The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 1697 - The JFK Files Exposed (For Real This Time!)

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

We've got the most explosive revelations from the JFK files, Harvard launches a remedial math course, and President Trump might eliminate income tax for the vast majority of Americans.   Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/4biDlri   Ep.1697   - - -   DailyWire+:   We’re leading the charge again and launching a full-scale push for justice. Go to https://PardonDerek.com right now and sign the petition.   Now is the time to join the fight. Watch the hit movies, documentaries, and series reshaping our culture. Go to https://dailywire.com/subscribe today.   Live Free & Smell Fancy with The Candle Club: https://thecandleclub.com/michael   - - -   Today's Sponsors:   Allegiance Flag Supply - Go to https://ShowAllegiance.com and you can save $35 off your complete flag set.   Balance of Nature - Go to https://balanceofnature.com and use promo code KNOWLES for 35% off your first order PLUS get a free bottle of Fiber and Spice.   ExpressVPN - Secure your online data TODAY by visiting https://ExpressVPN.com/knowles and you can get an extra four months FREE.   - - -   Socials:   Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3RwKpq6   Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3BqZLXA   Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3eEmwyg   Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3L273Ek Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Some people were very upset with me yesterday for titling the show, breaking massive JFK file drop explained, and then not talking at all about the 63,000 JFK assassination files that the government released. I want to be very clear. I make no apology. There was no false advertising. I made good on my promise because my show yesterday revealed precisely as much new information about the JFK assassination, as is contained in those files. I want to see if I have this straight.

Maybe I'm a little thick. Maybe I'm missing something. People believe that President Kennedy was murdered by the CIA, the mob, the Soviets, the Soviets, the Cubans, the Fed, the Deep State, LBJ, George Bush, or some combination of those players. They believe that our government is so evil that it covered up the murder of a president. for 60 years and then violated a federal law mandating the release specifically of those documents for 33 years. But now they believe the government is just going to tell us. Is that that's the

theory? Okay, cool. Great. Sounds good. Let me know. Just let me know. I haven't read through them all. You tell me what you find in those 60,000 pages. I can't wait to hear about the smoking gun which I'm sure we're going to hear about any day now, probably right after we learn the real story about Jeffrey Epstein. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles show. Welcome back to the show. Will the vast majority of Americans have their federal income tax just completely eliminated? That is what the Trump administration is suggesting. That really, that makes me even more patriotic than I already was. There's so much more to say, first though, go to show allegiance.com. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, the flag that was made right here in America by the good folks at allegiance flag supply.

This flag, this is the flag to get. Okay. Hand-sown American flag made in Charleston, South Carolina. I love the flag very much, have for my whole life. First song I learned when I was a little boy was it's a grand old flag. It's a high fly in flag and forever in peace, may she wave. My grandpa taught me that. I have a lot of flag pins. I fly a flag in the back windshield in my car. I have flag key chains, a great flag keychain that my kids love from Allegiance. You got to go get this is the one. Don't get some cheap Chinese made American flag. That kind of undercuts the point, doesn't it? Go get the flag. Fly in front of your home. I have the allegiance flag for the front of my home. I have an allegiance flag from my office. I have this one here. I haven't even done anything with this one here. There's just here to show you the product. Go to show allegiance.com. experience the difference of an American-made flag and celebrate this great American golden age.

Right now, you'll save 35 bucks of your complete flag set, show allegiance.com for American flags made the American way. The JFK files thing reveals a degree of political innocence and naivete that I actually find charming. I want to be very clear. The thing that I'm laughing about is not the notion that JFK will. was not killed by a lone gunman who had no connections to anyone. I'm not laughing at the suggestion that some other groups or individuals were involved in the murder of JFK. It is totally plausible to me that JFK was actually murdered by the Italian Jewish Cuban mobsters who worked for

George Bush and Lyndon Johnson. I'm not even really joking. I'm joking about 20%. I don't know. There could be of conspiracy, an American president was murdered. The thing that I'm laughing at is that the people who think that believe that the government's just going to tell us. It's not, if that happened,

if it were some combination or just even the individual conspiracy plot by the CIA or the Soviets or the Israelis or the Cubans or the LBJ or the George Bush, or like whatever.

You will never find out about that. That will, the document would not exist anymore. It's just amazing. On the one hand, it reflects this very jaded view of the gall. You know, it's like a guy with a cigarette by a youth.

You think you know the government. I know the government. I've been looking into these files for years. Oh, the kind of corruption. Yeah. Oh, it's so bad. This government, you can't trust a thing they do. Now I can't wait to read the 80.

thousand pages they just gave me. That'll probably tell me the truth. That won't just be a huge waste of time. Oh my goodness gracious. It's like whiplash. So anyway, I'm not going to look at all in the JFK files. Please be my guest. Read through all of them. Let me know if you find anything juicy. I don't think you will. If I were a gambling man. Okay. Now, turning away from Kennedy, but still speaking of Harvard men, this article is like an onion. headline or a Babylon B headline, Harvard University is launching a remedial math course because Harvard students, Harvard is supposed to be at least one of the best schools in the country, Harvard students can't do basic math anymore. So this is from the Harvard Crimson. I'm not even

reading it from some outside group. Harvard is essentially putting this press release out themselves, Harvard launches new intro math course to address pandemic learning loss. Hold on, to address pandemic learning loss. The Harvard Math Department will pilot a new introductory course aimed at rectifying a lack of foundational algebra skills among Harvard students, according to Harvard's director of introductory math, Brendan A. Kelly. The course, Math MA5, will run along other math courses with an expanded five-day schedule. They need five days a week to teach the Harvard students remedial math. But they say it's totally understandable because of pandemic learning loss.

Hold on, hold on. I understand the COVID lockdowns did interrupt learning at schools all around the country. That should not have affected Harvard students. To get into Harvard, even today, at least until recently, was still really, really hard. To get into those top schools, I'm not saying to graduate those. To graduate Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, all those schools is actually relatively easy. The great inflation is rampant. But to get in is still very, very hard.

Missing a few math courses should not affect your ability to do the work at Harvard. I don't believe that COVID is responsible for the remedial math class at Harvard. These kids should have figured out foundational algebra in sixth, seventh grade. It wouldn't have mattered if they missed a few years in high school. I don't think COVID is responsible. You know what else happened in 2020 at Harvard? It wasn't just that COVID messed up the schedule. You know what else happened in 2020?

Harvard removed the requirement that students take the SAT and ACT to get in. Harvard removed standardized testing to let its students in. This is also around the time that Harvard was fighting tooth and nail to keep its affirmative action racial discrimination policies in place. If I were a gambling man, I suspect that has a lot more to do with Harvard students not being able to do basic math than COVID. Now, 2020, Harvard says we're going to get rid of the SAT, the ACT. They've announced last year they're going to bring the SAT and the ACT back. Why? Because the students are not of the same intellectual caliber that they used to be. Because it turns out standardized tests aren't everything, but they do reflect some realities of competence and intelligence.

They just do. And Harvard doesn't like that. And Harvard has this vision, this social justice, leftist DEI vision, that it's going to create a class that focuses more on racial identity or sexual identity or blah, blah, blah, over raw intelligence, ability to learn academic skills. And this is the consequence of that. Harvard can do that. Harvard is well within its rights to say, we were once among the preeminent universities in America.

We are the oldest university in America. We were the most prestigious. We now, we were that thing because of our extreme academic rigor. We now want to confer that prestige on people based on criteria other than academic rigor. We want to confer it to people based on their race or based on their sexual desires or based on their social justice, leftist activism in their extracurriculars in high school. Whatever, they can do that. But they cannot then expect the students. to be able to keep up with the old academic standards.

The inevitable result of that kind of social engineering is to lower academic standards to the point that you now have remedial math at Harvard. Absolutely hilarious. Speaking of all of those sexual minorities and all of these kind of DEI initiatives, Cynthia Nixon is an actress. I think she ran for governor of New York too. Cynthia Nixon's an actress. And she has just come out at some rally

and made the claim that not only is her child trans, the child she has with her quote-unquote wife, but her nieces or nephews are trans. And actually her children's friends are trans. And, well, she can explain the pattern. I am here today as the mother of a proud, trans man. I am here today as the aunt of a proud trans man. My best friend's kid is trans.

And my kid's best friend is trans. My wife and I, our lives are filled with the most amazing, beautiful, brave, trans people, young and old, but especially young. And the idea that this city is filled. with young people who thought they had a place to go where they could receive the highest care and that place has now been shut to them. Sickens me. Sickenes me to my core. It sickens her that now the people have elected politicians who don't want to trans the kids because don't you know every kid she knows is trans. Her kid is trans. her kids' friends are trans,

her family members kids are trans, all the kids are trans. What a coincidence, huh? What are the odds? What's in the water at the Nixon household? I did the math, and I'm being very conservative with my numbers here.

Because she says, you know, my children or my nieces or my friends or so. I don't, she could be talking about 10 kids. She could be, but let's just say it's four. let's just say it's one kid for her, two kids for her sister or her friend or whatever, and one friend of the kids. Let's just leave it at that. It seems that she's implying it's more kids, but let's be really conservative. And let's also be really generous and say 1% of the population is trans or identifies as trans because trans isn't real. That means that there is a one in 100 million.

chance of Cynthia Nixon knowing all these so-called trans kids. The odds are one in 100 million, but actually the odds are a lot better than that if trans identity is not a real natural thing, but is rather a social contagion and an ideology into which kids have been indoctrinated in recent years by people like Cynthia Nixon. What do you think? What do you think? Is it just the craziest coincidence ever that upends our understanding of human nature? Or is this a social contagion and child abuse? I know what most Americans think, because I know what the election results were in November. There's so much more to say first, though, go to balance of nature.com, use promo code noles. Balance of nature, fruits and veggies is the most convenient way to get whole fruits and vegetables daily,

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balance of nature.com. promo code Noles. I got my Mayflower, triple flame lighter here. This is not the single flame zichard lighter. This is the triple flame one comes in, or it's built for that

humidore, that beautiful Mayflower glass top, Humidor, Triple Flame. I'm going to use that to light. My smells and bells candle. Yesterday was the Feast of St. Joseph. Today, we're back in our Lenton penances. This is the second full week of Lent. I hope your lent is going very well. Make sure you get your home to smell like a 12th century monastery. Thecandleclub.com slash Michael, that's how you do it. Speaking of young people and leftism, the CEO of Ben and Jerry's has been fired. And this is great, great news.

Because the CEO of Ben and Jerry's was fired for pushing radical leftist activism. Specifically, I suspect, because less than two weeks ago, Ben and Jerry's posted to social media about its great love of and defense of and care for abortionists. Today, they wrote, today is a national abortion provider appreciation day. We stand with abortion providers today and every day. Learn more and take action now. And this was extreme even for the left. We know the left loves abortion, but usually they use euphemisms.

Let's say women's rights or women's health care or whatever, privacy, autonomy, bodily autonomy, but no. Then sometimes they'll say we support women and mothers. No. Happy abortionist day. We love abortionists. Get those four steps out and thank your local mass murderer. Crazy stuff. That is psycho stuff, even for left-wing activists.

So it was too much for the parent company of Ben and Jerry's, because Ben and Jerry sold it out years ago to Unilever. Unilever removed the Ben and Jerry's CEO, but Ben and Jarius is fighting back. Ben and Jerez is suing. the parent company over breach of contract because the contract that they signed apparently says the unilever cannot unilaterally remove the CEO. That's exactly what happened. So on the one hand, I want to congratulate all of you. I said on the show when that abortion tweet came out, I said,

look, I almost never call for a boycott because I don't think that boycotts are particularly effective and you got to make sure that you're focused. You focus your resources on the one that you can really win. I said in this case, no person of good conscience can ever eat Ben and Jerry's again. I call for a full boycott on Ben and Jerry's. And other conservatives echoed the call, and it did have a political effect, obviously, because the parent company said, all right, we don't want to deal with this. This was obviously about the abortionist tweet. We're going to get rid of the CEO. So then you ask yourself, okay, does that mean we can eat Ben and Jerry's again? My answer is no.

Because we know that Ben and Jerry's the company underneath this major corporate structure, Ben and Jerry's isn't sorry at all. Ben and Jerry's is actually suing the parent company because they want to be able to promote abortionists today and every day. So they haven't learned their lesson at all. I don't see why I would give one red cent to Ben and Jerry's. You might say, well, Ben and Jerry's doesn't own Ben and Jerry's. And if Unilever gets the message, shouldn't we support them? Okay, maybe. Maybe. Here's what I want. I want an explicit apology. Forget about Ben and Jerry's. Those guys are losers and they're completely useless. They're not going to give you anything that you want. But I want a full explicit apology written down by the parent company, Unilever, right now. If we get a direct, specific apology, we are sorry. We should not have promoted. abortionists, then maybe we loosen up and we eat Ben & Jerry's again. If we don't get that,

I see no reason ever to eat their slop garbage again. Now, speaking of business and commerce, the Commerce Secretary for President Trump, Howard Lutnik, has some very good news for the majority of Americans, not for every single American, but for the vast majority of Americans, for all Americans who earn less than $150,000 per year, the Trump administration wants you to know your federal tax rate might go down to zero. So we are the buyer of everybody's commodities, products, goods and services. Everything comes from us, right? Let them pay a membership fee.

We all understand that model. Let them pay. How about we, you and I, and every single person we know pay less? How about no tax on tips? How about no tax on overtime? How about no Social Security? How about all those things? These are the kind of thoughts that will change America. I know what his goal is. No tax for anybody who makes less than $150,000 a year. That's his goal. And that's what I'm working for. Huge. Absolutely huge. So, Lutnik here, he's defending the tariffs. And he says, look, we consume everybody's products. Everybody wants to be in the American market.

So let them pay. Because when we want to go into their markets, they make us pay. They slap huge tariffs on our products, on our agriculture, on our automobiles, on. These are allies of ours. These are our supposed friends, 100% tariffs on our automobiles to protect their own national industry. So, okay, they're going to make us. pay, then we make them pay. That's the art of the deal, reciprocal tariffs. Let's try, maybe we'll just reduce the tariffs for both of us kind of approach. But I think what Lutnik is

signaling here is something I've suspected for a long time, which is that Trump does not merely support the tariffs in order to get better trade deals. I don't think Trump's support of tariffs is merely instrumental or a bluff or a threat. I think. I think Trump's support of tariffs is merely instrumental or a bluff or a threat. I think Trump believes in tariffs because if you are going to eliminate the federal income tax for people who make less than $150,000 a year, that means that you're eliminating the federal income tax for the majority of Americans. But what is the median income in America, $80,000? Something like that. So you're talking about the clear majority of Americans make less than $150,000 per year. How are you going to make up that money? We already run massive budget deficits. We already have a $34 trillion debt. How are you going to

make up that money. The only way to make up that money is with tariffs, which means that Trump is leaning on the tariffs, not merely as a negotiating tool, but as a revenue razor, which means that when he talks about the McKinnelly Golden Age and how he's going to use tariffs, when he invokes presidents like Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, the man who said, give me a tariff, I'll give you the greatest nation on earth. He means it. It's not just a bluff. It's not just a little showbiz. Razzle-dazzle. Trump is a... shifting the economic conversation. He's returning the economic platform of the GOP to what it traditionally had been before the middle of the 20th century. Trump is leaving a legacy. No federal

income tax for people making less, making $150,000 per year. That's quite a legacy, especially if you live in a good state like mine, Tennessee, which doesn't have a state income tax either. Man, that'd be a lot of extra money, a lot extra scratch line around 50 grand, 60 grand. more pretty good. I'd take it. There's so much more to say first, though, go to expressvpn.com slash Knowles. If you own any internet-connected device, there are thousands of companies that might know you better than you know yourself. They're called data brokers.

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Chuck Schumer does not like the idea of Americans paying less than taxes. Chuck Schumer does not like the idea of Americans even wanting to pay. less in taxes. Schumer is invaying against the Americans who don't want to pay their fair share to the federal government. And you know what their attitude is? I made my money all by myself. How dare your government take my money for me? I don't want to pay taxes. Or I built my company with my bare hands. How dare your government tell me how I should treat my customers, my, the land and

water that I own, or my employees? They have. hate government. Government's a barrier to people, a barrier to stop them from doing things. They want to destroy it. We are not letting them do it and we're united. Chuck Schumer is showing his age here. This is a totally outdated

attack. This is the sort of attack. This is the exact same attack that Schumer would have made during the Tea Party or during the 2000s, during the Bush era, or during the 90s, or during the 80s. These Republicans they're just fiscal libertarian zealots who hate the government and want to eliminate it.

That was true. That was a good attack from the 1980s up through the Tea Party era. That's not really a precise attack in the Trump era, 2016 onward, in the populist era. Because the Republican Party is no longer, I don't know that it ever really was. It certainly shouldn't have been the party of small government. There's no such thing as a small government in a country of over 300 million people. There is a party of limited government, and there is a good argument for limitations on the government. But Trump wields the government. He wants a robust government.

He wants a government that levies tariffs. He wants a government that is muscular, that deports people, that enforces social policy and norms and standards, that annexes Greenland, that invades Canada, apparently. He, this is not your father's Republican Party. It's your great, great, great-grandfather's Republican Party. It's your great-grandfather's Republican Party. But it's not your dad's Republican Party. There's been a change, as we've been observing. And Chuck Schumer hasn't kept up.

The problem that the new right-wing coalition has with taxes is not the same problem that maybe our parents had. the previous generation Republican Party didn't like paying taxes in part for the reasons Chuck Schumer's saying because they believed that they had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps because they believed that it was their money and the government didn't have a right to it because they believed at the extremes that taxation is theft because they were very much taken with this late 20th century libertarian ideology. Not so anymore. We still oppose high taxes. But the reason, I'll always speak for myself. The reason I oppose high taxes is not because I don't think the government has any right to tax. I think the government does have a right to tax. I don't believe that taxation is theft.

I do believe the state is important. I don't believe in radical individualism. I think man is a social creature. I actually do like roads and bridges, which was always a Democrat attack against Republicans, that we refuse to acknowledge who built the roads, who built the bridges. I don't think that the government is intrinsically evil. I'm not an anarchist. I'm not any of those things.

The reason that I oppose high taxes is not because of the procedure of collecting taxes. It's because of the substance of what the government is spending those taxes on. That's my problem with it. It's just the latest iteration of maybe the defining political shift of the last 10 years, which is a turn away in focus from procedural norms towards substantive goods to think about it in the free speech issue. A turn away from just debating speech in the abstract and a turn toward debating which kind of standards and norms we're going to live by because standards are inevitable. A turn away from the government just only doing bad things, a turn toward the kinds of

good things the government can do and the bad things that the government should not do any longer. So when we're talking about taxes, it's not just, oh, the government has no right to my money. It's no, no, no. The government has no right, or the government rather is not right to spend my money on lesbian ballet performances in Thailand. The government is not right to spend my money prosecuting pro-life fathers for praying outside of abortion clinics. The government is not right to use my money to spy on Catholic churches because they call them traditionalist radical extremists. The government is not right to put my money behind lambasting and ostracizing Americans, ordinary parents who just want a little control over their kids' curricula, and comparing them to terrorists. That's the problem. It's not that the government doesn't have the right to be a government. We like governments. You know, our founding fathers created a government for us. The civil authority is there for our own good. fashionable late 20th century libertarian ideology

toward a more classical and indeed a more Christian conception of government means that we recognize that the civil authority is there for our own good and it does not bear the sword in vain and there is such a thing as a common good and the common good and the states need a common good but it needs to be a common good not a common bad

okay that's the deal schumer and so I think some of the boomer lib establishment politicians. They just haven't caught up with that, but there has been a tectonic shift, not even just in electoral coalitions, but in the very way that we think about politics. Now, speaking of that tectonic shift, speaking of people not keeping up with the times, the liberals themselves are recognizing that there is a major problem with how their party is handling the Trump administration.

Charlemagne from the Breakfast Club, this liberal show to a predominantly black audience, has just bucked his party's leadership, has just bucked the talking points of the Democrats, by asking, hold on a second, why are Democrats standing up for face tattooed Satan worshipping foreign, illegal alien gangsters? I want to know more when it comes to the deportations because deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes. I understand that. Shouldn't be a problem, right? It shouldn't be an issue. So why are folks fighting about gang members being sent

away? Like there are some other deportation cases. I'm sure they could be fighting about, like, folks who've been in this country for a long time, not committing no crimes, paying taxes, but have gotten caught up in the process. Those are folks they should be fighting for. Why are they raising hell about a gang being deported? So the main thing is proof and making sure

that the U.S. is getting it right when it comes to deporting criminals, you know, and making sure that they get their due process, that you're actually deporting people who are committing crimes as opposed to just be running down on anybody just because they might be a migrant. People want them to have due process, but I'm with you, if they're a gang member and they have warrants and nah, just like, who are we fighting for? Are we fighting for good people?

Are we fighting for people that's been paying their taxes? We're fighting the people that's been here trying to stay here. He's totally right. And even the woman who's responding, she's admitting that he's totally right. Yeah, no, I mean, the best defense she can have is, yeah, I mean, we just got to make sure they're getting her right. Yeah, okay, but hold on. are we really confused about deporting illegal alien gangsters, cartel members?

Are that, is that really controversial? And no, of course it's not. Most Americans voted in November for mass deportations of like everybody, not just the face tattooed criminals. So what Trump has done masterfully is, he's begun the deportations only focusing on the very worst and most obviously wicked criminals hardcore dirty rotten down low rapist murderer criminals with face tattoos a visual clue that this person might have some problems and because the democrats reflexively oppose anything that trump does

the democrats have taken the side of the aforementioned satan worshipping face tattooed criminals So Trump takes, this is not an 80-20 issue. This is an 80% support, 20% opposed. This is a 982 issue. This is a 991 issue. If that. In fact, Charlemagne, a huge lib, a major voice on the left says, hold on, does anybody disagree with deporting the Satan worshiping criminals? And the answer is yes.

The elite tier of the Democrat Party. the people leading that party right now. The people leading that party, even in the conception of the party base, straight off a cliff. You know, right now, Ben Shapiro is breaking down one of the most controversial cases in modern history.

The case for Derek Chauvin, an exclusive high-part series on the Ben Shapiro show. Episode two drops today. You do not want to miss it. In today's episode, Ben walks you step by step through what really happened when George Floyd tried to pass counterfeit money in Minneapolis, the struggle, the police encounter,

and the events leading to his death. This is not slanted. This is not some woke tale, as we have been told by the media. Ben is giving you the whole story from start to finish. Ben is making the case for why President Trump should pardon Derek Chauvin. And you need to hear it for yourself. Listen now on DailyWR Plus. My favorite comment yesterday is from Joseph Roberts, 9-786, who says, Happy Feast of St. Joseph, Michael. Have a good day. Was the feast of St. Joseph yesterday. And so, you know, we're in Lent right now. And one of the things that I'd given up for Lent, I'll tell you, be open. I'm not addicted to anything, but I gave up. Every so often I like to throw in one of those little zinnies, you know,

a little three or six-milly lip-pilly, as all the right-wingers are doing nowadays. And the night before St. Joseph's Day was my birthday. It was Michael's Day. So I went out, had a couple of Coca-Cola, had a cigar, you know, and I was a little tired the next day. And I was Johnson. I said, if any day, if I were going to have a little, one of those little nicotine, but now would be the day, okay? And then I realized it was St. Joseph's Day, which meant it was game on.

Game on for your boy. So I was very glad to hear that. It was a particularly wonderful St. Joseph's Day. Now, speaking of President Trump's reorganization of the government and recalibration of the Republican Plata, platform and ideology. Vox.com, a left-wing outlet, noticed something recently, noticed that President Trump is attacking his opponents in a rather different way than Republicans traditionally have. Vox.com pointed out, after canceling $400 million in federal grants for Columbia University last week, Trump officials sent a letter demanding the school make sweeping

changes to its policies and governance or risk losing the rest of its federal money. And the basis for Trump's threat was civil rights law. Christopher Caldwell has a very good piece in Compact Magazine right now on this shift, that Republicans for years have been running against the political machine, the weapon of civil rights law that the Democrats have used to crush their enemies for 60 years now. And the, and the, argument that Republicans had been making is that civil rights law creates a kind of parallel constitution and then it violates the text and tradition of the Constitution consistently, and it's only ever used, it's got this nice sounding sales pitch, you know, we're defending civil

rights, but it's only ever used by the left to crush the right. Chris Caldwell wrote an excellent book on that at the age of entitlement, but what Vox.com is noticing, what Coldwell's noticing, what a number of people are noticing right now is that Trump has flipped the script. He's not just running against civil rights law, civil rights law, which is a misnomer because it actually diminishes or outright denies the legitimate rights of most people. Trump is using it. This regime that the left installed in the 1960s to give itself nearly limitless power, Trump is now using that himself. And it's brilliant. It's brilliant. It's galaxy brain stuff. Okay. It's like tired, wired, inspired. You know, tired is wield the civil rights regime for leftism. That's tired. We don't like that. Inspired is dismantle the civil rights regime, which is never going to happen. Inspired is wield the civil rights regime for the. the right for the good stuff, for the common good, for the American tradition. That's what Trump does.

More evidence of the, it's occurring to me, it didn't even occur to me when I was putting the show script together last night. This is even more evidence of the distinguishing feature of the Trump era of the last 10 years, which is the shift away from procedural norms towards substantive goods. Trump is a realistic person. Trump has a good political gut. He is not some ideologue. He's not a utopian. He sees the country as it is, and he's going to make the most of what he can with what he has. Trump is looking, and he says, okay, how does our law really work? If he were an ideologue, he'd say, well, you know, it works like schoolhouse rock with a bill up on Capitol Hill, and this is how the government should work, and the way that it actually does work in practice

is a perversion of that, of the great vision of our founding fathers, and that's why we need to completely ignore the bureaucracy. No, no, no. Trump looks at. He says, okay, I don't know about School House Rock. I don't remember my civics class. What I do know is how the government actually works because I have been a media mogul businessman for 40 years, 50 years maybe. And I've dealt with these politicians and I bought them off and I've gotten things done and I've built buildings and I've testified before Congress.

And I know how the government actually works. And the way our government actually works is largely through the civil rights law regime, the parallel constitution. okay, well, if that's how the government actually works, and I want to do stuff with the government, I just got elected to run the government in a good way, I guess I got to deal with that. Okay, well, I guess that means I'm going to use that regime to stop the nonsense at Columbia. I'm going to use that regime to punish my opponents, the people who are enemies of the common good of America. I guess I'm just going to deal with in reality. That's the thesis of the Trump administration. Is it any way?

wonder that he has been a much more effective Republican than, I guess, pretty much any in our lifetime. Certainly in my lifetime. Speaking of civil rights, big news story out, the Italian parents of a child recently born in the USA via surrogacy say that they're too afraid to return home because they fear prosecution for procreative tourism. What does that mean? Well, it's confusing because it says the Italian parents of a child, they're not really the parents of a child. It's two homosexual men who flew to America

to purchase a woman's eggs on the open market, then to rent a woman's womb, then to hire some scientists to create a human being in a laboratory, with the express intent of denying that child, his natural mother,

with the further intent of denying that child his gestational mother, the only human being he's known for nine months, then to take that child from the country in which he was born, fly the kid back to Italy, and pretend that they're a real family. And that's illegal in Italy. Georgia Maloney, the prime minister of Italy,

has passed a law to defend the rights of the child and said, you can't have procreative tourism. We're not going to allow human beings to be sold like commodities. We're not going to allow baby stores to exist. We're not going to allow unethical science, to perform human experimentation or to treat human beings like accessories to be purchased by decadent single individuals or homosexuals, or heterosexual couples for that matter. We're not going to, we haven't gotten quite to the last part in the IVF surrogacy industry discussion yet,

but clearly that's where the momentum of the idea has to be going. At the very least, we're not going to allow people to deny children their natural mother or their natural father. it's against the law. And so these two fellows decided to subvert the law. And now they're pretending they're the victims. The only victim in this case is the child whose legitimate rights have been denied. A child whose most basic human connection that any human being will ever have with his mother has been denied him because of the whims and fantasies of selfish men. That is the only victim in this case.

And these two men pretend to be the victim. and they recognize that they could be subject to prison terms of up to two years, fines of between 600,000 euro and a million euro. This law was passed a little while ago, just went into effect with the aim, according to reports, of protecting poor women around the world who are exploited for surrogacy. Because women are exploited. They're treating parts of their body

and biological products of their body as commodities. You know, women who are hard up for cash, they'll just allow some unethical doctor to harvest their eggs and pay them a fee for it, or they'll rent out their womb because they need the money. So that was the argument for the law, that these women are being exploited. But Italy cannot argue that the women in California are being exploited,

according to the defenders of this couple, because in California, this is all perfectly legal. And America is a first world rich country, and it's all about consenting adults. So I think you can still make the argument that women are being exploited, but it's much harder to make an America than it is in Eastern Europe or, frankly, even in Italy, or in Asia or something like that. Okay. And that's all true, which is why we need to be honest about the central concern here.

The exploitation of women is a concern. It's a reason for banning the purchase of babies and the hiring of scientists to create custom-made, bespoke babies. But the real reason is because the IVF and surrogacy industry denies the legitimate rights of children, robs them of their legitimate rights, of the most basic human connections they deserve. That's the problem. It's kind of like pro-life messaging. You know, pro-life messaging often talks about how women are victims of the abortion industry, which is partially true.

Women can be victims. You know, some boyfriend impregnates a woman and then pressures her to kill her own kid and then she lives with the trauma and guilt of that for the rest of her life. Or the abortionist lies to the woman and pretends that the woman's baby is not really a baby, and the woman figures out that the baby's a baby lives with the trauma the rest of her life. Women are, in a sense, victims of the abortion industry. But they're not the primary victim. The chief victim of the abortion industry is the baby who is murdered.

Okay, that's, so we need to be honest about that. However we can ban these hideous, evil practices is fine by me, but we need to be focused. Otherwise, we're going to leave ourselves very vulnerable. If this is only about the exploitation of women in Eastern Europe or Asia or something like that, then there are going to be ways around it and you're still going to have a very evil industry. that treats human beings as nothing more than commodities. Okay, speaking of ethics, morality.

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