Michael Knowles (36:18)
There it is, Fox News Sunday, Glenn Youngkin, who is a presidential contender, he says, Yeah, I think J.D. vance would be a great nominee and notice how he endorses him. He doesn't just say, I, Glenn Youngkin, independently think J.D. vance, the Vice president, would be a great nominee. He says, I'm with Trump and Rubio. Rubio, who is the number two guy who could be the nominee in 2028? Rubio has already come out and said, I support Vance, I want Vance to be the nominee. Trump, the guy who picked the cabinet and obviously picked JD Vance to his running mate. He came out, he said, yeah, I think Rubio should be secretary of state forever. And I think Vance, if Rubio's not gonna be secretary of state, Forever. Maybe Vance and Rubio can run as a ticket. So he has not quite explicitly, but more or less crowned JD Vance as his successor, which he was always going to do because it's a non consecutive second term. So the moment that Trump picked his vp, he was effectively picking the nominee for the next time. Glenn Youngkin now coming around this as well. Even the way he does it, it reminds me of something and I've tried to convey this in various media when the question has come up. There is a lot of talk about a right wing civil war. We hear this was dominating America Fest tpa. You hear this on all of the podcasts. There's a right wing civil war. You hear this especially in the liberal. Not really there isn't. There is one. There is a thing happening and we can call it the right wing civil war. But the Youngkin endorsement of J.D. vance on the basis that Trump and Marco have already endorsed JD Vance reminds us that the so called right wing civil war is entirely a podcasting phenomenon. And I find that very interesting as a matter of politics, actually, that this division on the right is really just exclusively in the domain of the chattering class. It's different podcasters attacking each other. When it comes to actual policy. You don't see a ton of disagreement, do you? You see plenty of people cheering on Trump's policy in Venezuela. Even sort of famously or infamously, Tucker was urging caution on Venezuela. But since the Venezuela strike, I don't think Tucker has come out and attacked it. He was at the White House just the other day. Even there, he would be the critic, the big critic of that policy. There's really no disagreement on the policy. How about on the candidates? Everyone supports Trump and then everyone basically supports the vice president for 2028, including the people most likely to run against the vice president in 2028. They've already endorsed him. This is the silver lining of the right wing civil war is there is, as a matter of policy and actual politicians who will affect the policy, more unity in the Republican Party than I have probably ever seen in my entire lifetime. That too, by the way, is a characteristic of this historic situation we're in, which is the non consecutive second term of Donald Trump, who's dominated American politics for a decade. This is not to say that the things that the chattering class is attacking each other over are not important, that they don't involve real moral issues, that they're not thought provoking. Often they're not, but I guess sometimes they are. There are disagreements to be had. However, my strategy from the beginning is I say, I think that the incentives here are misaligned. The incentives for podcasters, for influencers, for tweeters, for tiktokers is to just create a lot of conflict and get more views. The incentive for people who want the conservatives to advance, for the Republican Party to win as a part of that, for the country to do better. Those incentives are to have a unity, to minimize conflict, at least to minimize public conflict, to try to solve the problems behind the scenes. And so we should be very open about what we think about issues, whether those issues are about geopolitics, foreign policy or murder mysteries. It can be on all of those issues that are supposedly within the purview of the right wing civil war. I've been clear as day on my views on every single one of them, and I encourage everyone to be clear as day. But I guess my point on the right wing civil war phenomenon is I don't think it is helpful in any way, at least not helpful to the common good of the country for it to become all this kind of personal jabbing and attacking and picking. You take this side and I take this side, and we're in this faction. And that, because that is divorced from the actual political question. It's a kind of a meta political game. It's a meta political entertainment, but it's divorced from if people had different candidates and were advancing different policies, that would be a totally different story. But they're not. Glenn Youngkin just endorsed J.D. vance because he says Rubio and Trump did the same. And we're all excited about Venezuela, and we're all excited about the immigration policy, and we're all excited about the tax policy, and we all ostensibly agree on everything. Now, speaking of those policies, one more little we have to get to this. I'm old enough to remember when back in 2015, 2016, all the real fancy conservative types, they said Trump is not a real conservative. And there was some reason to wonder about that. Back then. Trump had been a Democrat. We didn't really know exactly what he thought after the first term. It's hard to say he's not a real conservative. After the interregnum, especially into this term, it's very hard to say that, well, President Trump, I think, I hope, has just put those claims to rest forever when he declared an anti usury jubilee. We are talking about Pentateuch levels of conservatism here, but we're not just talking about 1776. We're talking like books of Moses levels of conservatism here's what Trump said. Please be informed that we will no longer let the American public be ripped off by credit card companies that are charging interest rates of 20 to 30% and even more, which festered unimpeded during the sleepy Joe Biden administration. Affordability, all caps. He's taking Zoran Mamdani's word. He's taking the left's word, using it against them. Effective January 20, 2026, I, as President of the United States, am calling for a one year cap on credit card interest rates of 10%. Now, one year, that's the Jubilee part. But interest rates of 10%, that's the anti usury part. It's actually a little tricky to exactly define what usury means. Does usury mean taking of any interest? Does usury mean taking of excessive interest? Does usury mean taking of interest in certain. It's actually quite unclear for millennia now exactly what usury means. But put that aside. Coincidentally, he says the January 20th date will coincide with the one year anniversary of the historic and very successful Trump administration. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Okay. Love it. I love this for a lot of reasons. One, usury is bad. Usury is actually bad. There are going to be some people who are idolaters of the free market who say, no, no, this is terrible. Actually, we need to let the free market do its work. And the only effect of this will be to cut certain people off from taking out lots of credit. Say, yes, that's a feature, not a bug of this policy. Because we don't want to allow people who are not going to be able to pay that back to just enslave themselves in debt for the rest of their lives. That's actually not a great thing. We do want to discourage spending on certain things. If they can't afford food or water or medical care, we will offer that to them. We already do that through the welfare state. But we don't want people through sheer vice and miseducation to enslave themselves in debt to go buy more baubles. That's actually bad. And our civilization has discouraged or outlawed that for all of history. That's true. However, let's get down to the even deeper level. This is very, very conservative. Very conservative. As I mentioned books of Moses, conservative. And throughout Christendom we've had anti usury laws. Someone responded said, well, Michael, we want to conserve 1776. We don't want to conserve some medieval Christian society or some ancient Middle Eastern society. We want to conserve 1776. The American tradition. Hear me. Hear me. All who have ears to hear, let them hear. We had anti usury laws in 1776. Hear me. Hear me. We had anti usury laws well into the 19th century, like, very serious anti usury laws. And then they started to be weakened a little bit, but they persisted in substantial form until the late 20th century. This happens so much even when people on the right especially have a more libertarian flavor. When they talk about tariffs or whatever, when they talk about free speech, when they talk about blue laws, when they talk about freedom and individual liberty, they say this is the American tradition. And what they are describing is very often an innovation of, like, the 1980s. They're just wrong about. We've had in this country all sorts of laws that they would be shocked to find out. Laws against blasphemy. Okay, Laws. Laws against burning the American flag for a very long time until, like, within the last few decades, we've had laws against usury. We've had establishments of churches in the states for decades after ratification of the Constitution. This is also very American. And then just at a practical political level, what I really like about this is it gets us through the midterms. The libs are going to complain about that, but that is part of it. It gets us through the midterms. You can't. But you can't have that forever. It would be much more radical to cap interest rates at 10% on credit cards forever, and it would probably create more downstream economic effects. But Trump's not above winning an election, and it's good to win elections. You don't want to be immoral to win elections, but you want to win election. It's good. And winning is important. A lot of Republicans just want to lose with dignity, and they don't even have dignity when they lose. The final reason this is important is it means that Trump is sensitive to. He is responding to the real economic challenges, especially of young people. That is real. And these people who are often very rich, who want to explain it all away. Oh, it's. No, you kids pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You kids quit your belly aching. Yeah, you can't afford a home, but the homes are a lot nicer now and quit your belly aching. You got big screen TVs and you got. You got Uber Eats and you need to stop ordering avocado toast or whatever. Even if we are, you know, even if we are curmudgeonally old men deep down, you know, even if that is, as conservatives, that's kind of our natural state. We have to recognize the palace is never safe when the cottage is unhappy. And there are very real economic challenges that young people, even young conservatives, are facing today. You can say the homes are much bigger and nicer now, okay? But there aren't, like, cheap, small homes that your grandparents had. So you still have this housing problem problem. You've had massive economic tumult because of the technology revolution. You've had mass migration, which has damaged the economy and economic prospects. You've had decades of racial discrimination against whites and Asians in affirmative action. You have real economic problems. Trump needs to respond to that. And he is even down to banning institutional investors from buying single family homes. BlackRock doesn't get to buy single family homes anymore. This is the kind of responsiveness that you get from Trump that is deeply conservative. And there are kind of two schools of thought on this. There's one, they're the guys who think that what politics really is is just perfectly reciting verbatim the campaign slogans of Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign in 1984. They think that true conservatism is never changing anything in any way, including the syllables uttered by politicians from what Ronald Reagan said on the trail in 84. And there are others who say, no, no, no. Ronald Reagan wouldn't be saying that today. If Ronald Reagan were alive today, he would not be saying the things that he said in 1984. Because politics is a practical art and science, and it applies eternal principles. Yes. To constantly changing circumstances. And part of the reason Reagan won, by the way, is he was reacting to the real circumstances of Jimmy Carter, of stagflation, of a weak foreign policy. He was responding to it. He would have run differently had he run in 1950. He was very sensitive. That's how he built a big coalition of people who previously hadn't voted Republican. Trump did the same thing. He's showing that sensitivity now. And the future politicians we're looking at, whether we're talking about midterm races in 26, whether we're talking about presidential in 2028, whether we're looking at 2032, they need to be sensitive to. They need to be able to build and rebuild coalitions and change the way that they're talking about policies, not in a way that is hypocritical in undermining their principles, but in a way that is applying those very principles to changing circumstances and by acknowledging the reality of change, which is one of the constants in this world. Okay, today's Music Monday. The rest of the show continues now. You do not want to miss it. Become a member. Use code nollescanner Wles at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.
