Ep. 56 - Happy Trump-aversary: 365 Days Of Covfefe
Happy Trump-aversary! Precisely one year ago, the Good Lord blessed us with a Noahide deluge of leftist tears. We’ll look back on 365 days of covfefe. Then, after Ed Gillespie lost two nights ago and Senate candidate Roy Moore has been accused of dalliances with teen girls decades ago, Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson joins us in-studio to run the numbers for 2018. Then, Roaming Millennial comes on the Panel of Deplorables to talk Kevin Spacey Stalinist purge and why Facebook wants you to send them naked pics. And finally, the Mailbag!
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Precisely one year ago, the good Lord blessed us with a Noahide deluge of leftist tears.
We will look back on 365 days of covfefe.
Then, we will also talk about how Ed Gillespie lost two nights ago.
And Senate candidate Roy Moore has been accused of dalliances with teenage girls decades ago.
Not good.
Very bad.
Republican pollster Kristen Soltis-Anderson joins us in studio to run the numbers for 2018.
Amber Athie and Roman Millennial come on the panel of deplorables to talk Kevin Spacey's Stalinist purge and why Facebook wants you to send them naked pics.
Why wouldn't they?
Finally, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Happy Trump-aversary, everyone.
Now, before we get into all the good news, and then Kristen is going to tell us all the bad news, we have to celebrate some capitalism, because consumer confidence is at an all-time high, the economy is doing really well, but in particular, our economy is doing very well because we have another sponsor.
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We're going to be talking about millennials later in the show.
I am a millennial.
That means two things.
I need instant gratification and I don't want to pay very much for it.
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Enter Covfefe.
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Okay, now it is...
The Trumpiversary, everyone.
Happy day.
365 days of covfefe is what we're talking about.
How has he been doing?
If you look at the Democrat press releases or the mainstream media reporting, but I repeat myself, then the country is in smoldering ruins.
If you look at reality, not so much.
Here is the real story.
On the economic front, consumer confidence is at the highest level it's been in 17 years.
Over half a million jobs have been created in the first three months in office.
Furthermore, stock market rally has rallied since Trump, and it is the second biggest one since JFK was in office.
Those destructive tariffs and trade wars that conservatives feared have not materialized.
Tax reform awaits a congressional vote.
So, Congress Republicans, go and vote for it.
On corruption, Trump imposed a five-year ban on lobbying the government by former White House officials and a lifetime ban on lobbying for foreign governments by former White House officials.
On the so-called social issues, Trump repealed the Obama mandate that forced states to fund Planned Parenthood.
He reinstated the Mexico City policy that protects U.S. taxpayers from having to fund abortions overseas.
Unlike his predecessor, Trump has refrained from Refashioning the White House into a giant glowing rainbow to celebrate activist judges' abuse of the Constitution.
Instead, quite the opposite of that, he's appointed Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, a marvelous originalist justice considered the second coming of Antonin Scalia, Scalia's old fishing buddy, albeit slightly thinner and less Italian.
He's also appointed 12 other textualist judges to the lower courts and many others who await confirmation.
How about immigration?
On immigration, President Trump has added more ICE agents, he has expanded deportation priorities, he ended the immigrant advocacy program at the DOJ, signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to defund sanctuary cities, and as a result, the number of illegals crossing into the United States has dropped by at least 70%.
On foreign policy, where we were promised that Donald Trump would recklessly plunge us into nuclear war, what has really happened?
Well, he got some trade concessions out of China.
He's convinced them to cooperate in wrangling North Korea.
He very ably handled the Syrian chemical attack, which was a test of American credibility and resolve, and specifically a test that Barack Obama failed with his red line that was a pink line and then it was an invisible line.
He also oversaw the return of American high school student Otto Warmbier from North Korea, which has added to the tension in that conflict, but he did get the student home before he died.
He dropped the Moab on ISIS, over which Syria just today declared victory.
Victory over ISIS. He has approved the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines.
Barack Obama's North Korea strategy of strategic patience is over.
Barack Obama's Middle East strategy of leaning from behind, it's over.
Donald Trump also pulled us out of the pointless virtue-signaling Paris Climate Accord that experts say would have no effect on the climate.
Speaking of the environment, at the EPA, 25 rules have been overturned.
19 rollbacks are in progress, 8 are in limbo.
$23 billion of regulations were slashed within the first six months of that presidency, while a net 13,000 new federal regulations have been added annually for the past 20 years.
Under Donald Trump, the number of net new regulations is near.
Zero.
As the New York Times reported in May, quote, Trump discards Obama legacy one rule at a time.
This includes ending Barack Obama's disastrous so-called clean power plan, which, as the Heritage Foundation explains, would have resulted in higher energy prices, fewer jobs, less growth, and it disproportionately hurt poor families, and it would have affected, you guessed it, zero environmental benefit.
Most importantly, Donald Trump has cracked the patina of credibility that Democrat operatives masquerading as journalists once enjoyed and sophisticated Republicans, those very nice Republicans with nice glasses like I have, that they once indulged.
As a result, nearly two-thirds of Americans now recognize that mainstream media outlets shill for Democrats rather than present unbiased reporting.
And Hollywood lies in rubble as the preening moralizers who hold their countrymen in contempt are caught, literally, with their pants down.
All in all, an unexpectedly very covfefe year.
And if you've enjoyed all of these improvements, the protection of your First and Second Amendments from the clause of Hillary Clinton's Supreme Court pick, less government, more freedom, and strength abroad, thank a Trump voter.
I would also be remiss not to point out another anniversary.
Tomorrow is the Marine Corps birthday from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.
The Marines have been keeping us safe for 242 years.
So thank you very much and happy birthday.
Now in the news, Ed Gillespie lost in Virginia last night.
The Alabama GOP nominee Roy Moore has just been accused of trying to pick up teenage girls 40 years ago.
Not good.
And we are joined by pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson for analysis on what the numbers look like for Republicans in 2018.
Kristen, I have just been so exuberant.
I've been so happy.
It's been a very covfefe year.
Make me feel terrible.
What is it looking like in 2018?
Oh, but I'm normally a cheerful person.
But if you are on the right side of the aisle, there's a lot of data that suggests the next 12 months could be kind of ugly.
That's not good.
Look, Republicans have been feeling good because many of these special elections since Trump has become president have broken our way, whether it's John Ossoff losing in Georgia and on and on.
So Republicans had been feeling pretty good about things.
But the big test came On Tuesday night.
And in Virginia, you had in Ed Gillespie, a candidate who was trying to split the difference between being a fairly mild-mannered, nice, you know, cheerful guy.
Been in D.C. forever.
nice guy trying to, as much as possible, kind of embrace a Trump message, a tough message on things like immigration, talking about law and order issues.
You've got MS-13 that there are, you know, over 1,000 MS-13 members in Northern Virginia sort of talking about those issues.
And I think in part because he barely won the primary.
He was primaried by a man named Corey Stewart, who made a big issue out of keeping Confederate statues up.
Now, in the exit polls in Virginia, a majority of Virginia voters who turned out said they do actually want to keep those Confederate statues up.
But nonetheless, that was not their main voting issue.
And so Ed Gillespie lost.
He lost by more than what the polls suggested.
It was a big loss.
It was a big loss, and now there's the question of, does this have national implications?
Now, I'm always hesitant to say, yes, it does have national implications, because whether it was that Georgia special election or a statewide in Virginia, there are local dynamics, there are individual candidates and their personalities.
But I think the thing that should have folks worried is that Ed Gillespie's numbers looked pretty similar to what Donald Trump's numbers looked like, especially in some of those bellwether swing counties.
Now, in a state that Trump won, that may be fine.
That may be perfectly enough to win.
But Virginia was not a state that Trump won.
And so I think for Republicans that are in places that Donald Trump didn't win, they're going to be facing a really big challenge for those midterm elections.
Well, that's the question.
A lot of people, myself sort of included, but I'll at least acknowledge that I'm doing it out of my defense of the Republican Party and Donald Trump.
They'll say, well, Virginia is a blue state these days.
It's been going blue for a long time.
And there was a statistic going around that in the last five presidential administrations, the president lost Virginia and New Jersey governorships in the first year in office.
I don't know how someone figured that out, but that's an interesting statistic.
Can we just write it off and say, well, it's a blue state, Gillespie's not a great candidate, he's a fine candidate, and being pretty good doesn't get you over the finish line?
Or should we be worried that we're going to lose the house or something like that?
So I think you should not think, oh, well, this is just a blue state going blue because of the magnitude of the loss.
If Ed Gillespie loses by two or three points, hey, it's a blue state, it happens, you tried your best.
But it's the way in which he lost.
Ed Gillespie actually did great in places like Southwest Virginia, places that Donald Trump did very well in.
Ed Gillespie's numbers were up dramatically, up dramatically from when he was on a Virginia ballot three years ago.
So there is a Trump coalition.
There are voters that have embraced Ed Gillespie more now that he's gotten closer to a message that's Trump-like.
But it's in northern Virginia and even in the suburbs around Richmond.
So not just that beltway, you know, these are all folks that work for the government.
This is further south in Virginia, but nonetheless it's more upscale suburbs.
These are the types of places where Gillespie just got annihilated.
And that's where a lot of these swing districts are across the country.
If Republicans are struggling in middle to upper middle class suburbs around metropolitan areas, that makes the math for the midterms very tough.
I come from one of the most debated, contested congressional districts in the country, New York 18 in the Hudson Valley, and they don't like Donald Trump there very much.
Very hard to run on him.
They're a Republican sort that wears these glasses and this kind of jacket and they work at hedge funds and things like that.
Now, you wrote a book called The Selfie Vote, Where Millennials Are Leading Americans and How Republicans Can Keep Up.
I have a question.
Where are millennials leading us and how can we keep up?
So where millennials, I think, are leading America is by embracing a lot of changes that have other folks from other generations feeling anxious.
So whether it's cultural change with millennials having sort of more progressive views on things like what is the definition of a family, things like smoking pot, whether it's economics with millennials, I think, being much more open to Communism.
Well, okay.
I mean, there is data that suggests that a lot of millennials don't actually really know what the term socialism means.
They think of Denmark.
They think, well, that's fine.
Maybe we could have that here.
Technological change, things that older generations sort of balk at or think.
Why would we want to change X, Y, or Z? Millennials were very comfortable with it.
They don't go to church, right?
They don't.
They're just as likely to do things like pray daily, but they're more likely to say, I'm not religious, I'm spiritual, that sort of thing.
Oh my gosh, that is the worst.
So there are a variety of things where millennials are just abandoning institutions that their parents' or grandparents' generation had embraced.
Mm-hmm.
And so that creates a tension when Republicans tend to do really well among voters who are married, who go to church, who are white, who live in areas that are not as dense population-wise, and you see that millennials are living in areas that are denser and more walkable, and they're structuring their families in different ways, and they're not going to church, and it's a very diverse generation.
All of these demographic things come together to make it really hard for Republicans to have a message to the millennial generation Without embracing diversity, without embracing different family structures, things like that.
So it's created this tension, and in the book I try to give Republicans a way forward that tries to preserve conservative principles.
I don't think the answer is Republicans should just become Democrats.
Democrat-lite or something.
Because young voters don't love the Democratic Party either.
Republicans have in some ways been given a stay of execution all along, because while young voters liked Obama, they're not fans of the Democratic Party.
But so what are things that conservatives can do that are completely in line with our principles that match up with some of those values?
How can we use technology to make government run more efficiently, make it smaller, make it do the few things that it's supposed to do really well so it can stop trying to do all of the other things it shouldn't be doing?
Stuff like that.
And I think that there are a lot of opportunities that Republicans have missed over the years that it just frustrates me.
Because now we have the oldest millennials are in their mid-30s.
It's too late to win them back.
The data that scares me nowadays is not seeing Republicans lose voters 18 to 29, because Republicans have been losing that age group for a decade or more.
It's now that we're losing voters in their 30s, those millennials are getting older.
Some of them are getting married.
They're buying homes, they're paying taxes, but they're not becoming Republicans.
And that should really concern the right.
Well, what you said reminds me of the title of your book, The Selfie Generation, because you hear this all the time.
People say, well, I'm spiritual, but not religious, which to me means I don't care what God wants, but I'm very interested in myself.
So I do like the idea of me, you know.
And that is depressing, but obviously there's a certain narcissism that typifies the generation.
You might notice that I talk into a camera for a living every day of the week.
The group that gives me hope is the next generation, Gen Z. From some of the studies that come out from them, it seems they go to church more, they're a little bit more conservative.
Is there cause for hope?
I think there are some areas where you find Gen Z folks embracing things like tough views on immigration, being further to the right than their millennial older brothers and sisters are.
We shouldn't just let everyone come in and blow up our cities or something.
Well, there are a handful of views where Republican teenagers have pretty conservative views.
There are issues, however, like gender identity, climate change, where they trend even more progressive than their millennial older brothers and sisters.
But I think for Gen Z, their views have not been cemented.
For the millennials...
We either came of age right before or during the Obama presidency, and so for a whole variety of reasons, that has started to cement their views as being a little further to the left.
But for Gen Z, that stuff is much, it's malleable.
If you think of it like cement, when you first pour concrete, it's malleable.
You can still write things in it.
I think that's where Gen Z is now.
And if Republicans and conservatives make an effort to actually say, here's why markets are good.
Here's why our values are good.
Those are arguments that were never made to millennials.
Yeah.
But there's still time.
But what about that immigration argument?
If they're to the right on immigration, if they're to the right of what most Republicans were on immigration even 10 years ago, does that mean that we need to eschew Donald Trump and say, this isn't what conservatism is?
Or do we have to take a little bit of the Trump movement and the Trump election and say, yeah, maybe we should speak more Bluntly about issues of legal and illegal immigration, national security, even possibly tax regimes and free trade.
Well, I think the other thing you have to keep in mind, though, is the diversity of these generations.
So if you look at the baby boomer generation, I think three out of four are white non-Hispanic.
And as you get further and further down into the generations, for millennials, I think we're about 56 percent white non-Hispanic.
For Gen Z, it's about half.
So the increasing diversity of America is showing up most prominently in these younger generations.
So the question is, how do you have a message that says it's important to have a secure border?
And it shouldn't be considered wrong to say that.
That doesn't sound like we want America where everybody looks.
You've got to find a way to have the argument for your policy that does not sound like you don't want America's changing diversity to happen.
That's a hard argument for me to make because these days, you know, I guess I'd be okay in that America.
But during the heat of the summer, I would be booted right across.
I get very swarthy.
That Sicilian skin starts glowing out.
Okay.
Kristen, thank you so much for being here.
I really appreciate it.
Kristen Soltis-Anderson.
And check out the book, The Selfie Vote, where millennials are leading America and how Republicans can keep up.
And we better keep up because we need to win elections and keep the kefefe coming.
Thank you, Kristen.
Thank you.
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Okay, so in the news right now, I want to welcome the panel, by the way, Roaming Millennial.
Thank you for being here.
Joe, just roaming.
We lost Amber.
This is like our second date now.
And by the way, good timing on the news cycle, because I think both of these stories are about sex.
That's not good.
I'm going to get Harvey Weinstein for that.
The first one is Kevin Spacey.
They are editing Kevin Spacey out of all the money in the world.
Here is Kevin Spacey for a reaction.
Any pugilist worth his salt knows when someone's on the ropes, that's when you throw a combination to the gut and a left hook to the jaw.
Even Achilles was only as strong as his heel.
Every kitten grows up to be a cat.
They seem so harmless at first, small, quiet, lapping up their saucer of milk.
But once their claws get long enough, they draw blood, sometimes from the hand that feeds them.
That last one is too real.
We should not have played that one.
Roaming, is this a Stalinist purge of Spacey, or is it just capitalism at work?
You know what?
I was actually wondering that exactly about Stalin as well.
When I heard about, I think it's Ridley Scott, the director, who's editing Spacey out of his movie.
And you know what?
Okay, to be honest, I actually really like Kevin Spacey as an actor.
I really enjoy his performance in House of Cards.
Me too.
I think he's really good in almost anything he's in.
But this does make sense.
I mean, if you have this huge movie, I think the budget was about $40 million I read.
You have this huge movie that's going to be promoted and is going to be launching.
At the same time, one of the main actors is embroiled in this awful sex scandal harassment allegation thing.
It does make sense to try to distance yourself from it.
Now, he's going a step further.
Not only are they excluding Kevin Spacey from the promotional events, they're actually just editing him out entirely.
And apparently this wasn't the studio's choice.
This was the director's choice specifically.
And I think it is smart for business, even if it means they're going to have to spend some money, invest a little bit more up front to do some reshoots.
But I think it also sends a more positive message from what we're used to seeing in Hollywood.
I mean, if we look at people like Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, even Chris Brown from the music side, we're so used to Hollywood kind of turning a blind eye when these allegations are made against people and just kind of acting like it never happened.
But at least I think maybe now because there's so much attention around the issue, we're actually seeing people face consequences from it.
And I do want to say that I think this is different than just one person making an allegation against someone that being unsubstantiated with Kevin Spacey and people like Harvey Weinstein were actually seeing like documented instances many, many years.
And I don't see what immediate gain a lot of these people would have from launching these allegations, which again, you know, I'm for innocent until proven guilty.
But this is something where we have to kind of look at everything contextually to figure out what actually is happening.
And when you're talking about a 40 million dollar film, which when you factor in promotion it could be 70 million dollars, something like that.
The thing that's really crazy about this is for people who've never been on a film set or been in the film industry, There is seven weeks right now.
There's seven weeks until the release of this movie.
They've recast.
They want to reshoot.
They want to re-edit this movie.
That is insane.
I don't know that it's possible.
I did an indie movie last year.
It just started screening next week.
For big studio films, it could take at least seven months, a year.
To do this in seven weeks, I'm skeptical that they'll do it.
But clearly, they're worried about the money they're risking.
So I get their capitalist point of view.
They don't want to lose all that money.
Nobody goes to the movies now anyway.
From the viewer, though, from the person who is enjoying the artwork or reading the book or seeing the movie, should we punish artists for their personal lives?
That's something that I've thought about as well.
And to me, you know, there's a difference between saying, oh, you know, Lady Gaga, she supported Hillary, Katy Perry, she also supported Hillary, but I can still enjoy their music.
There's a difference between saying, I'm going to let this artist have whatever political views they want, you know, and accept that they're not going to agree with me on everything.
They might even say some kooky stuff.
That's fine.
There's a difference between that and saying, I'm going to continue to financially supporting someone who is a known sexual predator.
Mm-hmm.
I do think it makes sense to make that distinction.
And I'm not someone who's going to boycott someone just because they have different political views than I do or just because they have, like, a personal lifestyle that maybe I don't agree with.
But now we're talking about, like, actual crimes that are being alleged against him.
And I think that is something we need to differentiate between, like, oh, you know, they're just, I just don't like their opinions, therefore I'm going to boycott them.
Like, no, that's not what we're talking about.
That's true.
And I guess if we're not going to financially support those predators, I guess, Marshall, today will be your last day.
There is a...
I know, it's sad, but Roaming made the decision.
There's this book that Andrew Klavan and I were reading a few months ago called Darkness at Noon.
I forget the name of the writer.
He's an ex-communist, wrote a book about...
It's a novel about communists, basically, in a Stalinist purge.
And it's interesting on a sort of meta-literary level because the author of that book, I believe he was accused of rape.
He was apparently just a dirty, rotten, horrible guy.
And yet, the artwork that he produced is very good, and I'm glad that I read the book.
So that is a difficult balance.
I personally don't really care how awful the artists are.
I think the art stands on its own.
But fair enough.
I guess while Marshall's still here, we shouldn't keep filing his paycheck.
Speaking of sex, Facebook wants you to send them nude photos over the Internet.
So that they can prevent your nude photos from going on the internet.
Not sure if you saw that story.
This was a statement from Facebook, quote, And obviously I am...
Furious, that I didn't think of this first, the Michael Knowles Show anti-nude photo, nude photo collection program.
It's a stroke of genius.
Doesn't happen to everybody.
Only those geniuses like Mark Zuckerberg can think of it.
To take their point seriously, revenge porn is a serious issue.
It is a terrible thing that happens.
Will people, will girls who send naked photos, will they use this program because they trust Facebook more than their ex-boyfriends?
I think a lot of people will actually use this program.
I don't actually use Facebook.
Smart girl.
I had a Facebook account in, I think, ninth grade.
I deactivated it.
Tried to make a new one when my channel was starting.
Everything was different and confused me.
Got frustrated and gave up immediately.
So I'm still not on Facebook.
But a lot of people do really trust Facebook.
And I think for...
I mean, we've seen this happen to celebrities all the time.
Even, I mean...
This happens very commonly to, I think, high school and college students especially.
I wish it wasn't a thing that, you know, exes would feel the need to be, I guess, vengeful and to try to hurt people.
It's a bad situation and it's weird that this is now a thing in our society.
I'm not someone who would think like, oh yeah, I better just upload my nude photos to Facebook so that the nude photos I've sent to other people Can somehow be edited out of the internet.
I'm hoping that's just never a situation I will find myself in where that thought logic makes sense.
But I think a lot of people will actually do this if they are concerned, which I can see a lot of people, unfortunately, nowadays being concerned about.
What I wonder is if my personal profile is already a very tasteless nude photo, will they just automatically use that when people upload revenge porn?
I don't know.
You bring up that question, though.
Why on earth?
In this age of hacking and of scummy boyfriends and of Big Brother technology, why on earth would a girl send her boyfriend or some other guy a nude photo?
Not that I'm complaining per se, but that seems like the most foolish thing in the world.
I mean, pretty much all of our devices are synced with the cloud or something, some sort of thing that keeps not only a copy of the photo on your hard drive, but also an electronic copy in your account.
It doesn't seem like a very good idea to me, but I know with a lot of the celebrities that this happened to is because they were involved in long-distance relationships.
Still not a very safe and secure thing.
We can talk about...
How it's not the best move to make.
But I mean, a lot of the stories I've seen have it's happened to high school students who are not making good decisions in the first place.
And I think really the emphasis of the blame should be on the person who either hacked it or leaked it.
I think it's a huge invasion of privacy to the person that happens to.
My advice to everyone is to do what I do.
I do Polaroid and then FedEx overnight.
It's more expensive, but it's much safer.
That's the smartest way.
That's the way to do it.
Whatever happened to tasteless oil paintings?
What happened to those?
There's this really great artist on Twitter, and she keeps painting these paintings from my photos.
So I tweeted something like, paint me like one of your French girls, but I think that was too far.
Nobody on Twitter wants anything to do with that.
Alas, alas, alas.
Romy, thank you for being here.
We have to move on to the mailbag.
Always great to see you.
Thanks so much for having me.
I will see you soon.
Now it is time for the mailbag.
From Pete.
I am slash was a lapsed Catholic that has attempted to return to the sacraments upon learning that my wife is pregnant.
Yet, I can't help but feel dishonest with myself as I still am heavily lacking in faith.
I've been agnostic pretty much since my confirmation.
I was too.
And nearly chose Thomas as my confirmation name for that reason.
That's exactly why I did exactly that.
I want to return to the faith so my child has the same chance at it that I have had.
But I can't manage having faith myself.
What advice can you give this heretic and to any others out there?
I don't doubt your heresy.
I don't mean to question your apostasy.
But even asking that question, even having that impulse when you think about your future child and your pregnant wife, to me is evidence of the kernels of faith.
I don't think you'd ask that question if you didn't have it.
This is a difficult question.
Andrew Klavan did a great video now eight years ago at PJ Media called How to Find God in 60 Days because he was an atheist and he Is now a Christian.
Wrote a great book about that called The Great Good Thing.
And his advice is to just pretend like God exists for 60 days.
Pray to Him.
Behave like it's all true.
Try to follow God's will.
And then you will.
And then you'll believe in Him.
I was basically an agnostic atheist type from my confirmation to my I don't know, 21 years old, 22 years old.
And I was then intellectually convinced that God exists by some of the arguments for God.
Saint Anselm and Thomas Aquinas and the ontological and the cosmological.
And so I was perfectly intellectually convinced that God exists.
I don't think there's really any good argument against God, and there are many good arguments for the existence of God.
But I couldn't bring myself to faith.
I couldn't bring myself to praying, to a person, to a man.
And that came later.
I don't know how it happened.
I read more.
I followed that intellectual journey until the numinous experience, the religious experience, happened.
I would recommend behaving as though it is true because we'll get to this a little later.
Another question touches on this.
Because there are so many forces in the society telling you that if you believe in God, or specifically in the Catholic Church, the most maligned of any of those institutions, if you believe in God and that version of Christianity, then you're stupid, you're ignorant, you're uneducated, you engage in wishful thinking, you are afraid of the dark and afraid of death, and you don't understand evolutionary psychology and blah blah blah blah blah, all nonsense.
As Antonin Scalia said to New York Magazine once, many more intelligent people than you or I have believed in the devil.
And it seems to me that the weight of intellect, the weight of history and philosophy and theology is with Christianity and with, specifically, I'm a Catholic.
So I would say don't be discouraged by what the culture is telling you because, you know, it's right there in the book, pal.
The culture is going to try to tell you that none of it's true and that you'd be a dummy for believing it.
So good luck and congratulations on your child.
I hope all goes well.
From Joseph, which of the seven deadly sins do you think is the most prevalent in modern society?
Yes, all of them.
I guess they've always all been around.
The most prevalent seems to me, pride.
Seems to me, superbia, pride or hubris.
We were just talking to Kristen who wrote about the selfie generation.
The trouble with that one, it's the most prevalent.
Obviously, we're all taking selfies all the time and I'm speaking into a camera for hours at a clip.
And, you know, there isn't a lot of real friendship or real conversation that occurs, but also it's where all of the other vices and sins come from.
So, you know, there is lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy.
But they all come from pride and it's a pride that I was just discussing with that previous question.
It's a pride that God doesn't exist.
I'm the greatest thing there is out there.
It's a pride that I can do whatever I want.
I'm not transcending any moral order.
It's a pride that I can have sex with whomever I want and Relationships be damned and people who love me be damned.
It's a pride that I can take whatever I want from someone else.
And it doesn't really matter because there's no judge and there's no judgment and there's no good and there's no bad, but thinking makes it so.
On and on and on.
It's a pride even in sloth.
It's a pride that, well, it all doesn't matter.
We're born in a random chance and we're all going to turn to worm food, so who cares if I get up and do my job today or get up and do any work or be productive?
It infects everything.
So I'd be wary of that.
You know, pride is an occupational hazard, if not a prerequisite, of show business and politics.
So we all have to be careful of that.
But that's the one that the devil likes best.
From James.
Dear blank book millionaire, I wish.
But, you know, still pretty good.
I'm not complaining.
Australia is still having its same-sex marriage debate, and I am voting no to changing the legal definition of marriage.
It is my view that voting yes would be ignorant of the history of marriage between a man and a woman and ignorant of the fact that it is an institution of forwarding procreation.
Makes sense to me, pal.
Does this position of not wanting to give same-sex couples the legal recognition of marriage conflict with a libertarian view of government?
No, it doesn't.
People say this a lot, libertarians who have a very myopic view of politics, but I suppose that's an occupational hazard of libertarianism.
It isn't at all.
It isn't a matter of...
It isn't a matter of the government.
The left has done a great job at framing the issue of redefining marriage as one of rights.
This person has this right to marry a person that he loves, but this person doesn't have this right to marry a person that he loves.
But that's not where the debate starts.
It isn't about the rights.
A premise of both of those questions is that marriage has a meaning that allows for a same-sex monogamous union, but the question we have to debate is what is marriage?
And furthermore, what are men and what are women?
If men and women are basically the same and there aren't really any differences between them, then the left's argument on same-sex marriage makes perfect sense.
If men and women are different, if they're complementary rather than indiscernible from one another, then that opens up a big question.
Now, there is a reason that for all of history marriage has been between a man and at least women, if not just one woman.
For most of our history it's been between a man and one woman.
But we also can look at marriage in today's day and age.
What does it mean?
What do men mean?
What do women mean?
What is the purpose of procreation?
Is it to bring a child into the world?
Or is it so that the child can make us feel good about ourselves?
And the arguments against redefining marriage seem to me We should engage in that debate on a much more serious
and sophisticated Which is, what is marriage, what are men, and how do we deal with a society in which traditional marriage has broken down entirely, and so why not admit monogamous, same-sex couples who might raise children better, who might live a much more productive life?
That's where the debate should be.
It shouldn't be on some frivolous matter of rights.
From Gregory.
Hello, Mr.
Knowles.
Please note, my name is Jopert.
I just called you Gregory.
It may show my dad's name above, but that is false.
Well, I don't want to spread falsehood.
I am a Catholic and a junior in a liberal high school.
In AP Physics, we're building egg drop devices.
In my group, I suggested the idea of just gluing a small cross on the egg and dropping it unprotected.
This, of course, was a joke, but more recently I've been wondering what, in fact, would happen if I did this, if I dropped an egg with just the cross.
If, with complete faith, for the purpose of converting the class, I dropped the egg with only a cross, what would occur?
I know that all things are possible through Christ, but I can't grapple with the idea that the egg would drop and not break in Christ's joper.
Yeah, good, man, because in The Last Temptation of Christ, I'll just read you the passage.
when the Antichrist takes Christ down to the wilderness.
And he brought him to Jerusalem and set him on a pinnacle of the temple and said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence.
For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee to keep thee, and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.
But what did Jesus say?
Jesus answering said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.
It is not up to you to show off God like a magic trick that you have power over.
You don't have power over him.
Only by grace are you saved by the grace of Jesus.
So if even Jesus would not drop himself down to test God, and he is God, I don't think you should either, because that egg is going to end up everywhere.
From Brandon.
Dear Michael, I am the son of a Cuban immigrant and am currently attending a university where I have often heard a romanticized view of the state of Cuba perpetuated by students and faculty alike.
Oh, you mean anywhere in America?
Yeah, that's probably where you were.
This infuriates me because so many of my family members who are still in Cuba tell us of the plight in which the Cuban people truly live.
How would you recommend I deal with these situations when they arise?
Do I attempt to reeducate these Bernie-loving ignoramuses or just ignore them entirely?
Thanks, Brandon.
Good question.
I noticed this too when I went down to Cuba.
I noticed that people don't wear Che Guevara shirts down there like all of the idiot white liberals wear in America who are completely ignorant of that slave island.
What you should do is give your testimony, just as you have.
This might be the one place that I'll abide the idea of white privilege, but it is a white privilege.
It's at least an American privilege that we live in such luxury and freedom that we can become very lofty in our minds and say, well, who cares if communism doesn't work in practice?
Does it work in theory?
Yeah, I know those Cuban people have been slaves for half of a century, and they've been killed and tortured and starved to death, but you know, you know, look, it's obviously for a good purpose.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, guys.
So I would engage with it all the time.
You have a unique perspective and voice, and people should hear from the horse's mouth what that horrific ideology and that horrific regime are really like.
From Jordan.
Hey, Knowles.
My name is Jordan.
Since out of you, Ben and Andrew, I hear you're popular with the ladies...
Who'd you hear that from?
P.S. Heard that from Andrew.
Okay, fair enough.
It's not true.
Yeah, totally fake news.
It's because I went to college with Drew's son, Spencer, and maybe he's telling tales out of school.
I'm a cashier and I work with a girl named Samantha.
To be honest, she's way out of my league and more mature than me.
Come on, give yourself a little credit, man.
We're about the same age.
Sometimes we make eye contact and maybe I'll get a smile from her without doing anything.
I'm not really experienced with asking a girl out.
I'm afraid of rejection like most.
What's the best way to get your foot through the door and stay out of the dreaded friend zone?
Also love to hear some inspiring love experiences you may have had that can help.
And I'm not giving you any of those, man.
That's going to be for my sequel romance novel to the blank book.
Thank you, Michael Knowles, a.k.a.
Love Doctor.
Marshall, I want you to only call me that from now on.
No, that's not a thing.
Dr.
Love, baby.
So I've gotten this question a few times, and so I'll give some variation on that because I don't know that I've given a complete answer on young men trying to find love in a swipe-right culture.
I have had a girlfriend for longer than Tinder existed, so I'm really unfamiliar with that.
But the best advice I'll give you, which everyone...
I've seen a ton of really ugly dudes have beautiful girlfriends and wives because they are confident.
Henry Kissinger, I believe, said that power is the greatest aphrodisiac.
So be confident.
Be confident in yourself.
It isn't the end of the world if this girl doesn't go out with you, but it would be fun to go out with you.
So, you know, make it playful.
Make it a fun thing.
If it becomes a creepy or desperate thing, then she's not going to want to do it.
You wouldn't want to do it either.
It also helps in conversation if you like women.
It helps if you actually like these people and you're not just trying to get in their pants or something.
It's true in conversation generally.
If you have a conversation with someone, And you are interested in what they're saying.
It will be a better conversation and you both will enjoy it more and you might even get something out of it.
You might learn something or be entertained or what have you.
If you're not, if it's just a technique like you read one of those pickup books and you say, hey honey, and you look like Mike the Situation from the Jersey Shore, then you're going to be a slick creep and she won't want to go out with you.
Just be confident, be interested in her, and keep it fun.
The purpose of dating is that it's very, very fun.
And ultimately, it leads to things that are probably less fun and more duty-bound, like marriage and raising children and, you know, being a pillar of society.
But the early part, the dating is extremely fun, so don't let it get you down.
I had a teacher in high school who, he was a biology teacher, and he would say, don't think of this, oh no, I'm sorry, this was my history teacher, a great history teacher, and he would say, don't think of this test as an opportunity to be penalized, as an opportunity to fail out of class or something.
A test, an exam, is an opportunity to get points.
And so, that same thing with asking a girl out.
It's an opportunity to go on a fun date and, you know, see what happens from there.
But it isn't something to dread or feel nervous about or rejection.
And if you get rejected, so what?
You know, that just goes with the territory.
And you try again next time.
I hope that helps.
From the Doctor of Love.
We've got to rename the show.
That's real good.
I am Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show, the Doctor of Love.
And we...
We will be back.
This is the end for this week.
You can survive the Clavenless weekend by listening to Another Kingdom.
Andrew Claven's Another Kingdom.
It is the tale of a 30-year-old Hollywood schlub who walks through a portal into another world with monsters and ogres and a dead bloody woman at his feet and a dagger in his hand.
It's got like 500 plus reviews on iTunes.
People seem to really like it for some reason or another.
So please go if you subscribe and leave a review.
That will really help us out.
And I think you'll enjoy it as well as Hollywood lies in ruins.
Then tune in for the conversation next Tuesday, but I'll see you Monday first.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
See you next week.
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Marshall Benson.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
And our associate producer is Bailey Lynn.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
