Ep. 2097 - JD Vance's Post-Election Comments Go Viral

This episode is brought to you by Good Ranchers. Good Ranchers partners with American farms and ranches and delivers the meat directly to your door. Go to goodranchers.com slash Knowles, Kenna WLAS. They're starting their Black Friday savings early with $120 off your first three orders plus free meat with every order. Good Ranchers, American meat delivered. Republicans reel as late-breaking election results make Tuesday night go from bad to worse. Sorry, from really, really, really, really bad to catastrophic. And all the top dogs jockey for position. Vice President J.D. Vance comes out swinging against the Iran war. Iran war supporters come out swinging against J.D. Vance. President Trump defends both the Iran war and J.D. Vance. Underneath the national level, an overt socialist looks poised to replace a secret communist in Los Angeles. West Hollywood establishes new legal protections for orgies, and Republicans at this very moment are set to lose Mississippi. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show. A little bit of a palate cleanser amid this moment. I'm Michael Knowles. The morass of crazy political news. Liam Neeson has just reacted to the news that Meryl Streep will play the Jesus character in the new Narnia movie, and his reaction is just perfect. It's delightful. We need a little palate cleanser with all of the political news. We'll get to that in a moment. First, though, election night hasn't ended yet. I know it seems like election night ended and all the headlines are the Republicans got routed, but it actually hasn't ended because America is kind of a banana republic now, and we can't conduct elections in a night or two nights or three nights. So we still don't know the final tally. We still don't know how many seats the Democrats are poised to pick up in the House of Representatives. Initially, it could have been limited to 25 seats, 30 seats. I actually, I had a congressman friend of mine text me. He was kind of texting me dark humor jokes about how bad it was on Tuesday night, and I was responding with these kind of macabre jokes, but it never even occurred to me. that congressman friend in a deep red part of the country very likely will lose his seat too. Never even occurred to me that his seat could be in play. I only realized that when I Googled the races later. So that 25 seat pickup for the Democrats is now looking closer to 40, 40 plus. Then at the Senate level, Democrats pick up seven seats. We still don't know about Mississippi. Mississippi. M-I-S-S-I-S-I-P-P-I. Mississippi. I know two things about Mississippi. How to spell it because they teach you that in kindergarten and that it is a deep, deep Republican part of the country until now. The results right now, separated by about 1,200 votes, 1,200 votes, almost a million votes cast, 1,200 votes separate the Senate candidates and the Democrat is currently in the lead. Democrat Scott Cullum, 49.01% to the incumbent Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith, 48.89%. Total vote counts 464,926 for the Democrat, 463,788 votes for the Republican. That means that the Democrats could pick up eight seats in the Senate. And we'll put that in perspective in a second. We'll bring the perspective and the balance back to the Senate. Everyone's running around like a chicken with their head cut off. Everything's on fire. We'll get to that in a second because I was a big doomer going into election night. Uncharacteristically, I was probably more doomer than most Republicans and I'm usually pretty chipper about it. So we'll get a little balance in a second because now I was a doomer and a lot of people weren't. Some people even thought the Republicans would do well. Now it seems like it's flipped. Now everybody is just completely blackpilling and despairing. And I think we need to add some important historical and political context. So about the reactions. Vice President J.D. Vance has an amazing tweet come out yesterday. Comes out swinging, bold take on the meaning of the election, saying the things a lot of Republicans don't want to say and identifying the main issue cause of the Republican route, namely the Iran war. People are trying to point at other things and say, oh, it's candidate quality. Oh, it was this. Oh, it was tariffs. Oh, it was this. It was that. Give me a break. If there is an issue, it's about more than issues. But if there is an issue, it's about more than issues. If there is an issue, it's about more issues. But if there is an issue, it's about more than an issue that caused the Republican route. It was the Iran war. As sensible people knew from the beginning, as sensible people knew before the Iran war kicked off, as the bombs were falling at the outbreak of the Iran war and for the days afterward. So here's the vice president's very, very thoughtful tweet. It's really an essay. You're now seeing some Republicans posting essays on Twitter, and they're pretty thoughtful. But this is what got J.D. in all sorts of trouble and I think what's getting him a lot of support. Quote, one of the things that I think is the data analysts on our side obsessed over was composition. Whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. Don't forget, it was two years ago that Republicans win this big blowout, deprive Democrats of the popular vote for the first time in 20 years. Big new coalition, young voters, young men coming over to our side, Hispanics coming over to our side, Republicans chipping off enough of the black vote to really hurt the Democrats. Is the composition the same? Despite the polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story. In some states, turnout was merely okay. In other states, it was downright amazing. And in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team. Our people were showing up. So you understand that in the tracking, in the days before the election, they said, okay, well, in midterms, the big problem is that our side just doesn't feel motivated to show up to the polls. And the other side is really energized. That's true no matter which party we're talking about in the first midterm after a year. They say, okay, well, hold on, the data show, our guys are showing up. This is good news. Maybe that blue tsunami is actually going to be a blue trickle. Maybe there's going to be a big red undertow there because the Republicans are showing up to the polls. And so they say, well, this is really, really good news. But actually, what first seemed like good news turned out to be far worse news than had the Republicans not showed up to vote at all. What happened was the Republicans did show up and they voted for Democrats. Now, this is five alarm fire scenario. You can come back from your base is not motivated to go vote. You can come back from that. There's a path. That's a tried and true precedent. It's much harder to come back from your guys did show up and voted for the other guys. So vice president goes on. He says, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? No, he told me. We might do better than the poll suggests, but the data is telling me that a lot of people are going to be shocked. So I'm going to show up and vote for Trump. Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us. Well, that looks prophetic. Now, says the vice president. Our voters did show up in Florida. For example, the electorate was nine points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 24. Undoubtedly, there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026. He goes on, he points out there's gonna be a lot of infighting. People are going to vote for Trump. He goes on, he points out they're going to try to point fingers and identify the blame. But that is just a fact of the data. Okay, so he says, okay, there are all these issues. Economic messaging wasn't sharp enough, blah, blah, blah. I'm sure that's true. But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone. Another pollster, one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we would lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. Again, this is almost my reaction too. I felt negative going into Tuesday, I was one of the doomers. And yet the only way in which my prediction was inaccurate is that even I, thinking it was gonna be bad, didn't think it was gonna be quite that bad. So what caused all of this? Talk to the voters, talk to the respondents, conduct the polls. This pollster asked those voters who had abandoned us, what would cause them to come back to our team? The top four answers accounting for nearly all the responses were one, end the war. Two, focus on cost of living inflation. Three, put America first. Four, and this is the really controversial one, supposedly, in certain quarters of the Beltway, change our relationship to Israel. Now, these are all related issues, of course. The top issue, according to the exit polls for the voters, was cost of living, the economy, gas prices, on and on and on. But that is just another way of saying it. It's not just about the cost of living. It's about the cost of living. The top issue for people was the downstream effect of the war in Iran. People are gonna try to cast blame, say, oh, you know, actually, it was tariffs. The tariffs were fine. The tariffs actually didn't really spike inflation. A lot of economists said they would, and then Scott Besson spiked the football and pointed out they didn't, actually. They're gonna say, oh, it's Biden. It's the holdover from the Biden inflation, because you had 9% inflation year over year under Joe Biden, and it takes a little while to clean that up. So we brought the rate of inflation down, but we didn't actually reduce the cost of goods other than certain specific cases like eggs. So no, it's actually Biden's fault, and that's what they're upset about. No, no, no, no. The inflation that we are seeing now, and the inflation that we're seeing really directly, because diesel is at $6.50 a gallon. gallon and gas prices are way up from where they were before the war, that's because of the war. And when oil goes up, the cost of everything goes up because everything has to be transported all around the country. So that's a way of saying it's the war, cost of living, focus on cost of living inflation. One of the big drivers of cost of living is the high interest rates. That's the Fed. The politicians have basically no control over that. So, okay, yeah, the interest rates are really tough, but the interest rates are where they are because the Federal Reserve is trying to manage inflation from the Biden era and from COVID. And okay, yeah, that's true. But the proximate issues of cost of living and inflation come from the war. Yes, mass migration caused the big spike in housing prices five, six years ago. That's true. But what voters already voted in the meantime, they voted for the Republicans massively in 2024. So 2026, what has changed? It's the war. Number three, put America first. This is a tricky one because voters want the government to focus on domestic issues. Now, it's not as simple as turn away from the rest of the world. We can't actually do that because we're a global empire. To quote Thucydides in the history of the Peloponnesian War, a lot of people don't want to have an empire. They don't feel comfortable having an empire. They didn't seek an empire, perhaps, but they will miss the empire when it is gone. Because the thing about empires is a lot of our domestic issues are not going to be prosperity. A lot of our domestic way of life is contingent upon the American maintenance of the global order. It's contingent upon, perhaps, the global reserve currency. It's contingent upon the United States guaranteeing that the waterways are open and that oil and goods move around the world. It's contingent upon keeping our adversaries like China and, to some degree, Russia in check. It's dependent upon peace. That is, at the most basic level, what an empire promises. That is the advantage of an imperial system of power. Politics is that you get peace. And when you have peace, you can have freedom, and you can have prosperity, and you have new companies, and you have jobs, and you can have all of those things. So you can't neatly separate America's imperial interests with our domestic concerns. They're dependent upon the other. If you only focus on the domestic concerns, you're going to lose your place in geopolitics, and your domestic prosperity is going to collapse. But if you focus too much on all the foreign stuff, and you get involved in a bunch of imperial wars, you are going to neglect domestic concerns. And then you ask, well, what's the empire even for? Very thorny issue. I think the vice president nails it. And then number four, change our relationship to Israel. This is the really controversial part. Because there are many people for whom Israel is the top issue, whether theologically, or as a matter of brand strategy, or whatever. It's always very, very controversial, and it brings out people from the fringes, and it does bring out certain aspects of bigotry. But it's also just like a basic part of the empire. So I think it's a very controversial part of geopolitics. And so that's the one that's going to get all of the heat. And yet, something I haven't seen anyone mention, for that fourth controversial point, change our relationship to Israel. Do you know who agrees with that? It's not just the vice president going out on a limb saying something totally crazy here. You know who else agrees with that? President Trump, who said that the morning of the election. He said, oh, yeah, we're going to stop the way that we fund Israel. We're going to end that. We have to change our relationship. You know what's kind of funny, too? You know who else agrees that America needs to change its relationship to Israel? Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu months ago came out and said, yeah, the way that this is working, where we just get a check from the United States, that's not good for anybody. It makes Israel too dependent on the United States, and we want more control over our domestic affairs. The American voters resent that because they think that they're just sending all their money over to this country in the Middle East. Yeah, yeah. We got to change it. It's not to say we need to blow up the U.S.-Israel alliance, but it's saying, we need to change the relationship. It's not working for either party here. So all of a sudden, the most controversial part of the vice president's tweet is actually perhaps one of the few issues that all American voters can agree on and all the people at the high levels of government can agree on, even that our allies can agree on, including Israel. So he's going to get a ton of heat for that. And yet, to me, that one's just common sense. The vice president concludes, he says, our voters showed up, but those all of the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. Need to figure that out. So the question, of course, is how is the president going to react to the vice president going rogue allegedly after the midterms? We'll get to Trump's reaction in a second. First, I want to tell you about Good Ranchers. There's a lot more to say. First, though, go to goodranchers.com slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. Everyone who hosts Thanksgiving can tell you exactly what time the turkey goes in the oven. Ask that same person what everyone's eating Wednesday, there's a pause. Then someone suggests ordering six pizzas. My recommendation, Good Ranchers. Start a plan at goodranchers.com slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S this November. Get $120 off across your first three orders, plus free meat with every order. I, as a very, very generous man, I just gave some Good Ranchers meat to a friend of mine. She gave rave reviews about how delicious it is. Good Ranchers, we love all the sponsors equally, some more equally than others. Good Ranchers, Good Ranchers, it's actually a part of me because I eat it, I don't know, most of the time. Certainly when it comes to meat, that's what I eat. I eat Good Ranchers. The Wagyu burgers are the best. The filet mignon is the best. The New York strip, bone-in New York strip is the best. Elisa prefers the ribeye. I prefer the New York strip. The sausage, the pork, the everything. Get it right now. This November only offer is available at goodranchers.com slash Knowles. $120 off across your first three orders. Plus free meat with every order. Goodranchers.com, American meat delivered. Headlines, the vice president goes rogue, sends out this tweet about the midterms. Trump must be fuming, right? Mr. President, what do you think of the vice president's tweet? The vice president wrote a very lengthy post about how the war impacted the results last night. Well, I knew he was, I know how he feels about it. I think it was, I think it was fine. I thought it was good. We knew that. I know that. I knew that when I went in and we stopped them from having a nuclear weapon and they will never have a nuclear weapon. So this really deflates a lot of the people who are waging this shadow war soon to come out of the shadows for the 2028 presidential nomination. There've been all this little shadow boxing among supporters for the vice president, supporters for Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio, who himself has shown no indication that he's going to run, who actually has endorsed J.D. Vance. There are other people though. Governor Ron DeSantis making big, big moves to start a presidential campaign. By all accounts, we'll get to that momentarily. Senator Cruz has, has suggested that he wants to run in 2028. Rand Paul has suggested he wants to run in 2028. So now this is coming out into the open. The minute you have the midterms, the next day, the presidential campaign starts. And what does Trump come out and say? He says, oh yeah, I, yeah, I saw the vice president's post. I agree with it. Yeah, yeah, it was good. I know how he feels and I launched the Iran war. So he's defending both vice president who says, yeah, we lost the midterms because of the war and the war itself. He does so explicitly. Talking about running, you can have people running. You're going to have a lot of people. Maybe you're a lot of people running. Maybe nobody's going to run. Maybe he won't run. I don't know who's going to run, but I can tell you that as far as that war is concerned, I would have done nothing different. Okay. So here's president Trump offering a little steady leadership. And this is what the Republicans need right now. We need steady leadership. We got totally rocked at the ballot box. It was bad. It happens, though it doesn't happen like that very often. What we need is steady leadership. If the vice president came out and said, I totally disagree with the VP, one, I wouldn't have expected that to happen, but two, that's no good. And if Trump came out and he said, yeah, I made a huge blunder on Iran. It was crazy. And we're going to get pulled out of the war tomorrow. And it was just the worst thing ever. And that also would be strange because the swings that you're seeing among the electorate, you can't really see that reflected in the government too, or things really can start to spin out of control. So here you have good, steady responses from the White House and acknowledgement of reality. I think reasonable minds can indeed disagree on the Iran war. I think, as you know, before the war happened and while the bombs were falling and in the early days of it, I made very clear, had I been on the National Security Council, I would have urged restraint. There was reporting that came out from the New York Times at the time that said that plenty of people in the government were urging restraint, including the VP and the Secretary of State and the CIA director. Other people were urging more of a hawkish stance on the Iran war. Obviously, President Trump was swayed that it was worth going in. Everyone hoped the war would wrap up quickly. It didn't wrap up quite as quickly. My argument for restraint was not that the Iranian regime is good or that they don't want a nuclear weapon or anything that you hear from the peaceniks. I said, no, no, no, they're awful. They're like the worst people in the world. They definitely want a nuclear weapon. They hate us. They want to blow us up. That's true. My disagreement was prudential. I just thought the Iranian regime is more durable than the hawk said it was. And I think I was proven entirely correct about that. Don't forget the Iranian regime, the mullahs, the Islamic regime has lasted twice as long as the CIA backed regime that we had from 1953 to 1979 after we ousted Mossadegh. That was my argument is just these guys are willing to take a lot of pain. These guys are pretty good at politics. These guys have 50 years of contingency plans. I don't think this is going to be smooth sailing in the way that you saw in Venezuela, for instance. So now the knives are coming out. A lot of reporting saying Pete Hegseth is on the chopping block. You know, the Iran war was the cause of the midterm route, and Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of War, so they got to fire Pete Hegseth. And I don't know, Trump seems to be tamping down some of that rumor mill, but it doesn't really make sense to me to blame Pete Hegseth for the war in Iran. If you want to make a comparison to 2006, when the Republicans got routed in the midterms, and then George W. Bush fired Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, you say, okay, well, people hated the war, and Don Rumsfeld was running the war, so they had to fire Rumsfeld. Okay, people were upset about the execution of the war in Iraq, and there were lots of mistakes in the execution of the war in Iraq. But in this case, what people are upset about is simply the decision to go to war in the first place. And it wasn't Pete Hegseth who made that decision. In 2006, you're talking about a war that had been going on for three years and had ups and downs and lots of big problems. In this case, the issue is that the war has gone on for six months instead of two months. So I don't think those are really comparable, and I don't think it would solve the administration's problems if they just fired Hegseth. For Susie Wiles, some people are trying to blame Susie Wiles, chief of staff. I don't really see why you would do that. I don't see any evidence that Susie Wiles is responsible for the midterm loss or the Iran war or anything like that. I think reasonable minds can disagree on the Iran war, but President Trump is coming out and saying, look, I knew it would be politically tough, but I think it was the right thing to do for grand strategy, for morality, for this, that. And you say, okay, that is actually a bold stance. That's a courageous stance. He's sticking by his guns. People can disagree with him. A lot of voters obviously did. But it's not passing the buck and saying, no, it was just one cabinet secretary who made some bad moves. No, no, no. Trump is taking responsibility for that. So now what do we make for all of this different messaging? Well, I'll tell you what. There's one connection that people are not drawing. After that Vance tweet, oil prices collapsed. Which is a good thing. That's what we want to see. There's a little reporting in Axios on this, but you can just see Brent crude prices. After the tweet, they drop right down. Oil prices fell sharply Wednesday as traders weigh signs, including a widely circulated post by Vice President J.D. Vance, that the midterm election will add pressure on the White House to find an off-ramp to the Iran conflict. So when all the dust settles beyond all the little arguments and the infighting and jockeying for 2028, what does that mean? It's a good thing. It's a good thing. It's a good thing. What do we have happen? We have all the top dogs, all the real players in the arena saying, yeah, we got routed. It was really bad. There's some structural issue here, which is that Republicans always faced headwinds going into the midterms. The proximate cause on issues was the Iran war, and we need to find an off-ramp for that. And as a result, the markets are reacting very well. I don't know. This seems like a good management thus far from the White House of a very very tough situation. Meanwhile, you have all the potential presidential contenders coming out. The one taking the biggest swings right now is Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, one of the few states that remained red. We'll get to that in a second. First, I want to tell you about Tecovas. There's a lot more to say first, though. Go to Tecovas, T-E-C-O-V-A-S dot com slash Knowles. Anywhere worth going this holiday season is better in comfortable boots. Even I, I can barely, I'm a Yankee, I can barely pull off cowboy boots. They're the only ones I'm able to pull off. They are broken in immediately the second you buy them. They look great. You'll get a lot of compliments. Now, if you are like me, a little more of a loafer kind of guy, Tecovas makes some of the best-looking, most comfortable loafers you have ever seen. I've probably gotten more compliments on those loafers than on any loafers I've ever worn. They make such phenomenal products all around, including my favorite wallet. Look at this beautiful alligator wallet. Holds up well. I even, I was on it by a member of the clergy, by a bishop who bought one himself. It's just the best, man. Tecovas is terrific. Right now, you can get 10% off at Tecovas dot com slash Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S, when you sign up for email and texts. That is 10% off at T-E-C-O-V-A-S dot com slash Knowles, Tecovas dot com slash Knowles. See site for details. Tecovas, point your toes in your boots or your loafers or your wallet west. Ron DeSantis taking a victory lap, after the whole country's going blue, and Mississippi might go blue, and Texas went blue, and DeSantis says Florida remains the bright red spot. Last night, we witnessed, to call it a wave, I don't think would be fully accurate. It's the political equivalent of a meteor strike that went all around the United States, blue states, red states, everything in between. And the one state that was able to hold the line and withstand that is right here in the free state of Florida. Okay, so DeSantis, look, he worked for this victory lap. He deserves his victory lap. He obviously has presidential ambitions because he ran the last time. He did get clobbered because he was running against Trump, and Trump is Napoleon. But he won't be running against Trump the next time, and so he seems to be setting the stage. I agree with most of what DeSantis said here, and he deserves a lot of credit for sure. But he did say one thing that I felt took it a little too far. Okay, DeSantis did a great job here. He deserves a lot of plaudits. He's got a lot of political advantage now, and he's totally capitalizing on that, and good for him. That's very, very impressive. The only part I would quibble with is that last little bit of rhetoric where he says, what Republicans saw on Tuesday was a near extinction-level event. As I have mentioned once or twice, I was one of the doomers going into Election Day, uncharacteristically so. I was on Nigel Farage's show that day, and he said, oh, I think the Republicans are actually going to do well. I said, Nigel, you're drunk. Get out of the pub. There's no way. I love the hopefulness, but I know it's going to be bad for Republicans. So I think I have a little credibility here when it comes to the other side of it. As everyone now is freaking out, the Republican Party is dead. It's going extinct. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold your horses. Now, I was one of the biggest doomers going into the election. I guess I'm one of the more hopeful people coming out of the election because how bad was it? The best comparison to what happened on Tuesday night and what is continuing to roll out as more results come in, the biggest comparison was 1994. In 1994, many of our young to remember this. I am almost too young to remember this, but I was a political nerd from a very young age. 1994, the Democrats had controlled Congress for 40 years. Gingrich, leading the Republicans in 1994's midterm elections, picked up 54 seats and eight Senate seats. 54 seats. This was a major turnover. Bill Clinton had just been elected two years prior. You'd had Republican before that for three terms, two of Reagan, and then Reagan got a third term in the form of George H.W. Bush. Bill Clinton gets elected in 1992. Two years later, Democrats suffer the most brutal midterm loss you can possibly imagine. A midterm loss that was in fact worse than what Republicans saw on Tuesday night. Republicans might lose 40, 43 seats in the House. Democrats lost 54. The Democrats in the 94 elections lose eight seats in the Senate. Republicans might lose seven seats. Depends what happens in Mississippi. Let's say it's eight seats. Okay, then that's a draw. Did the Democratic Party go extinct after that? That was brutal. That was a worse loss for the Democrats in 94 than the Republicans faced in 2026. Did the Democrats go extinct after that? No, unfortunately. I wish they had, but they didn't. The Democrats remained strong. In fact, do you know what happened two years after 1994? MathWiz, 1996. What happened in 1996? Bill Clinton won re-election. Now, what happened after 1996? You had 1998. You have the impeachment of Bill Clinton for getting a little frisky with his humidor in the Oval Office. By humidor, I mean his intern. They were synonymous at that time. Things went south for a little bit. Then you got George W. Bush. Democrats were supposed to go extinct in 1994. They won a big presidential victory just two years later. And so much of that happened. And so much of that hand-wringing over the midterm election results last night was over the 2028 presidential cycle. Can any Republican win? Well, our nearest historical analogy says, yes, a Republican could win. Now, a lot of things have to happen in the meantime, because the way that Bill Clinton was able to survive that brutal shellacking in 94 was when he came out and said the era of big government is over, when he changed up some personnel, when he changed up his attitude on the government. Nevertheless, he was really, really bad. People didn't want to admit that it was going to be bad going in. They should have. People didn't want to admit it was the Iran war. They should have. But likewise, right now, people are also facing a different kind of delusion. They're saying the GOP is just totally dead and might as well pack it in and start a new political party. Hey, guys, is that what the Democrats did in 94? I don't think so. And the Democrats have done pretty well since then. Need to keep a little bit of perspective, okay? Before we get into more of the political fallout, on the point of extinction, we need to focus on some of the craziness going on outside of Washington. DC. We need to talk about some of the predictions made by the conservatives in the 1990s, actually. West Hollywood has now officially decided to allow people to register as throuples, foursomes, and multi-partner relationships. We're talking about a foursome. We're not talking about golfing at the Bel Air Country Club. We're talking about really weird sex stuff in West Hollywood, which is one of the top three capitals of weird sex stuff in the entire country. The West Hollywood City Council has unanimously approved new legal protections for polyamorous couples. This was put forward by Mayor John Heilman, quote, the measure allows people in relationships involving multiple partners to officially register with the city, granting them certain rights, including hospital visitation and additional tenant protections. This will allow three or more individuals to formally register their relationship with the city by submitting paperwork to the city clerk. To qualify, participants must satisfy several conditions, including mutual consent and the absence of blood relations. So they get all these other protections now. In other words, West Hollywood has just legalized polygamy for all intents and purposes, exactly as the social conservatives have been predicting for decades. I remember I was around in the 90s and 2000s when there was the debate over same-sex marriage. And the social conservatives said, you can't have same-sex marriage. It's just an incoherent concept because marriage is intrinsically the union of a man and a woman. Or toward the procreation and education of children. So it's not that we want to be mean to the homosexuals. It's that that just can't be marriage. It's like same-sex marriage is like a square circle. It's just not possible in its nature. And if you do it at a more practical level, there is nothing stopping you from legalizing polygamy. And at the time, all the liberals said, that's ridiculous. Come on, stop it with your stupid slippery slope arguments. The social conservatives have been vindicated. On every single slippery slope argument they've ever made. Every single one. And then we're going to make some today and they're going to say the same thing about us. But we've been vindicated on every single one. On abortion. If you legalize abortion and you establish that it's okay to kill innocent babies in the womb, pretty soon you're going to have abortion, not just in the first trimester or even the second. You're going to have abortion late term. You're going to have partial birth abortion. You're going to have an abortion on demand. The craziest slippery slope argument we made was, pretty soon they're going to let you have abortions after the abortion. The baby's already born. And what happened? All the libs said, oh, it's crazy, slippery slope, stupid nonsense. You're hallucinating. What happened? How many years ago now was it that the Democrat governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, came out and he said, yeah, yeah, if a baby's born, but the mother doesn't want it, she actually wanted to have an abortion. She'll talk to the doctor. Maybe they'll kill the baby. We now have ballot referenda around the country on Tuesday night, legal in Virginia, legalizing abortion up until the moment of birth. All of that. All of that was predicted by the social conservatives. Before we move on from this totally predictable and totally revolting story, I just want to focus on the next slippery slope thing. It says, okay, the ordinance allows throuples and menage a quatre, menage a cinq, menage a six, sept, huit to get legal protections, basically to be married. But they must satisfy some conditions, including mutual consent. Consent is the only moral criterion of liberalism and the absence of blood relations. So they say, okay, you can do plenty of weird stuff, gay, trans, pans, thank you, ma'ams. You can do whatever, three, four, five people or more in your fake marriage. But the one thing we won't cotton to is blood relations. No incest. Why? Why? West Hollywood does not have a lot of heterosexuals running around. So for these, all polyamorous relationships have to be homosexual to some degree, because there's only two sexes. Despite the protestations of the libs. So they're all gay in some way or other. So why can't you have blood relations? The argument against incest, the reason that we've had legal prohibitions on incest when it comes to marriage and relationships is because, well, it's really icky, but two, because it can cause birth defects. If you have too much consanguinity, then there are going to be defects and deformations in the kids. But we've mostly taken the kids out of sex. We now have kids who are gay. We now have kids outside of marriage and outside of even sexual relations because of in vitro fertilization. And people can get married and have no intention of ever having kids. So we have so weakened the meaning of marriage. It's no longer a lifelong bond necessarily because we legalized divorce. It's no longer ordered toward the procreation and education of children because now plenty of people get married and don't have any intention of having kids. We don't think that kids are an intrinsic part of what a marriage is. The openness to life. Obviously, many couples suffer infertility. But we have kids who are gay. We have kids who are gay. But the openness to life, we always thought was part of marriage. We no longer do. And in West Hollywood, a lot of these marriages are gay. So you take that out entirely. If, this is so gross, and it's a family show, but we have to just follow this to its logical conclusion. If kids are not a big factor here, if it's just like three or four fellows who want to pretend that they're married in West Hollywood, why can't they be related to each other? They're not making babies. Even if they go to the baby store and the surrogacy, and they try to buy one, they still haven't figured out a way to create a baby out of a man and a man. You just have to go rent the eggs of some other woman who presumably is not related to you. So according to the logic of the West Hollywood mayor, and love is love, and let people do whatever they want, my body, my choice, why can't two brothers get gay married in West Hollywood? You're saying that five, six different people of any sexes can get married. Why can't two brothers do it? They're not going to make a baby. There's no threat of genetic malformations or anything like that. By the way, according to the logic of my body, my choice, you do you, maximize individual autonomy. I'm not even sure that that argument would hold up against incest and marrying people of your family. But let's just put that off the side for a moment. Why can't two male cousins, two brothers, an uncle and a nephew, why can't they do it? According to the logic of West Hollywood. Here's my argument, is it's totally icky and gross, and it should be illegal, and it's contrary to natural law. And marriage has a meaning that is intrinsic to what it is. And so not only should you get rid of the throuples and all this weird stuff, and incest and all the rest, but also it's a lifelong union of a man and a woman ordered toward the procreation education of children. That's my argument. You say that my natural law arguments are wrong, and it inhibits people. Okay. What's the limiting principle? You say, oh, come on. That's just a slippery slope argument. You're right. It is. And we have been proven right on all of them. We have been proven right on all of them. Stay tuned, man. Stay tuned. Gamora by the sea over there. Okay. Now, speaking of LA, things are getting worse. This is a race nobody's even talking about. The socialist city councilman, Nydia Rahman, who was running against Spencer Pratt, the Republican, and against Karen Bass, the incumbent Democrat mayor of LA, she was written off for a long time. It looked like Spencer Pratt had destroyed her chances of becoming mayor of LA. Now, the socialist is supplanting the mainstream Democrat. And it's especially ironic because that mainstream Democrat actually used to be a communist. So, we'll get to how LA has gone from not just bad to worse, but really, really, really bad to catastrophic. Then we'll get to Liam Neeson, and then maybe a little bit more on the election first, though. Speaking of Hollywood, Confession comes out November 11th on Daily Wire. It's in select theaters. Go to dailywire.com to buy tickets. Movie's terrific. Go check it out. I did not pick the favorite comment yesterday. Just a firehose of information coming in, and I had the producers pick it. This is from Eddie, who says, at least an ex-Yankees player won a Republican seat in Texas. We're saved. I know, that's exciting. And the congressional baseball game is going to be great this year. Okay. Nydia Rahman, socialist, is leading right now. This race still hasn't been called either, at least as of turning the cameras on this morning. The latest LA County election results show Rahman with 405,193 votes. That's 51.67%. Compared to Karen Bass, 379,069 votes. Nice. So that's 48.33% for Karen Bass. That is a 26,000 vote advantage right now. It means the incumbent is getting taken down. So the way this should be read, because most people don't know the total personal history of Karen Bass, the way this should be read is voters choosing an overt socialist over a mainstream Democrat. Now, Karen Bass, I mean, she let her city be burnt to the ground. You remember during the LA fires that destroyed that city, Karen Bass not only wasn't on the job in LA, she wasn't even on the continent. She was visiting Africa. She was phoning it in while her city was burning down. It was burning down in part because of her own policies and the Democrat policies from the governor. So what the voters went into is they said, okay, we can either keep our mainstream Democrat or we can go further left and elect a socialist. It looks like they're electing a socialist. There is a little wrinkle to this though, which is, Karen Bass is not a mainstream Democrat. Karen Bass is actually a communist. So Karen Bass, this was years ago at this point, but she was an actual card carrying member of explicitly communist organizations. So in reality, in LA, it's just all awful. And I'm very glad I left because that city is just unsalvageable at this point, at least for the foreseeable future. But we should still be very concerned about this because what it means is, the voters now, For all they know, not understanding that Karen Bass is a communist, they're moving further to the left. They are embracing socialism in their own minds in a more distinct way. Okay, speaking of Hollywood, another little palate cleanser, Liam Neeson. Love Liam Neeson. Liam Neeson was just reacting in an interview to the news that in the new Narnia movie by Greta Gerwig, Aslan, the Jesus character, is going to be played by a woman. My first introduction to your work was not your face, it was actually your voice when you voiced Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia films. I was just curious, now that Narnia is back in the news cycle, we're getting a new interpretation next year, if you had a chance to check out the trailer and what it feels like to now have people revisiting that franchise on the big screen. I'm sorry, this is news to me. The new Narnia? Yeah. Well, I'm grateful to be the one to break it to you. Oh, great. Meryl Streep is taking on Aslan this time around. Meryl is playing Jesus Christ. She is. Well, if you're going to make Christ a lady, nobody better than Meryl. What an amazing, amazing reaction. And it's just like, he's me for real, for real. Everyone's talking about how we now identify with Anakin Skywalker. I identify with Qui-Gon Jinn. I think Liam Neeson's reaction is just magnificent. I am withholding judgment on the Narnia movies for now because Greta Gerwig has been a crypto conservative filmmaker for a long time and her movies are great. So, but I don't love, I don't love what I'm seeing in the news that they're getting a lady to play the Jesus character. And look for a rock ribbed right wing conservative like me, that's an understandable reaction. But even Liam Neeson, I mean, I think this is, I think he's, he's got the reaction of the kind of normie, not all that political audience member, which is they're having a lady play Jesus. And he's very diplomatic about it. He goes, well. If you're going to have a lady play Jesus, I guess Meryl Streep's the best one. You know, she's the best living actress. So if you're going to have a lady play Jesus, what? If, you know, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a Merry Christmas. That's a big if. Why are we? So for all the people covering this, we'll see what happens when the Narnia movie comes out. It's not just a right wing ginned up culture war issue among. These perpetually angry incels on the internet, you know, it's like Liam Neeson. You know, it's Hollywood royalty. People who are relatively lib, you know, or live in liberal environments. They say, hold on, we got a lady playing Jesus. Why are we? What are we doing? What are we doing with that? He's me. He's me for real. You guys can be Anakin. I'm going to be Qui-Gon Jinn. Last little bit of political news coming out. Mike Johnson has, it is now being reported. I don't know that he's. Made a direct statement on this. No, I suppose he has at this point. I suppose he has actually confirmed this. Now, Mike Johnson, who is the Republican Speaker of the House, done an excellent job. I know Congress gets so much flack. The reason Congress gets flack is because they don't do anything. And the reason I don't do anything is is actually structural to Congress. Congress has been rendered politically impotent for years and decades, with very few exceptions in between. So Mike Johnson, I think, has done an excellent job as Speaker of the House. Given what Congress. Can do in the 21st century. I think Mike Johnson has done an excellent job. And it's the worst job on Capitol Hill. I've said it for years now. Whenever names are floated, when I have friends, some friends of mine who are in Congress, hey, so-and-so should be Speaker, so-and-so might be Speaker. I said, I wouldn't wish that on him because I like that person. And that's the worst job in Washington, D.C. I would much rather be the janitor at Shelley's Cigar Bar than have to wrangle the herd of cats on Capitol Hill as a Republican Speaker. Especially as a Republican Speaker. It's harder than being a Democrat Speaker. In any case, I think Mike Johnson has done a great job. But he says, I have no interest in being the minority leader on Capitol Hill. You are seeing a sea change here. Something big has shifted. So we need to keep these two things in mind. Right now, you just have people coping and saying, oh, no, nothing's changed. It's no big deal. Keep calm and carry on. This is fine. No, no, no. Oh, it's just a little instability because of the tariffs. No, no, no. And you have some people saying, this is obliteration. We need to start a new political party. The country's gone to pot. Go buy a compound in New Zealand. No, no, no. That's wrong, too. This is a survivable event. This doesn't even mean a Republican can't win in 2028. But this is a massive change. An era ended on Tuesday night. What happens in the future is anybody's. The Republican Party will survive. But it's going to be a very, very bumpy road. Okay. Much more to say. We're out of time. It is Theology Thursday. The rest of the show continues. Now, you do not want to miss it. Become a member using code KnowlesKennedy. Check out for two months free on all annual plans. Father, I used to feel Christ. I cannot feel anything here. They take me out of my bed, and they brought me here, and they tell me nothing. What have I done? Article 58, counter-revolutionary activity. That is all I know. There are so many enemies of the state, all of whom claim their innocence, who protest, who cry. There are no answers here, other than the ones they put in your mouth. Your break. Today is your opportunity to demonstrate your loyalty to the people. Do you know why I'm here? Of course. But you already know, don't you? You must believe in something greater than the party. You will remember your duty. I've told you I know nothing. They growl like a feral animal. You stink of failure. You want me to lie. Still a drunk. Damn you! They all break. They all break. They all break. They all break. They all break. Maybe.