The Michael Knowles Show - Friendly Fire: Fauci's Fabrications, A Socialist Repents & Blowing Up Bus Lanes

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

Dr. Fauci is in the hot seat, refusing to testify before Congress, and dodging justice. Ben Shapiro hits the road and previews his new show. A former top far-left Democrat operative joins the hosts to repent for the madness of today's "progressive" socialists. And the hosts hear pitches to mandate voter ID, blow up bus lanes, and save the suburbs. Friendly Fire Ep. 20 "Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative" by Evan Barker is available here: https://a.co/d/0be6ioOw https://washingtonreporter.news - - - Today's Sponsors: Helix Sleep - Visit https://helixsleep.com/DailyWire for 27% OFF sitewide. PureTalk - Visit https://PureTalk.com/KNOWLES to make the switch to PureTalk, a wireless company that ACTUALLY values what you value. Kalshi - Visit https://kalshi.com/friendlyfire to see live prediction markets and sign up today to trade on the outcomes that matter most to you. - - - DailyWire+ 🎆 🇺🇸 Our America 250 SALE is still available! Get 3-Months of DailyWire+ for just $17.76 📜 Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. Go to https://DailyWire.com/Shop 📕 Andrew Klavan's novel "After That, The Dark" is available here: https://dwplus.shop/AfterThatTheDark 📗 Michael Knowles' book "Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds" is available here: https://dwplus.shop/Speechless 📘 Ben Shapiro's book "Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America (and Her Critics)" is available here: https://dwplus.shop/LionsandScavengers - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I just want to know before we begin, because we haven't done one since, did you guys see the worst movie ever made by Hollywood in the history of images? I mean, well, what I've been told, what I've been told is that the Odyssey, the better movie would have been for there to be a man who goes around, killing everyone, banging the lady who's not his wife for 10 years, and then killing all the chamber baines. That would have been better, probably. Now that you put it that way,

I am actually coming around to Walsh's point of view. Now I see the flaws in the picture. That's it. I just don't know what we're here. If I can't complain about the Odyssey for the next 10 weeks, I don't know. Like, what are we going to talk about? There's nothing left to talk about.

I got a letter from somebody complaining that they had turned, they had turned Odysseus into a weepy girl. old man. So I sent him the passage in Homer where he weeps like a woman. And I said, you know, you think this is an argument between good people and bad people. It's really an argument between people who know what they're talking about. People who have no idea what they're talking about it. What's funny about it is that I feel like we're all having the same argument about like that we all kind of agree on what the movie is kind of trying to do. We just have disagreements on whether that's a good thing or not. Right? Like, like, I think

that, you know, I heard, I heard your take on a Drew and I think it was basically the same take as my take on it. which I think was also... You were more enthusiastic, I thought. You were more enthusiastic, I thought. I like Nolan better than you guys like Nolan. Yeah, I mean, but, like, as a piece of, as a piece of, like, morality, what he was trying to do thematically is obviously he was taking sort of the ghost of

Christian morality and pouring it into the vase of a Greek story. Because, I mean, and I think we all sort of agree with that. I thought that that's, like, kind of a good thing. Because, again, if you wanted, I think, well, listen, I get where Matt's coming. from because he loves apocalyptic right apocalyptic is here's what pre-Christian morality looks like and then here comes Christianity oh thank God right I mean that's what apocalyptic right I'm saying everything is horrible and then oh thank God the conquistadors are here and and I get that but that wasn't going to happen at the end of Homer's the Odyssey because no one comes at the end of

Homer's the Odyssey to save you from pre-Judeo Christian morality yeah right you're just stuck in that world where Odysseus is the hero who again bangs everything in sight and then kills all the chambermaids. So, like, that's not like an amazingly evocative story for a film. So, again, you could make Northman. It just, Northman does no box office. I don't understand, though. You know, I thought it was an aesthetic problem.

Like, I didn't think his take really did quite graft on aesthetically onto it. I just, I didn't believe that Odysseus was saying those things, even as he was played in the movie, even as the character was played in the movie, I didn't believe that those would be his problems. But so what? I mean, so it's a summer movie that's incredible. entertaining for three hours, which is hard to do. And so it doesn't all, you know, it's not the smartest movie in the world.

But so what? You know, what's Nolan supposed to do? Is his job to sort of make everybody feel that their point of view is being represented in his movie? And by the way, I just want to say one thing, Ben, I would much rather hear you overpraise a director that you love, which is a wonderful thing to love a director. You know, there's directors that I love more than they deserve, but I just love their work. I would much rather hear that than a bunch of conservatives cranking you.

that somehow they didn't get the ideological, you know, diatribe that they wanted from somebody. There's also on the ideological point. Like, Ben, you're completely right that he's Christianizing the story in a very overt way. He invokes the golden rule. There's a baptism scene. The big turn at the end is like literally confession. There is a scrim and he is confessing his sins to his wife. Correct. You know, that is part of the Western tradition. And he lets you know he's doing it. Because the Ellen Page part comes from Virgil. It doesn't come from Homer. It's his character Sinon.

And though the Sin on character does kind of take the place of Achilles in the Hades scene. So maybe that's why it was leaking that she played Achilles. But in any case, he's reading the poem through Virgil, through Dante in particular, the fact that Ulysses sails off at the end is part of Dante's telling of it. And so Dante is obviously Christianizing the story. But the difference is when Dante does that, he puts both Sin on and Odysseus in like the deepest depths of hell. And here, you get Odysseus at the end sort of whining and crying. And then he goes off to sail into the sunset.

But it's like it is the most boomer lib version of that, which is he's really upset for the whole movie. And then he cheers up when he takes his wife on a cruise. So you don't get that to me. army but the Greeks did this too you know the Greeks identified with the Trojans too

they wrote the Trojan women they you know Odysseus cries for the Trojan women in Homer they identify with the defeated well here's the thing that annoys me I'm just are we supposed to think

that Christians living in the United States or Jews living in the United States people who are part of the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition shall we say living in the United States in the year

26 are somehow angry at the Christianization of Greece. Like, some of us actually wrote books on why that was a good thing, right? Like, I think all three of us may have written books on why that's kind of a good thing. And so, like, the idea that, like, what we needed was, like, the pure Greek brutality. Well, we weren't fans, okay? Like, my people have, like, entire fast days dedicated to the Greeks destroying things, right? We have entire holidays around Jewish revolts against the Greeks, right? And it turns out Christianity is largely.

build around the idea that Greece had to be Christianized, that Greek morality was not enough. I mean, this is what Paul is doing, not to lecture people on Christianity. But this is why, like, when I see Christians who are very upset about this, and listen, I get all of the Ellen Page of it, and it's ridiculous and stupid. And I agree with all of that. And I also, listen, I sort of get the Lapita Nyago, although that didn't bother me very much. The thing about me more than Yango is no, no, I'm sorry, I'm taking you off. What the hell? Yeah, sorry. Because she's in the movie for three minutes. And also, I'm just telling you, Diane Krueger does not look like a Greek check. Okay, Diane Krueger, everyone's like, well, shouldn't Helen look like Diane Krue? I don't know.

Is Diane Kruger, you know, like a hun? She's in German. I'm pretty sure that the people from like the, the Teutonic forests of Germany were not great resemblances to the short brown women of Greece in the, in the year 1,500 B.C. or BC. Like, I was saying to Knowles before you showed up that, like, the attack on Ellen Page. And I agree with you, Ben. I thought it was very brief, but every woke decision he made was bad. It did bring the movie down a little bit.

But the idea that Ellen Page is a mentally ill woman who's pretending to be someone she's not. That defines every actress. If you take that out, there are no actresses left in Hollywood. Maybe Merrill Streep, she looks a little sane. But all the rest of them, they're mentally ill people pretending to be what they're not.

Yeah, but here's sort of a broader, there's a broader point here, Drew, that I wanted to ask about. And that is, I think the conservatives, at a certain point culturally, we have a tendency to huff our own farts. Like, it's like, oh my gosh, I don't like that LN pages in this movie, therefore we'll do zero business.

It's like, no, this movie was always going to do gigantic business. Like, can we please stop with this? And this is a matter of tactics, which I think will appeal to you Knowles because you're very big into like, you should launch wars that you can win. You should not launch wars that you're going to lose.

Okay, like this movie was always going to make a fortune because it is beautiful to look at. Yeah. And the last one hour of it is actually incredibly well done and exciting. Even if you think that the first couple hours are slow the last hour of it is really compelling. And it's Christopher Nolan. And he's got every major star in the world in this film. It was always going to do big business. And so this kind of bizarre thing that the Wright did, which is like, Ellen Page's in it,

therefore, we'll do no money. And therefore, anyone who even says that they kind of like it must be cast out, must be thrown out of the, like, what are you doing? Just on a tactical level. It's a, even a category era. It's a category error, though, because it's not like putting that clown trans guy on a beer can, which is essentially indefinitely. endorsing the fact that he's wearing woman face and really disrespecting women by pretending to be one. These are actors. They're all nuts. They all have like weird lives and all that. They go on and they pretend to be someone else. That's part of the arts. I mean, the women, men were playing women in Shakespeare's Day. You know, they've done it before. It's like, it's part of the arts. The arts are

weird and they're crazy. It's not the same thing as selling beer or selling some object. So the entire thing is ridiculous. What is Ellen Page? because she's got problems, she's never supposed to work again. I don't care if she's in a movie as long as she's, I didn't think she was very good in this, but I think, you know,

I don't mind her working. What's that got to do with me? Why does he? I also, it didn't annoy me, but I have a kind of Straussian take on this, and it's like the, the esoteric reading is always, the line between that and wishcasting

is very, very thin, kind of intrinsically. But on all the woke stuff, which you point out, Drew, like all of it, every bit he did was just so insane and it all blew up. But, you know, the story, ultimately is about the greatest trickster ever. The story is about the greatest deceiver, fraudster, trickster of all time. And you didn't really get that in the Odysseus character. Like,

Odissi, one of the critiques of the movie is Odysseus just wasn't Odysseus. He was, it was like Oppenheimer, too. It wasn't really Odysseus. But I wondered if, it's, because Nolan didn't just go a little bit woke, it wasn't like, he didn't just, like, pick an ethnically ambiguous Helen of Troy. He picked a woman who called herself dark as night. Like, he picked, like, a very, very black actress. He didn't, he didn't just pick like a gay guy. He picked like the, the tranny lady to play the stand-in character for Achilles. It was like, it was so in your face. And I wondered, did he go that far to make a point? Was he, was, was this his own kind of odysian trickster way to generate publicity, to win an Oscar with the DEI? I don't know. I'm just, I, maybe I'm reading

too deeply, but he's a very smart guy. I think the rage publicity was probably a point in his mind. I think it may have been, you know, just to get us everybody angry and talking about. The general point of the film, which, again, I think you can boil down the morality of the film too, there is a golden rule that was instituted by, in the movie it's the gods, but God, right, in our conception, there's a golden rule that God said to do. And if you violate that rule, then sin is infectious. Sin is infectious. And it actually has externalities. And those externalities come back and bite you. And sometimes the only way to put the genie back in the bottle is to sin again, but that's a sin that causes you to go into exile.

that is an incredibly biblical message. That is not, that, that is actually, like, that, that was the thing that they got me about. And again, you can even quibble with all these things. And I agree with a lot of the critiques of the film. And if I were going to rank Nolan films, this one comes in, like, top of the second tier of Nolan films for me. This isn't like one of his top three films. But again, sort of the overblown, like, we must, we must have a malice struggle session over the Odyssey. It's so, it's so ridiculous.

Well, speaking in struggle sessions, you know, there was one on Capitol Hill today with Fauci. also speaking of great deceivers and one of the worst fraudsters in history. So we'll get to that. It's friendly fire. Friends are these, goatee enemies, and friends are these,

goonies enemies. Hey, Ben, before we get into Fauci, I do have to ask, why are you dressed in a Vladimir Zelensky costume? Okay, here's the actual honest answer. The actual honest answer is

that it's really, really hot where I am. So we just filmed a show, and we are in like an old mansion. in Cincinnati, Ohio. And it's like Europe here. There's no air conditioning. And so I cannot wear a jacket. And so they gave me the shirt,

which normally I'd wear with a jacket. And then I just decided just because I have to flex that I was not going to, you know, wear the jacket. And also because I want to fire drones. Yeah, exactly. I just wanted to fire some drones in Moscow. So I decided that in honor of Vladimir Zelensky's meeting with the president and the president's shifting back

to the side of good against Russia, I'm going to dress up like Vladimir. The real answer is I'm in like a cloak closet in Cincinnati. It's the actual real reason. So what are you doing? Can you tell us why you're in Cincinnati or no? This is this very secret project. It's not like the most secret project, but we are doing a new show where I'm interviewing

the top names in business and finance about sort of the future of the economy and AI and technology. And so I was interviewing somebody for that. So it should be a great show. All right. That's coming out soon. All right. That's exciting. Can we beat up on Anthony Fauci?

He was on, oh, I think we have a clip from the show. Here is a simple truth. Almost nobody wants to say out loud. The world you're living in right now is about to disappear. not in a century, not in a generation, soon. Artificial intelligence, biotech, energy, capital markets, every foundation of the modern economy is being ripped up and re-poured at the same time. One day in the very near future, we're all going to wake up and the world around us will be unrecognizable.

Now, a lot of people are terrified of that. We understand. They look at the horizon, they see a dystopian hellscape and a handful of tech CEOs who make trillions while everybody else is managed by the machines. Your job, automated, your choices, decided by algorithm, a world where everything is provided for you and nothing is up to you. But that's not really the truth. This could be the greatest era of human flourishing in history.

Free people, free markets, armed with the most powerful tools ever created, making life longer, richer and freer. But that outcome is not automatic. It does have to be built. The people building that future are not waiting for permission. So instead of speculating about them, I'm going to sit down with them. The founders, the CEOs, the investors, the people actually making the decisions that will decide the next decade, the next century.

What are they building? Why are they building it? What should the rest of us be doing about it? This is Titans on tomorrow. It's about to be a new world out there. Let's get ready for it. I look forward to my invitation to the show. I was hoping to be like doom, you know.

I think the one thing we can conclude from that preview is that I look better with a jacket on. Now, Mr. Fauci, Dr. Fauci did not look good on Capitol Hill today. He was totally humiliated by Josh Hawley, by Rand Paul, by, I mean, they were just raking this guy over the coals. He pled the fifth to everything, even though he had a blanket pardon. So our friends over at Calci asked whether or not these people will be arrested this year. Right now, other than Fauci, we have John Brennan, 37%, Mahmoud Khalil, 27%, James Clapper, 20%, you know, it'll all be great, but I'm really sorry to tell you, 11% say that Fauci will be arrested. I don't know who the 11% are that don't know what a blanket presidential pardon is,

but that seems a little high to me. So two questions. One, will this do anything? It was satisfying to watch him squirm and to hear the great questions, but will this do anything? And two, did Fauci have the right to plead the fifth, given that he received this presidential pardon? So on the legal question, that's actually a pretty complicated legal question, because the question is sort of what the Fifth Amendment is for. The typical idea is that you do not

have a right against self-incrimination for a crime that you cannot be convicted of, right? So can you take sort of a preemptive fifth, meaning that he knows that the whole thing here is going to be what he considers to be perjury traps, right? People asking him questions to get him to conflict with testimony that he gave at other times. Does his pardon cover his testimony from other times, or testimony that he gives now that conflicts with testimony that he gave it other times? None of this is particularly clear. The chances that you get a successful process, prosecution for perjury or for violation of the use of the Fifth Amendment. You get a contempt and that amounts to jail time, congressional contempt, probably difficult, I think. I feel like

that's a bit of a stretch. So I don't think the Calcium markets are wrong on that one. It does go to show you that this is not a man who is eager to speak exactly with the Senate. I understand why he's suspicious that every Republican is chomping at the bits of put him in jail. I think that it does say something that he's unwilling to answer literally any of the questions, given the fact that his diaries are out there. And we now know that many of the suspicions that people held about him for years have been now fully justified by the insane stuff that's in his die. Those diaries are crazy, by the way. That's wild stuff.

They're delightful. They're really funny. I love the, I love Julia likes me, you know. I'm saying to those, it's like watching a 14-year-old girl and a pink, fluffy pink dress dancing around the room going, I'm so beautiful. I'm the prince will love me. I'm going to the ball. Well, because the diarrantries did, I mean, it was things like, I got a really beautiful picture on the Washington Post today. My hairline was looking really, really good. Love Gossip Girl or whatever, you know, and it was like all of them. The whole diary. But nothing's going to happen. Right thing I want to see, though, Knowles. I want to see, I want to see, I don't care whether he goes to jail. He's an old man. I don't, I really don't care what happens to him. I want to see a reckoning for the, what the media did and how they contributed to this incredible. incredible disaster. Really the worst failure of leadership since World War I that killed the economy, that sent these poor poor children, these poor children, into a tailspin in their education that'll

never be caught up with. And every time Donald Trump opens his mouth about the election that he feels he won, the press reports, oh, you know, this unfounded claim is always unfounded in the reporting of Trump talking. But what about the unfounded claims about Hunter Biden's laptop? What about the unfounded claims about where the virus came from? What about the unfounded claims of Russian collusion? The reckoning that we have had for the utter failure of our media class and our leadership class and our elite class.

It just hasn't come. It's kind of dribbling out over time because people saw it. They're not going to be lied to. And so the trust in our institutions has vanished as it should have vanished. Our institutions failed us. But why can't we just bring it out into the open and talk about it so that it like rip the Band-Aid off and have the reckoning and fire the people who need to be fired, rejigger the press that needs to be rejiggered. Instead of this kind of slow bleed where the press is pretending,

is hoping it's all going to go away. It's not going to go away, as Ben was just saying in his show, it's a new world where they're not going to be able to hide. Here's the thing. I think that the press already paid the price. I think the press is basically a defunct institution. It doesn't mean that they can't have impact. But what has happened to the press over the course of the last three years is catastrophic. I mean, truly catastrophic. The ratings do not exist. on CNN. Many of the major institutions have been taken over by people who the press disagrees with overtly. Here, I'm thinking of CBS News, obviously. Yeah, there have been some significant change.

Jeff Bezos has reshifted, even the editorial page of the Washington Post. Like, things have happened. I think there are two things that, to me, are the dogs that never barked. One is, how is it that we are still playing ball with China? I mean, like, the real story about COVID, I understand that we botched it. So did pretty much everybody else on Earth. Okay, like, the only country that didn't really botch it particularly badly was sweet. And pretty much everybody else botched this thing pretty horribly. And on a state to state level, people botched at sort of different levels. But you understand that, you know, dealing with a once in a century pandemic where nobody knows what to do, people make mistakes on both a governance level. The thing with Fauci is that he knew

what he was doing, right? That's what makes what Fauci did so terrible is that he knew exactly what he was doing when he was going after J. Batacharya and the Great Barrington Declaration or when he was shutting down investigations into Wuhan. How China has been able to get away with unleashing a virus on the planet that killed legitimately five to 10 million people planetwide. And somehow they just keep on trucking. And nobody says anything about it. And the president even said they're trying to steal our election. And he's still not really doing anything about it.

That's one dog that didn't bark. And the other dog that didn't bark, I got to say it, because it just happens to be true. One of the reasons President Trump lost the 2020 election is because he really did not handle this well. Anthony Fauci was a Donald Trump appointee. A Donald Trump could have fired Anthony Fauci at any minute. And he would go on truth social or X at the time. he wasn't banned yet, and he would rip into Anthony Fauci, but he worked for President Trump. If President Trump wanted to fire him, he could have fired him. And so I think that because he didn't,

and again, I understand why he didn't. There were all sorts of political cross-cor. I get all of that. But in the end, if you're the president and the guy works for you, it is very difficult for you then to be the lead attack point against the guy who you kept employed the entire time and you were using as sort of your figurehead as you tried out COVID policy. So the bottery was on so many I think the argument you made before, though, about the leaders who didn't see it coming and they didn't quite know what it was and they were afraid and they panicked. All of that applies to Trump a lot more than it applies to Fauci and a lot more than it applies to the press whose job it is to ask questions and to say, is that true? And how do we compare these two ideas? And instead,

how did Jay Buttercheria from pillar to post? I mean, what they did to him was absolutely disgusting. So, you know, I agree, look, I agree that the minute Trump won the second time, the press was doomed. And I think that never happened to a nicer institution. But I do think, like, we still have not had the conversation at the level of, like, you know, this is what went wrong. This is what we ought to do next time. I'm ashamed of the churches that let themselves be shut down, especially, you know, those Catholic churches that let them be shut down with that denied the host, you know, to people that denied the body and blood to people and didn't have the guts to say, as what his name did in California. I'm staying open. I don't care what you do to me. A lot of failure around the board. And I just don't think we've really discussed it on a national level yet. It was amazing to see, you know, especially

for the non-sacramental shades of Christianity, they, you know, they can say, well, it doesn't matter. The church isn't a real place. It's like just kind of in the air and we can watch it on TV or whatever. But for those who have sacramental theology, notably including the Catholic Church, you need the sacraments. And I remember in L.A. when some of the churches were, we're, you're go in real weak need and shutting down or trying to change things. There was this old, he was kind of a left winger, but he was this really old Dominican priest who, it was 92 or something. He was still hearing confessions from the side door of the church because he knew that you can't do that. You know, he was of a certain generation that just understood you need to be there for people,

especially at moments of crisis. And I think you're right, Drew, that we've had this national and international trauma that we're recovering from still. And so that's why you need the reckoning. It's just the problem is, okay, we're going to go humiliate Tony Fauci on Capitol Hill. All right, that was a good. We're going to get some good podcasts out of it, and then that's going to be it. Well, you know, one of the things that I think that has been under discussed is the failure of forget about the reckoning from, you know, people like us who many of us were critical of Fauci very early on. Michael, you were super critical. Drew, you were critical of Fauci. It took me a little longer to get to critical of Fauci.

But by the middle of summer of 2020, I was pretty critical of Fauci. You know, the thing that is really amazing about the lack of self-critical, right? It's the self-critical thing. It's not that they need to be badded about by members of the Republican Congress. The biggest problem we have right now in sort of the scientific community is the lack of rigor with regard to policing your own. If you don't police your own, then what ends up happening is that the trust in the institution of science really does decline, right?

It is not that people like Josh Howley or Tom Cotton or, you know, you or me or any of us were attacking Anthony Fauci, and that was attacking the science. That was not the problem. The problem is that Anthony Fauci didn't get the crap about the science, and neither to any of the people who were following Anthony Fauci, and yet they stood for the science. And so the natural reaction to that was a counter science revolution. Right. It was we moved from, we should be skeptical of the experts to, we should be completely non-sceptical of the non-experts, right? Which is not the same proposition, right? Like, we should be skeptical of the experts, and we should ask them difficult questions, and we should force them to wall and demand,

like all those things for sure. But the contrapositive of that to distrust the experts is not trust the non-experts, which is I think where so many people ended up going. And that really is kind of a dangerous thing. And I think that, you know, if the scientific community wishes to get back on the horse here, they're the ones who need to do this. It doesn't need to be Republicans who are grilling Anthony Fauci. It needs to be members of the scientific community who are grilling Anthony Fauci as opposed to doing what they are doing today, which is relighting their Anthony Fauci, vouchee, votive candles. Over on MSNBC, they really were.

They were doing this whole, like, war in mourning. It was so terrible how Anthony Fauci was treated. If you guys had asked those questions, maybe we could have come back to some sort of scientifically based rigor. But you're not asking those questions. So, you know, the consequences are a complete reactionary shift in a direction that, frankly, I don't think it's universally wonderful. And, you know, by the way, when Anthony Fauci, hold on one second, I want to hear what you have to say,

but I just want to point out that when Anthony Fouchy was lying down on his bed, kicking his feet in the air, writing down, Dear Diary, I'm still beautiful. Well, he was doing that on his bed. I'm sleeping soundly on my bed because I have a Helix mattress. I don't just have a Helix mattress. I have multiple Helix mattresses. In fact, I just ordered another Helix mattress to improve the mattress in my guest room because I am a very courteous host. You can get your Helix mattress too. Helix has over 20 mattress models with cooling upgrades built for nights that we're all experiencing right now, especially in Tennessee. Free shipping anywhere in the U.S., a 120-night sleep trial, a limited lifetime warranty.

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You go right now to helixleysleep.com slash daily wire. Drew, you were saying? Yeah, you know, especially with this uprising from the DSA, I was talking to Molly Hemingway last night. And she and I are the only two people who say, you know, the only difference within the DSA and the Democrat Party is the DSA, the socialists are honest. They're like, we hate your country. We're going to destroy it where the Democrats run on the policy that they're going to be moderate and then they hate the country. Then when they win, they hate the country and they want to destroy it. But the lack of information about socialism and what it does and how it works, there is now no source in the country that young people can trust or feel they can trust to become educated. They don't, you know, the guys, most of these kids who are voting for socialists, they have no idea what they're voting for.

You've never read a book about socialism. They don't know any history about it. They've been taught in college if they went to college. The socialism is great. The level of induced ignorance in the country is so high. And now, who can you turn to to get like just an honest, you know, here's the news. This is what happens. This is what happens when you have socialism. I know who you can turn to, Drew, if you want to get the promotion of socialism. Yeah, besides. Well, you can turn to us. But if you want to get the kind of pro-socialist side, you can turn to Evan Barker, our guest, who is the author. of nothing left. Yeah, we have a socialist on the show. Semi-reform, quasi-reform. I don't know, Evan, nice to see you. Former. Former. You've been reform. Thank you so much, you guys. Oh, go ahead. No, you got the goods. What is it? What are the Utes thinking? I know they're eating Tidepods and they're going to the sock hop with their honeies. But tell me, what is the voice of the youth? Okay, so first of all, correction, former socialist. Thank you guys so much for having me on the show today, by the way. Yeah, so I worked with DSA-enlined candidates for a long time, you guys.

I worked at a firm out of Washington, D.C., called Left Rising, and we were behind some of the biggest names on the far left, Ilhan Omar, Corey Bush, Jamal Bowman, Jasmine Crockett. The list goes on and on. I worked for Abdul Al-Said. and I ended up leaving the progressive movement in 2024 right after the DNC. I had enough and I left and today I've got a book out and I wrote all of the juicy, exciting details about what it's like inside that movement inside the book. What changed your mind? So many things.

So it was actually kind of a long, slow disillusionment for me. I first got activated in Democratic politics in 2008 because I have a lung disease, similar to cystic fibrosis. And Barack Obama promised me health care. And in all actuality, the Democratic Party was a lot different back then. I mean, I think Barack Obama, by today's standards, probably wouldn't even fit in. I mean, he deported people. He was for a closed border.

The Democrats were a lot more normal back then. And over time, you know, I ended up getting disillusioned with the establishment wing of the party in 2017. And that's how I found the Bernie Sanders movement. And I thought that they had all the answers. And then in 2020, things got even more insane. I ended up working with a criminal justice reform pack. You guys have probably heard of this guy. His name is Sean King.

And that's when I started to feel very uneasy about the things that I was seeing and the things that I was hearing behind the scenes. And by 2021, it all kind of hit me what the far left was actually about. And in 2022, I had a baby boy. he's four years old now and I think he made me a little bit more conservative too to be honest with you becoming a mother

kind of reframed some of my political beliefs and then I kind of stayed out of politics for a few years after that just focused on being a mom and then in 2024 I did go to the Democratic National Convention

I was kind of interested intrigued just because of the whole Joe Biden debacle debate I was hoping that maybe the Democrats would remake themselves, that there would be some sort of open convention. And instead, when I got there, I just saw the coronation of Kamala Harris.

And at that point, I went home and I thought I was posting a resignation video on my TikTok to 40 followers. And instead I woke up the next day and there was about 2 million views. And so at that point, I just decided, screw it. I'll just keep telling people everything I saw. Now, you said, Evan, that you figured out what the far left was all about. How would you summarize that? I mean, what was it all about?

Yeah. So I would even say it's funny because they like to cloak themselves in the cause of the working class, right? And I actually come from a working class union family in the middle of the country. I've kind of watched over time as how most of my relatives have stopped supporting Democrats and now all love Donald Trump. I was kind of like the last one. But to, you know, to leave the Democrats behind. And, you know, they say. that they're socialists, I don't even know if I'd really call them socialists, because they don't really even focus that much on economics. It's more about having a cultural revolution in the United States. They kind of just want to demean and denigrate anyone that isn't oppressed by their standards. And if they do actually support socialism, I think it's basically socialism for like non-white people. I think if you guys saw, oh, sorry, go ahead. No, no, I was I was chuckling and agreeing with you. I think that's a good diagnosis. Yeah, no, it's, it's true. I mean, if you saw Zerunamadani, he ran on like, let's tax rich and whiter neighborhoods more. It's

funny, when I ask my friends who are still Democrats about that, they like to give him a lot of leeway, and they're like, well, you know, he just was being overly descriptive. You know, he's not actually talking about poor white people or anything like that. But that's not true. I mean, that language is incredibly intentional. And Democratic elites, like, they push that kind of language onto politicians. That is actually what they mean. And so it's kind of a movement that's based in racial grievance and grievance for anyone that, you know, just basically doesn't fit into what they believe is, you know, marginalized, I guess. It's kind of crazy.

It's, it's, they basically pushed everybody else out of the movement. Yeah, Evan, one of the things that I've been saying for a while is that many of the things that conservatives like to say are sort of the bugs for the DSA. Those are actually the features. Yeah. We on the right will say things like, well, you know, Mom Donnie's only popular. You see John Stewart do this. and he's not on the right, but he's sort of more traditionally left.

He'll say, you know, the reason Mondani's popular among DSA types is because of his talk about affordability and all the rest of this stuff is just sort of the chaff, the real wheat is the affordability argument. And I've been saying for a while that that's nonsense, that actually the affordability is the stuff that allows dupes like John Stewart to swallow the medicine. But the actual thing that most people who are sort of DSA aligned are into is the grievance politics. It is the anti-Americanism. It is the sort of radical victim-victimized or oppression matrix. Yeah, I think that is, I could not put that more aptly. I think that's exactly right. It's just, it's just a, it's grievance politics. I mean, they, they don't like America. You know, I actually, I lost my brother on the USS John McCain in 2017. That was actually another little thing that I, that I read about in my book. Actually, it was a huge thing. But it was, you know, when I went to AOC's office for the first time,

in 2018 to visit her. It was about a month after she won her election against Joe Crowley. And I went in and I found these like American flag stickers. And I know this might seem, this might seem insignificant to something. It was they were crumbled up. It's like somebody intentionally took them and crumbled them up and just threw them at the bottom of the garbage can. And I remember reaching down. I was about a year after I lost my.

brother and I was like, I was about to go visit his kids. And I pulled them out of the trash can and I was like, you know, it was, it was just a, it was a constant thing. You know, I would be behind the scenes and campaigns and, you know, they would be so reactive to Donald Trump that they would want to just like immediately blast out emails, you know, anytime Trump, you know, any sort of military action in the Middle East. And I remember one time there was a threat actually towards U.S. abroad. This was back in, I think it was in 20, around 2019, 2020, and they were sending out fundraising emails. And I was like the only person around that was like, you guys, you don't know like what's going on with our troops right now. Like, what are you doing? Where are you

trying to make money off of this? Like, you should just be saying that you're praying for them and nothing else. And like they don't love America. Yeah, they're open about it. And I think all of these things. If you like to speak to them directly, If you get him after a drink or so, they are pretty candid. I don't think we're slandering them at all here. And you even see... It's on their website. Yeah, it's on the right. And even like on the Mamdani point, you know, Mamdani said he wants to just help poor people or whatever. He's going to tax 31,000 people who don't even really live in New York. They just have Pietater. They're that extra homes, whatever. And then what happened this week? That 31,000 number went up to almost a million New Yorkers. And not only did he say he's going to take their property, he died. He died. them. After whipping up the mob against these people, he put out their names and addresses and more or less said, go get them. You know, and you just think, oh, wow, this is not about

helping poor people. It's really just about hurting rich people. It's not, you know, it is like just profoundly unpatriotic. What drives me nuts about this, by the way, is that, you know, my family back in the Midwest, my mom, like, she's really struggling right now. I've had to pay for her rent or help her with her rent the last couple of months. And, you know, if I asked her about Zora Mamdani and like what she thinks of his policies, what she thinks of free grocery stores, she hates it. Even if she's like struggling to pay for her groceries right now, like she thinks government-run grocery stores are like an absolutely terrible idea. If you ask her, like what she thinks about Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or any of those guys, she doesn't hate them.

She doesn't have like envy of their success. She actually likes them and like looks up to them and thinks it's amazing that they're building jobs. And I think that. That's a common thing if you talk to actual working class people, not people in New York City who are highly educated, who have rich parents and, you know, have five college degrees and can't get jobs, you know, making more than six figures. Not those people. They have a lot of grievance, right, towards the rich. But if you talk to actual everyday ordinary Americans, so Ron Mondani does not represent their politics. Yeah, that's right. I know we have to let Ben go because you have to go drone Kiev. Sorry, the Kremlin, not Kiev. You would not know. You're not running them. Ben, good to see you. I want to keep Evan around.

This is like a big trade-up. Hold on. We're going from Ben to Evan. I want this to be permanent. Ben, good luck. Looking forward to the new show. Evan. Yeah, I want to see the new show.

It looks great. Before I let you go. So there's this new poll out that shows that the DSA, the Democratic Socialists, are more popular with rank and file Democrat voters than Democrats in Congress. So I guess it's kind of, you know, a low bar for the DSA. But obviously the candidates are doing pretty well. And the DSA seems to have a bright future, at least in the primaries. What does that say? I mean, what does that mean for the midterms and maybe for 2028? You know, it's kind of crazy, but I have seen the people in the Democratic Party,

not just the people that work in the Democratic Party, but the actual voters in the base of the Democratic Party get more radicalized over the last 10. years. I mean, people that I knew in 2016 that really liked Hillary Clinton, like these days, they're all in for Abdul Al-Sayyad and think that Haley Stevens is terrible. So it's, I think that the base of the Democratic Party is honestly just really fed up with the establishment. And, you know, they have a reason to be mad at the establishment. The establishment has lost many times now to Donald Trump and has lost pretty key elections. But I think because the progressive, the DSA wing are the only built-in alternative that they have.

Unfortunately, it means they are looking to them as their answer to countering Donald Trump. But I think that this is completely misguided and will actually push them in an even worse direction. Evan, you know, one of the things I started out on the left, too, and one of the things that changed my mind was just the revelation. The one thing all liberals know is that right-wingers are evil. And when I started to realize, oh, they're not evil and start to question their ideas. Their ideas were pretty good. Is there anyone on the right that you think, yeah, I would vote for this guy? Here's a conservative or Republican that I would vote for.

So, okay, so I do consider myself an independent now. I did vote for Trump in 2024. Let's go. Let's go. I've already done it. Love that. Yeah. I voted for Trump in 2024.

You know, I like, I like, I like Josh Hawley. Yeah, yeah, I'm from Missouri. I really like the center of Missouri, Josh Hawley. There's still some Democrats I like to, though. So, you know, it really, it just depends on the person. I just, I think that the Democrats have, you know, they've just gone so far to the left. Like, if Kamala Harris is the nominee in 2028,

I'm not going to vote for her. And I don't think anyone in my family would either. I don't think Doug Mhoff's going to vote for her. I mean, you know, I think she's pretty much, done as you just put a fork in her. Evan, the book is nothing left. Everyone needs to go get the book. We need to fire Ben from this show and just have Evan on. This is so much more pleasant. This is great. Wonderful to see you. Where can people follow you? I'm on X at Evan WCH. All right, Evan WC.H. Go see her at X. Thank you, Evan. Now, I want to talk to all of you before we go and before we get to our game show segment. I want to talk to you about.

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Yeah, this is all right, this is it. Hopefully I won't be alone. I think we're doing that stupid game show again. Is that right? Did you? Oh, my God. Come on. Do we have it?

I want to do it. It's called the producers you're telling me it's called I'm not convinced. I love, I've been waiting for this all. Yeah, no, I want to, hold on. I want to do a stinger. I want them to... The game show is called I'm not convinced. Brain!

There we go. They don't... All right. Well, all right. They'll fix it in post. The first guest, Sonny Joy Nelson. Hello, Sunny.

Hey, thank you for having me. What's your pitch? All right, here's my pitch. It's very on brand. You're going to say, wow, of course, very unique here. My pitch is... is a serious one. And it is the immediate passing of the Save America Act. Most specifically,

the portion that says, you have to show your ID to vote. You have to prove that you are an American citizen to vote. And here's my reasoning in that. Last week, I went to T.J. Max to return some clothes. I don't fit me anymore because I'm seven months pregnant. And I had to show my ID to prove who I was to return some clothes to T.J. Max. When I left there, I went to target. to buy a lighter for my three-year-old sparklers for the 4th of July. I had to show an ID to buy a lighter. Now, this is absolutely crazy. We have our priorities totally mixed up in America right now. It should be common sense that our elections are 100% secure with voter ID. Okay, yes, we all agree. We all need to pass the Save America Act. This is an 8515 issue at least. But in order to get it done,

you need to end the filibuster, which is not part of the Constitution. It's not intrinsic to the Senate, but it is this great Senate tradition that gives the minority party some power when they're out of power. Would you blow up the filibuster over this? I believe that I would. And the president has been very clear about the filibuster and what the Democrats are going to do once they become in power. They're going to stack the Supreme Court. They're going to do away with what little security we have in our voting system right now. So this is something that needs to go. And it's something that is important for Republicans this go around. Drew, you're older than the filibuster.

Would you blow it up? Before they blow up the filibuster, I would like them to pare down the Save Act to exactly what we're talking about right now. The Save Act is littered with a bunch of things that put some people off. You know, Susan, I'm sorry, it was Murkowski who was complaining that it put special burdens on people in Alaska who have a hard time getting to the polls. I think all of that would be cleared up if they would just put it. You know, the whole act could be one sentence, you need picture ID, official picture ID, to vote in America.

And I think if they would boil it down to that, I think there's a possibility that could even beat it without getting rid of the filibuster, which we have to admit is a dangerous thing to do. Power never stays in one hand in America. It's going to go back to the Democrats at some point. And once they have the power without the filibuster, and, you know, I know the argument, the argument is they're going to do it anyway. But before we take that risk, I would like to just see them. down the Save Act to this one thing. Of course you need ID to vote. And I would like to see Democrats vote against that because they made it just too easy for the Democrats to wiggle out of it by adding all this other stuff. Sunny, what do you think? Are you going with Drew's version or are you

sticking with your own? The Save America Act as is must be passed. I have to say it's a solid point and I totally agree with it. I'm of the mindset that whatever works to get voter ID universally accepted in a federal rule in our elections, let's go with that. I totally think that we need to get that past and everything else we can focus on after that because if we don't have secure elections, we don't have a country. The president said that many times. But when you look at the thing, the voter fraud, the voter interference, the foreign interference that happens in our elections, these are things that happen in third world countries. America is the greatest country on the planet. We all agree on that. We deserve to have the most secure state.

elections on the planet as well. Yes, I think that Drew's addendum to your point, Sunny, is good, so I'm persuaded by that, but you sound and look much better than Drew in every single way. So I think you both win. I'm convinced. Thank you, Sunny. We now have Matt Foldy. Matt, what's your idea? Hello? Guys, I want to win not the war on the suburbs with you, but I want to win a battle in the war on suburbs with you. And the way that we can solve this is by doing something very simple. It is banning bike lanes. Bike lanes, as we know, are not used by anyone. They are certainly not used by bicyclists. And all that they do is they add needless congestion to suburban Americans who use cars. I was just in Australia. Other countries, they don't love cars in the way that

Americans do. We have had a love, hate relationship with our cars since they were first created. and bike lanes serve basically no purpose. What do they do? They take up a lane of traffic that should be used for cars, and you still have bicyclists in the car lanes. So my proposal is that, ban bike lanes. Are bike lanes a big deal in the suburbs? I thought they're just in the cities.

They're in the city because they are part of the war on the suburbs. Oh, got it. Yeah, okay, now I understand. And I will say, look, in the suburb that I'm from in Montgomery County, Maryland, they are now spreading. So I think that, you know, in the same way, you got to kill them over there, so you don't have to kill them over here. Stop the spread now before they come to a suburb or to an exurb near you. I have to disagree. I'm not convinced because I agree with you. The bike's thing is ridiculous and nobody should ride them. But when I travel to cities in the United States,

especially D.C., when I travel to cities around the world, I could be in Budapest. My chief mode of transportation, my favorite one, it's not a bicycle, but it's not a car and it's not a subway. It's those stupid scooters that are clearly a nuisance and probably carry diseases. But I love them. They're really cheap. They're easy to get around on. And I like the bike lane for that reason. And so I'm not convinced, Drew.

So, Michael, that's you and Ben as well and Gangbangers. Yeah. And really, you repeat yourself. Drew, what is? I don't want to ban bike lanes. I want to ban bikes and bicyclists. I don't know what it is about people when they get on a bike that they suddenly lose all of their manners. They think they have the perfect right to scream at you, to, you know,

give you the finger because you didn't see them in your, in your side view mirror. They're impossible to see. And they're fun to run over. So it's an added incentive to just, you know, just drive right over. Yeah. I also want to see a picture of you on one of those scooters so I can prove that you're not heterosexual. Sometimes people snap them. If I'm driving by occasion, I'll get someone shout out a window like, hey, I'm just there full suit on, just going down the road. But, To your point on bicycles... It's so gay, I'm sorry. No, well, but actually this relates to my big objection to bicycles, which is bicycles

don't really exist. There are straightsicles, there are gay sickles? But is there really any sort of thing as a bicycle or are you just like, you don't want to admit the whole thing? So anyway, I don't know if that means affirming a transportation binary. Yeah, I am. I certainly am. And I don't...

Yeah, so we're just going to throw them off a rooftops or whatever. I don't know. Before it's really going downhill, I don't know if that means that I'm convinced by you, Matt, or not convinced, but in any case, this whole segment's been very, very gay. Thank you, Matt. I appreciate that. Do we have any other guests? You guys are talking about other battles in the war for the suburbs. So I think that ultimately we are all in agreement whether or not it's banning bike lane, banning bicycles. We're coming at it from the same heterosexual standpoint. I agree. I agree. We all agree on that. I don't know what standpoint you're coming out for. We all agree on that.

Do we have any other heterosexual, homosexual? No, we don't. It's just us. It's just us. And we contain multitudes. Okay, that's all I want to talk about. Drew, do you have anything else? You need to get off your mind?

I have one. Yeah, I finally finished J.D. Vance's book. I texted you about it. I don't know if you got my text. I was really impressed with that book. I have to say, you know, I think he's been, I think he's been, I know you love him and all this stuff. but I think he's been tripping over his own feet lately, and I think he's looked pretty bad in this Iran thing

and some of the ways he's handled it. But I feel like there is this person there. I wish we could extract him. You know, I said before that he needs a tucker-ectomy, and I think that really is true. I think he needs to show some leadership on this issue. You know, Tucker is the one... I never get panicked about these media figures.

They come and go. Tucker is doing something wicked, and I think he's dangerous in this low-information atmosphere that we're in. But I really was interested in this book. I actually thought he said some very self-searching things. And some of the things, my objections to his personality, he actually put in the book.

You know, some of the things that I worry about in his personality that he follows people too easily. And then he gets angry at other people who suggest he might be wrong too easily. But I think he's at least thoughtful. I hope he can find his way because he may well be the candidate. Yeah, it's funny. Because I agree. I think he is the presumptive nominee now. I think there are all sorts of campaigns to try to displace him, but it's just not showing up in the polls or the scuttle butt around Washington. But I really like your point there, Drew, because a lot of it, you know, there are these descriptions of Vance, who I do like. I really do try to not get involved in primaries. I don't think it's my job. But I do think, do we have a Cali report on who the nominee is going to be. What are they saying right now? Okay, right now Cali she says,

saying Vance 40, Rubio 30, DeSantis, five and a half, which is actually... So that's Ruby on the rise, though? Yeah, well, it's closer than the public opinion polls, but the public opinion polls are diverging. And there was just another one. It put Vance somewhere, like around 49 or 50, Rubio below that, followed by DeSantis and Ted Cruz, who I actually think has a lane in the race. But then when you go Vance Rubio head-to-head, it actually goes apart even further. So I think it's like 60-30 or 60-29. And I also just don't think Rubio is going to run against him. But because there's this campaign on, I do think people are projecting onto Vance these simplistic ideas that he does not really hold. And so I have the same impression that you have from the book, which is this is a really sharp guy. He's a thoughtful person who, you know, really is interested in ideas. When I interviewed him a few weeks ago, he gave me an hour. And so I spent 45 minutes of it or something talking about religion. I knew I had.

to get a couple questions in there for the headlines about AOC or whatever. But I said, no, no, this is the rare politician with whom you can actually talk about, like, the differences between the Dominicans and the Jesuits and syndicalism and distributism. And I don't know, he's like a really thoughtful guy. So, yeah, I'm glad you had that, that reaction, because that was, that's mine too. Yeah, no, it lifted him in my, you know, I'm rooting for him. I've been rooting for him from from the beginning, but I do think he's, he's bumbled around a little bit and bumped into the walls a bit. And I think he needs, I think he does, you know, once you're in office, you don't have time to change your mind. You've got to act on the principles you have.

And I think he needs to establish his principles a little bit more firmly. And one of the things he could do is speak up against the rampant anti-Semitism and anti-Israel idea. You know, I don't care if you think we shouldn't be that involved in the Middle East. That has nothing to do with it. But the anti, to be against the one free country in that area, smacks of anti-Semitism. And I think he needs to get his head around that in some way. And show leadership. Because, like, anti-Semitism certainly has been on the rise, and you do see it on the right.

I mean, Yoram Hazoni made this point. He said, look, I didn't predict it. I didn't think you'd see it rise on the right. And it has to some degree. But, of course, it's so much more pronounced on the left. I mean, it's like not even comparable, you know. So it's true, though. It, you know, it crops up throughout history and you've got to tamp it down always.

But I think he needs to be really firm on the issues that really matter, like I just mentioned, Dominicans versus Jesuits. And I know where he stands on that. I know that perfect. Okay, that's friendly fire. Drew, good to see you. Now it's just going to be me yelling into a room by myself.

Bye, everybody. See you later. I'm Michael Knowles. We'll see you next time.