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Michael Knowles
This episode is brought to you by Cardiff, America's favorite small business lender. With over 12 billion funded since 2004. Apply in under 3 minutes for same day funding up to 500,000 at Cardiff Co Knowles. The Blue wave appears to be rising as Democrat James Tallarico takes the lead in the Texas Senate race. Tucker might start a third political party after ditching the Republicans and conservatives spend the entire day arguing about burritos. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show. A WNBA player is is writing years, decades, if not centuries of racial injustice by introducing a black doll. There are no black. She said growing up there were no black Barbie dolls. And she's gonna write that wrong even though she's like 12 and the black Barbie was introduced in 1967. We will get to imaginary racial injustice first though, I gotta start with the burrito gate. There is so much within a burrito. You know, rice and beans and pork. No, there's so much political meaning within a burrito. The entire conservative movement spent all day yesterday arguing about burritos. And this was all Andrew Colvett's fault. Our pal Andrew over there at the Charlie Kirk show in tpusa. It's all his fault. But it's not really all his fault. He just touched on an issue, a seemingly trivial little point that really got to the heart of a lot of the rancor, a lot of the divide on the American right between the neocons and the libertarians and the traditionalists and the populists. Some of the same fissures you saw in the Never Trump movement versus Trump in 2016. Some of the same fissures you've been seeing going all the way back to the founding of the post war conservative movement with William F. Buckley Jr. And Russell Kirk. What did Andrew say? He is in trouble. Boy. Andrew writes, One of our TPUSA college students gave me his take on affordability. Quote, a burrito shouldn't cost $20. Yeah, a lot of this is hangover from COVID and Biden era inflation, but the lived experience is the same. It just feels like basic things cost too much. Okay, so simple point, there you have it. But some conservatives did not like this, including my pal Joel Berry, representing a little bit more of the libertarian view, a little bit more the neocon view. He posts. Last night my wife made burritos for our family of eight and it cost less than $20 total for everyone. I'm beginning to think the affordability crisis is really an. I don't know how to cook crisis. By the time Joel weighed in, everybody got going. You had my pals here at dw. Matt Walsh weighs in. He says, I can't make burritos for my family of eight for 20 bucks. No way. Groceries are way too expensive. Ben Shapiro weighs in. He says, if you're paying 20 bucks for a burrito, you're doing life wrong. We have Mark Thiessen, the speechwriter for George W. Bush. He weighed in. He said it's ludicrous to speak spent $20 for a burrito. The vice president, J.D. vance, weighed in. He said he actually made a kind of a joke about Mark. He said, mark, it doesn't look like you've ever missed a burrito in your life. And it only got more explosive from there. Everybody was piling on the post liberals, the liberals, the classical liberals, the traditionalists, the everybody. So Rabba Mari was. Everybody was weighing in. Okay, And I will tell you what the debate is about. Eventually. I held back, though. I will give my opinion on burritos. I held back for a little bit just to get the view of the conservative movement. Because I think a lot of times people within their own conservative factions, what they wanna do is they wanna say the other guys are not really conservative. This was the hallmark of the Never Trump movement. They say Trump isn't a true conservative. You're seeing this play out now. There's a kind of op going on against Catholics in particular. A lot of the discourse around common good conservatism. Post liberalism is really a knock on Catholics, but it shouldn't be. Because a lot of the arguments that the post liberals or whoever else are making are really arguments that just go all the way back to antiquity, from Aristotle and cicero up through St. Thomas Aquinas, up through the Founding Fathers who are writing about the common good. And it's just become this major, major flashpoint. So someone asked, they said, why are all the conservatives, at a time when we have a mass migration into this country, another foreign war has kicked off, economic difficulty. Why? Why are we all talking about burritos? And I will tell you why. The neocons and the libertarians were fighting with the populists and the traditionalists. Not even over affordability, but over affordability. How to respond when normal people who are not political nerds complain about the economy? People are complaining about the economy because for a lot of people, it's tough out there. Okay? And why is it tough out there? For all sorts of reasons. For immigration, for the massive inflation that we experienced under the Biden era because food did go up. The rate of increase of the cost of food has actually leveled off. But still people are feeling it. It's not like the cost of food went down again in most cases because energy prices have gone up, because housing prices have gone through the roof. And it's tough out there, especially for young millennials and Gen Z who can't afford houses, who feel like they're kind of stuck in an economic rut and they don't have some of the advantages that earlier generations had. So the question was, how do we respond? How does a true conservative respond when people complain about the economy? And the neocon and the libertarian side suggested that what we should do is call the people who are complaining stupid ingrates and say, oh, it's not that bad. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you want to get by. You can look, you can stretch the meat in your burrito, you can eat ramen noodles. Forget about the burritos, you can eat ramen noodles. In other words, their argument was just personal advice to say, don't focus on the political problems. Don't focus on political change. If you ever focus on politics at all, you're basically a communist. Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, hustle, do your own thing, make your own way, Be an individual. Meanwhile, the populists and the traditionalists said, no, no, no, you can't ignore political questions. We have a right in a self government to deal with political issues and to deal with the political structure, a lot of which has been rigged against us. Not just over the last five or 10 years, but over the last 30, 40 years. Policies that outsourced American jobs, policies that destroyed American towns, policies that sold out American manufacturing and American supply chains, policies that bailed out big financial institutions, bailed out Wall street at the cost of Main Street. That's not just a pull yourself up by your bootstraps individual issue. That's a political issue. And we absolutely have a right and a responsibility to deal with the political issue. But there weren't all that many firm suggestions. So you got the neocons and the libertarians saying that we need to, in an election year, call the people a bunch of stupid ingrates. But then you have the populists and the traditionalists just offering kind of vague economic suggestions, nothing all that concrete. And really what a lot of their ire was about is just the Iran war. They just want the Iran war to stop. So they're blaming the Iran war for driving prices up. And the Iran war has driven some Prices up, but not all that much. And it really hasn't driven up the price of burritos. So I come in here from the top and I observe both sides actually have a point. Okay? The populists and the traditionalists are absolutely right. And if I had to give a winner in this debate, I would say the populists and the traditionalists make the better political point. The populists and the traditionalists are right that we have social obligations to our fellow citizens. We actually do. We're not just atomized individuals. They're right that markets are political institutions. We're not a polity serving a market, but we have markets and we cultivate markets in order to serve our political community. But that's what it's for, okay? The market is not some sacrosanct thing. The way some of the neocons and the libertarians talk about the invisible hand of the free market. It's as if they're talking about God himself. They make an idol out of the market, but markets are political institutions. Also, the populists and traditionalists are right that while. While my friend Ben Shapiro is totally accurate when he says facts don't care about your feelings, politics exclusively cares about your feelings. And the palace is never safe when the cottage is unhappy. However, you gotta give the libertarians and the neocons their due. The former group is right not to let populist economics get carried away, not to make the errors of the leftists who think that we can have a command and control economy and that we can control prices with a magic wand. So they actually do make an important point, though the libertarians and neocons sound politically tone deaf. So I didn't weigh in immediately on the central question itself, the burritos. So I would like to give my opinion on the burritos, okay? Which I think is a third way. Between the Joel Berry and the Andrew Colvett take, between the Matt Walsh and the Ben Shapiro takes. Thank you. By the way, professor, would you like to show. I have my associate professor Jacob here. He's dressed up like a burrito. He is an embodiment of the conservative movement. And he's brought me three burritos of different prices. What are the prices here? This one is $1.50. That's a burrito from McDonald's. This one is $2.07. That's the homemade burrito. And here we have the $16 burrito with tax and tip. You're hitting 20 bucks. So let's see. I've eaten a McDonald's burrito on more than one occasion. It's a breakfast burrito. So I like the sausage and the egg and the cheese. Okay. Not very satisfying. Then we've got the $2 burrito. I guess this is a homemade burrito, though. I don't know. Who has a panini press. Oh, wow. A lot of meat in that one. That's true. It's not a breakfast burrito. So it's a little bit. We're kind of debating apples and oranges here. Okay, that is a breakfast burrito. How much meat do you put in your breakfast burrito? That's crazy. Okay, that's a nice burrito. The homemade one. That's a nice burrito. And then we have this little fancy bougie one. This is the avocado toasted burritos. It actually has avocado in it. Okay, okay. All right. That's fine. That's fine. I would say of the three, I would say the homemade burrito for $2 is actually the best burrito. Who made that burrito? Can someone tell me who made that burrito, please? Nick Sheehan. Yeah, he's an idiot savant. Emphasis on one of those words. But he is. That's a good burrito. The $20 burrito is definitely more delicious than the McDonald's burrito, but the McDonald's burrito will get the job done. Actually, though, my conclusion is I don't really care for burritos. I don't really like them very much. They're a little exotic. They're a little unpleasantly exotic for me, I would say. I'm not a big fan of. I don't like Mexican food. I'm American. I've got some Italian heritage, and Italian food is much better than Mexican food, just entirely without exception. And I'm American, going back to the Mayflower, which is a great cigar brand, by the way. And so I don't. I can't. You know, I do oppose mass migration. I do want to build the wall and close the border, so I don't. The burrito, to me, it does nothing. It makes me feel nothing. I don't really want any of the burritos. Can you please clear the burrito? I don't want any more of the burritos. And I definitely don't want that big human burrito walking around my studio. Thank you very much, Professor. I hope that clears it up. If it hasn't cleared it up, Perhaps we should have one final point on this, which is that this debate that you're seeing play out over the Economy versus political action. This debate over focusing on the individual versus focusing on the political order. This is a perennial debate within the conservative movement. That has been true going back at the very least to William F. Buckley, Jr. And Russell Kirk and the post war conservative movement. This strain between the libertarians and then what became the neoconservative movement, the early neocons, who actually had a pretty good point, the later neocons have a little bit lost the way of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoritz. But there's that side which is a little more abstract, a little more focused on the individual, and the more classical conservatives who say, no, no, no, we have obligations to the common good. I mean, James Madison is writing about this in Federalist 47, and many of the Founding Fathers and framers are writing about the common good. You know, the purpose of the Constitution is to promote the general welfare. The Declaration of Independence assails King George for ignoring the public good. And this obviously has much longer legs in Western political philosophy, going all the way back to antiquity and all the smartest people who ever lived. As a political point, though, you cannot tell people that they are not feeling what they're feeling. This is why the socialists are doing very, very well in the Democrat primaries. And it's why we're seeing the beginnings of what could be a serious blue wave here with the Democrat candidate James Tallarico, leading Ken Paxton in the race in Texas. What I think a lot of this comes down to is a debate over feeling, fellow feeling. The people who say, yeah, you don't really have economic problems. Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You know, fast food is a luxury good these days. No, no one wants to hear that. Fast food should not be a luxury good and people should be able to afford houses. And it's not that you can just wave a magic wand to bring prices down. The libertarians and the neocons are right about that. But you have to take people's issues seriously. Because if people go to the ballot box in November and they say, you know what? Those socialists, they're speaking to me, they're speaking to my real problems. I'm having problems paying healthcare costs. I'm having problems buying a house. There are measures of the economy that are not encapsulated in GDP or the preferred economic measures of some of the right wingers that are telling me that I am really struggling right now. If, if one side channels, Bill Clinton says, I feel your pain, and the other side says, shut up, you stupid ingrate. Be happy for your ramen noodles. Guess which side's gonna win the election. Guess which side is gonna win. Now, there is a way that Republicans can engage in the affordability conversation that does not just turn them into socialists, does not make them ape. The left does not constitute a Pyrrhic victory because we'll win the election, but we'll end up implementing left wing policies. There is a way to talk about it, but you cannot ignore the problem. Okay. There is a reason that Donald Trump took over the Republican Party in 2016. It has somewhat to do with his personality and his celebrity and all of that. But I think the reason that he took over the GOP in 2016 was not as many thought, because of his personality in spite of his policies. If anything, I think it was because of his policies in spite of his personality. That's what I think it was about. He offered different answers on immigration. A lot of the GOP said shut up. Yeah, your communities are being overrun with immigrants and they don't speak English and they commit crimes and they lower your wages, especially for the working class, but whatever. Shut up. That's just freedom. That's just the American way. That's just how to keep GDP up. Shut up. We don't care about you. And Trump said, no, we do care about you and we should stop migration cuz it's bad for your country. On trade, you could say that tariffs are ultimately bad and you could say they weren't implemented right, or you could make any sort of criticism you want about the tariffs. But the fact that the entire GOP said, nope, sorry, we have to outsource all your jobs, we have to get rid of American manufacturing, we have to have everything made in China, we have to send our supply lines over to our greatest geopolitical adversary cuz the gods of the free market demand it. So shut up. If your town got bankrupted, shut up. If you can't live in the town that your parents have lived in for 10 generations, don't care about you, stop being such a loser. That's not gonna play. Okay? And Donald Trump came in and he said, no, no, we need to rebuild American manufacturing. I think there are good economic arguments for that in itself, but that certainly resonates with voters. And when that debate was had in 2016 and then somewhat relitigated when Trump ran again for a non consecutive second term in 2024, the more populist and the more traditionalist side won that debate. And we should pay attention to that, otherwise we're gonna get blown out of the water in November. And we should listen to that because it is good. It is good because rulers, governors, congressmen, politicians, they have an obligation to their constituents. And politics involves three parts. It's like the tripartite soul, another insight from antiquity. There's the logical part. There is the facts, don't care about your feelings part that matters in politics. And there is the thematic part. There's the spirited part of politics where you can rally people, you can make them feel good about their country again. You can make America great again. That's the thematic part. And there is the appetitive part. When your constituents tell you they are having a problem, you need to show them the respect of taking that seriously. Even when it comes down to burritos, which are not good, they're not good. You know what's good for your digestive tract though? Cowboy colostrum. Go to cowboycolostrum.com Knowles K N A W L E S There are two kinds of health products. The ones that taste like you're being punished for making good decisions and the ones you're actually disappointed when you run out of. Cowboy Colostrum falls into the second category. I am very skeptical of a lot of health products. Sweet little Lisa, you know, who's quite pregnant. She takes these awful prenatal vitamins and stuff every night, and a lot of them taste terrible. Cowboy colostrum, totally different story. I love it. I've been hearing from my gigachad friends over here, especially Mr. Davies, about how great colostrum is. And when your gut is working well, you simply feel better every day. Less bloating, better digestion, just feeling more like yourself. Cowboy has actually studied it. In their clinical trial, 83% of participants reported improved gut health. 79% experienced less bloating. 72% reported improved digestion. Right now, try the new cookies and cream flavor for yourself for a limited time. Listeners get up to 25% off their entire order. Go to cowboycolostrum.com Knowles K Wles use promo code KNOWLES at checkout. That's 25% off when you use code KNOWLESKNOWLES@cowboycolostrum.com Knowles how did the vice president respond to this? Because beyond the tweet, kind of making fun of Marc Thiessen, the vice president weighed in on this issue even before Burrito Gate erupted. He was on Laura Ingraham's show and he was asked about the rise of socialism. And he gave, I think, a really nuanced take, a take that I totally agree with on how conservatives should be responding to the rise of these DSA candidates in Michigan, all over the country,
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Interviewer
but they say they can't afford a home. The average home ownership is up to like 42 years of age. You know, 10, 15 years ago, it was much lower. There's concern about the cost of living still high energy prices, 100 bucks to fill my tank today. What does the Republican Party, specifically administration, need to do better on that front? Because there are real strains out there.
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J.D. Vance
Well, I think that what it shows is that the past 40 years of economic policy, bipartisan economic policy, have failed. I think a lot of people look at El Sayad or a lot of these other radical candidates and they say socialism is evil. They're right. Socialism is evil. But we have to ask ourselves the question, why is socialism so appealing to a lot of people who, to your point, have lower assets, who don't have the same ownership, who went to universities and were sold a bill of goods? They got a lot of debt, but they didn't necessarily get the good jobs that came along with that high debt load. And I think our answer to that, and by the way, you've already seen a lot of it in the Trump administration, is number one, protect American manufacturing. The manufacturing economy is the foundation of the middle class. We see this in Europe, we saw it in the United States. Every country that sells its industrial base to the highest foreign bidder loses its middle class and sees socialism come on the back end. What I think is actually going to happen is these socialist candidates, they've caught the tail end of an economy that wasn't working for most Americans. Unfortunately for them, the Trump economy has made lots of long term investments in rebuilding that manufacturing base and making America energy independent and actually making it possible to own a home, to have a family, to build the real elements of middle class life.
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Interviewer
Manufacturing.
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Michael Knowles
Preach. Preach. Yes. Thank you. This is the response. Notice what he says there off the top. He says socialism is evil. Some of the more neocon libertarian types are going after Vance in particular because the 2028 presidential race has already begun. And they've said, you know, J.D. vance is basically a socialist because he thinks we ought to have, I don't know, family policy or a manufacturing, a developmental economic policy, or because he defends the tariffs or because he thinks that it's legitimate when people complain about the rising cost of goods. He's a socialist. What does J.D. van say here? He says socialism is evil and we need to address why people, especially young people, are turning to socialism. We need to examine that. We can't Just bury our heads in the sand and say, oh, they're just a bunch of stupid idiots. They don't even know that the cost of groceries hasn't risen all that much since 2023, even though it rose dramatically during the Biden era because of inflation, in part because of the spending policies during the days of COVID These stupid idiots. If they would only read economic tables, they wouldn't be socialists, you dumb, stupid idiots. Well, you know, that's a great strategy for getting socialism. And what Vance is saying is socialism is evil. And if you want to stop socialism from rising, you need to speak to the underlying gripes based on the underlying conditions that are giving rise to it. These are just facts. It is hard for young people to get homes. Why is it hard for young people to get homes? For households headed by people under 40? Right now, the inflation adjusted median home value rose 30% from 2019 to 2024. Price of housing rose 30%. Do you know how median income rose during that exact same time period? By 9%. That's a problem. When the cost of housing outpaces the rise in incomes by 3x, that's a problem. That's a big political problem. Under 35, homeownership is now near multi decade lows. That's a problem. That's a political problem. The housing shortfall right now is anywhere from. It's a pretty wide range, but it's anywhere from 2 million to 5 million housing units. That's a big political problem. And in certain areas, areas with stupid Democrat policies and lots of immigrants and sanctuary cities, in certain areas run by Democrats, the shortage of the housing supply is astounding. We are not going to beat socialism if we don't take the concerns that socialists appeal to seriously. We have the same goal. It's amazing the factions of the gop, how they call other people, they try to kick other people out of the conservative movement. They suggest, look, in some cases there really are wolves in sheep's clothing. But that's not mostly what we're looking at here. I mean, I saw yesterday James Lindsay, who was a liberal Democrat, atheist, who I think he voted for Obama and Hillary. And he came along and realized that the left was totally nuts. And especially during the rise of the transgender movement, all that kind of critical race theory, all that stuff. He said, okay, they're nuts. I wanna side with the conservatives now. But yesterday he called Matt Walsh a leftist. Give me a come on, what are we doing? I like James, but come on, what are we doing? Matt Walsh is not a Leftist, okay, you could call him a lot of things, but you can't call him a leftist. And I think in this case we all have the same enemy. The same enemy is socialism. But it is not heresy. It is not a violation of conservative principles or American principles to say that maybe we need some industrial policy. Maybe a protective tariff is worth considering. Maybe we need to listen to people when they gripe about the skyrocketing cost of housing. Maybe not the skyrocketing cost of burritos, but the skyrocketing cost of housing. That's a real gripe. And you're not a communist or a traitor to the American cause for saying so. For goodness sakes, the country was built largely on tariffs. You can say the tariffs won't work as well now or they have to be implemented differently. But give me a break, guys. The country was built on a conception of the common good. To say that a consideration of the common good makes you a leftist. Give me a break. First of all, the leftists don't care about the common good. They care about the common bad. But even beyond that, it's just so ridiculous, the recriminations going. You're not a true conservative. No, you're not a true conservative. No, you're not a true conservative. The conservative coalition in America has always been incoherent. The left wing coalition is coherent. They're all progressives, they're all leftists. Plus John Fetterman, I guess even he's kind of pretty liberal though. The conservative coalition going back to Reagan's three legged stool was libertarians, traditionalists with the religious right and war hawk Democrats like the neocons. Those three groups have basically nothing in common other than a common enemy. So let's focus on that. We have a common enemy, socialism. We have a common enemy. These left wing candidates, the DSA candidates along with the mainstream Dem candidates who are basically indistinguishable from the DSA candidates who want to destroy our country. I'm glad some of these ideas are coming to light. I'm glad we have a reintroduction of ideas such as the common good. We have a reintroduction of the idea that we don't just worship the market. I'm glad that we're having those kinds of debates. But guys, focus on what really matters here, okay? And if you wanna do it in a really practical. I do wanna offer some practical solutions. How about you point out that the driver of virtually all of these problems is mass migration. The housing crisis is a migration crisis. If you look at California and New York over the last five years or so. Basically 100% of the increase in the cost of housing is due to mass migration. There was a study on this, came out some months ago, and for the rest of the country it's about 60%. You want to talk about wages, especially among the lower middle class and working class wages stagnating. A lot of the downward pressure on wages is because of mass migration. You want to talk about the fraying of social solidarity, a loss of a sense of the common good. A lot of that is because you're just introducing too many foreign elements that are not assimilated to the country. And that at a time when you're discouraging patriotism that is largely driven by mass migration, it's not even exactly the immigrants fault that they're part of it, but it's the policies that led to that that's a big problem. The rise in prices, that was Biden era inflation. Okay, so focus on that. If the conservatives are willing to allow themselves to take seriously the complaints of their constituents, then you can say, hey, this is caused by immigration and interest rates. A lot of people are locked into their homes because they bought their homes at 2% interest rates and now interest rates are 6 or 7% and they don't feel like they can sell their homes. And you can point to improvements in the inflation rate since the Biden era thanks to Trump. You can point to the reshoring of investment in America that J.D. vance was just talking about. You can point to those things and you can actually channel the popular discontent with the economy toward a good end. But if you don't do that, if you don't engage with that and you just have this kind of snooty attitude toward your fellow Americans and you say, oh, shut up about the burritos, stop eating your avocado toast or whatever. If you do that, you are just gonna drive those people into the arms of the socialists who are on the rise right now, who are poised to take the House, maybe the Senate, and then you can sit and once we lose the country and the Democrats pass a mass amnesty and they pack the Supreme Court and they further denigrate our country and destroy our society and they reinstitute all of their racial and sexual ideologies and they further entrench their two tier system of justice and they let the criminals out of prison and they try to abolish prisons and they abolish. You know what you can do? You can sit there and you say, but I was the Most perfectly ideologically consistent libertarian. I was the most perfect special little neoconservative. I never once compromised on my misunderstanding of American history. I never. I'm so ideologically pure. And that's gonna sound really nice echoing off the walls of the gulag that the left puts us into. Not a good idea. There is a way out, but it's not gonna be through disrespecting your fellow Americans and not taking their concerns seriously. Okay. Another opportunity, an alternative view to this, which is just fixing the Republican coalition and moving forward and beating the Democrats, is to take our ball and go home and start a third party, which is what we are being told is happening by guys like Joe Kent, who was the head of the Counterterrorism center during the Trump White House. He left over a disagreement on the Iran war. Tucker was teasing that maybe he would launch a third party. He gave a big address last night. We'll get into what that third party could look like. Then we'll get into some good news on the immigration front. Big win at the Supreme Court now about to go into effect with hundreds of thousands of people who should not be here. First though, I wanna tell you about Policygenius. Go to policygenius.com knowles knes it is hard to believe, but summer is almost over. Which means it's time to do what Americans traditionally do at the end of summer. Panic about everything we were supposed to accomplish and somehow didn't trust me. I got a list of mile long. Now, maybe you had a few big changes this summer. Maybe your family grew, maybe you moved, maybe you changed jobs. Or you simply discovered that feeding everyone for three months is significantly more expensive than you remember. That's the thing about life. A year ago, your circumstances may have looked totally different. A year from now, they could be different again. So as summer winds down, you start thinking about what's next. It's worth taking a few minutes to think about the people who depend on you and whether they would be financially protected if something happened to you. Now, it's not the most fun thought to have at the end of summer, but you don't need to make it more complicated than it already is. Policygenius is an online insurance marketplace. Lets you compare quotes from some of America's top insurers side by side for free. With Policygenius you can find 20 year life insurance policies starting at just $276 a year for $1 million in coverage. Go to policygenius.com knowleskanawlies to compare life insurance quotes from top companies. See how much you could save. That is policygenius.com knowles all day yesterday we got this tease coming around. There was a picture that Tucker posted the other night. I don't think we pulled the picture. It was Tucker with Joe Kent and Marjorie Taylor Greene and various spouses at Tucker's house up in Maine talking about a new political movement. You know, there's discontent with the Democrats and with the Republicans, with the left and the right. So there's gonna be this third way in politics with people who have left the Republican Party. Joe Kent went on the very left wing program Cenk Uygur show the Young Turks to explain his desire for a third party.
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Joe Kent
I think it's especially for the presidency. I think it is having a very, very simple platform and it's acknowledging upfront like we are gonna disagree on a lot of domestic policy and a lot of social issues. At the end of the day, the president can talk a lot about all those things, but he really doesn't have a lot of power. We do agree that we don't want Israel dictating our foreign policy. We don't want any more foreign wars. We don't want to have to run a massive empire all over the rest of the world. And then from there, when we go to make any kind of decisions that are going to affect the divisive issues, that it's going to be more of a open discussion. Those other issues would be handled in the House, would be handled in the Senate, they'd be handled at the state level. Therefore, if you built this very, very simple platform, but a broad coalition, people could vote top ticket, you know, for the, whatever it is, the independent party that wants to keep us out of the foreign wars and stop AIPAC from calling all the shots. But then down ticket. Yeah, if abortions are number one issue as a Republican or as a Democrat, as a pro life or as pro choice, then that could affect how they're gonna vote in the House or the Senate.
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Michael Knowles
Okay, so the pitch for the third party, this is not coming from Tucker, this is coming from Joe Kent. The pitch for the third party is literally just opposition to Israel. There have been third parties that have cropped up in American history for all sorts of different reasons and motivations. But in this case, what Joe Kent is saying to this left wing host, Cenk Uygur, is he says this third party will be focused exclusively on opposition to Israel. And then all these other issues like the right to life or I mean any other issue, I guess taxation, immigration, any of it down to Occupational licensing reform, every single other issue. You can just figure that out yourselves at the state level. But really all that this party exists to do is to oppose Israel. I don't think that's gonna sell. Israel has declined massively in popularity in the United States. That had happened on the left a long time ago. It's begun to really show up in polling on the right. That's not enough to sustain a political party. Furthermore, Jo Kent ties it into this distaste for American empire. And he says, you know, we don't want to govern this empire overseas. We don't want to have a big empire. We want to be a yeoman Republic like in 1790 or something. And that's not going to fly either. In fact, I think both of these big issues, wanting a third party and wanting to get rid of our empire and just go back to being a yeoman, farmer Republican, both of those things sound popular. If you poll people, you will get high approval ratings for both of those ideas. We don't wanna be the world's police. We want a third party. We're unhappy with both political parties. People will tell you that they want this third party focused on these kinds of issues. Maybe not exclusively the Israel thing, but the umpire issue. But people don't actually want that. A third party is the kind of thing that Americans want to want, but they don't actually want. Just look at some poll results. This provided by Gzero.92 to 2016 third party candidates. And you had some major third parties appear during that time. You had the Reform Party, which was supposed to be a huge force in American politics. Ross Perot up through Pat Buchanan. You had the Green Party, Ralph Nader in 2000. You've had these hints. You had the Tea Party movement from within the Republican Party. Now you have the DSA coming out and whatever this joke third party could be. But look at how it actually turns out. People hate the Republicans and the Democrats. And yet 92. 43% Democrats, 37% Republicans, 19% third party. That's not electoral votes, that's just sort of popular support. Popular vote. Then the third party support declines 8% 4% in 2004 and 08, it's 1%, then 2%, then 6% in 2016. These are not real. These are not real movements. And then on the American empire point, a lot of people will tell you, we don't want to be the world's police, we don't want our empire. And yet that's just not how history works. That's not how Powers work. It's not how nations grow. People don't actually want to give up the empire because basically all of the privileges, not literally all of them, we have some geographic advantages, some ideological advantages, but most of the privileges that we have as Americans for our wealth, our prosperity, our security, all the rest are downstream of the American empire. Empires are super annoying and there are lots of downsides to having an empire, but people miss the empire when the empire is gone. Let's look at examples of great empires that gave up their empires and let's see how they're doing. The uk. The UK was one of the greatest empires in the history of the world. The sun never set on the British Empire. The UK gave up its empire after World War II. How is the UK doing today? Is it thriving? Has it returned to the glory days? Are they playing out their history from the Battle of Hastings onward? No, I don't think so. The UK is in decline and in decay right now and it's being overrun by Muslims and immigrants. And now they have two tier system of policing that disadvantages actual Brits. It isn't working out well. Spain was one of the great empires. How is Spain doing today? Ask the residents of Ceuta how Spain is doing today. Ask the citizens of Spain who have a terrible socialist government that just gave amnesty to half a million immigrants. Is Spain doing really well right now? I don't think so. Portugal. Has Portugal thrived since it gave up its empire? No, it doesn't. Giving up your empire isn't all that great. Now, Tucker then went on and gave a 90 minute or so monologue about what people were expecting was going to be the launch of a third party. And it wasn't because Tucker is a little more sophisticated than that. So he gave this monologue about how what we need in America is fairness and what we need is justice and what we need is sovereignty and all these things that basically everybody agrees on. There was nothing particularly radical in Tucker's monologue last night. He didn't call for a third party. So I'm not exactly. It seems like there's some disagreement over some of the people who had dinner with Tucker and Tucker himself. But in any case, I think when you watch those two statements together, Joe Kent saying what the third party's about, it's about we all hate Israel, we all hate Israel and we don't want to be an empire. That is not a viable platform for a third party. And then you watch Tucker's much more sophisticated speech where he says we need fairness and we need Sovereignty. And we need, you know, we need America to be great again. Everybody agrees with that. But that's also not the platform for a third party. It's good criticism of the Republican Party. It's good criticism of the Democrat Party. There's maybe some lessons to take from that. But none of that is a third party. My actual least popular view today is a day of unpopular views. I know many people tuned at the minute I said I don't like burritos. It's just, I'm not. Come on, guys, I'm an American. In a pinch, fine. But I don't. But my actual least popular view is that the two party system is great. Actually. It's great because the two sides actually do have relatively coherent policy platforms. The right doesn't have any coherent ideology. It's got a lot of different ideologies. The left has a coherent ideology and a basically coherent policy platform which is to destroy everything and to radically liberate the individual. But the GOP has a relatively coherent policy platform. If you're the kind of person who cares about the right to life, you are the kind of person who is thinking about the natural law. You're the kind, even not consciously, but it's just part of you. So you're thinking about national sovereignty. You're thinking of the order of loves, the fact that we have a greater responsibility to our families than to foreigners. You're thinking about property rights. If you're thinking about the right to life, you're thinking about the right to property too. And there actually is a kind of coherence between how the right thinks about abortion and taxation and national sovereignty. And there's a kind of coherence to how the left thinks about it too, which is you don't have a right to anything. And it's just a total vindication of an imposition of the will. And there isn't much room for a third party there. If, you know, if Joe Ken's hobby horse is, we should stop supporting Israel, I think you're gonna see that emerge from within the two parties. If that's gonna emerge, which again, I don't think it really will, because it does tie into the the empire question. And that part of the world has been a troublesome province going back to the Roman Empire. But nevertheless, we are an empire, and that involves dealing with troublesome parts of the world. But that is how the nation has grown on its course. I suppose we could give it up willingly, but I don't think most people will like that. Okay, so beyond what People say they want but don't actually want. Let's get back to the big issue. One of the big practical issues that is actually driving a lot of this discourse from the foreign empire down to the burritos. And it really specifically touches on the burritos because we're talking about immigration. Good news on the immigration front. First, though, my favorite comment yesterday is from Bonfour, I almost killed a snail. It's an interesting name. Who says Michael's candle is hypnotizing me? You can get it@thecandleclub.com I don't think. I don't even get a royalty on it anymore. I'm slinging candles for the love of the game, okay? My favorite products are combustible, the Mayflower cigars and the candles. I want to be in your home. I want to suffuse your space. The body is a temple and the temple needs incense. One thing that I think the. The sort of Tuckerite faction it gets right, that I think a lot of the populists and traditionalists who are a little different from that faction, but they also get right that even I think the neocons, certainly the libertarians know, and I think even the neocons understand to some degree is people mostly care about domestic issues. Even if we want to benefit from having a big empire, we don't want to think about the foreign issues that much. When constituents come up and they say, I just want to. I don't want to be involved in the rest of the world. I want to focus on the problems we have at home. I get where they're coming from. I feel that too. You can't neglect the rest of the world when you're a great power, really, when you're any nation. I mean, going back to the earliest days of our country, let's not forget, five seconds after our country was founded, we were dealing with a war in the Middle East. We were dealing with the Barbary pirates. Nevertheless, yes, most people wanna focus on domestic issues and we wanna see big wins on the domestic front. Well, we did get one win recently, which is we've trying to get rid of these Haitians for like 15 years. These Haitians come over after a natural disaster in, what was it, 2010 or something, and they were given temporary protected status. And then they were supposed to leave 18 months later, but they didn't leave. And they just kept being allowed to stay and allowed to say. And then when conservatives tried to deport them, the courts would gum the whole thing up based on nothing, based on Just their desire for progressive politics. And so it's taken forever. Finally, the Supreme Court comes in and reverses a stay from a lower court judge and says, they gotta go. It's been too long. The people who want the Haitians to stay forever, they say, well, no, these Haitians, they own houses. They've had a quarter million kids. And you say, yeah, they shouldn't have. That's part of the problem. Why do they own houses? Why do they have mortgages? But a Gen Z conservative with a bunch of student loan debt who did everything right and followed the law, how come that guy doesn't have a house? That's part of the problem. So finally we're getting rid of them. One of the arguments was you couldn't send him back to Haiti because Haiti is hell. Haiti's hell because of the Haitians. You know, Haiti is part of this island, Hispaniola, which is half Haiti, half Dominican Republic. It's the same geography, it's the same kind of people, you know, biologically, but it's just the, the Haitian side is hell and the Dominican Republic side is nice. It's safe, it's relatively prosperous. So the issue here, it's not the trees and the dirt, it's the Haitians. So if Haiti is ridden with crime and all sorts of social pathologies, why would we bring that here? Finally, we're getting rid of the Haitians. Here is DHS Secretary Mark Wayne Mullins on what's going on.
- [45:38]
Mark Wayne Mullins
We're going after them right now. We are giving them an opportunity to either leave on their own and we'll help you, or we'll arrest you and send you back. Either way, you don't have have status inside this country anymore. That has been litigated. The courts spoke very clearly. We knew that we were going to win this because in its name itself, it says temporary protective status. The president has the right to start it. He also has a right to end it. The president ended it, which was the right call. So these individuals can either self deport or we will arrest you and send you back. It's that simple.
- [46:08]
Michael Knowles
So it's happening now and it involves even a little self deportation in that we're offering these guys $1,000 or 2,000 bucks to just get go home themselves, which you say, well, why are we rewarding them for overstaying their temporary status? And it's, look, it's just cheaper than arresting them, so we'll give them the money to find. That's great. However it is though, we're talking about what is it like 350,000 people? Yeah, 350,000 Haitians. That's a good start. That's a good chunk of the foreigners who are here, who should not be here. The other reminder, though, in this whole saga is that the chief threat to liberty. This gets us right back to the burrito point. The chief threat to liberty today is not from an executive that is too powerful. The chief threat to liberty is from the other parts of the government, the other parts of the political order, the judges in particular. But I am not that worried. I know there are a lot of people who are concerned, not a lot, but a lot of pundits at least, who are concerned about the rise of authoritarianism and a strong man, Francisco Franco, in America, which, first of all, I can't believe it took me this long to get to this point. I cannot wait to debate with Ben on friendly fire over this. He made a post where he said, if you support Mussolini and Hitler and Franco and Mao and Stalin, you're not American. That's un American. And I say, hold on. Four out of five ain't bad. Three out of four ain't bad. Whatever it was, you can't love me. Yeah, I agree on the Mussolini point and the Hitler point and the Stalin point and the Mao point. But Franco, Francisco Franco is one of the greatest men of the 20th century. Francisco Franco stopped the communists from conquering Iberia. The communists who were raping nuns and killing priests en masse, who would have taken over Spain and Iberia already had been doing that. Franco comes in, by the way. It's not like he was super chummy with Hitler. Hitler personally hated Franco. He thought he was a huge jerk, and he was not liable. And he wasn't an ally. He never allied with Nazi Germany. Franco was a good American ally during the Cold War, and he saved Spain. And in this house, Franco is a hero. I mean, Bill Buckley called him an authentic national hero. In Spain, Nixon and Reagan were palling around with Franco. Anyway, sorry, I'm getting distracted. But it's on this point, which is I see why people think, absent historical context, that the chief threat to liberty that we face is from an overwhelming executive that is taking too much power and governing in a dictatorial, tyrannical way. That's not actually what's happening. The executive cannot, even for years and years and years, kick out the Haitians whose temporary protected status expired over a decade ago. The executive has, like, no power. One of the big issues, a driver of the discontent, is that the policies that Trump has been trying to implement, not the least of which is the mass deportations have been gummed up at every step of the way by not just legislators, by the judiciary in particular. That's where your threat to liberty lies, and that's where the blame should lie for a lot of these problems that people, especially young people, are feeling. Difficulty in the job market, housing, even the cost of burritos. Don't deny what people are feeling. Recognize what people are feeling. Show people the causes of their discontent and channel it in a way that will be productive for the political order. So much more to get to. Well, here's the tease. I mean, we teased it right at the top of the show. James Tallarico. James Tallarico, this guy, the guy who says that God is non binary, who points to the Blessed Virgin Mary as a defense of abortion. James Talarico says women are our neighbors with uteruses. James Talarico, the putatively straight white male. His girlfriend, she lives up in Canada. She goes to another school. James Talarico is leading Ken Paxton in Texas. Right now, it's within the margin of error. It's 47 to 45. But November could be a bloodbath, historically speaking. It should, because we have all the political wins against us right now. And if you want to mitigate the damage or, I don't know, possibly pull a rabbit out of a hat and actually beat the Democrats, you can't hand over really juicy political issues to them, especially when they have no solutions to the issues and they are the cause of the issues in the first place. Okay, today is Theology Thursday. The rest of the show continues now. You do not want to miss it. Become a member, use code Knowles Kane at WLAS at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.