Transcript
Michael Knowles (0:00)
Hey, do you remember four months ago when White House press secretary Karine Jean Pierre insisted that Joe Biden had not been spending FEMA disaster relief money putting up illegal aliens in fancy hotels? Former President Trump is accusing the Biden administration of using FEMA funding to support undocumented migrants. How is the White House responding to this? I mean, it's just categorically false. It is not true. It is a false statement. False. Categorically false, not true. False statement. Opposite of the truth. Not right. Well, Elon's Department of Government Efficiency just discovered a $59 million FEMA payment last week to house illegals in luxury hotels in New York City. FEMA could not find the money to help out hurricane victims in North Carolina. Maybe a $700 check here or there. Maybe if the American citizens were l. But $59 million in one week to put fighting age male economic migrants up at the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan? Well, no problem. And you think those 59 million bucks are bad? That is just the tip of the iceberg of what Elon has dug up in our crooked federal government in just the last 24 hours. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show. Does President Trump View Vice President J.D. vance as his successor? The president weighs in and the answer might surprise you. There's so much more to say. First, though, Tex Knowles to 98. 98. 98. Everyone has been thinking about the economy lately. Economic experts have been analyzing long term trends. Some are expressing concerns about potential serious economic challenges once we approach 2030. It's interesting when you look at the big picture. We have the boomers entering retirement, which puts pressure on Social Security and Medicare. At the same time, we're dealing with a smaller workforce, national debt and rising cost of living. Now we hope that we will see changes for the better in the near future. In the meantime, these are the kinds of things that should make you think about financial security and how to protect your savings. Now, I've looked into plenty of different options. You can't just dismiss the tried and true traditional approach, which is investing in physical gold. That's where Birch Gold comes in. They're making it pretty simple and straightforward to diversify your portfolio to. They can actually help you convert an existing IRA or 401k into a gold IRA without any out of pocket costs. I myself have a decent portion of my portfolio in physical gold and I'm quite happy about it. Protect your future today. Text Knowles Ken Wles to 9898 98. Get your free info kit on gold and a copy of the Ultimate Guide for Gold in the Trump Era with a forward by Donald Trump Jr. There is no obligation only information Text Knowles kwles to the number 989898 today also folks, you gotta get your candles from thecandleclub.com the Michael Knowles Collection at the Candle Club is always a wonderful aspect of our consumer products, but especially now we are looking down the barrel toward Mardi Gras. Then it is Ash Wednesday, then it's Lent. And it's why you're going to want to get the Wise Man Candle, which is the new incarnation of the Smells and Bells candle to make your home smell like an 11th century monastery. So go to thecandleclub.com make sure you check out the Michael Knowles Collection. Get the Wise Man Candle. That's my favorite one. Okay, what else is Elon digging up? According to the Daily Caller, White House correspondent Reagan Reese has the scoop that Doge found $900 million of wasteful contracts at the Department of Education. What are these contracts? 900 million across 90 wasteful contracts from the Institute of Education Sciences at the Department of Education and Administration official is telling this to Daily Caller. The contracts they found were not directly funding student score improvement, which is the whole purpose of the Department of Education. $1.5 million just for example, went to a contractor to quote, observe mailing and clerical operations at the U.S. census Bureau's National Processing center in Jeffersonville, Indiana. What does that have to do with education? Couldn't possibly tell you. The contractor was tasked with securing and handling logistics support of an external expert for mail out operations consultation. What? What is that? That's just a made up job. That's like, that's like four made up jobs. That's like a made up job for a made up job for a made up job for a made up department at an agency of the government that should not exist. Back in the 1880s, in 1883 there was the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. This was signed into law by President Chester Allen Arthur. Chester A. Arthur, a great president in many ways. I actually have a Prageru video on Chester Arthur because no one remembers him anymore. But he was this crooked New York politician who never really wanted to be president. He accepted the vice presidency so he could dole out patronage jobs to his friends because he was one of the kings of the patronage system in New York. And then James Garfield died shortly after being inaugurated president and Chester Arthur became the president. And he was a crook. But oddly enough, through a correspondence with this woman In New York, he came to realize that he had squandered a lot of his life and his political opportunity, and he grew into the role as president. And he did not just dole out patronage jobs, he actually reformed the civil service. The purpose of that reform was to turn the bureaucracy from just little handout to your political friends when you won an election to a merit based system to make the government run better. And that's what we have been told for decades now, well over a century, that the civil service is. Except what we just found out thanks to Elon Musk and DOGE is actually it's become a patronage system again. The irony is people were warning that when Trump and Elon were gonna go in and reform the way that the government works, that they were going to compromise our dignified civil service, which has based on merit and is nonpartisan, and they were going to turn it into a spoil system patronage system again. But actually, no, just naturally, what had happened over the century and a half since civil service reform is it just kind of reverted back to a patronage system. And so we need another reform. We had the 1883 Pendleton reform, now we have the 2025 Doge reform, okay? And we're finding out that there is so much more waste in the government than even the greatest efficiency hawks had considered. All right? So Democrats, if they're of good faith here and they're being really honest with themselves, should be cheering on Doge Because Democrats are the ones who supposedly want a merit based civil service that is not merely a way to give handouts to your political cronies, right? If the Democrats are opposing this reform, if they oppose DOGE as they are, it must be because the Democrats want to maintain the machine. Because the Democrats, in fact, rely upon this patronage machine to advance their interests. And the minute you get rid of an agency like usaid, which is a feedback loop funding liberal activism not just around the world, but even in America. The example I was pointing out last week was your taxpayer dollars go to the irs. The IRS dishes them out to the federal government, the federal government appropriates it to usaid. USAID sends that money to the Tides center, the Tide center sends that money to blm. BLM burns your city down, kills your neighbors, loots your local footlocker, demands that your corporations and politicians further shake them down by the ankles and send more money to the government to go to usaid, to go to the Tide center, to go to blm. And it's this feedback cycle. It's even here, though, within the Department of Education. Then your other money goes to the Department of Education and that money just goes to the Deputy assistant Deputy Director of finding experts for mail out operations for the U.S. census Bureau's Education initiative or whatever. It's all just graft. Good on Elon for finding this. Pay close attention to the people who are opposing this reform. Now, while we're talking about big numbers, it's a smaller number than 900 million. But what about this number, 2,400? You know what that number represents? That number represents the number of files pertaining to the JFK assassination that have just been discovered by our federal government. We're 60 years now after the JFK assassination. Just now we've just discovered the FBI just must have looked behind a bookshelf or something. Found 2,400 records tied to Kennedy's assassination that were never provided to the assassination review board. This is according to Axios. So Trump in his first term was going to declassify the JFK assassination files. This follows decades of American official policy being the release of the JFK files. They were supposed to be released back in like 1992 and then the government just kept putting it off saying no, this would compromise national security, it would compromise sources and methods, it would compromise people who were still alive, blah blah, blah, blah blah. They kept kicking the can down the road for decades. Trump gets in there, he's a real shaker, mover and a shaker. He says he's gonna do it, but even he doesn't release all of them second term. Especially cuz he has Bobby Kennedy working for him now. He says, okay, we're gonna do it, we're finally gonna release all the records and this is evidence that I guess maybe they will since the FBI is now admitting, okay, well actually we do have thousands more records that people didn't even really know about. Why are people so fascinated with the assassination of jfk? People are really, they're not as fascinated with the assassination of Garfield, the President I was just talking about, or I don't know, McKinley or I don't know, why him, why Kennedy? Is it because he was a really good president? No, he wasn't. There's a modern mythology that's cropped up that Kennedy was this great president and he was shot down in his prime. Kennedy was not really a good president at all. I feel to see any evidence that he was even a competent president. He screwed up the Bay of Pigs, he invited the Cuban Missile crisis cuz he didn't know how to manage Turkey. He presided over the construction of The Berlin Wall, which Khrushchev admitted he built because he knew that JFK was inexperienced and weak. So, no, he wasn't president for that long, and he didn't do a good job while he was president. Why do people care so much? There's a good reason. There's a totally logical reason. The reason is because the JFK assassination coincides with almost precisely the moment that everything starts to go wrong in the country, that Americans start really deeply distrusting their institutions. That you have the Vietnam War, which Kennedy got us involved in, but the Vietnam War really starts to escalate. You had all the tumult of the 1960s, which was in part caused by. It was both a symptom and a cause of the JFK assassination. You had all of the racial strife in the 1960s. You had the advent of not only the massive welfare state, but also a new system of racial discrimination that came up. You had not even just the racial strife. You had the sexual strife, radical feminism. You had the sexual revolution, broadly. It just kind of all fell apart in the 60s, and we all know it. And it's represented by those wacko hippies who looked dirty and smelly and aimless. And that's kind of what our country became, dirty and smelly and aimless. You know, we just didn't know. We didn't exercise proper order or anything like that. It was in the 60s. So I think we're focused on that because we realize something broke here. And whether the break was caused by the Kennedy assassination, I don't really think so, though it did lead people to distrust even further government institutions. But maybe it's just a coincidence. In any case, we recognize something went really wrong here. Maybe we need to revisit that era to see if we can get back on the right path. There's so much more to say first, though. Go to goodranchers.com use promo code knowles. I'm gonna tell you about my dinner last night. I come home, sweet little Elisa, and the boys had already eaten. But actually, I don't know if sweet little Lisa had totally finished eating because the boys are running around. They need this, they need that. So, anyway, I go to get my plate, and I see a nice, beautiful, delicious New York strip steak from good ranchers. So I go with the tongs. I get my steak, and Elisa says, don't take that whole steak, Mac. I haven't had that yet. I said, wait, hold on. What, you. You want me to cut this steak in half? I'm a grown man. I'm not Gonna eat this full New York strip steak. No, I wanna have some. I said, fine, I'm a good husband. I cut the steak in half. Even though I wanna eat this entire delicious New York strip from Good Ranchers. I take half. But then she tells me later, she goes, but there's also a little ribeye over there. You have some of the ribeye and then you have. I said, okay, that makes a little bit more sense. So I have both the New York strip and the ribeye. Both delicious. Frankly, I liked the New York strip a little bit more. Whatever you have from Good Ranchers, you're gonna love it. It's the best meat you're gonna get. The price can't be beat. It's all American. It's all really good, clean stuff. Not too late to start the new year, right. Go to goodranchers.com right now. You will get free ground beef, chicken breasts, or wild caught salmon in every order for a year, plus $25 off with code knowleskin@wles goodranchers.com, promo code knowles. Speaking of death, Ilhan Omar is accusing President Trump and specifically the state of Israel of planning for Gaza not only an ethnic cleansing, but a genocide.