce boom.
Couples undergoing rapid weight loss twice as likely to end unhealthy relationships, study finds.
Now, what's an unhealthy relationship?
An unhealthy relationship.
is generally defined as a relationship that I no longer enjoy.
What is that?
Does that mean that one of the spouses is beating you, or does it just mean you're sick of your husband or wife?
It can mean any of those things.
The growing popularity of fat jabs is expected to increase Britain's divorce rates as slimmed-down partners look for new love, health experts have said.
According to research from academics in Sweden, people who undergo rapid weight loss are twice as likely to divorce.
The study focused on people who had been fitted with gastric bands, known as Bariatric surgery, the risk of weight loss drugs will trigger an even larger divorce trend in the future, researchers said.
This brings me back to a conversation that I had with Clavicular.
I interviewed Mr. Ickular before he ran the guy over, allegedly, before he was arrested, before he shot the crocodiles with the, or the alligators with the guns.
And I said to him, what are you after?
You know, what do you want?
And he said, I just want to look as good as I can possibly look.
I want to look smacks.
I said, okay, that's very interesting.
I found Clavicular very, very interesting to speak to.
I thought he was quite thoughtful.
especially for his age.
The guy's 19 or 20 years old.
I thought he was quite thoughtful.
He was going down a very bad path, but he was pretty thoughtful about it at least.
So I really enjoyed speaking to him.
And I asked him a question that he both couldn't answer but answered delightfully, which is, I said, what is looking good for?
Why do you want to do it?
What is the goal?
What's looking good for?
And he didn't have an answer.
So the answer he ended up giving was, he said, look, I just want a mog.
I just want a mog.
And what is to mog?
I mean, dictionaries could be filled, encyclopedia could be filled.
The etymology of mog would go back many millennia, probably.
What is to mog is to just be great.
to be better than another, not only to be great, but to be greater than someone else, to mog.
And I said, well, that's it?
Because I thought looking good, if you're a guy, the reason to look good is to get a girl.
Or maybe if you want to be a movie star so that you get the part.
Or maybe if you want to be a politician so that you can win over votes.
Or maybe you get, I don't know.
But mostly it's to get a girl.
That's why women want to look hot is to get a guy.
And men want to look smacks to get a girl.
That's what I thought.
He said, no.
It is looks maxing for its own sake.
Even if it has all these other negative effects on you.
One example he gave was because he was shooting himself up with so many hormones, he was impotent.
He couldn't conceive a child if he wanted to.
I said, well, that's not good.
Because if the point is to look good, to get a girl, to get married, to have a kid, you've just totally undermined your ostensible purpose.
So he said, well, that's not even my purpose.
It's just to look good in a sterile way.
Well, that's how I feel about the fat jabs.
Why are these people getting them?
What they're all going to tell themselves is it's for health.
But there are some negative health effects to these drugs.
So I don't know.
I mean, talk to your doctor, right?
I don't know that it is.
Maybe if you're single, I kind of get it so you can get a spouse.
It's hard out there.
If you're a little hefty, it's hard to get a spouse.
But if you're already married, isn't there something rather fitting about getting a little bit plump once you get married?
Isn't there something kind of because you're not who are you trying to you want to look good for your spouse.
but you're not hitting de Klerb every night.
And indeed, if you start to make an idol out of your own looks, that might undermine your marriage.
You know, our Lord tells us, we're in Easter week, our Lord tells us, what good is it?
What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but to lose his soul?
What does it profit a tubby to lose all that fat but to lose his marriage?
What does it profit a man to look smacks but lose his family, his progeny, his legacy?
What's it for?
I would be very skeptical.
Trump's Presidential Library00:07:07
I don't know.
I would be very, I don't know, but you got it.
With anything in life, you do have to ask yourself what it's for.
Back in the old days before we got destroyed, before we got one-shotted by modern philosophy, before Descartes just scrambled up all our brains in early modernity, back in the old days of Aristotle, we knew that the way you understood what a thing is, is largely by what the thing is for.
What's the fat jab for, guys?
Put down the fat jab!
What profited if a man to mog the whole world but to lose his perhaps slightly chubby wife?
It's not a good idea.
Okay, speaking of purpose, President Trump has once again upended standards and norms because as he prepares to build his hotel, sorry, I gave away the game, as he prepares to build his presidential library, he just came out and said the one thing about it is it's not going to be a library.
I got one.
Your son Eric posted a photo of what will be the Trump presidential library.
It's a huge skyscraper.
Is that all a library?
What else is going in there?
Well, it's a library.
It's a museum, a library.
It's a presidential.
But I wouldn't start it until I'm out of office.
I don't believe in building libraries or museums.
It's really like the Barack Hussein Obama one in Chicago, in not a good location, and it's a very unattractive building that's seriously late and seriously over budget.
I think you're going to see a great one here, and it'll go up on time, on budget.
Best location in Miami.
They say it's the best block in Miami and the state.
Will people live there?
Will people live in the floors?
No, it's going to be most likely a hotel.
This concept could be an office, but it's most likely going to be a hotel with a beautiful building underneath and a 747 Air Force One in the lobby, which is going to be a trick.
You know how much I hate to say I told you so?
I might be the most vindicated man on the face of the earth.
I said, I've said since the first Trump administration, maybe since year one, I said, I want Trump's presidential library to actually be in Atlantic City and called the Donald John Trump Presidential Library and Casino.
That's what I wanted.
And we didn't get the casino yet, but he said it's going to be a hotel.
I don't really like libraries, he says.
Look, I like libraries.
I love libraries, actually.
I'm kind of a bookish guy, you know?
I have a bow tie on right now.
I have my yearly bow tie on.
Trump doesn't love libraries.
So it would be ill-fitting for Trump to make his presidential library primarily a library.
Trump's a businessman.
Trump is a hotel magnate.
Trump is a big real estate developer.
It's very fitting for his building to be office space.
The mock-ups of it are like a, it kind of looks like Freedom Tower in New York, the new World Trade Center.
I don't really like the new World Trade Center.
I didn't really like the old World Trade Center.
You're not really allowed to say it anymore.
I thought they were kind of ugly.
Now you miss it nostalgically, but they're kind of ugly.
But it's very fitting for Trump.
He's a businessman.
He's an 80s, 90s, 2000s New York businessman.
It's very fitting.
I love it.
Frankly, Barack Obama's library is fitting because it's a big, ugly, gray hunk of garbage.
as is his legacy.
So it makes sense.
Okay, before we go, there is one last Trump building thing that we need to touch on.
Trump was on Air Force One.
He was asked about building that ballroom.
So he's building this ballroom.
I saw it.
I saw the cranes at the White House yesterday.
And now a federal judge has stepped in, of course, and said Trump can't build the ballroom at the White House.
He says he can't build the ballroom unless he gets approval from Congress.
Mind you, the ballroom is being built with private funds.
Note, not one taxpayer cent is going toward building the ballroom.
But the federal judge, I mean, a federal judge would probably try to stop the Artemis launch, probably try to make Artemis turn around from right behind the moon, say, sorry, this might help Trump, sorry, rocket ship, you have to turn around, you have to come home, because federal judge Sally Fernandez in the district court of whatever says that Trump can't do it.
But now they're saying he can't build a ballroom, and this is really silly.
One, because many presidents before him have built things on the White House grounds, many.
But two, The reason this is really silly is, and I haven't heard anyone really talking about this.
The ballroom isn't just a ballroom.
Here he is on Air Force One.
Considered the best, most beautiful by far.
And what's your timeline on this land?
Timeline.
So we're ahead of schedule and under budget.
And all of this money, all of the money paid, are paid by myself and donors.
It's all donors.
There's not one dime of government.
money going into the ballroom.
Now the military is building a big complex under the ballroom, which has come out recently because of a stupid lawsuit that was filed.
But the military is building a massive complex under the ballroom, and that's under construction, and we're doing very well.
So we're ahead of schedule, that's part of it.
The ballroom essentially becomes a shed for what's being built under the military, including from drones, and including from any other thing.
The ballroom will be over the Presidential Emergency Operations Center.
Going back to the initial construction of the East Wing of the White House, of all the things that have ever been in that area of the White House grounds, it started under Teddy Roosevelt and then was expanded under Franklin Roosevelt.
Why?
Why did Franklin Roosevelt build there?
He built there, he built the East Wing as cover for a wartime bomb shelter.
It was a cover.
Truman vastly expanded it.
Neither of those guys got congressional authorization for it.
And this, too.
The White House does need a bigger event space.
The White House is weirdly kind of small, so they do need an event space.
But he's updating the Emergency Command Center, which is directly underneath this.
We shouldn't even really know, it shouldn't be that popular that that's what's underneath this, but it's so, so stupid.
A judge says that Congress needs to give approval. for the president to renovate his residence with private money when no other president has ever had to deal with that?