Ep. 1700 - SCREENSHOTS: Trump Admin "Group Chat" EXPLAINED

It's every edgy right-wing guy's worst nightmare. Screenshots of your group chat with the boys get leaked.
But now imagine that instead of you and your buddies, the group chat included the vice president of the United States, the secretary of defense, the director of national intelligence, the national security advisor, and the head of the CIA. And instead of sending spicy memes, you were describing a bombing campaign on Houthi rebels

in Yemen. And instead of the group chat getting leaked to your girlfriend or your mom or something,

it was leaked to the editor of one of the most liberal magazines in the country.

That is where the Trump administration is right now. We will separate fact and fiction.

I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.

I have never been more satisfyingly proven right than I was yesterday by the New York Times on an obscure little issue about environmentalism that I sounded the alarm on over five years ago on this show. I bring the receipts to show you why the Michael Knowles Show is so much more reliable, so much better for expanding your mind than the New York Times is.
There's so much more to say. First, though, go to balanceofnature.com.
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That is balanceofnature.com, promo code Knowles. The Atlantic claims to have had war plans texted to it by the Trump administration.
That's the headline, the Atlantic. The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans.
U.S. national security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen.
I didn't think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling by Jeffrey Goldberg.
What happened? The claim here from the editor of The Atlantic, a super duper lib magazine that has attacked Trump many times, is that some of the top administration officials accidentally included him in a Signal chat. Signal is an encrypted messaging service where the messages

sometimes disappear after a while, sometimes they stay for longer. It's supposed to be safer than ordinary iMessage texting or regular SMS.
And that they're all texting the VP, the NSA, the head of the CIA, the SecDef, and they just accidentally include this liberal journalist. It doesn't, there's no way, right?

There's no way.

What did the messages say?

Very interesting. they just accidentally include this liberal journalist it doesn't there's no way right there's no way what did the messages say very interesting messages that the title of this signal chat was huti pc small group jd vance a person with the name jd vance in the group chat might really be him might not be says at peth, if you think we should do it, that is, if you think we should bomb the Houthis in Yemen, let's go.
I just hate bailing out Europe again. Let's make sure our messaging is tight here.
If there are things we can do up front to minimize risk to Saudi oil facilities, we should do it. A person who goes by the name Pete Hegseth responds, VP, I fully share your loathing of European freeloading.
It's pathetic, but Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, is correct. We're the only ones on the planet on our side of the ledger, meaning on the free world and the America-led world, who can do this.
Nobody else even close. Question is timing.
I feel like now is as good a time as any, given that POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes. So the Houthi rebels, because

they're firing on Israel, because the Houthis are funded by Iran, Iran, the sworn enemy of Israel, Israel at war in Gaza, the Houthis are firing on Israel and they're taking over shipping lanes, shipping lanes that we and everyone else in the world needs to trade our goods. somewhat dizzying, but that's why we care about the Houthis.

It says, given the POTUS directive to reopen the shipping lanes, I think we should go. But POTUS, the president, still retains 24 hours of decision space.
And someone SM, people are speculating, is it Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff at the White House? Who knows who SM is? As I heard, the president was, green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. So notice this theme keeps returning to Europe's not doing its fair share.
Europe needs to start taking responsibility for this security. Europe benefits from this trade.
Europe needs to have some skin in the game. We also need to figure out how to enforce such requirement.
E.G. E.G.
I don't know who E.G. refers to.
It's unclear from the chat. If Europe doesn't remunerate, then what? If the U.S.
successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost, there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return. Pete Heggseth agree.
and then you get a bunch of these guys just kind of agreeing jv i guess jd vance excellent jr john

ratcliffe head of the cia a good start mich Michael Waltz, NSA, does a little, I like this fist pump, American flag fire emoji. You know, man, these guys, they really, they are the boys, you know, they are, it's just like yours, yours and my right wing group chat.
M-A-R, unclear how that stands for, good job, Pete and your team, Michael Waltz, team, great job, great work, all powerful start.

Okay, so just, you know, give an attaboys around.

Is this real?

First thought, there's no way this is real, right?

However, Jeffrey Goldberg claims the minute he got the chat, he didn't believe it.

But then at the predicted times, bombs started falling in Yemen, so he thought it was real.

The Trump administration has confirmed the authenticity of the chat. So this raises another question.
Did they just accidentally add this journalist or was this 5D chess? Some have suggested it is 5D chess because the libs are claiming that war plans were released and this endangered American personnel. And that isn't true.
That's just hyperbole. This doesn't read like war plans.
Even the more specific details outlined in the chat were just giving a slightly advanced notice of a bombing campaign that most people expected in Yemen anyway. So it's not as though there were actual operational plans here.
You know, the libs are just ridiculous about that. Furthermore, even the Atlantic article admits that the libs claim that these senior administration officials coordinating on Signal, on an encrypted messaging service, the libs are claiming that's illegal, that's evading federal records laws.
And even the editor of The Atlantic here is admitting it is not uncommon for national security officials to communicate on signal. So that claim goes out the window.
Some are suggesting, on the right, that it was an intentional leak to signal to Europe that we are sick and tired of them freeloading off of us and they need to pay up. So that this is kind of a 5D chess move in trade negotiations with Europe.
I'm a little skeptical of that. That sort of thing can happen and often does happen.
Intentional leaks to send a message to some other party. However, in this case, the leak makes it look like the Trump administration is sloppy.
And usually if you're going to try to to send a message that way, you're not going to damage yourself in the mind of the public in the meantime.

So I don't think that's real. However, you got to ask yourself how this guy got added.
So the theory that seems to be floated in the press right now is that it was Michael Waltz, as Daily Wire is reporting this, Michael Waltz, the national security advisor, added the journalist as a signal connection a few days before he was added to the chat. So was it the national security advisor who added the journalist? Why did he do it? One wild speculation is that, I don't know if I believe this at all, I just kind of saw it floating around, and it's as good as any explanation I've heard so far, that he meant to add through a voice

command, Elbridge Colby, an administration official, and accidentally added Jeffrey

Goldberg. I don't know if I buy that, but maybe.
You speak things into the voice-to-text,

and you can get totally crazy results. So I guess there's enough assonance and almost a rhyme,

maybe. Who knows? Who knows? It'll be investigated.
The consequence of this is nil. The libs are going to pretend this totally upended American foreign policy or something.
It had zero consequence on American foreign policy. The libs are going to try to compare this to, they're already doing it, they're going to try to compare this to Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server and the Republicans making a big deal about Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State using a private email server, totally unsecured.
They're going to compare that to these top admin officials using an encrypted messaging service. There's really no comparison there.
The big problem, two big problems with Hillary's server. One, it was totally insecure.
Signal actually relatively is quite secure, certainly compared to the Clinton home server. But the real big problem about the Clinton home server is it appeared as though Hillary Clinton was using the private server because she was also simultaneously raking in zillions of dollars from foreign donors, foreign governments even, through her Clinton Foundation.
So the issue with the private server wasn't even just that she was storing classified information in places that were not secure. It was that it at the very least gave the appearance that Hillary Clinton was conducting private business and selling American influence for personal private gain.
Much the same way that Joe Biden did that when his son was the bag man collecting money all around the world, notably from Ukraine, to peddle American influence overseas. No one is suggesting anything like that for the Trump administration officials.
So I think that's totally apples and oranges. What's my takeaway from this story? It's a wacky story.
There's no question about that. I'm not going to say there are no questions that are raised by it.
Really, I guess the top question is, why would any Trump administration official even have this guy's number in his phone? Nobody should be talking to the head of the Atlantic if you are a Republican official. But I'm just going to take the story for what it's worth.
What can we learn from this? The biggest takeaway to me, reading these chats, assuming they're authentic and the administration says that they are. My biggest takeaway is that J.D.
Vance really is who he says he is. And no one's talking about this.
Very few people are talking about this. That's my big takeaway.
My big takeaway is Mike Waltz, the national security advisor, is a little more hawkish on foreign policy, a little more interventionist. That we all expected.
Pete Hegseth is willing to hear both sides, seems fairly open-minded on the use of military force, but leaned in the direction of intervening here in Yemen. Says, VP, I hear your concerns, but look, we're the only ones who could do it.
We should do it now. It's in line with the president's directives, but I agree, we gotta weigh costs and benefits.
So Pete is open to hearing both sides. And J.D.
Vance does not want America to get involved militarily all over the world, which is how he's campaigned for vice president. That's how he writes now.
It's how he talks. It's how he campaigned for Senate.
He really is that guy. Some people say because J.D.
Vance has had a big transformation, he used to be liberal politically, now he's quite conservative. He's kind of on the bleeding edge avant-garde of mainstream conservatism.
Some people have questioned the solidity of his views. I'd say if you're actually looking into his private group chat, when the rubber meets the road, and there's a major foreign policy question in a really hot part of the world, J.D.
Vance is sticking to his guns. Which I think is where the avant-garde of the MAGA movement is.

My biggest takeaway really has very little to do with foreign policy or the operations of the Trump administration. Really, the biggest takeaway for me is J.D.
Vance is fully the MAGA guy. He is at the bleeding edge of the Trump movement, and he is setting himself up to be President Trump's successor in 2028, and it doesn't seem deceitful.
He really appears to be that guy. There's so much more to say first, though.
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Get your Lenten candle right now. Speaking of foreign policy, another doozy coming out of the Trump administration.
President Trump has suggested that the United States join the Commonwealth of Nations. What is the Commonwealth? The Commonwealth is the successor organization

to the British Empire. When the British Empire fell apart, it transformed into the Commonwealth,

which is this group of nations led by the King of England. Wait, what? Hold on.
Hold on. Didn't we fight a war in 1776? Didn't my ancestor Simon Knowles fight from Bunker Hill all the way to Yorktown, go up to Newburgh with General Washington? This man crossed the Delaware with Washington just so we could leave the British Empire.
Why on earth would President Trump want to rejoin the successor organization? Well, this is just being reported according to the Daily Mail, UK paper. King Charles is expected to offer the United States membership to become the 57th member of the Commonwealth.
and Trump responded, I love King Charles. Sounds good to me.
This might be a little unpopular. I like the idea.
I'm with Trump on this. I'm with Trump on a lot of things, but I'm really open to this idea.
I think this is an issue that is going to be a great measure of the depth of a person's conservatism. How conservative are you? Are you conservative by 2012 standards? Yeah, that's a lot of conservatives these days.
Are you conservative by 1960 standards? How about by 1776 standards? How about by 1620 standards? How conservative are you, buddy? I often say, I don't want to go back to 2012. I want to go back to 1220.
Why would this be a good idea? Well, there's a lot of fake news about the Commonwealth. First of all, if you join the Commonwealth, that doesn't mean you have to acknowledge King Charles as your monarch, okay? America is not a monarchy.
America is a republic. There are plenty of republics in the Commonwealth of Nations that have their own heads of state.
President Trump ain't acknowledging anyone else as being above him as a head of state. So you don't have to do that.
You don't have to start paying stamp taxes to the British or anything like that. It would be a symbolic gesture, but it would be a gesture to show that we have something in common with England.
Because to quote Antonin Scalia, he made this point, I played it on the show a couple of weeks ago. Antonin Scalia observed that our culture comes from English culture.
He said, he's one of the most Italian looking guys in the world. And yet when he would go to Italy, he did not feel at home.
When he goes to England, he does feel at home because that's our culture. That's where we come from.
It doesn't matter in America what you look like, where your family came from. If you have assimilated at all, you have assimilated into the Anglo-Saxon culture.
And it shows that we're willing to take seriously the civilizational threats that we face because we recognize that modern liberalism is living on the fumes of a civilization. But because we cut ourselves off from our heritage, from our cultural inheritance, we're starting to fall.
We're starting to crumble. Our institutions are starting to crumble.
If we're going to make our country great again, we need to draw on the great wellsprings of our civilization, which did not pop out of the air in 1776 or even 1620. They go back further.
They go back to our great heritage in, I don't know, they go back to Magna Carta. They go back to the writings of Shakespeare.
They go back to the Roman Empire, which was present in the UK. You can see the Roman Wall when you're in London.
It goes back to the great foundations of our civilization. And especially at a time when the liberals are trying to involve us in all these sorts of contrived, lib, stupid, modern institutions like the United Nations,

get us to fund the whole European Union,

all of this globalist left-wing nonsense.

If we can show that we recognize that we're part of a broader civilization

and we're going to lead that civilization and we're going to have a leadership role,

but we don't want to be part of this modern globalism,

I think one way to do that is to say, yes, we do have something in common with the Commonwealth

nations. Yeah, we do have a shared heritage.
We're going to keep leading. We're going to

keep innovating. We're going to be strong.
We're going to recognize we have that role.

I've said for a long time, I don't think that Trump is really a hardcore nationalist.

I think Trump, I think his political vision is an imperial political vision. But there's just two kinds of imperialism.
There's the liberal globalist imperialism of the UN and the EU and the IMF and the WTO and the George Soros of the world. And then there's the conservative imperial vision, which is manifest destiny, which is go West, young man, which is we will make America great and strong.
And we're not going to be the world's police in every single corner of the world, but we're going to pursue our interests all over the globe. And we have many of them.
That's Trump's vision. I don't think Trump himself is an isolationist.
I don't think he wants to make America smaller. I don't think he wants to go back to a yeoman republic.
I don't think that's him. I think he wants to be great and big and expansionist, and he wants Greenland, and he wants Canada.
There's so much more to say. First, though, text Knowles to 400 400.
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A story closely related to what we were just talking about and the Commonwealth of Nations offer.

I think Trump is serious about making Canada a state.

So I guess as we join the Commonwealth, we can also take a Commonwealth country away and make it part of our country.

President Trump was asked about this again in the Oval Office.

Here's what he had to say. And remember, with Canada, we don't need their cars.
We don't need their lumber. We don't need their energy.
We don't need anything from Canada. And yet it costs us $200 billion a year in subsidy to keep Canada afloat.
So when I say they should be a state, I mean that. I really mean that.
Because we can't be expected to carry a country that is right next to us on our border. It would be a great state.
It would be a cherished state. The taxes for Canadian citizens would go down in less than half.
They don't spend money on military because they think we're going to protect them. There are many things that they do, like icebreakers.
They want us to provide icebreakers for them. Oh, that's wonderful.
So the Canada, they're very tough traders too. I think he's serious about it.
I've talked to friends of mine who are very sharp thinkers who work in a variety of different fields, not just politics, but finance all over the place. I said, what do you make of all this Trump Canada talk? Is he trolling? And increasingly people say, no, no, I think he's serious.
I think he just wants Canada to become a state. Some of them have said that they don't want Canada to become a state because they don't want to be countrymen with Canadians.
Listen, I like Canadians. I can't say some of my best friends are Canadians, but I like them.
I don't know that many Canadians, but I like them well enough. He seems serious.
Further evidence that Trump's political vision is essentially imperial. And this is really profound because I have argued for a long time.
I support nationalism. I say two cheers for nationalism, not three cheers, but two cheers for nationalism.
I think nationalism is preferable to liberal globalism. The George Soros's, the World Economic Forum, just taking away our national sovereignty and our rights and making us all live in pods and eat bugs and plug into the matrix.
I definitely prefer nationalism to that. However, I recognize that nationalism is contrived.
It's modern. It's essentially liberal.
Nationalism as we know it today, the world order comprising a system of nation states, is a product of the Treaty of Augsburg and the Peace of Westphalia to end the religious wars in Europe, the religious wars which cracked up what we now call Western civilization, used to call Christendom. So it's the second best.
You know. It's a perfectly workable compromise, but I don't think it's the ideal.
I certainly don't think it's the natural constitution of politics. I think the more natural constitution is imperial because borders cannot be permanently fixed as we pretend in the modern nation-state liberal order.

Borders can't be permanently totally fixed because peoples grow and shrink.

Countries flourish and countries die.

Migration does happen.

Wars do happen.

Conquest does happen.

We pretend in the post-World War II liberal order that doesn't happen,

and yet it still happens.

And it's been happening immediately since we started that order. We started to pretend that such an order were possible.
So the more natural constitution of politics, and this is a classical insight, certainly up through the Middle Ages. We've forgotten it only recently.
The more natural political order is imperial. Imperial not meaning that we're going to impose some tyrant from the top who's going to dictate every aspect of your life, but recognizing, kind of like feudalism, that there are just overlapping relationships of power and responsibility.
And those exist at a really low level, they exist to a higher level. At the higher level, they usually have to have a little bit of a lighter grasp because of the principle of subsidiarity that decisions that can be made more efficiently and effectively at the lower level ought to be made at such a level.
But there are overlapping kinds of relationships of power. This is how we have a nation-state liberal order where we have to pretend that it was Becky, Becky, Stan, Stan, Stan, to quote Herman Cain, is a nation in precisely the same way as the United States is, but it isn't.
America is the global hegemon. We are certainly the empire that controls the West, if not the entire world.
Now we're moving toward a more multipolar world, But when we say multipolar, we're still talking about like two powers, America and maybe a rising China. And you've got India and Russia kind of playing a little bit on the periphery.
Then you have regional powers like Iran and the Middle East. But these are all only properly understood as empires or incipient empires.
So when Trump says, yeah, of course I want Canada, it's ridiculous. Canada is not a real country compared to the United States.
I think that's the vision he's getting at. And because Trump is not particularly ideological, because he's a gut politician, generally the things he says in politics are just naturally right.
Even if they're not the most polished statements of political philosophy, he's just got a good understanding on it. Which means I don't think he's going to let up on the Canada thing.
All of that is a really long way of saying, I don't think the guy is going to let up on the Canada thing. Now, speaking of other nations close to the UK, Rosie O'Donnell has fled America.
In her defense, she has made good on the frequent liberal threat to leave America if Trump is elected. Most of the libs who promised to do that did not do that.
Rosie followed through. She moved to Ireland.
She does a TV show in Ireland. And she makes a pretty bizarre claim that Elon Musk rigged the election for President Trump.

You know, a lot of people did vote for him.

Yes.

Do you accept their right to do that and their opinion of him?

Well, I respect their right to do that.

I question why the first time in American history a president has won every swing state

and is also best friends and his largest donor

was a man who owns and runs the internet. So I would hope that that would be investigated

and that we would see whether or not it was an anomaly or something else that happened on election night in America when Kamala Harris was filling up stadiums with people who supported her and donald trump was not able to do that. So it's curious to me.
Okay, there are a lot of, if this is true, then that. But the ifs, the premises seem off.
Rosie says, Kamala was filling up stadia. Was she really? I didn't notice that.
Says Trump couldn't fill up stadiaia. I was in Madison Square Garden when he completely filled it up and he was filling up stadia all around the country.
Stadia, the plural of stadium. You know I love the English language and in this case, the Latin language.
That's just a little pretentious rhetorical flourish for the day. Though it's not pretentious if it's not pretend.
That's the first claim. Second one, she says, it's a little curious to me that Trump won all of the swing states for the first time in American history.
But that wasn't the first time in American history. Ronald Reagan, just to use the most obvious example, Ronald Reagan in 1984 won every state but Minnesota.
So he won all the swing states and pretty much every other state. And the only state he lost was his opponent's home state.
And by the way, I was speaking to Ed Rollins probably 10, 15 years ago, who ran the Reagan 84 campaign, and he thinks they won Minnesota too. They just didn't sue about it because they don't want to look like sore winners.
So just the premises are totally off. But then what is the, I don't even know what the claim is.
She's claiming that Elon Musk controls the internet. We all know Al Gore controls the internet.
He invented the internet, but she says Elon, because he owns the smallest of the big social media platforms, controls the internet. He has internet satellites.
He has Starlink. And he, what did he do? He used a combination of Twitter and his space lasers to zap the voting machines in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and change all the ballots from Kamala to Trump? that's your working theory i had in fairness to rosie i had a family member of mine

suggest this to me over breakfast that's your working theory? I had, in fairness to Rosie, I had a family member of mine

suggest this to me over breakfast.

He says to me, dead serious,

he says, you know,

I have a theory about the election.

Some people are going to call it a conspiracy theory.

I think Elon rigged it for,

it's the same theory that Rosie just suggested.

Compare this to 2020.

We were told we were evil, terrible election denier,

coup d'etat, insurrectionists, because we had a few questions about the 2020 election.

2020 election, the libs in the weeks before the election changed all the big voting rules,

sent out widespread mail-in ballots that are quite vulnerable to fraud. In some cases, those ballots were contrary to the state constitution, as in the case in Pennsylvania.
They then took hundreds of millions of dollars from big tech oligarchs who were super lib who wanted to get Trump out to fund left-wing organizations that established the ballot drop boxes, in some cases, illegally far from county clerk offices. And then the vote count took days and weeks.
And we had reports of pipes bursting, and we had ballot watchers who were not permitted

to actually look at the count. We had election officials putting up cardboard and poster board

to keep the public and the news media from looking in at the count. I mean, you know,

regardless of what you think happened in 2020, there was at least a justification to ask

Thank you. to keep the public and the news media from looking in at the count.
I mean, you know, regardless of what you think happened in 2020, there was at least a justification to ask some questions, wouldn't you say? Compare that with 2024. Some of those abuses had been curtailed, but all of those abuses cut in favor of the left anyway.
But we were restored to a somewhat more normal electoral order. There's no evidence that there was really any chicanery in the election.
The best the libs can come up with is Elon Musk with a magic space laser zapping Pennsylvania. And we hear boo about it.
Pretty weak stuff from the libs. In fairness to Rosie, she is offering as plausible a view as to how Democrats lost as any of the Democrats.
You know, DEI, it's collapsing. Walmart, Meta, Morgan Stanley, all backing away from the woke agenda because Americans are done playing along.
Trump signed, keep men out of women's sports. The NCAA started to backpedal the next day.
University of Maine caved. Columbia's quietly rewriting policy like no one's watching.

The left's grip is slipping and they can feel it, but don't pop the champagne yet.

They will be back, louder and more radical than ever.

That is why the Daily Wire will keep up the fight.

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My favorite comment yesterday is from Cara Thrace, BSG. I work at the grocery store and about 85% of people use EBT.
People spend $100 on candy, soda, and ice cream. I see it every day.
That is not good. That is not good.
I agree. And I got in a little bit of trouble yesterday with some of the really hard line, more libertarian conservatives who said that food stamps, EBT, SNAP, should not be permitted for use on anything other than the most basic subsistence foods.
And I don't think that's totally fair. If someone on food stamps wants to buy their kid a candy every once in a while, I don't begrudge them that.
but to the point on soda soft drinks big soda gets like 5 billion dollars a year on your dime

because of welfare. I said, this really should not be permitted, no matter what the soda lobby was paying influencers to peddle out there.
This should not be permitted in part because it seems kind of frivolous. And if people are really that hard up, then they should stick mostly to the essentials.
But also because soda is not even really considered a luxury anymore. The elite people, the really fancy people who know about luxury, they don't drink soda anymore.
They drink like frilly little seltzer drinks and kombuchas. It's not, it's really kind of bad for you.
We're in the Maha movement, baby. No more big soda.
I grew up, my blood type was like Coca-Cola and Snapple, but it's a different era, baby. We're in Maha.
Okay. Speaking of our national health, here's a really disturbing story that just came out from NBC News.

One in five, oh, actually, I'm sorry, this study came out a while ago, but it's cropped back up in the public discourse because we're all talking about the population decline, the breakup of the American family. from the study from all the way back in 2011

showed that one in five

American mothers

have kids with multiple fathers.

Which is The study from all the way back in 2011 showed that one in five American mothers have kids with multiple fathers, which is not ideal. There are hierarchies of good and bad.
So at the very least, you could say, well, these women having kids with multiple baby daddies is better than them killing their kids through abortion because abortion is now so promoted. I guess we need that little caveat.
It's better to have the kid, even with multiple fathers, even out of wedlock, even than to murder the kid. But that's a pretty low bar.
Not ideal for the mother, certainly not ideal for the kids, not ideal for the father to have kids out of wedlock. Study shows one in five of all American moms have kids with different birth fathers.
Researchers, when they look only at mothers with two or more kids, the number is even higher. 28% of them have kids with at least two different men.
As a postdoctoral fellow who worked on this said, to put it in perspective, this is similar to the number of American adults with a college degree. It's pervasive.
And 43% of the women with kids with multiple dads were married when their first babies were born. Now, since 2011, when that study came out, probably another reason the study is going around right now, the numbers have gotten worse.

And why? What is at the heart of this? Well, that last part there, 43% of women with kids with multiple dads were married when their first babies were born, mean that a lot of this comes from divorce and remarriage, or divorce and having kids out of wedlock. meaning if we did not have the liberal divorce regime that we've had since the 1960s and 70s

that really only solidified in recent years, New York, liberal New York, did not tolerate no-fault divorce, so-called no-fault divorce, which is an impossibility. Someone's at fault when you get divorced.
When you vow to stay together for life and then you don't, it's somebody's fault. But they didn't have no-fault divorce until 2010, 2011.
So this is relatively recent. And what do people say? What do the libs and the squishes say? They say, oh, well, who cares? Just consenting adults.
What business is it of yours if people want to get divorced? Well, a consequence of that, a direct consequence of that is now many mothers, in 2011 it was one in five, now it's more like one in four or more, U.S. mothers have kids with multiple fathers.
Well, what business is that of yours? It's just consenting adults. Well, it's not just consenting adults, it's kids who now have to deal with this.
And when kids are raised in unstable households, when they're raised in single parent households, when they're raised with stepmothers and stepfathers, they have worse outcomes, worse educational outcomes, worse social outcomes, worse marital outcomes themselves. So it's not just a matter of consenting adults.
Well, what business is it of yours, how these people's kids turn out? Well, it's actually a lot of my business. The state has an interest in how the next generation of Americans turns out.
I have an interest in how people in my community turn out, because I live in society, and because I can reason about justice in the abstract, because I'm a rational creature who can participate in a self-government. That's the premise of our civilization, okay? Or rather, that's the premise of our country and the present of our society, premise of our society.
So, what do we do about it? What's the answer here? The problem is only getting worse because it used to be that the elites in society, the people who got the fancy jobs and went to the fancy schools and bought the fancy house and the fancy neighborhood, that those people all got married and stayed married and had kids by one father and did all the things that are supposed to be model behavior. Even if they didn't talk that way, they might not preach what they practice.
They might preach liberalism and free love and a bunch of nonsense, but they behaved in a rather bourgeois way according to conventional morality. These kinds of issues, lots of kids by lots of different fathers, that was a lower class issue.
Now though, you're seeing this exact kind of behavior modeled by the upper classes. Lots of divorce, lots of kids by different fathers, lots of, you're seeing it at the highest echelons of society.
So with no model whatsoever, you know, the only point in having upper classes, every society has various classes, even the ones that pretend that they don't. The social good of having higher classes is the social good of having an aristocracy, even, aristo, meaning good, is that you have some good behavior to model yourself after.
But now the aristocracy is not good. They don't model good behavior.
This is part of the cycle of regimes when the aristocracy turns into nothing more than a selfish oligarchy. They're pursuing not the common good, but the private interest.
So what do we do about this? Well, we have to recognize the way to turn around a social pathology such as this is to recognize it is widespread. There is grace.
There is forgiveness. We can't improve.
One in five, one in four U.S. women, okay, we're not going to throw them all into the outer darkness where there's wailing and gnashing teeth.
But the first step to fixing a problem is admitting that you have a problem. And you have to recognize this is not ideal.
No one wants this. Really.
So what do you do? You have to tighten up the divorce laws you have to you have to change the way that we educate people about sex no more of this free love you know everyone should just use a condom and go have promiscuous sex and explore yourself you got to curtail that you have to discourage promiscuous sex outside of marriage you have to recognize that the moral foundation of your society has to be something other than the maximizing of individual autonomy, individual choice. There's got to be something better, some other good that we're aiming at.
We have to reinstitute and re-inculcate the good of family. We need to know what a family is then.
We need to recognize that a family requires a mommy and a daddy, that is to say a man and a woman, joined together for life for the purpose of the education and beginning of children. Which means that family can't just be anything some liberal judge wants to redefine it as.
We need to really get back to basics. Okay, now speaking of getting back to basics, this is such a great, I don't care, I'm going to go a little late today, I don't care.
I have never been proven so beautifully, satisfyingly correct. The New York Times has a story out yesterday.
What shopping bags should I use? All bags are not created equal when it comes to the environment. And paper might not be as green as you think.
I won't read the whole article. The upshot is that in recent years, the libs, who all read the New York Times, have been banning single-use plastic bags from the grocery stores.
The good shopping bags that you've used for much of your life, banned. Because they're bad for the environment, we are told.
So they use paper bags. They use cotton bags, canvas bags.
And so they make you buy some stupid bag when you check out. New York Times now admitting, actually, the most environmentally friendly bag that you can use at the grocery store is the single-use plastic bag.
Who could have told you that? Five and a half years ago, on this very network, I turn you to the August 20th, 2019 episode of your favorite podcast.

You would have to reuse a paper bag, a paper grocery bag, three times if you wanted to bring its environmental impact down to the level of a single-use plastic bag. Now, do you ever reuse paper bags? No, nobody does.
You just throw them out. Ironically, you do reuse the environmentally pretty fine plastic bags, but you don't reuse the paper bags.
So they're actually much worse for the environment. Why is that? It takes a lot more energy to make the paper bags.
You have to create the pulp. You have to manufacture the paper bag.
And in all of that energy and all of that time, you could have just made that single use, very thin plastic bag from oil. 1,299 episodes of The Michael Knowles Show ago.
You know how much I hate to say I told you so. Your favorite podcast host broke this story.
Did I break it? I thought it actually was kind of common knowledge among people who cared to look into these things. And then five and a half years later, the New York Times gets the message.
Had you, I don't know when you started listening to my show. Had you been listening to the Michael Knowles show then,

you would have known the breaking news

from the New York Times, the paper of record,

five and a half years early.

I want that to be the commercial for the Michael Knowles show.

That know the future five and a half years in advance.

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