Ep. 2077 - Mamdani "Remembers" October 7th With Anti-Israel Tweet

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio marks October 7th with a speech for the ages at the Acropolis, and the Muslim commie mayor of the most Jewish city, Latin America, marks the day by talking about how much he hates Israel. Then, speaking of religion, a city council meeting in Iowa opens with an invocation to Satan. And most shocking of all, President Trump reveals that he buys his suits at Joseph A. Bank. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show, The Story That Will Not Die. There's another update in the case of the Cornell 7. You know, the girl initially said it was all consensual. Then later, she didn't get invited to a party, so she said that the guys raped her. Then the guys came out and they said, no, she might have raped us based on the fact that we were all drunk, if that's now the criterion. Well, now there's an update. She may have actually, like actually, not just they were all drunk, like she may have actually done that to one of the guys. 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Okay, before we get into the magnificent speech from the Secretary of State at the Acropolis, before we get into some of the other speeches, President Trump gave a great speech, before we get to NatCon Jerusalem on October 7th and Mamdani and all the rest, I want to thank everybody for the prayers and congratulations. My fourth child was born yesterday. First baby girl Knowles, very exciting. I did not wait for you all to light my celebratory cigar. Very, very exciting. You're probably thinking I'm a horrific husband and father because I'm here right now with all of you. I just love you so much. I will go back. I will go back to the hospital to be with my wife and daughter after this, but I couldn't miss a show. It was too exciting. Plus, I couldn't smoke a cigar at the hospital. Do you know, back when I was born and we were a proper family, you could smoke a cigar at the hospital. Did you know that? A lot of people don't even remember this. You could smoke at a hospital until 1993. And then President Bill Clinton ruined everything. Bill Clinton, how ironic is that? Bill Clinton, known as something of a cigar aficionado himself, though he didn't smoke them exactly, but he liked cigars. Anyway, we don't, we're talking enough about Cornell. We don't have to get into that. Bill Clinton ruined it. Now, we're not a proper country. So I, anyway, I had to smoke the cigar on my drive up. And with all of to cover some really, really amazing stuff. Marco Rubio was at the Acropolis. By the way, just last bit on the cigars. If you want the beautiful Mayflower smoking jacket, pre-orders end in one week. This is the coveted Mayflower smoking jacket made in a collaboration with Shepherds, a magnificent menswear company with fabric from Como, Italy at the very best mill. And it's made to measure. It's a bespoke garment. It's got a real working buttons made of real animal horn. And it's just, it's phenomenal. Mayflower logo, very delicately done on the Bemberg lining. Anyway, if you want it, if you want it, like you're never going to get a real smoking jacket anywhere near this price. We don't, we don't do it for the profits. We do it for the culture. Go to mayflowersigars.com until next Thursday. You have one week left to order. Okay. That's it. That's all the ads because I want to tell you about Marco Rubio. Rubio goes to the Acropolis on October 7th. And so a lot of people were wondering, why is he there? This is October 7th, that day in the modern conception, it just, just refers to that horrific terror attack by Hamas on the state of Israel killed over a thousand Israeli Jews three years ago. And there's a lot of resonance. There's a lot of significance to that date, but the tie into the Acropolis is that three years ago was not the first time that October 7th became synonymous with a Muslim attack. The first time goes back to 1571, the battle of Lepanto. When the Ottoman Turks, very nearly took over Europe. There have been three occasions when the Muslims nearly conquered all of Europe. The first time was the battle of Poitiers. They were taken back. They were finally beaten back by Charles Martel, Charles the Hammer, grandfather of Charlemagne. Second time was the battle of Lepanto in Greece. That was October 7th, 1571. The third time was in 1683. It was the battle of Vienna, largest cavalry charge in history. That was September 11th, 1683. So even when you see these dates crop up again, it's not just a matter of time. It's a matter of time. It's a matter of again and again with Muslims in history. They do that. That's the sort of thing that they do. Osama bin Laden referred to that date, actually, as to one of the reasons why they chose September 11th. So same thing here. Rubio is not just making a point about the Muslim attack on the state of Israel three years ago on October 7th. He's putting this into a broader context. The speech is absolutely phenomenal. Here's just a little clip of it. I encourage you, though, to watch the whole thing. Here's the Secretary of State. Right, we, the types of political parties, we all have a very simple, natural history. The people of Palestine, the Israelis, the West Bank, we all have a very simple, natural history. And that's important. The way that I would provide an answer, what I don't believe we have, is when I'm going through the second half of the second half. Even if you don't know what I'm going to do in a long time, I'm going to do what I'm going to do for the rest of the year. Okay, put a pause here. This is such an important framing, because the speech could very easily have been purely defensive. Say, we must protect these things because, you know, the Muslims tried to take them over in 1571 here in Greece. Or, well, they do it more recently. They've done it in recent years. They keep doing it. And it's not just the Muslims. It's the leftists and it's the communists. And it's all these people who are trying to protect these things. These people are threatening us, so we need to defend against that. That's not what he's framing this as. He says, hey, I'm here at a place where Western civilization began and what they were pursuing. pursuing what they were going on the offensive for was excellence. Now, excellence is a really key word here because what he's referring to is virtue. And in the modern West, we refer to values. Even the conservatives, forget about the leftists for a second, even the conservatives will say, we need to defend our conservative values, our Christian values, our Judeo-Christian values, our Western values. Even accepting the framework of values is conceding something to the left because there's a big difference between a value and a virtue. A value is a modern idea. A value is a relative idea. It's a subjective idea. You have your values, I have my values. Our civilization, we have certain values, but other civilizations have their own values. Virtue is different. Virtue is older. Virtue, is classical. And virtue is objective. Virtue is just excellence. Virtue, you have athletic virtues. The New York Yankees didn't show very many of them last night when they were eliminated in the ALDS. Luckily, my daughter was born that day, so it was a good day on the whole, but it was a little rough night. You had athletic virtues in ancient Greece. You had moral virtues. You can have political virtues, but they're objective. We can know something about them. We can be confident they're about something outside of us. Something that is pulling us to be greater than just our own inclinations and our own individual desires. And he's saying, no, no, no. What we stand for is solid. It's excellence. We could know it. Other people should be like us, and we should defend them, not just because we like them or they suit our preferences, but because they are true and there is something about them that is perennial, even eternal. Keep going. We have a lot of standards to ensure that we're going to win. We do have to put ourselves forward with the confidence that we're going to succeed. It's potential. It's just. We know the most exceptional things about us in the United States are the fact that we're going to win. We're going to win. And we have to put ourselves forward with the confidence. We know that if we have to be strong enough to do something right, we can surpass the others. Because we want to be the best in all of this. The nature of growth studies that we've done is to go to the best of both worlds and try to be the best in the world. And we've been doing that for a long time. And we've been doing it for a long time. And that means growth is not only for growth. It's a massive thing. It's a great way of election marketing. Put a pause here. There's been commentary in certain quarters about the threat of post-liberalism or whatever. This Christian nationalism where all these kind of populism, all these isms that are united in as much as they supplant the old kind of squishy liberal neoconservative GOP consensus. There's been a lot of talk about that. And some people have even tried to put forward Marco Rubio as an exemplar of the liberal neoconservative establishment order. Contrary to people like President Trump or JD Vance or any other number of people in the Trump administration and the conservative movement. And what Rubio is showing here is he's one of the real conservatives. He's not a lib. He's not going to just be some neoconservative establishment type. Because we have the juxtaposition of value versus virtue. Here we have the juxtaposition of liberalism versus a more classical conception of politics. Politics ordered toward excellence, ordered toward the common good, ordered toward the advancing of our civilization. Liberalism, not just in its modern leftist progressive form, but liberalism generally, even in the classical form, establishes what Leo Strauss called a low but solid ground. So we're not necessarily going to reach for the highest things. We're not necessarily going to pursue virtue. We're not necessarily going to weigh in on the matters that really move the human heart and that concern the human mind. No, no. We're going to establish a low but solid ground of mere economic power. Of appeal to mere private interests. And, you know, we might not hit the very heights anymore. But it's going to be a really nice stable political order. And what Rubio is saying in this speech is no. No, no, no. We don't want the low but solid ground. We want to look up. We want to be like the builders of the Parthenon. We want to build up. We want to strive for excellence. We want to strive for virtue. We want to be better than others. And we want others to look to us as an example and to build themselves up too. That's what we want. Rubio obviously is Catholic. So he's approaching this from a Christian framework. But this kind of speech would appeal to people who are not Christian. This would appeal to ancient Greeks. The kind of men who built the Parthenon. This is a really, really important speech. Because what it is signaling to the American right is, sorry, you guys thought I was your last best hope to go back to the old squishy consensus. The kind of neocon, kind of libertarian, kind of just make money and ignore all the big issues stuff. I ain't doing that. Hey, did you get the message? I'm standing in front of the freaking Parthenon. We're going to build up. We're not going to accept low but solid ground. We're not going to accept just mere peace and safety. We're going to be excellent. Keep going. Put a pause here. Sorry, I know I'm going to have to stop every 10 seconds in this excellent speech. Well delivered by Rubio. I'm sure he had a hand in authoring it. Whoever the speechwriters were, excellent work. He's getting into Thumos now. Now we're talking, baby. Thumos is the spirited part of the soul. It's not just the pure facts, logical part. It's not just the policy wonk part. It's not just the appetitive part. It's the spirit. It's the chest. We say, no, no, no. We are, by the way, this is not merely a classical conception of government. This is something that the founding fathers and the forefathers did. This is something that the founding fathers and the framers of the Constitution were deeply concerned with. Alexander Hamilton writes about this at length in the Federalist Papers that we want a spirited government. So this is going to irritate some of the late 20th century libertarian types. It's going to irritate maybe some of the neoconservative and establishment types. But he says, no, no, no. We don't want just a tiny little government that can fit into our pocket that we can throw away. We don't merely view politics as a thing to be contained so that we can maximize individual autonomy. To the point that we can chop our genitals off. No, no, no, no, no. We want spirit. We want an active government that is within its proper limits, but that is doing good. And in order to do that, you have to get beyond mere procedural questions, mere quantitative questions of the size of government. You have to get to qualitative questions, to substantive questions. What is good? What is bad? What is excellent? What is degraded? And we're going to pursue the former and reject the latter. Keep going. Absolutely right. We're doing this not just because we have great ambitions. We're doing this because if we are not actively pursuing the good, if we are not actively building, if we are not actively excellent, not only are we going to stagnate, we're going to die. Superb speech. Loved it. Very, very well done. There's a sense of something eternal here about our civilization. And this is contrary to the view of Karl Marx. Karl Marx said there was nothing eternal, that we could just change everything. We could change human nature. We could change through the development of the science of history. Nothing would remain permanent. It was all up to our praxis to do whatever we want. We shall be as gods. Rubio says not quite. We can emulate God. We can try to be closer to God. We can pursue the good. But those are eternal things. And we shall be as gods. These are eternal things. And we have to change our orientation to pursue them. We're not going to change reality to go into accord with our subjective feelings. Okay. Really, really good stuff. Now we'll get to what Mamdani said on October 7th. First, though, I want to tell you about Cowboy Colostrum. Go to cowboycolostrum.com/Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. 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So let's turn from Athens over to New York City. New York City, a great city, even though the baseball team really blew it last night. New York City, a place that I've lived in. I grew up, I was born in New York. I grew up in New York and sad to see that New York has become Mamdanistan. I am not Jewish, but I have many friends who are Jewish and New York is a very Jewish city. And on the anniversary of October 7th, 2023, the mayor of New York decided to take the opportunity to discuss how much he hates the state of Israel. You can't make it up. I shouldn't laugh, but you can't make it up. He says, this day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7th. On that day, Hamas. Hamas killed more than 1100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss. Okay, that was what, two sentences? Three sentences. Now you get this novel that he wrote for the rest of the tweet. You get that little nod to, yeah, okay, well, I guess it was bad that Hamas killed all those Jews. And then he gets into what he really wants to say. The suffering did not begin nor end on that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government's devastating ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering is intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on hospitals waiting. Israel, Israel, Israel, Israel, terrible. We hate Israel. Israel sucks. Israel's the worst. I mean, I'm not defending Hamas, but like, you know, come on, Israel's really, really bad. Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue. Okay, yeah, three years later, the lesson is Israel sucks. To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live in freedom, safety, and dignity. But I'm really only talking about the Palestinians, and I'm going to mostly ignore Hamas. And did I tell you Israel sucks? That's his tweet. That's the mayor of New York. Jew York City, as some of us call it. You know, a lot of Jewish constituents in New York. Jews have done a lot to build up New York. Even if it weren't a largely Jewish city, come on, man. I don't know. It's October 7th. How about you save your anti-Israel invective for October 8th? Does that sound? No. Mamdani can't do it. He cannot do it. And why is he saying this? This is not a question. This is the part that people aren't getting. Mamdani is not just saying this because he's an ideologue who hates the state of Israel. Mamdani is saying this because it is politically safe to say it. In other words, Mamdani is saying this because most people hate the state of Israel now in America. And this is something that Israel supporters largely do not understand or refuse to understand. If you are ardently pro-Israel, if you're in the Israeli government, if you are an Israel supporter in the United States, this should freak you out, not just because Zoran Mamdani has an ideology you don't like. This should freak you out because he is allowed to say it because he feels he has the political cover to say it because most people in America today, especially if you just look at the left and Republicans under 40, it's basically everybody kind of agrees with him. And one reason why NatCon, the National Conservatism Conference, took place in Jerusalem, I was really hoping to get out there. I really enjoy going to NatCon. I would have loved to do it. And the reason I could not go is because I had something a little more important going on here. Very few things would be more important than a great political event. But the arrival of my daughter was certainly one of them. So I did not go. A number of my friends did go. And they had some pretty tough words for people who are concerned about the U.S.-Israel alliance. We'll get to that in a second. Before we get to that, though, I do want to stick in America because we're talking about religion, Islam, Judaism, Christianity. Well, guess what's going on in Ottumwa, Iowa? In Ottumwa, Iowa, the city council opened with a prayer, with an invocation, not to God, the God of the Jews and the Christians and the Muslims, imperfect though some of their conceptions may be. It didn't invoke with a prayer to Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, the incarnation of God himself. It began with an invocation to the devil. It is done. Hail Satan. Let us pray. Dear dark father, let us stand now unbowed and unfet by arcane doctrines born of fearful minds in darkened times. Let us embrace the Luciferian impulse to eat of the tree of knowledge and dissipate our blissful and this is the most special boy of all of Reddit. It's weird, especially because he's bald that he's not wearing a fedora. He's not wearing a literal fedora tipping his cap. Hey, fellow Satanists. God, I don't believe in a spaghetti monster. You know, like all that mid-2000s Reddit-tier nonsense. No, no. There's something deeper about this. And this is something a lot of people are not going to want to hear. But to bet. I showed up to work today after my daughter's you might not necessarily want to hear. But the more perceptive among you will get this. He's not just an edgelord, this guy. He is taking liberalism to its logical conclusion. You see, you read that line there? He's referring to the Luciferian impulse, you know, in the Garden of Eden to taste from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Liberalism, not just the modern progressive kind, not just the leftist kind, but liberalism as such. Is Luciferian. There's a reading of John Milton's Paradise Lost. It's the radical romantic reading of Paradise Lost in which Lucifer, in which Satan is the hero. And I don't think that that's really what Milton is intending. Milton is showing that in a way because Lucifer is very tempting. He's very attractive. He wins people over. He persuades them. He seduces them. And so the Satan in Paradise Lost kind of does that. But when Satan says it's better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven, that is what liberalism says. Liberalism says, rather than constraining my autonomy to follow the objective moral order and the institutions and the traditions, I'm going to throw all of that away and I'm going to do whatever I want to do. When Lucifer says in Paradise Lost, the mind is its own place. It can make a hell of heaven and heaven a hell. That's what liberalism says. Liberalism says we can't ever know any of these great questions objectively. We just have to do what we want to do. We need to come to our own conclusions. We need to live our lives authentically in accordance with our desires all the way up to choosing our own sex. We can be whatever we want. The mind is its own place. The texts don't have any meaning. The world doesn't have any meaning. There's no telos to human nature. No, no. We just make of it what we will. That's liberalism. That's basic liberalism 101. Liberalism itself. I mean, yes, I do. It's just Luciferian. Liberalism, which arose as a competitor ideology to displace Christianity, which had ruled the West for a thousand years. We should not be surprised when liberalism leads to the invocation of Satan at a city council meeting. What the Reddit tier atheists and Satanists will say is, well, you know, you have religious freedom. So if you get to have a Christian prayer or a Jewish prayer or even a Muslim prayer, why can't you have a Satanic prayer? Why can't you have a Satanic prayer? Checkmate, Christians. Okay, they can say that. But what's your answer? What's your response? Indeed, one of the evidences that liberalism is Luciferian is the fact that liberalism says this can happen. Now, of course, this is not what the founding fathers or the framers of the Constitution intended. This is not what John Locke or John Milton intended, who were very early classical liberals, some of the archetypal classical liberals. They all said that atheists should be censored. They shouldn't have any free speech or participate in the government. But the working out of liberalism throughout history has led to this. If your political ideology, let's say that you're a good liberal, a good classical liberal, what is your argument to stop the invocation to Satan at a public institution, at a house of our government? Do you have one? Probably not. A lot of people are going to say, who cares if he makes his invocation to Satan? Other people who are good, they're going to say, well, this is wrong, but I can't quite say why it's wrong. And I can't quite think of a mechanism to stop it that would not be authoritarian or totalitarian. Meanwhile, of course, all the framers of the Constitution would have run this guy out of town on a rail. They would have deported him or killed him. There's no question about it, but we're not going to do that. There's no law that would do that. Why is that? Because of a weakness which is one of the reasons that you've seen arise in all of these responses. Post-liberalism, at its most basic, post-liberalism is not one thing. Post-liberalism is a lot of different things, much as Protestantism is not one thing. It's a lot of different things. It's just all reaction in reaction to something. Post-liberalism is in reaction to liberalism. Protestantism is in reaction to Catholicism. I'm actually not, I'm not having any invective here. I'm not drawing a liberalism and Protestantism or whatever, or Satanism or anything like that. I'm just pointing out, these are negative categories, and they're arising in response to something. Okay, one of those responses is national conservatism. There was this NatCon conference in Jerusalem on October 7th, and there was one speech, it's getting a lot of heat online, one speech in particular I loved. First, I want to tell you about GOP votes. Go to gopvotes.org. The midterm elections are here. If the DSA Democrats win, they will push a radical socialist agenda and drown President Trump in endless investigations. We've seen their playbook before. They tried impeaching him. They tried putting him in prison. They tried everything. Do not let them win, because if we lose, they will undo everything our movement has fought for. I need you to vote early. You can bank your vote and fight back against the left's turnout machine. Go to gopvotes.org right now and find out when you can vote. If you live in the critical Senate battleground states of Maine or Ohio, early voting is already underway starting this week. Making your voice heard is easier than ever. You can get a vote at gopvotes.org. Get election reminders, look up your polling location, and pick a date to vote early. Go to gopvotes.org today. Paid for by SLF PAC, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. A lot of good speeches at the NatCon conference. Now, I'm sure I would have delivered the very best. No, I don't know if I would have delivered the very best, but I would have agreed with a lot of the speakers there. My pal, Matt Peterson, gave a particularly good one, I thought, as I was going through some of the speeches in the hospital room last night. Here is Matt taking on, obviously, a rather urgent issue in Jerusalem on October 7th, which is the U.S.-Israel alliance. Republicans frequently complain to me that they're done with this dynamic. Many, again, who support Israel, want me to convey this message. They do not think that their Christianity requires them to blindly support whatever decisions Israel chooses to make and find it condescending if anyone assumes that this is the way they should think about it. Now, this does not mean that they see no religious ties to the Holy Land. It means that relying on this approach alone to American Christians is a dead end. I submit the way forward is frank policy discussions based on reality. This means getting clear where interests align and do not. And when they do not, it's okay. Excellent speech. Matt's going to get a lot of flack for this. He's going to get flack because he's telling hard truths. Now, nobody can say that NatCon is anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. It's put on in part by the Herzl Institute, which is the Zionist Institute. The logo is the Star of David. And the founder of national conservatism is a superb Israeli philosopher, Yoram Hazoni, who wrote that great book, The Virtue of Nationalism. But there is a whole gamut of people who could listen to Matt's speech here and be really edified by it. Some of the people who are skeptical of the Israel alliance, who feel that the Israel alliance is costing America more than it's benefiting us, who don't like the moral, I don't know, slogans, the moral domineering that you have from the pro-Israel, that suggests that the United States has some always and eternal obligation, moral obligation to support the state of Israel, whether because of theology or something else. What Matt is saying here is that is not resonating with people. The polls completely bear that out. And people, understandably, who listen to George Washington, the same George Washington who wrote the letter to the Hebrew congregation saying that Jews are welcome as full participants in the American project, that same George Washington said, avoid entangling alliances. So, people have a reasonable take if they're somewhat skeptical of the Israel alliance. And, you know who else could be edified by that speech? People who are super-duper pro-Israel. Because they're looking at the support of Israel in the United States collapsing, especially among younger people, on both sides of the aisle. And what Matt is saying is, if you want to preserve something like that alliance, you need to try another tactic. The old slogans of the 1990s are just not working anymore. And so, we need to ground, support for that alliance on things that are really tangible. When our interests align, we point that out. When they don't align, we don't push the issue. On realpolitik, on imperial interests between the United States, Russia, and China, between economic interests of the United States, strategic interests of the United States, it's got to be more tangible. You have to speak a different language if you want to stop the collapse in the polls. Here is more of Matt. You have to understand that the desire to call out hatred. But here's the problem. Denouncing anti-Semitism in America in the abstract these days is much like calling an opponent racist. Both terms have been hollowed out by the left. The ADL, for instance, has long since lost any power over the right by attacking figures like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and TPUSA, which is why the FBI cut ties with them last year. We have a boy who cried wolf problem in America in the West. The left makes accusations like this all the time, and the younger rising right doesn't care about being called names or abstract "ists" or "isms" from any side. And frankly, neither do I. But I don't-- Yes, thank you. But I do not mean to tell anyone to be silent. Far from it. On the contrary, if we're going to sort through the noise, my advice is to stop using abstract categories and "isms" and "ists" and "istics." Call out and argue instead about specific statements and positions you think wrong or evil instead. Ask specific questions to specific people. Bingo. Cheers. Spot on. Spot on. I am quite concerned with the spike in anti-Semitism in the United States, just as I would be concerned with a spike in unjust racism. I don't-- I think the anti-Semitism is a little more pronounced at the moment, certainly on the left, but even on the right. Various forms of racism ranging from the benign to the deeply unjust. You know, they're-- that's a little less pronounced. And so I'm concerned about that. But I think Matt is entirely right when he says just calling someone anti-Semitic, calling some idea in the abstract anti-Semitic, it's not going to do anything. It's not helping. Look at the numbers. Pew Research found that unfavorable views of the State of Israel rose from 42% in 2022 to 60% in March of this year. Among Republicans under 50, 57% now hold an unfavorable view. A clear majority of Republicans under 50-- it's not Republicans under 50, it's not Republicans under 20 or 30, it's 50. That's a lot. That's the majority of even remotely plausibly young. Middle, middle-aged and under Republicans. So what Matt is saying is, no, no, no. Calling people anti-Semitic just generally doesn't work. So then there's going to be this response which says, well, what, you just want us to shut up in the face of rising anti-Semitism? We're not going to do that. And Matt says, that's not what I'm telling you to do. That's certainly not what I'm telling you to do. Oh my goodness, look at me here. I'm here at the National Conservatism Conference, in Jerusalem. What I'm telling you to do is try a more effective tactic. Your tactic is clearly not working. Your tactic is having exactly the opposite of the intended effect. And I'll tell you exactly why. It's the same thing that happened to racism. It's not that there's no such thing as unjust racism. It's that the left completely hollowed out that term. And so it's useless. It is completely impotent. And a similar thing has happened with anti-Semitism. And the ADL, by the way, has a lot of blame for that. And the left largely has a lot of blame for that. Okay, so what do you do now? Matt says, voice your concerns, make your arguments, but be specific about it because specific arguments about specific people saying specific things with specific policies, they are much more likely to have an effect. So, so true. And then Matt gets to young men. And this is an issue that is bigger even than the question of anti-Semitism or the US-Israel alliance. Where many of the young men on the right are coming from. As Stephen Miller posted within the last 24 hours from the White House, a nation is its people. This has always been true. This will always be true. But if you are a young white American, you have grown up in an education system and culture that celebrated both mass migration to America as well as organized tribalism in America among all those being imported there. Okay. This is a system and political culture that encouraged every ethnicity to join together as an interest group against oppression from, well, you. They have been told that they must apologize for their whiteness and that if they were ever to act as a group like everyone else in America they see as trained to do and celebrated for doing, they are evil or Nazis. And this anti-white sentiment and discrimination has had very predictable results. Now, I'm not going to go into this in detail, other than to say, I'm not happy. We are sanguine about the tribalization of America. But this is the reality in which young people have been born into, a reality in which World War II is as far away as the Civil War was to those who fought in that conflict. Phenomenal, phenomenal point. He says, look, these young men, these young white men in particular, have been raised in a culture that has said that everybody needs identity politics except for you. And the reason that everybody needs identity politics is to fight you. They're going to impose identity politics. It's upon you, young white men. They're going to view you as a discrete group, but you're not allowed to view yourselves that way. And don't you dare even consider doing that. that because we need to destroy you first. We need to call whiteness evil. We need to call masculinity toxic. And we need to blame every single problem on you. We need to discriminate against you by the law and with the encouragement of the popular culture. In other words, these young men are responding to real political phenomena. And you might not like those political phenomena. I certainly don't like those political phenomena. The young white men definitely don't like the political phenomena. But they're happening. They're real. And burying your head in the sand is not going to solve a thing. There is a kind of complementarity between Matt's speech in Jerusalem and Marco Rubio's speech in Athens, which is saying, hey, we have to ground our politics on things that are real, objective, even eternal. That's what Matt is saying here. He says, it's not that young men are questioning the U.S. government. It's not that young men are questioning the U.S. government. It's not that young men are questioning the U.S.-Israel alliance in isolation. It's not that young men are sending edgy memes and jokes to the group chat in isolation. They're questioning everything. Matt goes on to say, they're questioning everything. And so you need to provide real answers to that, to real specific questions about specific policies and people. You can't assume anything. These young men have been so maleducated. We all have because of the absolute insidiousness of the left, which has gone after them personally, which has lied about American history, which lied to them in a massive scandal during their education, namely COVID, when they shut down their schools and made them take poison into their veins for no reason at all. Yeah, no wonder they're a little bit skeptical. And it occurs to me, listening to, and it wasn't just Matt's speech. There were a lot of speeches from all sorts of people, Americans and Israelis and women, slave and free. No, there were no slaves there, but all are one in Christ Jesus. All of these speeches gave me this takeaway, which is that there are three groups that benefit from dismissing young right-wing men as Nazis, all of them with a broad brush. There are three groups that benefit. Podcasters do that because they get to up their ratings because they get to promote absurdity and all. So podcasters benefit, their numbers go up. Rhinos benefit because they can try to contain the more conservative and classical conceptions of politics. And leftists benefit because they've been calling all of us Nazis, anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton, Nazis for 50 years. Those three groups benefit. You know the only group that doesn't benefit? Conservatives. Sorry, I shouldn't say that's the only group that doesn't benefit. As far as I can tell, there are three groups that don't benefit from that. Conservatives in America, also Israelis and Jews. Those are the three groups that don't benefit. And it was a really important point that came out of the NatCon conference in Jerusalem. So anyway, I hope I can make it next year. We'll see. We'll see. Sweet little Lisa, she keeps getting pregnant, but maybe next year I'll be able to go. Okay, and so you think that's shocking. Well, I have the most shocking political news of any of it. And it comes from President Trump. It turns out the president wears Joseph A. Banks suits. We'll get to that in a moment. First, I want to tell you about Policy Genius.com slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. Every horror movie requires someone to make an obviously terrible decision. The lights go out, the basement door opens by itself, and instead of leaving the house, someone decides to investigate. No sensible person does this, which is why horror movies last longer than six minutes. It is easy to recognize bad planning when you're watching it on a screen. In real life, people postpone important financial decisions because eventually it feels comfortably far away, until it isn't. If your family depends on your income, life insurance should not be one of those responsibilities you keep putting off. Policy Genius makes it straightforward. 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Careful, Michael, that one-hour paternity break you took could be a bad example to other dads to be lazy. I know, you're right. No, look, that's why I'm back in the chair. That's why I'm back in the chair right now with my cigar, with all of you. It's a beautiful thing. Shocking, shocking political content. President Trump was speaking at, he's doing a lot of campaign rallies for the midterms, and he shows up, and he's coming out, you know, anyway, at one point, you know, he's kind of in this hero pose, opening up his suit jacket, as people are wanting to do. But the cameras spied the label of the jacket, and it turns out that Trump wears his suits from Joseph A. Bank, which is one of the most affordable menswear companies in the entire country. It's kind of like menswear house, you know, sometimes, I actually have a lot of Joseph A. Bank clothing, because I'm pretty frugal. And so, one of the hallmarks of Joseph A. Bank is, you know, you buy one suit, and you get three for free, or whatever. It's kind of like menswear house that way. And Joseph A. Bank does make some suits that are a little more expensive, but compared to other menswear companies, Brooks Brothers, J-Press, Paul Stewart, it's way, way, way less expensive. And you say, what on earth? Why is Trump shot? Why is Trump, what is he worth? Five billion dollars? Seven, eight billion dollars? Why, by some measures, if you include the crypto stuff, it could be tens of billions of dollars. Why is he wearing a Joseph A. Bank suit? I have never more deeply felt that he's just like me, for real, for real. You know, he really, I'm pretty frugal. I like the, I have a taste for the finer things. My favorite way to get the finer things is when people give them to me. I'm happy. I try to be generous with my friends and my family. But when it comes to spending on me, I'm cheap. I don't have to be cheap, but I like to be cheap. And it's the same thing with Trump. There are these stories of Trump being very, very generous to people, taking care of people's medical expenses. He doesn't take a salary as president of the United States. There's a lot of evidence of him being very, very generous with people. And he loves the finer things. And he likes the finer things, especially when he can work them as part of his businesses. I like cigars so much. I was spending so much money on cigars, I had to start a cigar company. So I stopped spending so much money on cigars. And President Trump is frugal. And that's the kind of guy I want to be president. He's frugal, not because he has to be. He's frugal for love of the game. I love that so much. I drive kind of an older, less expensive car around here. And they yell at me at the daily wire. They say, Michael, including Professor Jacob with the stupid Camaros always crashing. He says, Michael, this is embarrassing. Get a fancy car. I said, no way. Michael, come on. We're going to chip in. We're going to buy you a car. I won't take it. I won't accept it. I like the frugality for love of the game. That explains, one, how he's so rich. You got to save pennies to spend dollars. It also explains why he gets what lots of Americans from lots of different backgrounds think. And that's why he's so rich. This guy was born rich. He became much richer. He has been world famous for 50 years. And he's been the most powerful person in politics, even when he was out of office, for a dozen years. How does this guy have such a connection? He has a better connection to broad swaths of Americans than any president in my lifetime. How does he do it? Joseph A. Bank is one way that he does it. Can you imagine how high their stock is? He's going to jump. One last point on this. One last point from the speech. I think this was a different speech, actually. Trump, he's called greedy and selfish and egotistical and prideful and all these things. He took a moment, he paused during one of his speeches to make fun of his own hair. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I'm not happy right now. Getting a little bit thin up there. I'm not happy. He's touching his hair, looking at the big jumbotron. This is not good news. Now I'm depressed. I said I look really sharp tonight. Then I just looked at myself from the back. This is not good. Why didn't you tell me? Okay, two things Trump is showing us right here. One, he's showing us meta politics. And I've observed this a long time ago on the show. Trump differed from the other presidential candidates he ran against in 2016 and 2020 and 2024 in that they were all earnestly running for president. They were doing the sort of things you do when you run for president. They were doing the hand gestures and they were saying the things and they were doing all of that. And Trump did that to some degree too, but he added a layer to it. He added a layer to it. to it. He was self-consciously running for president. in as much as he would go out there, he'd say, okay, I have to say something. They tell me I have to be presidential. Can you want to get a load of this? You know, he might as well light up the cigarette, pull out the stool spotlight on him. Get a lot of this. What they want me to do, they want me to get a dog. Can you, would you, that's what all the presidents get dogs. I don't, that's not me. I don't think I can get a dog. I'm, it wouldn't, it wouldn't be me. Would it? Here's what I got to say the thing they want me to say. And so he's doing a riff about that, which reads as profoundly authentic. It reads as much more honest than the other politicians. All those other politicians want to say Trump lies all the time. And he's lying about the value of his businesses. And he's lying about his policies and he's lying about, he's exaggerating. But Trump revealed himself to be more honest than all the other politicians because he was, he was honestly running for president. Whereas all those other guys were, they were just a layer below that. Okay. That's one thing. The second thing he's showing us is that he's not. He can be self-effacing. This is a point I've made and, and people have made fun of me for observing this point, but I'm totally right about it. They say Trump is so prideful. He won't accept any insults and you have to fawn over him all the time. Trump is up there. He's giving a speech on a totally unrelated topic. He catches a glimpse of his thinning hair in the jumbotron. And then he says, I got to stop. And he doesn't try to hide it. He calls attention to it. He makes it into a bit. He goes, I'm getting a little thin up there. Now I'm depressed. I was having a good day. Now I'm depressed. Cause I'm not looking as good as I used to. I thought I looked good. Now I'm not looking as good. Look at my hair. Look at my thinning hair. Look at my age. Look at my imperfections. Look at what's wrong with me. That's what he's saying. And so paradoxically, you get Trump, who's this bragger who puts his name in gold everywhere, who ends up being the most self-effacing politician of anybody who shows up to the stages. That's part of the magic. Trump showed us this. The thing that totally convinced me of this was years ago on St. Patrick's day. Someone asked me to have a beer. He said, me, I'm not going to have a beer. Nah, I've never had a beer. I'm the only president probably in history who can say he's never had a beer. That sounds like he's bragging. He says, could you imagine if I did? Gosh, that's the only good thing you can say about me is I never had a beer. Oh man, if I drank, I'd be the worst. That's self-effacing. That's the only good thing you can say about me. Look at all my flaws. Whatever I'm trying though. I'm doing my best, doing my best for you guys. Crucial political skill. And it reveals why Trump's opponents are like Wile E. Coyote chasing the roadrunner. They can never get him. They buy all the big bombs and falling pianos from the Acme corporation and they never land on him. They never land on him because they don't, they actually don't get what he's doing. Okay. I have an update on the Cornell seven. Remember I told you at the top of the show, I said, I was going to try not to get to the Cornell seven because it's so gross. Now there's, now it turns out the girl who initially said she was not raped. Then later she changed her tune when she didn't get invited to a Halloween party. She said, she wouldn't get invited to a Halloween party. She was raped. Then the guy said, well, maybe we were raped because if you were raped because you were drunk, we were drunk too. So maybe we were raped. Anyway, one of the guys, it appears was like very literally tangibly raped by this girl. So we're not going to get to that today. I'm having a good day and I want to get to that story. We'll get to that story tomorrow. Today's Theology Thursday. The rest of the show continues. Now you do not want to miss it. Become a member, use code Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S at checkout for two months free on all annual plans. Every significant movement in history has started with protesting. Uncle Tom, this is our generation's civil rights. I have no idea what the protest is about. Bingo. Given the current climate, should a figure as polarizing as Clay Saunders even be allowed on campus? Can you hear me okay? Saunders is a close personal friend of Chancellor Friedman. This is a decision I cannot fight. Islam will conquer the West. Are we paying attention? They've taken over the building. They're downstairs and they've blocked the doors. I seek forgiveness from Allah the Almighty. We cannot run and hide. Muhammad is the messenger of God. There is no God but Allah. What do you say we turn those SOBs into a fine red mist? As we move, one man will cover while the other guys go. They call that leap front. You need a course in safe weapons handling.