The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 2042 - WATCH: CNN Crashes Out Over Trump’s Pretty Assistant

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

Another crazy woman goes viral for harming her children and trying to kill herself, New York offers to kill your granny, and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle move back to the United Kingdom. Ep. 2042 - - - Today's Sponsors: Cardiff - America’s favorite small business lender, provides the liquidity to move at the speed of business with same-day funding up to $500,000. Apply in under 3 minutes with zero credit impact.  Apply now at https://cardiff.co/knowles Hallow - Download Hallow today and get 3 months free to join The 21 Days of Prayer Challenge at https://hallow.com/knowles Hillsdale - Go to https://hillsdale.edu/Knowles to enroll. It’s totally free. Read deeply. Think clearly. PragerU - PragerU has no paywall. No smirking newscasters, no bias dressed up as "objectivity." Just the facts presented in an age appropriate, wholesome, all-American way. Go to https://PragerU.com/dailywire - - - DailyWire: Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://dailywire.com/subscribe 🎆 🇺🇸 Our America 250 SALE is back! Get 3-Months of DailyWire for just $17.76 📜 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. 🍿 Run Hide Fight: Infidels will premiere on The Daily Wire, Wednesday September 16th. 📘 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

The midterm elections are heating up, congressional control, and President Trump's agenda hangs in the balance. Every headline has the potential to shift the odds. And in a key Senate race, James Telerico is currently trading at 52% to beat Ken Paxton. That means $100 trade pays out over $180 with a win. Use code Daily, D-A-I-L-Y, to get up to $20 when you trade $20. Cal-She, K-A-L-S-H-I-C-C-T-E-T-T-E-T-E-L-S-H-I-C-T-T-E-L-H-I-C-T-E-L-C-T-E-L-C-E-L-E-T-E-T-E-L-E-V-E-E-R-E-E-V-E-L-E-C-E-R-E-E-V-E-E-C-L-E-V-E-M-E-V-E-V-E-L-E-V-E-V-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-V-M-E-M-E-M-M-E-M-M-M-E-V-M-S-E-M-M-W-M-M-V-V-M-V up to 500,000 at Cardiff.C.O. slash Knowles. As the nation debates the Lindsay Clancy murder case,

another crazy woman goes viral for harming her children and trying to kill herself. In related news, the state of New York is now offering to help vulnerable people kill themselves, and Prince Harry and Megan Markle are moving back to the United Kingdom, which likely makes King Charles want to kill himself. Then CNN airs multiple segments on the breaking news story, that the President of the United States has an assistant, and the Transportation Secretary tells his daughter not to go to Harvard. Just when I thought it was impossible to like the Duffies more than I already do,

there you have it. I'm Michael Knowles. It's the Michael Nulls show. Welcome back to the show. Speaking of Cabinet Secretary, Scott Besson, the Treasury, secretary absolutely bodied one of the most prominent leftist economic figures of the last 30 or 40 years. And it was delightful. And it is a model for all of the other cabinet sector. This is a day of cabinet secretaries because I also have Scott Turner, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, happens to be in town. He said he was going to swing by this morning. So maybe we'll get to chat with Scott during the Membrum segmentum. Before all of that, though, I want to tell you about

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and also we got to check in on the women. Something is not right right now with the women, especially on social media. Before we get to that, though, Megan Markle and Prince Harry are moving back to the United Kingdom. I don't have any champagne to pop. I do have cigars that I could light this morning. This is obviously really great news for America. Congratulations, President Trump. Congratulations, my fellow Americans. We are finally ridding ourselves of the Markles, Mr. and Mrs. Markle, the artist formerly known as Prince Harry, now Mr. Megan Markle. They left the royal family, what was it, three years ago now, in order to move to America and become TV stars. And now they're moving back to the UK because that's all dried up.

I do feel for His Majesty, King Charles, I send my condolences. The reason this is a political story, though, is not just that we're finally ridding ourselves of Harry and Megan, the reason that's a political story is because of the warning that it tells us about how we engage with civic life. Megan Markle wanted to be a princess. You got Prince Harry here, one of two children of King Charles. She doesn't get to be the queen, but she does get to be a princess. She marries Prince Harry, but then she realizes she doesn't actually want to be a princess. She doesn't know what it really means to be a princess. She was an actress. Crucially, she was an actress. And what she realized was she didn't want to be a princess, she just wanted to play a princess on TV.

It's very, very sad. She didn't want to be a real princess. She wanted to be a Disney princess. And so she destroys the royal family. I've long wondered if Megan Markle is not some kind of CIA op, you know, a biological weapon that developed in Quantico or something in order to destroy the royal family as payback for the War of 1812. I don't know what it is, but she goes there, blows up the royal family. and then gets her prince husband, who she sought out, to quit being a prince, because she would rather be a pretend prince, princess, than a real princess.

Compare her to King Charles' sister, Princess Anne. Princess Anne has been a real princess. And do you know what being a real princess means? It means doing 20,000 official engagements over the course of 56 years. What is an official royal engagement? It's like doing a ribbon cutting. the random new store in the middle of nowhere, England. That's what it means to actually be a princess, or a prince, or a king.

What it actually means is to serve. It means to put the good of the people before your own personal good. A lot of girls, when they're little, they say, oh, I want to be a princess someday. Oh, wouldn't it be so great, a guy would say to be the king of England. It's very difficult, actually, because you don't get to do anything that you want to do. You don't get to pursue your passion. You don't get to do that career that interests you. You don't get to just have a luxurious life.

There's some luxury involved. You get some nice clothes and nice houses. But your whole life is about service to the community. And that's the good version of monarchy. The bad version is tyranny, like dictatorship, autocracy. But the good version is that. You're just serving. And Megan Markle clearly didn't want to do it.

She wanted to wear the tiara on television, but she didn't want to actually bear the weight of public service. So they move to the U.S., but that dries up. They try to be celebrities in the U.S. and get Netflix shows. Nobody wants to watch that. So now they're going back to the U.K. And you don't want to attribute cynical motives to them, but right now the way that they make money is just by selling dirt on the royal family

and publishing memoirs and doing interviews with Oprah. So I don't know, the dirt's run out because the royal family finally had enough of them. So they say, okay, we're going to go back to the U.K. That's sad. That's too bad. And it's just a warning for all of us. To me, I've said it for many, many years. Part of the essence of liberalism is wanting the appearance of the thing without the substance of the thing.

They want decaf coffee. They want diet coke. They want trans women. They want to kind of look like a woman but not really be a woman. They want modern marriage where it's marriage, but it's marriage without commitment and without kids and without sacrifice. They want what looks like the good of the thing, but they don't want to actually do the thing, so they're deprived of the good. Don't do that. If you want to be in public service, you have to serve the public. If you want to get married, you have to fully give yourself to your spouse and you need to be open to

the possibility of life. And if you want to, if you want to do it, you got to do it because there are really no half measures. Okay, very, very sad for King Charles, very good for us. Speaking of disturbed women, in the wake of Lindsay Clancy, another crazy woman is harming her kids and trying to kill herself. There's a really messed up video of this. This woman is, we can play at least the first part of the video. She's like half naked setting her kitchen on fire while filming herself on social media. I mean, this is wearing some kind of weird mask, screeching in a foreign language. Her name, I guess, is Melisa Sanchez.

Throwing a mug into the fire. This is in her kitchen. Okay. All right. And I don't even want to watch this part of the video. Cut it off here. This is part of the video where she's pouring hot wax onto, I guess, onto her and then she pours it onto her poor kids.

So, you know, this is like really, really dark stuff. The way it's being reported is that it's a Florida woman. And but then when I first saw the video, I said, is this in Argentina or is this, where is this? She's speaking Spanish. It's all, but she's a Florida woman, which these days, I guess, actually kind of makes sense. This woman's like posted pictures on her social media account with a giant gun in her mouth. I mean, really sad, scary messed up stuff. She's a 26-year-old and she has 60,000 Instagram followers.

she's a social media influencer who is obviously nuts. The husband was out of the house here because they're having marital issues. He was staying with his parents. And then while he was out of the house, she was clearly abusing her six and three-year-old daughter threatening to kill herself, lighting the house on fire. She had already attempted suicide. Okay, so what do we take away from this? In the wake of all of these women defending Lindsay Clancy, some of them defending Lindsay Clancy on the grounds that she didn't actually kill her children, which is absurd because not even Lindsay Clancy is arguing that. But most of those women who are defending her are defending her because she killed her children. I say, oh, you just don't know what it's like. You don't understand how bad postpartum depression is.

She didn't have any help. Meanwhile, her husband was helping her. Her doctors were trying to help her. She was prescribed a ton of psych medication. A disturbing number of women are defending her. And then you point out, okay, well, half of the women in the United States defend killing their own kids, right? They defend abortion. So this shouldn't be totally surprising. But I think a big part of this is social media, obviously. This lady posted regularly online. She had a lot of Instagram followers.

And social media clearly exacerbates this problem. Social media clearly exacerbates most problems in society. But it's a little bit of a chicken and the egg thing because it is, it is, it is. Is women who are a little unhinged who post the most about themselves on social media? That is for sure true. A good rule of thumb, if you're a married woman, you should not be posting selfies and like dancing on social media. You should not be doing that. If you're doing that, it's a red flag.

I'm not saying you're going to like go murder your whole family, but it's a red flag. You should not be doing. Because you have to ask yourself, what are you doing that for? If you're posting, you know, really nice looking pictures of yourself selfies on social media and you're a married woman, who's that for? that's just to attract other men who are not your husband. That's not good. Or it's to make other women envious. That's not good. So it's not, that's a bad sign. Women who are already a little bit unhinged are attracted to social media. But social media obviously compounds the problem because it plays into all of our worst vices. We know this. And because we're memetic creatures. So we, this is the inside of René Girard that I've mentioned a number of times on the show.

the idea that we shape our behaviors and also our desires based on what we observe from other people. You want the Rolex watch, not because you know anything about how watches work, but because people you like or admire have the Rolex watch, so you want one too. It's not even a bad thing. We look at the behavior of how people that we admire act, and then we try to imitate that. And we imitate even their desires, which is why it is, it's why. the private behavior of people is a public problem. This is why when the liberals and the libertarians say, what's it any business to you? You know, if someone's doing drugs or doing weird sex stuff or kind of,

you know, behaving erratically or saying a bunch of crazy stuff, why is it your problem? You know, just leave me alone, man. Well, I say it's my problem because I live in society. And there is clearly some memetic mania that is spreading. You see this in the spread of some of the true crime conspiracy theories that have gone around. People are describing Lindsay Clancy as like Carmelo Anthony for women. It's like Carmelo Casey Anthony. You know, people who are just defending her out of this kind of identity. They know she's guilty, but they just, I don't know, this girl power, they identify with her. But that spread is really, really bad. And you're going to see copycats. What I think is most jarring about that video, part of the reason it's going viral right now is it just feels kind of like a

Lindsay Clancy copycat because we're memetic creatures, which is why, it is important for us to behave well, not just for our own souls, but for other people, because we commit the sin of scandal when we behave badly in public, or even in private, because there aren't really private sins. We scandalize other people, and let's not forget, in the Gospels, when Christ talks about tying millstones around the necks of people, it would be better if a millstone were tied around their neck. That is in response to people scandalizing, innocent people, scandalizing little kids. So very dangerous, and what it requires is much stronger social taboos.

It requires much greater social restraint and a little bit of censorship and maybe regulating social media and regulating our behavior. And it requires a role of the government to regulate social media, which is our public square. Okay. Speaking of a lot of death, a lot of death this morning, I want to get to a horrific change that just come about in New York. Assisted suicide is now available to terminally ill New Yorkers. And there are going to be some people who say, oh, well, if you're on the brink of death, you know, what's the problem with that? There's a big, big problem. For starters, we're all terminally ill.

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Those are just a few of the questions from real posts on X, your questions, answered by one of the most important and respected leaders in the Catholic Church. His eminence, Raymond Cardinal Burke in the latest episode of Off the Clock, check it out. Could God make a burrito so expensive that he could not buy it? I think there actually is a serious theological question hidden in there. They say, can God make a square circle? Well, it's ridiculous question. A circle is a circle and a square.

God doesn't contradict himself. See, this is evidence as to why I want to ask my questions instead of taking them from Twitter. Watch full episode now on the Michael Knowles YouTube channel for the uncensored ad-frey version. Subscribe to DailyWire Plus. Assisted suicide is now available to terminally ill New Yorkers. So how does this work? New Yorkers who have less than six months to live. can now get doctors to help kill them.

And there are a lot of people, even conservatives, who say, you know what, there's often a lot of pain at the end of life. And so, you know, if someone who's in a great deal of pain who only has six months to live, you know, shouldn't we just let them, shouldn't we help them to kill themselves? There are a few problems with this. It's very insidious. First of all, you don't know how long someone has to live. You don't know how long someone has to live. This is one of the arguments that pro-abortion people make. They say, a lot of them say women should be able to kill babies whenever they want,

but the ones who are a little more sophisticated about it, they say, well, at the very least, babies who have serious defects. You know, things like Trismy 18, where we know the baby is going to die within a day or two after being born if the baby even survives. You know, just kill the baby in the womb. We just, we know. And they're even, they're even fairly conservative people who will go along with that. But it's often not true. In fact, I have a friend who had a baby with trism, Ayrin said, oh, you know, abort the baby. Oh, the baby's going to live for a few hours, maybe a day or two after he's born. Baby's two years old. And then what they will say, if they're being a little more honest, is they'll say, yeah, but his quality of life isn't good enough. You know, the real reason, yeah, sure, I mean, Down syndrome people can be born, but, you know, they're not as smart as I want them to be. They don't look as good as I want them to look. They don't live up to my standards of what a happy life would be. Meanwhile, people who have Down syndrome are some of the happiest people on earth. and you have an entire political order saying, well, your life is not valuable, actually.

We should kill you because I just don't value your life. Well, the same thing goes for elderly people or sick people. You don't know about that six-month diagnosis. I think a lot of us, maybe all of us, know someone or have heard of someone, who was given a six-month or maybe a year prognosis. 20 years later, they're still alive. And what you're doing is you're praying on their anxieties, their fears, their worries about being a burden to their family, and you're getting them to kill themselves,

and you're having doctors violate the Hippocratic Oath. But there's something even further. I googled this story. When I saw this pop-up, I googled the story yesterday. I said, assisted suicide New York. And you know what's so amazing? When you Google that, the first thing that comes up on Google is a message, and it says, help is available.

Speak with someone today. 9-88, suicide and crisis lifeline. the languages are English and Spanish, 24-7. Anytime that you're even Googling suicide, help is it. Don't do it. Call this number. We will help you. You can call.

You can text. You can chat online. There's an official website. Call. Unless you want to. Hmm. What? This doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?

Google is not some right-wing conservative organization. Google's super lib. and yet even Google understands that suicide is bad. It's the sort of thing we tell people not to do. It's the sort of thing we try to prevent as best we can. We'll have people on the line 24-7 in multiple languages. Don't do it.

Don't kill yourself. Unless you want to. Does that make a lot of sense? Is suicide good or bad? Everybody agreed. I can't even say until five minutes ago. It's like today. even the most liberal people, many of them agree, suicide is really bad. We have to prevent it.

We can't allow people to give in to despair because despair is a sin. And you can't lose hope. Where there's life, there's hope. But then you have politicians in New York. Here's what Kathy Hochel said, the governor of New York, she said, our state will always stand firm in safeguarding New Yorkers' freedoms and right to bodily autonomy, which includes the right for the terminally ill to peacefully and comfortably in their lives with dignity and compassion. There is no dignity in suicide. It is the least dignified way to go. It's a grave and horrific sin. It is deeply scandalous.

Speaking of scandal, it's deeply scandalous. People who commit suicide are massively increasing the chances that many other people in their family will kill themselves. It is deeply scandalous. For anyone who has anything even resembling a kind of traditional religion, that it is deeply scandalous because you're signaling, you don't. believe in the religion. Or you're telling your family that you don't mind going to hell. But her statement doesn't even make sense. Our state will always stand firm in safeguarding New Yorkers

freedom and right to bodily autonomy, which includes the right for the terminally ill to kill themselves. Why only the terminally ill? If you stand firm on the supposed freedom and right to bodily autonomy to do whatever you want with your own body, why would you limit assisted suicide to the terminally ill? First of all, we're all terminally ill. No one here gets that alive. There's a happy ending that's available to you because God so loved the world that he's sin has only begotten son

that whosoever believes in it might might not perish but have eternal life. But in this world, no one here gets, we all have a terminal illness called life. So why, that doesn't make sense even on the terms of the left, even on the governor of New York's own terms. It doesn't make sense in accord

with any other policies, by the way. New York, even liberal New York still has drug laws. If you stand firm on the freedom to perfect bodily autonomy, why do you have laws against drugs? I don't have the right to shoot something into my veins? Why not? I thought I had bodily autonomy. It doesn't affect anybody else. And you say, well, your drug use does affect someone else because you might behave erratically.

You might, I don't know, you could interact with people. And so we, okay, well, same thing goes for suicide. Same thing goes with everything because we live in a society. deeply, deeply scandalous, and they know it's wrong. You know, someone made this point the other day. I forget who it was, so I can't give credit. But someone pointed out, you know, we all try to figure out pro-abortion activism from this really logical, ideological standpoint.

There's a little bit of that there. I think a lot of pro-abortion activism, a lot of the women who are most ardently pro-abortion, publicly pro-abortion, I think they're just trying to rationalize to themselves the fact that they killed their kid and they feel guilty about it. I think that's what a lot of it is. And the thing is, we all sin and there actually is forgiveness available and you are redeemable. And it is possible, but not if you persist in your error. So it's this real, it's a double whammy. And I think, I think the same thing probably goes here. We know that it's just wrong. You don't have a right to a wrong, first of all, but we just know it's wrong. Everyone knows suicide is horribly wrong.

But you know what? We're just going to kind of do it anyway because health care is really expensive at the end of life. And, you know, grandma, she's a real hassle to take care of when she gets older. And suffering is tough. And in our modern society, we don't really know how to make sense of suffering. So we're just going to, and we believe now we've reduced the moral order to just like whatever you want to do is fine. If it feels good, do it. If nothing really matters, but please recycle.

That's what we've reduced it to. So, okay, we're going to let people do it. And we're going to ignore all of the hideous consequences that come of it, making the most vulnerable people praying on them, making them feel worthless, making them feel like a burden, encouraging them into a grave, grave sin. We're going to do all of that, and we're just not going to think about it too much.

So when you try to find information about the story, and you Google it, the new assisted suicide law in New York, Google is going to tell you, don't kill yourself. unless you know, unless you want to and you live in New York. Okay. We turn from the elderly now and the sick to the young and the vibrant because the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy and his lovely wife, Rachel Campos Duffy, of Fox News fame. They have a new reality show. You know, they met on a reality show. They met on the real world from their reality stars. And Sean from his position as Transportation Secretary, they have a new series called The Great American Road Trip. So taking some of their skills that they've developed for years and bringing that to bear in this public role. So they've gone viral for the first episode because Sean and Rachel tell their daughter not to go to Harvard. Just when you think you can't love the Duffies any more than you already do, they tell their kid not to go to Harvard and my heart rose 10 times the size. We'll get to that in a moment. First, though, speaking of universities,

I want to tell you about Prager You. Go to prageru.com slash daily wire. The decaying old gray lady might as well line your cat box. New York Times readership among young Americans has totally cratered. No one wants a scolding lecture pretending to be journalism. Here's the thing. While legacy media across-the-board hemorrhage trust, Prager You is the rising generation's last best hope. Millions of students log on every day for five-minute videos on economics, history, faith, and freedom that teach the truth. Now, what CNN and others want young people to believe, Prager U has no paywall, no smirking newscasters, no bias dressed up as adjectivity. Just the facts presented in an age-appropriate, wholesome, all-American way.

But Prager U runs on people like you, not the government, not advertisers who despise you. Give today your donation is triple-matched. Go to prageru.com slash dailywire. That is prageru.com slash daily wire. While you're over there, maybe consider checking out the book club, which is the Prager U show that I host and check out my five-minute videos. Whatever you do, though, hit on over there right now. That is brageru.com slash daily wire. Here is the clip that's gone viral that Cabinet Secretary Sean Duffy telling his kid not to go to Harvard.

If I do get it, I feel like you can't say no. To Harvard? Yeah. Well, me and mom can say no. Catholicism to us is everything. It's the basis of our marriage. It's the basis of our family. So I'm nervous about the idea of Paloma going to Harvard.

We spend a lot of time nurturing and providing formation for our kids, giving them an environment where they are steeped in faiths and values. And so the idea of dropping her off at a place that would undermine that or try to undo all those things makes me worried. And again, I don't want them to get one viewpoint. I want them to get a lot of different viewpoints. But I don't want them fed only one viewpoint that's contrary to the way my kids were raised. Listen, my problem is we have thought about how we've raised you and how hard we've worked to, I think, raise what is a remarkable young girl. If I send you there, I think what

happens is they have professionalized, figuring out how they can take good young girls like you and I think corrupt their minds. This is a brilliant point. So one, I mean, any jabs you can get in at Harvard. Awesome. Love it. That's great. The Trump administration has taken particular aim at Harvard, and they deserve it. But he makes this very good point. He says, places like Harvard, institutions like Harvard, have professionalized how to take good young girls and corrupt their minds. That is indisputably true. Now, there are two polls that we have to balance here when conservatives think about this. Because on the one hand, you say, yeah, why would I send my kids? is I spent 18 years raising my kid to be a good person and to, I'm then going to send them off to

one of these institutions that is totally diametrically opposed to all the values that I believe in, all of the habits of virtue that I've tried to inculcate, and it is going to try to get these kids to hate me. And I'm going to pay a quarter million dollars for the privilege. Why would I do that? More than, probably more than a quarter million dollars, probably $350,000. Why would I do that? That's one side. But then the other poll is these institutions still have power.

So if we pull ourselves out of them, then we are just seeding that power to the left. This is what happened at the teaching level in a lot of the schools from the 1960s through the 80s. So that then before that, you could have fairly conservative teachers. You had a lot more religious education. And then a lot of that went away. And now it's this crazy secular lib education that already poisons your kid mind starting in kindergarten. So how do you balance these two things? He's totally right that we need to, at a personal level, be,

very cautious about this. I've wondered, I mean, I'm a product of one of these schools. And for most of my classmates, they went there with whatever their views were, ranging from moderately conservative to extremely communist. For most of my classmates, over the course of four years at a very liberal university, they became more liberal. That's what happens for most of them. And some of them became really radical.

And, you know, it like, it turns people into lesbians. and it gets crazy. So that's for most people. But for some people, it makes you much more conservative. I had the reactionary response to going to one of these schools, which is that I became more conservative. I entered as a libertarian. I left somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan.

And it made me more religious. I entered as an atheist. I left believing in God. And within a year or so of graduation, I returned to the church. So I had, that can happen. this paradoxical reaction to these schools, which is you see how nuts it all is, and you become more deeply entrenched in the beliefs that you already sort of held. That can happen. So it's a little bit of a prudential question. For some kids, they're going to be able to survive that,

especially for places like Harvard where it really generates a lot of sharks, if you want to become an investment bank or something. Yeah, that's probably a good place to go. If they can survive through that, great. Some kids can do it. Some kids, it's not for them. And they're a great school that they should all go to. But we need to balance this. The personal aspect. I don't want my kid to turn into a trans-pigmy Muslim lesbian who hates me. You got the personal aspect and then the political aspect, which is we need to take over Harvard. I want Harvard. I don't want the left to have Harvard. I don't want the left to have Yale. I don't want the left to have New York or California, some of our most important cities. I don't want to just give those away to the left. I don't

want to give the left the media. I don't want to give the left any of the big cultural institutions. I don't want to give the left the bureaucracy. I don't want to give any of this. And you're seeing this debate play out right now on the American right. There's a big debate happening on the right over how we proceed. Do we proceed in a way that repeats the same kind of libertarian slash neo-conservative slogans of the last 20 plus years where we say, you know, we want you to elect us, We want you to give us power so that we don't wield power. We want you to elect us so we can just get out of these institutions. Politics is downstream of culture.

We don't want to wield the government. That would be authoritarian. We don't, no, no, no, we don't want to actually, we don't. You can't legislate morality. No, no, no, we don't want to. Uh-uh, uh-uh. We don't want any power. That's a tough pitch in a political campaign.

You're saying, give me power because I don't want power. It doesn't work. There's that, there's those people who are arguing that. It's saying, we don't want to stop blaming the government. government for your problems. That's what the left does. That's what the socialists do. You just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, Buster. Eat a little bit of ramen and work hard. And, you know, then you'll make something to yourself. Well, you know what? Those guys have a point, personally. That is true. I did all that. I did all of that stuff. I ate the ramen. It worked a lot.

I didn't whine and blame people for my problems generally. Yeah, you do need to cultivate those personal habits and you need to instill them in your kids and in your political community. but that is not an excuse to give up politics. Man is a political creature. We have a self-government for a reason. Our framers of our Constitution gave us a self-government for a reason so that we can do stuff, so that we can pass laws so that we can form behavior because the law is a teacher and the purpose of government is that good should be pursued and evil should be avoided.

And part of the purpose of government is having the country flourish, and part of having the country flourish, is encouraging habits of virtue and discouraging vice. This is why we give tax breaks to people who invest in our communities. We're going to be talking about opportunity zones with the HUD Secretary Scott Turner momentarily. But this is why we incentivize certain behavior. We give tax breaks for virtuous behavior. If you are educating your kids in certain ways, if you are investing in certain neighborhoods, if you're doing the stuff that we want to reward, we reward it. And we punish other behavior. like drugs and crime and vices and all that kind of stuff.

So that's just what politics is. And too many, for too long, we've had the libertarian and the neo-conservative types who don't really represent the base, but they are overrepresented in the pundit and political class. They have told us to give up on politics because it's easy and maybe because they have a mistake in ideology. But we shouldn't do that. There's nothing American about that. There's nothing traditional about that.

There's nothing that really has no place in serious political philosophy. So I guess my response to this clip is, yes, the Duffy's. are awesome and I love attacking Harvard all the time. And they're very, parents need to be totally aware of this. And at a personal level, you need to make sure a school doesn't get your kid to hate you and undo 18 years of hard work that you've put into them. And at the political level, we need to take back those institutions. Trump has actually shown a fair bit how to do that. You need to threaten to defund them. You need to put a lot of pressure on them. You need to, we do, our taxpayer money goes to Harvard.

We fund a lot of Harvard stuff. You need to threaten that. By the way, for those who are saying this is like Francisco Franco stuff, this is, you know, this is authoritarian or whatever. Like, the modern conservative movement was founded by William F. Buckley Jr. With a book called God and Man at Yale, which was about this. God and Man at Yale, which was subtitled the superstitions of academic freedom, which called for trustees and parents and people with political power to beat Yale. into submission and to get the socialists and the atheists fired so that they could have a good education for children. That's what we got to do. Do the personal, do the political. You don't have

to exclude one for the other. Okay. Now, I've got to get to this breaking news story. CNN ran multiple segments on it last night. Shocking stuff. Pull over if you're driving. The president of the United States has an assistant. First, though, I did not pick a comment, so I told the producers, I said, okay, you pick the favorite comment. The best comment yesterday, according to them, is from Professor Jacob, who says, inshallah, next time you pick a comment, Habibi. Wow, unbelievable. That's unbelievable. The insolence, the insubordination is shocking. I need, I need new assistance. I need new, but that could be, get out of it. Get him out of my ear. I need new, but if I got a new assistant, you know what, that, maybe that would be a national news story. According to CNN, it is. Here is CNN's

Aaron Burnett. It literally says breaking news. Talking about this woman, Natalie Harp, who's just like a nice lady who works for the, she's one of many people who works for the president. She's his assistant. So she assists him a lot of the time. And she's pretty. I guess that's part of the reason that the Democrats are attacking her.

She's like a pretty woman in her 30s who assists president. There is not even a hint of anything improper about their relations. There is not even a scintilla of an iota of a shadow of a hint that Trump and this assistant are doing anything improper at all. She just works for him. And John Ossov, this senator from Georgia, insinuate, he wants to make himself the next Obama and he thinks he's running for president. He insinuates the other day, calls out this woman and insinuates that she's sleeping with her boss. And it was just such a nasty, despicable thing to do to a random staffer. So ugly, deeply misogynistic. But it's not just him.

CNN's running with it. Here, CNN gets the great guest. She gets this assistant's brother to come on to talk about her job. We've learned right about his incredible reliance on her at all hours of the day to post social media posts just as one example. I think that Trump's best friends are people who are his fan club, you know? Like, and so she's his biggest fan. And so that's probably why he likes her. And, like, she's good looking.

She's got a good personality. Like, I don't know. I want to ask you, press about something that just. She thinks that he saved. He thinks that he saved. your life. So, like, somebody living with that kind of gratitude, that must feel pretty good. I want to ask you about something. CNN. This is CNN. Breaking news story. The Aaron Burnett clearly realizes this is not going very well, and this is really tawdry and despicable, but her evidence of some

improper relationship. She goes, you know, the president has this assistant, and she's with him a lot, and she's posting social media posts for him at all hours of the day and night. Oh, you mean like an assistant? You mean like an assistant? She does her job. I don't, I'm not the president of the United States. I'm a podcaster and cigar salesman. And I have, I'm with my assistants a lot and sometimes I have them post social media at all hours of the day and night. It's not, the story that she's, suggesting is somehow nefarious is that the president, not a podcaster or a CNN journalist or a cigar salesman, the president of the United States has an assistant and she assists him. And then she gets this complete dupist brother on. And this is, yeah. I mean, and actually I kind of like the brother, because the brother, he doesn't say there's anything wrong about their relations. He goes, yeah, I mean, I don't know, she thinks he saved her life because of the right to try legislation. So, like, she really likes him. And he likes having staff members who like him, too. So yeah, that's it. And she's

like nice and good looking. So yeah, isn't that crazy? And so Aaron Burnett knows this going wrong. She then brings on Maggie Haberman, his other journalist, to really plumb the depths of the story that the POTUS has an aid. You note in your new article that Natalie Hart never takes a day off, not even a Sunday, right? She is committed and she is indefatigable. How much does Trump depend on her? Hold on, put a pause. Put a pause. Hold on. I just get, we got a, I'm not going to let that one slide. Aaron Burnett, she's got a real serious journalist face on. And she goes, you know, I mean, we're getting these reports that she works all the time. She just works like every day. Do you know, do you know what it is like to work at the White House? I've never worked at the White House,

but I have a lot of friends who currently work at the White House and who have worked at the White House. Yeah, you work all the time. It turns that I work all the time in my job. I'm a podcaster and a cigar salesman. You probably work a lot of the time, if not all the time, in whatever job you do, in whatever, yeah. But now, if you work at the White House, for the president himself, you're going to, yes, you work all the time. You know if she didn't worry, if she, like took weekends off, the story would be like, Trump's staff is lazy and they're not doing anything.

But the thing I don't want to let go is, she's got her serious journalist face on. She goes, I mean, and yeah, and the reports are that this woman is indefatigable. Indefatigable. I am Ron Burgundy. Indefatigable. The word is indefatigable. Aaron Burnett.

These people talk about the appearance of the thing, but not the essence of the thing. These people, they look, they go on. their left wing news channels, which the left wing news channel, it looks like a news channel, but it's not a news channel. The news that they're reporting is that the president has an system. And then they look like they're very serious people. You know, they're kind of well-groomed. They speak in an articulate way until you realize they don't speak English properly. They don't, they don't even have, forget about not having a grasp on the facts. Forget about not having a grasp on the meaning of those facts, the significance of those facts.

They don't have a grasp on the English language. This woman's job is to, talk and she can't talk. Indefatigable. Indefatigable. What a strange placement of the syllable. I'm sorry. Keep going. All right. And it's important to note, Aaron, you know, in our reporting,

that story was by Sean McKeach, my colleague and me, Jonathan and I have separate reporting in regime change just about how Trump views her. And part of it is, you know, he will describe to other AIDS that and said this during the interregnum period, that you know, everyone else will go off and make money.

she'll never leave, that essentially she is the person who loves him as much as his wife and children. And she serves a specific purpose. In a White House, in a government, there are other channels, official channels of information. You know, she doesn't provide him with his national security briefing, the presidential daily brief. She is not the White House staff secretary, which is supposed to be the last step for paper flow. She's not the press secretary from whom certain media requests are supposed to come. She is a channel by which, as you said, foreign leaders try to reach him if they can't some other way. She is a channel by which he reaches people he sees on television, who he likes what they are saying,

or that he will just send out notes to. She is with him so much of the day during those meetings. Okay. So you see what she's revealing here? You see what Maggie Haberman is revealing the big breaking story. Trump's assistant sometimes makes phone calls for him. and it's not just that sometimes people who want to reach trump call his assistant you can't you couldn't script that oh yes we're getting pretty shocking leaks and reports

out of the white house that trump's assistant sometimes she'll write like little notes for him sometimes do you again i'm not for anyone who has ever had an assistant or a colleague that you were closed. That's what they do. That's what, what does Maggie Haberman, what does CNN think an assistant does? If, if the report were, oh yes, she's, you know, at six o'clock in the morning, she's making him eggs Benedict in the cafeteria of the White House, you would say, okay, well, that's a little, an assistant could do that, but that's a little weird, okay, if, if they said that she was, I don't know, she was ironing. his bryoni suits. That would be, like, again, an assistant could do that, but that'd be a low.

The accusation is that Trump's assistant is like taking phone calls for him. That's like the main thing an assistant does. Oh my goodness. So anyway, not to belabor the point. My main conclusion is Trump is clearly the greatest president and perhaps the most morally pure president we've ever had. And I'm not, I'm not saying that to puff up Trump. I would have, if I came to that conclusion, I would have to base that conclusion purely on the CNN reporting. Because if the best thing they have is that Trump has a nice assistant who really likes him, who works hard at being an assistant, clearly there is just, clearly the guy does no wrong. Right?

Crazy. Okay, before we get to, I'm very excited to get to the HUD Secretary Scott Turner. Before we go, though, I know I'm running late. I don't care. I do have to get to one other cabinet secretary, Scott Besson, Treasury, secretary, who absolutely bodied one of the most prominent left-wing economic figures of the last 30, 40 years. I can't even call him an economist. This guy Robert Reich. He's actually not an economist. But he works on economic policy and he's a political pundit and he worked in the Clinton White House.

I think he was the Labor Secretary under Clinton. So Robert Reich levies one of these attacks on Scott Besson, some big essay about how Besson is totally wrong about the economy and Trump's destroying the economy and how Robert Reich is great. And so it's kind of a minor attack, but on economic policy. And I just, I just want to read you this masterpiece. Scott Besson writes, once again, the professor has come up short. His latest screed is an impressive display of economic press to digitation. Press to digitation. It's like being quick with your fingers, like magic, like a magic trick. Love that. Press to digitation. He concedes that wages are growing faster for low income workers and then attempts to bury that dispositive fact beneath nearly 2,000 words.

Bank of America data show, data show. Scott Besson is rightly using data as a plural noun. People often say data is the data shows. It's actually data. The singular is datum, not to be pedantic, but the pluralist data. I love that he just effortlessly gets that right. Bank of America data show that spending among lower and middle income households is converged toward levels at the top as they lead labor market gains.

Professor Reich has a documented history of inventing dialogue when the truth doesn't fit his narrative, a habit that forced him to rewrite his memoir after the media exposed his fabrications. Burger King appears not to be the only one who peddles whoppers. As I do not like punching down, this will be the last response to his four-decade pattern of packaging falsehoods as fact. One thing you need to know is Scott Besson is very, very tall, and Robert Reich is very, very short. He's four foot 11, I think. It's that final line. And so I do not like punching down. And I just forget about even the economic point that they're making here. I love Scott Besson. Can I say, is that not,

I don't mean, I don't, I hope that doesn't sound weird. I love this, he's one of my most favorite political types, maybe my very favorite political type, which is that he's extremely intelligent, extremely well educated, very competent, he's clubbable, he's affable, and he's a bloodthirsty, savage beast. This guy, these reports coming out of the White House of him just like beating people, up in the West Wing with a little smile on his face. He's like so you could you could take him to the country club. You could throw him in the UFC ring. And he's just absolutely brutal. This is a brutal takedown of this left wing economic figure. And so all of that to say, I want Bessent to stay the Treasury Secretary for the whole term for all of the Trump's next like seven terms. Just permanent

Treasury Secretary. He's done a very good job at the actual role. But also I want him to write all of the Republican speeches. He's just, he's brutal. When he gives us Senate testimony and he's just, it's like he takes the Democrat senators and he just starts like chomping at their throats and just like eating their entrails. And he does it in this very affable, gentlemanly way. It's just delightful. Okay. So now, so much, so many cabinet secretaries today. We're very, very excited to be joined by the Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Scott Turner. The rest of the show continues now. You do not want to miss it. Become a member use code Knowles, KennaWLAS, a check out for two months free on all annual plans.

Thank you.