In these days of #MeToo and #NoMeansNo and politicians and media moguls dropping left and right for sexual coercion, consent has taken center stage unless you're Christian. We’ll discuss Masterpiece Cakeshop, the Supreme Court, and why no only means no until love wins. Then, Roaming Millennial and Amber Athey join the Panel of Deplorables to discuss what the resignation of John Conyers tells us about Democrat strategy, the Supreme Court’s upholding of Trump’s travel ban, and the joyful post-Michelle Obama return of 1% chocolate milk to school lunches
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In the days of hashtag MeToo and hashtag NoMeansNo and politicians and media moguls dropping left and right for sexual coercion, consent has taken center stage as the indispensable prerequisite for mutual action.
Unless, of course, that means a confectioner declines to participate in a gay wedding ceremony, in which case he must be stripped of his First Amendment rights and he'll do it and he'll like it, baby.
Just relax and enjoy it.
We will discuss Masterpiece Cake Shop, The Supreme Court and why no only means no until hashtag love wins.
Then, Roaming Millennial and Amber Athey join the panel of deplorables to discuss what the resignation of John Conyers tells us about Democrat strategy, the Supreme Court's upholding of Trump's travel ban, and the joyful post-Michelle Obama return of 1% chocolate milk to school lunches.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
The Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments on Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
This is the famous Christian Baker gay wedding case that you've heard about for years.
If the Supreme Court hasn't totally given itself over to nonsense on the First Amendment, the Baker, Jack Phillips, will win this case.
And there's actually good reason to be hopeful for free speech and religious liberty here.
This Supreme Court has been generally excellent on First Amendment issues, Citizens United, obviously.
The fear is that Anthony Kennedy showed us in the Obergefell decision that when it comes to gay marriage, he stops thinking like a lawyer and starts writing like a lyrical 19th century poet.
But in that case, he found a right to intimacy somewhere in the Constitution, which seems that it doesn't jive that well with the #MeToo climate, does it?
If there were a constitutional right to intimacy, then Harvey Weinstein would get off scot-free.
Kevin Spacey, Al Franken, Roy Moore even, he'd be seated immediately.
The right to intimacy is obviously ridiculous.
I think Scalia said at the time that the right to intimacy isn't found in marriage also, Ask the nearest hippie.
Hell, I miss that man.
It's ridiculous, but that said, the court's swing vote, Justice Kennedy, has been pretty good on free speech, so we'll see where he falls here.
Religious liberty and free speech, by the way, would not have had a shot of winning the day had President Trump not won the presidency and appointed Neil Gorsuch to the bench.
If Hillary had won, this case would be over already.
We wouldn't be talking about it.
So thank you to America for electing Donald Trump.
And also to Mitch McConnell, who doesn't get enough credit for this.
Mitch McConnell staved off the Democrat hordes who were clamoring to put Merrick Garland on the bench just after Justice Scalia died.
So, to the merits of the case.
There's a lot of fake news out there, so let's break down what we know.
In 2012, before Colorado redefined marriage to include monogamous same-sex unions, a Colorado gay couple, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, ordered a custom wedding cake from Jack Phillips' boutique, Masterpiece Cake Shop.
Phillips, a devoted Christian, declined the order because his religious beliefs prevented him from participating in it by lending his artistic services to gay wedding ceremonies.
His religious beliefs also prevent him from making custom cakes for lewd bachelor parties, divorce parties, and Halloween.
He won't make a custom cake for Halloween.
Those are his religious beliefs.
This is his artistic cake shop.
The couple, he explained, was free to choose from any of the generic cakes for their ceremony, but he wouldn't create a custom piece for the event.
So what happened?
Craig and Mullins went to one of the other countless cake shops and they got their cake made for their ceremony.
There are apparently plenty of cake shops that are willing to bake cakes for gay wedding ceremonies.
We're anticipating probably a 30% boost in revenue this year from gay wedding cakes alone.
30% boost.
Yeah, there are all these new ceremonies.
Every other cake shop is willing to do it.
Some people are owned by devoted Christians or Muslims or whatever and they have these religious beliefs and they don't want to participate in the wedding and lend their artistic expression to it.
Problem solved, right?
Apparently not.
Because Craig and Mullins decided to make it their mission to force Phillips to craft the gay marriage cake or else to shut down his store, to lose all his business.
They filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
They claimed discrimination.
The case has now made it all the way up to the Supreme Court, and they just heard oral arguments this morning.
We should make this point very clear.
This case has very little to do with gay marriage.
It has very little to do with gay marriage per se.
Gavin McGinnis said he used to support gay marriage until he realized that it was mostly a political act to screw with Christians.
And cases like this are where Gavin got that idea from.
George Will, too, by the way, thinks the Supreme Court should side with the state and make Phillips craft the cake.
A lot of conservatives.
The conservatives who are like conservatives, but not that kind of conservative.
You know, the ones who are, I'm a Republican, but I don't like any Republican stuff.
They insist it doesn't matter.
Who cares?
It's just a cake.
It's so trivial.
Just make the cake.
The left is obviously making the same point.
Republicans are terrified of gay wedding cakes for some reason.
They say people can't help who or what they fear, but let's be honest, being afraid of a gay wedding cake is a choice.
Oh, they're afraid, isn't that?
They're just afraid, you silly people.
So it doesn't matter.
Well, okay, if it doesn't matter, then drop the complaint.
It doesn't matter, right?
It doesn't matter.
It's a silly case.
Okay, good.
Then you back down.
Then the other side in the culture working back down.
They drop the suit.
If it doesn't matter, just go to another cake shop.
Actually, the couple did go to another cake shop, but they know that the cake matters.
The cake does matter because it's a symbol and it's a mechanism of coercion.
Who gets to decide how you use your artistic talents?
You, your conscience, or the government?
Who gets to decide which messages are optional and which are compulsory?
George Will is either being obtuse here or he's missing the point.
He claimed in his column on the subject that the primary purpose of cake is to be eaten.
Sure, right, that's the primary purpose of cake.
But wedding cake is different than regular old cake.
That's why regular old cake costs $11 and wedding cakes cost into the thousands of dollars.
I'm looking at wedding cakes.
Nobody has turned me down yet because my money is green.
As Princeton professor Robbie George rightly points out in today's New York Times, a former newspaper, wedding cakes are the centerpieces of weddings, and they symbolize an idea.
That's why we have them.
That's why we don't just only serve cannoli or something or donuts at weddings.
There are wedding cakes.
They symbolize an idea, namely that a wedding has taken place, that a marriage has begun.
Some people don't believe that that is the case when it comes to same-sex monogamous unions.
The state has no right to force an individual into expressing an idea with which he disagrees, even if that idea has been adopted as the official state line as of like five minutes ago.
This is the other aspect of insanity in this case.
Until the day before yesterday, nobody would have fathomed redefining marriage to include same-sex unions.
Now, that which is not forbidden is compulsory.
And by that light, it's not so bizarre that this whole case, which is really about compulsion and free speech, it centers on whether or not an individual is required by law to express so recent, so utterly novel an idea as gay marriage.
It Flexing its muscles and pounding individual liberty and conscience into submission.
So some claim that a ruling in favor of religious liberty and free speech, a ruling in favor of Masterpiece Cake Shop and Jack Phillips, that will destroy all sorts of anti-discrimination legislation in the country.
But there is no evidence for that.
As the cake shop's lawyers, Phillips himself, have made clear, the custom cake is an artistic piece that clearly comes along with free artistic and philosophical expression.
That's why they're so expensive.
That's why the bakery is called "Masterpiece Cake Shop." It's not called "Commodity Cake Shop" or "Food Cake Shop" or "Regular Old $10 Cake Shop." It's a masterpiece.
It involves artistic expression.
By the way, it is also ironic that the left, which has degraded and deconstructed art so much that now, you know, a tricycle on top of a newspaper is art or a giant block in a park or a smear of color on a wall, that sort of thing.
Now, those people are telling us that confections delicately crafted to be exhibited at the centerpiece of wedding ceremonies, masterpieces, those are not art.
But that is neither here nor there.
The point is that it isn't discrimination.
It isn't that the artist can choose which customers he will serve.
If, hopefully, the Supreme Court rules in favor of religious liberty here, it's not that the artist can say, I'm going to sell to you but not sell to you.
The artist has to sell cakes to everybody, as he repeatedly offered to do in this case.
The portrait photographer has to take photos of everybody.
The painter has to paint paintings of everybody.
But these artists don't need to convey ideas with which they disagree.
A Christian painter, A Christian painter is not required by law to paint an image of Satan stomping on the head of Christ.
A Christian photographer is not required by law or the Constitution to recreate the piss Christ.
Consider the reverse, actually.
To drive the point home with not-so-subtle a brush, there's an evangelical pastor named Joshua Fierstein, I think.
He called a Florida-based bakery that calls itself LGBT-friendly.
He called it up and ordered a cake decorated with the phrase, quote, We do not support gay marriage.
Now, as you might expect, and as Fierstein expected, the bakery hung up.
That's entirely their right.
They didn't want to express that idea with their art.
They have every right, moral and constitutional, to refuse to express certain ideas in art.
Anti-discrimination laws entitle you to an artist's products, but not to their creativity.
The left now insists on this schizophrenic argument.
Freedom of choice and consent are the essential prerequisites of modern life until you contradict their ever-changing orthodoxy.
Because hashtag MeToo only matters until hashtag love wins.
Speaking of hashtag love wins, we will now bring on our all-lady lovely panel of deplorables today, Roaming Millennial and Amber Athey.
Roaming.
Does this matter or am I just an insane culture warrior?
I think this absolutely matters and this story and others like it that we've seen always bother me and they frustrate me every time they're brought up and you know what like you said I think this is absolutely freedom of religion and it's a freedom of speech issue but I'm going to go further than that and say despite these anti-discrimination laws that exist I don't believe that small business owners should be compelled to give their services to anybody they don't want to for whatever reason I believe that if you're in the marketplace if you own Your business and, you know, you're your own employer.
You should absolutely have the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason.
And if people don't like that, they're free to take their business elsewhere.
To me, this is a question of, you know, big government and keeping a hold of our rights in the marketplace.
This is an aspect of the Civil Rights Act that muddled the conversation on this, of course, which is that you no longer can refuse service to people just because you don't like the look of their jib or something.
And the question is, how far can you take that?
I mean, is there any shot that we would return it to a time when...
I could walk into a restaurant and they would say, I'm sorry, we don't serve anybody who even vaguely reminds me of Rachel Maddow here.
Or are we going to have to construct some more complicated, less clear version of freedom of expression and freedom of commerce given the 1960s?
I mean, even in light of America's past, I don't think that the fact that prejudices existed in a widespread manner 50 years ago means that we should have laws that are unconstitutional and limit the freedom of business owners now.
If someone does have a rule that they don't want to serve Rachel Maddow-looking customers...
Even to think about it is so hurtful.
Right.
But you're allowed to go somewhere else and you're allowed to tell people, hey, this is what this person is doing.
Do not give them their business.
Why do we want to fund the businesses of bigots in any case?
I would rather know who they are so I can go and shop somewhere else.
That's the irony, as it is people tilting at windmills.
Probably wasn't the case in the 1960s, but these days, if you had some racist shop owner, he would be run out of town on a rail.
The culture has changed so dramatically since then.
Now, Amber, who is going to win?
It seems to me this all comes down to Anthony Kennedy.
Is the baker going to win, or is big, oppressive, coercive government...
I actually think this is towards the baker because there was a discrimination case at a Denver area bakery where that baker refused to make cakes for traditional marriages.
And the Diversity Discrimination Commission ruled there that it was not discrimination against That person's Christian beliefs for a baker to refuse to make a cake for a traditional wedding.
Well, this happened in three cases apparently in Denver.
So it's only discrimination when you're discriminating against the politically correct class, but when it's the politically incorrect class, it isn't discrimination.
But how is the Supreme Court going to rule?
Well, they definitely seem sympathetic to the fact that in the role reversals, it was not considered discrimination.
Reading through a lot of the arguments today, they seem to be grappling with the idea that art is free speech, and to what extent can the government compel someone to provide a service, and how does that infringe on their art?
So basically all the things that you talked about in your monologue.
The thing that really bothers me about this issue is, as Roaming Millennial said, If someone is willing to discriminate against you, why would you want to give them your business anyway?
Why would you want to then turn around and give them your money after you just found out the only reason that they're willing to provide you with that cake is because the government is forcing them to do so?
Let's say you go to a restaurant and you have the absolute worst service of your life Your waiter comes in.
They spill water on you.
Your food is terrible.
And then at the end of the meal, your waiter says, well, we're going to give you a gift certificate so you can come back and eat here again instead of comping your meal.
I mean, what person in their right mind would want to go back to that restaurant?
Yeah, a free meal.
I don't know, man.
It depends how terrible the service was, I guess.
But you make an excellent point.
And it also sounds like a setup.
I mean, these guys went there.
They ordered the cake.
The baker said, no, I can't do that.
I won't make your Halloween cake either.
And they went and they got a cake at any of the gazillion other bakeries that would make a custom gay wedding cake.
But they've made it their mission to destroy this guy's life.
Roaming, was it all a setup?
I think so.
I think this is absolutely politically motivated.
I think that they're trying to prove an ideological point here that goes beyond the plight of just looking for a wedding cake.
They've absolutely made this a political issue.
And I really hope that you, regardless of whether you're Christian or not, and personally, I'm Christian, and I wouldn't have a problem with the cake thing, but regardless of how you feel about that specific issue, this is just about being compelled to do something that you don't believe in.
And to express an idea that you don't believe in.
Yep.
Right.
And I think that's something that everybody should be able to get behind, whether you're, you know, Christian and atheist, whether you're conservative or liberal.
And, you know, Stephen Crowder, who's on YouTube, I'm a big fan of his.
He's done an experiment before where he's actually gone into Muslim bakeries and asked for for gay wedding cakes to be made.
And guess what?
They're not crazy about the idea either.
But you don't see any lawsuits against them because it's not a popular thing to talk about.
Other than Crowder, who's out of his mind and is like the last journalist in America, but other than him, you never see people going into Muslim bakeries.
You don't see people going into Jewish kosher bakeries.
It seems to always be these Christian bakeries.
I wonder why that is.
So I am going to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but before I do that, I have got to tell you folks...
Our third episode of The Conversation is coming up on Tuesday, December 12th at 5 p.m.
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Once again, subscribe to get your questions answered by Ben Tuesday, December 12th, 5 p.m.
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Now, while you're over there, what else are you going to get if you subscribe?
If you get an annual membership, that's just $100 a year.
It's $10 a month or annual is $100 a year.
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But you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr, folks.
This is going to be very important, especially depending on what the Supreme Court does in this important case.
So if those cakes are allowed to be made with artistic freedom of choice, you are going to need this to collect all of the salty runoff.
Go to dailywire.com to do that.
And before we say goodbye, I do need to thank...
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So go over to PolicyGenius and also go to DailyWire.com if you want to watch the rest of the show.
That's the only way you're going to hear from the lovely, brilliant, all-female panel of deplorables, Amber Atheon Roaming Millennial.
We'll be right back.
- Back at dailywire.com.
I am pretty surprised the Democrats went this far.
John Conyers, the longest-serving Democrat rep, the longest-serving rep period in the House of Representatives, he's been there since the Johnson administration.
He has resigned because of sexual assault and sexual harassment allegations.
He's had pressure from his colleagues all the way right up to Nancy Pelosi.
Amber, are they gearing up to go after Trump?
What is this about?
Why are they throwing—other than this guy's old and desiccated and of no use to them anymore—why are they going after him?
There are a couple of things at play here.
So first of all, Democrats have been hammered by the right for going after Roy Moore and Donald Trump because they haven't been taking care of their own harassers in their own house.
At the same time, though, it's very politically expedient to get rid of John Conyers because now he's calling for he endorsed his son today.
He endorsed his son.
And then his grandnephew is also running for the seat.
So not only are they going to replace Conyers with another Democrat, they're going to replace Conyers with probably one of his own family members.
And we saw Democrats do the exact same thing during the trial of Senator Bob Menendez.
They were asked repeatedly if he should resign if convicted, and they refused to say, because guess what?
Chris Christie was still governor of New Jersey, so they were worried that if they came out and told him to resign if convicted, he would have to resign when Christie was in a position to replace him with another Republican senator.
So in my opinion, they don't really deserve that much credit for calling for Conyers to resign because this is just pretty much political expediency.
And it's always nice to see people keep the family in the family business, you know, the public business, the people's business roaming there.
We've heard whispers throughout the campaign and so on about all of the women who are alleging misconduct by Donald Trump.
And it kind of disappeared.
It didn't really go anywhere.
Some of it appears to have been discredited, but not all of it.
Is that what they're saying now?
We're willing to throw out this old guy who doesn't mean anything anymore.
We're willing to throw him out and trade him so that we can finally go after Donald Trump?
Is that the strategy we're gonna see?
I think it's absolutely the strategy.
And not only are we seeing the Democrats kind of throw Conyers under the bus, but we're also seeing them do that in large part to Bill Clinton as well, because he's no longer politically useful.
So it's very convenient for them to say, oh, look, now we're all of a sudden the party that actually cares about these sexual harassment allegations.
When the people in their party that are facing these charges, not even charges, these rumors, I mean, nothing I've seen has...
I would think be enough to convict anybody.
But when we look at what the Republicans are facing, it's a little bit more difficult.
And I think they're absolutely gearing up to start on the allegations against Trump again.
And I think what also doesn't help Republicans case is that although Nancy Pelosi originally kind of stood by saying, describing him as what, what an idol or something like that, she was She did the turnabout really, really fast, saying that he should resign.
Contrast that to how we have Trump handling Roy Moore right now.
He's actually come out and said, yeah, this guy, he should definitely be voted in.
And I understand why the Republicans might think it's important to at least get some Republican in in Alabama.
But if we look at the larger picture, it doesn't look good for the Republican case of, yeah, we're not rapey, frankly.
Right.
And obviously in the case of Roy Moore, his opponent, Doug Jones, does support fourth trimester abortions.
So it gets complicated on that political issue as well, not to say nothing of the Senate majority.
We see these figures coming up 2018, 2020.
There's talk that they'll nominate Kamala Harris or she'll be a real contender.
So you can see it building toward this This hashtag MeToo campaign that is totally fact-free.
It looks like the economy might do quite well under Trump.
It looks like he's doing an able handling of foreign affairs, so they're going to have to make it all this feelings-based MeToo stuff.
Are there any credible allegations against Trump?
I'm not saying that there are or there aren't, but are there any allegations that we see that are going to jump to the fore and be the ones that they're going to smack him with, either Roaming or Amber?
I'm not really sure, to be perfectly honest with you, because the ones that were brought up during the election obviously were pretty much brushed aside.
So I find it somewhat hard to believe that they would necessarily be re-litigated to the point that people would find them more credible in 2020 than they did in 2016.
That being said, one of the cases is in a lawsuit right now, so we'll see what happens with that.
But I just don't think that people are going to want to dredge it back up now that they pretty much already decided that they're okay with overlooking that to put Trump into office.
It's unlikely that that's going to become a major issue again.
They've already dealt with this.
They've already made their opinion on this.
That's a good point.
And they can always use the Clinton excuse of, oh, it's old news.
Say, well, it's only old news because you stalled for 10 years, and now you made it old news.
Yeah, it's old news.
Come on, stop.
Don't talk about it.
Other news from the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court has upheld President Donald Trump's travel ban from six Muslim-majority countries.
Now, this is being...
Portrayed as the end of the world, the end of America, even if America didn't already end with the tax cuts now, this is really the end of America.
But ironically, Barack Obama also restricted travel from precisely the same countries during his presidency.
Roaming, you might have seen this.
You're on Twitter all the time.
You're always tweeting.
There was this trending hashtag, hashtag no Muslim ban ever.
Is this a Muslim ban?
This is absolutely not a Muslim ban, and if it is a Muslim ban, it's one of the least effective Muslim bans that you could design.
You know, the largest Muslim countries, places like Indonesia, they're not on the list.
This doesn't affect Muslims who aren't from the areas that were highlighted of concern, you know, places like Iran, Libya, and stuff like that.
So if it doesn't affect Muslims who aren't in those countries, and most Muslims aren't in those countries, I feel like you have to really reach to call it a Muslim ban.
Obviously, I saw some statistic that only one of the countries on the list is in the top ten most populous Muslim countries in the world, and none are in the top five.
So you're absolutely right.
This is not a Muslim ban.
But Amber, is it genuine ignorance, or are they just being obtuse when they...
Flip their lids over President Trump's travel restrictions, but they probably didn't even know that Barack Obama imposed travel restrictions.
Is that comparison legitimate, and why didn't the Democrats freak out at the time?
Well, it's such an obvious political play, and I mean, let's not kid ourselves.
All politicians are hypocrites, so it's not really that surprising.
I'm to the base, though.
It's easy...
Well, it's easy rhetoric, right?
So, like, Democrats can say that Trump is bigoted towards Muslims.
And then, when the tax reform bill passes, they can say that tens of thousands of people are going to die.
It's this really aggressive, ramped-up rhetoric that somehow people buy into because, I mean, most people don't want to die, I would guess.
But it's really transparent.
As Roaming said, this isn't a Muslim ban.
This is about protecting American sovereignty and also making sure that people are coming into the country properly vetted.
And the countries that are on this ban list apparently do not properly vet their citizens.
So, I mean, Democrats can play this game, but the Supreme Court just ruled in favor of Trump.
So they've pretty much already lost here.
Love it.
I also love that we have Neil Gorsuch on the court because if Hillary Clinton had won, all of these decisions that we're just dancing covfefe about wouldn't happen, baby, would not happen.
So on to the most important.
I'm sorry, Roman, go ahead.
I thought this was like, what, seven to two?
I was impressed.
It was seven to two, I think, like Ginsburg and then one other.
That was higher than I thought it would be, actually.
It's because Elena Kagan is smart.
It was Ginsburg and Sotomayor dissented, but Elena Kagan sided with the conservatives.
See, they're not all conservative.
But apparently Antonin Scalia asked David Axelrod when that first nomination came up during the Obama years, the one that eventually went to Sonia Sotomayor, he said...
Listen, I'm under no misconception that you're going to send someone who agrees with me on the Constitution, but at least send us somebody smart, not to put too fine a point on it, send us Elena Kagan, whom he knew socially and I suppose professionally, and they sent Sotomayor, who is not smart at all, and then later on he got Kagan.
So it is nice to see that she can have some seriousness of purpose and she isn't just a lefty hack on the court.
There is a much more important story than any of these.
We're talking about coercion, big government, the travel ban, foreign policy.
Forget that.
1% chocolate milk.
Michelle Obama's tyrannical policy of banning 1% chocolate milk from school lunches has wonderfully been overturned by Donald Trump's Department of Agriculture.
Little boys and girls everywhere can now drink 1% chocolate milk at lunch.
I'm sure they're very happy about this.
Roaming, this again seems like a trivial issue.
Who cares if the kids have chocolate milk?
but does it send an important message and is it materially significant that this administration is giving people even down to little kitties even maybe chubby little kids is giving them choice and giving school districts choice over what they serve those children i think this is absolutely an important issue and as someone who's you know no longer in school no longer facing these school lunches it may not affect me personally but i saw some of the lunches that were presented under michelle obama's initiative
and i'm sure we all saw how unsatisfying you know just not enough calories just unpleasant to look at so i think this is absolutely a step in the right direction and childhood obesity it's not something to be lapped at It's absolutely a serious issue, but I think really it's something that needs to be tackled at the home level.
It's not something that we can just, you know, big government fix in schools, the, what, eight hours a day you might have kids, and even then we don't have them during the summer.
So to try and fix something that's so...
intervention at the government level like childhood obesity was never going to work in the first place.
And you bring up this point, it's nothing to be laughed at.
It's funny because I think for the photo, I don't remember, I think we selected a silly photo of a fat child.
But it's occasionally to be laughed at, but it is a serious issue.
And that's the point.
Transgenderism is actually not to be laughed at.
People who suffer from this illness, obviously drag queens can be kind of funny, but transgender dysphoria is nothing to be laughed at.
But it isn't the pressing issue of the federal government.
Lieutenant Scalia, I got to meet him one time and we asked about these questions and he said, not everything that is hateful or odious is covered by some provision of the Constitution.
We don't need the federal government to go in and invade every aspect of our lives and run our lives for us.
Little kids can choose their own chocolate milk.
There was this issue.
I think Michelle Bachman was the champion of it.
The lightbulb freedom of choice act.
Because after Al Gore's stupid movie, they made us use all those hideous fluorescent lightbulbs that destroyed the lighting quality of our home and poisoned us with mercury.
And they banned all of the good lightbulbs.
And they're expensive.
Yeah, they were expensive, and they banned all the good ones that burned all of the energy and looked really warm and nice.
Michelle Bachman came back and said, here's the Lightbulb Freedom of Choice Act.
And they all mocked her.
They said, wow, what a stupid issue.
If it's a stupid issue, then you back off.
Why is it a stupid issue when I want to hold my side of it and the side of freedom and choice, but it's not a stupid issue when you pass legislation to limit what kind of light bulb that I can have?
Amber.
We're talking about these cultural battles.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is reforming taxes.
He's packing the courts.
He's packing the courts with good originalist justices.
He's deregulating at the federal level.
Is this administration going to be a culture war administration, as many have thought, or is the culture war just distracting from the economic focus of the administration?
How are we going to look back on Trump It still remains to be seen.
We're still waiting on the full repeal and replace of Obamacare.
So we'll see what happens with that.
But I think this is definitely a great start.
I personally, I kind of love the cultural battles.
I think this milk story is amazing.
I was on free lunches for a couple of years back when I was in middle school.
And let me tell you, when you have a school lunch in front of you that has charred pizza and brown lettuce, you are really, really grateful I'll have to remember that.
I am shedding for the wedding, so chocolate milk will go on the list of things that I am able to have.
Yes, electrolytes after you work out.
That's very important.
And they are symbols.
A lot of times people say, well, it's just semantics, especially with gay marriage.
You say you're just arguing over semantics.
Semantics means meaning.
It means meaning we're arguing over symbols because we're arguing over the symbolized.
Now, you bring up Obamacare.
Just on this point, I'm still so happy.
I'm still dancing covfefe over tax reform.
The tax reform did something that we didn't quite expect.
It repealed the Obamacare mandate in the Senate that might make it to the final bill, which seems to set the stage.
It creates so much political pressure to now repeal all of the Obamacare regulations and reform all of those healthcare regulations.
It also might set the stage for entitlement reform.
That's what Rubio and Ryan are both saying.
Roaming, am I just having a fever dream right now?
Am I just exploding out of my head?
Or is it possible that we're going to get all of these legislative goals like healthcare and like entitlement reform that we thought were impossible with Trump?
Well, I would like to say that it's possible.
I mean, if there's ever a time that it would be possible, it should be now.
Republicans have both houses.
They have the White House.
I say...
Let's do this.
But, you know, you of course still have those people who shall remain nameless but are John McCain.
That seems to be committed to holding things back.
And I really think that, you know, the constituents Look up how your representatives are voting, please.
Look up how your senators are voting.
And if they're not voting in favor for things like tax reform, you need to be writing to them, and your specific representative, because they're only going to listen to you if you're a constituent, and even not really listen to you, but at least make a note of it.
And I think entitlements are an important discussion to have.
We can't really say we're serious about tax reform and serious about tackling the deficit unless we look at government spending.
And the biggest part of that It's entitlement.
So absolutely, this needs to be part of a giant conversation we have about big government and government spending.
By the way, it is usually McCain obstructing, but I got to give it to him on tax reform.
He showed up.
I was shocked.
My chin hit the floor.
And the only guy who didn't vote for it is Bob Corker.
I'm still too salty about health care.
I'm still too salty.
I know.
It was really hard.
Well, you know, yesterday he tweeted out, he said, or his social media intern tweeted out and said, we're only 50 followers away from 3 million.
And then all these angry Dems unfollowed him because of tax reform.
So I don't know.
You know, I'm a pretty happy guy.
I'm pretty grateful.
Go over.
I've re-followed John McCain because of tax reform.
And I'm laughing at Bob Corker.
I don't even care about Corker.
The guy's not going to...
I don't get to be re-elected anymore because he's been a jerk for the last year that he's been in the Senate.
And he voted against it.
Wah-wah.
Too bad.
Ha-ha-ha.
Ladies, you've made me feel better as you always do.
Such a delight.
Roman millennial Amber Avey, thank you for being here.
I'll see you again very shortly.
That's our entire show today.
What an excellent covfefe show.
I will be back tomorrow.
Get your mailbag questions in.
We will be changing your life on Thursday, hopefully for the better.
And in the meantime, 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.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
