Michael Knowles (10:39)
There it is. There's the mic drop. I really don't care, Margaret. So, first of all, JD Is so good at this. I Think this is going to be a big feature of the second Trump administration. Trump is going to send Vance out to do a lot of these shows because Vance is really, really good at sparring with the journalists. Trump is quite good at it in his own way. But Vance is really, really good at being precise. He knows the party line. He's obviously deeply educated and intelligent and he's articulate. He's just really good at this. Okay? I could see this being a huge part of the Vice President's role in the second Trump administration. And that's what he grills her on here. She says, well, actually there are vetted immigrants, okay? And they're all vetted. And he says, yeah, what about the guy who just performed a terrorist attack? That guy was supposedly vetted. Okay? That was a really particular case. And I don't actually, I don't think that really counts because he was wearing a blue T shirt and it wasn't like a beige T shirt and he just gotten a haircut. He was having a rough day. He woke up on the wrong side of the bed and he just cuts her off. He says, you know, I really don't care, Margaret. We're not gonna let him in. Okay? That's it. That is the response that needs to be the Republican response to all of these people. Make America great again is probably the greatest political slogan of our time. Just below that is I really don't care, Margaret. Yeah, I really. We're not gonna do it. The arguments I've just made are really good, Margaret. And you're being obtuse and you're keeping your head in the sand and that's fine, I guess that's your prerogative. But we just won unified government from the American people. And most people don't want some face tattooed criminal illegal alien in their neighborhood. And look, I don't have to deal with it, cuz I'm like a rich powerful guy, but I care about my country, unlike the rich powerful liberals. So if I don't want it for my kids, I, I'm not gonna force other Americans to have it for their kids. And you know, I just really don't care, Margaret. I love it so much. There was a clip years ago also on CBS actually, of Scalia talking to Lesley Stahl. And Leslie Stahl was asking Scalia to explain how torture was not cruel and unusual punishment. They said, well, it's cause it's not punishment. It's a tactic to get information, but it's not punishment. And she couldn't process this. She said no, but she. But no, you know, it's like you're trying to beat the you know what out of him. And she's just stamme over her words. And at a certain point he cuts her off and says, well, anyway, that's my opinion and it happens to be correct. And this is the new version of that. Well, anyway, I really don't care, Margaret. We're deporting them. I'm sorry that you're so upset that we deport face tattooed Mexican Satanists and Taliban members. Yeah, I know that upsets you, but I really don't care. Now, I do care what you have to say, which is why I want you to know how to submit voice mailbag questions. It's very simple. You go to DailyWire.com, you click the Watch page, you click the Michael Knowles show. It's all right there. It's all very easy. Then you click Submit a mailbag question. You can send your written mailbag question. Just opens up a little email box. You can send the written mailbag. Or if you want to send a voicemail back, here's what you do. You record it on your phone, however you record audio. But I am imploring you, I'm begging you on my knees, keep these voicemails to less than a minute. Some people wanna send me their life story and I don't have time for that on the show. Less than a minute. Ideally less than 30 seconds. Submit. If it's over a minute, it just will not be played on the show, so you have to limit it. Okay? So you record your voice message, add it to the email and then send it in. And then I will get to hear your beautiful dulcet tones, your mellifluous voice. Now, speaking of immigration policy, we have the numbers. President Trump's first week, he arrested 538 illegal aliens and he deported hundreds more. That's according to the White House. That's great. I'm not knocking it. This is a breath of fresh air. You're really not going to hear complaints out of me. However, we need to recognize what this is. And that is a good start. This is not the best it's going to be. I hope not. This is not a huge show of Force. No. 538 people, plus hundreds more. Let's be generous and say that hundreds more takes the total arrested and deported to 1,000. 1,000 per week comes out to 52,000 per year. 52,000 per year comes out to 208,000 per term. And President Trump's only getting one term unless Andy Ogles constitutional amendment goes through, which probably will not happen. You're talking about at this rate, deporting 208,000 people. Now, I think we should give President Trump a little break here, okay? He's been a little bit busy this week. He's accomplished an extraordinary amount in the first week. However, we need to dramatically ramp up the deportations. I'm not even saying by 20% or 50%. I'm talking about by orders of magnitude. You need to radically ramp up the deportations. The conservative estimates say that There are between 11 and 16.8 million illegal aliens in the United States. Some people think the number is much, much higher than that, but I'm using conservative estimates, 11 to 16.8 million. So that means that right now, if we just deport 208,000 illegals per year, that we will have deported 1.2% to a little under 2%. It's just not enough. That's not even close. So it has to ramp up dramatically. Now, the political problem is that illegal aliens have families here. So it's gonna create a big issue if you start deporting people's like Aunt Gertrude. I guess their names aren't Gertrude, but it'd be like aunt, you know, Maria or something. So I understand the political problem, but even if you are only deporting the really, really bad ones, you need to ramp that up dramatically, which I trust will be done. Again, you're not gonna hear complaints out of me. This is the first week of a presidential administration in my lifetime. It's all phenomenal. I'm all into it. But just keep these numbers in mind just to even have an appreciation for the scale of the problem that President Trump faces. Do you know how hard it is to deport 11 to 17 million people or more? It's really hard. Okay, so I give them a little grace, but means we gotta ramp things up a little bit. Now the libs are complaining because President Trump's first deportation flights were expensive according to them. This is the argument. According to the Mirror UK, Trump's first deportation flights, with average of just 80 migrants, cost up to 852,000 doll per trip. All right, that's expensive. I agree. Just 80 migrants on the flights and it cost $850,000 per trip. That's okay, so what, 10 grand per flight per seat, rather. Okay, but let's put this into perspective. How much does it cost just to have illegal aliens in the country? By the way, these are the very worst. So these are the Ones who are killing people and raping people and committing all sorts of particularly heinous crimes which you can't really put a dollar number on, but in as much as you can cost a lot of money. But I'm actually putting that aside. I'm saying your regular average illegal alien who does not go out and murder people and rob and commit all sorts of other crimes in the state of California, which is where I am right now, it costs $132,860 to keep a prisoner in California for a year. Okay, that's just what it costs. So if we're just going to arrest the illegal aliens and not deport them, that costs a lot of money. And Trump is only deporting criminal aliens right now. The Federation for American Immigration Reform Fair says that each illegal or US born child of an illegal alien costs $8776 annually. That is not people in prison. That is not people who are committing crimes. That's just your average old illegal alien. Heritage foundation in 2010 found that each unlawful immigrant household costs $14,387. That is cost for services offset by the taxes paid. So that's being as generous as we can to the illegal alien households still costs over 14 grand a year per household. That's an outdated number. That's 2010. The number is certainly much higher now. According to the center for Immigration Studies, the average household headed by an immigrant, legal or illegal, costs taxpayers $6,234 in federal welfare benefits. It's not counting state benefits. That is 41% higher than the $4,431 received by the average native household. Native American. I'm not talking about the feathers and the tomahawks. I'm talking about regular old Americans. Okay? So even take out the $132,133,000 to keep a prisoner. And these guys are criminals. Just regular old illegal aliens cost a ton of money. This flight is a good deal. Even if you're gonna pay $850,000 for a flight of 80 people, which I assume the costs can come down a little bit, but even if you are, that's a good deal. The libs are walking into a little bit of a trap here from the immigration restrictionists, which is they're saying, look how expensive this is. And the immigration restrictionists, even just the people who want to enforce the law are saying, yeah, do you have any idea how expensive it is just to have illegal immigrants? Because the libs will say, well, no, but they pay taxes. And, you know, they don't even get Social Security or whatever. Yeah. Okay. Even the small amount of taxes that they do pay. And they do pay some taxes when you consider that with the welfare benefits that they receive, not even counting the crimes that they commit, it costs us money to have them. Okay. They're a drag on the economy. So you want to come here with numbers to me, you want to come here, talk about the cost of the planes? All right, let's talk about costs. President Trump once again, the art of the deal. Great negotiator getting us a really good price. We all know President Trump hit the ground this week running, delivering on key promises, many of which were battles initiated and amplified by the Daily Wire. I'm happy to say our hit comedy film Lady Ballers tackle the absurdity and dangers of men competing in women's sports. We'll get to a story on that momentarily. Conversation now at the forefront of national policy debates thanks to new executive orders. Am I racist? The number one documentary of the decade exposed the race hustlers driving DEI initiatives. Following recent executive orders, DEI programs have been significantly dismantled at the federal level and scaled back by major corporations. We'll get to the risks. Daily Wire does have some exclusive info. We got some risks on that coming up. But in the moment, we're winning. Okay. The fight is far from over. So here's the deal. We cannot keep doing this without your support. Every dollar you spend helps fuel the battle for truth and sanity in our country. Now is the time to join the fight. Watch the hit movies docs series shaping our culture. Get access to so much more. Go to dailywire.com subscribe today. Speaking of Latinos, one of my favorite Latinos, Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, just went to Davos to the World Economic Forum to call all of those liberal elites pedophiles, promotes the LGB agenda, says that women are men and men are women only if that is how they perceive themselves. They say nothing when a man disguises himself as a woman and kills his rival in a boxing ring. Or when a prisoner claims to be a woman and ends up raping any woman who crosses his path in prison without going any further. A few weeks ago, the case of two American homosexuals who flying the flag of sexual diversity and were sentenced to 100 years in prison for abusing and filming their adopted children for more than two years made headlines around the world. I want to be clear that when I say abuse, it's not a euphemism because in its most extreme versions, gender Ideology constitutes plain and simple child abuse. So true. They are pedophiles. Therefore, I want to know who endorses these behaviors. I want to know who endorses these behaviors. Cuz they're pedophiles too. Javier Milei coming out swinging, man. You know, I met him a week ago at the Trump inauguration and I just had to translate what he said because Javier Milei doesn't speak English. Which is why actually in our picture together, I couldn't. I was speaking to him in English, but his security guard was yelling at me because I was holding a martini. And I don't know, I'm sure that guy's under a ton of threats and he might have thought that I was going to throw martini on him or worse. But anyway, in the picture, because Melaye didn't understand a word I was saying, he's looking at me like I'm about to pounce on him or something. But that guy, he's got the right idea. Over at WEF, it's pretty simple. It's like Orrin McIntyre has that meme that he posts. He says, it's not so complicated. These people just want to diddle kids. It doesn't explain the whole ideology, but it does explain some of it. At a certain point, if a group of people continues to condone abusive behaviors, just needlessly support ideologies that conduce toward child abuse and that really damage the lives of children and that put vulnerable people in really bad situations, at a certain point, I'm going to stop defending you and saying, well, you might have the best of intentions. At a certain point, you're complicit. Okay, that's true. Not just of the gender ideology. That's true. On immigration, that's true. I understand why someone might want more immigration or even open borders. But at a certain point, when people are getting murdered and raped and face tattooed, Satanists are hopping the border, poisoning Americans, at a certain point, you lose my sympathy. Okay? At a certain point, we just have to enforce the law. Now there's a story that Dwell has got. We'll have a longer Twitter thread on this later today. But you know, Trump is succeeding at dismantling dei, which is really, really great. You're seeing these initiatives across the federal government. You're seeing downstream effects of that. However, we cannot get complacent because the libs in the federal government at the state level and at the local level are going to try to resist this and they're going to try really hard and they're going to Try immediately. There's one story which we have from a school district in Colorado, Durango. The school board received a complaint that one of the classrooms was flying a Black Lives Matter and a Pride Progress flag. Pride Progress is the Pride flag, but it's got the trans and the BLM and I don't know, it's like the terrorist Pride flag. So we're flying these flags and a mother said, I want these flags in the classroom. So there was a review by the chief academic officer, and the chief academic officer said, yeah, all right, well, if the teacher's going to fly that, then we need an open forum for all flags. You know, this could be a First Amendment issue. And the district's lawyers did not want this open forum because they feared, and we have documentation of this, that the apparatchiks and the school board and the school district feared that this could open the pathway to a Straight Lives Matter flag in the classroom. Could you imagine heaven for Fend? We can't have that. So the district, the Durango School district has decided that what they're going to do is they're going to redefine things like Black Lives Matter, Black power, pride as government speech. Not political speech, but government speech. Now, I don't know the local laws, I don't know exactly how these lawyers are, in a Jesuitical way, trying to parse the difference. Obviously, government speech is political speech. Political speech does pertain to government speech. But I guess this is a legal distinction that would allow them to create protections for radical leftist ideology in the classroom, radical leftist indoctrination, but not trigger an open forum for other people to express their far more normal political views. The board is furious about this. They're referring to parents, concerned parents, as outside adults, as adults important to the child. This is giving Biden vibes, you know, this is giving radical extremist parent sorts of connotations. So they're considering this resolution now. They still want to embrace trans in the classroom. They still want to embrace so called gender affirming care, which is child abuse, as Javier Millay rightly pointed out at Davos. This district, by the way, should probably be a little careful because one of their teachers was arrested for child pornography. It's allegedly one of the teachers who was flying the pride flag was arrested for possession of child pornography and attempting to entice a child. Okay, so if I were this school district, I would be pretty cautious with the old pride flag. They're not. They're trying to enshrine all of this radical leftism contrary to the national movement against dei, contrary to the national movement against gender ideology. I mean, President Trump won unified government in large part because of these issues. But you're seeing so much pushback. Ways to hide the programs, ways to legally protect them while not protecting conservative speech that's going on. So, you know, we like the wins. We're applauding President Trump. We're so happy. You need to dig in at the local level, at the state level, even at the federal level, we're going to have to dig in because the leftists are not going to go down without a fight. Now, speaking of elites, breaking news. Pull over your car. Sit down if you're standing up. The New York Times is reporting that the CIA now favors the lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins. That story is from what, January 25, 2025. You might recall, you might recall during COVID this New York Times headline, senator Tom Cotton repeats fringe theory of COVID origins. Scientists have demissed dismissed suggestions that the Chinese government was behind the outbreak. But it's the kind of tale that gains traction among those who see China as a threat. Fringe theory, totally crazy. Actually, the CIA agrees. So now we, the New York Times, are going to admit it five years later. Okay, well, congrats to the New York Times, the paper of record, for admitting an obvious fact five years after everyone with two brain cells to rub together knew it. But even this headline is not accurate. This headline is obviously dishonest because it says, CIA now favors lab leak theory. That's not true. The CIA doesn't now favor anything. Trump is now the president. That's what happens. You could change the headline to Trump is now the President. And so the CIA needs to get in line. Yeah, that Trump was the president back in 2020, when Trump was the president that time, that time around the first go round, the deep state was doing everything it could to cut down this guy's administration. Before he even became president, the FBI and the DOJ were trying to kill his administration. Then they continued that effort through the Mueller investigation. You had the intelligence agencies conspiring against him, lying about him. Chuck Schumer even joked about it. He said, don't make enemies of the intel agencies. They'll get you 20 ways from Sunday, Trump is out of office. Then they try to throw him in prison. They establish the justification to kill him, which almost happened twice. And he comes back in and they just lost. Okay. The libs seem really demoralized right now. The agencies grudgingly seem to be getting in line. Trump seems to be exerting more power over them. And coincidentally, right now, the CIA says, oh, yeah, actually, the Republicans might have been right. We've known this. We've known this for a long time. Okay? The New York Times, I think, knew this for a long time. The only question to me is not, did the virus originate in a lab leak? That was obvious. That has been for years. The question is, was it intentional or unintentional? That's what I want to know. And I don't know the answer to that. Did the Chinese government intentionally leak Covid? Because when I look at the ways that people were conspiring against Trump back in 2020, 20, 19, 2020, I can't help but notice that Trump was waging a successful trade war against China. And Trump was looking like he was going to sail to reelection victory. And Covid was the way to, first of all, for China to stop that trade war. And Covid was also the way to give Democrats justification to change all the election rules. So I don't know. I'm not saying that it was intentional. I don't have any evidence that it was intentional. It might not have been intentional, but I could see that as a possibility, the very least. That's the debate. But the New York Times and the CIA for that matter, I'm sick of it with the CIA and the administrative government. These guys are pretending that the real controversy is over a debate that was effectively resolved five years ago. No, let's go. Let's move on, buddy. It's the Trump era. I know you're trying to catch up, but you're going to have to move a little faster now. Also, very exciting news in the Trump era. Pete Hegseth has been confirmed by a skin of his teeth to be the Secretary of Defense. Collins, Murkowski and Good old Mitch McConnell. Three Republican senators voted against Pete Hegseth and nevertheless, he overcame. We will get to how that went down. We'll get to another shocking vote that might switch to get RFK through in a moment. First, I want to tell you about my favorite comment of the day. That was on Friday. Spiderman and Jenny says two terms for president, only two terms for Congress as well. No exceptions, because some people love Trump and seem sympofantic. It's either sympathetic or sycophantic. Maybe it's both. That's a nice new word. Nice neologism. Look, I get the point. However, I'll point out Ronald Reagan disagreed with you. Ronald Reagan wanted to repeal the 22nd Amendment. He thought that there are term Limits at the ballot box. We have a natural kind of term limit in our American republic, and that is the voters at the ballot box. Now, some people think that incumbency is too hard to overcome. Maybe. I do not favor term limits, certainly not for the House of Representatives, not really for the Senate. And I'm basically with Reagan even on the presidency. And, well, Trump actually says he doesn't want to serve a third term, but I'm with Reagan at least. I don't think there should really be term limits, because there will be power. This is the thing. People want term limits because they think that it's going to limit power, but the power just exists. There is just a certain amount of power that is to be wielded in the government. The question is, by whom? Is it going to be wielded by the elected representative? Is it going to be wielded by the staffers and the committee staffers in the House? Is it going to be wielded by lobbyists? Is it going to be wielded by bureaucrats in the administrative state? That's the only question. But there will not be a reduction in power. So when you limit the power of the elected representatives, it just goes to one of the other guys. It just goes to a staffer or a bureaucrat or a lobbyist. It just goes to one of them. So that's why I get it. You know, I understand the impulse to say, no, we need term limits everywhere. But I think term limits moves power from people who at least constitutionally ought to have the power to people who wield it in much worse ways. So I'm not. I get it, but I wouldn't be so quick about that. PDeGseth5150 confirmed as SecDef.
