Daily Wire host tells Republicans “Nuke the filibuster. Reopen the government. Pass any legislation. Get the upper advantage.”
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From the November 6, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Michael Knowles Show
MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): A lot of what we've been talking about in recent weeks has to do with timing. You know the key to comedy, right? You know the key to comedy? Timing. It's timing. Timing is really important.
There are ideologues who want to say that one policy prescription must be true for all time. You saw this with a lot of the never-Trumpers. You see this with a lot of people in all factions of the right, and they're wrong because politics is applying internal principles to constantly changing circumstances. So it's true. Today, Republicans are kind of pro-tariff. For decades, they were very, very anti-tariff. Before that, though, they were pro-tariff, and actually the the party was founded on tariffs. Does that mean that one side of that argument is always wrong, one side is always right? No. It's that some times call for tariffs, some circumstances. Sometimes our geopolitical adversaries put us in a position where the best course of action to advance the good of the country is a tariff, and sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's to remove a tariff. Sometimes you need more migration. Sometimes you need a lot less migration. That — there's no hypocrisy there. There's no heresy. Some of these people are going to say it's heresy. It's not. It's prudence, which is the chief political virtue.
There was a time when I would have said Republicans should not nuke the filibuster. That time has passed. That time has passed because when the Democrats get back into power, they will nuke it. I'm pretty confident of that. They almost did it last time, except there were two — it was a Manchin and Sinema who basically held it up. Manchin and Sinema are gone. So, they're going to do it. There was a time when Democrats would not elect a Muslim communist mayor of New York. That time is gone. There was a time when Democrats would not openly celebrate the assassination of a right-wing debater on college campuses. That time is gone. There's a time that Jay Jones' texts would have eliminated him from the race immediately. That time was, like, five years ago, and now that time is gone.
Principled conservatives who have long rightly defended the filibuster, I think should recognize what time it is, recognize that time is gone. Because whichever party does nuke the filibuster is going to have a tremendous advantage. Whoever does it first has a tremendous advantage. For a while, we could kind of count on the other party not doing it. That's over, guys. That's over. They would celebrate your death, and they've told us that repeatedly for over a month.
Nuke the filibuster. Reopen the government. Pass any legislation. Get the upper advantage. We're in a different political situation. We can either die politically fighting the last political war as a lot of conservatives are inclined to do. That reluctance, that caution, that patience is a good conservative feature until it's not. We can either do that or we're going win. I say we win. I'm with Trump. I say we win. I'm with the more in tune parts of the conservative movement that says, guys, we're in a different era now. I'm with cocaine Mitch McConnell who says the winners go to Washington, the losers go home.