Should President Trump overturn a stupid Obama-era rule banning big game hunters from keeping trophies like elephant tusks? As someone with years of experience seeing pink elephants, Michael explains. Then, Paul Bois and comedian Owen Benjamin join the Panel of Deplorables to talk lascivious leftists at the New York Times, red tape destruction at the EPA, and President Covfefe’s latest poetry.
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Should President Trump overturn a stupid Obama-era rule banning big-game hunters from keeping trophies like elephant tusks?
As someone with years of experience seeing pink elephants, I will explain why we need to kill the animals or else they'll die.
Then, Owen Benjamin and Paul Bois join the panel of deplorables to talk lascivious leftists at the New York Times and President Covfefe's latest poetry.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Oh, we've got a lot to talk about.
People are really misunderstanding this Trump-era rule on big game trophies.
There is just more sex, sex, sex.
That's all that's in the news cycle now.
And shock, you'll be surprised.
It's all Democrats committing all the crimes.
But before we get to any of that, we have to get to something at the heart of all of this, which is capitalism.
Capitalism, we're gonna talk a lot about that today, And one thing I really like about capitalism is it allows me to keep the lights on here and Marshall employed and Covfefe in my cup because we have a sponsor.
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Now we have to get, you know, this gives you nice images of childhood, and that's really nice.
Now we have to get back into the news and think about dead elephants.
Just less pleasant.
That's not as nice.
But in any case, President Trump is walking back his administration's decision to end a three-year-old Obama-era regulation banning big-game hunting trophies from Africa after a bunch of people who don't know anything about big-game hunting or conservation complained on Twitter.
Even Republicans, even conservatives are getting in on this because people don't seem to understand the rationale behind big-game hunting and trophies.
Here, Uncle Jimbo explains.
Now, we only kill animals to, quote, thin out their numbers.
If we don't hunt, then these animals will grow too big a number and they won't have enough food.
So you see, we have to kill animals or else they'll die.
There it is.
That's simple enough.
We have to kill the animals or else they will die.
That's very, very simple.
And, you know, it's comedic, right?
It's so counterintuitive that hunting the animals will actually increase their numbers and lead to more conservation.
But just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it isn't true.
Shallows are clear, right?
And so the Atlantic summed up stupid coverage of this this weekend.
They wrote, quote, if you were an elephant, you might be puzzling over human behavior this week.
Well, I'm not an elephant.
Also, elephants don't puzzle because they're animals.
But this is how they think, right?
If I were the animal, if animals were like people, they go further.
They say, if elephants are recognized as illegal persons, a term the U.S. courts have granted to corporations, well, and New Zealand has given to a river and it's been extended to yada, yada, yada, it would be more difficult to hunt them at all, let alone import their body parts.
Right.
So it is true.
Let me try to explain this to The Atlantic, how an elephant might not be a person, but corporations are people.
Corporations are groups of people.
They're not groups of animals.
They're not buildings.
They're not newspapers.
They're groups of people working in corporation with one another.
And you don't surrender your rights, your constitutional rights, just because you work with other people.
That's why, famously, Mitt Romney, he was pilloried for this, but it nevertheless is the case.
Corporations are people.
What else are they?
They aren't gates.
They aren't unicorns.
They aren't buildings.
They're people.
They're groups of people working together.
Now, here's a statistic.
30,000 elephants a year are killed by poachers.
When we're talking about big game hunting and giving out licenses, we're talking about a handful of these things per year.
We're not talking about the 30,000 that are killed because their tusks are so valuable that starving people in Africa who want to make a profit decide to kill them and they sell an ounce of it and they make a year's salary.
According to a 2005 paper in the Journal of International Wildlife Law, legalization of white rhinoceros hunting in South Africa motivated private landowners to reintroduce the species onto their lands.
So we're not just talking about preserves that are held by the public or held by the government or whatever.
We're talking about incentives.
So when this became legal, landowners realized, oh, interesting.
If we bring some of those things on here that are worth a ton of money and we allow people to hunt for them, then we will make money too.
As a result, there was an increase in white rhinos from fewer than 100 individual rhinos to more than 11,000.
Even while only a limited number were killed as trophies.
Well, how does this work?
It's because conservation is expensive.
So you remember this.
A couple years ago, in May 2015, a Texan legally shot a critically endangered black rhino in Namibia.
So there's this species of black rhino.
They're critically endangered.
This guy goes over there and shoots one.
He bought a license for $350,000.
That was money generated from the hunt.
It was a totally managed hunt.
That money was reinvested in conservation, maintaining habitats, maintaining environments, keeping people around to stop the poachers.
And the key here isn't even the money per se.
Obviously in Namibia, $350,000 goes a long way.
It goes farther than it does in Los Angeles or New York.
But that isn't it.
It's about the system of incentives.
Just like capitalism, as we describe it, And I don't even like to use that term.
It's a term that was invented by socialists to pillory free markets.
But freedom, economic freedom, free markets protected by the rule of law and people making sure there's a level playing field.
It's not just about all of the wealth it produces, though it does.
The reason it produces that wealth is because all of the incentives are aligned.
So if we're just talking about conservation and only basing it on altruism, there's a limit to human altruism.
But there isn't a limit to humans looking after their own interests and hopefully producing good along the way, meaning property, meaning prosperity, meaning jobs for people, meaning wealth to invest in the environment.
We'll talk about this a little bit more on Thursday when we get to Thanksgiving.
But the pilgrims learn this lesson very hard after a couple of years.
Incentives are important here.
So, for instance, when this big game hunting is illegal, when trophies can be taken home, then there's more of an incentive to have wild land and less farmland.
So it keeps the wild wild.
Why is this?
Well, if landowners can make more money, either the government or private landowners can make more money from selling licenses and letting people hunt these beautiful animals than they can from farming, then.
Then they're going to do that.
But if they start farming, then they're going to cut down all of the grazing habitats anyway.
So controlled, legalized hunting has also been beneficial for Zimbabwe's elephants.
Now, this is the big issue.
People love elephants.
I love elephants.
It's the symbol of my...
party.
I wear elephant designs and things like that for just that reason.
There are those weird videos of elephants painting that are very terrifying.
You know, they're clearly, they exhibit some intelligence.
So they say, well, if we allow this, these trophies, then, you know, then the elephants are going to be endangered and all of their tusks are going to be taken and sold for the ivory.
But trophy hunting has doubled the area of that country under wildlife management relative to the 13% in state protected areas.
Why is that?
Because there's an incentive for wild areas to remain wild.
As a result, the area of suitable land available to elephants and other wildlife has increased.
And by the way, we're not talking about post-hunt sales.
So we're not saying, well, there will be more and there will be a freer market in trading in these things, so poachers are just going to go out and get them and sell them.
First of all, they're already doing that.
Poaching is the problem.
These big game hunters are statistically insignificant when we're talking about big game elephants, rhinoceros is being killed.
But we're not even talking about post-hunt sales.
We're talking about trophies.
So you have to hunt it, you have to get it, you have to bring it home.
You can't buy it from a poacher.
It doesn't change that market whatsoever.
Now, talking just about rhinos, two rhinos per day were killed in Africa in 2012.
Well over 700 rhinos.
South Africa alone, 461 rhinos were killed in just the first half of 2013.
South Africa is a major area for this.
So we know that that's the problem.
The problem isn't Eric Trump going and hunting or some dentist from America or a guy who purchases a very expensive permit to go to conservation efforts.
It's difficult for lefties to consider these things beyond the graphic.
Even some conservatives have fallen into this.
I saw a lot of famous right-wing celebrities.
I won't name them because they're allies and they're usually right, but they were wrong about this.
Saying, this is awful.
Donald Trump, you have to get rid of this.
This is so terrible.
But, you know, shallows are clear, folks.
Very often, you know, you see the picture, you see the poor little rhinoceros or the animals or the cheetahs, and you say, we shouldn't do that.
But your gut, emotional, visceral reaction is not necessarily the way to protect these animals.
It isn't enough to say, not that one.
Oh, look, we saved Cecil.
Isn't that okay?
Don't worry.
Everything's fine now.
Cecil isn't the issue.
The issue is 30,000 animals being killed every year.
The issue is, or poachers, because these trophies have value to them.
And the challenge is to stop being emotional, to stop saying, well, as long as we don't see any more pictures, that's all well and good.
You have to think beyond the pictures and think about creating incentives and systems that will actually protect those animals.
So as a result, I hope that President Trump thinks about this thoughtfully and doesn't simply listen to all of the people on Twitter, because people on Twitter very often don't know a thing.
Let's bring on our panel to debate this.
We are blessed today.
We have His Eminence, Paul Cardinalbois, and excellent comedian Owen Benjamin.
Thank you both for being here.
What's up, guys?
Owen, thank you for your first appearance on the panel of deplorables.
I appreciate it.
Before we get into the news, there is so much sex in the news.
The news is just all sex, basically, and then a little bit of Twitter.
Before we get into that, I want to keep talking about this elephant thing a little bit.
Am I totally crazy here?
Am I just like the arch conservative who is contrarian about everything, including poor-suffering elephants and rhinos?
Owen, should Donald Trump reverse this three-year-old Obama-era rule banning the importation of these trophies?
No, because if you care about the animals, you know that the conservation comes from the money that hunters spend on the animals.
My uncle hunts in Africa three times a year, and when you allow trophy hunting, that will pay for the conservation efforts to get rid of poachers.
Well, that's the issue.
And I think the issue is we don't want to talk about the poachers because we only want to talk about the mean, wealthy, white Americans who go over and shoot.
Mr.
Bois, you're a Shiite Catholic.
Is there any, you know, Pope Francis has been very forceful about saying that we need to protect the environment and global warming is a big issue and, you know, we need to protect dear sister earth.
Is there a Catholic or Christian or religious argument for not shooting these animals and thereby saving them?
Well, for me, when it comes to, I mean, I certainly have a philosophical and theological bent.
I mean, when it comes to hunting, I would say, I mean, if you plan on eating the animal, then go ahead and hunt it.
Coming to the trophy hunting, I mean, I'm not very privy towards that.
I mean, I haven't fully seen the full theological and...
Moral explorations of it.
Because we can, because we have dominion over the earth and the sea.
Yeah, I mean, in terms of just killing an animal just for fun and for sport and just to display it on your wall, I mean, that's not necessarily something that I myself am fully gung-ho about, but at the same time...
Typical hippie claptrap from Paul Bois.
I'm sorry I cut you off.
As you laid out in your piece, I certainly think that when it comes to big game hunting like this, I see no reason to issue a full stated ban on it.
I think if we didn't, it would just succumb to poaching, and I actually think more animals would die as a result of it.
I think the bigger thing to talk about here is, and Matt Walsh laid this out on the Daily Wire, is the left's obsession, and I would call it animal worship, Of crying about elephants and lions being killed as we're slaughtering unborn children here in the United States.
And that's really just the total irony of all this, is that the left throws up in arms over a couple of elephants or rhinos.
I mean, Cecile Richards, this is the irony over the weekend.
Cecile Richards, while Al Franken is getting accused of sexual harassment, she doesn't say anything about him, but she's lamenting about Trump lifting the ban on Big game hunting in Africa, completely unaware of the fact that her organization's killing 350,000 unborn children a year.
So that's the real big debate in all this.
The best is that combination of these lefties, the vegan socialist who says we need to protect every single organism except for innocent human babies, and says that we should have no free markets whatsoever.
Except in trading baby parts from Planned Parenthood.
There are some contradictions one seems to think at the heart of their thesis.
Now, Owen, your family hunts.
Teddy Roosevelt, personally, former president, went and bagged like 500 of these big game in Africa.
Has America gone soft?
Why has the attitude toward hunting changed so much?
Well, and to go off your other point, it's all ironic because if you like elephants, you save elephants with these laws that let hunters hunt them.
That's the irony.
It's not even about saving elephants because if you want to save elephants, you would charge hunters an exuberant amount of money to go shoot one and bring home tusks because then that money pays for the protection of the animal.
So if you're looking for a net Gain in elephant population, you will support hunting.
I live in a state park and I live in the Adirondack Mountains in New York.
And so the best conservation method is charging people to see something beautiful because then that'll pay for people to protect it.
That's right.
The free market incentive model is the only way to protect anything.
If you're relying on people's goodwill and saying, oh, just donate and whatever, you know, that might not be the most reliable, but you know people are going to want to see beautiful things and you need to align incentives so that that works.
Absolutely right.
But it gets to that point.
It isn't about saving the elephants.
It isn't about saving the rhinoceros.
It's about feeling good about ourselves.
It's just about— Performing virtue so that when we go to cocktail parties, we say, oh, did you see that awful, what Trump did with the licenses?
Oh, yes, well, that was just terrible, wasn't it?
And they do it on the sex stuff, too.
This brings us to one of the finest stories today.
The insufferable New York Times White House correspondent, Glenn Thrush, has said of sexual harassment allegations against fellow journalist Mark Halperin, quote, Not betrayed by little men who believe they're bigger than the mission.
You know, the mission of the New York Times.
To spread fake news, one assumes.
But maybe he thinks there's a different mission.
Now, it turns out, he's completely full of it.
And there are allegations against him.
One woman writes, five years ago, when Thrush and I were colleagues at Politico, I was in the same bar as Ocasio's friend, perhaps the same booth.
He caught me off guard, put his hand on my thigh, started kissing me.
He pressured one woman who went into a cab crying, apparently.
Three young women who were interviewed, including this woman who writes about her experience in the cab, described a range of similar experiences, from unwanted groping and kissing, to wet kisses out of nowhere, to hazy sexual encounters that played out under the influence of alcohol.
And they all explained that they were scared, violated, ashamed, weirded out.
out.
And the woman who wrote this piece said, I wasn't am angry.
Then it turns out Thrush, when the women would turn down his advances, he would disparage them in the newsroom and try to hurt their careers.
He has now been suspended, which is quite nice.
Al Franken is also in more trouble.
He's accused of copping a feel during photos at the state park.
He basically denied this.
He said, I take thousands of photos at the state fair surrounded by hundreds of people.
I don't remember taking that picture.
I feel badly if the woman came away feeling disrespected.
Now, the woman and her husband, they say, I was upset.
I wasn't happy in the least.
He was already gone.
I wasn't going to confront him, but I was in shock.
That's a Democrat senator.
Said she feels gross, wanted to wash it off of her.
The best, I think, of all of these is a writer on the HBO show, Girls.
Marie Miller has been accused of rape by an actress.
That's a serious allegation.
So what did Lena Dunham do, the creator of Girls?
She called the self-identified rape victim a liar.
That's what Lena Dunham, feminist Lenny Letter, that's what she said, quote, one of the 3% of rapes misreported every year.
That's it.
How do we know?
Because we shouldn't believe the victims.
She tweeted in August, however, quote, things women do lie about, what they ate for lunch.
Things women don't lie about, rape.
Seems she's changed her mind because it's now affecting her show and her friend.
Now, I want to get into this.
There is so much here to talk about.
But before we can talk about all the weird sexual deviancy of the Democratic Party, I have to say goodbye to you, dear Facebook and YouTube.
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We've been talking about capitalism all day.
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You get the Ben Shapiro show.
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I actually wasn't sure on this story if the Democrats are just being cynical and deceptive or if really they're ignorant.
Lena Dunham here is making me think it's the former.
Mr.
Bois, do they have any credibility on this issue?
Is it stupidity or is it malice?
I'm gonna go with malice here.
How did I know?
Especially with Lena Dunham.
I don't necessarily know Lena Dunham's full relationship to this particular situation, but my guess is that the second one of the people in her circles Uh, was accused of rape.
She immediately said, okay, that's going to reflect badly on me.
I have to immediately get out there and see if I can, uh, do enough, uh, damage control and discredit this accuser, uh, fast enough.
Uh, and hopefully, uh, it will go away.
But I think she quickly realized that that was a very, very bad move.
And now she's, she's swung it the other way.
If you notice what she said in her apology, she didn't even just come out and say, you know, I, I made a mistake.
I reacted, uh, to You know, I was just harsh.
You know, I know this person and I was just trying to be a good friend or something.
She comes out and she immediately says, oh, as a true feminist, we need to make sure that like every single time a woman comes forward, they are automatically believed, automatically believed.
So essentially she takes it from I'm going to call malice here.
It's a nice little dance that she does because she gets to defend her friend and defend her show and call this woman a liar.
And then once that passes, she does a little Lena Dunham two-step and now says, oh, but actually we should do exactly the opposite of what I did.
And I have credibility to tell you that because I am the voice of feminism.
I am the voice of my generation.
And it is this total...
This is the essence of the left.
They want the appearance of the thing, but they don't want the essence of the thing.
They want the appearance of taking sexual assault very seriously, but then they'll support Bill Clinton, they'll support Al Franken, they'll support their showrunner, their writer on their show who is accused of rape.
They'll support anybody because that's just the thing itself.
What really matters is the appearance.
It's not the thing, it's that greater truth that their complete lie that they're promoting is supposedly getting at.
Now, to be devil's advocate here, oh and politicians have always been dogs.
They've always cheated on their wives.
They've been sort of the scum of the earth.
Madison in Federalist 51 basically explains Congress as a place to put all of the sociopaths so that they can counter each other and keep one another busy and not destroy the entire country.
So knowing all of that, should we really force people like Franken to resign for doing what politicians have always done?
Well, I think just to add on your last point, I think the left is the first to stand up for something and then the first to sit down.
I mean, I know a lot of these people and Lena Dunham is the product of what happens when you give a comedian fame based on pushing a political agenda and not being funny.
What they do is they go for applause, not laughter.
And then when they ask themselves, what is the right answer?
It's not, it's nothing to do with ethics.
It has to do with what will give me more applause.
And in one minute, it's saying everybody who claims rape is a victim.
The next minute, you have to say the opposite.
But in their mind, it's just about power acquisition, not about living a principled life.
So they will change constantly.
And the male feminists are Just, like, don't fall asleep around a male feminist if you're a woman, because they're so self-hating, you can't possibly trust them.
And thank you so much.
I do think male feminists are the creepiest people on planet Earth.
I never let my daughter near any of them.
They are.
This has been your observation, too.
And obviously, there are a lot of scandals to that effect hitting comedy specifically right now.
Yeah, and, like, I lost my agent and got—I lost a gig at a college because I said three-year-olds can't be transgendered because there was— It's just getting absurd.
It's like The Onion wouldn't be able to do this.
Marshall, you booked a bigot on my show.
Are you telling me that you...
I can't believe you would book such a sick, vicious monster.
So you...
Okay, Owen, you're trying to tell me that little toddlers can't decide that they're the other gender and then completely destroy their bodies with drugs.
Right.
And I was arguing with someone on Twitter, this guy, Jesse Thorne, who has a pretty big following, blue checkmark, that whole thing.
But I... And I was getting the sense that I had to back down on this, and I'm like, I'll die on this hill.
We're not going to pump a kid full of hormones.
What's wrong with you guys?
I'll go down the lazy river on a couple of these things because I don't...
Because you want to have a career.
Right.
But then I was like, I'll get another job if I have to agree to basically turning a kid into a eunuch.
We got rid of the Castrati in the early 20th century, and now they're making a swing back.
They were gone for 100 years, now we're doing it to kids again.
Yeah, and I think with stuff like Franken, I think a lot of the nation wants their head.
They want them to resign because, you're right, like that old quote that you were talking about, how Washington's full of sociopaths and these people are just a snake pit.
But at the same time, when you have someone that's promoting such You want to see them burn when you realize that they're hypocrites.
I think that making a mistake, like train wrecks are a lot more forgivable than hypocrites.
And I think dudes like Franken have been so outspoken about how Cis white males are the devil and, you know, American capitalism and America as a nation is somehow bad and we should bow down to, you know, these elements of socialism and Marxism that I think when they're revealed to be just slimy perverts, We just want them to look at their own mirror and say, sorry, which they never will, so they just have to go.
Yeah, totally fair point.
And the sliminess of male feminists and soy boys and all of that is really frustrating.
I love, too, your distinction between the comedians who are going out and can actually get laughs and the ones who need to supplement their laughs with applause.
My favorite comedian, my favorite living comedian, is Norm MacDonald, and I see him whenever I can.
Oh, yeah.
He's so good.
His book is so good.
And he, man, when he plays live, every word, every syllable out of his mouth is designed to move you closer to a laugh.
He describes comedy like, that's it.
Comedy is to make.
A noise out of your audience.
And he's also brilliant.
He makes great points.
But it's all about the comedy.
Do you think it's because some of these comedians just aren't that talented, so they're cheating?
Or do you think something about that culture of comedy and entertainment is making, is incentivizing all this virtue signaling?
I think it's the culture.
I think that, like, there's some comedians that I've watched be pretty good, turn into absolute garbage.
Like Trevor Noah...
His first hour special, there's some funny stuff in it, and now he's literally a propagandist.
Like, there's no laughter.
And Jon Stewart, you know, I don't agree with his politics, but he would make me laugh because at least he's being a comedian.
That's why I made that video, Why I Hate the Left, on YouTube, if you guys want to check it out.
It makes a distinction between Just liberals how I always thought they were, you know, just bigger government and then leftists, which I now think so many more liberals are becoming, which is just this postmodernist nothing matters and promoting just this weird self-hate of our country and culture.
And I think that Really good comics a lot of times get blackballed from Hollywood because laughter terrifies authoritarians and people that are trying to get rid of individual autonomy.
That is a tremendously good point.
And it hadn't occurred to me that that's what's so scary about comedy as a political weapon and as a weapon in the culture.
It's kryptonite.
I'll do a video in Corpus Christi, all Hispanic, and do a joke that one of these leftists would say makes me racist, and you'll watch rednecks and Mexicans just dying laughing together, and that terrifies people that are trying to put us into demographic voting pools, because it shows that their entire premise is flawed, that we are individuals and we aren't defined by race, gender, all that stuff.
And when I do male-female jokes and you see women buckled over laughing, it's a lot harder to say that I'm a sexist for saying there are differences between men and women.
Right.
Because they know it's true.
They're obviously laughing because it's true.
Exactly.
And then when you watch someone like Colbert also make that transition of being funny in that character to now being almost like a...
A weird preacher.
That moment with Comey when he's like, Trump fires Comey and they applaud.
And then he's like, But wait, no, we don't want that.
And then they applaud the next point.
It's like no one even knows what they believe.
Stephen Colbert is an even more obtuse Dick Cavett, which is an achievement, but it is insufferable to watch.
And the comedy in politics, this does make me think about the exuberance behind the Trump election, the Trump campaign, and the movement it spawned.
I just...
Could go through three of my favorite tweets from the weekend, and maybe we can talk about the poetic diction of those.
The first one from El Presidente, President Covfefe, quote, Marshawn Lynch of the NFL's Oakland Raiders stands for the Mexican anthem and sits down to booze for our national anthem.
Great disrespect.
Next time NFL should suspend him for remainder of season.
Attendance and ratings way down.
I also love that they've expanded up to 280 characters on Twitter.
We're getting a lot more cofefe.
He goes on, he says, Yeah.
and biggest loser of all time.
She just can't stop, which is so good for the Republican Party.
Hillary, get on with your life and give it another try in three years.
Just...
Absolutely.
Absolutely brilliant.
It's also filling a void.
Oh, sorry.
Go ahead.
I want to end this on a high note.
I want to end this, Owen, with you explaining to me why this is great.
But before that, I do want to check in with Paul Cardinalbois.
Is there anything undignified about this sort of humor?
One word, Michael.
Nope.
Great.
And here's why, you know, this is one of the greatest things about me being a Catholic.
And, you know, the thing is...
Well, the best is the heaven, I guess.
Yeah, but after that, second...
But one of the, I mean, I guess, reliefs about being a Catholic in this modern age is that, you know what?
The presidency is not my papacy.
And therefore, I don't look at it as this, like, perfectly, like, clean place where the president always has to be this just, like, perfect, A bright, shining example of everything that is wonderful and decent.
And, you know, because what a lot of Never Trumpers will say is that, you know, if people in the culture are acting badly and acting wrong, objectively wrong, the president should just shut up and let them do it and run all over us.
And I say no.
I say absolutely not.
These UCLA players go to a foreign country, they steal, and then they could end up in jail in China for 10 years, and then their dad is going to be a jerk about it on national news.
I say, absolutely, do it.
You know, good on President Trump for that.
Good on President Trump for blasting NFL, for kneeling before the national anthem.
I absolutely say, go out, do it.
You know, I mean, that's why we elected him.
So I'm totally on board with that.
It is great.
Your traitorous dual allegiance to your king in Rome does give you a pretty good perspective on this civil religion.
People love civic religion.
They treat the president like he's a divine monarch or like he's a divine figure.
But no, he's just a politician, and we can laugh at them.
Owen, is Donald Trump the funniest president in the history of the United States?
He's definitely up there.
I mean, and I think that he...
Millard Fillmore was hilarious, I'll give you that, but...
Trump is pretty good, too.
I mean, Taft was funny, but it was usually just physical comedy from being fat.
Like the bathtub splits or something, yeah.
Lincoln was a prop comic.
That hat was just total shtick.
Yeah, it is.
Carrot Top came in the vein of Abraham Lincoln.
It's the first time that statement's ever been uttered.
Do you find this comedy, I mean, it's really entertaining.
Is Donald Trump using it intentionally?
Does he understand how effective his language is?
It seems to me he does.
And why can't the left get it?
Why is the left so weak and so vulnerable to this form of right-wing humor?
Well, I think he's feeling, like, as a businessman, he's filling a niche that has just been so unnaturally vacated, which is just men.
Like, I think in this world of how, you know, men are just seen as toxic and manspreading and mansplaining and, you know, we have to hire women for jobs, even if a man's smarter.
Like, men are just like, I want someone to talk like a man talks.
And scold people when they do something stupid and not have to act like everything everyone does that isn't male is just brilliant when it isn't.
And I think that Trump's just clear language is very, very refreshing to a lot of people and a lot of people that don't want to admit it either.
I mean, I have liberal friends that I've watched them see Trump say something, and they instinctively laugh.
And that's why laughter is so terrifying to authoritarians, because I look at them like, you know that's funny.
And you know that Hillary is crooked.
And now that Donna Brazile's book's out, showing that it's even worse than a lot of people thought, just to have this guy just speak very plainly and not demonize Especially white males.
The worst of the worst.
The villains of history, right?
Right.
The villains of history, exactly.
There is...
Oh, sorry.
Go ahead.
No, you go ahead.
There is this reason that Crooked stuck to her.
I love that Crooked Hillary thing.
People laugh at it.
He had tried a few others.
He tried No Stamina Hillary or this or that.
But the reason Crooked stuck to her is because it's true.
The reason his comedy works, the reason comedy in general works, is when it's true.
When it's pointing out something and people always say, "Well, he's saying what we're all thinking." Or, "It's funny because it's true." I love it.
It made me think, you know, I published this blank book at the beginning of the year.
By the way, Black Friday's coming up.
The most important gift.
To give to all of your Democrat friends and relatives is the presidentially endorsed number one international best-selling political dome, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide, which is completely blank, of course.
And all the reactions I got from Democrats, a number of magazines called Esquire Cold and left-wing magazines, and they said...
That's not funny.
Wah, wah, wah.
It reminded me of that meme on the internet of Sandra Fluke, the total Democrat contrivance who had the sacramental view of birth control.
And she would say, that's not funny.
You know, and her arms were crossed.
That reminds me of them.
But can the left reclaim humor at all?
Or is it lost?
They're done with that.
Because it's...
It's just, they're so not set in reality.
And comedy has to be set in reality.
That's what makes it special.
Where you say something and you make people laugh because they're like, that is true.
And if you time it properly, it's like music, you know?
And the left is so just diluted at this point that, like, the Overton window just went off the cliff.
Right, right.
So there's just no...
There's no more comedy coming from those guys.
You know, there's no Stalingrad funny bone.
Because there's no objective space.
There's no common space where, you know, obviously if comedy is the kryptonite to the totalitarians, they are the totalitarians.
So, you know, they're probably not going to put it out.
But there's no point because their vision of the world is so distorted.
It has become so warped.
And the thing that you got knocked for, you lost your representation because you said that toddlers shouldn't have hormones injected into them to make them eunuchs.
They think that that's the appropriate, that's a socially just and progressive thing to do.
It shows that their vision of the world is so distorted.
That's the perfect encapsulation of it.
And so you can't be funny.
You've got to be real if you're going to be funny.
That's what makes people laugh.
All right, guys.
Sorry, one more.
Final word.
Oh, no.
I could just talk about comedy theory all day, so you've got to cut me off at some point.
All right.
I've got to cut you off, and we'll bring you back on to talk about it, because we are in a moment of conservative cultural exuberance and comedy, and we should enjoy it, because for a long time, the left tried to dominate that realm, and now they're just, to quote Sandra Fluke, they're not funny.
Okay, guys.
Thank you for being here.
Comedian Owen Benjamin, Paul Cardinal Bois, his eminence himself, That is our show today.
Get ready.
I've got a fun Thanksgiving show coming up so you can send in all your questions about why the lefties are completely wrong about Thanksgiving and I'll try to fit them in.
And make sure you listen to Another Kingdom, my show with Andrew Klavan.
It's Andrew Klavan's latest story, a narrative about a 30-year-old Hollywood schlub who walks through a portal into another kingdom and he's the murder suspect with ogres and daggers and damsels.
And it's got a gazillion views.
If you could help us get even more, leave a review and subscribe and send it to your friends.
We might force it down Hollywood's throat, and that would give me great, great pleasure.
Until tomorrow, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Come back tomorrow.
tomorrow.
We'll do it all again.
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.
