The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 2026 - Why This 16-Year-Old Lifeguard Went Viral

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

A 16-year-old lifeguard risks his life to save a 10-year-old boy in Santa Cruz, Zohran Mamdani doxxes a million of his constituents, and President Trump eulogizes Lindsey Graham. Ep. 2026 - - - Today's Sponsors: Good Ranchers - This July, start a plan and get free meat with every order plus $50 off your first order with code KNOWLES at https://goodranchers.com PreBorn! - For just $28, PreBorn can provide one free ultrasound and help equip a new generation of parents to choose life and build strong families. To donate, dial #250 and say "BABY" or visit https://Preborn.com/knowles - - - 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

This episode is brought to you by Good Ranchers, Deliving 100% American beef, chicken, pork, and seafood straight to your door from local farms and ranches. This summer support the American ranchers keeping agriculture alive by going to Good Ranchers.com using code and Olts, CanadaWLS at checkout to get free meat with every order and $50 off when you get your first order on a plan. Good Ranchers.com. American meat delivered. A 16-year-old lifeguard saves a 10-year-old boy from 10-foot waves in Santa Cruz. As White Boy Summer reaches its absolute apotheosis, we will get into the hidden cultural reasons why everyone cannot get enough of this story. It's actually a lot more than the heroic act. Then, New York City Mayor Zohanamam Dhani doxes nearly a million of his rich constituents as he promises to take away their property. This is a key insight into what socialism is really all about.

Spoiler alert, it is not about helping the poor. And President Trump, eulogizes Lindsey Graham as the late senator is laid to rest. Clips galore. I'm Michael Knowles. It's the Michael Knowles show. Welcome back to the show. Ohio Republican-ish Governor Mike Dwein is imploring the White House not to send Haitians back to Haiti. Haitians who were supposed to, they were given temporary status in America. They were supposed to leave like 14 years ago. They didn't. They kept putting it off and off and off. Now he says you can't send them back to Haiti because Haiti is hell. Doesn't that kind of sounds to me like he's calling Haiti an SHIT whole country? I thought you weren't supposed to say that. Anyway, we'll get into it. First,

a biggest story. This 16 year old hero, 16 year old Gigacad lifeguard in Santa Cruz. He's looking out, They're big waves, eight to ten foot waves. I think we have video of it. People on the beach were capturing a video of this. 10 foot waves, and this guy swims out because he sees a little kid's head, a little 10-year-old's head, bobbing up for a little bit in the water and then going back down in the water. This kid was going to die. This kid was going to get pulled out major, major waves here. 16-year-old kid handles it perfectly, fights these waves for two minutes, just pulling this kid, lock grip on the kid, pulling him.

back into shore. Finally, some people from on the beach, you know, a few other guys came in. They're trying to help the lifeguard and the kid get out, but the waves just keep pummeling these guys. 16-year-old saves the kid. Unbelievable footage. Unbelievable heroism. So much so that President Trump is inviting the lifeguard to the White House to give him a very high civilian honor. Trump says, we are going to bring this heroic young man and his family into the White House with perhaps the boy he saved to give him a high civilian honor, very brave he deserves at President Donald J. Trump. Trump, uncharacteristically, by the way, posted that to X. He usually posts everything to Truth Social, which he owns, and then the posts from Truth Social end up going viral

on every other social media platform. Here, though, President Trump posted it directly to X. It shows you that this cultural moment matters even more than most of the things that President Trump weighs in on it seemed to tap into something in the popular culture. Trump has a great gut for these things, so he knew it. He could feel that viscerally. Why? Why is this the moment? Yes, the act of heroism was amazing.

Yes, thank God, the 10-year-old boy was saved. But why? Plenty of people die every year drowning. There are plenty of acts of heroism every single day across the United States. they never get any mention. There's no viral clips, no high civilian honors. Why this one? People love this story, not just because it is virtuous, but because it shows all the things that we're told can't happen anymore. That's why people love this story. What's the nuts and bolts of this story. The action was not only virtuous, the action was not only heroic, it was manly. It was

really manly. It'd be manly for a 25-year-old guy to jump into those waves to save the kid, much less a 17-year-old kid. And I mentioned at the top, this is the absolute apotheosis of white boy summer, you know, this trend that showed up, what was it three years ago now? They said, we're going to have a white boy summer. Tom Hanks's kid said, boys, this could be a white boy summer. And no one knew exactly what that meant. Is that a racial, I'm a racial, I'm. Identitarian statement. No, is it? What is it? I think in the scope of Providence, the whole meme of White Boy Summer was the setup to this payoff. This is the punchline. This is the apotheosis of White Boy Summer. And it's all the good things that White Boy Summer could possibly be. And the culture loves this

because this is all the stuff we're told can't happen. Because we are told, on the race point, we're told white people are bad. Whiteness is evil. Whiteness is toxic. Whiteness needs to be abolished. whiteness is oppression. There are courses taught in universities around the country about the evils of whiteness. And here you got this white boy being aided by more of a swarthy guy there at the end there and some other. But you see a white guy doing something really, really good. And it's a guy, by the way. Did I mention he's a guy? We're told masculinity is toxic. Masculinity is misogynistic. We can't have all this harsh. You see, a bunch of guys. There were like four guys here. of all different builds and races,

but they're all trying to help this lifeguard come in. We're told that young people are checked out, in cells, losers, can't get anywhere, don't want to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, they're whining, they're whining on the left because they're socialists, they're whining on the right because they're doomers.

And here's a young guy, here's a teenage kid, going out there, risking his life, not even for someone who's close to him, but for just someone he doesn't know out there who needs saving. What this story taps into is a proof that all of the vicious evil slander that you have heard about different groups, white people, men, young people, sensitive young men, all that slander

you've heard might not be true. And the slander you've heard about this country, we don't care about anybody anymore, we don't have any patriotism, any sense of community, any sense of sacrifice. We're all just takers now. We're not makers. We're not asking what we can do for our country. We only ask what our country can do for us. It disproves all of that.

So it's totally aspirational. And it is a proof that all the worst people in our country who have just tried to get us to feel so bad about ourselves that maybe just maybe they're wrong. And this is why it's so appropriate for this kid to get a high civilian honor at the White House. This is why honors at the White House exist. This is why the presidency exists in large part, because the legislature is the appetitive part of the government. It's supposed to be responsive to the sensitive needs of the demos. And the judiciary is supposed to be the logical part of the government, which is just analyzing the law. And they're not as emotional and they're not, they're disinterested. But the executive, the presidency is supposed to be the thermotic part of the government, the spirited part of the government that encourage, the common good, that encourages patriotism, that rewards acts of heroism like this, among other things. That's what this is about. It's a little glimmer of hope that everything we've heard, mostly from the left, but it's infected the right a little bit too, everything we've heard about how much everything sucks might be wrong. That even the people who are most maligned,

who are actually disadvantaged as a matter of law, you know, that we need more women in schools. We need, we got to put these men back in their place. We need affirmative action. We need to sort of punish white people and Asian people a little bit too, because it's bad and it's toxic and what, that all of that, no, we're not doing that anymore. There is a glimmer of hope. That's, that's the hope of the story. It, yes, it surrounds these two individuals, but it touches something so much more. That's why it went viral. Now, you look at the flip side of this, go up to New York, Zoran Mamdani. Zohran Mamdani, who is the poster boy, the poster, Overgrown boy, the poster 30-something-year-old child, petulant, whining.

He says, no, no, no, politics is a zero-sum game. We need to eat the rich. We need to take from some people in order to give to other people. Zoranamdani is the face of socialism in America, maybe even more so than AOC. And Zohanam Dani now is going to finally put some action to his words. he ran on this campaign of, we're going to help the poor. The rich don't pay their fair share, and the poor are getting screwed, and so we're going to take from the rich to give to the poor. Because we want to help the poor. And how's he going to do this? He's going to do this through what he's

calling a pietater tax, attacks on the second homes of only the Uber, super duper wealthy, who don't even stay in their homes. And that's going to fix housing for New Yorkers. That's going to bring costs down. It's going to finally give the working man a fair shake. And yet, as Mamdani goes into implement this, he proves that all of that is bunk. He proves the true nature of socialism, which is not to help the poor. It is to hurt the rich. If the poor get helped as a consequence, fine. And they won't actually because of how socialism actually works.

But the primary aim of socialism and of communism is not really to help the poor. it is to hurt the rich. To go back to the words of Karl Marx, Karl Marx, who called for the ruthless criticism of all that exists. Carl Marx, whose favorite line of literature comes from Gertes Faust, in which Marx says that everything

that exists deserves to perish. Marx's ideology, Marx's political project, which is really a destructive project. It's not a constructive project. It's not about building a better world. It's about tearing down the world that exists. That's what Manbani is showing you.

Because the way this is going to be implemented is that he is going to docks his wealthy constituents. After he's been ginning up all of this hatred of the supposed super-duper rich who are not paying their fair share supposedly, he is going to dox them. He's going to tell all the people that he's been riling up the left, which is extremely violent these days, he's going to tell them where they live.

After in New York you had that CEO of the healthcare company, of the insurance company, murdered in cold blood by Luigi Mangione, who is now a cult figure on the left, he's got supporters protesting outside of the courtroom in his defense, shot the guy in cold blood just because he was wealthy. You got Zoranam Dani saying, hey, in this context of political violence against wealthy people, I'm going to tell you where they live. And by the way, it's not just the super duper wealthy. The number of people that he is doxing here is multiples and an order of magnitude larger than he told you it was going to be. We'll get to what that is in a second. We will also get to the political consequences because in a midterm election year, it should see Republicans get

totally destroyed. There is actually a decent chance right now that a Republican wins the New York governor's race, shocking a lot of people. We'll get to all of that in a second. First, I want to tell you about my dinner last night. I want to tell you about Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com, code Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. What did I have for dinner? What did I have for dinner? I come home I don't think it was last night it was two nights ago actually I come home and sweet little Lisa says

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company are just absolutely wonderful on the team. Just get it. Just there's not, I should tell you not to get it. I should tell you not to get good ranchers. So there's more good ranchers for me. But I'm too kindhearted. I'm too magnanimous. This July started playing. Get free meat with every order plus 50 bucks off your first order with code Knowles. Just go to Good Ranchers.com. Use code Knowles. KnaWLA has a checkout. Free meat with every order and 50 bucks off when you start a plan. You will thank me. You will write me letters and thank me. Good Rancho.com American Meat delivered. Mamdani initially had suggested that this tax was going to affect 31,000 people. Now, in a city of how many million is New York up to now? 10 million? More than 10 million people, probably. 31,000 people, it's just a small number. They're not even really New Yorkers.

These are just second homes. Not true. According to the New York Post, 960,000 residences and individuals were doxed by Mamdani's administration. You said it was only 31,000 people that were going to soak, that we're going to take their property. Now it's almost a million New Yorkers. That's a real serious percentage of the total New Yorkers.

The city's finance department uploaded this doxing list of all residences in the five boroughs worth over a million dollars. All residences worth a million dollars. This is New York City. A million dollars will. get you a tenement. This is New York City. This is some of the wealthiest, most expensive real estate in the country. They then included the full names and addresses of every property owner, including a guy who's on the city council. City Council Minority Leader David Carr,

who's from Staten Island, which is the only reliably Republican borough, his name appears on the list. The project is about, these are very important takeaways. The project of socialism, of communism, of leftism broadly. You can't separate these things now at a time when the Democratic Socialists of America are more popular with rank and file Democrat voters than Democrat members of Congress. The leftist project is primarily about envy. This is, Winston Churchill had this famous line. He said that socialism is the gospel of envy and the creed of ignorance. So it's this gospel of envy, which the great political philosophers, all the way up through the great writers of literature, point out, envy is the cause of evils in the city. This is about envy. This is not about

improving conditions for working class people. This is about taking from the supposedly rich people. But in New York City, you talk about a million people now? Not just to say, hey, we're going to take money from a generic million people, but we're going to punish a generic million people particularly, but we're going to tell all of you where they live, all of you increasingly violent people. it's about punishing the rich and the rich, the number of the rich always expands. So even if people are willing to make moral compromises here and say, you know what, yeah, look, maybe it's wrong that we're singling out this small number of people, but whatever, it's fine. They have so much money anyway.

Let's take from them and let's give everybody else. It's not going to affect me. The number of the rich always expands when these projects are implemented. You might be fine taking the money from the Jeff Bezos is in the EU. Elon Musk's and the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. But very, very quickly, in this case, before the policy is even implemented, it's going to expand by an order of magnitude and more. And sooner than later, it's going to come for you too. No one is going to be helped by this.

Nobody, no poor person's life is actually going to improve as a result of Mumdani's policies. But an ever-increasing number of people are going to be seriously hurt by this. financially and if you're releasing doxing lists, very likely physically. And even if you're willing to make moral compromises here, which I don't recommend, you might find yourself on that list sooner than later. So this is not playing very well in New York. New York Governor Kathy Hockel is running for re-election. There was a poll that came out June 23rd. This is from Sienna University. She was, as usual in New York, absolutely clobbering Bruce Blakeman, who is a county executive in New York, the Republican opponent. She was clobbering. It was 52 to 32. It's a 20-point swing.

New poll out. Do we have, yeah, new poll just comes out from coefficient. This is on July 2nd. Race tightens up, 47 to 41. So now you've got a six-point swing. Another poll comes out 10 days later from Red Oak Strategic, 47 to 43, with 10% undecided. So now you've got a four-point race in New York. I worked in New York politics. I cut my teeth in politics working on campaigns in New York. I have a lot of friends in the New York political scene. I have been there for every New York governor race that we thought we were maybe going to win and we don't have. It doesn't happen. Carl Palladino, that wasn't going to happen. Rob Astorino, it didn't happen. The Senate race is Wendy Long. It didn't happen. In this case, you're looking at a four point race.

And what's so astounding about it is, I was, I worked in New York politics. First race I worked on was in 2010. This was a major Republican year. It was kind of the inverse of the year we're in right now. Obama had just gotten elected in a landslide in 2008. First midterm after that election is the T-party election. Republicans had all the wind at our sales. This was the one that gave Republicans back the House of Representatives and still the Republican candidates getting clobbered in the state races in New York. Here, this should be much worse. Kathy Hokel should be running away with this race. This should be a 20-point race. Now it's down to four points. Totally against the wins of politics, totally against the wins of history. Because another message for everyone who's doom and gloom and everyone who's disappointed because the Republicans haven't done enough,

and there's always something to complain about there. No matter how disappointing the Republicans are, at this moment in history, the Democrats are even less popular. The Democrats appear even more toxic. The Democrats appear even more dangerous. This is a really, really good side. I don't know if the Republicans are going to win in New York. Probably he won't. Like every single thing is working against the Republicans other than the sheer toxicity, perfidy, threat that people perceive from the Democrat Party. Now, Hockel has a fourfold fundraising advantage here. But make no mistake, the Democrats are squandering their midterm advantage. And they're squandering their midterm advantage because they made a deal with the devil.

Like Karl Marx, you read Karl Marx's poetry, you read his private writings. this guy did not just have economic problems, though he had a lot of those too. He was always borrowing money from his buddy angles. He had very serious spiritual problems. I mean, he writes about making deals with the devil, that sort of thing. He writes about what seems like demonic oppression.

And the Dems made a deal with the devil when they embraced the super woke part of their constituency, when they embraced political violence, when they embraced mutilating little children, when they embraced murdering children, the chickens are coming home to roost on all of that. And Republicans are going to have to put the pedal to the metal on every one of these races to have a shot of overcoming the historic disadvantage they're at right now. But there is a chance.

It's like dumb and dumber. You're telling me there is a chance. So Republicans, of course, are going to do everything they can to clutch defeat from the joys of victory, as they always do. Including a very strange case here, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, Republican governor of Ohio, Ohio, reliably Republican state. Mike DeWine is taking issue with one of the most popular things that the Trump administration has done to date. Trump, who was elected in large part, promising mass migration wins the popular vote effectively on that point. Trump says, okay, forget about deporting 20 million people, forget about deporting Abuela or your gardener. At the very least, we're going to deport the Haitians who have no right to stay permanently in this country,

who were brought here some 14 years ago who were supposed to leave 18 months later, who didn't leave 18 months later, who just stayed and stayed and stayed and no one would ever let them be deported back and lose their temporary protected status, which was ostensibly because of a natural disaster in Haiti. So much so that now the argument is you can't deport these Haitians because they have hundreds of thousands of children because they have mortgages at a time when Gen Z can't get mortgages. Gen Z, actual Americans can't get mortgages. And you say, well, they shouldn't have had children here. They shouldn't have gotten homes here. They shouldn't have been allowed to stay in the country long enough to do that.

And it's a Republican governor of Ohio who's saying you can't deport them. And his reasoning is just beautiful. He says, you can't deport the Haitians back to Haiti because you'd be sending him back to hell. Trump got in so much trouble for calling a bunch of countries around the world, S-H-I-T whole countries. And we were told by all the Dems and all of the really nice, fancy, civil Republicans who just really want to be polite. we were told you can't say that. How dare you? That's so racist. That's so xenophobic and nativist. How dare you call a country an S-H-I-T-H-H-T whole country? Mike DeWine, post your child for these polite Republicans who are opposing Trump on an important issue. Mike DeWine says the same thing. Hold on. You're allowed to call a country hell, but you can't call it an S-H-I-T-hole.

Hell is worse than an S-H-I-T hole. They're really effectively synonymous, but if either of them are going to be worse, it's going to be hell. Why does he get allowed? Why is he allowed to say it when Trump is not? And why is Haiti hell? We'll get to that momentarily first, though. I want to tell you about preborn. Go to preborn.com slash Knowles, KNAWLAS. Every human being begins life the same way.

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That is pound 250 keyword baby or give securely at preborne.com slash knolls, KnaWLAS. Preborn.com slash Knowles. Every gift is tax deductible. You can't deport the Haitians who were supposed to be deported like a decade ago because if you do that, you'll be sending them back to hell. Why is Haiti hell? Haiti is hell because of the Haitians.

There's nothing racist about that. Haiti, we have a perfect control to test this hypothesis, because Haiti is not its own island. Haiti is one half of the island of Hispaniola. The island is two countries. One of them is Haiti. One of them is the Dominican Republic. at the level of genetics, the level of biology, it's all the same people. And yet, the Dominican Republic is a Caribbean paradise and Haiti is hell.

The Dominican Republic has a GDP that's five to six times the GDP of Haiti. The Dominican Republic is one of the very safest nations in the Caribbean. Haiti effectively doesn't have a GDP and effectively doesn't have a government. It's just a gang-run hellhole that is run in part. by literal cannibals. Why? Is it because of the geography? No.

Is it because of white supremacy? No, there aren't really white people in Haiti other than the people who go to give them charity. Is it because of toxic masculinity? The same number of men in Haiti as there are in Dominican Republic. It's because of the Haitians. That's why. And so then the logical next question is, okay, well, if the thing that makes this place hell is how the Haitians behave,

why are we going to permanently import a ton of Haitians? That seems like a bad idea, doesn't it? Especially at a time when no one assimilates. So, DeWine is going to do his best. Please, Republicans do not fall for this. Because we feel bad. Yeah, I wouldn't want to send anybody back to Haiti. Haiti really is hell.

You're right. But if you just follow that logic, why would we import hell into America? It won't really fix anything. Mike Anton, who works for the Trump administration, is from Claremont Institute, a very interesting political writer, he observed the celebration parallax with regard to migration, with regard to the great replacement theory. When a Republican says that libs are importing a ton of the rest of the world in order to change the demographics of the country in order to replace the native-born population. We're told that as a racist, anti-black, anti-Hispanic, neo-Nazi conspiracy theory.

But when Democrats say the same thing, which is, yeah, we're going to change the demographics, and we have a coalition of the ascendant, and we have replacement migration, which even the UN writes about. When they say that as if it's a good thing, then it's not a conspiracy theory anymore, then we should all just celebrate it. Anton called this the celebration parallax. There's a similar phenomenon going on with regard to Haiti being held. when you say Haiti is hell keep these people out that's a horrible conspiracy theory

and racist and terrible and awful when you say Haiti is hell that's why we need to bring all of them in that's a manifestly true statement these Republicans I don't know who has time for them but it's not just that they don't know what time it is

it's not that they haven't followed the election results and they don't realize that mass migration and mass deportations is a mainstream popular vote-winning political issue, is that they just refuse to see reality, whether that's because of ignorance or cowardice, I don't know what. But everything that he said is making a stronger and stronger argument to get rid of these Haitians. And if you can't deport the Haitians who were supposed to be deported a decade ago, you can't deport anyone else. So it's not, if you make a special carve-out

and you say, well, no, at least the Haitians get to stay, then what you're effectively saying is we're not going to deport anyone. Because if you're not going to deport the who were supposed to be kicked out 10 years ago, then you're certainly not going to deport Abuela or the Gardner. And then, okay, then we're going to keep 15 million, maybe more illegal aliens in the country, and the Trump election was basically for naught, the one that he won the popular vote on.

Okay. Speaking of President Trump, the late Senator Lindsey Graham was laid to rest yesterday. A lot of video clips came out of this funeral. Kind of dark, but, you know, people grieve in different ways. ways and he was a major political figure. President Trump eulogized Lindsey Graham in this way, but he deviated from his prepared notes. Heated things got in Washington virtually everyone, Republican or Democrat, liked Lindsay. Well, not everybody, but it sounds good. Not everybody.

He was a tough cookie, okay, I have to be. I have to veer from this first. He was a tough cookie, darling but he was beautiful i like people were going after trump the lives were making great hay about this and saying oh yours did trump is dissing lindsay graham at his funeral or first of all he's not dissing lindsay graham lindsay graham you don't want to speak for the dead i didn't know him very well at all but i'm quite certain he was a very public figure i'm sure lindsayam would have loved that eulogy because he he he got along pretty well with both sides of the aisle if in our very polarized time could get along with opponents. He was Lindsey Graham. He's a very charming man, very, very nice guy. But the idea that everyone loved Lindsey Graham, yeah, that is crazy.

And so Trump, some speechwriter writes his remarks and he goes, hold on, I got it. Lindsay Graham was a tough guy. And I am fairly certain Lindsey Graham and most politicians in D.C., for that matter, would much rather be described as a tough guy than just, you know, a little teddy bear that everybody loved. No, no, he was a tough guy. He was really tough, especially when it came to foreign policy and military intervention. He was a real tough guy, and he raised strong emotions in people. The other thing about this is, this is what people love about Trump. Barack Obama would never do this. George Bush would never do this. Mitt Romney would never do this. The kind of ordinary Republican would just read the notes and stick to the script. But Trump, he weaves. You know,

he comes out of there and he says, oh, now, what is this? Who wrote this? That's That's not true. It sounds nice, but it's not true. He was a real tough guy. He could be a real tough cookie sometimes. But he was beautiful. That's what people love. A eulogy, by the way, which is it's like good words. That's what it literally means. And so at a eulogy, you focus on the good things. It's kind of like a diplomat friend of mine explained to me the difference between diplomacy and flattery. You don't want to be a flatterer. Flattery is actually a sin. But being a diplomat is a very good thing. And the difference is, flattery is when you lie about or to someone in order to yourself. Diplomacy is when you focus on the good things. And a eulogy is about focusing on the good

things. Now it's very curious from the standpoint of our funerals. Our funerals are very confused now. Most people don't even have funerals. They have like celebrations of life because our culture is so neurotic and anxious and terrified of death that we don't want to deal with the plain fact of death. We don't want to deal with our grief in the way that we always have, which is with a quick funeral. No, no, no. We'll just put it off and we'll have a celebration of life later on. But what are you celebrating? If death is just, if we have a materialist conception of the world, if people doubt salvation, if they doubt religion, if they don't take religion seriously, then there's nothing to celebrate. This was a point made in Nolan's Odyssey in the character

played by Ellen Page, Sinon, which was really a recasting of Achilles, a famous scene in book 11 of the Odyssey, where Achilles is talking in Hades to Odysseus, and Odysseus is trying to make him feel better about dying. And Achilles says, don't try to console me about death. There's no consolation in death. Death sucks, and we spend all of our time wishing we were alive. Even for the very best of us and the most virtuous and death sucks because it's a place of no hope. That's the pagan morality. The Christian morality is, no, there is hope. Christ offers you hope and redemption and salvation. But the traditional Christian understanding of a funeral was that it was the holy sacrifice of the Mass on the merits of Christ's crucifixion on Calvary,

and it's prayers for the dead. It's praying for the dead, just like you see in Maccabees, in the Bible. It's, you're actually doing something. It's for the dead and for the hope of their salvation. The introduction of eulogies into funerals and especially funeral masses, that is a kind of return of the old pagan thing. where you just sing songs of how great the dead were. But the Christian idea is a little bit different than that. And so I think Trump's comments here in particular were great. It's funny too, on the point of tough guy. There's a clip that was going viral. I don't think we pulled it of Trump saying his last goodbyes to Lindsay. And instead of, you know, weeping and wailing on top of his coffin or whatever, he kind of walks by, looks at it, kind of a tough look, gives him a little pat on the coffin

and keeps walking. And people were interpreting this as being callous or as if he didn't care, about Lindsey Graham. This is, this is Trump doing what he, what he rightly said Lindsey Graham did, which is, you know, I'm not going to be overly emotional or sentimental or whatever. I'm be a real tough guy. See you, buddy. So even that, I thought, was really pregnant with meaning. All sorts of other funny lines from this funeral. There aren't usually a ton of funny lines of funerals, but Sean Hannity said that Lindsay was, you know, living up in that big Mar-a-Lago in the sky. And so it was a very political affair. Well, yeah, Lindsay Graham dedicated. it is entire life to politics.

Now, you might say, maybe you shouldn't dedicate your entire life to politics. Maybe there are better ways to have life. Maybe they're more enjoyable ways to have life. But in any case,

I thought it was very, very fitting for Lindsey Graham. And I thought, Trump's tribute, really more than any of the other ones. I thought it actually did befit Lindsey Graham very well.

Okay. Now, speaking of White House, turning to weightier matters, I want to get to a story that I mentioned just at the end of the show, I teased because I'm such a tease. A story about how we're waging a war,

not with Iran, not with Venezuela, not potentially with Cuba, but how we're waging the war that we're currently in with China, because there's a big move coming out of the White House, and you're not seeing a lot of reporting on it. First, though, my favorite comment yesterday is from Cohen-Mariemann, who says, the Spotify comment section was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the users of any other platform. I know. I love.

Guys, look, I love all of you total schizzoes, you unhinged freaks on YouTube. I'd love you. I get a real kick out of your comments. I do. But it's unbelievable how the different platforms speak to different groups and to different inclinations. Spotify. It's like the Marquess of Queensbury rules. You know, it's like high tea at the Lanesboro compared to YouTube, which is basically indiscernible from Fortune at this point. There's a place for that, you know, but it reminds me someone,

this is not an original thought. Someone pointed out that social media, all the different platforms speak to the different deadly sins. So, you know, Twitter speaks to wrath and a link to, in speaks to greed, I don't know, Instagram speaks to lust and so on and so forth. Anyway, good job, good job, Spotify. Something very exciting, folks. I have been excited for this, waiting for this for months now. There is a particular kind of frustration that comes. When you're packing for your trip, you're going on your summer vacation, your Labor Day vacation,

and you realize your cigars are going to spend the flight getting crushed in the duffel bag next to your shoes. You don't want that. Now, sometimes you get the nice plastic travel, humidor. Those are great. I have a bunch of those. We have great ones. But sometimes you show up, whether you're traveling, you're going to a nice dinner, whatever. You want something a little more classy. That is where the Mayflower leather travel humidor comes in. This raises the class. This is a beautiful piece. One of my very favorite humidors. Open it up. Spots for the little humidity here. You've got spots for your cigars. You've got the little lighter compartment. It's, this is what you bring to the cigar dinner.

This is what you bring to impress your friends, to impress your in-laws. This is the kind of fits beautifully, protect your cigars beautifully, nice. Spanish cedar on the inside. Get the Mayflower leather travel humidor. So you're ready wherever the voyage takes you. It's going to sell. I say this every time. It's going to sell out if you want it, if you want it for Thanksgiving.

If you want it for Christmas, if you want it for whatever, just get it now. If you want to give it as a gift at Christmas, because it's a really, it's a beautiful thing. and it's at a very good price. Just get it now. And then please don't complain to me when it sells that. You have to be 21 years old or older to order what were prohibited. Conditions and exclusions apply. You guys know we're at war with China.

Are you aware of that? We covered this a little bit on the show yesterday. The Chinese are so sneaky. They're so, maybe Media Matters is going to clip that out. I don't know. I don't mean to play in any stereotypes, but they're very, very sneaky. The Chinese and the Chinese Communist Party. And so when they wage war on us, they don't do it in a really overt way.

they do it in death by a thousand cuts. So they'll do things like smuggle bio-weapons into our country through their graduate students studying at American universities to try to poison our crops. How many times has that headline popped up? It's like every three months that headline pops up. So we're in a war with them. And the flashpoint of this war is in tech

and specifically in AI. Part of the reason I think that you're seeing a lot of media, a lot of social media influencers talking about how terrible data centers are. Part of that, a big part of that, is that it is Chinese propaganda. It's a Chinese influence operation. And I don't mean to say all of the concerns are bogus.

They're not. People who think that, who hear it that way, they just don't understand how propaganda works. Good propaganda does not work by just inventing a concern. Good propaganda works by identifying real tensions, real fissures in a society, and then exploiting them. This is what the Soviet Union. famously did during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which then became the black power

movements, a lot of leftist violence. It's not that the Soviet Union invented racial strife in America. We'd had that for quite a while. It's that the Soviet Union exploited that to their own purposes to create division in American society. That's what you're seeing here. There are legitimate concerns about data centers with regard to energy prices, with regard to local water, with regard to property and employment, because the data centers don't employ that many people. concern. There are real concerns about surveillance. People don't want to see the growth of AI because they're concerned that it will displace their jobs or that it will surveil them all the time. Those are all real concerns that need to be dealt with. But the reason that you're seeing

a major push in some of the influencer class against the data centers and a major push just in sort of random social media accounts is because the Chinese want to beat us in the AI war. Because if the Chinese beat us in the AI war, that will be basically the final nail in the coffin in terms of the Chinese rising up and displacing America as the global hegemon. So what is the White House doing? The White House is killing two birds with one stone. The White House, according to the Wall Street Journal, is redirecting hundreds of billions of dollars in funds from colleges and universities toward AI development. Let me see. I think I have the Wall Street Journal account somewhere here. Do I? Do I? Do I? No. Yes, I do.

Wall Street Journal report. This overhaul will reshape $200 billion in spending a year and favors individual scientists in order to outpace China. This is from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy argues that individual scientists can help the nation move faster to use AI and scientific research, so they're going to take money away from various universities. This is good, because the colleges and the universities have really been perverted away from their purpose. The purpose of colleges and universities is at its highest level is the liberal arts, which is education befitting free men to help people make sense of their freedom, which means disciplining their wills and their appetites and improving their intellect to better know the truth. The universities do the opposite of that all the time, and they do it at your expense. They do it at taxpayer expense. So we give them our taxpayer money. We give that to the government. The government gives it to these schools. The schools do not teach people to discipline the will and pursue virtue. The schools, if anything, just encourage resentment and anger and violence and anti-American protests when they're not just outright promoting sex and orgies and drugs and booze.

and stuff like that. But then on the level of the intellect, at the very least, you would hope that the universities would be teaching the truth, and they're not. They're teaching the boys can become girls. They're teaching that America is evil. They're only focusing on the very worst aspects of American history. In some cases, they're making it up outright. And so the universities are totally contrary to their actual mission. They're not even taking seriously at all, the ultimate point of religion, which comes down beyond anthropology and morality and ontology, all the way down to theology all the way down to religion. They don't even pretend that that's part of their mission anymore. This is the subject of John Henry Newman's wonderful book, The Idea of the University.

He was diagnosing this problem 150 years ago. Regardless, this is a great way. We weaken the universities and improve America's position in the war against China. Very, very important. Good point. We need to beat China in the AI war. We need to be China in the AI war because we need to remain the global hegemon. We need to remain the global hegemon because so much of our prosperity and so much of our peace is dependent upon America's position in the world. The world using the U.S. dollar, the world looking to the United States is the protector of the global order. If we lose that, it's not just going to take us back a few notches. It's going to radically alter basically every aspect of our lives. And even if you don't care that much about American

Agemony on your day-to-day basis, trust me, you will miss it when it's gone. of wars would turn all the way back to the Civil War. Did you know that Gone with the Wind is really, really racist? That's what Netflix wants you to know about one of the greatest films ever made, about one of the greatest works of art that the United States has ever produced. They want you to know that it's just really, really racist. This just popped up on the Netflix website. How would you describe Gone with the Wind?

Some people haven't seen Gone With the Wind. It's an old movie, but it's truly, it's one of the great masterpieces of American art. This is the entire description on Netflix. A 1939 American Civil War epic known for its racism. And then, no, that's the first sentence. Second sentence, the last sentence is, to learn more about Black Lives in America, search Black Lives Matter. That's the Netflix description of Gone with the Wind.

Now, I think that the 1939 American Civil War epic is best known for its beautiful writing. wonderful acting, really interesting acting, because it was the mash of some of different acting styles. You had the rise of naturalistic modern acting styles. You still had here the kind of older representational kind of acting, but it's just beautiful. It's just an absolutely magnificent work of art. It tells you a lot about American history, the complexities of this near suicide of the United States. No, no, no, no. It's just known for its racism to learn more, search up this complete scam, violent shakedown operation called Black Lives Matter. Brings us all the way back to the top of the show.

Why people love the story about the 16-year-old kid pulling that 10-year-old kid out of the waves, risking his own life to save that 10-year-old kid's life. Because what we have been told, in my case, as a millennial for my entire life. and for Zumers, since they were in the womb, since when they were a little glint in their father's eye, we have been told that this, not just gone with the wind, but this entire country is primarily known for its racism, and its misogyny, and its self-interestedness,

and its contempt of its fellow man, and its cruelty and its violence, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And none of that is true. All of those statements are idiotic, and you can see them disproven in real time. And when they are disproven, when people's hunches, when they're deep, still lingering, even after all this propaganda, still lingering sense that America actually is kind of a good place.

And, you know, masculinity is not toxic, and white people aren't evil, and young people aren't losers. And actually, you know, like maybe there's pretty good stuff here and we can build on it and we should encourage each other. still get that lingering sense and it's proven right. And that's why that story goes viral. That's why that kid needs that award.

It's why we need to celebrate it and see a lot more of it. Okay, today's work for on Wednesday. The rest of the show continues now you do not want to miss it. Become a member use code, Null's Ken to W-L-E-S at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.