Michael Knowles (12:54)
So he's master debating. He's locked the bathroom door, he's master debating. And his mother says, you gotta get out of there. Don't you even. This is this brilliant observation of an inversion here. Used to be back in the olden days that if a boy were, I don't know, this is a family show. How do I clean it up? If a boy were looking at naughty images, maybe spending a little too much time alone, that would be transgressive and wrong. And his parents would yell at him over, don't you do that. But these days, pornography and the sexual revolution, that's totally mainstream. That's normal, that's encouraged, that's called healthy. That's supposed to conduce to your flourishing. No, no, no, that's fine. No parent would ever tell their kid not to do that. Now, what is subversive and transgressive and supposedly bad for you and awful for your health is debating political issues, is going after the left, is owning the libs, is that's what's transgressing, that's what's kind of cool. That's what the kids are doing that the parents don't want them to do. Great observation. Now, scene. We don't have time to go through the whole episode. There's one scene though that shows you what South Park's doing really clearly and it's the Charlie Kirk Awards for owning the libs or whatever. Charlie Kirk Awards for Master Debating. So right there it tells you Cartman is not Charlie Kirk. None of these guys are any of the individuals as I mentioned. I think they're very, very clear references at the beginning to Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes and Charlie Kirk. I think there are also. There's a wink at Ben where it says, you know, lib owned, whatever. I think that's a wink at Ben Shapiro. I even think maybe I flatter myself. I think there might have been a little wink at my CPAC speech during the Charlie Kirk Master Debater Awards. When Clyde is receiving the award, he says, you know, okay, and in conclusion, lesbians are an abomination from God. I wonder, you know, that was a little wink at the very least at the religious right and the anti lgbt, but lesbian abomination might have been a little wink at trans eradication. In any case, it's just everyone altogether and Cartman saying, you stole this from me. And this gets to a point that Trey Parker and Matt Stone had made many years ago. He said, when we made Cartman, who is the most lovable character on the show, we made Cartman because we asked ourselves what would happen if you had Archie Bunker, the old character from all in the family, 1970s. What if you had Archie Bunker, the kind of bigoted, ornery, sexist guy, racist, anti semitic, but you put them in the body of an eight year old boy. And this is an observation about TV and culture, which is that these comments, these, the anti black and Jew and woman and this and that, it's funny, it's lovable, it's endearing. If it's said through the voice of a clown, if it's said through the voice of a comedian, if this were just a video of some actual skinhead or neo Nazi going out and burning a cross or something on someone's lawn or beating a woman or something like that, it would not be funny. That person would be the most villainous character in the show. But because it's said through the mouth of a clown, because it's politically ineffective, unthreatening, it's the most lovable behavior, it's the most endearing because there's always racial tension, there's always religious tension, there's always sexual tension and you gotta let it out some way. Society needs a way to let that out. And if you can Let it out through the voice of a clown. All the better. The clown gets to make fun of the king. And it's okay. If a serious person did that, that would not be okay. And so the characters, I mean, just from the top of it, the fact that you have Alex Jones being parodied, Alex Jones said that a bunch of kids who were murdered in a shooting didn't actually get murdered. But Alex Jones is still a really sympathetic, lovable character. Why? Because he's big and funny and he's a comedian and he makes you laugh, and he's kind of clownish in his behavior. Well, a lot of these other guys, not everyone on the right, but a lot of the other guys who do these streams and these podcasts, how do they do it? Do they do it in a really serious way and they're just presenting the information to you really sober? No, they're laughing and they're making jokes all the time, and they're using really crass, vulgar language. And it's because that is a sign that you're not a big political threat. It's a sign I'm just being a clown. I'm just a clown. And so, because it doesn't actually pose any threat to the system, these are guys who say, I'm not gonna vote for Trump. I'm not gonna vote for anyone. I'm not gonna participate in the political system. I'm just. I'm just here telling jokes that becomes very, very lovable. And that is what south park did. That was the point. That was actually explicitly, intentionally the point of south park and Cartman. That's the point of Archie Bunker on All in the Family. For the kids in the audience who probably haven't seen all in the Family. That's the point of that character. He's the most lovable character. He's the most racist, anti Semitic, sexist character in the show. But he's lovable because he's the clown. So he's not coming from a place of hatred, but he's saying all of these things in a way that really doesn't threaten anything, doesn't threaten the system. The point of this season, as I can see, is that we're all in south park now. We're all in south park now, and young people love it, and it's hip and it's cool and it's fun and it's transgressive, but we're all south park now. I think it's brilliant. I think it's great. I think the right should embrace it. Okay? Speaking of naughty language, there is a commencement speaker at some college, it's really unclear where, who's gone viral for concluding her speech with F ICE and F the Trump administration. Excuse my language, but to that I say ICE and the Trump administration. So brave. So brave. This has just started going viral. Obviously, this commencement happened a month or two ago, but it's just started going viral, making the rounds. And you see the faculty behind her, the administration behind her. Yes. Wow. Nodding in their magisterial academic robes. And she says like she's speaking truth to power. F. Ice, Immigration enforcement. F. The Trump administration. Yes. And she's nodding along. The people behind her, all the establishment. Nodding along. Nodding along, nodding along. This is really cringe, really lame. Strikes me as very millennial coded. It's a very millennial thing. I don't know. It doesn't strike me as zoomer coded. It seems millennial to me. You use a naughty word. You think saying a naughty word is transgressive and gets us right back to South Park. In 1998, saying naughty words on cable was extremely transgressive. It did not happen today. What's transgressive today? What's transgressive is not saying naughty words today. Being wholesome is transgressive today. Getting married and going to church and acknowledging a moral order and trying to live up to it, that's what's seen as transgressive today. It's a different world. It's a different. The culture is kind of stolen south park shtick. So now to be transgressive has to be a little bit different. This is the safe thing. You know that this commencement speech is a safe thing because the professors behind her are nodding along with approval. Commencement speakers, valedictorians. The top of the class is always playing it safe. Almost always. That's how. That's how they get to the top of the class. And that's the safe thing now. That's the millennial. That's not the transgressive thing. That's not the future. It's just lame. Super lame. Now the people who don't hate the Trump administration are noticing that actually this administration is doing some pretty great things. Like this was announced right on Friday, I think. Trump has apparently ended the 35 year conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The President of the United States, the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia will now sign the joint declaration on the outcomes of the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity summit. This is really important stuff. And It's a topic that's pretty close to my heart because Armenia is the oldest Christian country in the world. Armenia became Christian as a country before the Edict of Milan, before Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire. It a long time. Was it 310 or something? It became Christian. Azerbaijan is a Muslim country. Azerbaijan has been fighting with Armenia. One particular expression of this was the Nagorno Karabakh conflict over some disputed territory. And it gets even more bizarre because in the Azerbaijan Armenia conflict, America was indirectly attacking Armenia, the Christian country, and helping Azerbaijan, the Muslim country. Why? Through Israel. Which makes it even weirder because it means that the Jewish country was helping the Muslim country against the Christian country because the Christian country, Armenia, had allied with the Muslim country. Iran and Russia. Iran and Russia, both geopolitical foes of the United States for a very, very long time. And so it was just this complete. It was a complete mess. And it threatened some of the oldest Christian sites in the world. 35 years this has been going on. This has been going on since the end of the Cold War. Trump resolves it. How did he resolve it? It's going to create a major transit corridor. It's going to be the Trump route for international peace and prosperity. It'll help these two countries. It'll help global trade. It'll connect Azerbaijan with one of its autonomous exclaves, which is in Armenian territory. And this is not the only global conflict Trump has resolved. I'm beginning to think I would go so far as to say Trump might be the best geopolitics president, the best president for global peace in my lifetime. Hold on one second. Pull over. Stop. Sit down. Go to PureTalk.comKnowles how many times have you told someone, if it ain't broke, don't fix it? That's good advice on most things. Not so much for your cell phone. Cause your cell phone is actually kind of broke over time. The battery life fades and the processor can't keep up and it's fallen on the ground one too many times. And if you're like sweet little Elisa, you just chuck it at the wall. You just hate your phone so much, you just chuck it at the floor. That's what it seems like. I don't know. Why is it. Why do women drop their cell phone so much? I don't know. Men do it, too. Fortunately, thanks to Pure Talk, your cell phone is something you can replace without feeling guilty. When you. When you switch to PureTalk this month, they're going to give you a Samsung Galaxy A36 for free with a $35 qualifying plan. That's 35 bucks a month for talk, text and data. Plus free Samsung phone with scratch resistant Gorilla glass and a battery that lasts all day. All on America's most dependable 5G network. I love it. I've had my pure Talk phone forever. My kids try to play with it and it can withstand them playing with it. But I still say, give me that, give me that. That's an instrument. That's a very good cell phone on America's best 5G network. You can even take it overseas. Supporting companies like PeerTalk is a good thing. You win by cutting your cell phone bill in half. They win by hiring more Americans and helping more veterans. You make the switch in as little as 10 minutes. You go to PureTalk.comKnowles get your free cell phone today. PureTalk.comKnowles switch to my wireless company, America's Wireless Company, PureTalk. What conflicts has Trump resolved? Do you remember when India and Pakistan were almost about to go to war? India and Pakistan, two nuclear nations that hate each other more than just about any two countries on earth. Yeah. What happened? They walked back from the brink. Why? Well, according to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, largely thanks to Trump's leadership. You don't need to take Trump's word for it. Trump claims credit for a lot of things. The Pakistan PM thanked Trump for his leadership in resolving that conflict. Israel and Iran. I thought we were on the brink of World War Three. Remember all the panicans were saying, we're gonna get dragged into World War iii. There's gonna be a nuclear war. Trump was not putting American interests first. He was screwing up everything. And then what? Bunker buster missile blows up a nuclear site? No. Escalation negotiates a ceasefire. Both sides basically break the ceasefire or start to position themselves to break the ceasefire. Trump nevertheless insists that the ceasefire remains very, very impressive. No big deal. Ends that war. Rwanda and the DRC. The Democratic Republic of the Congo. It's a 30 year conflict. TRUMP resolved it. There was a conflict that looked like it was about to break out between Serbia and Kosovo. It's a little unclear, it's a little unfalsifiable because the conflict did not break out. But Trump is claiming credit for it and Kosovo agrees. Kosovo agrees there was about to be a war and Trump stopped it. So Serbia kind of denies it, but Kosovo acknowledges it. There's another conflict. Trump ended. Cambodia and Thailand. There was four days of fighting. Back in July, Trump negotiated a ceasefire. Ceasefire. This is very impressive stuff. The only president of my lifetime who could claim a better record, maybe, maybe, or even close to a rival record on foreign policy would be George H.W. bush, because he successfully managed the Gulf War and the dismantling of the Soviet Union. So I guess you'd say, though, the way the Gulf War was fought, it did kind of set the stage for the second Gulf War in Iraq, which most people think was a disaster. So I don't know. I think probably Trump is an even better geopolitics president than George H.W. bush. Who comes close? Clinton, no chance. Bill Clinton set the stage for 9, 11. Bill Clinton, he was a good short term geopolitics president, but long term, even Clinton, I think, would acknowledge he kind of blew it. George W. Bush, Mm, not quite, man. Had good intentions, but probably not quite. Obama. Give me a break. Biden? No, I think it goes to Trump. I think Trump is the greatest geopolitics president of my lifetime. And we might get the resolution to another war because according to reports, Vladimir Putin is offering to end the war in Ukraine. And the way he's offered to end the war is in exchange for the regions that he's conquered. So before Trump won back in the Obama administration, Putin took Crimea. Putin came in and took Crimea. Actually, let's go back to the George W. Bush administration. George W. Bush, on his watch, Putin takes Georgia, just goes in, not the peaches, but the one in Eastern Europe. He goes in and takes Georgia. Then Obama's in charge, and Putin takes Crimea, an important strategic location that has belonged to Russia at various points in his history, but previously belonged to Ukraine. Then Trump is president. Putin stops no more. Then Biden becomes president, and Putin invades Ukraine and takes a lot of territory. So the territory, thanks to a little handy chart here from the BBC, takes all these regions in Eastern Ukraine, Luhansk, Donetsk. I'm certainly gonna mispronounce Zaporizhzhia. And Kherson takes all of those regions and still holds Crimea. So now Putin reportedly is gonna say, okay, I'll agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine. Not gonna go take over Kyiv. I'm not gonna even go take Kharkiv. I'm not gonna take all of these other territories that I've threatened over the years. I'm not even gonna insist that Zelenskyy be kicked out, but I'm gonna keep all of those regions that I conquered. Now, Trump is in a very tough spot here because if he allows Putin to do this, he's rewarding Putin's aggression. He's imperiling places like Poland, the Baltics, he's imperiling a lot of places. It makes America look weak because this is not contrary to nationalist self flattery. This is not just a war between individual nations. This is a great power struggle between empires. The broader, the entity formerly known as the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, which is trying to reconquer territory that it's lost, and the American empire, which is the global hegemon. And China's waiting in the wings there as well, with its own imperial ambitions. So the BBC also gives us another little handy chart, shows you Ukraine's natural resources by the concentration. So you've got the kind of lighter colored regions. If you're watching this, if you're listening, you'll have to just have me describe it to you. Lighter colored regions with relatively few resources and the darker colored regions with a lot. You can see in the Donbass region, there's a lot of coal and iron, a lot of natural resources. So those first two that Putin went into, pretty heavy. As you move into the other regions, it's a little less heavy in natural resources. So the Zaporizhzhia, I gotta work on my Ukrainian pronunciation, and Kherson, and down there, it's a little less. Crimea still has a lot of resources. So one thing that the Trump administration could do is say, okay, you're not gonna get all of the territory that you've conquered. Putin, you're gonna have to pull out of some of the eastern regions, but we'll let you keep Crimea, which is historically part of Russia and which is strategically very important for Russia and which is disconnected from the other eastern regions if you lose the bottom two, but you're still connected to Russia. So you get to keep Crimea and you get to keep Luhansk and Donetsk, but you don't get to keep the latter two regions. So you're gonna cede that back to Ukraine. And then it looks like kind of a win win. But this has been three years of war. Now you have to give both sides the ability to claim a win because there are gonna be some hawks in America who say, well, let's just go in and kick him all the way out. You know, he's some two bit jerk. He has got a country that's really just a, it's really just a gas station with a country attached, like John McCain used to say, and they're not nearly as strong as the United States. We can go in and blow them out of the, out of the hemisphere. I guess that's true. But Trump is constrained by this paradox Americans do not want to be in this war, and Americans do not want to lose this war. That's the way it goes. They don't want to be in this war, they don't want to lose this war. That's it. Similar dynamic playing out in Israel, Gaza, but that's the problem. So if you're trumpets, it's not so easy. It's not so easy. Americans don't want another war in the Middle East. We also don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons. Oh, there's a tension there. So what's he gonna do? I think Trump has to claw back some of that territory as a win. But if Putin is able to keep the more strategic and resource rich areas, that's a big win for Putin. He can take that home to the Russian people. It's a win win. And Ukraine maybe should just return to being a buffer state, which it was before. Before we got a little big for our britches in that region and screwed things up and gave Putin the opportunity to go in and actually invade. Okay, speaking of taking over territory, you know this story that the supposed federal takeover of Washington D.C. that's the claim Donald Trump wants to commence with a federal takeover of Washington D.C. which is in principle a completely bogus story because the federal government already controls Washington D.C. going all the way back to the Constitution. Article one, was it article one, section eight, clause 17, if I'm not mistaken, says that the Congress controls the federal district in all cases whatsoever. The federal government directly controlled Washington D.C. from 1800. 1800, 1801, whenever D.C. was incorporated until 1973 with the home Rule act, not only was it Congress that was controlling D.C. it was also the Executive branch, because for a little over 100 years, from 1871 to 1973, the President would appoint mayors and governors to exert control over Washington D.C. but it was still being run by the federal government. Now, because a lot of bad things happened in the 70s, now DC has home rule and it's a disaster. And Democrats are getting carjacked and Secret Service trucks are getting carjacked and firing off shots in Georgetown. Nice part of town. And it's just. It's a disaster. Okay, so Trump is saying we need the nation's capital to be beautiful and safe and we're gonna take it back over. That's probably a good idea. But there's one rebuttal to that. The one rejoinder that the libs are lobbing is, hey, crime is coming down in D.C. crime had been manageable. It had come down a Little bit in the 90s. Then it spiked like crazy up till 2023. But now over the last 12 months or so, it started to come down. That's the line. And so they say, if it's coming down, if the trend line's in the right direction, why are you trying to federalize D.C. and this is a hard line to argue against. You could say, well look, there's been maybe been a tiny blip that was diminishing. But the broader trend line is that crime's been going up. But it's still. It's a hard one to argue against. In fact, I was on TMZ Live the other day and Harvey on TMZ said, hey, come on, crime's going down now. So why now? Why you want. And it's tricky to answer until you realize crime is probably not going down in D.C. the only reason people think that crime is going down in D.C. is that the D.C. cops have been lying about it. So you'd have no reason to know, to be able to argue that crime is not actually going down in D.C. but here's a little report from just a few weeks ago. D.C. police commander suspended, accused of changing crime statistics. By the way, this is being reported by a local NBC affiliate. This is not from some right wing news sources from NBC. D.C. police commander suspended, Accused of changing crime statistics. Police unions. His directive to change offense classifications comes from the command staff. So the cook in the books. That's why. And I spend a lot of time in D.C. especially since the boys are back in town. Since this January Republican Congress takes over. The Republicans come back to the White House. I've been in D.C. a lot. It does not appear to me that crime is going down in D.C. or that homelessness is going. D.C. is rough, even in the nice areas I've been hanging out with. I was with a US senator once in a nice part of D.C. his car got robbed in a smash and grab. They stole his briefcase close to the White House. Henry Quell, our Democrat congressman was, was carjacked at gunpoint by Capitol hill, by the U.S. capitol, like a year and a half ago. Okay? Crime is not going down. The one good argument the Democrats had, the one even plausible argument against the federal government asserting its rights in D.C. apparently totally bogus. Mr. President. Take back the federal district and also erase that stupid BLM square and all the dumb pride flags that are all over the place. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. Okay, now, speaking of cities falling to pot, there's a safe injection site, a taxpayer funded safe Injection site in New York City up in Harlem. You're not gonna believe what this safe. Well, you will believe it, but it's shocking and gross. You're not gonna believe what this has led to. We'll see it in one second. First, you want a culture that fights back. You want daily shows that are uncensored, unapologetic, and grounded in facts. You want entertainment that entertains without the pronouns, the lectures and the ideological landmines. It's all here. Take a look at what is happening this month on Dailywire. I don't care what you did in your career the last five years. What are you gonna do tonight?