Grab a mug and hold on by the handle because the tea coming from a steaming member of the Beckham family is piping hot. After years of speculation, Brooklyn Beckham announced to the world this week that he is done with his famous parents, David and Victoria Beckham, and has no plans to reconcile after claiming his family tried to sabotage his marriage. “I do not want to reconcile with my family. I’m not being controlled, I’m standing up for myself for the first time in my life,” Brooklyn said. In a lengthy post on Instagram, the 26-year-old said his parents have tried to ruin his relationship with his wife, Nicola Peltz Beckham, well before the two tied the knot in 2022. “The night before our wedding, members of my family told me that Nicola was ‘not blood’ and ‘not family.’ Since the moment I started standing up for myself with my family, I’ve received endless attacks from my parents, both publicly and privately, that were sent to the press on their orders,” Brooklyn said. The Beckham’s first born continued with scathing allegations against his parents, including that they tried to bribe him to sign away the rights to his name, his mom refused to make Nicola’s wedding dress, and his parents would invite his former flings around the family to purposely make him and his wife uncomfortable. Brooklyn added that several members of his family allegedly told him that Nicola was “not blood” and “not family” ahead of their wedding day. But wait— the most public part of the allegations may be that Brooklyn claims Victoria “hijacked” the “first dance” during his wedding from his wife, Nicola, and “danced very inappropriately.” “My mum hijacked my first dance with my wife, which had been planned weeks in advance to a romantic love song. In front of our 500 wedding guests, Marc Anthony called me to the stage where the schedule was planned to be my romantic dance with my wife but instead my mum was waiting to dance with me instead,” Brooklyn said. “She danced very inappropriately on me in front of everyone. I’ve never felt more uncomfortable humiliated in my entire life. We wanted to renew our vows so we could create new memories of our wedding day that bring us joy and happiness, not anxiety and embarrassment.” Brooklyn and Nicola noticeably didn’t attend David’s 50th birthday bash last spring. Don’t worry, Brooklyn addressed this scenario as well. “We still travelled to London for my dad’s birthday and were rejected for a week as we waited in our hotel room trying to plan quality time with him. He refused all of our attempts, unless it was at his big birthday party with a hundred guests and cameras at every corner. When he finally agreed to see me, it was under the condition that Nicola wasn’t invited,” Brooklyn said. The now-obvious strain was solidified late last year when he blocked his parents and brothers on social media. “The narrative that my wife controls me is completely backwards,” Brooklyn said. “I have been controlled by my parents for most of my life.” David was asked about his son’s statements on Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. The soccer legend chose to be “Switzerland” on the matter and ignored the question from the reporter. Later in the day, David appeared on a talk show where he seemingly addressed the accusations by discussing the positives and negatives of social media. “It can be dangerous, but what I’ve found—especially with my kids as well—use it for the right reasons,” Beckham said on CNBC’s “Squawkbox.” He shared how he has used social media for good before adding, “I’ve tried to do the same with my children—to educate them. They make mistakes. Children are allowed to make mistakes … you have to sometimes let them make those mistakes as well.” Brooklyn doesn’t view his social media spill as a mistake, instead saying, “My wife and I do not want a life shaped by image, press, or manipulation. All we want [is] peace, privacy and happiness for us and our future family.” Though Brooklyn said he has found “peace” since parting with his once picture-perfect family, stay tuned for the next chapter in this apparent fractured fairytale.

Normally Stephen Miller, the White House homeland security adviser, spends his time focusing on major issues facing this country and the world at large — like removing illegal aliens from the United States, purchasing Greenland, deposing South American communists, and so on. But every now and then, Stephen Miller weighs in on topics that — at least on the surface, and several layers below the surface — don’t seem quite as important. For example, the other day, Miller offered his assessment of the new “Star Trek” show on Paramount+, called “Starfleet Academy.” Here’s what Miller wrote. It wasn’t exactly a flattering review. Tragic. But it’s not too late for @paramountplus to save the franchise. Step 1: Reconcile with @WilliamShatner and give him total creative control. https://t.co/HRMDcYeBnU — Stephen Miller (@StephenM) January 16, 2026 Credit: @StephenM/X.com Shatner, who of course played Captain Kirk in the original show, responded with this. ? ? I am so on the same page with you @StephenM! The fact that they have not cure Hyperopia by the 32rd Century is an abysmal oversight on the writers!? Also @paramountplus needs to up the budget because I’m sure that a well oiled organization like Starfleet in the distant… https://t.co/96MtYUGGWf — William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) January 19, 2026 Credit: @WilliamShatner/X.com Shatner writes, “I am on the same page with you Stephen Miller!”  He also called out some “abysmal oversights” by the writers, and wrote, “shame on the line producers. I am ready to assume command of the series.” Seeing this exchange, it occurred to me that this new “Star Trek” show is an ideal target for a deep dive — sort of like the one we did Thanksgiving week, with Ken Burns’ documentary about the American Revolution. That’s not because anyone should care about a new streaming show that’s complete garbage. Those are a dime a dozen. Except that these garbage streaming shows somehow cost like 100 million dollars to make, so it’s more like 1.2 billion a dozen. But I digress. The reason we should talk about the state of “Star Trek” as a franchise — and the reason Stephen Miller probably cares about Star Trek — is that it’s a useful window into what the modern Left has become, where they went wrong, and how to defeat them. And on top of that, some of the scenes in this new show are genuinely hilarious — unintentionally — and it will be highly enjoyable to mock them. As a certified Trekkie, I’m more than qualified to weigh in here. I’ve been watching Star Trek ever since the days when Frodo and Hermione were battling Dr. Doom on the Death Star, so I know a lot about this series and the lore behind it. Now, yes, it’s true that Star Trek began in the 1960s as a progressive, liberal show, by the standards of the day. And they weren’t exactly subtle with the messaging about equality. They had a black woman on the bridge, serving as a communications officer, which was unusual at the time. And by the time the movies came out, the writers decided that, in the Star Trek universe, there was no money at all. Everyone just worked for free, to improve mankind. It was a communist utopia. But in those early communist Star Trek shows, there were still some elements that you could describe as Right-wing, at least in modern times. Everyone in the crew was physically fit, which you’d expect from the crew of a military vessel. So there was no body-positivity movement. The leaders were all highly competent, decisive men. The officers talked to one another like serious people, who understood the gravity of their positions. As the author Isaac Young put it: Star Trek’s beating heart was a professional 19th century naval crew in space. It was basically a love letter to Rightwing aristocracy and professionalism with a Leftwing coat of paint, and you can literally pinpoint the exact second it died by the BMI of the cast. https://t.co/wSsFHTDu19 pic.twitter.com/z6VuodF7w7 — Isaac Young (@HariSel57511397) January 12, 2026 Credit: @HariSel57511397/X.com And more importantly, the old Star Trek shows explicitly rejected the idea that everyone is a “blank slate.” Every species on the ship was clearly distinct, in significant ways. According to my producers, who wouldn’t lie to me about something like this, the Klingons were the warriors who were obsessed with honor and violence. The Vulcans were cold and unemotional but highly logical. The Ferengi were scheming and untrustworthy. And so on. Ferengi sound to me like some kind of parasitic infection you pick up in an African jungle, but apparently they’re an alien species in Star Trek. The point is that these differences weren’t inherently good or bad. They were just unavoidable, consistent differences. That’s how liberals and most communists — including Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the series — used to view the world. They recognized differences between large groups of people, and they wrote a show about those people getting along, sometimes. But new Star Trek, like modern Leftists, takes a very different approach. They enforce the fiction of blank-slateism — meaning that everyone starts life with a blank slate. Under this worldview, no particular demographic has any inherent advantage or disadvantage over another. We’re all the same; we’re just molded by our environment. This is unscientific and factually, obviously wrong. But it’s a core tenet of Leftism. And that’s why, at every opportunity, “Starfleet Academy” on Paramount+ takes pains to push blank-slateism. For example, no longer are Klingons a warrior race that’s fixated on honor and warfare. Instead, Klingons are now into science and bird-watching: Watch: Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy So, you can already see that racial diversity was very, very important to the writers of this show. Unfortunately, writing was not important to the writers of this show. A lot of people have accused Starfleet Academy of having bad acting, which it does. But you can’t blame the actors. Think about the dialogue here. One character says: “I watch birds. They’re beautiful.” And the other says: “Nice.”  What do you want an actor to do with that? You try delivering those lines in an award winning way. Daniel Day Lewis couldn’t elevate this material. It’s impossible. But at least it really subverts your expectations to have a gay birdwatching Klingon. And more to the point, it completely erases anything unique about the entire race. And of course, the people who are writing this trash — the people who are going out of their way to turn traditionally masculine characters into effeminate bird-watchers — are women. A large portion of the writing staff of this show, including the lead writer and a show runner, are women. And with this show, they’re showing us exactly how liberal women see the world in 2026. For instance, judging by this show, liberal women still haven’t recovered from Donald Trump’s first term. They’re still very upset about the fact that, when parents commit crimes, they’re separated from their children. In fact, that’s the plot device that “Starfleet Academy” uses in order to put the entire show in motion. The show begins with the villain — a white guy, of course, played by Paul Giamatti, who is way, way too talented to be here. Paul Giamatti on Starfleet Academy is like if Marlon Brando was still alive and played the villain on the 5th season of “Stranger Things,” opposite a bunch of actors who wouldn’t get the job if they auditioned for a high school play. Anyway, Giamatti, who must be working to pay off some serious gambling debts or something, plays a character who is working with an impoverished woman to commit a space robbery. And a Starfleet officer is ultimately murdered during the robbery. By any measure, this crime means that both Paul Giamatti, and the mother, should go to prison for a very long time. Instead, they throw the book at Giamatti, and the mother has to go to rehab. Yes, rehab, for committing felony murder. So already, this is an extremely lenient sentence for the mother, by any measure. She commits robbery and murder, and her sentence is to talk about her feelings. But the show immediately tells us that, in fact, that sentence is a great travesty of justice. That’s because the mother, in order to go to rehab, has to be separated from her child, who is taken into the custody of Starfleet. The Starfleet woman who issues the sentence — played by Holly Hunter, who’s extremely difficult to understand when she talks — comes to regret it. She has a full-on meltdown, actually. She quits her job in Starfleet and becomes a teacher. And that leads to this remarkable scene, where a high-ranking officer tries to convince her to go back to work. This is one of the most cliche’d kinds of scenes in shows like this, but they manage to make it even worse than normal. Watch: Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy First of all, what a way to date the show. Everyone can tell that they wrote this a decade ago. The Left doesn’t pretend to care about “family separations” anymore. They’re straight-up admitting that, in their view, only Nazis enforce immigration law, period. They’ve dropped the pretext of being outraged by “family separations.” But in Star Trek, apparently, they’re still hung up about the fact that, if you murder someone, you’ll get separated from your family. If you have a child, you should be able to commit any crime you want. That’s their position. And then we learn that, in fact, the entire show is going to be a power fantasy for the white liberal woman who’s been frozen in a time capsule since 2017. The white female captain decides to track down the child, 15 years later, and offer him a career in Starfleet — even though, by that point, he’s become a criminal himself. Watch: Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy This is the dream of every Leftist woman who voted for Kamala Harris. They dream of breaking oppressed, multracial illegal aliens (and other criminals) out of prison. The more crimes they’ve committed, the better.  And of course, in this show — spoiler alert — the multiracial criminal saves the ship in the end. He reprograms the villain’s goo that’s eating the ship alive, or something like that. So he’s a genius, in addition to being a criminal. He’s far smarter than any of the professional officers on the ship, somehow. All he needed was a better environment — and for his mother to get away with murder. This is the blank-slate fantasy that underlies Leftism. And at some level, they know it’s a fantasy because they don’t pretend to take anything in this show seriously. The old shows would at least try to present thoughtful, intelligent content. But throughout “Starfleet Academy,” the female captain sits in her chair like a cat lady who’s lounging at her house, watching reruns of Grey’s Anatomy. Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy She keeps the same posture even when the ship is being attacked and nearly destroyed because she decides to take a random detour. Sometimes she has her glasses on, because in the future, they’ve figured out intergalactic space travel and teleportation, but not optometry. And by the way, speaking of that “attack” on the ship — the big dramatic moment in the show — it gave us yet another insight into the IQ of the writer’s room. See if you notice anything odd about the dialogue in this scene: Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Yes, they’ve got a ton of injuries on the crew. Things are blowing up, and people are seriously hurt. Some senior officers have been impaled, in fact. But on the bright side, there are “no casualties.” Not to nitpick, but somehow, through the entire production of this show, none of the 15 executive producers, none of the 20 writers, none of the crew members, none of the actors, and none of the directors picked up on the fact that a seriously injured individual counts as a “casualty.” The show made it all the way through production without a single person noticing that the doctor of the ship doesn’t know what a “casualty” is. A few minutes earlier, when the attack began, there was another technical error. This one, admittedly, is a little harder to spot. But if you’re watching the video version of the podcast, see if you can identify it: Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy They say the incoming fire is coming from the port side of the ship. And then they cut to the CGI shot, where the fire is clearly coming from the starboard side. It’s obvious what happened here. The woman writing the show — who was probably hot and bothered by all of the fan-fiction she was writing about rescuing a multiracial criminal and turning him into a Starfleet officer — quickly looked up the definition of “port.” And she learned from ChatGPT, which also wrote most of the script for her, that “port” means “the left side of the ship when facing the front.” But for this definition to work, you have to understand that you’re facing the front of the ship, while facing in the same direction as the bow of the ship. So in this diagram, “port” is the red portion of the diagram. So in this CGI shot, the weapons are hitting the starboard section of the ship, not the port. In a show with any standards, they’d be embarrassed by this. The bridge crew on this ship is supposed to consist of professional, highly trained officers. But they don’t know the difference between port and starboard. Of course, the point of modern storytelling in Hollywood isn’t to create a realistic environment, or believable dialogue. Instead, they’re contractually obligated to shoehorn as much Leftist ideology as possible into the episode. And to that end, we’re introduced to a “jerk” character among the cadets, who of course is played by a white actor. So the villain and the jerk cadet are both white men. But to the extent that white people are portrayed positively in this show, they’re either salivating over criminals, or they’re lesbians delivering DEI struggle sessions. This is from Episode 2 — it’s a viral clip you may have seen already. Watch: Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy One thing you immediately notice when you watch these woke streaming shows is just how bad they look. Putting aside the atrocious ChatGPT dialogue and the wooden, lifeless acting. It just looks cheap, even though they spent more than 10 million dollars per episode. They had better sets, with more character, in the 1960s. From the looks of it, it appears that they shot the entire season of Starfleet Academy at a Chuck-e-Cheese. And hired the employees to be the lead actors in the show. The rest of Episode 2 isn’t much better. They have a telepathic species using sign language, for the first time in the show’s history, as a way to appeal to the deaf community.  Yes, in the future, telepaths — who by definition have an extremely advanced system of communication that’s beyond human comprehension — are also using sign language. They apparently retconned this, changing the way the whole species works, just for the sake of appealing to deaf people. Then they spend the rest of the episode telling us that walls are bad, and that Donald Trump is a bad man because he built a border wall. Again, parts of this show were definitely written a decade ago. Then, in a more modern touch, they also tell us that the multiracial criminal isn’t actually a bad guy, because he didn’t get “due process.”  You see, he’s just like Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Watch: Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy First of all, even if you commit a crime outside of a “jurisdiction,” you can still be considered a criminal in that jurisdiction. If a high school student commits some heinous crime in Tokyo, and somehow escapes to the United States, the United States will still definitely treat him like a criminal. We certainly wouldn’t let him into West Point, which is what’s basically happening in this show. We’d arrest him and put him on a flight to Japan. And for what it’s worth, the telepathic guy actually makes a great point in this scene. We’re supposed to think he’s obnoxious, but he’s absolutely correct. He points out that Starfleet’s standards must be pretty low, if they’re letting a criminal into their highly selective academy because a liberal white woman is attracted to him. And in response, the white liberal captain explains that, actually, they didn’t lower the standards at all. You see, in this Leftist fantasy, the multiracial criminal from a broken home has a 98th-percentile test score. That’s a revealing moment, in a few ways. The writers could’ve said, “Yeah, he had bad test scores, but he brings other skills to the table.” But they insisted on keeping the line about 98th percentile scores, so they can have a girlboss “gotcha” moment where she puts the racist white man (again, another nasty white man) in his place. And they included this line because, even in their fantasies, Leftists still recognize that objective standards are important. They just imagine that, since everyone is a blank slate, all of their preferred demographic groups are capable of meeting those standards — even though it’s not remotely true. Every streaming service, across virtually every show, in virtually every genre, is now full of shows like this. To give just one more example, there’s a new Agatha Christie adaptation on Netflix, where they introduce a black character (who wasn’t in the original novel) who lectures all of the white people about how Europeans destroyed Africa. It’s just a constant stream of propaganda, and all of it says the exact same thing.  Watch: Credit: Paramount+/Star Trek: Starfleet Academy They insert dialogue like this, where it obviously doesn’t belong or make any sense, into modern adaptations of classic works of literature. You’re trying to watch a mystery series based on a novel from the 1920s, and instead of getting that, you’re informed that white people caused all of Africa’s problems. And the person telling you this is a Cameroonian scientist, not a German like the original novel, for the simple reason that the writers felt compelled to deliver yet another lecture on colonialism. They really thought that would be compelling to watch. They’ve done this to Star Trek, they’ve done it to Agatha Christie, and they do it to everything else. Streaming services are full of this garbage — most of which is based on fabricated history, bad data and anti-white feminist propaganda. We put a lot of effort into my show, “Real History,” for exactly this reason. You can make a very strong case that, if more people understood history, then streaming services would have a lot less slop. That’s because, in all of these shows, the writers see themselves as “atoning” for past “injustices.” They believe it’s their role to bring about “equity” because of atrocities that never actually happened. And audiences, for the most part, don’t know any better. Particularly if you went to public schools, then no one ever told you the truth. But even if you don’t buy that theory, the fact remains that most new streaming shows are unwatchable. They treat you like you have a Somali-tier IQ, and they beat you over the head with Leftist messaging. “Real History” — which will continue monthly, with new episodes — is my effort to combat this trend and ultimately, to end it. Let’s hope there are many more similar efforts to come.

President Donald Trump promised that he would carry out a historic mass deportation campaign once he took office one year ago. Since then, federal authorities have deported more than 670,000 illegal immigrants. Additionally, roughly 1.9 million illegal immigrants have left the United States on their own. “On President Trump’s first day in office, he unleashed ICE to target the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens, including pedophiles, murderers, gang members, terrorists, and rapists,” Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement shared with The Daily Wire. “Today, we thank our law enforcement for a record-breaking first year of achievements including more than 670,000 removals and two million self-deportations. DHS is committed to continuing to remove dangerous illegal aliens from American communities. 70% of ICE arrests [are] of criminal illegal aliens who have been convicted or charged with a crime in the U.S. We will not rest until American communities are free of the scourge of illegal alien crime,” she added. The Department of Homeland Security shared the “worst” illegal immigrants nabbed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since Inauguration Day with The Daily Wire. Here are their rap sheets. ICE officers arrested Uzbek national Akhror Bozorov, who was wanted in his home country for belonging to a terrorist organization, on November 9 in Kansas while he was working as a commercial truck driver. They also nabbed Afghan national Jaan Shah Safi in Waynesboro, Virginia, in December after he provided support to the ISIS-K, while his father was found to be a commander of a militia group in Afghanistan. Safi entered the United States during former President Joe Biden’s “Operation Allies Welcome,” which brought over thousands of Afghans following the botched troop withdrawal. In April, ICE arrested Harpreet Singh, an illegal immigrant who was wanted in India for his ties to terrorist activities that included planning more than a dozen grenade attacks on police officials, according to DHS. Singh crossed the border illegally during the Biden administration and was swiftly admitted into the country. MS-13 leader Rene Escobar-Ochoa, who had an INTERPOL Red Notice from El Salvador for drug trafficking and conspiracy to commit murder, was arrested by ICE in July. The Trump administration has also targeted Tren de Aragua gangbangers, including Yorvis Michel Carrascal Campo, who was charged with murder, racketeering, and drug trafficking in New Mexico. ICE arrested the Venezuelan gang member in Colorado Springs on January 8. Campo allegedly took part in a brutal kidnapping, where gangbangers strangled the victim in a New Mexico apartment before they buried his body in the remote desert, according to the Department of Justice. ICE arrested the now-former superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools, Ian Andre Roberts, on September 26, after learning that he’s an illegal immigrant from Guyana with a deportation order, according to DHS. During the arrest, the officers found that he had an illegal handgun, a hunting knife, and nearly $3,000 in cash. Roberts arrived in the United States in 1994 as a tourist before he got a student visa in 1999, according to DHS. He was charged in 1996 with criminal possession of narcotics with intent to sell, criminal possession of narcotics, criminal possession of a forgery device, and possession of a forged instrument in New York. He faced charges for third-degree unauthorized use of a vehicle in Queens, New York, two years later, but the case was later dismissed. In 2012, Roberts was convicted of reckless driving, unsafe operation, and speeding in Maryland. He was charged in 2020 for second-degree criminal possession of a weapon (having a loaded firearm outside his home or business); third-degree criminal possession of a weapon (an ammunition feeding device); and a fourth-degree weapon offense, according to DHS. He was convicted of unlawful possession of a loaded firearm in Pennsylvania in 2022. Roberts was also denied a green card four different times. He was still given a work permit, which expired on December 18, 2020, three years before he took the role in Des Moines. Roberts was absent from his immigration hearing when a judge ordered his deportation. ICE also arrested Harneet Singh, 25, of India, in August after an 18-wheeler he was a passenger in made an illegal U-turn on a Florida turnpike, killing three people. His brother, Harjinder Singh, who was behind the wheel, now faces three counts of vehicular homicide. The crash sparked the Trump administration to crack down on states issuing commercial driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. The feds took Honduran MS-13 leader Gerson Emir Cuadra Soto off the streets in December after learning that he was wanted in his home country for a quadruple homicide. Soto crossed the border illegally after he bribed his way out of a jail in Honduras, where he was being held on firearms charges. ICE also took Honduran illegal immigrant Olvin Rodriguez-Inestroza off the streets after he had active warrants for 394 counts of pornography involving juveniles and two counts of sexual abuse of an animal, according to DHS. Agents arrested Aldrin Guerrero-Munoz in October after he was incarcerated for more than two decades for the intentional murder of his three-month-old son. While he was behind bars, Guerrero-Munoz was convicted of assaulting another inmate. Meanwhile, the Trump administration isn’t letting up and continues to carry out major immigration sweeps across the country. DHS recently deployed thousands of federal agents to Minnesota to push through anti-ICE agitators trying to obstruct arrest operations and continue to chip away at their list of thousands of targets roaming the sanctuary state.

Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife, second lady Usha Vance, are pregnant with the couple’s fourth child, the second lady announced on Tuesday. The Vances put out a statement announcing that they are expecting their fourth child, a boy, to be born in July. The baby boy will join his three older siblings Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel. “We’re very excited to share the news that Usha is pregnant with our fourth child, a boy. Usha and the baby are doing well, and we are all looking forward to welcoming him in late July,” the announcement posted to Usha Vance’s social media pages said. “During this exciting and hectic time, we are particularly grateful for the military doctors who take excellent care of our family and for the staff members who do so much to ensure that we can serve the country while enjoying a wonderful life with our children,” it continued. The vice president, 41, and his wife, 40, have been married since 2014. With the birth of their new son, the couple will have joined a small club of presidents and vice presidents to have had a child while in office. The couple received congratulations from across the administration after the announcement. “The most pro-family administration in history!” the official White House X account posted. “CONGRATULATIONS!” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard shared the news, saying, “Congratulations to our friends @JDVance and @SLOTUS on this wonderful news! Abraham and I are thrilled for you and your family.” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum wrote, “Congratulations, @VP and @SLOTUS! There is no greater joy than being a parent. Honored to work for an administration that puts family first!”

The following is an edited transcript from “The Michael Knowles Show.” * * * Michelle Obama went viral yesterday — on Martin Luther King Day of all days — for comments about shopping habits and race. The viral description making the rounds, however, reads, “Michelle Obama says she is mindful to try to avoid white-owned brands…” The question is whether what she actually said matches that description. Let’s find out. Watch: Michelle Obama says she is mindful to try to avoid white-owned brands and others also should be pic.twitter.com/5MqY5gaxUv — End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 19, 2026 Credit: @EndWokeness/X.com At a superficial glance, just hearing her words verbatim, you’d probably have to say the viral description isn’t entirely fair. Nowhere does she explicitly say “don’t shop at white-owned brands.” Nowhere does she say “shop at black-owned brands and not white-owned brands.” And in defense of Michelle Obama — and I don’t generally defend her — that’s not literally what she said. She said that if she sees a black-owned brand and she likes their stuff, she’ll choose that brand. But she stops herself. She doesn’t say, “and I won’t buy from anyone else.” She doesn’t say, “I only do it because it’s black-owned.” But here’s the problem: she injects race into the decision. She’s saying, “If I like their stuff, and if it’s black-owned, then I especially want to buy it.” And when she says, “If you have the money to buy Chanel, you have the money to buy everybody,” she very carefully stops short of finishing the sentence. She doesn’t say “black-owned brands.” She says “everybody.” What she’s doing is trying to privilege the black-owned brand while avoiding the explicit consequence of that choice. She wants to be a racial identitarian when it comes to the positive act of buying — of supporting a business — but she doesn’t want to be a racial identitarian when it comes to the negative act of not shopping somewhere else. She never says, “Don’t shop at white brands.” Instead, she says you need to shop at black brands, and everybody needs to shop at black brands — but maybe not less at white brands. It’s a kind of gobbledygook. And that’s why, ultimately, I think the viral description is basically fair, even if it’s not perfectly precise. It’s like the IQ bell curve meme. At one end, people say she told people not to shop at white stores. In the middle, it’s “she said to shop at black stores but also shop at white stores.” And at the other end, what she’s really saying is: shop less at white stores. Her minor premise is wrong. She says if you have the money to buy Chanel, you have the money to buy everybody. WATCH: The Michael Knowles Show That’s simply not true. Money is a finite resource. Just because you can afford one expensive brand doesn’t mean you have infinite money. And even if you did have infinite money, you have finite closet space. You have a finite number of dresses you’ll wear. A finite number of days in the week. Where are you going to wear all these clothes? This is the core problem with diversity ideology. If you privilege one thing, you necessarily disadvantage another.  This is exactly the problem with affirmative action. Everyone says, “Oh, it’s great, we should help out black people.” And yes, for the vast majority of Americans, that sounds good. Who doesn’t want to help? But affirmative action in practice means something very concrete. There are a finite number of spots at a university. A finite number of jobs. When you give an advantage to black people simply for being black, you are necessarily disadvantageous to someone else — often white people, or Asian people in the case of college admissions. There is discrimination happening. There is an injustice that comes with that, too. The same logic applies here. When you say, “I’m going to shop at the black brand,” you are necessarily saying that, at the margin — the last dress that fits in your closet — you are not going to shop at the white brand. You are choosing not to go into that shop, not because you dislike the dress, but because of the race of the person who owns it. That is discrimination on the basis of race. That’s what Michelle Obama is saying — without saying it. She doesn’t want to go all the way, but there is no other conclusion you can reach from her premises. This ties directly into why people don’t really talk about Martin Luther King Jr. the same way anymore. Part of it is that the modern Left rejects him because he was too conciliatory and too egalitarian. But the other reason is that the practical politics don’t match the rhetoric. Dr. King famously said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” And yet his successors say that in order to achieve that dream, we need affirmative action, DEI, and diversity ideology. Which, in practice, means judging people — especially white people — by the color of their skin. Taken to its extreme, it means not shopping at white-owned businesses. And even if you agree with MLK’s premise, you are completely undermining it with these practical consequences. So no, I don’t begrudge Michelle Obama for shopping at black-owned businesses. That’s fine. But if you’re going to say it, say it with your whole heart. Finish the sentence. Tell people explicitly: shop at black businesses. Don’t shop at white businesses. Define what counts as ownership — 50% plus one ownership? Board seats? Stakeholders? I don’t know. But say it clearly. And if you’re not willing to say that, then just buy the dress you like.