Ep. 1632 - Why Are We Celebrating Terrorists Taking Over Syria?
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Let me share with you an objective example of how truth prevails. Starting in January, Jeremy's Razors will become an official partner of UFC. That's right. The Daily Wire is joining forces with the most merit-based sports organization in the world. More details coming up later on in the show. There's good news and bad news in geopolitics over the weekend. You want the good news first? All right, I'll give you the good news first. The good news is that a brutal Middle Eastern dictator has been overthrown.

Now, the bad news is the guy who overthrew him is a leader of Al Qaeda. Formerly, maybe he's changed. Not ideal, you might say, but par for the course when it comes to our foreign policy establishments blunders. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show.

Daniel Penny, the hero Marine who protected people on a New York City subway by taking down a crazy guy who was trying to threaten them. He just had his top charge of second degree manslaughter dismissed, but the liberal courts are still trying to throw this guy into prison.

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I can't believe it, but we're going to have to begin today with foreign policy. No one ever really cares about foreign policy, including me, really. You know, it's just, it's so complicated and there are all these alliances. But this one does show you a certain aspect of domestic politics too, namely how the media work and how our foreign policy establishment doesn't ever seem to have its priorities in order. Bashar al-Assad, the president,

of Syria until about five minutes ago has been overthrown after a quarter century in power. And that is after his father ruled for a quarter century. So the Assad family has been running the show in Syria for a long time. And then all of a sudden, he's out. This is after a 13-year civil war. It looked at first as though Assad was going to go 10 years ago, whatever it was.

And the international community and all the Democrats and all the Western powers said, this guy's got to go. He's the worst dictator ever. And then he just managed to cling on to power. And then we all made nice with Assad again. But now he's gone.

The person who replaced him is an Islamist named Abu Muhammad Al-Gholani. His name is also pronounced Al-Julani. It's a little confusing because that's not even really his name. That's his nom de guerre. I forget whatever his real name is, but he goes by Abu Muhammad Al-Gholani.

Al-Gulani, the nom de guerre referring to the Golan Heights, which is currently controlled by the state of Israel, but at other times is controlled by Syria. And in Arabic, you pronounce Golan Julan. And in the West, we pronounce it, you know, in Hebrew and in English, we pronounce it Golan. So anyway, whatever you want to call them, Al-Gulani.

or Al-Julani, call him whatever you like, just don't call him late for dinner. He showed up and led this offensive through Syria. He is one of the rebels. Now, in the Western media, we've been told that Bashar al-Assad is the really evil, terrible man, and he represses his own people

And he's legitimately done very terrible things, tortured people. He's accused of using chemical weapons against his own people. And then this guy is one of the rebels. And we're told the rebels are the good guys because they're overthrowing the oppressive leader. The problem is that the rebels are made up of

of guys who served in Al-Qaeda, guys who served in ISIS. Actually, this guy, Abu Mohammed al-Ghalani, served in both of those. And then he started his own group, and he led this coalition to topple Assad and to take over Syria. Now, he is, in the words of Bill Roggio, who is a managing editor of Long War Journal, he is a, quote, specially designated global terrorist.

He was a member of al-Qaeda. The U.S. keeps him on that list for a reason. So now I got to ask this question. After we hear all the great media reports, so good, Bashar al-Assad is gone, a wonderful day for freedom. Now the Syrian people have their spring, a chance at freedom and independence. Hold on. Can anyone explain to me why I am supposed to celebrate that Bashar al-Assad was replaced by a member of al-Qaeda?

Say what you will about Assad. I've made temperate defenses of Assad and of his father, by the way, for years at this point because nasty fella, total butcher, all sorts of bad things as dictators and totalitarians do. But one thing that he did right, that he made a key aspect of his presidential propaganda and of his administration was to protect religious minorities. Syria is mostly Sunni Muslim territory.

Bashar al-Assad is an Alawite, so it's a break off of Shia Islam. But there are all sorts of other people in Syria. 10% of Syria is Christian. And so this is really what gets to my interest here. When I think about all these countries that have all sorts of problems, probably my chief interest is the protection of Christians.

The Middle East, this area right here, the Levant, is the birthplace of Christianity. These are the oldest Christian communities in the world. They have been subjected to absolute misery and terror, in particular over the last quarter century, though many times over the last 1,400 years or so. And Bashar al-Assad, say what you will about him, was pretty good at protecting the Christians in Syria when these Islamists take over.

The Christians get absolutely decimated, further decimated than they are before. So I'm not celebrating the overthrow of Assad. Say what you will about Assad. He basically kept things together and basically protected the Christians. I see no reason to believe that things will improve in Syria with Assad gone. Just as we remember, all the Democrats told us it'll be so great when Gaddafi is gone in Libya. There will be freedom and a new spring for the Libyan people. And that's why the U.S. has to put its thumb on the scale and overthrow Gaddafi. Things didn't get better. Things got a lot worse.

Basically, the same thing was true with Mubarak in Egypt. A lot of our interventions in the Middle East only seem to make things work. The overthrow of Saddam, did that really help the region? Did that even advance our stated goals of countering Iran? No, not at all. It seems as though the Western forays into the Middle East are a series of one blunder after another. We never learn the lesson that sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don't.

So now Assad is gone. And why is the foreign policy establishment happy about this? Because Bashar Assad was a proxy of Iran in particular and a proxy of Vladimir Putin. And we don't like Iran and Vladimir Putin. Iran is the chief enemy of Israel. Israel is the closest American ally in the Middle East. And Iran and Russia are both on the same page when it comes to Syria. And we've been fighting Russia for about 70, 80 years now. The Cold War is ostensibly over, but Russia still has a lot of missiles pointed at us. So...

Now that you've got the Turks, who are a NATO ally, even though we don't really like the Turks that much, and the West has been fighting the Turks for also like decades,

like a thousand years now, you know, it was a big feature of the Crusades, but we are friends with the Turks for the purposes of the Cold War. And we've maintained Turkey in the NATO alliance and Turkey was funding the rebels. And so that I guess is good. And Turkey is allied not only with NATO in the U S but also allied with Israel, which makes it really complex in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, because in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the Armenian Christians, the only oldest Christian nation in the world is actually allied with Iran and the, uh,

Azerbaijanis are allied with Turkey. And I don't like the Azerbaijanis in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, but I guess we sort of like Turkey. And anyway, as you can see, it's very, very confusing. Very, very confusing. But if I'm trying to simplify it and I just look at this today, I say, this is a bad thing for Christians in the Middle East. The U.S. foreign policy establishment might say, okay, well, this sort of advances our grand strategic goals. And okay, good luck with that.

I need a little bit more of a track record of our grand strategic goals working out after 25 years of just absolute chaos and blunder and failure in the Middle East.

All right, I ain't celebrating that. I know that all the newspapers want me to celebrate Assad is leaving. I'm not celebrating that. Now, speaking of historic drubbings, Assad run out of Syria to Russia, where he got asylum in Moscow for supposedly humanitarian reasons, not just because he was a puppet of Russia. President Trump just gave a brutal drubbing to NBC and Meet the Press. He went on this classic establishment media show.

And a lot of people were wondering, why? Why does Trump want to go on these shows? He won. Why does he care what these people think? Why doesn't he just boot them out of the press room and move on? No one really likes NBC anymore. No one likes any of these outlets. Well, he went on anyway, and it did work out because he did not take their bait at all. And he just gave it back to them. Whatever they were giving to him, he gave it to them three times over. Here is the first time that Welker on Meet the Press tries to lead Trump

into questions about the 2020 election. Sir, I don't have to tell you this because you've talked about it. It comes at a time when the country is deeply divided. And now you're gonna be leading this country for the next four years. For the sake of unifying this country, will you concede the 2020 election and turn the page on that chapter? No, no, why would I do that? But let me just tell you, when you say the country is deeply divided, I'm not the president.

Joe Biden is the president. But you're going to be the president. No, no. I'm not the president. So when you say it's deeply divided, I agree. But Biden is the president. I'm not.

And he has been a divider. And you know where he divided it more than anything else, and it probably backfired on him, I think definitely, is weaponization. When he weaponized the Justice Department and he went after his political opponent, me. He went after his political opponent violently because he knew he couldn't beat him. And I think it really was a bad thing. And it really divided our country. So she goes, will you, just for unity, because of how divided we are, will you

admit that you lost the 2020 election. And then the implication is you led an insurrection to try to overthrow. And he just goes, no, I'm not. And the way he can get away with this is not only because he has guillons of steel, but also because he just won in a landslide, an electoral college landslide, and he won the popular vote. So if the American people really believe that Trump were an existential threat to democracy, he were causing the division, they wouldn't have elected him.

including the majority of married women and 40% of women under 30 and one of five black guys and almost half of Hispanics and just a good chunk of every single group in the country voted for him. So he says, no, I'm not going to give you anything. The country is divided. It's not divided because of me. Here's the proof. Biden is the president and everyone just reelected me. There's so much more to say. First, though, go to good ranchers dot com.

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Before we get to the major policy announcement that Trump just made here, the libs believe that in the Meet the Press interview, they got a real gotcha on him. And that is over the question of tariffs.

I want to delve into one of your signature promises on the campaign trail, which was to end inflation, to lower prices. You are now proposing tariffs against the United States, three biggest trading partners. Economists of all stripes say that ultimately consumers pay the price of tariffs. I don't believe you guarantee American families won't pay more.

I can't guarantee anything. I can't guarantee tomorrow. I love that. This is another example of him just swatting down the premise. Can you guarantee that your major economic policy will not increase the cost of goods in any way on anything? And he looks at her like she's got three heads. He goes, I can't guarantee anything. I can't guarantee tomorrow. What are you talking about? I'm talking about a major economic upheaval.

And so the libs think, ha ha, here's the gotcha. Trump is admitting that his economic policies might increase the cost of goods and services.

That's not a gotcha, guys. I think that there is a good case to be made, not only for tariffs as a tactical matter in a negotiation, but also for tariffs as a way to raise revenue and support the economic health of the country by increasing domestic manufacturing. I think there's a good argument for tariffs, okay? But I'm not going to suggest that tariffs won't possibly raise the prices of goods. That's how tariffs work.

So what Trump is saying is, I think by implication, in the short run, tariffs might increase the cost of certain goods. And that's going to be a little bit of pain in the short run. But in the long run, that redounds to the health of the country. Because one, whatever that price spike is, could come down substantially once we start making those goods here in America, which is the point of the tariffs. The point of the tariffs is not just to punish people overseas, not just to punish China for manufacturing goods and selling them to us.

The purpose of the tariffs is to create an incentive for American companies to produce goods here, to create an incentive for American consumers to buy goods that are bought here. And maybe it'll be a little bit more expensive because China has slave labor in concentration camps and we don't.

But, so first of all, there's just an ethical argument to pay a little bit more anyway, because we don't want to be supporting slavery. But even beyond that, it's a matter of national security. We saw during COVID that when we don't control our manufacturing, if supply chains get disrupted for anything, for the Wu flu, for a little cough coming out of a lab in Wuhan, right?

That Americans might not get their medicine, might not get their goods, might not get their food, for goodness sakes. So it is a matter of pressing national security that we start making some goods here again. And Trump is saying, yeah, look, I'm willing to take the short-term political hit. I'm willing to deal with a little short-term economic difficulty for a long-term economic and political gain. But then he announces the big policy that he's talking about.

And he begins with the question of deportations. Here's what the Libs say. Trump says, we need to deport the criminals who are in this country illegally. And the Libs say, no, but what about the sweet little dreamers? And the dreamers at this point are like 50 years old. They try to pretend that it's six-year-olds, doe-eyed, who are brought across the border without their consent, without their knowledge. What about the dreamers? What about, even beyond the dreamers,

The people who are born in this country says, you know, you have a situation where you've got illegal aliens crossing the border. Then they have a kid. They have an anchor baby. The baby is granted American citizenship at birth. So are you really going to deport the family members of that of that person who's given birthright citizenship?

In other words, they're trying to smuggle in 11 million, maybe as high as 20 million people. Because they say, look, some of them have had anchor babies, so you can't deport any of them. Trump says, nah, I'm afraid we're going to enforce the law.

The estimated four million families in America who have mixed immigration status, so I'm talking about parents who might be here illegally, but the kids are here legally. Your border czar, Tom Homan... You're talking about separation? Well, I mean, there are two aspects to this. Your border czar, Tom Homan, said they can be deported together. Is that the plan? Well, that way you keep the... Well...

I don't want to be breaking up families So the only way you don't break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back even Kids who are here legally well Well, what you're gonna do if they want to stay with the father look we have to have a rules and regulations You can always find something out like, you know, this doesn't work. That doesn't work I'll tell you what's gonna be horrible when we take a wonderful young woman who's with a criminal and

And they show the woman, and she could stay by the law, but they show the woman being taken out. Or they want her out, and your cameras are focused on her as she's crying as she's being taken out of our country. And then the public turns against us. But we have to do our job. So he's saying, look, I know exactly your game plan. I know what you're going to do.

you're going to just give all the hardest cases possible where you've got some criminal, some economic migrant who came over, blatant violation of our laws, and she's a pretty young gal and they want to get married or something like that, but we got to deport the

criminal. He goes, and you're going to try to turn that on me, but look, I'm willing to take the short-term political hit. This is the, they always say Trump is just reactive and he just goes wherever the wind blows and he's so emotional. But think about what he's saying here. On tariffs, he goes, look, I'm going to do the responsible thing for our country, even if it hurts me and my ratings in the short term. On immigration, he goes, look, I know what you're going to do. I know my approval rating is going to go down. I know you're going to attack me unfairly, and I'm willing to take the hit because we have to do our job.

I wasn't elected necessarily just to be popular. The knock on Trump, he's a populist. He doesn't care about the long-term health of the country. He's just reactive. No, I think you're seeing the opposite here.

This guy is taking a mature statesman-like approach to these issues, and he is actually demonstrating the political courage and discipline and even humility to do what his predecessors, including the Republicans, refused to do because they were too afraid of being unpopular. Then you get the big answer to this question. The problem here is you have families with mixed citizenship because you got the anchor babies and you got some parents who are here illegally.

What are you going to do about that? Trump goes all the way. He says we need to rescind birthright citizenship.

You promised to end birthright citizenship on day one. Is that still your plan? Yeah, absolutely. The 14th Amendment, though, says that, quote, all persons born in the United States are citizens. Can you get around the 14th Amendment with an executive action? Well, we're going to have to get a change. We'll maybe have to go back to the people, but we have to end it. We're the only country that has it. Through an executive action? You know, we're the only country that has it. You know, if somebody sets a foot, just a foot, one foot, you don't need to, on our land,

Congratulations, you are now a citizen of the United States of America. Yes, we're gonna end that because it's ridiculous. Through executive action? Well, if we can, through executive action. I was going to do it through executive action, but then we had to fix COVID first, to be honest with you. We have to end it.

Now, there's a little trick that that journalist slipped in there. She left out a few words from the 14th Amendment that I think speaks to Trump's point. There's so much more to say first, though. Go to strongholdrescue.org. As Americans, we are blessed to have people like Navy SEALs and Army Rangers to defend us during the worst of times. However...

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Well, hold on. The 14th Amendment, the greatest amendment ever to the Constitution, the amendment that lets us do whatever we want and we can justify basically anything by twisting its words. It says that any person born in the United States is a citizen. But she left out a few words there. Any person born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof is a citizen. The 14th Amendment says

was passed after the Civil War to make black people into citizens. There had been controversy over whether black people were citizens, could ever be citizens, could actually participate in American political life, even after being freed slaves. And 14th Amendment, 13th Amendment abolishes slavery. 14th Amendment says, yes, they're citizens.

This doesn't mean that if the ambassador to Mexico's child is born while he's on duty in America, that the child of the ambassador to Mexico is a citizen. He's not subject to the jurisdiction thereof. There was an open question as to whether or not foreign nationals born here are...

are citizens. And that was resolved to some degree in 1898 in the Wong Kim Ark case, which follows English common law. So it actually does go back even further, goes back to the 17th century when the English said, if you are born on the soil, you are subject to the king and you have the privileges and protection and rights given to you by being a subject of the king.

So that's where you get the eus soli in the American tradition, the right of the soil. But there's another kind of right, which would be eus sanguinis, and we have that to the right of blood. So if you are born to American citizens overseas, you are an American citizen at birth, even if you're not born in the United States. This is part of why the controversy over Barack Obama's citizenship was a little bit of a misdirection, because...

Even if Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, even if he had been born on planet Mars, his mother was an American citizen. He would have inherited American citizenship at birth immediately. So the question here is, are we going to maintain on the basis of a tenuous reading of the 14th Amendment and following this one Supreme Court case, one K-Mark in 1898, are we going to

continue to create a major incentive for foreign nationals to break our laws, come to America, bring a ton of drugs, bring a ton of crime, all in the hope of getting one of the most valuable commodities in the world, which is American citizenship. Are we going to do that? And I think Trump's answer is a very practical answer. And I think it's obviously the right answer, which is

He's not getting into constitutional debates over Wong Kim Ark or the 150-year reading of the 14th Amendment. He's saying, look, we can all say, we can all know, actually, the people who drafted the 14th Amendment did not intend for the amendment to create automatic citizens out of 20 million Venezuelans. Okay, that was not the, I can promise you that. That wasn't the purpose of it. And even if you have this tradition of right of the soil, of, you know, coming from the

We now have a particular political problem, a particular political crisis. And so we just have to deal with that. And maybe that means that we need to circumscribe the rights of so-called birthright citizenship so that we stop creating the incentive for all these people to come over. It's bad for them. 60 to 80% of women and girls who come across that border illegally are raped along the way, according to Fusion Amnesty International, reported in the Huffington Post. That's a left-wing paper. We know that the people who come here

are often paid lower wages. That's one of the arguments from the supposed people on the right who support the open border, is they say, look, we need to pay off our gardeners. We need to pay our domestic help. A lot of liberals say that too. Good luck finding someone to mow your lawn for a cheap price. Yeah, right. But I don't think it's a good thing to keep these people in a state of perpetual indentured servitude. I don't think it's good to pay people slave wages. So

There are all these problems. It harms the people who come over. And more importantly, it harms us. We're no longer allowed to have our own borders. We're now no longer allowed to make our own immigration laws. The most basic aspect of having a country we're not allowed to do. So Trump says, yeah, we got to fix that. That's a problem. It wasn't a problem in the 1860s, 70s, 80s. It wasn't a problem in 17th century England, but it is a problem now. And so we're just going to use the law to deal with that. And I think he's absolutely right. Speaking of birth,

horrific story out of the UK, I believe. A man has just been sentenced to jail for 12 years for slipping a woman an abortion pill in her drink. The woman gets up to use the bathroom. The man slips, not a Mickey, not a Roofie. He slips an abortion pill to kill her child. This woman was 15 weeks pregnant. If you've ever been pregnant or if your wife's ever been pregnant, you know, 15 weeks pregnant

This is a baby. This is a pretty big baby. This baby is moving around. This baby is totally recognizable as a baby. You are, I mean, you are on the way. Five more weeks, the baby can survive in some cases outside the womb. Abortion is wrong at all stages, but it's viscerally, knowably wrong at 15 weeks. This guy slips her an abortion pill. She starts to bleed. She then dies.

The baby is murdered by the pill, and then this man is brought up on charges. Stuart Warby, 40 years old. He apparently also gave her a bunch of other abortion tablets to try to make sure that this would work. Now, the woman has lifelong anonymity because she's a victim of a sexual offense, but she miscarried. She was horrified. She said, look, this might be the only time I can get pregnant. I am permanently traumatized by this. It's true. In reality...

This guy should at the very least be imprisoned for life and probably should be executed by the state for what he did because he murdered a little baby. He jeopardized a woman's life. He murdered a woman's child, also happened to be his child, and forget whose child it is, he murdered a little innocent baby.

This guy, at the very least, should be in prison for life without parole and more likely should be executed by the state for what he did. If that kind of a crime does not merit the death penalty, I don't know what does. Or he should not be punished at all. Those are the two options. The only punishment that doesn't make any sense is 12 years in prison. What is 12 years in prison?

If the baby had been born and he walked up and took a sledgehammer and smushed the baby, would he be given 12 years in prison? No, he'd be given life in prison or executed. Or if it wasn't really a baby, if he just walked up to a clump of cells, like a mass of, I don't know, an amoeba or something, and smashed that with a sledgehammer, he would be given no prison time. But what is 12 years? 12 years...

sentence for this crime is a perfect representation of our total incoherence on this issue. We can't resolve, as in our civilization, whether we want to protect babies or not. We don't want to answer that question. So we split the baby. This is a punishment of splitting the baby. But in the Bible, when splitting the baby comes up, it is used as an example to show the absurdity. You can't really split a baby.

That's the worst possible. But here, that's what we're trying to do. Totally incoherent punishment. Louis C.K. made this point. He goes, you know, I think that abortion, look, it's a woman's choice. It's a woman's health care. It's like sitting down and using the toilet. Okay, it's just a bodily function. It has no moral significance. Or it's murder. But those are the only two things. It can't be some moderate crime. It's either nothing or it's infanticide. But it...

I don't even understand what the argument would be that it's just this kind of moderate crime and you get, you know, 12 year sentence, but you only serve five and then you get probation for this. This isn't insider trading. It's either murdering a baby or it's nothing. But they can't resolve it. So they give the actual worst sentence, which is a handful of years in prison. Okay. All right. That guy, he's lucky he got off the hook.

for murdering a kid and killing a woman's kid and endangering her health. I guess he should count as lucky stars. But...

What a poor reflection on us. I remember during college, we were debating all of the incipient debates over rape culture on college campuses and the Title IX lawsuits. And a lot of it seemed really incoherent because on the one hand, you'd have these leftists and feminists arguing that sex was not meaningful at all. You should just go out, engage in the hookup culture. There was no difference between how men and women approached sex. It was just a casual, fun thing, kind of like shaking someone's hand.

But on the other hand, sexual assault was the worst crime ever. It was so serious that you shouldn't even be entitled to a trial by a jury of your peers. You should just immediately be expelled and have your life ruined if you were even suggested to have maybe engaged in any improper sexual activity. And it didn't make any sense. If sex is meaningless, then why is sexual assault different than any other assault? Why is it different than giving someone a shove or slapping them in the face?

It's an incoherent point of view to hold. The left wanted to have it both ways. Our culture wants to have it both ways here. It doesn't make sense. Speaking of the sexual revolution, back here in America, our own Department of Health and Human Services is celebrating Pansexual and Panromantic Pride Day. I hope you all had a blessed Pansexual and Panromantic Pride Day. This was two days after the Feast of St. Nicholas, one day before today's feast, which is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception,

HHS was celebrating what they consider to be a much more important feast on the liberal liturgical calendar. That is pansexual and panromantic pride. What does HHS say about it? Today on pansexual and panromantic pride day, everyone deserves to feel seen, respected, and supported no matter who they love. Create a world where everyone feels proud to be themselves. So a lot of people are going to ask, what does pansexual mean? What does panromantic mean? And I googled it.

I was curious. Pansexual and panromantic is apparently just bisexual, but through the lens of transgenderism. So it just means that you'll date or hook up with whoever. But whereas bisexual believes that sex and gender are basically the same thing,

Now we live even further through the looking glass. So pansexual thinks that there's a difference between sexual, biological sex and gender identity. And they say that if you're pansexual, you can be attracted to anyone. A man who thinks he's a woman, a woman who thinks she's a man, a man who thinks he's a man, or a woman who thinks she's a woman. So it's just bisexual, but with a few extra fantastical steps in your own mind.

Why is HHS celebrating this? This concept, which is totally counter to science, it's supposed to be a scientific department, counter to health, certainly mental health, because we're going to have feast days. That's why. Just another reminder, we are going to have feast days. We're going to have holidays. That's just what culture does. That's what every people has done for all of history.

So for the secularists, the people who want to separate church and state, so we got to get our religion out of the state. We're going to have feast days. We're going to have holidays. And a holiday is a holy day. That's what's in the word. So the question is, are we going to have good holidays or ridiculous holidays? That's the only question. Are we going to celebrate the Feast of St. Nicholas around Christmas time, or are we going to celebrate pansexual, pre-romantic Pride Day?

We're going to celebrate people of heroic virtue, or are we going to celebrate the queen of all vice, pride? That's the only question. Now, today...

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My friends, we're just getting started. Celebrate today by going to jeremysraisers.com to get your Jeremy's Razors. My favorite comment yesterday is from Chemical Prophecy. He says, does anyone actually know where Biden is? Who? I've almost forgot about that guy. Joe Biden. Who is that guy? I don't know. He's totally, totally forgotten. Now, I want to skip ahead a little bit. We've been going back and forth between England and America, England and America. But as we look ahead to our political future,

Don't think that the threats to your political life have gone away. A cop has just gone viral in the UK for attempting to arrest a man for Facebook comments. Times 20 to 3, 1440, arresting you on suspicion of improper use of the electronic device.

So I'm actually being arrested? Right. Right.

Oh, really? Oh, it's a Facebook crime, is it? OK. Right. So we need to ask you some questions about that. Right. I'm going to be arrested for posting on Facebook. We've had reports that you've made some comments that are offensive, obscene, and people have made a complaint about that, and it's transferred... Can you tell me what this comment was? OK, well, we'll do that when we interview you. All right. And so what, am I going to be locked up for the night? Hopefully not.

Well, you know, listen here, Governor. Yeah, yeah, we've got to arrest you now. You had a few too many likes on Twitter from some right-wing content. Yeah, yeah, get in the back of the patrol bugger. Yeah, yeah. That's my best British cop accent. This has gone viral. However, there's a little context needed. This is not a recent video. This video is from back in June, June of this year. The guy who was arrested, it's not clear what he was arrested for. Was he posting about, you know, men or not women or some basic sort of thing? Or...

Was it something a little more serious? According to the UK government, he violated Section 127 of the UK Communications Act of 2003, which criminalizes matter that is, quote, grossly offensive or indecent, obscene, or menacing in character.

So it could have been just offensive by today's standards, which is, you say, a baby's a baby. You know, that's deeply offensive. But it might have been indecent, might have been obscene, might have been menacing in character. And we have laws against that stuff in America, too. And we have prosecuted people for that stuff in America for all of American history, even back in the good old free, you know, early constitutional days. And even recently, we prosecuted and imprisoned at the federal level a pornographer in 2008, right as Barack Obama was about to take office. So we do that, too.

It's kind of my point on the holidays and the holy days. We're going to have rules against certain speech and behavior. We have for all of American history, and we've enforced them. The question is, what are you going to go to jail for? Are you going to go to jail for showing pornography to kids in schools? No, now you're going to be put on the board that is establishing curricula standards because that happens in elementary schools. Are you going to go to jail for exposing kids to pornography? Or are you going to go to jail for questioning transgenderism?

But it's not, are you going to be punished for certain kinds of speech? That's always been true. And if we ignore that substantive question, we only focus on procedural matters, hearkening back to some halcyon libertarian era when we didn't in any way enforce speech standards that never existed, we're just going to keep losing. We're going to cede the ground to the left. Now, what is going to inform us?

It can either be the degeneracy, the culture of selfishness and atheism that the libs are pushing, or it can be our traditional moral standards. And there's some good signs on that front. Bible sales are up 22% year over year, according to the Wall Street Journal. According to the Wall Street Journal, if you look October 2024 versus October 2023, Bible sales are up 22%.

This is despite nearly a third of U.S. adults identifying as religiously unaffiliated. So they're not exactly saying they're atheists. They're just saying we don't have a religion. A lot of them were raised without a religion or they were raised in some incoherent kind of religion. You know, I have a lot of friends like this who they grew up in New York and one parent is Christian, one parent is Jewish.

And so rather than coming to a decision and say, okay, what are we going to teach our kids about the eternal fundamental questions? They say, oh, we'll do both. You know, you'll go to Sunday school and then you'll go to Hebrew school. And in one, they'll tell you that Christ is Lord. And in the other, they'll say that he isn't. And you'll just have these two contradictory religious systems. And what's the result of that going to be? The real result is not going to be that you're Christian or Jewish. The real result is you're not going to have any religion.

You're going to be completely confused. You're not going to take religion seriously. And to you, if you do vaguely end up Christian, it's going to be Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and a Christmas tree. If you vaguely end up Jewish, it's going to be bagels and, you know, a sense of history. You know, the tragedy of the Holocaust and, I don't know, going back to the exodus of Moses. But that's it. It's not going to actually have meaning to you. And so these people, I have great sympathy for them.

grow up without much religion, and now they're buying Bibles. And why are they buying the Bibles? They're buying the Bibles because the eternal questions remain. The libs didn't get rid of them. The secularists didn't get rid of them. The new atheists didn't get rid of them. Chris Hitchens could turn a witty phrase with that silly accent of his. I'm being really tough on the Brits today, huh? He could turn a clever phrase, but there wasn't much substance there.

He didn't really make arguments. I remember I read his stupid book, God is Not Great. He never actually makes the argument that God is not great. He just whines and complains about religion. And I think the new atheism really ran its course because it was based on lies. You know, it was based on, and there were historical lies, historical moments that they seized upon. But it was based on the lie after 9-11 that all religion's the same. So you think Islam is bad, but you don't want to criticize Islam. So let's criticize Christianity instead.

But Islam and Christianity are not the same. Religions are not. They believe different things about basic questions. It was based on the lie that the Catholic Church sex scandal was the worst sex scandal ever. There was a scandal. There's no doubt about that. But turns out, with the light of data and retrospection, we can see the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church was no worse than in any other religious group.

It was actually significantly lower in frequency and severity than some other religious groups. And it was about half the rate of public schools. So that goes out the window too. Why else? Why else are people drawn to the Bible? I have a theory even beyond those sociological observations that

That is politically incorrect, but I think it explains it. And that is that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. It actually is what the church says that it is. And that draws people back. And the fundamental things apply as time goes by. And the revolutionaries and the social engineers and the people who want to rewrite the world, they can try as they might to stop it, but it's not going to work. Now, before we go, I do want to get to an important case. Daniel Penney, a real moral matter. Daniel Penney

who is that hero Marine who protected people on the subway when a crazy person was threatening them, but then the guy ended up dying as Daniel Penny was restraining him. He just had his top charge dismissed. That was second-degree manslaughter. That was dismissed. The jury said, no, we can't convict him of this. They were hung up on it, so that's thrown out.

But because the judge, in an unusual way throughout the top charge, the judge will now have the jury consider a lesser charge, but still a serious charge that carries four years of jail time. That is criminally negligent homicide. And Daniel Penny's lawyers have objected to this and said, hold on, you can't, you're just basically trying to have a redo. You knew you weren't going to get him on what you're going after him for. So you're trying to, you're begging the jury, please give him the lesser verdict so that we can still send him to jail.

But the evidence is clear enough. Several subway riders said they were terrified that Jordan Neely, the man who, the guy with a long, a rap sheet a mile long, who was, by the account of the defense, schizophrenic and high on drugs. He was on a drug called Spice, which is synthetic cannabinoids. It's much more serious than marijuana. It tries to mimic that, though, that this guy was a real threat to them. That's what the subway riders say.

He says restraining him for the moment was a relief, but if he would have gotten up, he would have done what he would have done, says subway rider Cadran, shrunk. So they're still going to try to get him, and they're going to try to get him in part because they have this racial politics that says black people are always innocent and white people are always guilty. So that's part of it. That's obviously informing it. But also because the libs are responsible for Jordan Neely's behavior to no small degree. The libs say we can't lock up lunatics.

The people need to have the liberty and the freedom to roam the streets and shoot up drugs. The libs want to legalize drugs. The libs want to decriminalize and liberalize drugs. The libs think that law enforcement is somehow evil. So they want to reduce law enforcement. They want to get cops off the streets. They want to get criminals out of jail. So they created the conditions for this kind of incident to occur. And then when one hero stands up and says, hey, no, we're not going to do that.

I'm going to protect you if your civil authority won't. They have to go after that guy. Because Jordan Neely, the criminal, is the avatar for the liberal establishment. And Daniel Penny is standing in their way. Today is Music Monday. The rest of the show continues now. You do not want to miss it. Become a member. Use code NOLSKIN at WBLA. So check out for two months free on all annual plans.

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