The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 2018 - China Steals 220M Voter Files: Trump's Primetime Speech EXPLAINED

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

Trump declassifies bombshell documents showing China stole 220 million voter files, a trans activist runs to replace Platner for Senate in Maine, and I see Nolan's DEI Odyssey. Ep. 2018 - - - Today's Sponsors: Catholic Match - If you’re looking for a partner, check out the largest Catholic dating platform in the world. Built for Catholics serious about their faith. Visit https://CatholicMatch.com to get started  Balance of Nature - Visit https://BalanceofNature.com today. Subscribe to the Whole Health System and receive an additional 10% off your subscription with promo code KNOWLES. Mack Weldon - Don't sweat the heat this summer. Feel as effortlessly cool as you look with Mack Weldon. Go to https://MackWeldon.com and get 20% off your first order of $125 or more, with promo code MICHAEL. - - - DailyWire+ 🎆 🇺🇸 Our America 250 SALE is still available! Get 3-Months of DailyWire+ for just $17.76 📜 Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://dailywire.com/subscribe Becoming a Daily Wire member allows you to see all of our content ad-free. 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 📘 My book "Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds" is available here: https://dwplus.shop/Speechless 📗 My book "Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide" is available here: https://dwplus.shop/ReasonsToVoteForDemocrats 🕯️ Get your Michael Knowles candles: https://thecandleclub.com/collections/michael-knowles 👕 Don’t dress like a squish. Shop my merch here: https://dwplus.shop/MichaelKnowlesMerch - - - Socials: YouTube — https://youtube.com/@MichaelKnowles Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/michaelknowlesshow Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/michaeljknowles TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@notmichaelknowles X — https://twitter.com/michaeljknowles - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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China currently has the ability to file ballots in your name or to alter your current voter registration. Also, there are well over a quarter million foreign nationals currently illegally registered to vote in federal elections. President Trump revealed all of these troubling findings last night in a primetime speech that the news networks conveniently decided not to air. We will get into the details and what is to be done about it. Then Vice President J.D. Vance gets in even more trouble with certain factions of the Republican Party. This time over economics, a transgender activist runs to replace former Democrat Senate nominee, Graham Platner in Maine. And speaking of transgender's, I go see Christopher Nolan's Odyssey.

I'm Michael Knowles. It's the Michael Knowles show. Welcome back to the show. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio gave a superb speech yesterday, calling for a crackdown on global leftist violence. And what was so great about the speech was not just the diction and the timeliness, but he really got to the heart of what is wrong with socialism, communism, anarchism, all of these leftist ideologies. He really got to the heart of what they're about. Hint, spoiler alert. It's not about economics primarily. We'll get to that in a moment. First, though, I want to tell you about Catholic Match. Go to Catholicmatch.com. People today, they approach dating. It's almost always online now. And they approach it like they're curating a Spotify playlist or something.

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have lots of babies, because God tells you to do that, and also so that we can overpopulate our enemies. Okay, Catholicmatch.com. President Trump last night, he actually delivered. A lot of people weren't totally sure if this primetime speech was really going to deliver. Trump exaggerates and teases a little more than he delivers in these speeches to get the networks to cover them. This one he delivered. There was a ton of declassified information from the CIA, the NSA, the broader intelligence community showing that our election systems, which we are told are as secure as ever since 2020, the most secure election in the history of elections.

We now have not just claims from the president, not just slogans from the Republican Party, We have declassified intelligence from the IC, CIA, FBI, NSA, showing that our election system is extremely vulnerable to leaks, to hacking, to manipulation, by the powers that are most hostile to us around the world, and that the intelligence community knew about this all the way back in 2020, in some cases earlier, and that deep layers of the intelligence community knew of, about this. We have the files. They've been declassified. The White House release them. You can go to whitehouse.gov to see them. It's right when you go to whitehouse.com today, it says, do you want to see the declassified files? Deep layers of CIA, NSA, deep layers of the IC, kept that information not only from the president of the United States in his daily briefings, but kept that information even from the heads of the agencies. So you even have CIA directors who don't hear this stuff. And you have admissions from guys in the IC,

in their emails, in their memoranda, saying, yeah, you know, we're running the government here. We've got to keep this from people that are too high up. So this was really tremendous. Here's President Trump just laying out the problem. Tonight, I'm announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence, revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure. This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes and rules. really exposes like levels never thought possible to hacking, exploitation and foreign interference.

Just as disturbingly, this vital information has for many years been covered up and hidden from you. The documents cover five major areas of concern. First, they show that over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People's Republic of China carried out. what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China's illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files. Okay, I want to just cover there's so much in these files. I encourage you to read them. We'll cover a little bit of what's in them right now, but I want to head off right at the top, a line that you're going to hear from the left.

And it's in response to this question. What is this speech about? why is Trump giving this speech right now? We are heading into midterm elections, looking ahead to the 2020 presidential election, but we're not quite an election season yet. We're in mid-July. Why is Trump giving this speech now? And what the left is going to say is Trump is trying to relitigate the 2020 election. And he is trying to validate his conspiracy theories, which, you know, seemed to, I mean, we got the CIA memoranda now. But anyway, they're going to say he's looking backward, he's going to claim that certain winners of 2020, be it at the presidential level or the Senate level, are illegitimate. That was one of the leaks about the speech. Some of the reporting said

he's going to claim that the Democrat Georgia senators are illegitimate because of election interferes. Notice, none of that happened. None of that happened. Trump did not really get into his gripes about the 2020 election in the speech. He didn't claim any sitting senators are illegitimate. He didn't do any of that. That is not what the speech is about. That speech last night was about one thing and one thing only, getting Republican senators to pass the Save America Act. That's what it was about. Right now, you have this bill, which is an 80-20 issue, not even, it's like an 85-15 issue. Everybody supports voter ID and voter integrity. You have Democrats trying to stop it because they rely on weakening our election integrity in order to win elections because they want to flood the country with foreign nationals.

They want them to vote illegally. They want insecure elections. They know that our adversaries hate Trump, so they know it will benefit them. That's what they're after. But you have these squish Republicans and the squish Republicans say, you know, actually our election system is pretty secure. Trump went a little far with his claims in 2020 and it's really fine. You know, fraudulent voting. It's not that big an issue. There aren't that many ineligible voters who are registered to vote. there aren't our foreign powers don't have access to hacking the voting machines they don't don't don't don't don't and what trump proved last night is yes they do there are a lot of foreign nationals registered to vote in federal elections every single one of those is illegal hostile foreign powers including

China including Russia including Iran including North Korea including Venezuela a key part of the the 2020 discussion those guys do have the ability to hack into the American system. In the case of Venezuela, they could hack into actual voting machines that were using protocols very similar to the U.S. protocols. So he was saying, yes, guys, forget about 2020. I'm not relitigating that. I'm the president, all as well that ends well. But our election system is extremely vulnerable. And in a democracy, in a republic such as ours, in a self-government, by the people, for the people, if you don't have confidence in your elections, you don't have a government, you don't have a country. So you, you don't have a government. So you don't you.

you need to pass the Save America Act. Will they listen? Well, let's see. The highlights from the files, detections began in the spring of 2020 that 220 million voter files had been breached by China. This was the largest data breach in U.S. history. By August of 2020, 18 states had voter databases breached by China. Intelligence did not brief the President of the United States, the Congress, or the states. By 2023, the number of files that had been breached grew from the initial smaller number of 17 million to 220 million. CIA and NSA analysts agreed that the decision not to tell

Donald Trump, the president of the United States, was a politically motivated decision by deep state bureaucrats by careerists at places like CIA and NSA. It was a political decision motivated by their partisan hatred of Trump. This, according to, analysts at CIA and NSA. the NSA intercepted information that China was looking to, you know, meddle in all sorts of ways,

increase racial strife, get some dirt on Trump. None of that is surprising. Yet all of these intel reports, basically none of them, very few of them made an into a presidential daily briefing. As I mentioned, you had real issues in Venezuela. Now, Venezuela was hacking its own elections, but the machines in Venezuela were very similar to machines that were used in the U.S. all of this kept from the president. In the fall of 2020, Trump mentions this in his speech. The FBI heard from Michigan state police that they had found industrial scale election cheating in Michigan.

Fake IDs in voting coming from Democrat operatives. The FBI estimated, through one sample, roughly 30% of the ballots were fraudulent. You're talking massive industrial scale. Coming from Michigan, which is a Democrat state. in one box, 91 out of 107 votes were fraudulent. We're talking massive, massive scale fraud. As Trump pointed out in the speech last night, Biden was president at that point. The DOJ slow walk the case and no one was held accountable because it benefited Democrats. We're talking the kind of election manipulation and rigging that would put Tammany Hall to shame. Okay, we're talking because at least in Tammany Hall, you're only looking at one city, one state. Here, you're talking about just,

massive multiple states, widespread fraud involving foreign nationals. So the DOJ starts looking into some of the election problems and recognizes that there are some people on the voter rolls who should not be on the voter rolls. In 12 states that were cooperating more red than blue, they found 22,000 non-citizens on the voter rolls. Then four states that DHS analyzed by buying public data found quarter million, four. foreigners who shouldn't be on the federal rolls, on the federal rules. On and on and on. There's so much more to get into. There's not enough time. What this is about is the Save America

Act. And the question to the Republican senators who are concerned about standards and norms and who want to hold up the filibuster and whatever, just ask yourself, when it comes to standards and norms, is there any standard and norm that is more important to maintain than the integrity of our elections? when you have massive evidence, not just coming from Trump who some people don't trust, but coming from CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the vaunted intelligence community for years and years and years, six, eight years in some cases, showing vulnerabilities in our election system exploited by our chief geopolitical adversaries. Is there any standard and norm more important to maintain than the integrity of our elections? I can't really think of one, which is why I like the filibuster too. I would like

to maintain the filibuster, but they must pass the Save America Act. It has to happen. Okay. Now, as I mentioned, you probably didn't hear this if you were watching the TV news networks last night because they decided not to broadcast a speech. So now President Trump says they should pull the broadcast licenses. The left once again calling him a fascist and authoritarian. We'll get to what that means in a second. Then we'll get to Rubio's excellent speech on leftist violence. J.D. Vance's apparently controversial comments, not this time on Israel, but this time on economics. Once again, I think conservatives have wax in their ears or they're just, I don't know, ignorant of the conservative tradition. We'll get into all of that first, though. I want to tell you

about balance of nature. Go to balance of nature.com. Use promo code Knowles. I've discovered there's a big difference between eating perfectly and eating reasonably. And this is someone who's eaten very unreasonably at different times in life. Perfectly is exhausting. Reasonably is sustainable. There are going to be weekends where you're grilling with the friends. They're going to be dinners out, vacations, birthdays, road trips, all the things that make life enjoyable. You don't want to turn every meal into a moral exercise. You need to build a routine that is simple enough to stick with. That is one, many reasons, I love balance of nature. Their whole health system is made from 47 real ingredients, fruits, vegetables, spices, and fiber. So it's easy to work into your day without adding another

complicated routine. It is terrific. We love Balance of Nature, not just the supplements, the freeze-dried snacks here. Great. We all love them here at the Daily Wire. They're very easy to throw into a backpack. Keep in the car, pack for a flight, keep in the office when you want something quick. Make your life inclined to making those healthy choices easier. Okay, that's really what it's about. Go to balance of nature.com today. Subscribe to the whole health system or any of their other subscriptions. Get an additional 10% off with promo code Knowles, KNAW-L-E-S. And it'll come to your door. You can be a hyena, like all the producers of Daily Wire. Balance of Nature.com promo code Knowles. President Trump does not like that the news networks did not cover his bombshell speech

last night. So, he's contemplating pulling their broadcast licenses. In a rare move, NBC and ABC fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about. because of the fact that they don't like the topic, because they know how corrupt our system is and they don't want to reveal it. They and others in the media are part of a plot. They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason.

They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left. They can't have a great country, and that's true. You can't have a great country without free and fair elections. Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses. They use our public multi-billion dollar in value airways for absolutely no money. They pay nothing. Okay, so cue the left and the squishy loser right.

Cue them right now saying, this is authoritarian. He's gone too far. We can't revoke the sacred federal broadcast licenses of NBC. And ABC is that our founding fathers bled in the revolution. they suffered at Valley Forge so that NBC and ABC can peddle fake news on public airwaves. I don't think that's true.

The question is, is there a legal justification to revoke their broadcast licenses? There are certain criteria according to which, there's a rubric, according to which the government can revoke

the broadcast licenses for these networks that are on public airwaves. They're not going to revoke my broadcast license for the Michael Nulls show. I'm not on public airwaves. We pay our own way over here. And you pay our own way. Thank you very much to the viewers and the listeners. Not so when it

comes to the public airwaves, not so when it comes to broadcast. NBC, ABC, they have no right to those licenses. Licensees, these public broadcast networks, must operate as public trustees of the spectrum, serving their local community's needs. So public affairs programming, covering the news, and failure can lead to non-renewal of their licenses. So in this case, would you say that a national address by the President of the United States on a crucial matter such as the integrity of our elections, would you say that's a matter of public interest? Would you say that covering that sort of news would be servicing community needs? Would you say that is part of, would you say that is part of the deal when a news

network signs up to get a public broadcast license. Would you say that covering that kind of thing, the president covering a crucial issue, getting to the very heart of our politics, a national address? Would you say that's part of the deal when you sign up to get a broadcast license? Because I would. I would say that. And the fact that Trump is now threatening to revoke their licenses, I think is a good thing. And I think these guys need to be brought in line. In other words, Let me be perfectly clear, lest the left and the squishy loser right get confused about this. The threat to our freedom and our way of life and our great national traditions and our standards and norms and our country, the greater threat to all of those things lies in the perfidy and corruption of the media,

more so than it does in the duly elected, popularly elected president of the United States. States wielding the power that is afforded to him. The greater threat to our freedom and our way of life and our standards and our norms, even though I know Trump's an eccentric character, the greater threat lies in the absolute corruption of our establishment media, especially the broadcast networks, far more so than it does in the duly elected president exercising power that he has. No question about it. The left wants to pretend otherwise. They want to pretend that they're speaking truth to power in an authoritarian regime, this, that, and the other. It's not true. If anything, the opposite is true. The establishment media are part of not an authoritarian,

but rather a totalitarian system of liberalism that seeks to dominate and dictate every aspect of your life, not merely those circumscribed to narrow aspects in authoritarian regimes. Trump himself is not authoritarian. Some of us wish he were a little bit more authoritarian, and what he's threatening here is totally just. Okay. Probably not going to happen. You know, there would be a lot of hurdles to it, but he's absolutely right to make the threat. Speaking of threats, we now turn to threats from the left and the international left, Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling for a crackdown on global leftist violence. More than 80% of radical violence is now driven by far left and anarchist actors. These are not abstract statistics. Americans have seen what those numbers mean. And all out of salt

on our immigration officers, sniper attacks, explosives, armed ambushes, a transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray his gun marked with slogans like where is your God now? A health care executive executed in cold blood in the streets, multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president, and the murder of the greatest conservative activist of a generation. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialists or communist or anarchist or Marxist. But the fundamental character is always the same. It's always the same. It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice,

liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built to wrecked what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world. Spot on, man, absolutely precise from Secretary of State Maraca Rubio. What I love so much about this speech is not just, you know, the recognition of left-wing violence, calling them out internationally as well as domestically, but the fact that he recognizes what it's all about. A lot of people think socialism is about giving money to poor people.

A lot of people think communism is about an egalitarian system. A lot of people think that anarchism is about freedom or something. No, all of those radical leftist ideologies are about the same thing. They're about resentment, envy, and destruction. That's what they're about. And I'm not even only speaking polemically here. that's what Karl Marx says they're about. What does Karl Marx say? Carl Marx, I think in the greatest summation of his ideology, says everything that exists deserves to perish. That to me is the line from Marx that sums up Marx's view of politics better than anything else. Everything that exists deserves to perish. It is pure. destruction. It is a zero-sum game. It is negative. It seeks to destroy intrinsically. That's what the

left is about. That's why they're more violent. That's why they're angrier all the time. That's why they damage their own bodies. That's why they damage communities. That's why they damage statues and paintings. Because the ideology itself is destructive and violent. and there are some aspects to it that talk about economics. You know, there's some aspects to it that talk about immigration or whatever. But it's not what it's about. The heart of it is violence. That is totally right from Rubio.

And it is why we should not look at the now totally undeniable spike in left-wing political violence, even admitted by the left, even admitted by the Atlantic magazine, even using data sets that don't count most left-wing violence, like the BLM violence, like the BLM violence, like Antifa showing up to college campuses, like tranny shooting up churches and schools. Even when you don't count that stuff, even today, even the leftist magazines, have to admit that political violence is chiefly a left-wing problem. It's why we can't look at that as an unfortunate turn of leftism, of revolutionary leftism. It's an unfortunate turn of revolutionary leftism that's become violent. No, no, no, it just is violence. It just is

violence. The most extreme conservative, like, smokes a lot of cigars and really super hard reads a lot of old dusty books. That's like the extreme of conservatism. The extreme of conservatism is getting like a really nice leather Chesterfield sofa and listening to Bach and smoking cigars and drinking good scotch. That's like if you let, if you just let the conservative id run wild, it would be like a, it would be like a guy wearing a lot of tweed or I don't know, sitting in his nice home with his beautiful wife in her nice dress with their kids eating an apple pie. That would be like, that's like fantasy run amok.

Whereas the extreme of leftism is lopping off heads and emptying the bastille and toppling statues and burning down countries. Rubio, totally, totally right. Can't believe I just confessed all my fantasies on air. all the tweed, all the port. Okay. Before we get into another top member of the Trump administration and another presidential contender, really the heir apparent J.D. Vance, he's in trouble again. He got in trouble yesterday.

They called him anti-Israel because he compared Israel to, he said Israel should be like our other allies. It's not the only ally. It's not, you know, in this special category. We should consider them like our other allies, England and France, who are literally our two greatest allies we've ever had. And for that, he was called anti-Israel. Now he's in trouble for talking about economics. They're calling him a communist or something. Let's see what he actually says about economics. First, though, before we get into that, I want to tell you about Mac Weldon.

Right now, go to Macwellden.com, code Michael, M-A-C-W-E-L-D-O-N.com. Code Michael. I love Mac Weldon. Okay? I went on vacation last week. I took my week-long vacation for the year. I was at the beach, and I wore Mac Weldon. every day.

Not only did I wear, this is a little TMI, I wore the boxer shirts, which are phenomenal, but my favorite, one of my very favorite pieces of clothing that I own right now is the Mac Weldon Terry Cloth shirt. It is absolutely perfect for summer. It's like you're wearing a towel, but it looks really nice and cool, and it's just terrific. I mean, their fabrics are all great.

You get great airflow, four-way stretch. It's just, it looks good. I was wearing my Mac Weldon bathing suit. These guys just get it, man. They're so, so good. So right now, do not sweat the heat this summer. Feel as effortlessly cool as you look with Mac Welding. Go to macwelden.com. Get 20% off your first order of $125 or more with promo code Michael, M-I-C-H-A-E-L. That is, M-A-E-L-D-O-N dot com. Code Michael. J-D Vance just can't stay out of trouble with certain, a little bit more estableness,

A little bit more neoconservative factions of the American right. He's in big trouble right now, not just for his views on foreign policy, but for his views on economics. Here's what he had to say on Rogan. Some other guy owns 35 mansions, right? That to me is the fundamental challenge of AI, is it's going to unleash a lot of wealth creation. But if that wealth creation all goes to some segment of people, you're going to have communism. Like that is the choice before us is a lot of wealth being created. That's good, by the way.

I like wealth being created. But if you don't ensure that there's some broader prosperity from that wealth creation, like we have run this experiment before and it leads to communism. Right. So. Okay, so J.D. Vance, I can't get over. I hope the attacks coming from certain parts of the right on J.D. Vance are disingenuous. because I think that, I hope it's not just ignorant or idiotic,

or I hope they're disingenuous in a way. I think that's the more charitable read. But J.D. Vance comes out, he goes, I really don't want communism to rise up in America. I really don't want leftist economics to rise up in America. And so we need to make sure, as we go through the midst of a radical new industrial revolution that is certainly going to bring huge changes to the labor market and massive wealth, and equality, we need to make sure that everyone's brought along for the ride. People have buy-in to the market economy so that you don't get communism. And people pointed at him, they say,

you're a communist. Do you got cotton in your ears? What are you talking about? This is leftism. This is, what on earth? He hates wealth. He just said he loves wealth creation. He come, he worked in Silicon Valley. What are you people? Oh my goodness gracious. The point that he's making here is really, really important, which is you want economic growth. The left sometimes doesn't want economic growth. You want economic growth. You want new wealth creation. The left wants appropriation of wealth. The left wants redistribution of wealth, but they're not really focused on new wealth creation. No, he says we want all that. We want all that stuff. But we just need to make sure that people are bought in. One, because the palace is never safe when the cottage is unhappy. Two,

because in a self-governing republic, you need people to have buy-in to the society. A nation is not just an economic zone. It's not just a grocery store that we all happen to go to, but we have no other connection to one another. It is a communal project. It is a community, ultimately. That's where politics comes from. It comes from the polis, which is the city-state.

And so we all need to have some investment in the future of that community, of that entity. And there are all sorts of different ways to do that. We can have a buy-in through military service. We can have a buy-in by all being invested in our 401ks, the stock market. There are a million ways that we can have buy-in. By intermarrying and having common language and common religion. But we need to have some buy-in in the future.

And if a massive technological change of a new industrial revolution leaves 90% of the people behind, that's a political problem. The consequence of which is going to be communism. So if you want to avoid that, you need to address. adapt eternal principles to changing circumstances, which is one of the most basic definitions of politics. So is this leftism? Is this only? I mean, the last time this happened, the last time we had a massive industrial and labor change, it was actually Republican presidents who addressed this in many of the same ways that J.D. Vance is talking about. Teddy Roosevelt, who is the president, one of the presidents most frequently compared to Donald Trump. He dealt with that. He dealt with that with the

Square deal and new regular. Both Roosevelt and Taft focused on antitrust protections, on different labor protections, because the economic system had changed after the Industrial Revolution. But this goes back earlier than that. I mean, you think about Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, when the slaves are freed, he offers them an intervention. He offers them 40 acres in a mule. They never got their 40 acres in a mule.

But he's offering a kind of intervention. Is Lincoln a communist? is Lincoln, is Taft a communist? Is Teddy Roosevelt a communist? Give me a break. This is not a uniquely progressive. I mean, Teddy Roosevelt was a kind of progressive, a little different than some of the leftist progressives, but plenty of other people, taft less so than Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, other, even more modern presidents. I've had all sorts of economic interventions. George W. Bush, was he a pro-gege George H.W. Bush? I don't know. Give me a break, guys.

This is not merely progressive intervention. The other knock on Bance, you're seeing a lot of anti-Catholicism rising up, a lot of sharpening anti-Catholic rhetoric, which Arthur Schlesinger says is the deepest bias in the history of the American people. But what some people are saying is this is just Vance embracing a kind of Catholic economic view, which is quasi-communism. A ridiculous, a ridiculous argument to make when that in recent years

that modern Catholic economic view has been most prominently promoted by John Paul the second one of the two men who took down communism Ronald Reagan and John Paul the second and a little hat tip to Maggie Thatcher

those are the people who destroyed communism popes have invade against communism and socialism said not even a moderate form of socialism can ever be Christian it's totally anathema you cannot claim that

that Catholic economic view is socialism or communism. John Paul II, the great anti-communist hero, writes in Chentezi Musanos, which is written on the 100th anniversary of Pope Leo the 13th encyclical Ray Rum Navarum, a brilliant document

which is the beginning of Catholic social teaching. John Paul II writes in Chantasy Muzanos that the free market is the most efficient way to allocate goods around an economy, but we need to make sure that we're focusing on resources that are solvent and marketable, that we need to recognize that we have to circumscribe certain aspects of the market because human beings have dignity. There is nothing uniquely Catholic about

that. There is nothing sectarian. There's nothing communist or socialist or anything like that. That is just common sense. And I don't know. There's going to be a Republican primary, I guess. I think Trump is just going to pick the nominee ultimately. barring some total collapse of his administration. But it's fine. I mean, people have their horses. Some people really want Rubio to run against vans, even though Rubio's already endorsed vans. Some people want people who are outside of the administration, like Ron DeSantis, maybe. I don't know. There's no real evidence that Ron DeSantis is going to run. Whatever, it's fine. I mean, the GOP loves fighting each other, so you can all duke it out in the primary. But I don't

know. If you're going to make these kind of criticisms advance, at least make honest ones, kind of silly. Okay. Speaking of common sense, there's a new candidate in Maine, a new Democrat had to replace Graham Platner, who had to drop out because he's a Nazi rapist, allegedly. And so the new candidate we have is Ashley, Ashley Webb. And then with the trans community, like, we're being dehumanized. They say that we want to hurt people. I don't want to hurt anybody. I just want to use the bathroom.

And if they want me to use the men's room, I will. I don't want to be assaulted. I endorse Ashley Webb. I endorse. I am now giving my full and complete unequivocal endorsement of Ashley Webb. I don't know Ashley's real name. And for the purposes of this endorsement, I don't care. Ashley, it is time. Enough transphobia from the Democrat Party. Ashley Webb must be the Democrat nominee for Senate in Maine. The Democrats must campaign on the civil rights issue of our time, letting trans trans, women use the women's bathroom.

Of course. They can't abandon that civil rights issue. And Ashley Webb needs to be the standard bearer to take on Susan Collins in the midterm elections. Please, Democrats, don't. Come on, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Don't be on the wrong side of history.

We got webmentum, baby. Where do I donate to Ashley Webb? Okay, speaking of transgenderism, I saw The Odyssey yesterday. I saw Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. This is one of those great. I said, oh, it's work. I got to go for work as I'm leaving the office at 1.30 in the afternoon.

And I go, I go check it out. I had some trepidation, actually. I will give a much fuller review. Look out for it. Maybe on the RSS, definitely on the YouTube channel elsewhere. I'll give a fuller review. I don't have time to get into all of it now. My main takeaway from Nolan's Odyssey.

I love the Odyssey. I've read that poem for decades now. Everyone was afraid of the woke stuff, the DEI. They've got Lupita Nyango, who is a very good actress, but they're saying that Helen of Troy is black. They're saying Lupita Nyango is the single most beautiful woman in the world.

We've got Ellen Page playing a guy. We were initially told she was playing Achilles. Then we were told she's playing this character Sinon, who is not even in the Odyssey. It was actually from the Aeneid. So it's a later epic written in a different place in a different language. but weirdly she kind of is playing Achilles

and just given how that character subs in and so there's all this woke stuff there is an underlying theme of feminism and my main takeaway is I hate how talented Christopher Nolan is I'm not joking it's insidious how talented Christopher Nolan is because his skill and talent

allow him to get away with a lot of nonsense. So we'll get into how he changed The Odyssey in ways that, you know, I haven't even seen other people talking about that are really, it makes me really rethink Christopher Nolan's worldview. I thought he was a kind of center-right conservative Republican after Dark Night. And I don't know, he's making,

it's a, in many ways, a really beautiful movie that is dangerous because of that. Okay, it's a very deceptive and tricky, kind of like Odysseus. Maybe that's the underlying theme. Okay, we got to get into the mailbag first, though. My favorite coming yesterday is from May who says, Michael, you don't think women should wear yoga pants, but you're okay with cameras focusing on their private areas. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't accuse me of that. It says, modesty is a good thing, and we should support it, especially as Christians. So yes, I'm glad they're trying to focus on women's athletic abilities rather than making them objects. No, you misunderstand my point. I'm not saying

they need to zoom in on women's breasts or something. The European athletic associations, came out and said, we need to stop focusing on women's bodies when we cover their sports. And you rightly point out, I don't think that women should wear athletic wear in public, yoga pants and gym clothing, the real tight stuff. I don't think women should wear athletic wear in public because I don't think that's appropriate to wear in public. It is appropriate to wear in athletics. The thing that makes the athletic wear inappropriate in public, is that it focuses on women's bodies. It's too revealing.

It's immodest. But that's what athletics is. Athletics is about the body. So my point on the silly European Athletic Association standards is it's not just that they're not letting us, you know, look at those hot chickies anymore. It's that their guidelines make no sense. They're drawing a distinction. to focus more on women's athletics and less on women's bodies, they're the same thing. Athletics is about physical excellence.

Now, I don't watch women's sports. So I get, you know, and as I, all women's sports has some aspect of sexiness to it other than the WNBA. But all the other, no one watches the WNBA. But all of, you cannot separate. I guess this is, at the deeper level, there is this real gnostic impulse in modern life, which tries to downplay the importance of the body. But you can't, if you are watching women's athletics, you are looking at their bodies and their bodies are good looking.

you can't they're different from men's bodies men's bodies are not they're like men's bodies can be beautiful in their own way too but totally differently than women so you can't it's like it's like it's like when the feminists say stop stop looking upon a woman's body with you know sexual attraction stop objectifying me so you're not it's not that you're an object but i'm going to look at you like you're a woman and you can't cease to be like stop it's like trans they want to they want to be men but they're not men women's sports is different from men's sports. Maybe it means we should ditch a lot of women's sports. I don't know.

Our mailbag is sponsored by Peartock. at Peartotoc.com slash Knowles, K&WLES to start saving today. Take it away. Hi, Michael. This is Megan coming to you with another dating question. I've been attending singles activities through my church for a couple of years now. There's a guy I met the first time I attended who was dismissive to the point of being rude as he was clearly interested in another woman who ultimately rejected him.

At the time, I was at my heaviest weight with a BMI over 40, which is considered morbidly obese. However, it was one instance, and overall, he's a really kind and stable guy. I've since lost a third of my body weight, and I'm barely considered overweight at this point. I also don't think I'd ever be comfortable dating someone who found me attractive when I was at my heaviest, as this has been a significant lifestyle change, and I have no intention of gaining the weight back. He recently has reached out to ask me on a date. Should I look past the bad first impression and give the guy a chance,

or our first impression is important and indicative of who a person really is. is. Thanks always, Megan. Good question. And congrats on losing all that weight. That's really impressive. Oh, my goodness. If you were, you know, I don't really know what the BMI's. I can't picture what that is, a BMI of 40, but if you're saying that's morbidly obese, if you were really, really overweight, you lost a third of your body weight. That's very, very impressive. So congrats on that. And I, yeah, I would date him. I'd give him a shot at least. I don't, maybe he's a jerk, but I would date him. Because you say, you say, I don't, I have transformed in part so that I can

you know, meet a guy. I assume that's part of it. And I wouldn't want to date a guy who was specifically attracted to someone who's really, really fat, in part because I don't ever intend to get really, really fat again. And so I guess there's only one further question I would have on this, which is when you say he was dismissive to you, to the point of being rude, was it like you come up to him, hey, hey, hey, buddy, how you doing? And he says, oh, hey, yeah, sorry, I'm more, I'm more interested in that chick. Sorry, not interested. Was it that? or was it like, hey, porky, put down the pork rinds or whatever? You know, if he was doing that, don't date him.

He sounds like a huge jerk. But if he was just, if he really was just interested in some other woman, he's like, hey, sorry, yeah, I'm not, you're not doing it for me. Sorry, you know. If it was that, I'd say, I don't know, maybe give him a shot. The purpose in losing all the weight was to go on dates with these guys who were looking past you. This actually gets to an important point. Ben and I were talking about this unfriendly fire the other day.

based on that bit from Peter Craft, the great Catholic philosopher who did an interview on Matt Fred's show, and he talked about falling in love with his wife. And he said, can you love a person if even when the person gets old and fat and ugly? And even when the person gets kind of nasty and starts to lose her mind a little bit. He said, I fell in love with my wife again an hour after she had died. I'm looking at her desiccated body. And I realized she was beautiful, beautiful like a crucifix. and Ben made a half good point where he said, yeah, see, it's such a beautiful clip because it means that beauty is in the soul, not the body. And I say that's a half good point because beauty is in the soul, but the soul is not really separable from the body in our earthly sojourn here. And so I said, no, no, no, Ben, when Dr. Crave says that he falls in love with his wife again as a body, actually just to, as a body because the body was as beautiful as a crucifix. The crucifix is the image of perfect love.

Christ crucified is the image of perfect love. And that is physical. And so there is a physical aspect. Beauty is not just skin deep, but it doesn't exclude the skin either. There's an interplay of both because human beings are both of those things. So don't exclude him just because he didn't find you physically attractive before and now he does find you physically attractive.

Let's say, give him a shot. Okay, next one. Michael, last year I sent your rather scathing voice mailbag about your terrible stance on daylight savings time. And although you seem to get a real kick out of it, it obviously failed to stick. So I'm going to remind you why we should retire daylight savings time in favor of permanent standard time.

You mentioned Chesterton's fence. In the case, daylight savings time, we don't have to know why this particular fence was built, but only who was responsible for building it. Namely, some of the worst liberals in American history, including Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and LBJ, making daylight savings time at least as gay and communist as soccer, if not more.

so. Although I've not missed an episode of the show in nearly four and a half years, if you continue to espouse such a light in the loafers' Marxist opinion, I may be forced to abandon the Kremlin for the Sweet Baby Gang, and I don't think you or I really want that. So, for both our sakes, please reconsider. Love the show. They call me gay because I play ukulele. They call me because I have loafers and sometimes dance in them. They call me gay because I was an actor. They call me, and now they call me gay because I like changing the clocks once or twice a year. Is that Is that where we're at? Yes, I am aware that, though I actually had forgotten for a year or two, that the daylight savings time thing was pushed by bad presidents. But bad presidents have done some

good things before. You know, Harry Truman, he won World War II. With the help of FDR, who was a terrible president, but he helped win World War II too. It's not all bad, not everything thing that a bad person does is necessarily bad. You know, Hitler drank water. And he liked dogs. So I don't like dogs. So actually, that's a bad example. In any case, it's another mark in favor of daylight savings time that you can use it to prove that not even Woodrow Wilson was all bad. Okay, next question. I want to get to one more. I know him late. I don't care. Hello, Mr. Knowles. I see that you are defending daylight savings time by arguing that is basically an American tradition or part of American culture by now.

However, I would argue that the setting the clocks back and forth is more like an application of transgender ideology applied to time, a sort of trans-time, you could say. Because time has a meaning, does it not? Noon is supposed to be in the middle of the day, which has to do with the position of the sun and such. If we set our clocks back or forth to pretend that noon is something else, how is that different than a man pretending that he is a woman? Time has a meaning, just like man and women have meaning.

So while conservatives do respect tradition, and as an Orthodox Christian conservative, I can say that tradition is basically my blood type. I would argue that we should be opposed to daylight savings times because if we allow people to pretend that time is not what it actually is, then the trans ideology will never be really, as you say, eradicated. Also, please tell whoever is in charge of picking songs from Music Monday to use the ones I suggest every week when I send them to your mailbox and email. I think my songs would be more prone to a substantive analysis. than what you've been recently exposed to. Just my opinion. Thank you.

So because I like changing the clocks, not only am I gay, but I'm trans. Is that, that's the new, okay, why did we keep doing the member block today? Now, your argument is a more interesting argument and a deeper argument than just, you know, Woodrow Wilson bad. So you're saying, look,

the sun should be at the top of the sky at noon. In other words, time has real physical reference points that we should respect. and by arbitrarily taking time into our own hands, we sort of make ourselves into gods and we're just the same as a man who says that he's a woman. Now, of course, we have taken time into our own hands many times

and not just the libs, not just the trannies. The French did that in the revolution. They tried to remake how they ordered time. And so, okay, that's a bad example. But we've had the Gregorian calendar, the Julian calendar, we've had standard time, daylight savings time. And then I think that the bigger issue for your argument is time zones. Because, okay, if time is, if the reference point for time is just the position of the sun, then what of the person who's 50 miles away?

What time is it for the person who's 50 miles away? Because the position of the sun will be slightly different in the sky. And for the person who's 300 miles away, it'll be different. So then you enter into this question of time zones, but even within time zones, the sun will be at a slightly different position in the sky, depending on where you are. So at a certain point, you have to take the matter into your own hands and draw some sort of not necessarily arbitrary, but just decisive position. And so this gets into a very deep matter, which is,

when we talk about social construction, you know, things are, we just construct things. But there is objective truth and there is mental construction. And the two actually have a relation to each other. Mind independent things and mind-dependent things have a relation to one another in our cognitive power. Because the cognitive power is perceiving real things mediated by signs, but it also is drawing connections and helping.

to construct things and make deductions from the world. And so there is a relationship there. There is to quote the great philosopher Kamala Harris, a great significance to the passage of time. And we have to play some role in that with our cognitive powers, using our minds to overcome the challenges presented by the physical world. And we do that with things like time zones and daylight savings time. It's fake headline Friday. The show. continues now. Do not miss it become a member use code. NOLASKINDA has to check out for two months free on all annual plans.