Ep. 1690 - Trump Deports Pro-Palestine Columbia Student

On Saturday night, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia graduate student who led pro-Palestine demonstrations on campus last year. Yesterday, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from deporting Khalil until a meeting on Wednesday.
Leftists are arguing that Mahmoud should stay because they hate Israel and support Palestine. Some on the right are arguing that Mahmoud should stay because they think his protests are protected free speech, regardless of what they think about Israel or Palestine.
I, for one, think Mahmoud should be deported, not because I care all that much about the Israel-Palestine conflict, but because he's a Columbia graduate student, and all Columbia graduate students should be deported, even if they're American citizens.

At a time of tectonic political shifts, what is the correct conservative American take?

What do we believe? I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show. You want to talk about ideological confusion.
There is a funding bill that is before Congress right now that President Trump is in support of. You got a member of Congress and Thomas Massey says he's going to vote no on the bill.
And you got President Trump comparing Massey, who is arguably the most right wing member of Congress, to Liz Cheney and saying that he's going to primary him. So which side are we on? What do we believe? What are we doing? I know one thing I'm doing.
I'm getting myself the Mayflower Cigars Captain's Capsule. That's right, baby.
I've been very excited about this product, and it was getting delayed in shipment, and I haven't talked about it at all. It is graduation season.
It is soon to be Father's Day season. It is wedding season.
This is the gift. You get the captain's capsule.
It is the perfect gift for graduation, for Father's Day, for weddings. Have a few of these hanging around.
You pop open the little capsule. I'm waiting for it to pop open like it's a, look at this.
You get a little cool can in there. So you take it just like you're cracking a nice cold one.

You open up that can sealed for freshness.

So you don't need to worry about your cigars drying out.

And then you get this beautiful assortment of eight cigars.

I'm not going to take them all out, but you get the picture.

You get some of the dawn, you get some of the dusk.

It's nice.

Okay.

You don't need to worry about transporting it.

You don't, oh no, are the cigars going to get crushed? Are they going to dry out? No. The captain's capsule has you covered.
Get yours now before they sell out. I don't want to hear about it.
Oh, my son didn't get one for graduation. Oh, my husband didn't get one.
You got warning. There's so much more to say.
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Upgrade to Public Rec and feel the difference. Before we move on from this Columbia grad student or former Columbia grad student, I should say, what do you think? I bet there are many of you in the audience who are so certain about your political views.
Whenever you see a news story, you say, I immediately know this side is right, this side is wrong. These people are going to be on this side, those people are going to be on that side.
But this one is dividing people, even on the right. You have some who are saying, look, this guy, he supports a terrorist group.
He is not an American citizen.

Get him out of here.

Who cares?

Even some people say, I really support Israel. Israel is one of my most important issues, and this guy hates Israel, so deport him for that reason.
But there are going to be some people who say, look, well, there are going to be some people on the right who say, I don't like Israel, and so I actually like this guy that he's pro-Palestine. He should stay here.
There can be some people who say, even though I'm the most ardent pro-Israel supporter in the whole world, I think this man has a right to free speech and he can lead protests, even if they're disruptive, even if they threaten students, even if they cause all sorts of problems. I'm a little bit simpler about it, I guess.
I try not to get too lost in the ideology of constantly talking about rights and in the ideology of liberalism and in the ideology of free speech and academic freedom and this ism and that ism i look at it i say okay is this guy he's a citizen or he's not a citizen oh he's not a citizen okay he's not even a student anymore he graduated in december okay so he not a citizen, which means he has no right to be here in the United States. I look at the protests that he was involved in.
I don't know. I mean, the Israel-Palestine conflict, I guess, is complex, but I don't know.
You're supporting the side that's run by Hamas. That's a little sus to me.
And those protests were quite nasty to Jewish students, in particular at Columbia. And I don't really care all that much about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
And I do wish that we in America were as muscular at tackling anti-Christian discrimination as we are at tackling anti-Jewish discrimination, anti-Muslim discrimination, anti-thisism, anti-thatism. But Christianity is the one religion that we are allowed to and actually encouraged to mock in public and denigrate and push to the side.
So all of those things considered, yeah, yeah, sure. But my chief question for immigration is, what benefit are these people to America? in some cases, in rare cases, we take in refugees out of the goodness of our heart because it's gracious and charitable, and we were strangers in the land of Egypt.
That's a relatively small aspect of what we're talking about here. When it comes to immigration, the primary question, at least to my mind, is do these people benefit America? In fact, that's how our immigration laws are written.
That's how basically all immigration laws everywhere in the world are written. Does this person benefit the country? Do they do a job, for instance, that people in the country can't do? Do they offer some special benefit? If they do, let them in, maybe.
And if they don't, don't let them in. So I look at this guy.
I say, okay, his political ideology is pretty whack, and he doesn't seem to be contributing all that much to the country. And he's a Columbia graduate student, which means his views are almost certainly horrible, and he's very unlikely to support America.
So I don't know, to me, it's a little bit more of a practical prudential question. I'm not going to lose sleep over Mahmoud Khalil being deported after leading a bunch of his fellow Columbia grad students, one of the most left wing of the Ivy League schools, which are already left wing.
I'm not going to lose sleep over that. Now, speaking of ideological conflict and immigration for that matter, a clip has gone viral from Jubilee's Surrounded show.
This is the show that I was on a month ago. It's the show where one person surrounded by 20 or 25 people who disagree with him, and he's got to just debate them successively.
So it was me versus 20 or 25 LGBT LMNOP activists. That was an hour and 40 minutes.
You can go watch it over at the Jubilee channel. This week's episode was with a left-wing political commentator named Sam Sater.
And Sam Sater showed up and he was surrounded by, I guess, 20 or 25 conservatives. They were debating all sorts of questions, one of which was religious fundamentalism.
We'll get to that in a moment. The other of which was immigration.
And so he's sitting down next to this right-wing journalist, Sarah Stock, and they're just getting down to brass tacks on immigration. And Sam Sater cannot believe the things that she is saying.
Take a listen. What's the problem with xenophobic nationalism? Don't you think that's better for Americans in general? To be xenophobic nationalism is better? We should have a coherent culture.
Everyone should be a part of the same culture. We should have assimilation.
Do you get to choose what the culture is? We already have a dominant culture based on European and Christian values and identity. That is the dominant culture.
White Christian. It's rooted in European identity.
White. So your argument is that.
That has been the dominant culture. Just to be clear.
And we're not letting people assimilate to that. We're saying you should keep your culture.
And this is why our culture is so divided. Your argument is that Trump is good for those who want a dominant white European culture culture I mean that is what America is it's rooted in European identity and Christian values that's what it has been you like would you really disagree with that what is it then if that's not the identity of America what well I think the identity of the majority of time America's been a country you don't think that's been the identity well actually and no I think the identity of America.
For the majority of time, America's been a country. You don't think that's been the identity? Well, actually, no.
I think actually the identity of America has been, you know. Okay, let's put a pause right here before he gets into what it means.
I love how he's stalling. He doesn't know how to respond to her.
Well, no, actually, but actually, what's her argument? She's using a provocative slogan, no doubt, xenophobic nationalism. This is a scare phrase used by the left.
And so she is provocatively throwing that phrase back at the left. But what she's saying, xenophobic, meaning preferring one's own countrymen to foreigners, and nationalism, meaning preferring the nation to a kind of borderless liberal globalism.
Well, that's what most American voters voted for in November. Not exactly in those terms, not in such sensationalist rhetoric, but that is what people voted for.
And then Sam Sater says, well, hold on. You're telling me you think there's a dominant culture in America? She says, of course there's a dominant culture.
There's a dominant culture in any polity. Of course there is.
Culture is defined by something, and whatever it is defined by is the dominant aspect of the culture. Okay, well, you're telling me that America traditionally has been defined by European culture and Christianity? She says, yes.
But could you disagree with that? Would anybody seriously disagree with that? In 1960, she says, it has been, at least until very recently. In 1960, 93% of Americans were Christian.
In 1960, just under 90% of Americans were white, so descended from Europeans.

America, really, whatever view you take of the Mayflower, great cigar brand, and the American

founding, the Revolutionary War, and the 19th century up through the 20th century,

can you really argue it didn't come from European values, European institutions? We were a British colony. What is your argument? The American Revolution was influenced by the European Enlightenment, for better and worse.
The founding of America at Plymouth Colony was a separatist movement from England. You know, America doesn't just exist in outer space or something like that.
It's not just floating through the ether. It comes from historical movements developed by real people from real places.
You know, you might say, well, that's terrible. I hate Europe.
Or you might say, that's terrible. I hate Christianity.
I wish America weren't like that. You can make that argument.
The left makes that argument all day long. But if you're this guy, if you're the liberal guy on this, you're really going to be confused by the idea that America comes from Europe and that the religion that has dominated in America has been Christianity? I mean, John Adams says the principles on which the revolution was won were the principles of Christianity.

John Jay goes further.

He says, thank God that we all descend from the same stock and that we all have the same religion and we all believe basically the same stuff. And you can find similar writings throughout many, many other founding fathers and framers of our constitution.
And you can just look at the demographics, religious, ethnic, national, all the rest. We didn't have mass migration of the sort that we're looking at today until the mid 1960s.
So things start to change. But even still, most Americans are at least vaguely Christian.
And I guess the majority of Americans are still white. That's 60%.
So it's obviously much lower than you. So I don't know, Regardless of whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing, how could this liberal guy be confused by that? He's really that ignorant of not just what his opponents believe, but of American history? There's so much more to say.
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Jubilee podcast surrounded Lib Sam Sater versus conservative Sarah Stock. Keep going.
The identity of America has been, you know, for better or for worse, a melting pot in that regard. Yeah, maybe since like the 1960s.
Even then, like even we had this idea of a melting pot literally means assimilation too. It means melting.
It means you're assimilating to the dominant culture. Is that not what melting means? Okay.
So he says, no, no, no, it's a melting pot. And she says, yeah, yeah, that's how we view it since the 1960s.
It goes back a little earlier. The term melting pot comes from a play by a playwright named Israel Zangville in 1908.
And curiously, Teddy Roosevelt went to see this play and loved it so much. He said, Mr.
Zangville, this is a great play. I love this play.
And the notion of America being this melting together of different identities goes back earlier than 1908. So it had been building for some time, but then she hits the real point there, which is, well, hold on.
A melting pot means assimilation.

A melting pot is not a salad bowl, for instance. It's not that you keep your distinct identities.
The tomatoes over here and the cucumbers over here and the lettuce is over here. The melting pot means you all melt together.
And Zangville, who wrote the play, The Melting Pot, actually explained this five years after it was first produced. He said, the process of American amalgamation is not assimilation or simple surrender to the dominant type as is popularly supposed, but an all-around give and take by which the final type may be enriched or impoverished.
So he's saying, it's not that you totally give up your identity. When the Italians came here, for instance, they didn't totally give up their identity.
When the Irish came here, they didn't totally give up their identity, but they largely did. To the point that, just to use the Italians, partially my people as an example, you can no longer predict an Italian American's political views and behaviors based on their ethnicity.
You get Nancy Pelosi on the left. You get Antonin Scalia on the right.
You get Andrew Cuomo on the left.

You get Michael Knowles.

That's the English name from my father's side.

But I got a lot of Italians on the other side.

On the right.

You can't tell.

The Italians have assimilated.

And they've added to American culture.

Mob movies are a big part of our popular entertainment. People really love pizza.
You know, certain Italian expressions have gained traction, but they've also surrendered a lot of Italian stuff. So what Sarah Stock is saying here, the point she's making is almost entirely correct.
She says, yeah, it's a, even, look, we're not just a melting pot. Like we come from a real culture, but even if we were a melting pot, that means that you do at least largely give up your identity.
You contribute a little bit, you give up your identity to assimilate to this new kind of identity, which is the American identity. And then they conclude on the, on the biggest head scratcher.
And now instead we're saying there's something wrong with xenophobia. culture no I mean mean look i gotta be honest with you like i you and i have a fundamental disagreement we will never see eye to eye on this it's a choice and people i think what you're expressing though is really what the the the trump uh movement at its heart is about and i think that's i mean i disagree i don't think Trump's like anywhere close to being a Christian nationalist.
That's ridiculous. Like Trump's basically a Democrat from like 15 years ago.
I love this point. And I think President Trump would agree with that.
I think a lot of Trump voters would agree with that. Yeah, he's like waving the rainbow flag.
You know, Trump is he doesn't care that much about, much about hard right-wing traditionalist social conservatism.

That's how he got people like Bobby Kennedy

and Tulsi Gabbard and Joe Rogan

and most voters to vote with him.

He's the center.

Trump is the center.

Trump is the mainstream.

It's the left that is extreme now.

But Trump is, he's not Sam Sater saying,

well, this kind of extreme right-wing rhetoric, that's why people vote for Trump. She goes, what are you talking about? He says, that's, I just disagree with you.
I got to be honest with you. Whenever someone says, I got to be honest with you as a preface to their statement, what they are admitting is that they are regularly not honest with you.
They previously have been dishonest with you. So he says that, he says, well, I got to be honest with you.
I just don't agree that America, what? That America has a religion? You don't agree? You don't agree. We have in God we trust in our national anthem and on our money.
We were founded by people who called themselves pilgrims. Okay.
The founding fathers and the framers wrote extensively about the importance of Christianity to their country.

And you're telling me we don't have a religion.

We don't have a founding stock of people.

No, it's not England.

It's not the Dutch.

It's not, no, no, no, it's not.

It's Martians.

I don't know what it is.

There's no religion.

There's no founding stock.

There are no traditions.

There's no common morality. There's really founding stock.
There are no traditions. There's no common morality.

There's really no geography.

So what is America?

Matt Walsh asked this question yesterday.

It's probably going to be his next movie.

That's going to complete the trilogy.

What is America?

But the answer from the libs on the left and the right is, well, America is an idea.

Merely an idea.

Floating in outer space in the ether.

Except when they say that, they say America is an idea. You say, okay, what's the idea? At least the people who say that on the right, well, they'll say, well, it's the idea of individual liberty, and it's the idea of free association.
And they'll give you some answer from late 20th century libertarian readings of the American founding. And it might be right, it might be wrong, but at least they'll give you an answer.

You ask the left, what's the idea of America?

They won't give you an answer.

Because the left-wing liberal project is about surpassing all limits.

It's about maximizing individual autonomy.

It's about breaking down anything that might circumscribe choice. So if you say, well, what's the idea? America is just an idea.
Okay, what's the idea of America? They can't tell you. Because to say America is this idea is simultaneously to say that America is not that idea which contradicts this idea.
And they can't do that. America's got to be everything to everyone for all times.
America, the idea would have to contradict Aristotle's law of non-contradiction because it would have to include every idea. So to the left, America is not even just an idea.
America is an idea of an idea. It is so radically abstract that it's nothing.
And in practice, when the left governs, America is nothing. It has no border.
It has no tradition. It has no common language.
It's nothing. It's just, it's a vacuum.
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Okay, I will move on from this Jubilee episode, but it was fascinating. And this guy in particular was a really interesting guest on the Jubilee episode because the format it has seemed to be is you get one conservative to debate two dozen libs.
The first guest was Charlie Kirk. Ben Shapiro went on there.
Lila Rose went on there. I went on there.
And without, I have no false modesty here, generally seems to be the rule that the conservative is surrounded by two dozen libs and the conservative beats all the libs. It seems to be the structure of the show, okay? I'm not, listen, false modesty is a form of pride.
And so I will admit, not just for me, but for the other three conservatives too, they generally won pretty decisively. In this case, the lib facing off against the 20 conservatives, he lost.
He didn't come, even if you're a big fan of this guy, whatever you, I don't follow his stuff at all. But I've heard of him at least.
I know he's a liberal commentator. And he did not do as well as the conservatives did against the libs.
You saw the exchange with Sarah Stock. Here's another exchange.
I wish I had this guy's name. I just started following him on X yesterday, but I don't have his name off the top of my head.
Another conservative comes up to debate religious fundamentalism. And here, Sam Sater's ideological confusion becomes, or philosophical confusion, becomes even more manifest.
Hey. It's nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you. Okay, so I would like to touch on the religious fundamentalist aspect.
Are you an atheist? I'm a Reformed Jew. I don't have a strong belief in the existence of God, but I don't think that religion in and of itself is bad.
Okay, so what's wrong with religious fundamentalists? So like when you said trans rights and women's rights or something like that? Well, the problem I have with religious fundamentalists, and really more, I guess it's really uh theocrats is that they want to impose

their uh morality that comes from their religion on the rest of us and i don't i don't but morality from your view is going to be a preference right it's not morality it's a preference what's the so morality without a foundation is going to reduce you to a preference well i have foundation for my morality. Which is what? It's a humanist vision of what basically creates as little suffering as possible for as many people.
Okay, so you're like a consequentialist? Utilitarian? I don't really bother myself with being a consequentialist or util utilitarian okay what what is remarkable about this exchange is not that sam satyr is a leftist or that his interlocutor is a conservative what is remarkable about this exchange is that the leftist taking on the two dozen conservatives doesn't know what he himself believes. What's remarkable about this exchange? It's not that the leftist doesn't understand what conservatives believe, that we expect.
The leftist doesn't understand the basic premises of his own arguments. He says, look, I don't like religious fundamentalism.
He never really defines it. He's obviously confused about it.
I don't like theocrats. He clearly doesn't know what a theocrat is because a theocracy is government by religious clerics.
But here he's using theocracy to mean government by people who have religious views, which is all governments for all time. And certainly we have a self-government and we're a that have religious views.
So he's totally confused about what theocracy means. But so the interlocutor says, what is the basis of your morality? Is it just preference? Just whatever you feel like, which is sort of what it seems like.
And Sater says, no, no, it's not that. It's, and he's kind of stumbling around.
He says, it's, I want to reduce suffering for the greatest number of people possible. Okay, now that is a moral view.
That is the view of Peter Singer, for instance, who is a professor at Princeton. And the interlocutor rightly says, he said, okay, so you're a consequentialist.
Your ethics is a consequentialist ethics. And Cedar looks really confused.
He says, uh, uh, hummina, hummina. He says, you know, utilitarian.
Utilitarianism is a subset of consequentialist ethics. And Seder looks at him and says, I'm not, I don't really, I don't think about, I'm a consequentialist or utilitarian.
But it wasn't like really a question to him. The interlocutor was helping him.
He was saying, no, the thing you've just described by definition is a form of utilitarian ethics, specifically one advocated not even just by John Stuart Mill or Jeremy Bentham, but most recently by Peter Singer. That's your view.
And so the question then becomes, okay, well, why is that your view? You know, I guess the grounding of my ethics is that good is to be done and evil is to be avoided. That's different than his utilitarianism, which is just minimize suffering for the greatest number of people possible.
It reveals a great distinction between classical political philosophy and liberal political philosophy. Classical political philosophy pursuing the greatest good, the sumum bonum, the common good, recognizing that there is such a thing as a common good in society liberal political philosophy beginning with with thomas hobbes saying that basically there is no common good we can't really understand a greatest good the only thing that we could even define as a common good is peace to save us from the war of all against all in which life is nasty brutish and.
And so really what we're after is not pursuing the greatest good, but avoiding the greatest evil, which is death, suffering and death. That's kind of where that comes from.
So it's an interesting political divide, and it could have been an interesting conversation, except the left, this guy showed up. He's supposed to be one of the better people on the left to articulate his views.
He doesn't even know what he believes. Also, it's not like this guy is 22 years old.
I think this guy's pushing 60, okay? This guy's had a long time to figure out what he thinks. He doesn't even know what he thinks.
I think this is true broadly with the left, and it's why our political debates are largely fruitless. And this is backed up by social science, by the way.
I think Jonathan Haidt did a paper on this.

It's not just that we're speaking past each other.

It's not just that we have an irreconcilable first principles or something like that. It's even more basic than that.
The right understands the left and the left doesn't understand the right. And so when the left is simply making arguments from ignorance the the bases of which they themselves don't understand now speaking over confusion on what we believe that's all it's a great you got to watch the jubilee episode it's it's fabulous speaking of confusion over what we believe dylan mulvaney he's back he needs he needs a little press he'd been out of the news for a year or so.
And so he's got a book. We covered the book on the show a week or two ago, a little bit from the first part of it.
Now he's doing the media tour. He goes on The View and forget about Dylan Mulvaney, even forget about the transgenderism issue, which I'm sick of talking about.
Just pay attention to how Whoopi Goldberg, a chief spokesman of the American left in pop culture, because she has the seat on The View for many years. Notice how little she understands about the view that she is proposing.
I'm not sure what's going on or why this is an issue. The same for me as when people say, oh oh you know i i don't know how i feel about

you you do god doesn't make mistakes and the challenge is not to the trans people it's to the people who are not trans that's what god is looking to see how you treat people yeah That's what is absolutely true.

The argument is transgenderism is true.

Men can be women.

Men should be permitted to behave as women.

Men should be permitted to undergo mutilations, to radically change their bodies, chemical procedures, psychiatric treatment, perhaps all the way down even to little children.

They must be permitted to do that because God doesn't make mistakes. You catch the contradiction there? Listen, Johnny, you're a boy.
You got all the boy parts and the boy DNA, and you've been Johnny your whole life. But now you say that you're Sally.
And you say you were born in the wrong body. And your true identity doesn't match the body in which you, the true you were born.
And so you must undergo very expensive, very painful medical experiments to change your body to better align with your perceived understanding of yourself because God doesn't make mistakes.

Right, God doesn't make, if you want to take the God doesn't make mistakes, obviously God in principle doesn't make mistakes.

Though that doesn't really tell us about the point Whoopi's trying to make here.

But if you say God doesn't make mistakes, then you would say, yeah, transgenderism's fake. God doesn't make mistakes.
You're a boy. Now, what is needed here really is just a more thorough and coherent anthropology, because God does not make mistakes.
God does not do evil. And yet, mistakes are made in the world, and evil exists in the world.
So how do we account for that? Whoopi's confusion, a lot of the left's confusion in political philosophy, by the way, comes from their inability to understand original sin. The fact that they took original sin, the Christian concept, Christianity, which built our civilization, and they just throw it out.

They don't like the idea of original sin.

But original sin is not some prescription about people.

It's a description.

It's just a fact of the world.

It's a fallen world.

So how do we make sense of that?

Even little babies, they don't commit any personal sin, and yet bad things happen.

And they do bad things, even though they're not totally aware of it. How do you make sense of that? Well, there is original sin.
Okay, so if you can make sense of original sin, where does original sin come from? It's because human beings have abused their free will. So it's not God doing the evil.
It's not God making a mistake. It's man abusing his free will.
And in the Christian understanding then, you would say, well, look, maybe God didn't make a mistake in the evil that pervades the world, but he definitely made a mistake in creating the world because he created a world in which human beings would abuse their free will. And so that itself was a mistake, right? No.
Christianity accounts for this too, in the fact of the incarnation and the atonement. That perhaps this is in fact the greatest possible world because a world in which God himself takes on flesh and dwells among us, in which God sends his only begotten son to be crucified for our sins and to be resurrected on the third day is an even better world than a world in which man had not abused his free will and fallen.
You might say, well, that's all crazy, Michael. I don't believe in any of that.
I'm not a Christian. I'm not saying you have to be, though I recommend it.
I think you should be. I'm just telling you, Christianity accounts for that.
Our traditional understanding of ourselves and our culture accounts for that. It makes sense of the world.
Liberalism does not. Leftism, random humanist utilitarianism, whatever Sam Sater on the Jubilee show says, it doesn't.
Whoopi Goldberg's understanding of transgenderism, it doesn't make sense of the world, even on their own terms. So you can tell me, well, I find Christianity unsatisfying and insufficient.
Okay, what's better? Give me a better alternative. You can't.
You can't. And that's where a lot of our confusion comes from.
We threw out the systems that did make sense and that allowed our civilization to flourish. And we said, we know better.
We can recreate the world out of our tiny stock of reason. But it turns out we're not that good at it.
And things begin to decay as a result of that. Now, at The Daily Wire, we bring you the facts.
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My favorite comment yesterday actually didn't come from YouTube. It came in an email from a young man who hosted me one evening after I spoke at a university and had a really enjoyable dinner after this university speech.
A number of the students and people. But anyway, he wrote this in.
He said, Michael, I briefly wanted to push back on your outlook of boozing and Zoomers. While I do partially share your sentiment, the rebellion against the system or your parents, which Joe Rogan points to as a reason young men have flocked to conservatism, I fear the problem is far more serious.
We live in a recorded, judgmental, digital world where a foolish night out sees young men faced with allegations that strip them of their dignity and where men do not even wish to approach women for fear of being seen as creepy or weird. A shocking 45% of men my age, 18 to 25, have never asked a woman out in person.
That's a crazy number. I wasn't aware of that number.
Meanwhile, online alternatives mean no more drinking in the parking lot before a movie, after the football game, or at a casual bar. Less hookups, good.
Less drinking, neutral. And less eudaimonia, less happiness, less human flourishing, bad.
A great point. A great point.
Because my view was, it's hip to be square. The Zoomers aren't drinking because they're on the straight and narrow or something.
But that's a great caveat to it. And it takes a big, handsome, wise, delightful man to admit when he's missed something.
And that's a very good addition. Getting back to some practical politics for a second, we got a fight going on, baby.
This actually does link in with everything we've been talking about today because it gets to ideological confusion. This time, not on the left, but on the right.
House Republicans have a continuing resolution before them, a bill that would avoid a government shutdown and fund the government through September. President Trump supports this bill.
The vast majority of Republicans in Congress support this bill. All the Democrats oppose it.
I think every single one, maybe either one or two straights, but I think every single one opposes it. The Republicans overwhelmingly support it.
Three Republicans are no or maybe no on it. And one of those Republicans is a hard no, Thomas Massey.
What's really interesting about this is Thomas Massey is regularly considered one of, if not the most right-wing member of Congress. But he says no.
So first, what's in the bill? The continuing resolution increases defense spending by $6 billion. It decreases non-defense discretionary spending by $13 billion.
So non-defense discretionary spending excludes things like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, which the libs have been fear-mongering on for decades at this point, saying Republicans want to throw granny off a cliff and kill your social security. Some Republicans have been open to it.
Trump, though, consistently for his entire

political career has said, we're not going to touch entitlements. We're not touching social

security. We're not touching Medicare or Medicaid.
Now that's non-discretionary spending. That's

money that just has to be spent. So the 13 billion that's being decreased is out of money that is not

spent on defense, and it's not mandatory spending. There is not a single earmark in this bill

Thank you. that's being decreased is out of money that is not spent on defense, and it's not mandatory spending.
There is not a single earmark in this bill. Pork barrel spending, community projects, which is how members assent to give their vote to a lot of bills, is they'll say, well, look, I'll give you my vote, but you got to build a $10 million bridge in my district.
It doesn't even need to go anywhere. It could be a bridge to nowhere, but you got to build it.
And so there's a lot of federal spending there. As a portion of the federal budget, it's not a huge deal.
John McCain made it a big deal during the 2008 presidential campaign because he was a Republican who supported bigger spending projects, not just on defense, but also on entitlements. So the way that he could seem like he was tough on spending was to go after earmarks, which are a relatively small portion of federal spending.
But in any case, this bill doesn't have that either. Immigration Customs Enforcement spending is slightly up to $10 million here.
So my read on it is, as far as continuing resolutions go, it's pretty good. It freezes spending at 2024 levels, so the spending is at least not going to increase.
And it reduces spending in certain areas, which is good. And then Trump and Elon are reducing spending in the executive branch through their own power, not through the legislature.
So all in all, it's pretty good. If I were a member of Congress, I would vote for this.
However, I understand why some members might say, well, it's still a lot of money. And so you got Tim Burchett and Corey Mills, two Republicans are saying, I don't know, I'm on the fence.
But the one who says, no, I'm a no, is Thomas Massey, who is a huge fiscal hawk. He's kind of like Rand Paul in that way.
Rand Paul in the Senate votes against a ton of stuff, just kind of reflexively. Both of these guys are from Kentucky.
Must be something in the water. But in any case, it's a principled stand.
I don't know that I agree with it, but it's a principled stand. And Trump is furious.
Trump is now threatening to primary Thomas Massie. He says, thank you to the House Freedom Caucus for just delivering a big blow to the radical left Democrats and their desire to raise taxes and shut our country down.
Because the House Freedom Caucus, which is usually the impediment, they usually obstruct these kinds of bills. They've agreed, okay, we're going to support it.
The Democrats hate America and all it stands for. That's why they allowed millions of criminals to invade our nation.
Sometimes it takes great courage to do the right thing. Congressman Thomas Massey of beautiful Kentucky is an automatic no vote on just about everything.
That's kind of true. Despite the fact that he's always voted for continuing resolutions in the past, he should be primary, all caps, and I will lead the charge against him.
He's just another grandstander who's too much trouble and not worth the fight. He reminds me of Liz Cheney before her historic record-breaking fall, parentheses, loss.
I like how he has to give you a synonym. He doesn't define what her fall was.
It's a loss. She lost.
The people of Kentucky won't stand for it. Just watch.
Do I have any takers, all caps, three question marks. Anyway, thank you again to the House Freedom Caucus for your very important vote.
We need to buy some time in order to make America great again, greater than ever before. Unite and win.
Okay, this is notable, not because Trump is threatening to primary a Republican. That's happened before.
He's threatening to primary one of the most right-wing Republicans.

How is the Republican base going to take this? Say what you will, Thomas Massey is no Liz Cheney.

He's got some real right-wing bona fides. Will the GOP base take this? This will be a test of how much Trump dominates the GOP.
I suspect in a fight between Trump and Massey,

even though Massey's a real tough guy, I think Trump's going to win. I think he just dominates

the GOP that much. But there's a real question.
What do we believe? What do we want? What are we

fighting for? Whose side are we on? What defines conservatism? What defines our politics?

The Trump election, certainly the Trump re-election, signals a seismic shift, a tectonic plate shift in our politics. The shift from Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Obama, sorry, to Clinton to Bush to Obama, it wasn't all that big.
They all kind of basically agreed the same stuff. The shift to Trump was a big shift.
Okay, the shift from Eisenhower and Nixon to JFK and LBJ, and then certainly into the LBJ administration, that was a big shift. The shift into FDR's administration, certainly the shift into Woodrow Wilson's, that was another big shift.
Wasn't just moving deck chairs around. That was an actual change.
We're seeing a change here. And so the question is, what will define the right at American politics moving forward? This battle between Trump and Massey is a pretty good example of that.
Okay, there's a story I really want to get to. I don't know if I have time, though.
Well, I'll get to it. I'll get to it really quickly.
The Financial Times has a woman's guide to wearing ties. Woman's guide to wearing ties.
FT, women should wear ties. The latest female power dressing, Flex, is women wearing long necks ties.
I can get to this story very quickly because my advice is very simple. Don't do it.
It makes you look like a lesbian. Neckties are good.
Men should wear more neckties than they do. I'm guilty of this.
I don't wear a necktie on this show. I probably should.
Neckties look good. It completes an outfit for a man, but it's for a man, not for a woman.
The FT is admitting this when they say it's a power dressing flex. And power is traditionally understood as more a male virtue than a female virtue.
Women have plenty of power in their own right, but it's a little bit different. When the women try to be the girl boss in the boardroom, that is women consciously taking on virtues that are traditionally ascribed to men, not to women.
Neckties for women are nothing new. They have popped up for over 100 years.
But it's always by women who are trying to be more like men and who are probably disproportionately lesbian if we're being totally frank about it. Okay, it's the suffragettes, for instance, wore neckties.
Feminists of 150 years have worn neckties. Ladies, don't do it.
You have real power in your own nature. You don't need to, I'm not saying you can't go work in public.
I'm not saying you can't do this. I'm not saying you can't do plenty of things that men do that you want to do.
But don't, trying to be a man is not expanding your power. It is limiting your power by saying that the only kinds of virtues that are to be pursued, that have any value, are the virtues that naturally attain to men.
Okay, don't, no, you're a woman. It's good, that's something, I can't be a woman.
Men are dressing like women. Women are dressing like men.
It's very confused.

Ideologically very confused.

Anthropologically very confused.

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