Michael Knowles at CPAC DC 2025 – Day 1

Good to see you. Thank you. Oh, look at this. Look at these beautiful, patriotic, energized... Oh, I love it. I love being at CPAC. It is always a pleasure to be at CPAC. I feel like an old man when I was thinking about this trip because I first came to CPAC in 2011, and it was fun then, it's been fun ever since, but something feels different this year. Doesn't it? Something. What is it? What is that thing? I don't think, I don't think that it's just that we won. Because, you know, we won in 2016. Some people say we won in 2020, I'm not going to get into it, but it can't just be that we won. I think the big difference this year is that we won, and we won the popular vote. That was the big difference. Most voters in this country voted for Donald Trump. Huge swaths of every demographic, including groups that Democrats have had a lockdown on for decades. We're talking about an historic proportion of black male voters, almost half of Hispanic voters, something like 50% of women over 45, even, this one really shocked me, 40% of women under the age of 30. That was the most Kamala-y demographic, and we still got that. So many of them voted for Trump and for Republicans in the House and the Senate. It was a clean sweep. It was a clear mandate, and it was a mandate for common sense. That's the only way to explain this broad coalition of people who usually argue with each other. Republicans, disaffected Democrats, conservatives, liberals, people across both sexes and all ages and all races. The Democrats lost the common sense, and their loss is our gain, not only at the ballot box, but also in expanding the political imagination, in opening up the discourse that we can have in our politics. For too long, uniparty elites have limited political discourse to exclude the common sense policies that people actually want. Just look at immigration. For decades, we have been told that we have two choices when it comes to immigration. More illegal immigration, or more legal immigration. And, sometimes the left and the right, they compromise and they give us both. Great. But it turns out that most Americans do not want more immigration of any kind. Most Americans want drastically less immigration, legal and illegal. Gallup polling last July found 55% of Americans want overall immigration reduced. This backs up another poll from 2018, Harvard-Harris, found that most Americans want annual legal immigration capped at about half a million. That is about 60% less than the current levels. That is about 85% less than overall immigration levels. That is what most Americans repeatedly have indicated that they want. And it's perfectly reasonable. Today, we have the highest foreign-born percentage of the population that we have ever had in our nation's history. It is not possible for a nation to maintain social cohesion and its own way of life while taking in unlimited numbers of foreigners. There's nothing bigoted about that observation. And yet, until recently, that view, the preference of most Americans, was totally unrepresented by either major political party. Look at the LGBT ideology. In recent years, uniparty elites have told us that we have two options. Either we trans the kids in kindergarten, or we wait until they turn eight. Maybe, maybe if we're lucky, we can wait until the kids are out of elementary school before the indoctrination begins. What kind of a choice is that? Within the past decade, transgenderism did not exist in public life at all. Not in schools, not in sports leagues, not in bathrooms, not in the military, not anywhere. And things worked a lot better then, and probably we should return to that. To put in perspective just how rapidly this gender bending LGBT ideology has been forced upon us, consider that Barack Obama in the final year of his first term as president, held that marriage is the lifelong union of a man and a woman ordered toward the procreation and education of children. Hillary Clinton believed that too. Basically, everybody believed that. Everyone, everywhere, for statistically all of human history has understood that fact. That is the only definition of marriage that distinguishes it from other kinds of relationships. Marriage was not invented by ideologues. And it cannot be redefined by ideologues either. It is a natural institution. Not even the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court wants to try. But not even they can change that reality. It just is what it is. Nothing bigoted about that observation. It's just a fact.