The following is an edited transcript excerpt of &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1909-treason-americans-trash-their-own-country-at-the-olympics?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">The Michael Knowles Show.</a>&#8220;
* * *
During the Bad Bunny halftime show at the Super Bowl a slogan appeared on the big billboard at Levi’s Stadium, right next to a Bud Light ad. Very fitting. 
The message was posted in all caps on a white background in black text and reads:
“THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE”
Then a guy on X <a href="https://x.com/WesleyBout/status/2020692160153370972">tweets</a> it out and writes this message above the image: “imagine getting mad about this and still thinking you’re a good person.”
The post has taken off and gone totally viral. Over 4 million views at this point.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Imagine getting mad about this and still thinking you’re a good person <a href="https://t.co/jWdNzJmCCE">pic.twitter.com/jWdNzJmCCE</a>
— Wesley (@WesleyBout) <a href="https://twitter.com/WesleyBout/status/2020692160153370972?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 9, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Credit: @WesleyBout/X.com
Why would you get mad at the transvestite, anti-American, vulgar, degenerate rap singer babbling in a foreign tongue that the vast majority of Americans don’t understand, featuring two men grinding on each other in front of a sports game that is supposed to be viewed by children? 
Why would you get mad about that? How could you get mad about that when he put up a sign that said, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love”?
Imagine getting mad about this meme. This is a meme that the Right uses to make fun of the Left, and the Left is just now doing it sincerely and unironically. And the meme is this: While they’re killing people, slaughtering babies, mutilating little children, flooding the country with rapists and poison peddlers and murderers, the Left comes out and says, Yeah, but we stand for love. We define everything we do as love and everything you do as hate. So we’re actually the good guys. Did you know that?
Did you know that when the libs redefined marriage for basically the first time anywhere in human history, they did so in such a way that excludes mothers from their children’s families — or alternately excludes fathers from families — and leads to all sorts of horrible things, up to and including creating children for the purpose of denying them their natural mother and father? Really heinous stuff. But what did they say? They said, Love is love. Love wins. How could you oppose love? We have defined the disordered things that we’re doing, that are contrary to reality and to the common good and human flourishing, we’ve defined them as love. And if you oppose us, you hate love.
Checkmate, conservatives.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1909-treason-americans-trash-their-own-country-at-the-olympics?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: &#8220;The Michael Knowles Show&#8221; on DailyWire+.</a></h3>
This is like when Anthony Kennedy decided to abdicate his responsibility to interpret the law as a Supreme Court justice. Instead, he decided to write cheap romantic poetry that is fitting for an eighth-grade English class. He decided that his interpretation of the Constitution was going to find a right to privacy, just as he earlier, in an abortion case, had found a right to define the sweet mystery of life somewhere in the Constitution.
I don’t know where it is.
And they say, Look, we support mystery, we support love, we support life.
That’s the key here. Because when your lib friends send that meme around — hate is worse than love, love beats hate — how could you get mad at that? 
At that point, you should tell them that you are pro-life. And they are angry at people who are pro-life. How? Imagine being against life and thinking you’re the good guy.
And what would they say? They’d say, No, no, no, but you’re not really pro-life. You’re anti-choice. You want to control women’s bodies.
They would use all of their own silly euphemisms.
That’s when you say to them: Okay, before we get into the abortion issue, I just want to point out you have granted me the premise. You have accepted the premise that sometimes people use words in ways that can be misleading or tell a partial truth, or at the very least can be euphemistic. You’ve granted that point, right? Okay, great. So you don’t like my phrase “pro-life”? I think pro-life is an honest phrase that accurately depicts what we’re talking about. But you dispute that. Okay, fine.
Then let’s dig into the real substance of it. I support the law coming in and restricting women from going to a medical professional to kill her baby. That’s what we’re talking about. You want to get past the euphemisms and the slogans? That’s what we’re talking about. And what you support is women being able to kill their babies in defense of their own disordered autonomy. Right? That’s what we’re talking about.
With marriage, you support excluding mothers or alternately fathers from marriage and denying babies their natural mothers or fathers. Okay. That’s what you support, along with other acts that we don’t even need to get into when it comes to gay marriage. I support that babies have a demonstrated right to their mothers and their fathers.
Nevertheless, I think you will find that the libs love to promote all their slogans: “love beats hate,” “love is love,” “love wins,” or whatever. I think you will find conservatives, on the other hand, are more than happy to put the slogans aside and talk about the real issue.
The libs will focus on more and more hyperbolic and preposterous slogans. They will do whatever they can to avoid looking at the real issue. They will only speak in euphemisms, and that very fact tells you everything you need to know.
Yes, all politicians use slogans, but the way they use them tells you everything you need to know about the issues.
Conservatives use slogans and euphemisms to try to convey the truth. The Left uses slogans and euphemisms to deny the truth.

Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show

When Super Bowl Slogans Replace Truth In American Politics

advertising

Bad Bunny

Conservatives

Democrats

Hate Speech

Leftists

Liberals

Michael Knowles

Opinion

Super Bowl

There&#8217;s a palpable frustration out there in American politics.
It’s clearly rooted in some ugly and unpleasant realities: the reality that many of our major institutions blew up their credibility on COVID-19, BLM, and Russiagate; the reality that we don&#8217;t really have any idea how AI is going to reshape the job market; the reality that a ton of people in the political class have no scruples and are totally willing to engage in open corruption.
That frustration is turning into something else before our eyes in this country.
And that thing is nihilism.
That nihilism is rooted in a gigantic lie. A truly gigantic lie that tries to make us believe that all of our problems in the United States are intractable, that individual problems that you may have or I may have in the United States are the result of an evil system, often led by cohesive groups of conspiratorial elites, that you cannot succeed unless you pierce this supposed matrix, and all of those who call for individual responsibility and dutiful decency are actually part of this evil matrix. 
This thinking is not solution-making. It is thought-preventing. It is success-preventing. It&#8217;s a recipe for personal and national disaster, and the result is an increasingly incoherent and unhinged politics and an entire generation of young men and women who go looking for meaning in all the wrong places and on the very fringes, sometimes turning to violence.
On Monday, Peter Whoriskey <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/08/nihilistic-violence-emerges/">wrote</a> in The Washington Post:
<blockquote>Amid a wave of high-profile killings and political violence in the United States, investigators have been confounded regularly by the absence of a recognizable agenda. The assailants in several cases — shootings, a bombing, a planned drone attack — resisted familiar labels and categories. They were not Democrat or Republican, or Islamist militant, or antifa or white supremacist.
They were something new. In their manifestos, these attackers declared their contempt for humanity and a desire to see the collapse of civilization. Law enforcement officers and federal prosecutors have begun to describe these attacks as a contemporary strain of nihilism, an online revival of the philosophical stance that arose in the 19th century to deny the existence of moral truths and meaning in the universe.</blockquote>
This is not new. Societies that experienced major dislocations are often the breeding ground for nihilism and violence. That&#8217;s been true going all the way back to Dostoyevsky&#8217;s “Notes from the Underground,” which he wrote in 1864. But if you reread “Notes from the Underground,” Dostoevsky goes further.
He writes:
<blockquote>I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, à propos of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: “I say, gentleman, hadn’t we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!” That again would not matter, but what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers—such is the nature of man. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated.
One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice. </blockquote>
In other words, convince people that they don&#8217;t have any choices in life and what you are likely to get is a nihilistic retreat into barbarism, specifically because people want to lash out at their supposed lack of choice.
You&#8217;ve heard me rail against what I&#8217;ve called the conspiracy theory of society. That&#8217;s the idea that everything in life is controlled by systems you can&#8217;t quite identify, and that your problems are solvable only through violence or through some sort of pseudo revolution.
<div id="attachment_974957" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2365-sub?elementPosition=2&amp;row=6&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-974957" class="size-large wp-image-974957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>DailyWire+</div>
Philosopher Karl Popper explained this again back in the mid-20th century. He said, “The &#8216;conspiracy theory of society&#8217; is a typical result of a secularization of a religious superstition. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone. The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups &#8211; sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from &#8211; such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists.”
None of this is new.
But what we are experiencing right now in the United States is dangerous and stupid. Of course, there are conspiracies out there, but conspiracies generally have specific people involved and evidence of their involvement. What has been effectuated is the conspiracy theory of society that everything in your life is out of your control, and there is a group of manipulative elites who are getting together behind closed doors to figure out how to screw you.
That is something different. And that conspiracy theory of society is finding unbelievably fertile ground right now. And there are a lot of people who are promoting it for their own pure grift and greed.
They are doing it because of the con.
It turns out that this modern wave of nihilism is not entirely organic. It is fomented by influencers and politicians who commit ideological arson so that they can pretend to be firefighters, people who manipulate their audiences into believing that their problems are unfixable unless they hand over more power and control to precisely those same influencers and politicians. 
After all, influencers can get really, really rich off the nihilism of crowds. Politicians can foment the change they seek by channeling nihilistic energy, at least temporarily, until they&#8217;re eaten by the movement that they actually foster.
The pool right now is really, really warm for tons of influencers and politicians who wish to promote the idea that society is rigged, and that if you follow their particularly crappy advice and give them attention and therefore cash, you will somehow break the matrix and your life will become better.
It&#8217;s a lie. 
We live in a time that is rife with the con.

The Con

A Time Rife With The Con

Ben Shapiro

COVID-19

Russiagate

Violence

Washington Post

WDRB News

Meet The DEI Activist Judge Who Let A Rapist Out Of Prison Early To Spite White People

Blacks

Criminal Justice

Matt Walsh

O.J. Simpson

Racism

Television

White Supremacy

Whites

That Anti-American Super Bowl Halftime Show Should Be A Wake Up Call For Real Americans

That Anti-American Super Bowl Half Time Show Should Be A Wake Up Call For Real Americans

Donald Trump

Music

The following is an edited transcript excerpt from <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1908-crossdressing-puerto-rican-hijacks-america-s-favorite-sports-event?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">The Michael Knowles Show.</a>
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A Democrat from Texas went full mask off with his contempt, and his political party’s contempt, for white people.
Here is Texas State Representative Gene Wu:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Rep. Gene Wu (D) goes mask off:
&#8220;Non-whites share the same oppressor and we are the majority now. We can take over this country.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/CrxsPqlkLI">pic.twitter.com/CrxsPqlkLI</a>
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) <a href="https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/2020327211648324001?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 8, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Credit: @EndWokeness/X.com
Rep. Wu says,
<blockquote>I always tell people the day that the Latino, African American, Asian and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor is the day we start winning. Because we are the majority in this country now. We are. We have the ability to take over this country and to do what is needed for everyone and to make things fair. But the problem is our communities are divided. They’re completely divided.</blockquote>
One of our problems is our communities are completely divided — when we should be totally united against the majority.
White people are still the majority of the country, probably not for long because of birth rates and migration. But today, the Year of Our Lord 2026, white people are still the majority of the country. And this guy comes out and says, “We need to stop being so divided. We need to be united to go get rid of the majority.”
Hey everybody, I just want to bring us all together here to say, “Go kill Whitey.” All right?
And this is only different in degree. It’s not different in kind from the other sort of rhetoric we hear from Democrats and the Left broadly: calls to abolish whiteness, calls to minimize whiteness, to apologize for whiteness. The coalition of the ascendant of the people of color who are perfect, and the white people who can do no good. This is just a more extreme version, which is to say the oppressor is white, the oppressed are non-whites, and the non-whites need to overthrow the whites.
There are some people on the Left, and even on the squishy Right, who have complained in recent years about the supposed rise of white racial consciousness in America. Now, I question the premise. There’s basically no white racial consciousness in America.
In fact, a <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/02/05/most-black-adults-say-race-is-central-to-their-identity-and-feel-connected-to-a-broader-black-community/">Pew Research Center study</a> from February 5, 2020, titled &#8220;Most black adults say race is central to their identity and feel connected to a broader black community,&#8221; found that whites were the least likely to be racially conscious. 
<div id="attachment_1041307" style="width: 452px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1041307" class="size-large wp-image-1041307" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/Pew-racial-442x576.jpg" alt="Credit: Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/02/05/most-black-adults-say-race-is-central-to-their-identity-and-feel-connected-to-a-broader-black-community/" width="442" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/Pew-racial-442x576.jpg 442w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/Pew-racial-230x300.jpg 230w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/Pew-racial.jpg 620w" sizes=" (max-width: 442px) 100vw, 442px" />Credit: Pew Research Center</div>
Every other racial group has a very high racial consciousness. When asked, is your race extremely important or very important to your identity, 56% of Asians said yes, 59% of Hispanics said yes, and 74% of black people said yes, being black is extremely or very important to how they think about themselves.
Only 15% of White people answered yes. 
White people have no racial consciousness. Every other group has significant racial consciousness, like majority racial consciousness. White people have basically none. But let’s say the premise were true, even though it’s not, that there is a serious uptick in white racial consciousness. What do you expect? Democrat politicians are going on air, saying we need to gang up on whitey. We need to target whitey. We need to overthrow them. We need to punish them. We are demanding a racial consciousness for this group.
If there is an uptick in white racial consciousness, isn’t that just a rational response to what you guys are doing? I want no apologies for this from the Right. No haranguing from the Left. The only response to this “kill whitey” stuff is to say: Well, I guess they consider us a racial group. I get it. I guess we have to proceed accordingly — that is, in accordance with justice and the Constitution and all the rest of our founding documents. 

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<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1908-crossdressing-puerto-rican-hijacks-america-s-favorite-sports-event?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Michael Knowles Show on DailyWire+</a></h3>

Texas Democrats To Reportedly Return To State After Governor Ends Special Session

Texas Democrat Goes Full Mask Off: ‘We Are The Majority In This Country Now.’

Texas Democrat Goes Full Mask Off

Asian American

Hispanics

Minorities

Oppression

Texas

There is something that goes on in American culture that is highly irritating to me.
If you notice everyone celebrating something that is politically Left-leaning in nature, people tell you that you’re crazy for pointing it out or being upset about it.
I&#8217;m not particularly upset by halftime shows at the Super Bowl, because in the grand scheme of life, who cares? It is not a big deal.
But the reason that some people are concerned or upset today about this year’s halftime show is because of what happened at the end of the performance.
I am not a Bad Bunny fan. I don&#8217;t know whether he&#8217;s a good bunny, a bad bunny, or the worst bunny. I have no gradation, no scale upon which to judge the badness of his bunnyness.
I do not know his music. I didn&#8217;t understand a word he was saying. As a person who does not traffic or listen to his music, I had no idea what he was saying during the halftime show.
I will admit that it felt to me like being in a car crash, and there was a person walking toward me, telling me that I needed to get out my insurance card in a language I did not understand.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2364-a-very-bad-bunny-super-bowl"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957 aligncenter" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
<h3>The Pros</h3>
The show was beautifully produced. The couple getting married and mid-show, the kids falling asleep on the chairs was very, very charming. I have no problem with a lot of Spanish being in the show, because that&#8217;s what a lot of people in the United States speak; that&#8217;s totally cool. A lot of people in the United States speak a lot of second languages. I remember a few years ago Shakira and J. Lo did the halftime show, and I believe they did a song in Spanish. There are tens of millions of Latino Americans who contribute in unbelievable ways to our common project as Americans.
<h3>The Cons</h3>
First: No English at all, so people who don&#8217;t speak Spanish couldn’t understand what was going on. He could have been saying anything, and I would have had no idea what he was saying.
Second: To pretend that Bad Bunny is an apolitical figure is silly.
Bad Bunny is not an apolitical figure. He has never pretended to be an apolitical figure. When he showed himself on the Grammys and gave a Grammy to a little kid who looked precisely like an ICE detainee, don&#8217;t tell me that wasn&#8217;t on purpose. Of course it was.
But the major problem for me came at the very end of the halftime show. Bad Bunny walked through and announced every single country in the Western Hemisphere, starting geographically with Argentina and finishing with Canada. As he did, a bunch of people followed him carrying flags from various other countries that were not the United States.
Here is the problem: One of the truly amazing virtues of America is that you can both assimilate to the values of the United States and still keep the flavor of your old culture. One of the great things about America over the course of the last couple of hundred years is that many cultures merged into the gigantic stream that is the United States, which is why every American has eaten Mexican food, Italian food, and Chinese food.
And that&#8217;s wonderful. That&#8217;s great. The fact that you have weddings where you have people dancing salsa, and you have weddings where you have people dancing the hora, is wonderful.
I don&#8217;t think a whole lot of Americans object to that.
The salient question is this: Are you showing gratitude for America being unique? That’s why people focused on that part of the show.
Where was Bad Bunny&#8217;s gratitude?
There have been other shows where he&#8217;s refused to stand up for the national anthem. He is rich and famous because of the United States. He is living in splendor because of the United States. He&#8217;s one of the greatest recipients of American largesse ever.
If you&#8217;re born in Puerto Rico, you&#8217;re American. If you&#8217;re born in America, that is the greatest privilege that you can receive.
So, it is my opinion that you should show some gratitude for America being unique. It seems to me that American flags should have been all over the place in the middle of this demonstration.
This is something the political Left does that is totally wrong.
It&#8217;s astonishing to me. The political Left has the opportunity to grab the upper hand culturally with a lot of people and simultaneously celebrate the country. He could have done this entire show almost identically, with American flags everywhere, saying America means that you can have salsa dancing at your wedding, but that&#8217;s what&#8217;s amazing about America. You can do all that and still be an American who loves football and still be an American.
Football is a uniquely American sport. You can still be an American who is doing all the American things, and you can also enjoy these cultural variants.
This United Nations routine was not a celebration of America or a celebration of cultures that coexist peacefully in America.
His attempt to say we are all Americans by making some sort of pedantic geographic point that the Americas encompass the continents of North America and South America was silly. No one sees it that way.
When people say American, they believe that you are talking about the United States — as they should. Football is an American event. It is not the world&#8217;s biggest event. It is America&#8217;s biggest event. Not many people in Japan watch the Super Bowl.
This was not the World Cup. This performance at the World Cup or the Olympics would have made perfect sense because those are international events with a bunch of different countries.
What I am concerned about is the innate argument that is being made, that the greatness of America somehow must be subsumed under the rubric of “All countries are awesome, and America is somehow equivalent in some way to other countries.”
We are not. America is exceptional. It&#8217;s unique.
And ignoring that message is un-American.

A Very Bad Bunny Super Bowl

Puerto Rico

Sports

United States

On Thursday, President Trump returned to the National Prayer Breakfast and proceeded to give a speech that was reasonably religious in overtones.
Something fascinating about the president is that he&#8217;s been able to do things that a lot of Christian conservatives and religious Jews appreciate while maintaining a largely secular coalition.
What would appear to be a marginal increase in non-Christian affiliation inside the Republican Party is not marginal because the overall loss in the traditional religious constituency in the Republican Party is reflective of an overall loss of religiosity in the American public more generally.
Today, the majority of Republicans are religious, but an increasing percentage are not particularly religious, and it is pretty religiously diverse.
That does not mean that the Republican Party should somehow abandon the moral issues that make the Republican Party the Republican Party. That&#8217;s not my case.
My case is that making the Republican Party non-ecumenical as opposed to ecumenical is a mistake. We’ve seen this sort of move being made on behalf of some parts of the sort of the trad-Catholic Right, some of the quasi-integralists on the Right, who seem to be making a move to break up the Republican coalition by suggesting that there is a vast religious revival that is happening in the country that is going to drive Republicans to victory.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2363-sub?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Those numbers do not exist. I wish there were; I wish there were a vast religious revival in the country and that the Republican Party was closer to its biblical moral values. I wish that were the case.
But that is not supported by the data, which is why Trump is the right president for this moment, and it&#8217;s why Republicans have to watch out for coalition building and how not to break it up.
When you talk about the increasing irreligiosity of the body politic, that is correct. That doesn&#8217;t mean that Republicans should abandon social issues. They absolutely should not.
But it does mean that the more overt you are about marginal social issues, the more you are likely to lose the Trump coalition. Trump is winning outsized shares of Christian evangelicals, Catholics, and religious people because the Left is crazy, not because he is campaigning as some sort of religious figure.
If you wish for Republicans to win, then presenting good policy with a moderate face — even if you have outsized rhetoric like President Trump — is a better path to victory than embracing the fringe positions taken by so many on X and elsewhere.
President Trump can go to the National Prayer Breakfast and give what are, at best, sort of vague religious statements. And that&#8217;s fine with people. President Trump literally joked about making it to heaven at the National Prayer Breakfast, saying:
I said, “I’m never going to make it to heaven. I just don’t think I qualify.” I don’t think there’s a thing I can do, but all of these good things I’m doing, including for religion — you know, religion’s back now hotter than ever before — but I said, “Even though I did that, and so many other things” —  I named things. I said, “I won’t qualify. I’m not going to make it to heaven.”
And the New York Times did a front-page story that Donald Trump is questioning his life and the meaning of his life. No, I was just having fun. I really think I probably should make it; I mean, I’m not a perfect candidate, but I did a hell of a lot of good for perfect people.
That last line, that he&#8217;s done a lot of things for people, is the reason he’s been elected president twice. 
President Trump says, listen, you have to believe in something. You have to have a religion in general. 
This is the American position. The American position is that Biblical values are good and that we like religious practice in this country. Freedom of religion and freedom from government intervention in religion are in the same amendment for a reason. That broad ecumenism is a winning approach for the Republicans.
And pointing out the anti-religious secularism of the Left is a winning approach for Republicans.
President Trump has the pulse of the American people on the vast majority of issues, which is why he usually takes the 80% on 80/20 issues.
Republicans need to continue to do that.

US-POLITICS-RELIGION-PRAYER-BREAKFAST-TRUMP

The Big Tent: Trump’s Ecumenical Path To Victory

Bible

Christianity

Jews

Judeo-Christian Values

Prayer

Religion

Republican Party

White House

The following is an edited transcript excerpt from <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/mks-ep-1907?elementPosition=3&amp;row=6&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">The Michael Knowles Show</a>.
* * *
There is an interesting development in the Epstein case and it comes from CBS News.
The official accounts about who did or did not enter Epstein&#8217;s jail cell on the night of his death have been contradicted a myriad of times. 
If you’ll recall, we were first told there were cameras on Epstein’s jail cell and on his floor, but that they weren’t working, so there was no footage to release. Later, officials released closed-circuit footage from the night of his death and claimed it was uninterrupted. Shortly afterward, we were told that a minute of the video was missing. That missing minute was eventually restored, and we were assured the footage was original — despite clear signs it had been edited using video software.
So what&#8217;s the latest? Well, newly released video logs appear to contradict official accounts.
This is from <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/epstein-files-jail-cell-death-video-logs/?ftag=CNM-00-10aab7e&amp;linkId=903657594">CBS News</a>:
<blockquote>Newly released Department of Justice documents show that investigators reviewing surveillance footage from the night of Jeffrey Epstein&#8217;s death observed an orange-colored shape moving up a staircase toward the isolated, locked tier where his cell was located at approximately 10:39 p.m. on Aug. 9, 2019.</blockquote>
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Questions swirl as video logs show person may have entered Epstein jail tier the night he died" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EN1TmI5F1hs?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Credit: CBS Mornings/YouTube.com
I love the way they&#8217;re describing it: &#8220;An orange-colored shape.&#8221;
 So some people, probably on the Left, are imagining that this is just Trump himself. Yes, a vaguely mango-colored, you know, blond-haired, had a very nice Brioni suit on with a slightly too-long red tie.
Or no, that would be the live version of what we on the Right all imagine.
What is probably meant is that the person is wearing an orange jumpsuit, or maybe carrying something orange.
This isn&#8217;t particularly new information. I was covering Epstein months and months ago when some of this footage came out, and we noticed the strange figures that were moving around. Okay, now we can zoom in, and we see this weird orange figure. 
CBS <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/epstein-files-jail-cell-death-video-logs/?ftag=CNM-00-10aab7e&amp;linkId=903657594">goes on</a>:
<blockquote>Thomas told investigators he discovered Epstein in his cell shortly after 6:30 a.m. on Aug.10 and that he &#8220;ripped&#8221; Epstein down from the hanging position.
Investigators asked what happened to the noose. 
&#8220;I don&#8217;t recall taking the noose off. I really don&#8217;t,&#8221; he replied. &#8220;I don&#8217;t recall taking the thing from around his neck.&#8221;</blockquote>
That&#8217;s a little weird, right?
I guess what you could say is it&#8217;s always shocking to see a dead body, but it was especially shocking here. This is one of the most wanted, talked-about criminals in all of America, in all of the world and you find him dead in his cell, and maybe, who knows, your hormones are spiking. You have a surge of adrenaline, you&#8217;re shocked, you&#8217;re sick, and you forget. Maybe he just forgot.
It gets weirder.
<blockquote>Noel, who remained standing at the cell entrance, told investigators she saw Thomas lower Epstein to the floor but did not see a noose around his neck.</blockquote>
Hold on. 
So now it&#8217;s not just the guy who discovers Epstein and takes him down. It&#8217;s also the observer standing a little bit further back. 
<blockquote>The noose Epstein allegedly used has never been definitively identified. According to the inspector general&#8217;s report, a noose collected at the scene was later determined not to be the ligature used in Epstein&#8217;s death.</blockquote>
The guy who took him down never saw the noose.
The lady watching him take him down never saw a noose.
And investigators never even found the noose.
Add on at least one medical examiner saying that the breaks in his neck were more consistent with strangulation than with hanging.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1907-new-video-someone-entered-epstein-s-cell-the-night-he-died?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Michael Knowles Show</a></h3>
Everyone is focusing on the aspects of his life — Epstein had a connection to Russia; he had a connection to Israel; he had a connection to the CIA, and so on.
Some of the accounts actually contradict each other. Was he a super spy? Was he just a sex-freak rich guy? Was he really trafficking women? Was he really trading secrets? Was he really dealing with the Arabs and the Israelis, or was it the Russians or the Americans, or was it the British?
You’ve got to put that aside for a second. We now have every theory covered. Yes, we’ve connected him to every country on earth, every intelligence agency, every vice. And that’s not getting us anywhere.
If you want to get to the heart of the Epstein story, the first thing you have to ascertain is the end of the story, not how the story begins.
Not a lot of people want to focus on how a guy who dropped out of college ended up becoming a math teacher, who was hired by Bill Barr’s father at The Dalton School, but then became some kind of trader at Bear Stearns? How? He then went on to become the money manager for Les Wexner, where he said he would only have clients who were investing over $1 billion.
And then he worked with intelligence agencies.
And then he helped this sheikh in Arabia.
And then he — 
Don’t look at the beginning of the story. That is going to lead you down a billion different trails, especially with a guy who seemed to be connected to every powerful person on earth.
I think you have to start at the end of the story. 
And curious, isn’t it, that the shadiest part, the part that has been most covered up, that has been most contradicted, is not found at the beginning of the story. No one is asking, &#8220;Did Epstein work at Bear Stearns?&#8221; &#8220;Did Epstein know Ghislaine Maxwell?&#8221; &#8220;Did Epstein pal around with Bill?&#8221; It’s none of that.
The part that has been most assiduously covered up is the end of the story.
How did he die?
Who killed him?
Why don’t we have the noose?
That’s it. I don’t think we’re going to get an answer on it. And that&#8217;s been my consistent position from the beginning. Either Epstein is who they say he is, in which case we know everything about him, or he’s something more, in which case we know everything we’re ever going to know, because they’re not going to let it out. 
But if we could ascertain who killed him, that would help us to answer: why was he killed? That would help us to answer what purpose he primarily served in world politics. That would help us to answer who, chiefly, he was working for.
That would help us to answer what the Epstein operation was really about.
But the only way you’re going to get those big answers is by going backward. You’re not going to get it by going forward.
Now we’re getting some little, little tasty hints — but nothing definitive.
And if you want me to put some money on the table, I don’t think we’re going to get much more than that.

Two Prison Guards Charged With Falsifying Records In Jeffrey Epstein’s Death

Who Was The Orange Figure That Appeared In Epstein’s Cellblock?

Who Was The Orange Figure That Appeared In Epstein's Cellblock?

CBS News

Epstein Files

Jail

Jeffrey Epstein

New York City

Prison

The following is an edited transcript excerpt of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1906-libs-in-minneapolis-create-their-own-border-patrol?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">The Michael Knowles Show</a>.
* * *
Liberals in Minnesota have had it with ICE raids and Border Patrol, so they’ve decided to take matters into their own hands with a novel plan to keep the people they don’t want out of their communities.
They are, quite literally, creating a system to control who comes and goes.
In the middle of the road at 32nd and Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis, activists erected a makeshift roadblock, turning the intersection into a roundabout. Cars slowed as drivers noticed. Some honked, others asked questions. One man even brought food for the people standing watch.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Minneapolis roadblock created as safety measure against ICE, residents say" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kpxvfub-gHA?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Credit: @WCCO &#8211; CBS Minnesota/YouTube.com
When asked how it felt to see a community checkpoint in his neighborhood, one local shrugged it off. It felt “fine,” he said. He didn’t have any trouble with people “helping out.”
<blockquote>Wade Haynes has been standing at that corner twice a day for one reason: to stand up against ICE activity and “keep his community safe.” He chose that corner. Others chose other intersections. He found it inspiring. “Wow,” he said. “We’ve got folks out there who are kind of taking care of us, looking out for us.”</blockquote>
Taking care of them? Looking out for them?
Some might say policing their communities.
And the way they’re doing it is by erecting structures in the street on the corners — stopping points. Some might even call them “borders,” staffed by people who check to make sure that only the right people get into the community, and that the people they don’t want stay out.
Many people, including some on the Right, have questioned President Trump’s tactics in Minneapolis. But you can’t argue with results — and the results of the Minneapolis raids are that Trump got anti-ICE liberals to invent Border Patrol.
That’s the beautiful part.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1906-libs-in-minneapolis-create-their-own-border-patrol?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Michael Knowles Show</a></h3>
Trump actually trolled the Minneapolis Left into reinventing everything they claim to oppose: border patrol, wall checkpoints, cops, enforcement. “We need our own ICE to deport these ICE agents,” they cry, without a trace of irony.
This is what always seems to happen when utopians on the Left — of all stripes — dream up their perfect society.
They start by declaring that society as it exists is no good:
<blockquote>We’ve got markets. We’ve got people making money. We’ve got private property. We’ve got exploitation — we don’t want any of that, man! 
So what are we going to do? We’re going to move to a commune. A farm in the middle of nowhere. It’s going to be beautiful — not like this city, not like this town. We’re going to live together in harmony. Some people are going to grow the food. Some people are going to bake the bread. Some people are going to watch the kids. It’s going to be amazing. We’re going to have a diversity of labor.</blockquote>
Oh, you mean we’re going to have a market economy?
<blockquote>Well, yeah, but this time it will be perfect. And we’re all going to take care of each other, man.</blockquote>
Oh, you mean like police?
<blockquote>Yeah, man.</blockquote>
And so, without realizing it, they invent society as it has always existed — just with the assumption that this time, they’ll do it right.
<blockquote>That’s the problem with our society, they say. We just didn’t do it right.</blockquote>
And now, in Minneapolis, they’ve reinvented Border Patrol.
It’s so beautiful.
So I say: take them at their word.
Yes, we do need people to keep our communities safe. 
Yes, we do need checkpoints to keep the people we don’t want out. 
Yes, we do need a group of people to take care of the community.
If that’s what they believe, then flood Minneapolis with even more ICE agents, Mr. President.

Federal Agents Descend On Minneapolis For Immigration Enforcement Operations

Minneapolis Liberals Invent Their Own Border Patrol

Border Patrol

Communism

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

Minneapolis

Minnesota

Wedding cake visual metaphor with figurine cake toppers

Conservative Influencer Cheating Scandal: Was The Manosphere Right All Along?

Andrew Tate

Catholicism

family

Marriage

Relationships

Social Issues

Western Civilization

Tragedy occurred in the Bezos universe yesterday when 16,000 people were cut from Amazon.
The first round of cuts in October led to roughly 14,000 white-collar employees receiving pink slips. People in the world of journalism were deeply affected. They were really upset that tens of thousands of people were about to lose their jobs at Amazon, one of the most successful companies in America and in the world.
Just kidding.
They didn&#8217;t care.
They barely covered that; it lasted in the news cycle for about five seconds.
What they are really, really upset about in the Bezos universe is that The Washington Post is going to lay off one-third of its staff. The Washington Post is cutting — wait for it — 300+ jobs.
I&#8217;m just going to point out where the sympathies lie. 30,000 people lose their jobs at Amazon because Amazon is cost-cutting and reevaluating thanks to AI, and journalists respond, “You know, those are people who work in Amazon. Those might be factory workers, those might be middle management. They&#8217;re not us.”
But at The Washington Post, they laid off the third-string journalist in Gaza, who may or may not be a contractor for Hamas; they laid off the race and ethnicity reporter, and it’s “My God, the American promise has been sullied and violated! No, this cannot be!”
The Wall Street Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/media/washington-post-layoffs-feburary-2026-c105b237?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=AWEtsqcaQNca6RrDYdMgDke2Qwu1pfAhNcuwCLeGw2gtfcyFA6ZnY6MoI_3SOtNXZjo%3D&amp;gaa_ts=6984dc53&amp;gaa_sig=APDqepx-qArXwdbgE1oFZKF_NO-7qs9L1QsLikbvbByoXzZcBaTeCL6ss9lDG47LXXcfxAiG6I1p2ATcf6q7Uw%3D%3D">reported</a>:
<blockquote>The Washington Post is cutting one-third of its staff, slashing hundreds of jobs across the newsroom and other departments in an effort to trim costs and reshape coverage.
The layoffs will affect journalists in nearly all news departments, including the sports, foreign, technology and breaking-news teams, as well as business and technology staff. 
“If we are to thrive, not just endure, we must reinvent our journalism and our business model with renewed ambition,” Executive Editor Matt Murray wrote in a note to newsroom staff Wednesday&#8230;. The Post is closing its sports department in its current form but will retain some roles in that coverage area. It is shrinking its international coverage, and will focus on national news and features, investigations and advice on health and wellness topics.
Murray said the Post will continue to have correspondents in about a dozen international locations, and will focus on issues related to national security. “That’s what our readers seem to respond to the most,” he said. &#8230; The Post lost $77 million in 2023 and <a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/media/washington-post-challenges-trump-second-term-61ea6ed9?mod=article_inline">$100 million in 2024</a>, The Wall Street Journal previously reported, as it contended with traffic declines from sources including Google and Facebook. &#8230; In recent weeks, Post journalists—including foreign correspondents, local-news reporters and members of the White House team—made public pleas asking the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, to maintain their jobs.</blockquote>
The Washington Post, like the Daily Wire, is not a nonprofit. If journalists wish to start their own nonprofit and get a bunch of left-wing funders to put millions of dollars behind their jobs, they are free to do that. There are organizations that operate as charitable organizations that do active journalism on occasion.
But the idea that Jeff Bezos owes it to the employees of The Washington Post to maintain their jobs when the paper is losing money is crazy and stupid.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2362-left-wing-journalists-panic-as-wa-po-fires-300?elementPosition=5&amp;row=6&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Nonetheless, the response from the media ecosystem is absolute shock and horror. Emmanuel Felton, the race and ethnicity reporter at The Washington Post — the race and ethnicity reporter? Is there breaking news in the race and ethnicity area? Is evolution suddenly occurring that you need l a reporter on race and ethnicity? How is that a coverage area? If on the Right there was a race and ethnicity reporter, we would recognize just how racist that is — put out a statement:
<blockquote>I&#8217;m among the hundreds of people laid off by The Post. This comes six months after hearing in a national meeting that race coverage drives subscriptions. This wasn&#8217;t a financial decision, it was an ideological one. The other reporter on my team covering race was also laid off as well as the editor in charge of race coverage across national. The team covering America beyond DC is now 90% white.</blockquote>
Oh, no. You mean that people covering issues are going to do so without regard to the race of the reporter?
We can&#8217;t have that.
“Racism,” says the guy who gets paid to talk about racism all day long.
Brianna Tucker, national politics breaking news reporter and the National Association of Black Journalists political task force chair, put out a statement saying, “I&#8217;m affected by layoffs at the Washington Post today. There aren&#8217;t enough words to describe the immense privilege and profound responsibility I&#8217;ve felt since hired at 25 as an editor. As a Black woman covering politics, (a dwindling cohort) today, that feeling is magnified.”
If your first take about being fired by a paper that is bleeding money is that you were fired because of your race, perhaps that betrays the style of coverage that you were doing, which might be one of the reasons the paper was suffering.
If you see everything through a racial lens and the paper for which you are reporting keeps losing money, and then you get fired, and in your firing statement, you talk about your specific race, perhaps you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Peter Baker, the New York Times’ chief White House correspondent, put out a tweet listing Bezos’ wealth over the years:
<blockquote>Jeff Bezos wealth in 2024: $194 billion Jeff Bezos wealth in 2025: $215 billion Jeff Bezos wealth today: $249.4 billion Net increase in Bezos wealth since 2024: $55.4 billion Cost of Bezos’s 417-foot superyacht: $500 million Amazon investment in &#8220;Melania&#8221;: $75 million Original Bezos purchase price of the Washington Post in 2013: $250 million Bezos net worth in 2013: $25.2 billion Net increase in Bezos wealth since buying the Post: $224.2 billion Last reported annual losses of Post: $100 million Number of years Bezos could absorb those losses with what he makes in a single week: 5</blockquote>
The premise of this tweet is that The Post is a charity, and that Bezos bought it as a charity operation.
The only number that matters in the tweet is this: “Last reported annual losses of Post: $100 million.”
Perhaps one of the reasons Jeff Bezos is worth $250 billion is that he does not hold on to declining assets. He does not run his businesses like charities. Maybe that would be the reason.
Maybe that&#8217;s why he is extraordinarily wealthy, and most of the reporters working for him are not, because they think they&#8217;re in the charity business.
As someone who&#8217;s the co-founder of a major media organization in the same business as the Washington Post, let me just say this: When you lose money, and you can see where you&#8217;re losing money, you have to lay people off.
That is how business works.
And Jeff Bezos is not doing anything wrong by laying people off.
The idea that journalists are somehow owed their position because the person who hires them is rich is extraordinary, especially when many of these same journalists are asking that the federal government step in and make the owners of their own businesses not rich anymore.
They think that the people who hire them are simply supposed to absorb the losses.
Bernie Sanders, a complete leech on the ass of American society for the last eight decades, a useless human being in the extreme, put out a statement saying, “If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie and $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don&#8217;t tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff. Democracy dies in oligarchy.”
What is this, “He doesn&#8217;t need to?”
It is not about what people need to do in America; it is about what they want to do and what they have the freedom to do. That&#8217;s why this country kicks ass.
And that&#8217;s why his version of the country sucks.
If Bernie Sanders wants to get together a bunch of his left-wing friends to put together a 501c3 and rehire all the race reporters in the Washington Post, he is free to do that. He could sell his lake house, and he could hire several of these journalists, and they could work for him, and they could gallivant into the utopian socialist sunset together and enjoy their time.
But he&#8217;s not going to do any of that, the man who spent over $550,000 in 2025 campaign funds on private jets. 
How many Washington Post salaries could that pay?

Guild Members Rally Outside The Washington Post After Layoffs

Left-Wing Journalists Panic As WaPo Fires Over 300 Employees

Amazon

Capitalism

Jeff Bezos

journalists

layoffs

When hundreds of students across the country walked out of class last week to protest ICE, the scene felt uncomfortably familiar. The chants, the certainty, and the urgency to declare a side reflected a pattern my generation repeats during nearly every political moment: strong emotion paired with limited understanding. Watching it unfold as a high school student, the issue appeared larger than a single protest. The walkouts exposed an education system that failed to teach students how the government functions — or how federal law enforcement actually operates.
From Georgia to California, students are walking out of class demanding that ICE be “removed” from their communities. In practice, for many of my peers, these walkouts function less as political statements and more as an excuse to miss class. At Lakeside High School in Georgia — where many of the protest videos originated — approximately 1,500 of the school’s roughly 2,200 students participated in an organized walkout protesting ICE. That would suggest that more than half the student body is so politically engaged that they are willing to sacrifice instructional time for a policy cause — an assumption undermined by the fact that fewer than 40% of Americans ages 18-19 vote.
For the small minority of students who genuinely care, the protests offer an opportunity to join a cause they assume is morally righteous. For all participants, however, these walkouts rest on an incomplete — and often incorrect — understanding of what ICE actually does and who holds authority over immigration policy.
The collapse of civic education in K–12 schools has produced widespread confusion about how the federal government functions. Many students believe ICE writes immigration law rather than enforces statutes passed by Congress. Others assume a president can simply suspend laws at will, or that public outrage alone can override the legislative process and reshape federal policy.
What no one has taught my peers is that Congress — not ICE, and not the White House — writes immigration law. Every administration, including President Trump’s, is obligated to enforce the laws Congress passes.
This confusion among students is not a failure of intelligence. It reflects an education system that avoids political controversy at all costs. Teachers are warned not to “take sides,” administrators steer clear of any topic that might provoke backlash, and students grow up believing that discussing the law or governance is dangerous. Instead of learning how the government functions, students learn how to talk around it.
This silence shapes how my generation engages with politics. Only a few miles from my Long Island high school, Generation Z played a decisive role in electing a socialist mayor in America’s most capitalist city. Many of those voters were never taught about the historical consequences of socialism — the collapse of economies, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the human suffering that follows. Those lessons are treated as too political for classrooms. The result is a generation making political choices without understanding the ideas being supported.
Students are not avoiding dialogue because of apathy. They avoid it because schools have trained them to fear disagreement. When issues such as immigration, abortion, or Israel arise, classrooms go quiet — not from a lack of opinion, but from concern over social and academic consequences.
Before becoming a nationally syndicated columnist, I hesitated to speak openly in classrooms. I rewrote comments, withheld arguments, and waited for safer moments to share my views. Now, I voice those perspectives in front of millions of readers, fully aware of the consequences. But even with all the pushback, my openness has not only sharpened my passion for politics but produced an impact far greater than I ever anticipated.
The danger of silence becomes clear during moments like these walkouts. When students protest without understanding what they want to change or how change occurs, it reveals how unprepared they are for civic participation. Informed activism cannot exist without civic knowledge.
Restoring serious civic education remains the only path forward. Students should learn not only which policies exist, but why they exist. They should understand how Congress, the courts, and federal agencies interact. Schools should encourage substantive debate rather than discourage it. Avoiding discomfort leaves students unprepared for the responsibilities of citizenship — and for the world they are about to enter.
* * *
Gregory Lyakhov is a nationally syndicated columnist and podcast host, regularly appearing on national television to discuss education policy, U.S. politics, and public affairs.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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