The Michael Knowles Show - Friendly Fire: The JD Vance Debate, Midterm Madness & Return of the Firing Squad

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Ben Shapiro gives his unfiltered thoughts on JD Vance's critique of free-market economics and Iran war hawks. Ben Domenech pours cold water on Tucker Carlson's presidential prospects. Cabot Phillips weighs in on how the midterms got even more unpredictable with loonie far-left socialists wiping out the Democratic Party. The hosts break down the Supreme Court's whiff on birthright citizenship. And Michael Knowles joins former top Trump DOJ official Theo Wold in unabashedly endorsing the return of the firing squad as a form of capital punishment. Friendly Fire Ep. 18 - - - Today's Sponsors: PreBorn! - For just $28, PreBorn can provide one free ultrasound and help equip a new generation of parents to choose life and build strong families. To donate, dial #250 and say “BABY” or visit https://Preborn.com/knowles Helix Sleep - Visit https://helixsleep.com/DailyWire for 20% OFF sitewide. Policygenius - Head to https://policygenius.com/FIRE to compare life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you could save. 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+ 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 📗 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 🎙️ Watch Wired-in-Live with Cabot Phillips Mon - Thurs 4:00pm ET https://www.dailywire.com/show/wired-in-live - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. So what was your reaction when FIFA tried to steal that World Cup game away from us? Yeah, no, I mean, I've been obviously watching the coverage for, you know, I can't even sleep. I'm so because Paley, right, was kicking it with his head. I'll tell you, man, I am so black-pilled that Americans are taking soccer seriously. I hate it. Well, we're taking it seriously because we're finally good at it.

Yeah, I hate that. I don't want us to be good at it. I don't want us to play it. This is a good rule. It's a good rule. It's not being an anti-American already. I want us to be great at everything. Ben calls a Poverty Ball.

I hate this freaking sport. It sucks. It's third world. It's gay. And I don't like it. I mean, but if we get good at it, then it's the most important sport. That's the way I see it. Yeah.

I feel the same way. I feel the same way about like the Olympics. I just want America to be the best at everything. I want us to kick everyone's ass consistently. Do you want us to be the best at transgender ballet? A USAID was funding that in the Philippines. Let's say they start a transgender ballet league and America joins. Do we want to be the best or the worst?

I want to be the worst in that. Yeah, I mean, now we get to the question whether soccer is inherently immoral, Michael. Yeah. It's not that it's inherently immoral. I'm not going to. I'm not quite there, though, I'm close. It's that I find it inherently. Well, it is the most corrupt sport.

I mean, by far. Is it that? Yeah, well, I mean, they're literally trying to keep out of the tournament right now. I mean, that's what's happening. It's 100% the most corrupt sport. Our best score was just red carded for legitimately no reason because Fife decided that it's impossible for the United States to essentially. make the quarter. So that's, that's, right? Am I getting this right, Ben? This is the other thing is it's

like, it does seem anti-American. I'm not even just intrinsically in the sport. I mean, like the people who play it and FIFA and whatever, they don't seem to be super pro America. And also, if we're going to have a world championship, I want to be like baseball where we, where we just declare what the world is. Like, we do the World Series. There's us in Canada. But see, this is, this is someone who should be a big fan of soft power. The World Cup here in America has been the biggest soft power export of American values that I've seen in years, in decades. All these people are going to go back home and demand of their politicians. Why don't we have air conditioning? Why don't we have showers that work? Why don't we have all these things? This World Cup has gone so well and all of these foreign fans who came over have been so impressed by all the different aspects of it. They're going to go back home and export American values and capitalism and say, What are we doing, like living the way that we currently live when we've seen the way that people live in America? We've seen Bucky. That's something that's great. Yeah. And it doesn't require any more money for the Pentagon.

Yeah. No, look, I actually, that's the best argument to watch soccer that I've ever heard in my entire life and ever will hear. The fear, of course, with all of this cross-cultural pollination is that, you know, is it us exporting our soft power or are we just importing third worldism and, you know, this kind of lame sport? But to your point, yes, people are talking about Buckeys. They're talking about Waffle House. They're talking about ranch dressing. And did you see the guy Freddie is apparently going to the White House? Well, so he was invited. Here's the thing with Freddie. And I don't know if you've followed this. We've been paying attention to it on the opinion side. The backlash against him on the internet has been insane because basically people dug up some vaguely right of center things that he might have tweeted out in the past. and things that, you know, they've gone after him, basically, as being someone who clearly is, wants to stay sort of, you know, he hasn't shown his face, he wants to stay, have some degree of anonymity and, like, be normal when he gets back from this. Probably never had any expectation of going viral.

But I also think it's phenomenal in the sense that like all these different people, he is one of many. And there are so many people who are going to go back. And I think, you know, import the values that we still have here in this kind of. that are good and are valuable back. I think that this has been one of the best things that we could possibly do in America's 250th. And I did not expect that.

I honestly thought it could be a complete crap show, but it turns out to be great. Yeah, okay, look, you have done more to convince me to like soccer than anyone has ever done. You don't have to watch it. I'm not saying you have to watch it. You know what I wanted?

Oh, first of all, I guess I should say, it's friendly fire. The 4th of July is coming up. So we're all getting ready to celebrate Somali Independence Day in Columbus, Ohio. I don't know if anyone's going to make the trek out there. But do you guys, do you have any big Fourth of July plans? Might have a big. Yes.

That's like that's an actual thing. Ben Ben, we are right on the verge. Yeah, no, we are right on the verge of baby time. I thought like one of the reasons that I can't stick around for the entire broadcast is you can hear my voice is totally. gone. The reason my voice is totally gone is because, like, two nights ago, my wife started having contractions about 20 minutes apart. And we thought for sure it was time to go to the hospital. And that lasted until about 2 o'clock in the morning, at which point it debated. So I was so short on sleep that it totally wrecked my voice. But yeah, I mean, any, any moment. And I've had a deal

for 20 years with my wife, which is that if the baby is born between July 2nd and July 4th, any year, but particularly into 50 year, then I get to use a founding father name. So this is like, so this is, this is exciting. Are you going to, so governor, I assume, or are you going to flow what the options are? Guvenor Morris, yeah, Guvonne Morris is going to be. Yeah, exactly. But there are some good ones to, some good ones to choose from. Jefferson Shapiro sounds kind of wild, but there, there's some possibilities that will merge. Charles Carroll, Shapiro, that could be a good.

Dude, if your kid is born on the 4th of July, that in the 250th, that would be, it's like providence, you know, providence has its ways. God has its way in history, has his way, rather. Okay. Now, well, then if I only have you for like five seconds, what I am told on this schedule that we have to talk about, and I actually do want to talk to you about, is I was just in D.C. I'm not totally on Baby Watch yet, but the reason I look terrible and sounds only slightly better is because I've been traveling all over. We were in D.C. I was already going for the unveiling of this statue of my great, great, great, great grandpa Simon Knowles, part of the American Revolution displays. And then I was stopping by the Great American State Fair, play the yes or no game.

But then at the last minute, the vice president was able to make some time. He actually gave us a whole hour to interview him about his book and Iran and 2028 and the Democrats and all this stuff. And so did you, Ben, I don't want to presume. Did you catch any of the interview? Yeah, he said. I caught much of the interview, actually. I thought you did a good job. It was a really interesting interview. Obviously, I have significant disagreements to the vice president on a wide variety of issues, as we've discussed on the program. I thought that to me, the kind of bizarre fixation that the vice president has on criticizing people who are mad at the MOU is, I think, unbecoming for him. He's far more critical of people who are critical of the MOU than he is

people who have been legitimately undermining the war and siding with Iran the entire time, which I find bizarre. But obviously, listen, he's really well spoken. He's very smooth. He's, And I thought you did a good job at the interview. No, thank you. I appreciate. You know, it's funny that you mentioned that the criticism of criticizing the people who were criticizing the MOU, because I did, even when he was talking about that, I wanted to clarify. I said, hold on, you're talking about the people who are upset about the war not continuing versus, you know, it was unclear which critics he was talking about. And, but he made that clear. My take on it is that the media at least, I don't know if it's

really the admin as much, but the media at least had made him kind of the face of the MOU. And so criticism of the MOU is often seen as criticism of him, even though obviously, look, it's, oh, I mean, listen, I've criticized him directly for the MOU. I mean, I'm not going to put it on the media. I've criticized the president for signing it, but J.D. Vance made itself the face of this. He personally negotiated it. He continues to personally do press on behalf of an MOU that is currently falling apart, not just in the Strait of Formuz, but also because an actual good peace plan has been put forward in Lebanon, which runs directly against the MOU. Vance's approach, which has been to essentially take sort of an Obama-esque tack with regard to opponents of the

MOU. All they want is endless war. They just want endless bombing. That's what they're promoting. And we've discussed this on the show multiple times on friendly fire. Like, what would alternatives be? I mean, one alternative would be just to walk away from the straight and not hand them things. Another alternative would be to bomb Harga Island and provide as much aerial defense for the Saudis, Bahrain, UAE as possible and basically destroy the Iranian economic capacity from this point forward. another possibility would be to essentially arm up all of our allies and then attempt to actually project into the straight of Hormuz. And if the Saudis don't like it, tell the Saudis to stick it, right? Project Freedom is something that the president wanted to do. And the Saudis apparently said, no, I have never and will never understand the idea that if we are funding and paying for a base in Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia gets to tell us what to do with that base. That's insane to me.

I think that we should tell the Saudis, listen, we're paying for your defense. All your F-35s belong to us, right? Now we're trying to protect you from your moral memesis in Iran. If we feel like opening the straight using bases that we are supplying staffing and running, then we're just going to do that. But in any case, those are all, I think, fair critiques of the MOU without reference to eternal war, forever war. And I don't like the dumbed down version of this politics. That sounds very much like Barack Obama's defense of the JCPLA, where Obama would say,

if you oppose the JCPLA, it's because you want a forever war with Iran or you want a nuclear war with Iran or he won't obliterate Iranian civilization or anything like that. I get the criticism, isn't it in the context of not just the GOP, but in the context of Trump, a criticism of endless war is not just Obamian, you know, Obamayan, it's also Trumpian. You know, Trump in 2016, one of his big breaks with the rest of the GOP is he criticized George Bush for endless wars and specifically Iraq. So isn't, when the vice president comes out and uses that language, that seems to me to be very much in line with Trump. Well, then the probably, Michael, The Trump's version of endless war.

Hold on. I actually, I've not had the time to watch the interview yet. I have to ask you, did you ask the vice president about his criticism, me personally? Did he criticize you? When he went on Megan Kelly, Megan Kelly read him a list of things that had been said about the MOU by some people, by Mark Levin, by others. But then one of them was from me. And that was what led into him saying, all these people just want to keep the war going. going on forever. They want to keep bombing until all the Iranians are going. Really? Oh, man.

To get the ratings up, I should. As someone who opposed the Iraq war, the Iraq war, that, by the way, tons of people supported, including his old boss, David Frum, who was calling people like me unpatriotic conservatives at the time that we opposed the Iraq war. I think it's really, I think it's unfortunate, and I think it's beneath him to suggest that people like me who do not, In fact, I really do want to just walk away from this thing. I think this deal is bad. Don't want to hand the Iranians any money. Want to keep bombing until all the Iranians are dead.

That I didn't realize. I think Ben, I think he might have frozen up a little bit. I don't think that the, you know, it wouldn't have been great to bring up that question had I known about it. In fact, I think to get the real ratings up, I should have had you walk out from the back. Like, well, we have him here. Ben Dominic, you are the father. That's, wow, that's amazing. Could you have the, could you have the glass shattering sound before I walk out?

Did you? I just think, I just think that I have to agree with Ben. I think that he's, it's unfortunate that he's using that argument because there's a lot of us who back the president, who think that he did something that was bold here, who just don't like the nature of this deal and who certainly don't want to keep bombing the Iranians forever. Are you kidding? Hold on. Our other pal, Ben, on here, just said he did want to keep bombing the Iranians.

Well, I actually didn't. Nothing that I just implied actually said. He said the bomb Karg Islands. None of which, none of which is not allowing until every Iranian is dead. I'm confused. No, I'm not saying every Iranian is dead. Well, hold on. Karg Island is a small island off the coast of Iran with a completely military population. It would take presumably about three B2 sorties to finish Karga Island. And then you would never have to go there again. That's not sound like an endless bombing of Iran resulting in the death of

90 million citizens to me. I might be getting that wrong, but I'm not sure that's how bombs work. No, no. I'm not saying, look, I don't, I don't know. I actually didn't even hear the vice president's comments about, you know, destroying all this. I guess President Trump did say he was going to destroy the whole civilization. But I didn't hear that. He's the only one who's threatened to do it. I didn't threaten. And neither is bad dominage. But yeah, there you go. No, I just mean the issue here with the MOU, I think everybody can agree. And I predicted this from the beginning, that if we did end this with a deal, the deal would be deeply dissatisfying. So I don't think anybody disagrees on that. But it just seems like right now we have a couple of options, which is either, maybe there's a third, but you get some version of the MOU, or you get some version of continuing to bomb them and fire missiles at them.

Or, you know, you could walk away, but now you're walking away with Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz. So now you're in a much worse position. And they're effectively in control the straight anyway. Honestly, I'm of the opinion that we'd be better off walking away from the Strait of Hormuz completely. the sanctions, making them smoke their ghost check. Replace the, like replace the MOU with the ham and cheese sandwich. Yeah. Exactly. I agree with this. And so that was one issue that I had with what the vice president was saying.

The other one was, of course, the vice president's bizarre attack on Milton Friedman's economics, as though Milton Friedman's economics stopped applying in the 1980s for some unspecified reason because the vice president, 2019, Red River Navarum, which means that now Milton Friedman is irrelevant, which is a strange. timeline since it turns out that he wrote that after Rhythm Navarum, but you know. Hold on here's a clip for those who didn't see it. Part of why Milton Friedman's ideas made more sense in the 1980s is because they were being advocated in a country that still had a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity.

And so, like, being laissez-faire in a world where there are Christian guardrails on everything is a much different proposition than being laissez-faire. affair in a world where globalized liberalism has become the sort of status quo of American elites. Okay. I'm not sure I disagree with that. Yeah, there we go. All right. I don't think he's wrong there.

I think that one of the problems that we've known about when it comes to American capitalism is that we didn't just import cheap televisions for people to watch. We didn't just import these different goods from around the world that, people enjoy here in America. We also imported a lot of their values with it. Unintentionally, we thought that this was going to change China, but it changed us. And it's one of these things that I think is sort of an underestimated aspect of it. You need kind of both of these things to have a really strong nation. That doesn't make Milton Friedman's approach wrong. It means that we need a religious revival in America, which is what I have argued consistently with my atheist libertarian

friends. You guys should be the biggest fans of like Rick Santorum or, you know, pick your, Mike Huckabee, what have you, religious revivalism, because you need that strength of society and family and everything else that goes with it in order to have the type of laissez-faire free nation that we've enjoyed for centuries. Ben, other Ben, you totally disagree. Well, so I agree, obviously, that church is very, very important. I mean, I've spent my entire life preaching in favor of the idea that people need to go to church. And obviously, church membership was, higher in the 1980s than it is now. I mean, if we're going to get factual about this, the reality is the church attendance in America really started to decline around the year 2000.

That's really when things started to drop fairly precipitously. As late as 1999, 70% of people, adults were members of a church synagogue, a church or a synagogue in the United States. But the idea that the fundamental basis of economics changes because of church attendance, and therefore what you need is government to somehow come in as the centralizing force that's going to re-inculcate a common good. So welfare programs or redistributionism or government regulation are going to re-inculcate virtue in the American population. It seems to me that if we are going to look at a correlation, the growth of government since the 1960s has been exponential. The attendance in church has dropped radically in that same exact period. In fact, I think it can make

the very strong case that actually one of the reasons for attendance declining in church and church membership declining is government actually replacing the functionality of church in everyday life for people. Totally. And the other thing is to say social security is that, you know, if the government pays for social security, you don't take care of grandma and she doesn't live in your house. If you don't, I don't have to give as much charity through my church or be a member of my church or engage in the values of my church in order to gain access to all of the institutional support of the church in order to just go pick up a check from the government. And so this bizarre attempt to sort of reverse engineer virtue via government.

fiat, government redistributionism, and centralization of economic resources, it's completely backward to me. I think when you have that dollar sign as like the primary motivation in your life, too, that also allows for the type of lies to emerge that build off of that social security experience that all of these socialists who I know we're going to talk about later, you know, can exploit because everything becomes just a monetary issue. It's all about, you know, who gets the money, who's scrabbling over this piece of the pie. And there is no kind of shared communitarian value that brings people together and that says,

I mean, just think about something as simple as the cost of child care in America when we have gone from an era in which, you know, relatives and friends and you could have teenagers that you could trust to watch your kids and not just have their nose in their phones. Like that's something that definitely we have lost here in the recent decades. And it's a major problem. And I think that it's one of the reasons why all these people are able to explore. a message of anti-capitalism to a bunch of dumb people who don't understand that it's what made the country as powerful as it was in the first place.

Sure, but also when we talk about the growth of government, I agree with a lot of those observations, but we can't only think about it from a quantitative perspective. There is also a qualitative perspective. In some ways, in the earlier parts of our country, we had a much bigger government role than we do today when we were prosecuting blasphemy. At the very least, when we had blue laws that said you couldn't, you know, you couldn't sell goods on Sundays or, you know, it restricted the sale of liquor or what have you. So in some ways, we had a much bigger government then. Since the 60s, obviously, you've had this massive growth

in the welfare state, but you've also had court rulings that have said the government has to pull back on certain moral matters. So I think there's a qualitative aspect there too. So, Michael, I agree with a lot of that, actually, but that's not with the vice president suggesting. He's not suggesting a return of blue laws and blasphemy laws. He's suggesting massive governmental intervention in the economy, and that reverses the arrow of causality. So I think that you can make a very solid historical case that church arrow capitalism, because that's actually true. I mean, the reality is that market capitalism in the West was actually an outgrowth originally of property rights rooted in sort of Catholic perceptions

of property and then later, animated by Protestant perceptions of the value of free markets, capitalism, innovation, and work ethic, right? I mean, that's Max Faber. And so, you can say these institutions precede capitalism, which clearly is true, but I don't think that you can then say the Marxist thing, and it actually is a Marxist idea, that economics precedes social institutions. And so what if we just change our economic system and then people go back to church? That's actually not. There are, I think we can say that political communities precede some social institutions or are coincidental with them. And so, you know, in the way, and you can't really firmly separate politics from economics, though maybe the Marxists would like to focus much more on the material

and the economic. But the juxtaposition that the vice president is making here is not between Milton Friedman and Karl Marx. It's between Milton Friedman and the economics of Alexander Hamilton. Last I checked, Hamilton precedes Milton Friedman. I don't mean to dis freedman. I like a lot about Friedman. But, you know, there are some things that seem to be important for the government to take on, namely, you know, under a totally laissez-faire system, which, you know, developed under the name of neoliberalism in the last 40, 50 years, we've outsourced a lot of our manufacturing or supply change to a degree that means that we are now very, very vulnerable to China. If we ever were to go to a serious war with China, we would be really up the creek without a paddle. We saw a preview of that during COVID, so that might suggest that maybe the government could focus in a Hamiltonian way on the development of industry in the United States.

So I actually agree. Hamiltonian argument on a national security level is something that I've actually agreed with and it makes sense to me. I think that he's using what we would call in law school an argument that proves too much. He's basically saying that because you're, man, you're taking key industries and outsourcing them. Therefore, the government should be in control of an enormous swath of American industry that has nothing to do with national security or just call it national security and stuff it under that rubric. And I think that that's totally wrong. And when he talked about Alexander Hamilton, I can guarantee you this. the idea that Alexander Hamilton would have been in favor of the kinds of nationalization schemes, full scale that are being contemplated or the gigantic welfare state that has been built

or the gigantic administrative and regulatory state is totally insane. What Alexander Hamilton was stumping for in a national bank was the idea that America ought to be able to pay its collective debt. That is the thing that he was attempting to craft an institution to do. The entire purpose of the national bank was basically to uphold the solvency of the United States because the United States kept blowing out a bunch of, of meaningless paper notes. And so now, if you're talking about consolidation under a single institution, you may notice that the main concern of Alexander Hamilton, which was that our good

faith and credit be good, is being undermined by the very institutions that J.D. Vance is calling to expand because the full faith and credit of the United States is not being put at risk by paper speculators in South Carolina. It's being put at risk by, yes, by Congress and United States being put at risk by, yes, by Congress and by the Federal Reserve and by the, and by the secretary of the Treasury and by blowing out money at an exorbitant rate unsupportable and unprecedented in all of human history. Yeah, listen, I'm all for reigning back Congress. I think that long precedes the Trump administration, certainly. But, you know, even to that, one last point of Friedman, and then right before, I know I have to let you go, but I do want to talk about Tucker's new political

party. But one less point of Friedman, let's not forget, during the very height of Milton Friedman's influence, which is a relatively recent innovation in American history, you also had no less a free trader than Ronald Reagan protecting U.S. Steel. Was he really doing that for national security purposes? Harley Davidson's agriculture. You know, you had George W. Bush, for example, protecting industries. You know, so you can trace protectionism back to Alexander Hamilton, to George Washington. It's precedented. It's just dumb. It's precedented. It's just dumb. It was not a good idea in the 80s. It wasn't a good idea when George W. Bush did it. It's a dumb idea now, unless you're doing it for national security reasons. Okay. Now, before I let you go, big news, maybe. I actually don't think it's that big news.

But Tucker left the judge. Tucker left the judge. GOP, he's starting a new political party. It's going to be a non-interventionist, America First, reform political party. Where have I heard of that before? It's not easy. Can I just ask which, which version of Tucker is this party? Like, I mean, he contains multitudes. You know, he is Legion. But it does, I mean, you look back at it. It's a funny question, but there's a real answer to it. I think the real answer is Pap Buchanan, right? Am I, am I misreading that? Yes. I know. That's That's right. It's like the Pap Buchanan version of the Reform Party in 2000, where Pap Buchanan won 0.4% of the vote, but just enough in Florida to cast the presidency to George Vobie Bush. That's his only role in history, Pap Buchanan. But the idea, first of all, it's not true. Okay, Tucker's saying he's launching a third party. He's not doing any of this shit. But let's explain exactly what Tucker is doing here. What Tucker is doing here is he is blackmailing the Republican Party into embracing his positions by claiming that he's going to posit a threat to the Republican Party from the outside. So what you actually have right now is Tucker trying to run a

quasi-DSA play. Essentially, he's looking at 2026. 2026 is going to be a disaster area for Republicans. Right now, Republicans are running dead even or behind in all six of the various states in which they have races up to and including Iowa, Texas, and Alaska. Tucker is looking at that. He is hoping he wants the Republicans to get their asses kicked because then what he's going to say is the reason that they got destroyed is because they didn't cater to people like me. And me sitting outside here with my non-existent third party, if only they'd engaged with me, if only they'd come back to me, then they would have won. And so it's basically a black male play. And it's smart, it's smart. But the idea that Tucker Carlson, who, again, says in that same interview that he has no attention

span, and it's widely known in the media as one of the lazier members of the media, that Tucker is going to sit there with the actual nuts and bolts of building a ground-up political party based on the pretensions of Thomas Massey, Marjorie Taylor Green, and Jo Kent, good luck. I mean, listen, my dream is that he starts a third party. I would love for Tucker Carlson to start a third party because then we could have a clear referendum on the stupidity of his ideas. But instead, what he's going to do is not that. What he's going to do is he's going to falsely claim that 2026 happened not because it was an off-year election, not because Trump was unpopular in a wide variety of issues, but because Tucker Carlson personally was displeased with Donald Trump's

policy on Iran and Epstein and all the rest. And therefore, the only, the only, way to assure Republican victory going forward is to put Tucker Carlson in the driver's seat of the party. And obviously, Tucker is very much aligned with J.D. Van. So I think that's the political movies making here. You know, it didn't, I could sense that this was just a replay of the Reform Party, especially the 2000 Pap Buchanan version. Tucker himself. Can I disagree for a second? I've met Pap Buchanan. I know Pap Buchanan. Tucker's no Papy Cannon. Pappy Cannon is smarter than Tucker. he's more consistent than Tucker. He is a more disciplined speaker than Tucker.

I still think that his 1992 convention speech was one of, was something that pre-sage, it is essential viewing for anyone to understand American politics. And by the way, while being referred to as a culture war speech, it is mostly about economics. It is not, it is about crime, economics, and working class issues. And then they did this whole revisionist history where it was like, oh, no, he came in and,

and destroyed HW's chances for re-election by turning it into this, you know, election that was going to be about abortion and gays and stuff like that. The truth is that I think that you have to understand, you need to understand Pat Buchanan in order to understand politics. I'm not sure you need to understand Tucker. And I'm not sure it's possible to understand him just given how crazy he's in the last couple of years. No, it's an interesting point. And I guess, I mean, if if the roadmap for the new Tucker party or in Ben's View not like kind of fake out part, party is just, okay, I'm going to do what Pat Buchanan tried to do in 2000, then you get, I mean, even to your point, Ben, where you say, I don't compare Tucker to Pat Buchanan, you say, well,

if you're, if you're just going to replay the same script, then, you know, one, it can only happen first one time. And to your point, other Ben, I really, this is very annoying, you know, having the only other two guys in the show. Anyway, it, to your point, it, like, it didn't work out. He got point. We'll figure this out eventually. Yes, yeah. But it actually had not occurred to me. I can't read Tucker. When he does these things that are really out there, and I can't, some people in politics, I can read them like an open book. Tucker, I couldn't figure out exactly what he was getting at here. But sociopathy is very, very difficult to understand. I think your read on that is probably right. I don't, I don't, Tucker's too smart to want to

start another political party. And he doesn't. And just by the way, there is a, there is, our sponsors at Cal She have a market on Tucker running for president in 2020. himself. And I guess it's currently in around 25%, something like that. Yeah, and I would short that. No way. I would short that. Absolutely. He does not have the discipline. He does not have the discipline to start a political party. He does not, definitely doesn't have the discipline to run for president. All right. That's not going to. On that, I guess no one here is joining the Tucker party. No one, you're not, neither of you are signing up. Okay, that's fine. But Ben, you are signing out. You got, you're on baby watch. That's awesome. Everybody keep Ben and more in your prayers.

If your kid is born on 4th of July, I'm going to have severe birthday envy, but it would be very cool. And I look forward to Governor, Governor-Govinear, Governor-Shapiro coming out. Good to see you, sir. Thanks so much, guys. Now, all of you, folks, the Declaration of Independence names three rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Notice that order. Life comes first, because without it, the other two mean nothing. The founders understood this.

And yet, every day in America, unborn babies are denied that first and most basic right. Preborn exists to change that. I love Freeborn. It is a wonderful ministry. It is one of my very favorite nonprofit organizations. I personally support it. I encourage you to give whatever you can. They're so good. They even fundraise for their administrative costs elsewhere. So every dollar you give is going towards saving babies. You give $28. That buys an ultrasound. A mother who sees her baby on ultrasound for the first time is 80% more likely to choose life. It is one of the best RIs you're going to get. In honor of America's 250th birthday, we're asking our friends to prayerfully consider a special gift of $250 to multiply your impact and help save even more lives. Right now, donate. Dow Pound 250, say keyword baby. That's pound 250, keyword baby. We go to preborn.com slash Knowles. Preborn.com slash Knowles. Every gift is tax deductible. Preborn.com slash Knowles.

Do we have Cabot? Oh, we do. We do. Hey, Cabot. What's up? And now it's less confusing because there's only one better. Thank goodness. I was driving me nuts, man. I've only worked in media for like 10 or 15 years. I couldn't figure out how to do it. We got to be thing one and thing two or something like that. I mean, you go on. So, all right, Kevin, we already covered my interview with the vice president and Iran and Tucker's new political party, which I heard you just joined.

But now I want to talk about the Dems. Where do the midterms stand? Yeah, it's been really interesting. I think given the last three or four months, you would have expected Republicans to have lost a ton of ground on the generic ballot with regard to the midterms. But if you actually look back the week before the war in Iran started, Democrats were at like 47.5 percent Republicans in the high 43s, despite the last three or four months of, you know, inflation going back up and the war getting worse and people not being happy with the war once it ended, Democrats have only gained about half a percent in the generic ballot. And so I'm still maybe delusional optimistic that given the lack of momentum for the Democrats, given the apparent ceiling that we're

seeing, given these new socialist candidates that are going to give the Republicans people to point to and make this race about that things maybe won't be as bad as a lot of Republicans are racing for. I'm always the delusional optimist, though. But yeah, that's what the big thing is just what these socialist races are going to do to the midterms more broadly. And we talk about that a lot on my new show, Wired In, which we filmed right on the set, which Ben Dominic has been on about half a dozen times. And Michael Knowles, what do we got to do to get you back? Yeah, I did it. No, I did it once. And I got, I don't know, I felt too intimidated. You on that nice big set. I kind of felt like you were set and suit maugging me. So I don't know, maybe I'd like

to come back now that we're in the heat of midterm season. And you point out you got all these socialists, but you're too rosy about it. Ben, can you please bring us down to Earth? Yeah, so I actually think that this midterm is going to be terrible for Republicans. And I think that they are likely to still hold the Senate. But that's still, I think, something that is a lot closer than anyone expected it to be, just given the map. Some of the decisions that they've made have made this a lot riskier. We saw that New York Times poll, for instance, that has Ken Paxton tied with James

Alarico. Something along the lines of, of these Supreme Court cases that just came down, they benefit Tala Rico because Paxton is going to have to lean hard on the birthright citizenship question. He's going to have to support whatever the Republicans coalesce around in response to that. Tala Rico gets to punt on the transgender sports question

because he can basically say Texas decided not to have men and girls' sports and I agree with them and that's going to be fine. And I have nothing to do with that as a senator. And the problem that really shows in that poll is, It's been apparent across multiple polls, actually, is that Paxton is losing Hispanics to Tala Rico dramatically. So you don't have the same type of situation that you had with Ted Cruz, for instance, and just two years ago.

Now, that doesn't mean that I don't think Paxton's going to win. I actually do think he's going to win. But the amount of time that's going to be spent backing someone like him, the amount of money that's going to have to go and do a state that should have been safe, that's stuff that comes away from other states that are much riskier. Democrats are also trying to play fast and loose in a bunch of these. situations. We've seen them do it before, you know, backing independent candidates in certain sentences. In Alaska, they actually put a guy with the same name as Dan Sullivan on the ballot, which is pretty

ridiculous. The one thing that I do think, though, that we should keep in mind is the Democrats lost this redistricting war. And so in a lot of these situations, these people are running in completely new districts. And the candidates, therefore, you can't rely on a one-to-one comparison compared to how they performed before because they have a different electorate that may not know them, that has a new response to them. I think the real question here is

if the Democratic Party is able to basically pull the wool over the eyes of the independent voter, say that these socialists that are confined to just these little spots in the country, don't care about that, don't look at that. There is no man behind the curtain who believes in Marx and Engels. We are instead going to try to, you know,

turn this into a situation where we are the party that's about affordability, that's about anti-corruption, that is anti-war, that is, you know, going to make your gas prices come down, et cetera, et cetera. They're going to try to run in that direction. And I think Republicans are going to run on crime and calling Democrats crazy. That doesn't tend to be the kind of message that gets people out who aren't already going to vote for you. Wow. Yeah. And so it makes me even more upset about the Supreme Court decisions because the birthright citizens, one ultimately is much, much more important, I think, than the Title IX decision, which seemed actually in contradiction to Gorsuch's view from the Title VII decision. And I don't know,

it seemed a little bit like they were kind of just following the headlines and the opinion polls. But regardless, birthright citizenship, that is a nation-shaping, like DeMoss shaping event. And so that's obviously terrible for Republicans. But at least we got the trans win, right? No, to your point, Ben, that takes the killer issue for the Dems, especially in places like Texas. I mean, Ted Cruz really wrecked Colin Allred. When that race looked like it might be a little tight. Totally. He destroyed him on the trans sports issue. Now it's totally off the table. Yeah. It gives them, it bails them out. And the last thing I would just say about this is I think Republicans always miscalculate how much voters are actually paying attention to the

craziest things that congressmen and in some cases, Senate candidates in Michigan and in Maine Senate candidates, or I'm assuming the craziest guy is going to win in Michigan, that they always kind of count on that to help them across the country. And I don't think that that's actually the way it works in midterms. It can help you when you're doing a national election in a presidential year, but it helps you less when it comes to these midterm elections because it's it is more localized and it's more about people's immediate concerns. I think unfortunately, Republicans have been, you know, they've been throwing rocks at each other here in Washington. They can't get on the same page. White House and the Senate are split, you know, and all these different, you know, house things are shenanigans are going on.

I just do not see a lot of signs that, you know, this is going to be a good situation, you know, for Republicans. I know that there's a, there's a Cal She market on this, of course, which party will win the U.S. Senate that you can check out. They're one of our sponsors, of course. And I think that this is a situation where the everything has tightened. people are a lot more concerned about this than they were six months ago when Republicans were confident they were going to hold that body. It could end up being 50-50, in which case

J.D. Vance, clear your schedule. You're going to be voting a lot. Ben, I agree with you that I think the average primary or the average midterm voter maybe isn't super aware of what Chevalier is doing or what Keeros in Colorado is doing. But I do think that Democrat leadership is very aware of those people, and they're very scared of them. And we've started to see Democratic leadership be forced to embrace them. We saw Kamala Harris this week come out and call Mom Donnie personally. She called a number of pro-Palestinian groups. Please. Please. Please.

Run again. Try to run as a socialist. But we saw J.B. Pritzker. I beg you. For America. Do it. Pritzker went on CNN, and he said, yeah, the strategy of these socialist candidates, he didn't fully endorse them. he said, their strategy is one that's going to win in 2026 and beyond. And so even if the average voter... He has to say that so they don't kill him.

Do they eat him? Yeah, but my point is that I think that these candidates, while they might not have a huge impact on Senate voters in Texas, they will have an impact on the broader perception of Democrats in that they're going to force Democratic leadership to go further left for fear of being eaten, as you point out. Usually Pritzker is the one doing the eating, but in this case, he's the one getting eaten. I wasn't going to say it. A lot for people to feed on there. But I think that's going to have an impact. I'm sure he lost all that way naturally. Yeah.

What I want to know about the DSA stuff, there was that poll that just came out that showed that rank and file Dems have a higher opinion of the Democratic Socialists than they do of Democrats in Congress. And you think, well, all right, that's a low bar. Democrats in Congress aren't polling that well. But it's pretty scary that they, that the Democrat voter would today prefer the socialists who used to be this kind of fringe, weird, young element of the party. party, even six, eight years ago, to now they're polling higher than the Democrats in Congress.

What does that tell you about the state of the party? To me, when I got that news, it reminded me of what we saw after Charlie was killed, which is, you know, that itself was obviously a major personal trauma for a lot of people and a political trauma. And then there was this additional political trauma, which is that you found out 28% of young leftists agreed that it was okay and, you know, it could be justified. And huge swathes throughout the mainstream left on, on television, in office, they would all minimize or dismiss that killing. You say, okay, well, that's a now a major political scandal. You're seeing, I don't know, you're just seeing a lot of evidence coming out that the Democrat Party, you look at the California state senators, they just voted to allow

child molesters to run for office. They voted down a measure that would keep them out of office. that wasn't just... No, they did more representation. They do. No, they do. I mean, because the headlines, the headlines weren't even as bad as the reality. I mean, who will speak for Epstein's Island? No, the original thing that we were seeing in the headlines is Scott Weiner was the one who did this. And Scott Weiner is a total freak and a pervert and a devian. But it wasn't just him. Like, I wish it were just him. It's the mainstream dem. Most of the Dems on this panel.

So what does that say about the party? So can I just, I'm going to... going to vote a random guy on X, who I think had a great explanation for this. Shout out to Roman Helmut guy. America is a Latin American country now. So let me explain politics. We elect communists to kill the rich. Communism brings poverty and crime.

So we elect fascists to kill the communists. But then the fascist hand the economy to oligarchs. So we liked communist to kill the rich. And unfortunately, as someone who has been saying for a long time that I thought that American politics was starting to look more in. and more like Latin America, including by the way with Donald Trump, you know, you must, you know, elect the strong man, elect the man who is going to solve the problems, you know, kind of thing. I think that that is unfortunately, dangerously what we are setting up in this situation,

which is a takeover of a decrepit, octogenarian Democratic Party that is out of touch with its most engaged activist voters. And it's going to, I think, completely reorienting. them. We saw this happen to a degree with the Tea Party, but the Tea Party, basically what happened was their ideas were subsumed into the Republican Party and the fundamental Republican kind of framework that that's, you know, three-legged stool that we've talked about, you know, to the endth degree. That remained intact. It just was sort of a change in priorities. But I don't think this is just a change in priorities. I think this is a change in one of the American parties, and I think that unfortunately, capitalism may end up being a monopartisan

affair faster than we could even imagine. We've had this huge movement of rehabbing Richard Nixon's image, and we've been Nixon maxing this summer. I think we might have to start Pinochet maxing. Y'all, don't try me with a good time. We might have to start. Pinochet did nothing wrong. Exactly. But on the topic of socialism, that poll of the number of Democrats that have used socialism favorably. I just can't help but think that that's more a reflection of their despair over the situation in America. They're feeling that neither party is speaking for them. And to that point, I do think that a lot of people who are embracing socialism, while the ideas obviously are important, they're not all wrong in saying that they have reason to be angry with the way that

they've been treated in the country. But I don't think that actually means what they necessarily think it means. Like, I don't think most of them would actually support the Democratic Socialist of America agenda. And to that point, If you actually look at the agenda, we know that the DSA supports universal health care, universal child care and student loan forgiveness and amnesty. That's child's play compared to where the DSA platform actually is. So this month they published their new, what they call it. The workers deserve more plan.

The official plan from the DSA includes abolishing the Senate, defunding the entire war department, quote, replacing the president and Supreme Court with an executive. and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress. The official DSA platform is do away with the White House, do away with the presidency, do away with the War Department, do away with the Senate. Establish the third international. Yeah, do away with the cops, do away with the border.

I don't think that the average Democrat who says, yeah, socialism, I do it favorably. I don't think they're supporting that, but that is what the DSA members are supporting. But Kavit, can I ask you, I assume you probably saw that viral clip of AOC responding to the question about, you know, J.D. Vance says you would be, a really competitive candidate, you know, if you ran for president. And one of the things she says

in that in that clip is about how people in her generation feel like they've been handed, you know, a bad situation by the people who came before. To me, that argument is the most powerful one that they have because it's true. Because the simple fact is that the boomers are the greatest generation in terms of distribution to themselves. And there's a reason why we have the kind of resentment for a situation where they are still by far, even though they have continually shrunk, obviously, as a generation, they own the most houses in America. They own the most property in America.

They don't want to sell it. They don't want to give it up. And so you have people who are trying to form families. You have to live in apartments. And that's the kind of thing where that resentment, there's a core truth to it. that I think Republicans have unfortunately failed to address. You know what I find unfortunate? The Cabot's still on this show.

So get out of here, you. No, listen, I know you all want more Cabot. So whatever you do, make sure right now to go and subscribe to Cabot's new show, Wired In on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. That is the only way you will be sure to see Cabot's return to this program. Cabot, any parting words? Yes, please go watch Wired In if nothing else, just so that you can stay.

Stick it to Michael Knowles. Yeah, he just had his big 2000th episode. We're on episode 50, and that's something worth celebrating. So come join us live on Daily Wire 4 p.m. Eastern every Monday through Thursday. It's a lot of fun. And we'll get Michael Knowles back on for the people. I'll do it, especially if you guys go over there on Mass, then I'm going to have to go over there and say, hey, watch me. That's wonderful. Cabot. Thank you. As always, good to see you. Now, I, now that we've just returned, it's just me and Mr. Dominic, I feel like I can rest easy. And if you want to rest easy, you need to go check out Helix. America turns 250 this week, which means it's been 250 years since anyone in this country

got a good night's sleep. The founders ran a revolution on no rest at all. George Washington crossed the Delaware in the middle of the night. Those men had no choice. You do. Between the kids, the show, and everything happening in the country. A good night's rest is about the most patriotic thing I can think of. And for that, I thank our sponsor, Helix.

I'm such a good, I'm such a good dad. I'm such a good father. I'm not a founding father, but I'm a father, that I got both of my kids who were out of the crib, Helix mattresses. And you know what? I just, for anyone who's going to be a house guest of mine, I just ordered another Helix mattress for our guest room. Ben, have you gotten a beautiful Helix yet? I do. I actually already had one before I joined the Daily Wire. I like it very much. In fact, it's my favorite mattress to sleep on, especially when my kid is trying to wake me up at about 3.30 in the morning. and I'm trying to get my wife unsuccessfully to change his diaper instead of me. That's very fair. When you said it's my favorite mattress to sleep on, I think, maybe I need to start mattress maxing. Maybe I need to get another one. Well, with Helix, the prices are so good you can get many. They have over 20 mattress models, whether you run hot, sleep on your side, or need extra support.

There's one built for you. They even offer cooling upgrades, which in July is not a luxury. It's a necessity, especially if you live in Mum Donnie's New York. It is the most worn mattress brand. 78 degrees. You saw that? 78 degrees. 78 degrees. Cool. A nice, a nice balmy night in New York. Go there right now. Helixsleep.com. Do it. You're going to love it. Helixleaf.com slash daily wire.

20% off site wide, 25% off luxm mattresses, 30% off elite mattresses. Helixlate.com slash daily wire. 20% off the regular ones. 25% off the lux. 30% off the elite. Make sure you enter daily wire. Check out so they know we sent you at helixleaf.com slash daily wire. One more thing I got to sell. You got to sell it, Ben. Sell it for me. Yeah. So you mentioned Washington crossing the Delaware. When Washington was crossing the Delaware, he understood the power of truth and the power of stories. And so he had literally being read to the troops in their boats when they were

crossing the Delaware River in the middle of the night to do their famous raid that changed the course of history 250 years ago. He had them reading the opening passage to Thomas Payne's American crisis, which decries the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot. We need more people than summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. We need people who are engaged at this moment in our country and understand the crisis that we're in. And the way to understand that crisis is to subscribe to the Daily Wire Plus. We are so proud to bring you a new deal on the 250th anniversary of this country that

is going to be a three-month deal for SOUTH. $17.76. Sorry, that is going to offer you everything that the Daily Wire has to offer is everything. It's all of the documentaries. It is a, you know, it's all of the different historical truths. It's all of the different articles and pieces and things and content that we're rolling out. The documentaries, the whole entertainment library, and we're going to be putting out a bunch of stuff this summer. So you definitely need to sign up for this. If you've been on the fence about joining, there's no better moment than on the nation's 250th birthday. Dailywireplus.com, go sign up and happy Independence Day. Okay, can I actually be totally sincere and earnest, which I almost

never am, certainly not on this show. That was an inspiring ad read. The Summer Soldier and Sunshine Patriot, Washington, that was a good, man, that was good. I want to sign up. That was great. I really like that. Okay, before I let you go, we're, we're, hey, you got, you got it. You got to, look, I'm not sure Tom Payne would approve of me using its words to sell things, but I think it's actually true. I think that what the Daily Wire offers is the truth about history, the truth about who we are. That's what Payne was offering those soldiers. They knew in that night how desperate they were, that they were really down to the end. And this was the kind of desperate, brave, heroic act.

And they could never have appreciated that they were in the midst of founding the greatest nation in the history of the world. And I think that that's something that we should appreciate now and subscribing to Daily Wire's is the way I think that you can help appreciate it and understand it now. And you know what else? You know what we now know, thanks to historians, is that Thomas Payne slept on a helix mattress. So head on over to eat. No, no, he didn't. I don't think he actually did that. Okay. We are now bringing on Theo Wald to talk about before we let all of you guys go, the Supreme Court decisions. I want to go through them. We talked about the political implications a little bit. I want to know about the decisions themselves. And then also Idaho becoming the first U.S. state to use firing squad for executions. Is that the first U.S. state ever or just we're bringing it back? I don't know. I don't know. I'm not expert on that. I think that's a question for Theo. Do you have Theo? Theo? There we go.

Yeah. It's good to be with you guys. And I just want to say, Ben, you know, Thomas Payne was a pamphleteer and a hustler. I think he would actually appreciate the sales pitch there. I was trying to make a buck, right? You literally was the original, you know, I'm interested in your ideas and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. That's right. So on the big case, on the one that really matters the most, on the birthright citizenship case, I never thought the court was going to go along with us out of cowardice.

I thought there were good legal arguments and good historical arguments for the courts to go along with us. But I think the court is just institutionally cowardly, for good reason, the Democrats keep threatening to destroy them for almost a century now. But in terms of the actual legal matters, what happened? Yeah, I think all of that as preparatory comment, that's correct. I think anyone who listened to oral argument knew that both justices Kavanaugh and ACB, Amy Coney-B, Amy Coney-Bert, were skeptical. That's probably the best way of putting it, skeptical at best of John Sauer, the Solicitor General, his arguments before the court. I think,

the Roberts opinion, one way of sort of distilling this down is to say it's essentially a discursive armchair historian's view of the 14th Amendment, but really rooted in Anglo common law. What is the notion of citizenship or subjecthood, more likely, that was imported from Britain into the United States? And that's where he kind of hinges his entire argument. And I think Alito is right to say in his dissent, and Thomas does the same, that Roberts really misses everything from the Declaration of Independence forward. And so you've got a very narrow reading of what citizenship requires. Hadley Arcus, you know, the famous natural rights theorist, he really pinpointed this line from Robert's opinion where Robert says, really what this is about is citizenship is the right

to have rights, which really would have struck the framers, obviously, as bizarre, but also the framers of the 14th Amendment as bizarre. So I think the majority opinion is trying to, trying to do a lot. And what it's really trying to do to your point, Michael, is to satisfy this question of what is the meaning of the 14th Amendment, what is the meaning of citizenship once and for all? And as we've seen over the last 40 years, anytime the court tries to settle definitively, what is really at root, something of a small P political question, the court ends up regretting it. You know, just think of Planned Parenthood v. Casey or some of these other sort of seminal cases where the court tried to say, no, this is the definitive answer for all time.

And I think the dissents from Thomas and Alito both get at this. Not only is it a wrong reading of the 14th Amendment, but it's also a political mistake the court's making. So Theo, I have a couple of questions about this. And I want to preface this by saying that I'm someone who is for a very long time, along with including hardline immigration people like my friend Mark McCorough, and supported birthright citizenship. And the reason that we supported is because we don't believe in having stateless children. And we believe that it's chaotic.

and we believe in border control, immigration enforcement, the kind of things that prevent this from being exploited. But the situation that we face today is obviously dramatically different than everything that we've seen, even just a few decades ago, when it comes to the level of birth tourism, when it comes to the level of people who are aligned to come here for a brief amount of time just in order to have a baby who can claim dual citizenship,

who are exploiting generous Medicaid and other welfare programs in blue states, Like, this is a completely different scenario than we were in even 15, 20 years ago. And obviously, that includes the importation of untold millions during the Biden era. The decision, though, to go with an EO, that I know that you were, you know, obviously a key component of that, you know, is from you. I actually don't know how much of it you worked on or if you draft the whole thing. But that EO was always something that seemed to put in people's minds. this thing is going to get kicked out because it's not Congress. It's not something that has the backing of, you know, a partisan or potentially even a bipartisan.

I think you might have gotten some Democrat randoms in the House that might have gone along with some kind of solution on immigration just based on where they are that tried to deal with this birthright question, which has loomed over us forever with all of these random district decisions and no definitive answer. I think Robert's opinion is crap. I think it's just like ridiculous. But I also think that this outcome is one that most Americans are just kind of going to kind of shrug at, unfortunately. Do you think that it was a wrong decision to do this via executive order? Yeah. I mean, so the executive order project that I worked on in 45, you could probably say it was much more about nipping and tucking and really getting at those four categorical exemptions that Roberts kind of dismisses. out of hand and says that's a closed universe, right?

The Native Americans, envoys, or ambassadors. Right, exactly. So really trying to hone in on, is that the defined space here or is there more sort of elasticity in the joints, if you will, because of the new situation we face with the millions of birth tourists in Miami or Southern California, you know, the false society claimants, etc. So I think the idea of tackling this through executive order, and I'll note, executive order alone, This could have always been dual-tracked with a statutory effort in Congress from the word go back in January of 25.

I think the idea of pushing this solely through executive order. It wasn't just Roberts and ACB who were uncomfortable with that. Obviously, Kavanaugh notes that in his opinion with the existing statute from the 1950s. And I think both Alito and Thomas both are kind of, you know, the idea that you could do this exclusively through unilateral executive power makes them uncomfortable. So I think that was also a mistake here, and especially a mistake in that I don't think it teed up, to your point, Ben, I don't think it teed up in a neat way the larger political discussion we need to have. What was missing was exactly what Alito said in his dissent, which is, you know how about this very weird scenario where legal immigrants coming to the country applying for citizenship have to engage in kind of like this reason-based Thomas Payne, if you will, based naturalization process. They've got to prove their loyalty, their understanding, civics education. But then a whole host of people who come here as birth tourists or illegal aliens can just have the magic of birth and automatically give birth to an American citizen.

That's a very weird scenario. And that's open. That would have been very promising ground for Republicans in Congress or elected Republicans in the state houses across the country to make that argument. We require this of naturalization. Why wouldn't we require something more, you know, domicile and a legal. for any citizen who's coming here and getting birth, missed opportunity again. Yeah, and even, so beyond the question of executive order versus legislation,

or even the Supreme Court precedent, which obviously comes from Wong Kim Ark, or the public meaning from the framing of the 14th Amendment, you make this very good point, Ben, which is that Roberts is leaning on, or sorry, Theo, you might have made this point. Well, one of you did, and probably the other one agrees with it, that Roberts is leaning on the Anglo tradition, which is where we get our law from,

the English common law. And the English common law had birthright citizenship. So we are told, you know, use solely versus us sanguinez, the right of the blood. But this, I think, miss is a really important point, which is that you had a birthright as a subject of the king. Not in any modern sense of citizenship. And so if we're going to make the parallel, and we're going to cite the United Kingdom, we should look at what happens after the Second World War when the United Kingdom begins to change its previous sense of the relation of subject to King into a more modern national kind of citizenship. What does the UK do? The UK gets rid of birthright citizenship. And they vote for this in 1981. It goes into effect in 1983, precisely because of these problems of mass migration. And so you say, look, Juan Kim Mark does not decide this to defend.

definitively in 1898. The Congress hasn't really weighed in on it. Obviously, the framers of the 14th Amendment didn't think that what they were doing was just giving a free ride to every Chinese spy that wanted to fly to Guam. It's totally absurd. And if you're going to look to the English common law, maybe we consider what the Brits did after that. Because the court ruled on the substance of the matter, because the court came in, 5'4, Kavanaugh would not join them for the substantive point. And they say, sorry, 14th Amendment gives every Nicaraguan peasant birthright citizenship immediately. Is there anything that we can do, the executive or the legislature, to fight back? Or do we need to fight another 49-year Roe v. Wade-like battle to get this case overturned?

Yeah, I think that's an excellent distillation, Michael. And, you know, funnily enough, I was just in London a week ago giving a presentation of exactly what you just laid out on both the 40. 48, 49 citizenship bill that obviously Enoch Powell essentially made his career on the early part of his parliamentary career fighting that. And then the 1981 and then the subsequent mid-90s citizenship act. So the British have changed their notion of citizenship three times in a fundamental, massive way. And yet we have a chief justice who's saying, well, we got to go back to the 15th century to look at the way the British understands subjecthood. It makes no sense at all. So I answer your question, unfortunately, because of the

expansive opinion here that this is resting on a constitutional interpretation. And I'd also add to Ben's point, because of the flaw in presenting this as an executive order, assertion of power, I think in large part, most of what Congress can do has been foreclosed by this opinion. It will require a constitutional amendment. And I think the white pill, as I've shared elsewhere, is to say, that might be a good thing to get people thinking again about the form of citizenship, what's required in a small our republic and having a fulsome discussion about what we want in terms of the rights and duties and obligations that citizenship imposes. Part of the problem here is for 50 years, we essentially neglected this entire conversation and left it to abstract legal theory

or judges and roads to determine who is and who is not a citizen. And this is, can I just, can I just make the point that the politics of immigration also played into this in the sense that for a long time, Republicans saw immigration as kind of a second, you know, third rail of politics other than like the, you know, kind of Medicare or something like that. They didn't want to touch it because they were worried they were going to piss everybody off by doing it. And the truth is that in that window where you could have probably moved something on something like this, I'm thinking the late 90s, early 2000s, that didn't happen. And because that didn't happen, we're left with this situation. As you said, you're,

said, you know, left with legal academic comment and judges and robes making this decision, I think that we need to have, you know, as a real considered moment here about what it means to be a citizen, about what kind of citizens, you know, we want and want to welcome. And, you know, look, Calvin Coolidge said that the founders, you know, fought the, fought the war in 1776 because they wanted to be citizens, not subjects. And that's what we want. There are a lot of people, I think, fit today, politically, who would be perfectly happy to just be subject. And we should not be those people. Very, very good point. Before I let you go, Theo, we have to talk about, speaking of the dignity of the person and, you know, living on our own terms.

I've long thought, if God forbid, I'm ever convicted of a capital offense. I'm not joking. This is not just a setup. What I would want to do is go out, standing up, blindfolded, probably a cigarette in my teeth. by the firing squad. That actually seems to me to be the most dignified way to go. Idaho has this. I believe you were rather involved in that. I actually don't get what the big deal is. Yeah, a great question, Michael. I mean, you know, The Guardian and a couple of other international publications have lost their mind in the last 24 hours about this. You know, the archaic, barbaric, gun-obsessed Americans are bringing back firing squads is essentially how the op-ed from the Guard and read yesterday. Look, I mean, really at issue here is something, a very basic premise that's tied to our previous conversation, which was, you know, the people of Idaho, reflective in numerous

red states and some blue states across the country elected to have capital punishment for a certain class of offenses. And not, you know, abolitionist activists and a number of their sort of institutional backers have campaigned to restrict the ability of states like Idaho to import the drugs that are necessary to create the three drug compound for lethal injection. This is essentially their way of short-circuiting the preferred choice of the people and the establishment of the law. And Idaho's answer wasn't like some other red states, well, I guess they got us. We don't have access to the drugs.

We can't use compounding of pharmacies anymore. So I guess we'll have no more capital punishment. Instead, what Idaho said was, okay, then we will revert back to a form of execution that is still recognized under the Eighth Amendment. And to your point, Michael, it turns out actually, There are lots of criminal defendants across the country who prefer the firing squad because it is a far more effective and humane form of execution. The average firing squad formalized medical death occurs in seconds as opposed to eight, nine, ten minutes in the few lethal injections that actually occur correctly. And I think you're using trained professionals, marksmen who are former retired military or police officers.

And there's no violation of the Hippocratic Oath that you require with health professionals using the lethal injection form of that. execution. So it makes sense for Idaho. And really, again, at root here is just a way of saying, you're not going to use your embargo and your activism to short-circuit the legal choices that the people of our state have made. Yeah, I say, kill them all. You know, no, no, kill them all. But, you know, if you're going to have capital punishment, that seems like the humane and right way to do it. Totally, totally agree with you. Gentlemen, I have to run. But not before Ben Ben gives his final thought. Great work, Theo. Thanks, thanks for having you. Good to see you. Mr. Dominic, I'm leaving. I'm leaving on a jet plane. I'm getting out of here, man. I want to go

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