Time’s Up for the preening hacks who pretend to be journalists on television and in the press. The real winner of the Fake News Awards is…us! We’ll analyze the surprising subtlety of this blunt stunt, and why it worked so well. Then Fleccas Talks and Philip Wegmann join the Panel of Deplorables to discuss how why Democrats sold “Dreamers” down the Rio Grande, the looming government shutdown, and why PC fanatics think white supremacy is OK. Last but not least, the mailbag!
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Time's up for the preening hacks who pretend to be journalists on television and in the press.
Time's up for the mainstream news media, which has decayed to become nothing more than the communications wing of the Democrat Party.
The real winner of the Fake News Awards is, you guessed it, it's us, baby.
We will analyze the surprising subtlety of this blunt stunt and why it worked so well.
Then, Fleckus Talks, Austin Fletcher and Philip Wegman join the panel of deplorables to discuss how and why Democrats sold Dreamers down the Rio Grande, the looming government shutdown, and why PC fanatics think white supremacy is okay.
Last but not least, The Mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'm wearing a black tuxedo today because time is up.
I'm so brave.
I am so courageous, aren't I? But time really is up for the left-wing hacks in the mainstream media.
And I don't mean it's up in that they'll go away or they'll stop being left-wing hacks or even that they'll stop influencing a lot of people.
But the time when places like the TV networks, the New York Times, Washington Post, etc., when they could pretend to be objective journalists, hard-hitting reporters, just interested in the facts, that actually is over.
And you have Donald Trump to thank for that.
After weeks of waiting, last night President Trump finally presented the highly anticipated fake news awards.
For months now, political analysts have wondered what the awards will look like.
Will it be televised?
Will there be a red carpet?
Will people wear black tuxedos and little lapel pins and things like that?
Trump first announced the awards in November, but no one was sure if he was kidding or not or if this was a real event.
He then announced on January 2nd that the awards would be presented on January 8th.
Then on January 7th, he announced that the awards would be January 17th.
And then last night, he tweeted the link to a blog post on the GOP website listing 11 news stories that he's already criticized for being fake.
Oh, and also the website crashed.
So it didn't even load for several minutes.
The conclusion of months of persistent trolling, which really was part of years of trolling the news media going all the way back to the campaign, was itself just a troll.
I love it so, so much.
That's it.
That's all it is.
It's just a blog post.
It is a barely functional blog post.
Not a speech.
Not even a tweeted list.
Just a blog post at the GOP website.
And you know what happened?
The mainstream media took the bait.
Of course they did.
Now, we should be clear.
This is a non-event.
Seriously, this is not...
It didn't even load.
There was no fake news awards.
There was a blog post.
The mainstream media could have simply ignored this, but they couldn't, could they?
No, they couldn't, because they're empty-headed kittens, and this is their catnip.
Who covered it?
Everybody covered it.
Chrissy Teigen, whom I'd never heard of until last night, hosted a fake fake news awards from her Snapchat last night.
Newsweek ran the headline, quote,"...forget Trump's fake news awards, former Obama ethics chief announces president's biggest lie of 2017." The article reads, A former Obama administration ethics star is planning to beat Donald Trump at his own game Wednesday, trolling him with the Golden Pinocchio Award for his biggest lie of the year on the night the president is expected to announce his most dishonest and corrupt media awards.
Cool, bro.
Really cool.
You really got him.
You got him.
Wow.
If President Trump had any idea that former Obama ethics czar Norm Eisen would tweet something, then he never would have criticized the mainstream media.
Really?
Good job.
Wow.
You got him.
The Washington Post fumed, quote, Trump's fake news awards were a huge flop.
But guys, here's the thing.
Here's the little secret.
The fact that you're writing about the Fake News Awards, the fact that we're talking about the Fake News Awards, the fact that there are 1,900,000 Google results for the term Fake News Awards, that means that the Fake News Awards did exactly what they were supposed to do.
I actually don't understand how people do not get this, how they still don't understand.
As for the awards themselves, CNN won the night, taking home four out of the 11 accolades.
You're shocked, I know.
For those who still haven't seen the blog post or weren't able to load it last night, here they are quickly.
These are the 11 hits.
Former Enron advisor Paul Krugman predicted in the New York Times that markets would never recover from a Trump victory.
The Dow Jones, you'll observe, just hit yet another record high.
ABC News published an entirely fabricated story on Trump-Russia collusion, sending the stock market tumbling.
CNN got another story about Trump and Russia entirely wrong.
Time Magazine published a totally fabricated story about President Trump removing the bust of Martin Luther King from the Oval Office.
WAPO lied about Trump's crowd sizes at a rally in Florida.
CNN lied about Trump overfeeding Japanese pet fish.
CNN lied about a meeting between Anthony Scaramucci and Russians.
Newsweek lied about the Polish first lady not shaking President Trump's hand.
CNN falsely reported that James Comey disputed Trump's claim that he was not under investigation.
The New York Times published a false story on Trump and global warming.
Then number 11, of course, the Russia collusion nothing burger, to quote Van Jones.
There is one last aspect of this that I'd like to point out because nobody's really been covering it.
The mainstream media aren't the only objects of mockery from this stunt.
The fake news awards, it mocks the fake news media, but it also mocks award shows, precisely as we enter awards season.
Formerly glamorous celebrities wearing gazillion dollar gowns receiving gold trophies.
Just as the fake news awards highlight the irrelevance of the mainstream news media, their total fall from respectability, it does the same for Hollywood, which has virtually, and literally, I'll point out, burned to the ground in recent months.
The fake news awards worked because both Hollywood and the news media have become ridiculous.
And Hollywood and the news media have become ridiculous for the same reason.
They're really the same thing.
Hollywood is a bunch of people going on television and pretending to be somebody they're not.
And the news media are now a bunch of people going on television pretending to be something they're not.
It's a bunch of Democrat communications advisors, Democrat propagandists, pretending to be journalists on television.
That's all they are.
They are nothing more than that.
They've traded both of those.
Hollywood and mainstream press have traded their original missions, which is to entertain on the one hand and to doggedly pursue the truth on the other, for shallow left-wing hackery.
Awards shows there are no longer glamorous.
They're tedious exercises in virtue signaling from millionaires complaining that they deserve even more millions of dollars to pretend for a living.
The mainstream media are no longer respected precisely because formerly journalistic institutions have become nothing more than petty propaganda centers.
If the press and celebrity reactions to last night are any indication, Yesterday's fake news awards will be the first of many because they still refuse to see why everyone is laughing at them.
Alright, let's bring on our panel.
So, we've got a great panel with us today.
We have Fleckus Talks, Austin Fletcher from Fleckus Talks, you've seen his YouTube channel, and Philip Wegman from the Washington Examiner.
Philip, you look okay, but I've got to tell you, Fleckus, wearing that Jersey tank top, you look phenomenal, sir.
We've got to get right into the news.
We don't have any more time to talk about fake news.
We've got to talk about real news.
Have sold the Dreamers down the Rio Grande after an apparently productive meeting on immigration, open to the press.
We all saw it.
Dick Durbin alleged that Donald Trump called Haiti a not very nice place to live.
So Durbin, in doing that, poisoned any possibility of DACA compromise.
Why did he do it?
I don't know.
Philip, did Dick Durbin just realize that it's better for Democrats' electoral chances to keep calling Trump a racist?
And if that means that younger illegal aliens need to be deported, so be it?
I think what Democrats are realizing right now is that a shutdown, at least in their mind, is going to play well with their base.
And so they're hoping that going into 2018, a shutdown is actually going to buoy their chances.
We see this, yes, with DACA, where you have Dick Durbin making this kind of small jab that in the larger scheme of things really only throws things off track.
So he does that to create a controversy, which slows down negotiations.
But then also we see this with CHIP and the current continuing resolution.
Democrats have been asking for CHIP for years.
CHIP, by the way, just for people who don't know what it is, CHIP is the Children's Health Insurance Program.
That's right, that's right.
And so they have been asking for months that this would be included.
Republicans have put forward a bill that Democrats initially rejected.
They've put the CHIP funding into the continuing resolution to keep the government funded as a compromise.
And now Democrats are suddenly quiet and they're saying, well, we're not going to mess with this continuing resolution.
We'd rather have a big shutdown fight.
And this is just completely duplicitous.
You're totally right.
I agree with that analysis entirely.
Fleckes, Austin, this seems to me final irrefutable proof, as I've said for many years, that Democrats do not give a damn about illegal aliens at all.
They just want to win elections.
They only pretend to care about illegal aliens when it suits their electoral needs.
Should the GOP finally talk bluntly about that, cut it out with all of the rhetoric about compassion and humanity and these poor people and dreamers and all the other things that we now know Democrats do not care about at all?
Should we speak bluntly?
Yeah, I absolutely agree.
I think it's about time that we did, because realistically, the Democrats have always been appealing to the left's sense of morality.
And bigger picture, I think the left, especially the uninformed left that I come in contact with at all these protests, they think they can solve global poverty with immigration.
They think, oh, the Dreamers, oh, they came here young, they're not familiar with the country they came from, they just want a better opportunity.
And that's the narrative, that's the narrative, that's the narrative.
And then when it actually comes time to make something happen, they self-sabotage and would rather shut down the government just to have a better chance in 2018.
I mean, I thought we didn't negotiate with terrorists, and now the Democrats seem to be getting time with us in our negotiations, and it's not good.
And they do it.
What's so offensive about it is there are so many awful costs of illegal immigration.
Something like 40% of young women who cross the border and girls who cross the border illegally are raped.
These people are forced to live in the shadows.
They can't access a lot of services.
Obviously, there's the flip side of that, which is illegal immigrant crime and gang membership, such as MS-13.
And there are all these really awful, vicious aspects to it for both the illegal aliens and for the American citizens.
And yet they couch it in this language of, we're the ones who care about these people.
We're the only moral ones.
And then you find out when push comes to shove, they don't give a damn about these people.
They're perfectly willing to let them be deported or let there be some stopgap measure for them.
Because for them, what it's all about is getting votes.
And it's Specifically, if they can rely on 80% of votes, if amnesty goes through and these people tend to trend Democrat, then they'll do it for that.
But if the illegal aliens were going to vote for Republicans, they would be the first people loading up the deportation trains.
So it's really frustrating.
And I hope that in this era of Donald Trump speaking bluntly and taking away a lot of that nonsense PC political talk, that we can speak honestly about this and say, look, Democrats, you're dirty, rotten cynics who are using these poor people as political cudgels and as little pawns.
And we're not going to take it anymore.
And as long as they sign the pledge, the Michael Knowles show Dreamer DACA compromise pledge, which is that they all get amnesty immediately as long as they agree to vote for Republicans for 25 consecutive elections, then that's fine.
Then we can form a deal and these people get to stay.
I hope the Senate takes up my suggestion.
Moving on to the government shutdown itself, the White House today has signaled that it will sign a one-month stopgap measure To fund the government until a longer military funding deal and budget deal is reached.
Fleck us.
This seems to me like the win-win reality of Trump.
Either he's competent and gets good things done, or he's incompetent and the government governs less.
Either way, that's cool with me.
Should Republicans fear a shutdown in this case?
I hope there isn't a shutdown just because we need to keep paying the military and if the left is going to have this quid for a quo type thing where amnesty for all, we're shutting it down, that's not how this should go.
And just to touch on the last point you made about the DACA people, the Dreamers coming over and the left wanting their votes.
The people I come in contact with the protests who are, you know, a lot of people are Latinos for Trump.
A lot of these people came here legally because they respect the country and love the country so much.
And that's why they tend to vote Republican.
So adding to your last point, like the people who are coming here illegally, it makes perfect sense that, you know, the Democrats want to help them as much as they can, because that's potential Democrat voters who aren't really, you know, America first ever.
Well, that's their base, is criminals.
But you're so right.
Of course we should have known that these people would try to vote Democrat.
They're criminals.
And that's a key aspect of the left-wing coalition.
Good point.
Philip, is the White House breaking ranks with Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans, who they themselves have signaled that they oppose the stopgap measure?
Or is there some strategy that I'm missing here?
So I'm not clear on the day-to-day strategy when it comes to conversations between McConnell, Ryan, and Trump.
That's definitely in flux, and it's keeping Democrats on their toes.
One thing that I would point out, though, is I don't think that Democrats should be so quick to make that foregone conclusion that somehow they're going to benefit because of a shutdown.
Yes, Trump keeps changing his mind about DACA and immigration, but he has made some pretty significant overtures when it comes to flexibility.
I think that if you're talking about that Latino voter or that dreamer, they're going to see that in this CR deal, Trump just is asking for a continuation of government funding and they're asking to lock in a couple different government programs and then deal with DACA later.
So if we shut down the government and then we're not able to get a DACA deal later on, I think a lot of core Democrat A lot of those young people who are looking for during the legislation to come through, they're going to be incredibly disappointed.
And I think they're going to see through this stunt.
Yeah, I think you're right, especially if we keep hammering them in this way, if we keep using blunt language.
And now that their chief communications wing has cracked, as we saw last night in the Fake News Awards, I think there's a real chance.
In the old days, the fear was, even if we're right on the facts, we're going to be so blown out by the press that it doesn't really matter and we just have to play by their rules.
I don't think that's true anymore.
It's largely not true anymore.
So let's cross our fingers.
During 2016, a bunch of Trump supporters started using the OK symbol, and 4chan decided to troll people into thinking that the OK sign was a white supremacist symbol.
So the son of New Jersey's Democrat governor, Phil Murphy, played this game.
He did a little circle sign during his father's swearing in.
And so the OK sign has many innocuous connotations.
And there's also this childhood game whereby you make someone look at the little okay sign, and then if they look at it, you punch them, like they did on Malcolm in the Middle, you might remember this.
Jerk.
You looked.
Ow!
Yeah, so I used to do that as a kid.
It's pretty fun.
And so anyway, 4chan decided to make this a symbol of their support for Trump or something, and Media Matters immediately pounced on this.
So now the New Jersey press are calling this kid racist.
Fleckes is okay white supremacist.
I'm not asking, by the way, if white supremacy is okay.
That is a subtle distinction.
Is the okay sign, we can't use that anymore?
It's news to me, but yeah, I mean, leave it to the left to ruin everything.
They had the same thing with Pepe the Frog.
The Pepe the Frog was like a meme, a popular meme on 4chan and Reddit.
And then someone made, I think, a Nazi version of it.
And now everyone who's ever used the Pepe the Frog meme is a Nazi.
And it's just leave it to the left to ruin everything.
They've already ruined Hollywood.
They've ruined every city that they run.
I just saw a L'Oreal commercial that came out today for a shampoo and the woman in the commercial was wearing a hijab.
I don't get it.
You're kidding me.
That can't be true.
It's true.
It's true.
I tweeted about it.
That is unbelievable.
I have to go looking for that now.
That is almost beyond parody.
And that's the problem.
We are now beyond parody, where even the okay symbol has become this Nazi thing or this white supremacist thing.
Philip, you know, admitted and avowed racists like Richard Spencer, they now use the symbol.
But it seems to me like it's ironic.
It seems to me 4chan is trolling PC culture, wherein even the most innocuous of symbols could be deemed offensive, and the PC culture totally took the bait.
So can we use it or not?
Are they going to take a picture of this screenshot of me doing the symbol, and now I became a Nazi?
Is that what's going to happen?
I think that's generally how it works.
What are they going to come after next?
The slug bug game?
I just don't get it.
They're ruining childhood.
The sad thing about this is that there's going to be some bad actor who eventually comes along and starts using this as a racist symbol for real.
And they're going to start ruining it just as much for the rest of us.
So we're in trouble from the left and the right.
But they actually, the alt-right in their being jerks about this, kind of underscore the same point for the mainstream media, which is that they don't get to tell me what totally innocuous widespread symbols mean.
The mainstream media doesn't get to redefine the okay sign or what's the next, the thumbs up or something.
And likewise, Richard Spencer doesn't get to do that.
There are like 50 of these people in the entire world who are actually white nationalists who want to deport all the black people, and they don't get to define widespread symbols for me.
I've got two words for those people, the mainstream media and the alt-right, and those words are not happy birthday.
Okay, that's all the time we have.
Panel, thank you for being here.
Now it is time.
We have to get to the mailbag.
That is Philip Wegman from the Washington Examiner and Fleckis Talks.
Go check him out on YouTube.
Before we get to the mailbag, I'm sorry, Marshall, he's cutting me off.
It's like they're playing me off like at all the other awards shows.
Time's up for me.
So if you're on Facebook and YouTube, you have to go over to dailywire.com right now.
If you're on dailywire.com, thank you.
You help keep the lights on.
You keep covfefe in my cup.
We really appreciate it.
What do you get if you join the Daily Wire?
Well, you get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan show.
You get the Ben Shapiro show.
It's $10 a month or $100 a year.
You get no ads on the website.
You get to ask questions in the mailbag.
You get to ask questions on the conversation.
By the way, the next version of the conversation is going to be me, so get ready for that and ask your questions.
But who cares?
No one really cares about any of that stuff.
What we really care about is this.
And this Leftist Tears Tumblr, we now have a really wonderful vintage.
You have got to get this.
They're the Cory Booker Leftist Tears.
And I didn't know, you never can quite tell when a vintage batch is going to come up, but it's 2018 and it's all thanks to Cory Booker.
So make sure that you have the right vessel.
Because it would be such a shame if you collected all of Cory Booker's salty, delicious, and ridiculous tears, and then they went bad.
And they went bad and you couldn't drink them in 10 years or 15 years.
That would be a real shame and a real waste.
Make sure you store them properly in the Leftist Tears tumbler.
You can keep it in a nice dry area and it will maintain the perfect salty ratio so you can gobble up all of Cory Booker's absurd performance the other day.
Okay, go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with the mailbag.
The first question comes from Clay Casasa.
There's a good Sicilian cake called Casata, but that's Clay Casasa.
Oh, voice of Another Kingdom Knowles, I've loved movies since I was a kid and have started to write screenplays on final draft as a sort of creative hobby.
I have no delusions about getting into Hollywood on spec scripts, but I would like to make them good enough to submit to contests and see how they do.
I've enjoyed the throwback to old radio of Another Kingdom, and I'm wondering if that would be a legitimate way to get my stories to the masses.
I'm wary of the artistic trope of starting and stopping and never finishing projects.
Would you recommend finishing in the screenplay format or immediately shifting to scripting for podcasts?
Thanks, Clay.
I think that you should immediately start going into podcasts or whatever medium you can control to get your stories out there.
I say this for a few reasons.
You brought up the question of contests.
You have to ask yourself, what are you doing this artistic endeavor for?
If you're doing it just to amuse yourself and see if you have any talent, and maybe some judge will tell you that you did a good job, then submit it to contests.
That's what that is good for.
And maybe they'll write you a note and say, this was good.
And actually, if you want to work on your craft and get decent feedback, I suppose that's one way to do it.
If you are ready to release this material to an audience and you have a clear artistic vision and you just want people to see it, don't waste your time.
Those things go nowhere.
The odds of them working out are very low.
If you watch this show, you probably are slightly on the right or at least you're right curious and that's going to kill you in Hollywood.
It's really going to hurt you.
So I wouldn't do that.
It's just about getting the work out there.
There are few screenwriters and novelists who are more successful than Andrew Klavan.
And we've been called in for meetings on "Another Kingdom" with TV producers and people all around town, very big names.
Then they Google "Andrew Klavan" the night before, and the meetings are icy cold.
And another kingdom has, I think, 17 or 1800 five-star reviews.
It's got a gazillion downloads.
Don't waste your time on it.
Get the message out there.
You know, the trick of Hollywood, you go into any coffee shop and there are 5 million people writing screenplays on their laptops, and not a one of them is going to get them made, or very, very few of them are.
So do what you can to control your own distribution, and you get an audience, and that will tell you if it's good or not, and it will tell you if you have a future in it, hopefully.
If you want to work on your craft, work with an editor, maybe submit it to contests, but if you want people to see it, do it yourself.
From Garrett, Mr.
Knowles, when is your book coming out in the audiobook version?
It's like John Cage.
I heard it was quite the read.
Second, how do you respond to the opinion that morality is an evolutionarily derived trait which our ancestors used to cooperate with one another so that the race survived?
How do we know that morality—really what you're asking is how do we know that morality is real and it's not just some evolutionary tick— That, you know, who cares what it is?
We've just developed it for some reason.
What this means, what you're suggesting by this evolutionary development, evolutionary morality, is that there is no good or bad.
There is no right or wrong.
Hamlet talks about this.
Because if there isn't a morality, if there isn't an objective morality which human beings are sensing or intuiting or reasoning their way towards something, if there isn't a standard outside of our own little brains, then nothing really is right or wrong.
And murdering and raping and pillaging, that isn't really wrong.
It's just not evolutionarily advantageous to certain groups.
So therefore, I guess we shouldn't do it, but it doesn't really matter.
It's just not advantageous, blah, blah, blah.
Hamlet talks about this when he's talking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
He says there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
This is this exact thesis.
And what you should know about that is that Hamlet is pretending to be insane when he says that.
That isn't Hamlet's actual outlook.
It isn't Shakespeare's outlook.
It's Hamlet pretending to be mad to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
So the other aspect of this, of evolutionary morality...
It's totally unfalsifiable.
So, you know, we'll say, okay, why have I evolved to, if I see a bus coming and there's a young woman in the way, why would I risk my life and maybe give up my life to push her out of the way?
I guess there's an evolutionary advantage to that to groups because then she can pass on her genes.
Hopefully she can pass them on with me.
You know, that might be the other psychological advantage by natural selection.
But why, when I see an old woman about to be hit by a bus, Do I also have the impulse to give up my life to push her out of the way?
Why do I have the reasonable understanding that it would be valiant and gallant and courageous for me to push her out of the way, even if it gives up my own life?
Why is that a moral good?
There's no evolutionary explanation for that.
She can't have more children, presumably.
And the way that these people who advance this hypothesis explain that away is they say, oh, that's just a secondary trait.
That's just, yeah, there was a reason for that in your psychology and the way that evolution has made you, but that is just a quirk from some other reason, for the young woman or something.
It just doesn't make a lot of sense.
Nobody behaves as though morality, very few people behave as though morality is not real, as if there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
A lot of people say that that's true, but they don't behave that way.
Because we all know that that isn't true.
It doesn't make sense.
It ends up undercutting its own arguments.
And so, whereas there may be many evolutionary explanations to a lot of things, if there isn't that outside of ourselves, if there isn't logic and reason and ideas and morality, moral standards outside of ourselves, then we're all just babbling nonsense and nothing that we're saying makes any sense and you can't rely on your own faculties of reason to get along in the world.
But...
Until we start doing that and we fully decay into just apes grunting at one another, then I don't think anyone is really taking that seriously.
From Noah.
Hi, Sir Michael Knowles.
You are my favorite guy in the news media.
Love your show.
Thank you very much.
It's very nice.
I grew up in the Foursquare Church, raised by my grandparents, who are missionaries to Malaysia, and they hold no sympathies for the Catholic Church.
Or I hold no sympathy.
I don't know.
Either you or your grandparents don't hold sympathies.
I believe your argument that God having come to earth for a particular woman in a particular place and at a particular time should have a particular church is flawed.
Jesus chose 12 disciples to build his church, 12 men from every walk of life and every creed, men who on the day of Pentecost were surrounded by people of every nation and every tongue.
In other words, Jesus, our Lord and Savior, chose nobody in particular to build his church here on earth.
Michael, please tell me why I should be a Catholic or forever hold your peace.
A few points just to begin.
One, the purpose of this show is not to convert everybody to Catholicism, though that might be a secondary trait.
That might be a secondary effect of it.
And just there is one inaccuracy you said that they came from every creed.
They didn't come from every creed.
Part of all of the earth coming to Christ is seen in the story of the Magi.
They are supposed to have come from Persia, from other religions, other places.
Often they're represented as being one of each race.
But even your statement itself, Christ chose nobody, that is clearly not true.
Christ chose those people.
So he didn't choose nobody because they weren't nobody.
All of what you said is true.
If Christianity were a fable or a philosophy that could stop there...
But Christianity isn't a fable or a philosophy.
It's a fact.
It doesn't begin in poetry.
It doesn't begin in mythology.
It begins in a thing that actually happened.
The birth of this guy, the life of this person, that really happened.
It wasn't just cooked up in a writer's room somewhere in Hollywood.
It really happened.
Christianity is the greatest story ever told, but it isn't fiction.
And you are in the story.
So yes, Peter, Paul, Matthew, Judas, they all represent many things.
They are symbols, but they're symbols created by God who lived on earth in space and time.
And so are you.
You're in the story.
You are in the story, but you're also a real person.
The crucifixion and the resurrection and the feeding of the 5,000 and the woman at the well and the walking on water, they all have tremendous symbolic and explanatory power.
They also really happened.
Same goes for you.
Your relationship to God is the relationship of Hamlet to Shakespeare.
In Christ, the playwright enters into his own story.
You cannot abstract yourself from the story of reality.
You can't get above it all.
You cannot lift yourself above it all.
You are in it.
Christ's church is universal.
That's what the word Catholic means.
It means universal.
It's also a real thing in time and space with real people.
Someday we will slip the surly bonds of earth and throw off this flesh, but we aren't there yet.
Christ speaks forever about the importance of time.
My time has not yet come, the fullness of time.
He speaks of the bread being literally His body.
And He knows that this is a hard saying.
And He says, this is a hard saying.
And the apostles can't stomach it.
Christ knows this.
And as tempting as it is to skip ahead, to deny the dramatic tension of our lives in time and space, of the limits of human nature, we shouldn't do that.
There is a time for every purpose under heaven.
There's a time and a space for every purpose under heaven.
This is a real...
Quirk of the modern era of modernity.
There's a reason that it coincided with the Protestant Revolution and all that has come after that.
It's a quirk of modernity to want to abstract ourselves, to pretend that we are not enfleshed, that we are not in space and time.
That acts of value are not enfleshed.
I think a lot of times people would rather it be the ideas of the apostles rather than the acts of the apostles.
They would rather pretend that Christianity is just a fable.
It's a fable by which we can live our lives.
But it isn't a fable.
It really happened.
That's what makes it so real.
That's what makes the intersection of heaven and earth, of metaphysics and physics in Christ, so powerfully compelling.
It's why it's the greatest story ever told.
It's because it's true.
It's non-fiction, and you should live as though it's non-fiction, as though these things happened, and there is consequence to what you do in time and space in relations to people.
Next question, from Mark Levin.
Dear Swarthiest Man at the Daily Wire, Mr.
Michael J. Knowles, I am a recent economics graduate and have realized that I would love to turn my obsession with politics into a career.
What's the best way to get started?
As I'm in the New York metro area, where it seems like the only available work is with progressive, read-socialist outlets.
All the best, Mark Levin.
Yes, that is really my name.
Can I leverage that?
Okay, my first advice to you, you're an economics major, is make a lot of money.
Don't go right into politics.
Make a lot of money.
Go and do something and make a lot of money to get you into politics.
Do that.
I'm from New York, and yes, it's very hard.
There are some Republican candidates there, though.
I still regularly advise candidates in the New York metro area on running for office and on their campaigns.
So there is that.
It's a little bit of a boutique industry, because a lot of times Republicans don't win.
I've been on plenty of winning campaigns in New York.
The reason you should make a lot of money right now is so that you don't need politics.
All the great politicians in history haven't really needed it.
They haven't needed to get re-elected, and therefore they don't have to compromise themselves, and therefore they actually achieve really good things.
It's also, it'll just make you more of a person.
If you spend your whole life working as a staffer in politics or as a I don't know, as an elected official or something, it really does wear away, I think, at you.
And it's good to just bring a life experience to politics.
So, you know, yesterday I had to miss the show because I was doing a film shoot.
Very rarely I still am an actor in Hollywood and I still get cast.
I call it my semi-annual acting.
And it really brings a lot to my life to have something outside of politics.
Obviously...
I spend most of my life with my head in politics.
I spend most of my life not writing political books, but it's good to have things outside of that, too.
And I think it'll make you a better politician or a better political analyst or whatever you want to do in politics if you bring something outside of it.
That said, you will win any race you want if your name is Mark Levin and you move to the right district.
That is how things work, especially down ballot.
If you run for Congress or lower, certainly state representative or state senate, you will win if it's a Republican district and your name is Mark Levin because people don't care about those races and inevitably...
Mark Levin has 100% name recognition among Republicans, and you have his name, and it'll just help you out.
So make a lot of money, but do it fast while Mark is still famous and important, and then run for Congress or something.
You'll almost certainly win unless you run in New York, so you've got to move, too.
Okay, next question from Seth.
Dear Michael, king of trolls and champion of deplorables, I often hear conservatives discuss the fact that our country was founded on Judeo-Christian values, but I was wondering what texts or writings support this claim.
I want to be able to better defend this claim when I make it to my liberal colleagues.
Thanks for all the work you do for all of us deplorables out here, Seth.
Okay, so what do we mean by Judeo-Christian values?
Those are the values that come through Christianity into the secular and modern world, ideas we get natural law and natural rights and all of that from.
Why are they called Judeo-Christian?
Well, because Christ was a Jew.
Christ is the Messiah from the Jewish people to all the nations of the world.
And all of the people who founded this country were Christian.
Dear old Samuel Fuller, Dr.
Fuller, my grandfather from the Mayflower, he certainly believed that.
The country was founded up in Plymouth, centuries before the Declaration of Independence was signed, by...
Very serious Christian religious zealots to be a shining city on a hill.
Then, if you want founding documents to read, read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
The Declaration clearly states, we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That alone is Christian.
How do we know it's Christian?
Because all of those people were Christian.
It is true that some were more deistic and a little less...
more abstract in their Christianity.
But we know the country was founded as early as 1620 by Christians.
It was Christians who populated the place.
So that culture is...
the politics is inseparable from that culture.
On the one hand, it is stated very clearly this is a constitution built for moral people and religious people and it couldn't survive...
Beyond a moral and a religious people.
We also know all of them, beginning in the 17th century, had these ideas and had this culture and that culture stewed in the United States and it created this country.
So if you want to trace it back, I would trace the founding further back than 1776, but look at the evolution.
This wasn't founded by a Muslim people, for instance.
This wasn't founded by Buddhist people.
It wasn't founded by Hindu people.
And the people who did that grew in a culture and had their vision of the world formed by Christianity, which is the animating force of the West, the meeting between Athens and Jerusalem, which gave us all of Western civilization.
From Marcus.
Hi, Michael.
I think this is possibly the most outrageous aspect of this Aziz story.
It's that they didn't finish their wine, which probably cost them $67 for the bottle.
Considering how expensive the restaurant is and how much the wine must cost, would you ever leave a restaurant with wine still in your glass and still in your bottle?
I would never leave anywhere with wine still in my glass and still in my bottle.
That is a universal rule.
That is true at all places and all times.
Really, what a decadent culture that this guy's got money to burn and he leaves booze sitting around.
A good Sicilian boy would never do that.
It's actually considered bad luck to leave wine on the table among a lot of different Italian regions.
And I think they're probably just explaining their own behavior.
From Andy.
Was it accidental that today you used the word indiscernible when you clearly meant indistinguishable?
Sorry, I know all the world loves a smart R's, but it made me wince.
I guess I had said this about the sexes, that they were indiscernible.
I actually did mean indiscernible because I was alluding to a specific Philosophical principle, an ontological principle called the indiscernibleity of identicals, that there cannot be separate objects or identities that have all of their properties in common.
This is also called Leibniz's Law, after the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
So this issue with...
With the genders is that people want to say that there are men and there are women, right?
There's feminism, and yet men and women are exactly the same.
They're indiscernible.
You couldn't tell the difference because they're identical.
But if men and women are exactly the same, then there's no such thing as women.
Because there aren't different categories.
If men and women are exactly the same, then there are only men.
And this is a minor example of all of feminism, which very often just hurts women because, as Andrew Klavan says, it makes them take on male values.
But Descartes actually uses this same point, the indiscernibleity of identicals, to prove that he is different from his own body.
So it's kind of fun to, I don't know that I totally buy it, but it's very fun to look at that.
But that's what I was alluding to.
It's why I use that word when I discuss this issue.
It's because if you think about it, even two steps down the road into Leibniz's law, then many of the claims made by feminists appear totally ridiculous.
From Samuel, Dear Michael, As Catholics, we're supposed to find spiritual strength and comfort in the sacraments and in prayer.
What happens when such resources seem to do nothing for us?
I've reached a period in my life where I do not think that I have a close relationship with God that is necessary to live an ethical and happy life.
What should I do when Mass, Eucharist, reconciliation, and prayer seem to have no positive effects on me?
Blessings in Christ.
This is going to sound blunt and mean, but it's just a little tough love to say.
Please don't take it.
I don't mean it in any mean way.
Stop thinking about yourself.
Stop it.
A man wrapped up in himself is a very small package indeed.
The sacraments aren't there so that you can feel really nice about yourself or so that you can feel comforted.
I quote it frequently, but it deserves quoting again.
C.S. Lewis said,"...if you look for truth, you might find comfort.
If you look for comfort, you will find neither truth nor comfort, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin and in the end despair." The sacraments are there for the unity of heaven and earth and physics and metaphysics and for you to touch God.
That's what Christ comes into being, to reconcile man to God and to redeem him.
There's a gratitude there, which if you just think about it a little bit, you couldn't deny that gratitude.
Now, of course, not every time you go to Mass...
Are you going to be enraptured and having a numinous experience?
That won't happen.
It didn't happen to the Virgin Mary.
The angel Gabriel came down to Mary, appeared to Mary, said, God himself will be conceived within you.
Then he went away and she went on with her life.
It's not like every moment was this total rapturous moment.
Partake in the sacraments because they bring you closer to God, but you'll have periods of doubt.
And a very subtle thing that begins to happen is once that emotional loveliness goes away or it's not there every time, then you might question God himself.
You shouldn't do that.
That's your faith being founded in a place where it shouldn't be or being placed where it shouldn't be.
You see this in a number of more charismatic Protestant movements.
It's all about the feelings and You know, the emotion of it and the acoustic guitars and waving your hands in the air.
But that isn't there forever.
Nowhere in the Bible does it show that that occurs all of the time.
You know, God speaks to Jacob at certain times, and certainly he speaks to Abraham at certain times when they're not just hanging out all the time.
So, look outside of yourself.
I don't mean this as a criticism specifically of you.
I do it all the time, too.
But look outside of yourself.
Look toward God.
And I think it'll get you out of your own head and stop wondering why you aren't so happy all the time.
This is why, just a little bit of a side note, whenever people at the holidays...
Like New Year's Eve or Valentine's Day, they very often have a bad time because you build these things up in your head and it has to be perfect.
And I have to be enjoying myself all the time and I have to be really happy all the time.
And why aren't I happy?
Why can't this be?
And you get miserable.
The holidays are miserable for a lot of people.
Stop worrying about it.
Why you aren't happy.
Stop worrying about why you aren't having pleasure and why you aren't feeling the thing you think you're supposed to be feeling.
There's nothing you're supposed to be feeling.
You're just doing the thing.
You're doing it.
You're in communion with God.
That's good enough.
That's good enough even if you aren't feeling the chill and emotional jolt of it at every single time.
Good luck.
God bless.
From Michael, "Is there ever an instance "where government regulation can fuel competition "in the market?
"I think specifically of the airline industry, "which some claim is an oligopoly "that promotes a mirage of choice "and the illusion of competition." More competition is better.
That's virtually always true.
And the example you cite actually proves it.
I travel on airplanes a fair bit, and it's a cliché to complain about air travel, because in many ways it is degrading.
They give you, I think, Six square inches of space for you to sit in on the plane.
I'm not a terribly gigantic guy, but I'm like, you know, obviously on three different people's laps in the new way that airlines are laid out.
But that said, deregulation of the airlines was a massive, massive success, particularly for the consumer.
The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 freed up the airlines and really broke up a lot of the legacy airlines.
But the prices dropped tremendously.
Prices dropped $1,400.
Or, I'm sorry, prices dropped 40% since the government set the prices and controlled the airlines.
And economists estimate that today the cheapest flight possible from L.A. to New York would be $1,400, if not for deregulation.
I can get a round trip from L.A. to New York sometimes for a couple hundred bucks.
Now, what does that mean?
It means that the things aren't as spacious anymore, the waiting rooms aren't as spacious, they don't serve you prime rib when you're on the plane.
That's because more people are using it.
It's much more efficient.
There are some airlines that make you pay for water.
Good.
I'm glad.
I want to pay for water.
I don't want to be subsidizing that guy over there his water.
I want to have as much consumer choice as I possibly can.
Now you have to pay an upgrade fee if you want to get like economy minus plus seven.
You know, I don't know.
You get an exit row you have to pay more for.
Good.
I want it because that means that when I'm a cheapskate and I just want my quick flight back from New York or wherever, I want to get the cheapest thing I can and I'll go into my cocoon and sleep.
I was caught in the UK at a wedding, and through a mistake of the travel agent and of me, my return ticket wasn't valid, and I got stuck in the UK. I had to come back here to do the show, and the flight was 15 hours away.
I had to buy a new flight direct London Heathrow to Los Angeles, 15 hours before the flight.
Most of the flights were thousands of dollars, but a cheapo airline had one for $600 that I was able to buy because of all of the competition in the airlines.
And it was a miserable flying experience, and I got to save a lot of money.
That is really good.
Whenever you see people complaining because of these things, it's easy to get lulled into how nice and luxurious a lot of accommodations are these days.
Don't forget how bad it could be.
Don't forget what will happen.
If the government comes in and starts heavily re-regulating these airlines, you're going to go back to before 1978.
And yes, they might have served the primary, but you paid a lot more money.
And the reason those lounges and those airlines weren't full is because nobody could afford to fly.
So more competition, bring it on.
And if you want a nicer seat, pay a little bit more money.
Okay, that's our show.
We'll have a show tomorrow, a Friday show, because we couldn't do it yesterday, so make sure you tune in.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you then.
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.
