Michael Knowles (11:27)
You watch the full episode right now on the Michael Knowles YouTube channel. Do not forget to subscribe to DailyWire for the ad free version. This is from an official on the ground. The fact that this was a cybertruck really limited the damage at the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas that occurred inside of the valet because it had most of the blast go up through the truck and out the front. Glass doors to the hotel were not broken during this explosion. How's that possible? You have this tank explode right in front of the hotel. How is it possible people were injured. How is it possible, though, that the only person who was killed, at least as of now, was the attacker? It's because, as Elon Musk says, the evil knuckleheads picked the wrong vehicle for a terrorist attack. Cybertruck actually contained the explosion, directed the blast upwards. Not even the glass doors of the lobby were broken. It's because it was a tank. This is actually, and we can be a little light about it, I think, because no one was killed other than this animal. It's because of how well engineered this truck was. This is the greatest advertisement in the history of automobiles, this thwarted terror attack. So the question on everybody's minds, are these attacks connected? Seems like a hell of a coincidence, doesn't it? And we know for a fact, because Joe Biden has left the border open for four years now, has actually invited foreigners in, totally unvetted. We know that Muslim terrorists have entered that border. Sean Ryan did a show, when was it? Some weeks ago, an interview with someone who said, oh, yeah, we've got over a thousand ISIS terrorists or Al Qaeda or other Islamic terrorists in the country guaranteed planning an attack. I don't know, it seems. It could just be a mere coincidence, but it seems real coincidental. So the question then is, who's behind it? Is this guy a Muslim terrorist? Could be. Is this guy like the guy in New Orleans? Is this guy connected to, I don't know, the Iranians, the Chinese, the, I don't know, the U.S. intelligence community? I don't want to suggest something like that. The only reason I suggest it is I'm going through the List of Trump's enemies. Okay, I'm going through the list of people who have tried to undermine Trump, and you have to include the US Intelligence community in that, because we now have it on record that they cooked up a fake dossier. They went in, they trapped Trump administration officials in the first term, guys like Mike Flynn to undermine Trump's administration. We know that. We know about those bad actors. We know about the Andy McCabes. We know about the pages. We know about the players in the American IC who have tried to undermine Trump, the 51 former intelligence officials who come out swinging for the Democrats against Trump. We know about all this. And we know. I'm not suggesting that the intelligence community actively did this. We do know that a lot of these attacks after the fact, they say, well, they were known to law enforcement. Okay, well, we have a surveillance state. The American intelligence community knows where every pro life granny in the country is. They've got their eyes on all the traditionalist Catholic parishes. Well, okay, if you got your eyes on these people, how does this sort of thing happen beyond the corruption in our own government, beyond the incompetence or deceit of the FBI? Is it the Iranians? Yeah, the Iranians have been trying to kill Trump for years. Trump killed the top Iranian general. They've had a fatwa on that guy for years. Was it the Chinese? Chinese have a lot of. There are a lot of people who want Trump dead or otherwise incapacitated. So the political takeaway for me, we don't really know much about the cybertruck attack. The political takeaway for me, though, is, is this going to stop? No. Trump is not the president yet. We are entering into a very dangerous 19 days, 18 days now. Trump is sworn in on January 20th. We're entering into a very dangerous time. And by the way, it's not going to stop when he's inaugurated. If there have been assassination attempts, foreign. If there have been attempts to kick this guy off the ballot, to imprison him, raiding his home, the FBI raiding his home with deadly force authorized at Mar a Lago. If the liberal regime has justified the assassination of Trump time and time again. Joe Biden started his campaign in 2020 on that, calling him a Nazi sympathizer. Total baseless lie. If they have been doing that for this long, they're going to keep it up. This is not going to stop. And it's a reminder that the apparently feckless policies of the Biden administration, which I don't think are feckless, I think they're Intentional? Well, they're gonna have real consequences. I don't think the open border during Biden was just a whoopsie daisy. You know, they just don't have their act together. That was intentional. But that intentional policy did allow terrorists to enter the country. Is it because Joe Biden wanted terrorists to enter the country? No, it's because Democrats wanted to flood the country with foreigners because they think that it will give them a permanent electoral majority. And they're willing to take a few thousand terrorists if that's what it's gonna take. They're willing to take hundreds of thousands of kids being missing and probably in sexual slavery. They're willing to take 60 to 80% of women and girls who cross the border illegally being raped or otherwise sexually assaulted along the way. That's just the cracking of the eggs that is required to make an omelette for the Democrats. Well, that has real effect. And the real effect here is with all of this, not just the open border, but the corruption of the FBI, the failure of law, the undermining of law enforcement, DEI in American government. The upshot of all of that is 2025 starts with two terrorist attacks. There is a lot to recover. There's a lot to work on. Also worth pointing out, even with the New Orleans attack, where we have more information than we do with the cybertruck, we still don't know all that much about this guy. We don't know all that much about this guy because he's got an Arab name. But there are some reports that he has really no Arab connection, that he might just be a regular old black guy with an assumed name. During the Black Power movement in the 70s, a lot of just regular black guys took on Muslim names because of the Nation of Islam and strange black nationalist ideologies. Again, we just don't know. We don't know anything about this. There's a chance he's not Arab. He just pledged his support to ISIS out of some ideology. We just don't know. We just don't know. But an inauspicious start to the new year. Now, speaking of immigration and Elon, the big story that took place over the break was the H1B controversy. The H1B controversy. This didn't involve Arabs. This didn't involve black nationalists. This didn't involve Venezuelans or Guatemalans crossing the border. This involved Indians. A huge fight broke out over H1B visas. These are visas offered to foreigners to come work in the United States. The most prominent example would be Indians being brought over to work in tech, there aren't that many of these visas. I think it's something like 85,000 per year. Still, though, 85,000 is a big number if you're one of the 85,000 people that loses your job in America to a foreigner. And it became a major controversy and it exposed a big split within the American right, big split even within the MAGA movement, where you had immigration restrictionists, where you had traditionalists, cultural conservatives on one side saying, we need to restrict immigration. And you had the more libertarian, more classically liberal types on the other side saying, no, no, we want to bring in all the best foreigners from overseas and some Americans might lose their jobs. But it's just the whole purpose of it is just to bring in all these super geniuses that will really help America. This took over social media, I think, in part because people were bored a little bit over Christmas. But it's not a minor debate. This issue is relatively minor, the H1B visa issue. But it signifies a much deeper divide on the right. And it is a debate that we cann. The stakes are very, very high. We'll get to that in one moment. First, though, I hope at some point over Christmas or maybe now, because people are getting back into the swing of things and also Christmas is still going on because Christmas is 12 days long. I hope that you checked out my yes or no game with John Crist. Great comedian. Let's say it was rollicking good time. If you want to play yes or no, you go to dailywire.com shop. You get the yes or no game. You get the expansion packs, philosophy, politics and religion, the conspiracy theories. Maybe some more coming. Go play it at home with your family. Best way to figure out who knows whom. Best real conversation starter. I'm sure after all of your holiday meals, you definitely want some more of those. Go check that game out and go check out the show right now. Oh, mention never take a paternity leave. Not because there's anything wrong with taking care of the family, but because you don't want people to think you're a lesbian. Okay, I didn't read the end of that. Hold on, hold on. You can get the full episode on the Michael Knowles YouTube channel or you can subscribe to Daily Wire plus and you get it all exclusive, uncensored, ad, free. DailyWirePlus.com should we take more Indians to fill our tech jobs? That was the big debate that broke out on the American right over Christmas. And Elon Musk, a man to whom we owe quite a lot, we Conservatives. The man who put his money where our mouth is and bought Twitter gave conservatives at least a little bit of a space to talk in Big Tech. $44 billion worth. The man who endorsed Donald Trump, I think, brought a lot of people over who helped Republican candidates. He came out, he said, this issue, H1B, is a major issue for him. He's willing to go to war over it. He said, the reason I'm in America, along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla, and hundreds of other companies that made America strong, is because of H1B. Take a big step back and I'll clean this up for a family show. But it's all caps F U C K yourself in the face. I will go to war on this issue, the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend. Now, he got a lot of pushback from people in the MAGA base who said, hey, what we want to conserve here is not the profits of various companies. What we want to conserve is the American way of life. We want to protect the American workers. So much of the realignment that took place over the last 10 years under Trump's leadership of the GOP is that the GOP is the working class party. The libs are the party of the elites. That was not true when I was a kid. That wasn't apparently true when I was a kid. That is true now. So he said, hold on. You can't sell out American workers just because you want to get some people from India to work the tech jobs and pay them much lower wages than you would have to pay to Americans. So on the Pro H1B side, you have the corporations and the libertarians and the tech guys saying, no, no, it's not about lower wages. It's about a dearth of talent in America. We just don't have Americans who are smart enough, who are educated enough to fill these jobs. These dummy Americans, they just can't figure it out. The anti H1B side said, no, you know, look, maybe Americans aren't great at these jobs yet, but that's because of failures of the schools. And actually, you know what? Forget about that. Americans are good at these jobs and you guys are just trying to save some money and you're importing foreigners and you're totally disregarding the desires of cultural conservatives and people who want to maintain a cohesive culture. Polity is not just about an economy. We're not a society serving gdp. We're not a society serving the market. The market exists to serve us, to serve our political ends. We don't want to let the tail wag the dog here. That was the fight. So one of the critics of the Pro H1B side was DC Drano, who pointed out, hold on. Even when you get down into the nitty gritty on who's getting these H1B visas, it's not just the 0.001% super geniuses who start major corporations. It's not the Elon Musk's of the world. It's people who make $22,000 a year to be a cook. One of the examples they pulled out because you can look this stuff up. That's federal information. You can figure out who gets the H1B visas. $22,000 for cook number three. You're telling me we can't find cook number three in America? You need some genius coder from India. You need some Punjabi genius to come be cook number three? I don't think so. Maybe you need a Punjabi genius to make a delicious tikka masala, but you're not necessarily for any other cooking job. Hold on. This seems to be about a little bit more than super geniuses. Now, what did Trump say? How did he weigh in? He weighed in on the pro H1B side. He said, I have many H1B visas on my properties. I've been a believer in H1B. I've used it many times. It's a great program. Before we get into how we should think about this, as conservatives, as people who want to make America great again, as people who have maybe a more robust and comprehensive right wing view of things, I want to defend President Trump for a second. People are saying Trump is selling out his base. He's breaking his campaign promises by embracing H1B. That is not true. First of all, we have 3 million immigrants come here per year, more under Biden, 1 million illegal, and then 2 million illegal or more illegal. 85,000 foreign workers getting temporary visas is a drop of a drop of a drop in the bucket. So in itself, it's not a huge issue, but it's significant of other issues. But then even on the deeper point, this is what Trump campaigned on. Trump did not campaign on restricting immigration. I think we should restrict immigration. I think we should drastically reduce the total number of immigrants that we take into America each year, legal and illegal. That's my position. That is the position of most Americans sometimes, but that's not the position of most Americans other times. What I mean by that is when you ask most Americans, you want more or less legal immigration, what do you think about immigration what most Americans answer on public opinion polls is they want to stop illegal immigration. And they either want the same amount of legal immigration or they want even more legal immigration. You know, we don't care who comes here, just as long as they do it legally. They go, well, all right, anybody's welcome to come to America. America doesn't have any deeper cultural identity. Anybody can come here if they're going to strive and make money, but they got to do it legally. People answer that on public opinion polls. However, when you ask people not are you pro or anti immigration, when you ask them, hey, what do you think the ideal number of immigrants that we let in per year is? The answer people give, the majority of people give is significantly lower than the number of legal immigrants we allow in each year. There was one poll, this was some years ago now from Harvard, Harris, showed that the lion's share of Americans want immigration to be somewhere around 500,000 or less people per year. 500,000 or fewer people per year. But we take in a million people legally each year. That's a conservative number. So that means that practically speaking, the vast majority of Americans want to drastically reduce, cut it in half the number of legal immigrants we take per year. But they don't think that that's their position. They think their position is illegal, bad, legal, good. But their actual position, if they knew the numbers, is to drastically reduce all immigration. It's just a case of our liberal establishment being so good at hiding how many people we brought into America that no one really knows. No one has any idea how many foreigners we bring into our country every year. And it's nothing against foreigners, especially Indians. I love Indians. I've been to India twice. I played the sitar. One of my best friends, I can say this sincerely, one of my very best friends is Indian from India. I love the Indian culture, okay? But an immigration policy is not just based on which foreign countries you like the most or what kinds of flavors of dinners you like the most. We've just taken in so many foreigners. We have the highest foreign born percentage of the population that we've ever had in America. It's at record highs over 15%. So does that just ask yourself, is there any limit to how many foreigners we can take in? If you just, if you took in 300 million foreigners, if you took in 600 million foreigners, now 2 thirds of the country is foreign. If you took in, I don't know, more than that, at a certain point, doesn't America cease to be America? Well, some people would say no. No, America is just the Constitution. America's just an idea. It's just an idea floating in the ether. And anyone who comes in and has this idea injected into their brains, then they're automatically American. I don't think that's true. I don't think that's how any nation works. I think it's the people, and I think it takes a little while to become an American. I think it actually might take generations to pick up on all the subtle cultural complexities of what it means to be an American. Not saying we can't take in foreigners, we should take in some foreigners, but it takes a while to assimilate. We have manifestly not assimilated people, and we have manifestly ignored cultural matters in service of radical ideology and money for decades. The movement of people into the United States over the last 60, 70 years is the largest movement of people ever in recorded history. It's just a little too much. So where does that leave us? Vivek, my friend Vivek Ramaswamy, he tweeted out, he waded into this debate. He said, merit or group quotas? You can't have both. I've said it for years. It remains my view today. So he's saying we need a pure meritocracy, but the question is, what do we mean by merit? So again, people are like knocking Elon and Vivek. I think their views are much more complex. Vivek himself said, I've long said the current H1B system is badly broken, needs to be gutted. It shouldn't use a lottery. It should be based on pure merit. It shouldn't tether workers to just one corporation. Same principles I favor today. There's another reason that corporations love H1B is because the workers lose their visas if they leave the corporation. So it just gives them basically indentured servants, people that they can pay low wages to who are totally beholden to them, or they get kicked out of the country. Musk, for his. For his side, also walked back his comments a little bit. He said, no question that H1B needs to be overhauled. My question, though is what do we mean by merit? The way this debate is being framed is it's merit versus entitlement. What do we mean by merit, though? Merit could mean a lot of things. Merit could mean smart foreigners, merit jobs in America because they're so smart and they're so good at engineering. And you might say, yeah, okay, they merit it. That's like the free market libertarian sort of libertarian view of merit. There's another view of merit, though, the critical race theory view of merit, the leftist view of merit is that non white people merit special treatment and advantages at the expense of white people because of slavery or whatever, you know, because of oppression. There's another view, this is maybe my own view and the social conservative view, which is I think Americans merit priority in their own country. I think American citizens merit. They deserve being prioritized by their own government in their own country, and they shouldn't have to compete with foreign workers all over the world. Maybe we don't deny market dynamics, but maybe we give Americans a little bit of a special treatment, a treatment that they actually deserve and they merit. Because this word merit, we use this word meritocracy. I don't use that word meritocracy, but some people do, especially libertarians and more classically liberal people. But it's a euphemism that just conceals a conception of justice. And so that's what we're really arguing over is the conception of justice a total worship of the free market. Yeah, the world is flat. Everyone should compete with everyone. Maybe all the Americans lose their jobs, but hey, GDP will tick up a little bit. And don't you like Chinese food and Indian food? That's one version. There's the leftist version of justice, which is basically white people are bad and every other person is good, men are bad and women are good. And so that's their version of justice. I prefer a classical view of justice grounded in the natural law, grounded in our Christian tradition, grounded in just the American heritage and how we've always kind of done things. So to wrap it up a little bit, because I know what you're going to hear from the libs, I actually already heard this when I expressed this view is they said, oh, Michael Knowles is embracing critical race theory. He's questioning meritocracy. No, no, no. Believe it or not, there are critiques of liberalism from the right that are different than critiques from the left. And so what's my solution to the whole H1B thing? My solution is not some ideology, it's not some neat policy that you can write in five bullet points on a napkin that should be eternally true for all times. My prescription is prudence, which Aristotle called the paramount political virtue which is at the core of conservative politics, prudence. Should we reduce the number of foreigners we let into our country through immigration or even through visa worker programs? Yeah, probably we should. So we shouldn't let people in anymore? No, I didn't say we shouldn't. Let anyone in, but probably we should reduce it. Why? Why? What's your ideology? What's your highly rationalistic policy wonk white paper? Yeah, I don't know. I guess just it seems like we got a cultural problem right now. People aren't assimilating. Americans don't like that. They voted against this. They regularly express their views on this. And we should probably, we should probably support them for right now. Doesn't mean it won't change in the future. We should probably just go on gut a little bit. We should probably look to the wisdom of the ages and we should probably just say, you know, we're kind of losing the American identity. We don't really know who we are anymore. The country's kind of going to hell in a handbasket and I'm not willing to sell out the soul of my country for a slightly higher gdp. So, you know, for right now, probably got to take fewer people in. That's that the liberal mind cannot comprehend the classical liberal, the progressive liberal. None of they can't comprehend the basic element of politics, of political thinking, which is prudence. How about we just be a little prudent, guys, you know, 2024 ended on a high note. 2025 wasted no time reminding us of the challenges that we face. Yesterday's terror attack in New Orleans and the cybertruck explosion outside of President Trump's hotel in Las Vegas showed that the fight for truth is more important than ever. This is why we're here, to cut through the noise, bring you the facts, and ask the questions the establishment media refused to. If you are ready to stand with us on the front lines of this battle, now's the time. Get live breaking news, uncensored daily shows, and the absolute best in investigative journalism from the most trusted and handsome voices in conservative media. Join the fight today. DailyWire.com subscribe My favorite comment yesterday, I don't know, it was probably over a week ago. From slapmybass3825 says, Props to Michael for working the day before Christmas Eve. Most people would just start their vacations early. Thank you for that. I actually, maybe I mentioned this on that show. I was Scrooge this Christmas because Jeremy, nice, generous Jeremy, tells people, two weeks off unless your supervisor says otherwise. But nice, generous Jeremy says, hey, the employees, you've worked very hard this year. It's been a crazy election. Two weeks off. But I don't want to take two weeks off, first of all, because staying home and juggling children all day is actually much more exhausting. Mr. Davies and I have discovered over this past two weeks, but also because I love the show and there's a lot of stuff happening and I miss all of you. So, anyway, I'm glad that you support my scrooginess and stealing Christmas away from the staff. One final point on this meritocracy, justice, H1B. This whole thing. There's another little debate that's broken out on the Internet, right? And it's over. The woke right. You might have heard this term, the woke right. What is the woke right? I looked into it a little bit. The best I can tell is when you ask libertarians, classical liberals, neocons, those types, what is the woke right? They'll say it's right wingers who are not true liberals. They're not sufficiently liberal. But then you ask other people on the right what the woke right is, and they'll say, you ask the traditionalists, you ask the religious right, you ask the, I don't know, other non liberal right wingers, and they'll say, the woke right is people on the right who are too conservative. Sorry, who are too liberal. And so you say. Hold on, the phrase means opposite. I think it's a meaningless phrase. But the reason this Debate matters, the H1B debate matters. The reason the woke right thing, which I think is ridiculous, matters, is because this is a battle that's been simmering for a long time. The conservative movement, such as it is in America. The American right has always been cobbled together of ideological factions that are incoherent together. Libertarians, traditionalists, the religious right, populists, neo cons, country club set, the chamber of commerce, war hawks, doves, people who don't want to go to war, you name it. There are these incoherent factions on the right and they come together to form a coalition to beat the lib. Sometimes the left, I should say the left, because we have liberals who are on the right also. But the left has an advantage sometimes, which is they are ideologically totally unified. They're all progressives. There was Joe Manchin. He's not a Democrat anymore. They're all progressives, but on the right, we're just fighting over what it means. This is the same kind of debate that you saw in the 1950s, Friedrich Hayek versus Russell Kirk. This is the same debate you saw in the 2000s between Pat Buchanan and the Bushies. In some ways, this is the same debate you saw in the 80s between Ronald Reagan and George Bush. The first. There's just competing sides that want to claim the American right for themselves. And I think this is the latest version of it. But no, guys, we don't need to just open our borders. We don't need to tell the American worker he's got to compete against the entire globe or he's going to lose his job. We don't need to sacrifice our society and our cohesion on the altar of the free market. We don't have to deny the reality of the family. We don't need to sell little babies down the river to people who want to kill them because we want to cut taxes more. And we think that that'll help us. You don't have to do that. There is a deep kind of conservatism. There are things that matter more than corporations making slightly higher profits. Corporations making profits is important, too, but there are deeper things to politics. So there's a little bit of good news. Mr. Beast is engaged. This is the silver lining over a generally rough news cycle. Why do I care that Mr. Beast is engaged? I don't ever think I've seen a full Mr. Beast video. No knock on him. He's the most popular YouTuber ever. I don't think I'm really the audience. This guy has 340 million subscribers. He has an estimated net worth of $1 billion. He's obviously doing something effective. But I love that he's getting married because he's 26 years old. The median age of an American man getting married is 30.2 years old. We have a big problem in this country that we don't have babies. We're a dying country. That's why the liberal establishment gets away with importing so many foreigners every year. It's why they argue they have to import all the foreigners. It's because we have a dying country. And our country will collapse. We'll lose our imperial hegemony. Our economy will collapse if we don't keep the foreigners coming to boost the welfare state and grow our numbers because Americans aren't having kids. Now the social conservatives will say, yeah, well, part of the reason Americans aren't having kids is because you can't raise a family on one income anymore. Part of the reason you can't do that is because we're competing in this race to the bottom with low wages from peasants from Latin America and tech workers from Asia and South Asia who are being paid cheap wages and basically indentured servants. So it's kind of a chicken and the egg issue. But it brings me back to Mr. Beast. I love that Mr. Beast is engaged at the age of 26, especially because his channel had a problem where his sidekick decided to abandon his family, his wife and his child to engage in some ridiculous fetishism, the trans ideology. And it was so disgusting. Finally, he got the axe on the Mr. B Show. So I thought, oh, no, this is a very left wing show. I don't know what it is, but I just love to see that a guy who has 340 million followers, who's got a massive platform, the biggest platform in the history of YouTube, YouTube, arguably the biggest media platform in the history of the world, that that guy is getting married or at least is engaged to be married, six years younger than the current median age to get married. There are individual things we have to do. You want to fix corruption in the FBI? We need a new FBI director asap. Kash Patel cannot take office soon enough. You want to fix law enforcement? Well, we need to figure out who carried out this attack, who he was working with in New Orleans or in Las Vegas. They're individual things. You've got to work out your immigration issues, seal up the border, find missing hundreds of thousands of missing children as the new borders are. Tom Homan mentioned. Maybe we'll get to that tomorrow. You have to do all these things. But if you zoom out a little bit and you look at the big picture, the immigration crisis is happening because we don't have kids. We don't have kids because we have adopted a contraceptive mentality that tells us that having big families is bad, that there's no obligation, there's no purpose to marriage. We don't even know what marriage is. We redefine marriage. We redefine marriage because we don't know what men and women are. And that goes back much earlier than recent years. That goes back all the way to the 1970s or even earlier than that. It's because we don't live a conservative life. And so if the people in our country are not encouraged to do the things at an individual and a familial level that make countries strong, you're going to have a weak country and you're not going to be able to fix those political problems with just some guy getting elected to office, that can help a little bit. But you're not going to fix that. You need the people to live a good conservative life. That's the only way you get a good conservative country. Some politician can't do that for you. And if I see any even glimmer of hope, some guy, the biggest guy on YouTube saying, hey, marriage is cool, I'm going to do it younger and I'm going to marry some pretty girl and I hope they have kids immediately. That would be a very good sign for the culture. 2024 showed us that whatever the pendulum had been doing in recent years, it stopped and it started swinging back. I hope that this is just the latest bit of evidence that the swing back is going to go a lot further and correct some of those problems. We have no member block because I'm trapped in my home and it's apparently difficult to do. So. Anyway, we've got the show tomorrow and then we'll be back in the studio next week. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. See you.
